As far as Grammar Nazis go, I’m about as lenient as they get. I don’t have a problem with incomplete sentences (“Apology accepted.”), split infinitives (“to boldly go”), ending a sentence with a preposition (“Give them what they asked for.”), or pronoun disagreement (“Somebody left their book.”).

I just don’t think that the way we use English, particularly spoken English, can be completely prescribed by arbitrary rules that were written hundreds of years ago. As language evolves, sometimes the rules need to change. Which is why I don’t have a problem with ”a whole nother,” a phrase that drives many people crazy, but is really no different from ”abso-freakin-lutely.”

Yes, it’s OK to break some rules. But there are other rules that are there for a reason, and breaking them annoys the bejesus out of anyone with the slightest appreciation for the English language. Here are some of the best ways to have the Grammar Nazis knocking at your door.

1. I could care less

This is my number one pet peeve because it’s so common, and so obviously the opposite of the intended meaning. When someone says “I could care less,” I wonder, “Well, why don’t you?”

If they could care less, that means that they do care to some extent. What they want to say is “I couldn’t care less,” meaning that they don’t care at all.

Come to think of it, no one seems to have trouble with “I couldn’t be happier” or “I couldn’t agree more.” Why?

2. Literally

On second thought, this is my biggest pet peeve.

Maybe someone wants to say “My mind is exploding with new ideas,” but they think this figure of speech isn’t strong enough. They decide that they need to embellish a little, or you won’t take them seriously. So instead, they say “My mind is literally exploding with new ideas.”

Well, if their mind is literally exploding, you should call 911. But chances are, they meant that their mind was exploding in a figurative sense. This meaning would have been perfectly clear without saying “figuratively,” but for some reason they decided to clarify their thoughts by adding a word meaning the exact opposite.

On those rare occasions where the word is used correctly, it’s often useless. If someone says “It literally changed my life,” that’s correct, but they could have simply said “It changed my life” with no loss of clarity.

It’s only necessary to say “literally” when your statement is likely to be misinterpreted as a figure of speech. My difficulty in coming up with a reasonable example suggests how rarely this happens, but for example, “Girls like that are a dime a dozen. Literally – I’ve never seen mail-order bride prices this low!”

3. Apostrophes

Apostrophes are not garnishes whose use is limited only by your imagination. They are used in contractions and possessives, not for plurals, and not whenever you want to spice up a sentence.

“Its about time you got you’re apostrophe’s right, dont ya’ think?”

4. Could of, would of, should of

“Could’ve” is a contraction of “could have.” Unfortunately, “could’ve” sounds like “could of,” and that’s how a lot of people write it. Maybe they could’ve, would’ve, should’ve learned some grammar.

5. Different than

The correct phrase is “different from.” Doesn’t ”I’m different than you” sound like fingernails on the blackboard? There’s a difference between “than” and “from.” You would never say “I’m taller from you,” would you?

6. Homophones

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same, but which have different meanings. They are usually spelled differently (which technically makes them heterographs), which allows the potential to pick the wrong word.

Suppose someone says, “They’re too experiments really peaked my interest. Eye thought they wood have a huge affect on me, but they barely phased me.” The words they were looking for were “their,” “two,” “piqued,” “I,” “would,” “effect,” and “fazed.”

You don’t notice when you here it, but you sure do when you sea it. So take just a split second to decide between then/than, principle/principal, complimentary/complementary, discreet/discreet, to/too/two, there/their/they’re, right/write/rite, and all the other words that sound the same, but aren’t.

7. I vs. me

This one is controversial because the correct usage sometimes violates our instincts, as in “He’s taller than I.” It’s grammatically correct, but it sounds weird. I guess we’re all so used to hearing everyone say it wrong, including ourselves.

So people say “He’s taller than me” because it sounds right, and even some grammarians will look the other way. (BTW, it’s much easier to see what’s right when you add the missing verb at the end – “He’s taller than I am” vs. “He’s taller than me is.”)

What I can’t stand though, is when people hypercorrect their overusage of “me” by using “I” when “me” is actually the right word, resulting in ridiculous sentences like “Tom’s coming to the movie with Fred and I.”

While their intentions are good, there’s no need to use bad grammar and look pompous at the same time. “I” is a subject, and “me” is an object. Tom isn’t coming to the movie with I, he’s coming with me.

Honorable mentions

This post is long enough already, but I didn’t want to finish without giving a quick nod to some of my other favorites: “I’m going to lay down,” “Everything’s going good,” “Think different,” “Nip it in the butt,” “Let’s try and do it,” “I have less apples than you,” and “I entered my PIN number at the ATM machine.”

What else you would add to this list? And what is the role of Grammar Nazis in today’s society?

Photo by kenposan

Here’s an interesting article about the advantage of dual identities. (Thanks, @introvertzone!)

Vladimir Nabokov is best known as the author of Lolita and other works of fiction. But he had a dual identity as a lepidopterist. He frequently described his life pleasures as “the two most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

The article is about what Stephen Jay Gould called “the paradox of intellectual promiscuity.” Nabokov had proven himself as a writer, and he couldn’t have gone wrong by sticking with that. So did his interest in butterflies have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on him?

