After receiving a comment from Rob Brooks, who blogs about the ongoing process of writing his first novel at Work in Progress, I decided to take a look at some of his posts. It became obvious to me that he and I approach our writing in different ways. I was inspired to leave a comment on Rob’s doorstep in this regard. Provided below, with some bracketed commentary from both Rob and me, is the gist of my comment on his page. It just goes to show there are more paths than one between points “a” and “b.”
When I started my completed manuscript, I had neither an idea how long it should be nor an inkling of what the story would be other than an intention to write about a serial killer. There was no outline. I simply wrote until I had a sufficiently long trail of blood, made my good guys adequately likable and inspiring, and revealed a villain both pitiable and worthy of hate. I ended up stopping at a bit over 72,000 words. I did some research that told me that novels fell between 50,000 and 100,000 words. It seemed I was right in the cozy middle, so I simply polished and tidied up. As you might have seen in some of my posts, I have since discovered that I might be a bit word-stingy for my genre, though James Patterson writes at about that count or less and seems to be prospering. One misconception, at least for me, revealed early in my writing process was that a keyboard would be the tool of creation. My experience with composing for business purposes was that the edit-on-the-fly capability provided by a computer was a good thing. I quickly found in writing my manuscript that I got too involved in editing and formatting and lost my creativity. In my case, story flowed much better from a pen. Granted, I wasn’t too happy about having to transcribe, but it really is all about creativity, characters, and story.
[Rob responded that his creativity flows right into his keyboard from his fingertips.]
My writing sessions were compartmentalized in the form of lunch hours spent up a spiral iron staircase in a loft windowed to overlook the main floor of a coffeehouse. Being in that environment came to mean putting my creativity in gear. The ability to observe the other patrons helped in writing people stuff, especially one scene that actually played out in a fictional coffeehouse. The story revealed itself to me in session after session, and I was excited each day to see where it would go.
I’d love to know the percentage of novelists who keyboard versus pen their works or who are outliners as opposed to spontaneous writers. It would be nice to know this in the overall, as well as segmented by authors categorized as the bestselling, the published, the middling, the struggling, and the unpublished. Another view might be by genre.
[Rob said, “I'd like to know, too. I know I would love to be a spontaneous writer. Stephen King claims to be, says he doesn't outline. I don't know how that could be, though, because there are so many things going on in his books, and they all tie together so nicely. He must change a lot in the edits.”]
[Red Stick Writer: I think sheer genius is the explanation for King. Simply in terms of subject matter, I’m not crazy about all of his stories, but they are told masterfully. Others of his stories, The Stand for instance, are among the best I’ve ever read. I would probably not have read it, but a friend strenuously recommended it. I’ll be forever grateful. Though I only saw the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, based on a King novella, was a great tale, too. His On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is one of the best books about writing to be found.]
Monday, February 26, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Watching My Peeves and Queues
I’m still waiting to hear from the agent who has my complete manuscript. I queried her on September 13, 2006, and her request for the full story arrived on September 23. She asked if I could increase my word count, so I reread By the Light in order to answer. My response and the manuscript were sent for her consideration on October 4.
She had indicated that it would be three or four months before I would hear from her. The wait was on. I basked in the glory of having my whole manuscript in the hands of an agent for about a month.
Not wanting to bask in excess, I started tinkering with expansion ideas. That’s when I was horrified to discover that the first page of the manuscript contained a sentence fragment. I had apparently gotten distracted when making a minor modification before mailing to the agent. Rather than let my potential agent-to-be and beacon of hope think that I don’t know the difference between sentences and fragments, I sent a follow-up letter on November 7. I explained and apologized for the error and provided a replacement first page. Hopefully, dressing the message up with a touch of self-deprecating humor will work in a manner similar to wrapping Fideaux’s pill in a piece of cheese.
