Just read a post by John Scalzi on why it seems that so few novelists are published in their twenties.  Or are “kinda old,” as he puts it.  Ahem.  Must be a young punk writing.  

As an old and creaky scrivener who refuses to yell at kids to get off the lawn but who does think the new Star Trek flick is unduly optimistic about the deep space survival odds of entire starship crews not old enough to shave anywhere on their bodies yet, I had to grumble a reply:

Here’s an interesting stat I found in the professional psychology literature: not only does it take a long time to get a novel published (on average, a published novelist is older than other kinds of artists), but there is also a second long time period between published novelists’ first publications and their “great works.” The researchers found that when you look at major novelists, there was, on average, a ten year period of working and publishing between their first published novel and the novels that lasted, that made them famous (if not necessarily rich).

While I love your post, it is interesting how the main reason for novelists being older doesn’t get a mention: people have more to write about as they get older. Sure there are exceptions, young writers, six year olds who can do a novel and get it published. And I wouldn’t put that down — occasionally, really great novels do get written by very young writers. But as an old guy with four or five practice novels under my belt and now, finally, with a really great agent selling my first sellable one, my sense is that the cold, hard realities of human psychological development count for a lot in the novel business.

Life experience is better represented in novels than in probably any other art form because novels, like life, can be complex and multi-layered. The problems in life can be incredibly daunting, crushing, mind-twisting. The twenties you think you are understanding as you live through them aren’t real — when you’re forty, you’ll realize how confused you were; when you’re sixty, you’ll realize how wrong you were in your forties. Sorry, but that’s how it is for everybody.

It takes a novel to lay out such complexity, and it takes a person who has been through them to be able to write it “true.” (Though there is no one under 40 who will believe a word of this blathering.)

Depends on what we mean by a “novel,” too, of course. Possibly, the word should be retired.

Just found a nice post by Jason Pinter  (here) on writers having to spend so much time marketing their work.  And really, on having to spend so much time and life energy marketing, instead of just writing whatever it is their mission in life to write about.  I added a comment and thought it might also fit on this blog:

I … agree that writers’ preoccupation with marketing has gotten tedious. It’s not just the problem of so many authors having to be so preoccupied with marketing (because publishers have discovered that they can drop that responsibility, like the good editing they used to provide, on the writers now and so we have to do it), but because it’s so easy to confuse writing in order to market, with writing about marketing, as if our readers really care.

But the more insidious effect of this preoccupation is on the mental lives of writers. As a psychologist and writer I can assure you that a writer’s mental real estate is finite. Time that should be spent reading literature (whether Tolstoy or Chandler or Nancy Drew mysteries) is devoted instead to reading our Tweets (and other writers’ blogs). Time we really really truly NEED to spend perfecting our craft (ten years at a minimum to be worth our first publication; ten years AFTER our first publication before we will probably write our lifetime’s best stuff) gets spend doing easily scannable blog posts, clever tweets, composing elevator speeches.

Nobody much reads the old shrinks like Eric Fromm anymore; they warned about this pressure in our culture to turn our personalities into marketing agencies. It may mean that we limit our abilities a lot as we strive to become really good jingle writers, instead of really good writers.

Not that marketing can be avoided, of course.   I think it’s really more a matter of striving for balance.  When I’ve run my therapy practices, I had to spend some time “marketing,” but it was really important to have spent far, far more time learning the craft of therapy, reading those hundreds of hours on therapy and psychology in general, and yes, being a patient myself so I’d know what it all felt like.  I have known a number of therapists who might be really good at presenting themselves publicly, at having the most inviting and charmingly reassuring websites, at recruiting lots of patients, but who were basically kind of undercooked in terms of their professional skills, their personal maturity, and most of all, in terms of that hard-to-define quality of “wisdom.”  People it’s easy to find in the book (because their marketing is so thorough), but whom you’d never refer your mom to if she needed a shrink.

Same goes for writers.  I want to read good writers, not good marketers.  If they’re good marketers too, that’s fine — how else will we find them, maybe?  But then again, maybe the master agents like Maas are right: the really great books mostly get promoted by word of mouth.  Somebody, somewhere, buys a copy.  Loves it.  It keeps her up all night.  And she tells two friends.  And so on.

I don’t know if it’s possible, of course, but when I dream, that’s the kind of books I dream of writing.  The kind that keep somebody up late at night so they hate me in the morning when they have to get up for work after two hours’ sleep… but all day they look for a chance to recommend the book to someone else.

My friend, author and freelancer Linda Formichelli, just posted a long interview with Dan Baum, former New Yorker staff writer and freelancer.  Linda had asked me for questions to put to Dan and so the interview is a blend of her questions and mine.  She posted the interview on her blog and by permission (Linda’s and Dan’s), I’m cross-posting it here.  (Thanks, guys!)  Some interesting advice and insights for freelance writers about the hows of doing longer-form journalism and current and future prospects for working writers.  

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Dan Baum has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, and other big-name magazines, and is a former staff writer for The New Yorker; on his website, you can download proposals that landed assignments with these magazines. Baum is the author of Nine Lives, and runs a blog called WordWork. The account of his “short career at The New Yorker“ran as a series of Tweets in May.

Many freelancers fantasize about doing the kinds of pieces that you’ve written. What does it take to succeed in that kind of long-form journalism?

The biggest mistake I see other freelancers make is that they don’t work hard enough. I know that seems odd because if feels like we all work really hard. But it always seemed to me that getting the assignment was the hard part; researching and writing the story is the easy part.

The trick is, proposals have to be really detailed. You have to do a substantial amount of the reporting and the writing just to get the assignment. So you’ve got to be clever about that, because if you spend weeks working on a proposal, you’re going to go broke because you might not sell the story.

On the other hand, if you don’t make the proposal really good, really dense, really packed with information and really well thought out, you’re not going to get the assignments. I’ve been doing this now since 1987, that’s 22 years, and I still write proposals that don’t sell. My website has a bunch of them.