Some possibilities:

• He wasted all this time on butterflies instead of writing another Lolita.
• Don’t worry, he didn’t waste too much time on butterflies.
• Lolita was great only because he studied butterflies.
• His work on butterflies was more important than his fiction. Lolita was the time waster.

To Nabokov, these two fields weren’t even all that different. They were just two puzzles he solved in the same way, using his deep passion for detail and precision.

His crazy hypothesis about the migration of a particular group of butterflies didn’t earn him much credit as a scientist in his lifetime, but modern technology recently proved him right. So in this case, we can score a win for lepidoptery and intellectual promiscuity, though more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death.

I think the right answer can only be decided on a case by case basis. I don’t know if there’s any hard and fast rule as to whether we should be chasing our butterflies.

How do you write a novel in 29 days? The same way you write a novel in 21 days, only slower.

This past November, I wrote my second novel for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), completing the required 50,000 words the day before the deadline. But my experience this time was very different from when I wrote my first novel, Mesothelioma Lawyers, New York.

Last time, the words flowed effortlessly. It was a lot of work, for sure, but nothing was forced. This time, it was really a chore, and the results show it. There’s only one semi-decent character, and the plot is held together by supernatural band-aids.

The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to go for quantity over quality, and just get a first draft done quickly instead of editing yourself to death and never finishing. So this was a success in that I crossed the finish line. I’m going to make a few revisions, then post it anonymously on one of my other sites.

Some people say that you can’t force inspiration when your muse is on sabbatical. Others say that writer’s block is a lame excuse to avoid work. What do you say?

I just wrote a movie script in 21 days. (Well, technically it took me from April 1st to April 22nd, but I took one day off.) It was actually my second time (I wrote a script for a Mork & Mindy movie when I was 10), but this was the first time I did it the right way.

If you’ve seen Howard the Duck, you might think anyone can write a movie script, and you’d be right. But how exactly do you do it, and how does it compare to, say, writing a novel?

This work was my Script Frenzy debut, and I’ll put it online after I do some basic editing. (Update 5/10/2010: I’ve just posted Mesothelioma Lawyers, New York: The Movie.)

What NaNoWriMo is for novels, Script Frenzy is for movies, plays, TV shows, and comic books. It occurs every April, with the goal being to write 100 pages of scripted material in 30 days. The idea is that if you give yourself a tight deadline, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish. Your draft might need a lot of polishing, but that’s far better than never finishing anything.

Script Frenzy sets the finish line at 100 pages. The reason for this is because it’s a nice round number, and also towards the lower end for a finished script. Each page of a screenplay translates into roughly one minute of action, so my 103 page script would give about an hour and 43 minutes of screen time.

As far as actually getting it done, most of my productivity tips about novel writing apply here, so check out How To Write A Novel In 21 Days. I’d say Script Frenzy is a bit easier than NaNoWriMo. It takes less than half as many words (for me, 21,000 vs. 55,000), though it’s twice as hard to get the words to flow. Now, what does a movie script actually involve?

A movie script, known as a screenplay in industry terms, is not a movie itself, but the blueprint for one. It gives directions as to what the characters say and do. It tells the director what roles need to be filled, what stages need to be built, what effects need to be created, and what lines the actors need to read.

As the screenwriter, your job is to spell out exactly what happens in the movie. You also need to make it easy for people to scan it to locate specific things, such as which scenes can be shot at night, or which actors need to be flown to Niagara Falls for a particular scene.

To do this, a very specific format and set of conventions are used. Fortunately, the good people at Script Frenzy are nice enough to provide a Word template to handle the formatting and a quick guide to illustrate the process. I’ll just give an overview here.

Using the template, it’s pretty easy to get the hang of things. You select SLUGLINE from the Styles list, which sets the left indent to 0.75″ and switches to all caps. Then you type something like:

EXT. FRANK’S STREET – NIGHT

A slugline tells you where we are – interior or exterior, location, and approximate time. This tells the crew whether they’re filming at a set or on location, and when. It helps them shoot all the scenes for one set together, instead of needlessly jumping between locations.

When you select Action from the Styles list, we exit all caps mode, and you describe the scene:

Snow has recently begun to fall, and it is starting to stick to the street. FRANK and JANICE are walking back from the movie theater, neither having broken the uncomfortable silence since seeing themselves onscreen for the first time.

When you select CHARACTER, we go back to all caps, with a left indent of 2.75″. Then you simply type:

FRANK

Character names are always capitalized before their dialog (and often, throughout the script). This lets people quickly see who is in what scene, as well as locate all the lines for a particular character. The name is followed by (O.S.) if they are offscreen (such as on the other end of a phone call), or (V.O.) if they are giving a voiceover (such as narration, or when another character is recalling something they said).

While actors don’t like being told how to say their lines, we can include a Parenthentical if we need to give direction to make our intent clear. For example:

(sarcastically)

Then we select Dialogue from Styles, which sets the left indent to 1.75″. Now we say what the character says:

Wow, that was a great movie. It’s a shoo-in for Best Picture.

OK, that’s most of what you need to know about formatting. But how do you come up with something to write?

Screenplays can be categorized as original or adapted. Original screenplays are not based on any existing work. Adapted screenplays are derived from previously published material (often a novel, but possibly a play, short story, poem, song, comic book, etc).

