Month: November 2014

The Creativity Myth

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This post by Kevin Ashton originally appeared on Medium on 10/29/14.

In 1815, Germany’s General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

In other words, Mozart’s greatest symphonies, concertos, and operas came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down.

This letter has been used to explain creation many times. Parts of it appear in The Mathematician’s Mind, written by Jacques Hadamard in 1945; in Creativity: Selected Readings, edited by Philip Vernon in 1976; in Roger Penrose’s award-winning 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind; and it is alluded to in Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 bestseller Imagine. It influenced the poets Pushkin and Goethe and the playwright Peter Shaffer. Directly and indirectly, it helped shape common beliefs about creating.

But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. This was first shown in 1856 by Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn and has been confirmed by other scholars since.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

Just the Right Word is Only a Click Away!

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 11/17/14.

How are your word usage and spelling skills? Try this quiz to find out.

Would you say, “Please join Kerry and me” or “Please join Kerry and I”? Do you lay down or lie down for a nap? Should you rein in or reign in your impulses? Did chaos rein or reign in the classroom for the student teacher? The homicide detective arrived at the scene of the grizzly (or is it grisly) murder. How did that effect (or is it affect) you? What was the effect/affect of that show on your kids?

Did the elicit or the illicit lovers have a discrete or discreet rendezvous? Do you insure, ensure, or assure that your seat belt is fastened? Do you hone in or home in on a problem? Do you say “He got his just desserts” or “He got his just deserts”?

Which is correct, “between you and me” or “between you and I”? Do you peak at a mountain peek or vice-versa? And do those juicy bits of gossip peak your curiosity or pique your curiosity? Do you pore over or pour over the details of a document? Did the singer damage her vocal chords or vocal cords? What’s the difference between continual and continuous? allusion and illusion? aural and oral? idyllic and ideal? further and farther? a gourmet and a gourmand? fictional, fictitious, and fictive? jibe and gibe? e.g. and i.e.? bizarre and bazaar?

What are the main differences between American and British spelling? Do Canadians use British or American, spelling, words and expressions? And what the heck is “codswallop”?

And for you fiction writers, what are the word length guidelines for flash fiction, short short stories, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels? What’s the difference between an antagonist and an antihero? What’s a crucible in fiction? How about dramatic irony? How is a metaphor different from a simile? What’s a McGuffin?

 

Read the full post, which includes answers to these and more usage questions, on The Kill Zone.

 

The Writing Class

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This essay by Jaswinder Bolina originally appeared on Poetry Foundation on 11/12/14.

Sometime in the early 1970s, my parents got into a still-infamous row after one of them splurged two dollars on a houseplant the other insisted they couldn’t afford. That spat took place a few years before I turned up, but they’ve laughed about it so often, I almost remember being there. It fits into my real memories of other squabbles they had in that shabby apartment we lived in on the north side of Chicago, the worn green carpet in its kitchen, a claw-foot tub without a shower in its single bathroom, scuffed paint on its walls, their arguments tumbling through whole evenings. It fits into my memory of what money meant to their otherwise happy marriage. Sundays we’d go in the used Oldsmobile from one market with a sale on tomatoes to the other where a gallon of milk sold for 10 cents cheaper. On the way home, we’d forgo the bright new gas station for the gloomy old one where unleaded cost a few cents less.

These are some of the ways my immigrant parents survived recessions, layoffs, and the disappearance of entire industries from the U.S. economy. This is how they earned, saved, and invested enough to move us into a brick split-level house with a two-and-a-half-car garage in the suburbs by the time I started secondary school. Though my father clocked into the same hydraulics parts plant as a machinist for more than a decade and my mother did data entry for an hourly wage at a financial publishing company, they could afford to buy me a set of encyclopedias and an Apple computer. They could pay for tennis lessons and give me a stereo system with a CD player and a double-cassette deck. They could send me to the private academy instead of the public high school.

This is how I lived a socioeconomic reality almost entirely separate from theirs. While my parents scrimped and stressed daily as part of the working classes, I went to a school with honors societies, study abroad programs, and AP courses. I went to college. I managed to turn my philosophy major into a high-paying job at a software startup south of Silicon Valley. Higher education had kept its promise of onward and upward mobility, which seemed easy enough in the bloated turn-of-the-century tech economy. Still, after less than six months at the startup, I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. This didn’t make sense to my mother and father. Though we were far removed from the ragged apartments of my childhood, their class consciousness remained rooted in those earlier struggles. It told them we weren’t the kind of people who did certain kinds of things. Abandoning a salaried job with stock options for a graduate degree offering little hope of future employment or reliable income was chief among these, but I liked the integrity in my plan. If a degree in poetry dumped me into bohemian poverty, I thought, so be it. At least I was being earnest in my pursuit. I was that kind of people.

