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Chasing Sales Never Works (for Me)

Author: October 4, 2017 0 Comments

I don’t know about y’all, but I always liked to imagine I was in charge of myself, of my life. That while I might not have a lot of influence on global events or the future of mankind, I did have total control over my own creative faculties. If nothing else, I could write anything, and write it well.

That’s true to a certain extent, but one area it’s never worked out is when I’ve tried to write a novel solely because I think it’s the right move career-wise, or a novel that will sell. This doesn’t work out for one simple reason: Whenever I write a book because I think I’m going to sell it it, it turns out to be a really, really shitty book.

Shitty Books, I’ve Written a Few

If you’ve written more than one novel, chances are you’ve written a shitty book or two (and sometimes all it takes is one novel, sadly). It can happen at any time, for any reason—you lose purchase on the concept or the characters or the plot, and the whole thing staggers towards the finish line as a stinking mess. You finally stick a disgusted “THE END” on its ass and stuff it into some dark closet, ignoring the smell.

Sometimes it happens just because. For me—and I’m not speaking for any other writers here—it happens most often when I try to write something for reasons other than pure inspiration. The more calculated I am, the less successful the book is. The nine novels I’ve sold have all been the result of pure inspiration instead of canny marketing speculation, and the times I’ve tried to be “smart” about the book I’m writing have always turned into abject failure.

Which is frustrating. Unless you’re selling books at a brisk pace and always signing new contracts with publishers, the thought will enter your mind that maybe you need to be more calculating. After all, the last few books your wrote in a fever of inspiration didn’t sell, or your Beta Readers didn’t like it, so why not look at what’s trending and go for that, or look back at your own past successes and try to replicate them?

And maybe for some writers that works. For me, it always ends in tears. And drinking binges.

career, General, Writing

The Debt

Author: October 2, 2017 0 Comments

Writers owe all sorts of debts to all sorts of people. Even if you’ve never sold a word of your work, if you’ve ever taken joy in the creative process you owe a debt to someone, and probably a lot of someone’s. Teachers, your parents—other writers who have inspired you.

Growing up, my parents were always very supportive of my creative endeavors. This was always offered within the confines of maintaining other parts of my life—my grades, a part-time job. As long as I was doing well in school and otherwise taking care of my responsibilities, my parents were always thrilled to read something I’d written, and always acted like it was the coolest thing in the world. My father would take my typewritten manuscripts into work with him, photocopy them, and show them to his co-workers.

One of those co-workers actually copy-edited one of those manuscripts, once, peppering my pages with comments and feedback. It was my first experience with editing, and it had a profound effect on me.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Without all of these people who directly or indirectly inspired me to write, I probably wouldn’t be. Or I’d be doing so in secret, never having gotten the support necessary to believe that my words are worth showing around to folks. As much as I like to imagine I am totally in charge of my life, the fact is a lot of people helped me figure all this writing stuff out, and it’s necessary to remember that.

The other side of the coin, of course, are the folks who discouraged me, and they’re just as important. Because if all you ever hear is praise and encouragement, there’ll always be a little seed of doubt, a little voice that keeps asking if it’s possible that someone only gets encouragement. It starts to feel a bit fake. Having a few folks shit all over your writing is healthy, because it legitimizes everything else.

And then, of course, there are the people who have bought me drinks over the years. Those people are the real heroes.

career, Writing

Choosing Not to Compete

Author: September 29, 2017 0 Comments

Professional jealousy is pretty easy to fall prey to. Whenever I talk shop with other writers, there’s a prevailing sense that there are some pretty awful books out there getting published and hoovering up all the marketing budgets, and that’s true in some sense, although the implication that our novels—published and unpublished—are much better and thusly deserving of more attention is not necessarily true as a result.

This sort of jealousy also seeps into the creative side, when you read something really good that you wish you’d come up with, or that seems frustratingly close to your own WIP in terms of concept and execution, rendering months or years of work kind of wasted. It can also be healthy, in that it inspires you to work harder and take more risks.

We Are Not Good People

My novel We Are Not Good People was inspired by this sort of jealousy. I went to a conference and witnessed other writers who were getting a lot of attention, getting a lot of support from their publishers, and I had the sort of panicky reaction you might expect: I had to get something really good out there or my career would be over. It’s a familiar feeling for a lot of writers.