The advantage of writing an adapted screenplay is that a lot has already been worked out for you. Someone else has put a lot of effort into developing the characters and making the storyline come together, so you can just focus on translating it to the big screen. The disadvantage is that some novels aren’t easily translated. Look at Jurassic Park – great book by Michael Crichton, great movie by Steven Spielberg – but beneath the surface they have very little in common.

When writing an original screenplay, you’re free to do whatever you want, and you’re not burdened with anything from the book that won’t work so well in the movie. The downside is that you have to come up with everything from scratch.

Mine would be considered an adapted screenplay, since it’s based on my novel. However, it’s not a direct translation. It’s actually a prequel, covering events that happened a few days prior to the novel. Also, the main characters in the movie are minor characters in the novel.

I’d say that the main difference between a novel and a screenplay is that the audience can’t hear your thoughts in the latter. In a novel, a character can look at a fingerprint and then launch into a five-thousand word explanation of how the murder happened. If this were translated directly into a movie scene, the audience would just see the character looking at a fingerprint, then staring into space forever.

The fact that the audience can’t hear your thoughts makes some things much more difficult. For example, how do you reveal a character’s last name in a natural way? I’m not sure. I did it with a combination of seeing names on office doors, one character being addressed formally by a superior, some characters just not having last names, etc.

This is a very simple problem for a novel, but a non-trivial one for a movie. But having gone through this, I’m sure I’ll be noticing this kind of thing when I see movies from now on. I encountered a similar issue with my novel, when I wasn’t sure how to say that a character said something, and now I always notice that when I read books. But you take a stab at it, you learn, you get better, and you enjoy the process.

Another thing is that you have to think about pacing, and whether the audience would constantly have something to be excited about. You may feel torn between using a bunch of dialog to explain something that’s really deep, as opposed to just shooting a whole bunch of guns to keep the action up. This is probably the biggest reason why the book is usually better than the movie.

After you’ve gotten your screenplay written, congratulations, you are now a screenwriter! You can either enjoy your script for what it is, or you can actually have it produced and turned into a movie. Speaking of which, if your name is Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, or Adam Sandler, please send me an email.

[Hoping to get your book published? Here is the continuation of yesterday's interview with Ian Coburn.]

Hunter:

What is it that publishers look for in a book? Or for that matter, do they know what they’re looking for?

There was a guy who tried an experiment with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. He changed the titles, put the name of Alison Laydee on them, and sent a few chapters to 18 publishers. One of them recognized the books; the other 17 rejected them or didn’t respond.

If Jane Austen isn’t good enough, what’s an aspiring author to do?

Ian:

Well, in all fairness, some of the publishers may have recognized the works and tossed the queries, baffled that an author thought he could pull the wool over their eyes. That being said, most of the queries probably just didn’t get read or were only quickly perused. They came via the route outlined on the publisher’s site or in guides, where they didn’t get past editorial assistants—aka the gatekeepers. Publishers are looking to do as little work as possible, just like the rest of us. The more you can bring to the table, the better. Overall, it seems they want an angle, the bigger the better. This is why people who aren’t authors get deals—prostitutes who sleep with governors, governors who get fired, etc. The media eats up the stories and that gets publishers seeing dollar signs.

Don’t worry about what publishers want. What do readers want? That’s where your focus should be. To get a publisher, then, show publishers you have what readers want.

Hunter:

How much of the marketing responsibility falls on the author versus the publisher? Time you spend marketing is time that you could have spent writing another book. How do you find a balance between promoting what you have and coming up with more?

Ian:

All marketing is you. Repeat; all marketing is you. If you get lucky enough to have your publisher market your work, great; that’s a huge bonus. But go in with the attitude that all marketing is on you because it is. Market smart. I went to the Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago a few years ago to market God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. A lot of authors sat behind tables, waiting for visitors to approach them. I handed out bookmarks advertising my book, mingling with the crowd. I gave out hundreds (these people were buying books; they needed free bookmarks!) and saw my sales on Amazon jump up over the following couple weeks. You should always be going after your audience—reaching out to bloggers, handing out free bookmarks to readers, speaking, and so forth, as opposed to waiting for your audience to come to you.

Near and following the release of any book don’t plan on doing any writing. All your time will be spent marketing, as it should be. As long as you are getting results—media interviews, blogger reviews, a flow of reviews on Amazon—you should keep marketing hard. It will taper off and as it does, you can then get back into writing. Eventually, all marketable interest will wane and you can then focus nearly entirely on writing again. I say “nearly” because you should always keep an eye open for marketing opportunities, typically by monitoring journalist and media queries for material. (Get on the “Help a Reporter Out” list, also known as “HARO”; it is a free list of queries from the media that goes out three times a day.)

Hunter:

Is it best to write the book first and then try to get it published, or get a publisher to accept the book first and then write it? If I recall correctly, Tim Ferriss took the latter approach with The 4-Hour Workweek. The problem with the former is that it puts a lot of faith in “if you build it, they will come.”

Ian:

Again, it really depends on what’s important to you. For me, it’s typically most important to get my ideas on the page. Writing is a release of my ideas that I want to share. It’s most important to me to share the ideas. If I don’t find a publisher who wants to pay me to write my ideas, that’s not good enough in some cases. I can’t just go to the next project. I want people to at least have the chance to get the information, so I start the project as I pitch it. I was halfway through God is a Woman when the publisher picked it up. Only small publishers wanted my latest as I pitched, so I completed it without signing with anyone, hoping to get a big publisher interested at some point. (I didn’t query many big publishers, wanting to hold off until I have a lot of page hits to show them.)