 

Read the full essay on Poetry Foundation.

 

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

The Three “Acts” of a Writer’s Journey—From Newbie to Master

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her site on 11/3/14.

The mark of a great storyteller is they make our job look easy. The story flows, pulls us in, and appears seamless. Many of us decided to become writers because we grew up loving books. Because good storytellers are masters of what they do, we can easily fall into a misguided notion that “writing is easy.” Granted there are a rare few exceptions, but most of us will go through three acts (stages) in this career if we stick it through.

 

Act One—The Neophyte

This is when we are brand new. We’ve never read a craft book and the words flow. We never run out of words to put on a page because we are like a kid banging away on a piano having fun and making up “music.” We aren’t held back or hindered by any structure or rules and we have amazing energy and passion.

But then we go to our first critique and hear words like “POV” and “narrative structure.” We learn that maybe we don’t know as much as we think we do and that we need to do some training. We also finally understand why so many famous authors drank…a lot.

 

Act Two—The Apprentice

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s site.

 

22 Common Problems Associated with Short Story Submissions

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This post by Amanda Pillar originally appeared on Alan Baxter‘s Warrior Scribe site on 11/7/14.

Do you write and submit short stories to anthologies and magazines? If so, you really need to read this, from the award-winning editor, Amanda Pillar. Thanks, Amanda!

I’ve worked on seven anthologies over the past six or so years. I’m onto the eighth, the Bloodlines* anthology to be published by Ticonderoga Publications. I’ve also judged a couple short story and flash fiction competitions. Over the last six years, I’ve noticed reoccurring issues with authors’ submissions. While I will not reject someone outright for forgetting to use standard manuscript format, or for misspelling my name, there are editors who will. So it’s these basic mistakes that may be hindering authors from getting published. There are other issues as well – the quality of writing, willingness of an author to be edited, attitude of an author (if you’re rude, people won’t want to work with you) and so on.

But to help, I’ve compiled a list of 22 common problems associated with short story submissions, shown below in no particular order:

1. Proof read* your work. More than one or two typos (on the first 2 pages) are not your friend. In fact, it looks like the author rushed the submission or that they cannot proof read their work. The latter can leave an editor worried about the entire editing process to come.

*Publetariat Editor’s Note – here in the U.S. we’d use one word, “proofread,” but this author is from Australia and spellings are sometimes regional.

 

2. Read the submission guidelines properly. If it asks for fantasy, don’t send science fiction and vice versa. If I say I want urban fantasy, do not send stories that are set in the future, or contain aliens, etc.

 

3. Send your manuscript in standard format unless otherwise asked for. This is an example http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html. (I tend to ask for Times New Roman font, because I hate Courier New. So check the guidelines to make sure!)

 

Read the full post, which includes 19 more specific tips, on Warrior Scribe.

 

The Fifty Shades Effect: Women Dominate Self-Publishing

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This article by Maggie Brown originally appeared on The Guardian 11/9/14.

The success of EL James’s erotic trilogy has led to a surge in the number of middle-aged women producing ebooks.

The success of EL James and her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy did much to overturn the stereotype of a self-published author. Now academic research further challenges the image of eccentric hobbyists scribbling away in their sheds by revealing that it is middle-aged and well-educated women who dominate the growing e-publishing market.

Alison Baverstock, an associate professor in publishing at Kingston University, Surrey, said her research showed a clear gender split, with 65% of self-publishers being women and 35% men. Nearly two-thirds of all self-publishers are aged 41 to 60, with a further 27% aged over 61. Half are in full-time employment, 32% have a degree and 44% a higher degree.

Baverstock said there was a widespread misunderstanding about who decides to self-publish a book, and how the genre was changing the publishing industry.

James has become arguably the richest of self-published authors through her “mummy porn” but, while the prose and storylines have won mass audiences, they have also attracted scorn. There is a belief, according to Baverstock, that self-publishers are doing so as a last resort, as vanity publishers, and may not have much formal education.

 

Read the full article on The Guardian.

 

10 Key Questions That Can Determine Your Success As A Writer

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This post by Jonathan Gunson originally appeared on his Bestseller Labs site on 6/26/14.

