ARE YOUR NARRATIVE ‘TELLS’ OBVIOUS?

By Kasie Whitener

Poker players have ‘tells.’ Maybe it’s tapping a pinky on the table, crossing or uncrossing legs, or blinking a little bit longer than usual. Tells are the minor behaviors that indicate the cards dealt the player are either very good or very bad.

Writers have tells, too. Whether it’s a pattern of development that is beyond genre conventions, or a particular phrase a writer favors, writer tells are the things we love to hate about reading the same authors over and over.

Ben Blatt captures these tells in his book Nabakov’s Favorite Word is Mauve. Using a method he describes in this article, Blatt suggests that the frequency of certain words in a piece works like a fingerprint to identify the author.

I’d argue that the fingerprint is just part of establishing one’s narrative voice. Prolific authors, like my favorite Kindle Unlimited romance star J.A. Huss, rely on the well-exercised muscles of vocabulary and voice to deliver stories quickly. I can’t be certain Huss isn’t being intentional about the fingerprint; I’d be more willing to bet she’s writing what she knows will sell.

So where would the identification of the fingerprint be really useful? Blatt explains the method was created to identify the true authors of anonymous writings like The Federalist Papers. Historians are notoriously dogged about assigning credit to things like anonymous essays.

How can the fingerprint concept teach us about our own writing?

While reviewing my novel, After December, before sending to a professional editor, I noticed what I described to my publisher as “The Brady Bunch Habit.” Everybody was looking at everybody else. Eye contact is my go-to narrative action. During this most recent revision, I worked on switching out neck-up action for whole-body action: posture, weight shifts, clothing fidgets, shoe scuffing. Anything to add action to the scene that wasn’t characters looking at one another (or looking away because eye-contact-avoidance is my second favorite).

I’m reading a series now where the author more than once has a character admit to being unable to read another character’s expression. Turns out these people are really bad at recognizing facial tells. Or, more likely, the author loves the way an inability to read one’s listener forces the speaker to take a chance on whatever she’s about to say. It’s an effective device used once per book. Unless you’ve read five of her books. Then it’s a recognizable tell.

On the daily our preferences as consumers are being catalogued by ones and zeroes wherever we leave a digital footprint. Facebook shows us relevant ads, Zappos basically stalks us, and Amazon suggests titles that match our browsing and buying history.

The author’s fingerprint is just another algorithm by which we can code the sloppy, emotional wreckage of creation. Whether it’s sentence structure or vocabulary, as we become better (and more prolific!) writers, we shape our own fingerprint through our work. Now we just have to decide if we’re intentionally telling other players we have a full house.

What are your narrative tells?

COUNTERFEIT BOOKS on AMAZON

By Bonnie Stanard

Counterfeiting is becoming a problem for writers who publish and sell their books on Amazon, according to the New York Times. Though it’s not considered widespread, there’s no reason to believe that book counterfeiters will willingly retrench their profitable activities, especially considering that there’s no organized measures being taken to track down counterfeit books.

How do you know if somebody has copied your novel and is selling it on Amazon? The discoveries so far have been made by readers who have recognized book duplicates or irregularities on Amazon. For example, an Atari buff discovered and exposed a counterfeit copy of Breakout, by Jamie Lendino. A certain Steve S. Thomas remade Breakout and sold it as his own. He got rid of the title and replaced it with the subtitle — How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation. According to the NYT, “He put on a new cover and substituted his name for Lendino’s” and kept Lendino’s biographical details. 

Other writers have said their books have been copied and sold by counterfeiters: Andrew S. Greer (her novel Less); Tish H. Warren (Liturgy of the Ordinary); Danielle Trussoni (Falling Through the Earth); Lauren Groff (Florida). According to the NYT, “For 18 months Amazon has sold a counterfeit of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express despite warnings in reader reviews that it is a ‘monstrosity,’ dispensing with such standard features as proofreading and paragraph indenting.”

Amazon tells prospective publishers and sellers, “It is your responsibility to ensure that your content doesn’t violate laws or copyright...or other rights.” In other words, Amazon does not assume any responsibility for selling counterfeits. And our courts have not found Amazon liable for selling counterfeit products. The company has successfully argued that it is a platform for sellers, rather than a seller itself.

The Authors Guild, in advocating for the creation of a small claims court, points out that a major factor to the rise in book piracy is that the law does not hold internet platforms accountable for copyright offenses of sellers in the same way as brick and mortar stores, which are held liable for unlawful sellers on their premises.

Andrew Hunt, publisher of a computer book that was stolen, pointed out that when somebody buys a counterfeit, the real author may get cheated but Amazon still makes a sale. “You could ask, What’s their incentive to do something?” he said.