It is now a tad beyond the four months originally indicated as necessary for consideration of my baby. I am a perpetual optimist about these things. It is not my practice to give up on an agent until I receive their correspondence announcing that a plump female vocalist has unleashed a terminal aria. Rather than think negatively, I would rather believe that the literary expert so loves my novel as to require a second reading in order to compose words adequate to express the intensity of their desire to represent my work.
The energy required for such positive thinking comes at a price. It makes me cranky. Just ask my wife. One has a tendency to become peevish when in queue. If that happens, it helps to vent. In that vein, I am taking this opportunity to highlight a few things that make me even crazier than awaiting a literary verdict.
First up is why so many people, the Prez included, insist on saying “nuke-you-lar” instead of uttering a nuanced “new-clear” ever so much more like the spelling. Being the Prez is no indicator of one’s mastery of pronunciation. Take, for example, Gerald Ford’s manner of saying “judg-uh-ment” as if perhaps the word was spelled j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t and that first e was not silent. Someone eventually got to him, as he quit doing it prior to the end of his Presidency. I have been told by one friend who graduated from law school that one of his professors told his classes that he would fail them if they ever spelled judgment with that extra e. I could talk about JFK getting cigars from Castro’s C-u-b-e-r, but I believe I’ve made my point.
Next, what is the deal with the inability of some people to pronounce pundit, which is correctly uttered exactly as it is spelled. Most notable among those who make this mistake are pundits themselves. For some reason, they seem to think they are instead something that sounds like it is spelled p-u-n-d-a-n-t. Merriam-Webster says that a pundit is a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media. It could be that the talking heads that keep popping up on our TV screens are simply something else that ends in a-n-t. Pundits who call themselves “pun-dants” seem somehow similar to a mathematician who says, “Pi(e) are not square, pi(e) are round.”
Then there is that I-me thing that teachers have drilled so deeply into formative minds over all these years. It is a matter of subjective versus objective pronoun usage. An example of the subjective case is: Bob and I explained our position to the boss. An objective usage is: The boss asked Bob and me to explain our position. Speaking or writing the sentences with out “Bob and” makes the correct pronoun obvious. Either the teachers have overemphasized “I”, or the students failed to hear the argument for “me.” Whatever the case, it seems that the use of I occurs in objective instances more often than does me, and that ain’t write.
That’s enough with the words. What’s wrong with the huge number of people who insist on turning on their parking lights instead of their headlights when driving at dusk (or dawn)? Not only do they do it, but they seemingly do it smugly, as if they know something we don’t know. Perhaps someone should inform them that dusk, already a very dangerous driving period, is not a good time for them to fool other drivers into believing they are parked. Besides, when does that precise moment occur at which you recognize dusk’s end and switch to the headlights, assuming you both remember and have not been in an accident.
Thanks for listening. Please forgive my peevishness. I feel better.
She had indicated that it would be three or four months before I would hear from her. The wait was on. I basked in the glory of having my whole manuscript in the hands of an agent for about a month.
Not wanting to bask in excess, I started tinkering with expansion ideas. That’s when I was horrified to discover that the first page of the manuscript contained a sentence fragment. I had apparently gotten distracted when making a minor modification before mailing to the agent. Rather than let my potential agent-to-be and beacon of hope think that I don’t know the difference between sentences and fragments, I sent a follow-up letter on November 7. I explained and apologized for the error and provided a replacement first page. Hopefully, dressing the message up with a touch of self-deprecating humor will work in a manner similar to wrapping Fideaux’s pill in a piece of cheese.
It is now a tad beyond the four months originally indicated as necessary for consideration of my baby. I am a perpetual optimist about these things. It is not my practice to give up on an agent until I receive their correspondence announcing that a plump female vocalist has unleashed a terminal aria. Rather than think negatively, I would rather believe that the literary expert so loves my novel as to require a second reading in order to compose words adequate to express the intensity of their desire to represent my work.
