Category: Inspiration

Interview with Jonis Agee

Quan

Jonis Agee is most likely the highest-profiled author I know. She is critically acclaimed, and has won more than her share of literary awards. She also has the distinction of being one of my creative writing teachers at the University of Michigan. I learned a ton about the craft of storytelling from her, and it is an honor to post her insights on her writing process here. Get more information about her and her books at her website jonisagee.com.

What inspires your writing?

This is a good question. I have to stop and think because it changes all the time, and it has changed over the years each time someone asks it. I always knew I would be a writer, even before I began to write. It just came to me that that would be my job. And it’s a great one! All kinds of things move me to write: it’s a form of talking to others, sharing things that move me, disturb me, fill me with happiness and beauty or outrage and a search for meaning and understanding. Each story, poem, or book I write is an investigation of something that is happening or has happened that I want to explore and address. My latest novel, The Bones of Paradise built up over fifteen years of thinking about and visiting the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, for instance. When I was told the story of what generations of ranchers did to the oldest son to guarantee their legacy, I was moved by another form of injustice and found a way to yoke the stories together to build the novel. I am currently writing a novel set in the Missouri Ozarks during the Civil War and 1930 with the building of Bagnell Dam and the Lake of the Ozarks. It explores the ongoing issues of racial, social and economic tension and the injustices that have never been resolved there. My people are from that part of the country and I have spent a lifetime trying to understand them. I guess that’s what finally moves me: the urge to tell people’s stories, people who are historically forgotten or ignored, working people and people whose lives are troubled, people who rise above their circumstances and search for dignity and meaning, and people who go the opposite direction.

What is your process of developing characters?

I collect old, historical pictures, the kind you find in junk shops and antique stores. I look for the faces and scenes that seem to speak to me, and then I began to listen to the stories they might have to tell. Sometimes a character will appear before a picture, and Flannery O’Connor style, I will hear their voice speaking and begin to write their words and feel their world unfold around them, a scene or story that led up to the words they spoke. I quickly have to find out where a character is, specifically, what the place is in detail. I guess I’m pretty literal about place and setting. The minute I see them in a place, watch them move around, I begin to know them. I work to get them to take over the story, to let the unexpected happen. I love how Toni Morrison lets her characters do good and bad things, regardless of where they fall on the axis of morality, so I try to open myself and the characters to those other sides of themselves. If I have a character who seems too good to be true, they usually are, so I roughen them up by seeing what is petty, mean, small or hidden inside them. We all have those moments where we don’t do or say the right thing for a whole variety of reasons, and to make a complete portrait of a human being we need that aspect too. The same is true of characters who are so dark or evil that they’re wooden tropes. I will write from their point of view, trying to get them to reveal their own story of themselves, how they see the world and what they are, which can bring some deeper understanding to the character for the reader. Or I look for what they love, without reservation, what they love so wholeheartedly that they are briefly disarmed in the embrace of that creature or thing. In one novel I discovered that a bad man, a truly bad man, really loved his dog. I mean, he treated that dog as if it were a girlfriend or a brother he never had. It had a terrific life, and seeing that capacity for positive feeling in that bad man, made him more complex and interesting. Another thing I do to develop characters is figure out what their dreams, desires, fantasies, nightmares, fears, and histories are. That takes a long time, but it’s key to grasping what a person is. I noticed several years ago when I was writing South of Resurrection that I had this urge to explain my characters psychologically too much when I was writing, I kept getting stuck on the word “because” and it was a real problem because I don’t have an advanced degree in psychology. Also, I was using too much of the pop psychology that was bombarding the media. Most importantly, my characters were tipping over into types because they were simply the result of a designated trauma. I made a rule then, that freed both the characters and me the writer: I could not use the word “because.” Characters acted and felt certain things without me having to pause for long and simpleminded diagrams of their mental health. I discovered that it’s important to let characters simply act and suffer or enjoy the results of that action, that we don’t always know or need to know or can know the root cause of behavior, that is what makes us interesting and worthy of spending time with, I believe.

Did you Start with a story outline or did you make it up as you went along?

I wish I could outline my stories. It would make the writing go faster I think. But, no, I never outline. I’m just lazy enough that if I know how the story turns out, how and when the angles of change occur, then I get bored and don’t want to write the whole thing. I have to be surprised by the characters and the story. I often hear or see the opening, and then I go to work to figure out how this all started and what these people are going to do next.

How much research did you need for your story?

With the novels I do a lot of research, whether it’s concerning place or historical events and place. Always place has to be researched. For instance, I have to know what plants, trees, animals, birds, weather, sky, water, houses, economic issues, ethnic, racial, religions are in a place. I read histories of a place regardless of whether the novel is historical or not. If it is historical, for instance, The River Wife, set in the New Madrid area of Missouri, the New Madrid earthquake was the big inciting event for the novel. It was also the biggest earthquake in North America, with aftershocks lasting a year. The old town of New Madrid was taken by the Mississippi River then, and the land developed swamp and sand boils and bottomless springs. I spent time learning about earthquakes, the Civil War since a decisive battle over the control of the Mississippi River and war supplies occurred at New Madrid, cotton growing, the depression and prohibition, Hot Springs, Arkansas, and women’s rights in those periods. I had to learn about architecture of the time before the Civil War and Audubon who wandered in the region teaching young women to paint while he researched and drew birds. I read his letters, and he became a character in the novel. When I write historical novels, it usually takes me longer, say six years because the writing is slowed by research.

What researching methods did you use?

I go to the place where I am setting my novel usually. I drive around. I meet people, listen to their stories, how they see their world. I visit the historical museums in the little towns where I am going to put my story. I read a general history or two of the state or the region to get a sense of how the region developed. The Sand Hills of Nebraska where I have placed three of my novels, including the most recent, The Bones of Paradise, I did a great deal of research into the Lakota people who originally roamed the region until they were forced onto the reservations in South Dakota just over the Nebraska border. I spent time on Rosebud primarily but visited Pine Ridge too. I read a great deal, of course, about history, religion, and everyday life. Because the land itself is the source of every aspect of life out there, I had to research grasslands, cattle management such as diseases and the economics, and explore life in very small, isolated towns and ranches. I do a lot of just poking around to discover what stories are in a place, how the people there exist, how they get along and don’t. I read the small town weekly newspapers too. I used to look into the phone books to see what businesses were there, the names of people. That’s harder now, of course.

