Phantomimic's Blog

How Much Artistic Capital do You Have?

7/7/2011

The writer Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame is one the most famous cases of writer's block that is often mentioned. Melville wrote a series of books in the late 1840s and early 1950s that made him famous but then was unable to write anything that could reproduce this literary success. However, it has been suggested that what happened to Melville is not that he developed writer's block, but rather that he exhausted his artistic capital.

At the time Melville wrote, many thought that he was making up his stories. As it turn out this was not entirely the case. Melville based his most successful books like Typpe, Omoo, and Moby Dick on his real-life seafaring adventures, and this is what his readers liked to read. What seems to have happened to Melville was that he ran out of experiences. These experiences were his artistic capital, and once he converted this capital into books he went broke.

Some writers do not seem to have this problem and are capable of creating stories in a manner that is by and large independent of their real-life experiences. These writers have an unlimited artistic capital. Other writers, however, base their stories at least partly on their real-life experiences, which are finite. These writers have a limited artistic capital. Once they exhaust these experiences writing on a particular topic they are unable to write anything else that is similar. If their readers then clamor for more, the writer will be unable to deliver.

One obvious way to deal with a dwindling artistic capital is to accumulate more of the type of experiences that you are writing about. But very often this is not feasible or desirable. Another option is to get in touch with or research the experiences of others and base your writing on theirs.

As a writer, especially if you have become successful writing about a particular topic, you should examine the nature of your artistic capital and become aware of its limitations and potential.

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John Locke Sells One Million E-books!

6/20/2011

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Author John Locke has become the first Indie author to join the Kindle Million Club. This is in recognition of him having sold one million books at the Kindle store. He was able to compete successfully against established writers thanks to the platform that e-books provided him, and also thanks to his unque approach to writing and selling books. He shares his writing/publishing/marketing secrets in a recent e-book.

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Reader Respect and Rewriting

6/18/2011

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There are many quotes from notable writers to the effect that "writing is rewriting". Although I agree with this to a certain extent, there are many people that take this to an extreme. For these people, writing is a seemingly endless process towards perfection where the writer writes and rewrites what he/she has created going deeper and deeper into the heart of the story. Many claim this IS the way writing should be, and others claim that writers SHOULD do this out of respect for their readers. If you don't rewrite what you wrote dozens of times making it more and more perfect, then you are disrespecting your readers.

I don't get it.

Let me be clear, if you are writing the next "great American novel" and you are aiming for immortality among the all time greats in literature yes, by all means rewrite your stuff a hundred times. Or if you write for a select group of demanding readers, or you can't help being a perfectionist, yes, go ahead and strive for perfection.

But what if your goal is just to sell books? Let me ask you something. Suppose you write and rewrite your book making it say 80% perfect, and you sell an average of one hundred a month. Now suppose you write and rewrite your book even more making it 90% or 95% perfect and you sell the same amount. What does that tell you?

The way I see it, it tells you that within this interval (80-95%) readers don't care for a 10% or 15% increase in the perfection of the book. In fact, the time that you spend writing and rewriting your first book is time that you can spend writing your second book while earning money from your first book. Why rewrite more when you can rewrite less and make money. Doesn't this make sense to you?

Furthermore, by delaying the publication of your book while you make it needlessly perfect, you are denying your readers the pleasure of reading it in a way that would be perfectly acceptable to them. Doesn't this show disrespect for your reader? Why delay and impose perfection on a reader who doesn't care for it? Some people will reply that this is to "educate" them. Wow, talk about respecting your readers! And even worse, after putting so much effort into making your book needlessly perfect you may want to charge more for it. Where is the reader respect in that?

Up until recently the above questions were moot as it was the publishers/editors who decided whether your work was perfect enough to be published. But with the advent of e-books, authors have been liberated from the grind of senseless writing and rewriting of their books. Authors are now free to take their work directly to the readers, and let said readers decide what level of perfection is acceptable.

