Lee Goldberg

I Hear Voices

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My brother Tod has started an interesting discussion on his blog about the role of  voice in fiction.

When someone tells me that they hear me in a book or story (fiction
only here — in my essays and columns, you often are getting unfiltered
Tod) I feel disappointed. My characters aren’t me and if you see me,
hear me in the narration, that 4th wall is broken.  I want you to hear
the narrator, whomever that might be. If it feels like I’m sitting
there telling you a story, I believe I’ve failed.

His comments were provoked by a blog posting from author Amy Garvey, who was thrilled when one of her readers "heard" her in her prose.

A friend of mine gave me the ultimate compliment recently. (Sadly,
it wasn’t about how much I look like Nicole Kidman.) She’s not much of
a romance reader, but she was interested to see what I’d written. So I
gave her my first book and got an email back which read, “It is so
‘you.’ I feel like you are sitting there telling me the story.”

Not
impressed? I was. Because what it meant to me was that beneath the
story, this reader had heard “my” voice——the writer lurking behind the
characters and the plot.

I may not agree with exactly how Ms. Garvey phrased it ( I don’t think I want the reader to sense the writer and, with it, the construction work behind the story), but I understand her being pleased that her readers heard her voice.

I think the author’s voice is important.    Some of my favorite authors have a very distinct voice that carries through all their books, regardless
of the stories they are telling or the characters they are writing about ( Larry McMurtry, Stephen King,  Elmore
Leonard, and John Irving immediately come to mind). I think that voice is part of
what makes their books special. Other authors take on the voice of their lead character, and that’s fine, too… but I don’t think either approach is technically superior when it comes to sustaining the "fiction" that the events we are reading about are real.

I Don’t Want to Find You An Agent, II

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The guy who wrote the letter that prompted the previous post replied today.  He wanted me to read his script and, if I liked it, recommend him to my agent.  In a nutshell, I said I wouldn’t, and listed all the reasons why, concluding with this advice: Don’t send me your script, and don’t send it to any other
professional writer either. It’s a stupid idea. Here’s his response:

Your use of the word
"professional" here implies that you regard me as an amateur. Your use of the
word "stupid" needs no comment. Well, it’s true that I’m not a professional
in the sense that I never got paid for my screenwriting up to now. However,
as I indicated in my (very polite) message to you, I have a long career
behind me as a journalist. I was hoping for a more mature response from you
on that basis alone — at least a response that does not belabor the obvious.

You’d think he would have put his journalism skills to use and a) read
my blog before emailing me and discovered  the many, many posts where I discuss the
pointlessness of sending your scripts and series ideas to me and b) he would have
researched the industry a bit and realized sending his script to a
screenwriter was not the best way to find an agent or break into the business.

Would you have been so patronizing if I had a name other than
Mohamed? Or if I was not a Canadian? Perhaps not. At any rate, your comments
are duly noted and I wish you continuing success with Diagnosis Murder
and whatever else it is that you do.

Ah yes, the last gasp of the desperate… the racism, sexism,  ageism, or xenophobia card. To be honest, I didn’t even notice his name or where he came from. I didn’t bother to read that part of his original email since I had absolutely no intention of contacting him about his screenplays. But you’ll notice that rather than learn from his mistake, and accept that his proposal  might have been wrong-headed, he has to flail around for some other, hidden reason that I won’t read his scripts. With an attitude like that, it’s not surprising to me he’s been entering his scripts into competitions for five years instead of selling them.

I Don’t Want To Find You An Agent

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I got an email today from a guy who says he’s been writing scripts and entering competitions for the last five years, ever since he got his MFA from York Univeristy in Toronto.  He can’t get seem to get any "reputable agents" to read his work.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. So here is my very presumptuous request: I’d like to send you one of my scripts. Read it when you have a moment — even if its a year from now. If you like it good, you can refer me to your agent. If you don’t, no harm, no foul.

I assure you that it will NOT be a waste of your time.

I get this request, oh, about 80 times a month. It makes no sense to me.  So, to all eighty of you getting ready to write me the same email next month, here’s why it’s a dumb idea to ask me to read your script and refer it to my agent.

1) I’m a writer, I’m trying to market and sell my own work, not yours. 

2)  It’s not my job to screen potential clients for my agent.  Finding clients is his job. I like to think he works for me rather than the other way around.  Besides, I want him spending his time on the phone getting me work, not looking for new clients who will divert his full attention from me, me, me.  (That’s not to say I haven’t recommended clients to my agent… I have,
many times. He’s even signed up a few. But they were close friends of
mine or people I’ve worked with and admire).

