Some Thoughts On Writing

Why do I write? You may as well ask me why I breathe. It's necessary and, though not completely automatic, it's not voluntary either. The challenge of it could be the cause. Like some of my fictional characters, I was born to solve puzzles. Writers do a lot of that in the course of writing. Of course, the puzzles we solve are the plots of stories and how the characters interact to resolve conflicts and such.

Maybe I started writing because it was something to do I rainy days as I grew up in the Midwest. Otherwise, I would have been exploring and playing the woods behind our house. I was a co-editor for my high school newspaper and I studied journalism in college – among other things. When I was in the ninth grade, I wrote something I was sort of proud of and turned it in to my English teacher who, exhausted all the red ink from her pen going over it. With the last gasps of criticism from her ball point, she made a note in the margin, "You'll never be a writer."

She and I didn't get along well – not at the time, anyway. Eventually, we became good friends. Somewhere, unless they have been destroyed, there are many longwinded letters I wrote to her from college – some of them typed. Was I trying to prove I could write? If so, I never accomplished it. I'm still working at it.

When did I start writing? According to my mother, a pencil was the first object I grasped with my infant hand. She said that was a sign, which later on caused me to wonder why it seemed such a surprise to my parents and family that I wanted to be a writer. When I broke the news to them it received a lukewarm response at best, as if they were saying 'oh well, this too shall pass'. How many other things did I want to be when I grew up? I lost count. They could have been relieved that the important news I had to break to them wasn't that I had knocked up a girl or that I was gay or suddenly decided I was a liberal.

Rebellious at age eighteen, I set out to prove something or the other, going away from home to college. That was around the time I decided to seriously pursue writing. It was a learning process from the first grade of 'C' I received in the required first year English course at Purdue University. I remember the instructor's name, not out of any vendetta but because it was Gary Owens, exactly the same name as the announcer on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Unlike his TV namesake, he wasn't funny despite his attempts at humor in the classroom.

The other things I recall about that course are that he had long dark-brown hair he wore about half-way down to his ass and the first day of class he presented a monologue that mostly disrespected Superman and the American Way – 'whatever that is', as he phrased it. My dad would have called him a Communist pink-o and feared he was out to convert me to his political agenda. I doubt he was Communist and I know he converted me to nothing at all. I was convinced I didn't want to be like him. I received a 'B' in the course, having written enough things the way he thought they could be written.

Later on, I took a creative writing class. That instructor spent an inordinate amount of time explaining how much effort goes into writing and how seldom it is rewarded financially – like all art, I would dare say. What was wrong with his assumptions were that writers, true writers, have the objective of making a lucrative publishing deal and selling movie rights to a book. Although that happens for some writers,  you have better odds of winning the Powerball jackpot. I didn’t learn much else in that course, though I started one of my novels with a character profile I wrote the first week. A grade of 'C' returned to me along with the paper I wrote it on. The teacher felt the character was too far out. Although I hadn't named it at the time, it was the first wolfcat.

There was nothing creative about the writing class or the instructor. As the old saying goes, those who can, do it; those who cant, teach it.

One of the many things that happened during college that inspired me to pursue writing was reading many books. After being assigned to a read Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel Player Piano, I was hooked. Subsequently I read everything he had written up to that time and later on I continued to follow him. I also read his son's book, Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express which is an account of his overcoming schizophrenia.

Through reading great and not-so-great literature, my world was opening and my imagination liberated. In January 1977, I wrote the first part of a story that would later become The Wolfcat Chronicles, a ten book series. Later that year I wrote he first part of One Over X, another series, though the title back then was Tarot – like the fortune telling cards.

Studying a lot of diverse subjects while in college, some of that was exploring possible alternate majors. All of that combined to give me a sampling of pretty much anything I wanted to know a little about but wasn't willing to commit to the process of learning everything I could. Although I hated reading and struggled with it as a grade school kid – I have dyslexia which went undiagnosed – I took literature courses in college as electives. One year I read over four hundred books, some of them like Samuel R. Delaney's Dahlgren, Frank Herbert's Dune, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy were books of considerable length. As you can tell from the book selection, one of the lit courses was science fiction and fantasy.

