Speak Widely and Carry a Big App

 

The world’s your stage...

A mystery writer friend was delighted when a regional writing conference asked her to speak and offered an honorarium of $1,000. She arrived at the venue and discovered to her dismay that no one had bothered to tell her that she could sell her own books. (The organizers did not want to go to the trouble of asking a local bookstore to sell, and were too disorganized to spell out the DIY details.) She spent hours after her talk silently fuming while other authors sold books in a meeting space, swiping credit cards with Square readers.

Another friend, who writes in the horror genre, has grown accustomed to driving to any small conference that will have him. But when a library group in upstate New York contacted him, he calculated that he would need to drive 700 miles round trip. He declined rather than ask if they would consider chipping in for travel expenses. “I hate to bring it up,” he said. “It would be too awkward. Some of those peeps are my friends. But shouldn’t they give me something?”

Yeah, dude! I know it sounds nutty, but many civilians love hearing writers speak—and they are often willing to pay. You just need to know how to ask.

In the book world, it’s expected that an author will make bookstore or library appearances for free when on the road promoting a book. It’s now somewhat expected that you will make yourself available to Zoom with book clubs.

Beyond these, there are book festivals, library conferences, university speaker series, women’s clubs, corporate retreats, historic sites, and town hall venues that pay writers attractive fees to speak.

Strangely, many of these events don’t do book sales. The world of publishing is so opaque that outsiders reflexively avoid onsite sales because they seem like extra work. Reasons range from a) not knowing how to acquire and sell books themselves, b) not knowing that they can invite a bookseller, and c) feeling confused about how much time on the schedule they should allow for a book signing.

Worse, sometimes they will allow book sales, but think nothing of insisting on a 10 percent cut of sales. And they never understand why bookstores tell them to pound sand. “Do these people know how much we make on a book?” a bookstore owner once told me.

Most of the best-paying orgs hold a place of honor in the contact lists of major speaker’s agents. And yes, some speaker’s bureaus exclusively represent writers. Increasingly, such bureaus are embedded in the offices of the Big Five publishers. Why? Money.

Publishers have figured out that a cash payment plus book sales is lovely thing to behold. Authors should also grasp that when the average paperback royalty is seven percent, a $500 honorarium is the equivalent of selling 420 copies of a $17 paperback.

Speaker’s bureaus take a 20-25 percent commission on your speaking fee, but they are arguably worth it because they arrange the booking, book the travel, have someone standing by to deal with travel snafus as they arise on the road, and mail you a check with expenses when the whole thing is done.

They also have the chutzpah to do what most writers cannot do: ask people to pay them. We writers are coded to be payment-shy, which is why the worst publishers find us such easy prey.

The folks who work at the bureaus do what literary agents do. They advocate for us when we think it would appear gauche to advocate for ourselves. (Have you watched Uncle Harlan lately?)

That said, these bureaus are as tough to sign with as literary agents, but you don’t need one to handle the occasional speaking engagement that comes your way. You just have to be savvy and borrow a few tricks from their toolkit. I’ll mention two.

Speaker’s agents have a standard patter that goes something like this:

“Mr. Slapscribe is very much in demand, and we typically quote $15,000 for one of his appearances. However, I have seen him get much, much more, and I’ve seen him voluntarily take less because he was impressed with an organization’s past record of inviting mystery writers who wear unflattering fedoras. So don’t be put off by the fee. Fill out our questionnaire and bring us your best offer. We need to know what your organization can offer in terms of a speaker’s fee plus travel expenses. And we’ll go from there.”

It’s a spiel that asserts the price but still manages to sound welcoming. The “best offer” line is critical, because it invites event organizers with small budgets to throw their hat in the ring. They return to their team, hammer out their best package, and fill out the questionnaire. If the dollar amount falls below the bureau’s minimum, the agent typically routes the deal back to the author/speaker, saying: “Here—you can deal with this one yourself. There’s not enough money to interest us. But please, for the love of monkeys, don’t do too many of these cheap deals because word gets around.”

In our household, who do you think ends up dealing with the events my wife’s speaker’s bureaus reject? I hate talking about money with anyone, but when forced to do so, I do what any self-respecting writer would do: I hide behind my words.

Over the years, I have compiled my own questionnaire, adding all the questions I’ve seen on the documents of the name agencies and a few of my own. Now, when a fresh inquiry hits my inbox, I triage it immediately. Is it worth sending to her speaker’s agent, or can I handle it myself? (I can usually tell.)

Then I unfurl my own patter, according to a time-tested strategy. Is this an organization she has worked with before and adores? If they’re not “a friendly,” are they relatively nearby? Will a significant amount of travel be involved? Then I go from there. Here’s how you might do the same:

“Thanks for writing. I have always loved talking to your group. Do you mind filling this out for me? It probably touches on stuff that don’t apply to your event, but at least we will all be on the same page.”

“Thanks for writing. I am happy to travel within 60 miles of home to do these types of events. I’m wondering if your group can cover any travel expenses because I estimate this will take 6 hours round trip by car. Since you’re planning an evening event, I will will probably need to book a room for the night. Do you mind completing…”

“Thanks for writing. The festival sounds fun, and next May is doable, but since it’s in a different state, I’d need to see the overall package you’re offering guest authors before agreeing. Do you have something you can send, or do you mind filling out…”

The toughest one is saved for a certain type of inquirer who gives the impression that they are doing you a favor by asking you to work for free:

“Thanks for the invite. These days most of my author talks are paid, or they go on my waiting list. But I look at all the offers people send. All I ask if that you be up front and give me your best offer so I can consider it quickly in good faith. Attached is my questionnaire…”

Responding in this fashion usually weeds out the groups who are simply not organized. Some of them never write back. That’s fine. I am guided by two principles.

The first comes from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, the computer scientist and attention management guru who famously does not respond to most emails, and forces his academic colleagues at Georgetown to boil their requests down to solid details before he will respond. The message is: Let’s not waste each other’s time. Summarize your expectations—all of them—in writing. If you can’t do this or find it onerous, we cannot work together.

The second is, humans are fallible. If an event organizer is not seasoned, it will not occur to them to mention that you can do book sales, or whether they can offer you a travel allowance, and so on. Inexperienced organizers are like deer in the headlights. They’re terrified. They are praying that you will make their problem go away by filling the empty slot on their schedule. If you say yes, they log you on the calendar and forget to tell you what is expected of you until it’s too late.

And that’s bad.

• If you knew that your hosts intended to post a recording of the event to YouTube, would you say yes?
• If you knew that they intended to sell tickets to your talk, would that change whether you did the talk for free?

Recently, for example, I have heard of two other annoying requests:

• If you knew that they insisted on seeing a copy of your talk or PowerPoint ahead of time, to make sure it was not “offensive,” would you agree?
• If they asked for a list of all your social media accounts to vet your level of “controversiality,” would you agree?

I swear I am not making this up.

Everyone’s circumstances are different, but a decent list of questions will unearth many of the issues that they will not think to share. The current version of my questionnaire lives on my website. Feel free to download the PDF, scrape and copy the text into a Word document, and tweak it with questions of your own. Send the document to correspondents, and see what happens. Three of the email openings I shared above raise the issue of some form of payment. The questionnaire asks it more explicitly. In the best-case scenario, prompted by the form, they will tell you if they can pay and how much.

Let me stress that it’s perfectly fine to do an event for zero payment. We do them all the time. We once participated in a well-run book festival where the only obligations were an hour-long talk on how one gets published (shoot me) and signing books for buyers in the sales room. They paid us $200 each for our time, and it was a lovely, 90-minute round trip through the mountains. We would do it again in a heartbeat. I’d just insist on a different topic.

I once did a Zoom event for an elementary school group for no payment, only to be surprised when a $50 check arrived in the mail with a school T-shirt, a mug, and a card signed by the students.

I will say that in the children’s book field, in-person school visits are no joke. They are often full-day events that involve leading one or more classrooms of squirming fifth graders in a writing lesson. Yeah—I would much prefer chatting on a four-person panel about how I do fiction research.

