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Today 101 Reasons is launching what I hope will be a regular, weekly series of interviews. Through these in-depth, hard-hitting sessions with successful writers, publishing professionals and delusional amateurs, we will explore in greater depth what it means to be a writer, to work in the publishing industry, and to love literature enough to want to procreate with it. These won’t be your typical suck-up advertorials, with softball questions about how to break into the business, and what pen to use. If you learn anything from these interviews, it’ll be how much you suck by comparison.
Evermore, the most recent product from the Lynn Viehl novel factory.
This week we’re talking with Lynn Viehl, author of, well, a whole lot of books. If you’re not familiar with Viehl, that may be because she’s a chameleon, constantly changing her byline to suit the market. She spent ten years writing before her big break, producing twenty-two manuscripts and collecting over one thousand rejections. Since selling her first novel some eight years ago, she’s sold at least 38 novels in five genres, most of which end in “… Romance”. (I say ‘at least’ because she’s probably sold more since this interview.)
38 novels, in less than nine years. Just think about that. She makes Stephen King look like J.D. Salinger (yes, there are two ways to take that). If there were ten, maybe twenty more novelists like her, they’d own the midlist.
Lynn Viehl is to the writing community what India is to the IT industry, the kind of hyper-efficient word machine that makes reviewers scoff, tenured literary authors sneer, and part-time amateur writers burn with raw envy, poorly disguised as derision. She publishes under at least six pseudonyms, because Barnes & Noble refuses to name an entire bookshelf after her. She also finds time to run her blog Paperback Writer, regularly posting advice and information about writing to help you maintain the delusion that you could ever be as successful as her.
Despite representing everything this blog stands against, I have to admit I’m kind of crushing on her right now — because as you’ll see below, she rocks this interview like it was a pandering plug piece on The View. She came to this knife fight wearing plate armour. She took my vitriol and made a martini out of it. No wonder she makes the medium bucks.
If you’re expecting this interview to delve into Viehl’s writing schedule, where she finds inspiration, how she balances writing with raising children, where she thinks the industry is going, etc., you are so on the wrong blog.
It’s a good thing that writing dozens of romance-themed novels hasn’t left Viehl bitter or jaded. Feel free to discuss in the comments how inadequate she makes you feel. And check out her blog Paperback Writer, where she’s much less funny.
Tune in next week, when we talk to … someone else.
Oregon, IL (Dec 5) — Editors and staff of sci-fi and horror fan magazines Starlog and Fangoria today announced their participation in the inaugural International Back-Issue Bonfire Day, and marked the occasion by incinerating their entire stock of previous issues of both magazines, along with the warehouse where they were stored.
Tony Timpone, editor of Fangoria, spoke about the event while roasting a s’more over the smoldering remains of copies of Fangoria #37, with Gremlins on the cover. “International Back-Issue Bonfire Day is an opportunity for the print magazine industry to move forward by burning the bridges to the past. Literally. Storing the old issues was holding us back. We’ve always over-printed Fango and Starlog, hoping to keep a lid on the collector trade. But the end result after years is an entire warehouse full of magazines that no-one wants. Sure, once in a while someone orders some issues with old Joss Whedon interviews in them, but we had an entire pallet of copies of Fango #142. Where’s the groundswell of interest in on-set photos of Halloween 6 going to come from? Does anyone even remember Tales from the Hood? It’s a shame the warehouse had to burn down as well, but if it survived, we’d've just filled it up again. Now we have to find a better solution.”
“Many people in the biz seem to think that just because the content is printed on paper that doesn’t turn to dust after a month, that somehow it’s meant to stay around forever, like it’s some kind of literature or something.”
Starlog editor David McDonnell agreed. “Starlog is dedicated to gushing puff pieces about Hollywood’s upcoming visions of a socially homogenous, spandex-clad, scientifically impossible future. We’re all about the cutting edge of science fiction in film, and shots of hotties with prosthetic makeup. We’re not about the past. Our core readership already know which episodes of Star Trek: Voyager Jeri Ryan appears in, and everyone who could possibly give a hoot already knows about the on-set technical problems that plagued the production of James Cameron’s Abyss. Not to mention all those uncritical coming-soon articles about lame skiffy shows that were cancelled before the issue hit the stands. Seeing old issues forces me to face how we have always made upcoming movies sound much cooler than they turned out to be, and I can’t handle that when I’m compiling and editing another issue’s worth of kissassery about next season’s batch of disappointing blockbusters. I’m glad the back issues are gone now. There’s nothing cool and sci-fi about warehousing magazines. And it was such a pain in the ass to walk around looking for issue such and such for that same guy in Cleveland who’s completing his collection at the rate of one issue per paycheck.”
