Microcasting! It’s our high-speed Q&A! Here are the Q’s, listen to the ‘cast for the A’s.

• Is it still safe to go the commercial publishing route?
• How do you find the balance when writing serious stories with silliness in them?
• What are the alternatives to three-act structure?
• Do you ever lose your drive, and what re-inspires you when you do?
• How does your writing life affect your non-writing life?
• What was the defining moment in your life where you decided to become a writer?
• How effective are book trailers?

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies, narrated by Simon Vance

Writing Prompt: Give us a story in which writers are using actual fantastic creatures in the process of writing fantasy — ink from unicorn horns, elf-skin parchment, etc.

Promised Liner Note Links: Dan’s 7-point Story Structure,

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.
Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.
*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points:
1. Is is still safe to go the traditional publishing route? Yes. Take a look at both, though.
2. How do you balance serious with silly? It depends.
3. What are the alternatives to the 3 act structure? Writing a stupid book. Dan Wells’ Seven Point Structure. MICE. Goal-based writing.
4. Do you ever lose your drive, and what re-inspires you? Yes. First, look at why it’s happened, then figure out what to do to get out of it.
5. How does your writing life affect your non-writing life? Depends on where you draw the boundaries.
6. What was the defining moment in your life that said to you that you could be a writer? Selling a story to Cicada.
7. How effective do you feel video book trailers are? How do you measure effectiveness? Useful to send to people. Consider the cost — $2000 and up.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Six, Episode Four, Microcasting.
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Mary] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Mary] I’m Mary.
[Howard] And I’m in a hurry. Brandon, give me the first one.
[Brandon] All right. If you haven’t heard one of our microcasts before, this is just us talking Q and As, and trying to hit a lot of topics very quickly.
[Howard] Don’t undersell it. It’s not just Q and A. It’s us addressing deep topics really fast.
[Brandon] It’s us… Important that I got off of twitter.
[Dan] It’s concentrated brilliance.

[Brandon] So question number one from Twitter. My latest question, “Is it still safe to go the traditional publishing route? A lot of things say no.”
[Dan, Mary, Howard] Yes.
[Brandon] Okay. Why? Mary, why don’t you give us a take on this?
[Mary] Because… The choice between doing a freaking huge amount of work on your own to go the nontraditional route… You would have to cover the layouts, everything about the book… Versus having someone give you money and then do all of that themselves. I would much rather be writing.
[Dan] Yeah. It’s… While e-books and self-publishing is becoming viable, that does not automatically make traditional publishing unviable.
[Mary] Commercial publishing. Sorry.
[Brandon] Commercial publishing.
[Dan] Commercial publishing. I don’t need your pedantry.
[Howard] No. Her pedantry is well-earned. I’m going to leave it at that, and maybe we’ll put it in the liner notes.
[Mary] It is worth noting that most people who do… Who are electronically published… I mean, not electronically published, who are self published…
[Dan] Are skilled.
[Mary] No, when they are offered a commercial…
[Howard] Commercial publishing gig.
[Mary] They take it. I think that is pretty telling.
[Howard] I would take it in a heartbeat. The only reason I don’t is because right now my understanding of the market is such that I know that I can sell to more than 10% of the niche that a traditional publisher, a commercial publisher could sell to in print.
[Brandon] I’m going to jump in here, and just add the counterargument. We’ve talked about it before, but let’s just say… Self-publishing electronically is becoming very viable. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening. It is something to look at. It is well worth your consideration.
[Howard] Oh, absolutely. But the question was, is it safe?
[Brandon] But is it still safe? Yes, it’s very still safe.
[Dan] Well, let me give one point about why he might be using the word safe. One issue that’s come to light recently is that a lot of publishers are simply not equipped at present to properly count e-book sales, and measure them.
[Brandon] There is a big dispute going on right now.
[Dan] It’s a big problem that is only going to get bigger. I currently am trusting, perhaps naively, that the publishers will be able to figure that out in time. But it is a problem.
[Mary] I will say, and I cannot go into details, that this problem may be over-reported.
[Dan] I would not be surprised.
[Brandon] My royalty statements… I have not… There is no discrepancy in mine. Mine… We’re pretty good at tracking these, and… So anyway, we’ve got to move on. But it is still safe. Both sides are legitimate. Listen to both sides on that one.