The energy required for such positive thinking comes at a price. It makes me cranky. Just ask my wife. One has a tendency to become peevish when in queue. If that happens, it helps to vent. In that vein, I am taking this opportunity to highlight a few things that make me even crazier than awaiting a literary verdict.
First up is why so many people, the Prez included, insist on saying “nuke-you-lar” instead of uttering a nuanced “new-clear” ever so much more like the spelling. Being the Prez is no indicator of one’s mastery of pronunciation. Take, for example, Gerald Ford’s manner of saying “judg-uh-ment” as if perhaps the word was spelled j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t and that first e was not silent. Someone eventually got to him, as he quit doing it prior to the end of his Presidency. I have been told by one friend who graduated from law school that one of his professors told his classes that he would fail them if they ever spelled judgment with that extra e. I could talk about JFK getting cigars from Castro’s C-u-b-e-r, but I believe I’ve made my point.
Next, what is the deal with the inability of some people to pronounce pundit, which is correctly uttered exactly as it is spelled. Most notable among those who make this mistake are pundits themselves. For some reason, they seem to think they are instead something that sounds like it is spelled p-u-n-d-a-n-t. Merriam-Webster says that a pundit is a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media. It could be that the talking heads that keep popping up on our TV screens are simply something else that ends in a-n-t. Pundits who call themselves “pun-dants” seem somehow similar to a mathematician who says, “Pi(e) are not square, pi(e) are round.”
Then there is that I-me thing that teachers have drilled so deeply into formative minds over all these years. It is a matter of subjective versus objective pronoun usage. An example of the subjective case is: Bob and I explained our position to the boss. An objective usage is: The boss asked Bob and me to explain our position. Speaking or writing the sentences with out “Bob and” makes the correct pronoun obvious. Either the teachers have overemphasized “I”, or the students failed to hear the argument for “me.” Whatever the case, it seems that the use of I occurs in objective instances more often than does me, and that ain’t write.
That’s enough with the words. What’s wrong with the huge number of people who insist on turning on their parking lights instead of their headlights when driving at dusk (or dawn)? Not only do they do it, but they seemingly do it smugly, as if they know something we don’t know. Perhaps someone should inform them that dusk, already a very dangerous driving period, is not a good time for them to fool other drivers into believing they are parked. Besides, when does that precise moment occur at which you recognize dusk’s end and switch to the headlights, assuming you both remember and have not been in an accident.
Thanks for listening. Please forgive my peevishness. I feel better.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Fiction No Stranger than Truth
During the course of writing By the Light, I thought it would be interesting to shine some light on abusive priests. The man of the collar was killed by a murderer whom he had abused in youth. To maintain my serial killer’s custom, I had to pick a lighthouse at which he would tell his story through the staging of bodies. My choices were to set the scene at a light in the Deep South near the site of the priest’s demise or at a light in Baltimore near the District of Columbia turf where he intended to select his next victim from the perennial bumper crop of philandering politicians. I ultimately chose to have him dispose of the body at a nautical beacon in my home state of Louisiana.
I wrote that sequence of events on my lunch hour in the cozy loft at the City Market Coffeehouse in Kansas City. On my way across the state line to my abode in Kansas that evening, I was listening to the radio news when a story was related about a victim in Baltimore who shot and wounded the priest who abused him years before. The newscaster said it was the first incident in which a victim had resorted to violence against his un-priestly abuser. The near intersection of fiction and reality almost caused me to steer off the road.
I wrote that sequence of events on my lunch hour in the cozy loft at the City Market Coffeehouse in Kansas City. On my way across the state line to my abode in Kansas that evening, I was listening to the radio news when a story was related about a victim in Baltimore who shot and wounded the priest who abused him years before. The newscaster said it was the first incident in which a victim had resorted to violence against his un-priestly abuser. The near intersection of fiction and reality almost caused me to steer off the road.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Why the Light?
