Writing

Writing What You Have To

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People are always asking Lawrence Block when he's going to write another Bernie Rhodenbarr book. He doesn't know. Besides, he's not interested in writing what you want him to write… because that's not what drives him, or most writers, to put words on the page. He says: 

It’s counterproductive to tell me what you want me to write. I sincerely hope that my writing pleases you, but if you think I’m here to give you what you want, there’s a lot you don’t understand about writing, and no end of things you don’t understand about me. The greatest disservice I could do my readers is to try to give them what they want. That’s just not part of my job description. All I can do is write my books my way, and try to make them so irresistible that you enjoy reading what I want to write.

[…]as much as I might want to write a book about Bernie, or any other character, the desire’s not all that’s required. There are writers who can write anything they’re asked to write, and I thank whatever gods may be that I am not of their number. I probably was, early on, but I got spoiled, and for years now I’ve been unable to go on writing a book unless it engages me.

I love my readers. I need my readers. But some readers have the ridiculous notion that the novelists they read work for them and have an obligation to keep churning out the same book over and over. Some authors are quite content to do that. But even among those authors, I know many of them keep writing book after book about the same characters because they love it, because that's what they are driven creatively to do, and not only because its what their readers and publishers want from them. I'm on my 14th MONK book, and I can tell you I'm not writing them for the money. If I was, I would have quit long ago, because the money is far from spectacular.

Others, like Lawrence Block, would rather go where-ever their muse takes them, regardless of whether it makes the most commercial sense or disappoints some of their fans (I am sure there are scores of readers who wish he'd do nothing but write Scudder and Burglar books for the rest of his life). He writes the story that he has to tell…not the story that you, or me, or the publishers want him to tell.

I admire that about him.  Maybe it's that dedication to his muse, and not his readers, that's one of the keys to his prolific output and great success. 

Scribe Award Winners Announced

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Gse_multipart38023 The winners of the Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in media tie-in writing, were awarded Friday at a ceremony at Comic-Con in San Diego by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers   Author Peter David was honored as this year's Grandmaster, and engaged in a lively discussion about his career, and tie-in writing, at the ceremony, which was hosted by Max Allan Colins and drew a packed house.

Nancy Holder won the award for best original novel in the general fiction category for Saving Grace: Tough Love.  The honors for best original novel in speculative fiction went to Nathan Long for Warhammer: Bloodborn: Ulrika the Vampire. This is the second time Long has won a Scribe for his work in the Warhammer franchise.

The Wolfman by Jonathan Maberry snagged the Best Adaptation/Novelization award while  Nathan Meyer won for Best Novel, Original or Adapted, in the Young Adult category with Dungeons and Dragons: Aldwyns Academy.  353167370

 

Tied In to Writing

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For the last few weeks, author Jonathan Maberry has been running a terrific series of lengthy, detailed interviews with Scribe nominated tie-in writers on his Big Scary Blog about the nuts-and-bolts of their craft. This week he focuses on the authors nominated for "Best Speculative Original." Here's an excerpt:

BIG SCARY BLOG: Talk about your process for creating a media tie-in book.

MATT FORBECK: If I’m not already familiar with the basis of the book, I immerse myself in it as best I can and become a fan of it too. As I do that, I look for story hooks, little “what about that?” or “wouldn’t that be cool?” bits. Those become the seeds of the novel. Once I have that, I write up an outline, get it approved, and dig in for real.

JEFF GRUBB: I think all media projects have a core ethos, an underlying truth about them. The original creators of the project may not know what it is, and in fact it may evolve over time. One of the goals I have when working on a media tie-in book is to dig down and find that piece, find that core ethos, and remain true to it in the story. Guild Wars 2 is very much about people coming together to fight a greater threat – that is one of Dougal Keane’s major conflicts in the book.

