Special Events12 Steps To Becoming A Storyteller By Keith Donohue, WIW Member The Business of Fiction Writing The first order of business in the business of fiction writing is to write fiction, and that is a craft or art that takes serious preparation that has been ongoing all of your life. Or, if it hasn't, perhaps you're in the wrong business or perhaps it is not too late to go catch up on some of the steps involved in becoming a fiction writer—or, let's drop that awkward term for the more euphonious storyteller. So here's my list of prerequisites to becoming a storyteller and then becoming involved in the business of actually selling your stories. 1. Be A Good Liar The truth is over-rated. When I was a young boy growing up in a family of seven children, I was encouraged—pushed out the door—by my mother to go play outdoors. The proviso was that I had to be home on time for dinner every night and, without a watch, I was to know that time had arrived by the appearance of my father's car in the driveway. Unfortunately, I was often a far distance from the driveway, distracted by the game afoot, or simply facing the wrong direction, and I rarely noticed with any precision the arrival of that car in the driveway. I usually arrived home, steaming with perspiration from my sprint in that direction, well after the first course had been served, and, usually, before dessert. But late. He and She that must be obeyed were not amused. I needed an excuse more plausible than I was simply not paying attention. I made up stories. Bald-faced lies about being chased by a lion or being stuck in a well. My older siblings laughed at the preposterousness of such tall tales. My parents laughed at the audacity. Night after night, I came up with one whopper after another, and, eventually, understood the game. The price for being tardy was some small entertainment. So lying, which on its face is a vice, became a virtue. That is, lying that exceeds the immediate cause—to avoid trouble—becomes lying for effect; in this case, the reward was not simply to escape punishment, but to entertain and be well-liked for it. Storytelling is, in part, lying with purpose. Eventually, the wriggling away from punishment grew more complex, layered and exuberant. The reasons for lying were not to avoid telling the truth but in the delight of the story's construction as it is built to achieve its ultimate effects. I leave your reasons to you, but they can be manifold—-from entertainment to moral instruction to philosophical questions to playing out some aesthetic questions. 2. Learn How to Read On my desk is a Bruce Kaplan cartoon that shows a little girl reading a children's book and speaking to a little boy. The caption says: "Finally, the alphabet is paying off." I can't think of any more practical advice in the business of fiction writing than to encourage you to read fiction. Francine Prose has written a marvelous book called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them (let's presume that the last pronoun stands for "books" and not for "people"). Each chapter takes one aspect—words, sentences, paragraphs, narration (not plot!), character, dialogue, details, gestures—and discusses how to read closely for these aspects of the story, and the book concludes with sections titled "Learning from Chekhov" and "Reading for Courage." And who could resist the appendix, a list of scores of novels and stories titled simply: "Books to Be Read Immediately." Or as my father would say in another context: Immediately, if not sooner. What Prose gets at is the need to read voraciously, closely, paying attention to the way other writers construct their stories. There are two things you'll need to be a writer—a gift for storytelling and a love of the language. The rest can be learned or acquired as technical matters, like learning the alphabet or understanding sentences. If you're the kind of person who has a book like Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style in your bathroom or on your night table, you have a shot. Or if you want to find that list of “Books to Be Read Immediately,” you are on course. 3. Workshop or Don't This is up to you. If you need an audience and feedback, if you want help on technical issues, if you enjoy the camaraderie of other writers, if you think such a program—whether workshops or full-blown MFA programs at major universities—will make you a better writer, you should join up, if possible. Provided you are already a good liar, a close and hungry analytic reader, and have the passion and discipline to write every day. As with every network, such programs may provide useful contacts for publishing and make it easier to find an agent or publisher. So by all means, yes. You cannot be taught to be a writer any more than you can be taught to be a dancer or a painter or a pianist. Some instruction and encouragement always helps, but unless it is in your bones and you practice and fail and try again, it won't be enough: 4. Write What You Want to Write Francine Prose writes in that last chapter of Reading Like a Writer: “Most people who have tried to write have experienced not only the need for bravery but a failure of nerve as the real or imagined consequences, faults and humiliations, exposure and inadequacies dance before their eyes and across the empty screen or page. The fear of writing badly, of revealing something you would rather keep hidden, of losing the good opinion of the world, of violating your own high standards, or of discovering something about yourself that you would just as soon not know—those are just a few of the phantoms scary enough to make the writer wonder if there might be a job available washing skyscraper windows. “All of which brings up yet another reason to read. Literature is an
