Lars Eighner's Lavender Green

1. Essentials

Written in Stone

These are the sayings of the craft, most of which are ancient, by which I mean they are older than I am, but a few are my own invention. Yes, the ones that are my invention are just my opinions. And the ones that are maxims of the craft are just the distilled opinions of those who came before me.

You are not a genius.

You have something to learn. Everything is not just wonderful and ready for publication as soon as you scribble it down or click it out with a keyboard.

If you are a genius I have nothing to teach you. You are wasting your time here. You should leave right away. Best of luck to you.

What are you still here?

Okay, then, you are not a genius.

Those who hope to write for publication on any subject must begin with an ability to write a reasonably good sentence. This ability ought to have been acquired in high school grammar courses, and anyone who can write a coherent business letter or a book report has it. Unfortunately, many beginners believe that simple literacy is enough, and having made good grades in English courses, they think they have all the writing skills necessary to produce a best-selling novel.

Writing for publication, however, requires more highly developed and specialized writing skills. For people who are not geniuses those are skills that require effort and practice to acquire. Bridging the gap between mere literacy and the ability to write for publication is the subject of this book.

Write What You Know

Sharpening the Tools of Expression Sharpens the Tools of Perception

How is that for an inscrutable koan?

First I must admit, writing is not the only way. Anyone who has had a biology or botany course may have been asked to sketch something. Sometime that sketching is reproducing illustrations in in textbooks; sometimes the sketching is of actual specimens, perhaps as seen through a microscope. The object of these exercises is not to humiliate those who are completely devoid of artistic talents (although that effect is often achieved). The reason for the exercise is that people hardly ever really see a thing until they attempt to express what they see. Most of the game in representational art is really seeing the object that is used as a model. (Sadly, the rest of the game depends on having enough coordination to get the pencil or brush to reproduce what has really been seen.)

For much the same reason, many curves are sketched in analytic geometry, calculus, or economics class although the equations are just the same whether the functions are sketched or not. In truth, no one has ever seen any such functions. No pencil point is sharp enough, no plotter program is fine enough to render the ideal of a mathematical function with complete accuracy. But to produce even the crudest sketch the student must learn where the function has its maxiums and minimums, where the curve is concave and where it is convex, and where the function intersects the axes or other functions. In order to attempt a sketch of the function, one must understand the function, and the sketch -- which is doomed to imperfection -- is not the point. The understanding is the point.

My high-school physics instructor Mr. Brad Gentry (aka Banlon Brad) often repeated: "Great big diagrams get big grades." He did not do that for the sake of art. Bigger diagrams have sufficent space to represent the pertinent aspects of a problem legibly. In simple mechanics (and it is a good thing Mr. Gentry never attempted to teach me anything beyound simple mechanics and a little optics) if vectors on a diagram are drawn to the same scale, the problem can be solved to slide-rule accuracy by simple measurement. (A slide rule is an ancient analog computer.)

Sketching is better for some things, music is better for others, and yet other things are best expressed in writing. Once more past my koan: Sharpening the tools of expression sharpens the tools of perception.

A person who does not try to express what he sees or what he feels goes through life in a twilight coma, only vaguely aware of the world around.

Now let me suppose for a moment that a person has never done any carpentry work and has hardly held a hammer in his life and he has been asked to go watch men building a house and to write something about it.

He goes to the site and watches the workers. He sees them get one piece of wood and another piece of wood and stick the two together with a nail. He sees very many similar operations involving sticking pieces of wood together with nails and often sticking a piece of wood to a larger assemblage of pieces of wood. He does not know what he is seeing.

He might write something like "I saw guys nailing pieces of wood together." He should not be satisfied with this, and he should suspect his editor will not be satisfied either. So he asks one of the guys what he is doing, and the guy says: "I am nailing this stud to this top plate." Now the reporter can write: "I saw a guy nail a stud to a top plate." This is better.

He could have open a thesaurus and found the various names that are sometime applied to 2x4s and seasoned his report them, and readers who knew no more than he did would be none the wiser. But spicing up work with special terms and the importance of using special terms correctly is not my point here.

What is more important in the long run is what the writer -- the person -- perceives. He no longer sees a guy nailing two pieces of wood together. He sees a guy nailing a stud to a top plate. Now probably the stud and the top plate are just 2x4s, pretty much identical until the guy makes one of them a stud and the other a top plate. By the time the writer learns what a stud, a top plate, a header, a cripple stud, a joist, a fascia board, etc. are, he has not merely learned a bunch of fancy names for 2x4s, even though all of these things are 2x4s (or 2x6s), he has learned something about framing, and more to the point, he has learned to see what he looking at when he looks at house framing.