I’d already started work on what would become WANGP, but on the way home from the conference I attacked that book like nobody’s business, fueled by a sudden desperation. And the result is, I think, one of my best books, and one that sold to a publisher pretty quickly.

So, it can work for you. But it has to be aimed properly. Using that sort of desperate panic to make yourself write faster and better? Great. Using it to fuel some sort of shadow competition with your fellow writers? Not so great. In other words, creative competition—trying to outdo their fantastic ideas and plot twists with your own amazeballs creativity—is great. Career competition is pointless, because you don’t control the market, sales figures, or budgets (unless you’re self-published, but even so you don’t control anything).

Easier said than done, of course, especially when your peers nail a big contract, or get a rave review, or have a film made of their novel. How do I handle it? I drink very, very heavily and then I write in a sweat-dripping panic, thinking of my own impending death and how I need to leave more books behind, and soonish.

Yep: Death and whiskey, the Jeff Somers story.

career, Writing

The Ritual

Author: September 27, 2017 0 Comments

I’m a man of rituals. The less kind might say I’m a man of rigid, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, but I prefer to think of myself as an old-school guy who enjoys the ritual of things.

Take drinking. Sure, ultimately people drink for the effects: the derangement of the senses, the relaxation, the shedding of inhibitions. On a secondary level, I drink because I enjoy it—the taste, the texture, the smell. And on another level entirely, it’s the ritual: The opening of a bottle, the setting of a glass, the pouring of a finger or two of something really nice. Ordering in a bar—the entire bar ecosystem, in fact, with its code words and sub-rituals like the buy-back or the heavy pour.

Imploring the Gods

It’s the same with writing, for me. I’m one of them there “digital nomads” who can work anywhere; have Chromebook, will travel. Except of course I hate to travel and prefer to stay in my house like some sort of crab monster, scuttling about. My house is where I keep my liquor, after all.

But when it comes to writing, I have my rituals, and I love them. When I worked on a manual typewriter, I used to thrill at the act of sliding a page onto the drum and then hitting the space bar four times to indent a new paragraph—it was something I did several times every day, and it always brought a sense of excitement. These days the typewriter is stored away, sadly, but an echo of the ritual remains when I open a document and search for “xxxx,” my placeholder for where I left off, or when I set up a new document with a header: Somers | Title (word count): Page.

On the flip side, sometimes breaking the ritual is just as exciting. Sometimes rituals are traps, and you get caught up in doing things the same way all the time, so suddenly doing everything differently can be freeing and exciting. It feels wrong in a wonderful way for a while, stirring up the sediment of your thoughts, making things float up that would have remained lost otherwise.

I just enjoy the ritual of it. Sitting at that certain spot, using those particular tools (a blue ink pen of specific brand, a college-ruled notebook, the aforementioned Chromebook). It’s part of the pleasure of creation.

Now, when you mix the writing ritual with the drinking ritual, that’s when things get really interesting. Usually in an unfortunate way that requires emailed apologies and dry-cleaning.

General, Writing

The Shifting Goal Line

Author: September 25, 2017 0 Comments

One thing they never tell you when you decide to be a writer is how the definition of success shifts and changes over the course of your career, often without your permission (and sometimes without your even noticing).

Everyone has a different experience and evolution of thought, of course. For me, it went something like this: When I was but a young’n, success was just finishing something that resembled a novel. It didn’t matter how good it was, or if I might ever sell it. Just writing 50,000 words or so that made sense was enough.

When I’d done that, the goal posts shifted: I wanted to write something good. Something original. When I felt like I’d done that, the goal shifted again. Now I wanted to be published. Then I wanted to be paid for my writing. Then I wanted a contract with a major publisher. Et cetera and so on.

The Ladder

Every time I achieved my current definition of success, the definition shifted on me, so I never quite made it all the way, and still haven’t. But you have to remind yourself sometimes that writing a book is in and of itself an achievement—most writers who intend to write a novel, or even begin one, fail to finish it. And most that finish that novel never revise it. Or never try to publish it. Or never write another one.