3)  I’m not a studio or network development executive. I don’t care if you’ve written a good script.  I’m not hiring writers. If I was, I’d hire myself.

4)  When I am looking for writers to hire on staff or invite in to pitch for episodic TV assignments, I only read writing samples that come through agents. Why?  Well, we said it best in our book, "Successful Television Writing" —

You probably think that’s because we’re a close-knit group of elitist jerks who want to horde all the money and opportunities for ourselves, and agents are just one more gigantic obstacle
we’ve come up with to keep you out.

You’re right. Sort of.

Agents are the first line of defense for us. They read through all the crap to find the very best people, the writers they can make a living on. And the only way an agent is going to make a living
is if his clients are talented, professional and will do a consistently good job for us, the producers.
The great thing about this system, for us, is that the agent has a real motivation to find the best writers out there, saving us the trouble. Because let’s face it, elitist jerks like us don’t want work any harder than we have to.

But agents do more than save us extra work. They also protect us. That doesn’t mean they’ll take a bullet for us or taste our food to make sure it isn’t poisoned. But they’ll make pretty sure we don’t get sued.

We’ll give you an example of what we’re talking about. Let’s say you sent us a script a month ago in which the hero of our show loses his memory. Then you turn on the TV this week, and what
do you see on our show? A story about the hero losing his memory. You’re going to think we stole it and sue our asses.

There are a lot of similar themes in stories being developed all the time, and a television professional, will understand that. A professional will also understand that the development process is much longer than a month, and that our script was probably written long before yours showed up in the mail. And a
professional will figure that we’ve probably been pitched fifty amnesia stories, because it’s a terrible cliche, right up there with evil doubles and the return of long-lost siblings, that’s eventually done on every show.

But without an agent representing you, and vouching for you, we have no assurance that you are, indeed, a professional.

Which leads me to my next point.  5) I don’t want to read your script because I may be working on something similar.  I don’t want to get accused of stealing your ideas.

So no, don’t send me your script. Don’t try to send it to any other professional writer, either.  It’s a stupid idea.

The Mail They Get

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If you’ve enjoyed reading some of the idiotic mail I get, you ought to visit Query Letters I Love, a new blog filled with the letters a Hollywood exec has received from people trying to sell their inept screenplays.

Here’s my favorite:

“Ducks, the Killer Breed” tells the story of some harmless ducks that
are transformed into blood-thirsty fowl by radiation from a meteorite
that lands on their barn.

Imagine you are a 10 year old boy who
lives on a farm and owns some ducks. Now imagine that one night a
meteorite crashes into the barn, bathing the ducks in radiation from
outer space. What would you do when you awoke to find that your pet
ducks had become bloodthirsty fiends?

Note to the reader: lest you find the idea of scary ducks laughable, I
should specify that as a result of being irradiated, these ducks have
grown fangs in their bills. Also, their droppings are acid, and will
melt anything they land on."

(Thanks to Sarah Weinman for tipping me off about the blog).

Jasper Fforde on Fanfic

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Novelist Jasper Fforde ("The Eyre Affair," "Well of Lost Plots," etc.) shares his views on fanfic.

My thoughts on Fan Fiction are pretty much this: That it seems strange to want
to copy or ‘augment’ someone else’s work when you could expend just as much
energy and have a lot more fun making up your own. I feel, and I think with good
reason, very proprietorial about Thursday and all her escapades; clearly I can’t
stop you writing and playing what you want in private, and am very flattered
that you wish to do so. But anything published in any form whatsoever – and that
specifically includes the internet – I cannot encourage, nor approve of.

Tod vs The Fanficcers

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Once again, my brother Tod takes on the fanfic universe.  First he did it with his column, now he’s doing it with Letters to The Editor.  He wrote to Writers Digest this month, criticizing them for an idiotic article (then again, aren’t most of the articles in that magazine pretty lame?)  that suggested that writing fanfic might be a good way to learn how to write.  As a successful novelist and acclaimed teacher of creative writing, Tod thinks otherswise. In part, he said:

Being handed a character…isn’t equal to the organic process you must
go through to create real, living characters. Writing fiction isn’t
about getting a shorthand lesson in creativity via someone else’s
established characters; rather, it’s the process of learning how to
create vivid characters and story lines from your own minds. Writing
fanfiction to learn how to write a novel is like filling in a crossword
puzzle with the belief that someone will hand you a doctorate
afterward.

