I was at last able to decompress to the point where I was able to get some coherent thinking in, and I realized what I desperately wanted to do with my time this summer was write fiction.

One of the reasons I had stopped writing fiction was because the market dried up. That is, lots of books were being published, but the brick and mortar bookstores were still calling the shots and they basically treated the mid-list as canon fodder.  (The midlist, for those of you who don’t know, was the bread and butter of the industry - things like genre and mystery series that had a smaller audience than the best sellers, but it was an incredibly LOYAL audience and therefore pretty much guaranteed a steady income to publishers and writers.)

The big bookstores took to churning the midlist.  If an author didn’t make it to a best seller status after two or three books, they stopped carrying the author.  Many people had to keep their careers going by changing their name every three books.

But people were working their asses off for almost no pay.  And then they’d be blacklisted.  I knew Amazon and other online retailers and publishers would be the savior in all this but it just wasn’t happening ten years ago.

But now it IS happening.  Now that Amazon offers used books, every book can still have an audience, authors can keep their careers alive.  And the market for online reading is growing, as people switch to reading from their computers, netbooks, Kindles, iPhones and other handheld devices.

John August has experimentally published a short story online as a mini-ebook.  He seems to be having great success - certainly much greater return than you’d get for most entertaining genre short stories these days.  And as it happened, I had planned in August, at the end of my fellowship, to set up a website for my cozy mystery western series - publish reprints and new short fiction.

Some how that whole August thing seems like kismet.  Stay tuned….

Feedback is one of those powerful things that can be motivating or debilitating.  You don’t always want actual judgement or criticism, but just some kind of marker, some kind of progress….

And that’s why blogging can be addictive.  If you put a hit counter on a blog, you can see every time somebody hits your blog.  You can often see what pages get hit and sometimes the referring link.  You make a post, and you see your hits go up.  So you think “oh, cool!” and you make another post, and check your stats again.

And this is why my eHow experiment seems to be working for me.  I see hits come in, I see pennies add up, and I feel good and I write more.  Nothing succeeds like success.

I used to feel the same way about rejection slips.  I’d get a rejection slip, and I’d feel like I’d made a point toward publication. (Among fiction writers, it is commonly held that you need to acquire 100 rejections to get published.)  When a story comes back from an editor, you have something to do toward getting published… you pop it in another envelope and sent it right back out. And if you want to mail more manuscripts, you have to write more.  When you get a story accepted, well, you need to replace it in the rotation. Write more!

I guess with screenwriting, you get that a little with phone calls made, email queries sent out.  But longer works, such as screenplays and novels don’t have that direct connect with the feedback, the way short stories and blog posts do.  There is no tit-for-tat feedback on each few pages written.

But I got a lot of long works written while I was writing short stories, so I think that maybe it’s a good thing to write short stuff for feedback to keep you going on the longer works.  (I have found some old novels waking up as I write these articles for eHow.  Old LONG novels.  What’s up with that?)

So here’s hoping for both funding AND creativity for the summer’s fellowship from my current article writing.

A few writer-oriented eHow articles:

• How to Think Outside the Box with Three Creativity Exercises
• How to Schmooze When You’re Shy
• How to Become An Author

A few months ago I was listening to NPR, and they were doing a story on some brilliant and powerful Latino gang in Los Angeles.  The thing that they singled out as a major factor in this gang’s success is that the leaders were lifers — in prison for life, but also dedicated “careerists” who devoted themselves to the gang.

One thing they did was when in solitary confinement, they had to come up with 1000, that’s ONE THOUSAND, ideas a day.  Every day.

Talk about your mental discipline! These guys have turned prison into a top think tank.

Of course, a writer I know who has a family to take care of said something like “Oh, yeah, well that’s easy when you don’t have to change diapers and clean house and run to the day job, and fill out taxes…”

Maybe we need to put ourselves in solitary once in a while.  And I don’t mean like the self-funded fellowship I’m saving up for. I don’t mean for writing.  I mean for THINKING.  For brainstorming.   That’s one of the bits of wisdom world leaders were overheard giving to Obama when he travelled overseas before the election.  “Schedule time just to think.”

Fortunately, that’s something that’s a part of the job when doing something like writing the tiny articles I’ve been doing.  It’s also one of the things that those pulp writers learned, having churn out story after story.  Donald Westlake was ingenious because he had trained his brain to stretch the limits on new ideas.

A few more of my eHow articles:

• Improve Concentration with a Magic Key
• Generate Ideas with Lists of Ten
• How to Be a Quick Food Photographer

As I may have mentioned, my life went to hell for a while.  Life does that.  If you are a working writer whose survival depends on writing, things like this can sometimes shift you into a higher gear.  But when everything is on spec, and you are just building your contacts and your portfolio of work, it can stop you dead.  Because when life goes to hell, especially if the situation is even vaguely threatening, your brain is hard-wired to concentrate on SURVIVAL.

But now I’ve got a big distraction out of my way, and I’m working on the restart.  I’ve decided that I really am going to start over.  I’m going to take some courses at the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, among other things.

