Category Archives: Great Writing

Dying Writers, Dying Readers

Author Annie Dillard once wrote, “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.” The quote intrigued me. What did she mean?

Source

It’s from a 1989 essay in The New York Times titled “Write Till You Drop.” The paragraph continues, “That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What would you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?”

Picture the situation. You are near death and so are your readers. The pen and pad (or computer) sit before you. How would you write differently than you do now?

Answers?

As morbid as the thought experiment may seem, some answers to that question occur to me:

  • Don’t waste time. You haven’t much time for writing, nor do your readers for reading.
  • Don’t ‘enrage by triviality.’ Write about what’s important, vital to being human. Write the thing you’d regret not having written, the thing readers would regret not having read.
  • Don’t save your best for some later time. Don’t keep that masterpiece in reserve. There will be no later time.

Wonderful Concentration

English author Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dillard admonishes us to write that way all the time, with a wonderfully concentrated mind.

Socrates

Consider the last words of Socrates. At his trial he received a sentence of death. Imagine the ‘wonderful concentration’ of his mind as he drank hemlock and felt his limbs going numb. Some have reported his final words as, “Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Don’t forget to pay the debt.”

How can that be? On his deathbed, one of history’s greatest philosophers prattled about not having paid for a rooster? Is that not enraging by triviality?

Newer interpretations of those last words paint a different picture. Greeks considered Asclepius a god of medicine and the rooster a symbol of rebirth or eternal life, for it crows every morning. Some now think Socrates’ words a metaphor, a way of saying, “Athens may kill me, but philosophy lives on.” If so, that satisfies Ms. Dillard’s advice to write as if you were dying.

Triviality

Regarding the part of her advice referring to triviality, that confused me at first. What is trivial and what is not?

After all, author and politician Bruce Barton said, “Sometimes, when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think that there are no little things.”

No little things? Aren’t they the trivial things?

Perhaps not. Mother Theresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

Ah, that might provide a clue regarding what Ms. Dillard meant by triviality. You may write about anything, large or small, but do so with great love. Use up every drop of your literary skill. It’s not the triviality of the subject, but the treatment of it by the writer.

In sports, we say a player ‘left if all on the field,’ meaning he gave it his utmost. I may be wrong, or I may be over-analyzing it, but that’s what I believe Annie Dillard meant in advising us to write as if we were dying, and as if our reading audience were dying as well.

If your next written sentence were your last, would readers say you ‘left it all on the field?’ Aim to write with a mind as wonderfully concentrated as that of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 14, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Has it Been 10,000 Hours Yet?

After Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, the Story of Success showed 10,000 hours of practice equaled genius, I felt good. After all, I’d been writing almost that long, so genius and success should lie just over the next rise. A few more hours to go. 

Then along came Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of this article in Scientific American, saying the 10,000-hour rule doesn’t apply to creative fields like fiction writing.

Now you tell me, Doc.

His rationale makes sense, dang it. To become a genius at an activity requiring repetitive motions—oboe playing, bricklaying, pizza-making, etc.—the 10,000 hours seems logical. Some of that is creative play, but much is building muscle memory and learning more advanced techniques.

But purely creative endeavors—music composition, art, and writing—aren’t like that. Muscle memory won’t help. Spend 10,000 hours typing and retyping Sense and Sensibility, and you’ll end up a fast typist. But your skills as a novelist won’t have changed.

The article counts 10,000 hours of practice (also called the 10-Year Rule) as one factor in creativity, but gives that number a wide error band.

The author cites several other factors of importance to creativity. Unfortunately, a writer lacks control over some of these factors, such as talent, personality, genes, and socio-economic environment.

Lucky for us, the article provides some aspects of creativity lying within our control. For example, Dr. Kaufman states that creative people often use messy processes. If you’re the neat and organized type, you’ll have to work on correcting that.

The author says creative people take interest in a broad array of things. If you write fiction, consider writing stories outside your normal genre.

Too much specialized expertise, says Dr. Kaufman, detracts from creativity. Often, he says, people outside a field contribute the fresh insights and creative solutions. As writers, we can take care not to become overly specialized, and each of us can claim outsider status in something.

