Stone In The Surf Press

WRITERS, AUTHORS and STORY TELLERS

I make a clear distinction between three forms of writing, a writer, an author and a storyteller.  A writer I see as someone who has an immense command of the mechanics of the English language.  They are masters of the very convoluted rules that govern the written word.  They are the tax accountants of speech.  If you have ever worked with a technical writer, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Authors are those gifted individuals who write great works of literary art, Tolstoy, Poe, Emerson, Shakespeare, and Rand.  They create works that transcend generations and become cherished pieces of human history.  I will never be either of these, nor do I desire to be.  For me, I love the role of storyteller.  If I can capture my audience, let them imagine for a bit, let them escape their day to day for a few hours and maybe take a little something with them in the end, I will have succeeded.  Sort of like the theme park engineer.  If you feel you got your sixty dollars worth at the end of the ride, my job is done.  The good Lord and my editors know, I’ll never be able to spell or properly structure paragraphs.  And I’m humble enough to know, I’m not working on the next great American novel.  I am a storyteller in written form because that is what I love doing.

THE ZEN OF WRITING

Ray Bradbury wrote in his book Zen and the Art of Writing, that we write because we have to.  That we write because we know, if we don’t something inside of us will die.  I believe that, I believe that with all my heart and soul.  In Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s 1972 TV movie, From Time To Timbuktu, he creates a world where everyone must be equal.  The newscaster has to wear coke bottle glasses so he can’t read any better than the average person and the ballet dancer has to wear heavy sand bags so that she is no more graceful than your average day klutz.  Despite this horrible encumbrance placed upon her by society, the dancer must dance.  She has to.  And in the end, when she sheds her sand bags, Diana Moone Glampers, the Handicapper General makes certain she pays the ultimate price for her art.  I’m not suggesting that writing will kill you, but there are times, when I thought it was going to drive me to that point.  Let’s face it, if you don’t feel that there is a story inside you that must be told, that yearns to be free with the passion of that dancer, writing is not for you as a life choice.  Make it a hobby, but don’t make it your life.

THE FOUR ESSENTIAL PARTS OF A STORY

A friend of mine once told me that a good story must have three parts.  I add to those three a fourth element.  It seems basic and almost silly to mention, but you’d be amazed at how many stories fail to have one of these elements if not more.  What are these essential elements?  A beginning, a middle and an end.  And I add to that, just enough words in between to tell the story. 

It used to be that writers would get paid by the word and with many magazines, they still do.  I have found that setting an arbitrary goal of numbers of words or pages, creates a factor which often times has a negative impact on a story.  Word count varies, but you can assume 250 to 350 words per page on your average paper back novel.  A two hundred page book makes a novella at 50,000 words and your average novel comes in around four hundred pages at 100,000 words.  In the day and age where you were paid 3 ½ cents per word, more words, more dollars.  Ever been to a movie that seemed to drag on forever.  You know the one where you debate if the plot doesn’t pick up soon, you will.  That’s what happens to a writer who concentrates on word or page count.  Tell your story in your own words and in such a way as to keep your reader wanting to turn the page and read what happens next.  The Bridges of Madison County, short book very successful.  And if you’re just starting out, it’s best to start out on a project that is manageable. Some thing you have the ability to begin, finish and publish.  That success will be an amazing inspiration to yourself.  For years I was a finance guy, accountant, bean counter type.  In the 80’s “Quality Circles” and “Continuous Improvement” was the raging fad in corporations across America.  I can’t tell you how many seminars I’ve endured.  I'm certain I even mumble the principals in my sleep.  The one thing I did take away from all of those courses is, make the first project you tackle one that is manageable.  It may not be the grandest endeavor, but picking one that allows you to see the project through from beginning to end will create an immense sense of accomplishment.  This feeling will allow you to take on bigger projects with a greater possibility of success.  True when building giant main frame computers, tanks and fertilizer and surprisingly true in writing and publishing as well.

If you do have that 2,000 page epic burning inside of you, maybe it can be broken down into a series.  It’s a problem I had with the Chronicle of Adrian Smith, every time I’d create a new character her or his life story became the basis for a new book.  I’ve got more than a dozen stories in the series outlined.  Although I could have written it as a huge epic, it worked better as a series.  My few faithful fans are clamoring for the next book, The Princess and the Parent, which, with luck will be out this fall (under a more enticing title) and I promise it will not disappoint them.  If I were to create a “rule of thumb” for length of a story, “it must have the right number of words to tell the story, no more, no less.”