But first I’ve got to fund my own fellowship.  So my concentration for spring is going to be money money money.  I also need something that I missed in learning my craft the first time around.  Pulp.

My first writing hero, Donald Westlake, died recently.  I remember reading interviews with him in which he talked about sweating over a typewriter at half penny a word, writing for the pulps to support his family.  And the same turned out to be true for many of my favorite writers, over and over again. They started in journalism, they started in pulps.  Sometimes those first writing jobs had very little to do with what they were later great at — but the crappy writing job gave them strengths and skills that you can’t get any other way.  Other than sweating it out for a half penny here and half penny there.

So for the next few months, my spare energy is going to go into writing little how to articles for eHow.com.   I don’t expect to get much money out of it, but I do expect to revive my concentration and discipline.  And what money I do get can help fund my fellowship.

More about what I expect to get out of writing articles next time.  For now I’ll just post a link to a couple of my first eHow articles:

• How to Write in a Professional Screenplay Format
• How to Generate Ideas while Watching TV
• How to Generate Ideas with a Dictionary
• How to Revive a Dead Battery On Your Remote
• How to Make Refreshing Asian Celery Peanut Salad

See ya in the funny papers…..

The migration of the account did indeed disrupt the feed (and I’m sorry — I screwed up — but then that’s why I warned you). However, we are now back up and running.  You will probably need to delete your old feed and click on the subscribe button to get it back.

I’m going to try to post more in the next couple weeks (starting Friday).  However, since my goal is paying for my own “fellowship”, I’ll probably write more about money than about writing.  Still, I think money is an issue of interest to all writers.

Feedburner, the service which has handled my RSS feeds up to now, is merging with Google.  This blog’s feed, unfortunately, is a bit tangled with another account.  At this point, I am thinking that the best way to straighten this out would be to delete this feed, and restart it in a clean new Google account.

It’s not quite clear what Feedburner and Google are swapping around, so this may not even cause a disruption to your feed.

I’m going to make these changes this week.  I will post again on Friday when they are done.  You can check your feed reader on Saturday, Feb 7, to see if the subscription survived.

In the meantime, I suggest you bookmark this blog, or send me an email at pitchlady@pitchlady.com for a notice of when I’m done.  Just in case things go wrong.

I have been in hibernation for a while.  No writing, no reading, no posting, just dealing with a really draining situation at the Day Job, which I believe I have now put behind me.  More or less.  I hope.

One thing I have realized, as I found myself drowning in crap, is that to get a fellowship (you know, that big goal I talked about last year?  Winning a Nicholl Fellowship?) you pretty much have to already have a fellowship. That is, you need the time and mindspace to really concentrate on your writing.  And a week or two ain’t gonna do it.

Due to the fact that I am very good at managing my money, and that I live very frugally in a state that has been depressed for so long that the cost of living is minimal, and because I’ve been lucky, I should be able to swing an unpaid leave over the summer.  (That’s the advantage of working in education. Most colleges are more than willing to forego your services over summer. It’s also a disadvantage of working in education.)

But even before summer comes along, my work life has improved to the point that I can resume my writing-related activities now.  And I intend to do so.

One way to get your productivity up is to post your progress publicly.  This is the theory behind Novel Dares and things like NaNoWriMo.  So expect me to post more often for a while.  Not only goals and updates, but postings about process and about financial matters and about whipping life into shape so you can get on with the story.

Everybody knows that query letters don’t work.  Everybody also knows that nothing else works any better.  Not for an unrepped, unproduced writer who has no connections.

However, knowing how to write a good query letter provides you with the foundation knowledge you will need for all future pitching interactions.

In any circumstance where you are making a cold pitch, the person you are pitching to wants to know four things.

1. What is it?
2. How is it?
3. Who are you?
4. How to contact you.

“What is it?”

This leading information is minimal, business-like, and fast.  The chapter on loglines in Save The Cat is a good guide here.  We’re looking for title, genre, and any indication of audience, style and tone. (If you’re querying a publisher or agent about a novel, include the length in words, rounded to the nearest 1000.)  It could be just title, genre and logline, or it could be a teaser line.  “What if the president’s plane were taken over by ghosts?”

Here’s the deal: you may think you want them to read beyond this paragraph, but actually, the thing you most want is for this paragraph to be so perfectly clear, that anybody who isn’t interested won’t have to read further.  If it isn’t in the ball park of what they want, then they will be much happier if they know it immediately.  So give them the bare facts they need to know.  (But make sure it’s clear: Our ghostly presidential thing doesn’t sound like a family comedy — so if it is for kids, they need to know up top.)

“How is it?”

Now that they know whether it’s the kind of thing they want, they want a sense of how you developed it.  This is the meat of your pitch: a paragraph about the story that gives them an idea of the plot, and also shows them you know how to develop an idea.  Whether you intend it or not, this will demonstrate how clear your understanding of basic elements like character needs and story structure.  Do you know what drives a story forward?  This is where it will show.

