The Method, Man

Dan Mader’s recent post on Indies Unlimited is pertinent here. In it, he goes all Wu Tang on our collective be-hinds, extolling the benefits of “the crew”, of having a cadre of peers with which to bounce ideas off of, collaborate with, borrow from, represent to, and party alongside till you’re hoarse and vacant. He has a point. Writers are horribly misanthropic for the most part, and that solitary nature can be toxic when left to its own unhealthy and addictive devices. I call it the writer’s paradox: we spend most of our time alone figuring out how to communicate with people. I mean, really. How utterly ludicrous is that?

So, I was trying to come up with this week’s post while in the type of mood Mussolini was probably in around the time those Italian partisans captured him and hung him on a meathook, only a much lower grade version, obviously, and was about to burn more bridges than all the desperate, self-hating trolls in and around Madison County by posting something pointlessly scattershot-angry to be read by pretty much anyone on the internet, which you don’t need me to say would have been astoundingly, mindbogglingly dumb, when I found myself in a conversation with our very own Mader and Brooks (which sounds like a Savile Row tailor shop, or maybe part of a law firm: Mader, Mader and Brooks) and they allowed me to rant for a while as they snuck occasional glances at each other, no doubt wondering how they were going to inform my loved ones, until I eventually ran out of steam and left an awkward, very pregnant silence. Not to mention the mother of all run-on sentences.

After which they suggested with exquisite, admirable patience that I tone down the outrage and frustration slightly, and instead of skewering my formless targets with sharpened words, I sweeten the whole deal with an extended metaphor. For which you, kind reader, will henceforth be the beneficiary.

I love music. I adore music. Music has saved my life. Music has preserved my last shreds of sanity. Music has taught me as much as any other human activity, including books. Like many who become obsessed with consuming something, I eventually tried to produce it. I saved my paper route money and picked up a small Spanish guitar for less than £20 when I was around 12, then a horribly battered Strat copy a year or so later for around the same price, for which a friend of mine built a battery powered 10-Watt amp so we could go annoy woodland creatures by playing distorted versions of “Stairway To Heaven” and “Anarchy in the UK” in bucolic settings (squirrels in particular really dislike the Sex Pistols, I’ve discovered).

As we all pretty much did back then (music lessons were for those middle class kids who owned handkerchiefs and didn’t drink from jars with chips around their rims), I basically taught myself to play—jamming with friends who were better, playing along to my worn records and cassettes, painstakingly rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing… until I noticed something that troubled me.

Basically, I sucked.

Don’t get me wrong, I learned a bunch of chords over the years, a variety of rhythmic strumming patterns (if three constitutes a “variety”) and even some picking techniques (if by “some picking techniques” I mean “two slightly different ways of moving my thumb and forefinger”). I was and remain an enthusiastic guitar player and have spent untold years downloading chords and simple guitar tablature for many of my favourite songs, which I have inflicted on very few bystanders given the sheer volume of songs I’ve managed to collect.

Because it bears repeating: I suck.

My singing voice is reminiscent of the sound you made that time you grated your thumb halfway down to the first knuckle instead of the chunk of fresh Parmesan. Hearing it makes honey badgers think it’s mating season. I’ve set off alarms. Triggered border skirmishes. Oh, and I’m not tone deaf. I can actually sing in key and everything. But then, that’s like saying Justin Bieber can wield a paintbrush. It’s meaningless on too many levels to even bother unpacking. The fact remains, I have the self awareness to realise that my career as a musician was basically stillborn from the moment I tried to play that riff from “Smoke on the Water” alone in my bedroom. I may be a complete idiot but I’m not stupid.

All of which saved me the headache of a lifetime of figuring out what time signatures are, as well as the heartache of telling my special friend back home that the oozing, alarmingly lurid rash in my bathing suit area was from sitting too long on hot, sweaty tour buses and had nothing to do with those silly groupies you, ha ha, might have, you know, heard about from an irresponsibly sensationalist media, baby.

So. I’m not taking up space on stage, or anywhere. I don’t have to yell above the fray to get noticed, to land that elusive recording contract, perhaps hit that stage while modelling burlap rainbow lederhosen and rubber nun suits or setting fire to fruit bat entrails and whipping them around my howling, desperate head while silently urging those A&R dudes from Sony BMG who just have to be scattered throughout the audience, to notice me, goddamnit, acknowledge my inherent genius, make me the star I know I should be…

As I said, I’m not doing any of that.