A beginning, a middle and an end.  Seems simple enough right?  You can’t believe how many authors fail to see this.  I often find a book will have a great beginning and a strong middle but the end leaves me empty.  It’s that roller coaster without the final loop.  I love Stephen King’s books.  He is by far the master of character development.  By the end of his books you feel that you’ve grown up with the characters, often times, the endings seem trite or contrived.  Your reader has paid upwards of $20 to read what you have written.  They’ve invested several hours of their life reading your words.  Give them their money’s worth.  This is true for any book, from “how to” to “history” to “fiction” or “romance”.  I developed my own style for the Chronicles for Adrian Smith series which in variations flows into my stage plays and other works.  I like to start the story with a conflict, take the characters through a number of trials and events which ultimately bring them right back to where they started.  Only those seemingly disassociated events along the way wind up solving the initial conflict.  It was a method I used for insuring that I had a solid beginning, a middle and an ending worth reading for.   In The Audit Report, Adrian Smith, an Earth born accountant, has found himself thrown into a strange alien galaxy.  It’s filled with black marketers. His only means of survival is to sell contraband from Earth, something he becomes quiet successful at.  His problem is, dealing in junk food from Earth carries with it an immediate death penalty.  Smuggling goods is taking a toll on him financially and emotionally.  He’s perplexed as to how to solve this problem.  And then, a series of events takes him across 100 light years of space and traces the steps of an alien visitor to earth 100 years ago. In the end I take him back to the exact place he was standing in the first few pages of the book.  It’s the journey that ultimately provides the solution to his dilemma.  This was a self imposed, “I’d better make sure the conflict is resolved” devise that works in this instance.  It won’t work in every story, but you should keep in mind that your reader will want resolution by the time the story is finished.  That being said, there are the exceptions where an opened ending, one that leaves the future of the characters up to the imagination of the reader, can be successful.  I caution that this only works if that is perceived by the reader to be the best conclusion and not a bit of literary trickery.

I’ll offer up a bit of self confessed adaptation.  I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs.  For those of you who are too young to know the name, he was the master of serial books and the creator of the character Tarzan.  Ever wonder where the city in Southern California Tarzana got it’s name?  In his Mars, Venus and Pellucidar series he had a very reoccurring format, boy meets girl, there’s an immediate attraction, boy saves girl, villain takes girl, boy spends rest of the book finding girl, boy saves girl, (somewhere along the way girl hates boy then realizes she really loves him), and finally villain whisks girl away – which make you want to get the next book in the series which starts the whole cycle over again.  Why do I hear a Disney cast singing “The Circle of Life!”  People like conflict – action – and resolution.

CUT TO THE CHASE

The most important part of your story will be the very first words.  Harlan Ellison, the infamous fiction writer and producer of Babylon 5, once talked about the art of writing television screen plays.  His most important advice has stuck with me for many years, “Cut to the chase.”  It was crucial back then and even more so today.  We live in a world of people with environmentally and media imposed ADD.  There’s a great “T” shirt with the slogan, “People say I have ADD but they just don’t understand…Hey look a chicken!”  It is a truism of the American population.  We want everything now, drive through food, microwave meals, instant access everything.  The radio media knows that they have 4 precious seconds to capture your attention, 3 seconds of dead air and you’ll change the channel.  Television viewers are an especially low attention span group, you’ve got a few seconds to catch their attention before they surf away.  Grab their attention in seconds one, two and three and they’ll hang on to see if the next sixty minutes is worth their time.  With the decline in people who read, the same is true only more so with books.  Reach down from that train speeding across Kazakhstan in the dead of night, grab the hand of your reader and pull them into your story.  Save the exposition for chapter two.  Imagine any one of these openings,

The classic from Edward George Bulwer Lytton’s 1930 novel, Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night….”

The explosion threw Samantha across the museum floor. She slammed into a priceless Ming vase whose fateful crash to the floor was drowned by the roar of the blast that was still reverberating off the walls.  Across the room the diamond sat untouched behind its protective glass display case.  She rubbed the back of her head and tried to stand.  “This isn’t going at all as I had planned.”

