New Publication in Short Story America!

Short Story America Fiction Anthology Volume III

One of my readers’ favorite stories, “Komenda’s Children,” has just been reprinted in Short Story America, volume III. Get your copy here, in time for the holidays. All the stories in this volume are high-quality, gutsy, and mean something. I can’t think of a better gift to give.

“Komenda’s Children,” a story about a Southern woman who travels to a slave trading fortress in West Africa while investigating her unsettling family legacy, was read at the second annual Short Story America Festival and Conference in South Carolina. It has previously been published in the Soundtrack Not Included anthology, which you can purchase here.

Writing Exercise: Creating Believable Villains

In the Novel Writing Group in The Hague last month, writer Suzanna Tjoa led an impressively bilingual workshop on crafting believable villains.

There are many things you can do to make your villains more believable. There are countless articles on the web about those things which elevate a villain from a mere baddy to a complex antagonist worthy of fear, compassion, sorrow, pity, and terror.

Instead of going into all of them here, I wanted to share a 15 minute writing exercise you can do, right now, to help you get inside of your villain’s head and understand where they are coming from. For this exercise, it helps if you already have an antagonist in your story or novel. Whoever they are, it’s important for you to know them well if your readers are going to care whenever the antagonist brushes up against your main character.

Before this exercise, my villain was a little too villainous. Sure, they had a family (as most villains do) which made them more sympathetic, but I wasn’t fully clear on the events that had created this most villainous worldview. Once I finished this exercise, it dawned on me how my baddie grew up the way he did, and how he justifies his actions to himself. Since then, the scenes where he is present have become so much  more multidimensional and truly menacing. I’m more afraid of him (and for my main character) now than I was when he was 100% evil.

So trust me when I tell you you’re about to have a 15 minutes of your life well-spent.

To make your villain more believable, give yourself 15 uninterrupted  minutes with a pad of paper and pen, or a keyboard and word processor (or hell, the memo function on your mobile phone- whatever works for you). Next you’ll choose a controversial subject about which your villain believes differently from you. You can choose any controversial stance your villain has already taken in the past (“It’s alright to kill in order to get what I want,” or “It’s only wrong to swindle/steal if you get caught,” or “It’s ok to cheat on your spouse”), or you can go for a controversial stance applicable to your life now (“Euthanasia is never acceptable,” or “freedom of religion should extend to freedom from religion,” or “we have an obligation to protect ourselves from terrorism, even if it means infringing on the rights of suspects”). Be sure to choose a topic in which you are emotionally invested in some way, and one on which you and your antagonist would disagree.

Now set yourself a timer for 15 minutes, argue their POV as passionately as possible. Have your villain explain why they believe that way. What experiences shaped their worldview, and how would they defend their position? How does their worldview benefit them? What have they invested in believing the way they do?

Once your 15 minutes are up, take a look at what you’ve written. Now you know something very personal and important about your antagonist that will help you predict their thoughts and actions, and will help you write them in a way that calls to your reader to keep turning those pages long past their bedtime.

 

The Haiga of Terry Ingram

I’ve been excited about these haiga for a long time.

Terry Ingram‘s haikus (available here for anyone who wants, no – needs, more) are these tiny flashes of lightning in a nighttime thunderstorm. After the electricity has gone out, for one brief second they illuminate something in a way you have never seen or considered it,  before life returns to darkness.

Ingram has put image to word in the form of haiga to make that little flash of illumination that much brighter. And for the very first time, I am showcasing his work here on my blog!

Perhaps selfishly, I picked out the haiga which spoke to me the most- those which play on the endless nights that settle across an urban landscape in late fall, leaving rooftop smoker’s faces a little too white in the light of the moon.

I know you’ll enjoy these as much as I do.

This post is part of Intermittent Visitors, a multi-author blog tour.

Coffee with Authors: Lessons from the WNBA panel at the Southern Festival of Books

These words of wisdom come from the Women’s National Book Association’s Coffee with Authors Panel in the Southern Festival of Books, October 13, 2012

Courtesy of Humanities Tennessee, 2012

The Women’s National Book Association is insanely fabulous. And it isn’t just the free swag talking (though their swagbags are the best I’ve ever had- several free trade copies of novels I’ve been desperate to read and anxiously waiting on!). These women do a lot of great literacy-based stuff in their communities and always pick the most challenging and multi-faceted books to recommend. So when I had a chance to get in on their early morning panel at the Southern Festival of Books, I didn’t think twice before signing up.

