Harry Crews: Write the Truth

Harry Crews is one of those authors I wish I read more of.

His New York Times obituary describes his books as being filled with freakish, swaggering, outsized personalities. Born poor, and raised rough, he’s the type of writer that you rarely see these days, with a voice that hasn’t been sanded down by MFA programs or the need to be politically correct.

“Repellent” is another word used in the obituary, which is certainly true. His novels aren’t for the faint of heart, as they are filled with gory misfortune and sexual misadventure.

I read Body by Crews. It’s a twisted book about a female bodybuilder that brutally satirizes the South. He handles issues of race, sexuality and the American pursuit of success with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Seeing him violently deconstruct the hand-wringing concerns of today is liberating, making you want to be more honest in your life and writing.

As Crews said about writing:

If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.

Books That Are Too Long: Swamplandia!

My favorite books are short ones.

The Great Gatsby is a slim 180 pages. That’s all it takes for Fitzgerald to recreate the Roaring 20s and give us the quintessential American striver.

Ernest Hemingway is a master of economy, using just 251 pages to tell the tragedy of The Sun Also Rises.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is another brilliant little book from the interwar period. It traces the fall of the British aristocracy in just 264 pages.

And my own novels are short ones, clocking in at under 300 pages.

Yet, most contemporary books sprawl unfettered, as if editors have just given up on their duties. Authors ramble, they discourse, narratives go off into tangents and down weird little cul-de-sacs.

For example, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. It clocks in at a wearying 416 pages.

The novel starts off incredibly strong, giving us the colorful portrait of the Bigtree family, famed alligator wrestlers of the Everglades. Being from Florida myself, I’ve felt that the comic potential of the state has been underutilized. From exiles plotting revolution to greedy condo flippers, if any state could produce The Great American Novel, it’s this one.

The collapse of the Bigtree family mirrors what’s going on in “mainland” society. Their struggles are shared by many in more prosaic circumstances – they lose it all and the family falls apart.

The section of the novel where the Bigtrees adapt to normal life is fascinating. I loved Russell’s depiction of The World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park on the mainland. It’s like a Disney World created by sadists.

But then the book rambles, in an endless journey through the swamp as 12-year-old Ava Bigtree goes in search of her older sister. Lush descriptions of flora and fauna are piled one upon another, creating a mangrove thicket of prose that nearly stops the reader cold.

It’s one of those books where you find yourself peeking ahead a few pages. When is the story getting back to the World of Darkness?

The odyssey in the Everglades takes so long that the ending feels rushed, unresolved, leaving dramatic threads hanging.

Swamplandia! is a good hundred pages too long.

Despite growing up reading books, even I turn away from novels that resemble doorstops. Reamde is a book that I desperately want to read. Yet, at more than a thousand pages, I don’t even want to start it. The novel represents too much of a time commitment in our distracted age.

It’s ironic. The Internet and our ever-present electronic devices have collapsed attention spans. Yet, our books keep getting longer and longer.

Our lives are crowded with information. In order to break through the electronic din, a novel has to be concise and powerful, a book that looks more like The Great Gatsby than Swamplandia!

Don't Mess Up My Block Advances to Second Round of ABNA

My new book, Don’t Mess Up My Block, has advanced to the Second Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).

ABNA brings together talented writers, reviewers, and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. The 2012 international contest will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance.

Finalists will be announced in May with grand prize winners selected in June.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is a novel that satirizes self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese and The Secret. It follows the adventures of an ambitious consultant as he goes from disaster to disaster, believing that success is a matter of just following the right catchphrase.

Read the first chapter and then buy it for yourself!

Adapt to Customers or Perish

It doesn’t matter what your business model is as a photographer. It matters what the customer’s buying model is.

The above bit of wisdom is by Guy Kawasaki, who is quoted in an interesting article on rethinking photography business models.

