Chuck Sambuchino, editor of the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents and Children’s Writers & Illustrators Market, is known to aspiring writers and agents across the blogosphere for his series of new agent interviews on his Writers Digest Guide for Literary Agents blog.

In addition to editing and interviewing, Chuck also works as a freelance writer and produced playwright.

And now—hot off the presses—Ten Speed Press/Crown is releasing his debut humor book, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack.

September 7, 2010. NEXT TUESDAY.

Who is this man? What’s it like to be the first person every new agent wants to meet? How can his secret knowledge of garden gnomes save your life? And what happens when you put him in front of a piano and get him drunk offer him a modest refreshment?

Join us Monday for:

How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack—the Chuck Sambuchino interview.

This is a big day for me. I feel, in a certain way, I have finally arrived as a blogger. You see, last week I received the following email:

Hi,

Nathalie here from Bozo Media and I wanted to drop you a line and just compliment your site http://victoriamixon.com/. Nice layout, good info, good resources. I was looking around at a few different sites relevant to Washing Machines. I definitely thought yours was one of the best. That being said, I also noticed you guys have some great content related to them.

I currently work for a company that maintains website that offers best deals and information about Washing Machines – http://www.wtfwashingmachines/fakeurl. We are a nationally recognized, reliable source for Washing Machines and I was wondering if you’d be interested in giving us an opportunity to write guest post relevant to your site. I can assure you that our article will be very informative to your visitors and also drive more traffic. I would be very pleased if you allow me to add a link to our site in the article.

Looking forward for your reply.

Regards,
Nathalie.

Wow. Nathalie. I just don’t know what to say.

Because the truth is teaching the craft of fiction is exactly like teaching people to use Washing Machines.

But how did you know?

Nathalie, you are my new best friend. There is simply nothing I love more than sinking my teeth into a good, rambling post about the essential link between great fiction and Washing Machines. So I will save you the trouble of writing it for me. That’s how much I like you, Nathalie. I’ll write that darn guest post for you myself.

This is the honest, unvarnished truth, people: modern contemporary American fiction is, from many angles, as Dirty as Hell. And it’s in desperate need of a really good Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.

My job is to teach you people how to clean up your fiction. Go ahead—write it, thrash around in it, have a fabulous time, make a big old fun muddy mess. Get it all over yourself. You don’t need me for that part. Anyone can do it, and hundreds of thousands of people do. It’s a blast!

Then go back and write your story again more honestly. Go down through the layers of superficial uniform dirt that get all over everybody when they truly relish a big, hefty, messy, magnificent first few drafts. Find underneath those top layers the story that’s really there. Find the real people living inside the characters, of whom you have barely scratched the surface. Find the details of their lives that make them three-dimensional in exactly the way your reader’s life is three-dimensional. Find the universal themes of comedy and tragedy out of which they’re been created and the complex interweaving of those elements that your characters must navigate on their way to enlightenment. Uncover the fabric of your characters’ unique lives that your reader needs to touch in order to reach the heart of what you’re doing.

Then write it again even more honestly. And write it again. And again. And again. . .

Every time you let your manuscript go cold and take it out later for another revision, you’re sending it through the Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine. Every time, the structure of your story gets a little clearer, the humanity of your characters gets a little truer, your reason for writing this novel gets a little more significant, to you, and to your readers too. Eventually—if you work hard enough, with enough dedication and soul-searing honesty, for long enough—it will be beautiful, vivid, shining. Clean. It will be a new definition of meaning.

And you will be proud to wear it around in public for the rest of your life.

But if you rush out and insist it be published while it’s still even sort of dirty (much less as dirty as it is when you first stand up out of rolling around in all that mud—and, yes, you can get stuff published in that condition, it happens all the time) then, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the dirt will become ever more and more obvious as the years go by and your craft improves.

As your understanding of the meaning of life deepens. As your reasons for living make more and more sense in the overall universal scheme of things, as seen through your own unique, vivid, unforgettable lens.

Don’t do this to yourselves, folks. I say this with all editorial love for the writers in you and compassion for what writing your novels means to you. I know. I write novels too.

Develop a sincere, lifelong, humble respect for the Great Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
—Kris Kristopherson, “Me and Bobby McGee”

1. Spend one day being a troll.
   
   Be as obnoxious as humanly possible online. Go around arguing with people on their own sites, expressing opinions they won’t agree with, picking fights you have no possible hope of winning. Make a complete idiot of yourself. And no hiding behind “Anonymous,” either. Use your own name. Then go back at the end of the day and read all the responses, especially the ones that prove you wrong. APOLOGIZE SINCERELY. (This one doesn’t count if you skip that step.) Endure the shame. That’s your crash course in publication.
   
   Alternatively, if your moral code won’t let you be a troll, go to the last three people you’ve hurt in your life and ask them talk to you for as long as they want about how it felt to them. Don’t respond, just listen. Endure the shame.
   
   This step is necessary to clean out the interior censor, the one who thinks there’s still time left to protect your reputation. There’s no time left. You’ve already long-since destroyed your reputation with the ones you love, the people who matter most. Welcome to the real world.
   
   If you’ve never hurt anyone, put down your keyboard and go apply for sainthood. You are the wrong kind of liar to be a writer.
2. Spend one whole day being silent.
   
   Don’t speak. Not even when asked a question. Point when your husband asks you where you keep the toilet paper. Smile and nod when your neighbor asks about your weekend. Don’t email or IM. Just be silent. Larry Hagman used to do this every Sunday, for years on end, and he said it was an extraordinary education in self-awareness. Of course, he informed his friends and family of what he was doing, so they wouldn’t think he’d lost his mind—you should too.
   
   This step is necessary to clean out the interior egoist, the one who thinks what you have to say is the most important thing. You have nothing all that important to say. You can only record the world of your readers for them.
3. Spend one day as a student of reality.
   
   Take a notebook and make a list of the most important locations of scenes in your novel. Then, beginning as early as possible, go to each location at the time of day your characters are there. Sit for at least an hour at each place taking copious notes. Note down every single fact you can about that location and the people in it. Not impressions. Just facts.
   
