Writing Advice for Newbies (Education)

Some of you might want to punch me in the face for what you're about to read. If only it were possible to put a fist through your screen without trashing it. But this is one of those reality check blogs that needs to be addressed. And I feel like I should be the one to do it.

Here's my 21st century take on investing in advanced educational opportunities if you see yourself becoming a professional fiction writer.

--finish high school.

--Now the sticky part. College is expensive. Super expensive. Unless your folks are very very well off, you will be stuck with repaying huge loans. Something freelance writers and fiction writers just starting off will find impossible to pay. At the very least, consider attending a junior college first and if you wish to go on for your undergraduate, try and attend a less expensive state school. And by all means, don't major in English. Major in something that will land you a real job, like journalism, accounting, or nursing.

--Instead of attending college right away, consider gathering some precious life experience instead. Travel, write newspaper articles, blog, take photographs, work in a coal mine, steal away on a tramp steamer, join the Army, wait tables in Europe, become a prison guard, work construction, work on a fishing boat in Alaska and don't forget your dogeared copies of Jack London's, White Fang and Call Of The Wild.

--NOw here's the even sticker part. M.F.A. or what's commonly referred to as "Writing School." DO NOT GO THERE! The MFA is a useless degree. Trust me, I have one. MFA programs are rackets designed to keep old fashioned, often washed up writers who can't sell employed and to attract would-be writers who won't write another word once they've graduated and exhausted another fifty to sixty grand from their savings account. Try and make that up in terms of today's average publisher advance. Like Jim Harrison once said, MFA programs are like Pampers and Budweiser. They exist because there's a market for them.

Now what are you going to do about educating yourself to become a fiction writer?  

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How My Books Are Born

"Awww, I've got so many stories to tell..."

A prominent lit blogger has asked me to pen a guest blog that details the-story-behind-the-story so to speak of all my books. Talk about an intimidating task, and considering this is a blog and not paid journalism, I'm more inclined to lean towards brevity and my humble wits than get into something that could arguably take a few days and cover an expanse of at least twenty thousand words.

So the question looms large. How are my books born?

My first novel, Permanence, a literary romantic/suspense/thriller (did you get all that?) is a fictional recounting of my my honeymoon to Italy and something I overheard about a psychiatrist who entered into what would be a fatal love affair with a disturbed client. "Wow, I gotta write that one," I remember telling myself as I wiped the peach fuzz from my chin. It was the spark that lit the fire. I was a young literary neophyte and convinced I would set the world on fire with my words.

Course, it took a while for the fire to start. But it's still burning and I'm still stoking it with my follow-up novels like The Innocent, Godchild, The Remains, The Concrete Pearl, Moonlight Falls, Moonlight Rises and the whole kit and kaboodle Moonlight Collection. More traditional gumshoe novels with quirky and sometimes brooding protagonists...anti-heroes...who on occasion find themselves doing some pretty bad things in order to do what's right and to uncover the truth behind a series of lies and injustices. Characters inspired by the authors who came before, like Robert B. Parker, Jim Crumley, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben and others.

The Innocent is derived from the real-life story of a prison escape that occurred at Green Haven Prison and also the Attica uprisings of the early 1970s. The Moonlight stories, however, are mostly made up. The product of my vivid imagination and love of over-the-top plot lines. They are inspired by Charlie Huston, one of the contemporary noir greats. Also, Boston Terrain, another contemporary great.

I'm currently working on two more novels. Moonlight Sonata...again, entirely made up...and Aziz, a fiction based upon a truth I overheard about an American officer who becomes a casualty in Afghanistan after ordering an airstrike on a Tajik village. Now in Venice with his fiancee nursing his wounds, which also include unexplained bouts of temporary or hysterical blindness, he finds himself in the desperate position of having to find and rescue his future bride when she goes suddenly missing.

I guess Aziz means I'm back to combining the literary with the thriller and romantic suspense genres. Which means I've come full circle. But then, that's what writers do. Invent and reinvent and steal from what's happening in the world around us. Capturing a portrait of the truth and reinventing it for the page like Monet reinvented a garden scene for the canvass, and in doing so making it more real than than God intended.

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Change is Good

Change.

It's sometimes difficult to accept. Just ask Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo who claims, "The Amazon threat is real." In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he blames Amazon for putting the independent bookstores out of business. But the fact is Rich, indies have put themselves out of business, in part by adhering to a an antiquated system of returns. I've had books published by majors and small presses. While my "big" books were carried by the independent bookstores for as long as they sold, the independent books stores were always uncomfortable with the small press productions. They feared that my the titles might be "POD" and therefore "unreturnable." In fact, they would often sell my small press efforts "On consignment only."

I assume Richard Russo doesn't have to worry about returns.

Now that the digital age of E-Books is here and I am selling hundreds of thousands of them per year, I also no longer have to worry about returns. Sure my stuff comes out in paper and audio, but readers are embracing change. They are reading more than ever and they are devouring E-Books.