Somebody pointed out on some blog that if you read my proposals that did sell and my proposals that didn’t sell, you’d be hard pressed to tell which is which, because there’s just a lot of luck in this business.

Margaret [my wife] and I used to do freelance for newspapers when we were living in Africa and in Montana, and they would only pay us like $150 per story, but they might also pay a little bit of travel expenses. So we would use the reporting that we did for the newspaper story to finance the writing of a magazine proposal; but it’s always this balancing act between doing enough work on a proposal to sell it but not so much that you’re doing too much work for free.

Generally, by the time I get an assignment, a third of the research is done, and at the very least, I know the parameters of where the research is going to take me and I have a sense of the universe of sources and documents that are going to be available. So I can pretty quickly and easily get the story reported and written.

It may be that you don’t need to do that. I’ve never had much success writing shorter proposals. This is just what works for me, and it’s not necessarily what works for everybody. I don’t want anybody to think that I’m saying that these are the be-all-end-all of story proposals, there are plenty up on the site that haven’t worked.

Well, you’re going to laugh because I cowrote a book called The Renegade Writer about breaking the rules of freelancing, and one of the rules you read in all the writing books is that your queries have to be one page long. But when I started writing longer pitches, I started getting into the national magazines.

Portfolio had a rule that all proposals had to be one page, and Portfolio just went out of business. I don’t think they went out of business because they demanded one-page proposals; I think they went out of business because they didn’t have a very clear vision of what the magazine was. But maybe their insistence on one-page proposals was indicative of a short attention span and a certain amount of panic that things had to move so fast. And that was a monthly, so they could have really taken their time.

Your proposals are a lot of work. When you come up with a proposal idea, do you target it only to one magazine or do you say “if it doesn’t work for magazine A I’m going to send it to magazine B”?

Well, you have to write a proposal for the sensibilities of a particular magazine, so when people tell me “I have an idea for a story,” my first question is “You have an idea for a story for what magazine?” Because you can’t say, “I have an idea for a story, and if I can’t sell it Playboyy I’m going to sell it toRolling Stone, and if I can’t sell it to Rolling Stone I’m going to sell it to Harper’s,” because it just doesn’t work that way.

The story and the magazine go together and it’s very hard to re-write a proposal that doesn’t sell at one magazine for another magazine. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

If you don’t sell that story to the magazine you originally have in mind, probably the smartest thing to do is put it aside, cut your losses, and go on to the next thing. Some people may try to recycle proposals for different magazines; I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do it.

Do you think that’s only for the type of writing you do? Because if I don’t sell something to Family Circle then I’m tweaking that thing for Woman’s Day.

It may be. I want to keep saying this that this is just my experience. Family Circle and Woman’s Daymight be similar enough. In the small number of magazines that I wrote for, you just couldn’t do it. I mean, if you were writing a proposal for Wired, there’s just nobody else you could sell it to. I tried, I’ve tried, I really have. I really have tried and it just never worked for me.

What does it take to make it — what kind of interests and background do you need to be able to do the kind of journalism that you do? What is your background?

I worked for six years in newspapers and then we’ve been freelancing ever since. What does it take? I used to say that for people getting out of college, working at a newspaper is great training, but newspaper jobs are getting hard to get.

I think it takes relentlessness. When I’m starting to work on a story, I’ll start reading about something, and I’ll just follow every link, and as I’m doing it I’ll make a list in a Word document of the people that I need to find.

I start calling them immediately, and talking to them and taking notes on my computer. The expression I use with Margaret is “I had a red dog day today,” which means I had my nose down on the ground and I was going after everything today. Just hoovering in enormous amounts of information. And when I start a proposal, I try to have a series of red dog days where I am just relentless, going after everybody, and as soon as I encounter somebody’s name I pick up the phone and I call. When I finish the interview I say, Who else should I talk to? Then I call those people.

I don’t put it off — I don’t say these are people I’m going to call later — I do it right then. Man, there are times when in one day I can get enough information to write a proposal that will get me a $12,000 magazine assignment.

When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?

I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wiredmagazine.”

So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?

No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.

What do you do if they ask when the publication date is?

I say “I don’t know, that’s out of my hands; it’s above my pay grade.”

On to another topic: You have such a broad range of things that you write about. How do you know, when you come up with an idea, that it’s going to fly? If it’s already all over the Internet, how do you know it isn’t already too much in the public consciousness for somebody to want to run it?

Yeah, that’s what you always face. I want to write a story about Masdar, which is this city being built in Abu Dhabi — a zero energy city being built from scratch. I thought this would be a great story for Wired.

It turned out Wired never heard of it but they said they were suffering from Abu Dhabi fatigue — they have too many stories on Abu Dhabi. Then I tried to talk to The New York Times Magazine and didn’t get anywhere. So I dropped it. It’s a great story, but I just dropped it.

I look for stories with interesting people in them, and one of the tricks that I’m always trying to impress upon young writers is that when you’re interviewing somebody, like if I was interviewing the chief solar engineer at Masdar, a big mistake people make is talking to that guy only about solar engineering. You have to throw in questions that have nothing to do with the subject. How many siblings do you have and what number are you? What do you read? What are your hobbies? Are you married? How many kids do you have? Have you ever been divorced? You’ve got to get them talking about themselves. I’m asking these questions that are just none of my business, really personal questions, and I’ll just keep getting in closer and closer and closer.

I’ll ask, What do you earn? And you’ll see this kind of shock of recognition on the person’s face. Sometimes people say “Well, that’s none of your business,” but rarely. I can barely think of a time that’s happened to me. Usually you see the shock of recognition when the person goes, “Oh, that’s the level we’re talking on.”

People like it, when you get them talking about themselves and unrelated stuff. You need time for this, and it’s a hard thing to do on the phone. But when you’re getting all of that then you know this person as a whole person, and then you can fit them into the story in a way that you’re still writing about Masdar and solar engineering, but you can just throw in a few licks to just make that person real.

