Blogcritics

Give It Away: One Solution To The Book Publishing Blues

Richard Marcus — Sat, 4 Oct 2008 09:38:02 EDT

I'm willing to let people read what I've written. Now the question remains - are people going to be willing to read it?
It's been slightly over two years since I finished writing my first novel, The Paths Life Takes. Since that day she has sat quietly in various computer hard drives, on CD data discs, on a floppy disc, and even in a cardboard box awaiting shipping to a publisher. She's been very patient waiting to see if I'll ever help fulfill her...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

NaNoWriMo Notes: More Fun With Publishing

Richard Marcus — Mon, 9 Jul 2007 22:20:22 EDT

In November 2005 I entered the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) contest just for the fun of it. The idea of the contest is to attempt to write 50,000 words within the month. Obviously 50,000 words isn't enough for a novel, but it's usually enough to tell you whether you have something that will turn into a novel eventually.At the time I was also eager enough to write a companion journal called "NaNoWriMo Notes" and published weekly installments of it online at Blogcritics and my own site before, during, and after the contest. I kept publishing because instead of it just being a journal about the contest it had evolved into a record of my attempts to complete a novel.You see, by the time November had come to a close that year I had written somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand words and was too far gone to stop. I've had plenty of fitful beginnings before, but none had ever cleared the thirty thousand-word mark, let alone gone as far as this one had, so I was determined to finish. I couldn't let all those words languish in obscurity; I had a duty to them to see them published.Since I was already in the habit of keeping a running commentary it wasn't that difficult to continue. In fact there were weeks when I managed to get more accomplished writing about what I didn't accomplish, than actually accomplishing anything. I have to admit that not only were those particularly frustrating weeks, they were also the ones where I know I came perilously close to self-pitying navel gazing.Even when I had finally finished the manuscript, including re-writes, edits, and proofreading, I continued to monitor my progress in attempting to find a publisher via the "Notes". But there is only so much you can write about that without repeating yourself. Since I was still without a happy ending for "Notes" - getting the book published - and I was contemplating self-publishing it through Lulu.com, a print on demand company, I decided for publication purposes that NaNoWriMo Notes: An Exercise In Creative Insanity would end with the completion of the novel so it at least had the illusion of a happy ending.In April of 2006 I sent off my first submission of a chapter and synopsis of the novel to a publisher. Almost immediately I received a request for the next three chapters of the manuscript. To say I was excited was putting it mildly. They must have really liked it if they wanted more within a week of receiving the first chapter. After three months of not hearing a word back from them since that request for more chapters, my excitement began to ebb substantially. Friends who had been published many times over reassured me that it meant nothing – publishers can take up to year sometimes to respond to even a query letter. But when the rejection letter eventually showed up I wasn't surprised at all -- it had become inevitable.As I had decided only to apply to one publisher at a time it wasn't until October of 2006 that I sent off another submission. This time I called in a favour and asked a friend of mine if he would write a letter of support for me to his publisher. I hoped this would at least guarantee that it would be read. He had no problem with doing that and so I sent a full manuscript to the offices of Penguin India.What with getting the manuscript copied -- 300 plus pages would have been too much for my desktop printer to handle and the ink alone would have cost more than the commercial print job -- and mailing, it cost me eighty dollars to send it off to the publisher. As recently as a year prior to my submission, Indian publishers had jumped at the chance to publish the work of foreign English language writers, so the money looked well-spent as far as I was concerned.Of course a lot can happen in a year, and Penguin India had recently changed management and policy. With burgeoning Indian nationalism the company's focus had switched so that now they only published a limited number of foreign nationals. I had already started picking up signals to that effect so wasn't overly surprised to find a lovely piece of stationary in my mail one day from Penguin India regretting they wouldn't be able to use my manuscript. That was in December of 2006 and I've only now sent off another unsolicited manuscript. Oh, I've been busy, true enough, but even to my own ear "busy" sounds like a feeble excuse. How long does it take to stick a chapter and two letters in an envelope and mail it? Even sorting out which publisher you want to send it off to next shouldn't take seven months, but that's how long it took me.One of the sticking points was trying to find the publisher most likely to publish the manuscript before submitting it. Now of course that's a sensible precaution within reason. You're not going to send a piece of fiction to a publisher that only puts out non-fiction obviously, but I was going a little further then that.I would go to a publisher's website and before I'd even check to see if they were accepting unsolicited submissions I would check out what type of books they sold. I'm not even sure what I was looking for, but I do know that if I didn't like the feel of their site, or their work struck me as being not the type I'd want to be associated with, I'd pass. In other words I could always find an excuse not to send off my manuscript: too intellectual, not intellectual enough, wrong type of attitude towards publishing, too big, too small, and so on. If you try hard enough you can always find a reason not to do something.I finally clued in that I had fallen into that trap, and from there it wasn't such a great leap to figure out that I didn't want to send my manuscript off again because I was scared of being rejected again. That might not sound like much of a revelation, but it actually took me by surprise that I felt that way. After I recovered from the shock, and accepted that's what had been happening, it became surprisingly easy to send off a submission. I found out the name of the contact I needed to write to, and sent a package off to one of the smaller presses whose books I've been reviewing. That may sound like an easy route, what with name recognition and all, but it will also make a rejection all the more bitter.So why, if I'm so afraid of rejection, have I submitted to someone whose rejection would have an even more devastating effect on me than another publisher? For the simple reason that if I can work up the courage to submit to them I'll be able submit to anyone. Of course it could also be that I'm hoping, that because they know me and what I'm capable of, that they might be more likely then others to at least consider me.If I'm being honest I have to say it's a split between the two. I guess you could almost call it a paradox – submitting to someone you know because you hope it helps your chances while at the same time being even more afraid of submitting to them because the rejection will feel that much worse. Of course the real problem is most likely that I think too much and should just get on with it (I heard you out there in the peanut gallery – don't think I didn't).So here I am sitting waiting for an answer and not expecting much in the way of anything. It's been almost two years since I finished the book and although I've been pecking away at its sequel, there are times when I read through it and it feels like someone else wrote it. Of course if they write back asking to read the full manuscript that will all change and you'll see how quickly I'll start to care.But for now I'm going to at least hold on to the illusion of sang-froid and just continue on with my daily business as if my life didn't hang in the balance based on someone else's opinion. Which it doesn't, really it doesn't, I couldn't care less one way or another… And if you believe that I've got some great land in Florida I'll sell you sight unseen.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

