Words on Writing, Part 1: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler

 If I were asked to recommend the single most essential book for writers of popular fiction, I would not hesitate to name The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.

 If your budget only has room for one book, get this one.  I know other teachers and bloggers and mentors will recommend others, but you asked me, so there's my answer.

I currently have two copies, the first edition from 1992, which is subtitled "Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters," and the third edition published in 2007, with the subtitle as above.  There is also a 25th Anniversary Edition which was released in 2020.  Even though I have two of the earlier editions, I just ordered the new one.  It's that important.

So, why this book?  Why not Strunk and White's Elements of Style?  Or Stephen King's On Writing?  Or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird?

Because. 

I've never liked Elements of Style.  While it may be a good resource for grammar and syntax, its emphasis on brevity doesn't work as well for fiction as it does for non-fiction.  Grammar, spelling, and writing style are important facets of skill no matter what you write, but fiction requires something way beyond that.

King's book is half memoir, half how-to, and while his personal history is interesting and gives insight into his writing, that very intimacy relegates the how-to half more to a "How I do it," as though what Stephen King does will work for everyone.

I've never read  Bird by Bird.  I never felt the need to.

I didn't discover The Writer's Journey until 1997, right before a writer's conference at which Christopher Vogler was going to be one of the featured speakers.  I bought the book a week or so before the conference and devoured it.  Vogler's presentation was supposed to last an hour; it stretched into almost three.  He was far and away the best speaker I've ever heard.

That still doesn't answer your question.  I'm getting to that.

Writing fiction, and in particular book-length popular genre fiction (as opposed to literary fiction, whatever that is), requires two skills: the ability to write and the ability to create stories.  Most of us can be taught the basics of how to write. We learn the rudiments in school, even if we forget most of them and/or never use them after they're no longer required for graduation.  Creating stories, on the other hand, isn't so easy to learn or to teach.  It's more a process of recognizing whether or not you have that skill and then putting it into practice if in fact you do have it.  If you don't, well . . . .

That may not be a popular opinion.  No one who really wants to  be a writer wants to be told they don't have the requisite story-telling talent.  And in this age of digital self-publishing, even being told that isn't a barrier to publishing.  It remains a sad fact, however, that there are many, many, many author-published books out there that just aren't very good.

For many of them, the author didn't have sufficient writing skill; even if there were a decent story in there, the writer couldn't bring it to life.  For many others, the writing is passable, but the story isn't.

If the story is there, the writing can be fixed.  If there's no story, no amount of fixing the writing will help.

The Writer's Journey explains what "story" is, how it's constructed of various parts, how those parts work together to complete the whole.  Perhaps most important, Vogler explains how and why this structure is virtually universal, over time and across genres and through various media, by giving numerous examples.  

"But but but, my story is different!"

No, my dear, it almost certainly is not.

Think about it.  What makes us keep reading, keep turning the pages, even if they're only digital pages on electronic screens.  "I need to know what happens next.  Will they be eaten by the monster?  Will she find her lost sister?  Is the grandmother the killer?  Will the volcano erupt?  Who changed the nuclear codes?"

"I need to know what happens next."

That's the essence of story structure: How each element logically, naturally, and emotionally satisfyingly leads to the next.   

Vogler's analysis is based on the works of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung, but being familiar with them is not at all necessary to understanding The Writer's Journey.  While Campbell analyzed myth as a historical -- and universal -- form of narrative, Vogler applies the form to the process of contemporary storytelling.  Campbell explains the hero's journey; Vogler shows you, the writer, how to create your own hero's journey and then make the journey with them.

As Shelly Lowenkopf pointed out in his 1982 article in The Writer magazine, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel," you have to hook the reader at the beginning. Back then, the first person who read your (laboriously typed) manuscript on its journey to publication (or, more likely, rejection) might give you as many as three double-spaced pages to set that hook.  Lowenkopf knew even then that many beginning writers are shocked to learn editors, agents, and the other gatekeepers of the traditional publishing business don't routinely read the whole book. 

"But but but, mine is different!"

No, it probably isn't, and if it is, you still have to prove it.  And you have to prove it in the first three pages.  Or less.

As Josh Olson has written, 

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer.  Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

Josh Olson, "I will not read your fucking script," Village Voice, Sept 9, 2009.

There's an even older adage that goes, "Write chapter one, write chapter two, throw away chapter one."  In other words, you've probably put too much "stuff" in the first chapter that really doesn't need to be there.  Get to the effing story already.  The reader wants to know what's happening.

And that means starting your characters, your hero, on the journey.  Where they will go, what adventures they will have, what problems they will encounter, what defeats and victories they will experience, all are part of that journey.  

If you're not already a voracious reader, you probably won't be successful as a writer, but don't take just Josh Olson's word for it.  Throughout The Writer's Journey Chris Vogler gives example after example of movies and books that follow the same mythic structure. You can read the books, you can watch the movies.  The structure is there.

Vogler states clearly that it's not a "format."  You can't just plug your individual characters and setting into a template and walk away with a successful, satisfying novel, regardless of genre.  It's more of a palimpsest, an older, almost erased document of which parts remain and on which newer tales have been superimposed.  

