Get Your Creativity to Explode: the Method

Think creativity and methodology are opposites? Well, they kind of are, but there's more, if you look closer. Any writer who's struggled to get the creative juices flowing knows that these two things can complement each other, and it's natural to find a method to inspire creativity. Yes, there's a method to your madness!

James Scott Bell said it well in The Art of War for Writers, one of his books on writing. (I'm in the middle of a re-read of the book, and it's so full of great information that it keeps showing up in these posts. :)  ) Bell says you have to feed inspiration, and one way to do that is develop a method for releasing your creativity. As a writer, you have to do this, because you have to become "a walking idea factory."

Walking is one of Bell's main methods of releasing creativity, and he suggests that there are few things you can do before, during, and after walking to capture the ideas that surface (pp. 54-55). To paraphrase:

• Before you walk, get fully focused on your idea that you want to develop
• While you walk, listen to an audiobook or do something else that will allow you to be creative without thinking about it. While you're listening, for example, ideas for your own novel will be sparked unconsciously and rise to your consciousness.
• Write those ideas down, while you're walking. Take a pen and pencil or a voice recorder with you on your walk.
• When you get home put all those ideas in a file on your computer, expanding each one as you add it. Let the words flow.
• Let the ideas cool down for a day. The next day, look at them again and assess them, after you've slept on it and let your subconscious do its work.
• Set aside the ideas you don't use, but don't delete them. They might come in handy someday.

Bell believes that if you get used to thinking this way, your creativity will explode. Makes sense to me! But I do think it pays to be aware of how important tapping into your subconscious is for this to really work. Yes, the movement of walking frees up our creative energies, but two of Bell's steps—one before the walk and one after—seem critical to making sure it's the type of idea generation we're after.

First is getting fully focused on the idea you want to develop before you walk. Do this during your writing time which is, yes, before.

Second is to sleep on the ideas before you even begin to think about them critically. Let your subconscious mind work on them while you sleep.

So, what do you think? Do you use a method like this, or something totally different?

Interview with Cory Doctorow by Bill Kenower for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association

Cory Doctorow, well-known science fiction writer, talks fast and doesn't use extraneous words, so he gets a lot of info into this ten-minute interview. For those of you who haven't got the ten minutes to spare, I've summarized a bit of what he says below. Or you can start at about minute four, which is where Doctorow gets into his process and what he thinks it takes to succeed.

Included in his perceptions of what it takes (which were honed over years of not only writing, but working in a bookstore where he got a strong understanding of what happens to books once they're published) are, first of all, believing that you can write a book, and having mentors to help in that belief and in the outcome.

He also talks about developing an understanding of what he calls "the extremely temporary nature of books" when he worked in the bookstore, by which he means the limited shelf life, sales, and presence in consumers' awareness of the great majority of published books.

Selling a book does not mean you've made it, he says, and goes on to talk about what the successful writer's life looks like.

Luck plays an important role in success, according to Doctorow. You do have to work hard and have talent, but those factors alone don't promise success. He speculates that the luck part might be partly that for some reason or other, the publisher or the writer figured out how to get the book into readers' hands better than usually happens.

Doctorow's closing comments revolve around being workmanlike (his bottom line); the value of finishing each day's writing in the middle of a sentence; the likelihood that blood sugar and seratonin levels play a role in a day's output; and the importance of not being "precious" about your writing or about yourself as a writer. He says he was, and talks about the process he went through that burned that out of him and made him a productive writer.

All in all, a fun and informative listen. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Three Essentials for a Successful Novel and How to Achieve Them

James Scott Bell's The Art of War for Writers is a book on writing I come back to again and again for pithy, excellent advice. In Chapter 24 (pp. 71-76), Bell harkens back to the hallmarks of successful novel writing that were put forth by one of his idols: John D. MacDonald. Below are MacDonald's essentials, and some of Bell's comments on how to achieve them:

Essential #1

First, there has to be a strong sense of story. I want to be intrigued by wondering what is going to happen next. I want the people that I read about to be in difficulties—emotional, moral, spiritual, whatever, and I want to live with them while they're finding their way out of these difficulties.                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                  —John D. MacDonald

       James Scott Bell's comments: Notice . . . that the reader has to wonder what is going to happen   next. To people.   . . . Create characters readers will be drawn to and put them in desperate straits soon.


Essential #2

Second, I want the writer to make me suspend my disbelief; I want to be in some other place and scene of the writer's devising.
                                                                                                            —John D. MacDonald
      
       James Scott Bell's comments: Simply put . . . (w)e have to to create the impression of something really happening in a real world to real people. So how do you do this? 

First, by being accurate. If you're writing about 1905 Los Angeles, do not include the Dodgers.  . . . You have to know your world before you write about it. . . .

And always choose the telling detail over plain vanilla description.

      "He jumped into his car and drove away."    
        Wait, what kind of car was it?
       "She was beautiful."
        Was she? I don't believe it. Describe her so I know it. Show me how other characters react to her.



Essential #3

Next, I want [the writer] to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases really sing.
                                                                                                           —John D. MacDonald

      James Scott Bell's comments: The key word here is unobtrusive. If the prose stands out too much, shouting "Look at me! I'm wonderful writing!" the suspension of disbelief takes a hit.

But if it's dull, if it moves the story along like a burro in Calexico, it creates no magic.

Example, from John D MacDonald's Darker Than Amber:

      "She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been."

Suggestions from Bell: Say you want to describe someone's wild hair. Write for five minutes without stopping. Describe the hair in two hundred or three hundred words. Let the images fly. Go back later and find the good parts and edit them down. . . . Write hot, revise cool. . . . And read some poetry.  . . . The lilt of language will help you tap into different parts of your writer's brain.