Why I'm Happy To Fail At NaNoWriMo This Year

Richard Marcus — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:09:33 EST

I'm not going to be making the 50,000-word count this year at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) contest and it's probably the best thing that's ever happened to me. I should have known after the first week I wasn't going to make it. I was struggling to keep up the pace, but was deluded enough to think that after I caught up by day nine, everything was going to be okay.Heck, the signs were there for me to read before the contest even started. I wasn't going to make it, but I didn't want to accept that I wasn't physically, emotionally, or mentally up to the challenge this year. Writing may look like a sedentary occupation, but it still requires you to be in good shape physically, or else you will get mentally exhausted from the struggles with your body.I have talked about my physical problems elsewhere so I won't go into the messy details, save to say that I have a chronic pain condition. In mid-October I had to have some minor surgery, a hernia repair, and had not considered how much that would actually take out of me. I had conveniently forgotten that once you have a pain condition, not only will surgery aggravate the pre-existing problem, healing from the surgery will take far longer then normal.There is also the radically increased chance of post-operative complications due to pain. Starting from the moment the freezing wore off after the surgery, I was unable to move because of the pain and had to be rushed into emergency. I am unable to spend more then a few hours at a time upright.Since I have a laptop, I figured I would just prop myself up in bed and write away merrily, and much like last year be well over the 50,000 mark by the end of the third week. Well that time is fast approaching, Tuesday is the 21st of November and I've not yet even topped 30,000 words. There's still a chance I could come up with over 20,000 words in the next ten days -- it's only about 2,000 words a day after all -- but if I do it, it will be strictly by accident. I'm no longer shooting for any particular word count on the project I'm working on; instead my goal is to finish the novel.I was feeling really depressed this past weekend about not being able to produce the numbers of words a day I had last year while taking part in NaNoWriMo. I had even written a long whiney letter to a friend of mine complaining about it. I was afraid that because I couldn't do what I'd done before, I might be losing my ability to write.At one point in the letter I had written about how aggravating it was that it had taken me four hours to write a simple book review. My friend had very patiently, obviously, read the whole letter and wrote me back to me remind of something that I'd forgotten. It doesn't matter how much you write or how long it takes; what matters is that you write.As I was mulling this and some other thoughts over in my head, I happened to spot a chunk of rock crystal my wife had picked up for me a few weeks ago. It’s a really neat specimen in that you can see the striations that have gone into the rock's making. Literally hundreds of individual points of crystal have grown together to form one shape with a perfect point of clear crystal.I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Writing can develop with the same sort of structure as that rock - one layer of crystal building on top of another to form a final perfect shape. It doesn't have to be done all at once like a volcano forming an island, although that does happen on occasion.Each piece of work you do is a unique and individual just like anything else. If you try to force it to be something it doesn't want to be it ends up rebelling and turning out opposite of what you’d hoped. You have to take what it gives you.Last year when I wrote so much during November, it took me three more months to finish. At the time I was inclined to put my inability to finish down to not having a deadline to shoot for. Now, in thinking about past attempts at writing, I came to a realization about a bad habit I had developed with my writing.In the past I have been so concerned with finishing that I would try to write the whole story as quickly as possible. Invariably I would run out of energy or my initial impetuous would dissolve, and the project would languish neglected and forgotten in my hard drive. In fact it wasn't until last year that I was able to complete a project of that size.Although that approach was appropriate for something like NaNoWriMo, it is not conducive to me achieving my own goals as a writer. I need to break the habit of trying to rush through and finish a novel all in one breath and learn to pace myself so that I don't burn out my inspiration. According to some beliefs there is a reason for everything that happens to you, but whether you pick up on it or not is your problem. When it became obvious I would have to take a disability pension for an extended period of time, I saw that as my opportunity to write on a full-time basis. If I follow that logic along, it means the reason I've been given this extra dose of pain is to teach me how to slow down when I write. Although I appreciate the thought behind the lesson, I can honestly say I wish the Universe could have thought of some other way of letting me know. While I may not finish the NaNoWriMo contest this year, I've learned a valuable lesson that's only going to improve my writing. To me that's even more of an accomplishment then putting up winning numbers.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #35: The End