When I write, that structure is always at the back of my creative mind, the blueprint on which an entire novel will be built.  It's also at the front of my mind when I'm writing a review.  Is it there when I'm reading?  I hope not!  I want to read for enjoyment; I want the words on the page to disappear so completely that I'm immersed in the scene, the action, the emotions of the book.  If I'm not, then the writer has done something wrong.

If you're a writer, do something right.  Read at least one edition of The Writer's Journey.  And if your budget allows it, buy a copy that you can have on hand to reference whenever necessary.  You'll be tested on it later.

 

 

Words as therapy, words as dreams

One lovely Sunday morning in August of 1963, I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled to the little drug store near my home.  I purchased an ordinary spiral notebook there and pedaled home.  With pencil in hand, I sat down on the front porch of our house, opened the notebook, and began to write:

Sunday, August 11, 1963 (Morning entry)

I won't bore you with the teen-aged drivel-and-angst the followed.  After all, I was two months shy of fifteen so there was a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst to be written.

This was not, of course, my first foray into writing.  At a considerably younger age -- perhaps 9 or 10 -- I had started a number of the almost obligatory horse-and-girl fantasy stories, but by the time I reached junior high, my range of reading material had changed.  I was only in sixth grade, so not yet 12, when I began writing a pirate story in the style of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, with a bit of treasure from The Count of Monte Cristo thrown in for good measure.  The summer before the diary was born, I had started what would today probably be called a dark ages historical romance, set during the barbarian invasions that collapsed the Roman Empire.  Though none of that manuscript remains in existence, I remember enough details of the story to know that my historical research for that period was pretty much non-existent!  Can you spell "anachronism"?

Sometime between the summer of 1962 and the summer of 1963, however, I began work on yet another novel, a contemporary mystery romance titled A Party of Ghosts.  The plot is kind of not really there and the main character is very Mary Sue-ish.  But there are themes of murder and sexual violence and non-marital sex and there may even be an illegal abortion.  This was pretty strong stuff for a 14 year old.  I'm not sure how far along I was on this novel by August of 1963, but I had definitely made a healthy start on it.  Writing the diary was not a new adventure for me.

Interestingly, though, I kept at it.  And I kept at the other writing, too.  Eventually, perhaps in the summer of 1964, I finished A Party of Ghosts.  The first draft -- chapterless and single-spaced on an ancient Remington manual typewriter -- is about 100,000 words, and I still have most of it.  There are a few pages missing, and I'm not sure why, but most of it resides in the file cabinet next to my desk as I write this.  Like the diary, it's filled with a lot of teen-aged drivel-and-angst.

I continued to write through high school, through my first stab at college at the University of Illinois, through my wanderings to New York and France and Spain and back again, but none of my fiction reached the completed manuscript stage.  And again, I still have a lot of it, tucked neatly in file folders or three-ring-binders.  Most of it is, um, not very good.

With my marriage in June of 1969, I vowed not to write fiction any more and instead to put my energy into being a wife and eventually a mother.  That vow lasted a few months.  But I had never promised to give up the diary, and it went on.  Yes, by that time, the diary was almost six years old.  It had gone beyond that spiral notebook and now filled several.

As the years went on and I continued to write fiction, I continued to keep the diary as well.  It now, almost 50 years later, comprises 23 spiral notebooks of various sizes and has recently entered the 24th.  I spent a great deal of spare time over a  period of about eight years actually transcribing it all, often horribly embarrassed in the process.  Was I really that angst-ridden at that age?  And "that age" wasn't necessarily as a teen-ager!

Would I ever want the diary published.  Good goddess, no!  I'd be mortified.  As Susan Douglas writes in the "Introduction" to Where the Girls Are: Growing up female with the mass media:  "Reading the diary I kept as a teenager is now excruciating, so mortifying that, if someone were to find it, I think I would blind myself with hot coals or simply commit hara-kiri.  I look back at my former self . . . the words she wrote in her spiral notebooks obsessed with two topics -- boys and sex -- and I wonder:  Who are you?  How could you have been so insipid?  Are you related to me?  How did you become me?"

When I read the first page of Douglas's marvelous, witty, and yet devastatingly honest book, I knew exactly what she was talking about.  But I also felt she had missed one point:  The importance of being able to look back at that former self.  Douglas's book, however, is not about the value of keeping a diary.  And keeping a diary is not a luxury everyone has or wants to have.

But as recent events have unfolded regarding the publication of unedited, authentic personal accounts, lost in the legal ramifications is, I believe, the true empowerment value of being able to express, without reservation and without qualification, one's feelings, all the drivel-and-angst that assails all of us at any age.

I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to  write.  It was never a matter of wanting to; I simply did it.  And I can understand that there are people for whom writing isn't the joy it is for me.  But as I've read some of the personal accounts of people who have endured traumatic personal events, more and more often I've read that they found some comfort, some relief, some healing in the venting of their feelings through writing. 

This kind of personal satisfaction doesn't rely on good grammar or perfect spelling.  The writer doesn't need to know or care about the difference between affect and effect, accept and except, writing and writting and written and wrote.  None of that matters, and it shouldn't.  That's the kind of writing that is for the writer.  She and only she is going to read it, and she knows what she means and what she wants to mean.  Eyes off and hands off her words.  They don't belong to anyone else.

