#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
My short story REMAINDERED is now available on Amazon for a mere 49 cents.
Whether you are a bestselling author or a writer toiling in mid-list obscurity, your books will eventually end up remaindered to the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble. The fear, of course, is that your career will eventually end up remaindered, too. I got the idea for this dark-comic mystery while actually living the humiliating booksigning experience that opens the story….
I got this email from "Bigby" today:
Lester Dent, the pulp writer who created Doc Savage
(and I believe wrote all or most of the Shadow stories) and God knows how many
others once gave his formula for any 6000 word pulp story… which is EXACTLY
the four-act structure for TV. He even breaks those six thousand words into four,
1500 word acts…Absolutely fascinating.
Bigby is right. Dent’s formula reads almost exactly like the four-act structure of an episodic teleplay. For example, here is how Dent describes the first 1500 words of a story:
That’s pretty darn close to what the first Act of any episode has to accomplish. The first Act sets up the central conflicts of the story: what the hero has at stake, what others have at stake, what his goals are and the obstacles that prevent him from achieving his aims. Dent says much the same thing, only in a different words ("He
tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem."). Dent’s advice is worth taking — whether you are writing a thrilling short story or a spec episode of a TV show.
Here’s sneak peek at the rough cover for HOLLYWOOD AND CRIME, the new anthology edited by the prolific Robert Randisi (author of over 400 novels!). My contribution to this anthology, which comes out in February, is a short story entitled "Jack Webb’s Star." My friends Max Allan Collins, Stuart Kaminsky, Michael Connolly, Paul Guyot, Dick Lochte, Gary Phillips and Gar Haywood are just a few of the other authors who have contributed stories, all of which feature at least one scene at the corner of Hollywood & Vine (Les Roberts, whose name is featured on the rough cover, unfortunately has had to bow out).
For those of you who, like me, are filling out your Bouchercon Anthony Award ballots and are trying to remember which books came out in 2005… here are two resources that will help: Cluelass lists all the 2005 Mystery releases and book critic David J. Montgomery shares some of his favorites for the top Anthony categories.
Novelist John Connolly has an interesting post on researching his novels. But what intrigued me was this little nugget about how he writes:
I brought with me to the US the initial draft of The Unquiet.
I imagine it would be almost unintelligible to anyone who tried to read
it as a coherent narrative. My first draft tends to be a little rough.
There will be inconsistencies of dialogue and character. Some
characters will appear in the early stages only to disappear later,
their failure to manifest themselves once again left entirely
unexplained. Some things seem like good ideas at the start, but quickly
prove to be distractions from the main thrust of the book, and as soon
as that realisation hits me I tend to let those elements slide.I don’t fret too much about how untidy the text may be (although,
in my darker moments, I wonder what might happen if I didn’t live to
finish the book and someone else, for whatever reason, decided to piece
together whatever was left behind. I wish them luck. I mean, I’ve
written it, and sometimes even I’m not entirely sure that I always look
forward to trying to put all of the pieces together). After all,
there’s nobody looking over my shoulder, and my main aim is to get the
plot and characters from A-Z, even if that means bypassing Q and R
entirely, and occasionally having to loop back to P just to reassure
myself that I have a vague notion of what I’m doing.
I’m guessing that John doesn’t write with an outline. I know a number of authors who write the same way he seems to…just going where ever the inspiration takes him. I’m not going to knock it because clearly it’s worked great for him. But I don’t think I could ever write that way. That doesn’t mean that I stick religiously to my outline, or that characters don’t come and go (I’ve had characters who were meant to die in Chapter One that I kept alive through the whole book), but I need it to keep me more or less pointed in the right direction. I would find writing a book, particularly a mystery, very difficult to do on-the-fly.
I had lunch with a TV writer-friend not long ago, and he was lamenting how the business was letting him down lately. He hadn’t worked much in TV during the last year and was despairing about his future. He told me that he wished he wrote books, too. So write one, I said. But I could see from the expression on his face that he wouldn’t. He liked the idea of writing a book…actually doing it was something else. He was a TV writer, and that was it.
