What You Love vs. The Day Job

How exactly do you reconcile the distance between doing that you love and doing what you have to do to eat? It means a constant state of dissatisfaction with your life as it is. You are unfulfilled by your day job, so it makes you miserable. You are not successful at what you love, so you don't earn enough from it, therefore you are unsatisfied with that too. This is how dreams get crushed. At some point a voice in your head is going to say, "grow up". People usually see following dreams in adulthood as a sign of immaturity, especially if you are not immediately successful. Most people don't have dreams, or gave up on them a long time ago. Misery loves company.


Technorati Tags: writing, dream, dream, talent, writers

Why Writer's Market is a Waste of Money (if you didn't already know)

Oh sure, Writer's Market was all we had before the Internet, but now it's obsolete. Almost every magazine's writer's guidelines can be found online, and the writer's guidelines are what you want, not those little snippets Writer's Market give you. A quick Google search is of far more use to you than $50.00 worth of paper that loses value every single day from the date of purchase. By the time you get it many of the listings will be already worthless, after a year you would be better off tossing it. For you die hard fans of WM I suggest you start highlighting all the submissions the USPS bounces back to you ("No forwarding address") if you want to see what I mean.

Technorati Tags: writing, writer, writer's guidelines, writer's market, books, articles, essays, selling, publishing, publisher, magazine, mail, postal, submission, submissions

Poets & Poetry

I suspect that all real writers have only contempt for poets and poetry .There is nothing of value to be gained by the attempt to be profound, the attempt to inspire with meter and rhyme and staid, pretentious constrictions on your words. There is no advantage and no substance to poetry, but it's short enough to be accessible, short enough that every asshole on the street thinks they can churn something out.

Technorati Tags: poet, poetry, writing, writer, writers, art, rhyme, words, lyric, lyrics

List of 26 Funny Porno Titles

Are the guys who come up with porno movie titles really writers? Maybe not, but these are pretty inventive I think.

1. Buffy the Vampire Layer
   
2. Indiana Bones and the Temple of Poon
   
3. Star Whores
   
4. Shaving Ryan's Privates
   
5. Sexmen
   
6. Forrest Hump
   
7. Sex Toy Story
   
8. The Sperminator
   
9. White Men Can't Hump
   
10. I Know Who You Did Last Summer
    
11. Good Will Humping
    
12. The Italian Blowjob
    
13. Black Cock Down
    
14. Monster Balls
    
15. School of Cock
    
16. Booty and the Beast
    
17. The Hump for Red October
    
18. Ass Ventura: Sex Detective
    
19. Armagedidon
    
20. Gays of Thunder
    
21. The Cum of All Queers
    
22. Lust in Space
    
23. New Jack Titty
    
24. The Ho-men
    
25. Million Dollar Booty
    
26. Riding Miss Daisy
    

Technorati Tags: porn, movie, titles, funny, humorous, amusing

Why Bother Reading?

There is a problem here. You start the story and wonder, before you get to the end of the first paragraph why you are reading it. Fiction writers and editors forget that in most cases, the people who publish small zines are unknown. They forget this completely. People have a reason to continue reading through a boring first paragraph if they know and like the author, but nobody knows some guy publishing in Underground Voices for the first time. If the story does not hold you, why bother reading? Is it that there is so little stuff in the world to read? Is it merely a matter of being charitable to a writer-hobbyist? Why publish something that starts out with words that grab hold of the reader's senses?


Technorati Tags: writing, writer, fiction, story, Underground, Voices, reader

The Problem with Editors

Everybody wants some kind of unique content that you can't find anywhere else. The problem for a freelance writer, is that you are a freelance writer, you write for different magazines with different aesthetics, different needs. It's not so much about being able to write in different voices for different editors as it is trying to get what you have written to sound like something that the editor has already accepted.

Technorati Tags: writing, writer, maket, publish, publishing, editor, editing

The Hack

I envy the guys from the old days of pulp fiction who could put out fiction by the pound. This kind of thing is where the word "hack" comes from. The "hack" is supposedly an uninspired wretch with no appreciation for true art. Supposedly "true art" cannot be produced in mass quantities. Writers have too high an opinion of their profession. What we do is supply insightful entertainment, either in the form of made-up stories, or in the form of easily-digested reportage of boring, mundane shit. The idea is to make money by supplying insight and entertainment. All writing should entertain, pleasure in reading should be a part of what makes you want to pick up a book or turn to an article. Reading should be as necessary and as hard to surrender as cigarettes and coffee, and writers, real writers, the ones who are earnest about the trade, should be working to meet the need.

Sitting and waiting for inspiration to strike, or struggling with words, you do these when you see writing as an art, some thing of incredible beauty that must come from your mind. You balk at the horror of the empty page, the immensity of the job. This is where knowing who you are comes in, this is where you are either a real writer or you are not. If you can get through the struggle and be able to admit when the last sentence was garbage, be able to burn three days of work, be able to smile as the words work themselves out the tips of your fingers, then maybe this is what you were always meant to do. Maybe.