That's how I feel about my diary.  When someone once read a part of it, I felt absolutely and totally violated, as though he had drilled a hole in my head and not only entered my thoughts and feelings but took them away from me, claimed them for himself, deprived me of my most personal possession.  For that reason, I never ever ever violated my children's privacy.  I never listened in on their phone calls.  I never looked through their dresser drawers.  When I found  a little "diary" that my daughter had written at the age of about 13 or 14, I returned it to her unopened and unread -- and it didn't matter that she was by then in her 30s!  The privacy of thoughts was sacrosanct.

When a writer decides to share her words, whether it's with one other person or with "the public," all those things that didn't matter before suddenly do matter.  Grammar and spelling and punctuation and using the right words.  All that stuff.  Why?  Because now she wants someone else to read her thoughts, and she has to use the tools of language to make those thoughts as clear as she can.  And the more people she wants to share it with, the more important her skill with those tools become.

As angst-ridden as my diaries from those teen-age years are, they are at least competently written.  As shallow and plotless and Mary Sue-ish as A Party of Ghosts is, at least a reader would understand what I was trying to say.  The verbs are right, the pronouns have proper antecedents, words are spelled correctly, commas are used where they're needed and not used where they aren't.

But that's because I always wrote.  I took the lessons learned in "language arts" class, as it was called at South Junior High in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and I used them to hone my storytelling skills.  These were the absolutely essential tools of the writing craft.  In all the years since then, I have often wondered if they might not also be the absolutely essential tools of living.

Maybe not.  Maybe now, in the days of Twitter and texting, when speed and brevity are more important, when feelings deeper than a :-) or a :grr: have no emoticons, when "IKR" is a whole sentence, what difference does writing make?

Writing makes a difference because we can't dream in emoticons and acronyms.  We still say "I know, right?!" in a way that means so much more than "IKR."  Maybe that will change with some future technology.  Maybe someday there will be tablets that you touch an icon and a whole emotional paragraph will appear on the screen or be broadcast through the speakers.  Who knows?  But for now, words are all we have to take what's in our hearts, our souls, our dreams, and make it real enough to share with someone else.

Sorrow shared is sorrow cut in half; joy shared is joy doubled. 

Sometimes it helps to share our sorrow, our grief, our fear, our anger, even if the only one you can share it with yourself.  Write it out, put it on paper or on the computer screen, and even if you don't share it with anyone else, even if you don't send that angry email or post that vicious comment or publish that scathing blog, just getting the words out can help.  Maybe it's just a vent for pressure and steam, or maybe it puts ideas into context, or maybe it helps understand.  If it's for yourself, that's enough.

But when the time comes to share the dreams and fears and joy and pain, then it matters how you write it.  It matters if you want someone else to be able to understand and feel what you felt. 

We do that, we who write, by following conventions so everyone is on the same page (pun intended).  Some of those conventions are so obvious they don't seem to need much explanation.  We all use the same alphabet, for example.  We all know what most of the common words mean: a, the, and, book, story, large, small, running, walking, eating.  We know, as both readers and writers, that something that doesn't follow those conventions won't make a whole lot of sense.

For example:

Deer Sirr:

I seed yoo wokkin outer the pos offiss yessaday an is hoppin yoo fown mi wollet gotz sum munny init.

Can you figure that one out?  Would it have been easier to read if I had written

Dear sir:

I seen you walkin outta the post office yestiday and I is hopin' you found the money what I lost.

In creating fiction, the writer has lots of options for re-creating the differences between what we consider standard English and non-standard.  Does the exact same feeling come across?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the compromise gives the same impression -- the person who wrote the note is not well educated and probably doesn't speak any more literate than he or she writes -- while still leaving the text intelligible for the reader without forcing her to back out of the reading experience to understand it.

This is part of the "invisible manuscript" technique that's so important for every writer.  You want the reader to forget she's just looking at letters and words on a page.   You want her to enter into the experience you're describing.

Some of us are lucky enough by fortune and experience to have acquired the language skills necessary to do that, and to have acquired them before we embarked on anything resembling a writing career.  For those who didn't, however, there are options.  Not everyone, of course, plans to become a writer.  Many who never wanted to write or who even actively disliked writing when they were in school find themselves years later wanting or needing those skills. Some never had the opportunity to learn.  But no matter what the reason, failure to write in a manner that allows the reader to enter the story rather than struggle to discern the meaning pretty much guarantees that the work will not find an audience.  If you want your story read, if you want people to get your message -- whatever that message may be -- you must make sure your writing conforms to the conventions established.

Does this mean you need an editor?  Yes, it does.

The necessity for a good, competent editor is never more apparent than when a good story that's been badly written is published, and all the world gets to see how terrible the writer is.  No matter how wonderful, how powerful, how emotional the story is, if the reader can't read it, all that wonder and power and emotion are lost.

Again:  If you are writing for yourself, if you are writing to get out the pain and fear and joy and frustration and excitement, none of it matters.  When you want to share that pain and fear and joy and excitement, it matters a lot.  And only a fool thinks it doesn't.

Making the words work: The basics of verbs, Part 1

After trying to read yet another poorly written self-published romance novel, I'm back with more lessons.  Free lessons that you can read at your leisure and in privacy, and no one will know that you're digging into your old digital files or e-books and checking for errors.

