Story rules? Certainly does, as much as an Empire

The path into a writing practice can be littered with a gauntlet of rules. In journalism school they told us never to write a headline that ended with a preposition, a rule that persists in every part of English that I know of. (Ha-Ha!) Except for poetry, of course. I'm reminded of the poets at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. They read their work in an open mike night, and each was commanded to add nothing other than this before they started to read: "This is fresh, but it smacks of genius."

The range of genius runs wide and rarely pays attention to rules while its sparks creations. That's why I like the scope of There Are No Rules, the blog by Writer's Digest editor Jane Friedman. Up on the blog's front page today are a long examination about the re-branding of Reader's Digest (good luck on that one), what makes her stop reading a blog (it has as much to do with how it looks as what's being said), and Great Storytelling 101.

Of the last, Friedman reminds us that Steven Spielberg has said that "people have forgotten how to tell a story." The blog entry includes a 9-minute YouTube movie that explains the fundamentals of storytelling's essential parts.

You may have been told a million times about the elements of a great story (e.g., protagonist, conflict), but this 9-minute clip has an immediate way of showing you what happens when those elements are missing! Fabulous.

It's a multi-part series, using Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the middling prequels to illustrate how the elements of storytelling work -- or don't, if they're missing or mangled. I subscribe to the school that considers The Empire Strikes Back to be a seminal text of storytelling, so the problems of the Prequels stand right out. Are there rules to be observed for a writer? Yes there are, and as a storyteller you will need to know them. Use their Force, young Jedi.

Bounding back from revisions

Writing is re-writing, but once you've done your rewrites it's time to move on into the next book, story or article. A fresh start on a new project can seem tempting while you're digging out of the problems of revising drafts. Once you're clear of that book, though, starting can be difficult.

Over at the blog Be The Story, author J. Timothy King offers several layers of advice on how to beat the post-revisionist blues. He shares more than 10 aspects to consider about tools to approaching that new work. One that stands out, for me after my first novel Viral Times, is to stop judging the completed work.

Have a look at King's post. It's adapted from How to Lift Depression ... Fast by Joe Griffin. As creators we tend to put a lot of our self-worth into our work. While the judgment is an appropriate part of the work, that kind of criticism tamps down our spirit to return to new creations. Let the best response to completing your work be encouraging, even if the writing is far from perfect. Writers improve their ability by writing. Authors have more than one project inside them.

From Oxford, a holiday gift or two

The Oxford University Press has unveiled another big-ticket present for the word-lover in your life (even if that's you.) The new Historical Thesaurus is the largest thesaurus in the world, covering 92,000 words in two thick, printed volumes.

Price? Just $316 at Amazon, plus shipping. Look at what you get:

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a unique resource for word-lovers of all types-linguists and language specialists, historians, literary commentators, among others-as well as being a fascinating resource for everyone with an interest in the English language and its historical development. It is a perfect complement to the OED itself, allowing the words in the OED to be cross-referenced and viewed in wholly new ways.

Amazon has a fun video of how to use this new resource to call someone stupid. Below-worm is among the epithets, right up to dork. Hundreds of them.

The entire project nearly went up in flames during a 1978 fire at the Press, which gives you an idea of how long this venture has been in play. The OED itself, available online in a subscription package, is still in print at $995. But the printed OED is now 20 years old. A compact version of the printed OED, just 18 years old, is available at Amazon's used marketplace for as little as $161. 

Tweeting on Twitter leads to writing, writers

I got lucky in being led to Twitter. A client already had a Facebook habit, so I joined his social network. Twitter took off while I was getting agile with Facebook, and before I knew it I was hooked on both.

Lucky for me, there's a way to feed both of these networks at the same time. When I post to my Twitter feed -- you can follow me at @ronseybold -- it will update my Facebook news feed at the same time. Facebook has a program to help you set this up.

