Getting Some Distance

You have just finished your brilliant work—a piece that combines the wit of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman with the social commentary of Midnight’s Children and the style of Finnegan’s Wake—and you are soaring in the clouds. Your long-awaited goal as finally arrived and you are ready to pack your baby off to the nearest publisher and wait for the money and Pulitzers to roll in. But, before you do, there are some things you need to consider that, if they catch you unawares, could cause you to stumble and fall from your great heights in angsty, writerly frustration (Be honest, you’re a writer and thus have a slight tendency towards the melodramatic).

Write what you know. And don't.

"Write what you know" generates a lot of discussion, some arguments, and even some anger.

WRITER 1: What do you mean, "Write what you know"? If I wrote what I knew, I'd write about sunken couches and empty cashew tins.

WRITER 2:  Yes. Do that. Because you have felt the couch. You have eaten the cashews. You know the taste of the salt on your fingers, the corduroy rub of the flattened cushion under your buttocks. That is real. That is pain. Write it. Write!

WRITER 1: I'd rather use my imagination and write what I don't know, thank you very much. I want to write about angels.

WRITER 2: Are you an angel?

WRITER 1: No. I mean, I'm not not an angel. Like, I'm not a bad person, or anything, but I'm not--

WRITER  2: How can you write about angels if you don't know what it's like to be an angel?

This isn't what "Write what you know" means.

Are You Being Followed?: Self-Promotion in the Web 2.0 Age

            Self-promotion of your new book has begun, you’ve printed advertisements, told your friends so much about your book they’ll buy it just to shut you up, and you’ve set up a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, you’ve even set up a MySpace page and a Friendster account, you name it, you’ve set it up on the tech front. But, now that you have all of these accounts opened, activated, and ready, you’re in sore need of something to fill your endless gigabytes of message board. I mean, you can’t just keep spamming “LOOK FOR MY BOOK ‘FLIGHT OF THE SALAMANDER’ AUGUST 24, 2011” for an entire year. This forward attempt may have worked with your friends and family, but the internet is a different beast altogether, one who is not above leaving a nasty comment on your wall and cutting off all further contact.

So, what do you do? Well, that’s a big question and requires different answers tailored to the specific social networking formats you’re using. Today’s post will center on the newest social networking site to hit the net; you’ve guessed it: Twitter.

Be a tortured artist, but don't be a spoiled writer.

You’ve written the book, and it’s good. It’s even published—whether by you or by a traditional publisher—and now you want people to read it.

But you don’t really want to have to think about how to GET them to read it, because you’re not a publicist or a marketer—you’re a writer. You spend minutes, many of them, searching for the perfect word (Work? no…Toil? nooope…Labor? yes! labor!). You craft your sentences with purpose, intentionally choosing words with a certain number of syllables (and maybe some assonance, too), and you place your commas (or refrain from placing them at all) very deliberately, all of it working together to draw the reader into the scene or the narrator’s mind and mood. You’ll even spend days—days!—pondering a character’s name—Paulo? Chadwick III? Bob?—until you find the perfect fit for your protagonist’s second cousin. How could you, an artist, be asked to—*choke*—sell your own books?

The Secrets of Self-Marketing; or, You're Published, Now What?

            So, you’ve managed to write your book, snagged a publisher, and are now wondering what you can do to help your book sell once it finishes its run through the publishing process. Well, it looks like you’re not the only one. Recently, the Huffington Post posted an article by publicist and marketing expert Arielle Ford concerning the various factors that motivate someone to buy one book over another. You can find the full article here. While short, it contains some useful information regarding what you yourself can do to drum up book sales both before and after your book hits the shelves. The article can be boiled down into three main ways in which you can work up your audience into a buying frenzy for your book.

Blogger's Block

Today I will be writing about that Sauron to your creativity’s Frodo, that Magneto to your intellect’s Professor X, and that Jar Jar Binks to your inner fanboy’s self-respect. Today, I will be writing about writer’s block.

The irony of writing about writer’s block does not go unnoticed by me, your heroic blogger. I came up with this topic following a desperate bout with this ultimate evil that left me with a fragment of an idea and a near-concussion after applying my forehead to the desk multiple times with increasing force. Now, I wouldn’t suggest such a response to writer’s block if one can help it. If not professionally done, the Head-Desk Method will only result in blunt trauma, a trip to the hospital, and possibly a broken keyboard. So, you may be asking, how do the non-“professionals” deal with this juggernaut if we don’t wish to fork over the money for a new keyboard? Well, I’m glad you asked, as it will provide me with a post for today.

In Defense of Ghost Writing

Justin Bieber is getting a lot of flak for writing his memoirs at 16. Not only is it difficult to buy that a 16-year-old could have enough to say to fill twenty pages, never mind a book, but it’s just as hard—primarily for writers who have been struggling for years to have their own work published—to see “Bieber” and “write” and “book” and “published” in the same sentence. Not because he’s not capable of writing a book—maybe he is, maybe he isn’t—but because we all know what he does, and it’s not writing. He sings. He performs. He does talk shows and guest appearances on “Saturday Night Live.” Who has time to write with that kind of schedule?

“He’ll probably have a ghost writer,” writers who write their own work scoff.

Yes. He probably will.

But that’s because he’s not a writer. He’s a singer. A performer. A teenage kid who blasted into fame when his YouTube video became a sensation. He's also someone with a story to tell.

Now, I’m not here to defend ghost-written fiction, because—a writer, myself—I can’t see that as anything but cheating. Writing fiction is like singing a song—the voice should be that of the artist whose name appears under the title of the work. In fact, it’s safe to say ghost-written fiction is the literary equivalent of Milli Vanilli. (You remember Milli Vanilli, don’t you?)

But ghost-written non-fiction is entirely different, because the focus of the finished product is rarely, if ever, the writing itself (unless it’s very bad). The focus is the subject, whether that subject is a person or a person’s singular experience. The story isn’t being created by someone else who will then take credit for the work—the story already exists. The ghost-writer simply acts as a conduit to deliver that story to the people who want to hear it or who’ll benefit from it.

I’ll admit it. I was one of those scoffing writers when I heard about the impending publication of Justin Bieber’s memoirs. Part of me thought it was ridiculous that a teenager had a memoir to write, and the other was reacting to what I viewed as the unfairness of it all (“I’ve been writing for close to twenty years and I can’t sell a novel, but this 16-year-old singing boy wonder gets a deal with HarperCollins?”). In fact, it wasn’t until I reached the mid-point of this blog post that I started to find myself on Justin Bieber’s side.

He’s 16. Yes. And when most of us remember being sixteen, we think, “What’s he going to write about, his first zit? What it’s like to be grounded? When he got his first bike?” We think those things because  that’s all most of us had experienced by 16. But Justin Bieber isn’t like the rest of us. His life has been completely altered by his sudden fame, and most of us can’t begin to imagine how that might affect a teenager’s everyday life. One morning he’s eating Fruity Pebbles in the kitchen before catching the school bus, and the next morning he’s…he’s…well, who knows?

But aren’t you a little bit curious?

Ghost writers bring us the extraordinary experiences of others. There’s a whole lot of life going on that we don’t know about, and even a whole lot more to learn from other people whose powerful or entertaining experiences make fascinating and/or educational reading. Without ghost writers, far too much of the human experience would die with the people who experience it simply because they’re not writers. And, I don’t know, but somehow that just doesn’t seem right.

- Lyla P.