The Ventilator of Publishing: A Mighty Blaze

The first thing you realized is that you are were all alone. The bookstores had closed. Your publisher had closed. The library had closed. Your agent was in shock. And you, you have a book coming out in the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu. Now what? And you quickly realize that you will have to do everything your self. Publishing as you know it ceased to exist. When a book comes out you are dependent on a push from your publishers, libraries, bookstores, reviewers. That push is now non existent and it is down to you and your book.

So you are flailing. Enter A Mighty Blaze. This is essentially a Facebook site run by eighteen writers who volunteer their time to promote the new books coming out during the pandemic. It is a lifeline, but more than that at a time when publishing is on life support,  A Mighty Blaze is the ventilator of publishing. On the Tuesday of publication A Mighty Blaze blasts out posts and likes and tweets and retweets to let the world know that even in a pandemic books are still being published. Followed by bookstores, agents, publishers, the literati now  behind ZOOM screens; A Mighty Blaze gives a face to the author who has effectively been silenced by this pernicious virus.

Eventually the publishers will return, the bookstores will open, the libraries will begin again and hopefully A Mighty Blaze will still be here. But if it withers after the normalcy of publishing returns then we can only be thankful that in the worst of times we saw the best of some people who put the collective importance of publishing books first and gave of their time and their passion.

william hazelgrove

Publishing A Book During A Pandemic

Herny Knox's Noble Train  will be out May 12, 2020. It is my fifteenth book. I have published in almost every situation imaginable. I have published during wars (First Iraq War) during horrible downturns in the economy (2008 recession/depression/) I struggled for years to get my first novel published and was handed the proverbial 250 rejection letters before finally a small publisher took a chance. Since then I have had good advances, lived the literary dream, movie deals, bad deals, lawsuits, triumphs, crushing defeats, and comebacks.. I have had to start over many times in the last thirty years since graduating college and deciding to become a full time writer. But I have never, ever published a book during a once in a century Pandemic.

It is like publishing into a void. Its not that the normal promotion hustle until you drop of modern publishing is hard enough...this...this is like publishing a book in a ghost town. It's not that I have stopped working, I work at home of course, it's just everybody else has and so I might as well be yelling into the night. All the pop-sickle stands are closed. Everyone has gone home. My publisher has gone on a three week furlough. The libraries where I give one hundred paid speeches a year are all closed. The trades are all working from home (PW Booklist, Kirkus) and I have yet to see a review. Only my agent has stayed at her post and so we are like the last of the Mahicans, two warriors not sure what battle to fight.

What makes this different is that the great Ferris wheel of publishing which is vast has for the moment just stopped and everyone is just waiting. Think of a party where you are the last guest and you are walking among the empty champagne bottles and picked over food. My editor let me know the books were in the warehouse last week and I should be getting my advanced copies. This is a good thing. At least the book will come out. But the question is then what? Barnes and Nobles is for the most part closed. The independent bookstores are closed. Amazon is still chugging along but busy with getting the nation toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

So I have to say publishing a book during a Pandemic is different. Maybe this is how authors felt when the Nazis marched into France. A sort of...now what? But it's your job. And so in a way I am back to where I started with my first book when no one knew or cared who I was. So I have a book that has just been published. I have a book and I better get to work selling it any way I can. I have always thought the authors job is also to sell so I have begun doing lots of Zoom presentations. I have always done lots of social media but it was always in support of larger efforts. Now it is back to square one. A brick at a time. More Social media. More zooming. Zoom might just be the ventilator of publishing for authors until the mighty Ferris wheel starts again. Just keep it all going...at least until a vaccine or a therapy. 

Authors Can Save Barnes and Noble

Authors can save Barnes and Noble. All they have to do is sell their books. Imagine if Barnes and Nobles had an author in every day. Not to sit behind a table but to sell their books. Not an author signing but an author selling. The author sells their book and then signs it. They will never beat Amazon at their game nor Starbucks or small cafes. But what Barnes and Noble does have is a physical presence and they have books and they have real live authors.

I sold 24k of my last book at a single Barnes and Noble last year. An unknown book. I did it all by talking to people coming in the front door. Most people are looking to discover a new story and guess what there is an author there to tell them all about a new story. Their own. And they can sign the book. It is a resource a sleeping sales force that Barnes and Noble can unleash right away because authors have a vested interest in selling their own books.