Generally speaking, most nonfiction work isn’t completed past the first few chapters until a publisher is found. Fiction work is almost always done before you start pitching. Is it most important to you to get paid for your work or to complete your work? If you wait for a publisher to pick it up, there is a very good chance your work will never be written. (Some experts purport that completing a nonfiction work ahead of time is the mark of an amateur; however, more and more publishers are asking to see complete works for nonfiction.)

Hunter:

People such as Steve Pavlina, Hugh MacLeod, Jonathan Fields, and Gary Vaynerchuk got their book deals in large part because of their popular websites. Not that they built up their online presence for the purpose of publishing a book down the road, but since they had the traffic, there was much less risk for the publishers.

When does it make sense to build up an online audience first, versus going directly for the book deal without any internet fame?

Ian:

I’m living proof that you don’t need Internet fame to achieve success with a book. Some popular blogs and sites don’t do well as books. Should you write a blog? Build an Internet following with a site? Blogging and writing a book are two very different types of writing. Take me for example. I’m not a good blogger because I tend to have one complete idea. I don’t have all the continually fresh content a blog needs. I’m more, “Here’s what I have to say. Here’s what works. Follow it, make it your own, take what works, discard the rest, and it will work for you. That’s all I got.” This works very well in a book because a book has a start, a middle, and an end. Blogs can often be entered at any point and don’t end. Bloggers often struggle writing books because they need to have an end and content that doesn’t only start a debate but also closes it. Next thing you know, the blogger has a variety of similar ebooks and books because he didn’t complete the thought in the first book. It can get confusing for readers; which one should they read first? Or should they just stick with the blog? I prefer to speak rather than blog, which is why I have a vlog/blog. The site serves mostly to provide applications of what I discuss in my second book as examples of implementation.

It all boils down to sincerity. If your writing is sincere it will find an audience because people want sincerity more than anything today. Sincerity sells. It makes a site, blog, or book popular, if even in just a niche. I wrote God is a Woman because I wanted to share my funny sexual and dating misadventures while giving readers, especially college students, the chance to learn from my mistakes so they could avoid them. I couldn’t go back and fix things in my own life to make unhappy experiences happy but I could share my experiences so others could avoid the same pitfalls and be happy. That’s what made it get noticed even without a popular site or name on the Internet. Sincerity is what made audiences laugh when I was a comedian.

If you’re not a recognized name in your topic, it is best to start a blog or site sharing your work as you create it. It can only help. You can still pitch while creating the site; no harm, no foul.

Hunter:

Ian, thanks for all this information. There’s plenty here that will give people a leg up on their competition.

Any questions for Ian? Ask away!

After ten years as a comedian, where he holds the entertainment industry record of 106 straight weeks touring, Ian Coburn no longer wanted to entertain people; he wanted to help them achieve their goals, just as he had with comedy. “There is no better feeling; no greater sense of accomplishment.” His tangible decision-making process for making good choices is shared in his second book, currently available for free download at www.bestpossiblechoice.com, where you will also find examples of its implementation.

Writing a book is one thing. Getting it published is another. And people who pull off the former beautifully often flop at the latter.

For those of you who’d love to see your literary masterpiece get the widespread distribution it deserves, how can you maximize your chances? Let’s ask someone who’s done it.

You may have seen comedian-turned-author Ian Coburn in the comment section on my blog. His first book, God is a Woman: Dating Disasters is available in bookstores and on Amazon. His second book, Choice – The Meaning of Life: How to Have More and Better Choices in Business, Relationships, Government and Life, is temporarily available for free online.

Over the next two posts, Ian will tell us about his adventures in publishing, and the advice he has for aspiring authors.

Ian:

First, I just wanna thank you for taking the interest in interviewing me about publishing; I’m flattered and happy to offer any insight I can. Hopefully it will prove helpful.

Hunter:

When God is a Woman: Dating Disasters came out, you got hit with a sudden wave of fame. What was that like?

Ian:

Unexpected. In many ways. I didn’t have a blog until after I wrote the book and it seemed like only I, my family, and two friends knew about it . . . none of whom actually read it. Yet, suddenly, a month into the book’s official release, I started getting emails asking dating questions from as far away as Norway and South Africa—I live in Chicago—and it jumped in sales on Amazon. I didn’t even know there was an Amazon.co.uk and when I checked it out, I was surprised to see the book selling there well, too.

How the hell did people hear about it? Sure, I was working hard to write articles for sites and doing interviews, but a lot of ‘em hadn’t even come out yet. And things kept growing. I discovered that in addition to my own efforts to spread the word, bloggers and these people called “pick-up artists” (pua’s)—whom I had never heard of before—were blogging and writing about it. They compared it to other books and liked it a lot because it was different than anything else out there. At the same time, women loved it because they got to read about a guy making an ass of himself as well as gain insight into the male mind. What woman doesn’t want those things? (Lifetime actually hired me to answer women’s questions on their site for a year under a column entitled “Ask A Guy” after they checked out the book; another surprise.) I became what I affectionately call “Internet Friends” with some of these people and because I answered each and every email eventually, I got even more word of mouth. The review on Legal Pub especially comes to mind; again, someone I had never heard of previously. I also owe a lot to reviews on Amazon, where it got good word of mouth, too.