Moderated by Nina Cardona, of Nashville’s “All Things Considered” on NPR, the panel of questions and answers was a whirlwind of fantastic writing insight. She grilled Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ecco/HarperCollins; 2012 National Book Award Finalist), Christopher Tilghman (The Right-Hand Shore, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2012 Great Group Reads selection), Gail Tsukiyama (A Hundred Flowers, St. Martin’s Press), and Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles, Random House) who were happy to give away their secrets.

Though these four authors write wildly different types of fiction, Nina Cardona’s questions revealed that they shared three main themes which shaped their decisions as writers: desire, research, and failure.

Ben Fountain was first to speak about desire. His insights into his character, Billy Lynn, are fueled by motivation and the young man’s desires:

“Billy is 19 years old, and I was 19 once,” Fountain said as the audience laughed.  Fountain asked himself,  “what do they want?” and found  “They want what all the rest of us want – to love and be loved. Even the most callow 19 year old boy/man wants that in his own way…Everyone wonders “who am i? what will become of me? What will I do with my life? What constitutes a decent life? How will I construct it?” These profound questions are at work in 19 year olds who are being whipsawed between the extremes of human nature and human experience. Billy has to act as a symbol of patriotism when he doesn’t know who he is. “As the story developed he became a kind of everyman. Maybe the kind of man I’d like to be.”  Fountain says he figured it out sentence by sentence.

 Everyone wonders “who am i? what will become of me? What will I do with my life? What constitutes a decent life? How will I construct it?”

Desire also played a large role in Gail Tsukiyama’s writing process. Tsukiyama said that in life, “what I can’t do I want to do…I was never smart enough to be a doctor, so I practice in the books.”  Your own desires find their way into your characters.

Research was also a central theme in the discussion.

Nina Cardona called Tsukiyama’s book “intense yet gentle” because of how the China’s revolution took a background to the familial fallout which was center stage. Tsukiyama said that so many books set in the Revolution were written by people who lived through it, so she wanted to write about people who were marginal. “This is a book about the one who isn’t in prison, but the one who stays at home.” She wanted to get the POV of those left behind in these vast historic moments, which required a combined approach of research and imagination.

Christopher Tilghman’s research all came down to place:  “My work has always started with a place… Placedness and landscape are important to me.”

Ben Fountain agreed that research is a tricky thing. “There’s a risk that when doing research you’ll over-determine the story… It will be so present and front that you’ll lose some other elements. So basically I do the research first, then give it time to marinade.”

Karen Thompson Walker’s research was challenging, as her novel is a what-if novel, set in a future world. That gave her some wiggle-room. In addition to the what-if science, a lot of the research for Walker’s book was for the young-adult protagonist. Walker had to remember how she was at that age, filled with curiosity. This curiosity translates over to the writing process: “Writing feels like reading. I have to feel the curiosity I would as a reader when I’m writing… The times I get nervous is when I don’t feel that curiosity. Then I have to stop writing and go back.”

 “I have to feel the curiosity I would as a reader when I’m writing.”

Nina Cardona pointed out that so much great writing often comes out of great failure. The authors agreed:

Tsukiyama: “I wrote 100 pages of wartimes in this book and could not get it right.”

Tilghman: “I’ve tried a couple of times and failed badly,” he said.  “All my novels have come from failed short stories…they couldn’t be done in 30 pages; they needed 300. It just grows.”

The Moral of the story?  Think about what your characters want more than anything and let that drive the plot. Do the background research but don’t let the research dictate the story. And fail a lot, and be comfortable with failing that much. Once you know how to not do it, how to do it becomes more obvious. All four of these authors pushed through the failure to land publishing contracts with big houses and win big prizes and the freedom to work on their next projects. It’s worth it.

Many thanks to Cardona and the authors, the WNBA, the Southern Festival of Books, the Nashville Public Library, the city of Nashville, and all of their sponsors.

The Brussels Sprouts of Science Fiction

New on Zolder Writers: my post about the Brussels sprouts of science fiction. Don’t worry – sci-fi Brussels sprouts are nothing like Killer Tomatoes, I promise! Highlights include discussion of Robert Heinlein and the historical trajectory of the science fiction genre.

