Who Is My Reader?

Who is my reader? How do I impress him? How do I overcome his skepticism? These are not academic questions, but questions that go to the very heart of deliberate, purposeful writing. Writers are often tempted to write for the"market" or for some other vague, nondescript entity that is hazy in their mind. Such indulgence can be a form of laziness because, in imagining a vague entity, one allows one's writing to be lazy--it's easy, in other words, to impress a vaguely defined reader, for such a reader is as forgiving as the author's ego. But the vague phantoms of the writer's imagination don't read, and they don't buy books--real individuals do, and these real individuals must be impressed, have their skepticism overcome, and have their time respected.

Who do you write for? The genre fanatic? The housewife? The teenage boy? How old is your reader? Why is he reading at all? How do you impress this reader? You do so by taking your reader seriously. Taking someone seriously means respecting his time, money, attention, imagination, and intelligence. In essence, it means being ethical instead of self serving in your desire to simply "get it out there."

Respect his time and money.

Readers are busy people. They are not rich. They are husbands, wives, sons and daughters; they have jobs and worries--they want writing that respects them by being clear, direct, and well executed. Slow openings, bad editing, poor story construction and other symptoms of laziness signal to the reader that the writer is not taking them into account or is doing so only peripherally. Lazy writing makes the reader sorry he spent money on your book. It makes him feel cheated.

Lazy writing does not respect the reader's time. It is vague and requires labor to digest. Why should the reader invest his precious hours in your cryptic ramblings? When you read the work of great writers, or even writer who are merely competent, you notice that their writing is clear, logical, and focused. Such writers don't waste words or space, they don't pad around; the logic of their writing is so easy to follow it almost doesn't require thinking; their focus is so clear, nothing dangles or is left unused in the writer's project of creating meaning. There is a great deal of discipline evident in good, professional writing; and this discipline is evident to readers, and they know that they are being respected.

Make it interesting.

Who is your story supposed to interest? Without a clearly imagined reader, the answer is most likely anyone, which means, in practice, no one. But if you have a clear imagine, a living concept, of a reader in your mind, he becomes a person for you, and you write to interest this person, to engage his imagination, intellect and to entertain him.

Suppose that you're writing a children's story. Do you even know children of the age group you want to write for? Try volunteering at a local elementary school as a story teller and see if you can even engage their interest. It's a lot harder than it seems because children, like all people, are intelligent, not dumb. The same insight applies for any potential reader, whether the mystery buff, the technothriller fan or the literature connoisseur--all want to be wowed. How do you wow them? How do you overcome their resistance?

Logic, focus, clarity.

Good writing has the following hallmarks--logical development, arrangement, and movement in some direction. Good writing has a singular focus and clear destination. It moves to this end with clarity and grace. Bad writing is the opposite-it lacks the logical connections, it has vague focus, and it is often unclear. The writer mocks the reader with bad writing, and who wants to be mocked?

Revision, Motivation And Craft

Writing is hard work, writing is lonely work-motivation, sooner or latter, becomes an issue, especially when what one writes does not seem to amount to very much. How do you stay motivated? Should you?

Motivation is the desire to achieve something that one sees as necessary and worthwhile; it requires a passion to see something happen. For writers, motivation often means the desire to see a book on the library or store bookshelves; or the desire to tell a story that is important to the writer for some reason. The writer believes in the worth of his story. He believes in the necessity of telling it. Trouble begins when the writer becomes tired of the mundane aspects of writing and the motivation to see the project through to successful completion becomes a chore. Here are some thoughts to help dislodge the writer's block.

Is it still necessary?

When you look at your story or book, do you still think it is necessary, and important story worth telling? Or has it become a festering, confusing, headache-inducing mess that is far from your original inspiration? You have to ask yourself the following questions. Why did the story seem necessary in the first place? What was it about and why was this worth writing about? Where did the original spark come from?

The creative spark

Something sets your imagination on fire and makes you want to write. After a few months of work, this fire seems to go out. There are more mundane problems to deal with-scenes, reversals, character development-stuff that's technical and seems to have little to do with being creative. That initial creative burst seems to vanish and the technical aspect of constructing a story leaves you with a headache and a strong desire to do something else, anything else but go back in front of that computer.

The solution is to go back to that initial vision of the story. In the first place, you should have written it as clearly as possible on a sheet of paper so that it can serve as your reminder of what this story is about and why it is important. Another possible way to capture the original vision is to make a poster or a book cover that will inspire you, when you're feeling tired, to keep going. Yet another way is to draw scenes from your story, especially the most important ones. Of course, you need to be able to draw, but that's fun, and it will help you with the writer's block.

Why bother?