It's either there or it's not, only you can tell. The jumble of ideas in your head, the sentences you overheard at a dinner-party, the pictures you saw this morning on the front page of the paper, the raw material of all the yet-unwritten, either have the story or they don't. Only the man with the keyboard can see the worth and draw it out.

Why I'm a horrible writer - The Stanford Daily Online

Why I'm a horrible writer - The Stanford Daily Online: "I did a horrible job of covering men's tennis for The Daily. Depending on who you ask, you'll probably find people who strongly agree and others who disagree. Regardless of what others think, I think that I did a pretty subpar job. Because I'm one of the biggest fans of Stanford Tennis, I'm probably also one of the least objective writers you'll ever meet, which causes a problem when my position calls for unwavering neutrality."

Mediocre Writing

Part of what I want to do with this blog is to avoid the rut of sameness, the chronic mediocrity you find among writers' blogs. All these silly people who have not come into any kind of contact with the truly ugly, or had any experience outside of generic middleclass whiteness, who have no eye for the truly interesting. You get the feeling that everybody wants to be Anne Rice or Dean Koontz, nobody wants to be different, to set themselves apart. Everybody has to be part of a clique, this kind of pretend-writer or that kind of pretend-writer, some place to validate themselves other than in their stories. Social writing. So you can churn out a few thousand words of "content" in a sitting, fifty-percent padding, fifty-percent copy-and-paste, this means...what?

Writing is something you do because you have to, not because you think you might be able to. There is a difference between taking a piss and learning to crochet. Most "readers" are stupid people who think that reading is a good way to look smart, being able to quote is a good way to impress friends and co-workers. Most newspaper articles are written to impress the writer, not to actually tell you anything. Few are in it because their sanity depends on getting words out. Those are the people you need to find.



Technorati Tags: writing, writer, writers, Dean, Koontz, Anne, Rice, blogs, blogging

3 Tips for Writing Flash Fiction

Flash fiction, or the short-short story, is popular now because of the Internet and because readers are lazy, but does it have merit? of course, more merit, at least, than poetry which ties itself to sounding good and thus is usually either banal or meaningless. Like poetry, however, the brevity leads everyone to believe that they can do it so you have a million worthless pieces of flash fiction floating around the web along with the ghazals and limericks and sonnets that would have been better off burned than shown to anybody.

Things to note before you start writing a piece of flash fiction:
1) Have something happen. Bad writers make the mistake of forgetting the reader entirely and writing what sounds good in their heads. Under the pressure of a specific word-count, they masturbate furiously with their words, coming up with writey prose signifying nothing.

2) Have something DRAMATIC happen. This is not 30-round boxing match, this is one round with a young Mike Tyson. Hit hard or die.

3) Write it as quickly as it would take to read it. If you have to think too hard, your readers probably will too.


Technorati Tags: writing, writer, flash, fiction, literature, dramatic, word-count, flash+fiction, advice

5 Proofreading Tips

1. Let your work Marinate
Do not proofread immediately, let it sit for a couple days and then come back to it. Sometime enthusiasm for something can block the more objective part of the brain and you lose focus on the quality of your work.

2. Read as you write.
Reading a good book as you try to write something can open us up to mistakes we have made and the possibilities of doing something better.

3. Never trust spellcheck.
Some words when misspelled are actually other words, basic stuff, I know, but you would be surprised how many new writers do not know this.
e.g. none=nine and buy=by and lost=list and so on.

4. Do not be afraid of the re-write. Re-writing is practice, you get better at something by doing it repeatedly.

5. Read your work aloud. Hearing something, especially something that sounds like crap is often the way to tell that it, in fact, is crap.

George Lucas

You have to wonder what it is about men like George Lucas that makes what they have to sell so attractive to your ordinary person. I suspect that phenomena like the Star Wars movies have largely to do with a kind of mass hysteria, where individuals feel compelled to like something because a large number of other people like it, but still, what is it that gets that all started?

Lucas was no trailblazer, not in the true sense of the word anyway,he had the smart idea of using the old stories, the ones that have always worked and reworking them in new contexts, kind of like Bill Gates (maybe I am on to something here). He paid homage to old movies (writer's euphemism for "stole from"), who had paid homage to other older tales, everything from Vaudeville to Shakespeare.

The thing is that your average America youngster knows very little about what came before him, so even the corniest, played-out shit is new to the next generation. The average older person is not inclined to like anything new because that's just the way you are when you get old, so stuff that feels familiar is attractive to them. You can recycle everything to make it popular, in fact, that is the only thing that will be popular, shit that people have seen or heard before (see your latest Top 40 charts for confirmation of this). You can re-make Casablanca as an interracial romance or a sci-fi western and somebody will think it is fresh. George Lucas is a genius, yes, but at recycling, not creation.

Technorati Tags: George, Lucas, writing, writer, screenwriting, script, screenplay,

Bad Science Fiction

Even the best science fiction hovers on the brink of the absurd. All speculative fiction depends on the reader to be completely in tune with it, with the intent of the writer. Mainstream fiction draws you in, seduces you with the story, whereas, to a certain extent, science fiction demands that you already be seduced, at least by the genre.

