Happy Fourth of July.

 

I hesitate to say happy Independence Day.  We have too little independence in this country today, far too little freedom.  No person is ever free  who relies on any government for income, food, shelter, clothing, health care, or anything else.  No person is ever free who lives on someone else’s money, or under someone else’s roof.

Our freedom hasn’t been taken.  We’ve given it away a piece at a time.  It is, of course, a truism that half the people in any country, at any time in history, have always wanted it this way, have always wanted a target to point the finger of blame at, to say, “It isn’t my fault, it’s theirs, and the government owes me this, that or the other because it isn’t my fault that I can’t support myself.”

Of course it’s your fault.  Way down inside you know it, too.

Under the founding Constitution, those who owned no property could not vote.  The theory was that only those who had a stake in the country, who earned money, who found a way to get along without government help, could be counted upon to vote for the good of the country, rather than for the good of their own pockets.  We’ve now proven this is true.

History has proven that when the majority of people vote for bread and circuses, when the majority of people stop paying their fair share,  when the small minority must support the large majority, the system must, sooner or later, fail.

In this country, half the people pay not one penny in federal taxes, and, in fact, still take money out of the system in the form of food stamps, rent checks, college grants, “stimulus” checks, etc. 

In this country, 90% of all federal taxes are paid by just over ten percent of the population.

And in this country we are, if you count unfunded programs such as social security, some fifty trillion dollars in debt.  That’s a lot of money.  We’re getting dangerously close to the point where our debt will exceed our worth.  That’s the tipping point.  That’s the elephant in the room that no one mentions.

We can’t keep the elephant from trampling us for a time just by finding ways to take ever more money from the top fifteen to twenty percent of the country, though our economy will suffer from doing so, along with sneaky ways of taking money from the poor with hidden taxes, though our economy will suffer from doing so, but sooner or later the elephant is going to get too fat for the room, and it’s going to walk all over us.  It can’t end any other way.

Along these lines, I spent about four hours at the shooting range yesterday, along with my son, Nolan, and my nephew, Don.  I seldom get the chance to hit the range with both of them, so I blew off writing for the day.

I was afraid my shoulder wouldn’t let me handle a large caliber handgun, and I was right.  I fired one round from a .45 acp., and three rounds from a .40 S&W.  Big mistake.

I spent the rest of the day with a small caliber, but still had fun.  Good to know I can still fire dime sized groups.

But it looks like I need to buy a 9mm for use until my shoulder gets better.  Not a lot of power, but it’ll do the job with well placed +P  hollow points.

 

The question is whether to buy a Springfield XD or a Browning Hi-power?  What’s the difference?  Well, about six hundred dollars.  The XD is a good semi-auto, but the Browning is not only reliable, not only accurate, it’s soooo pretty. 

Anyway, been visiting gun shops lately, and it’s scary.  There’s so much demand for quality handguns and rifles, particularly tactical rifles and combat handguns, that prices have almost doubled, and in some cases, tripled  And ammunition has become so scarce you almost can’t find any.  For rifles, .223/5.56mm, .308, 7.62mm,  and 30-06 rounds are in the highest demand  For handguns, the .45 acp, .40 S&W, and .357 rounds just aren’t there in most localities.

And if you want hollow points, forget it.

You know people are buying a LOT of ammunition when factories can’t make enough to meet demand.

My brother-in-law was in a gun shop recently, and after watching a few customers buy and carry out pretty much all the ammunition still in stock, asked the shop owner, “What are they doing, getting ready for a revolution?”

The owner just looked at him for a second, and then said, “Yes.”

Tough times down the road, I think, but no better time for a writer to be alive.

So Happy 4th of July.

 

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

 

This is a question I’ve heard at least a thousand times since I first started writing some three hundred and seventeen years ago.  Can Creative Writing Be Taught?  The universal answer seems to be, “NO!  Hell, No!  Creative writing can be learned, but it can’t, by God, be taught.

“The only way for a writer to learn how to write well is to read everything possible, and to write, write, write.”

I heard Stephen King say exactly this just last week.  King is a great writer, was a teacher, and has tried to teach many a student to write.  This means he ought to know, right?  No, it means only that he can’t do it, or believes he can’t, which is the same thing.  There are just as many poor teachers as there are poor writers, and a teaching degree is no guarantee of teaching competence.