Look not everyone wants to talk to author when they walk into a Barnes and Noble but one in four  do. I counted it out and I sell a book about every fourth person. People are interested in the story the author has to tell and then they are interested in the author. The biggest advantage Barnes and Noble has is there are real people in those stores and real authors selling their books would cost them nothing. I impacted the bottom line of many Barnes and Nobles after four hours of selling my book and the managers were grateful. My sales swung the total revenue for the day.

This is a no brainer. The resource is there waiting to be tapped. An army of authors who just want people to read their books. Somebody just has to invite them in. The customer gets to hear about a new book, have an interesting conversation, and then get a signed book. And the author sells their book and now has an active role in controlling their royalties. It is a win for the author and more importantly the passive art of selling books will be gone for good, replaced by a motivated sales force of people going to the customers...authors.

Finally, yes it is a cyber world, but we are human beings. And humans like to talk to humans. An author can demolish any online sales model with this simple model. Give the author cards with a cover of his book. The customer walks in. "Can I give you this card? It is actually a book I wrote... "

www.williamhazelgrove.com william hazelgrove

Adjunct Hell

Years ago during my writing career I dipped in and out of teaching like a drunk going back to the same run down bar. I was the aspiring writer coming into the purview of the full time professors. I usually got the crappy classes nobody wanted at eight AM and it was usually first year comp. I taught at a very prestigious expensive private school. Two of them in fact. When they had faculty meetings the room was full of adjuncts. In the middle sat the anointed full time professors, all five of them. The other twenty five teachers were adjuncts. This was at a school that charged 40K a year in tuition.

So I learned quickly there were two worlds. The hotdog money world of the adjuncts (2500-3500) a class and the tenured full time 70k+ world of the professors who generally didn't speak to the adjuncts. My brother is a full fledged professor and he told me many times that the adjuncts came and went so why get to know them. So you show up at a class with no fanfare at all. You were hired months before and then you never saw anyone again. You teach your guts out for a class or two and then you get in your car and drive home. That's it.

No collegian conversations. No going out with your colleagues over lunch. No dinners with the University President. You are on the outside, you are the lone ranger, the interloper, in fact you don't exist. The students call you professor  but they do not know the dirty secret .You are not really employed, you are a contract player who will probably not return.Hey what are you teaching next semester?  You demure. You don't know. If enrollment is down you wont be teaching anything. And then you just disappear. That's what happened with me. You just don't get another class.

So you get the word that your class was taken by a full time professor. You try and get another class but suddenly it is like you never taught at all. You are unemployed. So you do what any self respecting writer would do...you sit down and write a book. And never look back.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How Barnes and Noble Can Survive and Thrive

Barnes and Noble has been under siege for some time by Amazon. They just hired another CEO to get sales moving in the right direction. They are scratching their head on how to compete against people clicking away on their books. Barnes and Noble is not exploiting their biggest advantage, their physicality and the physicality of their authors. Let me explain what I mean.

I do a fair amount of book signings at Barnes and Noble. My book Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson came out in the fall and my latest is out May 1 Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt. So I have been in the stores. Here is what I tell the manager. Put me in during your busiest days if you can if not I will take whatever time you have. When I am in the store I usually sell every copy of my books. And I don't have people coming to the store to see me. In fact I sell all my books to people who had not even heard of my books when they walk in. How do I do it?

What I do is when people pass my signing table I talk to them. I tell them about my book about the story of our First Woman President Edith Wilson who took over the White House in 1919 and ran the government for two years. I tell them about Teddy Roosevelt losing his wife and mother on the same day and then going West for three years. People want to hear a good story. They want to read a good book. And then I tell them I will sign the book and it is game over. A sale. It doesnt matter if I have 5 books to sell or 20...I can sell them all by just talking to people.

If I was the powers that be at Barnes and Noble, I would have authors in the store every day of the week and surprise people by having them talk to people about their books. I would not have them sitting behind a table and waiting for people to talk to them. Have them rove the store. The very advantage of a physical store over the internet is that it is full of real live people. I see people walking around in Barnes and Noble looking for a good book. Imagine if  "surpise authors" all over the country were chatting it up in the stores with customers. The books would fly off the shelf. No one is more motivated to sell their book than an author.