Noted weirdo Woody Allen once said that success was 99% showing up, and he’s right—whatever your current definition of writing success, it all comes back to putting in the time and the work, producing material, and getting it out there somehow. The goal posts might shift, but the ways of getting to them don’t—you write, you revise, you submit.

And you should keep in mind the shifting nature of success in this business, and remind yourself that there was a time when the thing you did yesterday in an almost routine fashion was once your definition of success. The world is a machine designed to prevent you from writing, so just getting words on the screen is success, sometimes.

The world is also a machine designed to murder us, but that seems like a topic for a whole different sort of blog.

career, General, Writing

Plot Skipping

Author: September 22, 2017 0 Comments

You may have heard the old line from Elmore Leonard about skipping the boring parts when you write, and that’s powerful advice. Most people apply it in a micro sense, or as we now know it, the Game of Thrones Season 7 sense, which is usually expressed as no one wants to see Jon Snow in a boat traveling south for six episodes. In other words, detailing your character as they drive seven hours someplace is maybe not worth you or your reader’s time.

Another aspect of “skipping” can be just as powerful. Simply put, if you’re having trouble writing a scene or sequence in your novel, consider just skipping it (for now) and writing something in your plot’s “future” that’s more fun.

Getting to the Good Stuff

Now, some writers already work in a non-linear fashion, writing scenes in any order and then piecing them together. Even then, though, some scenes are easier than others. Some scenes are more fun than others. And some scenes are like black holes that suck you in, and six months later you’re still struggling to find the right approach.

You probably have to write those scenes eventually, but if you’ve been struggling for a while on a specific scene, take a break. That doesn’t mean you take a break from the book in general. Instead, you could just take a break from that scene and skip over to some other scene that’s more fun. An action sequence, or a fun moment—or maybe the climax of it all, the Big Moment you can’t wait to write. Sure, you’ll likely have to do a fair bit of clean up work, but in the short term it’ll get your writing jump-started. And you might learn something about your story that will help you when you get back to the tough scenes.

Or maybe you’ll realize you don’t need the tough scenes at all.

This does require a bit of Plotting, so for Pantsers this might be a tougher trick. Even Pantser usually have some notion of where their story is going, or at least of cool moments they want to include. Skip to those cool moments, then skip back, refreshed and re-energized.

Or go the Somers Way and have a cocktail. It’s almost as effective.

plot, Writing

I Got the Music in Me

Author: September 20, 2017 0 Comments

Yanno, I play a bit of guitar, and while I’m not deluded enough to think anyone really cares, I do believe fervently that there’s no point in creating something unless you at least put it out there for people to experience in some way. So, here are four songs I’ve recently composed in my little home studio, otherwise known as the tiny, cat-filled office I work in. Enjoy?

Song882

Song883

Song898

Song902

Enjoy!

gee-tar

SKIP INTRO is Why I Live in the Future

Author: September 20, 2017 0 Comments

If you have a Netflix subscription (or are borrowing someone else’s), you’ve likely noticed the new “Ship Intro” option whcih allows you to, say, not watch the goddamn credits sequence for Friends for the 5,000th time. There have been some think pieces about this new feature that lament the loss of credit sequences, noting that a few such sequences (Bojack Horseman is mentioned as an example) actually make watching the intro worthwhile.

Hogwash. The SHIP INTRO feature is the greatest thing invented this week.

I grew up in the era of Awful TV. I had four channels as a kid, didn’t get cable until I was 14, and our primitive VCR was a top-loader. If you don’t know what a top-loader is, or what a VCR is, or what cable is, you are one of the blessed, move along. My point is, when I was younger I not only had to watch the fucking credits, I had very little control at all over what I watched. It was pretty terrible.

The people who think SKIP INTRO is a bad thing are the same people who wish Times Square in New York City was still filled to the brim with prostitutes, drug dealers, porno theaters, and garbage. I remember taking a bus into New York while in high school and being propositioned by male prostitutes, so people who have affection for the old-school Times Square are idiots. I don’t care how awful the modern version is (and it is awful) I still wouldn’t go back.