Anyone who has been through school knows there are teachers who could teach an artichoke to sing, and others who couldn’t teach a rubber ball how to bounce.

Now, in all candor, I’ve always believed creative writing could not be taught, and I absolutely agree that the two most important things any writer can do is read, read, read, and write, write, write,  but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize “Can Creative Writing Be Taught” is not only the wrong question, but that the difference between learning and teaching is hardly as cut and dried as many seem to think. 

When we learn, someone is pretty much always teaching us at the same time.  The teacher may be the writer of a great novel we just read, or an actual teacher in a classroom, but learning/teaching go hand in hand.  Read, read, read is incredibly important, but because we learn by reading does not mean we aren’t being taught.  Our teachers may be the novelists and short story writers who wrote the tales, but they’re still teachers, teaching by example.

Okay, so why is “Can Creative Writing Be Taught” the wrong question?  First, because, obviously, creative writing can be taught.  Pick any one hundred people at random, and in a week or two you can teach all one hundred to write short stories.  The stories may range from bad to horrible, but they will be short stories, and this is creative writing.

Fine.  So what’s the right question?  How about , “Can talent be taught?”

Better, and this is, I think, what most people mean when they say creative writing can’t be taught.  And it’s true enough that you can’t teach talent.  But this is still the wrong question.  So what is the right question?  I’ll get to that later.  First I want to talk about talent itself.

Talent is not I.Q., but it functions the same way.  I.Q. is really no more than how fast you learn, and how far you can go because of how fast you learn.  Talent is very much like this.  It’s how fast can you learn, and how far can you go because of how fast you learn.

So who among us has talent, and how much talent does it take to become a professional writer?  Tough questions.  The more talent you have, the better, of course, but success is often more in knowing how to use the talent you have, rather than in how much talent that may be.

Let’s talk about degrees of talent by first looking at math, then at sports.  We can all do math, just as we can all write.  Two plus two is four, eight divided by four is two, etc.  But as we progress through math, it gets tougher and tougher.   Sooner or later, whether it’s in an algebra class, a geometry class, or a grad level class in theoretical quantum level mathematics, most of us hit a wall we cannot go beyond.

We each reach the point where we just don’t get it.

Isaac Newton got it, Max Planck got it, and Einstein got it, but the vast majority of those who go through math are never going to get it.  Yet a great many who never reach the level of these giants nevertheless have great careers as math teachers, even at college level, and often make significant contributions to science.

Writers are the same way.  Few of us stand any chance of being the next Shakespeare, but this does not mean we can’t have great careers as writers.  Nor does it mean we can’t write something that contributes significantly to the overall canon of literature.

If, that is, we use whatever talent we have well.  Doing this first means listening to Dirty Harry when he says, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

It’s true.  Knowing your limitations is important.  This is not because we should let out limitations stop us, but because if we don’t know our limitations, we can’t get around them.  We’ll keep ramming out heads against the same old wall, rather than finding a way over, under, or around the wall.

Let me talk about sports for a minute.  In sports, they say You Can’t Teach Speed.  It’s true.  You can’t teach speed anymore than you can teach talent, and speed is crucial in many sports.  They also say you can’t teach height, and this is true, as well.  But let me tell you about a football player named Steve Largent, and a basketball player named Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues.

Steve Largent was a wide receiver, a position that usually demands a lot of speed and above average height. Largent had neither. At five-eleven, he was shorter than most wide receivers, and as one announcer said, “You time most wide receivers with a stopwatch.  You time Steve Largent with a calendar.”

The Houston Oilers were going to cut him, but decided to trade him to Seattle.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Largent got no faster and no taller, but he knew his limitations, knew he couldn’t blow by safeties or out jump defensive backs, but he worked hard on having good hands, and on learning how to read defensives to find the open spot.  When he did this, slow and short stopped mattering.  He seemed to be wide open on every play.

He made the Pro Bowl seven times, made the all-decade team for the eighties, and is now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  This would be fantastic for a tall, fast wide receiver, let alone a short, slow one.

Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues was a pro basketball player.  He played for fourteen years, scored 6,858 points, had 6,726 assists, and 1,369 steals.  That’s a lot, folks.  That. Is. A. Lot.