Many children’s book authors print flyers describing the type of events they offer for payment, and hand them out at conferences if anyone asks. Others post a one-sheet “explainer” PDF on their websites that school districts can download. Those docs spell out the types of talks they do, their ground rules, fees, and required deposit. (Example: the school district pays the writer a nonrefundable half-fee three months in advance to get booked on the schedule. That way, the writer does not book the flight unless money is in hand.)  

One of our friends, a bestseller in this field, states openly on his website that he charges for school visits because he’s a full-time professional author, and this is how he provides for his family. Can’t get any clearer than that.

It’s nice to work with people who appreciate what you have offered them. But far too many groups have gotten it into their heads that writers will do things for free because of the “good publicity.” And that’s just plain wacky.

My last tip comes from a young writer friend who has dealt with this attitude far too often. (You’ll see why I italicized that word in a second.) A while back he was asked to attend an event three states away for no pay or travel expenses. His room and board would be covered because he would crash with a fellow writer in the destination city. Rather than fly, he insisted on driving 521 miles in a single drive. (Times two, counting the return trip.)

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said.

“Naw. I’ll make money on the mileage alone,” quoth he.

He’d become such a pro at non-paying writer events that he counted on them to reduce his annual income taxes. For 2025, the US business mileage rate is 70 cents a mile. That means a 1,000-mile car trip to a nonpaying author event can, in theory, “earn” you a $700 income business tax deduction.

 
It’s the same sort of logic I have used to justify pricey conference expenses: “But we can deduct it!”

Said friend uses the QuickBooks mileage app to track out-of-town trips, not to mention his in-town “writer business” errands to bookstores, the library, the post office, the UPS Store, FedEx, Kinko’s, office supply stores, and driving to meet fellow writers for lunch. 

I asked my accountant about this, and he chided me for not doing it sooner. I prefer an app called MileIQ. (Both are subscription based, but even the subscription is tax-deductible.)

In closing, let me say that I wish you well, wherever such events take you. A world that wants to hear what writers have to say is a beautiful one indeed. It also better not make us angry. Long may we flap.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Information Flows to the Writer

Look what you people have done to me! I am obsessed. Obsessed, I tell you!

The book-to-film conversation that arose a few weeks ago has been buzzing in my brain quite a bit these days. In my last installment, I promised another article in that vein soon. But then I realized that there are a few other rants I have been meaning to get out of my system first. To my mind, they all speak to the same topic—author empowerment.

So here we go.

Almost any writer who’s been doing it long enough will accept as gospel the maxim “Money flows to the writer.” I hereby nominate a sub-clause to be enshrined in our holy tabernacle: “Information does, too.”

But what is the first thing a writer does when they land a literary agent? The writer puts the agent’s contact information on the contact page of their, the writer’s, website. And as the writer accrues more representatives in their careers, they add still more.

Want to hire me for a speaking gig? Talk to my speaker’s agent! Want to inquire about book-to-film rights? Write to my book-to-film agent! And so on…

I understand and sympathize with such writers. They have worked hard to acquire these people. Finally, they are validated! Someone cares enough about their work to help them make as much money as possible from the rightful exploitation of their growing creative empire. If they’re being honest, they will admit that slapping these names on the website gives them a rush. Their contact page looks busy, alive, and ripe with juicy links. They are broadcasting to their family, friends, and other writers: Look! I’ve arrived! 

But what have they really done? They have given strangers license to talk about them and their careers without their knowledge. Now, anyone can write to one of these agents and the writer will never know that the possibility of an offer is in the air.

Believe it or not, our agents have lives that do not revolve around us. Personal lives too. And those demands take precedence over inquiries about your work.

A writer friend told us recently that his agent had taken a step back because of her pregnancy. He didn’t know about it until his gentle email badgering progressed to an Actual Phone Call. In the business world, bullshit is often cloaked in euphemisms. Fred doesn’t have fire in the belly—so we fired him. We’re looking for someone who can hit the ground running, so we cannot offer you the job. Specifics would be nice.

If an agent is taking a step back, presumably they will spell out to their clients what that actually means before they vanish into a pinprick of light. Suppose, during the time your agent was, um, regressing, a publisher in Varna wrote asking about the foreign rights to your book? How would you know? The Bulgarian editor went to your website, clicked the link which you so helpfully provided, and sent your agent a note without you ever knowing.

“Oh, but my agent wants to make money,” I hear you splutter. “They would hop on an inquiry like that because a sale for me is a sale for them, too—wiseass!”

Uh, no. Go back and read Freakonomics. Every human responds to incentives. Every human quickly figures out how little work they have to do to keep their gravy train running. And when humans deem the incentive too low, they don’t hop on a damn thing, especially if they have more lucrative things to do.

I had two nonfiction articles chosen two years in a row for the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. And for some reason, textbook editors later came out of the woodwork asking to reprint portions of those old Discover magazine articles. Each time, I referred the editors to the guy who was my very first agent. By then, the agent and I had become “friends.” This means that we were stupidly young and occasionally hung out together in Village bars talking about famous writers and their exorbitant book deals.

“Are you sure you want me to handle these for you?” he said, referring to my minor contracts. “I’m gonna make like 50 bucks on the whole thing.”

That’s how they think. I now know better.

Your agent will get right on that foreign rights offer to your book. Really.

In that famous 2005 book by Levitt & Dubner, the authors argued that real estate agents really have no desire for protracted negotiations on the sale of your home. If the price goes higher, you make thousands more, but their commission bumps up by a few hundred. Why work? Better to close the deal and move on.

Similarly, in publishing an agent’s cut of (most) foreign sales makes them a pittance compared to you, so they will be tempted to a) pressure you to take the deal as offered, or b) drag their feet on responding to an outside inquiry in the first place.

At the bigger literary agencies, newbie agents are assigned to work the foreign sales desk. Smart. Frees up the senior agents to make the real money. But what do you think every one of those junior agents learns to say when they send you an email with your hot new foreign offer? “It’s a solid deal. I think we should take it.” Translation: Please don’t make me work harder.

Speaker’s bureau agents have set dollar amounts that trigger their handling of your booking. When you sign with them, they’re usually quite transparent about those amounts. At a decent agency, if they’re only interested in handling inquiries involving, say, a $2,500 or higher booking, they’re supposed to refer the low-figure offers back to the speaker. (That’s you.) But in practice, they might let such an offer slip through the cracks. Many nonprofits and library foundations are empowered to offer speakers honoraria in amounts such as $500 to $1,000. Would you accept such payments, even if you had to handle the travel arrangements on your own, without an agent’s assistance? Yeah—I would too, only neither of us found out about them because the org wrote to our speaker’s agent directly and no one bothered to tell us.

Book-to-film agents are trained to ignore rights requests from small production companies they’ve never heard of, without looking further to see if there are mitigating factors that might mean something to you, the author. (In addition to the dramatic rights option, the interested party wants an option to produce an offshoot documentary about a serious social topic or cause you champion in your novel.)

In the real world, talking about someone behind their back is considered rude. Yet that’s exactly what happens when you route business inquiries to others who are supposed to look after your interests. So don’t. The only email address or link on your contact page should be the one leading to your inbox and yours alone.

Every inquiry must come through you first.

Information flows to the writer.

Yes, I understand you are a writer who just wants to write. Wake up. It’s not that hard to take charge. I am not advocating that you negotiate these things. I simply propose a scenario that works like this:

An email containing a rights inquiry or speaking engagement offer hits the writer’s inbox. Fresh intel in hand, the dutiful writer logs the fresh inquiry in a notebook, then forwards the note to the proper agent: “Hey—just got this note about a Japanese translation. Please check into it. We can talk about it next time we Zoom.” Then, said writer shoots a note to the Japanese inquirer, saying, “Thanks for writing. I forwarded your note to my literary agent. If you haven’t heard from NAME at AGENCY in a timely manner, feel free to write me again.” Not hard at all.