It was also very different. I was a comedian from basically 18-30. I was used to getting responses in laughter and applause. I met fans after the shows in-person, immediately. I had only face-to-face encounters and lots of ‘em. Suddenly I was getting emails and nothing face-to-face. It’s weird for a people-person like me to realize that the Internet was this huge social dynamic. You can learn about and contact people you might otherwise never have met. Prior to releasing the book, I had never used the Internet for social purposes beyond emailing the various sports teams I captain weekly game times. Other people were using it to date, get jobs, make friends, find roommates, plan trips . . . Wow, did I have a lot to learn! Mostly, the wave was flattering and fulfilling, as people thanked me for writing a book that helped them while making them laugh.

Hunter:

These days, there are more publishing options than there were in the past.

For your first book, you went with a small publisher and got it into bookstores. For your second book, you currently have it freely available online with a suggested $10 donation. My first novel is freely available online and supported by ads. Tim Brownson and John Strelecky sell their book on their website, and reinvest 90% of the proceeds in printing copies for those who can’t afford them. And companies such as CreateSpace and Lulu let anyone self-publish their book.

How does someone decide which method Is best for them?

Ian:

Ha! As you know, I am big on answering what I call the Basic Life Concept Questions, BLC’s for short. The questions are:

What do you need? What’s important to you? What are your responsibilities? What are your limitations? What I love about the BLC’s is that you’re not limited to just applying them to your whole life; you can also apply them to any aspect of your life. Redecorating your kitchen? What do you need in your kitchen? What’s important to you in your kitchen? I apply them to all my big projects, including my books. I advise other authors to do the same.

For my first book, it was important for me to have control over content to “keep it real” and to see it on bookstore shelves. I wanted to see my name on a book at Barnes & Noble and other stores. That was big. (Not many people realize it but few books actually get shelved. What you see at a bookstore is only a small percentage of the number of books actually published.) For my latest book, it was no longer important for me to see the book on bookstore shelves. It is important for me to get a big publisher, though, because I had to focus too much on publishing issues with my first book. For example, each week I sent B&N and Borders a letter updating my media appearances and reviews. This is why they finally shelved the book. I shouldn’t have had to do that. It’s also important for me to get the information in the book out to as many people as possible; I am eager to help others achieve their goals and the tangible system I teach is a great vehicle for achieving your goals. So I put the book online as a free ebook, asking for donations, to help spread the word and build an audience; hence, I am in the position to reach people and garner interest from a big publisher.

One thing that drives me nutso, especially in fields like the arts or publishing, is that experts always assume that every artist or author or comedian or musician or whoever has the same priorities and are in the same position to go after them; thus, their advice tends to be narrow and incomplete. You’ll be much better off if you identify what your specific priorities are, and what position you’re in to go after them, from the start, before you think about publishing. Then go after the appropriate publisher.

Hunter:

If someone wants to go with a traditional publisher, how do they find and approach them?

Ian:

All right, against all better judgment, I’m going to share a huge secret with you. It goes against better judgment because I know there are people reading this who are thinking, “I am a great writer. I should be treated like a great writer by all,” and because of this attitude they do everything half-past. These people always piss in the pond for the rest of us. So I’ll preempt my answer by telling everyone out there reading this not to send anything to any agent or publisher, using the approach I’m about to share, until you’ve had a professional editor check your work over. I don’t mean your friends; I don’t mean bloggers; I don’t mean an English teacher you know. I mean a professional editor. Or, alternatively, until you have a foundation.

When I say foundation, I mean you’ve already been published by someone big, or have a successful book, or have published numerous articles for which you’ve been paid, or have a large blog following, or are an A-list talent, and such. (If you are a prostitute who slept with a president or an infamous drug dealer, that is not enough. You still need an editor to reach out using this method; however, a big publisher will probably contact you before you even think about writing a book.) If an editor says your work isn’t ready, follow the traditional advice you get in Writer’s Market and other such places. I mean it. If you just start following what I’m about to share, sending in outlines you wrote on napkins while drunk with your friends, your delusional butt is going to ruin this approach for everyone. You’ll literally kill it.

Forget all the advice you get outside being professional and polished. All you need to know is this: In the back of almost every book authors write “Acknowledgements.” They name their agent. They name their editors and publishers. Google those names to see where these people are currently working. Still at Crown? HarperCollins? With the same agency? If you can find the email pattern at a publisher, like HarperCollins, email the person. As long as you have credibility, they will respond and typically request what you offer to send them. If you can’t determine their email, send them a letter addressed specifically to them at the publisher or agency for which they work. Again, as long as you have credibility, you will hear from them.

I’ve gotten key personnel at publishing houses across the board (small to huge) to read my pitches using this method and they have all responded with feedback, including the much welcomed constructive criticism. Which reminds me, if you don’t want to receive criticism, another sign you are not ready to consider publishing, don’t use this method. You’ll piss off whoever you contact when you reply to their feedback by telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about, arguing for your content, etc.

Hunter:

What are some common mistakes that first time authors make, or red flags that they should watch out for?

