The Layover

May 9, 2012

Ron Seybold scene, short story , , , Leave a comment

Sylvia toweled off in the truck shop’s washroom. She looked in the metal mirror and despaired about diesel grime that still coated her sunburn. Her cell phone sitting next to the scratched sink chirped at her, carrying the voice of her boyfriend Redmund.

“Sylvie,” he said over the speakerphone. “Watcha doing now? Real quiet in there.”

“Washing up, okay? You try slugging a rig down I-80 for six hours after a thrown fan belt tossed you off schedule. I’m a whole day behind on my miles.” The damn carrier knew, of course. They tracked her through that phone like a pelican after mackerel. GPS, yeah — Giddyup, Push and Steer.

“Okay, okay. Why so touchy, Trucker Gal?”

“Thinking of what my mom said when I stopped in Fort Collins on Monday. Had my laundry and that dog Butch to drop off. Mom said I wouldn’t look white again if I sat in a tub of bleach.”

“The grime, huh? Important to see you clean and girly.”

“You don’t know, fella. Her part of Fort Collins is so upper crust even the maids are European. Trucker Gal troubles her. Like I’m slumming on those 18 wheels. Instead of trying to pay off the old man’s gambling debts.” Banging rattled the metal door of the washroom. “Gotta go. Some rig-monkey wants his turn.”

“Whoa. I don’t like the sound of that.”

“His turn to shower, nimrod. I got this handled.” She thumbed the disconnect and stepped into gray pants and the company orange shirt with the logo and her name on it.

At the bar she perched on a vinyl black stool with a back. The barman eyed her like they all did, first at her chest and then her nametag. “So Syl, what’ll it be?”

“You’re asking me about my drink?”

“What else?”

“I think we both know what else. But I just got cleaned up, so let’s stick to the liquor. Make mine a shot of that low-rent scotch.”

He left a glass of Peat Brothers on the formica bar-top and started pulling beers. The laughter from the sports trivia game that was mounted on the corner of the bar made the back of her neck tingle. Mom wouldn’t even be thinking of her daughter’s color, or being clean, here in Cheyenne. Sylvia sipped at the scotch and shivered.

“None too smooth, huh?” This was a different voice, low and slow behind her. She turned to see a black man, something that stood out in Wyoming like an elk with bells on his antlers.

“Not smooth, no.” There wasn’t a tub of bleach that would ever turn him white, either. They had that much in common already, at least for a night of her layover on I-80.

Polishing up a short-short story

May 9, 2012

Ron Seybold short story Leave a comment

I watched Melanie polish that band of silver every night, as faithfully as she took her birth control once we were parents. Her father’s MIA bracelet, stamped out in the ’80s and now older than our daughter, a co-ed prowling the job boards with a panther’s cunning. My father in law who I never met was less lucky. Mel’s story is that her dad fell into Cong hands in a province too remote for any exchange. On weekends she worries the Web like a squirrel collecting acorns, nuts of facts that shine up her story like she buffs that bracelet. She needs a hero that I can’t become, because I’m never going to be her father. I could use a hero too, but I didn’t lose my dad just months before I was born. Our friends all say that I’m lucky that way. But there’s no bracelet for me to wear, no auto-icebreaker that guarantees immediate compassion, love and acceptance.

Boundaries spark creativity

May 1, 2012

Ron Seybold groups, habits, inspire, submissions, teleplays-TV 1 Comment

It’s easy enough to revel in the first-draft mania of a writing project. This is important time, the period to clear your pipes and empty that tank of ideas and dreams. The genuine creation time, however, is when there’s a deadline and a word count or a page count to meet.

That’s what drives Saturday Night Live, according to its producer Lorne Michaels. He’s been interviewed on Alec Baldwin’s top-flight Here’s the Thing podcast. Michaels said that “I believe creativity doesn’t exist without boundaries.” For him there’s both a page count and a deadline. The show is ready by 11:30 Eastern Time — or as he puts it, “it’s not ready, but it’s got to go on the air at 11:30.” At some point, a piece of writing needs to meet a deadline to show to a writing group, an agent, a contest, or a lit mag’s submission date.

And SNL needs to unspool in 90 minutes total time — so plenty of it has to be dropped or shortened to meet time. Sometimes whole skits are dumped if they don’t work out during the frantic six days before airtime.

Boundaries exist to create choices, and some people believe that choices are all there is to define art. There’s a great scene in the movie Wonder Boys. Novelist Grady Tripp is slogging through his second book after a debut success. You see him creep into his study and take a page and feed it into a typewriter. He lines up the paper for a page number and types 261 — then looks around and adds a 4, for a 2,600-plus page manuscript. Later his grad student Hannah reads the wooly piece of writing and confronts him about it.

Hannah glances at the huge stack of paper sitting on her dresser, then, hesitantly, looks back to Grady.