Richard Marcus — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:14:27 EDT

"So now the end is near…" or something like that anyway, are the words from that old Sid Vicious classic, "My Way". There he is in his white tux jacket standing at the top of the big staircase crooning it out for all he's worth, for the opening lines anyway, then it's the Sex Pistols/punk/howl/thing that comes screeching out of his mouth.Well, Sid did it his way, but that's not the way most of us choose to go out, in the Chelsea Hotel on bad heroin and in a bad way. But old Sid must have been pretty much D.O.A. when he checked into the hotel anyway – maybe even when he checked in with Malcolm and the boys back in the beginning. He was too much punk for most tastes – nihilism to the max – and made sure of the 'no future' part. Because in reality he didn't have much of a future and a part of him knew that, somewhere in that fucked up drug and alcohol riddled brain he knew after this – this being Nancy and the Chelsea Hotel – it was downhill on a bumpy roller coaster to hell. So what's Sid got to do with anything, except that I was thinking about finishes and endings, and doing things the way you plan on it and the whole "My Way" thing popped into my head. Which of course brought the late Mr. Vicious to mind and caused my mind to start wandering down the path of the choices made that brought me here instead of maybe my version of his lonely hotel room and empty life. Which in turn might prompt some among you to wonder what any of this has to do with NaNoWriMo Notes and the price of bread. Probably nothing about the latter, but something that my tortured brain says has to do with the former, at least in terms of bringing things to a close – ending – making a finish. Last year in October, perhaps a little earlier in the month, I began the first of two projects that have preoccupied, if obsessions can be said to preoccupy, me for the greater part of the ensuing time. Bless Dr. Pat's head (former esteemed Books Editor for this site) for his forbearance, allowing a relatively green writer the freedom to sink or swim in the potential pool of self-indulgence that became "NaNoWriMo Notes". Initial objectives of the series was to provide updates and reports on my progress in the November nuttiness known as the National Novel Writing Month. Of course with its now close to 75,000 participants worldwide, the National part of the title is obsolete, but why change a good name and all the memories of a young Robin Williams it evokes? The object of said contest (NaNoWriMo for short) is to write a minimum of 50,000 words during the course of November for no other reason than to say you did it. Sure, some people have used it as a springboard to make a rough start on a novel, but for the most part it's just an exercise in spontaneous creation: how far can one bit of inspiration be carried?For some people it can feel like running with one of those medicine balls that sadistic phys ed teachers used to make pre-pubescent kids throw at each other in an attempt to show that they could stand up to the weight of the world being suddenly tossed in their direction, tucked under your arm. To others it's no more weight than one of those plastic baseballs that seem to have more holes in them than plastic. Pick it up with one finger and run with it for days, leaving the medicine ball-haulers far behind.Ask anyone who has any experience with me and they'll gladly tell you I've some strange peculiarities, which if you're being nice you'd call eccentricities, but could also be called psychoses. Tell me to write 50,000 words of a story in a month just for the sheer hell of it, something no obviously sane person would attempt, and it's like offering me a treat. What, how can you be stressed by this, I can't think of anything that could be more fun!Ask me to go out to a mall, walk down a busy street, or even go to a social gathering where there are going to be people and noise, and I'm a basket case. I don't want anything to do with it, them, or whatever. I come over all faint, I make excuses, and if I do go, I hide under clothes and a hat with a brim. In fact ask me to have anything to do with the normal goings on in the world and I could easily be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly.It's not even like I'm some classic serial killer social misfit "he was always so quiet and kept to himself" type of guy. I'm happily married, have one or two close friends, and am reasonably personable; it's just that modern life and most of the people living it freak the shit out of me. I take some drugs to help me cope and see a shrink whose job is to try and ease me back into the swing of things, but I'm not overly interested in doing that, thank you very much.I think this is where we can fit in the hotel room and Sid Vicious now. You see, quite a number of years ago I was defining myself by imagining me through the eyes of others and always, of course, finding the results wanting. (Whether they did or not is another thing altogether.) Living like that requires a great deal of outside "assistance" in whatever form you feel like at the time and puts you on that down elevator to a cold slab in the morgue unless you hit the emergency stop button.I was close to the basement before I even found where the stop button was on the control panel, and I still had to choose whether or not to push it. Hitting it and starting to walk back up the stairs was probably the hardest decision I'll ever make. Making it only helped me see the stairs; climbing them was another matter all together. Lots of people stop but never climb out, but I couldn't see any purpose to that.But to make the climb you have to find a reason inside yourself, for yourself. If you do it for somebody else, or because the gun to your head has someone else's finger on the trigger you're just going up the down staircase. In my case it started as just simple survival instinct. Not wanting to check out caused me to hit the stop button in the first place, and once pieces of the past started to click into place and I came to understand the whys and wherefores for me being how I was, there was sufficient motivation in that basic urge to get me climbing.Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is the fancy name they give to the way you feel after having your whole system - physically, emotional, spiritually, and psychically - put through a meat grinder. The longer you were tenderized, the finer you were ground, the harder it is to recover. The grit that saw you through surviving the storm gets you to the first couple of landings but that vanishes and soon you're bereft of everything, including excuses.If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you – nobody else – who determine your destiny and decide your fate. -- e.e. cummingsThere it was in black and white spelled out for me in a book I'd carried around for years. Hell, I'd quoted those lines to people many a time to show off what a great fucking "artiste" I was, but hadn't ever taken them to heart in any shape or form. I was stuck on the landing and all along the answer was right there waiting for me to remember it. I could do whatever the hell I wanted, but I'd have to do it and commit to it, whatever it was.Or, I realized, it meant that anything I did - work, personal relationships, etc. - had to be given that type of consideration. I was the one responsible for my part in everything I came in contact with and there could be no excuses ever again. Let me tell you, it's one damn steep climb, and I've got plenty of cuts and bruises from where I've fallen along the way and I've had to re-climb the same set more then once. It would have been very easy to decide I had no future like Sid, but instead I opted to keep trying. I found the means to help me climb the stairs and that was doing the one thing that had always been a constant in my life, writing. But now I started to write for the sake of writing and myself, not to get people to like me or earn their respect or whatever else might be offered as a reward. The idea of NaNoWriMo appealed to me because it was a perfect example of doing just that. Nobody really cared what it was you were writing, just that you were writing. I had tentative plans for the story I was writing and thought I could see where it was going beyond the 50,000 word quota, but at the same time I didn't even have a title for it until after the first 10,000 words were written. The idea behind this series initially was to try to let people share in the excitement and drama, if any, of being involved in a contest like this. But when I spoiled that plan by hitting the target mark with something like ten days left in the contest, I began to shift the focus. Eventually it became a sort of guided tour through my process of actually taking this thing I started with no expectations and turning it into a novel. I'm sure at times it appeared self-indulgent and bordering on navel-gazing to some people, and I'm the first to admit that there probably were elements of both involved. But writing is a self-absorbing process, not something you do as part of a team usually, so that was as inevitable as bears and popes. Everything about the process was fair grist for my mill including whining about the industry and the difficulties involved in getting an agent let alone published; the drawbacks of self-publishing and why I wasn't interested in that route for the novel; the tedium of editing; and even a rejection notice from my first tantalizing query. (They had actually requested further chapters after my initial submission before ultimately turning me down.)The "Notes" managed to take on a life of its own independent of the novel it was supposed to be commenting on to the point where I self-published the first twenty-four instalments in a book form. NaNoWriMo Notes: An Exercise In Creative Insanity is now for sale at Lulu.com and I think I've sold two or three copies. The irony isn't lost on me that the commentary might be the only thing published from the whole exercise, but since I didn't expect anything, something is a pleasant surprise.But a year has rolled by and November is almost upon us again which means it's NaNoWriMo season again. The Paths Life Takes (the title I ended up with for the book this was supposedly all about) has been mailed off in its entirety to a second publisher and I'm awaiting another verdict on its relative merits. So it's time to shut this down before it turns into something you'd see on Oprah on a slow day. (Judging by the content of this last installment, it's not a moment too soon, I'd say.)There's not going to be any big production number to end this with, I'm most definitely not going to sing "My Way", but I will say thank you to all those who bothered to peek in now and again and I appreciated most of your comments. These were fun to write, and also helpful in that they would help me clarify thoughts about things. Hopefully those of you who read them laughed occasionally, and not just at me but with me as well, and they made you think on occasion. If not, then why the hell were you reading them? Joyce ended Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man with that memorable quote about going forth to recreate the conscience of his people in the smithy of his soul, or something along those lines anyway. My aspirations aren't quite that lofty, but I'm going to keep writing and keep seeing what comes of it for a while yet. It's only the end of this series after all, not me.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #34: Reading and Writing

