Writing Terms

Quick quiz: who gets a query? When do you write a proposal? What's a synopsis? Isn't that the same as an outline? How is a pitch different from a query and when is it needed? What about a hook? How about the high concept? Some of the confusion about these terms comes from the fact that they are used loosely and interchangeably by professionals who forget their words are taken as gospel by beginners. Another cause of confusion is the crossover of terms from one format to another, most notably "high concept" from screenplays to other fiction forms. A last source of mixup in some of the terms is that the language of writing, like English in general, is alive and mutating. The authoritative definition is not in a dictionary, which is a snapshot of use at a certain time and always out of date, but living people using the language in the everyday workplace: at our messy desks, in writers' groups, during working lunches, online, in letters, over the phone, at conferences. So, what's a what? Well, I am hardly one to dictate, but here's the lexical lay of the land around these parts:

• Proposal -- comprehensive project plan that can include a synopsis or outline
• Synopsis -- condensed version of fiction
• Outline -- condensed version of nonfiction; working structure of writing piece
• Query -- usually a letter asking if an editor, publisher, or an agent would look at a manuscript, proposal, speculation piece; formal request for review
• Pitch -- less formal than a query for writing; serious persuasion for film; invited
• Hook -- high concept in a sentence; lead or grabber first sentence of a work
• High Concept -- from film, phrase that encapsulates an idea

I tried to order these terms with the more comprehensive items first. The last three can be part of the first four. Complicating matters further is the transition period we're currently experiencing during which we sometimes have to send an email asking if email queries are accepted. I did this recently with a magazine that also has an online version and found that only paper queries were acceptable, even for online material!

Douglas Clegg

Remember I mentioned Cory Doctorow's successful policy of giving away writing on the Internet? Here's another place to find a well-published author's works:

Horror - Horror Books - Ghost Stories - Suspense - Dark Fantasy - Douglas Clegg. He also just started a blog blog that let's us in on his novel-writing process. (He has written under the pseudonym of "Andrew Harper" as on the cover shown.)

Boomer Novelists

Over in the Boomer 2.0 blog I noticed Nandini Seshadri's piece on author Greg Kihn "Become a Novelist, Boomer!" Seshadri says, Long before he became a rock star and racked up two Top 10 hits and nigh-on a dozen albums, Greg Kihn loved The Twilight Zone. After the music career and other parts of his life went belly-up, Kihn turned to writing horror novels centered around musicians. Some of Kihn's writing tips Seshadri listed:

Write about what you know
Write about what you love
Join a writers' group
Take a class and learn from a pro
Write to your favorite writer
Read Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron workbooks

From one of the comments:
I have Natalie's book 'Writing down the bones' and I love it. Also, Sol Stein's 'How to Grow a Novel' has a wealth of information that every writer could use. For editing, 'Self Editing for writers' and for encouragement, it's a tie for me. I like Betsy Lerner's 'The forest for the trees' and 'Bird by bird' by Elizabeth Berg - that might not be the right title. OH, and Stephen King's 'On Writing' - fabulous!

VidLit Note

Here's a hilarious way to send your editor a message if you all have broadband connections to the Internet (required for viewing, too) and a lot of money. The expense may change in the near future, according to VidLit honcho, Liz Dubelman. Remember you saw it here first! VidLits are used by some authors, like the writers of Yiddish With Dick and Jane, to promote sales.

Agents Emails

Find almost five pages of agents who accept email queries and links to their websites, provided to Backspace by Kristin Nelson at Nelson Literary Agency. A last page lists other writers' resources, including the quirky Gerard Jones' Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too attempt to document contact information of everyone in publishing, including agents' email addresses. Unfortunately the listing is not searchable, and you'll still have to cross check and verify for yourself before contacting anyone. It's a start and the price for the information (free) appeals to many writers, especially beginners.