Naturally, this has pissed off a lot of fanficcers, including some folks who are writing their own Harry Potter novels. Like this woman, for instance…

Well, Tod Goldberg, I majorly disagree. To begin with, I think
fanfiction gives people the courage to write. One, because you can put
up your work in a welcoming atmosphere and not have to go through the
self-esteem destruction of trying to get published. Two, you can get
your work read by someone other than your mother. Even if you
write something and set up a web site for people to read, you’re not
likely to get the draw that you would putting up a story at a fanfic
site. Three, you don’t have to go through the very hard work of making
up a background, allowing a writer to jump write in and write!

She has, of course, just proven Tod’s point…but I doubt she noticed.  But far be it from me to dive back into that  debate again.  I’ll leave that to Tod over on his blog.

Translation please?

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I got this email tonight.

In fact , It’s a great pleasure to me to send this letter especially for you
because I admired with your fantastic series which one of them like (( Martial law )) — please : contact with mbc tv and tell them to show your series (( martial law )) , call for me on number : XXXXXXXXXXXX  in kuwait country – or send me on this e-email XXXXXX@hotmail.com as soon as possible          thank you

I wonder if it’s too late to call Kuwait?

Another Publishing Scam…they just keep coming, don’t they?

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First there was the PublishAmerica scam, now comes another vanity press masquerading as a publisher. I got this email from a reader here:

Hi All, I was just ready to submit my novel (which took about 8
years to write) to PA. Boy, glad I did some reasearch first, Whew!

Any ideas/comments about www.american-book.com before I submit?

So I checked the site out. The company is called American Book Publishing. They proudly proclaim:

We don’t abide by today’s conventional book publishers’ wisdom. We don’t conduct
business as usual, at least not in book publishing.

They certainly don’t.  In their author submission guidelines, they say:

We provide our authors all the professional services of editors, book designers, and book publicists to ensure their success.

In other words, you ARE A CUSTOMER.

We may issue publishing contracts with offers of financial advances to authors who have been published and have already established their popularity.

Conventional publishers don’t work that way. When they say "we may issue publishing contracts with offers of financial advances," it means that their standard practice is that  they don’t. But they will kindly make an exception if they can trade on your  good name.  How thoughtful of them.

We may issue publishing contracts to professional writers who have become accomplished in their writing career and the contract may neither offer an advance or request a deposit.

A deposit??? This should be your big, fat tip-off that this is a vanity press eager to take advantage of your desperation to be published.  But just in case you missed that subtle clue, they go on to say…

We may issue publishing contracts to talented writers who have not been published before or become accomplished in their writing career, and this contract may request a one-time deposit of $780 that is returned to the author the first quarter after the book has been formally released.

Publishers pay you, you don’t pay them. Don’t let your desperation to be published blind you into throwing your money away on a vanity press trying to  pass itself off as something else. Open your eyes!

If you want to be self-published, at least go to a company like iUniverse that doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.

Sidelined

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Sorry there have been so few postings here over the last couple of days… somehow I managed to throw out my back and am hobbling around like a guy who’s testicles have been crushed in a vice.  Feels kind of like that, too. Strange thing is, I have no idea how I hurt myself.  A visit to the chiropractor today hasn’t improved my condition.  And I’m still in physical therapy three mornings a week for my arm… and wearing a new splint/torture device that basically makes it impossible for me to type with my right arm for three hours each day.

In the midst of all this, I’m also working hard to finish my sixth Diagnosis Murder novel to meet a March deadline…knowing that, between now and then, I’m attending/speaking at the San Francisco Writers Conference and Left Coast Crime in El Paso.

Maybe that’s what hurt my back… sitting at my desk writing.

Who knew writing could be so strenuous?

2 + 2 = DEAD

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I got this email today:

Hey Lee,

I just discovered your site and look forward to visiting it more often. I’m new to writing mysteries and wondered if you, by chance, are aware of any books that are a study of the mystery genre that utilize equations or diagrams when it comes to analyzing how mysteries work…I know
this is probably an esoteric request but I just thought I’d ask because when I study mysteries I tend to see the orchestration & plotting of the  suspects and clues in an almost mathematical equation…is that a common  approach to the structural part of mysteries?

Anyway I know you’re a  busy guy but I just thought I’d pick your brain with this question…all the  best, Matthew

Um, I dunno, Matthew. But there’s a new series called NUMBERS premiering on CBS Sunday about a guy who uses math to solve crimes. Does that count?