The bonfire burned out of control for several hours, fuelled by the organic quality of much of the magazines’ contents. Firefighters fought valiantly to save the last copies of Starlog #287, with Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider on the cover, but the fire’s destruction was total.
“If any of this content was really topical and interesting, we’d blog about it, and if we thought it’d be worth a damn in a year’s time, we’d put it in a book.”
Ian Birch, editor-in-chief of TV Guide and one of the event’s principal evangelists, was on hand to witness the bonfire. “International Back-Issue Bonfire Day is designed to focus the magazine industry on the transience of the material we publish. Many people in the biz seem to think that just because the content is printed on paper that doesn’t turn to dust after a month, that somehow it’s meant to stay around forever, like it’s some kind of literature or something. But most magazines are only good for papier-mâché by the time the next issue comes out. TV Guide is leading by example — we recall unsold issues after three days, and ship them to a power station in upstate New York as a coal substitute. We’re now meeting three percent of Manhattan’s power demands.”
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, described the fallacy of maintaining stocks of back issues: “Magazine content is designed to be consumed and replaced. Half the stuff in magazines is out of date before it even gets to readers, half is evergreen topics that just get rewritten every six months to a year, and the remaining half you can already find online somewhere else. I mean, look at any issue of Wired from two years ago. Half the stuff we covered has been bought out by Google or Yahoo, half are profiles of companies that have run out of funding and locked their doors and let porno sites take over their domain, half is meandering essays about hip tech trends that the blogosphere has already memed to death by the time we get to it, and the other half were just puff pieces so gadget makers would keep sending us toys. If any of this content was really topical and interesting, we’d blog about it, and if we thought it’d be worth a damn in a year’s time, we’d put it in a book.”
When asked for comment, Harry Knowles, founder of movie rumour website Ain’t It Cool News, replied: “Wow! Ha ha! Magazines like that still exist? That’s crazy! Ha! Who waits around to read about new movies and stuff in a magazine? That’s what the Internet is for, man! That’s a crack-up. I gotta tell the guys in the forums about this. Ha!”
“We’ve both known for years that selling all the back issues was a pipe dream, and that sooner or later we’d have to pay someone to haul them all away. In the long run, torching them will save us money.”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said this was the ideal time for Starlog and Fangoria to embrace the digital revolution. “Books are works of art, and things of beauty in themselves, worth collecting and preserving. But magazines are just throwaway trash. You read them once then leave them somewhere, hoping someone else will be bothered to dispose of it for you. Most of them seem to roll downhill into dentists’ offices, and I sure as heckfire wouldn’t trust my mouth to a dentist with Fangoria in the waiting room. Books are one-off products, but magazines are ongoing synergies between advertisers and readers motivated enough to spend money on something. That’s why the dead-tree print magazine model is dying. You can’t synergize a dead tree. Fango and Star … Starlo should go fully digital, and publish electronically, like maybe on the Amazon Kindle! Yeah, that’d be neat. Readers could download back issues instantly rather than sending in a check and waiting six weeks. Only, the screen on the Kindle is small, and mono … monochromo, so readers would have to put up with that for a few years until the Kindle 2 or 3, when we’ll charge them another four hundred bucks for a color screen. I’d love to read all the back issues of Starlog on my Kindle. Anyone who’s seen the design of the Kindle knows I’m a huge Star Trek geek.”
Editors Timpone and McDonnell expressed confidence that participating in International Back-Issue Bonfire Day was the logical next step in rethinking their magazines for the 21st Century. “We’ve both known for years that selling all the back issues was a pipe dream, and that sooner or later we’d have to pay someone to haul them all away. In the long run, torching them will save us money. We’ve both got complete collections at home, of course. Look for them on Ebay real soon.”
