I started re-reading Noah Lukeman’s ‘The First Five Pages’ last night – as excellent as I remember. Noah Lukeman is a highly experienced literary agent based in New York, though he’s not taking on any new clients at the moment.
He’s written a number of well-reviewed books on writing, including ‘How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent.’
This is available as a free Kindle edition:
It’s my day for finding free ebooks. Strunk & White’s ‘The Elements of Style’ is a widely recommended guide to writing clear and correct English.
It’s available for free on several websites, but Project Gutenberg offers the widest choice of file types:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134
In researching the likes and dislikes of a literary agent this evening, I found an interview with her in which she recommended that prospective clients should consider the shape of their story.
She recommended that they watch this video clip, which features Kurt Vonnegut and an appreciative audience:
This short clip brings up a series of videos with famous authors – not that I’m trying to distract you.
I was looking through the articles on books in the Guardian newspaper, finding this interesting piece in the archive about writers and vanity, written by Julian Baggini, a British philosopher.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/feb/25/writers-vain-egotism-julian-baggini
(some great stories on writing beneath this article, and do read the comments section)
One of the first pieces of advice that I’d give to anyone considering writing a book, is to develop a hide as thick as a rhinoceros. Everyone thinks that they’ve got a book inside them, but nobody considers what will happen when the book is released into the wild!
Being an author is setting yourself up as a target for criticism and rejection. These brickbats will come from complete strangers, friends, family, readers, publishers, book-sellers and critics. That’s if they say anything at all, for being completely ignored is the usual fate of a freshly published book. This is why writers welcome adverse criticism, as at least it means that someone has noticed you.
Ego and self-confidence aren’t the same thing. We have to believe that we can write a story, or it simply won’t exist. As Rumi observed:
Being over-egotistical is a sure way of suffocating any talent that one may have. Talent needs cold and clear objectivity to be honed until it’s sharp and bright.
How do you deal with self-confidence, ego, arrogance, hubris, self-belief and vanity?
This article from the New York Times is worth a read. Even established authors suffer setbacks and get the blues, so if you’re just starting out difficulties can grow out of all proportion.
I constantly remind myself that if it doesn’t come naturally, then leave it. There’s little value in forcing something into being—things take on the flavour of their creator’s mood.
Setting a writing project aside for a while, and tackling something different, some poetry or a short story might free up the log jam in your mind + you’ll get a kick out of seeing a new piece of work flow freely from your imagination. There’s more than one way down the river of creativity.
Anyone who has suffered from depression knows how debilitating it can be. I was laid low with it from 2009-2013, recognizing it for what it was from previous experience. I’ve sought treatment in the past, with mixed results. Counselling sessions were very helpful, but medication less so. One of the problems with antidepressants is that there’s often a long take-up period before one notices results, and then if things don’t alter much, it’s recommended that a gradual tailing-off of the dosage occurs, rather than just stop taking them. It can all take a long time to find the right chemical for your system.
With the last bout of depression, which started in 2009 and lasted for four years, I chose to use it as an opportunity to confront a few issues about self-belief and what I really wanted from life. I’m a firm believer in the effectiveness of counselling and have trained as a marriage guidance counsellor, also working as a volunteer on Samaritan and Rape Crisis helplines. I previously saw the same counsellor for sessions five years apart, and talking to her was invaluable, and each time I was left with the conclusion that I wasn’t so bad a person after all. I thought that this would be the result if I went through counselling again, so decided instead to work on what was hampering my self-belief.
It took me a few years and was much helped by the resurgence in my creativity which welled-up out of me in 2013. It was almost as if I’d been denying myself the thing that I most wanted to do.