It's absolutely necessary in the development of a writer to read a diverse sample of other writers' works. It is not necessary to learn the mechanics of the language beyond what is necessary to tell stories, though. The difference between an aspiring writer and a successful author is story-telling. Many an aspiring writer decides to study English, for example, and becomes adept at writing things for a select few who know all the grammatical rules. They get lost in the weeds of the mechanical part of writing and, in the process, break the connection with their creativity. That's the way I see it, anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said in a interview that the best thing he ever did for his writing was studying chemistry in college instead of English. The idea of over-thinking the process of composition is not unique in the world of literature. Leave the grammar and such for later revision. What's important is to get the story onto paper (or into a word document on a computer). It can be fixed later, with the caveat that a bad editor can easily destroy what might be a great piece of art. Good editors make suggestions.

Some of my characters live out my childhood dreams. Some of them are my alter egos. That happens in writing, I think. The old adage is 'write about what you know'. It applies with me, to a large extent. However, I am not completely like any of my characters. I used to go by the name Brent when I was in college and when I served in the USAF. My middle initial is B, but doesn’t stand for anything. I decided for a while it was intended to be Brent. On my degree from Purdue my middle name is Brenton. By the time I received my degree from UT Austin, I decided to use my birth certificate name, Elgon B. Williams.

My books tend to be set in places I know, having lived there – though not always. I've never lived in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles as examples, but several scenes in my books are set in those cities. I've visited all three. It helps in writing to have actually been somewhere a few times. Also I know people who live or have lived in those cities and have heard some of their stories. That's a substitute to firsthand living experience.

Where do my ideas come from? 'Many places' is the quick and easy answer. Over the years I experienced periods or relative draught for ideas, though I continued to write. I don’t think I ever lacked creativity or had writer's block. It was just I didn't feel like I'd lived long enough to have anything important to say.

Over time I learned that I probably will never feel that I have any words of wisdom to share, but that is not for me to determine. I wrote a rough draft of a novel in 1979. In 1986 wrote a highly classified unit history while I was in the Air Force. Otherwise from 1981 to 1988 I did nothing but keep a personal journal.

Meanwhile I worked, fell in love, married, had kids and slept whenever possible. In 1990 I resumed working on a couple of ideas I never did anything with since college. In 1994 I bought a computer, ostensibly for the kids but I was the one who ended up using it. I converted my writing of a novel-in-progress to digital form. From then on, I have written something each day.

If there is one thing I can tell about myself that others might want to take as advice for writing, set a specific time aside each day for the purpose of writing. Determine the place to do it and never deviate from it except for emergency situations – those are extremely rare from my experience. You must do it daily, regardless what else is going on in your life because writing does not come from a spigot you can turn on and off. It is not something you can abandon without suffering from the loss of connection in your soul.

Once you make that connection you must do everything to maintain the flow of creative inspiration from your mind. I've not found any other way of doing it than finding private time, away from any distraction – except I often listen to music in the background while composing though not revising or editing.

Write creatively for only the specified time. Yes, occasionally you may be in the creative zone and oblivious to the outside world and suddenly realize you've been sitting at your desk or table writing something for several hours. But don't force the issue. Move on to editing or revision of other things you have written.

At other times during the day go for a walk, play with children or pets, or otherwise divert your attention from singular focus on your writing. Take a mental break. But come the specified time the next day, be there and ready to write.

Sometimes there are dreams that seem to want to be told. It's fine to jot those down if you can make sense of them once awake. The best dreams are recurring and so you'll have the chance to revisit the mood and setting again. Other dreams will make sense only in their own context. Are those useless? No. But as a writer you must handle those inspirations differently. Some dreams come from the same places as creative impulses, but that doesn’t mean you have to draw your inspiration from them. That is your decision. If it works out well for you, continue to do it.

Welcome To A World Without Windows - Great News

Installment 1:

A month and a half has past since I began living a writer's dream. After thousands of rejection notices, whether by snail-mail or email, I received one that congratulated me on a great novel I'd submitted merely a week before.

