self publishing

This weekend, I attended the 25^th annual Writer’s Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin. It was my second time, and the first since self publishing my first novel, Ojibway Valley. It also felt like the beginning of spring after what was a long and brutal winter, in more ways than one.

In the prior months, as the winter progressed, I could feel my Parkinson’s disease symptoms worsening. There were balance problems, including a couple of falls (nothing serious, fortunately), increased issues with my speech, and an overall decrease in stamina. The combination of these symptoms and the solitude of being locked up in my house while outside the snow was deep and the air was frigid lead to feelings of isolation and depression. The result was, even though I had lots of time to do nothing else, I got very little writing done, particularly on my second novel. Bottom line, I was in a rut.

In addition, after self publishing Ojibway Valley in January and seeing some early modest sales, by the time March arrived, sales had completely dried up. I knew I wasn’t marketing very aggressively, and I knew I was in this thing for the long haul, and that huge numbers of sales were never important to me, but it was still disappointing. I had registered to be a part of a book sales / book signing event at the conference, but given the funk I was in, and per my general neurotic nature, I expected depressing results, having visions of sitting alone at a table with copies of my book, being ignored and humiliated.

So as I drove to Madison on Thursday night, my expectations and enthusiasm for the conference were low. I got there late, checked in to the Madison Concourse hotel, where the conference was held, and tried to start writing a short story I had an idea for, but after a clumsy hour of trying to plow through the disjointed words and phrases that passed through my constipated brain, I gave up and went to bed.

I woke up Friday morning, took my meds and a shower, and made my way downstairs to the conference. I looked for an acquaintance, Thomas Cannon, a fellow writer from Oshkosh, who had also just self published his first novel, The Tao of Apathy. He wasn’t hard to find, as he must be about 6’8”, and towered above everyone else. We talked in the hallway between sessions, and met up and ate lunch together in the hotel restaurant.

Friday morning, I attended an excellent session about independent publishing hosted by the independent author Kimberli Bindschatel, who’s first novel, A Path to the Sun was a quarterfinalist in Amazon’s breakthrough novel award. Her presentation was great, and gave me some much needed confirmation that I’d taken the correct path in self publishing Ojibway Valley.

The topic of the next session was writing about home and included a writing exercise. I was able to put aside the self consciousness I felt about my voice to step up to the microphone and read a passage of my writing, feeling completely at ease and comfortable. This was a big moment for me, as I’ve always had a morbid fear of speaking in public, heightened by the speech impediments Parkinson’s has imposed on me.

By the time Thomas and I met for lunch, I became aware that I was feeling good. Really good. I was enjoying the conference more than I expected to, and I felt the dark cloud of the funk I’d been in being lifted. It occurred to me that I was in my element, surrounded by people with the same passions.

Saturday morning kicked off with a panel discussion in the grand ballroom with local booksellers, including Joanne Berg, owner of the Mystery to Me bookstore in Madison and John Christensen, manager of Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Wisconsin. They lead a very entertaining and informative discussion about the future of independently owned and operated book stores, and how they can’t compete with the price and convenience of buying books on-line. What they have to offer is the bookstore experience; the magic of walking off of a busy street into the hushed presence of fully stocked bookshelves, the feel and the scent of a new book in your hands, the difference between discovering and searching. Google can return things searched for, but it can’t discover things the way you can wandering through the aisles of a bookstore.

Then it was time for the keynote address, “Writing From the Heartland,” delivered by New York Times best-selling author and Wisconsin favorite son, Michael Perry. Perry is one of my favorite writers and something of a hero to me, coming from and writing about the same landscape I wrote about in Ojibway Valley. I had the great pleasure and privilege last year to interview him via e-mail for the 2^nd First Look website; later I had the opportunity to meet him in person, at a book signing event in Chicago. His address was outstanding, funny and personal, and when he talked about how he loved the act of writing more than anything else and how lucky he was to get to do it, it resonated with the whole room. For me it perfectly articulated what the conference had already done for me, and reminded me of how much I love to write.

Afterwards, it was time for the book signing event, and as I lingered outside the ballroom for instructions on where to go to set up, I stumbled upon Perry. I said “Hi, Mike,” and as he looked at my name tag, a spark of recognition lit in his eyes and he smiled and said “Hey.” I told him it was as usual a great presentation, and he smiled a “thanks,” and I let him go.