What have you just done? The friendly stranger offering a bagful of cash now knows how to reach you directly, and is less likely to walk away if he doesn’t hear from your agent. And your agent knows that you know about this inquiry and that you are likely to follow up with them down the road. They can’t very well drop the ball. If, after all you have done, they do drop said spheroid, then is that not its own form of information?

Every writer must figure out for themselves how many indignities they are willing to take from all these agents before the writer takes their business elsewhere. What’s your price? Two brush-offs or dropped balls? Three? If you let strangers speak about your work without knowing what’s going on, you may be staying in a relationship that has long ago left you in the dust.

And yes, I know that there are exceptions to this rule. An interested party may go direct to an agent because you thanked the agent in the acknowledgments of your last book. Or the correspondent saw you and your agent speaking on a panel together at a conference. Your point is well taken. But in the real estate you control—your website—the funnel should always be pointed back at you.

* * * 

As always, this is my opinion after years of doing it the conventional way and having it blow up in my face. I'm sure lots of you have had lovely relationships with agents that did not fall along these lines. If so, certainly let me know!

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Maybe You Don’t Want Hollywood to Turn Your Book into a Movie

I admit it: it’s a clickbaity title but work with me here. This week the issue of book-to-film rights popped up on the boards of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and it nudged me to think about the specifics of deals I’ve been privy to.Authors dream of Hollywood deals because we assume they lead to big money. Granted, everyone’s idea of big money differs, but I venture to say that these days those fantasies involve six zeroes.

I have in my possession an interesting document that confirms the fantasy is possible. Don’t ask me how I got the doc, which pertains not to one of my ghostwriting clients’ books, nor my wife’s, and certainly not one of mine. Suffice to say someone just got sloppy.

Let’s preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, agent, or hotshot writer. But I do think that the publishing and film industries like keeping writers in the dark about how much their work is worth. So if someone was stupid enough to slip me a doc, I figure it’s okay to share, provided I don’t identify the people involved.

The document is a response to a studio option offer for a book written by a young writer who, at the time the 2024 document was written, was already a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author in one genre. This deal was for the person’s debut in another genre, which will be pubbed in 2025. No, I am not acquainted with the writer.

A year ago, the still-to-be-pubbed book must have been considered “hot,” whatever the hell that means these days, because in the push-back document the author’s book-to-film agent believed that they could get $150,000 for a 12-month initial option, with a renewal at the same rate and length. An option is the money a production company or studio pays a writer to have the exclusive rights to a work (for a fixed period of time) while the studio attempts to get the film greenlit. When talking about options, agents focus on several deal points such as:

Initial option: How much the studio or production company will pay the author to exercise their option on the work (story or book), over how much time.

Extension option: How much they will pay to renew this option on the work.

Purchase price: How much they will pay if/when the work is turned into a film or TV show.

Royalty: How they will pay per episode if the work is turned into an episodic TV show.

Backend: How much the author will participate in the gross profits of the resulting filmed project.

These are just the basics. There are a litany of other points, from the onscreen credit the author will receive, the rights the author will reserve to the project, all the way to how much creative control the author will be allowed to have on the final product, not to mention travel perks, etc.

The options I’ve seen for my ghostwriting clients, my author friends, and my wife involve a payment for a term lasting one to two years, usually with a built-in renewal clause with payments at the same rate or slightly higher. It’s safe to say that of all the contracts I’ve been involved with, I’ve never seen figures as high as the ones in this document. And yes, I’m a newb in this world.

Back to the doc in hand. If the opposing side accepted the agent’s counter, the author would earn $300,000 on the option over two years. If the production happened, the author would be paid a purchase price of $1.5 million. Already we’re at $1.8 million. This fits our six-zero dream nicely.

Remember, this is a counter-offer, so in a way it represents the agent’s wish list for the author’s book. I don’t think the agent would have been throwing around such figures if they didn’t think it was feasible. The purchase price figure seems designed to arrive at $1 million after the lawyers get involved.

In this particular document, that $1.5 million figure is thrown out as if it covers all types of productions. The memos and contracts I’ve seen tend to break out different purchase prices for, say, cable or network TV productions, major motion pictures, limited series, etc. I assume the agent wanted to send a message to the opposing side that they wouldn’t get the license for this book cheaply.

Not every literary agent has the credentials to sell their clients’ work to Hollywood. So they partner up with a book-to-film agent, who has the track record and contacts. The book-to-film agents I’ve met appear to practice the Spaghetti + Wall method of promotion. They email a glowing pitch letter with attached manuscripts or book proposals to studio heads and production companies they think might be interested, then sit back and wait.

They don’t pick up a phone to verbally pitch a damn thing—i.e., “work”—unless something in the news has suddenly made a project “hot.” (Yes, there’s that stupid word again.) Like literary agents, book-to-film agents don’t have to sell your book to make a living. They just have to sell a book. But if a name director, producer, or actor has read or heard about a book or story, then the agents can sit back, field offers, and play each bidder against the other.

Side note: My favorite movie scene of a talent agent defending his existence…

There’s always stupid additional money and perks involved in the deals these agents lock down for authors. If the book I’m discussing gets turned into a TV series, the author would theoretically be paid $7,500 per episode as a royalty, $25,000 per episode as befits the author’s proposed non-writing executive producer (NWEP) credit. (This is why everyone wants to be an executive producer.) The author will also earn a percentage of the modified adjusted gross receipts (MAGR), which is the “backend” in the laundry list above. What’s more, this particular author will be allowed to offer “meaningful consultation on all creative decisions” and be able to participate in the writers’ room if the work is turned into a TV show.

If the author must travel 60 miles from home to indulge in these bouts of creativity, the production must provide travel, accommodations, and a per diem to cover the writer’s expenses. If the film or show is nominated for awards, our author is guaranteed an invite to the award presentation, with a similar travel package and budget.

As written, every thing on this sheet of paper is a sweet deal, and I hope the writer got what the agent proposed, or close to it.

We have not discussed the impact this production will likely have on the author’s book, which, let’s remember, has not been published yet but will soon. With the kind of exposure a TV show or film is likely to generate, the book will no doubt sell phenomenally well, which is every writer’s dream.

That is the whole point of a print project going Hollywood. Movies and TV shows raise the visibility of books and authors, and have since the first moviegoer walked out of a theater hoping to snag a hard copy of Gone With the Wind. I would not have read Wicked without hearing about and later seeing the Broadway play. I’m a Baum fan from childhood, which is why I won’t be seeing the movie. Two versions of that story was enough.

So yeah—a Hollywood deal is sweet, which is why everyone wants one. It’s wonderful to have a piece of paper detailing such a juicy option in your hands—or even a complete stranger’s—except that none of it may ever come true.

Most books are never optioned by Hollywood. And the ones that are are rarely made. Notice how many times I have used the word if in discussing everything up to now. As you may have surmised from my headline, I am here to argue that sometimes it’s perfectly okay if an optioned piece of writing never gets made into a movie.

My premise is based on the experience of a friend who started in journalism and later switched to writing narrative nonfiction books. (That’s code for history that doesn’t suck.) All but one of his titles have been New York Times bestsellers. None have been made into movies. His big breakout book sold modestly in hardcover but hit its stride in paperback, when—goes the publishing biz theory—it was eagerly gobbled up by book clubbers who wanted to read a real-life story that “read like a novel.”

Decades later, his breakout book still hasn’t been made into a movie, despite being optioned way back in the early 2000s, and having a revolving door’s worth of name actors, directors, and producers attached to it over the ensuing years.

Said friend is not weeping over this state of affairs. At the time we first met him, he estimated that he had earned $100,000 from a decade’s worth of option money. That figure is now probably $200,000. The studio he signed with just kept extending the option. Again and again and again.

