New Year’s Resolutions for novelists.

This list will consist mostly of New Year’s Resolutions that I would make if I were to make any (I haven’t decided), and of things I already do that I think help keep me sane and productive, so some might be pretty specific to my own personality, and therefore useless for others. I suspect, though, that at least a few people share each of my own failings. On with it:

1. Try to stay in shape, even while working on a book.

I have no problem staying in shape between books. I’ll go running, do push ups and sit ups, do yoga every other day, and so on. But as soon as I sit down to write, the rest of the world disappears. I begin eating horribly. I drink more. I move less. Two days ago, I threw out my back — carrying a cardboard box to the trash. Not as bad as the time, a couple years ago, when I threw out my back sneezing in a fast food restaurant, but pretty close.

2. Get out every day, even when working on a book.

Sometimes I go days without seeing anyone but my wife. Sometimes I go days without seeing the sun. I should try to make sure I go for a short walk every day, get outside, see people. I like people. And it’s probably not healthy to stay locked in solitary confinement. Prison movies have shown me it’s a good way to go crazy, and I really don’t want to start drawing on the walls with my own shit.

3. Read fifty-two books.

That’s only a book a week. I rarely read that much. Now, I buy well over fifty books a year; but I tend to read between thirty and forty-five (yes, I keep a record of every book I read). Maybe it’s time to bump that up a bit.

4. Write every day (if you are working on a project).

I don’t believe in writing every day for the sake of writing every day. If I’m between books, I don’t write much. I do research for the next book, I read novels, I play Resident Evil 4 and Red Steel 2, I go for runs. I don’t even know what I would work on if I was between projects. Do people who write every day, no matter what, just type whatever comes to mind?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I do, however, believe a person should write every day once they have a project going. I think it keeps the story and characters fresh. If you aren’t waking from dreams about what your characters are going through, you’re not enough in their world.

5. Take up a creative hobby that has nothing to do with writing.

If you’re writing every day with the goal of a sale, or publication, there’s pressure there. I think it’s important to then have another creative outlet for which you have no professional goals. Paint, play an instrument, build an instrument. Anything. So long as it’s creative and there are no pressures attached to it.

6. Shower and get dressed upon waking.

If you’re working out of your house/apartment, it’s very easy to stumble into the kitchen, put on the coffee, stumble to the desk, play online backgammon, drink some coffee, play online Scrabble, check your email, look at your manuscript, play solitaire, answer a few emails, decide you need to look up the cost of hand-painted ties in Los Angeles in 1952, get lost in a series of hyperlinks, and end up blowing hours of your morning and accomplishing nothing. I think that by getting up and showering and putting on clothes (work clothes), you are telling yourself to get ready to do a job, and you’re more likely to get things accomplished.

7. Write 100,000 words of polished copy.

That’s not all that much, but it’s a good-sized novel or a hundred thousand-word articles.

8. Meet all deadlines.

I haven’t yet missed a deadline, but this year’s novel is going to be close, only because I’m working on a big, ambitious book that also requires a lot of research. I think I’ll make it, but just barely.

9. Write at the same time every day (if you’re working on a project) and do not let yourself do anything else until you’ve got the words in (I try to do a minimum of 1,250 a day).

It’s too easy to sit down and fuck off. Don’t let yourself get caught up in useless shit that only steals your time. If you’re sitting down to write, write.

10. Give yourself time off between big projects without feeling guilty about it.

Everybody needs time to get out in the world and recharge.

 

Beautiful words.

Someone once said the two most beautiful words in the English language are: “Check enclosed.”

Here a hundred others — according the linguist Robert Beard, the hundred most beautiful words in the English language. My ten favorites:

Desultory

Efflorescence

Ethereal

Gossamer

Inglenook

Lassitude

Mellifluous

Onomatopoeia

Tintinnabulation

Woebegone

More literary snobbery.

The New Republic thinks the classics are too good for the masses. Hillary Kelly, assistant editor of The Book, is upset that Oprah chose for her book club two classics by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.

She has asked millions of people to follow her into some of the more difficult prose to come out of the nineteenth century—prose she knows nothing about. Put simply, a TV host whose maxim is to “live your best life” is not an adequate guide through the complicated syntax of Dickens.

Adult watchers of Oprah are apparently too stupid to read Dickens without an “adequate guide.” They can’t possibly get anything out of his novels on their own. Good Lord, if we’re not careful, people will be able to walk into stores right off the street and buy copies of any Dickens book they want.