You might be wondering why I have featured a picture of a lighthouse on this blog page. The fundamental and easy answer is simply that I like them. In my last post, I listed some of the most aesthetically pleasing places on the planet. These venerable and regrettably disappearing nautical landmarks and the locales in which they reside richly deserve inclusion in that company. Why the light? By the Light is the name of my yet-to-be-agented novel. So you will understand the title’s meaning, here’s the initial or hook paragraph that I generally use in my agent queries:
My completed 72,000-word manuscript, By the Light, is a fabric of suspense highlighted with threads of romance. A man and woman are drawn into the pursuit of a serial killer that leaves two nude corpses at the foot of the Biloxi Light. The man is a profiler who has resigned from the FBI and returned to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. The woman is an Atlanta crime reporter and award-winning author whose curiosity is piqued when she spots a wire report of the double homicide in her hometown. They have a past. As they discover couple by couple at lighthouse after lighthouse, so does a murderer that eliminates practitioners of infidelity and by signature comes to be known as Rose.
The lighthouse pictured here was built on the Mighty Mississippi at Hannibal, Missouri, to commemorate the hundredth birthday of Mark Twain. It was originally illuminated from the Oval Office by FDR. Years later after needed refurbishment, it was again illuminated from the White House by JFK. More recently after further restoration, it was relit from the Oval once more by Bill Clinton. Since the villain in my story kills couples involved in extramarital carnality and enjoys taunting his pursuers, it was a natural that he leave the remains of a philandering televangelist and his squeeze du jour by this light with storied connections to three presidents between whom infidelity is an additional common thread.
If these peeks at By the Light intrigue you, please tell the most effective literary agent on your Christmas card list about it. Ask them to light a fire under a suspense/thriller-needy publisher on their Christmas card list. Cranking up a bucket brigade here might help my story earn its dustcover. Thank you for your support. My apologies to Bartles and Jaymes are sincere.
My completed 72,000-word manuscript, By the Light, is a fabric of suspense highlighted with threads of romance. A man and woman are drawn into the pursuit of a serial killer that leaves two nude corpses at the foot of the Biloxi Light. The man is a profiler who has resigned from the FBI and returned to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. The woman is an Atlanta crime reporter and award-winning author whose curiosity is piqued when she spots a wire report of the double homicide in her hometown. They have a past. As they discover couple by couple at lighthouse after lighthouse, so does a murderer that eliminates practitioners of infidelity and by signature comes to be known as Rose.
The lighthouse pictured here was built on the Mighty Mississippi at Hannibal, Missouri, to commemorate the hundredth birthday of Mark Twain. It was originally illuminated from the Oval Office by FDR. Years later after needed refurbishment, it was again illuminated from the White House by JFK. More recently after further restoration, it was relit from the Oval once more by Bill Clinton. Since the villain in my story kills couples involved in extramarital carnality and enjoys taunting his pursuers, it was a natural that he leave the remains of a philandering televangelist and his squeeze du jour by this light with storied connections to three presidents between whom infidelity is an additional common thread.
If these peeks at By the Light intrigue you, please tell the most effective literary agent on your Christmas card list about it. Ask them to light a fire under a suspense/thriller-needy publisher on their Christmas card list. Cranking up a bucket brigade here might help my story earn its dustcover. Thank you for your support. My apologies to Bartles and Jaymes are sincere.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Virginal No More
Thanks to Nathan Bransford, literary agent in the Frisco office of the NY agency, Curtis Brown Ltd., for christening Red Stick Writer’s blog with its first comment. The names of both agent and agency sounded familiar, and it took only a quick glance at my agent database to confirm that I e-mailed a query to Nathan on August 6. He sent back an e-response the same day indicating that he was declining the opportunity to represent me in the literary marketplace. I don’t know if he thought my query had something in common with a Hoover vacuum cleaner, my hook was barbless, he simply wasn’t looking for a suspense/thriller novel at the time, or whatever. That he commented on my last post could indicate that he was so taken by the allure of my words that he couldn’t help himself.
