A video trailer for my novel? Hmmm...

The most recent edition of Writer's Digest has an interesting suggestion: authors should create a video trailer for their novel similar to the movie trailers that are so much a part of our culture.

Hmmm.....

I have to admit. I like it.

But, as good as the idea is, it also makes me want to vomit, just a little bit.

Now, on top of being a writer, a publicist, a public speaker, an event planner, a promoter and marketer, a web-developer and web-site administrator, I also have to be a videographer, video editor, sound technician and who knows what else?

And then I have to figure out how to promote this too?

Ohh, how I long for the days when I writer could just, you know, write.

On the other hand, I have gotten pretty handy with the iMovie program on my iMac. And I have recently purchased a tiny HD video-camera. And I do have my own Youtube channel on top of a series of blogs and two websites.

Maybe this could work.

And what better way to introduce myself to the lucrative world of script writing than to write a script for my own novel trailer?

It will be a lot of work, for sure. And it might not be any more successful than the variety of other avenues I've explored. But who knows?

And, if I try to approach it as yet another adventure in learning and creating, maybe I'll find a way to enjoy it.

Maybe. Once the taste of vomit clears up.

Arriving at a creative crossroads...

I have to admit it. I'm at something of a crossroads.

I have been working to promote my children's books, written, self-published and sold with all proceeds going to support the renovation of a local historical landmark, in every way possible.

With my sister and the rest of our team of volunteers, I've done everything the writers' magazines and websites have advised:

• We've made public appearances;
• We've worked hard to stir up interest in the media (with moderate success);
• We've created a website, a Facebook site, and a Twitter account for the books and our main character;
• I personally have been on the web as much as possible, trying to promote my own brand;
• I am writing regularly for at least four different blogs, including this one
• We've produced promotional mugs and fridge magnets, advertising posters and free bookmarks promoting the stories;
• We've designed and created an interesting point-of-sale display to help sell books in the various shops that offer them to the public; and
• Now, finally, we've produced an audio book of the stories in the first book.

Frankly, I don't know what more I can do.

The response has been very positive in a lot of ways. To our surprise, the first volume of stories sold more than 1,200 copies very quickly.

We were on a high. We were riding a wave. The media was interested, people were coming out to our public appearances. It was all good.

Sales of the second and third volumes, however, were not quite as overwhelming. Sure, selling 500 copies of each one is pretty good. Outstanding, to be honest, if you figure we don't have a publisher with a promotions arm to support us and we're only for sale at a small number of outlets in a limited geographic area.

But I just don't know where to go from here. How do we push this project to the next level?

How do we break out of the geographic limitations we're facing to reach a wider audience? How do we get national media interested? How do we reach readers who don't even know our books exist?

Or do I simply publish the fourth book (a Christmas novella, coming this November), promote it as best I can, and then move on to other projects?

After all, I've got an idea for a comic novel that is just itching to get out of my brain and onto the page. Should I call it a day on the children's story project and move on?

Writer's Digest: no beeps, blips or bleatings

I know that, for a lot of people, reading is now an electronic experience. They get their news from the web; they read books on their e-reader; they even read magazine articles online.

I'm pushing 50 and I don't think I will ever fully abandon my devotion to reading the old-fashioned way: ink on paper, with pages to turn and textures to enjoy.

Even as I stand at my computer, writing this blog entry, I have a book open on the desk in front of me. I doubt I will ever change, at least not completely.

So I still feel a distinct rush when I get home from work at the end of the day and find the latest edition of Writer's Digest waiting for me, among the bills and adverts that come with the daily mail.

I like the way it looks. I like the way it feels in my hands. I like the fact that it is a little bundle dedicated entirely to the craft of writing. There will be no pop-ups, no annoying video adverts sneaking into its margins, no distracting beeps, blips or bleatings.

I even like the way the paper starts to curl after I've flipped through it a couple of times.

And I like "flipping through" it too. You can't flip through an online magazine. At best, you have to "click through", don't you?

Not my cup of tea.

Now, I have to admit, this edition of Writer's Digest doesn't seem to have as much of interest to me as the last one. I doubt I'll read every page of it with the same keeness and avidity that marked my enjoyment three months ago.

But I will still enjoy it, as much for its physicality as for its contents.

How to be a successful writer....

