Episode 13: Book Club: Techniques of the Selling Writer

Hello, friends! It is the 12th of October, 2020, and this is Episode 13 of the Write Away Podcast.

I got a good bit of writing done last week, but it feels like I haven’t written in forever because Thursday I left at 2am to drive to the airport, which is generally four and a half to five hours away. That’s given that there’s no traffic, which there almost always is, but we’ve been having roadblocks lately from some protests going on. So I left really early to make sure that I avoided all of those.

I picked my friend up at the airport and it looked like we were going to have as easy a trip back as I had out there, taking about five hours going a bit of a different route than I normally do because of construction on the main road. We were less than an hour from my house when we hit our first roadblock and we were there for over three hours. Then we were at our next roadblock for another hour. So it was past 10 o’clock by the time we got home.

So Friday I felt a bit hungover from the 20 plus hour trip, and then my weekend was spent hanging out with Smalls. But now I have my new iPad and I’m having a delightful time setting it up and enjoying the freedom of not being at my desk. I’ve spent entirely too much time creating a digital planner, that I don’t think I need half of the little features I added in, so now I’m planning for my 2021 planner. But I do love using GoodNotes for my PDF writing things. It’s delightful.

So today is our first book club. I chose Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain, which was a doozy for a first book, as you’ll hear in our conversation. I’ve decided to switch between craft and business books going forward. So next month we’ll be reading Money Honey by Rachel Richards. And don’t forget to join us in the conversation over at www.writeawaypodcast.com.

So confession time: who managed to finish this crazy dense book? Anyone one?

Lon: I was so close, I was so close!

Crys: I promise I skimmed the last 40% but there’s a good reason for that. Like the first 33% is literally Motivation Reaction Units and Scene Sequel. And I got to the end of that point and was like, “Oh, this book must be done. That was so much.” And then I’m like, “I am only a third of the way through this book.” And then the second-third, pretty much it’s still craft, but it’s more high-level overview characters. And then the third is more the business of being a writer, I would say, and a really long appendances.

Lon: Yeah. And our one really, really short chapter it’s the best one. It’s like a chapter and it’s like two pages and so it’s really do this, do this. Boom, boom. Done.

Crys: Okay. Yeah. What was that about? Was that the one about age?

Marianne: Selling your stories, chapter nine.

Lon: Right. Always just keep nailing stuff out. Okay. And also like, do you need an agent?

Crys: Maybe after you sell a few things? Like you could tell it was written a while ago. Yeah. Okay. But first, I forgot to introduce everyone. So we’re going to do that. I know you guys just want to be floating voices. Alright, so we have Lon Varnadore.

Lon: Hello.

Crys: JP Rindfleisch.

JP: Hello.

Crys: And then Marianne Hansen.

Marianne: Yep. Hello.

Crys: Excellent. And we’ve all met through the Author Success Mastermind and I have captured them for this discussion, and Lawn has notes so he’s ahead of the game. So first impressions, other than awesome, super short chapter.

Lon: It was just a massive slog and I actually looked up how long it was on a paperback and it was like 350 pages essentially. I collect books on writing and most of them are like 150, 200 pages, maybe. And it’s good, but it’s also sort of just so dense, and I could easily see scaring off a lot of people who want to be writers who are very much not ready for that.

Crys: I would definitely agree that this is not a beginner book.

JP: Yeah. I felt like it was very academic, and so the academic side of me was like, Ooh, this is fun. But it had so many examples, so it definitely panders to a certain group of people and it will scare off a different group of people. Even though it was a slog, it was still very useful, even though it’s 40 years old.

Marianne: Well, I thought it was interesting because my initial response was, whenever I read a writer’s books, it seems like they say the same things with different words. So I just finished one that is called like Goal, Motive, Conflict. Then you have the Choice, Conflict,  Consequence, and I just wonder if you need to read so many brighter technique books, or if you just really need to pick one that’s highly recommended and learn it like nobody’s business.

Crys: So the interesting thing about that, I’m going to go to Becca Syme’s strengths here. There’s definitely a certain personality that will feel that way. I just want one or two that cover the basics for me. I’m a number one learner. Like I can never have too many books. I will read a bunch of things that say the same thing in a little bit different way, and one of them will ping for me and the others won’t. And so this one pinged for me really well in some really specific instances. Particularly with the Scene Sequel, which is why I started reading it, and then the Motivation Reaction Unit, which is the worst name ever.

It also makes sense why this particular thing, the Motivation Reaction Unit, may not matter at all to Marianne specifically, because I know some of her strengths, one of them being empathy.