The Twitter experience leads to other writers and industry advice on craft and business. Mashable.com has a wonderful summary of "100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter." Then there are agents and readers like AAKnopf, operated by the New York publisher.
The person Tweeting at Knopf advises

Go behind the covers with Knopf jacket designer @mendelsund in this @Omnivoracious interview: http://ow.ly/JwwX

That last bit is a shortened Web address, commonplace in the Twitter-sphere. Writer's Digest has a fine summary of some of the terms and techniques in Twitter use in its cheat sheet. Among their bits of advice on becoming someone who Tweets on Twitter:

1. Use your real name if possible. Make it easy for people you know or meet to find you on Twitter.
2. Add a profile picture. Preferably this will be a picture of you. People connect better with other people, not cartoons, book covers, logos, etc.
3. Link to a website. Hopefully, you have a blog or website you can link to in your profile. If you don't have a website or blog, do that. Now. And then, link to it from your Twitter profile.
4. Write your bio. Make this memorable in some way. You don't have to be funny or cute, but more power to you if you can do this and still make it relevant to who you are.
5. Tweet regularly. It doesn't matter if you have only two followers (and one is your mom); you still need to tweet daily (or nearly daily) for Twitter to be effective. And remember: If you don't have anything original to add, you can always RT something funny or useful from someone else.

Then there's the matter of following lists. To track a collection of Tweeters writing about books, sign in to Twitter on its Web site and head to twitter.com/tweet09/books

The life of a writer can be isolated and solitary. In fact, that's the best way to compose and refine your work. But you want connection with a community, too. If you can't make it to a workshop, manuscript group or a writing group meeting, Twitter can keep you connected.

Newspapering can lead to fiction

Some people come to the joy of writing fiction from a lifetime of non-fiction. Journalists write what's sometimes called Literature in a Hurry. Most of us turn toward fiction as some point in our careers, and some stay in the land of invented story for good. Hemingway is the classic example of a journalist turned novelist.

There are good connections between the two types of writing craft, but even a non-journalist can benefit from the work of these dutiful scribes. In a recent issue of The Writer, writing teacher Ruth Moose talks about what makes a good short story. Even amid lots of generalities, the article gives some good advice about stories starting with an idea. Some, she writes, start with an article from the paper.

One way to jump start a story is to take from the newspaper an item of some small event that actually happened. Here you have your Who, What, When, and Where. . . you just don't have the WHY. That's where you, the writer, come in. You change the names and places and fill in the Why. Make up the characters involved from your imagination, then let those characters carry out your story. When your story is finished, even you won't recognize the newspaper item that triggered it.

I have a file in my drawer that contains curious start points for stories, clipped from a paper's pages. These days you don't even have to go for the scissors, since so much journalism is online. When you've found your "lotto winner is identified as escaped convict" idea, you can just copy it as a file to read from your computer.

Are there copyright issues here? No. Copyright protects expression, not ideas. (Concepts are a gray area, but reports of public matter don't enjoy such protection.) The important thing here is to understand that a good idea will spark work toward characters. Journalists offer up short story ideas every day. Look for the people in the stories and imagine their lives.

Prescription for writers

From a morning seminar which I took with Lee Smith, a writer of short stories and novels:

Most people who come in here don't have the possibility of entering into any story other than their own. You do. To do this, write fiction every day. Just sit in the chair and put one word in front of the the other. This putting one word in front of another is to put the world in order. It's theraputic.

Good interview with Smith at the Writers Write site, written about the time that I heard her give the above prescription. I'm going off to sit in my chair and put the world in order.

Simple language leads to perfect stories

It's easy to find praise for simple things in life. But writing seems to evoke the opposite effect in building sentences, paragraphs, sections and stories. We want to be noticed with our writing. However, if you look underneath that wish you should find the desire to be heard and remembered. Simple language delivers those two results. Simple lets the story rule the reader's attention.

Last night in our weekly Writer's Workshop we enjoyed Blackberries, a simple short story that our member Kathleen Clark showed me over our summer break. The Leslie Norris sudden fiction story -- another name for a short-short, under 1,000 words -- has few sentences that run beyond 15 words. Despite the brevity, the language is rich in feeling and detail. Here's one of the few, written about a blackberry vine.

His father showed him a bramble, hard with thorns, its leaves just beginning to color into autumn, its long runners dry and brittle on the grass.

Just count the verbs to see why this sentence works so simply. Show. Hard. Color. Even the adjectives are doing verb work, like dry, or waxing specific with an action, like brittle. The nouns swing into action: bramble, thorns, leaves, runners, grass. Of 26 words, 10 breathe simple life into this writing. (Kathleen called the story "perfect." I struggle to find any reason to disagree.)