The writers I know who have accepted modest options on their books typically pocketed $5,000 every six months for terms that lasted 12, 18, or 24 months. Yes, that’s a small dollar figure—only three zeroes—compared to the sweet numbers and perks I detailed above, but it’s real money. The rest is so hypothetical you cannot bank on it. When you sign that contract, the option money is the only thing that’s real. Just like advance money is the only cash you’re guaranteed to receive when you sign a book contract. Royalties, if they happen, are gravy.

The most money any one of my short stories has earned—with reprints—in its lifetime is $1,220. Who am I to sneeze at a semiannual payment that is 409 percent higher?

I hope you are not reading this thinking, “Oh sure, that’s all well and good for novelists. I’m a short story writer. No one’s ever going to pay me that kind of money.”

Slap yourself upside the head right now. The films All About Eve, It’s a Wonderful Life, Arrival and tons more all started life as short stories. I am not even bothering to Google a list of the bajillion more examples that surely exist. Okay, I lied. And look at me—I keep lying. (However, in the comments, please chime in with the names of other films. I think it will warm all our hearts.) [EDIT: The day after this post appeared, fellow SleuthSayer John M. Floyd posted an entire article on short stories that became movies. See it right here!]

The real issue is learning a) to keep doing good work, and b) to be happy with so-called “small” paydays. Option only a few stories and those four-figure checks can provide an enviable income that will help you create more work. Perhaps a more accurate headline for this article might be “Getting Rich $5,000 at a Time.”

I guess the question is how you trigger that gravy train by getting your work optioned. I have seen numerous articles for writers that touch on this, and I’m sure you have too. Articles that tell you to, say, mail your work to actors and directors whose work you adore. (Don’t. I’ll explain why one of these days.) Other articles tell you to attend “pitchfests” to drum up interest in your work. (I hate talking to people, so don’t look for me at one of those things.)

Two movies I enjoyed got their start as quite obscure books. So far as I can tell, The Descendants hit the bestseller list for the first time after the George Clooney film hit theaters in November 2011. The Prestige, a marvelous science fiction novel by the late Christopher Priest, has won a respectable number of genre awards but I venture to say most of us who’ve read it did so after catching the Nolan Bros. film.

Each of these books were brought to the attention of their directors by book-to-film agents. What pushed those directors to take notice was the endorsement of someone in their circle who had read the books and loved them.

It sounds like something out of the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it? People who read books! In Hollywood! But it happens.

A producer I won’t identify used to keep an apartment in Florida so he could visit his son from a previous marriage. One morning, while riding down in the elevator of this condo building, he spied a poster for a book club meeting where attendees were slated to discuss a nonfiction book published a few years earlier. He wrote down the name of the book, bought it, read it, and later called my wife’s literary agent hoping to work out a deal.

“Wait,” I said the first time I met him. “You really read the book?”

“Cover to cover. Why, you wanna quiz me?”

---

Next time, if I get permission, I will share the details of a book-to-film contract.

See you in three weeks.

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Lawyer Who Saved Lennon

I was such a musical illiterate back in the day that I was routinely mocked in high school when a friend discovered that I could not name the four Beatles. One morning late in 1980, this same classmate spotted me in the halls and held up three fingers. “You only have to remember three now,” he said morbidly.

John Lennon had died the previous night.

Left to my own devices forty-one years later, I probably would not have sought out a nonfiction book entitled Lennon, the Mobster & the Lawyer (Devault-Graves Books, 2021) if I hadn’t met the author at a book event last fall.

It was the same weekend that Hurricane Helene bore down on our region in Appalachia. At the time of the storm, I was at a book event in Charleston when I overheard a gentleman named Jay Bergen tell a group of writers and hosts how he had come late in life to write his one and only John Lennon story, and how, when the book was done and published, he donated five banker boxes of legal documents in his possession to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Because of my hearing issues, my brain sometimes has to replay for me what my ears have heard. Oh shoot, I said to myself later, this guy was John Lennon’s lawyer!

It’s a riveting story whose prelude began in 1970, when Lennon was sued by record producer Morris Levy over alleged similarities between Lennon’s song, “Come Together,” and Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”

The real-life inspiration for the fictional Hesh Rabkin character on The Sopranos, Levy had a longstanding habit of attaching himself as a songwriter to the copyrights of his performers’ songs, thus ensuring for himself a forever share of their royalties. An associate of the Genovese crime family, he was a violent individual who had once beaten a cop so badly that the officer lost an eye. Levy filed frivolous lawsuits to bully people into paying him cash or to extract otherwise juicy commitments.

Predictably, the two parties settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs that Levy owned the rights to on Lennon’s next album. Lennon, by then a solo artist, was such a star that Levy was sure to be adequately compensated by whatever royalties flowed his way.

Except, the production of that next album bogged down. The record, which Lennon intended to be a collection of oldies that he’d long admired, became a “problem” project. For one thing, its producer, the legendary Phil Spector, flaked and absconded with the master tapes. Lennon moved on to another album, Walls and Bridges, which became his fourth solo release when it arrived in stores September 1974. Assuming Lennon had reneged on their agreement, Levy threatened to sue. Lennon mollified the manipulative hothead by informing him that twenty-eight boxes of the oldies tapes had been finally recovered. Listening to them again, Lennon felt some of the songs were salvageable but a lot would need to be re-recorded. He assured Levy that the oldies album would be released…soon.

Levy grew increasingly impatient for his expected payday. Since the two men lived in New York City, Levy kept insinuating himself into Lennon’s life, badgering him to visit Levy’s nightclub, inviting Lennon to Disney World in Florida so their families could hang out, and to his horse farm in upstate New York, where Lennon and his fellow musicians rehearsed.

Every time they met, Levy tried to persuade Lennon to let him release the album. Lennon always brushed him off. Lennon had an exclusive deal with EMI stretching back to his days with the Beatles. The firm alone decided how his music was marketed. Levy knew this, but was ever the noodge.

Lennon did not regard Levy as a friend, but he found it hard to say no. So when Levy asked if he could hear some of the recordings Lennon had made of “his” songs, Lennon sent over a rough cut, reel-to-reel tape of the entire album—sixteen songs in all—hoping to get Levy off his back.

With the tape in hand, Levy must have realized that every creative person he’d ever bilked was small potatoes compared to Lennon and the artistic firmament he had at his disposal. “I’m gonna put it out!” Levy shouted in his office in front of witnesses. “I’ve got a shot! I’ve got a shot!”

In 1975, Levy announced to the world that his (s)crappy record company would release Lennon’s new album, which Levy called Roots and which he planned to market via cheesy television ads. Of course Capitol Records/EMI filed an injunction. In a pair of lawsuits, Levy sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol Records, claiming Lennon had breached a verbal agreement permitting Levy to release the album. He claimed damages of $42 million, a laughable figure designed to rattle his opponents and force them to capitulate to a high-dollar settlement.

Enter Mr. Bergen, whose job it is to save John Lennon’s musical reputation, stop the bootleg album in its tracks, and keep John from having to pay millions to settle.

When he enters the story, Mr. Bergen is a young but seasoned litigator. The lawyer and the musician are both in their thirties and conflicted fathers who long to make amends with the children from their previous marriages.

Consisting as it does of court transcripts, legal maneuvers, and scenes of the two men roaming Manhattan in between depositions and court appearances, the book shouldn’t work but does. As they walk the streets, visit New York landmarks Lennon has never visited, eat lunch in dives and legendary restaurants alike, they form an unlikely but charming bond. Lennon comes to life as a decent fellow who always has time to sign autographs for fans as long as they agree not to bug him when he’s eating or tail him everywhere he goes.

Summoned to Lennon’s Dakota apartment on the West Side, Mr. Bergen is grilled by Yoko Ono, who, while noshing on caviar, stresses that they must keep the settlement figure down. She and everyone else assumes that Lennon will have to pay; they just want to keep him from paying big. Admittedly, Lennon’s case suffers from some glaring inconsistencies. If Lennon didn’t like and trust Levy, why did he spend so much time with him? Why did he and his musicians rehearse at Levy’s farm? If Lennon didn’t want Levy to release the album, why did he give Levy a tape of the entire record?