DAVID MACK: It’s a lot like most other writers’ processes, I imagine. Either I solicit an editor for a shot at writing for a particular license, or they approach me. Either way, if it’s a property I know well, I might already have ideas ready to pitch and develop.  If it’s one that I’m curious about but don’t know intimately, I’ll dig in and immerse myself in it until I start to get a feel for its big picture, its characters and its broader storytelling arcs.

Next, I’ll try to find a story that interests me and seems to offer some new angle that neither the show nor its existing tie-in titles have explored.  In some cases, such as a tie-in line that’s been running for a while, an editor might ask me to craft a story specifically to advance a part of an ongoing narrative.

Then I write a proposal, just a few pages, to see if my general idea is what the editor is looking for. Once we settle on an idea, I prepare a much longer and more detailed full outline that can be presented to the license-holder for approval. Once we get the green-light, I go to work on the manuscript.

To stay in the right mindset while working on a given franchise, I’ll try to listen to music soundtracks from it (if they’re available), and have DVDs ready for reference and quick refreshers on characters’ speech patterns, etc. Online references are also often invaluable tools, especially for a series that is still in production while one is working on it. Thank Heaven for the invention of wiki reference sites!

SEAN WILLIAMS: Well, firstly, I have to make sure I know the property sufficiently well to do it justice. With Star Wars or Doctor Who, say, that would be easy: I’ve been a fan of them for decades. Depending on the kind of project, the next step would be to get right down into the details of the story and character, since they’re the aspect of the tie-in most important to get right, at least in the early stages. This is always accomplished in collaboration with editors and other stakeholders in the project–the people who own the property, basically. I’m not just telling a story for me: in a real way I’m just channelling something for someone else. But that is a fun process, and a challenge, one I take very seriously. There are snafus sometimes, without a doubt, but whether I have one month or one year to write a tie-in, I give it the same energy and consideration I would give one of my own books. To do anything less would be to cheat everyone involved.

The entire series of interviews is well worth your time, regardless of whether you are into tie-ins. There's a lot of great insights into the craft and business of writing books shared by the authors, all of whom are experienced, hard-working pros.

Lawrence Block: A Passport to Yesterday

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Headshotcolor Today I’m honored (and thrilled) to feature a guest-post by author Lawrence Block…discussing, among other things, the perils of time on a series character like Matthew Scudder and how he approached writing his brilliant new novel A Drop of the Hard Stuff.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” That’s the sentence Leslie Poles Hartley chose for the opening of his novel, The Go-Between, and if those eleven words were all he ever wrote, he’d still deserve a spot in any proper collection of quotations.

Isn’t it a gorgeous line? And it has the added advantage of being true.

My wife and I are fairly intrepid globetrotters, and members in good standing of the Travelers Century Club. We’ve crossed borders on ships and planes, buses and trains, and a few more on foot, but we haven’t yet tried a time machine.

As a fictioneer, I’ve kept myself rooted in the present. I love period fiction when it’s done right (Thomas Flanagan, Jeff and Michael Shaara, Max Byrd) but have never felt inclined to get into the game. I have my work cut out for me trying to make sense of the world around me, right here and right now.

On May 12, Mulholland Books published A Drop of the Hard Stuff, my 17th novel featuring Matthew Scudder. I’ve been writing about the man since the early seventies, and he’s now in his early seventies, and no longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Which is my own damn fault, because I decided early on to have Scudder age in real time. I’ve never regretted it, because it’s made him more real for me and for readers as well, but this added realism brings with it an added sell-by date.

Now I may have to keep on working but why should he? The man’s got a rich wife and a pension from the city. And, considering all he’s been through, hasn’t he earned a comfortable retirement?
My wife’s bright and beautiful, but she never had Elaine’s opportunity to amass wealth. And all I get from the City of New York is a reduced-rate card for the subways and buses. I’m not complaining, mind you. . .