Did you draw on personal experience?

Always. That’s why I go to the place I’m writing about and put myself into the world, to see what it will send back. I have found scenes and plot lines and characters using this method. I sometimes draw on my own history. It’s impossible not to. But I don’t see myself as someone who writes autobiographically. I inhabit the worlds of my stories through my imagination. That’s what gives me the greatest pleasure, allows me to live a much broader and fuller life than I would otherwise. Reading and writing are absolutely linked in this way for me.

How did your publish?

I began writing as a poet, and my first published book was a long poem of ninety pages, with Truck Press, a small literary press. Then I turned to fiction and published two collections of stories with small literary presses, followed by my first novel which was published by what is now a division of Random House. All my novels have been published by large New York presses, and my last four short story collections have been published by Coffee House Press, which has grown to have a significant national presence as a literary, non profit press.

Why did you do it that way?

I didn’t plan it out this way. I actually got a literary agent when he was judging for the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction. He liked my work. Many years later, when I had a novel, I won a Loft McKnight Fellowship in Fiction, and they printed a booklet of our fiction and sent it to Editors at big presses in New York. An editor, Jane von Mehren, liked my work, contacted me, and we sold her the novel I had been working on for eight years. She was my editor for the first five novels until she became a literary agent. The editor of my latest novel, Bones of Paradise published by William Morrow, was Jessica Williams, and she did an excellent job. Meanwhile, my short story collections seemed a better fit for Coffee House Press. They keep the books in print and give me the latitude I need to take risks with my writing and subject matter. It works for all of us.

How long did it take to land representation for your latest novel?

I sent novel drafts to my agent for about six months, and then she began to submit it. It took about a month or so to sell it to Jessica Williams at William Morrow. I try to wait until I think the novel is pretty much done before I send it to my agent, and then I make revisions as she suggests. My husband, writer Brent Spencer, is my first reader.

What advice would you have for writers looking to publish the way you published?   

For novels, find a good strong story with characters that readers want to care about even if they are not paragons of virtue. Write enough drafts that it doesn’t need a ton of work on revision. Query agents, friends, other writers with agents, etc. to get an agent if you are looking to publish commercially in New York.  Get help with a good query letter for agents. Don’t expect agents and editors to do the kind of editing you read about in the past. Everyone is overworked. If you are interested in smaller, literary presses, look at what they publish and check out their websites for submission guidelines. Again, have the book in final form.

Do you use beta readers? No.

How many revisions did it take to get a final draft of you most recent novel?

At least six. I usually write complete drafts and end up throwing some of them away, restarting, reconceiving, etc. I apologize to the trees of the world. I print out each version. Each draft is too long, especially early on…say 700 pages or so. I spend time at the end of the process cutting and compressing. That is the really painful part.

What are some of your methods for establishing a believable and immersive setting you stories? 

I look for the smallest parts after establishing the big frame of a setting. I think of those long sweeping shots of the opening of films, or of the close up camera shot that gradually pulls out. I try to find where dust is, in the air, on character clothing maybe, on tables, etc. I think about what fills interior spaces in terms of “stuff” and what accumulates that indicates our living in a place. I addressed some of the business of place earlier in my comments because it’s so important to me and my storytelling.

What are you writing now?

I’m just finishing a new collection of stories that are very different for me. They cross into fable, myth, fantasy, surrealism, you name it. They explore the intersections of realism and fable or myth that create reality.

As I noted above, I am also writing a new novel, which I hope to finish this year.

What is your advice to other writers?

Write. Read. Write some more. Enjoy your job! Seriously, if you are a writer, you were chosen as much as you chose it. Throw yourself and everything you have into it! Our village is relying on us to tell their stories.

Her latest novel is The Bones of Paradise. Go get your copy now!

Putting Your Spin on an Established Story Type

Quan

How often have you read a book, watched a movie or played a video game and thought to yourself “You know, if I had written this, I’d have the story go another way”? I go through that a lot. Most stories follow well-established sets of tropes and conventions. But what makes a story idea “new” or “fresh” is the unique twists and changes they put on a story to make it different from what has come before. There are different ways you can do this, and each way creates fertile ground for new, groundbreaking story ideas that you can tap into.

Inverting Expectations

One of my favorite movies is the Drew Barrymore film “Ever After.” it follows a popular trend in movies where they take classic story and retell it with more modern sensibilities and attitudes. In this case it was a more assertive, independent and empowered Cinderella that didn’t need a fairy godmother or a magic pumpkin to get the attention of the prince.

It has been done countless times in comic books, like in DC Comics’ “Tales from the Dark Multiverse,” where things go horribly wrong during iconic events in the DC universe’s history, and those stories play out entirely differently from their original counterparts, with much darker outcomes.

To take this approach you can simply take a well-used story trope, study how that archetype usually progresses, and then ask yourself what would happen if you changed a few key details. There are lots of variations on the classic “hero’s journey” story type because of this. Imagine taking the story archetype used in “Dances with Wolves,” “Fern Gully” and “Avatar” and changing a key plot point so that the story goes in an entirely different direction.

Adding New Elements

The popular card game Magic: the Gathering has a history of taking popular stories and putting their spin on it. Whether it be Gothic horror with their Innistrad storyline, or Arthurian legends and Grimm Fairy tales with their Eldraine Storyline, or Japanese mythology with their Kamigawa storyline, they make a habit of taking well-known story tropes in pop culture and using them as the basis for creating something both new and familiar. You can do the same thing, by taking that story archetype, keeping the framework as-is, but adding some new elements to make the story unique. What would happen if you took that Dances with Wolves story type and added a live film crew that broadcast the whole saga like a reality show, with a live audience?