What I found it super useful for, the Motivation Reaction Unit, is simply that every story is a sequence of motivations and reactions. So motivation and action happens, reaction. How do you react? How does the character react to that thing? And the example he used was, a tiger jumps out of the bush. (He used better words than this, and I probably should have found it to read.) Tiger jumps out of the bush, Jack’s adrenaline shot up, he lifted the gun to his shoulder, then he fired and said die. What he talks about is there’s three steps to that reaction and it was kind of your physiological response, then your knee-jerk response, like how does your body react after that, and then your logical response.

I have a really hard time writing emotion, and I have found that particular little snippet so useful in writing emotion that is natural but yet not overdone. Because I have so much trouble writing emotion, when I put it in I feel like it’s extremely overblown, because I’m like, I need to make it clear, but I don’t know what other people think is clear. So I put too much in to make sure they get the point. Here’s my sledgehammer of emotion. You will understand what this is.

The Motivation Reaction, he says in the book, that you don’t need to use all three, but whatever ones you use need to be used in that order. That I have found so useful when I don’t know how to display the emotion I want right here. And so I’m like, alright, Motivation Reaction, just focusing on that reaction unit. That was probably the most useful thing for me.

Lon: Yeah. I definitely noticed that right away and I changed some of the scenes I was working on for Jay’s master class within the day I read that. Just because there’s such a fluidity or a natural sense to it that I just wasn’t thinking of. But you know, once you hit the, how do people respond to things, you should reorganize how people should be responding to those things, it makes so much more sense. So I definitely took that away immediately.

Marianne: Same here. Because I have a problem with exposition and I realized I just need to start writing reactions. I mean, not just reactions, but if I added reactions, and if I added some goals, I don’t think I would have as much problem with that. Do you think you have to start with feeling? The first chapter he talks about you have to start with feeling and I wonder about that.

Crys: Not everyone, because I would say that like hard Sci-fi is way less feeling. Well, I mean, maybe adrenaline and like we’re gonna win, like victorious feeling. Like there is a particular feeling that you’re looking for there. I do think that all fiction is driven by some kind of feeling. Whether it’s hard Sci-fi and it’s, we are going to have the satisfaction of unpacking this scientific puzzle, but we’re not going to deal with all of those other emotions, those lesser emotions, as the brainy types might think. But, yeah, I always go looking for a specific emotion from a story for sure. But that is very true of me, I know other people get really upset when there’s too much emotion in their books, the way they see it. But I do still think that they are looking for a particular emotion.

Lon: I mean, I would say when you’re starting to write something, you don’t necessarily need to start with an emotion. You just need to start with something. You know, character, setting, whatever, what have you. And I think that you will find whatever that emotion is as you go through your piece, as you’re working. If you don’t find it, then maybe you’re going to have to go back and say, okay, what emotion am I going to look for? But I mean, for me personally, I don’t ever really start with an emotion. I don’t really start with a feeling. I just going to start with: someone’s doing something, okay, we’re going to go from there.

Crys: Do you think that you pull that emotion through in editing though, Lon?

Lon: Yes. I mean, my first drafts are always just like word vomit, and I mean second drafts and later on that’s, you know– I always say, first draft, just get the story out. The second is when you can find the emotion if you haven’t already, sort of in the back of your head, sort of feel like that’s where it is. He even talks about there was a writer that he met, one of the hundreds of writers he talks about in the book, writes something four times. The first time is to get it out, the second time is to put everything in that wasn’t in in the first place, third was to take out the stuff that is extraneous, and then the fourth time is for polish, I think essentially.

Crys: It’s really interesting. He also is a real fan it seems of like old-school pulp writers, and I think was an old-school pulp writer himself. And it’s very interesting because we tend to, or current culture tends to, dismiss that as lesser writing. And yet he has, like you said, it’s very dense. It’s a slog to get through because there’s so much. For me, it was just so much information. You may have had a different experience, but there’s so much information and so little space, that it was not an easy read, but I found it a very good read.

JP: Yeah, I definitely felt like it’s one of those books that you read through and then you keep coming back to it. I definitely view this one as more of one of the reference books that I would have. Because I’m a lot like you Crys, where I read multiple books and I try to find the little connections between them. This one I find is almost like an anchor point that will then reach out to the other ones, so I definitely will be going back to this one and I can see it being used through phases of writing.

Marianne: In my defense, I do read a lot on one topic. Like Watergate, I read everything on Watergate, but for some reason, something on writing, I think with this book started to overwhelm me. This is one of my issues I have because I write commercial fiction, and so probably my book will be able to be read in six to eight hours, faster if you speed up audible kind-of-a-thing. It frustrates me that I’m going to put all of this energy into this. I’m going to go through chapter by chapter and find the reactions, and find all of these things for my characters, and then someone’s going to pick it up and read it in six hours.