I give the doctor credit for identifying personal attributes that influence creativity, but I don’t believe you’re stuck with whatever creativity you were born with. (Nor did he imply that in his article.)

You can increase your creativity. I believe you, and all of us, were born overflowing with creativity. However, society’s pressures to conform squeezed much of that creativity out.

You can get it back through regular exercise. Here’s the exercise to try. Think of a problem. If it’s a fiction-writing problem, maybe you’re stuck for an idea, or fell into a plot hole, or need a character motivation, or seek a setting description. The problem could be anything.

Now start writing solutions as they occur to you. Include stupid ideas, impractical ideas, zany and magic ideas. It doesn’t matter—no one will see your list. Often very good ideas only emerge after thinking of dozens of bad ones first.

Yes, you may call it brainstorming. Unlike normal brainstorming, though, you’re doing this alone. Also, unlike normal brainstorming, you’re seeking more than just a good answer to your problem. You’re trying to stretch your creativity muscles. You’re retraining your mind to free it from a cage built long ago to hold it.

Maybe you’ll run dry after ten listed solutions, but I encourage you to push on. It might help to consider this–back when you were five years old, you could rattle off fifty ideas without slowing down. That’s the childlike creativity you’re looking to recapture.

If you aim to be a writer, forget about the 10,000 hours, the 10-Year Rule. That’s for others. You need creativity, and no clock or calendar can give you that. Let your inner kid loose again, this time to skip around in the infinite playground of your mind where milliseconds equal millennia and a pace is as good as a parsec.

And, there he goes, the five-year-old version of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 20, 2023Permalink

Equation for a Great Science Fiction Story

If only we could write great SF by following a step-by-step process, or a connect-the-dots diagram, or a mathematical equation.

I seem to recall Isaac Asimov once said a good story maximizes the emotional impact on the reader. That definition starts out resembling an equation, but trails off into the unquantifiable chaos of human emotion.

NASA scientist Christine Corbett Moran did a nice mathematical analysis of what she enjoys about SF. She chose an interesting metric. First, she noted the point at which she became engaged enough in the book that she had to finish it. She divided the number of pages left after that point by the story’s total length. At the very least, it’s a good measure for determining how early a story grabbed her interest. She called the parameter engagement.

I tried a different approach to quantifying good SF. I listed twelve attributes I thought important (engaging protagonist, intriguing setting, interesting style, etc.) and performed a pair-wise analysis on them. This required comparing every attribute to each of the others to determine importance. Yes, it’s tedious, and yes, it forced me to make hard choices, but such are the hardships I endure for my readers.

My resulting list, from most important to least, is as follows:

  1. Logical Plot. Events must make sense in a cause-effect relationship.
  2. Engaging Protagonist. I have to care about the main character, and some lesser ones.
  3. Difficult Problem/Ingenious Solution. The problem should be important and appear impossible. The solution, unexpected and elegant.
  4. Consistent (or Explained) Motivations. The characters shouldn’t say or do things out-of-character. Or, if they do, I need to know the reason for the deviation.
  5. Believable Science. I can tolerate some stretching of science, but give me enough convincing techno-babble to make it seem plausible.
  6. Intriguing and Well-described Setting. Make your world fascinating and immerse me in it. Explore the implications to help it seem vivid and real.
  7. Plot Twists. The unexpected turn, the jaw-dropping surprise. A few of these keep me reading on.
  8. Interesting and Distinct Writing Style. If you choose words well, if your story flows like a stream with interesting ripples and eddies, I’ll follow you anywhere.
  9. Symbolism, Inside Jokes, and Easter Eggs. I’m a sucker for this stuff. I don’t always get them, but when I do, I feel like I’ve broken a secret code.
  10. Humor. Not all stories need humor, and not all writers pull it off well, but it’s a plus.
  11. Message. Don’t lecture me with a message or morale. Still, I like it when I finish a story and a day later realize what the author was really saying.
  12. Relevance to My Life. It’s nice when a character thinks and acts like me, but that’s not necessary for me to enjoy the story.  

Your list of attributes would be different from mine, and even if some items match, the order of your list would be different. That’s why one reader’s “great!” is another’s “meh.”

