Archive for October, 2009

James is almost back from his publicity tour for The Maze Runner, which has me thinking about how he got where he is (and has been over the last few weeks).  The answer is pretty simple: he wrote a good book, and The Hunger Games created a bubble for dystopian YA that raised his good book to the top of Random House’s list.  The first half of that forumla was produced through earned skill and a boatload of hard work over the years; the second half was born of providence, good fortune, or, if you’re not cosmologically inclined, blind luck.

I often meet writers who are looking to be the next Stephanie Meyer.  They actually talk about how to do it, strategize battle plans and the like.  This is a complete waste of time, and trust me, if you’re serious about publishing you have plenty of other things that will more productively fill every single second of your waking life.  Why is it a waste of time, you ask?  Because becoming the bestselling author in the world is a butterfly affect thing.  It is the cumulative result of so many different variables, many of which we are all completely unaware of, that trying to manipulate factors to bring it about is just laughable. 

It’s the nature of all popular culture—and by the way, phenomena like Harry Potter and Twilight are essentially pop culture events.  The biggest bestsellers are always products of adoption by popular culture.  Take the entire body of any story form for mass consumption, whether it be novels or movies or whatever.  About eighty percent have no chance of becoming huge.  They are simply too low in quality, targeted to too small an audience, not distributed widely enough, or something similar.  Some will be every bit as rich and worthwhile as any other narrative put out that season, and they still won’t have a chance to really break out.  Earning bestsellerdom takes more than deserving it, sadly.  You need sufficient quality, a sufficiently large audience, sufficient production and distribution—and a good deal of providence.  And what we find is that between ten and twenty percent of truly professional level stuff fits the first three criteria.  About the top fifth of any genre published has a chance to break out and make it huge. 

Why do so few actually do it?  Largely, it’s a matter of chance, but in this case luck almost always exhibits itself as word of mouth.  Word of mouth can be generated by innumerable factors, some of them quite silly.  In James’s case, he happened to write a book that reminded people at Random House of The Hunger Games—and he wrote it years before The Hunger Games was even contracted.  His timing was, in most respects, plain luck.  He happened to come out with a good book at the perfect time.  That is, in almost every circumstance, the formula for break out success.

So stop planning on being that next person who shakes the world on its foundation and makes Earth settle at a slightly different slant afterward.  For most who deserve such, it doesn’t happen.  And you can’t make it happen.  What you, and I, and any one of us can do is strive to be in that top twenty percent.  We can strive to be in the top fifth in quality, and write things that people really do want to read,  lots of them, and work until people in the industry realize that as well.  At that point, we qualify for bestsellerdom.  Then we just wait and see if the Fates pick our names out of the hat (hopefully, not to cut our threads).  If not, well, I intend to toss my name into that hat again, and I’ll keep on doing it as often as I can for as long as I can manage.

People sometimes accuse me of having a man-crush on Neil Gaiman, and deservingly so.  I’ve never met him (I hope to in the next few years), and I suspect that if and when I do it will take a monumental effort of will—along with a huge dose of false coolness—not to go full-blown fanboy.  I feel entirely justified in this.  Not only because he gives literary awards away for Halloween (kids, be sure to hit the Gaiman house this year—you just might get a Newberry that ain’t chocolate); not only because he writes everything but the same thing he’s written before, and sells lots of copies of all of it, and nobody manages to stop him; not only because he has that dreamy Brit-boy articulation that makes some of the world’s great audiobooks.

But also because reading his stories makes me happy.  I’m not certain why, but just a moment ago it struck me how remarkable that is.  My philosophy is that when I’m not happy, it’s probably mostly my fault for looking at things the way I am.  I’m not terribly comfortable with the notion that exterior events have the power to dictate my contentment in life.  So it’s no mean statement to admit that something makes me happy.  But reading Gaiman’s stories does. 

It doesn’t matter if the story is happy or not.  Strike that.  Happy stories don’t make me happy, and Gaiman doesn’t tell happy stories.  (The Blueberry Girl is a bit different.)  He tells stories that end happy, often, but the stories themselves carry conflict and trauma to the gills.  Yet when I read him, I’m happy.  I can stop and think of all the other things I might be doing, or should be doing to be productive, and am still happy to be reading a story.  To me, that’s magic in the most literal sense.  It’s something outside the norms of reality. 

Any truly great story I read is a magical experience.  Most stories don’t qualify as great; even those I enjoy very much all too often aren’t great.  But those few that are break the bonds of expectation and reality and make me happy.  To such stories I am an object to be acted upon, and am content to remain so.         