Crys: And then ask why you don’t have more books done already.

Marianne: So when I read books like this, I’m just like, I get it, It’s hard. It’s hard. It doesn’t matter what you write, it is hard, but man, I want it easier than what this book says.

Crys: I definitely want to reiterate that I would have just laid on my bed for a whole week if I’d tried to read this two, three years ago. I would have just been overwhelmed. Like I can’t do it like drama. The have hand over forehead, collapsing. I found that very true with a lot of craft books, that there’s a lot of craft books that a lot of people love. Like Story Architect, is one that I haven’t gone back to, but at the time that I tried read it, it was so far above what I was able to comprehend at that time because I hadn’t finished anything longer than like 5,000 words. I didn’t have the experience to even start to process most of the information in that book. but it’s one that people talk about all the time, and there are other writers early on in their career who have a brain who connect with that book, particularly who are going to do it fine, but not every book is going to work for every writer at every stage for sure.

Marianne: Yeah. Maybe that’s why they tell us to keep reading different ones. Just to drive us slowly insane, or to find the one that reaches us best. One of the two.

Crys: Was there anything particularly useful for you, Lon?

Lon: I’m very much actually in your camp and JP’s, like I actually want to get a hardbound copy of this. I want a paperback copy because I want to go back and underline different segments, because there’s some great material in there. There’s some great stuff in there. And the thing is that I do know that I can go back and I can look at it, you know, go back and I’ll underline the Motivation Reaction thing, and eventually that might get internalized. And that’s something that happens with just all of these different craft books, you just sort of like read them and eventually you sort of internalize what they have, or you don’t, and you just kind of toss the ones that you don’t internalize. You just have to keep going when it comes to writing and it comes to churning out more and more work. I think we’re all sort of more commercial fiction writers and we want to put out books that are good, but at the same time people are going to crank out, like the series that I’m working on, they’re going to crank out that in like five hours, you know, or, or less with Audible.

So I mean, yeah, I’m trying to make it a better book. I’m going to try every time to get a little bit more craft in there, a little bit better, a little bit better, but I mean, that’s more for myself. Because I know that a lot of readers are just going to be, “Oh, it’s a good book! Okay, cool.” You know, throw it away and move on to the next one. So the problem with being a writer is you want to put in a bunch of crap. You want to  show like, “See what I did in this book! I did this and this and this and all the other things!” And like the readers are going to be like, “It was good. Yeah. Congrats, buddy.”

Crys: There’s five people out there who get it.

Lon: And most of them are probably writers and they’re like, “Oh, Hey, this is a really good, Oh my God.” And they’re going to underline that passage because it was really great. It was perfectly written, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re going to be like, this is an example of how a good book is written.

Crys: I’m half joking when I tell people, like the reason I write is so that I can talk to other writers, but it’s only half joking.

JP: Accurate, very, very accurate.

Crys: I wanted to read an excerpt that comes in the first chapter, kind of talking about what Lon was just going over and it pins off that first idea where we were talking about with feeling, should it be the first thing? So he says that feeling should be the first thing, and then:

“After you find your feeling, rules come in handy . . . help you to figure out the best way to capture in words whatever it is that so excites you. But the feeling itself must always remain dominant. Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules.

Beware, too, of the other man’s rule. He sees the world through different eyes.

Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. “Start with a fight!” is his motto. And for him, it works.

But Fred Friggenheimer’s witch-cult yarn, as he conceives it, puts heavy emphasis on atmosphere. The fight he tries to stick in like a clove in a ham at the beginning, following George’s rule, destroys the mood—and the story.

Even with your own rules, indeed, you must be careful. Because somehow, subtly, they may not apply to this explicit situation.

“There is really no such thing as the novel,” observes novelist Vincent McHugh. “The novel is always a novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.“

And again: “The novel is not a form. It is a medium capable of accommodating a great variety of forms.“

Feelings differ. So do the stories that spring from them.

General rules imply that all are the same.

Be very wary, therefore, of anything that says, “Reject this feeling.” Search instead for the kind of guidance that tells you, “Here’s a way to do the thing you already want to do . . . to use effectively the impossible situation, the outlandish incident, the offbeat character.”

How do you tell whether a rule is good or not, in terms of a specific problem? Answer: Find out the reason the rule came into being. What idea or principle stands behind it?

“The man who knows how will always find a place in life,” says the adage, “but the man who knows why will be the boss.”

Arbitrary rules restrict and inhibit you.