Why am I doing it?  Why am I "helping the competition?"  Because when self-published books improve in quality, all self-published authors will benefit, and that includes me.  Yes, even the poorly-written books will benefit.  Readers will be less tempted to lash out at "yet another" piece of self-published crud and tar all of us with the same brush if they at least know some self-published writers know better and care enough to write well.  The dedicated writer who gets slammed for poor writing will get a clue and improve.  (Even if those who are dedicated enough are a minority, there are a few of them.)

Seriously -- A lot of the poor reviews self-published (and small press published) authors receive contain criticisms about the grammar and punctuation.  These are writing mechanics that can be learned, because each of us who knows them learned them at some point in our lives.  So can you if you really want to.

So here we go with verbs.

Why am I starting with verbs instead of nouns?  Because writers seem to have more problems with verbs than with nouns.  (Pronouns are another thing entirely, and we'll get to those in another lesson.)

Verbs are the words that do the "doing" in a sentence:

Joe walked.
Harriet ran.
Mahura lifted weights.
Lord Binkley mused about the dinner arrangements.
Lady Binkley wondered if she could cancel the engagement.

Verbs come in regular and irregular varieties.

Regular verbs follow a set pattern to form their various parts:

Infinitive:  To laugh.
Past participle:  Laughed
Present participle: Laughing.

First person singular:  I laugh
Second person singular:  You laugh.
Third person singular:  He/She/It laughs.
First person plural:  We laugh
Second person plural: You laugh.
Third person plural:  They laugh.

As you can see, all the forms of the regular verb to laugh are created by adding -s, -ed, or -ing, with auxiliary verbs as necessary.

Present tense: Mother laughs.
Past tense:  Roger laughed.
Past perfect:  Emily had laughed.
Present perfect:  Pedro has laughed.
Present progressive: LaWanda is laughing.
Past progressive:  Franco was laughing.
Present perfect progressive: Anwar has been laughing.
Past perfect progressive: Keifer had been laughing.
Future tense:  The chorus will laugh.
Future perfect: Mr. Hashimoto will have laughed.
Future progressive: We will be laughing.
Future perfect progressive:  Nadine and Claudia will have been laughing.
Conditional present tense:  Naomi could/should/would laugh.
Conditional present perfect tense: Asmodeus should have laughed.
Conditional present progressive tense: Liam could be laughing.
Conditional present perfect progressive tense: Minh would have been laughing.

Irregular verbs have different forms for the tenses or parts or plurals.

I am.
You are.
They were.
Jack should have been.

We go.
Ms. Nusbaum went.
No one had gone.

Nestor thinks.
Brewster thought.

Carol will buy.
Sean bought.

Davis drives.
Mike drove.
Louise had driven.

All present participles end in -ing.  That's what makes them so repetitive if the writer doesn't make a conscious effort to limit their use.

Now, when should the writer use the different tenses of verbs?  Are there rules?  Oh, honey, you betcha!

Present tense is an action of the moment.

I walk to the store.

The problem with present tense in terms of writing fiction is that it doesn't establish the relative time frame for the action.  Everything is happening at the same time that the reader is reading it.  This is the difference between present tense and present progressive tense.

I am walking to the store.

The progressive tense -- and again, refer to that link above -- indicates the action began prior to the statement, continues during the time frame of the statement, and will continue into the future for at least some while.  The progressive tenses, all of them, therefore should be used only to indicate simultaneous events.

Rose was watering the plants when Martin drove over the hose.

This indicates that Martin's driving over the hose was a started and completed action that happened during the action Rose was engaged in before he drove over the hose, while he drove over the hose, and after he completed driving over the hose.

An easy way to help determine if you're using the progressive tense correctly is to insert "while" or "at the same time" and see if the sentence still conveys the exact action you're envisioning.

Jumping out of the bathtub, I opened the door and let the dog in.

Does it make sense to write "While I was jumping out of the bathtub, I opened the door."  Were the actions taking place at the same time?  If not, then the sentence needs to be restructured.

After jumping out of the bathtub, I opened the door and let the dog in.

or

After I jumped out of the bathtub, I opened the door and let the dog in.

Okay, that should be enough for one session.  Feel free to ask questions. 

Just a few words about words about words

The knights paraded onto the tournament grounds riding magnificently comparisoned horses with their lances raised.  Once the competition began, the steeds would be given free reign, but for now they pranced in anticipation.  Sir George of Luxling, the only warrior out of the dozen on the field whom carries an unmarked shield, turns his red stallion in a tight circle until they are facing the lord's and ladies whom were seated under the royal canopy.

Lady Ashleigh sat near the end of the canopy between two older women wearing an emmerald green gown and silver crown.  She is the most beautiful woman Sir Luxling had ever seen, he immediately wondered who she was, what her name was, if she married or not.  Lowering his visor and planning how he would make the ladies acquaintance after the tournament, the red stallion snorted and pawed the dusty dirt.

If the preceding two paragraphs don't make your brain hurt, you could be a one-star self-published author -- or an editor at a small digital publisher.

In other words, just because your book was "edited" by someone other than yourself doesn't mean it's free of errors.  Errors of verb tense.  Errors of misplaced modifiers.  Errors of peerage titles.  Errors of pronoun case.  Errors of word usage.  Errors of missing words.  Errors of spelling/typing.  Errors of punctuation.

