The Nook? Really? by Christine Duncan

I was listening to NPR today and heard an interview that would have been rather startling just a few short years ago. The reporter was interviewing the owner of a rather large East coast used bookstore and he asked her what her take was as to why Borders didn’t make it and Barnes and Noble is still in business.
Her thoughts? Barnes and Noble jumped on the e-bandwagon and that saved the day for them. The Nook, their e-reader is a competitor of the Kindle and the fact that Barnes and Noble came up with that, along with content for it, was, she believed, the reason they are still viable.
Mind you, this isn’t a woman who reads e-books, if the interview is to be believed. She has a used (paper) bookstore.
Who would have thought…say back in 2000 that anyone would think that e-books could save a huge bookstore’s business.
Now if only we would use them to save…say our school budgets. Think of it, no more having your kid work with out-of date geography and science books. And no more backpacks that give the kids backaches.

In the Moment Description by Christine Duncan

A while back a writing friend told me that she kept notebooks of description ready to plop into the story of the moment. Whenever a detail struck her, for instance, the way, say feeling the heat of the sidewalk through her shoes as she walked somewhere on a hot July day, she would write it down. Then when a story needed some description about July, she would look up her notebooks and use it.

I thought at the time, that it was kind of silly. Afterall, we all know how hot July is. I can write about July in midwinter, no problem. But it’s Halloween today, and I have been struck by a couple of things that I tend to forget when it’s not Halloween. Little kids pushing all the buttons on the scary figures in Target, then running back to stand by their mothers as they watch the witch or Vampire cackle, and the way little girls seem to dance with heads held high, when they feel pretty in their princess costumes. And the teenage boys, acting all macho, and not dressing up anymore, but still wanting to go out on Halloween–but maybe not to any houses where someone might know them. Oh yeah, and the way the attic is so dark, lit only by a single bulb in the middle and the costumes always seem to be in the back away from the bulb and the dusty smell and cold feel of a mask that has been left up there for a year or two.

Anyway, you get the picture. I think organizing description like this, even on a computer could be difficult but I’m going to try it. Just to see if it adds something or gets something started with my writing.

Description by Christine Duncan

Having not yet found a writing book to help get me jump started (still open to ideas on books, folks) I have lately started to work on my description. First off, let me say, since I’m not very visual, that I usually have to go back and add description. But how a character feels about his/her surroundings can be a method of revealing character and I don’t want to miss any opportunities to do that. Yet description can feel so–clunky and obvious. I find myself annoyed with books that tell me So and So didn’t notice the way something looked. If the character didn’t notice it, and I’m in the character’s head, then I can’t see it either. Or am I just being picky here?
All of which is just my way of saying that lately, I have been trying to get into my character’s head by describing the things around her without using the obvious. If she is going up a stair in the battered women’s shelter where she works, I might describe the way she avoids the place where the carpet is unraveling so it won’t catch the heels of her boots, and have her make a mental note to take a sponge to the hand prints around the rail.
The truth of the matter is, that most of us are so focused on the chores we have to get through, or the places we are already late to, that we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about our surroundings. So it makes sense to filter description, not only through the character but through their actions. Anyway, that’s what I’m trying right now.
What trick are you using to jump start your writing?

Need a Good Writing Book! by Christine Duncan

I use books to teach me the things I need to know. I tend to go to the library for a good car manual when we have a problem or a book on fixing stuff when say, the washing machine goes down. I do the same with my writing.
I also use magazines to get me revved up to do things. For instance, I read Runner’s World to make me get ready for a long run and I read recipes in women’s magazines to help me get figure out what we should eat for the coming week.
But right now, I need a book or a blog to get me revved up on writing. You know how it is, sometimes you just need a jump start. I used What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter until I wore the book thin.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

Words! by Christine Duncan

Yesterday, I had that Meet the Author event at the library that I’ve been obsessing over. I had no bookmarks, they all got bent and messed up. I had no flyers asking people to invite me to talk to their book groups–my computer went down. I forgot to bring the Sony reader because I was so upset over the other stuff.
And yet, it was a very nice couple of hours talking to people who love books.
Did I sell much? Nah. Neither did anyone else I talked to although there was a bunch of trading of books going on between the authors. I think the woman with the cookbook was the winner there.
A lot of the talk was about the recession and about how hard a time it is for books–especially fiction books. I know I’m buying fewer myself these days.
It was just nice to talk writing for a bit. Promotion, marketing, dialog, critique groups–all the stuff we talk about here, but the conversation went on for a couple of hours and not just with the other authors there.
One exchange I had with a gentleman who was making the rounds of the tables was about how you can tell when someone reads–or writes.
I think it’s vocabulary. Readers and writers strive for the exact right word. We know there is one. We may not be able to think of it at just this moment, but we know it. So we look it up.
What do you think?