I decided long ago that I was going to be a writer first and a TV writer second. There’s no question that I make most of my living in television…but I believe it’s important to me professionally, financially, psychologically and creatively not to concentrate on just one field of writing (It probablyhelps that I started my career as a freelance journalist, then became a novelist, then a non-fiction author, and finally, a TV writer/producer). So I write books, both fiction and non-fiction, I teach TV writing, and occasionally I write articles and short stories… most of the time while I’m simultaneously writing & producing TV shows (though the TV work always takes priority over everything else).
While the income from books, teaching, and articles doesn’t come close to matching what I make in TV, those gigs keep some cash coming in when TV (inevitably) lets me down, keep me "alive" in other fields, and, more importantly, keep my spirits up.
As a result, who I am as a writer isn’t entirely wrapped up in whether or not I have a TV job or a book on the shelves. I often have both, or one or the other — but if I have neither, I have a class to teach or an article to write.
I’m not producing a series right now. But last week, I partnered with a major production company and pitched a movie with them to a cable network. I met with representatives of a European TV network that’s interested in having me teach TV writing to their writer/producers and consult on their series. I rewrote a TV movie treatment to incorporate studio notes. I turned in a freelance script to the producers of a new drama series. I taught an online screenwriting class. I submitted a short story to Amazon shorts. I wrote 60 pages of my next novel. Next week, I have a meeting with a studio exec who has shows to staff up, a notes meeting on the freelance script, galleys to proof on one of my novels, more pages of my book to write, and probably a whole lot more that I don’t even know about yet.
The bottom line is, I am always writing something for pay, even if that check is miniscule and hustling for my next gig, whether it’s in TV, publishing, or something else. Why? Because that is who I am… a professional writer. And I have a mortgage to pay, just like everybody else.
Author J. Steven York talks on his blog today about the widely held notion that anybody who writes a tie-in is a hack. Among his observations:
We’re used to being dissed, even sometimes by our fellow writers. It
was exactly that situation that lead to the recent formation of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers,
an organization created to promote and honor the writers engaged in
this challenging and under-appreciated area of publishing.Though I’m a member, I’ll be honest that I don’t know why it’s
necessary. Those of us in the business know the score, and I really
don’t care what the world-at-large thinks. My goal is to entertain my
readers with the best book I can produce, and enjoy myself in the
process.[…] most tie-in fiction is produced under battlefield conditions. No
waiting for the muse. No excuses (or none that your editor is likely to
care about). No delivering a book radically different from the one you
promised. It needs to be done. It needs to be done on deadline. It
needs to be done to specification. It needs to fit the package we’re
prepared to market. Does that hurt the quality of tie-in works? Sometimes, but less so than you’d think.
Sure, there are some lousy tie-ins and novelizations out there. But I’d say the ratio of good to lousy writing is about the same as you’ll find in popular fiction in general.
I look at tie-in writers as the literary equivalent of freelance writers on TV series. Every series uses freelancers but nobody inside or outside of the entertainment industry considers those writers hacks. That’s because freelancers are well-regarded showrunners between gigs or up-and-coming new writers contributing to a successful, on-going franchise. The same is true of tie-in writers.
If you look at some of the folks writing tie-ins, they include some of the most honored mystery writers in the field today (Max Allan Collins, Thomas Cook, and MWA Grandmaster Stuart Kaminsky come to mind). But, as J. Steven York point out, everybody has to pay the bills and, for some reason, that’s looked at as disgraceful in some writing circles.
I never fail to be amazed at the surreal and romantic notions that
people have about writers, publishing and "literature" (however you
want to define that last term). Publishing is a business, and it’s been "industrial" since the invention of movable type and/or the printing press.I don’t really know where the notion came from of the lonely, alcoholic
writer starving for their art, chiseling their masterpieces word by
painful word, stuffing the pages in a drawer for posterity.Fact is, its very difficult to find a writer who doesn’t at least aspire to
"pay the bills" through their works, even if that means publishing in
obscure literary magazines to support a academic career, or taking to
the lecture circuit to speak to the legions of people who would like to
pretend to have read your work.[…] Sell
more, sell better, write more, spend less time flipping burgers. It’s a
pretty simple formula that’s worked for a very long time. If you love
to write, you hope to sell.