The catch?  In a sport where height is usually supreme, where even a short point guard may be six feet or better, Muggsy was really short.  He wasn’t just short by pro basketball standards, but by any standard you want to measure him against.  In the U.S. the average man on the street stands five feet, nine point one inches, and the average woman comes in at just five feet, three point seven inches. Compare that to a pro basketball player, will you?

Muggsy was point seven inches shorter than the average woman. That’s right, he was just three inches over five feet, but he was a pro basketball player, and a good one, for fourteen years.

Like Largent, Muggsy knew his limitations, he knew he couldn’t go over the average point guard, let alone a seven foot tall center, but also like Largent, his limitations never stopped him.  They didn’t even slow him down.  He learned to go around, he learned to read defenses and find the open spot, he learned how to draw defensive players to him so he could make a great pass and get an assist.  He learned how to play basketball against others who were always bigger, always taller, and often more talented.

Writers are much like this.  Some talent is needed, and not everyone has enough.  Talent is critical.  You cannot succeed without some measure of talent.  But you don’t have to have as much talent as Shakespeare in order to write a good, entertaining, meaningful play.  Knowing your limitations, which in writing means learning how you use the talent you have in the  best possible way, is often far more important that the degree of talent itself.

Thomas Edison one said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

So is talent.  Some lucky few may have fifty, or sixty percent talent, but if you have the one percent, you have a shot.

This brings me to the right question, which is not “Can creative writing be taught, or even “Can talent be taught.”

So, let’s get to the right question, which is “Can those who have any talent at all benefit from having a good teacher?”

The answer to this is Of Course They Can.  No doubt about it.

A bad teacher can’t teach anyone anything, and even the best teacher can’t teach someone who lacks all talent and/or desire, who doesn’t even have that one percent of talent.  But a good teacher can certainly, without doubt, teach a talented student how to learn, how to get where that student wants to go, much faster than the student would get there alone, and can help the student ask the right questions and get the right answers.

Study Shakespeare’s plays.  Then study his private life, particularly his school years.  He had a couple of great teachers, and what they taught him shows up time and again in his plays.

The bad teacher points at limitations and tells the student, “That’s as far as you can go.”  The good teacher points at limitations and tells the student “You need to find a way around those.”  The great teacher points at limitations and tells the student, “If you work with me, I can show you how to get around your limitations.”

The student does need some measure of talent, however small, and the teacher must have knowledge, and the ability to impart that knowledge well, but when the right combination of student and teacher comes together, miracles happen, and limitations become no more than brief detours.

Any writer who hasn’t experienced this at some point, even if through the right sentence uttered by the right teacher at the right time, has done more sleeping through school/workshops/seminars/ etc.,  than paying attention.

The right student/teacher combination is important, so I think great care should be taken in selecting workshops, seminars, and even MFA programs, but when this combination comes together, miracles really do happen.

And in plain fact, if you can learn, you can damn sure be taught.

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

Life In the Fast Lane. (And PublishAmerica scams some friends.)

 

Okay, bad title for a post, especially since my life has been all too slow since my last entry here, and since even typing “PublishAmerica” makes me feel dirty.   There’s been a reason for my absence, and that reason is not knowing how the story was going to end.  Not a story I’ve been writing, but the one I’ve been living.

In short, I’ve been in and out of the hospital more times than a hypochondriac on speed.  Mostly day trips, a few hours at a time, but one delightful two night, three day visit, and one equally pleasant one night, two day stay.

I’ve still managed to get a fair amount of writing done, though about half what deadlines call for, and I’ve managed to maintain a presence on a couple of forums, though many of my posts have been phoned in, or relayed through someone else, and a few have actually been written by someone else.  I gave him the gist of what I wanted to say, and he put it down in his own words.  He did a good good, with the exception of two or three posts wherein I wouldn’t have said quite what he said, in quite the way he said it.

Probably a bad idea, and I won’t do it again.

Anyway, I still don’t know the end of the story.  Do we ever? But it appears my hospital visits are over for the foreseeable future.  I’m dog tired most of the day, I now have rampant tendonitis around most major joints, and I have a mosquito bite in the middle of my back, right where I can’t quite scratch, but I don’t have to spend half my time dreading tomorrow’s hospital visit, so life is rosy.

Not sure where or how to restart this blog, especially since a couple of better writers are now doing blogs along the lines of what I had planned here, and doing it better than I ever could.

Guess I’ll play it by ear for a couple of weeks, and see what tune sticks in my mind.