Still, the fact that I have to go on writing doesn’t mean I have to go on writing about Matt Scudder. But I was out for a walk one day, and it struck me that there was a gap of some seven years in Scudder’s story. (His fictional autobiography, you could call it, which I’ve been ghosting for him for the past quarter-century.) In Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), he leave a drink on the bar, goes to an AA meeting, and cops to his alcoholism. In Out on the Cutting Edge (1989) he’s seven years sober and living his life.

I didn’t skip this stretch of Scudder’s life because I figured it was uneventful. From what I’ve observed, early sobriety tends to be anything but. Thing is, I’d figured the series was done when he got sober, and it took me seven years to realize Matt and I weren’t through with each other.
Matter of fact, the book that followed Eight Million Ways to Die was a sort of prequel. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) recounts events ten years earlier, when Scudder’s world centered upon saloons and hotel rooms and after-hours joints. When it was published, it got an enthusiastic review from Richard F. Snow, the longtime editor of American Heritage; he justified it by proclaiming the book an historical novel, and the 1970s thus a part of the past.

I thought of that when I returned to Scudder’s past in A Drop of the Hard Stuff. I’d had a couple of other dips into past time in three Scudder short stories, “Looking for David,” “Let’s Get Lost,” and “A Moment of Wrong Thinking,” each consisting of today’s Scudder recounting events from his NYPD days. But this would be different. This would be total immersion, a full descent into that foreign country of past time. And, while it would be bookended by a late-night conversation between Matt and Mick Ballou, and would take place in 1982-3, it would reach back even further into the past—to his years on the police force, and his boyhood in the Bronx.  Drop of the hard stuff-1

Well, you know, I make this stuff up, so it wasn’t as though I had to go interview people to find out what Scudder was up to back in the day. But I had to return in my own mind and memory to a very different world, a world without cell phones and personal computers, a world in which we somehow actually managed to find things out without Google or Wikipedia, and even managed to hook up without match.com or JDate.

If the past is a foreign country, its New York was certainly a very different city. Neighborhoods, now all squeaky-clean with gentrification, were mean streets indeed. You couldn’t walk a block without encountering a pay phone, but you might have to walk half a mile to find one in working order.

I didn’t get a computer myself until the early 90s, so in the interest of verisimilitude I suppose I could have forced myself to bang out A Drop of the Hard Stuff with a typewriter. But why? Did Jean Auel write Clan of the Cave Bear by scratching in the dirt with a sharpened stick?

I wrote the book my Mac, but the apartment I squatted in to write the book didn’t have wi-fi, so I was without Internet access during my working hours. While that didn’t exactly catapult me into the past, it made me realize just how much I rely on Google and Wikipedia (though not, I assure you, on match.com or JDate).

I didn’t do anything you could call research, having always been too lazy for that sort of thing, nor did I make a colossal effort to recall specifics. It seemed more natural simply to let myself slip into an earlier time when I was writing, rather as I slip into another voice or another state of mind or way of seeing the world. That, I suppose, is how fiction flows out of the imagination.

But I came away from the book with the perhaps obvious realization that the world has changed rather a lot in the years since Matt Scudder uncharacteristically left a drink unfinished and walked off to start a new life.

Barry Malzberg, my good friend and contemporary, had this to say about the book’s time period: “Completely different. 1982 is to the young Yuppie crowd today what 1900 was to us in the early sixties. Utterly historic. The Web and the social networks have not only changed, they have reformulated everything. We have survived to this world and it is a privilege and we can in fact handle it pretty well but I don’t kid myself: it might look like a bear and sound like a bear and shuffle like a bear but it isn’t.”

I think he’s got the proportions right: a 25-year descent into the past now, is the equivalent of a 60- or 70-year trip when we were young. The world moves faster, and the past recedes more rapidly with every passing year.

I can’t help thinking of “The Lightoliers,” a story of Stephen King’s. The eponymous entities were monsters, always at our heels, devouring the past. I don’t remember a thing about the story itself, but that one image lingers, perversely gaining in strength as the past falls away. The Lightoliers, forever chomping away, stealing all past time away from us.