These days, just about the only way photographers can make a living is by shooting weddings. But brides are creatures of our modern age too and are balking at some of the more old-fashioned elements of the business. Scott Bourne writes:

Gone are the days when we can just send some negatives to the lab, order some cheap 8×10 prints, put them in a black folder, mark them up 400 percent and call it a day.

Instead, brides want everything done digitally. They want all the pictures taken during the ceremony burned onto a CD. They even want the unprocessed files so that they can Photoshop them on their own.

Photographers must adapt to what customers want in order to survive.

I see the same thing in the book publishing business. Customers have e-readers, wonderful devices that allow them to buy books instantly. They don’t believe that e-books should be as expensive as print. While publishers may resist, customers believe that e-books should be priced somewhere between free and $9.99. Continue reading “Adapt to Customers or Perish”

Cyber Monday – Murder in Ocean Hall for $0.99!

Murder in Ocean HallGet my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

 

The "Now, Discover Your Strengths" Approach to Social Media

Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the very few personal improvement books worth the money. It’s been superseded by the awkwardly-titled StrengthsFinder 2.0 but the message is the same in the new book:

You should concentrate on what you’re best at. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, instead sharpen the skills that you do better than anyone else. It’s a countervailing message in this age of self-improvement. It says to drop what you suck at (I’m never going to be a great basketball player) and work on what you do best (writing and photography). Continue reading “The "Now, Discover Your Strengths" Approach to Social Media”

Murder in Ocean Hall – Now for Sale in France!

We live in a magical age, where I can write a book in Washington, DC, and then readers in Paris can download my work to their e-readers.

Murder in Ocean Hall is now available in France. It’s available in la boutique Kindle, which is an adorable name for an e-book store.

The book is in English, BTW. Technology can do many amazing things but language translation requires the subtleties of the human mind.

And what did I do to publish my novel in France? Uh, nothing. I just made the e-book available on Amazon and they did all the rest.

Book Review: Purple Cow by Seth Godin

I’m a fan of Seth Godin, particularly his book, The Dip, which is about knowing when to quit and when to keep going. His thoughts on traditional publishing are also really compelling – it’s an industry that is broken. I read just about everything he writes.

purple cowPurple Cow is one of his older works, published in 2003 and updated last year. Purple Cow is a book that will push you to create something extraordinary. Godin’s basic point is that we don’t remember ordinary experiences, like the airline that got you to your destination on-time or the meal that was merely OK. Instead, we become passionate over excellent, “above and beyond” service and products. We rave about them to our friends and neighbors, which is the best marketing there is.

And about the only marketing that works.

Which is Godin’s point – in order to break through the clutter, we must create the truly extraordinary. Do work that scares you, that’s on the edge. Don’t be like other people – be unique.

A compelling idea, but one that probably doesn’t deserve a whole book (even a slim one). After a while, it’s the same story of iconoclasm again and again. Also, some of the examples are dated now, like JetBlue as a paragon of customer service and Godin’s comment about mobile phones being commodities at this point – obviously written before the iPhone.

But if you’re a fan of Seth Godin, or are currently working on a new product and need some inspiration, then it’s worth checking out.

Note: The 2010 edition includes an appendix containing stories of companies and organizations that have adopted the Purple Cow philosophy successfully.

Birthing a Book the National Geographic Way

I had the privilege to work with Janice Hall Booth. She’s a very inspiring woman who wrote a great book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love but is about someone who actually went out into the world and did something 😉 Her message is that you can find your personal mission through solo travel.

Janice has been a whitewater rafter, a photographer, a nonprofit executive and an avid adventurer, always willing to push the limits of what’s possible.

Only Pack What You Can Carry
Only Pack What You Can Carry

But perhaps her most challenging adventure was getting a book published! She’s been blogging about this and has now put the publishing story together in a handy PDF. Find out how she was discovered and what it was like working with National Geographic. It’s a warts and all look at the publishing world, told with her trademark honesty.

And I make a brief cameo at the end, as Janice’s new media coach. While I gave her checklists to follow and guides to blogging, my advice was really simple – use the tools that you’re most comfortable with to tell your fascinating story.