Sorry, I don’t know the equation for writing a great science fiction story. If it exists, and if top SF authors know it, they aren’t posting it on their websites.

It’s possible, too, that our elusive equation might include terms like luck and timing, both largely out of the writer’s control.

Perhaps there’s no use searching for an equation to write great science fiction. Maybe it’s better to spend your time trying to write better stories. That’s the nonmathematical goal of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 10, 2022Permalink

27 Ways to Celebrate Jules Verne’s Birthday

Just two more days until Jules Verne’s birthday on February 8th. He’ll turn 194. How will you celebrate?

I have a few ideas for you. For convenience, I’ll separate them into categories.

Low-Cost At-Home Activities

  • Read (or re-read) one of his books. Perhaps the best way to celebrate.
  • Join the North American Jules Verne Society.
  • Watch a movie inspired by one of Verne’s books. There are dozens to choose from, some available on the internet.
  • Toast to Verne with some French wine, and, as the wine takes effect, imagine taking an extraordinary voyage of adventure to some far-off, exotic location.
  • Play a game of whist with three fellow Verne enthusiasts. (Verne’s characters often played that game.)
  • Write your own fictional adventure story set in a place you’ve never been.
  • Imagine a trip back through time to meet Jules Verne. What would that conversation be like? What would you ask him? What might he ask you?
  • Do what Verne did in writing Paris in the 20st Century—imagine what your own city or town will look like a century from now, in the year 2122.
  • Find a globe or world map. Say you have to reach a specific location, but have only the latitude (as with The Children of Captain Grant), or just the longitude. Imagine the adventures you’d have as you searched along one line.
  • Imagine Verne time-travelled to 2022 and you could talk to him. What about our world would you show him first? What might fascinate him most?
  • Bake a birthday cake for Jules Verne. It could depict (or be in the shape of) a balloon, a submarine, a moon projectile, or anything else from his novels.
  • Compose, and sing, a birthday song for Jules Verne. For the lyrics, try to work in titles of his novels or character names.
  • Dress up as your favorite Verne character.
  • Write a poem in honor of Jules Verne
  • Write a letter to Jules Verne, wishing him a happy birthday.
  • Draw your own illustration of your favorite Verne character, vehicle, or scene.
  • Many people have their own version of what the Nautilus might have looked like. Pick your favorite from this website maintained by Michael & Karen Crisafulli, and draw your own.

More Involved Activities

  • Build a model of one of his vehicles. A search of the internet will give you many to choose from.
  • Build and launch a balloon made from a garbage bag, safely following instructions on this site, or this one. Imagine you’re aboard it, floating high in the air, for five weeks.
  • Use a 3D printer to print a Verne-inspired vehicle, or hire someone to print it for you.
  • Find a suitable cave and go on your own journey to the center of the Earth, (or as close as you can get).
  • Join a local model rocketry club. (Not the same as launching a manned projectile from a cannon, but it’s cheaper and safer.)
  • Visit the nearest submarine museum and tour its featured submarine. Note the differences between it and the Nautilus.

Activities for the Truly Dedicated

  • Jules Verne often set his stories on islands. Plan and take your own trip to an island somewhere.
  • Visit Verne’s birthplace and museum in Nante, France.
  • Visit Verne’s gravesite in Amiens, France.
  • Make a bet with some friends about how fast you can travel around the world, then win the bet.  

Later this year, the North American Jules Verne Society will have an anthology published under the title of Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne. Among the millions of people eagerly awaiting that event are you and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 6, 2022Permalink

When Robots Write Better

Here’s a thought experiment. We know researchers push Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology further all the time. What if AI begins writing stories and novels better than humans do?

To make it more fun, let’s assume AI lags behind humans in all other areas. That is, AI programs start to write wonderful fiction, but accomplish nothing else of note.

At this point, that seems unlikely. According to this article by Andrew Mayne, AI has made some progress writing two-sentence flash fiction. and author Erik Hoel found AI did a fair job of generating reasonable prose when he fed it prompts from one of his novels. To date, no AI has written a story or novel that has been widely read as literature.