Of course I understand we all have personal standards, but if our goal is to sell books, then we must also be practical. However, at the same time we should understand that there will be a threshold of imperfection that no story, no matter how good, will manage to overcome. Obviously readers will balk at reading sloppily written books full of spelling mistakes, garbled grammar, and typos.

I believe the maxim "writer know thy reader", should be approached from both ends. Don't overdo it, but also don't under do it either. For me, understanding this is what respect for your readers is all about.

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The Writer, sung by Ellie Goulding

6/18/2011

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You wait for a silence, I wait for a word, lying next to your frame, girl unobserved.
You change your position, you're changing me, casting these shadows, where they shouldn't be.

We're interrupted, by the heat of the sun, trying to prevent, what's already begun.
You're just a body, I can smell your skin, and when I feel it, you're wearing thin.

But I've got a plan. Why don't you be the artist, and make me out of clay?
Why don't you be the writer, decide the words I say?
Cause I'd rather pretend I'll still be there at the end.
Only it's too hard to ask, won't you try to help me?

Sat on your sofa, it's all broken springs, this isn't the place for, those violin strings.
I try out a smile, and I aim it at you, you must have missed it, you always do.

But I've got a plan. Why don't you be the artist, and make me out of clay?
Why don't you be the writer, decide the words I say?
Cause I'd rather pretend I'll still be there at the end.
Only it's too hard to ask, won't you try to help me?

You wait, I wait, casting shadows, interrupted.

Why don't you be the artist, and make me out of clay?
Why don't you be the writer, decide the words I say?
Cause I'd rather pretend I'll still be there at the end.
Only it's too hard to ask, won't you try to help me?

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Nobel Laureate Says Women are not Good Writers

6/8/2011

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The writer V.S. Naipaul made his mark writing primarily about British colonialism. He won many awards including the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, and he has been called "the greatest living writer of English prose". This is why, when he was interviewed on May 2011 at the Royal Geographic Society, there were many people listening. After all, when a Nobel laureate speaks, we assume that he/she has something to say. And maybe he did, but alas, whatever he said of substance was lost amidst the furor created by some comments he made.

In a nutshell Naipaul considers that there are no women writers who are his equals. He says that this is because women writers are "different". He claims that when he reads something written by a woman he can immediately tell that is the case. He believes this is because of women's sentimentality and narrow view of the world, which makes their writing inferior to that of men. The fact that they are not complete masters of a house comes across in their writing too.

He mentioned that when his publisher, who was a great editor, became a writer, all that she produced was "feminine tosh". And of author Jane Austen in particular, he said that he could not possibly share her sentimental ambitions and sense of the world.

Upon learning of his comments the first thing that came to my mind was to ask what would Mr. Naipaul think of the Erica Jong quote:

"Beware of the man who denounces women writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell."

Would he consider this particular world view to be sentimental and narrow?

It would be easy to end this article here with this naughty quote, but Naipaul's comments stirred in me again something that has always bothered me regarding writing. However, before I deal with that let me point out two things regarding his comments.

The first thing I would point out is: Even if it were true that women have a more sentimental and narrow view of the world, what is wrong with that? Emotions are a fundamental component of the human experience, and always seeing the forest, but not the individual trees, blinds you to important aspects of reality. To quote Erica Jong again:

"There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a lesser category of knowledge."

If women are indeed more sentimental and have a narrower view of the world, then their point of view is necessary to complement that of men's. But I think that Naipaul's implication that, if we allow part of what we are to "contaminate" our writing it will make it "inferior", only makes sense if these traits that he associates with women are something he lacks. I will not engage in armchair psychology here but you can google the details of his personal life: it's not pretty. In my opinion this guy is a character who could benefit from some sentimentality and a narrower view of the world himself.

The second thing I would like to point out is that women have come a long way from the time of the latter Erica Jong quote. Women are heads of state, captains of industry, Nobel laureates, professors, pastors, and even warriors in battlefields. What they say and do goes beyond the bedroom and the nursery: it affects the life of billions. By not admitting women to be the intellectual equals of men Naipaul is going against the facts.

So why do I waste ink on this clown? It's because of what bothers me about the nature of writing.