Blackberries, like many other stories in Sudden Fiction International, runs on three main characters and two minor players across the space of four printed pages. The writing doesn't shy away from using variations of the verb "to be" in various tenses. Norris considers that advice, of using better verbs than be or were, but uses these simplest verbs along with others. Much of the simplest writing does.

Could be a good time to be not yet in print

Google and the Authors Guild announced today that they're revising an agreement to pay authors for printed books that get read online. Along with the American Association of Publishers, the parties wanted to give Google the clear path to scanning millions of printed works, then offering them to read over the Web.

There might be no better time to stay out of print than now, while your as-yet-unpublished book isn't covered by the agreement. Published writers, you and your publisher have until June, 2010 to file an objection to the agreement if Google has already scanned your book. Nobody has seen the latest version of the agreement promised today. But DC Comics and Microsoft have filed objections to the existing settlement.

The Authors Guild threw up a roadblock to Google's scan-and-display policy when it was announced last year. A fairness hearing in US, scheduled for today, has been delayed until next month.

The Guild is the domain of the published writer, and the organization takes its eligibility to an exclusive level. Even if you have a book contract, it must "include a royalty clause and a significant advance, and must allow the author to retain copyright." Independent book publishers, who are accepting new books from new authors at a faster rate than major presses, are skipping advances these days. The Guild accepts members whose books are "published by an established American publisher... excepting small literary presses of national reputation."

So whatever agreement the Guild, major publishers and Google arrive at, it won't keep you from disputing when Google scans your small-press book and charges to read it. With exclusive eligibility requirements like these, Google is just ensuring that those left out of the agreement will probably welcome the online readership as a way to promote the books -- which will likely have links to online stores. That's where Google makes its money anyway, not in the per-reader charges.

Limelight burns more than Twilight

There's a great interview with Stephanie Meyer in Entertainment Weekly's Web site. The best-selling author of the Twilight series of teen vampire love said that being this successful -- first three books becoming movies, fans clamoring for more writing -- has blocked her on the project.

Everyone now is in the driver's seat, where they can make judgment calls. ''Well, I think this should happen, I think she should do this.'' I do not feel alone with the manuscript. And I cannot write when I don't feel alone. So my goal is to go for, like, I don't know, two years without ever hearing the words Midnight Sun. And once I'm pretty sure that everyone's forgotten about it, I think I'll be able to get to the place where I'm alone with it again. Then I'll be able to sneak in and work on it again.

While you work on your first book, you can be alone. But once a book hits with the splash that Twilight gave to Meyer, you'll never be alone again. This is the business side of writing, the one that creates fans, makes you a celebrity and rich. Meyer is about the same age as J.K. Rowling was when Harry Potter ascended. But the Twilight empire has emerged much faster (some say the writing is a little under-baked) and this is Meyer's first dance in the limelight. She talks of a new project she wants to work on that revolves around mermaids. You can look back at the movie careers of Quentin Tarantino, Orson Wells, even Kevin Smith after Clerks to see the challenge. The limelight was so hot that their second act was where the twilight fell on them.

You can climb back to the light, but it helps to be able to foresake the fame and quiet all those voices. An artist has to stay true to their own voice. If not, then your romance in the world of vampires might be dead to you.

As for waiting two years to release the next installment of Twilight, it's a period where her publisher gets to prove its faith. They may need to release an imperfect Twilight book to be able to let Meyer cast off the yoke of Edward and friends. Two years is an eternity for an impatient publisher. Time means something different to the undead, though. Last week Meyer was looking toward the movie screen, not the word processing screen. Her blog reported:

We only have to wait 71 more days until New Moon the movie hits theaters! In case you don't want to have to count the days on your calendar (like I just did) every time you think about Edward and Jacob, I've added a countdown widget to the New Moon Movie page

How hot is Twilight's limelight? Hot enough to withstand the wisecracks and endure self-parody. On Facebook you can find a group called Because I Read Twilight I Have Unrealistic Expectations in Men

Of course, that should be "expectations of men," but it's only English written by 266,000 fans in the group. This is fame and fun we're witnessing. And after 29 million copies sold, it would seem we're all witnessing.

