I’m a writer, at least that’s my daily affirmation. It even
says so on my Rotary name tag. I enjoy writing stories both real and imagined
but this is the first creative scribble I’ve done all week. I have my excuses
of course and they are quite legitimate. The truth is that I can’t write all
the time. I need other time to think
about what I’m going to write in burst mode. So I have other creative things to
do while I roll around in the back of my head stories or scenes in stories that
have to be worked out. I’ve been doing that, honest.
One week ago, today, I was sitting in a classroom at Grub
Street in Boston,
taking a class on how to write a query letter from Jenna Blum. Writing a query
letter is harder than writing a novel. Writing a rough draft of POPLAR HILL
took about 800 hours over three years. I’ve spent an equal amount of time
trying to sell it and editing it. Three years, ten different query letters and
several hundred rejections later I took a day off and paid $65 to find out what
I did wrong. Here’s my takeaway:
1)
Keep the description so simple it hardly tells
the story:
a.
An old woman faces death from a heart attack
b.
She has lots of stories to tell
c.
A friend of the old woman, a rural housewife
becomes fascinated by the stories
d.
A pentecostal preacher tried to “convert” the
old lady, over and over again
e.
Never use an adjective in the description (the
story may be a tragedy just don’t say so)
2)
The authors biography: Besides keeping it very
short, taking a course at Grub Street, apparently, counts more than having
already written a lot. Also being on a panel at AWP gives you more street
credibility than just about anything else including having written a bunch of
non-fiction trade books. Apparently I should also include the fact that POPLAR
HILL was a finalist in the Chaucer Awards for Historical Fiction (I won’t
mention that there were 23 entries for 27 finalist sub-genres).
3)
Ultimately, the only thing that counts in a
query letter is who’s name you can drop or who you know. I know Jenna Blum now.
a)
Ideally, you met the agent at a conference and
they still fondly remember you. Conferences cost a lot of money and don’t do
anything for your creativity except take time away from it.
b)
Second best, You know a successful author who is
willing to promote your work to their agent. Hello Jenna.
c)
Third best, you got an MFA from some school
where the agent also teaches. Doesn’t matter if they know you or not, it’s a
contact baby!
d)
Fourth best, do some name dropping even if you
don’t really know the names you’ve dropped: “Best Selling author Joe Blow
suggested that I contact you.” He
probably would have made the suggestion even if only to get you off his back.
That’s your rational in using his name. Note “Best Selling author” doesn’t mean
what you think it means: I’m a best selling author too and I sell about 10
books a year in Amazon’s Travel>Oceania>Fiji. I’ve been in the top 20 for
years. Doesn’t really mean much.
I think what I learned was worth
$65. If I took a “Master Class” in novel writing at Grub Street I’d be a shoo
in but I can’t afford it. Getting an MFA
is totally out of the question. I do want to retain some creativity.
So what else have I been doing
that’s kept me bottled up and unproductive for the past week? I learned a long
time ago that the only people who make money from writing are printers,
designers and (if they are lucky) a few publishers so I learned to design books
and magazines. Mostly I design books which is what I did all Friday morning.
Book design is an arcane field. It
has some very rigid rules that must, on occasion, be employed very creatively. The
book I was working on was one such book. The text had the annoying but very
modern feature of being a series of paragraphs with no connective tissue. That
is to say, the story would go on for a few hundred words then end. Normally
there might be a segue sentence between scenes but not in this book. In past
books like this I’ve added a dingbat to make it obvious that there is a
discontinuity in the text but the author didn’t want this so I had to make sure
there was at least a line above or below the break to make it obvious. I must
have spent an hour trying to resolve one such paragraph. I couldn’t and
eventually gave up. It stands as a tombstone.
Then I went to a Rotary function. Rotary
International is my “normal” outlet. Around 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon I
headed over to the Rotary District 7910 conference where I was assistant
Sergeant-at-arms. That means I helped haul stuff around, put things up and take
them down later. That lasted Friday night, Saturday afternoon and into the
evening and Sunday morning. It is a big annual event supporting 53 clubs in
central Massachusetts
and 1500 Rotarians.
Most of my friends are writers and
poets. That means that most of my friends are a little neurotic, creative
types, for whom the act of creation is more important than, well, almost
everything else. It’s hard to describe the mental state of a writer beyond
saying that it’s a lonely, emotionally and intellectually intense business,
fraught with failure. I love writing; I
don’t like being a writer. That’s where Rotary comes in.
My Rotary club is full of
outwardly normal people. These include a soft spoken retired Air Force Colonel
who thinks he should be a politician. He’s running for Selectman. That’s got to
be a letdown from commanding a squadron of F-16’s and 6 or 700 people – I can’t
say men anymore. He never kept up his flying license. I suspect he flew a
little too close to the ground for comfort one too many times. I’m studying
him. He’ll make a great character in a story someday.
Another Rotary character is the soon
to be retiring chief of the water and light department who’s nervous energy alone
could power a dozen houses. And that’s without drinking coffee. I imagine him
bouncing off rubberized walls in the office they’ve promised him after he
really does retire. He’ll also make a
good character someplace.