I believe good writers have a gift. They have a unique way to view the world, grasp its realities and then communicate them to others. Nobel laureates, despite all the criticisms levied at the Nobel committee, stand out among all writers as the very best examples of what can be done with this gift. So, call me naive, but I am shocked every time a Nobel Prize winning writer comes across as no more enlightened than the local drunken bum down the road.

I may not be a good writer, but writing has made me discover new universes in me that I didn't know existed before. Writing has enriched my human experience, and has made me a better person. Therefore I tend to believe that writing does this to every writer. Although I know this is not true, I would expect that this would be the case at least at the very top: that all writers of Nobel class stature would find that writing turns them into better persons.

That obviously is not always the case, and I don't know why. Perhaps for many, writing is not the magical process that I idealize. Writing may be no different than playing golf, collecting stamps, selling cars, laying bricks, or cleaning toilets. You may excel at these hobbies or occupations but they are just that: a hobby or a job, which can be totally divorced from what you are or become. And that is sad.

What do you think?

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Why Suffer Writing?

5/30/2011

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I once read a piece on advice for writers by an established author. Step one was, if one had not yet done so, to go to college and spend several years pursuing a degree in English. I was blown away. Was this a joke? I read the whole article: No, the writer was dead serious. And this was not an isolated comment. All traditional advice for writers seems to imply that they have an arduous uphill trek before them. It seems that would-be writers are supposed to spend years and years reading hundreds if not thousands of books while honing their craft, rewriting their books over and over, and getting rejected again and again before being published (if ever). It's a long and painful, but necessary, process that will make them better writers, if they survive.

Before I write anything more let me state that I am all in favor of writers improving themselves. I do not favor mediocrity. Each of us should have a willingness to do better. This is not only because we are writers, but because that is what we should do as individuals.

However, when you read some of the notions out there about what a writer should go through, you wonder whether the traditional writing world is controlled by masochists and sadists. There seems to be the idea, perhaps ingrained in our wider culture, that unless we suffer, what we achieve is not worthwhile; and the more suffering the better! It appears that if a writer has not been rejected hundreds of times while eking out a poverty-level living, working by day, and writing by night, then the writer is not "serious", and what he/she writes is probably "not good".

To these notions I only have this to say: thank God for e-books and self-publishing!

In traditional publishing many writers take a long time to get published going from one depressing rejection to the next, and even if their books are accepted the whole publication process moves as slow as an anemic snail. Finally, of course, no matter how perfect the book is, it may not sell, in which case it will be removed from the shelves, and go out of print. However, self-publishing your book electronically can reduce this time (and the pain involved) by orders of magnitude. Most books including e-books do not sell well. But if your e-book does not sell that much, not only can you lower the price to get more sales (or at least more readers), but your e-book will remain on the virtual shelves forever, gathering sales at its own pace and taking its time to find its readers, while you write your next book.

Self-publishing is much faster, easier, cheaper, and anyone can do it. You can take your book directly to the reader without someone vetting you because they think your book is not good enough or will not sell. What is wrong with that? Why is slower, more complicated, and more expensive better? Why suffer more when you can suffer less?

I can already hear the cries, "The quality! The quality! What about the quality?" Yes, I agree, without gatekeepers a lot of people will publish substandard stuff, but that is just the nature of the rough beast that is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born (sorry for that Mr. Yeats). It will be the end-user, the reader, who will decide whether what is published is good enough for them by buying or not buying the books.

Folks, the genie is out of the bottle. Let's not fight among ourselves about what is good or desirable. This will happen so don't oppose it, just find a way to deal with it. According to some polls as many as 80% of Americans feel they have a book in them. That is about 200 million people. Get ready out there because them books are a-comin, and the vast majority won't be paper books!

How Much Artistic Capital do You Have?

John Locke Sells One Million E-books!

Reader Respect and Rewriting

The Writer, sung by Ellie Goulding

Nobel Laureate Says Women are not Good Writers

Why Suffer Writing?

Amanda Hocking in Her Own Words

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