Everything I read about how to be a successful writer tells me I have to spend time writing every day. Every single day.

It's the only way to be productive, I'm told. By writing at least an hour every day, I can create a rhythm and get into a groove. My writing will be better, more consistent, more resonant, more creative.

My only question is: WHO, other than a professional writer, has time to write EVERY DAY???

Certainly not me.

I have time to sleep every day. Because if I don't sleep, I die. Same with eating. And with certain bathroom chores.

And, of course, I have time to go to work five out of every seven days. Because, without work, I can't afford the payments on the place in which I write, the machine upon which I write, the electricity that powers the machine, the food that powers the writer, etc. etc. etc.

I spend at least some time every day with my partner and our dog. I don't think those times are negotiable, do you? And the household chores are a part of life I can't avoid, aren't they?

So where do I find time to write every day? Honestly, where in the day do I find an hour or so for my writing?

I read these books and articles that tell me serious writers find time to write every day and I think... that's crazy. Life just doesn't allow it.

Yes, I agree, those times when I have managed to carve out time to write pretty consistently every day have been my most productive times. I once wrote an entire 300-page legal text book in the space of just three months. My editor was delighted and the book has sold well.

But I was single back then, living in a basement apartment, eating Kraft Dinner and little else, spending the minimum eight-hours a day at my fledgling and not very busy law practice. I spent three hours every evening at the computer (a 286 with a monochrome monitor, if you remember those dinosaurs) writing from 6:30 to 9:30.

It worked very well. I was productive, ridiculously so.

But life doesn't allow that now. I spend a great deal of time on other, very important aspects of my life. I spend, to be honest, a lot of precious time trying to make a name for myself as a writer, promoting myself and my already completed works. That's time I could be writing.

But I'm writing blogs, recording podcasts, designing and updating websites, making appearances at schools and other events, selling the books I've already written.

Reading books and articles on how to be a successful writer.

I guess what they are saying, in essence, is this: Stop reading this book and get back to writing!

Message received. I will read no more books telling me how to be a successful writer. But wait, what if one of these books actually has something helpful to say? I don't want to miss that.

And I do think I can continue to learn from Writer's Digest, don't you?

Twisting the rubber band....

My first issue of Writer's Digest includes an excerpt from the book Comedy Writing Secrets, 2nd Edition, by Mel Helitzer, with Mark Shatz. The article is entitled, "Realism & Exaggeration: Really, Truly Funny".

To be frank, I wasn't impressed with the excerpt: I found it uneven and unclear. I also didn't find the examples given by the author to be particularly funny nor effective. As a result, it certainly didn't make me want to rush out and buy the book.

The excerpt's clarity problems become apparent in its very first paragraph, which begins, "Humor only appears to be free-form. To the trained ear, it's predictable because it's structured."

Huh?

I had to read the first paragraph a couple of times to figure out that the word "appears" should be italicized in the first sentence, to make it clear that Heltzer is arguing against the unstated premise that most people believe that humor (or humorous writing) has no structure. Without the italics, I read the sentence as having the emphasis on the word "only", suggesting that the only way that humor appears to exist is in free-form format.

Confusing your reader does not seem to be a great way to launch an excerpt.

That being said, I did find that the Helitzer piece helped to confirm my own impressions of how to approach a successful comic novel. Helitzer talks about the important connection between realism and exaggeration in humor, pointing out that the two must be properly balanced in a truly funny tale. You must create a realistic background, he argues, and realistic characters, to make your eventual exaggerations that much more effective and funny.

I have just started attempting to write my own comic novel, my first. In preparation for this attempt, I decided to read a number of successful such novels from the last 15 years, just to get an idea of the elements that are common to all of them.

I began with Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, followed that with Richard Russo's Straight Man, Lazy Days by Erlend Loe, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson and finished up with two by John Green: Paper Town and An Abundance of Katherines.

All very successful and all, on the surface at least, very different. To paraphrase Helitzer, however, "These comic novels only appear to be different."

In reading them, you see, I found a number of common threads:

1. All featured male protagonists;
2. All the protagonists were portrayed as "real" people, but each had a slightly exaggerated characteristic that made him different from the norm;
3. Each protagonist, therefore, was positioned as an outsider of sorts in their communities, such that they were able to provide a slightly warped but still fairly objective commentary on the world;
4. The humor in each novel flowed from the interaction of the exaggerated characteristic of the protagonist with the people and events he encountered; and
5. Each novel featured at least one hilarious scene where a series of believable, realistic steps leads to a bizarre, ridiculously exaggerated outcome.

