This Writing Life

The hilarity just doesn’t stop.

Consequently, a typical writer apparently earns 33 per cent less than the national average wage.

► Literary Life – Telegraph via Jon Courtenay Grimwood

For this week’s Guardian Review, established authors were asked to produce ten writing ‘rules’. I agree with some of them and disagree with others. (For reasons best known to The Guardian, there is no web link at present for this feature, despite links to every other article in that section.) Update: James Viner points out that it is available here.

Here’s one of my favourites from Richard Ford:

1. Marry someone you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
2. Don’t have children.
3. Don’t read your reviews.
4. Don’t write reviews. (Your judgement’s always tainted.)
5. Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6. Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7. Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8. Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
9. Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10. Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.

All of these constitute advice of the very first water. I break these rules often; but I think they’re good ones.

So what would my ten rules be?

Ten Rules for Writers

1. Think of yourself as a writer

It doesn’t matter if you aren’t published. It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure that you’ll ever be published. By sitting in a chair (or standing up, in my case) and taking your craft seriously, you get the badge. The badge is not given to you by a publisher or an agent. Nobody takes it away unless you want them to.

2. Don’t believe people who say that whether or not you can write well is determined by forces outside your control

Someone (acknowledgement to Harlan Ellison) once wrote that you can either hear the music or you can’t. This belittles the graft that goes into learning to write fiction. Nobody is born to be a writer – unless you mean that a person can be born with the drive to be a great writer. It takes thousands of hours of effort.

3. Writing knowledge is predominantly procedural not declarative

In experimental psychology, we make a distinction between memory that is procedural – like the motor skills associated with playing the piano – and declarative – like the knowledge of music theory. Writing fiction, I would argue, is characterised by implicit (i.e. unconscious) learning through the determined attempt to write. That’s not to say that there are no rules to the construction of story. It’s just that the use of those rules should be informed by a judgement which is itself sharpened through long hours of trying to get it right. Apply structural rules retroactively, once the work is well in progress.

4. Don’t worry if you get depressed

For several reasons that draw on my psychology background, I would argue that, if you’re a writer, the probability of suffering depression at some point in your career is above average. Do whatever you need to do to get through these periods.

5. Luck is a major factor in writing success

It just is. I’ve never yet heard the success story of a writer who doesn’t start off with, ‘Well, I got lucky when…’

6. Determination is as important as skill

Established writers typically remain established because they excel at the writing process and display fierce determination in the face of long odds. To be good is not good enough if you want a career. Real Artists Ship. (‘Real’ means ‘published’ in this context; you can remain an artist without shipping.)

7. Rewrite more than you write

Get used to reheating the stuff you got sick of eating the day before.

8. Write true things

Fictional things are not false. They are usually more true than things in real life.

9. Clichés exist at many levels; kill them all

It’s not just clichéd to write ‘The man had a face liked a smacked arse’. If the man does things that men tend to do all too often in average stories – avenge the death of his wife, struggle with the mundanity of his job – then the cliché can work its way up to higher levels. The trick to killing cliché is to concentrate on the specific. Never think of a character, or a story, as a type. Everything is a one-off.

10. Get feedback

If you learn to play tennis against one of those ball-firing machines instead of a partner, you’re not really learning tennis, even if you’re wearing the McEnroe headband and getting sweaty. In writing, you need feedback. But note that while feedback on what works and what does not work should be taken seriously, comments about how these problems can be corrected should only be taken on board if the person making the comment is a writer. If the commenter is a non-writer, there’s a good chance that taking their advice will wound your story.

Dani Shapiro on the ’sell – or else’ mentality.

If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.

► A writing career becomes harder to scale – latimes.com

I’ve spent most of this morning reading through some documentation sent to me by John Jarrold, my agent, concerning the Google Book Settlement. Google is in the process of digitising books. It began this, and has continued to do so, largely without the permission of rights holders.

The issues are complex. Even the summary I read contained several statements to the effect that we simply won’t how aspects of the agreement will be interpreted until they are tested in a court. Adding to the complexity is a mish-mash of UK and US jurisdictional problems.

Overall, I don’t think Google’s actions are legal; opting in to the settlement will suggest I agree with the legitimisation of an illegal act, which I don’t. It represents a fundamental change to copyright law that puts the onus on rights holders to defend themselves against behemothic entities.

If you’d like to know more, here is the Google Book Settlement Page; and here is a summary by Gillian Spraggs.

Further to my review of the COOL-ER eBook Reader, it’s worth noting that, elsewhere, the Internet is lighting up with comments, speculation and reviews about the coming storm in publishing that is the digitisation of literature. Check out this MacWorld story. It outlines the ten new ebook readers announced or released at CES this week.

I had a brief exchange with @Sifter on Twitter yesterday. He reminded me that the key factor in the digitisation of books is the development of a device that will bring such books to the masses. Remember a few years back when only students, tech journalists and geeks were using email? Then, suddenly, your mum and dad had email accounts. You could bank online. A tipping point had come. For ebooks, the tipping point will come with a device that can finally compete with the printed book as the technology best adapted for reading, short form and long.