When a reviewer complains that a book needed to be edited, the author should not insist that the reviewer is wrong.  Just because someone edited the book doesn't mean it's free of errors.  Sadly, I've been looking at a lot of digital books that have been issued by well-known digital publishers, and the books are riddled with exactly the kind of errors illustrated and listed above.

The author whose name goes on the cover has to accept full and complete and ultimate responsibility for the quality of the product.  Shifting the blame doesn't correct the errors.

Which of these words don't you understand?

As often happens, reading someone else's writing sparks my own thoughts, and I suppose that's not unusual in a community of writers and readers.  Writers were, after all, readers first and still read.  Readers read what the writers have written.  There will always be cross-pollination.

So I'm going to start this rant with a link to Sunita's original blogpost here which was further disseminated via Dear Author here and explain that the subject is titled (by my predecessors, not I) "When I bought your book, I didn't sign up to be your beta reader."


I added several posts of my own to the Dear Author thread, so I'll only briefly here restate that I think it is very wrong for authors who are digitally self-publishing to engage in this particular practice, which consists of:

1. E-publishing an uncorrected, unedited, unproofread rough draft of their "book" and charging cash money for it, without noting in a prominent way so the reader is aware before purchasing that it is in fact a rough (or very early) draft.

2.  Revising said work based on reviews and/or comments made by people who have purchased said work, such revisions to include but not be limited to fixing typos and other mechanical errors, revising plot lines to improve logical progression, altering characters and/or character motivation, changing the ending to make it more popular with readers, adding or removing significant events from the story.

3.  Re-publishing the work as a new edition and charging new readers for the privilege, with or without notifying previous purchasers that a new edition is available.


Those are the basics.  There are other corollary things the author can do to make the experience even worse, but those will wait for later enumeration.

I'm also going to offer a couple of qualifiers to the three main points, one of which has already been mentioned in #1.

If the author makes it clear that the publication is a work in progress that's one thing.  Then the reader knows that she should not be expecting a polished product.  It's probably still bad form to do this, but at least the author is being honest and the reader can make an informed decision whether to buy or not.

Offering the work for free is not an excuse.  Again, if the author makes clear that the work is unpolished, that's one thing, but merely offering it at no charge without such an announcement is unfair to the reader.  The reader expects that the product, free or not, is finished.  A rough draft is not a finished product.

I can't stress this enough.  The reader buys expecting a finished product, ready to read, to all intents and purposes it's DONE.  In essence, it's ready to provide a reading experience in which the text becomes invisible (see my blogpost about invisible words here) and the reader is immersed in the story.

But what appears to be happening more and more often is that the reader buys something that's not finished.

Here's a review of The Duke's Reform by Fenella J. Miller, in which the reviewer laments:

Spoiler alert: I hate to write a bad review so I will start out with the good. This was a good story. Could have been a much better story. It was poorly told, punctuation and vocabulary and missing words and words added in that did not relate to the sentence they were in combined to make this a very difficult read. When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

. . .

This could have been a good read if only they had had an editor. The Kindle version has some serious formatting problems with new paragraphs beginning in the middle of sentences, some paragraphs in bold and other in italics for no apparent reason. Commas and other punctuation are just, willy nilly throughout the book. A stilted and unbelievable dialogue. I wanted to like both the H and the h. I really did.

I am left wondering why I read this book to the end except that, I really wanted to like the H and h and I wanted them to have an HEA.

But if you must, get a dictionary and keep it handy, you will need it. This is a long read and by the end I just wanted it to be over

Then there's The Taming of the Hart by Lorraine Burgess which was uploaded to Amazon sometime prior to 22 June 2012 based on the date of the earliest review.  Selected comments from the reviews:

Didn't anyone take a look at this book before it was uploaded to Amazon? This is a good story. It deserves better.

I don't only not recommend it, I caution against it because it literally gave me a headache while trying to read it.

Please use a proper dictionary and check the spelling of even small words like seem and such. It is a large hindrance when the technical parts of writing get in the way of the story.

A few days later the author issued an apology and stated this was her uncorrected version written for herself and she would have a corrected version uploaded "within 24 hours."  Three days later, that corrected version has not yet appeared.



As you can see even in this not-very-clear screen shot, the version Ms. Burgess uploaded contains errors in the very first sentence.  The bold italic font continues through the entire text, sometimes Times Roman, sometimes Arial or a similar sans-serif font.  She claims this uncorrected version was uploaded "by accident," and it's obvious from the text of her apology that she's still having problems with spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation.  None of her friends told her of the problems, which suggests either her friends never looked at it or they weren't skilled enough to recognize them or they chose not to tell her; but none of those explanations explains why she herself didn't take even the quickest glance at what she uploaded.

When she did upload a "revised" version a few days later, most of the problems remained.  A few of the usage and spelling errors were fixed, and it's no longer in Italic font but the bold text continues throughout and it's a mess.  It's a horrible mess.

Now, allow me to throw this out here:  Yes, I uploaded a slightly imperfect version of Firefly to Amazon, an error I related here, and had I purchased a copy and checked it all out, I probably would have discovered the problem.  However, I did at least make sure I hadn't uploaded a version that contained numerous spelling errors.  I also made sure the version that was uploaded was reasonably well formatted, and in fact on my Kindle for PC app, the font was a standard Times Roman, not "ugly courier" noted in the early reviews.  The courier font and font-related glitches only appeared, as far as I'm able to determine, on the actual Kindle device.  It did take some extra finagling for me to get the right version to show up on the Kindle, but at least I did check somewhat before I put the thing live.  Yes, I could have checked more, but as I have learned since then, even purchasing a copy might not have revealed all the problems.

