Alexandra Erin

There’s a lot of what I call “BOPPP” sites out there… you know, sites that ask you to Buy Our Proven Publishing Package, because they just know there’s an author buried deep inside you with a story to tell and if you would only just pay for their service they could help you turn that inner author loose, and hey look, some of the people who used their service even went on to be published! They promise!

Then there’s the ads that go “AUTHORS WANTED! Leading subsidy publishing house is looking for manuscripts from hungry young up-and-coming writers who have no idea how the industry works and don’t know what ’subsidy publishing’ is! For just $279.99, we’ll tell you the secret of paying us $5,000 to publish your manuscript on the promise that you can make that much back and more if you can somehow manage to personally persuade bookstores to carry it and then stage a national promotion effort for it!”

Well, actually, they usually cut it off at “up-and-coming writers”, but if you’ve ever seen one of those ads and been tempted, trust me about what follows. Especially in this day and age, there’s no reason anybody should ever pay a vanity subsidy publisher, period.

Then, on the other hand, there is Anna Paradox. Anna is an author and a life coach who specializes in helping other authors. I visited her site with a skeptical and knowledgeable eye, but found to my surprise that she’s not offering “Proven Publishing Packages.”… rather, advice and experience.

Her direct coaching is probably out of most people’s price ranges, but she has a sort of structured self-study course and work book called From Wishing To Writing which she offers for $27.

Big Disclaimer: I have not read the actual book, except for the excerpt she provides. I have not personally used Ms. Paradox’s services.

However, from what she’s made available on her website, I would say she has great advice and a sound approach. That one excerpt is better than a lot of the “So you want to be a writer?” books out there.

Also, from reading the rest of her site, I have to say, I love her attitude… I’m getting a very DIY-type vibe from her, which is always good. The headline at the top of the page where she offers her services as an editor and coach is great: “Write the Book Only You Can Write.” It’s a good thing she gives that one away for free… because honestly, it’s priceless advice.

I might just check out the course, so I can give a full review of it rather than this rather qualified endorsement… I don’t know that I’ll actually follow it, because she expects you to stat out writing five minutes every day and I don’t know where I’d find the time to do that… what with all the writing I do, you know?

But in the mean time, let me just say that it looks good and I’ll probably be pointing people towards her site rather than repeating the “Write every day. Write what you want to and need to.” type advice I find myself giving people over and over again. Honestly, if you’re trying to get started writing and find yourself stuck, even just the excerpt from her workbook might be of value.

Her site is annaparadox.com. The FWTW course is here.

With the help of Nanyque, I believe I have Tribe working correctly in IE 6. Apparently the ads were just too wide to fit into the alloted space, for some reason. Bleh. I ended up having to nuke all the current bids to resize them, but to encourage them to fill up again faster I’m taking some of the accumulated funds in my Project Wonderful account and buying a few hours time on Something*Positive.

I still don’t have any clue about the reported Safari problem, though. That’s just weird. I’ve reverted the stylesheet to default (except for my changes to main body font size… teeny fonts suck) and I’m hoping that fixed it, but if not… I don’t know.

Could somebody who has IE 6 and has problems viewing the new Tribe layout please go here and hit the “Test Run” link? That pulls up a sample blog with the unmodified template.

I need to know if it does the same thing or of it renders correctly. If it does, then it’s something I’ve done (probably the ad that runs the full width of the column at the bottom) which is causing the problem.

If it doesn’t, then the template simply doesn’t work right in IE 6 and I need to start weighing out pros and cons.

Okay, I’ve been playing around with Tribe’s layout some more and I think I’ve cleared up a lot of the lingering ugliness with it. How’s it look to everybody now?

First, my apologies for the lack of new Tribe yesterday. I tried to make up for it with a spiffy new template for the page. The one comment I’ve received on it praised both its appropriateness for the story and its superior readability, which is good.

Second, I’ve made a change to how I’m adding story links to the master feed site. I initially received comments about how clicking on the post’s title took you to the feed site instead of the story and I thought “Well, I can’t control that… it’s a consequence of using a blog to generate the RSS feed.” Then it hit me today that blog posts don’t actually require a title. This won’t result in any massive sweeping changes that anybody actually needs to pay attention to, but should make things a little less confusing for people who are new to the feed.

Third, after receiving a groundswell of two requests, I’m going to start putting The Wallflower Report in the feed, too. I didn’t do it initially because I figured not all of my readership would be as interested in Ariella’s musings… but then, the whole point of the master feed is to keep people up to date on anything that I write. It doesn’t mean they actually have to read each and every thing.

Well, after two weeks of adjusting by increments (and the interruption of the holidays), I have finally had the kind of work day I’ve been working towards from the beginning: I got up, had breakfast, and started writing immediately at 10. Between then and now, I’ve written a couple pieces of nanofiction, a Wallflower Report, a Void Dogs chapter, a Tribe chapter, a chapter of a novel, and a Tales of MU chapter. No mid-day crashing. No archive trawling of humor sites or webcomics. Only minimal checking of forums and website statistics. It’s a great start to the week, and now I’m off to the one part of my intended routine that I haven’t yet done… an hour or so on the treadmill.