Believe me, I know.

William Hazelgrove Website

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson
Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Why Writers Can't Write Another Book

The amazing thing that has come out of the Harper Lee Saga and it is a saga now is that we are finding out she could not complete a follow up to To Kill A Mockingbird. As an author this is nothing short of amazing. Here she has the publisher telling her just give them anything because this book has headed for the moon and anything you publish will sell like crazy and just give us something. She could not.

And the question then is why? So we delve into the saga. Here is a woman who submitted a manuscript that was rejected by the publisher all those years ago. That manuscript is what is being published now. But the publisher saw no book there. So she told her to rewrite it. More than that she told her to bring in each chapter as she went along. This kind of hand holding does not usually happen these days. This process went on for two years.

TWO YEARS. She rewrote with the editor for two years and at the end out came To Kill A Mockingbird. But then then they said ok write something else. She could  not. So then you have to go into what makes  a bestseller. Timing. A story. The intersection of history and events. Luck. Writers are aware of all these things. That is why only a few hit. But then there is that next book. Why could she not produce something else?

Harper Lee might have been a one book writer. She might have had nothing else to say. We can say now that without that heavy editorial hand there would be no To Kill A Mockingbird. And once writers are cut loose to go on their own then they have to fly. Incredible as it may sound, Harper Lee simply couldn't come up with another story.

Maybe the price of mega success is just that.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Californication

Maybe you have seen Californication. It is on Netflix and concerns a novelist who has a lot of sex and does a lot of drugs and drives a Porche. Wow. Not only that he is able to tell everyone how he feels and confronts people in movie theatres because they are talking on their phone and faces off with very tough husbands whose wives he is having sex with but he has no real worries and comes out smelling like a rose as he jets off in his Porche.

But the novelist has problems. He cannot write. He is not happy with the movie version of his movie. Poor baby. Still he has the Porche and a great apartment and lives in San Francisco and basically jets around doing a lot of nothing except for bumping into women at bookstores who are reading his book and then he goes to bed with them.

Now he does have an ex wife and a daughter whom he is trying kind of to be a better dad. I have to laugh or cry at Hollywood's depiction of the working novelist. His good fortune is so glossed over that it hurts the fantasy,. I really want to believe that this novelist life is out there. It is so full of sex and drugs and good times that it is really more of the rock star. It really would be something to strive for and it supposes that people still care about writers and the books they write.

Very cool. Too bad we live on earth.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa..."If someone doesn't make a movie out of this book then there is something wrong with the world."

 

Mark Twain and Subscription Books

We have authors putting 104,000 ads in the New York Times. We have authors who are starving and cant get their books in Barnes and Noble or just about anywhere else. We have authors who don't even bother and self publish on KDP and take their royalty checks Amazon sends them. We have Big Publishing screaming from the rooftops about the evil empire. We have the digitization of books following the digitization of music. When was the last time you bought a CD?

The first thing that hits you when you walk into Barnes and Noble is how does anybody sell anything anymore. There is just so much. And of course you cannot find your own book as an author unless you are the one percent who posted that ad (paid for by the wealthier authors) to complain about Amazonian treatment. And it is ruled by the few. We probably have the same gap in publishing that exists in the rest of the country. The few reap their profit while the many choke on the crumbs.

And yet the more things change the more they stay the same. Did you know how Mark Twains Books were first sold? They were not sold in stores. His books were not deemed worthy. They were sold by subscription services. In other words they were sold by mail and by door to door salesman. Subscription books were not deemed worthy of review then but of course that didn't bother Twain. He sold into best-sellerdom and beyond.

And now as the powers that be hack it out we are turning back to those subscription days. In a time when we are watching on our own individual screens our individual shows we now get our individual books recommended to us by Bookbub and Book Guerrilla. It is the future and it is now. Small bookstores will be that individual as well. Loyal patrons relying on their bookseller to hand sell them a book.

