A TO Z _ There is no WE in greed

 

GENEROSITY

 You are about to be honored.  

I, the ghost of Napoleon,

am here to dissuade you 
of a dangerous illusion.

Though I know that scoundrel, Clemens, cheated me in that poker game, 

still I will honor my word, and write to you 

of how to succeed in the war in which you have chosen to engage.

Some of you still cling to the dream of obtaining an agent for your work.

I caution you:

they are not interested in you because of their generosity ...

but for what you can do for THEM.

And they know you will be able to do

 little for them 

until you garner an AUDIENCE.

Do not think of a group when you think AUDIENCE ...

Think individual.

No group reads a book.  A solitary person does.

What do individuals want?

Spare me your platitudes.

An individual wants the universal desires:

Power and Sex.

It is a fact of life ...

most find themselves lacking the power to accomplish what they would.

They read to vicariously live a life of powerlessness growing powerful.

I saw some of you wince at my use of "Sex."

Romance is merely the acceptable way of saying "sex."

I see all of you punching into your devices of communication 

while growing ever more distant from one another

as technology widens the chasm between hearts.

Technology has become your all too real GAME OF THRONES

Winter has come.

The winter of loneliness, each of you cut off from the hearts of the other.

Write so as to make the powerless feel in touch with power

and the lonely in touch with the hope of connecting with another ...

And you will garner an audience and the attention of agents.

Now, I am off to have a reckoning 

with that card-cheat, Clemens!

A TO Z? F is for ...

"I don't want just words.  

If that is all you have for me, 

you'd better go."  

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

FUN

Ghost of Fitzgerald here.  

Call me Scott.  

Hemingway does ... among other things that Clemens and Wilde give him hell for.

 Odd.

That's what the profession of writing is ... odd.

You strive to entertain your reader, to make him have fun.

Yet, that is the one thing you must seldom do while in the course of writing: 

 Have fun.

Zelda and I burned ourselves up in our pursuit of fun.  

After all, parties kept us from the looming empty page demanding to be filled with absorbing prose.

Too much frivolous diversion tricks you 

into thinking your surface detail actually constitutes good prose.

I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher 

than most are prepared to pay at present. 

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, 

not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. 

This is especially true when you begin to write, 

when you have not yet developed the tricks of creating interesting people on paper.

Good writing comes from desperate and radical expedients 

like tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That is the price of admission.

Do not be morose over this.

“For what it’s worth... it’s never too late,

 or in my case too early, 

to be whoever you want to be. 

There’s no time limit. 

Start whenever you want. 

You can change 

or stay the same. 

There are no rules to this thing. 

We can make the best or the worst of it. 

I hope you make the best of it. 

I hope you see things that startle you. 

I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. 

I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. 

I hope you live a life you’re proud of,

 and if you’re not, 

I hope you have the courage to start over again.” 

 - your friend, Scott

A TO Z? E is for ...

EXPERIENCE

"The difficulty under which the novelists of our day labour seems to me to be this:

 if they do not go into society, their books are unreadable; 

if they do go into society, they have no time left for writing."
 - Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit

Ghost of Oscar Wilde visiting ...


Clemens and that irritible (and irritating) Hemingway 

are both off, seduced each by their particular demons.

 (Being a ghost is no laughing matter.)

I see where my friends are showering you with platitudes on how to write.

Let me instead urge you

 to live before you write.

I visited Neil Gaiman just last night and talked of this very thing.


He nodded and told of a novice writer showing him a passage from his first novel.

The poor boy's writing reminded Neil of a beautiful, shallow pond, brilliant but with no depth.

Indeed.  

The map is not the sea.  

You must sail the ocean to know it. 

You must live life before you can write of it convincingly.


You need not be a libertine to write well.

All you must do is use whatever pain, angst, or despair you have experienced 

as a touchstone to lend a semblance of soul to your characters.

But your griefs would be considered by most to be small you think.

I shall counter your thought with one of my friend, Clemens --

 “Nothing that grieves us can be called little:

 by the eternal laws of proportion 

a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”

I wonder: 

How do you render 

a semblance of soul 

to your prose?

A TO Z? D is for ...

"Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, 

 profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."
- Mark Twain, a Biography 

 D for ...

DAMN!

Mark Twain with Helen Keller

My meeting with the charming, brave Helen Keller dampened my proclivity to swearing afterwards.

The Creator knows that if anyone had cause for a choice word or phrase, it was that intelligent, kind lady. 

Now, my Huckleberry Finn struck a chord with folks, even feisty Hemingway ...

because I used a sprinkling of cussing and colloquialisms.

