Writing Fiction Longhand

            Shakespeare did it, and so did Dickens. Tolstoy, too, for that matter. In fact, up until about a century ago, everybody did it. Everybody who wrote, anyway.

            I’m talking about writing in longhand, with a pen and paper. Before the age of the computer, before typewriters came into wide use, everyone wrote in that fashion. Over the years, a number of people have believed (and still believe) that doing it that way, putting actual pen to actual paper, makes someone a better writer.

            Unless you were William Faulkner. He used a pencil, rather than a pen. A soft pencil on a cheap, ruled drugstore-style pad. He said it was important to him to be able to actually feel the words as he was writing them.

            And then there was Hemingway, who wrote on a typewriter, but what would you expect? He used to be a journalist.

If They Can, So Can I

            Being a recovering journalist myself, and being of the computer age, I’ve written all of my first three books on a computer. I do the outlining and plotting longhand, using a fountain pen and good paper, but when it comes time to do the book, I sit in front of the computer and let the fingers fly over the keyboard.

            Until this time. As I was finishing my third book, NotDeath, But Love, I decided to try something different. I’d write the first chapter of the fourth book (title still undetermined) in longhand with a fountain pen, or pens, just to see how it would feel to do that, and to see if I could detect any difference resulting therefrom in my writing style.

            In anticipation of the experience, I visited Silberman Brown Stationers in Seattle during our recent trip there. It’s an elegant stationery store, located at street level of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel downtown. When I said I was looking for a pad of high-quality paper for writing with a fountain pen, the knowledgeable clerk steered me to Clairefontaine Triomphe, a French luxury brand. I bought one pad lined and one unlined.

Feel the Glide

            I used the ruled paper, of course, and now that I’ve finished the first draft of the first chapter, I wish I could give a more definitive answer to the question of what difference it made to write fiction longhand. I’m really not sure.

            The experience was certainly different, inasmuch as he words weren’t coming out as if shot through a fire hose. I’m a fast typist and tend to really get on a roll when I write, and doing it by hand definitely slowed down the proceedings.

            One consequence of this, which may or may not be a good thing, is that it gave me more time to think about (and have doubts about) the quality of my writing. When I finished the chapter, I felt less confident about the quality of it than I had of the first chapter of the two preceding books.

            Then I showed the manuscript to Linda, who said she was drawn in by the story elements and that it seemed faster-paced than my other books. I wonder if writing it out is enough work that you steer clear of excessive verbiage and perhaps do more editing as you’re writing. I don’t know. I’m going back to the computer for Chapter 2, but think I’ll try doing the first chapter of the next book in longhand as well to see if I gain any further understanding of the process. I need all the understanding I can get.

Angling in the Summer of Drought

            My first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, had its genesis in an episode that occurred in Alpine County CA, on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada. Like my protagonist Quill Gordon in Chapter 2, I was fishing on a small stream in a remote area when some people camped nearby came over to let me know they were doing some target practice.

            The sound of their gunfire became so unnerving that after several minutes of it, I moved on to another creek. My shooters were just a bunch of weekend plunkers, but it occurred to me, with the citizen militia movement in full bloom at the time, that if it had been such a group, there would be a story there.

            Alpine County is one of many places I’ve drawn on for the settings of my three Quill Gordon novels, and for a long time it was one of my go-to fishing places. In the past decade, I’ve drifted away from it, and this year I decided to go back for a short visit and see how its fine streams have been affected by the drought.

Roughing It No More

            I used to go up in my 1977 VW camper and stay at Grover Hot Springs State Park, but I sold the camper in 2011. Instead, I booked a small cabin at the Carson River Resort, about two miles out of Markleeville, the county seat. It turned out to be just right for my purposes.

            From the cabin, you could walk across Highway 89 and fish the East Fork of the Carson River. Like all the streams in the mountains this year, it was down considerably. The river, in fact, was more like a large creek, and it was hard to believe that in a normal wet year, there are companies that set up river-rafting expeditions on it.

            Even though the water level was down a foot or more from normal, the East Carson had plenty of fish in it. There were good deep holes and decent riffles still, and I caught a few fish and saw others. I had feared it would be even lower than it was and unfishable, but that turned out not to be the case.

The Reservoir Was Down

            My first morning there, I drove up the highway to Kinney Reservoir, near the summit of Ebbets Pass, thinking I might try my luck there. No such luck. Ordinarily, you could walk out on the dam and cast into the lake a few feet below. The morning I got there, the water was about 60 feet below. It was like looking into the crater of a volcano.

