250 Things You Should Know About Writing (11 page)

Some will tell you legacy publishing is for chumps. Others will tell you self-publishing is for the talentless and forever guests of the slush pile. Wrong on both counts. Never judge another for their choice of publication. Writers are part of an ecosystem and diversity is a feature, not a bug. You see a zealot, brand them with a hot iron and kick them down the cellar steps. Where the dragon will eat them and then lay dragon eggs in their corpse orifices.

Micro-publishing means a flood of new material in the marketplace. Crap floats. I watched a self-published certifiable piece of shit with six reviews -- all one-star ratings -- sit on the top ten at Amazon Horror for a good week. Self-pubbers don't like to admit this to be true. But legacy publishers don't like to admit that it's true for
them
, too -- let us remind them that they published a book by Snooki. Which is like letting a baby chimp teach a class or allowing some kind of sewer-dwelling goblin-folk to babysit your children. Whatever the case, crap floats in all arenas. Self-publishing. Legacy publishing. Television. Film. (How big a box office draw is the
Transformers
franchise? Yeah.) Just because its buoyant doesn't mean it's good. Your job is to be both good
and
buoyant.

Publishing is a team effort. You need editors. You want an agent. You can do it without an agent, sure. You can also sell your house without a real estate agent, you can drive your car without a seat-belt, and you can have sex with a bucking centaur without wearing a helmet. An agent can help even the self-published author -- after all, certain rights remain open for most self-pubbers. Print, foreign, film. Also: your right to party. Nobody can take that away from you.

Don't hate the gatekeepers. Even in the legacy publishing world they usually represent a modicum of standards. Readers want quality, not undercooked narcissistic bullshit. In any situation you can put your own gatekeepers in place: someone who will challenge the work and make sure it's worth publishing -- and, if it's not worth publishing, you either fix it, or say fuck it.

Here, see this jar? It's got bees in it. But I've labeled it, "FREE MONEY." You're right if you don't see any money in there. It's seriously just a jar of bees. But if you stick your hand in there anyway thinking you're going to get some unclaimed cash, you're going to get stung. Because you're a dummy. In publishing, if you get screwed over, it's your own fault. Get an agent. Manager. Lawyer. Somebody to read contracts.

Sung to the tune of, "Don't Fear The Reaper." (More cowbell?) Writing a query can be a misery. Practice writing them. Learn how to sum up your work in a single sentence, a single paragraph, and three paragraphs. You want to know not just what happens, but be able to explain what it's
about
. Agents and publishers want to know why it's awesome,
not
why it's like everything else.

You're going to get a lot of rejection. From agents, from publishers. It's par for the course. Rejections are good. Treat them like battle scars: proof you fought the good fight and didn't just piss around on the sidelines. My upcoming book
BLACKBIRDS
was lucky to get picked up by an agent after one month, but not before a handful of rejections and a lot of no-shows. Then it took a year and a half to get published. Dozens of rejections. All of them arrows to my heart. But where each arrow punctures, the heart grows scar tissue, gets tougher as a result.

Everybody's got tips and tricks to get published.
It's who you know. Get a good blurb. Get a rockstar agent. Consume the heart of a stillborn goat in a ritual circle made of shattered Milli Vanilli CDs.
The biggest and best chance you have to get published is to write something that not only doesn't suck,
but is actually pretty goddamn good
. Go figure.

I'd be a naive douchematron (a robot that sprays vinegar and water from his face-nozzle) if I sat here and told you, "The only thing you need is a great book. Write it, stick it in your drawer,
and the publishing fairy will come and sprinkle his jizzy magic seed all over it
." You do have to know how to market the book. How to put it out there. How to get it in front of agents, publishers, and readers.

You may not be concerned about genre, but the publishing industry is. They want to know on what shelf it goes, and under what Amazon category. So that means
you
need to know, too. Though, let me be clear: this is not a precise equation. These are not well-defined margins. Get close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. I know many authors whose books were one thing but then were labeled as something entirely different for marketing purposes. Just make a stab at it. Don't freak out.

The old saying is, "The money flows
to
the writer, not
away from
the writer." This is still true, though self-publishing has complicated this snidbit of advice (
snidbit = snippet + tidbit
). In DIY publishing, you may have to shell out the capital for an editor, or a book cover, or e-book design. But that's not you spending money on getting published. You're not placing cash in the hands of some charlatan. You're spending money on the book in order to get it ready for publication. You're still the one putting it out there. And money should still flow toward you once that occurs.

If you are traditionally published, you have a 37% chance of ending up with a book cover featuring some bad-ass holding a gun or some hot chick holding a sword. Or maybe a battle-axe. She's probably facing away from you and showing you one, maybe both, buttocks. Those buttocks are probably in very tight pants. Your book may be re-titled to something like DEMON SLUT or THE EDGE OF STEEL.