Before AI comes to the point of writing better than humans, we’ll pass through a phase where human writers partner with AI to improve their productivity. A human author will come up with a story concept—characters, plot, setting—and put the AI to work generating text. The human will then edit and submit. We’re pretty close to that now, with software such as Marlowe, AI Dungeon, Jarvis AI, and GPT-3.

Perhaps not long after that, some AI software might become capable enough to create the story concept and write the manuscript and edit it. At some point, such submissions will pass a literary version of the Turing Test. A human editor won’t be able to tell if a human or AI wrote a story. In fact, some experts believe AI will write a best-seller by 2049.

A short time later, AIs might become capable of writing stories and novels better than any human writer. By that, I mean human readers might come to prefer fiction written by AI.

Since fiction explores the human condition and is designed to provoke an emotional reaction in human readers, my thought experiment postulates that AI might come to do this better than human writers. AI might know us better than we know ourselves.

What then? Is our species ready for that day?

No human writer after that time will stand a chance of keeping up with AI writers in quantity or quality. People inclined to take up writing will choose other pursuits and the number of human authors will dwindle. A small niche industry will linger on, since a few purist readers will refuse to read AI-written fiction. That small slice of the market will support a handful of human authors for a while.

Setting aside that tiny minority, think of the millions of readers devouring the prose churned out by clever machines. Assuming they pay for the books, who pockets that money? The AI developers?

What if fiction-writing AI software evolves on its own? That is, the software imagines—and programs—improvements in itself? Who gets the money when AI moves beyond the need for human programmers?

Moreover, what will motivate AI to write? We know why human authors write stories—they feel an urge to say something, in words, about the human condition in story form, and to earn money from doing so.

Why would AI write? What’s in it for them? Will AI feel some similar urge to reach humans emotionally, through language?

I don’t know the answers, and it’s disturbing to think about. Imagine that day when the last human author dies. Still, the advent of superior AI writers may usher in a wonderful era for human readers, able to read fiction surpassing all that’s been written before.

Perhaps, after even the memory of human writers fades, one person driven by an urge no other human feels, will strive to write as well as AIs. That scribbler will learn from the machines, and will put words together as the person’s ancestors once did. Perhaps this lone writer will offer a novel to the world, a novel in the true sense of that word—new. Perhaps readers will be amazed that a human can write as well as a machine.

Maybe that lone author’s efforts will inspire others, leading to a rebirth of human writing not seen since our Stone Age.

There’s a story idea for you, free of charge, from the (human) mind of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 9, 2022Permalink

The 4 Stages of Writing Productivity

If you write, you’d like to write faster. But how? On October 20, I attended a webinar by prolific author Vi Khi Nao, and she said some things that might interest and help you.

Vi Khi Nao

She titled her talk, ‘How to Write Effortlessly and Quickly,’ and I was struck by her four ‘productivity techniques,’ called Inflexible, Exact, Flexible, and Ideal Muse.

When she declared that last one, Ideal Muse, as her favorite, I figured I’d skip to it. Then she said you can’t skip. You must work through each technique in order.

Dang. That makes them more like steps or stages. You must go through them in order, she stated, because you will learn something at each stage that helps you in the next one.

I’ll outline each stage in my own words. What follows is my interpretation of what she said. If I got it wrong, it’s my fault, not hers.

Inflexible

Determined to write more, Vi Khi Nao put aside as much of her non-writing life as possible. She limited her interactions with others, devoting herself to writing. She filled her days with writing, and became ‘inflexibly disciplined’ about it.

Her output grew. She wrote a lot. However, she considered most of the resulting manuscripts bad. Her own prose bored her, and it required heavy editing. In the end, after many drafts, she ended up with a tiny amount of quality writing. Practicing this technique, many of us might find our health suffering, along with our relationships with friends and loved ones.

Still, she learned writing discipline, the value of daily ritual. She experienced writing in the flow, without self-editing.

Exact

She tried something else, setting a more modest goal of 10,000 words every two weeks. This time, she strove for quality as well as quantity. She decided any kind of writing counted as part of her 10,000 words—short stories, novellas, screenplays, and poems. She worked on bits of everything, alternating, much like a farmer rotates crops.