In the tradition of Sophia Petrillo, I digress. Golf is one of the pastimes by which my life has been enriched. It plays me more than I play it, which is why I gave up on trying to master the game. I realized that golf courses, along with most college campuses and some cemeteries are among the prettiest places in the world. Given that, golf is simply one of the ways I commune with nature. I have seen in my pursuit of high-compression, dimpled balls bearing names such as Titleist parts of nature most humans haven’t even imagined, many of them involving briars, brambles, and sometimes even gators. All of this is mentioned to enable me to say that, as invited by blog comment and under the guise of a mulligan, I might again send e-correspondence to Mr. Bransford.
The reason I say “might” is that I have a full manuscript currently under consideration by a lady who agents from Pennsylvania. From comments I’ve read from her clients and from independent journalists, I will indeed be a lucky fellow if she chooses to hawk my story and guide my writing career. When I went to the post office to mail my entire manuscript to her, I asked the postal clerk to put some good juju on the package. She told me that she didn’t think she had that power but was certain that things would go well. I took two steps away, glanced at the coins and currency I received from her, and returned to her window to express my sincere and superstitious appreciation for the Keystone State quarter she had by chance included in my change. That omen’s failure, God forbid, would be one of the circumstances that might precipitate my return as a bad penny to Nathan Bransford’s e-mailbox.
I stumbled into Nathan’s My Space world while following a thread of information regarding another agent. Discovering him occurred in exactly the manner I described in my previous post, chasing one thing and happening upon a myriad of other interesting things. That’s how I came to send him a query in the first place. I was impressed with his writing and the comments of his friends back then. After receiving his comment on my last post, I read all of the entries at his relatively new blog page, Nathan Bransford Literary Agent. I still like the way he writes and intend to continue reading his interesting and informative blog, make comments there, and take advantage of the Q&A opportunity he offers.
Thanks again, Nathan. Red Stick Writer is virginal no more.
In the tradition of Sophia Petrillo, I digress. Golf is one of the pastimes by which my life has been enriched. It plays me more than I play it, which is why I gave up on trying to master the game. I realized that golf courses, along with most college campuses and some cemeteries are among the prettiest places in the world. Given that, golf is simply one of the ways I commune with nature. I have seen in my pursuit of high-compression, dimpled balls bearing names such as Titleist parts of nature most humans haven’t even imagined, many of them involving briars, brambles, and sometimes even gators. All of this is mentioned to enable me to say that, as invited by blog comment and under the guise of a mulligan, I might again send e-correspondence to Mr. Bransford.
The reason I say “might” is that I have a full manuscript currently under consideration by a lady who agents from Pennsylvania. From comments I’ve read from her clients and from independent journalists, I will indeed be a lucky fellow if she chooses to hawk my story and guide my writing career. When I went to the post office to mail my entire manuscript to her, I asked the postal clerk to put some good juju on the package. She told me that she didn’t think she had that power but was certain that things would go well. I took two steps away, glanced at the coins and currency I received from her, and returned to her window to express my sincere and superstitious appreciation for the Keystone State quarter she had by chance included in my change. That omen’s failure, God forbid, would be one of the circumstances that might precipitate my return as a bad penny to Nathan Bransford’s e-mailbox.
I stumbled into Nathan’s My Space world while following a thread of information regarding another agent. Discovering him occurred in exactly the manner I described in my previous post, chasing one thing and happening upon a myriad of other interesting things. That’s how I came to send him a query in the first place. I was impressed with his writing and the comments of his friends back then. After receiving his comment on my last post, I read all of the entries at his relatively new blog page, Nathan Bransford Literary Agent. I still like the way he writes and intend to continue reading his interesting and informative blog, make comments there, and take advantage of the Q&A opportunity he offers.
Thanks again, Nathan. Red Stick Writer is virginal no more.
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