[Brandon] Mighty pretty dad asks, “All three of you…” And I guess we’re going to include Mary now. People don’t know that Mary is with us permanently now. “All three of you write serious stories with a lot of silliness. How do you find the balance?”
[Dan] Serious stories with a lot of silliness?
[Brandon] Yes. How do you find the balance? I would say the balance is dependent on the book I’m writing. I want humor to be a part of every book I’m writing, and silliness is a part of humor. If I’m writing a serious book, I let the characters occasionally be silly because people are occasionally silly, but I don’t make the context of the book silly. If I’m writing a silly book, I actually make the context silly, and allow the characters to be serious when they need to be serious. So that balance allows me to shift back and forth depending on the book.
[Mary] Carol Burnett once said that the key to comedy was that the character must absolutely believe the situation that they are in.
[Dan] Uh-hum. I write scary, horrible, awful things and use humor specifically as a respite and a safety valve and a way for you to like an unlikable character. So the balance for me comes in… Just enough… How do I find the balance? If too much tension is relieved, then I pull jokes out of it. Because I still need to maintain that fear.
[Mary] We may need more time to cover this.
[Brandon] Yeah. Let’s…
[Howard] We could do a whole podcast on humor. We’ve done whole podcasts on humor. Let me just say that for me, the balance is, I gotta have a punchline every day. As long as I’m doing that, any amount of seriousness I can put in the rest of the strip cannot possibly unbalance the humor. So I’m good to go.

[Brandon] MJF Mulligan asks, “New writers are often told to work with three act structure. What are the alternatives?”
[Howard] Writing a stupid book?
[Brandon] Howard really likes three act structure.
[Dan] Not getting published?
[Howard] I like three act structure, but that’s because it’s an easy place to hang my hat. You can deconstruct the things that I’ve written in five pieces or 10 pieces or parallel structure… Any number of ways to deconstruct what I’m doing. I break it down into three acts because it’s convenient for my head.
[Dan] I use a seven point system, actually, much more so than three acts. I stole it out of a role-playing guidebook, but I have recently learned that it is a very common screenwriting technique. This seven point plot structure… That’s something you could look up, or look on my blog, I’ve got a huge post about it.
[Howard] What’s the link to the YouTube video? What would they need to Google?
[Dan] If you look up Dan Wells’ seven point story structure, you can find a five piece lecture presentation that I did on it on YouTube.
[Brandon] That’s not a rickroll, right? You promise?
[Dan] No. It will be, I’m sure, at some point.
[Howard] [Something in audible in the background]
[Brandon] Mary?
[Mary] I use Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient. Which is basically that every story, whether short fiction or long, consists of four parts. Milieu, which is the place, idea, character, and event. How you structure the story depends on which of those elements dominates.
[Brandon] Okay. Excellent. You can read more about that in Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.
[Mary] Also in Character and Viewpoint. He covers it in both.
[Brandon] I use goal-based writing. I start with a goal, I want this to be accomplished. Then I worked backward, with what things need to happen before that goal can happen. So I do not use three act structure. I don’t think in three act structure. I can talk about it, and analyze it, but I don’t use it. I look for motivation, conflict, and how to resolve them.
[Howard] See, what’s funny is, I do exactly the same thing. I am goal-based. But then as I am laying out the story, I think, “You know, I want this to fall into three parts.” So as things are happening, as we are moving towards those goals, I start filing the actions to one side or the other of the act boundaries.
[Dan] The thing that is always fascinating to me is that whether or not you actually use one of these structure systems overtly, it’s there anyway. I don’t write in three acts, but my editors do. So when I send stuff off to my Harper editors, they’ll send it back and say, “This is where act two starts and ends, and this is what we want you to do with it.” They know that I don’t think that way, so they always point it out to me, so we’re speaking the same language.
[Howard] Can of Worms we ought to do. We ought to take something that Brandon has written in his goal-based stuff, and we ought to deconstruct it in three act, and then deconstruct it in seven point…
[Dan] That would be a fun episode.
[Howard] And then deconstruct it in the Orson… To demonstrate that…
[Mary] In the MICE quotient, yeah.
[Howard] That just because you used a particular tool for putting it together, doesn’t mean that that’s the way the reader is going to perceive it.
[Dan] That would be a great episode. Can of worms! Remember that one.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s do Book of the Week. Dan?
[Dan] Book of the week. This week, we are doing a nonfiction historical book that I am currently in the middle of, called, “1421, the year China discovered America.” It’s a fairly controversial theory that surfaced about 10 years ago. Well, it’s been kicked around for a while, but the book was written about 10 years ago. Which basically stated that the reason the Europeans were able to sail and discover quote unquote the Americas is that they were using maps produced by the Chinese who had already done it several decades earlier. The book is by Gavin Menzies. It is available, unabridged, on audible. It is absolutely fascinating, just as a work of… Historical detective work. He’s an amateur historian with a lot of sailing experience who is going through all maps, old records, a lot of hypotheses that he doggedly finds support for. Whether or not it is true, it is absolutely thrilling to read.
[Howard] So you haven’t gotten to the end of the book yet. So we don’t know the ending is?
[Dan] I haven’t gotten to the end of the book, where it turns out it’s actually aliens.
[Brandon] All right. Go to…
[Howard] Head out to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. Kick off a 14 day free trial membership. What was the name of it again? 1421…
[Dan] 1421. The year China discovered America.
[Howard] That would be a good choice.