It’s kind of a New Yorker trick. When you read about people in The New Yorker, they are somehow more three-dimensional than sources in other magazines. They’re not just a font of quotes, or a representative of a point of view — they’re people.

You also mentioned that you pick up the phone and call people. How do you find them?

Oh, people are easy to find. On the net, you can Google them, and you may not find their phone number but you’ll find organizations that they’ve been attached to. It may take two or three calls. I just tracked down Oliver North and it took three or four phone calls.

It takes a certain relentlessness. It takes not being discouraged. Sometimes you’ve got to call 40 people until you find the right one. If you’re looking for somebody’s who’s obscure, you use an online phone book. If you know Mark Riseman lives somewhere in the Midwest, and you look up Mark Riseman and up come with 400 of them, you’ve got to go through and call all the ones that are in the Midwest. That can take an hour and a half and it’s tedious, but you’ll find him. That’s what I’m talking about a red dog day. You just have your nose down on the ground, and you’re on the trail all day.

Do you worry about competition — other writers coming in and horning in on your gigs?

No. For one thing, we’re kind of out of magazines. I think in a way, it’s over. I think the days of being able to make a living as a magazine writer are rapidly coming to a close.

That is so sad.

It is. I’m not boasting here, but I should be able to get work, right? I was on staff to The New Yorker for 3 years, I worked for Rolling Stone for a long time. I have written for the biggest and most prestigious magazines out there and I can’t get work. Magazines are closing, they’re shrinking, they’re going from 12 issues a year to 10 issues a year, and they’re going from 300 pages to 140 pages.

Some of them are cutting their rates.

Some of them are cutting their rates. You know, when we started magazine work in 1989, a dollar a word was middling pay. A lot of magazines are still paying $1 a word.

And for a lot of freelancers, that’s the Holy Grail. “If I get $1 a word, that means I’ve made it.”

Yeah, well that’s what we were getting in 1989. But you know that whole question of dollars per word is a terrible way to judge an assignment.

You really have to think in dollars per hour. Is that how you do it?

I think of dollars per assignment. This is kind of dollars per hour…if a magazine assignment is going to pay me $3000, then I can figure out exactly how many days I can work on that. The LA Times Magazineis a pretty good outlet for me. They paid a dollar a word but they took 5,000-word stories; I could work on that for two or three weeks, and make a living. I don’t care; it’s just as easy for me to write 5,000 words as it is for me to write 2,000 words. In some ways it’s easier. So I don’t worry about competition. People tell me that they like seeing my pitches, and it helps them. If it helps other people, if it improves the quality of writing out there, if it helps younger reporters get started, I’m happy to do it.

How do you feel about what’s going on in the industry?

My sense is this — and this may be optimistic — I think we writers are in for a few bad years, because right now the public is used to getting everything for free. So the magazines are dying and the newspapers are dying and the quality of work is going to decline because nobody has yet figured out how to get the public to pay for quality reporting.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the public to say we really miss reading the results of two and three weeks worth of investigative work, and that’s worth paying for. Somebody will figure out a business model to get people to pay for it. Then I think we’re going to be a golden era in journalism. I think it’s going to be spectacular some day.

When newspapers and magazines and even book publishers are no longer saddled with the expense of manufacturing, handling, and shipping atoms, it’s going to free up a huge amount of money and I think it’s going to let a whole lot more people get into this business — and there are going to be a whole lot more venues to write for, and it’s going to be great.

I think we’re going to go through a swale of no work. Until the public figures out that it has to pay for quality research and writing, we’re going to face some lean years.

I’m being optimistic. Maybe the public will never say that, maybe quality journalism is over. I kind of don’t think so.

The paper The New York Times is going to disappear; all papers are going to vanish. I don’t worry about that — I don’t really care what medium people are reading in, if it’s a Kindle or if it’s a reader, I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue is, how do we get the public to pay for quality research and writing? Nobody’s figured that out yet because right now the public is excited about getting all this stuff for free. It’s just going to take a little while and I don’t know how long it’s going to take.

Some day it’s going to be great for us.

I hope it’s soon…I make my living almost 100% from magazines.

Yes, we make our living 100% from our freelance writing. I’m 53, Margaret is 55, and right now it feels like we’re back at the beginning of our careers.

It’s scary, but it’s kind of exciting in a way.

Well, it’s exciting when I think about what’s going to follow this period. Although yesterday the Times had a story about digital book piracy, and that’s going to be a problem.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there to write about — we just have to figure out how to get the public to pay for it.

As a kid I was fascinated by a comic strip about a bumbling cop, Fearless Fosdick, most famous for his habit of pursuing bad guys by “firing a warning shot into the crowd.”   In one series of strips, there was a sinister murder weapon that was killing people off — a sheet of paper on which was written a joke that was so funny that anyone who read it would die of uncontrollable laughter.

Thus was planted in my adolescent brain the possibility that a thought could literally kill a person.  (And of course, an undying curiosity to read that joke.  Kind of the Fosdickian equivalent of Odysseus panting to hear the song of the Sirens.)

Later I discovered that various writers of thrillers had attempted to plumb the depths of this concept.  Two of the most famous were Agatha Christie and Thomas Harris.  Harris, in The Silence of the Lambs, included an episode in which the evil psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter persuaded a man in the next cell, “Miggs,” to commit suicide by swallowing his own tongue.  (Lecter is generally good at mindfucking, but this is his most notable example of having a non-drugged victim literally kill himself.)

In her novel Curtain — Poirot’s Last Case, Agatha Christie creates a villain whose skill was in getting others to kill by means of psychological manipulation.  A string of murders are all committed, seemingly by a collection of unlikely suspects; in each case the “killers” had been manipulated into performing the deed by this third party, labeled “X” for much of the book.  Generally, “X” needed only a brief, seemingly casual conversation to launch the “bolt” through the other person’s actions.  It’s often pointed out that “X” is a kind of Iago on steroids.

