Tag Archives: writing

Summer Writing Contests

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It seems like the “contest scene” picks up steam during the second half of the year.  I know there are round-the-calendar listings, but I tend to jot the URL’s on postIt notes and lose them, so I mostly wait for the listings to come to me.  Here’s one from the Gotham Writer’s workshop:  http://tinyurl.com/3zbt3op (contest listings near the bottom of the newsletter).

Of note is the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction contest:  5000 word limit, all genres, $15 entry fee, multiple entries fine, prizes of $1000, $500, $250, and the top ten entries will be considered for representation by several literary agencies.  The deadline is Oct. 3, 2011.

There is also a contest for train stories between 2,000 and 20,000 words long.  There are two contests for non-fiction, one for screenplays.  In celebration of the 1950’s Sci-Fi Magazine, Galaxy there’s a contest for novellas between 15,000 and 20,000 words in length to be published in ebook format.

Unfortunately, some of the deadlines have passed, and others are only good through July 4, but there will certainly be more opportunities, especially for writers who like short fiction.  I’ve read several articles saying that while some of the print magazines that featured short fiction have folded, others are popping up in online form.  Let’s hope so.  This is something to watch.

About Branding

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In response to my comment yesterday about writers “building a platform,” my wife, Mary, sent me a gem that had popped up on her Facebook page.

Washington Post columnist, Gene Weingarten wrote a hilarious and scathing article called, “How ‘branding’ is ruining journalism:”  http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/2011/06/07/AGBegthH_story.html

A journalism student had written to Weingarten, as part of her thesis research, asking how he built his brand.  His reply was short and to the point:  The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.

The conditions that Weingarten describes in journalism – a financially-driven battle for “eyeballs” – affects traditional publishing as well, where writers are urged to “market themselves like Cheez Doodles.”  He cites Snooki as an example of publicity run amok.

Read it and weep.  Or better yet, read it and laugh.  Sometimes the two responses are not so far apart!

A Year of Blogging

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Snoopy writing

During high school and college, I tried to keep journals, because that’s what writers are supposed to do, but I never got too much traction writing only for myself.

Far more important were the letters I wrote to several close friends during that time.  You could say I learned to write because of them, for they really encouraged me, and an appreciative audience was all it took to turn on an incredible flow of words.  I wrote page after page, jotting down ideas as I tried them on for size, and things that just came to me in mid-sentence.  What kept me going was the thrill of knowing someone wanted to read what I had to say.

I think you can see where I am going with this…

Fast forward a few decades and in June, 2010, I signed up for a day long blogging workshop because these days, “building a platform,” is what writers are supposed to do.  I had and have some fairly cynical thoughts on that proposition (for writers of fiction that is), but that is beside the point.  I simply would not have kept at it if blogging was nothing more than a means to an end.

Almost immediately, this endeavor took on a life of its own.  It continues to surprise me.  If I had to sum up what blogging means to me, I would say, “discovery.”  Not only because of all the things I get to research and learn about, but because I continuously surprise myself by finding things in the psyche I don’t know are there until I see them on the screen.

So I want to sincerely thank everyone who stops here and reads a post, and maybe even takes a moment to leave a comment.  You keep me going and I appreciate you very much

I’ve learned many things this year, chief among them, the seemingly inexhaustible way the mind generates ideas.  I don’t know how many times I’ve posted something and gotten up thinking, “Well, that’s it.  It was a nice run while it lasted, but I’m finally out of things to say.”  The experience is so common, that I get to see, at least once or twice a week, that if I just go do something else, the next idea will appear in it’s own time.

Ideas are common – they come and go, but once in a while one sinks deep, resonates, and even changes some aspect of your life.  Something stated very simply this spring by Edward Espe Brown, who I posted about at the time, had that effect.  It crystalizing themes that had been on the back burner for a very long time:

Are you going to be a rule follower or are you just going to be you? – Edward Espe Brown

Brown made the comment in the context of spiritual practice, but it has a much wider scope.  It certainly does in the field of writing.  Here’s a confession:  some two years ago, a critique group buddy said, “I’ve heard that editors don’t like colons.”  I am ashamed to admit that I went home and rewrote several sentences.  Blogging has sharpened my perception of the absurdity of pronouncements like that, and something else that Brown said cuts at the very motive for heeding “advice” of that sort:

What is precious in us doesn’t come, doesn’t go, and it does not depend on performance.

Edward Espe Brown

I am very fortunate indeed to have a forum like this where I get to pass along things of value like that when I come upon them.  And as for what’s coming up in the next year – I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I do.  Meanwhile, I very much hope you will stay tuned.