Well now, isn’t that heavy baggage for a novel just designed to get you through a plane ride or a lonely night? But I won’t apologize. It’s the risk you run when you let a writer natter on about his work.

A very different place, the past. It’s hard to know what to pack, and you’d best have your passport in order. But a quick visit is not without its rewards.

And who’s to say? I might go back again. I can’t rule it out.

You can keep up with Lawrence Block and his musings on his blog, his Facebook page,  his website, and on his Twitter feed: @LawrenceBlock

Tod Gives Burn Notice the Burn Notice

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10082679 After writing five BURN NOTICE  books, my brother Tod has called it quits, turning down a contract for more. Remarkably, the publisher has decided to retire the series as a result. Now that THE BAD BEAT,   his final book in the series is coming out, Tod reflects on his blog today on what he's learned from the experience. Here's an excerpt:

…writing Michael Westen taught me how to write series fiction and, beyond that, how to pace commercial crime fiction. See, previously, the crime fiction I wrote was decidedly not series and decidedly not commercial, really. (And I would argue that I never really set out to write crime, specifically, even if Living Dead Girl and Fake Liar Cheat and a bunch of my short stories are, you know, stories about crimes.) At any rate, writing the books required a completely different skill set — the deadlines alone required that they be almost completely plot and voice driven, which is somewhat different than my other work which tends to be character and setting driven. Writing Burn Notice has changed the way I approach crime fiction, which is good since the novel I'm writing now — more on that in a moment — is a pretty straight crime novel. 

[…] because the deadlines were so close, I also had to learn to not be an obsessive rewriter, which meant I had to keep a pretty tight plot, which meant I did more outlining than usual…and by that I mean I outlined anything at all, which I typically don't do. I also ended up trusting myself more. Usually when I'm working on something new, I show drafts to my wife or to my agent or trusted friends to get some feedback, but I just didn't have the time to do that with these books and the result is that I ended up needing to be honest with myself. Not an easy thing for any writer.

Now I don't feel so guilty about getting him the gig.

I Hate William Rabkin

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WRITING-600x900 (1) William Rabkin has a new screenwriting book out on the Kindle — Writing The Pilot — and I hate him for it.

I hate him because I only meant to browse the book the other day…but I ended up getting sucked in by his engaging, smart, and entertaining voice and spent all !@#$% night reading it.

I hate him because it would be the perfect update for our long-in-print screenwriting book Successful Television Writing.…and now it won't be, the greedy bastard.

And I hate him because I actually learned some things about a subject I thought I knew at least as well as Bill, my best & oldest friend and my long time writing partner…who also happens to be Adjunct Professor of creative writing in the University of California, Riverside's MFA Program, Palm Desert Graduate Center, and also teaches television writing at the UCLA Extension.

But even through my blinding hate, I have to admit he's a terrific and justifiably beloved teacher and that Writing the Pilot is both extremely entertaining and jam-packed with useful information.
His analysis of what makes a great pilot…vs what makes a great opening episode for a series…is simply brilliant.

His indepth analysis of the pilots for Fast Forward, Life on Mars  and Fringe were particularly smart and insightful. He also deftly uses examples from our own career, in particular our unproduced CBS pilots Ella Clah and Silhouette, to illustrate the thought-process behind developing and writing pilots (and candidly discusses some of mistakes along the way and what we learned from them).

Spec TV pilots are all the rage right now, contrary to what we said years ago in the last chapter of our Successful Television Writing, and his book couldn't be more timely. If you want to get into the TV biz, or if you are a veteran TV pro struggling with pilot-writing issues, Writing the Pilot is a must-read.

The book will soon be available in trade paperback and Nook versions as well.

(Pictured: Tod Goldberg, me, and Bill Rabkin signing at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2010)

UPDATED 8/19/2011 to add new cover.