Mark Twain would get it. He surely would.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


www.williamahazelgrove.com

Afternoon of an Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a piece in his later years called Afternoon of an Author. In it he went through his routine and it had all to do with writing. It is not uplifting as Fitzgerald knew he was on the far side of his career and his life. But at least it was still about the writing. In Afternoon of an Author there is not one smidge of promotion time. He did nothing to push his books and of course now he is the giant who sells hundreds of thousands of copies each year.

Now here is the new Afternoon of an Author. Writing 10 percent. Promotion 90. Time online. Incalculable. We are certainly living through the transition from print to the digital book. And for the authors it is unbelievable. We have become the bookstore in that we have to put our wares out there 24/7. It is in fact nuts. The days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald where all one did was write are so over it is hard to believe they ever existed.

Fitzgerald had a great line in Afternoon of an Author. Slag of a dream. That is how he saw himself at the end. Certainly as we grind through one cyber promotion after another you certainly feel like the slag of a dream...begun a long long time ago.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Hawk Who Came through the Window

Writing along when a hawk came though  the window outside the stairs leading to my office in the top of the garage. I opened the door and was met with a wide wing span and very large talons and an expression that did not care for me. The hawk landed several stairs down and blocked my exit. He did not move. I waited and he turned his head and watched me.

So I sat down after I grabbed my phone and took a couple of shots. The hawk did not care. He just kept his one eye on me and we began our waiting game. When I first moved into the house I found the head of a bunny on the roof. Apparently a hawk had decided he no longer needed it and left it for me. I had to go out on the roof and retrieve the bunny head.

And this hawk was big enough to do that. He covered the stair and didn't move. It had been a normal Monday up until now. Dealing with old and new problems. Trying to get things moving and I was headed downstairs for coffee when I met my predatory friend. I always admired the way hawks soared far up in the sky, drifting on the air currents. It did look like pure freedom.

But one of us had to go. I did have to get on with my day and the hawk I assumed had to get on with his. So I waited and watched him and he waited and watched me. And then. As if he had just had enough. He turned and flew out of the garage. I went down the stairs and looked up and just caught him flapping away.

He had his day to get to and I had mine.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Getting Those Trade Reviews

Ok we are talking Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal. The Pitcher was covered by all four. And I am not talking about paying for any of them. I am talking about getting reviewed on the merit of your book. Which brings me to the first point. Write a good book. That is the best thing you can do to help yourself get these coveted trade reviews that sell to the publishing industry and the libraries. Now after you write the very best book you can write then here are some pointers.

Send your book in early. Say four or five months before your publication date. This is standard. Send an ARC if you have one but if all you have is the finished copy then the send that. And do not send it to a general mailbox send it to the editor who is reviewing your particular genre. Now I am really talking about fiction here since that is all I have written. Everyone of my five novels including the last book have been covered by the trades.

Which leads me to another truth. Once you get one of your books covered by the trades it is much easier to get your next novel covered. They know you do quality work and are much more willing to look at your next effort. You may have to send in several copies as they do tend to get lost and some gentle email follow up helps.

But I go back to my original point. All this is lost if you don't have the book. Write the very best book you can. The trades will follow.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher


 

The Luxury of a Book

I was thinking about going on vacation and I thought I should download a book for the week. But then I realized I didn't want to read on my Kindle. I wanted a book and I thought what a luxury. Funny thought but there it was. Something not tied to a computer. An actual pulp based reading machine that needs no power and is glare proof and I don't have to plug it in. And it doesn't say something to me I don't want to hear.

And I even saw myself browsing for the book. Wow. Picking up books and looking at them and putting them down. Why it was something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. A real honest to goodness interaction with something that does not glow or buzz. And it does seem luxurious. To sit in a chair by a lake with a book. Something about sitting by the lake with my kindle just doesn't do it for me.

And so that is what I will do. I will treat myself to a book. Hell I'm worth it. I can pay a little extra to have the tactile sensation of turning real pages. I don't have to justify the drive to the bookstore and the extra time it will take.

Sometimes....you just have to go for it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...a Real Book
 

The Changing Face of Literature

Chapters are getting shorter and shorter. At least mine are. I don't know if literature is changing or I am but the last two books have about sixty chapters with 220 pages. And people tell me this is the way books are going. Our shrinking attention span demands these shorter bursts. Of course flash fiction is the new kid on the block that may or may not be the future.  Hard to say.