There are many powerful ways to significantly improve your chances of building a large book readership.

To help determine the likelihood of you succeeding, I’ve put together ten key questions for you to think about when starting a new writing project.

Prepare to be “caught in the headlights” by these questions – they’re designed to expose the reality of being an author, but also to give a useful insight into your career pathway.

In truth, this is not a definitive list, but I’ve found these particular questions to be helpful guidance in my own work. Let me know in the comments which of these is relevant to you – I’d value the feedback.

 

1. Do you employ the potency of your TRUE self?

The most effective way to attract a large and committed readership is to develop your own unique “Writer’s Voice”.

This requires reaching into your deepest emotional wells, and writing about what you genuinely love – the things you obsess over.

You need to invoke the potent uniqueness of you.

A unique voice gives you control of a market, because committed reader fans can only ever buy this particular magic from you. You alone. Think about the gravity of this.

More about the power of “Writer’s Voice” here.

 

2. Are you writing for a particular genre because it’s popular?

 

Read the full post on Bestseller Labs.

 

Research Rejection, Part III

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This post by Stephen Brayton originally appeared on his blog on 10/24/14.

I posted the idea for this blog on Facebook wanting some comments and asking if other authors had experienced rejection. My thanks to David Schlosser and Bob Dunbar who responded with an example each. I can’t make up this stuff so I’ll let them tell their short stories in their own words:

David Schlosser:
I once wrote a scene in which a veterinarian sedates a bad guy and contacted the head of the US association of veterinary anesthetists to conduct research. He was polite and responsive until I asked what sort of chemical cocktail a vet would have access to in a vet clinic that would knock out a human. Then he said (IMHO, wisely, though it hadn’t occurred to me until he said), “Because I don’t know you, I don’t think I should answer that question.”

Bob Dunbar:
When I was doing research for my novel about the Alamo, a colonel in the Mexican army refused to allow me access to their archives, claiming that the Mexican army had never massacred anyone at any time during its history.

 

Read the full post on Steve Brayton’s blog.

 

Why Your Character’s Goal Needs to Be 1 of These 5 Things

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 10/24/14.

Every story comes down to just one thing. Know what it is? Conflict’s a good guess (“no conflict, no story” and all that), but before a story can offer conflict, it has to first offer something else: desire. In short, story is always going to be about a character’s goal.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about your character’s two conflicting goals, based on the Thing He Needs and the Thing He Wants. Between them, these two desires drive your entire story, pushing and pulling your protagonist and the people around him until they end up in a completely different place from that in which they began the story.

But here’s another question for you: Does it matter what your character wants?

Obviously, a character’s goal has to tie into the plot in a logical way. But there’s more. In order to resonate deeply with your very human audience, your character’s goal needs to be one of five specific things.

 

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Why It Matters to Authors

 

Read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

 

The Best Time Of Day To Market Your Books

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This post by Mike Lowndes originally appeared on his site on 2/5/14.

What Is The Best Time Of Day To Market Your Books?

Marketers have known for decades that people respond better to offers at different times of day and on different days of the week. But the internet has made things a whole lot more complicated, as well as opening up fresh opportunities for clever timing-based targeting. So how do you know what to send, when?

There’s plenty of research available on the subject, but a lot of it contradicts itself. In our experience your best bet is to let your target audience drive timing decisions. Here’s some guidance to help you hit the nail on the head at a time the nail actually wants to be hit.

 

When is the best time to market to your audience?

Facebook news feeds go out of date in no time. Old news gets buried and unless people are on there all the time, it’s likely they’ll miss your gems of wisdom and amazingness. The recent introduction of Story Bumping means time decay matters less than it did. But it still makes sense to post stuff on Facebook when people are most likely to see it. And the same goes for other social media. Old messages are buried fast, so it helps if you know the optimum time to release them.

Some studies suggest engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays – probably because people are at the end of their tether at work, looking forward to the weekend and more inclined to take a sneaky peek at Facebook than earlier in the week. Obviously there are variations, but as a general rule posting Wednesday to Friday seems to reach the most people and generate the best response.

 

Read the full post on Mike Lowndes’ site.

 

Worlds Without End – Interview With Ursula K. Le Guin

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This article by Sue Zalokar originally appeared on Real Change News on 11/5/14.

Sci-fi legend Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the limitless power of imagination

Ursula K. Le Guin started writing when she was 5 and has been publishing her work since the 1960s. Throughout her career, she has delved into some of the most insightful, political, ecological and socially important topics of our time. She has created utopian worlds and societies. She boldly challenged gender barriers by simply doing what she was born to do: Write.