Upon receiving the message in my inbox, I figured it was the usual, expected 'thank you for recent submission' that always before the 'but' followed, excusing the current economy or trends in publishing for why my manuscript was not deemed worthy of further consideration – or words to that effect. Having received other emails at the same time, I glanced at the other description headers, looking for an excuse to delay opening and reading yet another rejection.

It came so soon. Ordinarily, after a submission, it's weeks if not months before hearing anything. This time it started off differently, as if the planets aligned for a magical moment. Anyway, I was hopeful but not optimistic as I clicked on the message and it opened.

You see, I've been submitting a lot of my older material to publishers - things I wrote a decade or longer ago and have revised to the point that I felt comfortable submitting it for scrutiny. This one manuscript was different. It reflected my more recent writing, something I conjured from nothing a little over a year ago and posted as a series of installment on Fanstory for immediate feedback.

At the time of writing I was in the middle of dealing with some rough, uncertain times, having left a job and being forced to move for financial reasons. In the midst of all that confusion and frustration I began writing a fantasy story titled Fried Windows (In a Light White Sauce), a quirky tale about two unforgettable ladies a computer tech runs into while making a delivery of a new system. Five thousand words later, I posted the first two installments and, based on the feedback, tweaked it into a pretty good story.

A couple of members wanted to read more of the story, so over the course of the next few weeks, I posted some other stories that shared characters and a few threads of continuity, essentially giving a real world anchor of back story to the fantasy while also following the main character on his returns to a world where everything is possible, just like every five-year-old kid believes.

With a rough plot emerging, there was a nucleus of a novel, but at the time, I didn't pursue it. Concurrently I was writing a novel that was about the same main character several years later. Fried Windows served as a bit of background for the other novel in progress. After fourteen or so installments, the series of short pieces concluded for the purposes of presenting it in rough draft, and I moved on to other projects. Always I considered the work several related short stories. In the back of my mind I figured I might write some other stories connecting things together as chapters in book, smoothing the rough edges and expanding the vague conclusion into something more definitive.

This past April, I started uploading a number of my novels to Amazon for Kindle, basically everything I had submitted to publishers without success. Toward the end of that month, I decided to submit the first two installments of Fried Windows as a single short story to an online magazine. With the assistance of another writer serving as an editor and proof reader, a version came about that flowed fairly well. After sending the story via email I waited for a response expecting rejection.

For whatever reason, I took the fateful step of continuing to read the rest of the stories. You see, I was pretty confident the short story would be bought and published. In the process I wrote another story with the same characters and in the process filled in one of the known gaps in the plot connecting the otherwise discreet stories. I posted it on Fanstory and received favorable reviews and some helpful suggestions.

Around mid May I received a rejection email from the magazine to which I had submitted the original short story. Being honest, from the message, it didn't sound like they read it but who knows. The rejection sounded like a canned notice. By then I was already well into working with several stories reassembled into the sequence as a rough novel. Spending a week, I revised the entire story so the plot had connections between chapters. Doing that required composing four additional chapters, none of which were ever posted on Fanstory, mainly because of time constraints and my intention to publish the finished book on Amazon for Kindle which, as many of you may know, requires that the work not appear anywhere else in digital form. After another revision, I added a few more things to the story, tweaking it into something that read like a novel.

The 'final' pass through the story took another week, concluding on the last Friday in May. As I prepared it for uploading to Amazon, I receive notice through Twitter of a new follower, this time a publisher Not a huge thing, there are dozens if not hundreds of small publishers on Twitter. I followed back but decided to check out their links from Twitter to Facebook and from their the website.

Unlike other publishers I have checked out on Twitter, this one seemed to be more about marketing authors and their books rather than charging authors a fee to enter a contest or submit manuscripts for publication. The submission guidelines seemed straight forward and there was an interest in the sort of story I had written. After spending the rest of the day working on a query, a brief blurb about the book and a synopsis, in the evening I formatted the book as explained in the guidelines. Around midnight, I assembled the package and attached it to an email that I sent to the publisher. The instructions told me it would take four to six weeks before I heard anything. – nothing unusual.