I’ve been  out of touch in more ways than one since my last entry here.  Heard from several old friends this week, all of whom heard I’d been in the hospital.  I’ve been years out of touch with some of them.  Two of them told me tales of woe about falling for the PublishAmerica scam.  One said he realized it was a complete scam after letting them publish a single book.  The other said it took him five books before it hit him over the head.

I have no idea how so many new writers continue to fall for this scam?  I could understand it years ago, back when PA was a startup, but even a cursory Google search now reveals PA for what it is.  Ah, well, you live, and if you’re smart, you learn.  If not . . .

Talked to an editor today, one who’s been holding a novel contract I really, really need, along with contracts for several other writers.  It seems the recession hasn’t hit them as hard as feared, or even as hard as first numbers would indicate, and her boss told her to get all the contracts out and signed, some dozen or so in all.  Good news for all.

She had the cutbacks and layoffs have been beneficial, and should have been done years ago.  She also said most of the publishers still in trouble aren’t there because no one is buying books, but because they got caught in the same easy loan bursting bubble that smacked so many people and businesses up side the head.

I’ve heard this three or four or five times now, always from inside sources, so I suspect it’s true.

Anyway, the end of the story will have to wait, and for now I’m back at home, back to writing FULL-time, and back to blogging on a more or less regular basis.  Which is good.  I HATE, HATE, HATE being in the hospital, even for a few hours at a time.

 

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

The Successful Writer. Part 3

 

Grammar, Bad and Good.

The bad news about grammar is that, as a fiction writer, you must have a basic knowledge of how it all works.  There is no way to tell a good story and build great characters without a working knowledge of grammar and punctuation.

Nor, of course, can you write a story filled with atrocious grammar, and then have someone fix it, be it a friend or a hired “editor.”  Why can’t you tell a story any old way you want, a story filled with horrible grammar, and then just get someone else to fix it?  Because fixing grammar and repairing punctuation does not fix bad storytelling and poor character building, and without a working knowledge of grammar going in, the storytelling and the characters will be poor.

Think about it.  If repairing truly horrid grammar and punctuation fixed the problems lack of such knowledge causes, you wouldn’t need to find anyone to fix it, would you?  Editors would simply fix it for you, and, Voila!, the novel sells like ice water in Hades.

Oh, any editor will correct minor grammar and punctuation problems here and there.  We all make mistakes.  We all fall short of perfection.  But we do not fix novels that come in with horrid grammar and punctuation all the way through because experience has taught us that such novels are just as bad after we work hard to fix teh problems as they were before we touched them.

So the bad news is that a fiction writer must have a working knowledge of grammar and punctuation before he’s going to sell anything.

The good news is that in no way does a writer have to be a grammar guru.  No fiction writer needs a degree in English in order to write wonderful fiction.  The more a writer knows, the better, but in all honesty, a writer does not even have to know what a gerund is, what an infinitive is, split or otherwise, or even what a preposition might be.

It helps to know these things, and I would say that it’s darned difficult to know whether to use “was” or “were” unless you know what subjunctive mood is, but the jargon is usually unnecessary, and it’s the jargon that confuses most new writers.  Besides, you can learn subjunctive mood in a couple of minutes by simply typing “Grammar: subjunctive mood was/were” into Google. The rule is pretty simple, and once learned, stays learned.

So what do you need to know?  It’s enough to begin with the basics.  First, you should know what a noun is, what a verb is, what an adverb is, and what an adjective is.

Beyond this, you should have a firm grasp on syntax and tense.  You need to know how to identify active and passive voice (The word “was” does not automatically make a sentence passive), and to understand active/passive, you really need to know how to identify the subject of a sentence. 

You also need to know what a “clause” is.  Without knowing this, well, your comma use is going to be less than correct.

So, punctuation,  This  is both the easiest and the most difficult aspect of writing for many new writers.  But if you concentrate on a single piece of punctuation, the comma, everything else will fall in line.  From my experience as an editor, writers who use the comma correctly seldom have a real problem anywhere else.

And contrary to what you’ll find plastered all over the internet, you cannot determine comma use by where you take breath when reading.  That’s just wrong.

So, if you don’t know even these basics, if you lack all knowledge of grammar and punctuation, you’re going to need a grammar book.  And a style guide, for that matter.  Which one?  That’s the problem, isn’t it.  The rub is that most of the grammar books and style guides out there are way the heck too complicated for beginners, and about eighty percent of what they contain is simply not needed by the average fiction writer.