And the world sighs in sweet, blessed relief. Because I knew. All along. I knew I couldn’t turn the sow’s ear of my musical “talent” into the silk purse of a career. In other words, I had only half the prerequisites, which wasn’t enough: a deep and abiding love for music but nowhere near the talent. I even tried writing songs but they were essentially sounds stuck together with modeling glue and yarn. Love, but no talent. At least I had half.

But writing is different. And that’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’m saying. Now go. Figure it out. Scoot. I can feel that mood coming back…

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on April 6, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Power at Our Fingertips

In this week’s post, I want to demonstrate the power of what Mark Coker calls the “rise of the indie author collective” (The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success). Indies Unlimited is every bit a part of that rise, that revolution really, one that has eroded the power of traditional publishing and significantly democratized the entire process.

Now, there are as many tips and tricks out there for helping independent authors “maximize their brand” or “utilize the tools of the internet” as there are slightly dodgy-looking punters at a female mud wrestling contest, and the debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of reciprocal Facebook “liking” or Amazon “tagging” every bit as fiercely as it does over that of Mona’s standing moonsault and tilt-a-whirl crossbody press on Dolores back in the Fifth Round.

And I have no more answers to those questions than your average… well, dodgy-looking punter at a female mud… But enough of that; in the tradition of great pitchmen everywhere… I wanna tell ya about what works, folks!

On March 17, our colleague here at Indies Unlimited, the redoubtable Jim Devitt, showed us a neat if at-first-glance confusing trick. Well, confusing if, like me, you’re more than a little dense when it comes to the arcane ways of the mighty Amazon dot com. In his post, Jim explained a method by which you change what is known as the “category path” of your book on its Amazon page and effectively reduce its number of competitors by fine-tuning that path, or string. Now, I’m not going to completely humiliate myself by outlining each and every wrong turn I took after my initial wild misinterpretations of Jim’s instructions. Suffice it to say that, after a number of emails between Amazon and my heartbreakingly clueless self, I did manage to end up with two slightly more customized category paths. Read Jim’s post—including the comments section in which I also humiliate myself publicly (okay, sensing a theme here)—for a much better nuts-and-bolts explanation than I could honestly provide (I can do nuts, no problem, just not bolts).

But the point is that I did finally arrive at these two new paths, and noticed that in one of them in particular (Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > United States > States > New York > New York City), I was already ranked at #4. It so happened that someone bought my book that day and I noticed it move up to #2. Which is when it dawned on me that if I asked enough people to buy it over one short, frenzied period of time, there was a chance it could make the #1 slot, however temporarily, thus giving me a bone fide Amazon #1 Bestseller! The only question: how far ahead in Amazon’s mysterious ranking algorithms was the current #1 seller in that particular category path, and was it catchable? I didn’t know. But I wanted to find out.

So I called in all my favours from the boys downtown… well okay, from my slightly bemused and mainly bespectacled writing cohorts and colleagues from within various Facebook groups. Essentially begging them to buy my book, I even lowered the price, which is the equivalent of leaning into the passenger side window and flashing acres of cleavage while making kissy faces. Not a good look, in other words. And perhaps my lowest point to date as an independent writer was when I found myself with my finger poised over the Buy Now With 1-Click button… and clicked. Yes, I admit it here for the world to mock me with: I bought my own book. For which I later did penance by dragging razor wire through my spleen and driving carpet nails into my perineum.

But also, some very kind people, most of them my colleagues right here at Indies Unlimited, felt sufficient excruciating embarrassment sympathy for my plight that they dug deep and shelled out for my lonely little book. Cue a couple of tense hours refreshing the Amazon page and watching the ranking (what on earth did we do for fun before the internet? Torture the kids with crocodile clips and car batteries? Prank the neighbours with elaborate setups involving loud hailers, flamethrowers and wolverine feces? Oh wait, yeah, we read books), until… well, it worked. Just like that (if you doubt me, click on the embedded photo above).