But there it is, you mess of a manuscript, a tree hundred plus page monster that's absorbed every bit of your fee time over the past few months, sitting worthlessly on the hard drive. You have your posters and your scene sketches, but this thing is beyond help. Surely, there are other more important things you could be doing with your life. Think about all the things that you're missing out on. Why bother with it? It does not come easy.

Mastery of craft

This is the crux of the problem of the writer's block-the inability to revise. Writing is about revision. Nothing can be written in the first pass, nothing worthwhile that is. The original inspiration is often deceptive because it makes you believe that a story can be merely put down on paper as is and then you will be done. It is, you believe, only a matter of getting to the end. But then, you realize, as you write, that there is no end at all. You get trapped in the desert of revision and the original fire that set you ablaze at the keyboard is like a water, evaporated in the hot sun of the Sahara.

The only way out is mastery of craft. If you get stuck, unsure about where an action should go, only your understanding of how things like plot, theme, tone, voice, character and other elements of the story function can get you out of trouble and back into that sweet spot of creative flow.

Creativity is not magic, it's all in the mastery of the elements of story. Only when you master the elements of story can you truly be creative in you choices. You must know, for instance, how to create a great plot, how to create characters, you must know how character action and plot relate to theme, tone and mood-this an many other things you must know in a practical way, not in the academic way of definitions that are hazy in your mind. When you read a story, when you watch a movie, you should, right away, if you know your stuff, be able to know what the writer is doing, how he is doing it, what the effects are, and whether he's succeeded in his project. You should see the elements of structure and their effects and learn form them. Why is there tension, suspense? What specific actions have caused this to be? You should know how the plot, theme, character all interrelate. All this and more should be clear to you as you read the story. Only then can you reach a point where you can help yourself out of your writer's block because only then do you know the craft, the practice of it, to the point where it can be helpful.

Writing is all about thinking and rethinking, writing and revising whatever you put down on the page. Everything you place on the page has some meaning, some impact and purpose, and you must be aware of that, and be able to use it in your story somehow. Every word is a symbol, so is every action, each consequence of that action has meanings too. Even a simple story such as thriller, where the only question is of the type such as-will the spy reach Germany with the secret of FUSAG, as in Eye of the Needle-is not so simply to construct from scratch unless you have mastered how the concepts of suspense, tension, reversal, surprise, and complication work in practice, not just theory.

So what's the real secret to getting back on the saddle? Dissecting stories for their structure. If you're feeling stuck, outline what you have written. That's right. Do a fresh outline of your story as it is. Then you will see what you have and whether it is working. This outline will help you see what needs to be done in terms of plot, theme, and character development, and other aspects. And you're right when you think that, man, that's the start of a whole new version of the book. It is. That's what revision is all about, the going back to the beginning and starting over for the sake of reaching some end that's part of your creative vision for the story.

Of course, you will, at some point, ask yourself why it is that you should keep doing this work. It is very hard work, and more than likely, you could use your time in a more productive way doing something else-go hiking in the mountains, learn to dance, play soccer, ride a bicycle, learn to be a volunteer fireman… the possibilities for a fulfilling life are endless.

How long does it take?

How long does it take to write a book? The recent interview with Danielle Steele should cast some light--a year on a 80+ page outline, a year on the first draft, two years on revision of that draft. How do you stack up? Have you ever done an 80+ page outline?

In Hollywood, they do what are called treatments, which can vary by length, but most professional writers do create long treatments of their stories, sometimes working on that treatment for more than a year. Why all this work? To create the kind of stories that people want to see on the screen or read. Writing is hard work. Very hard. It takes commitment, discipline, effort, and talent. You can't be depressed or distracted. You have to be smart, alive, plugged in, part of something. You have to be an astute observer of life and people.

Your Best Bet

PODy Mouth has a great blog that I encourage everyone in the POD game to read because it's filled with interesting info on the industry. Her latest post Top 10 POD Books Right Now is absolutely essential reading for all POD writers, or those who want to go the POD route. So what's your best bet in POD? Non-fiction. When you look at the list, you will find that most of the bestselling POD books are non-fiction. What are the hottest topics?

• Relationships/Sex
  
• Money management
  
• Self-improvement
  
• Motivational/Management
  

In other words, stuff that people want to learn more about. I would also add health/coping with illness, identity theft, and age related issues--there are millions of Baby Boomers out there and they need to know about how to live after 65: they want to know how to spend money, protect their identity, deal with Medicare, manage their money, and other issues that come into play after retirement.

Self-publishing outlook (2007)

One of the bloggers whose posts I enjoy is Nathan Bransford, the San Francisco based agent extraordinaire. Recently he ran a kind of special on self-publishing, posting a number of posts about it, and posing the following question:

So what do you think -- will self-publishing make inroads into the territory once reserved for mainstream publishing or will it always be an also-ran for lack of the distribution and big-ness of the mainstream publishers?