            So I went over the pass and took a rugged dirt road to Highland Lakes, about five miles off the highway at an elevation of 8,600 feet. I was glad I did. Those lakes are natural, and they were full. I fished a couple of hours and had a few bites, but just being there was enough. There had never been any reason to go before because the streams were always full enough to fish.

            What this tells me is that drought conditions are situational. In the river, places I didn’t fish before were pretty good and places I usually fished were unfishable. One lake was fine and one wasn’t. It depends. However bad the drought might get, the fish will usually find a place to live. If you want to find them, you have to go check it out for yourself.

Quarterback Reflections

            It’s September and a man’s thoughts are turning to football. This year, I’m thinking about quarterbacks again.

            A couple of years back in this spot, I wrote a piece criticizing the tendency of sports writers to blame a quarterback for not winning championships. I pointed out that teams win championships, not quarterbacks, and that the best predictor of Super Bowl victory is having a future Hall of Fame defensive player on the team.

            Lately, I’ve been reflecting on another quarterback issue: Statistical evaluation. Ken Stabler, the great quarterback for the Raiders in the 1970s, died earlier this summer, and is now up for consideration for admission to the Pro Football Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee.

            One sports writer, and I can’t recall who, wrote a piece in Sports Illustrated online, saying, in essence, that though a case could be made, Stabler’s overall statistics just weren’t good enough.

True, But Wrong

            I’ll concede the statistics, while arguing that in some cases the numbers are behind the point. And it seems to me that in sports these days (and particularly in baseball) we’re trusting the numbers too much and our own eyes too little. How do you quantify a great game or a great play that takes your breath away?

            Two Stabler stories, recalled from memory:

            In the late 1970s, the Raiders were playing New Orleans on Monday night. With about five minutes to go in the third quarter, they were trailing 28-14 on the road, when Stabler, trying to avoid a sack, threw up a wounded duck that was intercepted and run back for a touchdown to make it New Orleans 35, Oakland 14. I turned the game off, did a couple of chores, then called home a half hour later. My father answered.

            “Aren’t you watching the game?” he asked. I told him I’d turned it off, and he said the Raiders were coming back furiously. We talked briefly, and I turned the TV on again to see Stabler lead the Raiders to a 42-35 win, with four touchdown drives in the last quarter and a third.

             Then there was the game against Miami in the 1975 playoffs. Trailing 26-21 with almost no time left, and facing fourth and goal, Stabler broke out of the pocket moving to his left (he was left-handed) and threw up an absolutely terrible pass as he was being tackled.

Hey, It Worked

            Terrible, that is, in every way but one. As it sailed over the goal line, the Raiders’ Clarence Davis leaped up and took it away from two Miami defenders for the winning touchdown.

            That’s the thing about Stabler. He was a gunslinger and a gambler who took chances other quarterbacks didn’t take. It drove down his stats, but also won his team a lot of games it might otherwise have lost. John Madden, who knows a thing or two about football, has said that if he could pick one quarterback to lead the drive for a winning touchdown in the closing minutes of a game, it would be Stabler. Isn’t that more important than completion percentage or touchdown-to-interception ratio?

            My favorite Stabler story involved the 1976 playoff game where the Wild Card Raiders were playing the Baltimore Colts in Baltimore. The game was tied 31-31 in regulation, and still tied after a quarter of overtime. At the start of the second overtime, Madden turned to see Stabler looking at the stands and laughing out loud.

            “What’s so funny?” Madden demanded.

            “I was just thinkin’, coach. These fans sure got their money’s worth today.” Then he went out and threw a touchdown pass to Dave Casper to win the game.

            That, alone, should be enough to get him into the Hall.

When Authors Coast

            Several months ago I read a mystery novel by an established author in the genre. I’d read a number of his books before and had been favorably impressed. This time, not so much.

            The plot was loosely woven and there were several holes left in it at the end; there was a romantic subplot written at the level of understanding one would expect from a junior high school student, and at the end, where the killer was holding a hostage, the author could barely be bothered to go through the motions of building up any tension or coming up with an interesting wrinkle in the way the hostage was rescued.

            It almost felt as if the author had turned the outline over to someone else to write the actual book and hadn’t given the product more than a cursory look. I’d purchased the book used and barely felt I’d gotten my money’s worth.