Me on Me Again

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The Writer Underground interviewed me this week about, well, writing…here's an excerpt.

Q: You came to writing early; you wrote and sold your first novel while still in college. How many novels have you written over the course of your career?

Eight Diagnosis Murder novels, 13 Monk novels, four Jury novels, My Gun Has Bullets, Dead Space, Watch Me Die, and The Walk.

Q: In an era where a lot of “experts” suggest you have to specialize to succeed, you write in several different formats (novels, online, TV, etc); how has that versatility paid off during your career?

It’s kept me alive. I have never put all of my eggs in one basket. So when TV lets me down, the books pick up the slack, and vice-versa. I also work as a TV consultant to studios and networks around the world.

Q: How do you approach new projects when you have little or no experience with that kind of writing (e.g. — your first script, your first novel, first tie-in novel, etc)?

With terror… and excitement. I like challenging myself. It keeps me sharp. I usually begin by researching the subject and talking to experts in it… before tackling it myself.

Q: Any quirky writing habits that would immediately endear you to my readers?

I write in the nude while listening to TV themes. I’m joking, of course. I at least wear underwear.

Q: You’ve got a pretty active online presence; how much time are you investing in your blog, interviews, social media, etc?

Way too much. In fact, I shouldn’t even be answering these questions.

Q: Writing professionally means dealing with tight deadlines, yet “writer’s block” is still a hot topic among writers. How do you make yourself “creative” on a deadline?

It’s the deadline that makes me creative. I do much better when I have a drop-dead date. I have never missed a deadline, even when I had an accident and broke both of my arms.

Q: Any advice for novice writers, or observations about the mistakes they make over and over and over and over…?

Avoid clichés.

 

We Are Family

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Famcroppedb My brother Tod wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal today about what it's like being part of a family of writers…and the dymanics that have shaped us into the authors were are today. He  says, in part:

the truth is that I didn’t really grow up surrounded by writers as much as all the people I grew up with – my older brother, Lee Goldberg, and my two older sisters, Karen Dinino and Linda Woods, who often collaborate – all became authors. We are separated by nine years, oldest to youngest, yet we managed to end up in the same place, at least metaphorically speaking.

My brother was first. His debut novel, .357 Vigilante, a slim men’s action adventure written under the absurd pen-name Ian Ludlow, was released in 1985 after he got a book deal through his writing teacher at UCLA. I would follow fifteen years later with my first novel and then my sisters, writing as a team, published their first book in 2006. Combined, we’ve published 50 books, hundreds of short stories, essays and features and, in my brother Lee’s case, written or produced 26 different television shows.

[…]We had a difficult childhood, all of us: our mother was dying for most of our lives, the victim of both lupus and cancer, though she’d actually live for 73 years, but that specter hung over us, along with her propensity towards madness. And our father was simply gone, long before he was actually gone. We each escaped into words from an early age. That’s the sad truth that lives under the happy result. The “how” is easily revealed: we enjoyed the escape so much that it became our physical world.

For more, check out the article. You'll know more about us afterwards than you'd ever want to.

 (Pictured: l-r Linda Woods, Lee Goldberg, Maddie Goldberg, Valerie Goldberg, Tod Goldberg, Wendy Goldberg, Karen Dinino, and Jan Curran)

My Favorite Child

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Copy of Watch Me Die_5   I’ve written thirty novels – eight of them Diagnosis Murder books and thirteen of them Monk tales – but my favorite out of them all is Watch Me Die, which was originally published in hardcover in 2005 under the title The Man with the Iron On Badge.

It’s about a guy who learns everything he knows about being a PI from reading books and watching TV shows. It's about the clash between fictional expectations/stereotypes and reality. The book is something of a spoof…and yet, at the same time, a straight-ahead crime novel full of explicit sex and violence. That shifting tone made the book a hard sell…because it didn't fit into a particular marketing niche. Is it a satire? Is it a PI novel? Is it a thriller?