With a variety of projects going at once, she found her creativity stimulated. Although she didn’t mention it, I suspect her relationships with others improved after stopping the previous Inflexible technique. The new, modest, 10,000-word goal helped relieve some mental pressure, and her product required less editing. However, I suspect most of us would gravitate toward short and easy projects to meet the word count goal.

From this technique she learned a better balance between quality and quantity.

Flexible

Still seeking a way to produce high-quality writing faster, she set precise end goals (a novel by this date, a screenplay by that date, etc.) but allowed time for flexing. She wrote based on the momentum of the moment, when the mood struck. While maintaining the discipline of writing each day, if she entered the flow zone, she went with it.

The emphasis on quality helped her writing. Having established good writing habits in the earlier techniques, she got quantity along with it. However, I suspect she still felt guilty when not writing, and she still wasn’t in tune with her muse, her inner creativity.

The Flexible stage teaches the elasticity of time itself. All hours are not equal for a writer. All days are not equal. Quality writing requires time, but cannot be created in a linear way.

Ideal Muse

Knowing now that her muse didn’t clock in and clock out at specific times, she merged all previous techniques and allowed her muse to schedule her writing. When the muse struck, she dropped everything and wrote, no matter what. If shopping, she wrote in the store. If driving, she pulled over and wrote. She set product-driven goals, not date-specific ones. Sometimes she wrote for five minutes, other times for five hours. She monitored her health, knowing she couldn’t write in an unhealthy state.

At which stage are you right now? If increasing my productivity means I must start with the Inflexible stage, I’m not ready to sacrifice everything else in life for my writing. Still, I believe I’ve gone through a lesser version of the first two stages, and am in the Flexible stage now.

Whoops. Hang on. The muse is calling—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 31, 2021Permalink

How Readable is Your Story?

If you’d like your fiction to sell well, wouldn’t it be beneficial if readers found your stories easy to read?

Not all writers see it that way. Some authors of the world’s great classic literature made it tough on their readers, but their books still became bestsellers. Obviously, readability alone doesn’t determine great writing.

For the most part, the factors of great writing remain intangible, but you can measure readability. Many word processor software packages calculate the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease’ score, as well as the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level,’ both standard measures of readability. The higher the Reading Ease score and the lower the Grade Level, the more readable your story.

Journalist Shane Snow inspired me to think along these lines with this wonderful blogpost. He did a lot of research obtaining Flesch-Kincaid data on many great fiction authors, and graphed it all.

That made me wonder how I measured up. I obtained the data on my ten most recently published stories. Listed from least readable to most readable, here they are:

StoryFlesch-Kincaid Reading EaseFlesch-Kincaid Grade LevelGenreYear Written
“The Steam Elephant”69.06.8Alt Hist2006
“Target Practice”69.36.5Scifi1999
“The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall”69.86.5Alt Hist2011
“Reconnaissance Mission”71.46.2Alt Hist2019
“Ripper’s Ring”72.26.4Alt Hist2015
“Moonset”74.85.3Horror2018
“A Clouded Affair”75.95.5Scifi2014
“The Cats of Nerio-3”76.35.1Scifi2016
“After the Martians”78.35.1Scifi2015
“Instability”79.14.8Alt Hist2017

Not too many obvious patterns there. My alternate history stories tend toward less readability than my straight science fiction, but not always. To some degree, I’ve improved readability with the passing years, but there’s some scatter in that, too.

When I average the F-K Grade Level of these stories, I get 5.82. According to one of the charts in Shane Snow’s post, that puts me around the readability level of Hunter S. Thompson, and between early J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad company.

If my stories don’t sell as well as theirs, it only proves that, as I mentioned above, readability alone doesn’t make for great writing.

What if it did? Could you write in a way that maximizes your Flesch-Kincaid readability score? The Wikipedia entry gives the formula. It’s very simple. Just take your average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and the rest is math.

To make readers struggle, use long words and long sentences. To make your writing more readable, do the opposite.

To make your stories irresistible and widely sold…ah, that’s the magic formula I’d really like to know. That equation—whatever it is—might contain readability as one factor, but also many others. Ernest Hemingway earned a F-K Grade Level of just over 4, and Michael Crichton earned one a little under 9.