Richard Marcus — Mon, 2 Oct 2006 14:15:05 EDT

There's a sub-folder in the My Documents folder on my hard drive simply called Richard's Words. There are more than 570 items in that folder; the majority of which are articles I've written for publication on the web either for my own blog or for other sites. If you count the documents scattered throughout the computer that have been moved into other folders for other projects the number becomes more than 600.Sitting by itself is another document that's around 340 pages long written during the same period but for another purpose. That file is my attempt at telling a story for other people's pleasure, the same way I've taken pleasure in the writings of others. In fact, each time I sit down to write I set out to entertain, inform, or perhaps amuse, so I can give people some of the same experience I get when I read the people I particularly enjoy.I used to joke if I wanted to read something I liked I would have to write it myself, which if you think about it, is conceit beyond belief. What I hadn't realized was what a tough audience I can be. Try writing a story you want to read some day and you'll see what I mean. In theory you'd suppose it would be easy, right? You know what you like to read, what kind of characters you like, what kind of writing you appreciate most, and what you look for in a novel. Well, there be plenty of slip twixt mouth and pen – or something like that anyway. First, there is a huge difference between reading a story and enjoying it and sitting down to write one. Can I hear a round of Duh from the peanut gallery about now? How about not stating the obvious for a change? But the obvious is sometimes something we miss in the flurry of excitement, believing we've found a solution to a problem. When you sit down and write the story you would like to read, learning to write it well enough to tell it in the manner you like can turn into a horrendous obstacle. Most of us can't just sit down and produce something that's suitable for more then birdcage lining or fish wrapping at our first go. Non-fiction, which is what I primarily write on a daily basis (although some might say otherwise about my politics, but that's another thing altogether) is quite a bit easier to write than fiction as long as your goal is to simply inform and provide analysis. Have an opening paragraph to introduce your story, and then tell it in the subsequent paragraphs, citing examples and source material as needed.If you are arguing a point, introduce your hypothesis in the opening paragraph and then prove it over the remainder of the article by finding information from credible sources to substantiate your claims. Your credibility in both cases is increased when you pay proper attention to the rules of whatever language you happen to be writing in. It also helps if you are able to make your point as neatly and succinctly as possible. With blogging the personal essay has begun to make a comeback. Authors like E. B. White, who aside from having written Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan for children was considered the foremost essayist of his day, would write about experiences in their lives and use them as examples or expressions of a philosophy of life. You start to realize the difficulties involved in writing when you begin to understand there are very few E. B. Whites or William F. Buckleys (to give the right their voice too) on the web and the results aren't usually up to their level. This type of non-fiction is a prelude to fiction writing. It requires the author to have a far better command of language as a prerequisite, and the ability to imbue their writing with personality, wit, and style.But even this is still a quantum leap removed from the ability to write even the simplest of stories. Successful essayists have had difficulty making the transition, although E. B. White didn't seem to have a problem, Will Buckley's attempts at fiction were far less successful. There's a quality to fiction writing and story telling that calls for more than just the technical ability to organize thoughts and ideas on the page in a coherent fashion, although that is an essential prerequisite.Creative inspiration, the muse, passion; whatever you want to call the it that provides the impetus for people writing something inspiring and enjoyable for others to read is a part of the formula, but not the whole picture. Anybody can have a good idea or be inspired; it's what you do with it afterwards that separates the creative person from others. Do you have the vision to take a flash of thought and turn it into something bigger?When I had the idea for my series of novels, I immediately saw the characters' story laid out for me like a road map. I could see almost everything I needed to know, even down to the tiniest of details like how they would be sitting around a fire in book two and I hadn't even begun to write book one yet. That is not to imply the book wrote itself, because it didn't and it still isn't. Unlike previous attempts where I've worked from only a vague notion of what I wanted, I know pretty much exactly what's going to happen all the way across hundreds of years and generations to come. Whether or not I tell the whole story is another matter, the fact I know the information is what's important. It's like the actor who creates a history for the character he's playing on stage, probably no one in the audience is going to know what the information is directly, but it will make his performance all the more assured and complete because he knows it. A fiction writer can only benefit from that kind of assurance and confidence. It goes a long way to making what you're writing believable if you can believe in it. Soon after I came to the startling revelation there was the world of difference between writing and reading, I had a further epiphany. If you're going to write, write about something you want to read about. I had joked earlier about the only way I was going to read a story I liked was writing it, but that's a lot closer to the truth than you'd think. There is no point in sitting down and putting all that effort into something if you're not interested in it. It's going to be crap for starters and you're going to hate every minute of doing it that sort of defeats the purpose of being creative.Working in the arts as a way of making your living is as close to taking a vow of poverty as you can get these days. Which means, like those friars and nuns of old who took vows of poverty, you're going to have to make damn sure yours is a true vocation not just a phase you're going through. Unless you're really lucky and happen to be like Steven King and John Grisham in that what you like writing about also happens to be what's extremely popular, you're not looking at making oodles of money.You have to get your fulfillment in areas other than monetary most of the time, which means you better be writing for the sheer pleasure of writing a story that brings you pleasure because that may be your only reward. If you're very lucky, maybe you'll get to see other people read and enjoy your work as well, which even if you don't receive a penny for it is an amazing experience.In my time writing over the past few years my total sales at Lulu.com, my print on demand publisher, has been about $30.00. But that doesn't seem to have slowed down my productivity. Everyday I get up and sit down at my laptop and begin to write something to post on the web. Some days it is a even a short piece of fiction, but more often than not it is a review of somebody else's work: music, book, or movie.I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate. Every day for this last while I've been able to do what I want to do. By doing it, I improve little by little. I've already received one rejection from a publisher for my first novel, and the completed manuscript is even now winging its way into another's waiting arms. I've had a quote from one of my book reviews appear on the dust jacket of a book I'd reviewed and I'm on first name basis with people whose work I respect and admire as writers and am treated as a fellow writer which always sort of surprises me, but makes me feel proud as well.I've always been a voracious reader and it now seems like I've become a writer as well - truly the best of all possible worlds.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #33: Modern Times