You know what's hot right now? Stripper Frankensteins. You know what'll be hot next week? Occult epistolaries. The week after that? Pterodactyl erotica. You don't know what's going to be hot by the time you finish that book and get an agent and the agent starts shopping that book around. So just write what you want to write, and make it the best damn book anybody's ever read.

What I'm saying is, you won't get rich in publishing. But you can make a passable living. Feed your kids. Pay your mortgage. Long as you're willing to write like a motherfucker. You think you can live on one book a year, then you clearly believe your name rhymes with K. J. Schmowling. And I bet it doesn’t.

"Midlist" isn't a dirty word. They may not be bestsellers, but they justify their existence. Midlist is a sign of a working author. An author who puts herself out there. Respect to the midlist. *pours toner ink on the curb for my homies*

Small publishers don't move faster than big publishers -- but they can turn on a fucking dime. Same way a little boat can drive circles around a steamship. This is worth considering.

You get published, you're not done. You've got more books to write. Promo to do. Interviews. Book signings. It's just the start of it. That's a good thing, though. Makes sure you do more than sit in your cave and bleed words from your eye-holes. That said, you still need to get back in that cave and cry out more words. Otherwise, who are you, Harper Lee?

The publishing industry is the lava-eye of Sauron, the sucking sandy mouth of the Sarlacc pit (both of which look like sinister hell-vaginas, since we're being honest with one another). You gaze too long or get too close it'll suck you in. At the end of the day, your job isn't to be distracted by the industry because that will start to eat your soul. Your primary identifier is still
storyteller
, so that’s what you do at the end of the day. I mean, unless you’re that guy who sells ONE MILLION E-BOOKS, because that guy’s not a storyteller, he’s a human spam-bot.

Your job is to write. Write like you don't give a damn about the publishing industry. Because you can. Write like that -- write like you
fucking mean it
-- and you'll find success. Love what you write and write what you want and you'll find the words come easy and the story comes correct. Don't worry right now so much with the publishing. Worry about writing. The other part will always come after, but by god, the writing has to come first.

Publishing won't happen overnight. Self-publishing, er,
does
, but the epic sales don't happen overnight. Embrace patience, perseverance, stick-to-itiveness. Gotta have a head like a wrecking ball, a spirit like one of them punching clown dummies that always weeble-wobbles back up to standing. This takes time. Stories need to find the right home, the right audience. Stick with it. Push like you're pooping. Quitting is for sad pandas. And this jar of bees is for quitters only.

That job is to convey information. It's job is not to be clever. It's job is not to sound nice. It's primary task is to present information. That's not to say it can't, or shouldn't, sound nice. Or be clever. But those are
value adds
. A sentence has another, more important job, and that is as an
information delivery system
.

Sentences comprise all that you write. They chain together to form ideas. Learning how to write a sentence properly, with clarity, and in a way that engages the reader or listener is the cornerstone of good writing. Sentences are made up of words and clauses (a clause being
subject
and a
verb
).

The simplest sentence is a nearly naked clause of:
subject verb
. Becky ran. The dog barks. The robot will dance. Never be afraid to use a simple construction. It's short. Sharp. Punchy. Equal parts "flick to the ear" and "grenade going off under your chair." Throw in a direct object in there (and maybe an indirect object, to boot), and now we're cooking with a deadly biotoxin. I mean, "gas." Just gas. Definitely not making bathtub biotoxin over here. You didn't see anything.

...while others go out and strike out on their own. Meaning, some clauses are independent, others are dependent. The former stands on their own. I'm not going to get into a whole compositional lesson here, but sentence construction relies on you knowing that dependent clauses cannot form their own sentences because they are immature assholes. They are subordinate, and like the remora fish must cling to the shark-like independent clause to survive. Independent clauses can come together to form sentences, if you care to do that. "Hiram likes cheese, but he thinks milk is for dickheads." Two independent clauses, connected by that little word, "but." ("And" works, too.) If I were to instead write, "Hiram likes cheese more than he likes milk," then you can see that
more than he likes milk
is the dependent clause because it cannot stand by its lonesome.

Sentence fragments are generally a no-no. And yet, I use them. They work when they help to establish flow in the ear of the reader, and they fail when they break that flow. Nine times out of ten, they break the flow. But roughly 10% of the time, they allow your prose to pop. Use. But use sparingly.

In fact, simplicity is the good neighbor of a strong sentence. He mows his neighbor's lawn. Picks up the mail. Doesn't tell the other neighbors about the weird bleating coming from the basement. A simple sentence can be thought of as "dumbed down," but that's not true, not true at all. Elegance and profundity may lurk within simplicity. Consider these two words: "John died." That's heavy. Two words like lead fists in your gut.
John died
. Oh, shit.