Writing

Slang: Don’t Overdo It

Friends, I am not a young man any more. Some might argue I have never been a young man, that I was born with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand a complaint about the Designated Hitter Rule cued up. Let it drift: However young I once was, I am no longer, and it almost doesn’t matter because I’ve never been much of a Youth Culture guy.

When I was a young’n my sainted Mother once got very annoyed with me when I went through a phase of ending every sentence with the word “man.” As in, hey, is dinner ready, man? or why do I have to do homework when people are starving somewhere on this planet, man? Like, she got really annoyed and launched a campaign to stop me. Which was devastatingly successful, because you did not mess with my Mom on the rare occasions she felt strongly about things.

Anyway, that might explain why I’ve always been slow to pick up on slang and the hot new speak of the kids, even when I was a kid. Which of course complicates things with the writing.

Things With the Writing

Slang is tough when you’re writing fiction. On the one hand, if handled well it adds oodles of what literary scientists call verisimilitude. Not to mention flavor and a naturalistic rhythm to your work. But, if handled poorly it all backfires and you are Steve Buscemi in a meme.

<MEME>

The hardest part for writers is the fact that we’re writers, which means we’re linguistically curious by nature. So when we hear some bit of slang, we’re intrigued, and sort of naturally pick it up and start playing with it, because words and the evolution of language is fucking fascinating. This does run the risk of appearing ridiculous, say by being a middle-aged white man who suddenly starts referring to his wife as bae or fam all the time.

You have to keep this in mind while writing, especially if you’re trying to make a young character feel hip and contemporary (ed. note: if this is your goal do not use the word “hip”). Using some slang you’ve gleaned from overheard conversations and Internet forums might seem like a great idea, unless you use them incorrectly—or if you stumble over cultural lines and wind up in Appropriation Land, or pick up slang without the necessary context and get into serious trouble.

So, your best practice with slang is to resist. Resist until you absolutely can’t resist any more, until the temptation is too powerful, then give in just enough to scratch that itch. Then back away rapidly and go back to using language the way it was intended, you filthy animal.

Submissions: Don’t Think So Much

You’ve written a novel! Or a short story, or an epic poem, or a confessional memoir that’s 350,000 words about your sexual exploits, drinking binges, crying jags, and occasional abduction by aliens. As one does.

As hard as that might have seemed, many writers find the next step to be much more difficult: Submitting that sucker. Whether it’s to an agent, a publisher, a magazine, or some other market, the moment you decide you’re done with a story and you want to sell it is terrifying, because you’re saying it’s done, you can’t improve it any more, and you’re about to voluntarily invite people to pass judgment on it. It can be paralyzing. Once you start reading the guidelines it gets easier and easier to think your story doesn’t fit, or it’s not good enough, so why bother?

I just sent off three story submissions to magazines, and one is probably a ridiculously inappropriate submissions. Wrong market, and I’m not 100% certain the story is actually any good. I submitted it anyway, because that’s the secret: Don’t read the guidelines. Don’t give the editor an opportunity to talk you out of it. Just send in the sub.

Like a Drunken Sailor

Submitting fiction like a drunken sailor may not make for the most efficient of submission processes. It may not make you any friends among editors, or result in any more sales than a more focused approach. But what skipping the guidelines—and the thought process over the appropriateness and quality of your work—gets you is peace of mind. Sure, you might still get that rejection, but better to be rejected and have had a chance at a sale than to talk yourself out of submitting in the first place.

I’ve certainly had the experience of submitting a story to a market that I think has no chance of selling, and, then selling it. The thing is that editors will always tell you how picky they are—you should only send them your absolute best work and then only when the moon is full and you have recently bathed in the blood of virgin goats, after spending decades in a cave contemplating your story. The more you read the guidelines, the easier it is to be talked out of any shred of confidence you might have in your work.

Just click submit. Your worst case scenario is a quick rejection. If you’re smart, you’ll do what I do and turn rejections into a slow-motion, long-term drinking game.

Taking a Break from Butt-in-Chair

When you start talking about writing a novel, you’ll eventually hear a variation of the phrase “butt-in-chair.” This is generally pretty good advice: You can’t write a book if you don’t make yourself, you know, sit down in front of a keyboard and write it. So making sure you get (and keep) your butt in the chair for good long intervals is sound advice.

Like a lot of advice or best practices or rules, the whole point of learning them and understanding their benefits is so you can break them judiciously.

Take a Nap

I always refer to Mad Men when I discuss creativity, because one thing that TV show brilliantly handled was creativity. Don Draper is a writer, a creative guy. And the show goes out of its way to show Don goofing off—or, apparently goofing off. Don goes to the movies in the middle of the day. He drinks in his office. He naps. He goes home. You would be forgiven for asking what, precisely, Don does aside from wear the hell out of a suit and be charming.