Making Fundamental Changes.

Quentin Tarantino’s film “Hateful 8” is, at its core, a chamber mystery. A bunch of unique characters are locked into a room with a mystery to solve, where possibly one of them is the culprit. It is a classic type of storytelling mastered by writers like Agatha Christie. Tarantino, however, puts two unique spins on the trope by first placing the story in the Wild West, and secondly by not having anything particularly mystery-worthy happen until more than halfway through the movie. The mystery until that point is figuring out why these disparate people were brought together in the first place.

For this approach, find a classic story archetype and try altering different aspects of it. Change the locale or the time period. Change the protagonist or the villain. And then see how those changes affect the story. We’ve seen that Dances With Wolves story in the wild west, in a Brazillian rainforest, and in outer space. What if you set the story in a circus? And had a drag queen as the protagonist instead of the typical male?

You don’t have to have a total blank slate when you are trying to come up with a new story to write. It is perfectly acceptable to take well-use story types and make changes to it to make the story your own. Give it a try and see what you come up with.

Finding Time to Write

Quan

In one of my very first posts on this blog, I wrote about eliminating your excuses to not write. If you have something you want to write about, you should be writing. No one is going to tell your story for you. (Okay, you actually can pay a ghost writer to tell your story for you, but you still ought to be an active part of the process.). When I tell people I’m a novelist, I still hear people respond with “I’d like to write a book someday.” I ask them why not now, and they say they can’t find the time to.

I call BS on that.

People will make time to do the things they truly want to do. And unless you are truly writing or a living (like a technical writer or a Journalist), then writing will not be a natural part of your daily routine. Only full-time writers can write when they want, but they have to because it’s their job. You have to make time to write, just as you make time to binge watch TV shows or make time to rant on social media. There are plenty of ways to eke out time to get your ideas out, you just have to be committed enough to do it. Here are a few techniques I utilize.

Wake up an hour early or go to bed an hour later

Sometimes making time to write means literally making time. If your story is worth the hours of lost sleep, then those moments are perfect fodder for writing. Heck, for some, the creative juices flow best right before bedtime or right when they wake up anyway.

Write during your lunchbreak or downtime if you can

I admit I’ve snuck pieces of scrap paper onto the floor when I worked at factories. When the machines are down I’d jot a few quick notes down before picking up my broom to clean the area (Not something I recommend, though). Mostly if I had a long enough lunch break, I’d write ideas down then.

Jot down notes

This is something every writer should do. You should always keep a means of recording ideas handy at all time, whether it be a pen and some scratch paper, a note taking app on your phone, a notebook you carry around, or whatever. Inspiration can strike any time and anywhere under any circumstance, and when it happens you need to write it down, and yes, even jotting down notes counts as writing.

Vocal recorders

If you don’t have access to pen and scrap paper, or like me you find thumb-typing ideas onto the note app on your phone to be too tedious, you can always turn on your vocal recorder and dictate your ideas onto your phone. I personally haven’t tried this because I just like the feeling of writing or typing my ideas out better and it allows me more freedom to better organize my thoughts. But if it works for you, then go for it.

Email yourself

A good way to record ideas is to send them to yourself via email. You can write as much as you want, and they will always be in a place where you can retrieve them. I’ve done this plenty of time. In fact, I’ve backed up entire manuscript drafts be emailing them to myself. I actually trust that more than The Cloud.

Write instead of doing something else in your leisure time

Instead of watching the game, or going out partying, or hanging with the crew, or playing video games, or watching cat videos on YouTube, how about taking a half hour to write about what’s on your mind? You would be surprised at how must time you spend a day on mindless entertainment. That time can be spent writing. Or you can even multitask. Keep your laptop or tablet handy and type while you’re watching TV, or in between gaming sessions.

Write when you don’t feel like writing

This is a big one. Oftentimes you just don’t feel creative. It could be fatigue from the daily grind, or you’ve been through something particularly discouraging. The thing is, this is a perfect time to vent out your feelings of despair or frustration or fatigue. You can pour those negative feelings onto the paper, and into your stories. My negative feelings about my life at the time were the genesis of my book The Hand You’re Dealt. The emotions you get as my characters struggle with their careers and relationships are very, very real and were things that I was dealing with when I concocted the story.

Write when something major happens to get the feeling and reactions while they are fresh in your mind.

Likewise, when literally anything of importance happens in your life, that is a perfect opportunity to record it and put it into a story. Take note not only of what happened and why, but how everyone reacted to it, and how it made you feel personally, and even speculation what comes next. This is a great exercise to help develop your skill as a writer, and may provide material fr future stories.

JUST WRITE!

Like I said, if you really wanted to do it, you’d find a way. For writers, the ideas and revelations will churn inside us, nag at us constantly, and pretty much drive us insane if we don’t get them out of our heads and onto some recordable form. It’s an unexplainable thing that drives us. If you have that type of creative passion, you get everything I’m saying. If you don’t, then you won’t. But you can generate that passion by taking the time, even making the time, to cultivate that germ of an idea you’ve got until it consumes you like our ideas consume us. Even something as simple as writing a sentence a day counts. And there’s no better time to get started than RIGHT NOW.

So what are you waiting for?

When Characters Hijack the Plot

Quan

If you are a writer that prefers to know exactly what is going to happen in your story before you start writing, then I assume you spend a lot of time outlining and hammering out your plot. You know exactly where your characters are going to go, what they are going to do, and how they are going to do it. You know all of the major plot twists beforehand, as well as how your characters should react to them. You have everything set up neatly and ready to go.

But then you start actually writing.

What happens when you write your characters and develop them within the story, and their development takes you in an entirely different direction? Or what happens when you introduce a new supporting character, and whatever that character wants to do totally derails your carefully planned and outlined plot?