You Must Go and Win: Alina Simone, Writer and Indie Rock Musician

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I love the way the digital age allows you to find marvelous things.  I was half-listening to NPR yesterday evening, struggling with a blog post I have since discarded and thinking about feeding the dogs.  A song came on that instantly caught my attention.  I walked to the radio in hopes of hearing the singer’s name, but when the announcer said it, I couldn’t quite make it out.  He was interviewing a youngish woman with a hint of an accent about her recently published book.  I caught the title, and quick trips to Amazon and youTube turned up an Indie rock singer with a haunting sound and a collection of vibrant essays that had me up reading way too late last night.

Born in the Ukraine in 1974, Alina Simone came to the US as an infant when her father, a scientist, refused to join the KGB.  She grew up in Boston and Sinead O’Connor’s music changed her life. You Must Go and Win recounts some of her misadventures on the trail of success, which her father had said was “only a matter of statistics…failure only means you haven’t thrown yourself, face-first, against the brick wall of probability enough times.”

But as she approached her 30th birthday, working a day job that had “something to do with Powerpoint,” and a career that seemed to be dying along with her cat, Simone considered letting it go.  As she wrote in the title essay, “You Must Go and Win,”

The problem was how to quit.  After all, America does not like a quitter.  In a broader sense, I knew that my exit from the music scene would cause not a ripple.  At worst, my core fan base of depressed Jews might find themselves a little more depressed.  But in this, I felt like I was practically doing them a favor.  No, for my own sake I needed a way to explain the sudden change of heart, a beautiful, glass-half-full way to spin this, like, “Don’t think of me as a failed musician when really I’m a successful cat nurse!”  After all, Etsa had turned a corner, hadn’t he?  The closets were once again redolent of cat pee, and lately he’d begun standing outside our bedroom door in the mornings again, serenading us with his bloodless screams.

Lucky for us, Alina Simone did not quit.  Instead, she still lives in Brookln with her husband, a Yale professor.  2011 has brought Simone a new daughter, Zoe, and has brought us a new album, “Make Your Own Danger,” in addition to her book.

Take a listen to her music on youTube and sample You Must Go and Win on Amazon. It will not be for every taste, but I am personally looking forward to listening to and reading from an exciting artist I found just “by accident.”

What is YA and Who Reads It?

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Recently someone suggested a novel to me, but cautioned that I might not like it because it was “women’s fiction.”  That sparked a mini-revelation.  I realized I read a lot of women’s fiction because I read a lot of young adult books, and the two have become synonymous.  As if to underscore the notion, an email from Amazon popped up in my inbox called, “New Releases in Young Adult.”  Of the ten recommendations, nine were by women, and the single title written by a man was a paranormal romance with a female protagonist.

That got me wondering about the history of YA, its origins, its audience, and its nature in the olden days, which I guess means before Twilight.  Wikepedia came to the rescue with a well done page on the history of YA fiction:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young-adult_fiction.

The honors for coining the phrase, “young adulthood,” and distinguishing “books for children” from “books for young persons,” goes to Sarah Trimmer, in 1802.  Even so, 19th century publishers did not use any distinct classification for young readers, though some of the titles published remain classics to this day:  Swiss Family Robinson, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, and The Jungle Book to name a few.

The trend continued into the 20th century, and the roaring 20’s established young adults as a group apart, but it wasn’t until the 50’s and 60’s that “young adult” as a classification entered the publishing world.  The genre as we know it did not begin to emerge until the 70’s and 80’s, for books like The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and The Lord of the Flies (1954) bear little resemblance to what you find in the YA section today.  In case I’m being too subtle, I don’t really think that’s a good thing.

Neither did a thoughtful blogger named Annalee Newits, who posted a piece called, “Stop Writing Young Adult Science Fiction,” in 2008.  Though she writes in defense of her favorite  genre, her observations transcend such confines:

If we really want to open science fiction up to new readers, we won’t do it by dividing our audience up into smaller and smaller groups. Nor will we expand the minds of young people by telling them that they should only read specially-designated novels for young people. Why not admit that teens have a place in the world of adult imagination, and vice versa? Adults and teens are different in all kinds of ways, but surely they can meet in the world of fiction.  http://io9.com/5037686/stop-writing-young-adult-science-fiction

I posted earlier about my frustration one day when I cruised the blogs, in search of the “proper” age for protagonists in young adult vs. middle grade fiction.  It turned out that just as in real life, no one knew what to do with the 14 year olds.  The real question is why we are asking this question at all?  Who told us we have to, and why?