Stephen Jayson Harris covered the magazine industry for Business 2.0, until it closed earlier this year. No bonfire was held — remaining back issues were pulped and recycled into pink slips.
Paul Riddell gives us a window into his own book buying habits, with this assessment of nonfiction shelves that are creaking with an oversupply of awfulness.
Just because the intrepid staff of 101 Reasons To Stop Writing finds so many examples of the site’s thesis in fiction doesn’t mean that we only need to focus on convincing wannabe, beginning, and established writers to quit writing fiction. Beating on poets is easy, and you really have to question the sanity of any mainstream publisher who continues to publish poetry from musicians and movie directors as if anyone’s actually going to buy it. We can all agree that the universe doesn’t need another Star Trek or Star Wars novel, and that the best way to stop their production is to feature their writers in a syndicated TV show much like comedian Bill Hicks’ aborted project Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus.
“A discussion on unnecessary and pointless publications is one where everyone has an opinion, and unlike discussions of literary merit, everyone’s usually right.”
However, bad writing, bad editing, and publishing decisions come from all over the place, and not just from the Vassar and Columbia twerps who figure that the world simply needs one more book about a lonely Ivy League graduate turned slushpile editor who finds love at her publishing house. Nope, it’s all over the place, and it’s up to the informed consumer to closer the sewer line.
A discussion on unnecessary and pointless publications is one where everyone has an opinion, and unlike discussions of literary merit, everyone’s usually right. This is because for every genre, subgenre, and passing trend in publishing that might be worth retaining and passing on to future generations, twenty or thirty could use a good stout cleansing, preferably with fire. Almost everyone is going to have a list of particular categories of nonfiction that need just as much discouragement of their writers as for fiction, but let’s start with some of the particular offenders that make my eyes water every time I walk into a bookstore:
Books about rock bands: Any rock band. Unless the author has incontrovertible photographic evidence that Elvis Presley is alive and hiding out in the Roy Orbison Celebrity Rehab Clinic in Sheepdip, Wyoming (where he practices on the small arms range with John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, flies ultralights with Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and conducts charm school classes with Sid Vicious and G.G. Allin), only one somatype is going to give a damn about a book on any musical act of the last fifty years, and that’s the music critic wannabe. Thanks to the iPod fragmenting normal music distribution channels, there’s no demand for books on the latest international superstar because there’s pretty much no such thing any more. Fans who want to know about a particular musical act usually find all the information they really need online, and they also won’t be embarrassed in twenty years at a friend or spouse finding the definitive biography of Hanson or Phil Collins on a hidden bookshelf in the closet. The Sex Pistols are all turning 50 and the Ramones are all dead, so don’t waste your time on books talking about the punk revolution because it’s not going to happen again just because you’re wearing Butthole Surfers T-shirts to the mall. I almost forgot: Kurt Cobain really was the voice of a generation, and that voice said “Oh, they’ll be sorry for calling me ‘Snivels’ when I’m gone.”
Chrestomathies of newspaper columns, articles, and reviews: Just as with collections of political cartoons, Webcomics, and “the best places to go on the Web”, almost anything ever printed in a newspaper goes flat the day after it comes out. Even some of the best newspaper columnists ever to write are barely worth collecting (Mike Royko, the greatest American newspaper columnist this side of H.L. Mencken, had two posthumous collections of his columns come out through the University of Chicago Press because no non-university press could justify the expense compared to the interest). Political columns are invariably dated before they’re printed in the paper, so putting out massive volumes of political commentary signals an editor interested in a bit of starfucking instead of an actual interest from the reading public. This doesn’t stop every last weekly newspaper film critic and “humor” columnist from attempting to get a collection of their “best” works into print so they can get to work on the all-important signing junket. One quick question for these geniuses: if the only response you get to your work in the paper is a regular cry of “Shut up and die”, why the hell do you expect a different response just because those bad music reviews to albums forgotten years ago are now in book form?