Instances like these are what I consider “hijacking” the plot of your story. The characters’ personalities, histories, goals and makeup dictate a different reaction than what you had originally planned, and it almost mandates you taking the story in an entirely different direction. It’s like in many episodes of The Simpsons, where the episode starts off seeming to be about one story element, but then something gets introduced which changes the plot of the episode drastically and makes the rest of the show about resolving the new development.

How you resolve this really depends on how flexible you are as a writer. For some writers, the plot outline is just a bare framework or suggestion of how things probably should go maybe, and if any element comes around to change things, they are perfectly okay with going with the flow. There are inherent issues that can come from that, but they are willing to deal with that. At the other extreme, there are writers that are determined, or obligated (in the case of ghostwriters or people under contract for franchises), to stick to their original plot outline no matter what. These writers now have to face the possibility of forcing their characters to act against their true nature for the sake of following the plot. There are also dangers with this approach, too. Chances are if you’ve faced this issue, you fall somewhere in the middle. Here are a few options on how you can handle it.

Make the new arc a subplot

You can take this new direction your character wants to go in, and make it a side story that you visit as a break from your main plot. This can actually add more depth to your core story as it allows room fr character development and exploration you might not be able to get to within your main plot. And it will be even better if you can tie this new side story back into the central plot.

Make it into a spinoff, and finish the core plot with new characters

If what this character wants to do is totally out of the realm of your originally story, you could just make a separate book dealing with that story. And if that character simply is no longer a good fit for the plot you have in mind, then you’ll have to create new characters that are better suited to your original story. In that case, you will need to create your character with the needs of the plot built into their makeup and backstory.

Change details about your characters to make them compliant.

If you really don’t want to craft an entirely new story around your characters’ new developments, you could just modify and tweak your character’s personality and backstory to be more compliant with your plot. This is actually something I’d recommend against. Once your characters discover their voice and perspective, I believe it would be a disservice to try to neuter or change their voice for the sake of a plot. Interesting plots are great for one story, but memorable characters can be utilized for multiple stories on end.

extend the story.

My solution with my story was that my characters would go off on this wild side adventure, and after that was resolved, then they still had to deal with their original problem. But now they were armed with more experience, new allies, new skills and a better understanding of the world around them. Of course, this meant that the story would take more than one book to be completed. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.

So these are different methods and approaches you can take when your characters start pushing you in directions you hadn’t intended, and start taking you away from the plot you had so carefully planned. It’s nothing of panic over, and happens often when you take time to truly develop characters. But there are ways for you to b true to both your characters and your plot, and if handled correctly, can add that much more depth to your overall narrative.

Everyone Has A Story

Quan

Writers are nosy. It’s just a fact. My wife often berates me for paying attention to the conversations of others. What she doesn’t understand is that it is part of my makeup as a storyteller to have an interest in the stories of others. One can never tell what tidbit of info will generate new inspiration for a new story, or a way to enhance an existing story. Many of the more interesting elements of stories that I have written have come from observing…or even flat out eavesdropping…others as they talk and interact.

A favorite scene from my book The Hand You’re Dealt came directly from watching people while waiting in line to sell my blood plasma at a clinic in Flint (Yes, that actually happened). The speech and body language of the people was so colorful, it would have been a waste to not use that material in a book. It also added the the authenticity of the region represented in the book, which helped with achieving the feeling of “city as character” I wrote about a bunch of months back.

Be Observant.

One of my all-time favorite TV shows was The Mentalist, about a Charlatan sleuth who’s main claim to fame is “reading” people. He can tell hidden details about people by the way they dress, the way they talk and the things they say, their body language and by other behavioral quirks that might escape the casual observer. These are techniques you can learn to employ. By being able to see beyond a person’s outward facade, you can gleam great details about that person’s life that you can mine for story details, or even full stories within themselves.

Be a good interviewer.

You don’t have to formally conduct interviews like I do in my monthly author interview series. But when talking to people about things they have experienced in their lives or are experiencing, be sure to ask them questions about it, and get to the core of what they are dealing with and how they are reacting to it. You’d be surprised ad what people will reveal about themselves and their world just by talking to you.

Always take notes.

You never know when you will see or hear something from somebody that will be worthy of inclusion into a story. So always keep a means of recording these moments handy. Most cell phones have access to vocal recorders you can use to record conversations or observations. In the absence of a phone, there are portable vocal recorders available for purchase, too. It is also good to keep a pen and notepad handy in case you can’t use a vocal recorder.

The key to collecting these little gold nuggets of information and inspiration is to always have you antennae up, and be ready for them to come at any time in any circumstance. And it does require a bit of training to be able to catch them. I advise taking a bit of time to just do people-watching. Go to a public place, have a seat, and just watch & observe the people there. And take notes on what you discover. You’ll be surprised at the cool tidbits of usable information you get from that.

Writing Musical Stories via Concept Albums

Quan

I ‘m a bit of a music buff, and I’m a sucker for concept albums. Even in this single-dominated music world. I absolutely love it when an artist takes the time to craft together a cohesive, thematic music project where every song is interconnected and all of the parts combine to make a greater whole. Most of my favorite concept albums are stories, with each song being a chapter. I think this takes a lot of thought and planning, and not every artist can pull it off. And the better ones are really engaging, with a LOT of layers to them. I eat that stuff up. I even managed to put together my own concept album telling an action-packed story as my super-spy alter ego, Agent 008 ½.

For those of you that enjoy songwriting, or for you prose writers that have thought about getting into songwriting, This may be an interesting exercise to help stretch your writing muscles. Songwriting is a different animal than prose writing, and even to so extent poetry writing. You have a much more limited framework with which to get your point across, and your words have to fit a specific cadence and rhythm, which puts another limit of which words you can use and how many. You also have a length limit in that most songs usually follow a 3 verse structure broken up by choruses, refrains and bridges. And at some point in time music will be involved, so your song has to actually fit the music it is being written (or you have to craft or find music to fit the lyrics). Now take those challenges and multiply them by about 10, and try to make all of these songs fit together in a cohesive narrative. It is quite a puzzle to solve, but for those that are up to the challenge, it can be quite the rewarding experience.