Yet another character looks like
an ex-Sumo wrestler from American
Samoa. At least that’s what I pictured when I first
met him. He punctured that bubble when he finally identified himself as an
African-American. That removed a lot of depth to the imagined character I was
already creating somewhere “back there.” The rest are pretty “normal,” average
suburbanites who just happen to like volunteering in good causes. Who can
object. It’s a fun club and the projects are always engaging. I wouldn’t know
anyone in town if I hadn’t joined. What is
disturbing is the fact that an awful lot of people know who I am but I don’t
have a clue who they are. I suppose that’s an advanced warning of what
celebrity status might be like.
One of the unexpected pleasures of
being a Rotarian is that I have instant friends all over the world. There are
over 30,000 Rotary clubs in mumble,
countries. When I had a job that took me all over the United States
for weeks at a time I always found entertainment at the local Rotary club. It
sure beat sitting in a hotel room alone. I once had a job teaching people from
the NSA (Oh come on, who else would be in Fort Mead MD?) and I was stuck in a
small Motel 6 on a strip full of McDonalds, Burger Kings and other assorted
cardboard venders. I went to a different Rotary club every night. One club met
in a diner near the Baltimore
airport. Another met in an Antebellum mansion and yet another met in the grand
ballroom of a modern motel. By the end of the week I was on a first name basis
with the District Governor.
I’ve been to clubs in rural Michigan, suburban Detroit,
Suva Fiji
and Paris France. One of the odd things about
Rotary is that no two clubs are the same. Most clubs serve a meal, breakfast,
lunch or dinner, but the club I went to in Paris was a wine drinking club. By the time I
realized there was no meal coming I was well under the table. In Fiji
we had to drink Kava before anything else. Kava is a strange drink with the
taste and consistency of old fashioned Kaopectate, a chalky and slightly bitter
remedy for indigestion and diarrhea. In Fiji Kava is supposed to have sedating
and aphrodisiac properties, according to the locals. My cab driver in Fiji said they
drank Kava because it was cheaper than alcohol. I experienced neither a sudden
urge to rut or a desire to sleep after drinking Kava.
The Rotary dinner Saturday night
was the big event of the weekend. Hank Phillippi Ryan
was the keynote speaker. She got her start in radio because the radio station
she applied to didn’t have a single woman reporter. That wouldn’t work today,
not where she works. Most of the reporters there, Channel 7 in Boston, are women. She wrote
yet another mystery novel and was promoting it. I don’t know how many books she
sold, a dozen maybe. Being a writer sucks, I’d rather write.
My job Saturday
evening was to march a bunch of flags into the room in the right order. We got the order wrong and we couldn’t find a
Ukrainian flag (some wiseass suggested substituting a Russian flag) and we substituted the Italian flag for a Mali
flag – they look the same. What didn’t go well no one noticed. I’m sure I’ll be
stuck doing it again next year. By Sunday afternoon I was tired and in gaga
land. I futzed around in my garden, managing to pull a muscle in my arm which
makes moving a mouse painful.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I
finished the design of three books. I finally caught up with what I had not
done because last Thursday I was at Grub Street learning about query letters.
Have I written a new query letter?
No. have I gone back to work on one of my new novels? No. I’m taking a break
from fiction and complaining, or explaining why I’m not working hard on my
novels. The truth is I’m at a plot twist watershed in all thee of the stories
I’m working on.
THE SOCIAL REGISTER: Is a
retelling of the stories in POPLAR HILL. In that story, Kitty, the protagonist,
alluded to her belief that many of her friends were spies. In the retelling of
the story they are all spies, including Kitty. One plot twist is that the real
members of the White Rose society were in Munich University
the same time she was. There is plenty of drama but no real hinge. I’ve written about 30,000 words but I don’t
want to put much more time into it until I can plot out the rest of the story.
I’m wondering if I can get away with just a spy story without any sex. Are
chaise scenes a good substitute for sex?
WAR STORY: Is the story of a
Vietnam War vet who sees more action than most and lives to tell the tail.
40,000 words in and I still can’t find the hinge besides having the protagonist
trying to get out of the Army. So far no romance or sex but that may be in the
book too. Very gory, very scary, lots of action. Rambo meets Radar O’Reilly
meets Harry Flashman.
FENWICK: I’m having the most fun with this right now.
It’s a semi-autobiographical novella of how I wish my last two years in high
school went. Fenwick, pronounced “Fenick,” looses his virginity, smokes pot, becomes an emancipated minor, buys a motorcycle, out runs a
local bully and a cop that’s a bigger bully and accidentally becomes the local
drug dealer and head of a Yiddish speaking gang (He’s not Jewish). Finally he
doesn’t get into MIT and discovers that his draft number won’t be called. He’s
exhausted, broke, living in an MIT frat house when he is thrown out of the
building after it’s discovered that he’s attending classes for free. He ends up
a homeless street urchin sleeping in the stacks at a Harvard University
library.
OK, I’ve ranted enough. Time to
get back to work.
