10 Reasons You Don’t Have an Agent
Your writing is unremarkable. You may have worked hard to craft a good story, followed all the rules – trimming unnecessary prepositional phrases, chopping adverbs, replacing passive verbs with active verbs – but the result is indistinguishable from any of a hundred other novels the agent has reviewed in the past month. Solution: Find your writer’s voice and pray it’s a good one. A writer’s voice is that unique stamp that sets his or her words apart from others. There’s no simple (or universal) definition for “writer’s voice,” but typically it will be revealed in such things as an author’s word choice, writing rhythm, and that intangible thing called “tone” or “color.” Best way to find your voice? Write. A lot. If you have a unique...
Inspiration, Perspiration and Aspiration
Thomas Edison is famously known for coining the oft-quoted phrase, “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Some folks hovering in the shadows of the publishing industry have glommed onto this quote as a rallying cry for aspiring authors. “It’s not about talent – it’s about hard work,” they say. Well, they don’t actually say “it’s not about talent,” but the implication of Edison’s statement when recklessly applied to creative genius is that anyone with even a penny’s worth of an idea can work hard enough to someday achieve their publishing goals. Nope. Not true. I’ll wait while you take a moment to quote examples of “no-talents” who have worked their way into successful publishing careers. Done? Yeah, I hear...
10 Reasons I Don’t Want to Be a Bestselling Author
1. I’ll have to purchase a whole new wardrobe from somewhere other than Wal-Mart so people don’t accuse me of wearing my false modesty like a neon sign. 2. Jerry Bruckheimer will want to add explosions to the movie adaptation of my bittersweet love story. 3. I’ll be the guest who gets bumped from Letterman when his lovefest interview with Julia Roberts runs long. 4. Struggling authors will hold quarterly “Hate Stephen Parolini” days to coincide with the receipt of their royalty statements. 5. An interviewer will ask me questions like “Did you know you had written a bestseller?” and “What’s your secret to writing a bestseller?” over and over again until I finally lose the very patience that helped me to complete a novel in the first place and...
Unexpected Things
So, yeah. About the roaring silence. Sometimes the best-laid plans…etc. Life has sent a few (significant) unanticipated challenges and changes my way recently. And these things aren’t about to go away. So… I’ve had to make the difficult decision to re-direct my energies from this site to the Real Life Stuff. I’m well aware that the way to build an online audience/platform is through regular, uninterrupted blog posts. And that just isn’t going to happen here. Not for a while. But rather than shutter everything and write it off as a fun three-month experiment, I’ve decided to leave the blog right here. When I have a writing window, I’ll finish one of the many posts waiting in the “drafts” folder and let you...
How Do You Write What You Don’t Know?
[Note: Stephen is currently collecting data on what it's like to experience a great deal of pain (for use in some future work of fiction, of course), so this post is gonna be short. He's really counting on a couple of you providing the bulk of the post in the comments section. Bring on your wisdom.] Okay, here’s the question of the day: How do you write a scene where a character experiences something you’ve never personally experienced? I mean things like shooting an innocent man. Jumping from a speeding car. Standing on stage in front of 100,000 adoring fans. Facing your greatest foe. Kissing someone who is not your spouse. Being told you have a terminal disease. Learning that your teenage daughter is pregnant. Dying. Yeah. These aren’t little...