Selling Your Own Book by Christine Duncan

Recently one of my publishers wrote a group email about links on our websites to sell our books. She has special banners for each genre. And the idea is that we should include those on our websites with the link to Amazon.
I don’t mind selling my book that way. It seems easy enough and it’s one of the reasons I keep a website along with a blog. But other ways of selling my books are…harder.
A couple of years back I went to Wyoming author’s day. That day was difficult because it was just part of the fair. People were there to do the kinds of things they do at fairs, eat fried stuff and ride rides that make the fried stuff seem like the mistake it probably was. And we authors were in a building in the middle of this, by ourselves sitting at tables with our books. People came through because they wanted to see what was in the building or to go to the bathrooms, or just to get out of the sun for a minute and were a little surprised to see us. My son helped me by giving out bookmarks, or maybe it was fliers and asking folks if they liked mysteries. I sold a couple of books and went on a couple of rides myself after the writers all went home. But it was a long afternoon.
A year or two after that, I did one of the Wal-mart deals where they put authors in the aisles. I forget why. They may have been promoting literacy. Another long afternoon of startled people who didn’t really expect to find authors in the women’s underwear section or wherever I was. No son there to hand out bookmarks.
So I tend to believe that it is hard to sell books when folks don’t expect to see you. So I was surprised to see a post on MurderMustAdvertise by author Susanne Alleyn saying that she has had some success selling her books at her own yard sales. She sells at a bit of a discount and says her best line seems to be “Signed first editions by an almost-famous author!”
I’m willing to try anything once–and I have as much junk that could go in a garage sale as the next person, but I’m not convinced. Wouldn’t that tend to make folks think your books were…I don’t know…junk?
What do you think?

Perfectionism the Enemy of Writing??? by Christine Duncan

I know a lot of writers are perfectionists. We strive for just the right word or phrase. We want to make it memorable, touch hearts, make people think. Sometimes we forget that the goal of writing is communication.

I know even with this blog, I sometimes think, I don’t have the time to do the post I want to do. Maybe I should just let it go this week. I have been planning the post, and composing it in my head, maybe even writing a draft or two, but it just doesn’t sing the way I want it to.

For all of you who sometimes feel that way, I want to remind you of a quote from Voltaire. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Think about it. Have you sometimes let your obsession with getting it just right, get in the way of communicating at all?

Setting by Christine Duncan

Michelle’s post on the London riots hit close to home. Life these last few years has changed. Times are harder. And yet, do we include that in our books?
After 9-11, in this country, authors on DorothyL asked this very question. Many of them were in the middle of books, some set in NY and they didn’t know if they wanted to talk about what happened. Did they take any mention of the towers from the books? Should they move on, so to speak?
I think it is something that we all should grapple with on a regular basis with our books. Setting determines sub-genres-in a large part. And yet, in these times, with many struggling, including a dose of reality can really darken the book. Do we talk about the fact that many are without jobs? Do we include facts in a cozy that may be based in a real place that a neighborhood has changed, after many were foreclosed on? Or after, a riot for that matter? Can we show empty shop windows (many small businesses have failed in this recession) and older vehicles in parking lots (statistics show many of us are keeping our cars much longer.) and chalk it all up to the way things are now? Can we do it and keep it upbeat? You know, cozy?
It seems to me that many times, books and movies can reflect an era and yet not be about an era. I’ve seen a move toward black backgrounds in TV shows in shows that are S/F and mystery genre. I can’t help thinking that what we’re passing off as sophisticated today, may strike those in the future as just dark.
What are your thoughts? How real can we be without going too deep?

Rules for Writing Novels by Christine Duncan

There was a time when I would have told you that there are no rules to writing. The very thought conjured up visions of hackneyed plots put together according to some regulating editor’s vision of what a book should be.
I’ve changed my mind. And what changed my mind was once again, reading.
As a reader, I am not willing to wait very long for you, the writer, to tell me what the book is about. No, I’m not expecting you to announce, “Hey, reader, this is a Sf/Fantasy/Mystery but you better intro the way your world differs from mine PDQ and I want the body on the floor fairly quickly too–although I do allow you time to make me care about the victim. Still I’ve discovered I have no patience for too much meandering.

As a reader, I like hybrids. Witness the SF/Fantasy/Mystery mentioned above. I actually liked “Cowboys and Aliens.” But don’t throw in some other genre on page 150 just because you’ve decided it’s probably popular. I can figure out all by myself that you don’t really like writing in that extra genre but you think you should. Those books hit the wall. I once was one of the judges for a contest where the writer was writing a coming of age novel but felt it needed more action, so somewhere around page 75, he killed a character off, so his hero could solve the crime. Then he decided to enter it in the mystery category, because he felt it had a better chance there, because coming of age novels are more literate than mysteries. Yes, he actually told me that. His score for the contest was not very high, and he was protesting it. His protest did not make me raise the score.

As a reader, I’m not much into head hopping. I’m not talking about for instance, Angels and Demons where a chapter goes to the bad guy and another goes to the hero. I think that works. But don’t give me a paragraph in the heroine’s head and the very next paragraph or worse, sentence, tell me what the hero is thinking back at her. I can’t ping pong like that, although many new writers write that way, and defend it all the time. Stick with one head per scene, please. It makes me dizzy otherwise.

What rules for writing have you come to believe are mandatory? Or do you believe there are none?