[Brandon] All right. Next question. I’m going to throw this one at Mary, because we’ve answered this before, but you haven’t on the podcast. Tenasitis asks, “Do you ever lose your drive, and what re-inspires you when you do?”
[Mary] That’s a really interesting question, because I’m in a slump right now. So, yes, definitely it happens. It happened before. Typically, it will happen for a couple of different reasons. The first step for getting myself out is to look at why it’s happening. Sometimes, it’s happening because of emotional fatigue. Sometimes it’s happening because the story is going in such the wrong direction. I just basically have to step back and examine what is going on, before I can figure out how to get out of it.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] I’m going to offer one that I have started using. Whenever I get into some kind of writing slump, or a lose motivation for a particular project, what I have learned is that if I start a new project in the same area, like I’ll start outlining a new book, that ruins it because then I don’t want to go back to the old, broken project. I just want to start the new one. So what I’ve started doing is I’ll start a new project in a completely different field. I’ll write out all… I’ll design a board game, or I’ll do something else… I’ll write song lyrics. Just anything to get the creativity working again. Then…
[Howard] I’ve heard some of these songs.
[Dan] Then once that energizes me, I’ll go back, and I can get back to my project.
[Howard] I’ve heard some of these songs. They’d make a great board game.

[Brandon] All right. Howard, I’m going to toss one at you. Okay?
[Howard] Whee…
[Brandon] OrayMu blippity-blip whatever twitter name says, “How does your writing life affect your non-writing life?”
[Dan] Howard, you have a non-writing life?
[Mary] I was just thinking the same thing.
[Howard] Yeah, that’s an excellent… That’s actually a question. I guess it depends on where you are drawing the boundary. Before this recording session, I wanted to make sure I was well rested, so I laid down for a quick power nap. The moment my head hit the pillow, my brain started running on some story ideas that are unrelated to Schlock Mercenary, but that I want to be exploring. That happens to me all the time. I’ll lie down in bed and think, “Okay, what do I want? Do I want insomnia or do I want to plot something and let my dream self solve it?” So, where do you draw that line? I run dialogue when I’m cooking sometimes in the kitchen. Then there are other times when I tell myself, “You know what? I have worked hard enough for today.” I need to physically, emotionally, mentally distance myself completely with what I was doing. Often, that means going and seeing a movie. Then I come home and I blog about the movie on the website, and it crosses the line again. It’s really fuzzy. What I love is that almost everything I do now has some aspect of me creating things tied to it, and I’m very happy with that.

[Brandon] I’m going to toss another one at Mary, because a lot of these are ones we could go around and all talk on for 5 minutes each. KW Ramsey asks, “What was the defining moment in your life that said to you, I can do this? I can be a writer.”
[Mary] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Seeing Scalzi in the tiara?
[Mary] No. Because… I had started writing when I was in high school, and then stopped when I started doing the puppetry thing. So I stopped writing for about 10 years. I started writing for my niece and nephew because they were in China. But I think the moment… I mean, there was a moment when I was looking at it and realized that I had something there. But because I had spent like 20 years in the performing arts, the idea of creating something and then getting paid for it was a natural progression for me. So I just… I immediately jumped to the “Well, how do I submit and send?” The moment that I was like “oh, I guess I can” was… “I guess I’m not bad at this” was I sold a story to Cicada. That was the first magazine that I sold something to that I had read growing up. It was so amazing. Like, this is what those people… These people… I’m like them! I just… I actually showed it to the waiter at the restaurant we went to that night.
[Brandon] Awesome. Dan…
[Howard] The meal was free?
[Mary] No. He bought me a drink.