I'm sorry for independent booksellers. I used to love to browse the shelves to see what was new by my favorite authors. But later on, when I became an author myself, I could see the writing on the table: I wasn't going to survive for very long in a system of returns that allowed for booksellers to remove my product from their shelves after only a few weeks. It also meant that being published by a small press was useless. If I were to survive, I needed to be published by a major legacy publisher. Only then could I guarantee that my books would be carried by all the stores.

Now I am published by Thomas & Mercer. I couldn't be happier. They not only know how to produce a great book, they know how to sell directly to the reader. Amazon embraced change because readers were begging for that change. Amazon hasn't put booksellers out of business so much as they have liberated authors from the chains and bonds of a system that crushed us.

Yes, Richard Russo, the Amazon threat is real.

Thanks God almighty....

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Fictional Lives

Admit it, you've always wanted to create a fictional life for yourself. It's why we become writers. Or, one of the reasons anyway. So we can make shit up and live in a world outside of the two slices of white bread we've been handed.

So here's your chance to really get creative.

Don't just invent one and two dimensional characters to conveniently fit your story. Create real, three dimensional people who have real lives. Before you write the first word or sentence of your new book, take one full day and create character bios. When was your character born? How much did he or she weigh? Where did he go to grammar school? High School? Who did he take to the senior prom? How many times was he beaten to a bloody pulp up in Juvy? That sort of thing.

You might not use a one-tenth of the information your create in the lives of your characters for your novel, but just knowing who they are, inside and out, will create a richer, more complex, more entertaining novel.

So tell me, who are you going to invent today?  

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Wake Up!

There are days when you wake up and go through the motions.
You brush your teeth, splash some water on your face, put on your clothes, stand in line to grab a lottery ticket and a coffee, and head out to a job you hate. It could be a rainy Monday like today. You think neither of the past nor of the future. You exist to exist, and if for no other reason than your heart beats and your lungs breathe. And oh yeah, you're in debt.

But on occasion, perhaps once every few years, if you are very lucky and if you still have hopes and dreams no matter your age, you wake up and something quite extraordinary happens. You realize that you are beginning a brand new phase of life. That this morning, this very minute, is the beginning of something entirely new that will bring with it, new adventures, new places to see, new people to meet, new experiences and challenges that will both test your body and soul, and cleanse it.

You begin to live unconditionally, no longer burdened by other people who hurt you, drag you down, spread bad toxic vibes, shower you with guilt, sink their greedy teeth into you, laugh behind your back, plot, steal, lie, and cheat. These are the gluttons. The blind people who go nowhere and live only within the scope and range of their envy. They are poison and you are not obligated to tolerate them no matter their connection. They live sad and will die bitter.

This wake up moment will be one of complete clarity and peace. You will leave the past's successes and failures behind like a book you've finally finished reading and now placed on the shelf beside so many other books. You take a deep breath and you begin the day knowing you are reborn and that today is your first day of a brand new cycle. Your birthday so to speak. A clean slate

Make plans.
Have hopes.
Dream.
Buy plane tickets.
Get in the car and drive.
Take a train.
See the world.
Write a new book
Quit your job.
Leave the bills unpaid.
Get out of a bad relationship.
Be alone.
Realize that you have only one chance.
Help people.


Wake up!

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Immortality or Worm Food?

Love him or hate him, Ernest Hemingway is hot these days. More than fifty years after his death by self-inflicted gunshot wound, the ever prodigal Papa is once more showing up in films and new books. Most notably in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris and presently in HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn.

It all makes me wonder: what makes one writer immortal and another forgotten almost as soon as his or her body becomes food for the worms?

Hemingway was a romantic individual. Handsome, big, outspoken, he was an adventurer, traveler, and a fan of the ladies. He also had a real cool name. One wonders if the author would have become a phenom had his name been Irwin Lipschtiz. But no matter what's in a name, his work was groundbreaking, especially the early stories that came together collectively in the 1924 volume, In Our Time.

I think it's possible that good writing might not be enough to make one immortal. Like Norman Mailer (who followed the Hemingway macho, bad boy line pretty closely), or even Elizabeth Gilbert (who has become a dynamic and charismatic speaker aside from a mega-bestseller), it's important that a writer also develop a cult of personality in order to achieve the kind of fame that will last and last.

Are seeking immortality in your writing?  Or as a writer, are you seeking the immortal?

 www.vincentzandri.com

Quality or Quantity?

As authors in this, the new golden age of writing, we find ourselves writing more novels than ever. It's all about the content, as they say. Who are they? The ones in the know. The ones who get the fact that the more books you have for sale as E-Book, especially Kindle, the better you will do in the marketplace.

And so we write...

We write without pause.
We write with abandon.
We write when we are inspired and when we are not.
We write like someone or something is chasing our tail, not the least of which is death.
We write because people find reading sexy again when you can do it bed with a digital device.
We write because we can make a good living from it.
We write because we have no choice but to write.

But just remember, we should not write if the writing is going so fast that it is not good writing.
You with me here?
Ask yourself this: Am I sacrificing quality for speed?

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