*****

Today in the Writing Center we are celebrating the National Day on Writing with several contests.  Students come in and write according to prompts and win prizes, including Utah Jazz tickets totalling nearly $240 in value.  I don’t think we employees are eligible to win, but I had to post my favorite word anyway: lilliputian.  Yes, it really is a word, and we have Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels to thank for it (and most profuse thanks we owe them).  It means tiny and comes from the diminutive nation of Lilliput.  (In theory, we may as well say Blefuscian, which would be fun too.)  I don’t think proper names were allowed, so I couldn’t place Hippocampaelephantacamelos (see Cyrano de Bergerac), which if you ask me is possibly the most underutilized baby name ever.

Oh, and for those who are interested in fake colors, a lip gloss of a most peculiar hue came to my attention today: flirty pink.  As a male, I am genetically permitted to believe in only ten or so colors, and flirty pink is not among them.  So I must assume it is, instead, an allegorical representation of some sort.  I’m still trying to figure it out, so insight from others is most welcome.   

I say that as an admission because, apparently, that fact that I don’t Tweet (is that right?) is quickly becoming a crime in the literary promotion realm.  But early on when I first heard about this new technology, I made an arbitrary decision (which describes most of my decisions) that I would be the last writer under the age of, say, seventy to Tweet anything to anyone for any reason.  (For those who doubt this, I swore the same solemn vow about refusing to own a cell phone, and I still live cell phone free.)  So while Neil Gaiman can light the world on fire with 255 or however many characters of text (he could probably do it with 4), politicians have a new realm for their snake-tongued soundbites, and their daughters can scandalize the public by sharing photos of their endowments, anyone reading this here will have to display the patience to plow through 250 or so whole words.   Maybe even more.  Bravo for those of you willing to brave the marathon!

*****

For those who aren’t aware, there’s a new Kurt Vonnegut short story—excerpted from a forthcoming volume of his unpublished fiction—that you can read for free in Vanity Fair.  It’s all about a woman who writes the story of her life and how her husband is this brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine, and sells said story, becomes rich, and all this ruins her life.  Anyone doubting that Vonnegut actually wrote the thing only need read that the story in the story takes place in “Hypocrites’ Junction” to know of its authenticity.  Read the story and improve your life, because this is what all Kurt Vonnegut stories do. 

For my part, I am determined to test his hypothesis.  I now intend to write lots of stories that sell for lots of money, draw inspiration for these from my brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife (Note to self: get brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife), and see whether it makes me miserable.  Preliminary results aren’t in yet, but I’m leaning a little more toward ”exultant” rather than “unhappy.”

*****

Random yet important thought (which characterizes most of my thoughts, I believe): Including the words ”based on a true story” on either cover of a novel—or anywhere in between—is one of the worst and most pointless ideas statistically possible, even from a random firing of neurons.  It’s like a highway slathered in mayonnaise.  I see many possible repercussions, but none that justify sticking the one with the other, and none of which I can possibly see as beneficial.  A novel means fiction.  It means “I made this up.”  How, exactly, does the qualifying “based on a true story” change that?  By indicating that some unidentified portions of the text to some unidentified degree correlate to some unidentified situations in the life of a person who may or may not be identifiable by the name used or, in many cases, would more accurately be described as an aggregate person combining several products of the above simple formula. 

What? 

You made the story say what you want, when you want, and where you want.  That’s fiction.  If all it took to make something “based on a true story” was correlation of inspiration to a “real” event there would be no such thing as fiction.  Every story ever written reflects the human experience of reality.  Every story is “based on a true story.”  In fact, every story is “based on the life story of its creator.”  All story is, therefore, “true.”  Not all story is factual.  (All the world’s—or worlds’, whichever you prefer—wisdom is rooted in semantics, after all.) 

So let’s get our terms right, okay.  If you’re writing a story that incorporates many facts you’ve uncovered about some person’s life or experience, and you change those when desired to craft effect, you’re writing a novel.  It’s fiction, so don’t go trying to invent some in-between quasi-realm where a story that didn’t happen will feel more tangible.  The moment a reader reads “novel” they, by necessity, doubt every word of every page in the book.  Whether things really happened or not becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

The point, I guess, is this: if you want to tell people what happened, do it as well as you can without sacrificing veracity, or as much of it as you can attain; if you just want to give people the best story possible, who cares which parts of the story were inspired by what.  And if you’re trying to do both without doing either completely, you’re ladeling more mayonnaise on your highway.  Go ahead if you want, but I’ve got this bad feeling that whatever else happens, as the day drags on I think things are likely to start stinking in the sun.           

***This post really should have been written last week, so I apologize for the tardiness, James.***

Please, as you read this blog post, do so with the ringing sound of trumpets echoing in the background.  For I here announce the (week-late) official, long-foretold release of The Maze Runner, a literary sojourn that will take my good friend (and non-Jane Austin character) James Dashner up at least several notches on the carven totem of children’s fiction luminaries.

