Want to be a Successful Author? 10 Things English Majors Have to Unlearn

—maybe with some help from BookCountry.com?

One of my favorite moments in film happens in Star Trek IV, when the Enterprise crew find themselves back the 20th century. Kirk refers to “the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, the novels of Harold Robbins,” and Spock replies, “Ah... The giants!”

Funny bit. But the thing is—they were giants. Not great writers, but great storytellers. They provided the stories people of their era were eager to read—the same way Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Dickens did.

WH-A-A-A-T!!? I can hear the English majors screaming now—“You dare to compare Susann and Robbins with great literary writers?”

Well, yeah. Because Austen, the Brontës, and Dickens didn’t set out to be “great literary writers.” They set out to make money writing books—just like Susann and Robbins.

Hey, I’m an English major myself (technically Art History, but I spent enough time studying literature to qualify.) I could compare and contrast the use of nature imagery in the Romantic poets before I’d ever read a Harlequin romance.

But looking back, I realize I should have given the Harlequins more notice. Studying classic literature gives you a false idea of what most people read. It also teaches a cerebral rather than visceral approach to writing—plus it gives us a pretty distorted idea of the typical author’s life.

Here are some things I learned in academia that worked against me in the real publishing world.

1) Genres? We don’t need no stinking genres! I’ve spent most of my writing life “trampling across every accepted boundary of fiction category with joyful abandon,” as my UK editor once put it. Which made my work almost impossible to sell.

The truth:  Most successful writers get in through the genre door. Even a lot of literary ones. Kurt Vonnegut wrote SciFi; Margaret Atwood writes women’s fiction; Dennis Lehane writes mysteries. Very few purely literary novels sell—and most of those are by authors who have published scores of exquisitely crafted short fiction pieces in prestigious journals.

We need to choose a genre and write as creatively as possible within its boundaries. Otherwise, no matter how brilliant we are, we can stay unread forever. Even self-publishers have to categorize themselves or get lost in the amazon.com jungle.

2) It’s all about the theme.

The truth: Nope. It’s about the story. Turns out theme is something you kind of sneak in, just for yourself. If you want future English majors to ferret out your themes a hundred years from now, you have to actually sell the book now. And, outside of a classroom, most people don’t give a damn about themes. I know. Sigh.

3) People will be impressed by your vast knowledge of literature.

The truth: Um, not really. That quote from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko may impress your former Restoration Lit. professor, but after she dies, there will be zero people who care. 

4) Use topic sentences; never use fragments; semicolons are our friends.

The truth: Strict adherence to the kind of grammar that’s required for English papers and the PMLA comes across as stilted and boring in fiction. And a little hostile.

5) Because writers like Gertrude Stein, Joyce, and Kerouac did cleverclevercleverthings with punctuation and syntax, you can imitate them, and people will think you’re clever too.

The truth: Hard to read is hard to sell. 

Gertrude Stein gave great parties (and her wife baked killer brownies) which fueled her fame more than her books. Joyce’s books were reputed to be, ahem, dirty (never underestimate the power of banning books to get people to buy them.) And Kerouac tantalized the Mad Men era with tales of the non-conformist life they were starved for. I’m not saying these writers aren’t great, but experimental writers usually need other factors beyond their actual writing to get them into the public eye. 

6) Beautiful prose=successful writing.

The truth: Henry James has a lot to answer for. When was the last time you picked up a book to read on the plane because of the long, detailed descriptions and tangential philosophic musings?

7) You can’t go wrong if you follow the masters. Prologues, omniscient POV, weather report openings—literature is full of stuff publishers tell you not to do. If Dickens or Faulkner did it, how can it be wrong?

The truth:

• Readers’ requirements change with the times. The Victorians had long winter nights and rainy days to fill. Wealthy flappers had servants and no jobs. Mid-twentieth centurians had only three TV networks. Even twenty years ago, there was no Internet. Fierce competition changes the rules. 

• What’s clever the first time can become clichéd. Good stuff gets repeated. A lot.  I’ll never forget taking a person to his first production of Hamlet. “Why do they call Shakespeare great?” sez he. “That play was just one cliché after another!”

• Some things are tough to do well. Why sabotage yourself by inviting comparison with the greats?

• They’re famous; you’re not. After a publisher has a bunch of money invested in your “brand” maybe you’ll get to break the rules, too.