   The sidewalk is pale grey with oval splotches of charcoal grey one-to-three inches in diameter every foot or so and, when the sun gets to about 60 degrees, almost invisible sparks of rainbow light from bits of glass embedded in the concrete, more reds and blues than yellow. The woman who sells fruit at the corner is in her fifties with a slight double chin ending rather sharply in premature dewlaps and a dress with huge pinkish-brownish-greenish blossoms and what look like spiders, which hangs on her as if there were weights in the hem.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you to write in your reader’s world.
4. Spend one day with the lyrics of your favorite songs.
   
   Pick one, and annotate every single line with random details you can see or hear (or smell or taste or touch) from where you are. Make the details absolutely specific—not a book, but Brett Halliday’s The Private Practice of Michael Shayne lying open on its face; not a cat, but the grey-&-black striped nine-year-old James Dean wannabe or the carrot-tip Siamese who pees outside the litter box whenever he’s mad. Feel free to throw in gratuitous imaginary details so long as they’re neutral and not meant to sway the reader toward either positive or negative interpretation. If you feel the urge to sway the reader, use a detail bent in the opposite direction from where you want it to bend.
   
   Do this with a handful of your favorite songs, then treat the annotated songs as Rorschach blots. Read them and take copious notes on what underlying connections you pick up. Swap the details around and do it all over again.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you subtext.
5. Spend one day writing and re-writing a single scene.
   
   Make it a scene about confrontation, and write it the first time as if you were the protagonist and you were indisputably in the right. Then write it as if you were indisputably in the wrong. Then write it as if you were insane. Then write it as if you were unbelievably boring. Then write two scenes about different confrontations and cut-&-paste the characters’ lines into the opposite scenes.
   
   Read the first scene and notice how appallingly self-congratulatory victims are to read. Read the second scene and notice that you didn’t entirely manage to make yourself indisputably in the wrong—write that second scene over again more honestly. Read the third scene and notice how hilarious non-sequiturs are. Read the boring scene and notice how much you rely on action and description to illuminate boring dialog—write that scene over again with the same action and description, but only 1/3 of the lines of dialog. Read the final two scenes and notice how much innuendo is buried in scenes at cross-purposes.
   
   Write the second scene over again, even more honestly. Write the boring scene over again with those 1/3 lines of dialog taken from one of the final two scenes. Write the second scene over again, even more honestly.
   
   Write all kinds of confrontation scenes, swapping characters indiscriminately when you’re done. Keep this up for the rest of the day.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you hard work.
6. Spend one day on research.
   
   Pick a handful of topics you know a little or nothing about and learn everything you can about them. Read articles. Take notes. Collate your findings. Write essays. Compare your conclusions. Look for the essential truth about reality underlying two of your topics, and write an essay on that. Do the same thing for two others. And the same thing for two others. Do the same thing for three. And four. And five.
   
   Write an essay taking the most fascinating fact out of each topic and linking them into a single theory of everything. Voila! You’re Einstein!
   
   Write a counter-essay proving yourself completely wrong.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you deeper understanding.
7. Spend one day watching children.
   
   Children are people confused by their world, without adequate skills to either communicate or function within the social norms of their tribe. Watch a family, preferably of several generations. Take copious notes on how they interact with each other—how they treat one child, how they respond to the child’s efforts to communicate and function, how they communicate with each other about the child, how they communicate with each other with no reference to the child at all. Take notes on how the child attempts or does not attempt to be involved with them. Now take the same notes on the other children, along with notes on why you picked that first child first. Sketch choreographic notes on how the members of this family move around each other in space.
   
   Write a scene in which a character is an adult using the child’s tactics, only in adult language and with adult understanding. Read it, and analyze the subtext between the characters. Write it again with a different character. And again with a different character. And again with the same character but a different outcome. And again with the same character but a different outcome.
   
   Write it as if it were your one chance in life to communicate what you need to communicate.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you compassion for every single character you create.
8. Spend one day crying.
   
   Face it: you’ve got a lot to cry about. Sometimes your life has sucked. And putting all the effort of not crying into your work will make it superficial and dishonest. Go ahead and cry as much as you can out of your system. Reach the anger underneath and go punch a tree. Reach the pain under that and go bandage up your hand. Take a good look at the damage while you’re bandaging it. You did this to yourself. You punched a tree. Don’t you feel like a prize idiot? Learn to love the prize idiot who punched the tree. You need to know how to love prize idiots who rush around getting themselves into trouble without ever feeling sorry for them or allowing them to feel sorry for themselves.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you courage.
   
   If you don’t have a lot to cry about, put down your keyboard and go apply for a job in a nice, safe cube somewhere. You’re the wrong kind of fantasist to be a writer.
9. Spend one day laughing at things nobody thinks are funny but you.
   
   This will feel like hysteria brought on by all the crying, which is what it is. Laugh until you can’t talk. Laugh until you can’t breathe. Laugh until tears are running down your face. Laugh in front of loved ones to whom you can’t explain the joke. Laugh in front of strangers until they raise their eyebrows and shy away.
   
   This step is necessary to teach you to accept what you bring to the craft of fiction. Claim your own utterly unique and bizarre nature. This is the only new thing you have to bring to literature, the one thing—paradoxically—your reader comes there seeking.


If you don’t have anything to laugh about, go back a step and cry some more.

10. Spend one whole day being grateful.
    
    In our family, we used to do a gratitude ceremony around a lit candle at the dinner table every evening, everyone taking a turn to say what they were grateful for. Dinner guests would wonder if they had to be grateful for only important things, and we’d say, no, no, anything at all. We had one friend who was always grateful for football. Sometimes I was grateful for compost or fingernail clippers. Sometimes my son—when he was very young—was simply grateful for the candle.
    
    Write long, rambling, specific letters to people who have made a difference in your life. You don’t have to send them. Just get them down in words. And don’t worry about making sense or communicating what you really mean. Just blither. Go up to people you love and look them in the eye. Tell them why your life is better because of them, in very specific terms. Mention football and fingernail clippers and candles, if they’re pertinent. Write letters to your characters. Write a letter to your imagination. Write a letter of gratitude to yourself about all the most dreadful aspects of your personality without which you would not be you.
    
    Remember that 1970s chain letter where you were supposed to send cute underwear to the top ten people on the list and then sit around waiting for 500 pairs of underwear some total strangers thought were cute? Say, “Thanks for all the underwear.”
    
