GENREALITY

Social Media Networking has taken all the fun out of my Internet social life.

I have been on the Internet since I had to dial up with my telephone. My BFF “from college?” Actually met her on a writing bulletin board. I told people we went to school together because before Internet dating became mainstream, it was mind boggling that I’d go visit someone I’d only interacted with at 56 Kbit/s (Look it up, kids.)

Especially because I lived in rural Texas, I relied on the Internet to connect with like minded people. This is not to say people don’t read in rural Texas, or even that they don’t read Science Fiction in rural Texas, but just… Well, the entire population of Refugio County could fit into Cowboys Stadium ten times.

What I’m saying is, I was social on the Internet LONG before Facebook or Twitter. Even before MySpace. (I also rode a dinosaur to school.)

Along comes Social Media Networking. Now there are classes and workshops on using the internet for networking, when really what we mean is publicity. How it’s not enough to have a website. Or even a blog. Now you need a platform, and Facebook and Twitter, and you need to provide Meaningful Content on a Regular Basis and Ohmygodthepressure!

I can’t just tell you that tonight I celebrated with a vanilla latte because I made it through one whole day without having to clean up dog pee from my floor. (I didn’t think anything could be harder to house train than a Papillon until I got a Pomeranian.) Now I have to be Entertaining! Informative! Profound!

Talk about performance anxiety.

Twitter is easier, because it’s a smaller investment. At 140 characters, I angst less over whether my readers will consider my love of caramel frappuchinos a waste of pixels. But a whole blog on my frustration with the running toilet right next to my office? (No, really. I’ve changed the flapper like five times.) It just doesn’t seem worth the click through on Google Reader.  (Um, it is, I promise. I’m hysterically funny when it comes to ranting about my plumbing. Uh, wait. That didn’t come out right… Oh heck. You see why blogging is so stressful for me?)

Here’s my point (because I have to have one, according to the class I took): The Internet allows unprecedented interaction between authors and readers. I want to give my readers glimpses into my life. I want to share information with them. And yes, I really really want to stay in their minds between books. But to keep them coming back, I can’t just be a platform. I have to be the person behind the book.

This is particularly important when your audience is teens.  A survey conducted recently said that marketing through Facebook not very effective on teens. They don’t like being marketed to. However, if your content makes the connection–for instance, a funny or cool viral video, or a blog where they feel like they’re getting insight into the author’s world–then when it comes to buying whatever it is (like, say, your book) they’ll remember your name.

No pressure or anything.

That’s all too much for me. I’ve decided to quit Social Media Networking. Instead I’m just going to go back to blogging and tweeting with my friends, colleagues, and most of all, readers. I think I’ll blog about movies and books and MY books and writing and my dogs and coffee and my diet and how I hate to go to the gym but I have to because I love cheesecake. I might also mention Russell Crowe occasionally.

And mixed in with that, I’ll tell folks about whatever book I’ve got in the works. So that when they go to the bookstore, they remember my name.

In honor of my new resolution, here’s a picture of my dogs:

P.S. If you want to see more of them, you can read my blog or follow me on Twitter @rclementmoore. (But don’t bother to friend me on Facebook, because I’m not doing Social Media Networking anymore.)

P.P.S. In case you couldn’t tell, this post was sort of ironic. Except for the part where we authors shouldn’t get so worked up about Social Media Networking that we forget to be a person–a nice, or at least polite person, if you can manage it–and not merely a Tweeting machine.

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I want to begin with a disclaimer. This is a blog about breaking rules – sometimes. But you can only break those rules if you know what they are. Please do not take what I’m about to say as something you should “always” do. Use only when necessary.

I’ve been judging a great many contests lately. Most of these are for new writers and the No. 1, problem I see is their stories are full of telling instead of showing. That and they almost always load up those first chapters with backstory they don’t need. But backstory is a topic for another day.