The point is, Don’s creativity often resembles goofing off. Creativity needs discipline, so butt-in-chair works. But creativity is also chaos and anarchy, so sometimes when it’s just not happening you really do need to just get out of the chair. Take a walk. Take a nap. Drink a half bottle of cheap bourbon and go running through the neighborhood shouting about flat-earth theories. Whatever it takes.

The point is, you can’t take advice too literally. Butt-in-chair is a good rule of thumb, but it doesn’t mean you force yourself to sit there until you’ve written some arbitrary number of words. It just means you have to get into the habit of working or you’ll never actually work. It doesn’t mean the occasional half bottle of bourbon and arrest for public intoxication isn’t just as good for your soul.

The Daemon

I’ve always had an affinity for computer programming, but I lack the discipline and math comfort required, or maybe I just didn’t get the right encouragement when I was younger. I dabbled in programming, mainly in BASIC, and I enjoy the creative aspect even as my bug-ridden code always reminded me that my attention to detail is … lacking.

I always think of programming and chess in similar ways: Deep oceans I’ve poked a toe into, knowing that if I try to swim out too far I’ll just drown, because my brain is about as deep as a puddle. I get very interested in things and for short periods of time learn everything I can—about programming, about chess openings, what have you—and once I have a superficial and minimal mastery of them I lose interest and wander off. The upside is, I know a very little about a huge number of things.

In operating systems, there are what are known as daemons, small programs that run constantly in the background, checking on things or providing data. And here, a hundred words in, we get to the point: Your creativity is a daemon process. It’s working all the time, even if you’re not.

Walk Away

This is why you have to take breaks. Writers often try to force themselves to achieve arbitrary goals, like 5,000 words in a day or a first draft of a novel in four weeks or something like that. And all well and good if that works for you, but keep in mind the typing is the tip of that iceberg. The real work is buried deep inside your head, and it goes on 24-7. And if it’s not producing anything, all the typing in the world won’t help.

That’s why sometimes the best thing you can do for your novel is to walk away and stop writing it. And why sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to worry about stuff like word counts or progress. That creative process is going to be chugging along in the background no matter what you do, so waiting for it to start pushing ideas to the front of your head isn’t wasted time; often it’s necessary time. That’s one reason creativity often looks like doing nothing, just like your computer looks like it’s not doing anything even though there are dozens of processes running in the background all the time.

Of course, this is also a convenient excuse for me to day drink, because when someone catches me sipping whiskey on the deck instead of writing, I just tap my head and wink and say “Creative process!”

Book Promotion: Don’t be a Jackass

Promoting a book can be a confusing, demoralizing process. Many authors spend a lot of time and energy and money crafting a comprehensive but affordable book promotion campaign, only to feel like they’re shouting into the wind, and no one is paying any attention to them. Some spend a lot of money and feel similarly, wondering why some books seem to just get a lot of attention naturally.

Along the way, you’ll no doubt play around with various free modes of book promotion, because why not? If it doesn’t amount to much, it was free, so nothing lost. And with social media platforms it’s pretty easy to do some basic book promotion using just your personal accounts and a little mental elbow grease.

But how do you decide what’s worth doing? Every week finds another social media trend, after all, another viral quiz or game that everyone is passing around, or a sudden wave of rhetorical tricks that other authors are suddenly engaged in. How do you decide if something on social media is worth jumping onto for the sake of maybe selling a book? You could use my simple guide, which pretty much serves me well in every situation: Simply don’t do things that make you feel like a jackass.

Jackassery: The Problem of Our Time

Look, social media can be fun. Dumb quizzes, memes, and trending hashtags can pass the time and connect you with your audience—that’s more or less the whole purpose of social media. Great! But sometimes people start doing things just because everyone else is, and then they try to layer on their own special brand of arch sarcasm, or ironic appreciation, or just general assholery, trying to simultaneously engage with the viral moment and be above it. And sometimes you’ll be tempted to do dumb things on social media that make you feel like a bit of a jackass, and my advice is: Don’t.

Everyone’s Jackass Limit is different. What you might see as jackassery of the highest kind might seem like hilarious clean fun to someone else. Don’t worry about everyone else. When you see all the other authors in your social media garden doing the same trendy thing, something likely born in a book promotion listicle the week before, don’t worry about whether they’re being jackasses. That’s between them and their readers. Worry about yourself. If you feel like a jackass just thinking about it, then the answer is simple: Don’t do it, no matter how many other people are.