So if you’re interested in writing a concept album, the question now becomes, “where do I start?” here is the process I went through when creating mine. Some concept albums are more thematic than linear (Secret Life of Plants by Stevie Wonder or Petsounds by The Beach Boys), but this article focuses more on albums that follow a narrative path.

  1. Consider the source. All concept albums tell a story of some sorts. So the first step is figuring out what story you want to tell. So take a deep look into your source material and parse out the most essential elements. For me, it was taking your typical James Bond movie and boiling it down to its most used tropes. Each of those tropes became a subject for a song.
  2. Figure out your format. What does each song represent in the context of your story? I treated my album like a musical novel. Each song was a chapter driving the narrative forward. But this is not the only approach you can take. For the Root’s Undun album, every song was a vague memory of a dying man, but with more emphasis on what he is thinking and feeling in that moment.
  3. Make a list. Now comes the simple part. List what each song is going to be about. Once you have enough songs listed to tell your story, then the real work begins.

After those steps, then it’s a matter of just writing the songs. It helps to have some music to write to or at least have a song format in mind. You might also want to cross check you songs to make sure details of your story stay consistent. I made sure to plant details in earlier songs that become crucial elements of latter songs (i.e. many of the gadgets mentioned in my Q-branch ode “The Quartermaster” are used a few songs later in “On the Run”). This helps make the project sound more like a compete project and not just a collection of loosely related songs.

Then there is the actual music. When searching for or composing the music, you want to make sure that the music is not only consistent from song to song, but that it also fits the overall mood you want to set with your lyrics. My concept album drew direct inspiration from the James Bond movie scores by the legendary composer John Barry (except with some Hip-Hop flair added).

Now, you don’t actually HAVE to put your lyrics to music. You could just make your concept album a collection of songs or poems. Essentially, you could say that the epic poems of The Illiad, The Odyssey and Hiawatha are concept albums that just haven’t been set to music. I even took my lyrics for my album and self-published them as an illustrated chapbook. But if you can put your story to music, it would enhance the narrative that much more. I would essentially be like recording a built-in audiobook.

For examples of good concept albums, here’s a list (in no particular order) of a bunch of my favorite concept albums:

  1. Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, by Kendrick Lamar
  2. To Pimp a Butterfly, by Kendrick Lamar
  3. Undun, by The Roots
  4. 12 Reasons to Die parts 1 and 2, by Ghostface Killah
  5. American Gangster, by Jay-Z
  6. Disposable Arts by Masta Ace
  7. The Long, Hot Summer by Masta Ace
  8. Black Materia, by Mega Ran
  9. Language Arts, by Mega Ran
  10. River City Random, by Mega Ran
  11. Gotham Down vols. 1-3 by Jean Grae
  12. Love and Divorce, by Babyface and Toni Braxton
  13. Prince Among Thieves, by Prince Paul
  14. Deltron 2000, by Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator

Finally, since I’ve explained how I put my concept album together, aren’t you wondering how the final product came out? Give my album “You Only Die Once” a listen here, and if you like it, then download it.

Vanity Press, Thy Name Is Mudd

Quan

My first novel, The Leopard Man, was published through a nefarious book publisher called PublishAmerica. Some of you may know of them and their reputation. I did not renew my contract with them and have since self-published The Leopard Man, even offering it for free on my website. This is an account of my experiences good and bad putting a book out through PublishAmerica.

1. I had just spent 9 months working on my new manuscript. It was an involved process, and I was very proud of the story. But I was intimidated by the process of seeking an agent and publisher. I had failed previously with two other manuscripts, and I wanted desperately for this one to succeed. I was also unemployed, and I was spurred on by the rags-to-riches stories of Tyler Perry and Michael Moore. They succeeded by working hard and believing in their dreams, and I wanted to do the same. I was jobhunting when I came across an ad for PublishAmerica on Careerbuilder.com. I was a little wary, wondering why a book publisher would be on a job hunting website, so I looked them up. I thought I was researching them. I visited their website, where they implicitly said they weren’t a vanity press. So I took their word for it and sent my query and then my manuscript to them. They accepted it without any problems. I was elated to have my book coming out, and told all my family and friends as much.

I missed a few clues that something was wrong. First of all, I had to edit my own book. In addition to that, I only got a $1 advance, they offered a bare minimum (not even that) of promotional support, I had to approach bookstores myself to get the book stocked. Also, The family & friend list idea seemed unprofessional, and I didn’t see any books by this publisher in bookstores near me.

I had made plans to go on a deep, involved marketing campaign. I had read Terry McMillain’s article on self-promotion, and took it all to heart. I was determined to make this book a bestseller, if I had to do everything myself (which I eventually had to do anyway). I had gotten quotes from various publicists. I had contacted numerous Writers conferences about setting up booths or doing appearances to promote my book. I had found an alumni from my college who would help me set up shop in Chicago. I had talked to an uncle who had a Movie producer friend about maybe getting the producer to buy the movie rights. I designed my own book cover, and programmed the promotional website myself. I told everyone at my high school reunion about my book and signed everyone up to my mailing list. I contacted both my Creative writing professors (Jonis Agee, who wrote Strange Angels) and a novelist who was an old classmate of mine (Anne Mallory, who wrote Masquerading the Marquess) about reading my manuscript and endorsing it. I was going to approach my church about endorsing the book, and had planned on taking out ads in local newspapers and magazines. I had gotten price quotes from merchandisers for book-related items like t-shirts and mugs I could give away or sell. I talked with a local bookstore about having a book signing the month my book was released. I had even talked to some music producers I knew about putting together a movie-styled score for my novel. I was thinking up sequels to the book, also.