BrainyHistory

BrainyHistory is a website/service writers can use as a tickler. Freelance journalists who submit to magazines work months in advance of a tie-in to an event. Before the WWW came along to put research at our fingertips, we consulted printed calendars, looking ahead for topics to pitch. Say we want to query a magazine with a six-month lead time. You can visit the Brainy History site and click through the listings for each day in November for story ideas. For example, on November 30, 1991, I discovered this entry: San Diego State's Marshall Faulk is 1st freshman to capture national rushing and scoring titles. The name rings a bell, and if I were interested in writing about sports legends, I could probably dig up enough information for a good story because I live in San Diego. I could also take a short cut, I discovered, to get a quick overview of all the holidays, events, births, and deaths for the whole month at Brainy Encyclopedia by typing "November" into the search window and searching that site, which lists "about 468" returns.

Book Quiz

The Book Quiz was designed and written by Loosely Based author Storey Clayton, who concluded after I answered six easy questions:

"You're Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser, you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile to much, and just avoid hat shops altogether."
Oh, how true!

Quote Week Seventeen

"Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbaric." -- George Orwell

Poetic License

Failing the Poetic License test is difficult to manage. After all, it's only The liberty taken by a writer or artist in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve an effect, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, as reported by Dictionary.com. A more fulsome definition appears in Answers.com: The liberties generally allowable for a poet to take with his subject-matter to achieve a desired effect or with his grammatical construction, etc., to conform to the requirements of rhyme and meter; but in a broader sense, it includes "creative" deviations from historical fact, such as anachronisms. For a specific explanation with examples, I like Balladeer's article in Digital Passions Poetry Magazine. Here's a hint I found in the Answers.com entry for "Rhyme": Some rhymes, as wind (noun) and kind, are called eye-rhymes (words which are spelled alike but not pronounced alike) and have come into general use through "poetic license."

Earthcore Podio

EarthCore, one of the world's first podcast-only novels, already has over 5,500 readers after just four weeks and five episodes. Read this Yahoo News brief for details. The novel is available from Podlot, which also provides statistical tracking to validate subscription data. Even more significant, I think, is that the novel is also available in author Scott Sigler's blog, produced with Blogger.

Passages Noted

I hadn't noted Saul Bellow's passing, nor Andrea Dworkin's for that matter, mostly because I didn't care for Bellow's work and don't know Dworkin's. Frances Wasserlein has a nice piece on her at The Soap Box blog. I think I was force-fed Bellow as an undergraduate at N.U., and now I know why -- he was an alum! See the university's claim at here that his first fiction works were published in the school's rag, contrary to other news reports. Stuffy universities get so huffy about inanities.

World's Worst

Home of Hardboiled Writer Victor Gischler is also the location of the World's Worst Interviews with authors in what has to be the World's Worst Blog (from a design standpoint). The content, however -- outrageously funny! If you like black and orange, you'll love this one. I found it by a process I barely remember, let alone comprehend. Let's just credit John at Lake Neuron for the lead. I am preparing to interview An Author for this blog, and I was interested to see what other writers ask other writers. I'm thinking along these lines for questions with no waffling responses allowed:

Star Trek or Star Wars?
Peanuts or Cashews?
Foundation or Dune?
High Test or Regular?
Grilled Cheese or Tuna?
Paper or Plastic?
Here or To Go?

You see, I have a theory (I'm allowed, having an advanced degree in Pop Psychology) that we can know all we need about someone else from the ordinary choices they make. Think of it as an extension of Malcom Gladwell's Blink. Feel free to add to the list of potential questions by email or comments to this post.

Word Tools

Word Tools produced this cute little meter to gauge how much of my novel I've written:

12 / 150 (8.0%)

Yes, well that was embarrassing. Moving on, this is just one of the services available on the Word Tools page at Zokutou, a British website with a Japanese name that means ascending spiral. The handy dandy Zokutou also gives you a random word, counts your words, makes .PDF files, and provides a simple analysis of words used in a piece of writing to help you spot word overuse. From the website: "* zokutou(n) 1. the acsending [sic] spiral; continued advance. 2. continuing to pitch. 3. an island belonging to a political entity".