If love could come at first glance, if there were any truth to the Oxygen Network, media  promoted lie about love at first sight, it could not have come at a worse a time for Jane Summers.  She stood precariously on the cliff, inches away from serenity and freedom from the pain the gripped her heart.  As the sun set over the Pacific, she was ready to quietly put an end to her life.  Hundreds of feet below her a golden Labrador jumped from one craggy rock to the next, dashing between the angry crashing of the waves.  The dog boldly led the way for a man who agilely followed his companion’s lead.  He stopped, looked up and saw her standing on the cliff.  His words rushed up to her carried on the salt air, “Beautiful day for a sunset!”   Jane acknowledged with a half hearted wave.  She had hoped to close the book on her life alone.  It was how she had lived most of her life, it was how she wanted it to end.  Why did he have to be there at that very moment?  Even in her final moments, life was going to be cruel to her.  He wasn’t moving on which frustrated her even more.  He called to her again, “Be careful, those rocks are unstable!” She waved again hoping he would leave.  The dog barked.  “Great, I’ll be laying there with some mutt licking my face.  Go away!”  Neither man nor dog moved.  Finally she gave up, the moment was broken. “Maybe tomorrow.”  She turned to leave, the ground beneath her feet gave way, her head struck the rocks. As she slipped into darkness she felt an unusual calming of her soul that fate had taken control of her and she could finally be at peace.

I find this works, in plays, in books, in any form of story telling.  Mind you story telling also includes books which convey real information, “how to” books, text books, well everything, including business plans.  Consider this. 

Gasoline prices are soaring.  Every 10 cent increase in price costs the average American several hundred dollars per year.  The current economic outlook projects that over the next 5 years the price of gas will rise to $5.17 per gallon.  With 240 million registered drivers in the US this equates to a $720 billion impact to the American consumer.  It is a trend that can bring economic hardship and financial ruin to millions of people.  Custom Genetics, Inc has developed the solution to this world wide problem.  With our patented modified yeast we can generate dodecanol from any organic waste.  Our process makes this chemical 100% interchangeable with conventional gasoline with no adverse impact to the vehicle performance and maintenance.  In most cases our test vehicles showed significant increases in mpg.  Because the process uses bulk fermentation instead of the costly cracking as in traditional petrol chemicals, the retail price per gallon is estimated at $.37, prices we haven’t seen since 1972!  Custom Genetics, Inc is seeking $100 million in series A financing to build our first full scale production facility.

Where’s my check book?  It’s all about capturing the interest of your audience.  That being said sometimes the best ideas just aren’t sexy or come at the wrong time.  Imagine releasing the movie Towering Inferno on September 12^th.    

Conveying information is story telling.  My father is not only a rocket scientist, but an avid student of socio-political economics.  Every once in awhile he’ll tell me about some book he’s read on the micro-economic impact of soy bean production in Latin America on the US exports of purple widgets.  I’ll ask him why it was so interesting.  The answer is never about the facts, but how engaging the author was in telling the story.  Anything can be interesting if told in a compelling manner.  One of these days I’m going to write the screen play about the discovery of Neem seeds in Africa. 

Humans are born with an innate curiosity, that insatiable desire to learn more.  That’s what drives us to send men and women into space, into the darkness miles beneath the sea and to turn the next page of a book.  That curiosity is what feeds your reader to want to read more, your perspective investor to ask “tell me more” and your potential lover to want to know more.  Learn to tell your story with this in mind and you will become a successful storyteller.

VOICE

A word about voice.  Voice is the term used to described the style in which you tell your story,  It is your written voice.  When I began researching books and articles about writing successfully and by that I mean producing work that a major publisher would pick up, all of them said pretty much the same thing.  “Read all of the best selling novels and write like one of them.”  To that I say bunk.  In my opinion that advice is a bucket of barn carpeting.  What makes those books great is that they are written in the unique voice of the author.   A comic who does impersonations is entertaining, but he or she will never be as famous as the person they are imitating.  Tell your story in your voice.  Readers are a savvy lot, they will know and appreciate honesty, they can also detect a sham.  Be known for who you are, not that she writes a lot like so and so. 