Mr. Bergen may well be a suit (that’s him in the dark, pinstriped suit in the 1976 Bob Gruen photo shown on this page) but he’s got the soul of a rock ’n’ roller. The moment he heard the Penguins sing “Earth Angel” on the radio back in high school, he fell in love with the form. When Elvis made a rare east coast appearance in 1957, young Mr. Bergen ordered two mail-order tickets from the venue—only $3.50 each!—but could not find a single college classmate at Fordham who wanted to make the long bus trip to Philly to see the pre-glitter King’s performance in a cavernous but half-populated ice hockey arena. Lennon, who idolized Elvis, demands a beat-by-beat recounting of Jay’s experience, which his lawyer is happy to provide. In short, Jay loves rock ’n’ roll. Chiselers like Levy sicken him. And if he can help it, his client will not pay a freaking dime.

In a scene that made me laugh, Mr. Bergen decides he will fly to Los Angeles and Detroit to interview the session musicians who witnessed Lennon’s interactions with Levy. Seeking to blend in, Mr. Bergen decides to leave his suits at home and dress casually. What sort of attire will put rock musicians at ease? We watch as he hilariously buys his first pair of cowboy boots, western-style shirts with snap buttons, and a crisp pair of black jeans that he washes a few times to break in. (It’s an aesthetic that will become Mr. Bergen’s sartorial preference later in life.)

Author publicity photo by Paul Mehaffey

Mr. Bergen’s key courtroom strategy is to get Lennon to recount exactly how he creates a song, records it, and polishes it before releasing it to the world. On the witness stand, Lennon’s creative process unfolds, and we (and the court) grasp that the rough cut tapes Lennon shared with Levy were never intended to be released. Doing so would have been like us writers allowing a digest magazine to publish the first draft of one of our short stories.

After the Lennon case, Mr. Bergen’s professional and personal life shifted. He built a lucrative practice representing rock stars, baseball teams, and even George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees. In time Mr. Bergen loosened up, let his hair down (literally and figuratively), remarried for a third time, and retired to our mutual corner of the southeast, where neighbors and local writers motivated him get his story down on paper. His book is a fine addition to his Nashville publisher’s long-running Great Music Book series.

In December 1980, like the rest of the world, Mr. Bergen was devastated to learn of the murder of his friend at age 40. These days Jay Bergen tells audiences that he is haunted by the fact that he missed seeing Lennon five days before his passing. John was in the same recording studio where Mr. Bergen was visiting a client, but Yoko was being weird, and Mr. Bergen did not permit himself the liberty to knock on a few of those studio doors to say hello (and goodbye).

Had he lived, Lennon might well have written books or granted interviews that shed even more light on his creative process. But since he was taken from us far too soon, we are lucky to catch a glimpse of that artistry in this story. We are lucky too that Mr. Bergen, now in his eighties, is around to help us imagine it all.

* * *

You can inspect some artifacts in Mr. Bergen’s Lennon archives here.

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

Have a Word With Yourself

Two writers inhabit the office where I’m sitting right now. If one of us is having a bad day, the other can’t help but notice. It doesn’t take long before the other occupant gets an earful. On one of those days, I asked my wife to pause in her exasperated recitation. I rooted around in our stash of stationery and produced a piece of textured card stock. I handed it to her, and urged her to write something in this format:

Dear (your name):

You did a great job yesterday writing (short description of the thing you wrote or edited yesterday).

Today you’re going to work on (short description of today’s goal). And you know what? It’s going to be awesome. Have a great day.

I love you,

(sign your name here)

She looked at me like I was nuts but she did it. And for weeks after, whenever I sensed or heard from her that she felt bad about the way the current project was going, I’d either present her with a card in person or leave it on her desk so she’d see it when she next sat down.

She originally thought it was a woo-woo idea, but she now has a little stack of these cards that she has written out. (I do too, because I couldn’t very well let myself off the hook when I was foisting this on her.) I bought two old-timey mail spikes so we could lend some order to our individual piles.

One day, when she resisted doing the exercise because it felt weird, she said, “Where did you even get this stupid idea?”

I did what any husband would do in such a circumstance. I blamed Lawrence Block.

Yes, fellow mystery scribes, that Lawrence Block. The MWA Grand Master. The author of the Matthew Scudder novels, the Bernie Rhodenbarr capers, the Ehrengraf stories… (Oh you don’t know them? You probably should. Very funny.) Block has written tons of books, including what his website calls “midcentury” erotica.

You can’t say this about many fiction writers, but I like Block just as much when he’s writing nonfiction. His advice books for writers, in particular, radiate a very gentle, conversational authority.
In the mid-eighties, Block attended one of those seminars that promised to change your life. He liked what he learned and thought it might even be useful for writers, except that no one had created such material. So Block created a group of exercises and a PowerPoint presentation. Then he booked ads, rented hotel conference rooms, and embarked on road trips with his wife to teach writers how to get in their right mind.

For instance, he had students pair up with another writer, sit across from each other, and recite a list of fears they have about their writing. While one person read off their list of fears, the other person’s job was to simply listen and respond as follows.

“A fear I have about my writing is that it’s all a big waste.”

“Thank you.”

“Another fear I have about my writing is that it’s not any good.”

“Thank you.”

“Another fear I have about my writing is that editors will reject it as soon as they see how bad it really is.”

“Thank you.”

Block’s logic is that fear and negativity are chickenshit. They run aground when they are exposed.
The technique reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting when the shrink character played by Robin Williams demolishes Matt Damon’s tough guy persona by repeating one phrase over and over again—“It’s Not Your Fault”—until Will’s subconscious finally accepts the truth about his miserable childhood.

Block and his wife presented these in-person seminars for two years. Attendees paid $100 for the one-day course. Hitting the road every weekend for three months at a time quickly got old for the Blocks. Little mistakes here and there often left them at the break-even point financially. Block hung up his spurs and got back to his writing.

But he did hear from former students who felt that the class had helped them enormously. Well, he thought, maybe I should write it all down in a book. The first book version of the Write for Your Life course ran about 60,000 words, 20 chapters, 175 pages. Back in the eighties, in the days before print-on-demand, the only way you could make a book was to order a full press run. Block printed 5,000 books hoping he wasn’t going to lose his shirt.

Far from it. He sold all but 25 via mail order. After 4,975 copies disappeared in the mail, Block allowed the book to slip from his mind. Those copies took on a life of their own, with vendors eventually hawking them online at astronomical prices. In 2013, Block says, an assistant of his found the 25 leftover books tucked in a storage facility somewhere. They slapped them up on eBay and alerted fans in an e-blast. The books sold out in three hours.

Block finally capitulated, making the text available as an ebook and a print-on-demand paperback. Though many of the exercises were originally designed to be conducted in a setting with other writers, you can easily adapt them. (Hence the subtitle The Home Seminar for Writers.) I reread the book to write this piece, and I discovered many exercises that I refused to do upon first reading it years ago, such as:

• I never got around to meditating at several points during the day: as a prelude to writing, after I had finished my writing for the day, or when I was stuck…
• I never got around to practicing automatic writing—putting down on paper anything that pops into my head—for 10 minutes…
• I never got around to compiling a list of all the eduction, expertise, life experiences, and references that I have accumulated that I might draw upon for my writing…
• I never got around to assembling a list of actions I can take to add to that “bank” of experiences…
• I never got around to decorating my home or office with positive affirmations that I can see on a regular basis…

I’ll stop there, but the book offers at least another 15 different exercises that I—haha—never got around to doing. Because I apparently was too busy not living up to my potential.

Oh—it turned out that the exercise I asked my wife to do is not in Block’s book. The closest is an exercise in which Block asks you to sign and date a letter to yourself in which you state that you no longer need to believe the aforementioned negative thoughts about your writing.

So it turns out that I, Joe D’Agnese, am also a self-help author!