8) Just be honest and authentic and “tell your truth,” and you’ll be a success.

The (real) truth: People don’t want to read about you. They want to read about themselves. “Authenticity” alone doesn’t sell books. Unless your work also tells a great story with universal appeal, nobody cares.

9) Writers’ lives are considered important and interesting. You spent all those class hours studying every detail of Emily Dickinson’s existence, every nuance of Scott and Zelda’s correspondence, and endlessly pondering why Virginia Woolf took that walk into the River Ouse. So you think maybe if you get published, people will be interested in your life too.

The truth: If you say you’re a writer, most people will 1) let their eyes go glazey, 2) ask the direction to the bathroom, or 3) tell you their life story and offer to go 50-50 with you on the book if you “just write down the words.”

10) Writers get to spend lots of time in exotic cafés, discussing life’s great questions and drinking interesting alcoholic beverages. (OK, I read way too much Hemingway and Fitzgerald at an impressionable age.)

The truth: Most writers are shy, boring people who work in hidey-holes wearing old sweats. Every day. Hardly anybody sends them to Paris.

But English majors need not despair. We now have help in unlearning all this stuff.

There’s a new kid on the block in the writersphere called Book Country. Penguin has just launched the site for genre writers ONLY. 

Yes. That Penguin. The company that was founded to bring great literature to the proletariat is now promoting proletariat lit.

The site helps you identify your genre and get your work critiqued. One of the founders is Colleen Lindsay , former agent and Twitter-goddess. I haven’t had much time to play around on the site, but it looks intriguing. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact they plan to also provide self-publishing services for a fee, but their genre-map is fascinating. Especially for people like me who need a little education in the whole genre thing.

There may be hope for us English majors yet.

So what about you, fellow scriveners? Did you major in English? Do you find it helped or hindered your writing career? Have you settled on a genre? Have you checked out BookCountry.com?

12 Signs Your Novel isn't Ready to Publish

Self-publishing is the trending subject in Cyberia. Last week my post on self pubbing got over 2500 hits. And 60 comments. It not only made “Best of the Best” of Jane Friedman’s “Best Tweets for Writers,” but got a shout-out from publishing blog-god Nathan Bransford. (Thanks, Jane and Nathan!)

I’m amazed. Many thanks to all of you—with special nods to everybody who has taken the time to leave a comment. Lots of information and food for thought there. I think one of the reasons this blog is getting popular is the quality of the comments.

To recap what I said in that post: KINDLE NO BOOK BEFORE ITS TIME! Don’t throw your fledgling book out into the Kindleverse without some serious thought. 

I realize you feel pressure to join the e-book revolution. Stories of Kindle millionaires are everywhere. The e-book provides a magnificent way for established writers to monetize their backlist—or even their frontlist, if they decide to go indie all the way like Barry Eisler. It’s also worked magic for new novelists like Karen McQuestion and Amanda Hocking, and I’m reading more success stories every day. (There’s one from author Mark Williams at the bottom of the comment thread of the self-pub post that’s a must-read.) I LOVE stories like this.

But it’s important to keep in mind these were all seasoned writers before they self-published. They had inventory. They knew how to build platform and make sales.

So don't expect their results until you're a seasoned writer, too. Even if you don’t get pounded with bad reviews, you could be sabotaging your future career. If a reader finds bad grammar, misused words, and no plot—even in a 99-cent e-book—they’re not going to want to read that author again. Maybe only a handful of people will buy it, but if you become a literary darling some day, that bad book will always be lurking somewhere on somebody’s Kindle, waiting to destroy your reputation.

Writing has a learning curve like any other skill. You don’t get to play Carnegie Hall after a few piano lessons. You don’t join the PGA tour after a couple of afternoons on the golf course. Learning to write takes time. Way more time than you think.

It sure did for me. I cringe when I read some of my early work. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the rejections that kept the worst of it from seeing print.

But at the time, I thought that stuff was perfect. Jody Hedlund discussed this phenomenon in a great post last week. She pointed out: “Writers are blind to their own mistakes.”

All beginners make mistakes. Falling down and making a mess is part of any learning process. But you don’t have to display the mess to the world.

Here are some tell-tale signs that a writer is still in the learning phase of his/her career.