And regardless, I would never have uploaded something that had such appalling errors as "belt of lightening."  Come to think of it, I would never write "belt of lightening" when I really meant "bolt of lightning" in the first place.  My fingers wouldn't let me.

Sometimes these books have many, many, many five-star reviews that rave about how wonderful the book is and how the reviewers just can't wait for the author's next book.  There may be a few that point out errors and only grant one or two stars, but frequently the author (or their surrogates???) counter these negative reviews with staunch defenses of the wonderfulness of the story, or they attack the reviewer personally.  Often the errors cited are never addressed, or even admitted to.  It's as if the authors are in absolute denial of the problems in their books.

When I did my original analysis of self-published books that had garnered a bunch of five star as well as one star reviews, I was specifically looking for titles that had both because I wanted to try to get some sense of whether the five-star reviews had any suspicion of being planted by friends, family members, the authors themselves, or "shills" who were actually paid to write glowing reports whether they had liked or even read the book or not.  As I expanded my data base (if you will) of these titles, I did indeed begin to see a pattern with the works that were original to the digital self-publishing platform.  In other words, the books by authors who had never published in print prior to uploading their books to Amazon.  (And of course the qualifier here is that I had not looked at any other e-publishing format.  More about that later.)

Secrets of Moonshine, by Denise Daisy is one of those books with a lot of five-star reviews but is still very badly formatted.  Although the author claims she paid an "editor" $900 to turn this into a "squeaky clean" product, typos and punctuation and syntax errors abound.  I feel like telling Ms. Daisy it wouldn't have mattered to me if she had paid $9,000 or even ninety million dollars for that editing job: The book remained a pathetic mess.  Telling the reader that it was edited does not make it so.

Asking -- or worse, expecting -- the reader to fix the errors is grossly unfair.  Remember what that reviewer of Fenella Miller's The Duke's Reform wrote:  When I read a story, I want to read what the author wanted to tell, I don't want to have to guess and fill in the story every other page.

It is the author's job to tell that story.  That is what the reader has paid the author to do, with payment being made sometimes in cash but always in time and in trust.

Many years ago, in an article published in Writer's Digest magazine, authors George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and John Ashmead reiterated what they called "The Ultimate Rule," which was an expansion on instructions laid out by Robert Heinlein.  I personally took that Rule to heart, and I have passed it along, always with attribution, to every aspiring writer I have ever come into contact with.

1.  You must write.
2.  You must finish what you write.
3.  You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4.  You must put your work in front of an editor who might buy it.
5.  You must keep it on the market until it is sold.

Obviously, with the rise of digital publishing, #4 and #5 are no longer as "ultimate" as they used to be.  And given how my attitude toward traditional publishers has soured, I'd have issues with those orders anyway.

But how does Heinlein's dictum apply to today's publishing scene? 

First of all, #3 specifically refers to the traditional publishing professional who, as the middleman between writer and reader, is trained to acquire those properties most likely to turn a profit for the publisher and is trained to put those properties into publishable shape.  Unlike the random reader who looks at the free sample of a book digitally published on Amazon and who may or may not know anything at all about writing, about editing, or about the factual accuracy of the book and whose suggestions may be completely wrong, at least under the traditional publishing model the editor is probably going to do much more to improve the work than make it worse.  What the shift to digital self-publishing has done is to split the gatekeeper function from that of purchaser by eliminating that editorial middleman.  And that means that the author must now take full responsibility for all of that editorial function, while purchasing is directly in the hands of the final user.

Second of all. Heinlein's #3 never meant the author should complete the roughest of first drafts and immediately start schlepping it around to the top editors and agents.  It does mean that when you have a clean and polished version of your work, stop messing with it and get it out there.  It does mean that you need to develop the professional writing skills that will allow your prospective reader -- whether that is an agent, a publishing house editor, a small e-press editor, or the person who downloads your digital book from Amazon -- to read your story as if it were ready to be set in type.  It does mean only listen to the complaints and criticisms and orders from those who are competent to voice and demand them.

Third of all, the writer must understand what #4 really means in the age of digital publishing.  Again, that "editor" now becomes any potential reader, and just as the traditional publishing industry demanded that the author deliver a manuscript as spotless as possible when trying to land an editor, today the digital shopper fills that role, not as editor but as acquirer.  The author must take on the responsibility that formerly fell to the publisher: making certain that the product is ready for the consumer to use.

Unfortunately, so many of the people putting out digital books are so lacking in even basic writing skills that they should never get past #1.  And they don't understand that #2 doesn't just mean writing "The End" after the first draft is cranked out.  "Finished" means ready for real people to read it.

Essentially, self-publishing means that the author has to take on all the roles of the publisher, and that doesn't mean foisting them off on an unsuspecting and perhaps unqualified reader.  The author must either be qualified to be editor, proofreader, copyeditor, line editor, cover artist, publicist, accountant, and legal specialist, or she must find and pay other professionals to perform those tasks.  Self-publishing is not just uploading a text file to Amazon or Pub-it or Smashwords. 