Ursula le Guin, Madeline L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien of course, Mercedes Lackey, Robin McKinley, and Neil Gaiman – these are just a few of the names that pop right to mind when I think of writers who have played by their own rules, who have written stories for young adults that have weight, substance, and staying power, and defy our feeble attempts at classification.

The blurb for the young adult winner of the 2011 Amazon Breakout Novel Award begins, “In the increasingly crowded paranormal marketplace…”  Apparently that’s what it has all come down to in young adult – we introduce an award for excellence by noting how the book has positioned itself in the marketplace.

Life is way too short to play by this kind of rule.

Marginal People, People of the Margins

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Given the doings and structure of the psyche, there is no such thing as being alone.  If you are the only one in the room, it is still a crowded room. – Michael Ventura

While reading and enjoying the interviews in Bill Moyers Journal (which I discussed here, https://thefirstgates.com/2011/05/24/bill-moyers-journal-the-conversation-continues/), I came upon a phrase that evoked a cluster of other ideas.

Moyers interviewed author, Louise Erdrich, concerning her novel, Shadow Tag, which he considers exceptional.  During the interview, Erdrich, who is the daughter an Ojibwe mother and a German American father, said “I live on the margin of just about everything, Bill.  I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable.”   I recommend the interview as a whole, as I do the others in Moyers’ book, but right now I want to focus on the phrase Erdrich used – “marginal person.”

Louise Erdrich

In context, she was talking about the split between people’s waking selves and their dream selves, which is one of the subjects of Shadow Tag.  She was also talking about the tensions between her Catholic upbringing and the Ojibwe culture, as well as the tensions between her various roles, such as mother and writer, which don’t always fit well together.

In short, I take the phrase, “living on the margin,” and being a “marginal person,” to mean”outsider,” one who stands at the edges watching, related but not quite part of.  I am going to take this notion a step further, because it accords with recent thought in depth psychology as well as conditions in our culture.

James Hillman, a prominent post-Jungian thinker, has written eloquently of our “polytheistic” psyches, formed of a number of archetypal forces that often compete with each other.  This is in distinction to Jung’s “monotheistic” psychology, which posits a central “Self” which is alpha and omega of the psyche.

James Hillman

Here is what Michael Ventura, a journalist, screenwriter, and friend of Hillman’s has to say:  There may be no more important project in our time than displacing the…notion that each person has a central and unified “I” which determines his or her acts.  “I” have been writing this to say that I don’t think people experience life that way.  I do think they experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about life in structures contrary to their experience.  Ventura adds, The central “I” is not a fact, it’s a longing – the longing of all the selves within the psyche that are starving because they are not recognized” (Michael Ventura.  From “A Dance For Your Life in the Marriage Zone,” in Shadow Dancing in the USA, 1985, out of print).

Ventura’s essay on marriage names a few of these “selves:”  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshipper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am you client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the more garish of the patterns. 

You get the idea, and though you may find it mildly interesting, perhaps you wonder, what is the point, and what does it have to do with margins?

Plenty, I think, and it’s all wrapped up in a word in a word related to margins.  The word is liminality, from the Latin word, limen, which means, “threshold.”  People and cultures in liminal states are “betwixt and between.”  The definition given in Wikepedia is:  a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes.  Though the word was initially used by anthropologists to anaylze the middle stage of ritual practice, it has passed into broader usage, with this important meaning: [liminality is] now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large…very useful when studying events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.

Hermes, the Greek messenger god, is the archetypal figure of liminal states, for he can easily pass between the worlds and speak to gods and mortals.  His Roman name, Mercury, is synonymous with quicksilver, that flashing liquid metal that is not quite one thing or another and cannot be contained.  My suggestion is that marginal people, people who are at home in the margins, people whose psyches welcome Hermes, are fortunate in this liminal state of our culture and world, as it becomes increasingly hard to bury our heads in the sand and fail to note “the dissolution of order…which [is] also formative of institutions and structures.”

Hermes, Messenger of the Gods

My previous post on nonfiction writing spoke of the “dissolution of order” in publishing and the nimbleness that is likely to characterize and benefit those writers who can adapt and even help create the new structures that are going to emerge.

The landscape of work is another example that touches everyone.  My father worked forty years for the same company, doing the same sort of job, before retiring with a pension.  Showing up as the same person every day served him well.  I had three distinct careers in six different organizations; that is the current statistical norm, and I bet it will seem tame to the generation now coming of age.  Access to a variety of “selves” was an asset in sailing those waters.

Rigid and hierarchical structures are not faring well this year, be they Arab governments, the government of California, the management of Borders, or people in almost any endeavor who cling to business as usual.