Haven’t read it yet, but I will.  What I can tell you is that this book took a long, complicated, and, I’m certain, angel-blessed pathway to Random House, where it found a good home at the top of their fall list, where it released last week.  Domestically.  I’m not sure when it releases in the seven (I think it’s seven) other languages that have already been contracted.  For anyone who has read and loved The Hunger Games, check out The Maze Runner, as I’ve heard it’ll please the palate.  

Currently, James is in the middle of a several week tour to a number of different states, which has me green in the gills.  I’m sure that by the end he’ll be nearly dead from exhaustion, but that tempers my envy only a tinsy bit.  Well, if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then envy must be a co-captain.  Here’s to James and The Maze Runner, which I hope sells almost a billion copies—but only almost.  Yes, my goodwill definitely has limits, and beyond these borders pettiness reigns!

When GDC came out a few months ago, I thought I’d get some copies in the SLCC bookstore.  It isn’t often–or ever, to my knowledge–that employees of the college have had nationally published novels to their name.  I assumed the bookstore would be ebullient to sell a homegrown masterpiece.  Instead, I found them… what’s a mix between indifferent and disdainful?  Well, whatever the word, it described them fairly well.  Eventually, they gave me the standard arrangement for self-published authors: twenty books bought on consignment for sixty days.  Basically, they were covering themselves in anticipation of selling no copies, and after sixty days of indulging me would tell me to take my wares elsewhere.

After two months, they were out of copies.  That changed things. 

So, I just got back from the bookstore, which bought ten more copies—this time not on consignment.  Apparently, they are no longer worried about being able to sell copies.  Can you tell this post has been written in a little bit of smug mode?

I just can’t help it.  I found out today that people have been stealing my book from the bookstore!  While this may not exactly be ethical, I find that really cool.  Now, it’s cool whenever people read my book; it still stuns me a bit that this is so.  It’s even better when people think enough of the book to buy it.  Best of all is when people tell me, in that special shallow-breathed enthusiasm, that they loved the book.  But there’s something special about knowing that people out there consider my book important enough to break the law to attain.  There’s something very charming about the thought of dashing thieves willing to live on the lam for the sake of great literature—or bizarre kids stories about dragons colliding with cows, however you characterize GDC. 

Anyway, I thought it was cool, and it made me happy.

When I was a boy, my mother decided that my health would benefit from naturally therapeutic supplements.  She decided upon a concoction based, I believe, on the following equation: a substance’s nutritional and antioxidant value rises in direct proportion to its difficulty to ingest without gagging.  The result of this formulaic search turned up a brew foul enough to sterilize a person who’d had their tongue removed prior to quaffing the draught.

I’ll not name the product, but here’s a hint: I’m pretty sure that it was created by scraping the topsoil from a never-before-cleaned dog kennel, liquefying that in a blender, then carefully folding in charred bits of lemon peal, linoleum, and bone (likely human).  If you taste it, you’ll know (and hopefully this knowledge will not have left you blind).

Now,while I maintain to this day that the only benefit I gained from exposure to this noxious material was a built up immunity to radioactive waste, there are plenty of nasty medicines out there that are good for you while being no fun whatsoever to take.  This is, I think, the best way to describe my presentations at the Idaho conference two days ago: I think the event benefited me, but it wasn’t much fun to go through.

Without going into too much detail, let me say that I misjudged my ability to talk over the heads of some educators despite the fact that I have little formal training in education and pedagogy.  I spent weeks researching my topics to substantiate my claims (teaching narrative literacy by killing the canon and teaching metacognition by writing fiction) in the belief that educators would demand such theoretical underpinning to even consider listening to my proposals.  When I finished my presentations, I’m fairly certain the attendees would swear that I knew exactly what I was talking about; they’d also swear, in many cases, that they had no clue what I’d talked about.

So lesson learned.  Teaching educators isn’t that much different from teaching writers (despite the fact that I consider myself a professional writer but not necessarily a professional educator).  I need not worry that the material I deliver will be either obvious or already assumed.  My brain just doesn’t move in those well-traveled channels.  If I’m interested in something enough to teach it, I’d better keep it largely to the basics, because it’s going to be new to a whole lot of people (and weird to perhaps even more). 

But all’s well that ends well (the only one of Shakespeare’s plays I just can’t sit through), and I’ve even been invited back next year, as well as been added to the possible presenter list for additional events.  My mysticism must have impressed enough to earn me a second go around, during which I’ll be certain to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid—any other interpretations will only be considered with the submission of a personal picture).