    Put your hand on your heart and say to the world in general, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me all you wonderful, insane senders of underwear.”

Then go keep your promise.

UPDATE: And if you have trouble making yourself cry, try celebrating the end of the War in Iraq with the return of our soldiers to the families who love them—guaranteed to push you over the edge. It is the end of a seemingly endless nightmare. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, President Obama.

A few days ago, Simon Larter used my blog as an example on his, Constant Revision, encouraging readers to take a walk on the wild and snarky side. It started a fabulous discussion on the topic of snark and made me think a lot about how much I love making people laugh—what fun it is to get so many comments about uncontrollable laughter on my most insane posts—plus Medeia Sharif used my new favorite participle about my blog: “entranced.”

Thank you so much, Medeia! And thank you, Simon, for pushing people to live courageously in their crazy, heartfelt, secretly terrified-and-terrifying worlds and take some virtual risks (which are way the heck safer than real ones, both for you and for others out there on the road). Thank you, everyone, for a truly scintillating conversation. . .particularly you people (Michelle) who were so intensely kind. Aw. You warm the cockles of my fuzzy little editorial heart.

(I would thank Violet, too, but she’s just about to see me descend on her doorstep tonight beladen with tequila and triple sec, so we’ll wait until the fireworks subside before we ask her how she feels about me then.)

And today, just to liven things up even more, Simon’s interviewed me. God love the man, he’s a brave soul.

It was a lot of fun, and I showed my compassionate and supportive editorial side rather than “dangerous” black humor side. Mostly. In the end I wound up getting emotional over my brilliant clients and readers, telling Simon and the whole world how appreciative I am of everything good and profound and beautiful you all have brought into my life.

And I mean every word of it, you guys. You’re a joy.

As I promised last Monday, here are the OTHER five things that should set off your bullshit alarm at writers conferences:

1. A presenter who can’t be bothered to research what they teach.


True story: I was at a writers conference once when the presenter sketched a quick triangle on the board. “Do you all know the plot triangle?” he said. “I think this is from Aristotle.” And he proceeded to “teach” a sort of vague, truncated, misunderstood version of Freytag’s Triangle.

Now, I’m pretty courteous myself. I’m not going to raise my hand and say, “Um, excuse me, but don’t you mean you think that’s from Freytag? As in: the nineteenth-century German writer who developed a pyramid structure to describe beginning, middle, and end along the lines of the five-act play? Because that triangle’s really famous. And I don’t think he even knew Aristotle.”

No, I’m not. I’m going to sit there on my hands, and if necessary I will smile. I will not point out in front of a class full of innocent hopefuls that this presenter hasn’t even looked up this triangle he likes to think he’s teaching before sailing blasely into this room to try to teach it.

Another true story: I was at a writers conference once where the workshop presenter added nothing at all to the critiques. She simply sat at the front of the room saying, “And what do YOU think of what we just heard?” This presenter had been snickering to me earlier about how she always accepts invitations to present at conferences because it’s freebie food.

I was an attendee that time, but I wound up carrying the ball for her workshop, whenever the attendees didn’t know how to sort out a dilemma, because the presenter just sat there smirking, trying to hide the fact that she didn’t know either. One attendee came up to me later and expressed her disappointment that the presenter hadn’t contributed anything to the workshop. At all. Several others came up to me later and thanked me for my help and asked me if I was a professional editor. (At the time I was, but I wasn’t freelancing.)

Even worse, another presenter came up to me later—a smart, engaging, professional writer—and told me how sorry he was I hadn’t appeared in his session. . .because I’d been in the lame workshop instead.

Associated with this is the presenter who doesn’t pay attention when they’re given demographic information on their students by the conference organizers.

Once I was in a seminar in which certain attendees were local high school students who had won scholarships to the conference. We all had to listen to the presenter announcing gleefully, “I love teaching adults because then I can talk about sex all I want,” and proceeding to describe fiction techniques in terms of sex, tell stories about sex, and even read sex-related blurbs from their own books. I wound up fielding in scribbled notes a PTSD disclosure of sexual shame from the teen I was there to mentor on the craft of fiction.

We missed a lot of that presenter’s talk.

The thing is, whether any particular class is made up entirely of adults or not, that presenter had no way of knowing if they were going to trigger PTSD in some of the attendees. Sex is either a painful or quite private topic for many people. They did not pay to have their personal issues messed with by a stranger in public. They paid to learn the craft of fiction.

Sex, religion, and politics: these are not appropriate topics for lecture at writers conferences without SERIOUS previous warning.


2. A presenter who can’t be bothered to plan their session so they actually cover everything they promise to cover.


How many times have you seen this one happen? At the beginning of the session, in accordance with popular advice on public speaking, the presenter lists everything they intend to cover before their time is up. If you know anything at all about teaching fiction, it might sound like kind of a lot to cover in one session, but you figure they’re probably going to skim. Or maybe they’re just way the heck more focused than you would be in their shoes. So you jot down the list, making little asterisks next to the items that look most interesting to you. If you’re really organized and really OCD (like me) you even leave big spaces in between in which to fill in what you’re going to learn about each item.

Then you spend a good, long time listening to the presenter tell stories about their own experiences with the first few items (probably, “Getting an idea for a novel,” and, “What my agent said about how my novel was the fastest sell in publishing history”), until suddenly it’s five minutes until the end of the session, and they still have half-a-dozen points to make.

So you and the rest of the class sit and watch them riffle through their notes saying loudly, for your benefit and without looking up, “Uh, plot—don’t be boring, character—ditto, troubleshooting—come to one of my classes back home, I’ll give you my card, professionalism—have it. Any questions? Okey-dokey. All out of time. ‘Kay, thanks, bye!”

And then you’re in line waiting politely until everyone else gets a chance to ask their question and get their copies of the presenter’s book autographed and make personal friends with the presenter, until the attendees for the next session flood into the room and appropriate the chairs, and the presenter picks up their things and heads out the door, still chatting vivaciously with someone about three people ahead of you in line.


3. A presenter who teachers misinformation.


And this is the one that really makes smoke come out my ears.

Because you guys can’t tell.

If you already knew this stuff, you wouldn’t be here to learn it, now, would you?