And pretty much the same thing applies to feelings, beliefs, personal relationships, theories, experiments, and everything else. Sharpening the tools of expression, sharpens the tools of perception.

You are a zombie if you are not expressing yourself, and you are a numbnuts if you are not trying to learn to express yourself more precisely. My way is writing, and that might not be your way. Your way might be drawing or music or sculpture, knitting, or baking biscuits ( scones). But there is a lot of crossover and the more you advance in your way, the better you are likely to become at appreciating or even doing the other ways. Get help expressing yourself from English class or this book or a different kind of art altogether, but if you do not get help expressing yourself from any of those places, get help somewhere.

The more you express things more precisely, the more precisely you will perceive those things. The cycle of expression and perception is one that only ends when you do.

Know Your Market

Learn the Rules, Then Learn to Break the Rules

This maxim applies on several levels, but here it is most often applied to issues of the author's style. It expresses a strategy for learning style which is: first learn to write clear, concise, vigorous, transparent English, and then learn to deviate from that deliberately to achieve various effects. Now, the truth is, this is not the only way. If you write reasonably well to begin with, you can probably clean up your writing somewhat and produce acceptable work if you stick to first person stories that are all about you or people very like you who are surrounded by people who are very like the people who surround you. That may suit you. It may, however, be limiting in the long run, and too often writers who want to proceed in this way underestimate the cleaning up their native style requires.

The maxim also applies to rule of grammar and usage. English is littered with grammar and usage controversies. Many rules that have been taught to educated readers are simply wrong and have always been wrong. In other cases, the language has changed, and fine points that were once the mark of careful writing now have an antique feel. Some usage advice and grammar rules are prefectly accurate, but hardly any are applicable in all situations. All of the rules and fine points are worth learning, even the ones that are silly or are only useful if you are invited to Windsor Castle. Second only in importance to knowing the rules, is knowing when not to apply them. That is a very different thing from failing to apply the rules through ignorance or carelessness. Most of the time no one will be offended if you follow all the rules, even the ones that are silly and groundless. We know for example that the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition is voodoo. If you do not end any sentences with prepositions, hardly anyone will notice. But if you do, the voodoo priests will have a hissy fit. So most of the time it is good to appease the voodoo priests. Occasionally, however, a sentence crops up that would have to be tortured into something unnatural to avoid its ending in a preposition. Beginners often reach the conclusion that a rule has to be broken prematurely and fail to consider recasting a sentence, but there are times that the voodoo priests will just have to lump it.

Likewise, story lines have structure, and the elements of that structure can be expressed in some rules or guidelines which are very helpful in constructing a story line and in judging, afterwards, whether a story has been created. Most writers create, usually sometime in adolescence, at least one, and sometimes many, many amorphous blobs of words on paper which they call poems or stories. This may be great therapy or something, but it isn't literature. To answer Green Day's question: No, I don't have the time to listen to you whine. Story line is not always so elaborate as the plot of a whodunit. Sometimes, "development" might be a better word. In anecdotes and haiku it is the scheme of setup and punchlike. It is having a beginning, middle, and end. That underlying structure, whatever it is according to the form you are working in, just has to be there if the work is going to be readable by anyone other than a mother and lovers. We all see sitcoms or read mystery stories that are composed of interchangeable story parts, and every once in a while someone declares he has done the research and there are only some relatively small number of plots. These things can happen because some authors and screenwriters have learned that there must be a story line, but having learned that, they have failed to take the next step, which is to break out of the story line.

The process is in two parts, and the first part is: Learn the rules. Beginners often complain, in the face of all the rules to learn, that this or that work of undisputed great literature does not follow the rules. And they are right. But much work that is plain uncolored good English with ordinary, uninspired story lines gets published or produced and writers get paid for that work. What is more, people are often entertained, if not entirely enlightened by such work. I would be remiss if I did not advise you: learn the rules first.

Show Us, Don't Tell Us

Dos

Do learn to type.

If you are still hunting and pecking around a keyboard, time spent learning to type will repay you well. You do not need great speed: sixty words per minute should be adequate, and once you have learned the basics of touch typing, speed will be gained through practice, which you should get by writing. Even thought speech recognition software will, before long, be good enough to be standard on off-the-self computers, keyboard skills will remain necessary for revisions for a long time to come. Most systems can now be configured to use any keyboard you might care to learn, QWERTY is still the standard in the English-speaking world and it all-but-certain to remain either the default or an easily accessible option.

Do run your spelling checker and maybe your grammar checker, if you have one

Spelling checkers and grammar (or usage) checkers have limitations. Those limitations are seriously aggravated when the software is not properly configured and operated.