Richard Marcus — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:20:09 EDT

Some weeks, the life of a writer seems to have little to do with actually writing anything, but more to do with mastering the technology that's supposed to be helping make our lives easier - the software to help us prepare our manuscripts and the great programs that online companies have developed to help you promote your work when you've got it ready. The wonder of modern times and its technology; right!Sometimes it can almost make you miss the days of typewriters and carbon copies. Not in reality, but in theory and sentimental memory, the idea sure does sound good. Especially after the week I've had dealing with printing and uploading. It’s enough to make me pick up a chisel and a hunk of rock a la Fred Flintstone for the rest of my projects.Did you ever wonder if the world had screwed Bill Gates over in some previous life? How else could you explain the horrors of trying to format anything using his damned software? Come to think of it, how else could you explain his success without there being some sort of huge karmic debt involved?I was seriously wondering about what I had done to piss him off in a previous life this week when I went and tried to print off the manuscript for my novel. At 340-plus pages, it seemed like a little much to do at home so I decided to put it on a floppy disc and take it down to a good inexpensive printer. That's when I ran into the good old demon of pagination and how documents can change from machine to machine.Have you ever tried to make your way through the help file that comes with Word 2000? All I wanted to know was how to make sure that chapters didn't jump from page to page whenever they felt like it. When I took the disc to the printers on Tuesday, I knew chapter one started on the top of page three. It even said it did on the computer screen down at the printers when I checked it before hitting the print command.But somehow or other the first paragraph ended up stuck on the bottom of page two like an afterthought to the table of contents. In fact every single chapter decided it wanted to invade the previous page. I had a complete manuscript with a bunch of hooligan sentences hanging around on the wrong pages smoking cigarettes and getting into all kinds of trouble. I debated sending it to the publisher like that for two seconds. I could’ve included a note in the cover letter apologizing and making disparaging comments about Bill Gates' parentage and hope they'd be okay with it. I discarded that idea as quickly as I thought about it and realized I would once more have to make an attempt to figure out the mysteries of chapter breaks and pagination. I quickly discovered the key was in knowing exactly what it was that you wanted to search for in the help file. By lucky happenstance I decided to type the word chapter into the keyword section of the search engine and the first result listed was how to separate chapters. After only three attempts at reading the section I was able to get the basic gist of how to work it. After only four or five attempts, I was not only getting chapters separated, but I had figured out how to have different headers for each chapter and have the page numbers be continuous. I don't think I have had a feeling of accomplishment equivalent to this in years. Not even finishing my final draft of the manuscript could compare to the feeling of having put one over on Bill Gates and Microsoft. Yeah I know that's a strange way to describe figuring out how to do something really basic in a word program, but there have been so many times I've felt like help files were written with the intent of preventing me from using the software so that when I did figure it out I felt like I'd won a battle with the creators.Figuring out my manuscript wasn't the only challenge I was presented with this week. When I had published NaNoWriMo Notes, I had decided to list it with the Google books search engine. This involved setting up an account with the Books Partners program and uploading a pdf version of the text to their server. I was able to overcome not having a pdf converter program by downloading a copy of the book from my publisher who converts all written text to pdf files upon uploading. Then it was simply a matter of uploading that file to Google. Sounds easy, and in fact it was at that time.The problems began last weekend when I decided to upload a revised copy of the text and the covers for the book. Before proceeding, I contacted their help people and asked how I should go about it. They said as long as I uploaded a file of the same name as the one they had already, it would simply replace it. To upload anything to the Google Books Partners service you need to not only have them in .pdf for text and either .pdf or .jpg for images, you have to name them in a certain fashion. Text files have to be called by their ISBN and image files have to be prefixed with the ISBN and followed by either frontcover or backcover. Again, I was able to accomplish this without too much difficulty - except for one problem. I had uploaded the wrong front and back covers. I only discovered the error when I went to send out covers of my new book, Voices Of Creation: The Blogcritics Inteviews 2005-2006 to those people who had participated in it. I couldn't find them anywhere in the images file on my computerIt was only when I noticed that I still had images files named “NaNoWriMo front and back cover” that I wondered what were the files named with an ISBN that I had uploaded to Google. A quick email to the Google support desk confirmed that as long as I uploaded two more image files of the same name they would be replaced just like the text file had been in the last go round.Fine and dandy I said. So I proceeded to rename the files appropriately and went to upload the correct image files. By now I guess Google had decided it had enough out of me and refused to recognise my files as being in the proper format. I tried everything I could think of, but after five times of getting the "this is not a accepted format" error notice, I wrote the people at support again. I tried everything they suggested and continued to get the same message and wrote them back again. They just told me to email them the files as attachments and they would upload them for me.I know I made the initial mistake and have no problem accepting responsibility for that, but what the hell could have happened to make Google decide that a file format that was acceptable one day was no longer acceptable the next day. I even double-checked with the help desk that the format I was using was okay. They said it was fine. It was when they started talking about downloading a new Internet browser and trying with that instead of Internet Explorer that I surrendered to the inevitable and had them do the upload for me. This was beginning to sound like way too much like work and more than just the simple point-click-upload I'd been promised.Our concept of work has changed because of computers, and we have heightened expectations about how things should come easily without any fuss and muss. If I were to remind myself what it was like to use a manual or electric typewriter, when no spell check existed and making a correction involved using something that should have been called lumpy paper instead of liquid paper, I'm certain I'd be eternally grateful for all the technology that I have today. You could go back even further to the days when you had to carve your own quills, grind your own ink, and paper was made from linen or hyde scraped very thin. But I'm sure you'd hear people back then complaining about the consistency of the ink or the poorness of the quality of the feathers and linen. Some things just don't change. The thing is though, from the guy who complained about his latest shipment of goose quills always splintering to me muttering under my breath about Bill Gates, I hope we're not making excuses for our work. What kind of writer would I be if I said it was the fault of my software that my work sucked? A poor excuse for one in my opinion. It's the poor craftsman that blames their tools for the job badly done.What does drive me crazy is the that these so called labour-saving tools and assets for writers take so much time and energy away from the actual creative process, even when everything works out the way it's supposed to. They have you jumping through so many hoops to accomplish simple tasks that you are almost worn out before you begin your day's work. For one reason or another a great many of us have only a limited amount of time we can use for our craft. When you end up depleting that time on trying to take care of the ancillary stuff that is involved with those things designed to make your life easier, it can leave you especially frustrated. There's lots to love about modern technology and what it has done to make my life as a writer easier (I'd be lost without spell check), but at the same time there are occasions when its capacity to frustrate far exceed its capabilities to help. In the long run, of course, I'm still in a far better situation then any of my predecessors, but that doesn't prevent weeks like the one just past from making me seriously wonder about what sort of karmic debt I'm paying off by having to use the equipment of these modern times.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #31: The Return Of NaNoWriMo