My opinion is that the best possible grammar book for someone lacking basic knowledge is whatever English book your local seventh grade school kids use.  Depending on your local school, you may have to go up or down a grade, but I’ve found that the seventh grade book is almost always perfect.  This book will, in fact, teach you everything the average fiction writer will ever need, and will do so in a way that’s pretty easy.  It’s intended for seventh graders, after all.  How hard can it be?

Your local school may even give you an old copy, or sell you a new one.  If not, they can either get one for you, or tell you where you can order your own.  But find one somewhere, somehow. 

For a style guide, one which is also a pretty darned good grammar book in its own right, get Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. There’s a reason it’s nicknamed “The Writer’s Bible.”  Every writer should have this cheap, thin, wonderful little book.  E. B. White was also a truly great writer, and when he speaks, writers should listen.

Next time: POV

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

The Successful Writer. Part 2

Heinlein's Rules For Writing.

Before I get into the rules themselves, I have a confession. I’ve been wrong all this time about one important aspect of Heinlein’s Rules. I believed that each rule not followed caused twenty percent of all prospective writers to fail. I did some pretty exhaustive research before starting this blog entry, and I was wrong, which means Robert J. Sawyer was right. It isn’t twenty percent, it’s fifty percent.

In other words, if you begin with one hundred wannabe writers, fifty will not follow rule one, and will fail. Of the remaining fifty, twenty-five will not follow rule two, and will fail. Rounding up, thirteen will still be standing after rule three, seven will be alive after rule four, and only four will remain after rule five.

This, of course, makes it far more important to know and follow these five “simple” rules.

Here they are:

HEINLEIN'S RULES FOR WRITING
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

To break them down much as Robert J. Sawyer does:

1. You must write.

Anyone hear a loud DUH! when they read this rule? Of course you must write if you want to be a writer. Despite this incredibly obvious statement, fully half of all beginning writer do not write often enough matter. Why? Lots of reasons, probably, with the main one most likely being the old saw that states something like “Everyone wants to be a writer, but darned few actually want to write.”

It’s like wanting to be a championship swimmer, but not wanting to get wet in the process. Excuses are legion, but pretty much every last one of them is an excuse, not a reason. If you want to be a writer, you must write, and you must do so early and often. You simply cannot write half an hour today, four hours week after next, and nine hours come December. Unless you plant your Butt in a Chair and write on a regular basis, you will be in the first fifty percent to drop out.

2. You must finish what you write.

There’s that “Duh!” again. This should be as blatantly obvious as rule one, but there are probably a thousand or more abandoned short stories and novels for every finished short story or novel out there.

Writing half a short or a quarter of a novel does not teach anyone to write. It just teaches them how to quit. You can’t even tell whether the first half is any good until you finish the second half. When you start something, finish it. How good or how bad you think it is doesn’t matter. If you want to be a writer, if you want to write good short stories and/or novels, you must write complete short stories and novels.

Nor should it take you six months to write a short story, or four years to write a novel. If it does, you aren’t really following rule one.

But twenty-five more writers just exited stage left.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

This is the rule that receives the most flak because too many think it means you should write a first draft, and then never touch it again. It’s true that Heinlein often did just this, and it’s equally true that a remarkably large number of writers throughout history have been able to do just this, and still produce fiction that was/is incredible. Many a classic novel and short story comes to us in first draft form, and that’s fine.

But it’s unalterably true that most of us can’t produce first drafts that are as good as they should be.

No, what this rule really means is to get your story in the shape it should be, and then know when to leave well enough alone. Tinkering endlessly does not make a story better, it just makes it take longer.

Once you start sending the story out, resist the urge to make changes with every rejection, unless an agent or an editor suggests changes that make sense to you.

And we’re down to thirteen writers.

4. You must put the work on the market.

If you don’t put your work on the market, you can’t sell your work, but some writers are either afraid to put it on the market. or they continue tinkering endlessly with the same result.

And we have seven writers still with us.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

If you don’t keep your work on the market, you’ll have to be incredibly good to sell it. Fiction must be good, but it also much match the target magazine, book line, etc., and it must get there when needed. It’s just wrong-headed to think a story won’t sell because it’s been rejected one, twice, or thirty times.