Going Through the Motions

            I can’t say for certain what was going on, but it felt as if the author had gotten tired of the series he’d been writing and was just going through the motions. And while I can understand the feeling, believe me, that’s a real occupational hazard, probably made worse by the pressure on authors to generate more and more books.

            Some authors manage to stay fresh and keep up a level of quality in a running series, and I hope someday to be one of those. Some grasp when they are starting to wear out the horse and get off it (or, try to, as Conan Doyle did, though the waterfall didn’t do the job). But others, either out of bad judgment or a desire to keep the revenue stream going, soldier on even though the quality of work is diminishing.

            Authors go bad in a number of different ways. Some, like the one I mentioned, stop paying attention to the critical details of their writing; some begin to take themselves too seriously and bloviate philosophically; some keep falling back on the quirks of a growing set of characters; many write longer and longer books that could have been cut by a hundred pages with no harm to the story.

The Co-Dependent Publisher

            Sadly, once an author reaches a certain level of success, it seems no one is willing to challenge him or her on a second-rate effort or a terrible idea. As long as there appear to be willing readers out there, the publisher probably isn’t going to tell a best-selling author to spend another six months on a rewrite. In that sense, the people in the book industry become co-dependent enablers of mediocre work.

            The one ray of light in this dark situation is that the readers can serve as at least a bit of a corrective. A few days after reading the book I described at the beginning of this piece, I went to Kindle to see how the readers had rated it.

            Most of the author’s other books were rated at 4.25 to 4.50 stars out of five, but the one I complained of got only 3.50 stars. It would appear that while the author’s agent, publisher and editor couldn’t tell it was a lesser work (or didn’t care), the readers smelled it out. Maybe if enough readers speak up, the publishers will listen — though I doubt it.

Free Book Giveaways, R.I.P.

            Several months ago, I wrote about rethinking Amazon free promotions, in which an author gives away a book at no charge for a day or two. The idea is to pull in some readers who might not have found the book otherwise, with the hope that said readers will tell friends, write reviews, and pay full price down the road for another book if they liked the first one free.

            At the time, I was debating the effectiveness of the tactic and have now concluded, based on steadily diminishing results, that it’s no longer worth it. With my first two mystery novels, I did a free promotion within days of the book’s release, and did about 20 more over the next year.

            There has been no free promotion for the third mystery in my series, Not Death, But Love, and I doubt there ever will be, though I remain open to evidence. Several factors propelled me to that decision, but two were particularly critical.

The Big Yawn

            For a period of a bit over two years, from July 2012 to October 2014, my free-book giveaways were generating good numbers. Using the direct-mail analogy, I figured an author had to give away a hundred books to get two to four read. In the first couple of years, I was moving a hundred books a day on free days as often as not, and sometimes as many as several hundred.

            In the past nine months or so, I’ve probably done 30 free giveaways and had only one 100-plus-book day. At that rate, I’d have been better off leaving the book out there at full price and hoping I sold one copy each of those days.

            I was also seeing evidence that fewer people overall were participating in the free-book frenzy, both as authors and as customers. Late last year and early this year, it was not uncommon for one of my books to be in the top 50 Crime Fiction free books with only 30-40 downloads. That’s a pretty low bar.

Done in by Borrowing

            Part of what I suspect is happening here is that Amazon has been promoting its Kindle Unlimited program, which allows people to borrow books free for a 21-day period once they’ve paid the membership fee. Authors get a small cut of the membership money, but not as much as if the book were purchased, rather than borrowed.

            In the past two months slightly more of my books have been borrowed than purchased, which shows the market is going in that direction. The allure of free ownership is diminished by borrows. After all, why wait for a free-book day to come along when you can borrow the book already?

            So my strategy now is to run Kindle Countdown promotions, in which one book each month is offered at a discount for a period of several days. I don’t move as many books with those promotions as I did with free giveaways, but the ones I do move are going to likely readers. Or so I figure. You’re not going to pay even 99 cents for an e-book unless you have some expectation of reading it. And the strategy is always subject to change.

The Last Good Owners

            A wise old newspaper editor — it may have been Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but I’m not sure — was once asked by a journalism student if the editor was the key to a good newspaper. He shook his head.

            Nope, he told the kid, the most important person in a good newspaper isn’t the editor, or even the publisher. It’s the owner. Without an owner who’s willing to spend money on news coverage and stand up to threats, no editor, however good, can accomplish much.