Did Aristotle invent Freytag’s Triangle? No, he did not. Aristostle invented the Six Elements of Drama, which any presenter worth their salt can discover in two minutes by googling Aristotle. Or Aristostle’s Triangle.

Did Syd Field invent three-act structure? No, he did not. Syd Field wrote a brilliant book called Screenplay in which he describes three-act structure and explores the ways and means behind why it works. Our current understanding of three-act structure, according to some sources, actually dates back to (are you ready?) Aristotle. It has been immortalized in our lifetime in books on screenplay by Syd Field, Robert McKee, and Yves Lavandier.

Should aspiring writers outline? Hell, yes, they should. Otherwise Freytag’s Triangle and three-act structure are no use to them whatsoever.

Oh, I could go on and on and on about this one. So many of you innocents come to me asking about the misinformation you’ve been taught, and I’m here banging my head on my desk thinking, Who is doing this to these poor people? And then I go to writers conferences, and I know:

Academics who earned degrees, or aspiring writers who got lucky with publication, without actually learning the craft.


4. A presenter who indulges in snark, bad manners, or irritability.


This one makes smoke come out of everyone’s ears.

Or it ought to. Only too often conference attendees assume that, because they’ve paid to be taught by these pillars of the publishing industry, any snark or bad manners or irritability that falls on their heads they brought on themselves.

You know what professionalism is? Professionalism is being friendly and polite and encouraging to everyone you meet, regardless of how silly or ignorant or ill-informed you find their questions and comments. Because they’re human beings. And they’ve paid you to treat them professionally.

If a presenter has trouble with an attendee who’s sincerely a problem, they go to the conference organizers. That’s what they’re there for.


5. A presenter who makes no bones about being there solely for the party with the other presenters.


“Ooh, look,” these presenters say to other presenters at the presenter/attendee social mixers. “They have square dancing in this town.”

“How’s your room?” these presenters say to other presenters behind their glasses five minutes later. “Have you been to the beach yet?”

“Oh, my god, you’re wearing the orange plaid!” these presenters cry from the podium when another presenter sidles into the room in the middle of their lecture. “I put the dishes in the dishwasher—your turn next time!”

“Are you a local?” these presenters say to random attendees. “How do I get home from here?”

When I was the editor of my high school newspaper (must have been my second or third year at it), I once got my butt kicked by our teacher for running a gag front-page article written by a student reporter about how to set up a “directions booth” downtown in our lovely vacation destination town to tell rude tourists right where they can go.

What these presenters who ask me for directions (because I’m a local) don’t know is that I’m a fiction writer because I like to lie.

Folks, these people are trouble not just for you, the attendees, but also for those presenters who really are prepared, who really did come to make themselves available to aspiring writers, who really do take these conferences and their function in the world of fiction seriously.

Those presenters can’t blow the whistle on such shenanigans without sounding petty, competitive, and unprofessional. So they walk away smiling politely and shaking everyone’s hand, while inside seething on behalf of the paying attendees they’ve just spent several days watching being duped.

But you can. You can blow that whistle loud and clear.

‘Tis the season for writers conferences. All over the country, hopeful aspiring writers are breaking open their piggy banks and digging their savings out of tin boxes under their mattresses and hieing themselves off to invest in their commitment to their craft.

And I salute you people. You bet I do.

Because you finance all those writers conferences. And I’m here to tell you those conferences—while often brilliant, thrilling, and enormously helpful—are not always all they’re cracked up to be.

I’ve been to my share, and I’ve also taught plenty of fiction, myself. So when I show up at a writers conference these days and find myself rubbing shoulders with authors/teachers/presenters who are only there for the free doughnuts and expensed party out of town, with little or no concern for the people who actually paid to be there. . .I get a little irritable.

I get especially irritable because 99.9% of the people who pay to attend writers conferences give these authors/teachers the utmost in polite, respectful, student-like attention, whether they deserve it or not.

And because writers conferences themselves are billed as opportunities to meet and connect with professionals in the writing industry.

For the record, when I attend writers conferences these days I’m there as an educator, not an attendee, and this list is compiled of my experiences from the professionals’ side of the fence. While out there attending (and evaluating!) writers conferences, folks, be aware that you’ve paid for something, and if you’re not getting it you have the right to complain.

Things that should set off your bullshit alarm:

1. A presenter who can’t teach anything but themself.


Say you show up for a seminar called Make Your Novel Happen! You’re ready, by god. You’ve got a novel (or at least a bunch of pages you think of fondly as a sort of misshapen favorite manuscript). You’ve got love of the craft. You’ve got a basic understanding of the enormous amount of sweat and dedication it takes to produce a really good work, and you’re under no delusions about how much of that you might not yet know.

You’re here to learn.

And you spend two hours sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair in a room full of strangers listening to someone possibly quite animated and charming talk about. . .how they made THEIR novel happen.

Huh, you’re thinking. I didn’t know I signed up for a seminar on their novel. I thought I signed up for a seminar on MINE.

But you know the publishing industry is made up of professionals who approach the work professionally, not a loose conglomerate of tens of thousands of whiny, disgruntled amateurs. And you’re willing to approach this work professionally.

So you’re willing to listen to a presenter talk only through the lens of their own work as much as you possibly can. Hey, you’re thinking. Everyone’s style is different. This is this presenter’s style.

And you’re a good sport about it. They’re enthusiastic about their novel. Oh, boy! Maybe they’re even entertaining about enthusing over it. So when they burn up a certain amount of class time trying to find someone with copies of their books and, when they do, jump up and run over to see if what they’re thinking about is in the copy somebody pulls out, you’re willing to roll with it. Maybe there’s something important in that book they want to read to you, and they somehow simply managed to forget to bring a copy from home.

But when they hand the book back, saying, “Yeah, this copy has it,” and go on with their talk about themself without relating either that book or what they found in it to what they’re saying in any way. . .

Yeah. You’re a teeny bit disgruntled.


2. A presenter who doesn’t know any writing techniques or standards but those they, personally, accidentally stumbled upon writing their own novel(s).


All over out there I hear about “pantsing,” as in, “I never outline. I don’t have to.” And I find this extremely bizarre, because writing a novel is not filling out the crossword puzzle on the back of a cereal box. It takes an enormous amount of foresight and planning and note-taking and delving. (“‘When is he going to delve?’ I was asking myself.”—Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.)