I don't think that self-publishing has much of a future as such. The biggest problem with self-publishing is the general lack of quality. Some books rise above that, but not many, and those few that do face an almost insurmountable obstacle of distribution. Distribution. Few mainstream readers know how to find self-published books, and even fewer are willing to look for them. Why should they, it is not as if the mainstream publishers are not publishing anything at all. These two factors cannot really be overcome, and they mean that self-publishing will remain a niche thing. But what about POD?

For the most part, self-published titles lack quality. Many struggle with formatting problems, bad grammar, poor punctuation, and plot concerns that none of the mainstream books suffer from. This is a death knell of the entire enterprise because readers are used to highly polished, professionally edited and designed texts and will hardly give a spare moment to labor through an amateurish self-published book. Of course, as this blog testifies, there are quality self-published books available, but they are few. Mainstream books are also well designed from story standpoint, at least a great majority of them are. Suspense, reversals, tension-all these elements are well designed, in the vast majority of mainstream books that propose to be thrilling. The same is not true of the vast majority of self-published counterparts.

Distribution is another factor working against self-publishing. Few, if any, readers know how to find self-published titles, and even fewer are willing to actively look for these. They have no incentive to do so, either. Mainstream publishers produce an avalanche of books every month, thousands of titles, all of which offer the kind of quality that readers are used to. Self-publishing could work if mainstream channels produced few new books or if such books were ideologically censored, or if they were out of touch with readers, but this is not, by and large, the case. What we have in the mainstream publishing is book inflation-too many books chasing too few readers. You Tube effect? Here's the problem with this theory-while the average You Tube video is a few minutes in length, at most, the average book is not. Perhaps if there were a book crazed mob of intellectuals out there, lusting for the written word the way that the mostly young 20-somethings who visit You Tube lust for the weird and unusual, the freaky and the odd, we could talk about the You Tube effect in publishing, but there aren't and we can't. The sheer word length works against this, the effort required simply to read. Books aren't videos. And what about POD? Surely, some reason, print on demand can put the press in the hands of the masses. But so what? Lulu.com already offers free publishing, had offered this for years, and nothing happened: there was not a single writer whose POD book broke into the NYT bestseller list. Look at Cory Doctorow, arguably the only writer who is positioned to use POD. He has not gone POD, even though he could have because he has the fan base to do so. Perhaps someone reading this blog knows Cory and could ask him why. I think that POD will become part of the mainstream publishing through something like the Espresso machine. Publishers or bookstores will own these and use these kiosks to sell books the way an ATM dispenses money. This will allow two things: publishers will be able to bring back titles that are no longer economical to print in large runs, and bookstores, especially independent bookstores, and perhaps libraries, will be able to offer an unlimited selection of books. Still, publishers will be doing the vetting because they will ultimately have the money to control these kiosks.

Self publishing is a niche thing. If self-published works offer something that is quality and is unique, they can carve out a small niche for themselves in the book ecosystem by finding areas that are not cost efficient for mainstream publishers to deal with. But to successfully do this, a writer would have to have a great deal of knowledge about the market and reader tastes, and, more importantly, would have to be a great writer. By definition, however, this approach is only complimentary and cannot compete with the mainstream. Sure, the publishing business has problems, and it does produce turkeys, but so does Detroit and Silicon Valley, but something tells me that they will endure.

Attention

Grumpy Old Bookman makes some interesting points in his blog entry about literature and trash. It all boils down to recognition. Thousands of books are published every year and review space is tight

your chances of being reviewed in any major journal are somewhere between slim and zero, and Slim just left town; and that reviews do not necessarily translate into sales, or anything else of much value.

He also has some sage advice about promoting one's work and avoiding obscurity--

If you must write short stories, or a novel, put the damn thing on the internet, for free. If it's any good, in terms of producing emotion in the reader, word will spread fast enough, you can be sure of that -- ask Cory Doctorow. And if you can find 50,000 readers or so, and prove that you’ve entertained them, then you won’t have to go looking for a publisher, because a whole gang of them will undoubtedly come rushing up the path to your door.

I couldn't agree more.

New Realities of Being a Writer

I checked the Amazon.com ranking of Antarktos Rising and found that it ranks 6000th plus, pretty damn good considering that most books published by mainstream houses rank something like 10,000 to 50,000. What does all this mean? First, it means that a well-written POD book CAN reach an audience. Second, it means that you need to use the internet to promote your work. There is no substitute for having a loyal fan base, and this applies equally well to mainstream writers, too. It also shows the new realities of being a writer in the Web 2.0 world.