Richard Marcus — Sat, 9 Sep 2006 18:41:16 EDT

It's September 9th today and the nights have been starting to get cold recently. The daylight hours are shrinking, staying dark until 6 a.m. and the sun setting before 8'oclock at night now. When the air starts smelling crisp and the leaves begin to turn, men and women brave of heart and weak of mind begin to think of NaNoWriMo.There are only 52 days left before you set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and begin the slow ascent towards the goal of writing 50,000 words within the month of November. There's the thrill of the first day that you easily surpass your daily word requirement, the agony of the days where you struggle to make the bare minimum needed to ensure you'll scrape in under the wire, and of course the greatest feeling of them all -- passing the finishing line as your word count clicks over the magic threshold to equal 50,001.Labour Day weekend has been and gone, so the "Three Day Novel" writing contest has passed you by yet again. The only literary competition left which has nothing to do with merit, or lack there of, is the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo.Let's face it - what else are you going to do in November? Talk about a depressing month; it's not winter yet so it doesn't have the redeeming qualities of snow to alleviate its greyness. It's not fall anymore so the trees are just naked sticks shivering in the dank wetness with no colours to brighten your day. Sure, you can go for walks in the freezing rain and look at the Christmas displays the stores put up when Halloween's over. But why bother when someone has saved you the effort of figuring out how to stave off Seasonal Depression by driving yourself crazy with an attempt at achieving a goal that's difficult but not impossible.Perhaps NaNoWriMo is a little too much like the old Chinese curse of "May you live in interesting times" for some of you in terms of the demands it will make - emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually and psychologically. But I would think it's a fair trade off for avoiding depression. Instead of being like all the other grey spectres around you, bummed out by the weather and the very Novemberness of it all, you'll be frazzled, anxious, inspired, and ecstatic. You ever see the movie Sean Of The Dead? It has these wonderful opening shots of people walking around like zombies going about their daily routines; cashiers at a supermarket scanning items and putting them in bags, people walking down a street in headphones all listening to the same music shuffling and jerking. All before anybody becomes a zombie; in fact some of them seem to have a little more purpose after they become undead - a focus is a marvellous thing.That will be the difference between you and the November zombies that surround you. You'll have a focus. Something that will give you a purpose outside of your normal existence, something that will break you out of any rut that you may have fallen into with or without knowing it. It might drive you crazy at times, but at least you'll be alive. Every morning you'll wake up and have a task at hand that matters to you. And it's a task you initiated, rather than an order from someone else. The fact that it is something creative is almost a bonus.But what a bonus; how often in your everyday life to do you get to express yourself creatively? When was the last time you took on a project of this magnitude that would force you to stir your creative juices on a regular basis? I know that's probably where a lot of your anxiety is coming from, but don't worry about it, it's part of the process.In fact, if you want to deal with that anxiety, the best thing to do is to start planning your assault on the 50,000-word plateau in advance. Start thinking about your story now. Who are the characters? What they are going to be doing? How they will behave? Where they will be? Who they will be with? And why did these events happen to them?Oh, and you'd better come up with a plot as well. They usually help to give your characters a sense of direction, a focus for all that who, what, where, how, and why stuff that I started to mention in the previous paragraph. If you are so inclined you can make up big charts that show how each character is going to interact with other characters and hang them on the walls around where you will be working. It will give you a feeling of accomplishment before you even get started. But if you use them for the actual project, think of them as guidelines not rules. The last thing you want to do is have something that's going to stifle your creative juices. If you get an idea from something you've just written don't ignore it because it's not on your list, go with it and see where it takes you and it will make for much more interesting writing and maybe even reading. The real reason for doing any planning is to reassure yourself that you're not in over your head. Once you lay stuff out like that on paper or in chart form you'll realize how few 50,000 words actually are. Once you understand that, you'll be amazed how what at first seemed insurmountable begins to look eminently doable.The National Novel Writing Month is a wonderful way to spend November, and -- who knows -- it may even be the beginning of that great novel you always wanted to write. Here's your opportunity. If you want to make a stab at it then you can go on over to the NaNoWriMo site and sign up. They don't usually open for registration until October, so you still have time. Enjoy.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #31: Singularity Of Purpose