This is a fascinating topic.  But a moment’s reflection might reveal that the idea of being manipulated into doing something horrendous is not far removed from our everyday experience.  Seductions abound, whether it’s someone using sex or wealth or “best foot forward” lies to get us to marry (or at least sleep with) them, or advertisers conning us into buying the ten dollar shampoo when it cleans no better than the cheapest brand.  Much in our lives is about being, or resisting being seduced into doing things that may be against our self-interest, whether as individuals or “demographics” or entire nations.

The problem, for me, was that these literary examples seemed to lack convincing detail.  For instance, what specifically could Lecter have told Miggs that would have convinced him to use such a horrific way to kill himself?  We don’t get the transcripts, just a news bulletin that Lecter went to work on him verbally and Miggs eventually cracked.  And how about “X” — what exactly happened to make his murders by proxy effective?  Christie’s details, those that she shares, never seemed all that compelling to me.  In fact, it’s precisely because we all, every day, must lash ourselves to the mast as we sail past multiplicities of Sirens beaconing us to the rocks (“Call now! Operators are standing by!”), that I became skeptical.

But there was one place where I knew that words can be very powerful inducers of emotional pain and turmoil, and even self-destructive behavior: the psychoanalyst’s couch.  In theory, this is never deliberate, and all analysts are supposed to be the “good guys.”  (Whether you think they’re effective, we must assume they are at least well-meaning, and deeply believe in the effectiveness of what they do.)

But… but… I also knew something that analysts generally avoid talking, or even thinking about: a surprisingly large percentage of psychoanalytic treatments have injured people.  This has been written about in the field for decades — even Freud admitted that psychoanalysis could be harmful.  (A good source on this is a wonderful book by Theo Dorpat, called Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis.)  And I knew first hand that not only was my own “training analysis” often pretty painful, but that many colleagues had gone through the same ordeals.  Friends talked about spending literally years struggling with and even hating their analysts, and one prominent analyst at a major institute told me that she estimated “about half” of her analytic colleagues had been traumatized by their analyses.  (Some research has confirmed this, such as a study done by my colleague Sue Nathanson Elkind. Elkind surveyed therapists who had been patients themselves and found that many had been injured, and that that a sizeable percentage said that they would never go into therapy again because of the pain or frustration or injuries they had experienced there.)

Thus was born my plan: to write a novel in which psychoanalysis was the murder weapon.  And not in some vague way, like just asserting it happened — I wanted to see if I could convincingly demonstrate the process.  My goal is to show how we can be injured, or even destroyed by the definitions other people might impose on us.  A therapist, teacher, parent, or classmate calling you “eccentric,” might be more harmful than for them to tell you, based on the same evidence, that you are “creative.”   Especially if their real agenda is to get you to swallow your own tongue.

So the book, guided by my great agent, went out to editors this week.  Fingers are crossed.  But I’ll talk more about the concept of psychoanalytic murder, and how one might weave important and (hopefully) constructive concepts into fiction, in future posts.

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[A related post on my other blog: The social intelligence of TV shrinks]

My friend, author Jennifer Lawler, tweeted something this morning about an agent’s blog, and I started looking at his site.  He made a comment in there about writers who read agents’ blogs as having an advantage in the writing world, and his blog site lists a whole bunch of agents’ blogs.  So I thought, maybe he’s right.  Maybe I should start reading agents’ blogs.  So I clicked on about six links and started an “agents/writers blogs” folder in my browser.

But after looking at a few of them, I stopped.  I realized that most of the blogs are really saying the same thing in different ways.  The short version: there are a million writers trying to get their attention, and God knows what publishers (those that still exist) really want.

Of course, this is all true.  Having grown up the oldest of five boys, I learned a valuable lesson about the writing profession and, I usually think, about “everything you really need to know about economics.”  The lesson: life is basically a school of piranahs fighting over one meatball.

You can get discouraged, or at least, wear out on the “we get millions of submissions” messages.  From a psychological perspective, the question is how to keep going, but more important, how to maintain your integrity, develop your unique voice, write your best stuff, and keep on keeping on.

One thing I’ve found helpful in thinking about this is Seth Godin’s little book, The Dip. Godin’s book talks about the psychology of sticking to things versus knowing when to quit.  In a nutshell, he says that the people who do really well at things in life generally have done two key things:

1. They’ve known what to stick to and what to let go of — in order to excel at something (like writing), you can’t also be doing fifty other things.  I agree.  The absolute worst thing that ever happened to my writing was trying to write and teach simultaneously.  Teaching totally wrecked my writing — uses all the same creative energy and skills, and I ended up not writing much at all during my teaching years.
2. They survive the “dip,” the period when the going goes from easy to tough, tougher, toughest.  For writers, this would be the time when you feel discouraged, when your work seems to be more flawed than you imagined, when that easy “Hey! I think I’ll write a book!” sentiment has ground down against the awareness that you don’t really have anything here that’s worth writing, or that writing is mostly rewriting and that’s boring, or your agent sends it back (if you’re lucky enough to have an agent) saying “make it more wonderful” and you sit there wondering WTF.

According to Godin, the good news (if you’re the kind who really works up that long, steep slope, who won’t won’t won’t quit ever) is that most people drop out about now.  It’s too hard.  They quit.  They go on to other things, or have too many other things going on. That is when you start, eventually, to succeed.  Because the harder and steeper the slope, the more people quit.  As long as you’re not one of them, as long as you keep on improving, getting more skilled and experienced, the steepness of the slope is ultimately your secret weapon.

So psychologically speaking, in a weird kind of paradox, all the competition may just make you better and better.  You just have to be one of the ones who never, ever quit.

I’ve begun to immerse myself in my second novel about my heroine detective, and so am thinking again about the daily workflow. Generally, the main part of the process that interests writers is the question of whether to have some kind of daily writing quota, most often a word-count based quota. But I think I’m realizing that what I really need is a somewhat more complex routine.