Bower

"I'll soon have a bower," I thought last week when I noticed swelling buds on the Star Jasmine entwining the supports and drooping off the overhead outside the kitchen. A mockingbird completes the illusion. I rush out each morning expecting to find a bowerbird of paradise, twitching its lovely tail, displaying for a mate. Indeed the yard became a love nest later: two alligator lizards locked in copulative bliss in a patch of sunshine. This weekend the first blossoms opened; the exotic perfume wafts me into an oriental reverie. I've conflated flora and fauna, let imagination run wild. If I sit here enjoying the flickering shadows and sunlight playing on my skin, the twittering and calls, the fragrance rare, perhaps a tale will unfold that I'll be bold enough to tell.

Bad Poetry

Charles Bernstein, Against National Poetry Month As Such says: "Indeed, part of the purpose of the Academy's National Poetry Month appears to be to advertise National Poetry Month and its sponsors -- thus, the Academy has taken out a series of newspapers ads that mention no poets and no poems but rather announce the existence of National Poetry Month with a prominent listing of its backers, who appear, in the end, to be sponsoring themselves."

His suggestion is to have a month of no poetry at all. No songs. No advertising jingles. Discourage people from reading poetry. This, we presume, would be better than the current assumptions that poetry is too abstruse and difficult for the commoners to consume unless it is watered down and made more palatable. Such actions, Bernstein claims, are taken under the banner of making poetry "more accessible" to the American public. Sort of like Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's project to distribute contemporary poetry to newspapers each week?

I'd like to take Kooser and Bernstein and put 'em in a paper bag together and shake 'em up.

How difficult it is for other (ordinary?) people to open a book and read a poem, or why do some complain about not understanding poetry. "It's too hard," they whine, "with all that symbolism and stuff." So it's back to Eddie Guest, I guess. A book of his verse was the only literary scrap in my grandparents' home, unless you count a King James version of The Bible. Perhaps that's why my first saga (written at age 10) began:

Lucky and Chloe:
A love that could never be.
Theirs was one of sweetness and devotion,
Not of passion, fire and emotion.

Quote Week Sixteen

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake." E. L. Doctorow

Poetry Sells

All you have to do is win a Pulitzer, and your book of poetry will pop up to the top of the chart! See the Nielsen BookScan Powered Charts for last week. The Book Standard Chart Alert said:

Ted Kooser first gained national recognition when the Library of Congress named him the 13th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry last August. Sales of his Delights & Shadows went up during that time, but after the author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry earlier this month, the book had its best sales week ever. According to Nielsen BookScan, the book sold more than 2,000 units and took the No. 1 spot on the poetry chart for the first time. The demand for the book jumped right away. "The week before the prize was announced, we had 7,000 copies in stock," says Michael Wiegers, executive editor of Copper Canyon Press. "Immediately after, we ordered 10,000 copies and doubled the order later that same day." An edition with the Pulitzer medal impression on the cover ships next week.

Dreadfully appropriate because April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. where poetry is read so little that Poet Laureate Kooser is going to give it away to newspapers weekly. If anyone knows how to get in touch with him (there's no email for the P. L.'s website) please let me know. I want to display his project in Writer's Edge. Lacking a response to my message to him at the University of Nebraska, I bullied my reading club into taking on a book of poetry. We'll see how that sells.

Synonyms

WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. The website also has an online reference system. It's from the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory and inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. Related-in-concept, but different (and not free) is the very interactive Visual Thesaurus, which allows a too minimal a play period each time you access the website. The display of word relationships reminds me of mind mapping, so popular in organizational development and certain pseudoscientific marketing statistical procedures in graphic presentation.