Is the genre "significant"? Is it capable of the profound statement, the insightful analysis, deep characters? Of course, but do they matter to the sci-fi reader? Probably not. People do not read sci-fi for its literary qualities. They read it for the escapist, fanciful daydreams that it can conjure up, for the sense of play-acting and childlike abandon than it can summon.

Bad science fiction however, is a creature so pathetic as to be beyond scorn or pity. Bad science fiction can be identified by the opening words and should be dismissed easily and without regret, not unlike used toilet paper or a banana peel. As was previously stated, even good science fiction by talented, smart writers hangs over an abyss of failure, always just barely escapes mocking itself. Writing one is not a project for morons or beginners.

The point of good sci-fi is to lure the reader in, to get him to want see what you have to show, to believe a myth with few real-world handles.. Always difficult, that's why sci-fi readers tend to be dedicated solely to the genre. They already what to see, already want to escape.

Technorati Tags: sci-fi, science-fiction, genre, writer, writing, write, literature, pulp, readers, fan, fanfiction, fiction, books, reading

Writer's Block

There is nothing in the world like writer's block, the only thing you can honestly compare it to is constipation: you know that there is something there that wants to come out but you can't bring it out. The frustration of seeing something worth writing down when you are not in a position to write is likewise unbearable. These two different situations feel like having a word on the tip of your tongue, or thinking of something that you should have said after an emotional argument rolled into one, the frustration of the missed opportunity that you could could have taken advantage of if you had only been a second quicker.

Technorati Tags: writing, writer's+block,

Mediocrity, Reviews, and the movie, Deja Vu

Note: If you have not seen the movie, the following notes will make no sense to you. You can read a review with a synopsis of the plot here.

It's interesting to see a too-obviously aging Denzel Washington and a pudgy Val Kilmer talking about good looks being lost with time. The movie is smart and definitely for grown-ups, in spite of the things that were obviously toned down to get a PG-13. This could have been one edgy, ugly motherfucker, not unlike Se7en or Hostel. Hollywood guaranteed mediocrity by making the scene of the first explosion easy-to-take, you can't have the scene with burning US servicemen being too ugly. Also, the Timothy McVeigh-like bad-guy shoots a guy before setting him on fire. Another weak, ball-less moment, when Hollywood sacrificed the idea that would have set this movie apart. There is no way that the writers wanted that, it fucked the whole experience. Denzel Washington does his thing from the Pelican Brief and his other more forgettable films where he laughs at odd moments to make the performance seem unpredictable, have a more uneven rhythm, kind of the way Robert Duvall does it. It felt like laughter by a man watching his underachieving career slowly sink in an arctic ocean of young white people. Take it from me, in a couple years Denzel will be playing fatherly school-janitors and other Scatman Crothers-type roles.

The first two-thirds of the movie, including the introduction of the time-machine and the science thereof, is clever, plausible, well-written. Poorly casted because there is nothing about Washington that says to me, ATF Agent, unlike say, Bruce Willis who has law-enforcement tattooed into his DNA. Don't get me wrong, Denzel has the leading-man screen-presence so rare among black actors, just not for this kind of movie. If Will Smith had been better in I, Robot, I would consider him for this part if you definitely had to give it to a black man. Anyway, back to the writing. Well-written up until the bad-guy gets caught two-thirds in, then they don't know where to go. It's clear that they then figured out the ending that they wanted to have (DW and the girl hooking up and driving off into the sunset) and cobbled up some shit to get them there. There are some smart touches, like beaming him into an ER because his heart will stop, but the story never recovers.

What I do like is that nothing is spoon-fed to the audience. It all makes sense, but you have to think, pretty much guaranteeing that the young people going into a PG-13 movie starring Denzel Washington, will be hopelessly lost and confused.

Technorati Tags: movies, screenwriting, writers, denzel+washington, review, deja+vu

Writing Cover Letters

I seriously fucking hate writing cover-letters for short stories?What is the point? Are they going to acept your work based on the quality of the cover-letter that accpanies it? No, of course not. And why do editors want them? I suppose it signifies that you have put some effort into the submission package and therefore are more likely to be worthy of their attention. It might mean that yours is not a blind submission if you can call the editor by name and put their address somewhere other than on the envelope, but it probably does not. The problem is that you can auto-pilot a coverletter just as easily as you can the rest of the submission.

Note this site of templates for your literary submissions.
Technorati Tags: writing, submission, cover+letter, writer, editor

Writing Well (Stay out of the rut)

Beware of the Earnest Rut. Good writers who take their work seriously and try hard to write well can fall into a rut of being somewhat well respected but not particularly successful. You wind up writing stories that get accepted to a few litmags or maybe a novel that 15 people have actually read (if you are lucky). You want to avoid writing to be popular as well, which is not unlike sucking dick in a public-toilet stall, meaning soul-killing and dirty. You need to figure out what it that you like about your favorite author's work and purify it, boil it down till it becomes a more potent form. Isolate the good stuff and concentrate it till you find your own formula. Ignore the people in your writer's group.

You have to understand, few people actually enjoy reading these days. For the most part books have just become a slightly more difficult form of TV. the idea is that for a book to be any good it has to be easy to read and have a murder in it, preferably a serial killer and a team of forensic experts.

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