About a half hour later, I was assigned a table to sell my book from, and I saw Perry setting up at a table not too far away. I was eager to show him Ojibway Valley and get some reaction, maybe some advice, but I was hesitant to approach him, fearing that I’d come across as Kathy Bates to James Caan in Misery. However, emboldened by our earlier exchange of pleasantries, I went up to him anyway. I took a copy of his latest book, From the Top, a collection of essays he wrote for the NPR show he hosts, Big Top Radio, and leafed through it, regaling him with my memories of two of my favorite episodes, one that featured Rickie Lee Jones, with Perry’s essay on being cool, and the episode featuring Steve Earle, where Perry’s essay included a mention that he knew the names of all of Earle’s ex-wives, which Earle (sarcastically) thanked him for later in the show. I commented that I doubted that Earle remembered all the names himself, to which Perry replied, “I’ll bet his accountant remembers.” We talked like that for a couple of minutes, and it felt like I was talking to an old friend, the exact way I feel when reading his books (even though on some level I felt like Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live interviewing Paul McCartney – “Remember when you were with the Beatles? That was cool.”). I appreciated this, and decided against thrusting Ojibway Valley in his face, that it would be an intrusion on his good nature.

The book signing event was much bigger than I thought it was going to be, with dozens of authors peddling their wares. All the nervousness I felt beforehand quickly faded away, and as we waited for the doors to open to the public, I went from table to table, talking to each author, asking about their books and how they published and so on. It was great, there were a lot of great books and writers, and I felt like I was one of them, like I belonged, and that all the cold winter nights I spent alone in my office trying to tap out something coherent weren’t a waste of time after all.

Then the event began, and the public entered. All told, in about two hours, I sold and signed four books. That doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s four more than I was expecting to sell, it felt like I’d made the New York Times best seller list. It was the conversations I had with people more than anything else, conversations about the book, about the cover (for which I received so many nice comments), about why I wrote it, about where they were from and what they did there. I had several people take my business cards, so maybe some will visit my web page, and maybe a couple more of them will buy my book on-line.

Near the end of the session, feeling brave, I took a copy of Ojibway Valley and approached Joanne Berg, owner of the Madison bookstore and panelist from the morning’s session. “Wouldn’t this look great on the shelves of Mystery to Me?” I asked. She politely took down my name and contact information, and as I thanked her and walked away, I saw her fellow panelist and owner of the Spring Green Arcadia Books, John Christensen, leafing through the copy of my book I had left with her. A couple of minutes later, after I’d returned to my table, John approached me and told me he thought my book might do well with his clientele, and gave me his business card, saying that maybe we could schedule an event at his store. I tried to project a cool and calm exterior as inside I was saying, “Yes, yes, yes!”

Later in the afternoon, with my Parkinson’s fatigue catching up with me, Thomas Cannon and I went to one last session, on “Demystifying Marketing,” again hosted by Kimberli Bindschatel. It was another great session, instead of the usual “have a web site, use social media, establish a platform,” focusing on understanding yourself, your customers, and the content of the messages you deliver. It gave me lots to think about, things I’ll be working on in the next few days.

Saturday night, I stayed in my room, stiff and exhausted, and watched the Badgers heartbreaking loss. I slept well, and woke up and packed my bags, deciding to get an early start home. Before I checked out, I took what remaining books I had down to the basement parking lot and put them in my car. On the way back to the ninth floor, the elevator doors opened, and there, standing in front of me, was my “old friend”, Michael Perry. “Hi, Mike,” I said, and he said, “Oh, you’re going up? I’m going down.” We waved to each other and the doors shut. I went back to my room, got the rest of my bags, and returned to the lobby to check out. I got to the front desk just as Perry was leaving.

We smiled and waved good bye to each other, just two writers going their respective ways.

Thanks to Laurie Scheer and everyone else at UW-Madison’s Writers’ Institute for a great conference!

If I were to teach a class about writing, here’s how I’d open: When it comes to writing, it doesn’t matter what kind of writing you’re doing, there is only one rule that has to be obeyed: make your point. Whether it’s a novel or a poem or a short story or an essay or a technical procedure, understand the point you‘re trying to make and make it as best you can. That’s it.

Things like grammar and punctuation and characterization and description and plot are all tools available to you. The more you learn about how to use them the better you’ll be able to make your point. For some jobs, some of the tools are more important than for other jobs. For example, if you’re writing a procedure on how to successfully diffuse a bomb, where a misplaced or omitted comma may blow the readers’ arm off, grammar and punctuation are going to be more important than if you are writing a play about two drunken high school dropouts from the rural south.

There are almost as many reasons people write as there are people writing, and they are all valid. You might be writing because you dream of being on the New York Times bestseller list or you might be writing a poem for only your spouse or lover to see. You might be writing historical nonfiction about an event or people that interest you, you might be writing to express a political or philosophical point of view, you might be writing because you have nothing else to do. Whatever the reason, it’s legitimate, and my one rule applies – just try and get your point across.

