Dialogue We’re all talkers, right? Most of us are, anyway. We know what a conversation should sound like, even if there’s no sound involved. (As the Gallaudet students recently proved, no actual speech is required to detect insincere conversation.) So why isn’t dialogue easy? Why do so many conversations lose their vitality when put down on paper, or get pulled out of context faster than a John Kerry song at the James Dobson Karaoke Festival? (I realize there isn’t such a thing... but there should be.) So, by reader request, some long-delayed suggestions on making dialogue work. (Yeah, I know it’s been a frighteningly long time since the last entry in this series... but I tried to make up for it a little with some bonus Leaving Laura excerpts.)
Worldbuilding
I've been teaching a bunch of big, sprawling setting-heavy books in my fantasy class recently (Lord of the Rings, The Mists of Avalon, A Wizard of Earthsea, with Watership Down and The Iron Dragon's Daughter coming up shortly) so I guess I have worldbuilding on the brain, but here's the thing: As a writer you still have to sell me on a believable world regardless of whether you're writing high fantasy or nonfiction. If I don't believe in the world where your book takes place - whether it's your vision of Middle Earth or your vision of the White House - I'm not going to believe in any of the points you're trying to make in your narrative.
How Publishers Pay You
Last week we touched on the "ask what you can do for your publisher" part of the equation, but tonight is time to "ask not what your publisher can do for you." Publishers would prefer you not ask that, of course, and may react with Hastertlike expressions of shock and incredulity that you wouldn't trust your publisher to look out for your best interests, and want to sully your artistic purity by actually asking to be... you know... paid for it. But before I can quote specific payment clauses (like last week's contract language) I need to talk a bit about how it is that publishers pay authors.
I almost didn't write this diary tonight. The events of the last couple of days have been so dispiriting, that I thought about taking a break, and just focusing on writing the books I have under contract, and the Connecticut election activities I'm involved with through the DTC I'm a member of. (Yeah, my name was on the round-up-and-torture list long before the Leaving Laura follies.) But then I thought about it a little more. The whole point of this series is to help progressive writers to finish books, sell them, and get them published. And I'll be damned if I'm going to stop pushing for that, just because our current government is treating the Constitution and Common Law the way previous generations of fascists treated partisans. ("For every incumbent you defeat, we'll execute ten more Constitutional rights.") So if you're new to the series, start reading here. But new or old, please write, and keep writing - fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is that touches your soul. While we still have a national conscience to be saved.
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." - Lillian Hellman
Ideas
If you're a writer, people approach you reasonably often with variations on the following proposition: "I have a great idea for a book. How about I give you the idea, you write the book, and we'll split the profits." They seem to think that the key to a great book is a great idea, and that the specialness of the idea is what gives the book it's value. I hate to disillusion them, especially since most of them don't believe me, but here's a cold truth about writing: Ideas are the easy part.
Editing
I've had a bunch of requests to talk about editing in its several aspects: not just "what will an editor do to my book once it's bought?" but also "how do I edit other people's work?" and just as importantly, "how do I sort out useful criticism from people who just don't understand what I'm trying to say?" All of these things are interrelated, and thinking about what editors look for is also a way of thinking about how to strengthen your writing on many levels. Ideally, the editor's job isn't to change your writing but to focus on your vision and hone it to its sharpest and eliminate any imperfections holding your writing back. Of course, it doesn't always work that way....
Outlining
Possibly the hardest thing for first-time writers is actually finishing a book. Lots of people can start a great book, but a lot of those starts peter out into nothing, or get written into un-endable corners. In the interests of seeing the finished products of a lot of folks hereabouts writing on bookshelves, I'm going to spend some time in this series on helping people to avoid getting stuck, and to get unstuck when the inevitable happens.
Marketing and Publicity
After many requests, I thought I'd skip ahead a bit and talk about what happens when your book actually appears - what the publisher is likely to do to help sell it (not much if you're a new writer) and what you can do about it (quite a bit). Most authors don't have the time, doggedness, or sheer personal charm to pull off what John Grisham did with his book: he bought 1,000 copies from his publisher and sold them to... well, everyone, really. There are publicity strategies for varying levels of time, affability, and money that you're willing to invest.
Copyediting
Yes, after a week in the mountains, and another week spent finishing up the new novel and sending it off to my agent and my beta readers, it's finally time for another episode in the series, this time focusing on a subject most authors love to hate.
Literary Agents
As promised, the long-awaited episode on literary agents: what they do (and don't do), why you need one, and what makes an agent a good fit for you (besides the obvious, "because she sells your books). As a bonus, a couple of literary agents that I know will be dropping by and responding to comments (though one of them won't be by until after 8:00, so keep checking back). And while one of yesterday's "best quotes of the day" made it clear why we'd like some republicans to have agents, this is the Kossack's Guide to the Care and Feeding of Literary Agents.
Publishing Lists
The publishing world is crowded with "-list" terms: Backlist, frontlist, midlist, etc. All of them relate to how books are bought and sold, and understanding how those lists work can make a big difference in selling your own book to a publisher, and marketing it once it's sold. Unfortunately, that means this episode is a bit more technical than last chapter's Leaving Laura. (Yes, this is an incremental step toward the "how to find an agent" segment, which will be appearing Monday around noon.)
Submitting a Manuscript
There have been a whole bunch of requests for an entry in this series covering the basics of how to submit a manuscript to a publisher. So this is going to be a long but fairly general nuts-and-bolts kind of introductory segment, with the more detailed nuances of book proposal writing, finding market reports, and such left for later segments. Most of what I talk about here is true for submitting both books to publishers and stories to magazines, and it's similar to what you'll be submitting to a prospective literary agent.
Book Packagers
As a former book packager myself, and an editor for the late NYC book packager Byron Preiss before that (about whom author Alan Rodgers once said, in perhaps a slight exaggeration, "When you shake hands with Byron, you have to count your fingers afterward), I thought I would talk a bit about this low-profile side of publishing, which is responsible for producing some huge best-sellers, but is also notorious for shady dealings.
Literary Conventions (With an Emphasis on SF Conventions)
By request, I'm going to use tonight's (very long) segment to talk about literary conventions. As a writer and editor, I'm less interested in the highbrow (and high-priced) literary conferences aimed at new writers, since I think your chances of learning your way around the field at them are significantly worse than the genre conferences. And I'm very skeptical of for-profit conventions.
If you missed the previous episode ("Why bad things happen to good books") you can find it here.
Yes, publishing is a swamp. Most of this series will be devoted to explaining how cattails can be yummy and the ways that marshgrass is sometines kind of sweet, but I wanted to spend a little bit of time exploring the muckier part of the swamp first, in the interest of y'all not drowning. There is some solid ground in among the mud, but certain areas of publishing, especially vanity publishing and self-publishing, are especially prone to scams. Another area where scams are common is in fake literary agents, who prey on new writers' naivete about how publishing works.
Now that we're finally starting to reclaim the best-seller lists from the likes of Ann Coulter, and many bloggers are turning their thoughts to writing books, I thought it might be helpful to do a series on how the publishing process works, why some books sell and others don't, and how to go about finishing your book, finding an agent, and getting published. I'll also touch on self-publishing and avoiding scams, as well as any other publishing-related questions people would like answered.