Quality is the key. If your book is not well edited, if the plot is poorly conceived and executed, if the idea is not cool or interesting, and if the characters are boring and uninspired, then all of this will sink your work. The more work you put into these basic elements, the more staying power your book will have. Quality means staying power. Quality builds great word of mouth. It is well worth your while, therefore, to pay someone qualified to edit your manuscript. It is well worth the effort to belong to a writing workshop group. It is well worth the effort to take some online classes through places like UCLA extension, which offers online certificates. (These can be expensive, UCLA being, last time I checked, around $ 3,000.00, but you get contact with other writers and with world class writing professors, and that’s priceless.) The worst this you can do is to become isolated and trapped in your own world where there are no challenges to your writing. No challenges means no motivation for improvements and there lies the path to stagnation and madness.

Quality has another aspect—the target audience. You must remember that what is quality to thriller readers is not quality to literary readers. Your book, in other words, must be able to attract some group of readers. Of course, as I wrote in another post, you cannot really make yourself write any specific kind of book unless you are predisposed creatively to write that kind of a book. So, you must know yourself as a writer and know what you are able to write well. Focus on this and polish it, perfect it, then put it out there and they will come. In the olden days, you gained exposure through magazines. Writers wrote short stories and got them published in magazines, building an audience for their work. Not anymore. You may go that route, but you must also use the new communication venues like the Internet to build exposure for your material and yourself.

Today, you can use venues like Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, and so on to create exposure for yourself as a writer. This is crucial because without such exposure, you are essentially unknown, and very few people will risk buying the work of a person that they don’t know. Through his videos on You Tube, Jeremy Robinson has created interest in his book and this interest has translated into impressive sales as he nearly reached the Amazon.com top 100. So have an internet presence. Have a blog. Give away some of your work?

Another avenue of exposure that you can pursue is giving some of your work away for free. (Check out the Bookcrossing site and leave your books at various places like libraries or bus stops for unsuspecting readers to find. Bookcrossing is the biggest book club and a way to gain exposure for your work. And it’s fun!)

The give-your-work-away-for-free is the model that writer Cory Doctorow is pursuing. If you visit Craphound.com, you will find that nearly all of his books are available for free as downloads. Of course, Cory can afford to do this, but the point is that it builds a great deal of goodwill among readers if you give some of your work away for nothing. When you do have something in the bookstores or on Amazon, all those readers are your built in audience and they are more likely than strangers to give you a break. Good will is crucial to any business, and as a writer, you are a brand and a business. If giving away your stories or books gets you exposure and potential paying readers, then do that. There is nothing worse for a writer than obscurity.

Conflict, tension, and suspense

Conflict is composed of an action and reaction struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist, with each action and each reaction taking place on a higher level of intensity, creating escalation. The struggle is also responsible for the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome, and uncertainty creates tension. Because struggle is comprised of reversals, no matter how bad things seem to get for the protagonist, hope remains that he will yet prevail, and the presence of hope maintains the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome. Without the possibility of reversals, once the antagonist would appear to triumph, hope would be lost for the protagonist and the story would be over. As long as the protagonist has a hope of reversing the triumphs of the antagonist, and as long as the antagonist can do the same to the protagonist's victories, there is uncertainty and tension. Uncertainty must be maintained as long as logically possible otherwise there will be no tension and the reader will lose interest. Tension rises as the struggle escalates but the outcome remains uncertain. Conflict is responsible for escalation of the action as well as for uncertainty and tension. Conflict also creates suspense.

Conflict is caused by some event that suggests a possible disaster. In order to avoid the disaster, the protagonist acts, and comes in conflict with forces that wish to make the disaster happen. The ultimate outcome, however, because of the conflict, is uncertain or suspended. As long as the outcome is uncertain, suspense is maintained. As long as the conflict is unresolved, its outcome remains suspended.

The Craft of Writing

This will be a new feature here at the PODler--in posts labeled craft we will examine the various topics related to the craft of writing. The first post will discuss conflict, tension, and suspense. Other posts will examine aspects of character development, plot, and scene writing, theme, and many others.

Niche Writing and POD

Many writers still have not discovered the power of POD. They attempt to use it in the old way, by hoping that somehow they will be able to attract the mass audience to their POD offering. This may or may not happen. Another thing that writers do is hope that if their POD hits a few thousand copies in sales, they will garner some attention from the mainstream. This, too, may or may not happen. Both approaches are a waste of time and effort.

What you should be doing is writing for the niche market. Forget about trying to impress the mass audience. You don't have the marketing muscle to do that. POD is not the back door to big publishing, either. Focus instead on the diehard readers in your genre of choice. What do they want? What kind of a book do they love reading?

Diehards are the keepers of the word-of-mouth. If you can impress the diehards, you will, very likely, also impress the heavy users, and before long, your book may become a cult classic. Cult classic. I think this is what POD books can legitimately aspire to.