You wouldn’t know it to look at me. I am not alone in buying such books and then not taking their advice. The entire self-help genre would die tomorrow if people did. At one point in the course’s history, Block realized writers so hate saying affirmations that he created and sold audiotapes where the affirmations were spoken aloud and you merely had to listen to them.

For me, what has become interesting about the “love letters to yourself” technique is noticing the negative reactions I have while doing it. I tell myself it’s stupid. I feel uncomfortable, almost sick, at the prospect of praising myself. In fact, I have already judged writing this very column about my experience to be a worthless and egotistical endeavor.

To which I can only respond: Thank you, Joe. Thank you very much.

But what does that mean for you?

Well, some morning soon, I hope you will rise, look yourself in the mirror, and say, “You know what, INSERT NAME HERE? You done good.”

If even thinking about such a thing makes you feel icky or weird, interrogate the feeling. That’s all I’m asking. And if it does make you icky, maybe you ought to check out Block’s book to see if it’s for you. Think about getting a paper copy so you can dog-ear pages or mark your progress as you work through the exercises.

Oh…and while you were looking at yourself in the mirror just now, I left this card on your desk. 

I use these Avery postcards
because they offer nice texture at decent price.

You know what to do with it. If following the instructions makes you feel weird, ask yourself why. Carry that question around with you for a few days as you go about your other projects and errands.

Not because it’s a big deal. Not because it’s supposed to change your life. Do it for yourself. Because it’s worth getting to know an interesting, creative person who builds such marvelous worlds.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Three-Legged Author Talk

Photo by Joseph Gonzalez on Unsplash

From time to time, we writers are asked to speak about our work. Some of us enjoy it. The rest of us scamper away and hide. The profusion of words we conjure up so easily in our work dry up the moment we step in front of an audience. Even if we have carefully outlined our talk ahead of time, it sounds unconvincing the moment it drops from our lips. 

What are we missing? Heart. Simply put, we are forgetting to give ourselves to the audience. I think if you knew just how easy that is to do, you’d volunteer for such talks.

About a decade ago I was in the audience at a weekend library event on Long Island, New York, where a well-known author was about to give a talk on the occasion of his latest book. As I took my seat, I dug in my pocket for my pen and notebook. I do this every time I’m in an audience, provided there’s enough light to see. Force of habit, I guess, for a former reporter.

Most of the time, I don’t bother taking notes because what I’m hearing is not worth capturing.

The speaker on deck that day was Garth Stein, author of a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller called The Art of Racing in the Rain. You may have read it. It’s heartwarming literary fiction about a golden retriever who dreams of being reincarnated as a human. (In the film version, the dog narrator was voiced by actor Kevin Costner.) Besides the movie, the book has since spawned a middle-grade/YA edition and four children’s picture books.

After the talk, as attendees traipsed out of the auditorium to buy books and have Mr. Stein sign them, I reviewed my notes and realized that he had used a very compelling structure to shape his talk. It was supremely logical, and has stayed with me all these years.

Open With What They Know

Mr. Stein had worked as a director, producer, and screenwriter of documentary films. At the time, he had produced three films, written two plays, written five novels, written one of those picture books, and won an Academy Award for short film. But on that day in the library, it was a safe bet that everyone in the bookish audience had heard of him because of his “dog book”—even if they hadn’t read it!

A lot of writers who are “perhaps best known” for a particular book rail against talking about that one. One writer I know tells people who hire him for speaking engagements that he will only talk about his current book. That’s his ground rule for book clubs too. He doesn’t want to talk about the same book for fifteen years.

Rather than shy away from the dog book, Mr. Stein made it the lede of his 45-minute talk. He told a charming story about how he got the idea, the struggles he had writing it, and at long last his agent’s reaction to the finished work.

“The book is narrated by a dog!” the agent said.

“Yes it is!”

“You can’t do that,” the agent said, enumerating all the reasons why.

Mr. Stein had a momentary crisis of faith, then he canned the agent and found one who believed in his work. A great story, because who can resist the tale of an artist standing by his work? Knowing just how hard it is to find an agent, I was impressed. And of course, it helped immensely that the book hit the bestseller list. It was the perfect squelch to the first agent’s objections.

The Valley of Youthful Dreams

From there, he swiftly recounted how he first dreamed of becoming a writer, and the sacrifices he made to get there. I don’t need to share his story because anyone who writes has plenty of material to work with. In this section, he also described his manner of working, because for some hilarious reason civilians always want to know about a writer’s PROCESS—a word I have come to hate.

“What’s your process?”

“So, what your process like?”

“Tell us about your process.”

Jeez Louise, you would think it was some kind of bewildering mystery.

So…if you are going to give a talk using this structure—which is where this is all going, if that isn’t already obvious—I will tell you right now that the folks in the audience don’t want to hear, “Well, um, I just sit in a chair and make sh*t up until it’s done.”

No way. Romance the heck out of them. Tell as good a story about your writing of a story as the ones you sell to your editors.

Heck, Gay Talese told a reporter once that he hung his typewritten pages on a clothesline in his New York City apartment, using clothespins. Then he read those pages from across the room with a pair of binoculars. He insisted that this was the only way he could develop the requisite distance to judge and edit his work. (No, I am not making this up. I heard a recording of the interview in college.)

If you don’t have a process, steal Talese’s. Or tell people that in between writing short stories, you write earwormy songs about the Ides of March. (See below.) Make yourself adorable. You probably are; you just can’t see it.

Wrap with What’s Hot, What’s New

Mr. Stein wrapped his talk by discussing his latest book. Makes perfect sense, right? That’s the reason he was on tour! Even here, he repeated some of the classic storytelling beats: how he got the idea, the challenges that he knew he would face during the writing, and the ones he didn’t expect. In any good story, there are always hurdles to overcome. Audiences eat that up. Such anecdotes are perfectly acceptable so long as you have triumphed.

Sometimes the triumphs are small ones. My wife and I have written a few books together. Three have been works of nonfiction history. For the entire writing period of that first book, we stopped in the middle of the day, got in the car, and drove to one of those restaurants in town that sell prepared meals. We’d buy a sandwich or salad out of the case, drove right back home, and eat lunch together on the front porch. It was summer. The weather was always beautiful in the Carolina mountains. We were working so hard to meet our deadline, and this was our only way to enjoy the weather. Crumbs swept from our laps, we went back into the office to write for a few more hours. We did that for three months straight, weekends included, until we had a decent first draft. Every time we tell this story, a chorus of awwwwws ripples through the audience.

You don’t have to try very hard. People like a story that makes them fall in love with the writer. If they think they understand you on a personal level, they’ll be moved to try one of your books or they’ll turn to your story first when they pick up an anthology. Hey, it happens every time I hear Lisa Scottoline speak. She’s hilarious, and I want to spend more time with that voice on the page.

Remember the three-legged stool: The thing they know. Your writer’s journey plus process. What’s hot right now.

It’s so easy, you don’t have to obsess about it. You just have to recount things that really happened, and make sure your anecdotes conform to the usual story beats. Up/down, try/fail, culminating with…success. If you show up for the audience, they will show up for you. Your obligatory Q&A session at the end will be a delight.

Years later, when I came across my Stein notes, I realized just how critical each part of this three-legged stool structure was to the overall effect of the talk. If he had omitted one, the stool would have collapsed.

If he had not opened with the dog story, or if he had not spoken of it at all, it would have been thrumming in the back of everyone’s mind. If he had opened with the new book, we’d be panting like dogs to ask him about his hero, Enzo the golden retriever.

Following his big success story with another up/down tale of his writing journey—a story nearly every writer has of trying and failing until something clicks—stoked our sympathy. By the time we got to discussing his latest book, we were all so emotionally invested in his career, we were eager to stick around to learn what happens next. He had coaxed us on a journey of suspense to boot.

At the end of the signing, my wife announced that all of us were going out to lunch at a cute place not far from the library.

“Who’s all of us?”