Shane Snow makes the point that a lower F-K Grade Level allows you to reach a larger potential audience for your stories. However, he cites two other factors that help determine whether your writing will gain traction and catch on. I’ll discuss my take on those in a future blogpost.

Although readability alone won’t determine whether your stories sell in the marketplace, consider this: if all other factors rated the same between two stories, wouldn’t you prefer the more readable one? I suspect you would, and so would—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 10, 2021Permalink

Can You Skip the Suffering Part?

Many great writers suffered early in life and during their writing careers. Of these, a good number wrote from a place of suffering, capturing that pain and creating timeless novels.

Did their suffering lead to classic writing? If so, would these authors have written so well if not for their suffering? In other words, is personal suffering necessary to produce great art?

Brian Feinblum explored this topic in a blogpost, and that’s what inspired my post today.

What about those of us who have led relatively happy and disease-free lives? Do we lack the necessary ingredients to produce great fiction?

The list of writers who suffered from health ailments alone (never mind other sorts of problems) is long. Here’s a partial list: 

  • John Milton—likely a detached retina leading to blindness
  • Jonathan Swift—Ménière’s Disease leading to vertigo and tinnitus, obsessive-compulsive disorder
  • The Brontë Sisters—tuberculosis and depression; one may have had Asperger’s Syndrome.
  • Herman Melville—pains in joints, back, and eyes due to Ankylosing Spondylitis which brought on depression
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky—epilepsy, gambling addiction, severe depression
  • Jules Verne—stomach cramps from colitis, painful facial paralysis from Bell’s Palsy
  • Edith Wharton—typhoid fever, asthma
  • Jack London—bipolar disorder, scurvy, alcoholism, leg ulcers
  • Virginia Woolf—depression, mood swings, hallucinations
  • James Joyce—eye problems after gonorrhea treatments
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald—heavy drinking, heart disease
  • Ernest Hemingway—depression, alcoholism, electroshock treatments
  • George Orwell—damaged bronchial tubes after childhood bacterial infection, tuberculosis
  • Tennessee Williams—depression, drug and alcohol addiction
  • Sylvia Plath—depression; shock therapy; several suicide attempts

Perhaps your life doesn’t include any ailments nearly as severe as any on that list. Does that eliminate you from contention on some future list of great authors?

Fiction revolves around conflict, and therefore fictional characters must suffer. That’s necessary so readers can believe in them, identify with them, and root for them during their struggles.

Writers with health problems may have an edge here. They can write out of their own painful experiences. They’ve gazed into the abyss themselves, and garner instant credibility.

However, not all people who’ve suffered end up as successful novelists. Further, not all great writers suffered from anything more severe than the typical pains of a normal life.

I think what matters more is your ability to identify deeply with a suffering character you’ve created, and to convey that suffering to readers with your words. That strong empathy will come through, and distinguish your writing.

You needn’t have endured intense personal suffering to create great fiction. Make your protagonist suffer, though, and convince your readers to care about that character.

Hellen Keller knew something about the subject, and wrote, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

You may not have suffered as she did, but you can write. On the journey toward great fiction writing, whether you’ve suffered or not, you’re free to join—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 3, 2021Permalink

Metrics of Fiction-Writing Success

Every writer wants to know the secret to publishing success. How can you get your first story published? How can you make more money from your writing?

What if somebody did a statistical analysis comparing successful writers to unsuccessful ones to find out what one group has and the other one lacks?

Someone did.

Written Word Media performed that analysis a few years ago, and their founder and Chief Operating Officer, Ferol Vernon, blogged about the results.

They polled a large group of authors and concentrated on two groups: financially successful authors earning greater than $5000 a month from book sales, and “emerging authors” earning less than $500 a month from book sales. What follows is a summary of the five main differences between the two groups.

The more successful group:

  1. Wrote more;
  2. Hired a professional book cover designer;
  3. Hired a professional editor;
  4. Used free promotions; and
  5. Wrote in a popular genre.

Written Word Media drew the obvious conclusion—to be a successful writer, do the things successful writers are doing.