Spelling checkers are now sufficiently common that people who have written on anything better than a manual typewriter have probably encountered one. The principal problem with spelling checkers is that they will pass words that are correctly spelt even when the word is wrong or the form of the word is wrong. Advanced spelling checkers may guess the right spelling so often that they may put the user to sleep as he selects the first-offered correction time and again. Sometimes the first correction will not be right. In many cases, the original word will be correct. This may occur because it is an usual word or an unusual form of a word. It may also happen with names and words which are peculiar to the work. Even a moderately good spell may have more hits of this kind than hits on true errors, and verifying that they are correct may be as mesmerizing as choosing the first-offered correction. Adding words to the user's dictionary will help reduce false hits. Since the spelling checker becomes blind to words in the user's dictionary, it may be advisable to review the user's dictionary occasionally or to use a different user's dictionary for each work or kind of work.

Grammar (or usage) checkers have a bad reputation. Some usage checkers are very simpleminded and simply check for certain words or phrases. The sequences may be words or phrases that are commonly confused or that are always considered wrong by whoever wrote the usage file. More sophisticated grammar checkers have, besides list of words and phrases to look out for, parsing engines which can -- up to a point -- check things such as subject and predicate agreement and pronoun case. The defaults for grammar and usage checkers are almost certainly wrong for fiction writing. If the user cannot learn to configure the grammar checker or to edit the usage file, he probably his better off not using this kind of software at all.

Grammar checkers cannot produce grammatical English from ungrammatical English. Parsing engines and the artificial intelligence that would feed them just are not good enough. They are checkers, not English-producing machines. As with spelling checkers, grammar checkers often give the wrong advice or mark as errors things which are correct. The user must know grammar better than the checker, or running the checker can easily do more harm than good. Grammar checkers can catch many careless errors, and when they are properly configured for the kind of writing giving them, they are not too tedious.

Putting a piece of writing through a spelling check and a grammar checker is not a revision.

Don'ts

Don't worry about copyright.

You do not need to worry about copyright. Do not put copyright notices on material you submit in the ordinary manner to established magazines and book publishers, and do not even ask about copyright registration. I do not know why beginners believe piracy is a big problem. But they do believe it. In fact, piracy -- from manuscripts -- is extremely rare.

The mundane facts of copyright are explained later. Do not worry about theft until you are producing material worth stealing. Meanwhile, if you have the opportunity to question a writer in a seminar or elsewhere, do not waste the opportunity by asking about copyright. Copyright cannot protect you from yourself. If you post your work to web sites or news groups you can destroy the value of the work, if it has any, while your copyright remains intact.

Don't steal.

I mean more by this than simply do not plagiarize and do not infringe copyrights. I would hope that would go without saying.

I mean leave other people's characters, universes, songs, lyrics, sitcoms, personalities, literary styles, and biographies strictly alone. My object in giving you this advice is not so much to protect the other people and their work as to discouraging you from wasting your time.

I see this often in beginners' manuscripts: someone loves science fiction so he writes a Star Trek or a Star Wars story. He wishes Jerry Orbach were still alive and acting (who doesn't?) so he writes a Law & Order novel. He wishes to establish a mood, so he borrows lyrics or perhaps just the title of a popular song. He admires a writer's distinctive style, so he immitates it in as much detail as he can. His life consists of video games, so he writes a Final Fantasy novel repleat with chocobas and moogles.

Not only is this cheap, but also it is very limiting. While some owners of proprietary universes tolerate fan fiction, or in some cases encourage it, work on such a project will always depend up the sufferance of the owner of the franchise. Even if such a work is not nipped in the bud by the franchise owners, its fans, if it attracts any, will be fans of the franchise, the writer will not have the right to issue sequels at will, and writer will not be permitted to make any major changes in the universe. The writer will not have exercised his imagination sufficiently to develop the skills to creat a universe of his own. Don't waste your time laboring in someone else's vineyards.

Fans try to write fan fiction, well, because they are fans. A similar motivation seems to motivate people who write in an immitative style. If they choose to immitate a clear, concise, transparent style, no one is the wiser. Unfortunately those who are most entralled by an author's style, to the point of wanting to immitate it, generally pick an author with a very distinctive style.

Do not pay an agent or book doctor, and do not pay to be published.

Some people covet the title of author for themselves. Wherever human beings have strong desires, other human beings will discover the means to profit from those desires. There is much more on the subjects of agents, book doctors, and vanity presses, both in this chapter and elsewhere in this online edition, but my point here is: do not open your wallet.

The number and variety of scams designed to part wannabee writers from their money is astonishing. Although I explain what is wrong with several of better-known the scams, someone is very likely to invent a new one. Many literary scams not only fail to deliver anything of value for the money, but also do harm to a writer's career.

What You Need

You will need some books.