Oh, God, Not Again; or, Genre Fiction v. Literary Fiction; or, Me Like Book.

Every six months or so there’s another “genre fiction can’t compete with literary fiction” article published somewhere. The most recent was penned by Edward Docx, who, I have to say, did a poorer than average job of it. A few points:

1. Docx holds Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson’s work up to ridicule to prove genre fiction is inferior to literary fiction while simultaneously admitting that their books aren’t representative of the best  in their genre. If they aren’t representative of the best, it’s nothing but a pointless cheap shot. You don’t get to compare the best literary fiction with mediocre genre fiction and then declare literary fiction superior. I mean, you can, but it doesn’t mean anything.

2. Docx claims that because genre fiction works within constraints, it “tends to rely on a simpler reader psychology.” All fiction works within constraints. Even experimental fiction works within constraints; being experimental, it must, by its very nature, be a push against what has come before. Literary fiction is certainly no exception. Readers come in with expectations. Writers fulfill them, or fail to fulfill them, and are judged accordingly. Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens all worked within constraints. Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon all blatantly employ various genre tropes. Is their work poorer for it? I think it is richer for it.

3. Docx then goes on to dredge up one of the oldest clichés in the genre fiction  v. real literature debate:

To enlist a comparison, one might choose to set up a vast and international burger chain and sell millions of burgers. Or one might choose to open a single restaurant selling line-caught eel lasagne one night and hand-fondled quail poached in liquorice the next. We all like burgers – me as much as the next man – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But let’s be honest: there is a major difference in both the production and the consumption of the two experiences.

No writer is a “chain.” Each writer, whatever genre he or she works in, would be, in this stupid comparison, a single restaurant, and would deserve to be judged individually, without regard to the type of food he or she chooses to serve. What Docx wants here is for each literary writer to be judged by his or her own talents while “genre” is viewed as “a vast and international burger chain.” It’s bullshit and anyone who’s actually done the hard work of writing a novel ought to know better.

Some literary writers are crummy, some thriller writers are crummy, some science fiction writers are crummy — and some people who write in each of those genres have written works that will be considered classics a hundred years from now (assuming people are still around).

4. After spending over a thousand words blasting genre fiction, Docx trips over his own ego and undermines everything he’s just said. Reacting to Lee Child, who (tauntingly) claimed that “literary authors can’t write thrillers,” Docx says, “Uh-huh!” and points to Crime and Punishment as an example of a literary writer doing just that.

If we agree that Crime and Punishment is a thriller, then Docx has just provided us with an example that disproves all of his previous claims about the inferiority of genre fiction.

Because as well as being a thriller, it’s a classic of world literature.

Bad Writing.

There is a documentary out about bad writing that looks pretty good. From what I can gather, it’s got a limited run in a few cities (LA, San Francisco, a couple others), and then, on December 14, will be available from Amazon.com as a Video on Demand rental/purchase (though it isn’t yet even listed).

Here’s the trailer:

Here is part of the review over at Jacket Copy:

What do George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Miles Corwin, Nick Flynn, Aimee Bender, D.A. Powell, Lee Gutkind, Steve Almond and David Sedaris have in common? They all agree that Vernon Lott’s poetry is pretty bad.

Don’t worry, Lott asked for it. In his documentary “Bad Writing,” Lott presents these well-known authors with a sample of his poetry in an attempt to suss out what, exactly, makes writing bad. He’d found his early — and yes, mostly lousy — poems in a basement, and the older-and-wiser Lott struck out across the country, visiting writers and writing professors asking them what bad writing is, exactly.

Lee Gutkind, an icon in creative nonfiction, tells him gently, “there is a sense of embarrassing sincerity about this piece.” Novelist Margaret Atwood is sweetly merciless. “There’s no rule that says you get steadily better,” she says.

The very independently produced documentary opens at the Sunset 5 in Hollywood on Friday night, where it will show in limited engagement through Thursday. It’s a must-see for any writer who’s ever wondered, “Am I any good?” or even “Is my writing bad?”

I may check it out this weekend.

Day jobs.

Back when I was fifteen or sixteen and certain that I would be a big-time writer in a matter of months — not years — I decided that I would not worry about a back-up plan, a career I could rely on in case writing didn’t pan out. To my mind, a back-up plan was a plan for failure. And I didn’t want that. I was going to be a writer, end of story.