Then a strange thing happened. I was applying for the Poets & Writers author database and was rejected. They said my credentials weren’t good enough. I wondered why, so I looked up the rules. It said “we don’t accept book published through Vanity Presses…like Publish America.” My heart hit the floor. “vanity press” is one of the most reviled phrases in the writing community. And I felt that I had basically been lied to.

That’s when I did some REAL research on Publish America. I googled them and found a plethora of information, mostly from authors complaining about them or warning others not to do business with them. There were complaints logged in the BBB about them. There was an extensive pro vs. con site about them, with the vast majority of comments being on the con side. Book Reviewers, magazines and industry resources didn’t consider their books as legitimate. Book stores would not carry anything published by them. Legitimate agents and publishers held any works done through them against you when considering future books for publication. Basically, publishers like PA don’t make their money off of actually selling books, they make their money off of the author buying the books from them. And my book was under contract with them for seven years. I saw my hopes and dreams of being a full-time author slipping out of my hands.

I was despondent for about two weeks. I was embarrassed that I had asked my Teacher and Friend, both established authors, to endorse what they could have easily seen as hack work. I was ashamed to be telling people of a book they couldn’t go to their nearest Borders (back when brick and mortar bookstores were a thing) and buy, especially since a great deal of my friends and family didn’t have access to Amazon.com, where my book was being sold at. I canceled the majority of my promotional plans. No more writers conferences. No more movie deal. No hiring of any publicist. No merchandising or ads in any publications. No book signings. I even canceled the soundtrack project. I stopped updating the website. My story covered some powerful topics – one of which I got the permission of a lady who had been through a very traumatic experience to use in my story, and I felt that I had let her down in not getting the issue addressed. I was on the verge of abandoning the book – and my writing – altogether. I had even gotten to the point of questioning how good the book really was, and whether I had what it took to be a successful writer.

Then a few things happened. First, I had gotten a response from the classmate, saying she loved my story and would gladly endorse it. I had told her what happened, and she gave me some words of encouragement, saying that this misstep didn’t have to be the end of my writing career. Some of the friends and family on my mailing list said they sympathized with what happened to me and would support me and tell people about my book. And then the book actually arrived. Vanity Press or no Vanity Press, NOTHING can compare to the feeling of seeing your first book in print. It’s an amazing thing. On top of that, I gave one of my two complimentary copies to Ashlynn, my wife’s teenaged niece, who allowed me to base the heroine of my novel on her mannerisms, opinions and personality. Seeing her face light up as I gave her the other copy of the book reassured me that I did the right thing in getting the book out. It inspired me to redouble my efforts to promote the book, if only to see how I could make the most of my situation.

I decided not to go all-out to promote the book like I had originally planned. I didn’t have the time or funds to sink into a huge promotional campaign (especially if I was doing it all myself), and this was before internet and social media book marketing became a viable thing to do. but I did manage to make some things happen. I approached a few libraries in my hometown and told them about my book. They ordered a few copies and even asked me to autograph one! I got a kick out of seeing my book on their shelves next to Grisham, Clancy, McMillan and Tyreese. I continued to update the website, adding Anne’s endorsement and even moving the site to my personal website when the domain expired. I contacted my college’s alumni magazine and they reported the debut of my novel and how to get ahold of it. I joined up with Amazon’s marketing partnership to help direct visitors to my site to Amazon to buy the book. A middle school English teacher who heard of my plight invited me to speak about it and creative writing in general to classes of young writers at a few schools in Ann Arbor. I still went to one of the conferences – the Sweet Auburn festival in Atlanta – and passed out postcards and flyers promoting my book. And, of course, I wrote this article.

A supporter of PA once said that they were satisfied with PA. The company treated them nicely, and they were happy to have their book published. And that really is fine and dandy…if all you want to do is get a book published. For those hoping to make a career out of writing, however, Publish America’s sordid reputation is a serious detriment. I learned that from experience. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken a more serious look at them, and checked around before sending or signing anything. It wasn’t all bad, though. For one, I did sell a few books: the libraries bought a couple, and a couple of family members bought books. I didn’t get much in Royalties, but with all of the money I spent writing and promoting the book, it counts as a huge benefit for me come tax-time. Since I lost more than I made, I can write all of that off and get some of that money back. I still get a kick out of seeing my book in the library, and my wife’s niece was so happy to be the star of her own novel that she took her copy of the book with her everywhere she went, up until she started attending college.

And I haven’t stopped writing. I’ve since gotten two other novels published with legit publishers or e-publishers, and I made sure I did my homework on them before I signed anything with them. Red Rose Publications, King Jewel and Necro Publications have been very good to me and my novels. My contract with PA finally expired, and I now offer that book as-is as a free PDF download on my website, www.quanwilliams.com. And now I am seeking an agent for two fantasy manuscripts I have completed as of tis posting, and I am , I promisecrrently writing follow-ups to both of them, But when I do finally garner the interest of another publisher, I promise to look before I leap into a situation with a suspect publisher. I don’t want to publish in vain again.

The book in question, The Leopard Man, is available as a free download here.

MORRISONING: Presenting Wild Ideas the Grant Morrison Way

Quan

In my list of top ten favorite comic book writers, Grant Morrison is in my top three, along with Fred Perry and Christopher Priest. There are very few projects his name is attached to that I won’t read or haven’t already read. I first became a fan of his with his epic run on JLA, and have devoured everything of his from his since, from his Invisibles book to his work on X-Men, Batman and Superman.

What I love about his style of writing is that he is able to concoct these wild, mind-blowing, larger-than-life concepts and ideas and make them seem not only feasible, but natural within the confines of the story. That is the true mark of a good storyteller, and it is one of the essential aspects of telling good stories in the genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Morrison has taken mundane police procedural tropes and expanded them to a cosmic scale in Green Lantern. He has taken some of the crazy, noncanon ideas of the campy Silver Age Batman and made them legit for today’s dark and gritty Batman…while also giving him a son! He has turned the core tenet of X-Men on its head by making Mutants trendy in the Marvel world and humans the endangered species. He gave the Justice League a grander, more epic rogues gallery and introduced the idea of the League being a new Pantheon. He told you that every conspiracy theory you heard of or were afraid of was real in Invisibles. He broke the fourth wall with Animal Man before Deadpool made breaking the fourth wall cool. He write a book about cyborg killer mechs piloted by household pets that just want to go home in We3. He quantified, populated and mapped 52 alternate realities in DC’s Multiversity. And this is just a small sampling of the ways he expanded the lexicon in his stories.