I found several useful online resources, which I recommend to anyone who is feeling crushed by the black dog. And that’s what depression can feel like, for I was weighed down by a lead cloak that made me ache physically and crawl mentally. Current research suggests that there may be a viral cause to depression and anxiety, with the virus residing in the gut, from where it affects muscles and brain activity :
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/anxiety-and-depression-caused-by-stress-linked-to-gut-bacteria-living-in-intestines-scientists-find-10422303.html
Moodscope is a test that can be done daily to measure how one is feeling. If you are in the depths of depression, I’d advise you not to do it every day, as it can have a negative impact on morale to see that you’re still at 0%! I do the test about once a month these days and have been at 100% for ages.
https://www.moodscope.com/
American born comedian Ruby Wax, was one of the founders of Black Dog Tribe, which encourages people to talk about their depression.
http://www.sane.org.uk/what_we_do/bdt
Psych Central discusses all sorts of mental health issues, including depression, though I’d caution anyone about self-diagnosing.
http://psychcentral.com/
ADDENDUM
My life has been transformed by writing. My creative resurgence was an irresistible force, with ideas for stories, poems and songs coming to me in chunks. I must admit that I’m a bit surprised to be feeling so positive, as to quote a book title by Richard Farina I previously felt like ‘I’ve been down so long it feels like up to me.’
One of the problems with depression is that it sneaks up on you, and once it has a hold your thinking has been crippled so much that it feels like it’s your well-deserved fate to be this way.
I have no embarrassment in talking about it, especially if my experience helps others. Fortunately, there’s been a greater openness about depression and other mental health problems, as celebrities including Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax, and many actors and sports people have opened up about their struggles.
Exercise certainly helps alleviate depression, though I’m not sure that aching buttocks from my recent 40 mile journey on the unyielding saddle of my bicycle is a fair exchange! I’ve just bought a safety helmet on eBay, perhaps I should search for some titanium cycling pants…
ADDENDUM
Apart from exercising, learning something new is a good way of evading the blues. It all helps to get parts of the brain firing that short-circuit whatever is bringing you down.
Actually, I’m not that keen on depression being referred to as the blues, as that sounds more like an entertaining song. Depression is darker than that – blues becoming purple, then mauve being absorbed by darkness. It makes me think of the Mark Rothko room at the Tate Gallery.
We knew this already, but apparently, the rest of the world needs to know—book lovers are good lovers.
It’s all true—isn’t it?
I actually trained as a librarian back in the early 1970s, working in the profession for six years. I always loved books, and as a lonely child, they were my constant companions. I’m a firm believer in the library movement, as historically it offered a way of allowing ordinary people to access knowledge. Governments would rather that we didn’t know things, and simply believe everything that they tell us. In the current economic recession, many libraries are being closed or are operating on restricted hours. My local branch is only open two and a half days a week these days. As Ray Bradbury said:
After feeling stifled by the way that libraries operated in a very static way, I jumped into a crazy way of earning a living, by becoming a motorcycle dispatch rider in London. I’ve done about forty different jobs since over the years, sometimes with the thought in the back of my mind that this would be a good way of learning things to write about later. I moved back into what might be called disseminating knowledge, through writing self-help and technical articles for magazines and by training as an infant teacher.
Since returning to creative writing six years ago, I’ve become aware that I never left librarianship behind at all. The whole world runs on a system of classifying and organising things, as regimented as the Dewey decimal classification system by which most libraries shelve their books. We understand how people, ideas and machines work by comparing them to other things. One of the first things that strangers ask of each other after exchanging names, is ‘What do you do?’ That becomes the first step towards pigeonholing someone, so that they can be understood. We paint folk with the colour of what we understand being a butcher, social worker or car mechanic means.
This habit affects writers in distinct ways. I wrote a crime story as my first novel for several reasons, including the commercial one of it being a successful genre of writing that sold well online. I like crime stories, but don’t exclusively read them, and nor do I only write them. Most of my twenty short stories and novellas are about other things, with just one concerning a case of mistaken identity in a murder investigation. Yet if The Perfect Murderer achieved any commercial success, I would immediately be labelled a crime writer.