I was gobsmacked. #1 in an admittedly gerrymandered category, but no matter. It was a real bestseller. Which is especially ironic, since it has never sold well, being both short and nonfiction; pretty much guaranteed niche market material. In fact, I don’t mind admitting that its usual overall ranking fluctuates somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000. And that brings me to another point: the book’s overall Amazon Kindle Store ranking peaked at around 22,000, which prompts me to ask: if a small number of near-simultaneous purchases is enough to lift one eBook hundreds of thousands of places in the Amazon lists, are the vast majority of eBooks really selling as well as we’ve been led to believe? Is this an example of the so-called long tail, and did I just witness my own book advance from its usual place partway down the tail to somewhere nearer the front… yet still essentially a part of the tail? Okay, we’re getting into areas outside my expertise, which is admittedly not difficult, but it’s nutrition for cogitation, don’t you think?

What I take from this, however, is that the power of social media and our potential for collective action gave me a bestseller, as it could give you a bestseller, and as much as an observer might accuse us of gaming the system, we still put in the effort and discovered it was possible. And that surely stands for something in a world in which the little guy often feels excluded by the arcane rules of gargantuan corporations; rules that appear only to benefit those already at the top. Hey, Coker’s right. We’re not so little after all, not when we’re many.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on March 30, 2010. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Book Was Better

“I just saw the movie, wasn’t a patch on the book.”

If I’d stuffed my face with a deep-fried Mars bar every time I heard this sentiment, I’d probably lose a weigh-in with an elephant seal, have a mouthful of teeth with the average consistency of a sea sponge, and skin the overall texture of pepperoni by now. I’ll bet every last one of us has said something similar, though. Which makes every last one of us a bit weird, really. Not quite stupid, but getting there, you know?

Let me explain my thinking. (I find I have to do that a lot, which says nothing good about me whatsoever.)

It’s actually quite simple. A book is a book. A movie is a movie. And Popeye is what he is… an extremely odd-shaped sailor with a fetish for canned green vegetables.

Seriously, though, “the book was better” has become one of those irksome knee-jerk phrases that are stand-ins for something else entirely. See: “it’s political correctness gone mad!” which actually means “damn, the world doesn’t condone my bigotry any more, so I’ll just have this here tantrum instead”. Or: “I knew them before they were famous” which translates as “I am an unctuous hipster and will drip oily, corrosive scorn on, you know, like, everyone not in the inner circle of me, dude.”

But what do we really mean when we utter this phrase? In a mundane sense, I suppose we mean “this apple is better than this orange”, but if we already prefer apples to oranges, it doesn’t really bear repeating, does it? We could just make that clear once and be done with it: “I am an apple/book person. Not an orange/film person”. End of story. No, I think what is happening is similar to when people say “oh, TV, I don’t bother watching that stuff any more”—a whole slew of assumptions lie barely hidden beneath the surface, not least of which is that certain media are adjudged inferior. My point isn’t to argue whether or not they are, but to lament the smugness of the assumption itself, as if our audience will automatically nod vigorously in agreement every single time.

The complicating factor, I suppose, and one that exposes my metaphor for the flawed and incomplete thing it really is, is that this orange is based on that apple in some elusive way. Which shouldn’t matter—it’s still a freaking orange!—yet somehow, to most of us, it does. Why? Are we incorporating a little of the knew-them-before-they-were-famous hipster vibe alongside an assumption that books are inherently superior to movies? Is it because, even after just over a century, movies are still the upstarts? Are we making that hallowed mistake every generation makes, by deploring the newest and latest medium (whether it be jazz, rock’n'roll, comic books, hip-hop or video games, whatever “the kids” are into) in favour of what we are comfortable with? Whatever it is, I wish we’d stop it. It’s starting to sound like the jerking of ancient knees, a particularly alarming mix of rubbery creak and twangy groan that makes my stomach feel weird. So yeah, stop it. Please?

Okay, look. There are many novels that have been adapted for film for which any qualitative choice is difficult if not impossible. Let me say it again: a movie is not a book and a book is not a movie. One is pretty much entirely text-based and requires the audience to use imagination and comprehension, whereas the other is almost entirely visual and auditory and requires a little of the same two qualities plus something more elusive. One takes eight or nine hours to ingest, while the other takes around two hours. One is largely a solo project; the other a massive team effort. They are both extremely complex in different ways. Sure, they are related, in that they contain narrative arcs and characters and themes and such things, but they are still very different. Just as a movie and a video game are different. Yes, there are convergences, but overall it makes little sense to judge them by the same metrics.