            If it was indeed Bradlee who said that, he spoke from experience. His owner was Kay Graham, and she was a great owner. Nothing lasts forever, and the Post is now under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. So far, from what I’ve read, he seems willing to spend money and try different things, but the jury is still out on whether he’ll attain great-owner status.

All in the Family

            Great newspapers have typically been a labor of love for families that had been in the business a long time and regarded the paper as an extension of their identity. I’m thinking here of families like the Grahams of the Post; the Ochs and Sulzbergers of the New York Times; the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times, and the Binghams of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

            And, to be fair, there were always plenty of terrible family-owned newspapers, where the crusading spirit of the founder had long since faded away, and the descendants were content to make no waves and cash the quarterly dividend checks.

            From the 1960s to the 1980s a great many family papers were bought by large chains, which saw their monopoly on a local advertising market as something worth a premium. In a few instances, the chains made the paper better (if for no other reason than it could hardly have gotten worse) by bringing a scintilla of professionalism to it.

            In most cases, though, the chains were content to cut the staff, cut other expenses, and raise advertising and circulation rates to a level that a local owner would have blushed at. The customers might not have liked it, but for years those papers were cash cows generating profit margins of 30-40 percent, sometimes more.

Gone Are The Days

            The Internet killed all that, beginning in the mid 1990s. The newspaper business will never again be a place where you could almost put a chimpanzee in charge of the operation, and still sit back and collect hefty rents from the advertisers and subscribers. The gutting of the old business model, though, has rained on the just and the unjust alike.

            There are a few weekly papers and small-town dailies that are still doing all right, and that have owners who care about the paper and what it means to the community. But of the four owners I mentioned earlier, only the Sulzbergers are still running the paper as a family operation. The Times is the best there is now, but it’s limping along financially.

            A lot of smart people don’t think newspapers will be around much longer, and if something comparable were rising to take their place, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Some day the Times may no longer exist, or will exist without the Sulzbergers, whom I think of as the last good owners, in some greatly diminished form. All I can hope is that it doesn’t happen for a long time, and that I’m not around when it does.

Legs

            Three years ago, full of hope and inflated expectations, I put my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, up for sale on Amazon. Good as it was, I thought it might sell 10,000 copies the first month.

            It sold 11 copies, and I personally knew 9 of the people who bought it.

            That was hardly an auspicious beginning, but the more I learn about self-publishing, the more I have come to realize it was par for the course. The old rule of thumb used to be that the average self-published book sells 150 copies. There’s a reason for that.

            Sociologists figure that between work, church, clubs, neighbors, and old friends, the typical American knows about 150 people reasonably well. If you write a book (and who doesn’t these days?) you can figure half your circle of people will buy it, and a similar number of outliers will stumble across it somewhere as well. And perhaps Amazon has pushed the number of outliers up a bit.

Reason to Keep Going

            Despite the slow start for my book, I started getting positive feedback from people who didn’t have to say anything, and the book gradually began getting positive reviews from strangers. Encouraged by the response, and experiencing a serious case of Writer’s Ego, I decided to write a second mystery in the series.

            Wash Her Guilt Away was published at the end of April 2014. At the time of its release, I expected it would boost sales of The McHenry Inheritance by a bit. After all, I reasoned, people who never saw the first book might read and like the second, then go back to the first. In a good month, I figured, The McHenry Inheritance might sell half as many copies as Wash Her Guilt Away.

            Wrong again. In September, the fourth month the second book was out, The McHenry Inheritance outsold it. And it continued to outsell Wash Her Guilt Away over eight of the next nine months. Furthermore, from the scant information Amazon provides its authors, it appeared that a fair number of people were buying the two books together.

What’s Happening Here?

            At the end of May of this year, I published the third mystery novel in the series, Not Death, But Love. June was the first full month it was available. And The McHenry Inheritance had more paid downloads (e-book sales and borrows) that month than the new book did.

            I must confess I’m at a loss to explain why the three-year old book is steadily outselling the newer releases. Is it because the cover is more of an attention-getter? Is it because it has more reviews on file than the other two books, having been out longer? Is it because it’s the first book in the series and people want to start at the beginning? Or is it some combination of those factors plus something else I haven’t thought of?

            Whatever it is, the book is showing legs that I never imagined it would have, and the wise author takes any sale he can get. Last week, on the third anniversary of its publication, The McHenry Inheritance got two new reviews from strangers (five and four stars) and sold its first copy in Spain. Spain! If this be magic of some sort, I’m going to get out of the way and let it happen. The wise author also has to suspect that the readers might be right.