East of Eden

Current events hurried my review of Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder. You can see a miniview at the new Allconsuming (if it's working), and the timely one at Blogcritics, in the Culture section. Meanwhile, my book club hashed Steinbeck's East of Eden this morning with these results: Biblical themes of Cain and Abel, wrestling with good and evil, carried by the structure of timshel, "you can choose". The gift/curse of God to mankind is the freewill to choose between good and evil. Would that life were so simple! For once we all agreed in liking the book, more or less. It is both plot and character-driven, and the author took space and time to put the elements in perspective, as is needed with a multi-generational saga such as this. We had a minor disagreement over whether or not the leading "lady", Cathy/Kate had the ability to choose. I held out for a congenital deficiency in ability to recognize wrong. Others with stronger opinions suggested that even sociopaths choose to behave badly. Hollywood insider tip: a new film version of East of Eden is in the works.

Swarm Stings

Bestselling German author stung by plagiarism claim says the bookish British Guardian reporting on Dr. Thomas Orthmann, a writer and marine biologist who insists large portions of author Frank Schatzing's The Swarm were taken from Orthmann's research. His website Oceans also carries information about this claim (in German, which Google will translate into English or French.

High Concept

"High Concept" sounds pretty high-minded, doesn't it? Maybe something terribly intellectual. Or a traditional, major theme throughout literary story-telling, represented by Joseph Campbell's myths. When someone referred to a story as being "not too high concept", I was too embarrassed to ask the others in a fiction writing group what they meant. I finally stumbled into an article on the subject when plumbing the depths of writer Gabrielle Luthy's website. Buried in a rich gold mine of articles was this nugget by Melissa Robbie: High-concept. The term comes from screen writing, and it's not so high at all, she says. Quoting Showfax, it is a " marketing concept that refers to a script/story as completely understood (gotten) within some twenty-five words or less." Robbie suggests that it recap the setting, tone, and major events; and you can use the high concept to pitch to agents and editors.

No Book

Naomi Klein is a journalist in somewhat of a complicated feud with publisher Gibson Square Books, as the Guardian recently explained. No War is still listed at amazon.com with Klein's name as author, although the part of the anthology that she wrote is freely available online, was previously published in Harper's magazine, and the rights to reprint were not Harper's to sell.

Unitarian Jihad

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle first reported this new [JOKE!] terrorist threat, and then Mark Liberman at the Language Log analyzed it. I especially enjoy Bill Humphries' service determining Your Unitarian Jihad Name, otherwise, I would have been Sister Half-a-Loaf-and-a-Hyacinth. They tell me I am really The Boot Knife of Reasoned Discussion. I think I prefer the selection based on my first name by the First Reformed Unitarian Jihad Name Generator: Brother/Sister Tactical Baton of Unassuming Wisdom. It certainly suits Grammar Stickler to an Adagio Tea!

Quote Week Fifteen

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." Truman Capote

Litblog Co-op

In addition to talking and reading about writing, now you can read about reading. The Litblog Co-op made its debut this week, a compendium of contributions from a dozen or so "literary blog" writers. They've set themselves the quarterly task of recommending a read, limited to : a) fiction (including short stories and graphic novels); (b) US publication by a firm whose primary business is book publishing; (c) living authors (at the outset); and (d) no e-books, self-publishing, or authors with personal relationships with nominators. I asked the management why they eliminate self-publishers, and what is "literary",although with all the exclusions, I think I get the idea. Just remember the Writer's Edge First Rule of Writing: Write!

Homophones

Homophones are two words that sound almost identical, but have different meanings. The difference between homophones and homonyms is slight (the latter can also be spelled the same, called a homograph). These words that sound alike but have different meanings give rise to the Eggcorns, malapropisms mentioned previously. While these can result from any mixture of inattention, lack of education, or striving to sound erudite, a common cause for writers to mistake "fast" for "vast", "airy" for "aerie" is learning the language by hearing rather than reading. My foreign friends who tell me "I love English; I love how it sounds" and then fill their emails with indecipherable cryptic terms also show me they are studying by satellite, not classroom.