Nor should self-publishing be a vehicle for authorial deception.  We've already seen too many instances of authors just plain stealing other people's words and trying to sell them.  Whether it's Janet Dailey or Cassie Edwards, Cassandra Clare or anyone else, plagiarism/copyright infringement is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.  No excuse, no defense, no forgiveness.

But also wrong is this ongoing business of posting deceptive reviews to self-published books.  The reader who browses the Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Kobo or Apple catalogue should not be bombarded with bullshit "reviews" that are nothing but the author's friends and family members and paid ad copy writers posing as unbiased reviewers.  Of course your mother is going to give you a good review!  We know that.  As readers, we want to know what other real readers thought. 

However, some authors are now turning to another tactic, and it's not being done to make their books better but rather just to sell them.

Among the intial group of novels I analyzed back in March was one that, as I began to read the free sample, struck me as having enormous potential to be a really, really good book.  Unfortunately, it was riddled with errors of just about every type: typos, wrong words used, historical inaccuracy, bad formatting.  And I noticed that while there were a whole bunch of kind of generic five-star reviews, there were also a lot of one- and two-star reviews that cited those problems. 

Now, if I were an author whose book received numerous detailed criticisms about specific errors, I'd be sure to consider those issues very carefully, research to find out if perhaps the critics were right, and then I would do my very best to fix them.  And as a matter of fact, the few reviews I've received on Firefly have brought up the issue of that Arizona ice cream -- but there's nothing historically wrong with it!  And I addressed that in the Afterword.  No, of course Del and Julie didn't take Willy to the local Baskin Robbins or Coldstone Creamery, but ice cream was not anachronism.

What I wouldn't do, however, is ignore a slew of criticisms and just remove the book from Amazon, then republish it as is on Smashwords, with a new title and a new pseudonym, with no reference to the original on Amazon and no correction of the errrors, which is what I discovered the author had done.  I only noticed it because she republished her book almost the same time I published Shadows by Starlight at Smashwords, and I saw hers as I was checking the status of mine. 

When an author does something like that, at that point the whole operation becomes nothing but deception and a ploy to make money off the gullible.  That, too, is wrong.  It's even more wrong when she chooses a title identical to that of another historical romance and a pseudonym very very similar to that of the author of that book.

Once again, self-publishing means the writer takes on the responsibility of fulfilling all the tasks traditional publishers would have done.  As far as I know, that never included making the reader do the work or intentionally deceiving the reader.

Now, self-publishing authors, what about this don't you get?

The magic of invisible words

As the subtitle of this blog notes, I am a "resurrected" romance novelist.  And throughout the course of this blog, I've been presenting some resurrected books and ideas.  For some time now, I've been trying without success to find an article I wrote for an RWA newsletter back in the days..  Although I remember parts of it, I had hoped to take the original and update it to reflect changes in the publishing scene.

Today, while looking for something else, I stumbled across one version of it, a fading hard copy that contained all the important points.

Writing has always been, for me, a very magical business.  We writers are able to create new worlds, where everything is exactly as we want it, where we are in complete control of everyone's lives and fortunes.  We can reward good and punish evil; we can dispense justice fairly; we can solve all the world's problems within the space of two or three or five hundred pages.  Love is always perfect, and everyone who deserves to will live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, once we decide to bring others into the world we've created, the magic doesn't always work.  In the old days when a writer was at the mercy of traditional publishers and editors and agents, she faced the very real possibility that her magic failed and she got rejected or didn't win the contest or her critique partners said, "Are you kidding me?"  The magic worked for her and she thought it would work for everyone, but it didn't, and that meant her book didn't get published.

Today, digital publishing is a magic all its own, and it makes possible the instant publication of virtually any book, no matter how well or poorly written.  Digital self-publishing has magically removed not only the time it takes to market, contract, and publish a book through traditional print channels; it has also removed the bad juju of rejection letters, of low contest scores, of critique group partners who say, "What the fuck?"  Digital self-publishing allows the writer to go directly to the reader without any intermediary.

But the magic of digital publishing is only half the magic.  It can bypass the traditional obstacles of agents and editors and publishers to take the created world directly to the reader, but it alone cannot bring her inside that world and make her enjoy her stay there.

Digital self-publishing has replaced the form letter rejection with the negative review, which wields the added weapon of public humiliation.  Whether it's "0 stars" or "DNF" or "F-" or "STA," the negative review is out there for all the world to read.

Many people used to say in the old days that there was no magical secret to prevent rejections.  But in fact there was.  And today that same magic works just as well to prevent negative reviews of digitally self-published books.

The magical spell for avoiding rejection slips and negative reviews is very simple:  Never let anyone see your manuscript.

The first spell was used frequently, often unconsciously, by those writers who were either too timid or too unsure of their work to put it into the hands of an editor, an agent, or even a friend.  These people wrote, sometimes churning out novel after novel, but they never showed their work to anyone else.  By never letting anyone see their manuscripts, they never suffered the pain, the disappointment, the disillusionment of rejection.

But by invoking that magic, they cut themselves off from any possibility of experiencing the joy of seeing their name on the cover a book, the sweet savoring of success as they scrawl their name across the back of a royalty check, the delicious delight of penning an autograph on the title page of their published novel.

Today, that type of writer does the same thing:  They don't put their stories online, don't share them with friends, don't enter contests.  They never let anyone see their books, and they never have to deal with negative reactions.  The magic works, every single time. 