As will become clear, you need a good, current, college-sized, American dictionary -- no matter how well you spell and no matter how much confidence you have in your electronic spelling checker. The name Webster's alone is now a generic name used freely by publishers of dictionaries both good and bad. Some authoritative dictionaries do not use the name Webster's, and many dictionaries that bear the name Webster's are not reliable. A number of dictionaries are now available online or can be obtained on CD (some print dictionaries come with CDs, but whether you can get them to work with your operating system is a crap shoot). Most people can look up words in a print dictionary faster than they can look them up online or load a CD. What is more, you can make marginal notes in a print dictionary.

Several dictionaries are authoritative. If you have a current edition of an authoritative dictionary, use it. If you are starting from scratch or if your dictionary is ten years out of date, you cannot go wrong with the current Merriam-Webster Collegiate, which contains as many entries from gay patois and erotic language as any general dictionary.

An unabridged dictionary is unnecessary. Unabridged dictionaries, besides being unwieldy, are not revised often enough to be useful for ordinary composition. If you own one, use it to resolve points not resolved by your college-sized dictionary. For consistency's sake, your college-sized dictionary and your unabridged dictionary should be issues of the same company. Consult first the current college-sized diction and prefer its usage.

Notice that Merriam-Webster dictionaries are organized on historic principles. That mean the first definition is the one most likely to be obsolete. Other dictionaries may put the most common senses first. Investigate the front matter of your dictionary to be sure you understand what the entries are trying to tell you.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is available in a tiny-type, so-called compact edition and on CD. It is the historic record of English. People who love words can derive many hours of pleasure from the OED, but it is worthless as a daily tool in modern composition. Anyone who loves words would love to have this book in any form, but unless you are writing historical fiction, you are kidding yourself to think you need it for work.

Stunk and White's Elements of Style is an inexpensive paperback. It is the crowning jewel of the English language, a mentor and an exemplar, and a fountain head of wisdom and beauty. Get a copy and study. After you have read it through several times, retire it to the throne room where it can be reviewed in odd moments. Strunk's original is now in the public domain and it available on the web. As White has pointed out, however, Strunk has strong opinions and expresses them strongly. You will not go wrong if you write exactly as Strunk advises, but it is a mistake to think Strunk has the only possible right answer at every point. Competent authorities differ with good reason on some points.

A thesaurus is helpful if the tip-of-the-tongue sensation of knowing a word without being able to evoke it occurs frequently. That sensation is the proper reason to consult a thesaurus. Word-shopping to gussy up your prose with words you do not command would be unwise. The better way of enriching your vocabulary, if you need to do so, is to search out new words in their natural habitat, which is fine literature. Online resources, including search engines, are likely to be useful for that tip-of-the-tongue situation. Once you have the word, from a print thesaurus or a search engine, it would be wise to look it up in your dictionary.

The Chicago Manual of Style (not to be confused with A Manual for Writers, which is about academic papers) is an expensive book that contains many details not pertinent to fiction. For an understanding of issues of editorial style and the publication process the latest edition is not necessary. If money is an issue, borrow this book from a library or obtain a previous edition secondhand.

The various fields of academic writing have various style guides. Scholarly journals may or may not adhere to the general standard for their subject. Guidelines for theses and dissertations are often detailed and extensive. You must obtain the particular style guides and guidelines for academic submissions, if you do that kind of work.

The Writer's Handbook is inspirational: short on matters of style, strong on techniques of fiction, worthless as a market guide. One edition will do for a whole career. If you have one, read it when you are feeling stuck or hopeless. The Writer is a related magazine. The few issues I examined years ago caused me to wonder whether The Writer knew the gay market existed or would care to know. The general market listings include many first-rate magazines, but not so many that seem promising to beginning writers whatever their subject or genre.

Many publications avoid listings in market books and the listings for those that are listed are often misleading in The Writer's Market (although owing to the way it is compiled, its editors probably are not to blame). Writer's Digest is the related magazine. Some editors, especially of small and special-interest magazines, would just as soon not be listed in Writer's Market or Writer's Digest. When Writer's Digest mentions a magazine, that magazine is flooded with submissions from the large part of Writer's Digest's vast readership that has yet to learn what "Know your market!" means. Unless your byline is recognized by the editors of the publication, your fine story will wait a long time in the slush pile with stories that are entirely inappropriate for the magazine. No doubt the same thing happens to every magazine mentioned in Writer's Digest, but the logjam effect is especially pronounced at periodicals with small staffs, which includes some magazines you may not think of as small.

Editors of special-interest magazines are especially open to submissions from new contributors, but they are likely to suppose -- and rightly I think -- that new writers likely to come up with an appropriate submission will already be reading the magazine, and can find editorial information in the masthead, while established professionals who think of sending something to them will know how to find the right place to send their submissions without the guideposts of listings in Writer's Digest or Writer's Market. Nonetheless, Writer's Digest is full of good advice for beginning writers. Anyone beginning a writing career might benefit by subscribing for a year or two.