endless source of courage and confirmation. The reader and the beginning
writer can count on being heartened by all the brave and original works
that have been written without the When I wrote The Stolen Child—a story about a boy who is stolen by fairy changelings and replaced in his family by a double—I was not worried about what my mother would think. Nor was I deliberately trying to cash in on the popularity of fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings, which I never read, or anything of the sort. Nor was I cognizant that some people would read it as a fantasy at all. It just seemed the best way to get at the story I wanted to tell which had to do with the doubleness of life, how we all grow up and yet remain, in some sense, the child we once were. And how, from time to time, that child, or at least aspects of the identity we shed, comes back to haunt us. Don't be afraid to write what you want to write and how you want to write it, as long as it comes out of the passion you have for telling the story. I do think it is a fool's errand to pursue some preconceived notion of what might be successful in the marketplace—i.e., my next book is Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code. Or dogs which are all over the bestseller list combined with some fictionalized memoir—I know if I can combine Running with Scissors and Marley and Me into Running with Fido or Fetching the Scissors or A Million Little Biscuits. I don't know the first thing about consciously writing a bestseller and would advise against such a thing. Write what you want, be passionate, don't be afraid. 5. Be Stubborn For some of you, no doubt, the foregoing is well-covered ground, and you are more interested in the actual business of fiction writing, but failing to talk about the art of fiction, I would live in abject dread of being visited by the Muse who would mumble something about finding someone else, it's not you, it's me... So the business. You've written the great American novel and are sure of it. All you need do now is find an agent, and here's where you'll need to be stubborn. Unless you already have published, you may expect a certain level of rejection. Stolen Child was turned down by 10 agents and another 20 did not even want to see the manuscript. A couple of object lessons: Prepare a stunningly eloquent query letter that will describe your complex work in a few bright sentences. Have your manuscript polished and ready to go. Do your homework. There are several good guides to literary agents available in bookstores, and most describe the kinds of work they wish to represent. Another valuable resource is Publishers Marketplace, an online database that will allow you, if you pay the fee, to search by keyword (and other categories) for agents that have sold books like yours. Even if you aren't ready to look for an agent, you should join up to get their free Publisher's Lunch—just to see what is being sold these days. You'll want an agent who has sold books with similar intents as yours, be it literary fiction, high concept mysteries, thrillers, or what have you. Finding an agent is a little like finding the perfect mate, and unfortunately, as good as these resources are, what you'll need is someone who "gets" you and your book, who shares a kindred sensibility, and who sees your potential. If you know your book is good, be stubborn. Keep searching. It took me two years, and I was ready to abandon the effort and try to find a good small press publisher. 6. Your Perfect Mss Isn't The call comes, the magical yes happens. The agent finally phones to
say, I love your book and want to represent it, wait for the... "and I
just have a few suggestions." In my case, it was a five-page letter
proposing major structural changes. Be prepared to acknowledge that the
story you thought was perfect is far from ready for publication. Agents have taken on more of the editorial gruntwork now that
editors, particularly at commercial houses, are too overwhelmed by the
volume of work. Be professional. Realize that you are entering into a
collaborative phase and that in order to sell the book, you are going to
have to consider these suggestions, weigh the compromises and choices,
and do what is best for the project. In my case, I was fortunate to have
worked for nearly 20 years on both sides of the editorial equation—as a
speechwriter, the work was always a collaboration with the principal. As
an editor, I had a sense of audience that sometimes differed from the
writer's. On Stolen Child, it took about three months of
re-writing the novel before it was deemed ready, and I viewed that as a
way to learn more about what I 7. Expect Nothing My friend, the poet Sam Hazo, wrote this short poem: "Expect everything, and anything seems nothing. Expect nothing, and anything seems everything." This is good advice when you are waiting for the agent to submit to the publisher. For Stolen Child, the agent set high expectations. He was confident that he could find a publisher, had talked up the book for months before submitting, and had carefully chosen how and to whom he would send the manuscript. He also asked if he might send it to an agent in Hollywood for a movie adaptation, and because I am such a good liar myself, I greeted this sort of talk with a healthy skepticism. The agent submitted the book at auction, and we received a very good offer from Nan Talese/Doubleday, and later, the agent in Hollywood was able to cook up a film deal as well. Some of this is pure luck, but I firmly believe that we would not have been in the position to be lucky had I not followed the steps I've mentioned—good liar, learn to read, write what you want, be stubborn, be professional in working with the agent. 