As you know, it is always better to show, rather than tell a story. Showing gives the author an opportunity to bring the reader in by showing the characters in action. Henry James called this dramatizing. According to Wikipedia Janet Evanovich says, “It is the difference between actors acting out an event and the lone playwright standing on a bare stage recounting the event to the audience.”

All of this is true. It’s difficult to engage the reader and get them invested in your characters if you don’t show the action. We need to feel like we are there and showing us through the actions and dialogue is the way to do it.

BUT there are times when telling is necessary. If you always “Show” your story, first you will have a tremendously long book. Second you’re going to have a lot of problems with pacing. When you show a story, it takes many more words to do so. When you do that all the time, it can bog down the prose and create a snail’s pace.

How many times have you read a book and thought, “Just get on with it.” You know those pages you skip and skip to get to the heart of what the author is trying to say? That’s where a little telling would come in handy.

In that same Wikipedia article it has a quote from James Scott Bell that says a writer “tells” as a shortcut in order to get to the meaty part of the scene. “Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid,” says Bell. “If you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won’t, and your readers will get exhausted.”

If you’re writing literary fiction, show all you want. But if you want to be successful with commercial fiction you need to find the right balance of showing and telling. People tell me all the time my books are fast reads. I honestly do more telling than I should, but I like books that have a fast pace. I’m also not a big fan of using a great deal of description, which is required with showing.

The thing to watch out for when you use  “telling” is that you don’t end up with: and then this happened, and then that happened and then…

As Bell says, you want those big dramatic scenes to mean something and that can’t happen if you are telling the reader about the event, rather than showing.

My point, and I really do have one, is that you have to find out what works best for the book/scene you are writing. I’m working on a scene where a character has to travel from one place to another. The journey isn’t what is important, it’s the confrontation when she gets there. If I show that journey, it’s going to take forever to get to the heart of the scene. We need to know that she’s gone from point A to point B, and that’s she’s nervous, but I can tell the point A to point B part, and show just a bit that she’s nervous. Then Pow! I hit you with the confrontation.

I’ve seen some really talented writers use too much showing, which bogged down their books to the point where I wanted to throw it across the room. I can be on page 75 and still not know what the hell kind of story I’m reading. It’s frustrating. But as I said before, I prefer books with a good, brisk pace.

I remember years ago I was in a class at a conference where an author was teaching the difference between showing and telling. He read one scene where he used “telling” and then he read it again where he used “showing.” He insisted the second one was better, but it wasn’t. It was a transition from one scene to the next, and it didn’t need all the showing.

I only want new writers to know, that yes, showing is important. But it isn’t always the best way to write a story. There are times when a little telling comes in handy.

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Many people are expressing dismay at the rapidly changing landscape of publishing.  As writers, we just want to write.

My first book came out in 1991 in hardcover.  I was clueless.  Most writers were and still are.  I’m not even sure there was an internet then.  Joking.  There was, but not like today, and I didn’t get on it until around 1997 or so.  No social media.  There were writers conferences.  If you knew there were writers conferences, which I didn’t.  I did my first conference in 1995 and only found out about it because I was in grad school and someone I knew in the English department knew I had been published and suggested I might present.

I had naïve thoughts my book would immediately make the bestseller list and I’d be famous.  Wrong.  If I’d have known, simply the print run number would had told me there was no way I could make any bestseller list.

For several years I thought I was making royalty off cover price, only to find out it was off what the publisher received which was 50% of cover price.  I also didn’t know royalty should be off cover price, but with this publisher my agent had settled for the other without telling me the difference.

My title was Eyes of the Hammer.  Incredibly dumb.  Meant nothing.  My agent and editor didn’t say a word about it.

I didn’t do a single book-signing.  Since the publisher wasn’t sending me on book tour, why should I do one myself?  Plus, I didn’t want to do booksignings.  I didn’t want to talk to people.

The print run was 10,000 copies hardcover.  Which, actually, was pretty decent.  I had no idea if it was good or bad.  It sold around 7,500.  Which is very good sell-through.  But the publisher switched distributors and I went to the bottom of their list for the sales force.  Over the course of six books I died the slow, agonizing death most mid-list authors do.