Here’s where I am at: I have the plot and plot outline. I have a working list of characters and scenes, though emphasis so far is on “list” because that’s just about all I have for most of these: tentative names and places. Vague glimmers of ideas about them. I also have a list of the “ingredients” that should be common to any book about this particular heroine, including things about her and her style of working, her mental profile/attitudes/psychology, and the kinds of situations and issues she tends to get pulled into. (This list is bigger — including things like the different dilemmas she keeps wrestling with, meanings of things like sex or work or identity for her, etc., but this is the gist. Some writers call this the “formula” for a particular character, series, or kind of novel. Formulas really do help keep things consistent from book to book; if a reader wants to follow a particular heroine or hero, say Jane Whiteside in Thomas Perry’s novels, it’s because there are predictable things about the character and her challenges from book to book that one enjoys reading about again and again. If the writer loses track of these ingredients, he or she loses that readership.)

Though I’ve started in on the writing, I’ve actually got a bit of fleshing out to do on many of these list items before I can move around easily in this imaginary world. While I’ve often written by just plunging in with a vague notion of plot, I think it’s proving more helpful to take the time to first construct the characters in a scene, to give them pretty fleshed-out independent lives. Because when you really know the whole iceberg, it’s easier to write credibly about the tip that shows up above water in an individual scene.

For instance, in scene one, I describe a new character, a pedophile who gets nabbed by the detective. For him, I did actually flesh out the profile first, using the template below. As a result, when I wrote the scene I felt like I knew a lot about how he’d react, and it made the scene, including his arrest, more vivid:

His wife Betsy later tells me they arrested him the next morning, after the kids were at school. He screamed and collapsed and it took four officers to pry his hands off the door jamb and drag his thrashing screaming praying to Mary Mother of God body into the back of the squad.

Because I had fleshed out details of his life, for instance, I realized that this guy would indeed collapse when arrested, and start frantically praying. As with other things in that chapter, it was much easier to give him a pretty complex set of attributes (how courtly and gentle he was to the detective, how he sheds a tear talking about how he wants his daughter to become a doctor, even though he’s also molesting her, etc.)

My current working template for fleshing out characters includes a bunch of questions that take time to answer (see below). My second scene in the book is one in which the heroine has to meet and interact with six new people, all important characters, along with learning about a new physical space (a large Victorian house which contains a school she’s attending) and an institutional “space” in transition (the tradition of the small school, and the fact that it is being purchased and transformed by a corporation.) Meaning, ideally, I have a lot of homework to do — six characters to flesh out, extensive notes on the space, etc.

Some of this can be invented as I write, but even when I do that, it helps inspire me and keeps things consistent if I have at least some background fleshed out. If you KNOW your character is secretly hostile toward men, for instance, you’re more likely to come up with the real-life, subtle little signs of that in the dinner party scene, instead of writing something that is too over-the-top that you’ll then spend a week trying to work around during your later revisions.

So I’m finding that my work day is kind of like riding a railway for a distance of 1000 words, but in order to do that, I first have to build the tracks. Since I want to do my thousand words in the morning, it means that I have to do two things later in the day: build the “track” for the next day (filling in the general information/profiles/listing clever ideas for the scenes I’ll write), and then doing some editing of today’s thousand words. Because I find if I write a section then go off to the gym, I always come up with a bunch of improvements or new ideas. (Often simple things: realizing I should have given some info about where people were sitting, what they were doing with their bodies in that first meeting; realizing that two characters might already be signaling that they are going to like, or hate, each other, etc.)

Last but not least is research. My character is learning about psychology, and also training in ninjitsu, a new sport for her. I have to do some scouring of the history of psychology and learn, maybe first-hand, some things about being a black-clad assassin. Sounds like a full day, particularly if I want to be a “working novelist” who actually gets one or two of these things written every year.

But a full work day isn’t bad, especially a structured one like this. Nothing is harder for a writer than not being sure what he or she is supposed to do next.

My Character notes template

Name and nicknames:

Age:

DOB:

Address:

Occupation:

IQ:

Physical description:

Character description:

Important goals in story/life:

Important background (synopsis):

Major secret:

Secret vices:

Secret virtues:

Interests and likes:

Dislikes:

Copes with stress:

Vulnerabilities:

How sees self versus how others see:

Vignette that reveals character:

Last night I watched the old 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon, which featured one of the very few positive portrayals of a polyamorous relationship in any popular film.  Since as a psychologist I happen to know something about the research on poly relationships, namely that they can be healthier in many ways than traditional nuclear relationships, I find it interesting that so few film or literary portrayals of these relationships exist.  Then of course, there’s also the point that so predictably, by the end of the film this tender, indeed quite wonderful picture of a poly marriage between two men and one woman has to be completely dismantled, with the surviving couple embracing traditional one woman, one man marriage.

The ending doesn’t ring true, of course.  The tenderness and vitality of the threesome and the vitality and health of the community of miners who support and embrace their marriage, feels like the thing the writers really believed in.  As the mining town collapses into the ground upon the arrival of the preacher and the “good people” who show up to colonize and wreck the place, we have a fleeting image of one of the collapsing buildings, bearing the sign “Garden of Eden.”  The film is deeply subversive in the good sense of that term — it lays out an alternative vision of a truly beautiful form of existence found seldom in our culture, and the implied question, behind the false commercial ending, is “why not?”

But as any writer with experience knows, they would have never made the film if it ended with a happy three-person marriage intact.  While most great literature is inclined to be subversive and you might say, constructively sociopathic, most commercial success depends on drowning those creative little kittens in a basket under a cold, deep stream of green.  Just as the only marketable solution to Paint Your Wagon was let one of the guys go off alone and to force the other two to smile and say they really prefer him gone, you may have to spend a lot of time with your agent wrassling your subversions into a form that will seem marketable.  How to do this and not lose your own vision?

(If you are very lucky, you’ll have an agent and/or editor who really supports your vision — they don’t steer you into something more “commercial” and never lecture you about what the other kids are selling; rather, they and you will engage this question together and in depth.)