If you recognize yourself as a marginal person, a child of Hermes, one who has never been quite “this” or “that,” but both and neither, relax.  These may be the very times when you shine, when your gifts are needed, and when the ways will open as you come into your own.

A Literary Agent’s Comments on Nonfiction Opportunities

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The guest speaker at the local California Writer’s Club’s June lunch meeting on Saturday was Matt Wagner, founder of Fresh Books, Inc. Literary Agency:  http://www.fresh-books.com/

Wagner specializes in nonfiction titles.  His clients include several “Dummies” book authors, Dave Crenshaw, who wrote The Myth of Multitasking, and Michelle Waitzman, whose Sex in a Tent:  A Wild Couple’s Guide to Getting Naughty in Nature evoked a lot of interest when he passed it around.

Here’s the bad news:  Wagner debunked any notion that nonfiction writers are thriving in our current “legacy publishing” environment.  With Borders in bankruptcy, a suitor seeking to buy Barnes&Noble just for the Nook, and the explosion of epublishing, confusion reigns in nonfiction as well as fiction.  If things are uncertain for publishers, they are worse for agents, some of whom are trying to reposition themselves as coaches to stay in business.  This leaves mid-list authors who are trying to break into print at the bottom of the food chain (Wagner defines mid-list as, “You are not Suzy Orman”).

Several categories of non-fiction are doing well.  One are the series books – the “Dummies” and the “Idiot’s Guide” titles.  Part of the secret is, of course, that these books are not for dummies.  I’ve read several that were excellent introductions to their topics.

Wagner also cited, “vertically integrated niche publishers” as prospering, and gave an example I recognized:  O’Rielly Publications, which specializes in books on open-source software.  For the quarter century I worked in electronic design automation, O’Rielly titles occupied at least a third of my bookshelf, and the same held true for my colleagues.  Need a reference on the Linux operating system, or the PERL or TCL programming languages?  O’Rielly has it, often written or co-authored by the developer of the language.  In addition, they have websites, blogs, and webinars.

This, according to Matt Wagner, is a route for nonfiction authors that is opening up in our internet world.  Do you have an area of expertise?  Is it something someone might subscribe to a newsletter to learn?  An example jumped right to mind:  Randy Ingermanson’s Advancedfictionwriting.com (there’s a link on my blogroll).

Ingermanson, author of the traditionally published, Fiction Writing for Dummies, offers several free articles on his website, including his “Snowflake Method” of plot design, which I have discussed here (it is very worthwhile).  He also gives you the option of purchasing software to guide you through the process.  There’s a free e-zine, and as well as other articles and lecture series’ available for nominal fees in several electronic formats.

Check this site out, both for its free content (solid suggestions on plotting and building scenes), but also because it’s a great example of the kind of “vertical integration” that agent, Matt Wagner believes is the emerging model for how nonfiction writers can survive and even thrive in our emerging new world of publishing.

Dreaming Up Ideas

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I have been busy working on several blog posts, but they are for later this summer.  Meanwhile, I found myself less than excited by any of my other topic ideas, so I drifted over to a blog filled with a wealth of advice and inspiration, “Writing On The Wall” (you can find it in my blogroll).  Out of all the tags, I chose a section called, “Getting Ideas.”  http://writingonthewallblog.blogspot.com/search/label/getting%20ideas

Most of the posts were by a contributor named Annette Lyon, who shares a number strategies for jump-starting the creative process in fiction, as well as some interesting facts, like Orson Scott Card’s moment of inspiration for Ender’s Game, and this great quote from Tom Clancy:  “The difference between fiction and reality?  Fiction has to make sense.”

I especially liked Ms. Lyon’s account of wrestling with the infamous cliche that she heard from a college creative writing teacher – the famously stupid advice to “Write what you know.”  I suspect that most fantasy authors have never believing that nugget.  Write what you can imagine is more accurate for writers and poets from Homer to H.G. Wells, to J.K. Rowling, but Lyon’s misguided professor actually forced his students to compile a list of 100 things they knew, and were thus qualified to write about.

Lyon, who had wanted to be an author since the second-grade, was initially paralyzed by the realization that she didn’t know anything on her list well enough to write about it.  Fortunately for her and for us, she round-filed the list as soon as she could and rephrased the motto as, Write what you are willing to learn about.  

Any writer who has ever researched anything will agree with her, and reading her post, I realized that learning new things is one of my greatest pleasures in blogging.  And speaking of learning, check out “Writing on the Wall.”  Scroll through the tags and you’re bound to learn something new and find this sort of inspiration.