Garden porn: Any horticultural section of any bookstore has two types of books: informative guides and garden porn. The guides are usually for all stages of gardening enthusiast, from beginner to expert, and they’re always full of information that can actually be used to complete a particular project. Garden porn, though, is like real porn: it’s intended to catch the eye in lieu of one actually performing those activities. Go through a used bookstore’s gardening section, and it’s the same depressing list of overpriced orchid guides purchased by a local rich twit who didn’t want to appear dumber than normal at Desperate Housewives functions, collections of “101 Gardens You Need to See Before You Die” to remind everyone of what can be done with their little suburban back yard if they have unlimited time and funds and a crew of indentured servants, and “How to Garden” guides. The last range from the hippie dippie “Turn your lawn into a food garden” manuals that encourage the reader to break laws on grey water use that exist for a damn good, to “How to make your grocery bill stretch further with gardening” pamphlets that can’t seem to get across that depending upon a back yard garden with a family of six is a surefire recipe for cannibalism. Those guides to growing marijuana are as much garden porn as the ones on raising legal herbs for fun and profit, because this implies that the ADD recipients reading them can remember to pull down their pants when taking a crap, much less remember to water and fertilize their charges. These books aren’t intended to be read for legitimate ideas and inspirations: they’re a literary sedative intended to get the purchaser to buy more resource material for the far-off “one of these days” when they’ll have the time to do these projects rather than kvetch about them. By the time that happens, they’re usually too old to enjoy the effort.
Children’s dinosaur guides: The one genre full of more idiots who KNOW that their manuscripts are genius than science fiction is children’s literature, and the one section in children’s literature more overloaded with unnecessary books is the dinosaur section. I realize that not every author of a child’s dinosaur book can be a Robert Bakker or a Louis Jacobs, and not every artist can be a John Sibbick or a Luis Rey, but still. Kids are just as savvy as reasonably well-informed adults, and most of them love science books of all sorts that don’t talk down to them about dumbed-down subjects. The only individual who buys one of the typical children’s dinosaur books, usually a book with information plagiarized from another children’s book written in 1952 and illustrations by an “artist” who paints with his phallus, is invariably a grandmother or other family member who buys it because it’s the first one seen on the shelf. Taking the time to check for scientific inaccuracies, as well as obvious typos, should be a no-brainer, yet I constantly see books on dinosaurs that read as if the author and artist might have heard about the film adaptation of Jurassic Park.
Home improvement guides: Much as with garden porn, anyone who plans to be serious about home improvement, home restoration, home construction, or home demolition has one or two good books on the aspects that aren’t covered with hands-on experience, and the rest are dross. Tie-ins for classic home restoration and furniture construction TV series such as This Old House and New Yankee Workshop aren’t bought by aficionados of the show, because they’re too busy doing instead of reading. Instead, they’re bought by family members who hope to connect with Dad or Uncle Phil during the few moments when they aren’t in the workshop. Likewise, the gigantic piles of discarded Trading Spaces guides in the used bookstore help demonstrate that this little publishing fad is over and that anyone wanting to revamp a bad kitchen or living room should never ask an interior designer for advice: congratulations to former Trading Spaces host Paige Davis and her own mountains of the remaindered autobiography Paige on Paige, for demonstrating that Edie Brickell isn’t the only horsefaced Southern Methodist University brat who parlayed her two sole and perky talents into inexplicable if short-lived fame.
Nonfiction guides to fiction series: The only thing in the universe more pathetic than a novelist famed for writing Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations trying to rationalize how they’re writing great literature while “playing in George Lucas’s and Gene Roddenberry’s universes” is the person writing the “nonfiction” background guides to science fiction and fantasy franchises’ peoples, languages, and technology. Oh, there might be a demand now for a quick guide to the latest bad skiffy show or movie, but take a peek on eBay as to exactly how much of a demand there is for Babylon 5, Farscape, and X-Files nonfiction tie-ins, and those shows ended not all that long ago. And while we’re at it, the authors who continue to crank out “unauthorized” guides to TV shows and movies haven’t been sued for a reason, and that’s because big media companies don’t waste time on pissants and pillocks who call themselves “Treksperts” when they have agents in the afterlife to deal with those issues. If they’re going to demonstrate their skills at jamming their tongues up William Shatner’s ass, they can do so with any number of fallen angels who haven’t had a good dingleberry removal in eons.