So where does that leave you? It means that you must figure out if Amazon is selling counterfeit copies of your book. When it comes to issues such as copyright infringement, we as individual writers have no clout. Which gives us a reason to join an organization and find strength in numbers. One of the best known for its advocacy of writers is the Authors Guild.

If Steve S. Thomas and a gang of counterfeiters are rounded up, can we expect them to be prosecuted? Will they go to jail? Not according to James Gibson of the University of Richmond School of Law: “...the chances that a copyright infringer will suffer any legal consequence – criminal or civil – are vanishingly small."

There is hope on the horizon. Congress is currently considering the proposed Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act, which would create a small claims tribunal to hear counterfeit charges. Currently such cases must be brought in federal court at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH RESEARCH?

By Rex Hurst

Currently I am finishing up a book, called Sunday Morning at the Peak of Hell, the setting of which is the great beyond, the bad place where the souls of all the people we don’t like go. It’s a modern day odyssey through the afterlife, similar to the one Dante took in the 11th century, only updated for modern times.

So far it’s taken me five years to complete. Not because of the plot, there isn’t much of one, it’s because every time I had a new historical figure, I feel the need to stop all work and research the hell of that sad soul.

Granted a lot of these characters aren’t exactly well known in the public domain: Decius Mus, Upnastium, Alistair Crowley, Anton lay Vey, Tomas de Torquemada, Hetty Green, Ambrose Bierce, Wilhelm Reich, and John Romulus Brinkley. Recognize any of those names and you get a gold star. However, when I added each of these characters, often knowing very little myself about their lives, I felt the need to stop everything, buy every book I could on them (often this didn’t amount to much more than two books, in two of the cases there weren’t any and I was forced to use Wikipedia alone), and absorb the whole of their lives.

Which is why the whole of the book has taken five years to complete.

You’re probably going to laugh when I say that all of these months of research often only resulted in a few extra paragraphs (maybe half a page at most) of text. But I was also trying to absorb the flavor of the historical figure’s personality, so that their dialogue in Hell would seem accurate to the two readers who would read my novel and also know who John Romulus Brinkley or Hetty Green were. For some reason, it needed to feel right to me.

Now later on, as I’m polishing this work up to actually send to publishers, I’m wondering if I just spent too much time, literally years, on making these obscure characters as real as possible. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I’ve got OCD. Maybe I’ve been wasting my time and no one will give a damn.

As a final taste test, I gave the latest draft to my wife. She read over the manuscript and shrugged.

“It’s pretty good,” she said.

“What did you think of the depiction of Ambrose Bierce?”

“Oh, is that a real person?”

Ah well….

MANAGING FEEDBACK to IMPROVE WRITING QUALITY

By Ruth P. Saunders

Getting feedback from other writers is not enough; we must also use it productively to improve the quality of our writing. Here are some guiding thoughts to consider.

      · Share an early draft but not the first.  

Develop the piece through self-editing before sharing but not for too long. Getting input sooner moves the writing forward and reduces opportunities for attachment, which can inhibit the openness needed to manage constructive criticism.

· Separate yourself from the products you have created.

The critique applies to the piece, not the person producing it. Self-doubt predisposes us to infer what comments mean about the writer rather than about words and sentences. Seek constructive ways to increase confidence rather than pursuing “evidence” to support personal misgivings. Alternatively, feeling accomplished as a writer may incline us toward reluctance to accept criticism of new work.

· Try it all on and then take off what doesn’t fit.

Treat all criticism as valid initially—open your mind completely and try out suggestions on the page. It’s like shopping for clothes or accessories: experiment, put on something new, and take a good look in the mirror. If it doesn’t look good or feel right, take it off.

· Allow time for processing and incubating.

Grant yourself days, weeks, or months to review feedback, reflect, “try it on,” and see how it works. Some comments become clearer with repeated consideration, and others need to incubate undisturbed for periods of time. Check with trusted others about remarks you find disagreeable or unclear.

· Pay attention to patterns.

Notice similarity in feedback received from different people over time and incorporate fixes for these into your self-critiquing and self-editing process. For example, I overuse the word “that.” I search for and correct this as part of my writing process.

· Consider the source and the circumstances.

Writers vary in ability to provide constructive criticism, which is a learned skill separate from the art of composing. And accomplished critics experience transient events affecting ability to provide useful feedback on a single occasion. Remember this if you are baffled by a review.

· Strive to provide useful and empathetic comments for others.

As your ability to critique others’ writing develops, you improve at assessing and applying feedback to your own.

· Affirm yourself as a writer.

Keep a balanced focus on what succeeds as well as the problems in every piece. The goal is to strengthen your work and you control this process. And, as always, keep writing.