Anyway, because my OCD side loves lists, I am now going to fire off a random group of 30 books, in no particular order, which weren’t better than their movie counterparts, but were simply different. Not better, not worse, different. Like apples. Like oranges. Like Popeye. Like deep-fried Mars bars. Okay, those last things are bad.

1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (renamed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in the original movie adaptation).
2. The Body by Stephen King (renamed Stand By Me in Rob Reiner’s film version)
3. The Shining by Stephen King
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (renamed Blade Runner in Ridley Scott’s classic film)
6. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
7. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
8. Psycho by Robert Bloch
9. Atonement by Ian McEwan
10. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (combine Peter Jackson’s trilogy for the comparison)
11. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
12. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
13. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
14. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
15. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
16. Deliverance by James Dickey
17. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
18. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
19. Children of Men by P.D. James
20. Misery by Stephen King
21. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
22. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (the best film being the 1939 version)
23. The World According to Garp by John Irving
24. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
25. The Dead by James Joyce
26. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
27. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
28. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
29. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
30. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Note the mix of classic lit, contemporary lit and genre fiction… No real reason, just note it… Okay, I admit it, I was going to make a great point there and completely forgot what it was. Cough. Moving on… Unlike the occasional glaring piece of wrongness, such as The Bonfire of the Vanities or Moby Dick, not one of these film versions is significantly inferior, or even inferior at all, some being arguably superior. Certainly my point stands that you can make a case for either incarnation. An argument can also be made, based on a closer study of these successes, perhaps, that a film—recognizing itself as a different animal entirely—may often work better if it doesn’t try too hard to replicate the source material.

And now, since I’ve only included works with which I’m familiar in both mediums, feel free to add, in the comments section below, the many I’ve overlooked.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on March 16, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Three Rs - Rules of Riting Revisited

Illustration: Andrzej KrauzeSo, after flirting with anarchy in my last Indies Unlimited blog post, I’m now going to continue to obsess about rules, just like that lady who didth protest too much.

In my defence, rules are kind of fascinating, even when we disagree with them. I mean, how was it decided, for example, that in the English city of Chester, you can only shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow inside the city walls after midnight? Not even sure which part of that rule I disagree with most, especially since it’s apparently okay to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow in York at any time of day or night. Except Sundays. (Oh, that’s alright, then. And no, I promise I’m not making any of this up, you can check.)

But, back on track. My purposes here are to highlight a really cool link, in which the Guardian newspaper, following an excellent response by crime writer Elmore Leonard to a similar request, asked a bunch of accomplished writers to list up to ten “rules of writing” of their own. It really is an impressive list. Now, I could simply point you there and hope you go read them, but not only would this be a very short blog post, but the piece itself is very long, is in two parts, and honestly, even I am not that naive. So instead, I’ll grab a fairly random handful of these rules, and hold them up for inspection. As well as mockery. Okay, not mockery; some sporadic light teasing, perhaps. All done in a spirit of affection, of course.

1. Elmore Leonard: “if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Hey, Elmore, that sounds a bit like writing to me. What’s that? Uh. Just kidding.

2. Margaret Atwood: “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

I now have an unrequited urge to ask the redoubtable Margaret Atwood if she’s heard of pencil sharpeners. Or mechanical pencils. Or, uh, iPads.

3. Geoff Dyer: “Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”

Uh-huh. Nodding my head vigorously if slightly stupidly here. Okay, not a good look. Moving on.

4. Ann Enright: “The first 12 years are the worst.”

Yes. And I would add—in flagrant violation of the entire principle of comparatives versus superlatives—that the next 12 years are also the worst. Face it, it never gets better. And I don’t even think I’m kidding this time.

5. Ann Enright: “Only bad writers think that their work is really good.”

I must like short and punchy, since Ms Enright gets two entries in a row here. And yes, I included this because we all feel hubris sometimes—until hubris grows suddenly weary of being felt and makes a break for it, leaving us alone with our far more familiar companion: crippling self-doubt. Screw you, hubris, we never loved you anyway. Sob.

6. Richard Ford: “Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.”

Good man! The spirit of Indies Unlimited right there. I also enjoy that he follows it up with “Don’t take any s@#$ if you can ­possibly help it,” which achieves a certain balance between gracious and curmudgeonly, one of the more difficult poses to maintain, I’ve found.