Ian:

Oops, I kind of answered this in the previous question. (I tend to do that a lot.) Lack of humility. Thinking you’re the bomb keeps you from finding tools to measure your ability. How do you know you’re stuff is good? Really?

My first manuscript was a fiction, sci-fi thriller called IP. My friends told me it rocked, except for one who told me it was “painful;” he couldn’t finish it no matter how hard he tried. I entered it into a couple contests to gauge my ability. I didn’t place. I left it on the shelf for a while and re-read it months later. My friend was right; it was painful. The manuscript sucked.

When I started to write screenplays, I entered contests for feedback and to measure my ability. I had no idea whether or not my stuff was good because it was a new medium for me. The feedback let me know I was on the right track. I won a contest and that got me a lot of attention, landing me my first manager.

Being humble kept me from sending IP to publishers and screenplays to producers before I had properly measured both them and my abilities. When writers aren’t humble they ignore all feedback and don’t bother with having their stuff measured. Remember, it’s much easier to open doors that are unlocked than it is to open ones that have been slammed in your face or to cross bridges that you burned by being premature. It’s great—and a necessity—to be enthusiastic and tenacious; just don’t be cocky.

Watch out for publishers or agents who want money from you in any way, shape or form. If you choose to publish via a POD publisher, don’t go with any that charge you more than cost for your book. You will need to send free copies to tons of places for reviews and possible media attention. Why should you pay 30% less than retail, well over cost, for those copies? A POD who charges authors extra money doesn’t believe in their authors or their products. They aren’t truly interested in selling your book to people; they’re interested in selling it to you!

[Come back tomorrow for the rest of the publishing interview...what publishers are looking for, marketing, selling a book before writing it, and leveraging internet fame.]

What’s the difference between bloggers who grab and hold readers’ attention, and those who don’t? It often comes down to whether the blogger has studied the art of effective writing.

New bloggers consistently make false assumptions about what works. They learned many rules of formal writing in English class, and they understandably think that they apply to blogging as well. Very often, they don’t. The blogger puts in lots of effort, only to be frustrated and confused when their readers don’t react the way they expected.

Ali Hale has a new ebook out, called The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing. It’s focused purely on the actual writing aspect of blogging, aimed at getting you writing with ease, enjoyment, and results.

Its 82 pages are shockingly comprehensive, and it comes with a whopping six month guarantee, so you have plenty of time to try out all the ideas. If you’re a new blogger, it’s very simple – you should buy it. That’s really all I have to say, so click the link and check it out.

Now, what if you’re a more experienced blogger? Well, as with any ebook about blogging, parts of it will surely cover things you already know. These parts will be a good read anyway, but that alone might not be enough of a reason to buy it.

Why might it be worthwhile then? Because experienced bloggers often get stuck in a rut without knowing it. You might have settled on certain ways early on, and perhaps never revisited them to see if they were working for you.

Maybe your style isn’t quite right for your content, or maybe your headlines aren’t grabbing all the attention they could, or maybe readers are having a hard time following the structure of your posts. These kinds of problems aren’t quick to resolve themselves.

It’s much easier when you learn about what makes writing effective or not. Then you can throw away your assumptions and take a fresh look at where you’re doing things right, and where you can improve.

Even for an experienced blogger, predicting what will work is sometimes difficult. But instead of blindly guessing, it’s better to make decisions based on a solid understanding of the foundations of effectiveness. Give The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing a try, and see what it can do for your blogging results.

Marge Simpson is known as the patient mother, dutiful housewife, and voice of morality in the Simpson family. But every now and then, she takes up a bold and daring project that rocks Springfield.

Case in point: her first novel, The Harpooned Heart. She started it on a whim, got it finished in record time, and quickly became the talk of the town. Here are some tips she used to spur herself to success (as well as some lessons she hopefully learned along the way).

1. Know that you can do it.

Marge walked into a Bookaccino’s bookstore to get a muffin. But once inside, she found out that Esme Delacroix, author of the novel To Kiss a Scoundrel was there. Marge asked Esme if she had any special training to become a writer.

Esme said that she just took a class at “the Y” (Yale University), but anyone with passion can write. Hearing this, Marge realized that she too could become a novelist. She had only one more question: ”If I write a book, will they tell me when it comes out?”

2. Enlist the support of your family.

Writing a novel is going to impact your family, so you need them to be on board with you.

On what Marge wanted to be her first night of novel writing, she was hoping that her husband Homer would watch the kids. But Homer informed Marge that he had just started a new job as an ambulance driver, with his first shift being that night.

A little more communication both ways would have been helpful in letting everyone pursue their goals.

3. Get inspiration from anywhere.

While pondering what to write about, Marge noticed a painting of a sailboat that had always sparked her imagination. As she looked at it, her imagination morphed the sailboat into a whaling vessel. Then she shouted, “That’s it! A novel about whaling! That’s something you haven’t seen before.”

4. Be aware of what’s already been done.

It turns out that there was already a kinda famous novel about whaling. When Marge read the title of the painting that inspired her, she said “Thank you, ‘Scene From Moby-Dick.’”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that her book would be accused of plagiarism, but it would be nice to know what’s already out there. However, it’s hard to know about everything. In high school English class, I wrote a short story that the teacher said was “Very Grapes of Wrathy, don’t you think?” But I had never read The Grapes of Wrath, and had no idea what it was about.

