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  • Mugs & Publishers: What’s the Difference? (Is There One?)

    Okay, two very disparate things to draw links between today (which linking is, of course, the basic act of all art):

    MUGS

    We had a quick chat last week on the writing Lab about whether or not we need these:








    The vote was yes, so my husband set it up so now you can get the mug on Zazzle. (The reviews rate these things very high for quality.)

    PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

    Then yesterday I just happened to have the same conversation three times with three different clients who are all going through a sort of crisis of faith, struggling with the current publishing industry.

    And the day before that I had to un-teach and re-teach plotting to another client, an innocent aspiring writer (quite a good writer) who’d just been to a plotting workshop taught by one of those published authors/Iowa Writers Workshop grads who are all over the place out there teaching workshops.

    Now, the fact is this workshop-leader is teaching complete nonsense through a sort of morphed generic ‘arc’ based on Freytag’s Triangle without knowing it’s based on Freytag’s Triangle. . .and certainly without knowing that Freytag based his triangle on analysis of the Shakespearean five-act play.

    This is not the first time I’ve seen this happen.

    • What the hell is going on at the Iowa Writers Workshop?

      We don’t use five-act structure these days. We use three-act structure. It’s quicker, punchier, and it doesn’t include an entire final act to wrap up all the loose ends. Today’s readers expect the loose ends to be tied up in one single fast knock-out blow of a grand finale—without that old 20% of the story of whoever’s left behind cleaning up the wreckage.

      In today’s world, the story ends when Romeo and Juliet die.

      On the other side of the coin is what happens to an industry when you let people run around teaching its craft wrong to the new folks just entering it: the industry collapses (much like Romeo and Juliet).

    • What the hell is going on in New York?

      In a really big industry worth billions of dollars this kind of collapse can take years, and during those years the new folks are still struggling to cope with it just the way they’re being taught to by the workshop-teachers and agents (many of them brand-new to the industry themselves).

      Aspiring writers are writing books, querying agents, sending out requested manuscripts, signing with agents, and then waiting for their novels to sell to publishers, pass editorial inspection, pass marketing inspection, and maybe even—um—be published.

      And as much as this sounds like exactly the right way to do it, for far too many writers it’s turning out to be a secret nightmare.

    • What’s going on on our end?

      It’s because we’re in those collapse years right now, folks.

      This is what’s going on on our end:

      • Some of you have agents and published books

        And you’re struggling to get your new books published, over obstacles that were not there before and actually make no sense to industry long-timers.

      • Some of you have agents and unpublished books

        And you’re struggling to supply your agents with the very best unpublished books you can, trapped against a stonewall that was not there before.

      • Some of you have manuscripts out there right now with agents

        And you’re struggling with long delays, close calls, and finally rejections letters that begin, “This is a great book, but in today’s market. . .” lost in a bottleneck that was not there before.

      • Some of you are querying

        You’re writing and re-writing those queries and synopses—and you’re struggling with blanket rejection (the “no response means no” rudeness that did not exist before) and conflicting advice from conference teachers and agents and sometimes downright ignorant stupidity from people who claim to be industry professionals.

      • And some of you are still working on your books

        You’re looking forward to the day you’ll be querying. You people, quite frankly, are the only ones not being driven insane right now. Because you’re still dealing purely with craft, and craft does not change (except for dropping the fifth act—that did).

    So I just want to say to all of you, to everyone I’ve talked with in the last four days and everyone else out there still struggling:

    it’s not you.

    It’s not even me.

    It’s not us.

    It’s the industry.

    We’re going to be okay.

    PS Now my husband is expanding his horizons. It turns out you have your choice of not just a regular ole coffee or tea mug but also a travel-mug, a 16-ounce frosted glass, or a stein.

    A beer stein, you guys.











    I’m getting me one.

    I’m also getting a mousepad with my cat’s face on it. He’s not going to know what hit him.















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    3 Comments

3 Responses to “Mugs & Publishers: What’s the Difference? (Is There One?)”

  1. sarah said on July 27th, 2012 at 1:11 am

    I hear what you are saying. I have two questions. Well, maybe one question and one comment.

    If the industry is undergoing a collapse, why are we going to be okay? And when you say we (okay maybe more than one question) do you mean writers in general or people like my friend who is working on her manuscript and hoping for publication some time in the next couple of years if she can find an agent, and if that agent can sell her book … ? Because the way things look right now, my friend’s not going to be okay.