Because, for one thing, if every author is doing it then people are gonna notice that it’s just promotion, artificial and grasping. For another, you can’t differentiate your brand by doing what everyone else is doing. And finally, feeling like a jackass is never going to be the right decision. Take it from someone who spent about 10 years in his youth being a jackass: It’s no bueno.

The Art of Rejection Part Four

Once again, I’ve taken a walk through my many, many, many rejections letters in search of interesting or humorous things. This time I switched over to my pile of short story rejections.

I write a fair number of short works out of love, and also because I think writing short stories keeps you in practice. By forcing myself to think up a premise and knock out 1,000 – 5,000 words that conclude with a recognizable ending every month, I’m keeping my skills sharp. Or so I tell myself. Whatever, shut up. Anyways, as a result of this practice I have tons of short stories to sell, and so I, er, sell them. I’ve been trying to hawk my short stories for decades, and I have the rejections to prove it.

These days, most of those rejections are emails, because I don’t submit via paper any more. But back in 2006 I was still sending out paper submissions, with HILARIOUS cover letters. Trust me: Hilarious cover letters for the win. I got this response for a short story called “Time’s Thumb”:

NO PANTS for the win.

I don’t recall what I wrote in the cover letter about my pants, but it amused the editor enough to invite me to submit again. Did I? I honestly can’t recall right now. Probably not, because I am incompetent.

I do think selling writing is 50% finding someone on the other side that sees things the way you do, who gets your jokes and references. Making an editor laugh is a good way to be memorable to them, and to wedge your story into their brains. Also, it’s one more step towards a world where everyone just accepts that I don’t wear pants. Mission: Accomplished.

The Art of Rejection Part Three

As I continue to trawl my own storied past of rejection letters for blog fodder, I came across this significant bit of personal history. The year was 2002, the novels was called In Sad Review, which is a terrible, awful title, but it’s the novel that, several re-writes later, finally sold to Tyrus Books as Chum.

Now, those re-writes were done with the occasional advice of my agent, who returned to it every few years with ideas and kept trying to sell it even as other books of mine sold, and even as other clients of hers took off and became Big Deals. And this is all interesting because the rejection I got in 2002 was this one:

So, a rejection, but one that prompted me to send In Sad Review to the person who would become my agent, and a mere ten years later she in fact sold that novel. Just goes to show, even form rejections can sometimes lead you to something good.

The Art of Rejection Part Two

Here we are in the second installment of essays about rejection letters I’ve received, because it’s educational and also because this blog is a hungry time-devouring beast that demands content, content, more and more content! until I lay awake at night wondering how in the world I will attract eyeballs tomorrow, and the next day, and the next until sleep is a distant memory.

Also, going back through these rejection letters has been eye-opening. First of all, I don’t recall being this industrious. I’m typically a lazy, lazy man. Secondly, I don’t recall being this hilarious.

Back in the Day I bought a Writer’s Market and read all the advice within and then promptly ignored it all and wrote these sloppy, funny, shaggy-dog type query letters based on the theory that I didn’t want to work with an agent or editor who didn’t “get” me or my sense of humor. This has proven to be excellent advice from my younger self, which is an unusual condition as my younger self’s advice is typically horseshit along the lines of “Sleep more” or “Dude!” – that’s it, just the word dude.

Anyways, here’s a query letter I sent out to a small publisher in early 1997, which was sent back to me with the handwritten notes on it, requesting the manuscript, and then my follow-up letter delivering the manuscript and the handwritten notes rejecting the book. I thought I’d share these because the query letter is a disaster in many ways, and yet it got a request for a full solely because I amused everyone in the room – in fact, I have another rejection somewhere that tells me flat out they would publish the query letter but not the book.

Yet Another Query letter from a Desperate and Violence-Prone Writer of Fiction

My God You Want to See the Book

The book itself was title Shadow Born (yes, yes, I know – my titles are awful and everyone knows this) and is one I still quite like, actually, although it is definitely juvenilia. It’s set at a college party where something terrible happens, is told from various POVs and employs some minor experimental things (experimental for me, not, you know, literature itself). The bit about my brother’s feedback is true. When he read the MS he complained that the final chapter, which was the MC ranting in a stream-of-consciousness way, should be titled “Lord Kincaid’s Farewell Address” because of its pomposity, so I promptly re-titled the chapter “Lord Kincaid’s Farewell Address” in a fit of pique. BURN.

Anyways, I had a lot of success getting responses from agents and editor by sending humorous, self-deprecating queries. I also had a lot of blank, form, and slightly negative responses to this tactic, so Your Mileage May Vary.