Well, Mr. Stein, of course. Plus two other writers, my wife, and me. I was only expecting to dine with my wife and our hostess for the weekend, who was, yes, a writer. (No one ever tells me anything.) A publicist from the publishing house came as well, making a party of six, but she left early. Folks, believe me when I tell you that she and I were the only ones at the table who had not been on the bestseller list.

That all changed some years later. But that’s a story for another time. Until then, go forth and tell the world about your work. You’ll kill. I just know it.

See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com

Watch Rob’s video tomorrow on the 2,068th anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination.

Speaking of killing, short story writer and fellow SleuthSayer Robert Lopresti debuted this March-appropriate song this week. Since it refers to a murder, I feel it’s appropriate to include on this blog. I just happened to see the video shortly after he posted it, while I was diligently adhering to my daily procrastination regimen of dog training, gardening, and home repair videos.

Rob reports that he is taking a songwriting class and this video represents a rare case of him doing his assignment. He’s playing an autoharp, which is resting on his lap and goes unseen in this video but appears in others on his YouTube channel. (You might enjoy his album of droll folk songs here.)

Fun fact I learned in high school Latin class: the ides are not always on the 15th of a month. Discuss.

With knives and flowers coming out of hiding, Spring must be just around the corner! Well done, Mr. Lopresti.

Dimes, Mules, and Starvation: An Inspirational Guide to Short Story Success!

I’ve been obsessed lately with sticking to a decent writing schedule, and still having some semblance of family life. How do you pull it off? To find out, I’ve been collecting anecdotes about writers who came before us. Alas, their stories tend not to be terribly helpful because the times in which they worked and their personal circumstances are so varied. But they are nevertheless inspirational.

Back in the 1930s, when radio was still in its infancy and print was king, a writer we all know adhered to a solid schedule for producing and selling short stories. His writing regimen is a matter of record, enshrined in a collection called Selected Letters of William Faulkner.

At the time, writing “good” stories for magazines earned Faulkner between $300 to $400 per story, so if he could stick to this schedule, he could support himself and his widowed mother on $1,200 to $1,600 a month.

That money was decent for Depression-era Mississippi, but it was still tight. When his father died, he tells a correspondent in 1932, Faulkner’s mother had just enough money to live on for a year. After that, her support fell entirely on Faulkner’s shoulders. And he could never rule out the possibility that his brothers and wider circle of kin would hit him up for money.

He experimented with ways to earn more. By 1934, he was working on two novels and still maintaining his weekly short story output. He tried upping his short story output to two stories a week, but found that exhausting. If a check from a magazine editor ran late, he mortgaged one of his late father’s mules, mares, or colts to tide him over. (Note to self: Joe, what is your horseflesh back-up plan?)

Then he hit upon a genius plan: He would crank out six—count ’em, six!—short stories aimed at the Mac Daddy of American magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. If they bought all six of these “pot boilers,” he would raise $6,000, enough money to live on for six months while he wrote another book. But the plan failed. The Post bought only one of those stories, and Faulkner—who would win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and a Nobel in his lifetime—despaired because in his mind the remaining five stories were fit only for the trash. He seemed to believe that The Post bought lesser stories that other magazines wouldn’t touch.

Another time, agent Harold Ober told him—either by mail or by phone, I forget which—that he would try to sell a story to The Post if Faulkner made some changes. Faulkner agreed, then told Ober to air-mail him back the damn story because he didn’t make a carbon copy.

Well, crap, we know that it would not do to wait, right? Our man needed cash and he needed it now. So what did he do? He rewrote the story from memory, incorporating Ober’s requested edits, and mailed it off so it could get in the pipeline and he could get his check that much quicker.

The story was “The Bear,” a hunting novella that is found in every high school and college anthology. The Post published that “pot boiler” in 1942.

That is the real point: The story that teachers and professors celebrate as a work of genius, fit for days of analysis, was written to stave off hunger, bills, and the loss of another mule.

In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 125 short stories, possibly more. Fitzgerald wrote 181. Hemingway wrote 70, the slacker.

Another writer returned stateside after World War II and cranked out 800,000 words in his first four months out of the Army. He worked 80-hour weeks, amassing 1,000 rejections. He never had fewer than 20 to 30 short stories in the mail. Eventually, John D. MacDonald sold 600 stories, and launched a career writing mystery novels. If his early output figure is correct, he wrote just under 7,000 words a day during those critical four months.

Like I say, that’s an amazing story of one’s dedication to craft but not terribly helpful to a guy who is looking for lessons in the realm of life/work balance. MacDonald lost 20 pounds sticking to this regimen. If the purpose of writing is to earn one’s bread, he was doing it wrong.

Let’s see…who else have I got here? Nathaniel Hawthorne, another darling of school anthologies, calculated that he could only write about 10 to 12 short stories a year–about one a month. If he could manage to sell them for $25 each, he could support his family. Getting $25 a story was feasible but difficult in pre-Civil War America. It forced him to be exceedingly choosy about which publications he submitted to. Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories, and I’m sure every single one of them will eventually be made into a movie. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant sold 116 short stories to The New Yorker. Our genre’s Ed D. Hoch wrote 950 short stories.

One of my favorite true stories concerns an American writer whose eyesight was so bad the military would not enlist him to fight in World War II. Hence, his creative adolescence, during which he sold his first few stories, extended well into his adulthood. He lived with his parents in Los Angeles until he married at 27.

Every week, he adhered to the following schedule.

“On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention…”

Even at that young age, the writer, Ray Bradbury, had begun to trust his imagination. The more he wrote, the more ideas came. Even though he lived at home, he was driven by an intense work ethic.

“There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.

“In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.”

One technique that served him well was to draw up long lists of story ideas. He’d write down the word “the” followed by a noun, usually something from childhood that scared or fascinated him. One list might have looked like this, he tells us:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

From there, he picked one of those ideas and let his subconscious take over. By the time he ran those personal memories through his process, he had a fresh story that bore no resemblance to its real-life counterpart.

In essays he later wrote about his process, he attributed his success to his early consumption of poetry and short stories. Those twin loves trained him to sharpen his prose, to bake economy into every sentence.

Short stories were his early bread-and-butter. It’s believed he wrote 400 of them, but at first glance they were useless in helping him land his first book deal.

In June 1949, he took a Greyhound Bus to New York, where he made the rounds of book editors, all of whom inquired if he’d written a novel. He hadn’t, and they could not care less about his stories. Even then, the world of New York publishing greeted a collection of shorts by a single writer the way one would welcome a shoebox filled with a three-day-old catfish.

He finally met with an editor at Doubleday, the friend of a friend, who cheerfully announced, “I think you’ve already written a novel.” The editor explained what he meant: Wasn’t there a common thread in the series of stories Bradbury had written for several years on the topic of Mars?

Why, yes, Ray said. He wrote them like that because he was so moved by Sherwood Anderson’s novel in stories, Winesburg, Ohio. Ray had never confided that inspiration to anyone and he certainly never thought of collecting his Mars stories in a book.

The editor requested an outline. Bradbury hurried back to the YMCA where was staying, stripped to his underwear, and pounded on his typewriter in the sweltering heat until 3 AM.

The next morning, the delighted editor offered him a contract and a check. “Now that we’re publishing your first ‘novel,’ we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales—?”

The “skin,” or framing device, of that 18-story collection was the story of a carnival refugee whose extensive tattoos spring to life, thus engendering each of the tales in the book.

So the first two books Bradbury ever published were fashioned entirely of short stories. The “novel” was The Martian Chronicles, the collection was The Illustrated Man. He triumphantly returned to his wife in Venice, California, with two checks totaling $1,500 (about $20,000 today). The sale of those two books gave the Bradburys enough money to pay their rent for a year, finance the arrival of their first daughter, and help with a down payment on their first house.

The following spring, Ray needed to find a quiet place to write and couldn’t afford an office. He escaped to the basement of the UCLA library, where he rented a desk-mounted typewriter for 10 cents per half hour. You put your money in, a clock ticked away, and you typed furiously to get as much of your money’s worth as possible in those 30 minutes before the machine bricked.