And I walk around scratching my head, wondering where on earth aspiring amateurs got the idea they could write an entire salable novel without paying any attention to where they’re going with it. Because, let’s face it, none of us is as brilliant as E.L. Doctorow. Even John Steinbeck planned out his novels for years before he sat down to write them.

So when I see a presenter at a writers conference stand up and say, “Don’t outline. It sucks the creative juices out of your story. It doesn’t take into account the life on the page,” a lightbulb goes on over my head, and bells ring in my ears, and suddenly I know: where they got the idea.

Have I ever pantsed a novel? Of course I have! I’ve pantsed THREE novels. Then I learned how to outline, and that’s how I found out which way produces a marketable work. How about that.

Does outlining “suck the creative juices” out of a story? Not if it’s done properly. If it’s done properly, outlining itself draws the creative juices from you, until you’re sitting in a veritable puddle of them and it’s all you can do to scribble it all down as fast as humanly possible. Outlining is all about taking into account the life on the page, so you can bridge the abyss between how it looks to you and how it looks to your reader. Then outlining continues to take that into account, drawing your creative juices in a controllable flow throughout the process of writing your novel, which is what you need in order to make it all the way through 72,000 words of storytelling.

Practicing any technique improperly is likely to confuse you and steer you wrong to the extent that you conclude it’s the technique itself that’s causing your problems. It’s not the technique. It’s not being taught how to use that technique properly.

And authors/teachers who haven’t happened to stumble across how to use a technique properly in their own work are the ones telling you not to use it at all.


3. A presenter who can’t answer straight-forward questions on the topic of the session.


Because, it turns out, they don’t know the craft of fiction. They only know themself.

You’ve figured out they’re mostly only going to talk about their own novel. And you’re listening politely, taking notes, thinking as intelligently as you can about how to apply what they’re saying to what you’re doing with your novel. And when you simply can’t find the connection, you raise your hand and courteously ask for clarification on a particular technique.

But you don’t get an answer on that particular technique. Or, rather, you get an answer on that technique as that author happened to use it in their novel.

Of course, since you just spent the last hour listening to how that author wrote their novel, you’re already pretty conversant with that. So you ask again, still courteously, how to apply such a technique to your own work. (You’re not going to take up class time describing your beloved manuscript, but you do want to know how to apply such a thing in generic terms.)

“Hey!” says the presenter excitedly. “Something shiny!”

And the next thing you know, they’re off answering someone else’s question, which—if it’s about that presenter’s novel—turns out to have an answer it takes another hour to fully explore.

This is quite a delicate situation for me, because I kind of want those aspiring writers to get the answers to their questions. But I don’t want to appear to be rudely taking over someone else’s students. So I wind up trying to remember what that aspiring writer looks like and finding them later to say, “Here’s my website. I answer these questions free on my advice column. There are real answers. Please—ask.”


4. A presenter who relies almost entirely on advice out of a famous book on writing by someone else.


This one’s a no-brainer: Anne Lamott and John Gardner. For the record, Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, which she says right up front is basically just stories about her own experiences teaching fiction and writing her books. John Gardner wrote a whole slew of intellectual, rather academic books on the craft of fiction, but the one everyone talks about is On Becoming a Novelist. I refer to them a lot too, along with lots of other canonical writers who also wrote some very perceptive and charming books on the craft, indeed.

Even worse is the presenter who relies on writing advice by someone whose name they can’t recall. And of course they didn’t plan ahead and write it down.

Yes, it was Donald Maass who said, “Tension on every page,” and he said it in Writing the Breakout Novel.


5. A presenter who dispenses their advice from on high and avoids any meaningful human contact outside the classroom.


I don’t know how many times I’ve watched aspiring writers show up full of hope over the promise of meeting and talking with professionals in the industry because, after all, that’s one of the promises writers conferences hold out as an enticement. And then I watch them get dissed time and time again by presenters who are too Big and Important to cross the quad talking in all human connection with some plebeian who isn’t even published yet. I watch these presenters answer questions outside the classroom as quickly and unhelpfully as possible, refuse to make eye contact, and disappear without saying good-bye.

Then I run after them into the private presenters’ lounge, and I kick them in the shins.

You betcha. You’re welcome!

UPDATE: The Other 5 BS Indicators for Writers Conferences

The pen is mightier than the sword.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy

Hey, guys, it’s been two mighty quick weeks of vacation, and I’m back from the Pacific Northwest. It was summer there. It might even have been summer here, too, but it was not when we left, and it’s not now, so I guess we missed it in the redwoods this year. Bummer about that.

Portland, Oregon, for those who don’t know, is a beautiful city. Truly. Clean, uncluttered, safe (compared to San Francisco), with a fabulous light-rail system and tree-lined streets, a huge, blue river, a vital downtown district, and—the cherry on the pie—Powell’s Books. In the summer it’s spectacular. My husband and I were both ready to pack up and move.

Except, of course, that it’s a city, and in real life we live on ten acres in the backwoods, where the only noise at night is the local fox barking its bizarre disco-y cough-like bark. Also, I lived in the Pacific Northwest for twelve years between the ages of 13 and 25, and I know what it’s like to survive unrelenting rain and cold for nine months out of the year.

But summertime. . .wow. We are so going back for OSCON every year from now on, for as long as they’ll take us.

Also, an amazing thing happened while I was gone. My last post, 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed as Writers, along with its companion post, 6 Personality Types Who Will Fail as Writers, got tweeted and linked to all over the place out there, bringing in, frankly, quite a few more readers than I normally get, even when I’m here in the trenches blogging dutifully away all the time.

What do I learn from this? Apparently, I could scale way back on the blogging. So I’m going to scale way the heck back on the blogging. Because all that writing and advice was taking a lot out of me, and I have a magazine to maintain and clients to edit. In fact, I have a very full roster in August indeed.

I can’t wait.

Also, as happens every once in a great while, some unsophisticated hopeful out there reprinted an entire post on a forum, thinking—I know not why—this would make them look smart. Well, no. It doesn’t. It makes them look like they don’t understand how the Internet works or what online copyright is. It also makes them look rude.