But Writer's Digest, or anyone else, has only so much to say to raw recruits. Writer's Digest's advice is repeated, year after year, with only slight variations. Some beginners do benefit from much repetition of good advice, and Writer's Digest repeats good advice often. Until you can put magazines containing your stories or your book on your coffee table, you can put Writer's Digest there so that callers will know you are a writer. Beware, however, of ads in Writer's Digest that suggest money can buy a shortcut to publishing success.

Some professional writers use The Literary Marketplace and subscribe to Publisher's Weekly, both of which are expensive and unavailable in general-interest bookstores.

Market information, however, dates too quickly to be accurate in any book (and for that reason no market list is included here). As will be made clear in the chapter on marketing, the theory of marketing according to someone else's published list is wrong. Consult market books at the library to be sure you have not overlooked something, but market according to your own list.

Many publications now have editorial guidelines online or state on their web sites where to send your request for guidelines, either by mail or email. Look at as many guidelines as you can (seach on 'writers guidelines', 'editorial guidelines', 'authors guidelines' -- do not worry about whether the terms should have apostrophes or if so where the apostrophes should go; search engines will crunch the same). Look at guidelines even from publications you will never write for. Your object is to understand what guidelines look like and how they vary from publication to publication. Be sure you are looking at guidelines for the print publication and not for the web site about the print publication. Look for signs of life on the web site.

No market listing is as telling as the recent issues of the magazine. While it is possible to get guidelines for many mass-market publications in a market book or directly from the magazine by mail or from the web, guidelines may be dated, even when you get them directly from the publication. Editors descriptions of what they want, as you interpret the guidelines, may not be entirely accurate in describing what they actually buy. You simply have to examine recent issues of periodicals you hope to write for. Read as many books of your subject is as you can. The kind and number of reference works a writer needs depend upon her subject. Many economies are possible. Last year's almanac will serve a fiction writer as well as the current edition. An old stack of National Geographics may still contain some maps that will be superior to the maps in a very expensive atlas, and the stories may suggest locales, both nearby and exotic, both recent and ancient. Part of the game in textbook publishing is issuing new editions that entail only trivial changes but that students must buy; the old editions can be had for a dime on the dollar.

Many kinds of research, especially at a level sufficient to underlie a work of fiction, can now be done on the web. But not everything on the web is true and not everything has got on the web. Moreover, many searches now return numerous worthless hits from commercial sites. Sometimes adroit use of a search engine's advanced features will separate some of the wheat from the chaff. But some searches simply cannot succeed. For example, if for some reason you needed to know the history of the shopping cart or who manufactures shopping carts, where stores buy shopping carts, or how they are recycled, you are entirely out of luck. Almost every commercial site on the web has software called a "shopping cart." So you will get millions of hits, and it's the needle-haystack thing. (You have to search on "grocery cart" or "rolling cart" to have any hope of getting the information you want. Ask.com will make these suggestions to begin with, but Google won't.)

You may need space.

Physical space is a valuable asset. An area of five feet by five feet is adequate to begin with. More is not especially useful since the idea is to arrange things within arm's reach. Such an area will hold the essentials: a table large enough for the typewriter or word processor and the copy, drawers for gadgets and supplies, a bookcase, a not-too-comfortable chair, a cardboard box to hold files.

Income tax regulations provide for a home office expense deduction, but there are many requirements and limitions. The first of these is that you must have a bona fide writing business. A beginner will have difficulty claiming any writing-related expense until the writing enterprise is showing a profit, so you might as well set up where you can and get started.

Many writers have done without a special space, have set up on the kitchen table, worked, and afterward stowed the writing gear. No doubt that promotes an orderly way of working. One of my most productive periods was spent in a boarding house when I did not dare leave the writing gear in the public area where I worked.

The essential kind of space is not physical.

Writers are difficult people to live with. Perhaps the television cannot be turned on when the writer says he is working. (A publishing writer I know of made his lover throw a TV in the garbage.) When the sun is shining and the spring zephyr is sweet, the writer wants to sit in a stuffy room, typing. When it is dreary out, the writer does not want to have some friends over for cocktails.

Compelled to attend a party, the writer disappears for hours and is found crouched in a corner, scribbling away on paper towels. It is not as if he made a great deal of money at it -- certainly nothing compared to what other professionals make at similar stages in their careers.

Not all of a writer's requirements are owing to amateurish temperament. Many of a writer's problems are shared by others who work at home. People do not respect the workplace in the home as they would a "real" office. They do not understand that though the writer is home, he may be working. They do not identify the things on a writer's desk as tools. ("What does this button do?")