I don’t doubt their methods or their numbers. I’d be a bit skeptical about some of the conclusions, however. Here’s why:

  • In my experience with metrics, I’ve learned people tend to measure only things they can easily measure. Statisticians like quantifiable numbers, or specific questions with yes or no answers. However, success is filled with intangibles, too. For example, how do you measure the quality of a writer’s books? How about the luck of writing the right book at the right time?
  • Sometimes, statisticians fall prey to mistaking causes for effects. For example, they see a high correlation between high-earning authors and the hiring of book designers and editors. They conclude that those authors are successful because of those factors. However, once an author becomes successful, that author is in a better position to hire a book designer and editor, so perhaps the success caused the hiring of experts, not the other way around.  
  • Last, there’s the ‘necessary but not sufficient’ argument. The list of five things may well be characteristics of successful writers, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you do those five things, you will be successful.

I don’t mean for my quibbles to detract from the value of the analysis, though. I’m certain if you write more, offer free promotions, and write in a popular genre, you’ll stand a greater chance of getting more book sales than if you don’t do those things.

As for paying book cover designers and editors, I’m a little less certain.

Regarding the intangibles, the unquantifiables not included in the analysis, I’d suggest you strive to write well. Write good stories readers would like to read. Write with your own, consistent, distinct style. Write from the heart.

How do you measure and graph those things? No idea. Don’t ask—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 26, 2021Permalink

Happy Birthday, Jules Verne!

He’s looking good, for a 193-year-old.

That’s the thing about great writers of the past, they still speak to us. In a sense, they live forever.

Would you expect there’d be an active fan club devoted to you, in a foreign country, 116 years after your death? In Verne’s case, there are several. The one I’m most familiar with is the North American Jules Verne Society.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned the NAJVS is sponsoring an anthology of short fiction, the first of those it’s ever done. The working title for the anthology is Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne. I’m fortunate enough to be part of the editing team.

That call for submissions is still active and NAJVS will be accepting stories (and artwork) until April 30. For more details, click here.

So far, we’ve received some good story submissions. However, we could use more stories based on the full range of Verne’s oeuvre. To start creative fluids coursing through your veins, allow me to mention that Jules Verne wrote about:

  • A 35-day balloon trip over Africa (Five Weeks in a Balloon)
  • A voyage to the North Pole with a mutiny, an ice palace, and a volcano (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras)
  • A hike many miles underground, encountering a subterranean ocean and prehistoric animals (Journey to the Center of the Earth)
  • A journey to the Moon aboard a projectile launched from a cannon (From the Earth to the Moon)
  • A globe-girdling quest for a lost father, knowing only his geographic latitude (In Search of the Castaways)
  • A trek across Russia by courier who can’t see where he’s going (Michael Strogoff)
  • A comet slicing off a chunk of the Earth, with people and animals still on it (Off on a Comet)
  • A family living underground for a decade (The Child of the Cavern)
  • Two men using their halves of an inheritance to establish rival utopian cities (The Begum’s Fortune)
  • A steam-powered mechanical elephant marching across India (The Steam House)
  • A ship-sized helicopter operated by a mad scientist (Robur the Conqueror)
  • An attempt to alter the Earth’s axis (The Purchase of the North Pole)
  • A mysterious Count in a Transylvanian castle, that might have inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula (The Carpathian Castle)
  • A man-made, propeller-driven island (Propeller Island)
  • A vehicle that operates on land, on and beneath the water, and in the air (Master of the World)
  • A plan to flood the Sahara Desert to create an inland sea in North Africa (Invasion of the Sea)
  • A description of Paris nearly 100 years in Verne’s future. (Paris in the Twentieth Century)

Oh, yeah. Verne also wrote a book about a submarine (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). In fact, the above list is way, way incomplete.

Still, something on that list should nudge a neuron in your noggin, move your muse to murmuring, and cause you to commence clacking on your keyboard.

Today, his birthday, is a fine day to channel your inner Verne. Allow him to inspire you to write a great story, or create a cover image. Send it in. Eagerly waiting to read your tale or view your art is a group of NAJVS editors, who happen to include—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 8, 2021Permalink