Storytelling, journalism live on The Wire

Abby and I are reveling in the sweep and depth of HBO's The Wire. It's a piece of genius, 60 hours of entertainment that feels like reading a masterful series of crime novels. Or a week's worth of old-school newspaper reports, what was once called "a series" and now is a rare breed indeed.

The creator of these connected, 1-hour dramas started as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, but after 13 years of crime articles David Simon aspired to say more than newsprint could carry about important issues. He wrote a non-fiction book in the late '80s that became the blueprint for Homicide, another TV show. In The Wire Simon, along with his ex-cop, schoolteacher creative partner Ed Burns, takes on big matters like poverty, crime, education, graft, politics both good and bad. They have created a Book That Makes a Difference and plays out on your DVD screen.

In his closing letter after the series wrapped, Simon points out that The Wire was built on interviews and details with experts. Once upon a time, he asserts, journalism at its best told this kind of story.

For those of us writing The Wire, a television drama, story research involved dragging the right police lieutenants or school teachers, prosecutors and political functionaries to neighborhood diners and bars and taking story notes down on cocktail napkins and paper placemats. To be more precise with their tales? To record it and relay it in a manner that can stand as non-fiction truthtelling? Yes, that's harder to do. But there was a time when journalism regarded that kind of coverage as its highest mission.

The true stories that The Wire traded in are out there, waiting for anyone willing to take the time. And it is, of course, vaguely disturbing to us that our unlikely little television drama is making arguments that were once the prerogative of more serious mediums.

The lesson to take away here is the drive for details, usually accumulated through personal contact. Efforts to connect with resources in this way will make a story stronger, whether it's drama or non-fiction or the creative non-fiction that blends both. (There's also the lesson about journalism fundamentals being a sound foundation for fiction, but this old newspaperman will not wax on too long about that bromide.)

By the way, if you rent The Wire, be sure to turn on the subtitles. It adds a level of richness for a writer, or anyone who enjoys a good read.

Popular and good writing can be exclusive

A USA Today story reports that Stephanie Meyer of the Twilight series is now "dominating" the paper's bestseller list. These books of the undead, and the movie franchise they've spawned, are lively enough to have earned her publisher Little, Brown $40 million already. So the author has her own $4 million in royalties to bank.

By most accounts, though, the writing is weak. Especially compared to the Harry Potter series, which USA Today was quick to compare to Twilight. Bestselling seems to be the only point in common. A reading teacher reports as much in the comments on the USA Today site.

I'm a Reading teacher, its my job! And I must say JK Rowling's books are far superior in writing, character development, plot, and readability, just to name a few things. Meyer is good, but Rowling is great! I put Breaking Dawn down utterly disappointed, compared to the tears of joy and sorrow that were gushing from my eyes when I put The Deathly Hollows down. Meyer may break records, but overall Rowling is Queen.

Does Stephanie love it, and live the creating like Rowling did? Her publicist reports that she's taking a break from the romance of vampire passion.

When Meyer might publish a new novel isn't known, says Megan Tingley of Hachette's Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. She's "enjoying the writing process without a deadline or targeted publication date.

What writer wouldn't enjoy that kind of writing life? Wealthy beyond her dreams, with only millions of Potter fans and the reading teachers of the world to sniff at her work. As for the publisher, they want the books as fast they can get them, to piggyback on the publicity. As the article points out, Stephanie has tapped the motherlode of young female readers with Twilight, Edward and vampire fantasy. If you desire good and popular writing all at once, working for the first might be a better place to start to get to the second. Unless you're plugged in to the fantasies of YA-reading women. They buy a lot of books.

I'm reminded of the line from Citizen Kane, when his business manager Bernstein is interviewed. "Making a lot of of money isn't difficult, if all you want to do it make a lot of money." I'd be wary of starting a vampire novel just about now, though. When every publisher wanted the next DaVinci Code when it was soaring, imagine how many candidate queries poured in trying to be just like the Flavor of the Last Three Months. The time of just-average writing of vampire teen romances is gone by now.