Well, that’s a start. Anyone considering other additions is perfectly welcome to take them, print them out on good paper, wad them up, and use them for toilet paper. The idea here is to stop the writing in the first place, not to start further writing by discussing how someone else should take the recommendations to heart. We all hear stories of writers who started because they read a book or short story so bad that they figured “I know I can do better,” so avert that crisis and refuse to buy the offending volume in the first place.
– Paul Riddell used to write, but then he got better.
Part of the breathtaking chutzpah of NaNoWriMo is the implication that writing a novel in a month is something to be proud of, in and of itself. It’s a facet of NaNo’s celebration of mediocrity, and pathological rejection of any standard by which writing is ordinarily judged.
For decades literature has lauded the image of the tortured writer who dedicates years, even decades, to crafting a "perfect" novel, while denigrating the "hack" writer who produces a book a year. But it wasn’t always so — at least to the extent that the definition of hackery was a lot less than a year.
"Asimov is said to have written for 8-12 hours a day, every day, except on days where he had to travel somewhere to hear people tell him how great he was."
In the pre-television years of the Twentieth Century, many authors made their living from cranking out stories and novels as fast as publishers could print them. Writing under as many as 20 pseudonyms, for little pay and usually no royalties, these authors often wrote more than a dozen novels a year, sometimes for decades. While predominantly considered "pulp" writers (so named because once you had finished reading a pulp novel, you could eat it), some of these writers have been critically re-appraised in recent years and are now regarded as significant writers in their genre, or significant influences on later writers.
The 1920s to the 1940s were a boom time for these writers. Since the entire world at that time was still in black and white, the luridly colored covers of pulp magazines and books drew readers like moths to a naked flame. Even the movies, which were also black and white, inspired rather than threatened this market, because it was easier to re-read and masturbate to the cover image of the sleazy four-colour gangster’s moll on the book hidden at the back of your wardrobe, and the description on page 42 of how she really filled out her blouse, than to try to recall the three second shot of Louise Brooks where you sorta saw the outline of her breasts in that movie you watched at the Odeon six months ago.
These authors included (and this is by no means an exhaustive list): Edgar Wallace and Louis L’Amour, credited with over a hundred novels; "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust), Georges Simenon, and John Creasey, who wrote 400 novels or more; and Isaac Asimov, who wrote, edited or compiled around 500 books, and yet is on virtually everyone’s shortlist as one of the most important science fiction writers of all time.
"The vast hordes of semi-literate readers no longer clamoured for endless variations of the same stories told badly — they had a new medium for that, one which required even less energy and imagination."
To produce their extraordinary output, these writers worked at a breakneck pace. Asimov is said to have written for 8-12 hours a day, every day, except on days where he had to travel somewhere to hear people tell him how great he was. One famous anecdote about Edgar Wallace has him dictating an entire novel in a single weekend. Frederick Faust apparently never bothered with a second draft for his pulp novels. I’m sure he and the others never bothered to re-read much of their work.
It should be noted that the definition of a "novel" was also different at this time. 60,000 words (200 pages) was around average, and much shorter novels, as little as 30,000 words (100 pages) were not uncommon. (Based on the easy-to-calculate 333 words/page: your eyesight may vary.)
From the careers of these writers, several general observations can be made:
"The pulp novel is now all but dead, because the limited pleasure afforded by the reading experience is easily surpassed by playing Grand Theft Auto with your pants off."
By the 1950s, though, with the advent of television, the pulp venues began to disappear. The vast hordes of semi-literate readers no longer clamoured for endless variations of the same stories told badly — they had a new medium for that, one which required even less energy and imagination. After the CIA’s failed experiments with psychoactive mind control in the 1960’s, everyone began to see in colour, and movies and TV quickly followed suit. In contrast, attempts to print novels on multicoloured pages proved disastrous.
The 1960s introduced another phenomenon, that spelled the death of the quickie novel: the Mega Seller. Though there had been the occasional mega-hit before, the absurd success of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls made publishers realise that an individual book could sell in the tens of millions. They’ve been chasing this goal, and almost nothing else, ever since.