When I first set out to sell Charlie’s Treasures bookstore to bookstore, I stopped in at a very well known shop in Berkeley.  The woman in charge of children’s books was a hard sell.  She asked if I wrote like a famous children's author?  I said “No.”. Like this person?  Again I said “No”.  Like this person or that person? And again I replied, “No.”  Frustrated she asked me one final time, “Then who did you write like?”  And to that I replied, “I wrote as the story inspired me to write.”  She took half a dozen copies on consignment.  People like to compare a new thing to an old thing, it makes it easier to stick in a box.  Unfortunately I choose to write as Richard Neumann in a voice you will either enjoy or wish you had chosen something else.

STAGE PLAYS

Word got out to a small community theater in Arizona that I write stage plays as well.  This is far more fun than you might think.  For me stage plays are quick and simple stories to write.  The director would call and tell me she had x number of men and x number of women and wanted a play about a Christmas Present or a dinner theater murder mystery.  I find it takes me about 4 hours to write for every one hour of stage time.  The interesting thing about a play that is different from a novel, is the exposition of location and character.  In a play I can say, it’s 1920 in a seedy bar on the wrong side of town.  Sam enters stage left his fedora pulled low hiding his face.  Stella sits at the bar stage right in a faded red dress.  She’s been there almost as long as the bar has.  That’s it.  I let the director and the set designer do the rest.  I can run ten pages of dialog before ever having to change the set or add anymore description to the characters.  Often times I will include a main character bio to help the actors understand who they are portraying.  The cool thing about stage plays is often times your local community theater will be looking to produce a series of shorts by unknown local authors.  This, if nothing else is a good exercise in writing.      

YOU ARE PART OF A VERY SPECIAL GROUP

Many people talk about writing a book, a small percentage of those, actually start, and few still ever finish.  For me completing The Audit Report was a personal achievement.  For years I had wanted to write.  Every time I tried to find the time to write, something always seemed to get in the way.  Finally one stormy night in a carport in Mesa Arizona, I sat down in front of a blank screen and began to write.  With minor life interruptions I have been writing ever since.   The fun thing is, the more I write the easier it is to write more.  No matter what it is you write about, realize that the completion of that work is an accomplishment that very few people will ever achieve. 

You have to be realistic in your expectations about writing as well.  I write because I have to.  And, the reward is the reaction I get from each person who reads my books.  I debuted Charlie’s Treasures to the mass public at the LA Time Festival of Books in 2006.  The Festival takes over a good portion of the inner quads of the UCLA campus and is attended by 125,000+ people.  One would think if only 1% of the people shopping for books bought a copy of Charlie’s Treasures, it would have been very successful.  As it was I sold about 20 copies.  Not even enough to pay for gas.  I should have boxed everything up, put my tail between my legs and gone home in defeat.  I would have, except that each of those books I sold reinforced with amazing clarity why I write. Late on the second day, a gentleman stood at my booth and read Charlie’s Treasures cover to cover.  When he finished, he looked up at me and said, “Thank you for writing this book.”   That is why I write.  No amount of money could ever take the place of a compliment like that.  So instead of being depressed, I went home and continued to promote Charlie’s Treasures and wrote When The Force Isn’t With You.

I shared the booth at the LA Times Festival of Books with a client of mine.  One of the partners asked me how quickly he could make $150,000 a year.  My reply was, “Not by writing and not by publishing, and definitely not over night.”  There are a scarce few people who have the ability to capture a very recent current event and churn it in to a novel or screen play.  For the rest of us, it is important to have the proper expectation of the world of writing and publishing.

WRITE

And finally, write.  Many people talk about writing a book.  Many authors are writing a book and will always be writing a book.  Write.  Write everyday if you can.  In When The Force Isn’t With You, I talk about a phrase my father passed onto me.  A phrase that has sat on my desk where I can see it every day.  It simply states, "So What Have You Done About It Today".  If your dream of writing, of sharing your story, of publishing a book means everything to you, then find a way to do something that will bring you one step closer to it everyday.  Easier said than done.  In our busy lives with work, family and other obligations it can be a challenge.  I can’t tell you how many thousands of miles my trusty 1996 Toshiba laptop has accompanied me on.  I’ve also taken to carrying a journal wherever I go.  Because I’m having to balance my own cash flow and have fallen back to the dark side and returned to accounting, I’m up every morning at 4:30 writing until I have to leave for work.  Find that time, half hour, hour or more when you can, let friends and family know this is your time to write.