The IAMTW was formed to celebrate the work of tie-in writers and educate people about who we are and what we do. We hope the 2006 Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in the tie-in field, will bring some positive attention to the writers of these bestselling — but underappreciated — works.
UPDATE 5-28-06: Author Keith R.A. DeCandido jumps into the fray:
The truth is that artists have always worked for money, just like
everyone else. The successful artists are the ones who had wealthy
patrons. The reason why art flourished in the middle ages is because
lots of wealthy people wanted art in their homes and it was considered
a noble profession — but it’s not like they were all independently
wealthy.Yes, we’re hacks. And we’ve always been hacks. Get over it.
The LA Times did something today that newspapers and major magazines never do — they reviewed a published screenplay of a recent film, Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of THE DAVINCI CODE. The book critic’s opinion of the script is secondary to the extraordinary nature of the review itself, which probably never would been printed (or even assigned) if not for the fact that the film had one of the biggest opening weekends in movie history. Which, perhaps, is why the anonymous editor felt it necessary to preface the review with his rationale for publishing it:
"The Da Vinci Code" is not just a mega-selling book, not just a
crowd-drawing movie, it’s also, at $21.95, an "illustrated screenplay"
replete with storyboards, stills from the movie, musings by author Dan
Brown and the movie’s principals and boxes of production trivia (such
as " ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had 25 revisions over six months" and
"Twenty-four rue Haxo doesn’t actually exist in Paris.") At the heart
of the "official making-of-the-movie book," though, is Akiva Goldsman’s
script. The Times asked film and book critic Charles Taylor to consider
how it plays on the page.
Screenplays are published all the time but are never taken seriously (or noticed at all) by the general media, only by the script-craft magazines. Does this mean we’ll start seeing more published screenplays reviewed by the LA Times? I doubt it. But still, in its own way, it’s something of a watershed event.
The New York Times reports that Harper Collins is teaming up with fellow News Corp. company 20th Century Fox to develop TV series based on their books. First up is a series based on Lisa Scottoline’s legal thrillers and another inspired by Elizabeth’s Noble’s THE READING GROUP, which follows a year in the life of a
women’s book group "whose members begin
to see their lives mirrored in the works they
discuss." The studio has hired Karen Glass, a former vp at Buena
Vista Productions, to work in the HarperCollins’ NY offices to sniff out projects on their book list.
(Thanks to Buzz, Balls and Hype for the heads-up)
I’ve been immortalized as a hitman in Victor Gischler’s new book SHOTGUN OPERA:
He was born Lee Goldberg in Sydney, Australia, but it had been many years since anyone had called him by that name. His stage name was Jack Sprat. He changed it after meeting the Fat Lady during a boardwalk carnival act in Atlantic City. Mavis was big and soft and beautiful, and Goldberg — now Sprat — fell in love.
They were married three months later and the stage names were a no-brainer. Jack Sprat was five feet five inches tall, all spindly hard muscle and sinew, a bald head and a big nose that gave him the appearance of a vulture.
He’s got my manly nose and sinewy bod down right, but the rest isn’t quite accurate. I’ve
returned the favor in my new book THE DEAD LETTER, where Victor shows up as a hitman, too:
Victor Gischler, known as The Do-er to the underworld of gun monkeys and the casual readers of the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine, drove his growling ’68 Mercury Cougar up to the Monterey Bay
area from his home-base in Fontana, California, where he liked to hang out with his fellow members of the John Birch society, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Boy Scouts of America.
[…] he’d show them both the glorious American eagle tattooed on his belly, its talons clinging to his hairy navel, and they’d be overcome by patriotism and lust. They might even fight with each other over who got to have him first.
I haven’t seen Victor’s belly but if he doesn’t have an American eagle tattooed on it, he should get one.