Know what your story desires to tell

NPR has a great interview with Richard Russo you can listen to on its site. The author of the divine Empire Falls (a Pulitzer winner) has a new book, That Old Cape Magic. The book is about a writer, a device that lets Russo explain a common author's problem, for those still learning the craft. It's not easy understanding what a story needs to say.

In his novel, [his character] Griffin decides to write about his childhood on the Cape -- including his love for a neighboring family. But his first draft of the story isn't any good because the characters don't come to life.

Russo, who used to teach fiction writing, says this is a problem that he frequently sees in beginning writers.

"The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. And I think that's why Jack Griffin can't write this story ... there's something about himself that he hasn't quite recognized."

Russo says this idea of missing the point is as common in life as in novels. And as memories corrode or morph, people -- parents and children, husbands and wives -- tend to form different ideas of the past.

How to avoid this pitfall? Keep crafting that three-paragraph synopsis, if it's a longer work like a book. In this format, paragraph one describes the inciting event. Two tackles the expansion and evolution of the story. Three delivers the Big Message: Why your readers should open the book, to learn a larger story, like how faith can overcome fear of the future.

Big truths of stories cover common ground, so a reader has empathy with the lesson: "Hey, I lived that one." Or knew someone who did. Or failed at the lesson.

By the way, Russo sounds like a dynamite interview subject on the radio. A voice as crackling as his characters.

When a book is finished

I've taken a couple of months away from this blog and the manuscript workshops to complete Viral Times. It's been a process of learning craft and considering workshop responses over more than six years to finish this first novel. (Thanks to all who read this in progress; you'll be in the foreward.) Although it took longer to finish than I expected, it feels delicious to have transformed my creative work from a project into a book.

At the end, in the last gallop to the wire, I used Scrivener on my iMac to make a pack of 51 chapters into a cohesive narrative. I'd been searching long and hard for a piece of software that would take dozens of Word documents (one per chapter) and line them up in my sequence of plot. The most brilliant part of Scrivener is creating what's called scrivenings: an test-run of scenes and sequel to make up a chapter, or a proposed set of chapters to devise a book. Highly recommended, Mac only, but there's a similar tool for Windows in Page Four.

I'm lucky in being able to bull my way to the finish with the Mac and Scrivener. Some of this fortune comes from earning a journalism degree rather than an English degree more than 25 years ago: the journalism pays for things like the 24-inch iMac and provides time to work on the book. I figured, back in 1980, that learning journalism would give me a better chance to earn a living than a proper literature degree. While I had to learn the craft of fiction over the past six years (a education in process), I was at least writing all the while to run a house and a business.

Now I'm in the rather comfy spot for awhile of waiting on an agent's response. A lucky connection with Cameron McClure of the Donald Maas Agency netted a request for 100 pages. Big chunk of a 293-page book, good agency, and an agent who sells stories like this future fiction tale of mine. No promises, but the book is on its way to whatever it will be in the months and years to come.

When is something this large really finished? You never can be sure, and I still think of what could have gone into it, or been cut out. Those things might still happen (and probably will) as the book moves toward publication. But one marker of completion is length. Scrivener helped in an enormous way with this. Few books should be longer than 120,000 words, with the rare exception. Fewer still will sell at under 70,000. Those numbers come from the Maas Agency, where one of the agents posted a great article on book length.

And now that Viral Times has come in at 98,000 words, I can look forward to my manuscript workshops of this fall. By the time we've met for half of the 8 monthly sessions, I'll have read and responded to 100,000 words. I come back to that work renewed and ready after my summer vacation.

Slow and careful writing about love

I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale this month. Margaret Atwood's story about a future America dominated by religion and males, with women subjugated and forced to bear children, does contain love and passion, too.

I was struck by the passage below, so beautiful that I made a note of it in my Kindle copy of the book. The writing shows off how loving Atwood is with words of love. Here, the heroine of the book describes her illicit, secret lover, her respite after she's lost the memory of her husband Luke.

I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his long sardonic unrevealing face. I ought to have done that with Luke, paid more attention, to the details, the moles and scars, the singular creases; I didn’t and he’s fading. Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless. For this one I’d wear pink feathers, purple stars, if that were what he wanted; or anything else, even the tail of a rabbit. But he does not require such trimmings. We make love each time as if we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever. And then when there is, that too is always a surprise, extra, a gift.