The Art of Rejection Part the First

SO, every weekend I sit here hungover and desiccated and try to think of something to write about on this blog that will make me feel like a Real Writer, entertain y’all, and possibly win me some sort of obscure blog award (do they still do that?). So I try to think about my few skills, which is always depressing. Aside from the ability to drink heavily (right up until the moment I lose that ability) and a certain skill in manipulating remote controls, I have disturbingly few talents. Oh, sure, the whole writing thing. So let’s amend that sentence to read “disturbingly few remunerative talents.”

And then it hit me: I do have one skill: The ability to collect rejection letters. I sent out my first fiction submission when I was 11 years old, and since then I’ve collected tons. Tons! of rejections.

These days they are largely electronic, of course, but I am so old I actually have a stack of rejection letters that I keep like the proverbial slave whispering in Caesar’s ear during the Triumph. So I thought, let’s examine some of these. It can be fun to humiliate yourself by exploring your failures. We’re starting off with this gem from the late 1980s.

What’s my name, Baen?

SO: Cravenhold was an awful fantasy novel I wrote when I was about 14. It was inspired a bit by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and I took from that series the idea of a person from our universe being transported to a fantasy universe where he had immense power but very little understanding of it or how it worked.

It’s not good. Still, because at the age of 14 I hadn’t yet realized that “good” is generally a requirement for manuscripts, I submitted it. Also, I had no idea that different publishing companies had different styles or flavors, and Baen was almost certainly not a good fit for my work.

Now, back in those days submitting a manuscript was a damn job, kids. I had to photocopy 360 pages of typewritten work, smeared with white-out (or, more accurately, pester my father to bring it into work and photocopy it for me) then type out a cover letter where I bragged about being 14, then stuff it with an SASE into a manilla envelope, then take it to the post office.

So, you can imagine my adolescent outrage when they sent back a flimsy form letter without even bothering to make a note of any kind to indicate that my manuscript was not immediately fed into a machine that turns manuscripts into dark black cubes that are then used to build more machines that in turn transform manuscripts into dark black cubes, and so on. Today, of course, I can only imagine the hilarity that ensued when Baen received a novel from a bragging 14-year old that contained as much awful writing and borrowed ideas as Cravenhold, and so I now think I got off easy.

The form letter rejection, of course, lives on, and I’ll admit that even today I am more surprised when places I submit (on my own, typically magazines) don’t use a form rejection, because I totally believe the line about how they have so many stories competing for attention, yada yada. So when I get a “Dear Jeff” and a line about the story itself, I am generally made very happy.

I’ll be posting more exciting moments of Fail from my literary life as we go. Because all y’all seem to really enjoy it when I fail. <bursts into tears>

Book Promotion: Readings Are the Worst

The classic question of an author’s existence is, if you write a novel and no one ever reads it, does it exist? I think most of us would be relatively unsurprised to discover one day that all of our terrible buried novels had simply disappeared, as if the universe had decided to give us a pass and burn their thread from the pattern, setting us free.

But what about the books you do like, once you’ve written them? Generally speaking you’ve got to get out there and try to sell them. Whether this involves finding an agent and a traditional publisher or self-publishing that sucker, the next step is to, you know, try to sell them. Which means promotion and marketing, which means, very likely, someone will suggest to you that you organize a reading. or will announce they’ve already done so.

Punch them. Punch them hard. Readings are terrible. And what’s more, they don’t accomplish much.

Welcome Back My Friends

Look, in theory Readings are perfectly reasonable. They give you something to advertise and promote, they offer your fans a chance to meet you and hear you read your novel, and you might sell some copies.

The reality is somewhat different. Now, if you’ve got a lot of fans you’ll likely get a decent showing, and they might buy your book to get it signed, or because it’s launch day and they couldn’t buy it beforehand. That’s all good! And yet it’s not worth it, because Readings are awkward horrorshows and you will never sell enough books to make them worthwhile, for a number of reasons:

  • The probability that the people who will come to your reading are already fans and would buy your book anyway is at least in the high 90s.
  • Chances those same people would buy a copy just to chat with you and have you sign it even if you didn’t bother doing a reading is about 100%.\
  • The chances that a person who has never heard of you will choose to attend your reading and then be persuaded to buy your book is very, very close to 0%.

So, what you get is a stressful performance conducted by people who were not put on this Earth to perform (most writers are the sort, like me, who hiss and spit whenever sunlight hits them), all in the service of selling books to people who would buy it anyway.

You might enjoy doing readings. Certainly they can offer promotion beyond the actual physical event, if you get some press coverage and the like. But don’t imagine for one moment that they’re really worth the effort, because they are soul-killing humiliation pits, and everyone who comes to laugh and jeer at you would have bought your book anyway.