5. Don’t be a perfectionist.

If you try to write the perfect novel on your first try, the likely result is that you’ll never finish. Instead, try the NaNoWriMo approach, which advocates getting a rough draft done quickly, then revising only when the draft is done.

Marge sat down at her computer and wrote this:

“Chapter 1: Starts and Beginnings

Swim, swim, swim, thought the whale, flopping his floppers.”

It’s not exactly great literature, but the time to revise it is after the draft is done, not constantly.

6. Be careful about taking too many brownie breaks.

Immediately after writing her first sentence, Marge ran into the kitchen for a “brownie break.” While it’s important to take breaks as needed, your breaks will be more effective and better deserved if you take them as a reward for getting more than one sentence done. And eating too many brownies poses nutritional problems.

7. Watch out for procrastination.

This is related to the previous point, but more subtle. While it will be obvious when you’re eating too many brownies, it’s less obvious when you’re doing work that seems productive but isn’t really.

Having barely started, Marge stopped to write her acknowledgements page. After thanking “…Mayor Quimby, Disco Stu, and our fighting men and women overseas,” she returned to the novel.

She then wrote one sentence: “Temperance Barrows stared at the sea, like a dog stares at a ham.” Realizing that she had just finished her first paragraph, she decided it was time to run spell check.

These are things that need to be done, but don’t forget that almost all of your focus needs to be on actually getting the novel written.

8. Write about what you know.

Marge based her characters on people she knew, which made it easier to give them consistent personalities. She was also knowledgeable about her novel’s setting, which made it easier to create realistic surroundings.

Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, so try to get some use out of them.

9. Be careful about writing a real person into your novel.

It’s one thing to base a character on someone you know, perhaps borrowing their looks, occupation, or personality to inject some believable positive qualities into a character. It’s another thing to make the character so similar that the person feels like they’ve been put in the spotlight.

Controversy erupts when Marge created a character based on Homer’s bad side, revealing his flaws to the world. Fortunately, Lisa advised her to show it to Homer before publishing it. Unfortunately, Homer said he was OK, but hadn’t actually read it. It’s best to let your fiction be fictional.

10. Don’t make your characters too perfect.

While Marge shouldn’t have done that to Homer, it did have the beneficial side effect of adding some character flaws. When Temperance’s husband was perfect, there was no conflict, nothing to keep the reader interested. But when he became a jerk, things became interesting. (Especially when the character based on Ned Flanders became a potential love interest – see the previous point.)

11. Create an idea file.

After seeing the conflict arising from the deeply flawed husband, Marge says, ”This story is as dark as those new Milky Way bars. Ooh, that’s a good analogy. I’ll work it in somewhere.” She then writes this down for later, and continues writing.

Lots of ideas will come to mind when you’re writing. If you always stop to see how you can work them in, that will suck up a lot of time. But if you write them down in your idea file, you can keep going, knowing they won’t be forgotten. When you’re done with your draft, you might see that they’re no longer needed, or you might know the perfect place to use them.

12. Be prepared for criticism.

You may have fans. You’ll definitely have critics. The best review Marge got was Homer’s less than enthusiastic testimonial: ”The end of your book was the wake-up call I needed after falling asleep at the beginning of your book.” But she handled it just fine, and will hopefully use the criticism to improve.

13. You don’t ever have to stop writing.

If you like writing one novel, there’s no reason you have to stop there. As soon as Marge was done promoting her first book, she jumped right into the sequel, The Harpooned Heart II: Thunder Down Under. She started with “Temperance Barrows stared at the shrimp on the barbie…” Who knows where her imagination will take her this time?

Photo by dannysullivan

I just wrote my first novel in 21 days. At 55,000 words, that’s about 2,619 words a day. While I’m not ready to release it to everyone just yet, I’m going to share some tips on how you can become a novelist too, at lightning speed. (Update 12/7/2009: My novel, Mesothelioma Lawyers, New York, is now available online.)

I did this as my first foray into NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November. Now in its 11th year, NaNoWriMo has become a popular international event (despite the “Na” part of its name).

The goal is simple: write a 50,000 word novel from scratch in the month of November. 50,000 words because it’s a nice round number towards the lower end of the novel range. And November because the founders wanted to take advantage of the miserable weather.

You can start planning beforehand, but you can’t actually start writing until November 1st. Other than that, there aren’t really any hard rules, although they suggest that you don’t just write the same word 50,000 times. They say that if you think it’s a novel, they think it’s a novel.

This year, there are 170,000 participants, and about 15% of the participants will “win,” or reach the 50,000 word minimum by the end of the month. There are no points for character development or interesting plots; if you write 50,000 words, you win. The premise here is quantity over quality.

While that may sound crazy, the idea is that most aspiring novelists fail to write their novel, not because they’re not good enough, but because they just don’t get the words written. They have this saying: a bad draft can be revised into a great novel, but a blank page can’t be revised into anything other than a blank page. And surprisingly, some NaNoWriMo novels have become bestsellers.

I wasn’t sure if I could even finish, let alone do a decent job. But I love the finished product.

I haven’t officially “won” yet, because their site doesn’t let you verify your word count until November 25th. When you do, you get a printable certificate, an icon for your website, and inclusion in the winner’s list.

