“All of us, always, when we’re young, have to hold something for those who are old, and we drop it and want to get away, and draw a ship in the sand to reach a new country, and we always forget the ballast—there is no ballast but the earth of the old country—”
—Maria Dermout, The Ten Thousand Things

There was a time when you could structure a novel like Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things and get away with it, but unfortunately no longer. Now your plot must be one strong, continuous tendon of cause-&-effect. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

So far I have managed to spend almost the entire day wrestling fruitlessly with my website. Always a rewarding exercise.

Today I’m going to highlight stuff off Twitter I wish I had time to engage in long, witty discussion about, like:

Agent Jenny Bent’s unexpected decision to hate sentence fragments.

Comedy-writer Julie Bush’s take on how a joke is a perfect story.

Writer K.M. Weiland’s discussion of whom you should be writing for when you sit down to write.

Screenwriter Laura Cross’s advice on subtext in dialog, thanks to Mystery Man on Film.

And, for those even more interested, Mystery Man’s own massive compilation of 25 posts on subtext in dialog, the never-ending study of this fascinating subject.

Jason Myers mentioned in the comments last Friday that he was hoping to get Donald Maass to Dallas, Texas, to teach a workshop.

Donald Maass dropped by this morning to let us know that he is, in fact, scheduled to do a “Fire in Fiction” Workshop in Dallas next July 9-11. He’ll be offering a special add-on workshop on going “beyond genre” with romance fiction. What does “beyond genre” romance mean? Time-travel love? Murderous love affairs? Love among unicorns? Doing things you shouldn’t atop ponies in the Wild West? You’ll have to show up to find out!

Maass also mentioned Writer’s Digest will be bringing out a compilation of his books (he says with new and updated stuff) in a ring binder format under the title “The Professional Novelists Handbook” sometime next year. They’re pushing the envelope with the ring binder—and in today’s publishing climate pushing the envelope is probably the only way to go. I’ll be interested in seeing how it does.

So I’m linking today to Donald Maass and his free book The Career Novelist, in which he asks first and foremost: are you writing for approval? or are you writing for the sake of writing?

But here on Pulp Rag I’m going to get into yet a third reason: to be part of the community of folks who love to write. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

This week we’re linking to literary agent Donald Maass, but even more than that, we’re linking to the free download of his book The Career Novelist.

Why?

Because Maass has done us all a huge service with this book, and I’d like to direct excellent aspiring writers his way.

Read Chapter One, The Dream, on why people write novels. Are you doing it for approval, or are you doing it for the sheer joy of writing? Writing is all about exploring the truth, and if you can’t nail this truth about yourself, you’re not going to make it as a writer.

Then read Chapter Two, The Reality, and pay close attention to the bad news about the publishing industry. Keep in mind that this book was written thirteen years ago, so even though Maass gives us a bird’s-eye view of the publishing industry from the seventies to the nineties, things have altered massively in just the past two years. What he does here is give you a clue: it’s a business. It’s always been a business. And under Storm Warnings in Chapter 20, The Economy and Publishing, he points out one of the most vulnerable high-risk groups is full-time writers who live off advances only.

Then read all his advice about finding the right agent, pitching the right pitch, and managing your writing career realistically in the context of the publishing industry. Because this is where you will be doing it, and you’d just better get used to that idea.

But, more than anything, read Chapter 13, The Bottom Line: Storytelling. Because that, folks, is what the whole thing is about.

We’ve talked about the quest. Now let’s talk about the relationship novel.

There’s a legend that after Faulkner left Hollywood someone found a piece of paper in the garbage can by his desk. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

Have you ever wondered why agents want to see an author bio paragraph in a query letter that is—as least ostensibly—supposed to be entirely about selling them on one particular book? They don’t want to hear about your other unpublished novels or ideas, but they do want to know whether or not you have any published books, even if they’re not the same type. They don’t want the full plot of this particular book, but they want hear what you do for a living if it matches your subject. They don’t even want to know the ending (which they’re such sticklers about with synopses), but they want to know if you’ve won a major writing award, although it obviously didn’t lead to literary representation.

Why?

Sterling Lord
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Lord:

A hopped-up madman and a psychotic angel shift the steering trannie into neutral and roll backward down Hyde Street at dawn.

America is my land, says Sam Eden as he and the saint with god in his eyes creep out Brody’s steep San Francisco driveway one morning before sunrise in 1949. They roll all the way to the pencil-thin heaven-piercing masts of the waterfront in a turgid, angel-heavy silence under the clouds, leaving Brody’s cigarette-girl wife from the alleys and red velvet backroom paradises of the International Settlement to wake to the grainy dawn between the baby in the sad sheets and the god-who-is-not in her womb. They are off to find the roads of America. Before they’re done, they’ll have met and kissed all the hobos and streetwalkers and tired seraphim turning crumpled bills into salvation on this cusp of the last mid-century before God’s throne falls with a crash to shake the ages through the blood-bellied sky.