But I cant help but wonder if the internet has done its dirty work and is starting to rewire all of us. It would make sense that something we spend hours and hours interacting with and reading would change all of us. At the very least we might rebel against longer discourses that tend to take a while to get to the point. The point in the internet world is usually in the first sentence. Don't bury the lead right.

But fiction is a building process. A river if you will that we have to get used to the water first. And this takes a little time and a little acclimating. Sometimes the water is cold and rough and we have to find our way across. Then we get out payoff. But maybe we don't have the patience for that. Maybe we want to jump in swimming or not at all.

Anyway. I will try for some longer chapters next time. Maybe to just prove I can still swim.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...on Summer Sale
 

Novels Are Changing

Novels are changing. Mine have changed. Is it the influence of computers...the Internet? Hard to say. But they have changed. Yes there are the big  novels still being published but the market seems to be moving toward the staccato chapters that tell a story in bursts. Short novels for people who are extremely busy. The cousin of flash fiction is surely the novels of sixty scenes crammed into two hundred pages.

That is not to say this is bad. I have moved along as a writer to the point where I want to tell a lot of stories versus just a few big ones. I would say I spend an inordinate amount on the net and maybe there is some spillover. I thought it was just me but I spoke with a writer in LA who said he sees the same thing. Novels are just shorter and the chapters are many.

Literary novels once upon a time were composed  of long scenes. But that was for people who did not have a phone beeping every few minutes or House of Cards or Game of Thrones cued up. But of course we reflect our environment and novelists should be of their time. So I will end this now. My phone just went off.


www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

Selling A Novel In Todays Market

I was coming out of a Literary Festival the other day and I saw something that made me think we have passed into a new world. There was a car and on this car were the trade reviews and quotes from a novel with a picture of the cover on the side of the card. These were painted onto the car and not just temporary. I began to read the reviews from Library Journal, Rick Kogan, Booklist, Kirkus written on the back and the hood and the sides of the car.

My assumption was this was some self published author who figured why not put his book on his car. But no. This was a press that did this. And so we have passed into the age of anything goes. Some might see this as evidence of clever marketing or some might see it as desperation against the titanic wave of cultural marketing that is now our society. So lets take it as a marketing ploy.

Do people sit in their car and read reviews from Library Journal on the trunk of the car in front of them? No. Would they buy a book they saw on the side of a car? Would they remember a Publishers Weekly quote streaming by on the hood of a car? Who knows. Probably not. But the point is that this publisher has reached the point of trying to advertise their book on the same footing as a real estate agent selling houses.

So again...desperation? Market savvy? Idiocy? Who knows. I did read the reviews and I did stare at the cover. Too bad I can't remember the name of the book. I'll just have to catch that novel as it passes by at sixty miles an hour next time.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Max Perkins and Writings Evolution

What is amazing is that Max Perkins took so many writers and created their books for them. What he did is unheard of now. You are a writer in 1935 and you take your manuscript to New York and bang on the door of Scribners and Sons and ask to see Max Perkins. He sees you and then he takes you out for drinks and he actually reads the inchoate mess you have in a shoe box that is maybe an idea and some fleshed out pages and then he calls you back and says I think you have talent and I will put you under contract for a  book.

Yet this happened again and again. From Here To Eternity was not a book until Perkins suggested to James Jones he write something about the War and Jones sent him a few chapters and then years later there was a book. The point is this type of literary development is unheard of now. You either come up with something ready to go or you don't even bother. The inverse of Perkins day is now where writers have to do it all. Then writers just had to come up with an idea and show promise.

But by the end Perkins time passed even him. His style of developing literary writers was already falling by the wayside and when he died a way of publishing died with him. There will certainly never be another Max Perkins and those writers who did very well by him are gone too. They probably didn't realize how good they had it.

Who does.

williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have
 

When Writers Run Out of Gas

Watching Downton Abbey. Self proclaimed junkie after Breaking Bad. Season finale fizzles like a wet balloon sputtering around the room and then falling on a bare light bulb...sizzling in flaccid relief. Such over burndened metaphors would have been a relief to the turgid soap opera Downton became at the end. It would seem Julian Fellows lost his way but probably after five seasons he probably just ran out of gas.