The problem for a writer is first viewed mainly from their own point of view as a person.  As a writer, you probably tend to be something of an outsider, a marginal observer more than a red-blooded full participant in your family, community, culture.  And you have a vivid imagination and so if you ask “what if?” questions, you can start to have fun filling in the blanks.  What if two men loved one woman and they wouldn’t accept the necessity of duels or grief to solve the problem?  What if space aliens really did land here?  What if Washington lost the revolutionary war?  Get most writers going on those kinds of questions, and they can immediately start to fill in the hypothetical “history,” often with what feels to them like improved visions of what might have been.

But selling it is another thing.  Two categories of reasons for this tend to be cited: political and commercial.  While the commercial reasons are generally simple in concept — “it’s great, kid, but it’ll never sell…” — the political may be less familiar but equally important to writers.

“Political” is shorthand for what in real life is the counterpart of the The Matrix — it’s the complex network of institutions and their ways of controlling things in our world, including how we even see and experience our world, which exists to maintain the current power relationships.  Political includes formal “institutions” like the government (who can fine a “wardrobe malfunction” or cordon off protest speakers), religious organizations that try to influence policy, and politicians who seek to enforce or create restrictive laws.  (Political forces are also shaped by the commercial — many if not most of our laws are engineered by corporations for their own profit-seeking motives.)

Most of all, “political” forces include the active participation of anyone in our society who reacts against threats to the status quo: if you say a “bad” word at a party, voice a suspiciously different opinion at church, or wear the wrong clothes to the club, somebody somewhere will take it upon themselves to let you know and try to make you change.  Not always, and seldom consciously doing it as a self-appointed “town marshall,” but they will have an unconscious “need” of their own to somehow let you know you’re straying too far, buddy.  And you only need to be “corrected” about ten percent of the time for the lessons to affect you on a deep unconscious level.

Your agents, your editors, the people you pitch a script to, all work within the confines of this political and commercial matrix.  If anything, they probably know their way around the matrix far better than you do.  If you’re lucky, or work in a genre where “different is good” this may not create a crippling set of problems for you in getting your voice out there.  But since real life is never like the fantasy, the most successful writers will generally have to find some way to navigate the matrix.

One clue to doing so may be based on going beyond the usual “political or commercial” theories.  Meaning, understanding something about the psychology of conservatism.  I’m not talking about merely the “Rush” brand of conservatism, though it includes this too. (And reducing all conservatism to “evil fucking blowhards” won’t help you think this through.) Rather, it’s useful to think about the psychological needs and difficulties that lead not just “right wingers” but most people to generally prefer the familiar versions of reality in their stories, whether stories are movies or books or those magazine pieces on “five ways to get the gerbils out of your shoes” that are the bread and butter of many writers.

A simple key to understanding this is to see your job as a writer as that of filling in gaps.  Because the thing that makes people uneasy about, say, a story about a polyamorous relationship, is “what then?”  Just as, when I was a kid, my father gently explained that I should not consider dating black girls because “nobody will accept the children,” most people don’t understand how to think about your wonderful, alternative version of how life could be because they just can not imagine how it will play out as well as the “normal” way of doing things.  What then?  What will your little half-black baby do?  What will happen to a poly family after the movie ends?

And if they can’t imagine the answers to those questions, they simply will not accept the story.

Or they will fill in the blanks with the available stock visions, and once that happens, your vision may be sunk simply because the stock versions are not what you had in mind, and odds are, they’re not at all pleasant.

Take poly relationships.  The current dominant vision of polyamory is a pretty unappealing one: a gristly 99 year old Mormon humping a dozen thirteen year old semi-retarded slave wives pretty much captures it.  Who (other than 99 year old Mormon geezers) wants that?  If that is the only possible version of “what might be,” your partially completed vision of an alternative community of polyamorous good people will be very hard to market.

People can’t help but fill in the blanks, generally with very stereotyped fillers.  Writers may forget that most people are not like them — they’re not good at imagining or constructing new and more satisfying resolutions to the “what then?” questions.  For most of your potential readers, it may not be obvious how this will play out, how it will work.  In fact, for the most part, your readers don’t really like ambiguity.

Psychological researchers are now saying that future conservatives were most often children who were more anxious than average about having things be structured and predictable.  They needed things more orderly, and would be uncomfortable otherwise.  Which is sad, but not necessarily evil.

Living deep within your audience like a possessing demon, the conservative tendency will gnaw at them for closure, certainty, and above all, predictability.  Your vision has to somehow mesh with their usual, preferred story.  Good guys win, bad guys are punished.  None of this “there was something good in the criminal” or “the good guys were morally corrupt too” shit.  They just won’t have it.  End of story. (“End of story” is, you may have noticed, a favorite argument-ender of right wing pundits and mentalities.  In saying “end of story” one is really saying “now we have closure and a version of the ‘truth’ I like, everything is tidy, there are no loose ends, so stop talking.” Conservative thinking distilled into a single phrase, that.)

What this all implies is that if you are a writer with an alternative view of what reality can be, your job is to fill in the gaps. Don’t let them end the story in their usual way.  Show (don’t tell — too scary) your readers what might be.  Flesh it out.  Make it work and above all, align your vision of alternative ways of living or thinking with the values you probably do share with your conservative audience: justice, truth, love, creativity, whatever.  Showing frightened people how fire works is, in the end, more constructive than just yelling at them that they are scared of a little light and warmth.

This is what successful writers do.  Often, the simplest way to put it is that they show the “alternative” character from the inside, and this appeals to at least a critical mass of open readers who may feel, yeah, he’s different from me, but I get it.

And don’t forget your other ally: the other “angel” inside the reader who is, herself or himself, “different” and open to, and even hungry for alternative visions, deeper understandings, new ways of seeing and feeling.  Forget this half of the equation and everything I’ve said can come off as far more condescending to the “dumb brutes” than I mean it to.  I, too, like the familiar a lot of the time. Much of life functioning at all depends on a 90% familiar experience most days.

I wish Paint Your Wagon ended at the “intermission” that is still built into the recording of the film.  Three people love each other, adapt to each other, solve problems together, and we can leave them to their life.

