The Failed Writer

Sometimes you feel like the failed writer when you see how well all the other writers are doing. Take grants for example. How the hell do all these writers get these grants? Authors are always thanking this foundation or that for getting large sums of money to work on their fiction. Or the more obvious one...the writers who get a million dollars for a book or a quarter million or a tenth of a million. How do they do that? Or how about the writers who are guest columnists in the NY Times? How did they score that gig? Or the ones that pop up on television. Or hit the NY Times Bestseller list. How did they pull it off?

So you think well I am not doing something. And that something could be a lot of things. Maybe you aren't blogging enough. Maybe you aren't sending out your manuscripts to the right people.  Maybe you don't have a great agent. Maybe you are just writing the wrong types of books. Maybe you have been barking up the wrong tree for years in your pursuit of literary fiction and really someone should have gotten hold of you way back when and said...THIS...THIS is what sells, not...THAT! And you could have made the change then.

But years have passed and you have been pounding away on your piece of stone and your hammer is bent and dull and your stone is chipped and scratched and sort of a dully putty color. But it is your stone. And so you pick up your hammer once again with all these questions smacking around your skull. And you hit that stone one more time. Then again. Then again. For all those questions without answers.


www.billhazelgrove.com

The Confessions of an Ex Cable News Junkie

Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.

But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!

Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.

Or  Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.

I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Choosing a Point of View

I'm going to start a new novel after Christmas and I have the plot squared away and I know what I have to research, but I haven't decided on a point of view. I assumed third person would allow me to do everything I wanted and had pretty much made up my mind, but then I started reading some old first person novels and thought about taking it straight first person. This would allow me to get cozy with the reader right away and also give me the latitude to throw in everything but the kitchen sink as a I muse along. I have written three first person novels and one third person and I like, as most Americans, having someone tell me a story as if they are sitting next to me. But there are drawbacks.

First person depends entirely on voice. If you don't have an  interesting narrator then first person will not work. The voice of the author should draw a reader in and there should be a melody, a musical quality to the narrator that is pleasing to the ear. I write from the sound of prose as most writers do. You can just tell when something is not right and so you play with the words or the voice until it flows with an unbroken cadence. Of course some first person narrators attack the reader and fight against cadence. But it is the way we like our stories told and there it is no coincidence that blogging with its first person narrator is so popular. It is the great "I" telling the story and we are there.

Now the problem is there are limits. We cannot be everywhere as a narrator and that limits our scope. So that brings in a strong authorial third person. Authors used to be much more assertive, talking to the reader and coming out from behind the curtain. Now a lot of our omniscient narrators hide behind the curtain and tell the story without getting in the way. A lot of people prefer this as they don't want some author getting in the way of  characters and action and giving his or her take on what is happening. We want the author to be essentially invisible, a voice from above.

Or you can get esoteric and use second person which is you. You take the train. You feel sick. You punch the man. You arrive at work and hang your hat and look at your watch. You know that it is a long time from lunch. I am using second person in this essay. I do it in most of my posts about writing and politics. It allows the reader to be part of the story...You. But you have to make a decision about what you want to use in your story.

So I will have to make up my mind soon. I am drifting toward third person because I just don't have a powerful voice nudging my authorial narrator aside. But if he does then I will go with it. And so should you.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January