Like I said, excellent advice from Bell. I'm at the beginning of revising a novel, over half of which I wrote eight years ago, then put aside. It was just more than I could carry at the time. It's a huge, powerful story that took all I had to give when I worked on it back then, and now, after writing other, lighter stories and novels while it lay fallow, I'm back at it. I've learned a lot about writing in the intervening years. Believe me, I want to get this novel right, because I think it might be real and moving and compelling—it deserves my best efforts. More about that in a later post, but I bring it up here because when I sat down to laser-focus in on making those revisions on the opening chapters, I wanted to test the results against excellent standards. I think these essentials and comments from MacDonald and Bell are great standards for that purpose. Or any novel writing, for that matter.

Do you have a favorite book on writing you go to to test your work against? There are many good ones. I'd love to hear what works for you, and why.

Amazon Removes Author Reviews

You may have already seen this—it might be an attempt by Amazon to deal with the 'sock puppet' issues that have plagued the credibility of book reviews posted on their listings. The company has removed reviews of books by fellow authors.

Here's the article.

On another topic, I hope you're all having a safe and happy holiday weekend. Personally, I'm loving being with family and once again realizing how lucky I am in life. Sometimes I need a bit of a jolt to put life in perspective! Thanksgiving is a great holiday to remind us of all the good things we enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend!

Best Books of 2012: Publishers Weekly's (and Our) Selections

It's almost Turkey Day, and I'm thinking we all want an easy, fun few days to surround it, so instead of posting on an industry topic of controversy and/or intensity, I thought this would be a good time to just share some book selections.

Below are Publishers Weekly's choices of their top ten books of 2012. But before we get there. . .

Let's all add one or two. Here's my selection: Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple: it's  hilarious, and a little dark and twisty. You'll laugh out loud if you've ever had to deal with holier-than-thou parents at your children's school, or if, by chance, you live in Seattle and don't care much for certain aspects of it (or if you understand why someone else might feel that way until they get to know the city), or if you sometimes think you might be crazy and nobody understands (wait, no, none of us writers ever feel that way).

So, what's your favorite book of 2012?

PW's list: Top Ten Books, 2012

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

E-Book Metadata: Key to Sales

One blog reader, Chihuahua Zero, commented on Friday's post that he'd like to read more about metadata—one of the key elements identified by Jon Fine of Amazon as important to e-book sales, and discussed briefly in my post. I appreciate that request—thank you Chihuahua Zero!

Simply put, what I gather from reading about the topic is that metadata is the information about your book that describes your work, and is used to classify it for e-book sales. The e-book publisher uses the metadata you provide to categorize where your book belongs in their lexicon, and how they will present it to potential readers (much like deciding which bookshelf it goes on in the brick and mortar bookstore). 

Here's part of how Jon Fine defined metadata (as reported in a Digital Book World post):

Metadata is basically the online version of everything publishers used to sell books before the rise of digital: Book cover, synopsis, author information, book-jacket blurbs and more. Ignoring the digital versions of these things can doom a book to obscurity.

It starts with the cover. Online, an effective cover is different than what works in print.

“What looks good full-size doesn’t necessarily look good on your cell phone,” said Fine.

But it doesn’t end with the cover. Publishers must make sure their books are categorized correctly and associated with the correct keywords.

“The amount of time you go online to shop for a book and use keywords has grown astronomically,” Fine said.

Perhaps the best piece of metadata that publishers can use to help readers find their books is the text of the book itself. For publishers that enable it, Amazon will search inside the text of the book when readers use the site’s search function.

Fine went on to make a strong pitch for Amazon's approach to selling e-books and how authors should tailor their metadata to fit that approach.

Fine identified metadata in terms authors can easily relate to, such as the appearance of the cover and the content of the book blurb. But there's a whole area about how the data is used technologically and how authors should enter it into e-book publishing sites, that needs to be emphasized as well. This is not stuff that many of us relate to so easily.

One way to understand what authors need to focus on when developing their metadata is to note the emphasis placed by Fine and others on 'key words.' It makes sense that the words you identify as key words to describe your book will determine the categorization and presentation, right? Anyone who's worked with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) knows how important key words are to getting traffic to your blog or website.

So where and how, exactly, do you enter key words for your book, and what else is involved?

According to the website, WritersServices.com, when you are ready to make your book into an e-book for a sales site, you will find that all e-book converters give you a way to add or edit metadata. But it's important to realize that "you should try to embed as much of your metadata as possible into the source file" because editing it in the files (once they've been set up) is not easy. (Go here for the full discussion.) The discussion also identifies what and where metadata is stored—in what online files of the publisher, etc., along with suggestions for how you, the author, might use that information.

I've got to admit, I have the same emotional reaction to this sort of important information that I have when I'm trying to grasp the details of filing my taxes each year. It feels overwhelming. 

So, those of you who've been through this process, could you chime in and tell us about your experience with providing (inputting) metadata, and share any wisdoms you've uncovered? I'd love to hear how you made it work for you.

How To Maximize Sales of Your Book on Amazon

In September Digital Book World held a conference in New York where one of the speakers was Jon       Fine, director of author and publisher relations for Amazon. According to Fine, there are three things you can do to make sure you are getting the best sales numbers possible from your listing on Amazon:

1. Make sure your book is available in all appropriate formats all the time.
2. Make sure your metadata is specific and good: book cover, synopsis, author information, book jacket blurb, etc. This, according to Fine, is probably the most important piece of maximizing Amazon sales.
3. Focus on creating a great Author Page to make it easier for readers to discover you through Amazon.

These suggestions sound excellent for all book sales, to me. For more detail on Amazon's suggestions, check out the DBW report on Fine's presentation here.