					HANNAH GREEN
		It's just that, you know, I was thinking about 
		how, in class, you're always telling us '-that 
		writers make choices--at least the good ones. 
		And, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the 
		book isn't really great-I mean, really great-
		but at times it's, well, very detailed, you 
		know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses 
		and ail the dental records and so on-and I 
		don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it sort of 
		reads, in places, like, well, actually, like... 
			(with trepidation)
	...you didn't make any choices at all.

Let choices of page counts, deadlines and characters establish the boundaries that can spark great writing. And remember, sooner or later it’s 11:30, and time to finish the creation.

The Free Dictionary: page definition: a youth being trained for the medieval rank of knight and in the personal service of a knight. →

How to Engage a Prospective Agent

February 24, 2012

Ron Seybold agents, conference, editing 4 Comments

Alan Rinzler is a veteran editor of the traditional publishing industry. He’s also a keynoter chosen by the Writer’s League of Texas for this June’s Agents Conference. This is a meeting that used to be called the Agents and Editor’s Conference by the WLT, but that’s all gone now. Agents are the new editors, but somehow Rinzler is still in the mix. Last year he sat at a banquet table 8-top at the San Francisco Writers Conference while we talked to him about our prospective books.

Rinzler has a website which includes links to a weekly column he writes. This week there’s an interview up there he did with four agents out of this business that he’s known since the 1960s. It won’t surprise you to learn these agents still have a lot of faith in big-house book deals. After all, the alternative for most of them is littler-house deals (rare is the advance there, so the agent’s payday on those deals is far away.) One agent said her agency is supporting self-published writers now. This is what I mean when I say that agents are today’s editors. I don’t know how many self-published writers are being supported by that agency. As many as the agency needs to stay in business, I’m sure. Some agencies have a stable of editors on call, freelancers. And book designers. And marketing and distribution experts.

(What’s that, you don’t know any of these? You will if you self-publish. Yes, I edit books. You always need an outside editor, which is why I hired one for my novel Viral Times.)

Rinzler took comments on his article and like a good blogger, commented on those posted. One commenter said you want to be careful who you engage as an agent once you get turned down by the biggest names. Rinzler has good advice on how to proceed in these middling waters — a backwater, by the way, where you can still get a full year older while your book remains agented, but unsold.

I agree that a recommendation from another writer or the agent’s track record are the best ways to evaluate an agent’s legitimacy and potential for success. And whereas I haven’t come across very many charlatans or freaks, there are, as you say, less experienced agents. They may be just starting out or entering the profession as former editors, publicists, marketers, refugees from the music or film business or even lawyers with experience handling intellectual property. These individuals may actually have more time to spend, may be hungrier and eager to sell.

Ways to judge whether or not to take a chance with them: See if they’re easily accessible, and respond to email or phone calls. Meet in person or via Skype or on the phone, and give them a clear schedule of your expectations. Structure a deal that requires documentation that your book has been sent to acquisitions editors within 30 days. If you haven’t received any offers to publish within six months, part company and seek elsewhere.

The part of his advice I like the best is his guideline of six months to get an offer. (You have to add this to the 3-6 months it might take you to get read by an agent, then read in full with your complete book.) Hungry agents will be okay with “after six months you lose my book” terms. The big-house ones, who have established writers to continue to represent, won’t.

 

How to Pursue Contest Entries: 10 Guidelines

February 10, 2012

Ron Seybold contest, lit journal, literary, submissions , 1 Comment

Contests are a great way to get your writing finished enough to share with the world. In the early days of my quest to learn fiction, I entered more than a few. I started by entering contests run by well-known literary publications. It might have gotten the writing completed (my short stories), but the fees would be used elsewhere now, after what I’ve learned.

I have 10 guidelines I like to have a contest meet. You can score your contest prospects along these marks. It’s really hard to get a 10. And you will want to submit in a passionate way to overlook the entry fee, the Number 1 guideline below. It’s your tuition, after all — you learn something from everything you do to support your writing. My guidelines:

1. I like an entry fee of under $20. Anything higher feels like fundraising to me.

2. I like a contest that completes and will anoint a winner in less than six months. Three is better. Life is short. Just decide, already.

3. I like a contest where I have a good idea of the number of first-round judges, and who they are. Otherwise, it’s usually grad students who volunteer. Not to be dismissive of less-practiced writers, but I never was crazy about 24-year-olds judging my stories.

4. I like a contest where I don’t have to be someplace to receive the prize. Travel costs money too, and I want to use my money for book research trips.

5. I like a contest with a cash prize, not a book contract. Publication in a lit journal Of Note might be worthwhile, too. If your goal of entering a contest is to get your writing noticed.
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Settings gain extra desire through experience

December 2, 2011

Ron Seybold setting, teleplays-TV Leave a comment

David Milch is one of the great storytellers of our time. His medium is TV. NYPD Blue. Deadwood. And now he tells the story of horse racing, one that he’s lived through as a compulsive creator. It’s his own experience at the track that makes him so careful while creating the new HBO series Luck, airing in January.

In the LA Times, Geoff Boucher interviewed Milch about the excitement of filming a story (with director Michael Mann) about Santa Anita Park. How he’s been there a lot. Milch jokes that “no, it was my cousin. My cousin spent a lot of time there.” But listen to what he says about the settings you write from your own experience.

