101 Reasons to Stop Writing

I wish every writer was like this guy.

Stop Writing, the Hard Way

• Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer prize-winning punch-drunk crazy man of American letters, died November 10, aged 84. Author of The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song, and a bunch of other works no-one reads anymore, he is most famous now for directing the 1987 Ryan O’Neal comeback vehicle, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. His last book was On God, which God has given the worst kind of review.

Striking Writers: Still Not Funny

If you’re still not sure what the Hollywood writers’ strike is all about, here’s a summary: People who make the money from selling the product do not want to share the money with the people who make the product. People who make the product increasingly not happy with this arrangement.

• Alexandra Sokoloff at Murderati has a detailed explanation of the main issue: “residuals” (royalties) for new media, such as that Internet thing the kids are all talking about. She compares the issue to the 1988 writers’ strike:
  

  In 1988 there were no TV shows being sold on videotape yet, and the television writers perceived the videotape issue as a feature writers’ issue. A group within the television writers persuaded the other TV writers to cave on the issue and the WGA didn’t get the residual rates it wanted on cassette tapes. Two months later the original STAR TREK series was released on videotape and the TV writers realized just how badly they had miscalculated.

• WritersWrite links to some great coverage of the writers’ strike:
  • How the writers’ strike is affecting book publicity plans. In other news, viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report sometimes remember the names of books and authors long enough to buy them.
  • Joss Whedon says do it for the kids. He works in a plug for a show he hasn’t even written yet.
  • Bill Clinton wants to act as mediator. He wants one of them gold statues, like what Al Gore’s got, only bigger.

News to Know, to Keep Up with the Conversation

• AP reports that a staggering 1,729 people signed on to the class action lawsuit over the bullshitosity of James Frey’s no-so-much-a-memoir, A Million Little Pieces, of the hundreds of thousands who purchased it. With the suit now settled, those grievously wounded, betrayed souls will get their sixteen bucks back. The poor lawyers, who worked hard to deliver justice to those 1,729 people harmed by Frey’s made-most-of-it-upness, have to make do with the paltry sum of $452, per plaintiff. Those heartless bastards at Random House, who published the lets-call-it-a-memoir, spent only $249, per plaintiff, to fund advertisements in over 900 newspapers to inform those people misled by Frey’s so-completely-unbelievable-it-must-be-unflinchingly-honestness. All told, Random House paid out a whopping 52% of the $2.35M fund they set aside to cover the lawsuit, out of the mediocre millions in profits from the book left over after Frey’s $4.4M in royalties.
• News at 11: Rumoured eighth Harry Potter book was a hoax. Journalists still suckers.
• Picador to start releasing books in hardcover and paperback simultaneously. Will soon trial releasing books directly to landfill.

From the Blogosphere

• I’m discovering InkyGirl’s Will Write for Chocolate webcomics, a series of pithy and satirical takes on the writer’s life. I only wish they were … what’s the word I’m looking for? Funny.
• Tim O’Reilly, publisher of a staggeringly unfunny range of tech books, comments on Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ discussion of what happens when people value books and music they like at zero. No word on the value of books and music people don’t like.
• For men who like reading about the ins and outs of the publishing industry, but wish it was more like sports, Nathan Bransford presents Query Stat-tacular. (A “tacular” is a metric unit for measuring the awesomeness of statistics.) Worth perusing for the breakdown of glaring query blunders — like saying an SASE is included, in an email query.
• D. Challener at Write Stuff explains how you can hit the NaNoWriMo target of 50,00 words, and still fail, and still feel good about it. Feeling good about failure is an important step in the denial process.
• Ann Crispin writes about Hollywood’s obsession with misrepresenting the lives of fiction writers, ending with a joke about literary agents. Yes, there is one.
• Samuel Tinianow, editor for hire, explains why no-one is going to secretly plagiarise your novel:
  

  Look, the real reason nobody — least of all me — is going to steal your manuscript is because it’s not even that good. It requires an atrocious amount of cleaning up which I would never do if I wasn’t paid. It’s not my child; I’m not in love with it the way you are, nor is anybody else. Frankly, I’m probably going to make more money by editing it than you are from publishing it because, statistically speaking, it’s probably not going to be published. Ever.

  Gosh, it’s like he’s talking straight to you, isn’t it?

• James Winter of Northcoast Exile is quitting writing. Oh, wait, just blogging. Nevermind.
• Jenny Rappaport of LitSoup blogs the slushpile in real time.

Problems You Will Never Have

• So you want to be one of those Hollywood “script doctors” who get paid half a million dollars per draft? The Jobbing Screenwriter has a challenge for you.

Quotes Taken Out of Context

• J.T. Ellison on the dangers of writing: “When you launch a book, [a] part of you dies.”

Reviews You Don’t Want

• Tod Goldberg asks the question: If you’re a massively overrated filmmaker who’s all but screwed the alleged indie cred of your first film into the ground with a series of crass, miserably unfunny, sexist, bestial stoner movies, and someone offers to collect your rambling, whiny blog entries about how not fun it is to be in Hollywood when you’re fat and the only star who’ll return your calls is Ben Affleck into a book, could the end result really be any worse than every film you’ve made with Ben Affleck, and do you take the check anyway? Yes, it can, and yes, you do.
• Overheard Conversation with Bill O’Reilly: “So I thought to myself, what’s the number one question on the minds of conservative Americans these days? I’ll tell you. It’s ‘How can I warp and control the minds of my children so they buy into the same blinkered pro-corporation worldview that I’ve sold my soul and mortgaged my own labor capital to be a part of?” And I tell you, the mindlessness of modern pro-consumerism MTV iPod culture just isn’t spitting out dispirited wage slaves fast enough. So I thought to myself, how can I make a buck from this fear that children will start to think for themselves? And I tell you, the answer is that I’ll get some chump with an English-MySpace dictionary to ghostwrite a handbook on Reillynomics for kids, with some of my best anti-immigrant rants made into rap lyrics. Now Timbaland wants to produce my debut album.”
• So, how does it feel when your manuscript submission is returned as a pile of ashes, but a book entitled How To Abandon Ship, 2nd Ed., gets coverage in the New York Times?
• You know you suck as a journalist (or more to the point, as a Bush Administration PR lackey) when George Bush calls you to give you shit and Jenna Bush gives you shit in person.

Stop Writing if You Need This Advice

• The Rejecter explains that the definition of slushpile etiquette really does vary from agent to agent.
• She also explains the concept of commission-based employment to people who think that agents get paid a base salary by the magical book elves in EconomicFantasyLand — the same people who think that market analysis is “Well if James Patterson can get published …”
• Joe Konrath outlines the five basic steps of plotting. I shudder to think of the person he’s writing this for. What’s next, “one word at a time” ?
• Fiction Scribe points out that there are really only two kinds of writers: those that search for the perfect synonym instead of using “said” all the time in dialogue scenes, and professionals.
• Nathan Bransford says don’t re-query an agent, for at least six months. That’s for a different book, of course — don’t re-query an agent with the same book ever. Repeatedly querying with new ideas says one of two things:
  • I’m sending you everything in my Bottom Drawer, or
  • I haven’t actually written this yet, but I’m hoping you’ll say yes then wait patiently for two years while I do.
• Pari Noskin Taichert of Murderati summarises all writing advice: perseverance, determination, hard work and luck. Everything else is padding.