It took another fifteen years for that happen in any meaningful way. During that in-between time it might have been nice to have a skill of some kind.

Instead, out of high school (after leaving at sixteen) I got a job working in a Wherehouse record store. I hated it. Having to be friendly to people as they approached the counter, checking them out, trying to up-sell them. The manager was always at the counter, always demanding that you try to get them to buy whatever you were supposed to be up-selling at the moment. It felt like a trick.

“How about this thing? It’s half off this week only.”

Well, if they wanted that thing they wouldn’t need me to tell them so.

One day while at the counter I saw a teenager standing by the CD racks looking around nervously. I immediately knew what was going on. I was a practiced thief myself at this point, though I tended to steal books, not music. Also, I hadn’t stolen in the way this guy was stealing in years. I’d developed tricks that didn’t involve hiding things under one’s coat. That was too risky for me.

(I was making five twenty-five an hour, about seven hundred dollars a month after taxes were taken out, and my rent was three twenty-five. I simply couldn’t afford books. An honest person would go to the library. What I did was, I would buy a book I wanted and take it home. A day or two later, I’d go to the store with the receipt, grab a different copy of the same book off the shelf, and “return” it. In this way, I got free books without having to be shifty-eyed and sweaty. I should note, it has been a long time since I’ve stolen anything. I younger and wronger then.)

Anyway, this kid was standing there shifty-eyed, keeping his hands low, but moving them, doing something with them out of sight. I stepped out from behind the counter. He saw me. He ran for the door with CDs piled in his arms. He made the door. The alarm sounded. He jumped on a bike. I ran after him. He started pedaling. I kicked the back tire of the bike as hard as I could. He went sprawling. CDs scattered across the asphalt. He got up and ran, leaving his bicycle.

That was exciting.

Two weeks later I was forced to quit. What happened was, they’d cut my hours down to about twenty a week. Well, I couldn’t pay rent on that money, anyway, so why bother showing up on time … or staying a full shift?

While looking for another job, I decided I’d take a few classes to improve my writing. I signed up at the local community college, took World Lit, English Lit, Ancient Lit, Creative Writing, American History I and II. During the registration process, I learned that the college had job placement assistance for students.

The first job they got me was tutoring English (I did very well on the entrance tests), and was paid ten bucks an hour to do so. The problem was, I was only tutoring five or six people a week, an hour each, for a total of fifty or sixty bucks. I put in for a TA job at a local elementary school and, somehow, got it.

The kids were great, except when they were horrible. The hardest part was being able to tell which kids were being abused at home, not because of bruises or anything, but because of their behavior — like whipped dogs — and not being able to do anything about it.

The school year ended and I was once more out of work.

I got a job at the college as a janitor. I’d empty trash cans after classes, sweep the floors, clean off the whiteboards. The bathrooms were the worst. Brushing toilets and urinals, mopping up piss, cleaning out the tampon receptacles. Between semesters was the best. Stripping and waxing floors in peace and quiet, painting walls in peace and quiet, replacing tiles on the stairs in peace and quiet, listening to my boss tell stories about when he used to drink. “One time I took this one-legged woman home and didn’t know it till I was sliding her pants down and came across the pros–, prosthe–, the fake leg.” (Yes, my boss was Foghorn Leghorn.)

There came a point, though, when the college either had to lay me off or hire me full-time. My boss wanted me full-time but his request wasn’t approved. They laid me off and hired another student as a temp, with the promise that they’d hire me back in the new fiscal year.

I simply wasn’t willing to suffer months of unemployment. So I did what anybody would do. I dropped out and joined the army. Nothing good happened there. I did learn a very important thing about myself, though: I don’t like rules.

After that, I did some construction. I worked in a warehouse, building props for trade shows. I loaded trucks with forklift and pallet-jack. I worked as the maintenance man for a few bars in Los Angeles.

Then I got a job in reality TV and did that for the next five years. That was the worst job I’ve had as far as writing goes, as it involved sitting at a computer all day. Last thing I wanted to do when I got home was sit at a computer some more.

The best jobs were the physical ones, construction, building props, stuff like that. When I got home from those jobs, I was tired, but my mind felt sharp. I could grab a drink and write for three or four hours without pause.

Now I think back on those jobs, the months of unemployment between them, the stress of not knowing how I would pay rent … and while I don’t regret any of it, I think there might have been other ways to go about attaining a career as a writer.

If your personality allows you to have something to fall back on without your feeling like it’s preparation for failure, you should.