I am seeking representation for my literary novel, BACK ON THE ROAD, completed at 70,000 words.

Unfortunately for you, who probably love this query so far, I am a belligerent drunk and an idiot. I style myself on my hero, Jack Kerouac, whom I am certain wiped his feet on women and despised his social inferiors as much as I do. I write exactly the way he did—putting a roll of paper towels in my typewriter and letting the words just breathe out onto the page in all their original genius and life force. I’ve submitted this query to I don’t know how many agents, all of them morons who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without their mommies, and gotten it bounced back in my face faster than a rubber band. You might think I’m a joker, but actually I’m a mean son-of-a-bitch who’s been convicted of assault and battery of at least three of those agents, not counting the ones who were afraid to press charges. I feel terribly sorry for myself and am only interested in an agent I can call up at all hours and insult horribly in my frequent black-outs. If you don’t believe me, ask around.

I keep submitting my stories to magazines, but they are staffed entirely by my unknown enemies who know I can write circles around them any day. I wouldn’t waste my time on contests, which are beneath me. Even you are beneath me. But what choice do I have? I hate you already.

Over-professional demeanor is not one of my glaring faults.

Sincerely,

The author who will never get representation because now the agent knows what kind of person they’d be dealing with if they took this project on

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, via Kathryn Estrada

So let’s talk about the quest plot structure. Because writing itself is a quest, and if you don’t know that when you first start out to tackle it, you sure will by the time writing’s done pinning you to the floor. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

Let’s call this Monthly Mania Monday. This month—in case you’ve been living in a cave—you might not know it’s the upcoming November National Novel Writing Month.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo? I’m not.

That’s because a) I don’t have time, and b) I’ve already put in my obligatory decades of practicing getting words down on the page.

But I know a lot of you are. And (here’s a surprise) I think throwing yourself into fiction like a barrel bouncing out of the back of a speeding truck is one fine idea.

Anything that gets you into a community of writers having a good time is a great idea in my book. Write because you want to! Write because you love it! Write because it’s fun to hash over your daily wordcount and character developments and plot snafus with other folks with the same problems!

For those of you wondering exactly what NaNoWriMo is and how to get the most out of it, lots of people are willing to help:

Joanna Penn explains NaNoWriMo.

Marelisa Fabrega gives an extensive nutshell overview of the process of creating a novel, specifically aimed at NaNoWriMo participants.

Maria Schneider brings us Alegra Clarke and her laughing, sweaty mania for NaNoWriMo.

Debbie Ohi has thrown her cap in the ring and wants to hear from the rest of you who do, too.

And Po Bronson has written a piece that serves to remind us NaNoWriMo is just that—a month of novel writing—and not the long, ardurous process of becoming a self-supporting creative writer.

It’s about the good time. A whole month of one, long, dedicated good time. As it should be.

Today I’m bringing you one of my all-time favorite writers of comedy: the inimitable P.G. Wodehouse. It’s Friday, and I say, what the hell.

I’m taking the weekend off from the publishing world, this madcap adventure in publicity, loquacity, and marketing perspicacity run amock. There is only so much eagle-eyed analysis one person can do before they keel over backward on their heels and find, behind them, their husband sitting calmly with a laptop waiting to share an evening of Jeeves and Wooster.

For those of you unfamiliar with this fabulous British TV series, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry spent the early 1990s bringing to the third dimension P.G. Wodehouse’s classic valet (in England that must be pronounced “valett”) and the congenitally lunatic young dandy he serves.

Hugh Laurie wrote this wonderful piece on playing Bertie Wooster, surely one of the greatest comic performances of all time. Until you’ve seen Laurie go through his facial shenanigans upon first swallowing Jeeves’ magic hangover cure in Episode One you haven’t really lived.

Stephen Fry wrote this touching piece on Wodehouse’s extraordinary facility with language, particularly the comic metaphor, denying that his creation, the hapless Bertie, is as “mentally negligible” as Wodehouse made Jeeves claim.

But far and away the most amazing thing about it all is the books themselves, those marvelous plunges into the absurd where “Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastadons bellowing across the primeval swamp” and Wodehouse’s hilarious creations of the British upper classes stumble through life showing every evidence that in-breeding does, in fact, do exactly to the human IQ what doctors are always telling us it does. Although anyone not raised on the mythology that the British upper classes are a simple fact of life, like toenails, may find themself commenting repeatedly, “But these people don’t do anything for all that money,” there’s no avoiding the fact that Wodehouse had the ability to pack mixed metaphors into a single sentence in a mind-boggling display of comedic mania that would have simply destroyed any lesser writer.

And I’m not just saying this because I first read Wodehouse at the tender age of twelve on a creaky old tub of an Italian freighter crossing the Atlantic in 1973, in the abandoned 1930s library of what had once been a very small, very charming, very wood-paneled British passenger ship.