Knowing why sets you free.

Take George’s rule about starting every story with a fight. It’s born of George’s markets—men’s magazines in which the emphasis is on fast, violent action, with blood on page one an absolute must.

If Fred only realized that fact, he’d ignore George’s rule when he himself writes a mood-geared story.

Projected, this principle means that a writer should have theories on every phase of writing—how to get ideas, how to plot, how to build conflict, how to bring characters to life, how to create the right feelings in a given reader. And, he should think through and take note of the why behind each and every how.

Otherwise, how can he discover the procedures most effective for and best suited to him, in terms of his own temperament and tastes? Nor does it matter whether these theories are right or wrong in the view of objectivity or the critics. Their purpose is only to provide one particular writer with working tools and orientation.

Universality is no issue. If an approach works for you, that’s all that counts.”

And I highlighted like 6% of the book out of my allowed 10%, by the time I got to 33%, and then had to start being very sparing with my highlights so that I could still export them into an email. So there’s a lot of highlighted in here. But it makes me trust someone more when they’re like, rules, I’m going to give you a bunch of rules, but if they don’t work for you, then they’re not your rules.

Marianne: I think it’s an odd way to start a book on rules.

Crys: I think my favorites all start that way though. The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird is another one of my favorites, another one that I would have been completely overwhelmed by two, three years ago.

JP: Yeah, but I think, especially with how this comes off so academic, it’s very much a, this is my perspective and here’s how much I’m going to repeat this. But then at the beginning he says, but I want you to take my perspective, and I want you to turn it into something that’s for you. So I feel like this is a good way to reiterate it at the beginning, because I feel like that’s important, especially when it comes to things like writing because there is no one right way. I killed the room.

Crys: I don’t want to be the one who’s always talking. I know that I can overwhelm in talking.

Marianne: No. What I thought was really interesting though, too, is throughout the book with all of these rules, he also says, but learn by doing, okay. Well now go write. And so even though, and it’s throughout the book, so it’s not at the very end of the book where he says, okay, take this, decide what you want to use and go write. He’s mentioning that throughout the whole entire thing. It’s like, he wants you to keep writing, and then if you find that maybe you need to apply one of these rules, that can easily be done during I revision. But if you try to buy it a hard copy, I’m not sure if they’re still in print because I had to get mine second hand, and the most fascinating part is to see what this other person highlighted. There’s a chapter coming up where like the whole chapter is highlighted.

Crys: Which chapter is that?

Marianne: It’s the Beginning Middle End, but it’s the section on the ending. So this person, I think has problems ending their story, because they have just highlighted the whole ending section.

Lon: Oh, that’s amazing.

Crys: Is there anything else you guys had in your notes that you wanted to bring up?

JP: So I personally liked a quote, it was actually just a couple of pages after your excerpt, and it’s:

“The day you mute yourself or moderate yourself or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved, that day you die as a writer.”

And for me, I think the reason why I like that quote so much is there is this focus to try and get everyone to like your work. I also do art, and realistically, art is not for everyone. And if you make it to pander to everyone, it almost becomes this dead piece of, you know, store bought art. So I feel like it’s kind of a reminder to yourself and to others that what you write may not resonate with everyone, but who it resonates with, as long as it resonates strongly, even if that’s just yourself, that’s good writing. And so that’s kind of what I took out of it.

Crys: I have that quote highlighted as well.

Marianne: I think he says that throughout the book to, to remember that, and to remember your audience. He talks about his audience and how you’re kind of writing to yourself because you should be the type of person who would read your own book. I’ve had a really good friend of mine, I’m like, “Will you read this?” She goes, “I don’t like that subject matter, like that’s not the type of a book I read.” She goes, “Oh, I’ll read it, but I’m not going to like it.” And when she gave it back, she’s just like, “You’re a decent writer, but I don’t like this. I don’t like this genre. What can I tell ya?” And I’m like, okay, I’m going to go find someone else.

Crys: I find homeless people in the street, throw books at them. “I’ll be back in a week, you better have finished it!”

Marianne: “And then we’re going to discuss it, and you’re going to like it!”

Crys: “I’ll take you out to lunch.”

Marianne: And then just, you know, randomly have an Amazon open for review. Oh, wait, we’re not supposed to do that.

Crys: Lon, anything for you?

Lon: Not that I can think of, but I didn’t, quote anything, so I just reiterate what you guys have all said.

Crys: Thank you for joining me on this adventurous first book for this book club. We will decide soon what the next book will be.

Marianne: Can it have pictures?

Lon: Illustrations, please.

Crys: I think Dr. Seuss is up, right? Excellent.