I just received an e-mail from a Colin Jaffe who has his own flash fiction/microfiction venture along the same lines as 365 Tales… only his operates along even more stringent guidelines. Not only is the target size smaller at 55 words, but it’s stricter, as well… the stories must be exactly 55 words in length. An interesting exercise, to be sure.

The site is 55 A Day, which is a much better title for a writing site than it is for a multivitamin. I’ll be adding a permanent link to it from the 365 Tales website. The site has many examples of his own work, but seems a bit bereft of outside submissions at the moment.

After writing the previous entry, I thought about the matter some more and have become convinced that Mr. Chekhov had it exactly backwards. The rule would be more usefully stated as this:

 If somebody is going to be shot in the third act, show us the gun back in the first.

You can have a lot of details in the opening scene which never “pay off” (in fact, there’s something to be said for being lavish with the details up front and then gradually paring them down as the audience and protagonist figure out what is and isn’t important)… but you can’t very easily have an ending that isn’t established by your beginning.

This is important: outside of certain kinds of shaggy dog stories or “theater of the absurd” type pieces, your climax must make sense given your set-up.

Note that the rule still shouldn’t be taken overly literally. If somebody gets shot at the end of your story, the “gun” you show at the beginning could be the shooter’s temper, the act which will eventually serve as provocation for the shooting, etc. There’s also some advantages to a “gradual unveiling” of the gun… a slow build, in other words.

The point is, it’s more important for a gun which is fired to be shown than it is for a gun which is shown to be fired.

…and I’m not ruling it out, though I sometimes wonder how much of my writing process could actually be made to work for anybody else… it would have to be titled Shoot Chekhov Before The Curtain Rises.

This title refers to playwright Anton Chekhov and an oft-repeated “rule” he formulated, which said something along the lines of “If you have a set of dueling pistols over the mantel in Act I, somebody needs to take them down and fire them by Act III.” It’s often used more generically as “If you show the audience a gun, somebody needs to get shot.”

The principle is often referred to as “Chekhov’s Gun”, or more broadly as “The Law of Conservation of Detail”: if the writer shows you something, it must be important. It must pay off.

The problem with these rules is that they create a vicious cycle, where the more writers come to rely on them, the more audiences come to expect them. “Oh, there’s a gun on the wall,” they say. “Of course somebody’s going to get shot before the end.”

Not only does this result in works of fiction becoming ever more predictable and homogenous, but it leads to the situation of the audience feeling “cheated” by writers who don’t deliver on the “promise” of the gun.

Oh, and in case it’s not apparent, the word “gun” here can sub in for anything. It’s a very general principle.

“Why did we have the scene with the X? What did that have to do with the plot?”

Sorry, folks, but it’s not always about plot. Maybe you stopped to pretend to listen to your neighbor complain about her podiatrist in the hallway and then got a cheeseburger on the way home from work… what did any of that have to do with anything? It didn’t advance any of your overarcing goals, did it?

Of course, fiction is notably not real life, and your life wouldn’t necessarily make a story people would want to read or watch. The point is that life rarely moves in a straight line, which means that fiction–whose purpose, the Bard tells us, is to “hold a mirror up to nature”–shouldn’t always do so, either. 

Now, all that is not to say that books and scripts should be filled with scads of irrelevant details. There should be some point, some benefit to the finished work (as represented by a benefit to some portion of the audience) from everything that goes into a finished story, but “furthering the plot” is only one goal.

What about characterization, hmm?

What about fleshing out the world? I mean even if the character is just Joe Schmoe from the Big O. (Omaha, that is) in a story with no fantastic elements, some glimpses of his everyday life can still be used to flesh out his world for the audience, even if they have nothing to do with the bank heist or whatever “the plot” is.

For that matter, what about comic relief or a simple release of tension? Not appropriate for every story, but not inappropriate for every story, either. There are places for these things.

The other problem with “Chekhov’s Gun” as articulated is that it not only leads us to the fallacious belief that every detail shown early on must “pay off” before the story ends, but that there’s a “right” way to pay them off. It’s probably harder to write a decent story revolving around a revolver where the climactic scene ends with said implement rather pointedly not being fired, but I guarantee you that if you can pull it off, it can be a powerful scene.

Of course, I don’t think Mr. Chekhov would have necessarily disagreed with that last point… but there’s oodles of would-be writers, would-be critics, and would-be filmmakers who would express disgust over the gunshot-less ending and go “Haven’t you ever heard of a little rule of writing called Chekhov’s Gun?”

Yeah, I have… but you see, I made a point to shoot Chekhov before the curtain rose, so I’m good.

I’m at my parents’ house for the holiday (American Thanksgiving) and we just watched the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang… and I have to say that I now understand why so many people (particularly MU readers) have asked me if I’ve seen it.

I love all the playing that gets done with the narration form. The narrator is unreliable in every sense of the word, except that he gets all the details of the story which he’s relating right. It’s beautiful. There are so many wrong ways to do an unreliable narrator, so many cheats and cheap shortcuts you can take with it.

Here, it’s done not even so much for any sort of plot point but more as a tool of characterization, and it’s done wonderfully.

I don’t really have anything else to say about it, or much of anything else, at the moment… but since at least five or six of my readers have asked me if I’ve seen it, I wanted to report that now I have, yes.

…and now I’m left wondering if anybody has written Agent Smecker/Gay Perry slash…

…but not strongly enough to check.