Except, of course, I was always a manuscript and a publisher ahead.  That was one thing I did do right.  (Because of all this I eventually wrote Warrior Writer, to educate writers how to be successful authors, along with many other reasons).

My point?  In the good old days, promotion and marketing was as important as they are now.  In fact, I submit, things are better today, because you actually can promote and market as an author much more easily than back than.  You have social media now, which we didn’t have then.

Once I woke up and realized my publishers were doing no promoting or marketing, but were just distributors, I tried just about everything.  Direct mailings, media, articles, contacting every independent bookstore in the country, driving 40,000 miles a year to do booksignings, doing conferences, teaching, etc. etc.  Did any of it work?  No idea.  I’m still making a living writing.

Does social media work?  We’ve switched web site providers over the past few days and updated the site.  Because of that, I couldn’t tweet about our books because the URLs for the pages were changing.  Our Kindle sales dropped 50% during those few days.  Consistently for 3 straight days.  I’m back to tweeting those key hashtags (#Lost, #SDCC for San Diego Comic Con, and other TV shows.)  I anticipate our sales will get back up to where they were.  Our new book, We Are Not Alone: The Writers’ Guide to Social Media is a good resource to learn content and procedure and an example of how publishing is changing.  It would have taken a traditional publisher a year to produce the book.  We did it in two weeks after delivery.

I saw authors 20 years ago who felt all they had to do was write.  While a few of them might have broken out and become huge successes, there are none I met.  Every single author I met in my first 10 years as an author who

a)    Thought they had it made because they were published.

b)   Didn’t think they had to promote.

Is now not published.

eBooks, Social Media, etc. has not changed being an author other than to actually make it easier in some ways, which means it’s still incredibly difficult.

Way back in the days of Faulkner, Hemmingway, the Algonquin Round Table, etc. it was just as hard, but different.  Then you had to schmooze, make contacts, get known.  Gee.  It’s kind of the same now too.

In all these eras you still needed a good book at the base of it all, but on top, all that has changed is the medium.  It’s still an integral part of an author’s job to promote and market.

There were no good old days for authors.  There’s just now.

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*sorry I’m late…I made the mistake of trying to upload over 400 photos to my online backup server last night, at once, and while it worked, it pretty much froze my internet for anything else, so at 330 AM I decided I’d post this when I woke up and went to bed*

What I learned on retreat…or should I say in retreat?

A few weeks ago I posted about going on a roadtrip/writing retreat with a buddy. It was something I’d been looking forward too for a long while. You see, my plan was to spend June and July focussing on other aspects of my life so that in August I’d be ready to re-focus on writing with much intensity. (I’ve come to accept that unless I’m intense/passionate about something, there is really no point in me even attempting to do it. ) As with most things in life, plans go awry.

June and July were full of stress and drama for me. So much so that I realized that if I was going to get serious about my writing again, I needed to leave the night job. Most people have Day Jobs, but mine is a night job for 2 reasons.
1) I work nights at it, not days. (Waitress/bartender)

2) Writing is my day job.

Yes, I claim writing as my day job even though I haven’t been doing a whole hell of a lot of it lately. See Carrie post yesterday about Time management to get an idea of what I might’ve been doing.

As you know, there is more to being a writer than the actual writing, so I’ve been keeping busy with plenty of things. Writing a bit here and there, promotions, planning, and researching for new projects. PLus, I’ve been trying to organize some of my previously published stuff to make available electronically. I mean, if it’s just sitting on my computer, why not give it a try and see what happens, right?