Ezines

Bradley's comment to yesterday's post reminded me to roundup some references to ezines, a good place for beginners to get published. Good because there's more opportunity because publishing a collections of writings on the Internet is infinitely less expensive than publishing them on dead trees and distributing them by hand. Bradley's upstart subter.com is already in its third issue (is it still an upstart?) Another 'zine with youth appeal is Turbula, put out by journalist Jim Trageser. It has a focus on music as well as literature, and the Winter 2005 issue carries Jim's personal remembrance of and tribute to Hunter S. Thompson. Citizen Culture bills itself as "The Magazine for the Young Intellectual", aimed at 20-40 year-olds with cerebral intent. Perhaps for an older audience, Narrative Magazine carries interviews literary figures Frank Conroy and Geoffrey Wolff and a nonfiction piece by southern humorist Roy Blount, Jr., concerning oysters.

Writing Sins

Not writing about sin, although there's a thought that's fueled writers since the time of Moses, but mistakes writers make that dampen, even quench, their careers:

failure to query, submit (from fear of rejection)
lack of followthrough (on assignments, promises, more queries)
missing deadlines
fighting or befriending editors
unprofessional behavior (lack of preparation)
failure to move on (to higher paying markets)
not negotiating for higher pay
talking about writing (rather than writing)

Writers must find fine balance points between several extremes. Wussy doormat and difficult, solitude and camaraderie, self promotion and obnoxious obsequiousness are but a few. It's especially difficult in the beginning. A new writer is trying to find a voice, sometimes not realizing that the person is equally important. The romantic days of writers as smoking, hard drinking, lascivious world travelers probably died out earlier this year with Hunter S. Thompson.

Agent Services

In the Backspace March 27 blog entry literary agent Ted Weinstein listed some of the ways good agents help their clients:

Providing expert and impartial feedback
Knowing what's selling in the market
Having contacts and access
Negotiating contracts with expert knowledge
Monitoring accounting and paperwork after a sale
Offering career guidance and continuity

I might add that real agents don't charge writers any front end fees. They receive percentages of sales, so they have vested interests in writers' successes.

Book Proposals

As Carl Wilkinson learned, sometimes there's a lot of writing that goes on before the writing. He tells in the Observer about the tribulations of preparing a book proposal. If you want to avoid all the angst, you could always opt for self-publishing as a roundup in The Independent reveals. It was so heartening to read one editor's view of submissions: Louise Haines, the editorial director of the publishing company Fourth Estate, says that most of the unsolicited manuscripts she gets are rubbish. Proposals are, of course you already knew, for nonfiction. Novelists can get by on a couple of chapters and a synopsis. The poor journalists must, in addition, "outline everything you know about your chosen subject and then speak with equal confidence of all the things you will find out, all the people you will track down and interview and all the events that you will witness," Wilkinson said. I happen to know it's even more comprehensive in execution, including marketing plans and sales projections, tie-ins, and a biography that convinces editors the writer will elicit raves at book signings and interviews.

B4B #10

The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books #10: Cruelty: "For this Blogging for Books, write about the cruelest thing you have ever done - either to another person or to yourself." See the website for details and competition guidelines. No fee, great prize from guest author and judge, Mark Sichel, Healing From Family Rifts.

Quote Week Fourteen

"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors." Dr. Johnson

The Eggcorn Database

The Eggcorn Database provides edification as well as a lot of laughs about unintentional goofs with the English language. One for today "spear of influence" struck me in particular because I'm currrently reading Katherine Neville's The Magic Circle in which an influential spear plays a part. Yesterday I gathered a few eggcorns of my own (belated gifts from the Easter Bunny, I guess): The Golden Rule cited as "do onto others ... " was my favorite.

Google Gulps

While we're having our little April Fool fun, take a look at Google Gulp, the metaservice's offering of the day. In another move, probably not a joke, Google announced it is doubling the storage capacity offered to Gmail account-holders. I have a few invitations available and in the spirit of the day, I posted at Blogcritics that I've reduced the price to $4.95. No, they're free. Just leave a comment with your current email address, or send it to me at the address for Writer's Edge (click on Profile, Email).

Writer's Fool

My favorite of the top 100 April Fool jokes from The Museum of Hoaxes:

#5: San Serriffe

In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that then gripped the British tabloids in the following decades. more