And keeping it on the market does not mean cursing God and deciding to self-publish. This is just taking it off the market in a way that lets you feel good about yourself. It means keeping your work on the market until there is literally nowhere left to submit it.

Only seven writers made it this far, and we just lost three of them.

Honestly, I’m being generous here. I should have rounded down, not up. But it’s close enough. Four percent of those who started the journey are still in the game. It’s no coincidence that nearly one hundred percent of selling fiction routinely comes from the top three to four percent of writers any agent or editor sees.

Tomorrow, the good news about grammar and punctuation.

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

The Successful Writer. Part 1

 

I’ve been getting a lot of questions on what it takes to be a successful writer.  This is, in fact, almost certainly the most commonly asked serious question that comes my way. (Non-serious questions include the ever-popular I have a great idea for a novel.  Suppose I give you the idea, you write the novel, and we split the profits?”

“Sure, and I have a great idea for a new type of death ray that will completely vaporize a person’s head.  Suppose I build the weapon, and you provide the head to test it on.”

So, first, let’s define “successful,” shall we?  Success does not mean you have to get rich from writing, and it does not mean you have to earn even a meager living from writing.  It does, however, mean you must first follow the basis principles of reading much and writing often, and you must be able to place at least some of your work with agents and editors every now and then.

Anything less is failure.  And before you say it, PEOPLE IN EVERY WALK OF LIFE FAIL.  PEOPLE IN EVERY WALK OF LIFE FAIL.  PEOPLE IN EVERY WALK OF LIFE FAIL. 

What I tell you three times is true. Those trying to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, basketball players, electricians, and clowns all fail.  And there’s nothing wrong with this.  The biggest failures in life are those who refuse to say they’ve failed at something.

Let’s get this straight.  You are not a failure because you fail at something.  You are a failure because you’re a bad person, or because you stop trying new things until you find something you that does bring success.  Failing at something is not a bad thing, and does not, in any way, make you a failure as a person.  To the contrary, if you never fail, you simply haven’t lived a very exciting or meaningful life.

Too many of us, new writers in particular, are afraid of failure, so they’ll define success in whatever way it takes to show they haven’t failed.  “Yes, I gave up, but I tried hard, so I didn’t fail.”  I may not have written anything that attracted an agent or an editor, but I self-published my book, and just gobs of people like it, so I didn’t fail.” 

It goes on and on, and it’s all pure BS.  In the first place, you didn’t really try. else you’d still be trying.  What you are is a quitter, and almost certainly a bad writer.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a bad writer, if you’re willing to improve.  The first of these writers, however, will never improve because they’ve stopped writing.

I am not opposed to giving up.  There’s a time and a place where giving up is the only sane and sensible thing to do.  But don’t give up and then proclaim you didn’t fail.  If you didn’t fail, then you succeeded, and we both know you did not succeed.

The second of these writers is a joke.  These are the ones who blame agents and editors, who say stupid things such as “I got tired of trying to please agents.”  “I got tired of having to kiss an agent’s butt in order to sell something.”  “I got tired of having to write something I didn’t want to write just to sell a book, etc.”

Nice excuse, but they’re lying to everyone, including themselves. Agents and editors want you to write whatever it is you want to write.  Always.  But they have this one little condition that you must meet.  What you write must be at least halfway good.  This is the only condition.

This second group of failures  can’t meet this condition, and never will, even if they have talent.  They won’t meet it because they already believe they write just as well as most of the published writers out there (They Don’t), and they won’t meet it because the moment they start self-publishing they stop improving at all.  Self-publishing doesn’t have the condition of writing well.  By the third or fourth self-published book, these writers are almost always worse than they were with book one.

Why do they get worse?  Here’s something most do not know.  Writing every day is important, but it does not automatically make you a better writer, anymore than banging away at a piano every day will make you Mozart. Simply banging away at a piano just means you have a steady habit of making loud, and nerve-wracking, noise.

To play the piano, you practice the scales, you practice playing music already written, and you consciously strive to make your playing sound like the playing of those folks you hear on the radio or on CD.   As you progress along this path, you add your own interpretation, usually without even knowing it at first.

What did you say?  Oh, you never listen to other piano players because you’re afraid it will unduly influence the way you play.  Yes, that’s what I thought you said.  Okay, fine.  The doors over there.  Don’t let it hit you where the good Lord split you.