The Haiku and Haiga of Terry Ingram

A little cuckoo across a hydrangea (Haiga) by Yosa Buson, from Wikimedia Commons

I love poetry, but I find it difficult to write. Unlike prose, it doesn’t come naturally to me.

I’ve always thought of Poetry personified as one of the cool kids smoking in the back of the bus. Poetry sits next to the long-legged Performance Art, Painting (whose parents don’t care how late she stays out), Experimental Music (who lives with two uber-cool moms in a riverfront loft), and the sultry and precocious Ceramics.

Poetry (along with these other arts)  is something I appreciate, and admire all the more because I have such a hard time with it myself.  I think of the surprising ways in which poets have made me feel, and I yearn for the chance to make others feel that way, too.

Therefore I’m very excited to have the chance to get to know New York poet Terry Ingram a little better. His most recently published haiku chapbook, Hiss of Leaves, explores the subdued beauty innate in even the most surprising and mundane in life. Ingram offered to share with us some BRAND NEW material in the form of his haiga – the Japanese style of visual art which often accompanies haiku. I can’t wait to see it, and share it with you.

Watch this space!

This post is part of Intermittent Visitors, a multi-author blog tour.

I get interviewed for Upper Rubber Boot Books’ Intermittent Visitors Blog Tour!

My interview with Joanne Merriam for the Upper Rubber Boot Books Intermittent Visitors Blog Tour is now live! Joanne  asked some great questions about my writing process and the best writing advice I’ve ever received.

Fans of my short story “For the Love of Ciderpunk,” (finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose Prize and published in Best New Writing 2012) will be happy to know she got me to spill all about how I came up with the grotesque events and unforgetably colorful characters who really made that story. It has everything to do with  the things I learned and the people I met while communally squatting various places in the UK in my early 20s.  You can read all about it on her blog.

 

This interview was part of Intermittent Visitors: a multi-author blog tour.

Nancy Nichols on Writing and Self-Publishing

Secrets of the Ultimate Husband Hunter (Copyright Nancy Nichols, 2008)

Motivational speaker and best-seller Nancy Nichols knows a thing or two about nearly everything in the writing business. She’s tried nearly everything on her road to publishing, and has a witty anecdote about each pitfall along the way (“Beware the Vanity presses. Vanity publishers are gonna stroke your creative feathers, and you’re going to cock-a-doodle-DO when really you shouldn’t.”). For her, self-publishing was the only way to keep hold of creative control, even if it meant learning every step of the business herself. Now she can do it all.

A native Memphian with the perfect list of links, the perfect book posters, and even the perfect hairstyle (seriously? How does she do it? When I write I wind my hair around my fingers or my pen and end up with Medusa-curls) manages to do it all by being hyper vigilant and perfectionist about the publishing process. Five minutes into the Nashville workshop on Self-Publishing, she got up and had to correct a crooked picture frame. As her students scratched their heads, she laughed, pointed to herself, and quipped “Anal!”

Nichols then asked how many of us had a book ready to publish. About half of us raised our hands. She then asked how many of us had a book in our heads, ready to write. Up went the other half.

She addressed them first. “I’m gonna call you wannabes until you start writing, because that’s what you are. Wannabes. You don’t wannabe a wannabe – you wanna do it!”

And that’s where her best advice came from – an unplanned motivational speech in the middle of our workshop. “Don’t worry about the writer’s block. Don’t worry if it’s going to be any good or if anyone is gonna read it. Just start writing.”

Nichols said that if writing a book is intimidating, to think about it as a journaling journey and just begin free-writing.  As you start, your ideas will come together and the next steps will be obvious. It takes a long time to get the process together and what you start now will look nothing like your finished project.

I know she’s right, because I’ve felt this sentiment myself. Writing is growing- you are growing in your mind and head. When you finish your book, you will not be the same person as you were when you began. People might write to inform others, but really the writer learns more than their reader ever will, and that goes for both fiction and non. That’s not something you can give up on, even if writing a book is intimidating.

Every time you say “I don’t believe in writer’s block,” someone’s writer’s block dies.

Say it with me.

I’d like to thank Nancy Nichols for sharing so many writing and publishing tips during her free workshop on self-publishing. If you live near Nashville and want to soak up some of her moxie and know-how, she is giving a 3-part extended self-publishing workshop at very reasonable prices (like $30 per person reasonable). You can sign up here.