    The comment is about the three act structure. I understand that it’s good basic sense. But I’d like to add that good books can have any structure they want and still be good if they’re written well. I really worry about the oversimplification of writing advice that I see out there these days.

    Actually, I worry about the oversimplification of *writing* itself (so two comments, sorry!) For example, I recently read that YA books “should be uncomplicated, with short simple sentences.” Apparently all those teenagers studying Shakespeare and Austen at school apparently can’t manage depth and intricacy in their leisure reading. I wonder if it’s the readers who are assumed dumb or the would-be writers.

  2. Victoria said on July 27th, 2012 at 11:03 am

    Oh, yeah, Sarah, your friend isn’t going to be okay if the only way she can be okay is to sell her book to a publisher.

    Because lots of books get sold to publishers and then tank in the market. Then the publishers dump the authors, and the authors feel like shit about themselves and their work.

    We’re going to be okay because we are writers, we love writing, and nobody can take writing away from us.

    Writing is not the same thing as being published. It’s writing.

    The advice you read on YA is just silly. See what I mean about people running around teaching craft wrong to the new folks just entering it? That’s advice for Early Readers. And even that overlooks the complexity of epiphany that is the goal of all great stories.

    As far as story design and good writing, as Flannery O’Connor said, “You can do anything in fiction that you can get away with. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever gotten away with much.”

    If you read the mountains of stuff I’ve written for my blog and my books and my guest posts for others, you’ll see I don’t oversimplify anything about this craft.

    It’s a hell of a thing.

  3. » Has a Techno-Shaman Ever Worn Your Blog T-Shirt? | A. Victoria Mixon, Editor said on August 2nd, 2012 at 6:39 pm

    [...] week my husband made me my own custom mug. Then we discovered you could also get them as all kinds of different drinking vessels like frosted [...]

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MILLLICENT G. DILLON, the world's expert on authors Jane and Paul Bowles, has won five O. Henry Awards and been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner. I worked with Dillon on her memoir, The Absolute Elsewhere, in which she describes in luminous prose her private meeting with Albert Einstein to discuss the ethics of the atomic bomb.

BHAICHAND PATEL, retired after an illustrious career with the United Nations, is now a journalist based out of New Dehli and Bombay, an expert on Bollywood, and author of three non-fiction books published by Penguin. I edited Patel’s debut novel, Mothers, Lovers, and Other Strangers, published by PanMacmillan.

LUCIA ORTH is the author of the debut novel, Baby Jesus Pawn Shop, which received critical acclaim from Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, Booklist, Library Journal and Small Press Reviews. I have edited a number of essays and articles for Orth.

SCOTT WARRENDER is a professional musician and Annie Award-nominated lyricist specializing in musical theater. I work with Warrender regularly on his short stories and debut novel, Putaway.

STUART WAKEFIELD is the #1 Kindle Best Selling author of Body of Water, the first novel in his Orcadian Trilogy. Body of Water was 1 of 10 books long-listed for the Polari First Book Prize. I edited his second novel, Memory of Water and look forward to editing the final novel of his Orcadian Trilogy, Spirit of Water.

ANIA VESENNY is a recipient of the Evelyn Sullivan Gilbertson Award for Emerging Artist in Literature and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I edited Vesenny's debut novel, Swearing in Russian at the Northern Lights.

TERISA GREEN is widely considered the foremost American authority on tattooing through her tattoo books published by Simon & Schuster, which have sold over 45,000 copies. Under the name M. TERRY GREEN, she writes her techno-shaman sci-fi/fantasy series. I am working with her to develop a new speculative fiction series.

CHRIS RYAN drew acclaim from the New Yorker for the hook to his novel Heliophobia. He is the author of poetry collection The Bible of Animal Feet from Farfalla Press. I edited Ryan’s debut novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him to develop Heliophobia and his work-in-progress Pogue.

JUDY LEE DUNN is an award-winning marketing blogger. I am working with her to develop and edit her memoir of reconciling her liberal activism with her emotional difficulty accepting the lesbianism of her beloved daughter, Tonight Show comedienne Kellye Rowland.

In addition, I work with dozens of aspiring writers in their apprenticeship to this literary art and craft.


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