Lets face it it happens. After the early seasons built around the verisimilitude of the era and the characters drawn so handsomely to the early twentieth century standards of gentlemen and their servents we were destined to drift aftter Matthew Crawley left the series and we lost our great love story. But more than that Julian burned through his material after World War I ended. This gave the series natural drama and we remained focused on the main characters.

But then history paused and we were left with flappers and F. Scott Fitzgerald besotment done badly by the upper class and worse by Rose wannabe flapper who goes for African American jazzmen and then forgets about him after matriarch in training Mary's wrath. The point is the soap opera moves in when the writer moves  out because then we just have drama for dramas sake with no underpinning.

Alas Julian probably should just shut it all down instead of ending the season on the beach with the servants and strange little sublots that wither and die like vines in a toripid heat. If this overwritten it is only because Downton was so underwritten and I wanted to right the apple cart.

I still have some gas left.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...


 

The Fantasy of Max Perkins

I have been reading Scott Berg's Biography of Max Perkins and it is really just unbelievable. This man was something of a Saint and after that he was Santa Claus. And after that he was brilliant. It really is a world Gone with The Wind. Take the financing of F Scott Fitzgerald after The Great Gatsby tanked in sales (unbelievable right) and he was broke again. Perkins would then gin up a collection of short stories and front him the money. Or he would front him the money against a possible movie sale on the novel he was working on or on serialization rights. Or he would just loan him the money.

Or how about discovering Ernest Hemingway and going to bat for words he could not bare to utter himself. Perkins could not stand profanity yet he went against the owner of Charles Scribner's and Sons to pull for Hemingway's right to include such words. Or how about discovering a young Fitzgerald and sending back the novel three times (This Side of Paradise) for rewrites and then going against the powers that be at Scribners and threatening to resign if they didn't publish him. And he had just started there!

Or how about taking Tom Wolfe's novel Look Homeward Angel and editing it from a the rambling mess to a cohesive book and then doing it again for his second novel that was more than a million words. And taking the author into his house while he did the editing and enduring his  verbal drunken abuse all the while he did him the biggest favor anybody would ever do for him by publishing what would have been an unintelligible mess.

These stories of go on and on. I have a great editor and I have no complaints,  but Max Perkins belongs to a different world when writers were Gods and editors were angels of mercy. Pure fantasy in the year 2013.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have

Time is the Difference For Most Writers

It really is time. After you have the talent it is time. There are many good writers out there who will never publish and that is because they will never write. The reason most artists don’t succeed is really because they do not have the time to develop their craft. Talent must be there but so also must there be time to create and in America that time comes at a high price.

So what is your day job? The standard question has the built in assumption you must support yourself to do your writing or your music or your acting. You have to do sometning to pay  the bills. But that something destroys most artists. Their energy goes into the support and not the art. Art takes time to come to fruition and it takes time to make its way in the world.

Take writing for instance. You only have so much psychic energy and then it is gone. Most writers support themselves by teaching. This drains the writer of his precious mental  reserve and by the time he or she sits down at the writing table there is simply nothing left.  It was given away to a student who will face the same thing one day. 

So really the great dividing line of those who go on to produce songs or novels or become actors is that they had years to develop their craft. Time it turns out is precious.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

Can Writing Be Taught?

Something to wrestle with. The problem is teaching has nothing to do with writing. We were all taught to diagram sentences with grammar spelling and punctuation. This can be taught. We can be assigned papers. We can complete the papers but this is not teaching writing. John Gardner in the Art of Fiction basically says that you have to have the talent in the first place. That if this talent is not there then no amount of teaching will do  it.

I am teaching an advanced fiction class at a private college and it is a question that pops up. Can writing be taught? Even craft is a hard one to teach to someone because it is the experimentation of rewriting that is craft. Basically writers have to be wired up. Their brains have to figure out why one word works when another one does not.

And of course we are talking connotation and denotation. What does a word really do. And this is something instinctual that no amount of courses can give you. I would even argue writing courses hurt writers because they codify what should never have been codified in the beginning. Still one has to try and convey what one has learned.

And so maybe it is like the old nudge the horse to water scenario.
But the thirst must be there.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher..What if a dream was all you had