The setting is exciting, yes, but there’s some nervousness in making it too. You want to get it right. You always feel a particular duty of care to whatever world you’re trying to portray, but then you especially feel it when there is a lived experience against which you’re measuring the activities of the imagination. I think that sense of responsibility is compounded. That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful to Michael, to bring that separate eye. That really enriched the end product.

Just don’t be holding out hope yet for a completion of the superior Deadwood, where HBO got cold feet about the costs of that stellar story and ended its run prematurely. Like leaving out the last four chapters of a novel. At the NY Times, an interview included this grim humor.

“Every man’s entitled to hope,” Mr. Milch said with a laugh. “It looked like we were getting close, about six months ago. It’s a complicated transaction, so we’re moving forward in other areas.”

Like a new deal to film the works of William Faulkner. No kidding. Milch has Iowa Writer’s Workshop chops, after all. They know a little about story there.

Don’t despair: A novel takes awhile

November 3, 2011

Ron Seybold novel, practices, revision Leave a comment

The novel, nearing completion

I’m in the final stretch of my novel Viral Times, doing the Ultimate Edits based on the reading and revision notes that I received from Jill Dearman — last summer. For a very fair fee, she read and marked 350 manuscript pages of the Summer, 2009 version of the novel. (I also got a five-page summary of the weak areas and the strengths of the writing.)

I am just doing the calendar math here, and June of 2009 — when I was pulling together and slashing down 144,000 words to 98,000 — is, yeah, about two and half years ago. There’s reasons as well as excuses about that span of time. A growing writing workshop practice, reading hundreds of pages of Manuscript Group books. It could have gone more quickly.

But I’m using the collective energy of National Novel Writing Month to get the end of this Ultimate Edit. It’ll be ready to read on Dec. 17. Just in time for flu season. Have a look at the work in progress — complete with a log of how the work progressed — at viraltimes.net. Leave me a comment, too.

Fiction opens eyes where journalism cannot

October 31, 2011

Ron Seybold character, hbo, Journalism Leave a comment

David Simon

Utne Reader has named The Wire‘s co-creator David Simon as one of its 25 Visionaries changing our world. In the Reader‘s package on Simon, a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, you can follow a link to a 2009 interview with him by Bill Moyers. At the NPR website you’ll see Moyers ask Simon if telling a story in fiction, with characters in the HBO series, gets through to help address injustice.

I did a lot of jounalism, a lot I thought was pretty good. As a reporter I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn’t work. I’d write these very careful and well-researched pieces. They would go into the ether and be gone. Whatever editorial writer coming behind me would write “let’s get tough on drugs,” as if I hadn’t said anything. And I would think, “man, it’s just an uphill struggle to do this with facts. When you can tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats.”

Simon went on to talk about part of that fiction success is the “delivery system of television,” but added that they got to “tell the story we wanted to tell.” When you see the words “Based upon a true story” at the start of any movie or book, that fiction is relying on facts — but they are chosen, because all art is about choices. What’s more they’re wrapped around characters, compelling people who act like the megaphones for the emotions and conflicts around any subject: public education, public safety, and yes, public health, like in Viral Times.

Why You Must Revise, Blast It!

August 24, 2011

Ron Seybold craft, editing, revision Leave a comment

To get published, or to be published.

Even if your goal is to self-publish, revision is a crucial step in writing any book. Writer’s Digest offered me this advice this morning in my in-box:

In her book, Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose says that “…for any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, or especially cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clean, economical, sharp.”

Despite that the vehicles carrying your writing to the market are changing every minute—whether you’re Tweeting, blogging, submitting to online/print publications, pitching conventional publishers or planning to self-publish—the cream still rises to the top. Your writing has to be edited and rewritten until it shines. The competition has never been tougher, and that’s why it’s important your work is vigorously self-edited and revised before you ever submit to editors or agents. Learning to edit and rewrite your own stuff is more crucial than ever.

And just so you know, you face competition whether you publish yourself, or ink a deal for a publisher to pay for the paper and ink. Even if you have the skills and drive to create and publish a book on your own, making something people want to read — that requires revision.

So get to it. There’s a lot of help out there.

Greatest Hits: using -ing verbs

July 31, 2011

Ron Seybold Grammar and Style, workshop Leave a comment

Back in 2006 I posted a short piece about the difference between -ing verbs and the other forms of the verb. It’s also got nice advice on what Dr. Peter Clark calls “branch to the right.”

So while -ing is a natural part of English, and maybe a significant part of your true voice, it is gentle, not powerful. Clark has another column about some of the best advice he got on writing strong. He calls it, “Branch to the right.” It means get your subject and verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as you can, then follow them with your subordinate clauses. “Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early,” he says.

You can read the full post here. It includes a link to Clark’s fine book. I use -ing in our Workshop as an exercise. We’re filling out the September tables now. You can be sign-ing up for a spot even now.

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