Stiff-necked Purists may scoff at the idea of using everyday language in literature, 

 but there is a sense of realism that slang and colloquial terms impart.

 If you want your novels to seem real, the folks in them must speak like real people.

And real people when they smash a thumb with a wayward hammer, do not smile and go, 

"Oh, fudge."

Profanity is like spice in a meal ...

too much blunts the flavor, too little makes the whole experience bland. 

HOW TO HANDLE PROFANITY

1.) KNOW WHERE TO PLACE THE DYNAMITE.

Never in the body of your novel -- only in dialogue.

2.) QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD

Dean Koontz was so embarassed about writing of the sex act in THE WATCHERS 

that reading his distanced prose took me clean out of the story.

So unless your character is a priest, do not put copulate, consummate, or fornicate in his mouth.

3.)  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

It will be for you, or at least your sales,

 if you chase away readers in this thin-skinned Politically Correct society.

Damnation, they would probably tar and feather me today.  Lord knows, they try to ban my books!

Well, children, I hope this helps, damn it!!

A TO Z_ C is for ... AND the IWSG post

"Now, as always, life is a CONTEST of appetites."
- Turquoise Woman

The Scribbler and the Boxer are off to their own devices.  

And I? 

 I am the Turquoise Woman.

I look out from my consciousness surrounding this planet that is my body,

and my horizon spans the swimming bodies of my sisters 

who wheel in their sweeping dance of gravity about Father Sun. 

And you? 

You are songs unfinished.

Which is why I bother with you and those songs you compose.

My consciousness sprang from the wheels of force whose passings are the Northern Lights.

Your invention of language provided the prism which focused my consciousness.

So I will help you in your struggle to further shine that prism.

Selfish you say?

Indeed.  Most factors which drive intelligence are selfish. 

It is often said that you cannot tell a book from its COVER.

How silly.

From the robin to the peacock, the most colorful males garner the attention of prospective mates.

The same can be said for book covers.

The most eye-catching snares the eyes of prospective buyers.

If a browsing reader does not pick up your book or enters your Amazon page,

she will certainly never buy your book.

Take some of Roland's books which have the good taste to include me within their pages.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1537255339/

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517251982/

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1523889152/

The song of your story is unfinished until you find willing eyes and ears to hear it.

Make your plumage as attractive as possible to help snare them.

What do you think?

A TO Z: B is for ...

Is for ...

BREVITY

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. 

To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, 

is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...

Anybody can have ideas --

the difficulty is to express them 

without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."
- Mark Twain's Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868

 Ghost of Ernest Hemingway here ...

That jacknape Clemens has wandered off after starting like he did so often in his writing.

If you should be wondering what the definition of jacknape is:

1 a : an impudent or conceited fellow.
   b : a saucy or mischievous child.

 2 : monkey, ape.

Either version fits Clemens.

BREVITY

Surprisingly, Clemens used an image suitable to the times and the subject.

When you find yourself winding on and on in your novel, be kind to the reader: 

rewind and begin again to distill your chapter to its essence.

If you truly care about your subject, you will strive to make the reader care as well.

You do not do that by boring him.

In this shallow age of texting and news bites ...

readers skim.

They did that in my time with newspaper articles.

I wrote in short, crisp sentences so that even skimmers would get the gist of my story.

In my “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” when the protagonist is nearing death because of a gangrenous leg, 

I wrote: 

“All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.” 

 Here the short sentences have a cumulative effect, pounding home the idea that the hero is nearing death. 

Try to achieve a similar effect in your writing 

by stringing together a series of short sentences when you want to stress a point or add dramatic punch to your prose.

Is your prose bloated or lean?  

Why?  

Intent or laziness?  

Mad? 

I am a ghost.  Your passions mean little to me.

The quality of your writing does ...

After all, if people stop reading for pleasure, who will read my novels?

A to Z?

A TO Z?

A is for

ARE you doing it this year?

Work has been a bugger this year so I am posting less each month.

Are you posting as much this year as last?

Ghost of Mark Twain here ...

Now, Roland needs a bit of help so here I am.

I figure using ARE for A is not doing this challenge justice 

so I will add a word that I have often been called:

ASS

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass; some observers hold that there isn’t any. 

But this wrongs the jackass. 

P. 347—Mark Twain’s Notebook

I mean to help you pilgrims in your struggle to be authors in this upcoming month.

Then, again, I have been courting a gal ...

Gal Gadot.  

So if you don't see me here often, it will be because she has at last warmed up to me.

'Course just tonight in her bedchambers as she hurled a slipper at me, 

Gal said that she wouldn't warm up to me even if we were cremated together.

I like a Gal that plays hard to get.

See you children later.