When the Muse is singing, it is difficult to lure the writer away from the keyboard. "I'll be there in a minute" means in a kind of minute that may last for hours -- days is not unheard of. A writer's lover wonders, "If there is a fire, will he save me or the manuscript?" Silly question.

Nothing funny happens if a man tries to come between a writer and his keyboard.

Only a special kind of person can be a writer's lover or roommate. Some who think it would be romantic do not have what it takes. The talent for loving a writer may be rarer than the talent for writing itself. It certainly is more mysterious.

Books are not dedicated for nothing.

What You Do Not Need

You do not need a computer or an electronic word processor.

Of course if you are reading this on your own computer, you probably have enough computer to do word processing. Start with what you have. The rest of this discussion is based on the assumption that you have nothing or are missing some key component, such as a decent printer.

You can use a typewriter, if you have one or can get one. Frankly, I would not mind having a serviceable manual right now. Although I would never dream of trying to produce a finished manuscript with a typewriter again so long as I had a computer available, there were many advantages to composing on a typewriter and there are many disadvantages to composing on a computer. If you have never known anything but a computer, you probably have developed the skills necessary to keep track of many little files of snips, false starts, and scraps, or you may keep handwritten notes, outline, and sketches. The main drawbacks of using a computer are that it is too easy to abandon something that is not going well or to lose things you cut from a piece and that, even if you are scrupulous about saving everything, it is too hard to sort through all your scraps and little notes.

These days an electric typewriter with some word processing capabilities is not cheaper than a low-end computer, new. Used electrics may be hard to service and hard to find parts for. If you are considering a typewriter at all, I would suggest a sturdy manual. They will work where there is no electricity and their batteries will not run down. It is also possible for a reasonably handy person to effect minor repairs on a manual, especially if that person wears glass and so has a handy set of jeweler's screwdrivers.

The lowest end new computers have much more than enough power to do word processing. The problem is that they come with the lowest end printers, which usually are ink-jets, possibly with do-it-all features like photo printing, scanning, copying, and possibly fax. If possible, upgrade to dot matrix or laser (not laser-jet) and look for one that has both USB and parallel-port connectors. Laser printers are the most expensive, but in general are cheaper to operate. The economic advantages of ink-jets, if there are any, are to householders who never want to do too much of any one thing: you want to print out a couple of photos, Tommy wants to print his book report, you want to make a birthday card for Aunt Martha. Sure the ink is expensive, but you never are using much of it. If you are sending out several stories a week or need to print out a book manuscipt, the limitations of ink-jet technology will become all too clear. (Yes, if you have an ink-jet, start with it, and send photocopies of your manuscripts out if the originals never really dry.) Modern dot-matrix printers are not good for your photos, but they are good for text. Some of the early dot-matrix printers were very poor and left daylight between the dots even in their best mode, but the best ones were always good enough, and today all of them are better than acceptable.

Even the earliest PCs are more than adequate for word processing, so a reconditioned computer is worth considering. Because so many people are caught in the upgrade loop, you may find reasonably good machines that are only a few years old and are cheap to buy or found sitting by a curb. You need an operating system, word processor software that will work on the operating system, a driver for whatever printer you may plan to get, and connections for the printer. You should look for USB ports and a parallel port for maximum flexibility in attaching printers you may get in the future. If there are no USB ports on a reasonably recent computer, you can probably get them by dropping in a fairly cheap card—provided you can be trusted to open the case. If you can get a configuration that works out, you may not be able to get security updates for an old operating system, so it may be unwise to put the machine on the internet.

My personal dream machine for writing is any DOS PC running WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. Unfortunately, drivers for USB printers are not available for WordPerfect 6.0/DOS and there is no work-around that works in DOS. I actually run a text editor (Joe) on a FreeBSD machine with printing handled by CUPS. This is not really very satisfactory and is not to be recommended to someone without geekish tendencies.

With some trepedation, I make available short-story templates for AbiWord and OpenOffice. These come with no warranty whatsoever, and if you have one of these word processors and lots of time on your hands you can probably force them to do better. Like all modern word processors, these are extremely difficult to learn and hard to operate if you do not want to do what the developers think you ought to want to do, and preparing manuscripts is not one of the things the developers think you ought to want to do. As of this writing, neither of these word processor can reliably produce files in MicroSoft Word format, so you might be as well off using a simple text editor to produce documents for printing and plain text electronic files for those editors who will accept them.

You do not need an agent

Fortunately. You cannot get a real agent. There is not money in short stories to make handling them worthwhile, altough sometimes agents who handle a writer's novels may deal with his short stories as part of a package deal. You are unlikely to produce enough material that does well enough that an agent could make a profit representing you. From time to time agents do accept new clients who have small, but promising careers. This is speculation on the agent's part. Fifteen percent of what a beginner makes will not cover the cost of the phone calls, postage, and copying required to sell his work. More usually an agent is engaged when a writer is negotiating his or her first book contract with a major house.