1)     Lots of writerly prose. Those long, gorgeous descriptions that got so much praise from your high school English teacher and your college girlfriend are a huge turn-off for the paying customer who’s searching for some kind of story in there.

2)     English-major showing off. It may feel incredibly clever to start every chapter with an epigraph from Finnegan’s Wake. But unless it’s really important to the plot, this will probably annoy rather than impress readers. Ditto oblique references to the Cavalier poets or anything by Thomas Mann. People want to be entertained, not worship at your self-erected literary altar.

3)     Episodic storytelling. I admit my own guilt on this one. I could never end my first novel, because it didn’t actually have a plot. It was a series of related episodes—like a TV series. (Many thanks to former agent Colleen Lindsay for reading the whole ms. and telling me this in a kind way. Because of her thoughtful comments, I could finally drop the book and move on.) Critique groups often don’t catch this problem, if each episode has a dramatic arc of its own.

4)     Hackneyed openings. I wrote a post on these a while back.The worst is the “alarm clock” opening—your protagonist waking up—the favorite cliché of all beginning storytellers. There’s a hilarious video on this from the comedians at Script Cops They say, “78 % of all student films start with an alarm clock going off.”

5)     Thinly disguised oh-poor-me memoirs and revenge fantasies. Having a terrible childhood does not make a great story. Neither does surviving a life-threatening disease. That kind of experience needs a lot of processing before it can be worked into entertaining fiction.

Also, readers probably won’t be enthralled by a 200,000 word description of a guy just like your toxic ex, even if he gets hacked up by his ax-murdering second wife in the final scene. (Yes, I know that was fun to write.)

6)     Semi-fictionalized religious/political screeds. You have to be really, really good (or Ayn Rand) to get away with political fiction. Carl Hiaasen manages to throw quite a bit of his politics into his comic mysteries, and Chris Moore gets in some digs in his hilarious horror tales. But if you aren’t as funny as those guys, save it for a letter to the editor.

And if you’ve written a novel just so you can send everybody who isn’t exactly like you to Hell, your reader will want to send you there, too.

7)     Dialogue info-dumps and desultory conversation. Another of my personal pitfalls. After 25 years in the theater, my brain’s natural habitat was the script. It took me years to learn characters don’t have to say all that stuff out loud. And “hello how are you fine and you nice weather” dialogue may be realistic, but it’s snoozifying. Readers don’t care about “authenticity” if it doesn’t further the plot.

8)     Tom Swifties. The writer who strains to avoid the word “said” can rapidly slip into bad pun territory, as in the archetypal example: “‘We must hurry,’ exclaimed Tom Swiftly.” Bad dialogue tags may have crept into your consciousness at an early age from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. They're great fun, but they were written by a stable of underpaid hacks and although the stories are classic, the prose is not.

9)     Mary Sues. A Mary Sue is a character who’s a stand-in for the writer’s idealized self. She’s beautiful. Everybody loves her. She always saves the day. She has no faults. Except she’s boring and completely unbelievable.

10) Imprecise word usage. This is what snagged the infamous unhappily-reviewed indie author of a couple of weeks back. If you don’t know the difference between lie and lay, aesthetic and ascetic, or why a woman can’t “carry her stocky build” down the stairs, you’ll get two-star reviews, too.

11) Incorrect spelling and grammar. The buying public isn’t your third grade teacher; they won’t give you a gold star just to boost your self-esteem. Spelling and grammar count. Words are your tools. Would you try out for professional baseball if you didn’t know how to hold a bat? Electronic grammar checks can only do so much. And they’re often wrong. Buy a grammar book. Take a course. Go to a writers conference. Seriously. Even a good editor can’t do everything.

12) Wordiness. There’s a reason agents are wary of long books. New writers tend to take 100 words to say what seasoned writers can say in 10. If your prose is weighty with adjectives and adverbs, or clogged with details and repetitive scenes, you’ll scare off readers as well. 

If you’re still doing any of these things, RELAX! Enjoy writing for its own sake a while longer. Read more books on craft.. Build inventory. You really do need at least two polished manuscripts in the hopper before you launch your career.

And hey, you don’t have to become a marketer just yet. Isn’t that good news?

How about you, scriveners? What mistakes did you make when you were starting out? As a reader, what amateurish red flags make you wish you hadn’t wasted your 99 cents?