So the question is how can you introduce mind-blowing ideas and concepts into your stories that will wow the reader? Here are a few ways to do it:

1. TAKE THE FAMILIAR AND TWIST IT

Morrison Famously did this with his take on an alternate version of Wonder Woman. He wrote a version of Wonder Woman that is a stark contrast to the current “Warrior princess” iteration that has come to define her, and developed her as a more youthful, pacifist hero akin to how she was originally portrayed back in the 40s.

You can do this in your stories by taking a convention or idea that people have assumed goes one way, and portraying it in a totally different light. When your readers expect a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, give them a peanut butter and turnip sandwich instead.

2. NEW EXPLANATIONS FOR ACCEPTED CONVENTIONS

Morrison’s fascination for Superman knows no bounds, and at every opportunity he is reexamining and reinterpreting what makes the Man of Steel so iconic from different perspectives and angles. And with each examination – whether it be normalizing all of Superman’s wacky Silver age abilities in All-Star Superman or having him team of with 51 other versions of himself in Final Crisis, he comes up with different reasons why Superman is the one great constant of herodom.

This is where you have the opportunity to take something ordinary and make it fantastic. Take that peanut butter and jelly sandwich and convince people that the unique combination of peanuts and fruit is the secret elixir of enhanced knowledge if eaten in the right balance with some rare fruit you just found out about on Google at exactly noon Pacific time on Friday the 14th. Hey, it worked for the Da Vinci Code, right?

3. EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE

Morrison did this best with Batman and the X-Men. With both he introduced concepts that turned both franchises on their respective heads, that are still being used by creators years later. Making Batman a type of legacy character, first with Bruce being exiled through time and influencing entire generations, then with introducing a legit heir, letting his first protoge wear the cowl for an extended period of time, and having Bruce publicly acknowledge that he was funding Batman, broke many Bat-taboos and created new possibilities that have been mined for future stories. Likewise with the revelation that humans were the true endangered species in his New X-Men run, which also flipped the Wolverine-Jean Grey-Cyclops love triangle into a Jean Grey-Cyclops-Emma Frost love triangle, revealed an evil twin sister to Charles Xavier…and introduced the idea of secondary mutations.

You can do the same. Take some established convention, idea, genre or trope and invert it, and see what comes of it. The high fantasy manuscript I am seeking an agent or publisher for as of this post is a meta-critique of many conventions and tropes used in JRPG video games. And I am currently developing a new comic book series about a team of superheroes strictly forbidden from doing any actual crimefighting. So tell people that your Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich was not intended for human consumption.

4. MAKE THE WILD SEEM MUNDANE

This is basically the opposite of the first technique. Instead of making a normal convention fantastic, you take a fantastic concept and present it as normal. Crossgen Comics’ book “Mystic” was set on a modern world where magic was the source of energy rather than electricity. It is a weird concept to wrap one’s head around, but in the story it is presented as a perfectly normal, everyday thing. Doing this serves to make your wild ideas understandable and relatable to the reader, and you aren’t just hitting them over the head with some new concept that would stretch suspension of disbelief. And when you do this, you often don’t have to do a lot of explaining of your wild idea or how it works. It’s just something that is woven into the fabric of your setting from the start. The peanut butter in your peanut butter and jelly sandwich comes from a rare peanut plant that once granted eternal life but was diluted over the aeons into just a regular peanut.

5. GO BIG. THEN GO BIGGER.

Morrison’s biggest claim to fame is that he is the guy that takes a concept and blows them out to larger-than-life proportions. It has been a formula that has been done before Grant, but he was one of the few able to do it with a style and flair that added gravitas and made the concepts truly mind-blowing. It was his idea to send the Justice League one million months into the future to meet their future selves, in a mind-blowing, time twisting tale where the only way they could save the world from Superman’s future greatest enemy was to literally create that enemy in the past.

When coming up with your crazy ideas, ask yourself how outlandish or unbelievable you can get with your concepts. What is the most far-out, unbelievable problem your protagonists could find themselves up against? What is the weirdest, wildest situation they could find themselves in? Now ask yourself how they get out of it. Take the filters off. Take the limits off. Let your imagination go anywhere and everywhere. Then find a way to explain it and make it believable. (Doctor Who does this on a regular basis) Every bite of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich creates an infinite number of different realities where the jelly changes into different flavors as you bite it.

These are just a few ways you can incorporate mindblowing concepts into your stories.

Give them a try and see what kind of wild ideas you can bring into reality. And while you’re at it, go eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Here is a fascinating book from Morrison studying the idea of superheroes and linking them to modern mythology. It’s the basis of a lot of his wild ideas.

I Wrote an Unprintable Novel! Now What?

Quan

Every now and then I go through my old archives to see if there are any unfinished ideas that I could mine for inspiration and/or new material. This process was how I got around to doing new material for THE SEIZURE webcomic and for its spinoff webcomic, WEEKEND HEROES. Recently I dug up an old novel manuscript I had written way back in 2002 which never saw print…and probably never will.

Why will it never see print, you may ask? Well, for one, the writing is EXTREMELY raw, and I have no motivation to polish it up. Also, I’m entrenched in my current projects like trying to find representation for these two manuscripts I just finished and writing their follow-ups.