Most of  the editors who rejected the book back in 2003 praised the writing but didn't see where it would fit in their publishing line.  There were two editors at major houses who loved it and wanted to acquire it…but  couldn't convince their superiors. Another wrote a LONG rejection letter, saying how much she loved it, that it was the best PI novel she'd ever read, and how it pained her not to be able to publish it. (In the mean time, I wrote a screenplay version of the book, which landed me the gig writing the Dame Edna movie. It never got made, but it was a very, very big payday for me and was my first solo screenwriting job outside of episodes of TV shows that I'd produced).

It was frustrating not being able to sell the book because I felt it was the best novel I'd ever written. I loved writing it and I very much wanted to write more about Harvey Mapes, the main character. I couldn’t complain too much, because I was having a lot of success with other books. Even so, this one meant more to me than the others. I approached my Diagnosis Murder & Monk editors at Penguin/Putnams about The Man with the Iron-On Badge…but as much as they liked me, and my work, they weren't willing to take the gamble.

Finally, after two years of  shopping the book, we took it to Thomson/Gale/Five,  which had a reputation for putting out fine mysteries…and for being a place  where  published authors can find a home for their "dropped" series and unpublished works.  It was an imprint run by writers (like founder Ed Gorman) and editors (like legendary book packager Martin Greenberg)  who truly loved books and appreciated authors. They produced handsome hard-covers that were respected and reviewed by the major industry publications. I had a great experience with them on The Walk (another book that was a hard sell that but went on, after it fell out of print, to sell 20,000 ebook copies in two years)  and I knew they would treat the book well.  6a00d8341c669c53ef00e553a33d7d8834-320wi

The downside with Five Star was that they paid a pitifully  low advance, primarily served the library market and had very limited distribution to bookstores.  Still, it was possible to win wide acclaim and impressive sales with a Five Star title. And I did. Here's a sample of the reivews:

"As dark and twisted as anything Hammett or Chandler ever dreamed up […] leaving Travis McGee in the dust." Kirkus, Starred Review

 “This was a witty, wonderful book,” Deadly Pleasures

“Goldberg delivers a clever riff on the traditional private eye novel, resplendent with witty and dark turns,” Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

“A fast paced, first person thriller about an under achiever who has to strive to be more than he ever thought he could be,” Permission to Kill

“Approaching the level of Lawrence Block is no mean feat, but Goldberg succeeds with this engaging PI novel,” Publishers Weekly

"Lee Goldberg bravely marches into territory already staked out by some fierce competition — Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, the early Harlan Coben– and comes out virtually unscathed." The Chicago Tribune

"Goldberg has a knack for combining just the right amount of humor and realism with his obvious love for the PI genre and his own smart ass sensibilities. [The book] is a terrific read. Goldberg is the real deal and should be on everyone’s must read list." Crimespree Magazine

The book even got nominated for the Shamus Award for best novel by the Private Eye Writers of America (losing to Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer)

And  although it sold well for Five Star, it failed to land a paperback or foreign rights sales…and went out of print in 2007. 

Last year, I re-released it as an ebook…where it has failed to gain much traction, despite several different covers,  lots of flogging on this blog, and a stage production by the legendary Firesign Theatre.

So now I have re-re-released it as Watch Me Die. And am doing more flogging.

I really, really want Watch Me Die to succeed.

I want it to be my bestselling book…by far. Not so much for the money, but because I am proud of it.

And if it does finally do well, I can justify to myself (and, more importantly, to my wife), investing the time to write the sequel. Or a string of sequels. I would like nothing better than to write as many Harvey Mapes books as I have Monks…or many more….because Harvey Mapes is a character and a voice and an attitude that I love.

So please, help me do that. Spread the word about Watch Me Die.   

 (Pictured: Orson Ossman performing as "Harvey Mapes"  in the Firesign Theatre radio play/stage production, at the RiverPark Performing Arts Center in Owensboro, Kentucky )