Manuscripts must stand on their own merit. A writer who sent a work or a query to every appropriate publication in the market without receiving an offer does not need an agent, but needs to learn to write better. The beginner who moans "If only I had an agent!" may entertain his or her friends with this routine, but knowledgeable people will understand the complaint really is "If only I had some talent!"

Unfortunately, the belief that an agent can work miracles with unpublishable material leads some would-be writers to employ services that seem to be literary agencies, but are not. Real agents get paid only when they have sold a manuscript. Real agents accept only writers who are already producing marketable work. Real agents do not attempt to teach their clients how to write. And real agents do not charge reading or consulting fees. Agencies that advertise for clients are criticism services (or worse), not literary representatives. Legitimate agencies do not advertise; they receive plenty of submissions from writers who did sufficient research to find them.

When he cannot recall how many of his books are in print, or when she falls behind in her bookkeeping because the checks are arriving so often, a writer will have little difficulty in engaging a real agent. However, a lover or spouse pressed into service as a business manager may do as well, and exactly this solution suits several mass-market writers.

You do not need vanity presses, subsidy publishers, print-on-demand, or self-publishing.

Vanity presses like to call themselves subsidy publishers. There are more respectable forms of subsidy publishing and the vanity presses would like you to be confused.

A vanity press offers a package deal which may include, besides getting the book printed and bound, some editorial services, book design, copyright registration, distribution, and publicity. The word subsidy may seem to imply that the author might pay for only a part of the costs, but with a vanity press the author bears the entire cost plus a healthy profit for the vanity press.

Some of these services are entirely worthless. Booksellers do not take catalogues from vanity presses seriously, and reviewers, who are drowning in review copies, never have time to look at offerings from vanity presses. Distribution of gay books is difficult enough for publishers who deal exclusively in gay books. A vanity press, which prints books for all comers, will not know how to promote or to distribute a work of gay erotica.

Other services are grossly overpriced. Modern home computers can produce completely acceptable camera-ready pages, and printing and binding can be had much cheaper by anyone who will solicit a number of bids. The odds of an author recovering the major part of his money are slight, and much less that the book will turn a profit. There simply is no excuse for vanity press, except of course for vanity. A wealthy matron who cannot get published otherwise and who merely wants copies to show up her friends at her bridge club or to force onto grandchildren, neices and nephews will get her money's worth from a vanity press. Of course, everyone who really knows something about the literary world knows what vanity press is and why people publish with them.

I should point out that while I do not think vanity presses are worth what they charge for their services, some of them are legitimate businesses. I am not saying they are frauds. If your Aunt Agatha, who is rolling in dough and could not enter cat on a desktop publishing program if you spotted her the c and the a, wants to have some of her poetry printed up to give to her friends and grandchildren, a vanity press can do that, and Aunt Agatha will not get stuck so badly if she can negotiate a package without the distribution and promotion and can live without a dust jacket. But there have been some companies pretending to be vanity presses that were frauds and did such things as charge for warehouse space for books that they never printed in the first place, and a few authors have discovered that whatever books existed along with the rights were tied up in various kinds of legal proceedings.

There are other kinds of subsidy publishing. University presses and various historical or genealogical societies often publish books for which authors are asked to bear some of the cost of production. Obviously this is not suitable for most erotic or most novels, but for poetry, novels too literary to be of general appeal, and books of limited regional appeal this is a better option than vanity press. At their best, subsidy publishers provide a means of publishing important, often scholarly books expected to sell only to a few specialists and libraries.

Since computers have made so-called desktop publishing possible, writers who are willing to pay can now get into print through self-publishing. A self-published author may edit and design the book electronically, take bids directly from printers for the printing of the book, and promote and distribute the book himself.

Certainly no one should self-publish who cannot afford to lose the investment. Publishing from top to bottom is a risky enterprise -- the next time you pass a remaindered table you might consider the hopes, dreams, and hard cash that each of the failed volumes represents. While investing in yourself is, in general, a good policy, investing your life's savings in your book may not be.

Some kinds of self-published authors have a chance of success. A poet, who is making the coffeehouse circuit anyway, who is giving well-received readings, and whose audience begs for more than can be fit into a single reading, ought to consider having a small volume printed up. But a poet, who thinks he or she can have some thousand volumes printed, drop them off at B. Dalton, and retire to his or her ivory tower to wait for the checks to roll in, would better put the money in a mutual fund.