The following Monday, I received an email from an acquisitions editor confirming receipt of the submission and informing it had been entered into their evaluation process. What was odd about the email was that it suggested I check the status in two weeks if I hadn't heard anything. I settled in to work on another project while I waited.

A week later, I received another email, directly from the publisher. I saved it until the end of the list of emails. When I opened it, at first, I doubted I was reading it right. It began, with the word 'congratulations'. Not knowing how to react, I did what you might expect. I checked to make sure it was actually sent to me, pertained to the book I submitted, and even then, I got up from my small desk and walked around the house for a bit before returning and rereading the note.

It requested a convenient time two days later for a conference call. Absolutely elated but still skeptical, I responded with my availability and my cell phone number. During the days between I went through the story and reread it. I mean, I reread it as a reader not its author – which is hard to do. No revising, no editing, not even fixing the few typos I'd missed that I suddenly noticed. I jotted those down along with the page numbers so I could go back later. The first eleven chapters flowed so well I wondered who wrote them. It was a rare, magical experience for me, reading something I wrote but did not want to change. Yes, that euphoria wore off in time, but it was something special to feel.

By the time I answered the phone call on Wednesday, I'd reread the complete book, fixed the typos and had an idea or two for amending the plot a bit toward the middle. Still clinging to hope that this was a real breakthrough with a publisher, I reserved complete acceptance of the reality pending my conversation. There are many stories I could tell you about ego-press publishers contacting me over the years. I'm sure many of you have similar experiences.

Of course the publisher did her research on me, visited my Amazon author's profile, Facebook and Twitter pages. She told me she read my autobiographical piece on Amazon, which is sort of humorous and self-deprecating. Also, she read the reviews for my books that have been posted on Amazon, few that they are.

The overall feeling from the outset was more akin to a job interview. Foremost she asked me why I was pursuing publishing through her company, in that I have posted several self-published pieces on Amazon. After explaining my present situation and my dissatisfaction with going it alone because I lack the resources to promote any books properly, we continued with a conversation that lasted for over an hour and a half. When we ended the call, she told me to expect a phone call regarding an acquisition contract and in the meanwhile, start a final revision, which she allowed a month from the contract signing to complete.

A few days after a phone conversation regarding a contract I received a draft to read and review. I jotted down a few questions and noted some things I wanted to negotiate. It seemed fairly routine from previous experience, except I needed to discuss a half dozen things and I didn’t like the secondary rights. For those who don't know, secondary rights are for anything resulting after the story's publication and promotion such a movie and TV rights. The publisher will work on those things through my assigned publicist once the book's marketing plan is developed and mutually approved. I signed the final version of the contract in three places and returned it. According to what I've been told the publishing process will take the remainder of this year.

I will be posting short pieces about what is going on. Usually it will not be more often than once a week because I don’t have the time to devote to anything more and, frankly, I'm not sure I would have that much to talk about. There is a weekly conference call on Thursdays with either the publisher, editor, publicist or cover designer, depending on where the book is in the production process. During this time I will be approving the editing suggestions.

The first step is structural editing. I'll explain what that is in the next installment, since it will be mostly about that subject and will extend for the next few weeks. The official announcement is today, Wednesday, July 17, 2013. The finished product will be released sometime early next year, probably February or March. I receive the full schedule tomorrow. I'll let everyone know.

Hopefully, these reports will be of some general interest to others. The reason I'm doing this is that is not to receive reviews, though I welcome comments for these postings. I will try to answer any questions if I know the answer.

For those wanting to know what it is like to publish a book through a publisher, this is it. There are similarities between publishers but process varies as well. For example, this publisher uses an accelerated 32-week schedule. Some others take as long as 64-weeks or more to produce a book. This publisher does not advance against royalties but offers a higher royalty payment. They do this to plow more resources into the production budget for the book which is over eighteen thousand dollars. The costs and royalties are based on projected sales of ten thousand books. I want to sell more, but I would be ecstatic if I sell that many books.