The Writer's Life

From the time I was a boy, I wanted to be a writer. Stories seemed so magical. My mother read to me almost evert day. I can remember sitting on the sofa in the living room, tight beside her, as she read stories to me. I began writing when I was a teenager and have written most of my life. Now I’m in my seventies and am writing with new enthusiasm. 

But I have only had one story or novel accepted by a publisher, and that was never published. People have always told me I have talent. In college I always got high marks for what I wrote. I remember one professor asking if he could keep one of may papers to use as an example in his classes. But still, I have had no success.

In the last year or two, I have taken up writing again with great joy. I have rewritten two of my old novels and have self published them on Amazon. They have gone absolutely nowhere. What I consider my best novel has sold one copy.

Now, as you read this, you can say, well, he must be a terrible writer. I don’t think that’s true. Everyone who has read my book Want has praised it. It’s a good story with believable characters. True, it’s not a great novel, but it’s a good one.

So why have I had no success? The problem is not my writing or my story ideas. The problem is me.

Unless you’re a genius, if you want to be a writer, there are certain things you must do. Here is my list. Except for the first two, I have never done any of them.

1)  You must write. Constantly. Every day. Even if you have the worse case of writer’s block ever, you must try.

2)  You must read. Read everything. All the great novels. But also history, biography, philosophy. Everything.

3)  You must talk to other writers, befriend them, become part of a writer’s group. Even if you     are trying to write dark psychological novels and they are writing mysteries and romances, share with them.

4) Share your work with anyone who will read it. Listen to what they say. Your mother will always tell you it’s  good. Your best friend will be more honest.

5)  You must really try to get published. Short stories in obscure monthlies, if need be. Stories any and everywhere. Twenty-five rejections for your novel should not matter. Maybe the twenty-sixth will sell, or the eightieth.

6) Nowadays, you need an agent. When you have a track record with magazines, find a good one.

7) When you become a novelist, stick to one genre. My books are all over the place, mysteries, general fiction. I’m now working on a science fiction novel!

8) Find an audience and contact them through FaceBook and blogs. Befriend them.

9) And most importantly, learn from criticism. If someone says Chapter Four is dull, don’t reject the comment  because you see Chapter Four as your best writing ever. If your readers find it dull, it probably is.

What to write

  Now that I’ve gotten back into the novel writing business, I’m intrigued by what the rest of the country is writing. We live in really strange times in America. The divide between Red and Blue grows ever wider, we have a resurgence of evangelical Christianity, we are deep in the grip of a terrible recession (still), the gap between the super rich and the rest grows wider every day, and young people, even ones with very good educations, find it difficult to find jobs. I would think that in such times, novelists would be screaming injustice at the top of their lungs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Of the current top ten New York Times best sellers, seven have to do with some sort of murder, one is a nostalgic love story (I think), one about a terrorist plot, and one about lawyers. These would have fit in nicely in the boom times before the great collapse of 2007.

  Is no one mad? Is no one upset that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket? Where is the Grapes of Wrath for our generation, or The Jungle? We seem to have relegated comments on current events to the non-fiction world of journalists who want to write large. Don’t get me wrong, some of these books are very good - for instance, Reckless Endangerment is a wonderful look on how the housing industry fell apart due to greed and corruption - but extended news articles, even when they are first rate, can never match the power of a good novel in depicting the times.

Poetry, I would think, is express some rage, but, sadly, poetry reaches a very limited audience these days.

  If you thumb through the books Amazon or Barnes and Noble advertise in emails or on their sites, what you see is a long list of vampires, fantasy, and troubled relationships. There is no anger in any of the works being sold.

  Now, you can blame that on the publishers, or the public. The publishers, obviously, print what will sell and once one vampire novel hits the big time, a flood will follow. And murder seems always to do well. If as many people in reality were murdered as are shown on TV or depicted in books, the population would be about the size it was a hundred years ago. Are the buying public looking only for escape? Have we all become subway readers, who only want to fill a boring commute with mind dulling murder mysteries?

  I can’t fault writers who are trying to make their livings, and hopefully their fortunes, tapping out drivel for the masses. But I can fault serious writers who want to write something worth remembering. I’m talking of serious American writers. They seem to want to use their fiction to rid their minds of their bad relationships or dysfunctional families.

  Oddly enough, with the birth of self-publishing on the web, an angry, serious writer has an easy way to present his work to the world. But even here we find endless murder mysteries, vampires, and sex.

  Anyone who reads this and also reads the novels I’ve published on the web will think I’m the biggest hypocrite in existence, because my first book is a crime novel and my second is about a family. But both of these were written years ago, before the American myth went south.