A traveling minister in a small sect who has his most inspirational sermons printed up and who hawks the books to the congregations he visits may make a profit on his book. Like the coffeehouse poet, he has access to groups with a special interest in his subject. The minister will sell far more books to a hundred people in a congregation he visits than he ever could to the next hundred people walking into Barnes & Noble. He is traveling to these groups anyway and he does not mind schlepping the books around. In some cases a self-published book need not turn a profit itself, but may be designed as part of the promotion for a self-help guru or a new age philosopher.

Civic and church groups have had great success in raising money by selling self-published cookbooks. Of course, the success of these ventures depends upon selling many books to those who contributed recipes, to other members of the organization, and to friends and relatives of the aforesaid. Like a cakewalk, the book has not really generated much revenue from outside the interested group, but has succeeded in lightening the purses of those affiliated with the group. In a similar way, little poetry groups can sometimes break even by issuing little anthologies, whereas a chapbook by a single poet might have a less desirable bottom line.

Evidently some would-be novelists believe that very good novels (that is, their own) will be overlooked by big publishers. This is untrue. Oh yes, Gone with the Wind was rejected by very many houses. But someone did buy it at last. Publishers are looking for marketable novels -- finding them is how they make their money. A manuscript may be overlooked at one house or given to a dyspeptic reader at another. But if ten people at ten houses, who rely on their literary judgment for their livelihood, think that your book is not marketable, there is a distinct possibility they are correct.

Almost everyone who makes a success of self-publishing (or of any other new small business) does so by finding a niche in the market that is not being filled. A few writers in the gay market, who already had considerable followings and conventionally published books in print, have had mixed success in issuing small books and booklets devoted to narrow fetishes or scenes -- one offered stories tailored by computer to the subscriber's checklisted preferences. These writers had special access to groups likely to be interested in their subjects -- one of the writers had a mailing list because he operated an adult mail-order business, another had access to free advertising in a magazine that reached readers likely to be interested in his subject. The potential of making a small profit exits here because these markets are too small to be served by larger publishers. But for that exact reason, one's market is soon saturated and everyone who is interested in the book has either bought it or decided not to. This sort of operation is nothing for a beginner to undertake with the object of making a profit or advancing a writing career.

Possibly because I am too lazy to motivate myself otherwise, I always think that whatever I am working on at the moment is the best stuff ever written. In retrospect, however, I find some things turned out better than others. Not many authors, and especially not many novelists, have any capacity for accurately evaluating their own work.

If you are a poor salesperson or if you do not have special access to groups with interest in your subject, you will have a hard time with a self-published book. You will find it difficult or impossible to get bookstores to carry your book, but even if you do get your book into a bookstore, it will be only one title out of the thousands available in the store. The big houses have the clout to get their books prominently displayed -- sometimes. You do not.

Print-on-demand is a relatively new variation on vanity press. For a certain set-up fee the print-on-demand publisher will create an electronic file of the book and when an order is received, will print out a copy and ship it. Much about this sounds very good: trees are not sacrificed for volumes that go to dust in a warehouse (or the author's attic), people are becoming used to buying books online and may buy more and more books that they have not actually held in their hands, since the books only take up disk space (which is cheap), a book could be put in print and kept in print this way when the demand was so slight that no real-space bookstore could afford to provide shelf space for it, and so forth. There is the potential for books to be update and corrected instantly: almanacs, guides, and histories could always be as current as the author cared to make them. Print-on-demand may well be the wave of the future.

At present print-on-demand has serious drawbacks. The setup fees generally are so high that they are near what an author would pay to self-publish real books. And while you can find print-on-demand books available through web vendors and even order them in real space bookstores, you have to know what you are looking for. The problem is: how do you get people to know to look for your book? Most sales of self-published books are achieved by hand selling. You, or your assistant if you are fortunate enough to have one, are on the spot to thrust the books into the hands of the potential customers. You will not achieve the same number of sales by giving out a web address or an ISBN and asking people to buy the book online. The cost of print-on-demand is still higher than conventional printing, and that goes for the books you might order to sell by hand. [more]

Occasionally one hears of a self-published or subsidy published book which has become a best seller. More often one hears of someone winning a lottery with a nine-figure jackpot, but it does happen. What you may not have noticed is that on the rare occasion when demand develops for a self-published book, the author immediately licenses the book to a conventional publisher. He has a self-published book in demand for which he is getting all of the profit, but he sells the book to a conventional publisher who will give him only part of the profit. Why does the author do that? The reason is that conventional publishers can exploit a book in demand better than anyone else, so much better that the author's part of the profit in a conventional published book will amount to many times what he would get from all of the profits in a self-published book. Anyone who says "I am self-publishing because I don't want to get screwed by publishers" means "I am self-publishing because my book isn't good enough for publishers."

Do not deal with vanity press and do not self-publish.

---

Skip to: Top or page information.

---