Richard Marcus — Mon, 4 Sep 2006 11:36:56 EDT

Throughout the ages, wise people from many cultures have espoused the philosophy of simplicity as the path to achieving harmony and contentment. Needless to say, that instruction has been as open to interpretation as any other edict passed down on how one should lead one's life.Everyone claims to have discovered the path to simplicity and seems more than willing to share their secrets with you for the price of their book and maybe a course or two. Not only that, but there also seems to appear a multitude of reasons for living the simple life. Enlightenment, peace, personal wealth, spiritual wealth, closeness to the God of your choice; in fact you seem to be able to obtain whatever it is your heart desires simply by following the instructions in one of the books you've chosen. What always astounds me about so many of these books is not only how there can be so many different ways of living simply, but how complicated so many people make it to obtain simplicity. Doesn't anyone else find it sort of self-defeating that it could take as many as 15 steps before you can attain simplicity? What's so simple about that?Perhaps part of the problem is that they are trying to take a path that was designed to eliminate distractions between those who prayed and their god. It was a matter of divesting yourself of worldly concerns and material wealth and narrowing your focus so all your actions and thought were aimed at service to whoever you worshipped. Almost every faith has those who adhere to something similar, and usually followers live their lives isolated from the rest of the world either through physical isolation or the taking of vows that restrict their participation in society. There are traditions among all the faiths that are geared to train the mind to assist in the development of that singularity of focus requiring years of study and commitment, if not many lifetimes. (Yes, that's a plural -- get over yourself; it's their belief, let them enjoy it.)To obtain that type of simplicity you have to have something you are prepared to commit yourself to as totally as monks or yogis commit to their faiths. You need a focus that commands the attention of as much of your mind, body, and spirit as is possible for you to surrender or you don't stand a chance. Of course it can also work in reverse. Instead of searching for something that you can use as a focal point to coalesce your energies around, you have something that you want to become the centre of your attention. You want your life simplified to eliminate all the unnecessary distractions that you see as getting in the way of achieving that goal or fulfilling that purpose.For me that focal point has been my writing, and I now realise that I have developed that singularity of purpose and not even noticed. Without much conscious effort on my part, my life has gradually evolved into two compartments: things that are part of my writing and things that don't have anything to do with it. As time has passed in the past 15 months, the items in column number two have gradually been reduced. The only thing that comes ahead of my writing is the well-being of my wife and our relationship. Without that place of core strength I wouldn't be able to write anyway, any more than if my hands were cut off. I'd as soon consider breathing as being separate from my writing.Everything else either falls into the category of being related to writing or not related to writing. I've been doing a lot of reviews recently, books, music and movies, and I was beginning to resent them after a while because I felt like they were taking me away from my writing. But then I began to think about it and realised that was stupid.First of all, anything that I read is beneficial because it exposes me to new ways of expressing ideas and different writer's styles. I don't even have to necessarily like what I've read or how the author's written it for me to get something out of it. (At the very least, optimism for my own work being published – boy I'm better than this, someone, somewhere is going to publish me.) Then there is the whole process of writing the reviews.No matter what it is that I'm reviewing, I need to be able to write about it in an intelligent enough manner to interest the reader, while at the same time be able to communicate an informed opinion. There is also the challenge of coming up with a way of making the actual writing of the review more interesting for myself. All of those things contribute to my skill as a writer.When it comes right down to it, any time that I sit down at my keyboard to write anything - a response to a comment left at one of my posts, a comment at someone else's post, or an email to a friend - is an opportunity to improve some aspect of my writing. It could be a simple matter of ensuring my spelling and grammar are perfect so that it becomes second nature to write with that in mind.It could even involve taking that extra minute to proofread a casual email for typos and extraneous words. That way I get into the habit of doing it all the time. The more you care, the more care you take, and the more you'll take care of what is truly important to you. I suppose that's what they mean by being mindful, but when I worked in theatre we called it attention to detail. But no matter how hard I try there are always going to be items in the not-related-to-writing column. Some people will probably consider me luckier than most because I don't have to go out and work every day as I'm on a disability pension. The downside to that is that I'm disabled, which limits the amount of writing I can do in any given day. Some days I'm lucky and can put in a couple of three-hour stints at the keyboard in a day. Other days I'm lucky to haul my sorry ass upright to write long enough to post. So I'd say those two pretty much cancel each other out, the job and the disability.Of course there are also the mundane details of daily living that can't be ignored: laundry, shopping, and housework all have to be done eventually. When the dust bunnies become dust buffalos and start migrating from room to room, even the most distracted individual is going to feel compelled to sweep. You can't just ignore that stuff or in good conscience dump it on someone else when half the responsibility is yours. No matter what, there are always going to be things on the not-related-to-writing side of the ledger that have to be dealt with.If you are like me and have only limited reserves of energy to expend on anything, or if your limitations are time related, the best thing you can do in either instance is learn how to best utilize the time you have at your disposal. For me it’s a matter of not doing too many of the things in the non-related column that I have no energy left to accomplish what I want to do. In our world, living simply means being able to keep in mind at all times what is important to you, and applying as much energy as possible towards that goal at all times. It means narrowing your focus to the point where everything is thought of in terms of how it relates to that goal. Unlike monks who have removed themselves from the world, I can only minimize the world's impact on my attempts to serve my purpose. The KISS rule (Keep it simple, stupid) serves as a reminder not to overly complicate matters or you find yourself overwhelmed and unable to do anything at all. I have this feeling that many of those ancient wise men would have appreciated the sentiment behind that thought.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #30: I'm Just Getting Started

Richard Marcus — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:19:55 EDT

Dear RichardThank you for submitting the sample chapters of your novel The Paths Life Takes. I apologize for the lengthy response time but because we accept unagented submissions by email we are inundated and I do read them all. I'msorry to tell you that we don't feel we can add your novel to our list. We can only accept a small fraction of the works that come to us and we must be completely committed to any work we take on. Your writing is extremely good and I'm confident that you will find the right home for this work if youpersevere.With all best wishes for your writing endeavours,James McKinnonWell there it is - my first rejection letter. It was delivered straight to my inbox yesterday with all the suspense that accompanies the arrival of a piece of spam. There's just something so unsatisfying about opening a letter like this by email. You want to be able to hold on to things like this with fingers trembling in anticipation as you work up the courage to first rip open the envelope and then unfold the letter.Just pointing and clicking took all of the drama out of the moment. These are supposed to be important way-stations in your career as a writer; rejection letters piling one on top of the other until you're almost ready to give up, when at the last moment you receive the long hoped-for letter of acceptance. It's just hard to build up anything akin to that sort of importance when the letter comes electronically.First of all it doesn't have any identification that it is from a publisher. There's just a name in the address line. It took me a couple of seconds to even remember who James McKinnon was, let along that he held a little piece of my soul in his computer. It would have been far nicer to receive it in some nice envelope with the publisher's crest or name embossed on the back. Then I could have some good anxious moments to spend before even opening it.Letterhead would have been nice too. You know some fancy-looking logo along the top of the paper with a heraldic type quote in Latin that looks literary even if it means something stupid like "Keep your nibs clean" I bet that would look pretty impressive in Latin. At the very least it would have been nice to have a return address across the top that proves this person was really from the publisher all along.I only have his word for it that he is an editor at the house. What if he's the janitor and been breaking into their computer systems periodically and stealing files? How do I know he's not just going to use my idea to write his own book along the same lines? (Well probably because I did receive another email under separate cover from one the publishers assuring me that James was indeed on their staff, and his first letter did come from the publisher's address and contained identification marks.) But still, you never know.Well I guess you do, because who else is going to write as polite a "go away" letter as that if not a publishing professional? Talk about your Dear John letters; they never want to hear from me again do they? "I'm confident you will find the right home for this work if you persevere" really means "We don't like your kind so don't darken our door again and peddle your wares elsewhere."To be honest though it's a nice change to even hear anything back from somebody at all. I've sent articles off to magazines months ago and not heard a thing back from them. I'm still waiting to hear anything at all back from the publisher in India that I had sent off a chapter and a query letter to somewhere back in February.Of course that's nothing compared to what it was like when I was acting. You never heard back from anybody unless you got the part. It could be down to you and one other person for a role in a film or a play and you'd only find out you weren't cast when the play opened or the film was in the theatres. Supposedly having an agent made a difference, but I never noticed. I've had casting directors rave over me and say I was perfect for the part, never hear anything back from them and then when I'd see the actor that had ended up being cast in the role he was as opposite from me as possible without being another species. So, all in all, as rejections go this wasn't so bad; in fact it doesn't even feel like a rejection in some ways. I didn't have much hope of this publisher signing me to a book contract. I'm a new author with no real publishing record, and they are a new publisher. They are going to want to play it somewhat safe in regards to who they take on as a client, I would think.Aside from the fact that I wasn't previously published another strike against me was the fact that my book's genre is so nebulous. There is nowhere near enough magic or other fantastical elements for it to be considered fantasy, but neither can it be considered straight historical fiction. I didn't have any sex or nude scenes either, mainly for the reason that only two characters fit that bill and it wasn't culturally appropriate for them or their situation.The subject matter itself might have been problematic: how well is a book dealing with events based on the reconquest of Spain where the Muslims, Jews, and Gypsies who live in the territories are painted as victims of Christian aggression going to go over on the mass market these days? The words lead and balloon may have been floating through the publisher's brains, as well as large zeros in terms of sales in the all-important American market.The only reason I even held out an iota of hope for this company taking a flyer on the book was the fact that they had requested more chapters. I had sent them the usual first chapter plus query letter and was preparing to wait a few months before I heard anything back from them. So when Jamie the janitor (or maybe editor as he claimed) wrote back a week later asking for chapters two, three, and penultimate, I had a brief vision of one of those fluky "first shot hitting the bull's eye" experiences that only happen to other people.I had images of my pages being passed around from editor to editor, being discussed in publishing meetings, and eventually my editor (I was thinking of him as my editor in those fantasy moments) taking them to the publisher and arguing the case for printing my book. Thankfully, I know some saner heads who were able to bring me down to earth by telling stories of publishers asking for the whole manuscript and then never getting back to them. Or others discussing potential edits and revisions, and afterwards express amazement that the author had gone to all that trouble when they weren't interested in the work. So what do I do now? Why, keep writing of course, and start sending out more letters and chapters. I still believe my work is far superior to a good chunk of what's on the shelves these days, and that I've got a good story to tell. A friend of mine is going to help me with getting my foot in a couple of doors he can open, but it's still up to me to wow them with my work. I'll take another look at the early chapters and see if I can polish them up even more, I haven't looked at them since April so I might catch something that I missed the first time. Aside from that, I've got book two still to write, other projects I'm working on, and a blog to maintain. I'm not about to let a little thing like a rejection letter stop me now. I've only just started.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.