In nine days Ray had the first draft of a manuscript. He thought it might become a novel, but it was still too short, only 25,000 words. He would eventually expand the story to a whopping 45,000 words. It only cost him $8.90—about 44.5 hours—to bring Fahrenheit 451 to life. Considering it has sold 10 million copies, I think we can all agree that the dimes were well spent.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Selected Resources:

Recent article on Mavis Gallant.

The material on Bradbury comes from his 1990 book, Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of about 11 essays on writing.

The material on John D. MacDonald is drawn from two articles, here and a 2019 SleuthSayers post by Lawrence Maddox here.

The material on Faulkner is drawn from Eudora Welty’s review of the Faulkner text, found in her book The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Vintage Books, 1979).

Citadel of Ignorance

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Back in June 2022, I deleted my social media accounts. I shared that news right here on SleuthSayers, enumerating the resources that help nudge me to that decision: three books and two documentaries. Each of those resources were sightly different, but they all telegraphed a truth that took a while in coming, but is now taken for granted by anyone who reads: social media rots your freaking brain.

In my 2022 post, I promised to check back in the future to let you know how my cessation was going. The future is now.

The backstory: I joined Twitter in 2010, and from that point forward, I joined everything else under the sun because everyone said it was in a writer’s best interest to do so. I did Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For a time, my only working blog operated on Tumblr. I created accounts on sites that lasted four minutes in the life of the Internet. (Who remembers Klout?)

Remarkably, perhaps, presciently, I never created a personal account on Facebook, but don’t let me off the hook so easily there. My wife and I did create four Facebook Pages, one for each of the books or series of books we were touting at the time. Well before my breakup with social media, I deleted three of those four because I just didn’t see the point.

At the very beginning, I took the advice of a buddy, who served as the social media guru for Barnes & Noble. He said to keep the promotion of my books and work to maybe 20 percent of my feed. The rest should be a mix of writerly service to my community (“Hey, look at this cool article I found on pitching agents!”), and personal observations and interesting tidbits from my personal life (“I cooked a ham this weekend! Look!”).

Well, I did all that, and I still felt stupid, awkward, and icky doing it. Everywhere I turned, people offered advice on the right way to do social media. Some of that advice came from the idiots that ran the publicity and marketing departments at publishing houses. Their underlying message was, “Do our jobs for us, please, since our employers have never trained us to do it properly!”

Like most people who declare themselves sick of the technology, I just didn’t know where the hell I was going to get the “content” I was expected to share on these platforms. I resented that agents and editors judged me for my low numbers of followers.

I read articles that said I should strive to be as authentic as possible, and I was at a loss how to accomplish that. (“Guys, I really, really need to share how I feel about the ham I cooked.”)

I finally dropped the pretense of promoting my work, and used, say, Twitter to disseminate a series of hilarious one-liners. I was a hoot on Oscar night, not that anyone noticed or cared. I gave up talking about books unless I adored something. Instagram became fun when I decided to simply share one photo, just one, every day. If it revolved around writing or a book, so be it. It was on Insta, for example, that I announced to the world that Pat Conroy’s cookbook was the only one I’d ever read cover to cover, because I just had to know how it ended. I still mean that. Mostly, though, I shared pics of nature, food, glasses of wine shot against the backdrop of the flowers in my garden.

You might say that social media rewarded me after I stopped caring.

And then one morning, I accidentally swiped to the right of my iPhone’s home page, revealing statistics about my daily phone usage. The phone insisted that in the last 24 hours, I had spent 3 hours and 25 minutes on Instagram alone.

“Liar!” cried I.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that my behavior around these apps had become obsessive, and, ahem, compulsive. If I was out with my wife, I checked the phone when she left for the restroom. I scrolled while waiting in the car for stores to open. The phone helped me kill time on queues the way that paperbacks did in the 1980s. And while I still read short stories (because, methinks, they’re short), my reading of books had dropped to all-time lows. Like the journalist Johann Hari, whose book I mentioned in my earlier post, I felt as if my mind was too splintered to finish most of the books I started. The thought of reading an entire series of mystery novels by an author I enjoyed—the way I had as a kid—seemed exhausting. Why read the Slow Horses series, when I could just watch it?

What’s worse, after a series of troubling political events in 2016, I obsessively checked social media and three to four news sites every morning, to keep myself apprised of current events. During the Covid lockdowns, my ritual was to read aloud the morning headlines to my wife as we sipped coffee on the patio, then read aloud the articles she requested, until we were both too sick and terrified to continue.

Scrolling—whether for fun or doom—had become a problem.

For a while, to assert control over my life, I merely deleted the apps from my phone. Cal Newport, one of the authors of the book referenced in my earlier post, advised checking social media on your desktop, and only if you needed to for work. That worked for six months, then I began simply reloading the app to sneak peeks anyway.

By 2022, I had read and absorbed the message of the 2018 book by Jaron Lanier—the computer scientist who advised everyone to completely delete their social media accounts in their entirety. The man is a genius, and his arguments were based on a deep understanding of the underlying technology and the corporate structures of the social media firms he consulted with. I understood why he urged this action, but I still felt I had to maintain those accounts. (What if someone claimed my old account and pretended to be me?)

By 2022, I had watched and rewatched the 2020 HBO documentary The Social Dilemma, and digested Hari’s 2022 book, which opened with him escaping to an isolated beach community for a month, sans phone and laptop. He found that his brain returned, and he read copiously, joyously, promiscuously.

Intrigued, I took the plunge mid-year 2022. Deleted all my remaining accounts, as well as the News app on my phone. From that moment forward, I was on a permanent social media purge, and tentative-for-now news fast. A journalist friend scoffed at this when I ran into him at a funeral of a colleague: “News fast? News. Fast! Come on! Is that even a thing?”

He and others like him wonder aloud how I can live without knowing what’s going on in the world. To be honest, I do feel sad when I don’t know that some personage has died. The In Memoriam reel at the Oscars has been something of a shock for the last two years, sure.

But you know what? If something is so huge, it’s not like the rest of you peeps aren’t talking about it. I do still maintain a Feedly account. It’s keyed only to news of the genres I enjoy, articles on writing, and the book world at large. Inevitably, news of the outside world seeps into those articles. If I want to know more, I allow myself a peek and do a search. Just one, then I close the browser. When the hurricane hit our city in autumn 2024, I sat on the patio in the dark and listened to my hand-cranked NOAA radio for updates. Because that’s what you do.

And yes, it is a pain not to be able to announce when I have a new story in a publication, but I am trying to preserve my sanity. In the world beyond literature, I know that there are school shootings, wildfires, and reprehensible political behavior. I don’t want to (or need to) ride that daily roller-coaster anymore. I can’t. Like my nephew used to say when he was young and a classmate offered him a bite of a peanut butter sandwich, “No thank you. It’s not good for me.”

I don’t keep a reading journal, though I probably should. But I do read a lot of ebooks. There, the evidence is clear: in 2020 I read 12 ebooks, in 2024, 64 ebooks. Granted, a lot of those 2024 titles were single short stories or novellas, but the same is probably true of 2020. And there are still other paper books in both years for which there is no record.

While it’s nice to have proof that the void inside my cranium functions still, I am troubled by the most recent attack on my Citadel of Ignorance. Many writer friends have migrated to Substack, so my inbox and browser teem daily with their irresistible musings. Substack is social media, which means these folks can, within the body of their newsletters, refer you to still more articles that they found interesting by equally fascinating writers.

Anyone who is interesting (and many who aren’t) has a Substack. People I like or find compelling. Without even trying, I discovered Substacks by people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Cheryl Strayed, Margaret Atwood, Michael Pollan, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Moore.

In the coming weeks or perhaps months, I will discover if I have the strength to unsubscribe from this new temptation, and leave it all behind. I’m sure that all these scribes have important things to say, but who has the time? If their words stand the test of time, they will have the good sense to put them in a book, where I will read them some day while waiting at the DMV, the way the good Lord intended.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com