Five summers ago I took a Novel seminar at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where we studied Atonement. Our instructor advised us to deliver the details of a body your character has come to know and love. Atwood gives us this as well as anybody I've read.

Short Roth stories long on quality

I just finished reading a short story from Goodbye, Columbus, the collection that launched Phillip Roth's career 50 years ago this month. The gem included in the Norton North American Literature Anthology was Defender of the Faith, a tight, plainspoken tale about three Jewish Army trainees and the Jewish sergeant who both learns and teaches a lesson about the boundaries of faith.

Roth has plenty of acclaimed long works to his name, having won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. But like so many great novelists, he honed his craft on short stories. About himself writing Goodbye, Columbus, he said in a 30th Anniversary Edition:

With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20s, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a soldier stationed in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and a novice English instructor back at Chicago following his Army discharge. Eisenhower, who was president, the embryonic writer despised, though not nearly as much as he was to despise Eisenhower’s Republican successors.

His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice and the American booster mentality. Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s — and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them — were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F.R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e.e. cummings — who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to be naturalized.

Another Workshop Finalist

We received word this week that Gordon Rives Carmichael has landed in the finalist pool in the Writer's League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Gordon's work has come past our manuscript table here for more than a year, with lots of evidence of polishing and extending his skills.

Gordon, we congratulate you. Best of luck in the finals selection; the conference is June 26. Even being nominated, as the Oscar winners say, is an honor.

This sort of milestone can only happen if you get your writing out there, in front of readers. Offer something up soon.

Fast finds for definitions

This morning I stumbled across Memidex, the free online "dictionary, thesaurus and more." If you ever need to know the difference between rhinoviruses and arborviruses, or what contiguous means, or a synonym for incipient, Memidex (memidex.com) finds it fast.

What I liked about this online tool was its relentless linking. The definition for arborvirus is teeming with medical words all linked to other definitions.

The unique features of Memidex include:

• detailed information for each sense
• more cross-references
• convenient hierarchical links
• full listing of inflected forms
• no obscure abbreviated labels
• quick search for exact matches
• complete, easily browsable index
• easy-to-link-to URLs
• clear, simple, uncluttered layout
• frequent, recorded updates
• fast average page access time

Are we reading differently?

The evidence in today's audience suggests the answer is yes. A fun article on Tim Bray's Ongoing blog suggests that our language skills are hard-wired to grasp conversational writing, because 90 percent of human language history used only talk to communicate.

There’s nothing much on the Net that’s without precedent in spoken language. What’s new is that written discourse is becoming less like oration and more like conversation. It’s not clear that this is bad.

Then there's Karleen Koen, a novelist who's working on her fourth book, historical fiction based in France. She writes on her blog

As I polish (which means cut, smooth out, delete, write new things that make the reading slick) I do believe people are reading differently, with less patience -- and the inherent problem with a historical novel is that a writer has to set up the background so the reader understands the world he or she is entering, and that can’t be done in a quick paragraph or two. Or at least I can’t do it.

There will be readers who love to immerse themselves in a book, get lost in the pace. But are there enough of them now, growing up in a Twitter generation, to give writers a livelihood? Bray notes that books are losing market share and adds, "Unsurprising, because when you start at 100 percent, there’s nowhere to go but down. Books are now competing, on a fairly level playing field, with the Net media: blogs and Twitter and mailing lists and fora of other flavors."

But a certain kind of story can only achieve its potential as a book. A good friend of mine just landed a nice contract for a first book. It will be an impressive debut when she finishes. A literary pace will probably govern her writing, though. Are you patient enough to give yourself over to a pace that will match your vision for your work? One clue: How long can you sit in the chair and just write, or just revise? I don't know many novelists who tweet on Twitter.

Hooray for a Pulitzer's worth of stories

Short stories get short shrift. These gems of tales, usually less than 3,000 words, usually can't find a publisher or a publication, but everybody professes to enjoy reading them. Count among the satisfied the jury of the Pulitzer Prize, which awarded the 2009 fiction prize to a collection of stories by Elizabeth Stout, Olive Kitteridge.