People, I really, sincerely appreciate your appreciation. It’s happy joy-joy stuff. Gives the time I spend online meaning. Absolutely.

But please don’t be rude. And please don’t make yourself look stupid, or I’ll waste time feeling terrible for you, and that’ll interfere with my real work.

So today I’m going to refresh everyone’s memory about copyright. This is straight off my own copyright page, which you can find if you glance vaguely around my blog header for the copyright symbol.

Yep. That’s it.

Everything you write is copyrighted automatically when you write it, writers. Just so you know.

Everything on A. Victoria Mixon, Editor is copyrighted. Because I’ve written it, now, haven’t I? That means I don’t want anyone lifting any of the posts and posting them elsewhere without express written permission. (From me.) Not even just big chunks of posts.

However, there is a little wiggle room in copyright law, and there’s a good reason for this.

1) It’s okay to re-post a sentence or two or even a paragraph or two in a periodical under the copyright clause “for review purposes.” This means you’re citing it so you can express an opinion, and this loophole was originally designed to allow periodical book reviewers to spread the love. It works exactly the same way on the Internet so long as you cite it properly and include a link to the author’s site.

(If you don’t include the citation and link, it’s plagiarism—the very worst type of copyright violation—and you’ll get a Cease & Desist letter and possibly your ass sued by the rightful owner.)

Personally, I like to know if you’re doing this so I can keep track of what’s out there. But it’s okay, either way, so long as you cite it properly as coming from me and include a link to http://victoriamixon.com.

2) IMPORTANT! This wiggle room does not work for your published works that are not periodicals.

This means if you want to quote someone else in your book or novel, you or your publisher has to get their express written permission. Even for epigrams. Many authors—especially famous ones—charge for this privilege, because they and their publishers have a huge vested professional interest in making sure their works are not re-used by random authors latching onto their coattails.

Prentice Hall paid for the cartoons my co-author chose for re-print in our book. (For my money, Michael Cunningham should have had to get Virginia Woolf’s express written permission for what he did to Mrs. Dalloway’s Party in The Hours, although I’m sure her copyright holder was happy enough to endorse the checks.)

3) Links are all goodness. I link to you guys, too. The Internet is one big ole snuggly interconnected network.

Remember, everyone: copyright protects you as well as the authors you read. These laws apply to your own works, keeping the world of written words fair for everyone. It’s not a profession if you don’t get paid for your work.

And writers are professionals.

Besides, no one wants to get whacked upside the head with something even mightier than a sword.

If you wonder what can happen to a good-faith editor who happens to have been online for a long time, check out the Book Editing Associates Hall of Shame. Lynda Lotman has had a lot of her material lifted over the years by the named people and associations.

For more on copyright law, try the University of Texas at Austin (or here if you’re in the UK).

Monday you got the bad news. Now you get the good news. You’re very welcome!

1. THE DILIGENT: those who sit down and write.
   
   Natalie Goldberg immortalized it without words, the simple gesture of holding up a pad of paper and writing.
   
   Don’t write for publication. Don’t write for ambition. Don’t write because you keep reading the news about people even less literary than you making it in the best selling Big Time. Don’t base your dreams on greed.
   
   Write for zest and exploration and color and detail. Write as research and daydreaming and argument and creativity and hypothesizing. Write for experimentation and hallucination and entertainment and friendship and education and sheer goodness of heart. Write for amusement and revenge and anguish and, ultimately, exhaustion.
   
   Write because writing’s what you do—and what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life—-even when you have nothing to write about.
   
   Guess what? You’re a writer.
2. THE IMAGINATIVE: those who are always looking for ways to liven up the party.
   
   You know why so many writers have such great biographies? Because the best ones never know when to leave well enough alone. They pull up their socks and yank on their shit-kickers and go out there to face life with all their innocence and guilt and huevos shining in all directions. They pay their dues and take their chances. They shoot the rapids. They wrestle the angel. They throw themselves on the mercy of the lion.
   
   And when they sit down to write, they approach it the same way, with recklessness and bravado and sheer, uncontrolled, brain-bursting inanity. That’s how they get themselves into the tops of trees and under the bowels of the earth, on the extreme end of adventures they can’t possibly get out of in one piece, hurtling lock, stock, and barrel into outer space. And that’s how they have the stamina and endurance to drag a whole galaxy of readers along with them.
   
   

3. THE SENSITIVE: those who pay attention to their senses.
   
   You were born with five, or at least most of five. They are your passport to the world of words. No matter where you go, what you do, or what you think about it, those five senses are always operating, twenty-four hours a day, rushing an infinite number of perceptions to your brain, where they are promptly transformed into concrete, vivid, material details, complete with all the trimmings.
   
   Even more than that, your brain itself sorts, classifies, and stores them all. THEM ALL. And for the rest of your life they’re there, being carted around inside that unbelievable micro-storehouse inside your brainpan and added to every instant of every second of every moment of your day. . .a constant, unending stream of fertile material.
   
   All you have to do is write it down.
4. THE INSENSITIVE: those who have a businessperson’s professional attitude toward rejection, vagaries of the industry, unforeseen disaster, yes, even self-parodying black humor.
   
   Almost every single time I write one of those black humor posts, I get a whole bunch of people laughing their heads off and one unhappy person saying sadly (or not-so-sadly) and without a trace of humor, “Why are you such a big meanie?”
   
   I’m not. Truly. Read my client testimonials. I’m an old fuzzy kitty-cat, and the people who work with me on their own tender, delicate, yearning fiction are my biggest champions.
   
   But I’ve been out here in the writing business for three decades and counting, and I know if you don’t develop a sense of humor about the weaknesses and failings you yourself bring to it, it will chew you up and spit you out long, long before you ever thought you could possibly be done. The publishing industry is not out there (like I am) waiting for you to bring it your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. The publishing industry doesn’t care about you and your wretched refuse. (For the record, it doesn’t care about me or mine, either.)
   
   The publishing industry is nobody’s mommy.
   
   It’s a business, that’s all. And the only way you’re ever going to succeed as a writer is by learning to laugh at yourself, alongside others just like yourself, in the spirit of camaraderie and warts & blemishes and cockroaches scuttling around under rocks in the dark of all those who have gone before you. Because they are legion. And when you are dead and gone, legions more will still continue to arrive on these fictional shores.
   