Now, where were we?

We were at learning to play the piano, which really means we were reading and writing.  If you aren’t reading just about as much as you’re writing, well, good luck let me know how that works out. Again, the door is right over there.

Anyway, let me ask you this: How many successful screenwriters are there in the entire world who do not watch a lot of movies?  None, you say?  Right.  Not one.

If you’re a writer, books are your movies, so read them.

So, now that those two are gone, let’s get back on track.  The first question is what should you be reading?  The short answer is everything you can get your hands on.  The more specific answer is a bit more complicated, but I can give you a basic list.

First, go to the library?  What?  You haven’t been to the library in years?  So you’re independently wealthy, you know all the books in the library that you should be reading, and you’ve bought them all for your home library?  No?  You aren’t wealthy, and you can only buy a book or two per a month?  And some months you can’t afford a book?

Door. Split. See ya.

Go to the damn library.  Once there, make you way to the 808 section.  You should read the entire section, but I’ll cut you some slack and say read just twenty-five books.  Only two or three look like they talk about your genre, your type of writing?  Too bad.  You still must read at least twenty-five books.

Then go to the genre section of you choice, whether it’s mystery, romance, science fiction, etc.  Again, you should read every book in this section.  You should love to read these books.  But, sigh, twenty-five will do for now.  You also have to read twenty-five books from a genre section you would not normally read, twenty-five from the large collection of classic novels your library will have, and a dozen books of poetry.  Throw in a dozen of so autobiographies of writers, and that will do as a bare minimum, and I do mean a bare minimum, beginning.

And this is hugely important.  When you find an 808 book that makes sense to you, or a novel you enjoy, the very next book you should read is that book.  Don’t like reading a book more than once?  Who cares?  This second read is not for pleasure, it’s for study.  You get to practice your scales. 

During this second read, study everything in minute detail.  If it’s 808, ask yourself why it makes good sense to you, and whether or not you’re doing these things in your own writing.  If it’s a novel, study sentence structure, word choice, mood, tone, rhythm, flow, etc.  As yourself why this character came alive, why that bit of dialogue sounded so right, why the story comes off the page, etc.  Stop and think on every page.  Make notes.

By the end of this second read you should know a lot more than you did, up to and including how many “ly” words and exclamation marks the writer used.

Okay, the writing.  How and how often.  How first.  By consciously and thoughtfully remembering how it was done in all those wonderful novels you’ve been reading and studying, and by imitating same.  There ain’t no other way, folks.  This is how you start, this is how you learn, this is how you become successful.  This is how the human brain works, even if the writer isn’t consciously aware of it.  Over time, you’ll add you own interpretation, find you own voice, but you may not be aware you’ve done so until and unless you have a eureka moment somewhere down the line.

So, how often.  As often as possible, of course, but this leaves too much wiggle room. This is where wannabe writers on the road to failing make excuses.  These excuses some in all shapes and sizes, ranging from “I don’t have time” to “I can only write when I’m inspired/motivated.”

BS. Door.  Split.

You do not find time to write, you make time.  If you can’t find a total of two hours per day, five days per week, you aren’t trying.  If you need inspiration/motivation before you write, you’re never going to succeed as a writer.  It should take great motivation not to write on a given day.  And let’s get this straight where inspiration is concerned.  As someone once said, “If you have to ask how to write, that’s normal.  If you have to as what to write, forget all about being a writer.”

While we’re at it, one more crucial thing.  You must read often, but reading is not writing.  You must think much, but thinking is not writing.  You must research, but research is not writing.  You probably need to daydream, but daydreaming is not writing.  You need to edit, but editing is not writing.  Only writing is writing, so your two hours of writing must be spent actually writing.

And that’s enough for today.  Tomorrow, class, will be a brief breakdown of exactly why Heinlein’s Rules are all-important.

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie

Sad On Groundhog Day.

 

Some may think this sacrilege, but there are things in life more important than writing.  Many things, to some of us.  My own more important items include my family, my country, my God, and, well, anything I love or that loves me.

Miss Kitty is, or fearfully was, one of these things.  Miss Kitty is, of course, a cat.  She’s mostly white, but with a calico tail, and just a couple of calico spots on her back and face.  At six and a half pounds, she’s small for a full-grown cat, but nothing comes tougher.  I’ve seen her whip cats three times her size, and dogs ten times her size, one of them a noted cat-killer.