To be precise, this lovely book is a "novel in stories," a collection of tales with recurring characters but not bound up with a narrative though-line. Reading a novel in stories is easy for people who only read once in awhile. You always feel like you've gotten everything there is to tell in a novel in stories, so long as you finish the chapter you're on. Every chapter is a self-contained story.

Six years ago, I saw a novel-in-stories slammed by a prize-winning novelist. Ann Patchett came to Austin to give a keynote speech at the Austin Writers League "Why Fiction Matters" conference. Patchett spoke knowing she'd just won the PEN/Falkner award for her novel Bel Canto. In the course of her talk Patchett said in passing, "and then there's the novel-in-stories, a form I loathe, by the way." We didn't all want to know what she liked to read, or thought was worthy. But some of us knew something Patchett didn't. The conference organizer Karen Stolz had published a successful novel in stories, The World of Pies.

So maybe — since Stout's novel in stories won the Pulitzer, like fiction of Phillip Roth and Michael Chabon — Patchett might want to revisit her judgment about the worth of novels in stories. She could reconsider while she's dusting off the section of her bookcase that's still waiting for a Pulitzer prize. Bel Canto is based on the Lima Crisis news event, but Olive Kitteridge doesn't need that kind of based-on-a-true-story leg up. It's Elizabeth Stout's world of coastal Maine residents. Booklist said in a starred review

But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this “novel in stories.” Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope.

Never let it matter that anyone, no matter how awarded their career might be, reviles your writing style. You can find single-star reviews for Bel Canto on Amazon, after all. Be your own judge and let yourself — not just your writing or publishing — be the beauty in the world.

Google gets all the books to search?

Over at the Boing Boing blog, the writers complain about the new online book search rights that Google just won in a class action suit settlement. It's a little tricky to parse out what this means, but it looks like if you have a book in print now, or ever did, Google can include its contents in a search result. This sentence kind of sums it up: "Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results."

Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

We all love Google, don't we? From the "search the Web by speaking" iPhone application to the wonderful shopping vistas, Google runs the online universe. But if I had a book out, and I wasn't one of the select 8,000 Authors Guild members, I'd be scrambling now to find out if my book's online rights were still mine to control. As the article says, challenging this settlement in court is going to be costly.

Not something to worry yourself about if you're still doing the writing and editing. This doesn't affect the practice of your writing art. It might reduce your ability to earn a living off a book, though. That thunder you hear in the air is the sound of Google's scanners warming up, ready to hoover up the pages of your book for a free search result on the Internet. Yeah, Amazon is big. But Google is bigger, smarter and hungrier.

Time changes stories

There may be times when stepping back for awhile from a story or novel can provide a deeper understanding of what is vital to the tale. Up on the Web site for the literary journal Glimmer Train, the writer Erica Johnson Debeljak talks about writing her memoir twice, 10 years apart, first as journalism and much later as a novelization.

An honest writer of either fiction or nonfiction has to admit that the treatment of characters and situations — what is left in and what is left out — ultimately serves the meaning of the work, and that meaning can change over time. In other words, there is content (lived experience, impressions, imagination) and there is form (genre, story shape, the flow of words and sentences on the page), and the process of a writer funneling content into form will virtually always produce a different product depending on perspective and what meaning is being pushed to the fore at any given time.

She goes on to say this isn't a viewpoint that non-fiction writers will embrace easily. But she "made changes in chronology and cold hard facts" while creating the memoir Forbidden Bread, the second life of her story.

More than a few writers in our workshops have worked on fiction based in life experience, or even a novelized memoir. Letting time elapse between drafts might help you if you're working on such a story.

Celebrate our finalist!

Lisa Carroll-Lee, who's been in one of my writing groups for more than two years, has landed another short story as a Finalist in the Austin Chronicle 2009 Short Story Contest. The Chronicle has a really lean word limit, but Lisa has made it to the Top 10 with her story, Monsters of Nature.

We saw Monsters in October at our manuscript group meeting and gave her our responses to her flight of fancy about furry children. Congratulations to Lisa, and best of luck in the finalists' round. As they say at Oscar time, it's an honor just to be nominated.

Lisa has made the the contest's finalist cut before. The Chronicle will publish the top three of this year's 2,500-word gems on Feb. 13.