It strikes me that people are often moved to write for the same reasons they are moved to draw a picture, or play music. It’s the need to express something we feel strongly about. It’s also the absence of rules – when we draw, for example, we are free to draw whatever the hell we want to; using whatever materials and colors and shapes we feel like using or are available to us. There are no rules to what we draw or how we draw it, just like there should be no rules when we write – well, maybe my one rule.

But it’s driving me nuts lately – all the “rules” out there that people are saying “good” writing must follow. They may have good intentions, and their “rules” might make sense most of the time, but they are not “rules,” they are not absolutes. A writer friend of mine who I have a great deal of respect for was recently bemoaning the glut of self published crap that is out there, and that to minimize it, maybe a writer should have to pass a certification before being allowed to publish. This strikes me as so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. Suffice to say that for me, creating art (which a lot of but not all writing aspires to) has always been about freedom, that there are no rules, that Jackson Pollack and Andrew Wyeth can both be considered “modern artists.” Art is where we turn when we feel the need to break free of the rules that dominate the rest of our lives. There is a certification for public accounting, let’s leave it out of art.

It seems that the “gatekeepers,” those who control who and what get published, are imposing more and more rules on writers and writing now days, especially when writing short or long fiction. It’s becoming something of a cottage industry. There are an endless supply of books, web sites, webinars, seminars, conferences and retreats where you can study all of the rules for good writing. And don’t get me wrong, most of them are sincere, and many of them are helpful. But I think the best approach, no matter how impassioned or emphatically the “rule” is expressed, is to take them as advice but not gospel. I think there are few if any hard fast rules that are absolute.

Some examples of popular “rules:”

The “show, don’t tell” rule – good advice, to a point. But if you take it as absolute, and show everything, your story will never go anywhere. After all, they don’t call it “story showing,” it’s “story telling.” You should show what’s important to show and tell what’s important to tell. How do you decide what to show and what to tell? Whatever helps you make your point best.

The “less is more” rule – again, a good idea generally, but there are times when “more is more.”

“Always write with an active voice” – avoid things like “to be” and “had not.” Sorry, Hamlet, your soliloquy from now on is going to start “Be or not? That is the question.”

“All stories must have a clear antagonist” – Tell me, in Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” or “The Sound and the Fury”, or Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” who the clear antagonist is. In Hemmingway’s classic short story “Big Two Hearted River,” is time the antagonist? Is it the war that has damaged Nick? Or the swamp? Whatever answer you come up with, it’s not obvious or clear who the antagonist is, or if there even is one. (“Antagonist” shouldn’t be confused with “conflict,” which I think is the one thing, in addition to a point, that every piece of fiction absolutely needs.)

“Every novel has to have a beginning that pulls you in immediately” – This is good advice, but is too often misinterpreted that every story has to start with some dramatic event or action packed cliffhanger. There are multiple ways of drawing a reader in. You can gently and simply introduce the main character (“Call me Ishmael”), or poetically describe the setting (“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream,” or “Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun.”) , or briefly summarize the plot (“This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.”) These beginnings all draw the reader in; note that there is no breathless description of pulse stopping suspense, nobody tied to the railroad tracks with an approaching freight engine rumbling loudly.

So back to my one hard rule – I don’t mean to imply obeying only one rule makes things easy. It’s still work, getting your point across, and even when you do, you can be assured that you always could have done it better, more concisely or completely. The tools matter and you’re better off mastering as many of them as you can. It’s easier to build a doghouse with a full toolbox than with just a hammer.

When you’re building a doghouse you need not only tools but materials. In writing, the materials come from inside you. They are how you view the world and your place in it, your experiences and what you’ve learned to be true. They are the things important to you. No matter what kind of writing you do, it’s going to be framed by how you process things. Even journalists trying to write the most objective report of a news event are affected by their experience, because writing isn’t only about what you write, what you put in the story, it’s also about what you leave out. By better understanding yourself, you are given access to stronger and better tools. You can build a much better doghouse with some two by fours and a couple of sheets of plywood than with cardboard, and you can write a much better story if you’re clear on why it’s important enough to you to spend the time and effort putting it down.

Whatever your reason for writing, remember that it is just as valid and legitimate as any other reason. And if you are serious about writing, keep at it – the more you write, the better you get at it, no matter which rules you choose to follow.

So that’s it. I’m done pontificating for now. I’ve made my point.

I think.

Drivel by Dave

Spring Thaw

My Point and I Do Have One Is …