NaNoWriMo Notes #29: It's All In The Voice

Richard Marcus — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 17:32:27 EDT

When I was first starting out as a writer I had the bad habit of attempting to emulate the styles of my favourite writers. This meant that at any given moment my writing could sound like early 20th-century Irish (Joyce in pre-Ulysses days), 1930s east coast American (e. e. cummings), 1950s-to early 1960s American (any number of beat writers including Kerouac and Richard Farina), 19th-century naturalist (Flaubert, Zola, even a little Tolstoy thrown in for good measure), and traces of Classical Roman poets (Catullus, and Ovid, in translation of course).Part of the reason for that cacophony of voices was my desire to impress people with my artistic credentials. "Wow," I could hear them saying in my head, "He writes just like a mixture of"… any combination of two or more of the above I could imagine being said about my latest contribution to the pantheon of artistic creation. It didn't matter to me that, at the time, I had as much chance of my writing being compared favourably to Joyce's as I did of passing as Mel Gibson. One of the bigger ironies about all of this is that, over the years, I've since discovered one of the hardest things an author can attempt to do is write in somebody else's style. You end up expending so much time and energy making sure you sound like the author you are imitating, that the story you're writing is given short shrift and you are lucky if you ever finish. It's quite amazing how many "40 pages of a novel" one person can write!I'm sure many of you out there have gone through the process of beginning to pursue writing of one sort or another and have been told somewhere along the line to find your own "voice." It's made to sound like some great quest you are to set out on. Quest For Voice or The Author And The Holy Voice. Only discover the secret of your "voice" grasshopper and you too can have a multi-million dollar deal with Harper-Collins. (I'm sure that's what was said to me anyway)The first time I was either told or had read that commandment, I remember getting a feeling of panic in the pit of my stomach. What the hell did that mean, find your own voice? How did one go about expressing the voice that one hears in your head using words on paper? What did it sound like out loud or look like written down?I don't know when I first realized I was making a huge something of nothing, but I think it was around the time I started seriously writing again a few years ago. After a decade or so of self-imposed exile, I began to reacquaint myself with the pleasures of putting words on paper. I was working a full time job at the time and my wife was doing a full time course of study via correspondence and required the use of the computer during her waking hours. I would make sure I woke up early enough that I would be able to have a couple of hours on the computer to write before I went off to work. I began work on a story that had some potential, but the more I worked on it, the more derivative it began to sound to my ear. It wasn't just the content that bothered me, but the fact that I didn't recognise the voice behind the action as belonging to me. I went back to some of my favourite storytellers and listened to their stories as I read them. In some cases I would even read them aloud to see if I could figure out what made a person's voice unique. As I did this I began to imagine seeing the author actually speaking the words I was reading. This was when I had my own little personal epiphany on the subject of voice. No matter what style each writer was utilizing or story they were telling, the ones I really liked were just being themselves. It was their story to tell after all, so why shouldn't they be present, in a manner of speaking.This doesn't mean they were only writing in the first person, but are describing circumstances, situations, and character from their perspective. It takes a great deal of bravery for the author to put him or herself in such a vulnerable position. In order to write like this, and for it to work, you have to know yourself and be brutally honest in your opinion of yourself. Otherwise, the story will ring false because it will sound like you are still imitating someone else. Until you've faced up to all your own personal demons, you're going to be holding something back from your emotional commitment to the work that will leave a hollowness in all you write. This is the true meaning of artistic integrity, committing yourself totally to whatever it is your working on. It's also where your voice comes from; the more you can commit of yourself to a story, the louder and clearer your voice will ring out and distinguish your work from others.This is vital in these days of bland mediocrity where everything sounds and looks the same, where individuality of expression is of far more importance now than it ever was before. Uniformity of expression, where everyone looks and acts the same, is fine for an army made up of those who are trained to obey orders without question. But writers are individuals who should not be expected to march in step with anyone but their own motivations and inspirations.A writer's voice is his or her artistic soul, not something that should be idly made to conform or fit into a hole, unable to accommodate diversity. Voice has nothing to do with content, so don't confuse this with a freedom of speech issue. Rather it has everything to do with your means of expression and how you choose to go about telling the story within the rules of your language.Grammar is the structure that supplies cohesion and coherency to your voice and spelling the means of accurately identifying the words you use to communicate with. They are your tools and must be respected and understood the same way a painter will respect and understand paints, colours, and brushes. An abstract painter learns portraiture; a jazz improvisational genius spent years learning scales; a writer must know how words work together properly before being able to abandon those rules for experimentation.Aside from these rules, and some points of style for purposes of address and title, a writer's voice should be sacrosanct. It is their only means of distinguishing themselves from countless others doing the same work or writing on the same topic. A writer's voice is the soul of his or her work. Cut this out and you leave a shell of the story behind.

Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.