Her first major work of science fiction, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” opened a new era in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. At a time when women were barely represented in the writing world, specifically in the genre of science fiction, Le Guin was taking top honors for her novels. Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors she has earned, her writing has received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.

In Paris in 1953 she married Charles A. Le Guin, an historian, and since 1958 they have lived in Portland. They have three children and four grandchildren.

After some correspondence, Le Guin invited me to her home to talk. I arrived bearing fresh-picked berries from Sauvie Island. She took me into her study and showed me the view she had of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

Urusula K. Le Guin: It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t want to see anything that big again. It was just inconceivable.

 

Read the full interview on Real Change News.

 

Why Worrying about Genre is Holding You Back

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 10/29/14.

I get a lot of emails from other authors who are struggling to gain momentum on their titles. Some of these authors have dozens of books out for sale (one industrious chap even had 70+) but sales aren’t where they’d like them. The main reasons I hear about?

“My book is in an unpopular genre.” Or, “Advice about book marketing doesn’t apply to my books. They’re too obscure.”

I get it, I really do. You’ve written something totally outside of the traditional idea of BISAC codes (the genre categories the ISBN companies use) and you’re not sure there’s a market. You’re more interested in writing for yourself first. And that’s cool. But it doesn’t mean there’s no audience.

Hell, if you can get ONE person to read your book, there’s nothing stopping you from getting a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a million. I’m yet to see a genre of book that doesn’t have an audience large enough to sustain a decent income. But you’ve got to make it easy for readers to find out about your work. And this is where the 80/20 principle comes in. Here’s what I mean:

The 80/20 rule in a nutshell: what’s the 20% of effort that leads to 80% of results? What’s the 80% of effort that leads to 20% of the results? The exact percentages are flexible, but you get the point. Here’s an example:

 

Read the full post on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

The War of the Words

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This article by Pete Gessen originally appeared in Vanity Fair‘s December 2014 issue.

Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.

 

I. Discovery

Otis Chandler is a tall, serious, bespectacled man in his mid-30s whose grandfather, also named Otis Chandler, used to own the Los Angeles Times. Chandler grew up in Los Angeles, attended boarding school near Pomona, and then, like his father and grandfather, went to Stanford. Upon graduation he entered the computer field. Because it was the turn of the millennium, that meant working at a start-up: Chandler found a job at Tickle.com, which was an early venture in social networking. At Tickle, Chandler eventually became a project manager, starting a dating site called LoveHappens.com. It did O.K. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide, parent company of Monster.com, the huge job-posting site, and about a year and a half later, Chandler left.

He started to think about what he should do with himself. One day, while visiting a bookish friend, he had what he calls an epiphany. “He had one of those bookshelves in his apartment,” Chandler told me when I met him in San Francisco. “You know what I mean, the bookshelf when you walk into someone’s house, the one where they keep all their favorite books. I walked into his living room and started checking out his shelf and just grilling him, like, ‘That looks cool. What’d you think of it? What’d you think of that?’ ” He left his friend’s place with 10 good books. “I was like, if I could go to all my friends’ living rooms and grill them about what books they like, I would never lack for a good book again. But instead of doing that, why don’t I just build a site where everybody puts their shelves in their profiles?”

 

Read the full article on Vanity Fair.

 

Odds In Our Favour: Race in The Hunger Games

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This post by Alice Nuttall originally appeared on For Books’ Sake on 6/25/14.

With popularity comes controversy, and The Hunger Games is no exception…

There have been questions around the franchise’s use in advertising, and  positive and negative reactions to the casting of the curvy Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. However, the biggest controversy has been around race in The Hunger Games, and its portrayal of racial diversity.

The Hunger Games isn’t the only series to have sparked this debate. Walter Dean Myers and Soraya Chemaly have questioned the lack of racial diversity in YA literature, and Victoria Law wrote a two-month blog series inspired by her struggle to find YA dystopian novels with POC protagonists.

None of the characters in The Hunger Games novels are explicitly described as black, white, or of any other racial background. Although her race is ambiguous, readers like blogger Alexiel have read the black-haired, olive-skinned Katniss as a woman of colour.

Like Harry Potter’s Dean Thomas and Angelina Johnson, Rue’s blackness is only implied, but her ‘dark brown skin’ means that it is a rather strong implication. The fact that Rue is African American is obvious – or so one would assume.

 

Read the full post on For Books’ Sake.