Fifteen years of irregular, low-wage work is pretty crummy. There’s no rule that says you must write your way out of a hole.

Book deal.

The deal I alluded to at the end of the last post has been officially announced:

Pan Macmillan has bought three novels by New Writing discovery Ryan David Jahn, winner of this year’s CWA New Blood Dagger. Will Atkins, Editorial Director for fiction, has acquired world rights in three new novels direct from US crime writer Ryan David Jahn, in a six-figure deal. Jahn won this year’s CWA New Blood (John Creasey) Dagger for his Macmillan New Writing debut, Acts of Violence. Atkins described his new novel, The Dispatcher (July 2011), as ‘one of the most exhilarating, original and exquisitely written thrillers I’ve read in years.’ The first book in the new contract is scheduled for 2012.

Well, if that’s not a nice way to wake up on your seven-year wedding anniversary, what is? Wait. Why am I talking to the internets? Must go make breakfast for my wife.

Two years ago today.

Two years ago today, 5 December 2008, I walked down 6th Street in Los Angeles to a 7-Eleven. I bought two spicy bite hot dogs, loaded them with mustard and jalapeno peppers, and sat on some concrete steps just outside and ate them. After finishing lunch, I went two doors down to an internet cafe. There, among the kids renting space to play computer games, I emailed a document to newwriting@macmillan.co.uk, along with a covering letter that said:

Please find my novel Acts of Violence, a thriller based loosely on the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, attached as a Word document.

The murder of Ms. Genovese is an infamous event in New York history, as it was witnessed by thirty-eight people and lasted nearly an hour — Ms. Genovese’s attacker even leaving the scene at one point, only to return later to finish the job — and yet no one attempted to help her, or even to notify the police.

Despite being the subject of a 1975 TV movie, a short story by Harlan Ellison, and being alluded to by everyone from Spike Lee in Summer of Sam to Alan Moore in Watchmen, no one has yet published a novel about the Genovese murder.

Acts of Violence is 63,000 words long and spans only two and a half hours, beginning just before the first attack on Kitty, and continuing through to the aftermath. It explores the events of March 13, 1964 from various points of view, examining the lives of Kitty and her attacker, as well as several fictional witnesses, police officers and paramedics, intercutting between them as their stories progress and finally come together during the conclusion of the novel. Along the way, I’ve attempted explore the nature of violence, and perhaps what it means to be a part of modern society.

Acts of Violence is my first novel, but I have been a screenwriter for the last few years* (my script agent is Dave Warden, of Warden, White & Associates), and have had short stories published in several little magazines.

Thank you very much for your consideration.

Best,
Ryan David Jahn

I had to send it from an internet cafe because I didn’t have Microsoft Word at home, and the free software I was using, Open Office, wouldn’t retain a header when I converted the novel to a .doc file.

After sending the email off, I bought a can of beer (Budweiser; I like good beer, but if you’re gonna buy a can of beer from 7-Eleven, you might as well do it right), and walked home. When I got home, I sat at my desk, popped open the beer, and wrote for an hour or so.

A lot has happened since then:

•I signed a contract for Acts of Violence a month later.

•I finished a second novel and signed a two-book deal six months later.

•Acts of Violence was released eleven months later (almost to the day: it came out on 6 November 2009).

•I turned in my third novel sixteen months later, and it is now winding its way toward publication.

•Acts of Violence won a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger twenty-two months later, something I couldn’t have imagined when I submitted the novel.

•I received the first translation of Acts of Violence in the mail twenty-three months later, Jon and Liz at Macmillan having, over the course of the last two years, sold rights to the novel in six languages. (It is a trip to see your novel speaking a language you do not.)

And here I am, living in the same apartment but feeling like I’ve traveled a great distance, sitting at my desk, writing a blog post while in the back of my mind I think about the work I’m going to do on my fourth novel after I eat breakfast.

I just signed another contract, this one for three books, and with an extra digit in the advance. I’m now getting paid I-can-do-this-for-a-living money to do something I love, to do something I spent many years doing for free.

I’m at the beginning of my career, of course, but two years ago I wouldn’t have had the stones to call it a career. Two years ago it was merely a dream.

_____

*I’d optioned a script twice and done one quickie non-WGA work-for-hire gig for a grand total of … about enough money to buy a very good used car. And my day job — up till about eight months earlier — was in the story department on a reality TV show, but I really did nothing creative there.