  My most current work, written late last year, deals with the problem of the divide between the one percent and the ninety-nine. I’ve sent that to a traditional magazine. When and if it gets rejected I’ll put it up on the web. The book I’m working on now is about the effect of automation on a small town factory as well as the separation of the owners from the workers. In fact, it’s working on this book at has made me look in disgust at what is being written by my fellow writers.

  I’m now and old man. I’ve lived through the absolute peak times of the American experience. I’ve seen the American Dream come true over and over again. What I see happening to my country now hurts and frightens me. We are becoming a oligarchy and no one seems to mind. 'Special Interests’ own our government and yet we seem to think the problems facing us today are the debt, abortion, gay marriage, and gun rights. Are we mad?

  It takes many things to change a trend on a national level. Perhaps a bevy of angry novelists may seem a small thing, but it’s at least something.

The hard work of writing

I hate to sound like an old fogey, but I think it was easier in the old days. In the old days, you wrote a novel, sent it to a publisher, got a rejection slip, and moved on to the next project. Now it’s far more complex. I’ve done the first part, I’ve written a novel, and, instead of sending it to a publisher, I’ve gone through CreateSpace to self publish it. That was a fairly easy task. CreateSpace, if you know nothing about it, is an Amazon company that will eventually change the world of publishing. It allows you to upload a PDF file of your book, create cover art, set up pricing, etc. When all that is done, and CreateSpace makes it very easy, the book magically appears on Amazon just like a real book. In fact, it is a real published paperback with an ISBN number and all. You can also go through Amazon directly and upload the same book for publication on the Kindle.

The only hard part of this entire process, apart for writing the darn thing in the first place, is editing it. You have no idea how many stupid little mistakes you make even with a good spell checker. But since I can’t spell for beans, I have my daughter-in-law handle the terrible editing task.

Anyway, after all that, you have a genuine paperback novel for sale. And you can actually talk some of your friends and family into buying the thing. But your friends and family are hardly going to make it a best seller or even move it past the threshold where they’ll actually send you a royalty check. What you have to do is market the book.

And this explains why publishing houses exist. They can actually force bookstores to take copies of your book and maybe even put them where people will trip over them. And they can get reviewers to read them and even put a well-placed ad somewhere if they think it worth the effort. That doesn’t mean you’ll sell even one copy or that the reviews won’t call it the worst drivel ever written. But at least it’s marketing.

None of this exists in the world of self-publishing. Lost in the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells and the just-over a hundred thousand self-published ones, your little book shines like a tiny star in the night sky. You are the only one who can see it because you know where it is.

In order to self-market your self-published book, I am told you must do three things. First you need a web site. The web site is to bring you closer to the faithful fans that don’t exist yet. I was a programmer in my real life, so creating a web site was sort of fun. I’m now having it reviewed by my son who has experience with this sort of thing. When that’s done I’ll put it up on the web through a web site provider who will charge me a monthly fee for hosting my site. Now I will be a little shining star in a whole other universe and still no one will know I’m there.

Next, I’m told, you have to try to sell your book of Facebook. I’ve been on Facebook for a while and still seem to miss the point of what it’s all about. Not to belittle my ‘friends’, but I seem to get an awful lot of nonsense from them, generally with pictures of people I don’t know. And one of my friends keeps trying to sell me imaginary items from his imaginary world. I recently bought two books on Facebook to see if I was missing something. One was how to market stuff and the advice was common sense that any blithering idiot would know up front. The other was how to set up Facebook, which I’d already done. Maybe I’m just too old to understand the value of Facebook, however young at heart I see myself.

The other channel the experts suggest is Twitter. To show you how out of touch I am, I thought Twitter was just for phones! I signed up the other day, and am still in the process of learning how it works, but my first impression is that Twitter is ten times better than Facebook. I see the point of it. It will take time, but I can see how you can build up a list of followers who are interested in what you say and the articles and books you recommend. And like the six degrees of separation we’ve heard do much about, your follower’s followers will give you a huge network of people who can look for that littler star of yours gleaming in the night sky. And who knows what will happen then.

So let’s review what it is you have to do to market a self published book. You must maintain a web site, make constant updates to your Facebook account, send dozens of Tweets, and even write a blog like this. Of course, none of this leaves you time to writer another book, which was what you love to do far more than any of the things listed.

Maybe rejection slips were a lot simpler.

I can prove I actually did write a book by sending you to http://www.amazon.com/Good-People-William-Ramsay/dp/1463545649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325626827&sr=8-1

You can Tweet me at @RamsayW1.