If you never let anyone see your manuscript, you will never be rejected.

But wait, are you saying you want to share your story, want to sell your books?  You don't want just to avoid rejection and negative reviews, you want success?

Well, you're in luck, because there is a magic spell for that, too, and it works just as well in the digital publishing format as it did when print ruled:  Never let anyone see your manuscript.

You say it sounds the same as the other one?  Well, similar maybe, but not identical.  And they mean two very different things.

Those writers who enjoy the thrill of publishing success in the traditional print format (not self-published or POD) have always employed that second spell rather than the first:  They let other people -- editors, agents, critique partners, etc. -- see their manuscripts, but they never let them see the manuscript.


The first spell obviously requires no complex incantations in an arcane language, no special ingredients, no ensorcelled tools.  It is very easy to cast:  Simply keep your stories to yourself and you will never be rejected, never be criticized, never be told you have no talent, never be embarrassed in public.  You can entertain yourself and be perfectly content.  There is no law that says you have to share your writing.

The second spell, of course, has always been much more difficult to cast.  It is not, in fact, a simple phrase, a cantrip to be mouthed in fervent hope.  Instead, it is an elaborate enchantment that is woven not on yourself or on your book, but on your reader, whether that reader is an editor, an agent, a fellow member of your critique group, the person who picks your book off the rack at the grocery store check-out lane or downloads it to their e-reader.

To understand how this second magic spell works, you must remember that your digital manuscript exists on two separate planes.  Its quasi-physical being is the electronic document that you upload to the publishing platform, whether that is Amazon's Kindle or Smashwords, or anyone else.  Its invisible being is the story those words convey to the reader.  The trick -- and it is tricky -- is to involve the reader so thoroughly in the story that she does not see the manuscript.

It ain't easy, but no one ever said it was.

Any little thing that reminds her she is only looking at words on an electronic device breaks the spell.  These are nasty little critters called Tokens of Visibility, and they are incredibly easy to conjure up, even without trying.  Whether it is faulty formatting for the digital platform or too many typos per page or wrong words or characters who can't stay in character (or historical period) or inaccurate research or vague descriptions that never let the reader see the scenes or grammatical errors that send her into gales of laughter or inappropriate dialogue or physically impossible sexual positions -- anything that takes the reader out of the story and back to the reality of letters on a digital screen is likely to result in the torment of negative reviews. 

The same problems that used to cause manuscripts to be rejected by editors and agents have not lost their power just because the books can now be self-published digitally.  The difference now is that their magic brings on the threat of public scorn.

The very first things the reader sees are your cover art and your listing on the digital bookseller's site.  If you are not a graphic designer yourself, get someone who is to do your cover art.  Excellent digital cover art can be purchased for $100 or less.  If you are expecting people to pay you for your book, you need to invest in the product, and that means providing an attractive display.

Your listing on the digital site should be exactly what the site calls for, and this is basically what would be found on the dust jacket flap or back cover of a printed book.  You are not allowed to make any spelling or grammatical errors here -- it's too public.  You have to put your magic skills on prominent display here.

Once the reader has purchased or downloaded your book, the magic takes over.  If you have not cast a perfect spell or if you have left too many Tokens of Visibility in your text, the magic will not work.

Allow me to repeat that:

If you have left too many Tokens of Visibility in your text, the magic will not work.

If there are too many Tokens of Visibility, the reader will remember she's just reading, she will not be caught up in the story, she will not engage emotionally with the characters.  The more Tokens there are, the sooner she will give up on the story.  And she just may leave you a negative review.

This is not the reader's fault.  It is the writer's fault -- and only the writer's fault -- if the magic doesn't work.  The writer is the magician, and if she fails to cast the spell properly, she has no one to blame but herself.

It is not the reader's fault that the formatting is screwed up.

It is not the reader's fault that there are spelling errors.

It is not the reader's fault the story is internally inconsistent.

It is not the reader's fault the historical or geographical or technological facts are inaccurate.

Now, it is very true that many writers whose magic fails end up resorting to devious and nefarious means to erase the negative reviews, the low star rankings.  As has been amply documented on the "Badly Behaving Authors" thread on the Amazon discussion boards, authors will go to great lengths to either erase negative reviews or post fake positive ones.  Such chicanery not only does not make the magic work; it is in and of itself the strongest evidence possible that the magic did not work.  And if the magic doesn't work, all the lies and all the sock puppet reviews and all the excuses will not make it work.

If the magic works, it works.  If it doesn't, it doesn't.  It's as simple as that.

Shenanigating authors may increase their sales, but shenanigans do not create magic.  Good grammar and clean formatting are not the only things that conjure the magic.  Engaging characters, fascinating plots, all of these combine, of course, with the more mundane mechanics of writing to create the magic of invisible words.  And while it is of course true that not every book will appeal to every reader, and there will always be readers who leave unkind (and even inaccurate) assessments of digital books, authors who understand the magic and how to use it will also recognize that there is nothing they can do to work the magic on these readers.  Authors who understand the magic and how to weave it will not attack the negative reviews; they will ignore them.  Authors who understand the magic and how to invoke it will not send out their minions to post shill reviews or denigrate the negative ones.

Authors who understand the magic and are able to create invisible words. . . . . . .are authors.