So, if we didn’t learn it above, we might learn here that it’s about the first African American president, and that the ghosts are John Brown, the violently radical abolitionist, and his followers. They believe they are protecting the president from attack, and they are desperate and merciless.  We’d learn something about one or two major characters — how they may have triggered the ghosts, and the attempts they make to pacify the ghosts.  Is there a conflict among the president’s staff?  Are the ghosts themselves major characters  or just a monstrous force?  We don’t need to know the ending, just the direction and the major conflicts.

“Who are you?”

If you don’t have anything to say here, don’t say anything.  The rest of your letter gives them an idea if you are literate, and understand what makes a story good.  But if you do have something to say, keep it short, relevant and casual.  One line about writing credits or screenwriting prizes, and another line or two about any experience you have with the subject matter.  (If, for instance, you wrote our Presidential Ghost Story, and you happened to be the curator of the John Brown museum in Harper’s Ferry, then that would be a great thing to mention.)

How to Contact You

You’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t make this easy.  The decision to read may be spur of the moment, and they can just as quickly decide not to.  Even if you have the phone number and email at the top of the letter, put it again at the bottom. (Even if you are sending by email and they can just hit “reply” — the letter may have gone to the assistant, who may have forwarded to the exec.)

Later I’ll go deeper into some of the techniques you might use in each of these elements.

I’m reading a pile of scripts right now.  Funny how a lot of common issues pop right out at you. Today’s script had a curious but common problem: There was no give an take in the scenes.  The beats were in the right place, the pacing was okay. The characters probably do have decent motivations and a character arc, but you couldn’t really tell because the scenes were so flat.

Give and take is the basis of scene structure.  You have two characters who want something. Their desires are in conflict.  In order to get what they want, they have to play a little chess game.  To play chess, you’ve got to move the pieces.  It doesn’t matter how safe your character feels behind a wall of other pieces, one of those pieces has to move with every beat.  Every bit of dialog, every action by a character changes the board.

Most people instinctively know this, but they don’t know how to do it.  So they start out with a character who, say, wants to be left alone.  And then there is somebody who desperately needs her help.  So you establish the situation with “Help me, please!”  “No!” …. and get stuck.  How do you get from there to “Okay I’ll help you”?  It shouldn’t be easy.  It’s got to take up some time.

So the writer puts in a place holder, and it goes like this:

Help me!
No.
Help me, please.
No, I won’t.
Help me!
No!
Please help me! Help me help me!
Oh, all right.

It’s like the Banana Knock Knock Joke.  It just repeats the exact same beat, exact same info, exact same character posture, until it changes, much to the relief of every one.  And while a lot of writers might use this just for a place holder, you NEVER let this kind of thing live to be read by anyone.

Maybe you aren’t sure now to fix this, but it’s really pretty simple.  (It takes practice, but it’s simple.)  Make your characters negotiate.  Maybe one of them can be stupid and stubborn, but the other will have to pick up on the very first beat that she has to change tactics to persuade, force or cajole the other into changing.

Really great scenes are like a dance.  It’s step and counter-step.  There’s movement.  There’s progress.  It can be serious, subtle, playful, wild, but it does move.

(The Banana Knock Knock Joke, for those who managed to somehow miss it in childhood, goes thusly:

Knock knock.  Who’s there? Banana.  Banana who?
Knock knock.  Who’s there? Banana.  Banana who?
(repeat until nauseated)
Knock knock.  Who’s there?  Orange.  Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say Banana?

Here’s a particularly extreme version on YouTube, featuring an animated banana and orange. )

A wise teacher once set a bucket and three boxes before his students.  He opened the first box, and pulled out some very large stones (or “boulders” as they call them in Zen Koan speak, although my idea of a boulder wouldn’t fit in a bucket).  He piled the rocks into the bucket until he couldn’t fit any more in.

“Is this bucket full?” he asked his students.

“You can’t fit any more stones in it, so yes, it’s full,” said the students.

So the teacher opened the second box and scooped out handfuls of pebbles. He dumped them into the bucket and shook the bucket so they would trickle down between the stones.

“Is the bucket full?” he asked again.  And again the students said “ah, yes, NOW it’s full.  You can’t get any more pebbles into it either.”

So the teacher opened the third box and he started scooping sand into the bucket, and the sand trickled down between the pebbles.

“Full now?”

The students hesitated, but seeing that he only had three boxes, they said “yes, it is now full.”

“You’re right,” said the teacher, and he dumped the bucket out.

This time he filled the bucket first with sand, all the way to the top.

“Is it full now?”

“No?” said the students.

“Can you fit any rocks or pebbles into it now that it is full of sand?”

“No,” agreed the students.  “It is too full of sand.”

And here’s where the teacher lectured them about how they should identify the most important things and make sure there is room for them FIRST, then let the unimportant things trickle in later.

I tell you this story because Complications Ensue just posted an excellent tip about comedy writing that really fits some of my philosophy of writing:  Always start with the best, coolest, most intense, most exciting, most important elements of your story.  They are your boulders.  Sand can trickle in later.