Andy Ihnatko recently published a sensible round-up of what the fabled Apple Tablet (or iSlate, or iBook) might feature. Elsewhere, Neven Mrgan hopes that Apple will take the reins of the distribution model for writers so that publishing a book will be as easy as uploading photos to Flickr. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has published two posts of speculating about the Tablet: the Tablet and Tablet Musings. How close will this device come to Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video?

Friday Project author Caroline Smailes – in a post entitled I’m Cheap – announced that her books In Search of Adam and Black Boxes are now available as ebooks for the relatively cheap price of £1.05. This, I think, is more sensible than the sky-high figures I’ve seen elsewhere, and I expect the trend to continue throughout the industry. (Note that some authors, such as Cory Doctorow, have been giving away ebook versions of their commercial fiction for several years.)

Interesting times.

My review of the device, together with some comments on how ebook readers might affect publishing, can be found as a guest post over at Scott Pack’s blog today.

I do hope so. Can’t bloody stand the stuff, particularly the cursive.

Anne Trubek:

Proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a “j” over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting’s history. For instance, early Christians jettisoned Roman scripts they deemed decadent and pagan. In their scriptoria, monks developed Uncial to replace Roman scripts. An internecine battle ensued when Irish monks developed a variation on Uncial that traditionalists deemed an upstart, quasi-heretical script.

Via Miller-McCune.

For those of you who don’t know – and there’s no reason, perhaps, that you should – DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it is a technology by which content distributors (record companies, for the most part) attempt to control how a customer experiences their product.

Now, audiobooks.

The starting pistol for Internet-distributed audiobooks has been fired and Audible.com is at the ‘b’ of the bang. They have a huge selection of titles read by great actors and if you go for one of their monthly plans, like I do, you can enjoy two books per month for very little cash. Top drawer.

The trouble? Audible’s titles are DRM’d. That is, they are locked down tight. Countless are the times I’ve said to a friend of mine, ‘Oh, you’d love this book I’m listening to…’ and then trail off because I know I won’t be able to lend it. The DRM means only a few machines I’ve nominated can playback the audio.

Well, this stinks. That much is obvious. But you’d think that Audible are doing this because of the pressures put upon them by publishers. It turns out that this is not necessarily the case. In an article for Publisher’s Weekly article, Cory Doctorow (whose book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I review here) relates the saga of trying to get (i) his publisher, then (ii) Audible, then (iii) the online Apple iTunes store to offer his new book without DRM. Thus far, he’s only managed to convince the first two.

Audiobooks are fantastic. They are unabridged, high-quality recordings of stories that you can enjoy when you’re out walking, doing the dishes, or working out. If Steve Jobs – and therefore Apple – is serious about his attitude towards DRM, he should make sure the online Apple store supports pure, unfiddled-with MP3s for both music and the spoken word.

I’m pretty sure this is what readers want. It’s what I want.

As a coda, you can download an audiobook of the first edition of Déjà Vu here – for £500.

H’only joking! It is, of course, free as in air.

There is an emerging genre of what might be called the minimalist word processor (cf. Scrivener, Write Room). These applications are designed to cut away visual distraction and leave the screen looking somewhat like a plain sheet of paper in a typewriter (or, if that’s too far back for you, then looking like an old pre-GUI text editor).

Ommwriter – for that is its name of one such – is available as a beta from here. You just need to provide a valid email address to obtain the download link.

Text is entered into a small window that floats above a background. By default, this background is a snowy scene with two black trees off to one side. Otherwise you see nothing but the blinking cursor and the text you type.

That’s about it.

I’m impressed. If there’s anything difficult about writing on a computer – which, let’s face it, makes it easy in a mind-bogglingly large number of ways – it is distraction.

James Burt, in reference to his own post on Literature Network about writing workshops, says:

At the moment I don’t feel comfortable with writing workshops, but I know my writing has improved in the past through many of the talented people I have workshopped with.

That goes for me, too.

The piece makes several good points. At the end of the day, I feel that a workshop full of writers is an unpredictable, chaotic entity that is unusually susceptible to initial conditions.

As I said, I’ve been lucky with writers’ groups. Here’s what I’ve found over the years:

• In any group of people, there will be some whose opinions are plain wrong. It can be difficult to identify those people.
• A fellow writer whom you admire personally can read out something that is absolutely awful. This will make for an uncomfortable moment when you try to give them honest feedback.
• Without honest feedback, a writing group is a pointless talking shop characterised by commiseration.
• There is a bias towards short fiction because this involves less work for those in the workshop than longer pieces. Through a form of cognitive dissonance, this can bolster the idea that short fiction is a higher or purer form of fiction than the longer variety.
• It is not the case, as far as I can tell, that other writers can provide you with useful feedback just because they are trying to write too.
• These people do know what it’s like to try and crash.