[Brandon] This one is targeted directly at you.
[Dan] Oh, wow.
[Brandon] Dfixit asks, “How effective do you feel video book trailers are?”
[Dan] Um.
[Brandon] You had one. Have you ever had one, Mary?
[Mary] Yeah.
[Brandon] Okay. Then I’ll toss this at you, too.
[Mary] Clearly it wasn’t that effective.
[Brandon] I’ve never had one. Except, I guess I had the Wheel of Time one. But I’m not going to count that, because the Wheel of Time is an outlier. So, you two.
[Dan] How effective are they?
[Brandon] Yeah, how effective?
[Dan] I really don’t know how to measure that, unfortunately. Now good metric exists right now, at least as far as I’m aware. I had one. I thought it was really good. I found it a useful tool to be able to send people. If someone was curious about my book, in person I could just give the pitch. Online, I could give them the pitch and a link to what I thought was a pretty cool trailer for it. I definitely think that because of the web, book trailers are going to become more and more common. I think that they’re going to be… They’re definitely a part of our future. As far as how effective they are, I don’t know of any information on that yet.
[Mary] One of the things you have to look at is the cost versus benefit ratio. To have a video professionally done, is going to cost you about… It’s about $250 per minute minimum. That’s like bare, rock-bottom minimum.
[Brandon] Most trailers that I hear are costing around 1500 to 2000 bucks for a bare minimum on a book trailer.
[Mary] Yeah. That is much more realistic. The… What I did, before Shades of Milk and Honey came out, was that I looked at the other fantasy books coming out from debut authors in Tor in the same month. So I did a comparison between my book… I tracked their numbers and I tracked my numbers. I cannot see any difference that the trailer made.
[Howard] I’ll be honest. I don’t like book trailers at all. Your’s was lovely. I watched maybe 15 seconds of it and thought, “Oh, this is very attractive. But I hate book trailers.” Click. Same with the John Cleaver one. I just don’t like book trailers.
[Dan] Well, I can agree. As much as I say I liked mine, I don’t like anybody else’s. It’s not something that I look at.
[Howard] I get sold on a book because I want to read a book, not because I want to watch a movie. The experience of selling me a book by showing me pictures is just foreign to me.
[Mary] That’s interesting, because one of the deliberate choices we made was to not do scenes from the book. To treat it very much like a movie trailer, where it’s to give you the feel… But like once you see it, the thing… It’s all different.
[Howard] Your book trailer was, at least in my experience, just guilty by association.
[Mary] No, no. What I’m saying is that I think that one of the places that book trailers fall down is that they try to portray exactly what’s happening in the book. It has to be a really amazing trailer in order for it to get viral, and there’s no way to tell one that’s going to happen.
[Howard] The only way I would invest in a book trailer is if I thought the book itself was funny, and I thought the trailer itself… Because funny videos go viral in a way that other videos tend not to. If you can sell the spirit of the book in a funny video, that could work.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s call it for today. Thank you guys for sending in your questions. I’m sorry for all those we didn’t get to. We will do another podcast based on these twitter responses. But… There were way more than we can do.
[Howard] It’s a rich, rich vein of material.

[Brandon] Anyway, let’s do a writing prompt. Let’s see. I’m actually going to grab one of these twitter questions and turn it into a writing prompt. So. Spencer Pager asks… Penger asks… “What are your thoughts on using traditional fantasy creatures in writing?” So, my question for you, my writing prompt is, you have to have a story in which people are using traditional fantasy creatures in writing. Meaning the actual physical creatures! Like you’re grinding up unicorn horns and writing with…
[Howard] Hey, hey hey hey. Not that one. I actually do that.
[Brandon] Or you’re using orcs blood or you’re doing… Somehow, the fantasy creatures physically are necessary.
[Dan] Are involved in the writing.
[Brandon] In the writing process.
[Dan] This book is printed on the finest elf skin.
[Mary] Quill of the Phoenix… You have to write very quickly, and not burn your hands.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.