Her technique for whipping dogs was simple.  She knows better than to run, or to stand her hair on end and hiss.  Miss Kitty simply waits calmly until the dog is ten feet or so away, and then launches herself at it’s face with blurring speed.  That noted cat-killer of a dog, some seventy pounds of snarling fury, lost an eye so fast that it didn’t know what happened.

There’s a reason Miss Kitty is so tough.  Her mother and two of her siblings were abandoned shortly after she was born.  The mother moved the cats into the woods, but it didn’t work out well.  Two of the kittens died within a month.  The mother lasted another six months before we found her dead on the road.  This left Miss Kitty.

I caught glimpses of her for months, but she was as wild and feral as they come.  Our vet said there was no way to domesticate a feral cat, but I started putting out food, and after six months or so, she allowed me to stay close while she ate.  After another few months, she let me pet her. 

She only came out at night, of course, usually after midnight, so this usually meant I had everything to myself, and I eventually coaxed her inside.  She was fearful, unwilling to come in more than a foot or two, but one night it was like a decision was made, a switch flipped, and when I let her in she ran to the couch and curled up.  I sat down next to her, and she let me pet her.

This continued for a couple of months, and never have I seen a gentler or more trusting cat.  I could rub her belly, pull her tail, play with her paws, and the more I did this, the louder she purred. 

No one else could approach her, though she finally allowed my wife to be in the same room with her.

Come morning, Miss Kitty always wanted out, and would run all the way back to the woods that were her place of safety.  I knew she fully trusted me when, about two months ago, she didn’t run back to the woods, but kept coming back to our patio door until I went out to see what she wanted.

Only then did she start for the woods, walking, not running, and continually looking back at me.  I started following her, and she led me into the woods, directly to a well concealed den in the roots of a big birch tree.

We were making so much progress with Miss Kitty that we were sure we could, in another month or so, turn her into a full-time, live in cat.

On Thursday night, a record setting snowstorm swept through the area.  A snow that piled up in drifts, and that, even on the level, was well over Miss Kitty’s head.  Instead of trying to fight her way back to the woods, she did something she had never done before. . .she sought shelter under our van.

An hour or so later, my wife drove the van to work.  When she stopped briefly at the credit union, Miss Kitty, probably terrified, jumped from beneath the van and took off, never looking back.

Had I been there, I might have caught her.  But I wasn’t there, and couldn’t get there for hours. 

This is a small city, and while the credit union shares a lot with four other stores, plus a service station and a fried chicken place, it still sits on the edge of some wild country.  Miles of woods, farmland, and tree-lined streams fill that country, and Miss Kitty naturally headed straight for it.

It was still snowing when I arrived, and a wicked wind was sweeping across the snow.  That wind would have wiped out a person’s tracks in a minute or two, so Miss Kitty’s tracks were gone as soon as she made them.  My grandpa used to say I could track a catfish up a muddy stream, but though I’ve been trying for four days, that wind left not a track to follow.

Honestly, I lack the health of the physical condition for such a hunt, and I’m lucky I didn’t have a heart attack out there.  The snow was deep, the drifts were massive, and fighting through them was not easy.  But I had to try.

Realistically, Miss Kitty is probably no more than three miles from her, but she has no frame of reference to find her way home.  She will try to get home, but by now that isn’t her priority.  It’s tough to live out in the woods this time of year, and tough as she is, hunter that she is, she’ll survive, but doing so will take up all her time, and the natural lay of the land, the direction where hunting will be best, takes her away from where we live.

We left word at every possible residence and business in the area, but it’s unlikely anyone will see her, and certain she won’t allow anyone to approach her.

It’s always possible we’ll find her tomorrow, or next month, or next fall, but it’s likely we’ll never see her again.  That makes me sad.  It brings tears to my eyes. It gives me bad dreams.  I’m the only person she ever trusted, the only person she ever loved, and a of all the pets I’ve had, this wild, tough, feral, survivor was the one I loved the most.

The thought of her out there in this weather, wondering where she is, wondering where I am, wondering where her next meal will come from, tears me up.  Miss Kitty is as tough as they come, and she’ll find a way to survive, and so, I suppose, will I.  But it sure makes for one sad Groundhog's Day.

 

Sincerely,

James A. Ritchie