So, the plan was to get that stuff done, and focus on some other things in June and July, then in AUgust, starting with the retreat, I could work on my new project. Well, the night job sort of ended up taking over my life for the summer, and I spent the first five days of the roadtrip/retreat simply decompressing because I had to work 13 of the 14 days before we left. The first days of our trip were on the road and even though Delilah maintained a three page a day quota, I simply drove, listened to music and thought about writing. (Okay, and spent time talking visiting family and shopping on Granville Island in Vancouver). Once we got hunkered down at the lake to write, I still couldn’t make myself do it. I walked the lake and played with my camera and thought about writing some more. By the time I finally got into work mode at the lake, it was time to leave, so I didn’t get much actual work done.
One of the things that relaxed me the most was that I’d given notice at the night job. It’s time to make writing the #2 priority in my life (#1 being my health).

So, I’m happy because I have one week left on the night job, then I’ll be able to focus more on writing! YAY!

So, lessons learned, again. Just because you’re not at work, doesn’t mean your not working. You need to be sure you’re taking a day off from all work every now and then, or your passion for, well, everything, will dry up fast. And the passion must be maintained. I say this because what Carrie said yesterday about being productive when she was still working was also true of me-before I quit to write full time. When I first started out, and I was driven to succeed I worked fulltime, and wrote every spare moment. Then I quit work to write full-time, and my writing productivity slowed so I could concentrate not on writing, but on career. One of the reasons I went back to the night job was because I thought it would help me find that passion to be super productive again. It didn’t. The only place to find that passion is deep within, and if you lose it, then nothing will get it back but time spent refilling the well. At least that’s true for me.

So, my promise to myself after being on retreat…I will never let my well get so dried up again. I will remember that in order to be productive and passionate. I must relax and take time off and away from the computer on a regular basis, to maintain my passion and drive.

One thing I know I’ll be using to refill my creative well from now on is more photography. In the comments tell me what you do to refill the well and be entered to win a $15 Amazon gift certificate. I’ll post the winner of the draw next week.

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I have less than a week to do everything I need to do before the next trip.  The list is smaller than it was when I started three weeks ago, at least.  It still feels like I’m not getting anything done.

Part of this is the curse of multitasking.  At one point last week I had three story files open, a file of blog posts, two different e-mail accounts, various online discussions I was following, and my phone on my desk, which I’d been using for various housekeeping/administrative calls.  I wasn’t doing everything at once, but I’d do a little piece of each — a phone call, a blog post, check e-mail, work on a story, another phone call when I got stuck, etc.  Everything gets done, eventually.  But it sure feels haphazard.

I know, I know.  I ought to finish one thing before moving on to the next.  But you know what ends up happening when I try that?  When there’s a thing I need to do that I don’t want to?  I play solitaire for two hours.  This is not a good use of time.  Instead, I tell myself:  answer five e-mails, then work on the story.  Or, if I’m stuck on the story, I have permission to go do something else on the list because at least I’m getting something done.  Baby steps, Grasshopper.

I’m one of those writers who discovered that I don’t produce much more now that I’m writing full time than I did when I had a job.  When I had a day job, I was much more careful with my time.  I really wrote for that hour or so between work and dinner because that was all I had.  I’m still writing about the same amount, but spread out over the whole day now.  And I’m pretty sure I didn’t have nearly as much writing-related administrative crap (e-mails, blogs, interviews, travel, contracts, post office runs, etc.) to do when I still had a job (I only started blogging after I quit the job, for example).

But you know what?  I’m a whole lot less stressed about it all than I was when I had a day job.  I really do have the whole day to get things done instead of just a couple of hours, and that’s nice.

Something I started doing off and on last spring:  if I’m feeling useless at the end of the day, I make a list of everything I did.  Everything.  This includes laundry, filling the dishwasher, taking the dog for a long walk, answering e-mails, writing 800 words, updating the website, making trip reservations.  Usually, the list is anywhere from 5 to 12 items long.  Which means I’m getting a lot done, I just don’t often feel like I am.

So, lesson learned:  Spend a bit of time contemplating how much I’ve actually done, rather than focusing on the list of things I still have to do.  I may not feel very efficient about it, but the stuff is getting done.

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