But the main reason why I won’t pursue finding an agent or publisher for the novel is that I’m not too sure I want this book to represent me as a writer. You see, I was in a very dark place in my life when I wrote the story. I had just lost my job to corporate outsourcing, I nearly lost two relatives and a close friend to the attacks on 9/11, the music group and entertainment corporation I had been a part of for the past 2 years was on the verge of dissolving, and I had just been screwed over by an auto mechanic on car repairs. I was NOT a happy guy. At that time I had an idea for a story bouncing around my head because I saw Christopher Walken’s character portrayal in “Last Man Standing” and loved how he portrayed a remorseless thug. I wanted to write a story about that. I had visions of this badass old thug walking down the street with some Deliberately-paced death metal playing behind him. He’d swoop into a city, do some dirt and leave. Kind of like Jack Reacher, except this dude has no morals whatsoever (but he does like dogs). I was also into John Malkovich’s criminal mastermind characters, and I came up with the idea of what if these two guys were pitted against each other? And that was the genesis of my unpublished crime novel BAD MEETS EVIL. While prewriting I heard of some writers debating on whether you could write an engaging story which was devoid of sympathetic characters, and I took that as a challenge. So this story evolved into a full-on evil-fest, starring seven dastardly people (each loosely representing one of the seven deadly sins) locked in a competition none of them could win. There’s a big illegal money deal going down, and everybody wants in on it: from The lazy CEO Vick and his Lustful, philandering wife Barb, to The arrogant Human trafficker Ken and his Wrathful crooked cop brother Abe, to the Greedy Private Investigator Kwame and his Envious girlfriend Terri, and of course The gluttonous superhoodlum John who is at the center of it all.

While writing this story, I ended up pouring all of my anger and frustration at my situation into the book. The result is a story that I wrote to intentionally offend and disgust as many of its readers as possible, regardless of race, religion, gender, social status, or sexual preference. I wanted to piss EVERYBODY off. The story was basically my middle finger to the whole world. Once done, there were actually some people brave enough to want to proofread it (I warned them about it, though. I told them that after reading it, they might want to take a bath). None of them could get past the first chapter. But it was for a reason other than the story being offensive. They simply couldn’t find my central protagonist interesting enough to want to read any more about him. That’s the cardinal rule of storytelling, it doesn’t matter how virtuous or evil your hero is, he has to first and foremost be interesting. And in that regard I failed. And that was the end of that, so I moved on to another story.

I think some people would think creating unpublishable works to be a waste of time, but I beg to differ. First of all, it’s good exercise, and helps a lot towards developing your voice and writing style. Secondly, it can be very therapeutic to just cut loose and not worry about grammar and character development and all that other stuff that content editors harp on. Just let the imagination run and see where it takes you. Thirdly, your unprintable story might have some ideas in it you can come back and mine later on for other more salable projects. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll see some elements from this story in something else I publish. Stranger things have happened.

Now Leaving: Your Comfort Zone

Quan

If you’ve looked at the body of my writing work, I think it would be hard to pigeonhole me into any particular genre of fiction. I’ve written comic books, Young Adult novels, Business Melodrama, Science Fiction and Survival Horror. I just published a literary love story, and I wrote a crime novel that will never see print. And right now I’m seeking an agent for both a high fantasy epic and a thriller with some elements of high fantasy. I never gave much thought into what motivates me to switch genres and styles of storytelling. I could say I just go where the story takes me, but that would be too simple.

Truth be told, every story I’ve written has been a challenge to myself in some way, shape or form. I get inspired by books I read, TV shows I watch and movies and video games I enjoy. And these stories inspire me to tell my own. I often ask myself “wouldn’t it be cool if I could write XXX kind of story?” and being the impulsive guy I am, it doesn’t take me long to hash out some ideas for that genre and style.

For the Thriller I just wrote, it started off as a prequel to an epic urban high fantasy series I’m planning. But as I was writing it, I didn’t really know how the story was going to get from its beginning to the point where my saga started. I’m usually a big “plot” guy, and I’ll spend a lot of time outlining the plot points and twists, creating a roadmap for where I want the story to go. But this time, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time pre-planning my story, and I really just wanted to start writing. So that’s exactly what I did. I only had a handful of vague plot points in mind when I started writing this story. I had two or three events I wanted to build up to, and I had a general idea of how I wanted it to end, but I left myself completely open with this story. I just created some characters, created a world for those characters to inhabit, and put the central character in a dire predicament. I then just followed that character around in this setting, observing his actions, getting inside his head to find out what he’s thinking and feeling as he does what he does, and writing everything down. This style of storytelling is counter-intuitive to every other book I’ve written, and it was uncharted territory for me. It was kind of scary. But it was also thrilling to be “winging it” and basically making the story up as I go along. And I turned out great; “Needle of the Southside” may be my strongest story yet, and I already have a ton of material in motion to take a similar journey in its follow-up book.

I believe the only way to truly improve as a storyteller it to challenge yourself and step out of your comfort zone. Even successful writers (actually, ESPECIALLY successful writers) can get complacent and fall into a rut, telling the same types of stories in the same style over and over again. This is why Steven King will take a break from writing horror to write stories like The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, Dark Tower and The Stand. It gives one a chance to freshen up, and learn new things about ones self as a writer and storyteller.

So my challenge to you is simple. Try something different. If you’re used to writing modern fantasy (especially if your Vampires glitter and your Werewolves are emo), take a stab at writing a crime story. If rustic heartland romances are your thing, take a shot at writing a political thriller. If you write historical fiction, then maybe you can shift from the past to the future and write some hard Science Fiction. And you can even stretch your muscles stylistically, like switching from the female protagonists you always write to a male one, or switching from Third person to First person (or the even bigger challenge of Second person), or switching from writing in past tense to present tense. In doing so you might broaden your horizons and discover some new things about your voice that you never knew you had before.

You don’t even have to commit to a whole book of it if you don’t want to. Maybe just a short story, or a simple scene just to see what it would feel like and read like in your new style or genre. And whatever you don’t finish you could just put in your writer’s vault for future idea mining. This would be a great way to improve your storytelling acumen.

Judy Blume is one of my favorite children’s authors. The Fudge series of books is legendary. But did you know she writes books for adults, too? Give this one a try.