Do Writing Contests Really Help Launch Careers?

Do writing contests really help launch careers?

The Blood in the Snowflake Garden (Copyright D. Alan Lewis, 2012)

There are several articles out there which discuss the benefits and drawbacks of writing contests. During a workshop on Agent/Publisher pitches, I had the fortune to ask a D. Alan Lewis, 2010 finalist of  Killer Nashville’s Claymore Award, about his experiences with this competition for mystery novelists sponsored by the Killer Nashville Mystery Writer’s Conference.

Lewis said that although he did not win the competition and the publication prize, that being a Claymore Finalist was instrumental in securing his publishing contract for his first novel, The Blood in the Snowflake Garden.

He emphasized that you just have to know the worth of winning or being a finalist in order to make the most your position. It is very worth it to enter these competitions, because mentioning this to publishers and agents in your query letter or during your pitch, often can garner your novel some notice. Nothing is a guarantee, but if you let an agent/publisher know that your novel was a finalist in a competition with over 600 other novels, it tells them that yours has been pre-screened and vetted by the writing community.

Prior to the Claymore Dagger competition, Lewis had written to several agents with little interest in his first novel.  After he became a finalist and included this in his queries and pitches, agents and publishers started asking for his manuscript. The contest didn’t get him published, but it helped him to get into that next round/step where actual eyes were on the manuscript.

Think of mentioning the contest as that little red exclamation mark next to urgent emails- its puts you that much ahead of the other novels awaiting representation/publication.

“My Novel is Actually Three Genres”

Pretend I’m an agent/publisher. You want to sell your novel. We’re in an elevator together during your favorite writer’s conference. You’re giving me your 1-minute pitch, and it’s going well. I’m nodding and smiling, not looking at my watch. Then I ask: “What Genre is your novel?”

 

The elevator at the conference will probably not look like this one. (Elevator in Abandoned Military Base on Teufelsberg, in Berlin. Copyleft Avery Oslo, 2012.)

 

 

So quick, tell me. Which genre?

 

…

 

Tell me now. Talk to your computer screen. Pretend I can hear you. Do it. Do it now.

 

…

 

Did you say something like “Well, it’s a Sci-Fi Thriller with a Romance, so kind of three genres?” 

(It’s okay, you can admit it. I’ve done it too.)

 

But no. Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. Even if it’s true, don’t say that.

 

Kimberly Richardson, an author and an editor with Kerlak Publishing, has heard this at conferences and conventions more times than she’d like to recall. During a workshop with author Alan D. Lewis about Agent/Publisher Pitches at the Nashville Writer’s Meetup, Richardson revealed that being unable to decide on the genre of your book  shows a certain amateurism, and a lack of understanding of the industry. In a time when money is tight and competition fierce, agents and publishers are hesitant to take on an author who isn’t informed about the publishing process. That author is seen as a liability.

 

Of course your book includes a little bit from several different genres; most good books do.  You shouldn’t cut down on the intergenrenality (is that a word? I’m making it a word) of your work. The best books borrow devices from several genres. Look at the Harry Potter books – they are YA fantasy, but also have the makings of a good thriller, romance, and even horror.  That is how it should be.

 

But if an agent or publisher asks: “Which genre is your book?” You should have an answer. AN answer. One.

 

But how do you know which one?

 

It’s easier than you think – the one the agent/publisher you are speaking with represents/publishes.

 

Obviously lying will get you nowhere, but if your book is genuinely a  “sci-fi thriller with a romance,” then you have the opportunity to cast a wide net. When you approach agents who represent sci-fi, then that is the genre of your book. When you approach a publisher who really only puts out romance novels, then pitch your book as you would a romance novel. And so forth.  So approach the right people. Look for agents/publishers who represent and publish sci-fi with thriller or romance subplots. Or for agents/publishers who are looking for thrillers in a sci-fi setting or with a romance subplot. Or for romance publishers who like to branch out into romance on other worlds or romance in the midst of a situation resembling a thriller.  

 

If you are fortunate enough to have written a book that spans three genres of which you can take advantage, make your novel of three genres work for you, instead of letting it trip you up. Come up with three separate pitches, and know to whom you are pitching. It’s just one more thing that can separate you from the rest.