8. Your Now-Perfect Mss Still Isn't The perfect novel that you subjected to intense revision in collaboration with the literary agent is now ready to be published, except that you will now have to undertake further revision, in a much more concentrated fashion, with an editor. Do not despair. They will, if they are any good, tell you "this is your book, so..." and then proceed to ask you to get rid of a major character or plot device or so on. Again, take this as an opportunity to become a better writer. Listen. Choose. Some of the best scenes in Stolen Child were added after I thought I was completely finished. Any book is never finished, merely abandoned. 9. Publishing, Unlike Fiction Writing, is a Business Publishers want to sell multiple copies of your book. Go along with their plans. Be generous of your time and attention to this effort. Listen to what they are saying about their plans, for that will give you a clue of their expectations. A novel gets scheduled for publication often a year or more after it is accepted. Part of this has to do with the editorial and production (cover, blurbs, copyediting, printing) aspects of the business, but mostly they are creating a manageable list of titles for the two "seasons" of the year—Spring and Fall. My book was purchased in October 2004 and slotted for May 2006. They used that time to market the book internally—along with all of the other Doubleday and its parent company Random House titles scheduled for Spring 06—to their marketing, publicity and sales forces. Based on the advance that Doubleday had committed, Stolen Child was projected to sell a certain number of copies (and other kinds of rights such as audio book) in order for the company to turn a profit. They devoted considerable resources to it for promotion—printing 1000 Advance Reading Copies to send out to reviewers and to bookstores about nine months before publication. Booksellers, traditional stores, chains and online—are the key to its success. They order copies well in advance and anticipate the number that they can sell. Pre-publication, the tempest occurs, as the publisher awaits orders and prepares the right number of copies to actually print and ship. At the same time, publicity is trying to convince newspapers to review, radio shows to interview, and bookstores and other venues for author readings. All of this is done well ahead of the game, and early reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal are signals of how the book may perform. Generating "buzz" here makes it easier for stories to be placed, and I was fortunate to attract the attention of NPR, Amazon.com, and other major national media. Amazon in particular was excited about the book—on its merits as a story—and placed a large order, thinking that if they marketed it, the book would sell. Advertisements and paid front-of-store placement were also made based on projections of sales, based on pre-publication orders, early reviews and guesswork. Publishing is a business, but it isn't necessarily smarter than any other business. While all of this was going on, my agent was still working for me, selling foreign rights to 25 other publishers and in Hollywood, the movie agent circulating the manuscript for film rights, which were ultimately purchased by Amazon itself which later partnered with Fox. Your agent, if any good, will be your ally in all this, bugging them to do more for the book, and you should be professional, willing to promote the book however you can, and doing what you can to sell copies. 10. Some People May Not Like Your Book If you write what you want to write, you should also be prepared for the fact that some people may not like your book, or you. One of the baffling criticisms early on was from people who thought the novel had been over-hyped. I don't think any novel can be over-hyped, regardless of its merits. A runaway bestseller like Time Traveller's Wife has sold about 3 million copies in hardcover and paper worldwide. That's a lot of books, but nothing compared to 2 billion iTunes or the number of people who watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials. But aside from this sort of backlash, others simply won't like what you wrote and in the age of blogs and reader reviews, they'll let you know. Keeping your sense of perspective for the bad and for the good—or for those media that simply ignore the book altogether—is essential to your work as a writer and to avoiding a nervous tic. 11. Pay Your Taxes (Commissions will be Deducted) It is all part of the business. Be a professional. Realize that agents take 15 percent; foreign and movies 20 percent. Royalties are 10, 12.5 and 15 percent on hardback. The government gets a healthy share of what's left over. And while the gross seems grand, it's the net that will determine whether you can retire to your country estate and write full-time. 12. Enjoy the Fame and Fortune, but Love the Word I'm still not convinced that The Stolen Child has been published, and it all has a degree of surrealism. Many different pieces had to fall into place for the novel to have reached the modest audience it has reached, but in the end, the hoopla fades. The real business of fiction writing is achieved through your love of the word and your desire to tell the story. Read every day, write every day. When it comes time to sell your stories, be professional, be stubborn, be smart when working with agents and publishers. Enjoy whatever comes your way, but remember that no one but you has to write the next word. |