This evening watched a swell old flick, Bell, Book & Candle, in which a witch played by the beguiling Kim Novack (and/or her cat — one can’t be totally sure) manages to seduce and beguile poor innocent little Jimmy Stewart and make him fall in love with her.  Well, things go as they do and so after a delightful romp, in the end poor Novack has discovered that she can’t really be “in love” unless she basically loses her witchly powers and becomes, gasp, a traditional 1950s housewife who cries and wears pastels.   Later on, found this nice post where the same observation was made.

It’s easy to recognize this abrupt retreat into tedious conventionality in the film as you watch it now, probably easier than it may have been for viewers in 1958, when possibly a smaller percentage of the country was “hep” to the various subtexts in the film and when people were still treading cautiously lest they be suspected of “un-American activities” by friends or neighbors.  But it’s also easy  to forget that George Carlin wasn’t famous yet, the sixties had not happened, and Elvis was still shocking people.  So we may feel tempted to blow off such a conventional ending, if we even notice it as a kind of letdown, except that things probably aren’t all that different today in many respects.

For many writers, there is still a strong external, and so internalized pressure  toward conventionality in what you write about, and how you write it.  It may not seem so much politically- as it does commercially driven.  (If there is really much difference between the two.)  The editorial calendar of a major writers’ magazine recently came out, and their year is planned mostly around articles on “how to make it,” how to make your blogs sell, how to market stuff.  Very little on what to write, on the inner life, the craft, the guts of writing as traditionally understood.  Writers, apparently, have been replaced by marketers who word process.

This is not evil people, it’s economics, of a sort.  (The devil is always a matter of economics, though.)  Because the attitude of the publishing world is generally driven by the need for the sure thing.  If it hasn’t already been sold by the millions, if your book or article is too-new an idea, you may hear that those things “never sell.”  You do “competitive analyses” in book proposals not to show that your new book will be remarkably different, but to reassure editors that it will be pretty much the same as some kind of Mendelian (or Hollywood) “cross” between current bestseller X and current bestseller Y.  What they want are clones, but clones that are of course totally fresh and different and new knockoffs of the stuff “that sells.”  Which means that if you write for a living (or want to), your critical choices (in things like what projects and directions to go in, what agents to seek, etc.) may be based in part on how you resolve this tension for yourself.

But on a different level, this isn’t just about being “commercial” versus being “an honest writer.”  Because the real dynamic tension for writers is that between expressing your individual ideas or vision or quirky thinking, and the legitimate psychological needs of most of your audience for some kind of predictability.  This needs to be understood, I think, because it can be easy to confuse the needs flowing from the psychology of asthetic joy on the part of your reader, from the political and economic needs of  your friendly global corporate publishing company and perhaps too-timid agent.

On the one hand, you (as a writer, artist, scientist, or citizen) can be so quirky, or so subversive, that you could shake the foundations of your entire society.  This may be just peachy — foundations often need shaking.  Jefferson, Madison, Franklin were shakers of foundations as much as Carlin or the Beatles were; religious visionaries are often the most dramatic shakers of all (before their followers try to pave it all over and stop the flow of change forever.)  As a writer, your “job” sometimes may feel like it’s questioning everything, being a troublemaker, a genuine pain in the ass of your culture, your corporation, your high school principal, or the school board.

On the other hand, you have to contend with the tendencies of the human nervous system to organize things into familiar patterns.  And to react strongly — even homicidally –  if the patterns seem too unfamiliar, out of place, or “wrong.”

By God, the audience WILL hear it as rhythm, whether you put it in there or not! Or if they can’t find one, they will literally filter the whole work out of their memories, and you’re sunk.    They WILL see a movie in 1958 as not quite “right” if Jimmy Stewart doesn’t “get” Kim Novack (and if, in 1958, she’s not the one who gets “got”), and it will not tolerate a movie ending with her still wearing black velvet outfits and being overtly seductive, instead of tearful and soft and helpless.  It’s not voluntary, it’s the nervous system.  Runs on its own, you see.  It’s a big machine for pattern recognition.

“Nothing we can do about it.”  Or so the marketers believe, anyway. (As did the “experts” who just knew that once inside the voting booths, most people would just flinch and not vote a black man into the, um, white house.)

Since cautious believers in the usual rhythms write the checks for writers (if and only if you produce  safe bits of art for them to bet on), they can tend to undermine subversion or change, not necessarily because it’s some political conspiracy (not that there aren’t those), but because, well, “who’s gonna buy a story like that?”  (And so the fewer weird, quirky little publishers there are around, say…  you already know the math.)

The tension this creates is carried by every writer who hasn’t already turned their writing into a variation of a corporate cubicle job — a “feed them exactly what they want and nothing more” series of assignments (usually, those that involve ad copy or selling lists of “top five” health tips for getting gerbils out of your shoes or something.  Remember, if you’re still thinking of selling out, numbered lists are hard to beat.)

But if you haven’t stopped trying to be yourself, if you haven’t given  up hope of changing the world, you will write because you see something that bugs you.  You may even want to scream about it, or murder someone.  (The wonderful old writer and Freudian analyst Theodore Reik used to say “a thought murder a day keeps the doctor away.” Try it, though some prefer slow torture.  Or better still, write about it, and infect others with your awareness.  Change the vibrations of more folks than just yourself.)

Yet, going totally off to your own drummer while still getting a decent piece of marketable fiction or essay or whatnot, is the trick, isn’t it?  You want someone to read it, you want someone to want to read it, you want them to want it on their Kindle.

So the magic trick, the trick to witchy spells, is to find resolutions that change the paradigms, that rewire brains, but in ways that still make sense, feel right, taste yummy to timid palates.  You want to find a way, in short, for Kim Novack to remain the sexy witch who weaves spells over Jimmy Stewart, and maybe for Jimmy to learn to loosen up and enjoy the process and her power over him a bit more… and maybe for the world to be a bit different, a bit more magical, than it was before all the shenanigans and spells started to disrupt the axes a bit.  How to write that way?