SKIP INTRO of course still allows you to watch the damn intro if you have a reason to. It’s just that now you have a choice. You don’t have to watch the same scenes repeated over and over again, endlessly. It’s a glorious time to be alive, and I for one am very happy that the world’s greatest technical minds aren’t wasting time on cancer cures but rather finding ways to make my streaming video experience slightly more pleasant. More of that, please.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Art of Ripping Off

Author: September 20, 2017 0 Comments

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all authors steal from each other. That’s art, really; you build on what’s gone before, chronicling the changes in society and human understanding by taking a work and playing with it from your own unique perspective. It’s only stealing if you don’t transform it somehow, if you don’t add to it.

That’s writing 101: Good writer’s steal. The thing is, the first stage of transforming something into your own unique work is very similar to simply ripping someone off.

The Green-Eyed Monster

The creative process is 99% driven by jealousy. The other 1% is a combination of things, including greed, the pure joy of creativity, and fear of monsters, but mostly it’s jealousy. Writers are the most jealous creatures in the world. Publish a book to acclaim? We hate you, because our books are smarter. Publish a book to great sales? We hate you, because people clearly lack the taste and wisdom to choose our books over yours. Writers may smile when they shake your hand, but we are black holes of hatred and jealousy.

When we read a book that’s really, really good—or really, really popular, or, god help us, both—we instantly start mining it for bits we can steal. And if the book really grabs us as something great, our first attempts at replicating it will be very, very close to simply ripping the book off.

And that’s okay.

Writing a pastiche of something else is a great way to figure out its secrets. Writing a story that is essentially someone else’s story with a few flourishes is like taking an engine apart and then putting it back together to learn how it works. At the end, you’ll have a small pile of parts left over—mysterious and ominous. But the engine, maybe, still runs despite that. It’s mysterious, but when that happens, you’ve taken your first step to owning the ideas and making them your own.

You keep taking it apart and putting it back together again. Parts get left over. If the story still runs, you put in new parts of your own to replace them. Repeat. Eventually, you’ve got a story that hums and purrs and there’s so many of your parts in there it’s no longer something you ripped off, it’s something you transformed.

That’s how it’s done. Although, please don’t take the word “parts” too literally.

ideas, Writing

The Slow Down

Author: September 18, 2017 0 Comments

Creativity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who has composed a story knows the thrill of having made something, of having pulled together a fictional universe from thin air, using nothing more than words. It’s a form of magic.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work involved. And it’s usually low-paying, soul-killing work.

If you’re a writer, you know the feeling. You start off with an explosion of an idea in your head. You’re excited about it, and the universe that has taken form in your brain expands quickly, all hot gases and explosions of inspiration. Before you know it you’ve written a few thousand words, drawn some maps, and conducted a thorough casting call of the best actors in the world to play your characters.

That’s the easy part. The Hot Gas Expansion part of writing a novel. At some point, your Big Bang will cool off, expansion will slow, and you’ll run into a bit of trouble getting through the middle part. In fact, if you don’t put in enough work to keep all your galaxies and planets spinning, your fictional universe might experience Heat Death and start to collapse into a Big Crunch.

I wonder how many space metaphors we can cram in here?

The Slow Down

Almost every writer hits a wall after that initial burst of inspiration—or, if not a wall, a Slow Down. This is inevitable when you stop dealing with a rush of ideas and start trying to organize them into a plot, characters, and a stable universe in which to place them. It can be a frustrating moment for a writer, because you go rather suddenly from rushing along, having fun to crawling along, in the dark, with sweat stinging your eyes.

Pushing through the Slow Down is the only way you’ll get that book written, usually, but there are plenty of different ways to get through it. You can just push and push, of course, pouring words onto the page laboriously until the damn thing is done. Or you can step away and take a break, and come back when you’ve got the itch back. You can skip ahead and write a scene in the future of your plot because it’s more fun. Or you can decide that if you’re working this hard to write the scenes, your readers will have to work that hard to read them and you’ll scrap everything you’ve done since you hit the Slow Down and start again.

The key is to try to push through, because Slow Downs happen and they don’t necessarily mean your story is no good. A Slow Down might mean that, but to find out you have to put the work in first. And the key to working through Slow Downs is to know they’re coming, no matter how intense your excitement is at first.

If you’re very unlucky, like me, you might actually wind up with several WIPs in Slow Down Mode simultaneously. Which is when you just go on a bender.

General, Novels, Writing