   Quit worrying about getting your feelings hurt and throw your arms open in joy now that you arrived here when you did. Even as we speak, you are recreating this place in your own image.
5. THE PATIENT: those who take their time, realizing life is long and a career in the arts takes the whole of it and even the greats never lived long enough to learn it all.
   
   Somerset Maughm lamented it. Flannery O’Connor lamented it. You can lament it too: you will never live long enough. You can devote all the decades of your life to the craft you love and be ecstatic you did, but you will still die, like Albert Einstein, leaning out of bed with the last frail ounce of strength, grasping for a reproducable theorum of the divine.
   
   And you will know, as you lean, that you gave it your all, every day of your life: your passion and curiosity and love and devotion to this craft that means so much to so many but, especially, to you. And you will die grateful you had the chance, thanking heaven you stumbled on it while there was all that time to luxuriate in it. . .even if you became a writer only days before you died.
   
   It came to you—this extraordinary craft—as a free and unfettered gift, and you got to own it, for just a little while.
6. THE BLESSED: those upon whom the gods smile.
   
   Because there is luck in all the business of humanity. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one in time plays many parts.”
   
   Get used to it. And get used to recognizing when you are blessed. It is a huge and amazing thing. It is well worth stopping and making an issue out of. You got smiled on! Break open the clouds, standin shafts of sunlight, let the angels sing.
   
   One of the gods smiled on you.
   
   For the rest of it, well, get used to sharing that with all the rest of us, this ridiculously motley crew of hapless strugglers, drowners, fighters, dreamers out here. You think you’re alone in your natural lack of blessedness? Open your eyes and look around. You’re not alone.
   
   Truly, people. A piece of paper, a pen, a handful words, and this life of yours: that’s it. Luck comes, and luck goes. Live long enough, and you won’t be able to escape it.
   
   We are all we have.

(This is all gone into rather more specifically in the Conclusion, “Tilting at Windmills with Miguel de Cervantes,” of The Art & Craft of Fiction.)

Now I’m going on vacation to Portland with a Linux expert and a newly-teenage maniac. When I get back in two weeks I expect to hear that all of you have been. . .what else?. . .WRITING.

This afternoon @layinda awarded me the Creative Liars Award. I’m just not sure why.

THAT’S A LIE.

I know exactly why she awarded it to me.

THAT’S ANOTHER LIE.

Huh. It’s getting kind of obvious, isn’t it?

Now, I am just getting ready to go on vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow, so this is going to be a mish-mash of nonsense (like my blog posts aren’t that anyway), and it will be incumbent upon you, dear reader, to interpret it as you see fit.

First I must thank Layinda and direct you all back to her. Thank you, Layinda! I think.

Then I must tell you seven things about myself, with the new wrinkle that I can lie.

1. I don’t know who my father’s paternal ancestors were, only that my grandfather’s grandfather was shot in the back in a vendetta killing.
2. I’m directly descended from a Colonel in the Revolutionary War and therefore eligible to be a DAR.
3. When I was ten my mother won a washing machine (and, I assume, dryer) on The Price is Right dressed as a Hershey’s kiss.
4. I can say “onion,” “crazy jackass,” and, “When love falls on a shit-pile it will still hang there,” in German.
5. My son was born in Canada.
6. My husband is French.
7. I have two middle names.

Then I must direct you to six other liars. Wow. Who’s NOT? I’m sorry, my brain is popping and fizzing like a frying egg. It took me a whole day to come up with the folks for the Versatile Blogger thing. So please refer to them. I assume they all lie. You can ask. They’ll probably lie about it.

Then I’m going to list here six classic, possibly under-exposed fiction authors because, as we all know, fiction is lying at its very best:

Jane Bowles. She’ll freak you out with her sheer artlessness. Read Two Serious Ladies, which was just re-released by Sort of Books in the UK. Then read the rest of her tiny legacy in My Sister’s Hand in Mine. Guess what? Everything you think you know about fiction IS WRONG.

Isak Denisen. The queen of layering, storytelling, abject profundity, Denisen can drop you like a pebble down a well, and you’re the one whose brain explodes when you never hit bottom.

Richard Brautigan. Strange as the day is long, he twisted the fictional form like taffy and left it torqued permanently beyond recognition. In Watermelon Sugar is my favorite because of the river in the living room, but Trout Fishing in America is another great adventure in fictional play you’ve never even considered before.

Paul Bowles. Beautiful language, beautiful imagery, beautiful juxtaposition of fact and fiction. Read his travel stories, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, and translations like A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. You think you know how to tell a story? You don’t know how to tell a story.

Horace Walpole. Read The Castle of Otranto. Just that. The little acorn from which the entire Gothic genre grew. So worth it.

Emily Bronte. Blow yourself sky-high with Wuthering Heights, then spend the rest of your life trying to reconstruct the legendary background story of Catherine and Heathcliff in the magnificent saga of Augusta Geraldine Alaisda of Gondal and her Byronic love affairs, now tantalizingly only in contradictory fragments.

All right, you guys! You’re on your own!

DISCLAIMER: It has come to my attention that I need to point out to some folks that my blog posts are actually about their titles. So you all are hereby forewarned: THIS POST IS ABOUT ITS TITLE.

If you don’t want to read about personality types who will fail as writers, hey, get out now while the gettin’s good. However, if you don’t want to read it but do it anyway, please do not feel compelled to let me know you didn’t like it. You can go write an opposite post on your own blog if it’ll make you feel any better. I promise not to read it.

1. THE WHINY: those who throw hissy fits when writing advice is hard on their tender egos.
   
   These are the people who write back to agents who send them rejection letters. You know how many acceptances those people get from those agents once they’ve let them know they’re not taking rejection lying down? I can tell you in words of one numeral.
   
   Now that the blogosphere has made good on Andy Warhol’s promise, “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” it is simply amazing how many folks are out there cleaning up the Intertubes for democracy, storming around letting other people know how dreadfully unhappy they are with the way they’re doing things. This is their use of their perceived 15 minutes. Unfortunately, they don’t stick to 15 minutes, but continue trying to throw their weight around long after everyone’s bored with them and gone on to some other blowhard.
   