I suspect I’m not the only one who has to struggle to get the hang of blogging. I have seen writers on some forums I read who say they just don’t get writing for blogs at all. (Their reasons are really about working for free, when as writers we have to work very hard to get paid anything at all for our work. Good points, those!)

But one writes if one is a writer, and most of the time that includes all sorts of things, paid or non. And I’ve neglected this one a bit.

My nonfiction agent mentioned to me that PhDs have the hardest time of anyone writing the “complete idiots guides” kinds of books. I think it’s for the same reason that I have dawdled on this blog. Obsessionality, pure and simple. Obsessionals are both excellent and lousy writers — excellent in dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s (for those of you who actually recall how one does dot i’s and cross t’s with an actual pencil or pen.) The lousy part is letting it flow… and keeping a post within bounds. The tendency is to worry too much, or to over-plan.

I should actually know something about this — I even got Writer’s Digest to buy an article on obsessional writers a few months ago. (Still hoping they publish it, but at least I got to cash the check.) One writes about what one knows, I guess.

Anyway, plan now is to get in here and say more, more often.

What language shall you make love in? It can seem like an odd or impossible question, but it gets right to the heart, I’m realizing, of certain kinds of writing and reading experiences. Particularly fiction, or so it seems at first glance.

Someone who’s spent time in a dark room with a lover who thought and spoke in different languages will know what this means. I remember someone whispering Lakota phrases once and it was like falling through a trapdoor in the dark to a different time, different tastes and touches and smells and glowing embers in the middle of the bedroom/tipi floor and suddenly what birds appeared and what they thought might actually matter, not to mention that for a moment this was the most exotic exciting woman on earth. I know people who have fallen in love together as they struggled over English-Hungarian dictionaries to decide what they wanted for dinner. Cut below the actual words and you are in a different mental universe, one where “core” meanings, primitive feelings, vulnerability and longing and hunger are the main tongues spoken.

Further tangential data — that “click” thing that happens when you immerse yourself for a bit in some other language. We went to Spanish camp and by the end of the week the strangest moment came when I looked down a list of Spanish sentences and realized that I knew exactly what just about every sentence meant but that if I had to do it, word for word, I could not possibly translate into English half the words on the sheet. It was a crystal clear moment of insight into something in my own brain, or maybe “brains” — I actually had been “growing” (no metaphor) a section of my language brain that spoke Spanish, but it had not connected up (and maybe didn’t need to?) with the older part of my brain that speaks and reads and thinks English.

All of which bears on my realization (not new, novel, unique or even clever, but still…) that to write a novel is to have to invent a completely new dialect. Or else (mainly until you get the hang of it) to adopt someone else’s, which may range from the crude (most stories in “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,” say) to the too-stylized by half (bad Hemingway) to amazing. The mental work involved in jumping into a new novelist — the little adjustments you feel yourself making when you go from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” to Alan Furst to Hawthorne, is the shift in your head. Same applies when you write something — I have two novel projects going and each one has different characters, developmental ages, languages, really.

It’s like playing dress-up, but only in your head. How does this person think, speak, move? What worries her or him? What excites? What swear words do they use, if any? (And if none, probably means you have some real explainin’ to do, or else you’re not going to take them very deep or intense or important, and so why bother writing it at all?) Then you actually have to keep tweaking that person’s personality, character, style — are they too much like me? Is that bad or good? Are they boring, conventional, predictable, prone to playing it safe all the time (which is why psychologists, say, end up being both lousy writers and lousy characters. Like accountants, but in tweed.)

Yet each new character/dialect calls for something “real” inside you — whether the point of view is that of a young woman who cuts on herself but longs for justice, or an old, depressed widower. Neither works if something hungry for expression doesn’t come through. So it’s dress up, but on “come as one of your favorite or most intriguing characters” nite.

This has been a ramble because I started wanting to drift around the periphery of the experience of reading something on my new Kindle. So far, it’s odd. By the end of the day I’m picking up paper books again, but I also recognize that my “home base” in terms of reading nowadays is often a computer screen. Maybe the K is a bit too far away — the “language” isn’t just what’s on the page, but the whole phonetic and tactile and aesthetic experience. It’s a little chunk of plastic that moves slow.

Recently watched — painfully — “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” about a man who is paralyzed except that he can blink. In French. So pretty nurses and speech rehab people are up close to him all day, arousing him (which of course nobody notices or attends to — sick people lacking any sexuality, etc.); reciting the entire alphabet (in most-probable-letter sequences… in French) and he’s supposed to blink when she gets to the letter he means. Wrote a whole book like that, then died (I suspect of exhaustion.) And all the while I sat there thinking, first, they did this better in the novel “Johnny Got His Gun” which everybody read 25 or 30 years ago but not since — because the guy used Morse Code. And second, don’t the French know Morse Code? It would have been vastly more efficient for him to have learned that and then to have found some nurses who could learn it. Heck, a short blink and a long one for an “a” is hugely better than having to wait till she gets to the “a” midway through the list and blurts it, then having to catch her before she gets to the next letter.

So aesthetically speaking, I wasn’t moved by his plight, just annoyed at the whole painful production. The little coating of sentimentality (in French) didn’t make it any better or more moving — it’s almost scripted that we “should” feel moved by paralyzed guys in wheelchairs, but I was not sensing any real clear person under there, and having an automatic “Awwww…” response to people in wheelchairs merely insults and marginalizes them anyway, so that’s out; anyway, the whole production was too distracting.

Reading the Kindle novel still feels a bit like that. Like making love filtered not through dictionaries or sensing the feeling of the other and foregoing the words, but needing everything spelled out like in some odd college campuses. [“I propose now to put my hand on your belt buckle -- please signify yes that is okay or no that is not and sign here...“] Click the page-turn button, have a flash of distracting blackout, and be so relieved the right next page comes up that you forget what the damned novel was about, or who was in peril, or about to score.