7. Esther Freud: “Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.”

Leave a little mystery, let your readers fill in the gaps. This feels like all-round good advice, like when the Brazilian government encouraged people to pee in the shower.

8. Neil Gaiman: “Write.”

Well, thanks for that, Neil. Must have scratched your noggin a good while before coming up with that one. But wait, hold up, he’s not done. He follows up later—like a drunk sportswriter mixing metaphors—with a slam dunk out of left field right in the top corner…

9. Neil Gaiman: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

I take from this: listen to the instincts of others—at first—but be wary if they then try to help you write the specific story they want to read, and not the story you want to read. Kind of like that initially harmless and even amusing drunk who then proceeds to follow you home from the bar. The one you turn to at some point, growl at in a low yet threatening voice to go write his own story and stop creeping yours. Sure, the metaphor died a little there, but what of it?

10. PD James: “Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”

This. Thank you. More of us need to pass this on. And very much related is Hilary Mantel’s “Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.” In other words, drop those sparkly-vampire boy-wizards now, you don’t know where they’ve been.

11. Andrew Motion: “Think with your senses as well as your brain.”

Again, succinct. But an invitation to live inside your story, to translate the sights, smells, sounds and textures into words. The real magic of writing. Maybe it takes a poet. And yes, that was an entirely sincere one.

12. Will Self: “You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.”

I sense some disturbing similarities between writing and sex here. We could investigate further. Or we could succumb to a probably fortuitous hybrid of wisdom and cowardice and move on…

13. Will Self: “The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.”

14. Will Self: “Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.”

15. Zadie Smith: “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.”

A basic density being my default mode, even I’m beginning to pick up from the last few examples that writing is probably not the ideal pursuit if your goal in life is, uh, to be happy. Damn. Hmmm. It really is too late, isn’t it?

16. Sarah Waters: “Talent trumps all. If you’re a ­really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni’s Room. Without “overwritten” prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, ­crucially, only by understanding what they’re for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.”

This comes closest to saying what I’ve been trying to express in my last two posts. It encapsulates that ambivalence with eloquence (ouch, after that particular ornate string of Latinate pretension, I will now be hounded for life by the finger-wagging ghost of William Strunk). But it does. And I would argue that the last clause, encouraging as it does the possibilities inherent in such experiments, may lead a few of us toward that greatness… or at the very least to soar awhile in that rarefied air. While waiting for the inevitable plummet earthwards, no doubt, toward a horribly gruesome crash that will nonetheless have been well earned.

And finally, if only because it’s both funny and annoyingly smartass to point out a paradox, here’s the ultimate (non) rule…

17. Michael Moorcock: “Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.”

(Seventeen? What kind of number is that? Who makes lists of seventeen? And yes, I did completely make up the word “didth” back there.)

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A version of this article first appeared on Indies Unlimited on February 17, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

On Board at Indies Unlimited

Uh oh, what have I done? Today, the website Indies Unlimited officially announced that they're finally at the barrel-scraping point and have clearly run out of decent indie authors to ensnare in their evil global-domination schemes. Against all commonsense advice, they went and "recruited" me—if by "recruited" you mean "drove up beside me in a van with blacked-out windows, threw a burlap sack over my head and dragged me to an undisclosed location that smells of cordite and sourmash whiskey".

But on a serious note, one glance at the range of talent and sheer Hollywood charisma of that staff team makes me feel honoured to be accepted among their ranks. I could call them out one by one, but I don't want to embarrass them. Suffice to say they are indeed a great bunch of writers... but more importantly, they give every indication of being great human beings, too. Well, everyone other than that Mader character. You gotta watch that one, he's crafty.

On a day on which the Guardian features an article predicting a correction in the market for e-publishing, it's even more essential to believe that independent writers can make their mark and achieve success on their own merits, so I thank Stephen Hise and the Indies Unlimited crew (motley and worrisomely shady as they are) for this opportunity to prove that quality and community can and will attract enough readers to make this whole experiment viable. Except "experiment" is too cold a word. These are passionate people behind their casual, urbane façades, and as funny and warm as they are once you break the ice (bribes and flattery usually help), they take writing seriously. Seriously enough to abduct people on the street. And threaten them with something that had a lot of little wires attached. Yes, that serious.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.