Will I do it again? Maybe not. I’m really glad I did it once, but I found it extremely stressful. But for those who want to, here are some tips.

1. Decide whether it’s worth it.

This is a big commitment that will take over your whole November. While you can back out at any time, it’s best to decide up front whether you really want to do it. If not, then don’t do it. If so, then don’t make excuses.

2. Turn off the TV, log out of Twitter.

There’s no time to lose, and you can’t afford distractions.

3. Join a support group.

NaNoWriMo offers a built-in community, with forums and ways to connect with local groups. I didn’t use these features, but they’re great for people who need to be in touch with other people who are going through it. I did enjoy the occasional pep talk emails though.

4. Know that you can do it.

I’ve heard people say that they can’t write a novel because they’re not a novelist. Well of course you’re not a novelist, if you haven’t written a novel yet! But after you write one, then you will be a novelist. So get started.

5. Do your planning and research ahead of time.

While I didn’t have much of an outline in my head before I started, I had some ideas. I also knew the main characters – their names, and a little bit about them. And the stuff I needed to research, I tried to do it before I started writing. Once the clock starts ticking, you want to just go full speed ahead.

6. Don’t worry too much about quality.

This was a tough one for me, because I tend to write very slowly, since I want to make sure everything works out just right. But I knew I didn’t have time for that here. I’ll need to go through my draft again to proofread it (I already noticed I accidentally brought a character back to life by using the wrong name). And I’m sure I introduced some inconsistencies by starting out one way, then changing my mind.

These things can all be taken care of later. That’s why they call it a rough draft. Rest assured that bookstores are filled with novels that are worse than yours will be.

7. Pace yourself.

50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words a day (that’s almost exactly the length of this blog post). But if you target the minimum, you have a problem when you fall short. I wrote 6,009 words the first day because I was excited to get started, but I knew that wasn’t sustainable. I decided to target 2,000 words a day, a goal I hit consistently, though I found it to be quite a lot.

By sticking to just over 2,000 words a day, I was on track to finish on time, without a big rush at the end. When I first saw that I could finish before Thanksgiving, and then saw that I could finish in three weeks, I ramped it up a bit. But only on three days did I write significantly more than 2,000 words.

8. Resist the urge to edit.

If you have a tiny little tweak to make, go ahead and do it now. But if it will take a while, just write a note to come back to it later. It will be hard enough just to write everything once, and there won’t be time to write everything twice.

9. Write the kind of novel you want to write.

Don’t think that your novel has to be the kind of thing high school kids would study in English class. Some parts of my novel are beyond ridiculous, but that’s the way I wanted to write. So you write the way you want to write.

10. Make decisions fast.

On the first page, I found myself in the midst of a huge internal debate over the brand of bourbon that the main character should be drinking. Realizing that there was absolutely no time for hesitation, I knew I had to just pick one and move on. This happened many times, so I got in the habit of deciding quickly, and reserving the right to change things later (the bourbon did change, in the end).

11. Be aware that some parts are much easier to write than others.

I found writing dialogue to be really cumbersome. I like writing what the characters say, but I hate figuring out how to say that they said it (i.e., “Blah blah blah,” he said in an accent reminiscent of the Swedish Chef on the Muppets, “blah blah blah blah blah.”)

But when I was writing exposition (the main character reflecting on the significance of various things), the words just flew by. So when I found myself writing fast, I kept following that train of thought as far as it would go. That would help pick up the slack when the words came like molasses flowing uphill.

12. Have a word count safety net.

I had one particular scene in mind that could be as long as I needed it to be, because two characters were just talking about stuff while waiting for something to happen. I was saving it for the end. I thought I’d write the rest of the book first, and after I was done, however short I was of 50,000 words, I’d get the rest from this scene. It could have been 20,000 words if it had to be. As it turned out, I didn’t need any extra words, but it was nice to know I had a safety net if I did.

13. Don’t necessarily do it in 21 days. Or even 30 days.

This kind of goes against the whole foundation of NaNoWriMo, but I think some people are better off not subjecting themselves to this time constraint. NaNoWriMo gives you 30 days to write 50,000 words, which is insane. I wrote 55,000 words in 21 days, which is even more insane.

Keep in mind that the time needed to write something increases more than proportionally with the word count. A 50,000 word novel takes much more than 50 times as long as a 1,000 word blog post. Writing a novel is a really big deal. If it’s going to drive you crazy to force yourself to do it in such a short period of time, then give yourself more time.

60 days would probably give you a comfortable yet fairly brisk pace for writing a 50,000 word novel. I wouldn’t stretch it out any longer than that though, or you might never finish. Get a decent draft done quickly, then revise it.

How many words in a novel?

By the way, for those of you wondering how long a novel has to be, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award gives these definitions:

Novel: 40,000+ words
Novella: 17,500-39,999 words
Novelette: 7,500-17,499 words
Short story: less than 7,500 words

NaNoWriMo sets the minimum word count at 50,000, a nice round number that’s big enough to be considered a novel. And while that word count is on the low end of the novel spectrum, there have been some great novels around that length. Personally, I find most novels far too long. When I read The Lord of the Rings, I remember wondering “are these damn hobbits ever going to stop singing?”

For reference, here are some well known works (some of them shorter than novel length), sorted by word count.

Photo by elginwx

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