It must be very frustrating for successful authors who get defined in this way, expected to write more of the same sort of story—to become a brand. It’s not that their other tales fail to work, it’s simply that the first one that readers glommed onto was a Western, a Science Fiction short story or a torrid Romance. We all do this sort of thing every day though – just think of the elevator pitch, which is used to quickly describe your new novel. ‘It’s a space romance, set in the 25th century and based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but featuring a love affair between a human-being and an alien creature.’ This immediately gives you a load of cultural reference points, which may tickle the agent’s interest or not.
Even our everyday life involves being a librarian. What about the cutlery drawer in the kitchen? The knives, forks and spoons are separated out, probably in a moulded tray. You may have other items arranged around the tray – corkscrew, spatula, coasters, scissors – and you know where everything is so you can find it straight away.
Running wild and free may be fine as a liberating concept, but to get through life without hassle we need systems, fences, boundaries and other organizational tools that make sense of chaos. We should definitely consider who we are and how our status, experiences and current circumstances can be used to sell ourselves as writers. We are as much classified by the public, as our books are.
Our potential readers might fail to be charmed by the idea of a novel written by an author who’s worked most of their life as an accountant, but be immediately attracted to a blurb which mentions how you’ve made 200 parachute jumps. This immediately transforms you from boring bean counter to exciting risk-taker.
Who are you?
Where do you fit in on the shelf?
I’ve been struck how many cliched images there are around to represent different professions. I’ve worked as a teacher and as a milkman, and it’s still common for these jobs to be represented by dated stereotypes.
Teachers are usually spectacle wearers, standing in front of a blackboard—t’s not unusual for them to be wearing mortar boards and even gown, at least in clip art. Milkmen invariably have a work coat and a damned silly peaked cap and are toting a wire cage bottle carrier. I ran my milk-round in the 1980s, rarely used the carrier, preferring to use the pockets of my coat to hold bottles, and I never saw the caps which milkmen still wear in commercials and advertisements.
(not me!)
I can just recall some teachers wearing mortar boards and their graduation caps at my grammar school in the 1960s, but it was a posh sort of place and the regalia was reserved for official ceremonies.
(Also, not me!)
Writers are often symbolised by being hunched over typewriters. I last used a typewriter in 1995, and I wondered how many authors still do their writing on one.
Even the tangle-haired model on the cover of this ebook How to be a Writer in the E-Age, is about to peck her typewriter with her forefinger.
I had a minor stroke ten days before Christmas, 1995. It was a hell of a year, the worst of my life, and the stress contributed to my brain temporarily conking out. I hadn’t helped matters by having been a heavy drinker for 27 years. Watching men die around me in the intensive care ward was one hell of a wake-up call—most were alcoholics.
Stubborn as I am, and determined to heal myself, I went through a period of recuperation which included researching why strokes happened. I found that the flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which killed 50-100 million people, had a knock-on effect in that victims who’d seemingly recovered from the infection later succumbed to heart-attacks and strokes. I’d suffered a nasty bout of flu a few weeks before my stroke.
I recalled that Roman soldiers supposedly ate garlic, to help to ward off coughs and colds when stationed in damp Britain. I also remembered a lovely film that I’d seen in the 1970s about the wonders of garlic, which was called Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic_Is_as_Good_as_Ten_Mothers
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Garlic+Is+as+Good+as+Ten+Mothers
As the old saying goes ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’, and as garlic is known to be an effective blood thinner, something that I was supposed to do to prevent another stroke, I started to eat it daily.
I have a lunch of pasta with a few cloves of raw garlic chopped up on it, along with a decent amount of olive oil. I haven’t had a cold for twenty-three years! I find that fresh garlic is less noticeable than garlic capsules and pills, which make me burp. No one has ever commented that I stink of garlic.
I also haven’t been bitten by any vampires. Mind you, a gay, gourmet werewolf followed me home one night, saying that I smelled nice…Stupid werewolf!