Since then we’ve seen what many refer to as the Death of the Midlist. Authors are no longer coddled by their publishers through long, lacklustre careers, happy to make narrow margins on moderate sales in the hope of eventually having a breakout hit. And apart from the occasional retro-cool reinvention, the pulp novel is now all but dead, because the limited pleasure afforded by the reading experience is easily surpassed by playing Grand Theft Auto with your pants off. To the people who would have been pulp readers sixty years ago, movies, television shows, video games and Internet porn have virtually replaced the need for written entertainment altogether.
"The literary quality of a novel is still partly measured in terms of how many years it took to come up with a completely original metaphor for constipation."
For a time in the late 1970s to the 1990s, the definition of "novel" expanded to the point where 60,000 words was uncommonly short, and 150,000 words (500 pages) was not unusual, even for debut authors. The increasing physical costs of printing such massive books has pushed the average back to around 90,000 words (300 pages), and authors of longer novels have to use their advance to purchase carbon credits. On the other hand, the costs of printing, promoting, and distributing a book are now so high that the break-even price point of a 100-150 page novel doesn’t seem like value for money to the consumer.
Meanwhile, the literary fiction scene has not changed as significantly as this. Sure, the market is smaller now than it once was, and there certainly is no modern equivalent to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary benders, or Norman Mailer punching out Gore Vidal. But literary fiction still maintains the mystique of the tortured writer, and the literary quality of a novel is still partly measured in terms of how many years it took to come up with a completely original metaphor for constipation.
We may never see another Asimov, and modern-day Simenons and Creaseys and L’Amours cannot hope to succeed the way the originals did. The market simply will not support this anymore. Individual novels are expected to be of a higher standard, worth the investment to publish and to read.
Which leaves your clumsy, meandering, plotless, padded, first draft, 50,000 word, 30-day novel only two places to go: your bin, or someone else’s.
A year ago Monday, I started writing about reasons to stop writing. For those of you who don’t know the story behind this site (and that means all of you), I thought I’d mark this anniversary by making up a story that is similar enough to sound plausible.
101 Reasons started, essentially, as a way to have a conversation about writing with my good friend Lee Battersby, who lives on the other side of the Great Southern Continent, and is thus unavailable for the kind of meandering, caffeine- or beer-fueled conversations writers are prone to share. We’ve been friends half our lives now, and we share a marvellous synchronicity: our IQ’s and our final high school scores (out of 500) are within a point of each other’s, and somehow we’ve both been lucky enough to meet and marry a fabulous woman (each!), and have a large family. There are more similarities, but a full list would just be creepy.
However, despite meeting in a University writing class, our writing careers are wildly divergent. Studiously adhering to Heinlein’s Three Rules of Writing, Lee has become a successful writer on the Australian SF short fiction scene, with over 50 published stories and a short story collection to his credit, whereas I have barely bothered to finish a story, let alone submit one. He has taught at Clarion South, helping to train a new crop of Australia’s most talented SF writers, whereas I have taken it upon myself to try to reduce the world’s writing output.
I have described Lee as the inspiration for 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. There are two ways to take that, and I mean both of them.
When I wrote the introduction to 101 Reasons, just one year ago, the publishing industry and my life were quite different. Back in October 2006:
It’s been an amazing year. I’ve learned that there are almost as many reasons to stop writing as there are bad writers who need to. When I began I had no idea if I could come up with one hundred and one reasons to stop writing, but now I wonder if I can restrict myself.
I’d like to thank the growing circle of publishing industry bloggers, who make my job easier by opening their office doors and letting us see just how insane the business really is. Credit is also due to the exploding field of blogging writers, both the professionals who let us see the realities of being a writer, and the (vastly more numerous) unpublished writers, whose arrogance, ignorance, denial and pseudo-profundity is an inexhaustible stream of good material for me.
A big thanks to everyone who’s linked here, or posted a comment. It’s your belief that you “get it” that provides the most amusement.
A tip of the hat to the inimitable Paul Riddell, who could run this blog by himself, if he’d thought of it first. He brings an unique combination of experience, philosophy, and a deep, world-weary resentment to his contributions that I have so far been unable to fake.
I love Ms Reasons. You would too, but she’s mine.
Here’s to another year (at least) of making the whiners cry. I’ll get to you eventually.
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