As Helitzer says, "You start with a realistic scenario, then bend and distort it for comic effect."

In the books I read, it is the exaggerated characteristic of the character that, in each case, does the bending and distorting of reality.

In Russo's book, for example, his character (William Devereaux, Jr.) is an anarchistic academic who simply cannot take "the rules" seriously. The result: he ends up appearing on the television news, holding a goose aloft, threatening to murder it if the University does not cooperate; or hidden, urine-drenched, in the false ceiling above a meeting room where his colleagues are deciding his fate.

In Lazy Days, Bror Telemann has an exaggerated love for the theatre... and for master chef and author Nigella Lawson. This leads to arguments at tennis courts and late night forays into the kitchen to make Nigella's favourite dishes.

My favourite is in The 100-Year-Old Man, where the main character's old-style formality and politeness lead naturally, inexorably to a memorable chase through the country-side in an old bus, with a small-time criminal, a gangster, a sexy mature woman and an full-sized circus elephant along for the ride.

John Green's characters, like the protagonist in The Rosie Project, are both hyper-intellectual, socially awkward young men in search of love. It's their intellectualism that gets in the way but also tends to lead them into increasingly bizarre and interesting situations.

In all cases, the characters are based in realism, with only slightly exaggerated character traits. But those traits cause the characters to proceed down carefully designed, increasingly exaggerated pathways to end up in hilarious places the reader could never have foreseen.

In the case of Straight Man and The 100-Year-Old Man in particular, the writing was so skillful that I never once questioned the build-up to the crazy punch-line (the professor dripping urine or the elephant in the bus). It was only when I got to the punch-line that, laughing heartily, I thought: How the heck did this author get me to this ridiculous place without me noticing or rebelling?

As I work on my own comic novel, I will remember the lessons I've learned. I will start from the realistic and allow my character's slightly exaggerated trait lead me into hilarity. And I'll have Helitzer and Shatz (and all the other authors mentioned above) to thank if my book is a success.

Much to Digest in new Writer's mag...

As a gift for a recent birthday, I received a one-year subscription to Writer's Digest magazine. It is not a publication with which I am particularly familiar so I was very interested to get the chance to explore it first hand.

My first issue arrived yesterday and it is a pleasant surprise. Sure, I have my concerns and criticisms (I always do) but I am impressed overall with the quality of the articles and the expertise displayed.

I am even more impressed because my first ever issue, May/June 2014, is focused on "Writing for Kids & Teens", with a healthy secondary focus on "Humor Writing".

Now, when you consider that the last three years of my life have been dedicated to writing and publishing a series of stories for young people (the "Middle-Grade" market, apparently, according to WD) and that my current project involves penning a "comic novel", I think we've got a pretty good match between my interests and WD's focus this month.

I don't plan to do an article-by-article review at this moment but I will say that one of the highlights for me in this issue was Marie Lamba's interesting article on the differences between fiction for the "Middle-Grade" (MG) market and fiction for Young Adults (YA).

I have gotten used to calling my Abigail Massey stories "YA fiction" but I now learn that I have been doing my self, and my work, a disservice by using that label. Based on Ms. Lamba's article, my three volumes of Abigail stories are better described as "Middle-Grade stories" or, even more particularly, "upper Middle-Grade" fiction.

Interesting.

Even more interesting is the argument Ms. Lamba makes that I should be marketing these stories mostly toward the "gate-keepers" for children in my target age group (gate-keepers like parents, teachers, librarians) rather than directly to the kids themselves. Where YA readers generally choose their own books, MG readers often have such decisions made for them. They are introduced to new books and authors by their parents or people in the educational system.

I am finding Lamba's article to be both helpful and comforting. Helpful in that it has provided me with some interesting ideas to ponder as I head into marketing my Christmas novella, featuring Abigail, this fall; Comforting in that it has helped confirm that, other than mislabelling my books as YA rather than MG, I have generally gotten most things right in creating the Abigail Massey stories as MG fiction.

All in all, I'd say my relationship with Writer's Digest is off to a very good start.