   Last week I found a guy posting an extraordinarily thoughtful and lengthy letter from a mega-big literary agent saying to him, “Can we please stop?” in response to his post-rejection tantrum letter, in which he apparently not only objected mightily to the agent’s rejection of his work but also made claims for its quality he clearly could not sustain. When I picked myself up off the floor from the shock of seeing how much time and courtesy this agent had spent trying to bring a little light to the life of this amazing dimwit, I was even more appalled to read the letter he WROTE BACK, which of course he also posted.
   
   Seriously. That agent is neeeeeeeeeeever going to represent that guy. And now that he’s posted his eye-popping idiodicy online, no other credible agent is going to, either.
2. THE LAZY: those who have no intention of making writing their life’s work.
   
   Sometimes I talk about what it takes to become a professional writer: learning how to write impeccably, for one; learning the ropes of the business, for another; learning all the ways to earn a living as a writer besides through fiction, for sure.
   
   And the minute I type the words “professional writer,” I hear in my head the chorus of objections from those who are writing fiction as a hobby. “We don’t want to be professional writers!” they cry. “We just want to win the lottery!”
   
   Professional writing is dull. Winning the lottery is exciting! Planning your work, meeting deadlines, taking advice without whimpering, being edited, going to business meetings, negotiating contracts, doing it when you don’t feel like it, making good on your promises, treating it like a responsibility rather than a right—that’s boring. Dreaming up a few characters out of half-remembered movies and throwing them on the page and waking up the next morning to find you’re J.K. Rowling—now that’s living!
3. THE SELF-INVOLVED: those who insist on writing only about themselves.
   
   You’ve met them in workshops and critique circles, the ones who submit, time after time, endless, mind-numbing, pointless droning on and on and on about whatever their pet peeve happens to be, styling their protagonist (almost universally in first person) as the ultimate blameless victim of fate who just—coincidentally—happens to do and say things that bring down all hell and high water on their own faultless little heads. Oh, the injustice. In sleep-inducing detail. “I woke up. My bed was just like it was yesterday, when I also woke up. I got up and got dressed. I brushed my teeth and spit in the sink. I rinsed my mouth and looked in the mirror, thinking about myself. I went in the kitchen to see if everyone in there was thinking about me, too. They weren’t! They were talking about their own stuff! Of all the NERVE.”
   
   Here’s a tip: if even the people in your critique group keep saying your protagonist is unsympathetic, there is no way in hell anyone’s ever going to pay you for that privilege.
4. THE DISGRUNTLED: those who are already mad they don’t make enough.
   
   Hey, you know what’s a bad idea when you think you don’t earn what you’re worth? Going into a field people work just for the love of it even when they have to move back in with their parents.
   
   Then quitting your day job.
   
   In the UK you people have the Dole. It’s not so easy here in the US. You know who lives under bridges? That’s right. Lots of really pissed-off people who quit their jobs in a huff the minute they got an agent—any agent—completely clueless about the publishing industry in general and their own teeny, tiny little role in it in particular.
   
   Remember the Vogon ultimate torture chamber in The Hitckhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Where you see the entire universe in all its enormity and your own dust spec of a self diminished down to its actual subatomic particularity? This is you. This is you without a day job.
   
   Even George Clooney appeared in a zillion unmemorable TV shows and movies for SIXTEEN YEARS before he got “discovered” on ER. I remember. He was really good. All of you with less talent and inherent compatibility with your medium than George Clooney can multiply that number by the number of years you were doing something else before you decided to throw your hat in the ring for this craft.
   
   And you thought you were disgruntled before.
5. THE UNREALISTIC: those who have No Idea what the publishing business is really like.
   
   Are you a Twilight enthusiast? A Bella-Wannabe? Mooning endlessly over Bella’s identification withWuthering Heights and thinking the only thing as great as being the author of Edward would be being the author of Heathcliff?
   
   Just so you know: the author of Heathcliff was dissed by her publisher, left unpublished until he could ride the coattails of her sister Charlotte, then published in a terrible edition with sloppy typesetting and cheap paper, and ignored by the reading public, who found Heathcliff—beyond reprehensible—downright disgusting. Emily Bronte was a bonafide literary genius whose greatest work, a saga in verse, was altered after her death against her passionately-clear wishes by busybody Charlotte and re-published in its mutilated form, although half the poems had vanished by then and have never been recovered. Emily Bronte died young, unloved, unhappy, unfulfilled. Undiscovered.
   
   And the author of Edward can’t write for beans. She stumbled on a misogynist aspect of our culture she could exploit in impressionable kids, along with a really good marketer. That really good marketer is now busy with Twilight, and you are in their backwash.
6. THE UNIMAGINATIVE: those who look at published garbage and say, “I can write that.”
   
   Why, yes. Yes, you probably can. So can a monkey. Are you as smart as a monkey? Congratulations.
   
   And you will suffer the fate of those authors: you will spend endless hours sending hundreds of queries to agents who want nothing to do with you until you stumble across one desperate enough to take a risk, all the while telling yourself, “You’ve got to persevere,” without wasting so much as an iota of your perseverance on learning the craft.
   
   You might even be a hardcore-enough marketer to push for publication until someone gives in and publishes you. Then you will get your head all puffed up with grandiose ideas of your own importance because you got a book on a shelf (as though the authors of all that other garbage didn’t have exactly the same thing), and you will be thrilled to have your name all over crap a dog wouldn’t read, and no one over the long run will take you seriously because you treated a craft many, many people love with all their souls as a quickie money-making gimmick.
   
   People will point to your book at garage sales and say, “What garbage! I can write better than THAT.”
   
   And on your deathbed—if you have gleaned any type of intelligence from your life experience at all—what finally kills you won’t be pneumonia or heart attack or old age but the utter and total humiliation of being known as the author of shlock, part of the lowest-common-denominator that not only did not maintain the quality of fiction in your era but actually dragged it down below the garbage you once thought you were so damned better than.
   
   Yeah. On behalf of everyone who takes this craft seriously: thanks.

UPDATE from Twitter: @rd_morgan “6 Personality Types Who’ll Fail as Writers” Or: 6 Personality Types Who’ll Inevitably Be in Yr #MFA Prog.

Coming up next: 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed