Fixing this flat got me thinking about how I started turning down invitations to teach novel writing once I wasn't writing novels and selling them regularly.
Foreground: Bike on repair stand
Background: Typeflow’s print book/ebook job board
Cyclists: The clamp won’t fit the seatpost and it’s a steel frame. Don’t write me about clamping the top tube.
The first flat of each year, I fix the puncture, pump the tire back up, and then can’t get the wheel back on the bike, because I forgot an inflated tire is too fat to get past these brakes.
And that’s just a flat tire on a bike – I'm going to retain a solid connection with novel writing and the fiction business a year after my last book? Two years? Ten?
Well enough to teach it?
Of course not.
This post brought to you by Paul Guyot’s book about screenwriting (which I designed), the non-designers who gave him design advice, and the 650b × 42 Panaracer Pacenti Pari-Moto.
Which is no knock against the Pari-Moto – no tire stays in C major forever.*
* no sharps or flats
Who not to listen to
Paul’s book, Kill the Dog, has, as one of its main themes, Don’t take screenwriting advice from people who aren’t working screenwriters.
Here’s a spread from it. (A spread is a left/right page combination.)
A spread from Kill the Dog
He had an idea that his screenplay excerpts could be in rectangles, to make them look like screenplay pages. All his self-published author friends told him it wasn’t possible. So did Vellum and Draft2Digital.
He eventually emailed me. My response:
(That’s my we-already-know-each-other voice. My pro-book-dude persona employs more and politer words to say the same thing.)
Of course rectangles are possible. They’re RECTANGLES.
“WHY TRUST THE knowledge of a brick maker about jewels? … If you would know the truth about sheep, go to the herdsman.”
—My artist friend G told me about this passage from The Richest Man in Babylon
Don’t seek writing advice from designers. Don’t seek plumbing advice from bereavement counselors. Don’t seek book design advice from writers.
Yes, some particular designer might have a great story idea. This one bereavement counselor might have stopped a leak once by tightening a coupling under a sink, and that might be the exact thing that fixes yours! This one novelist might have just the design advice you need for your self-published nonfiction paperback/ebook combo!
But out of a hundred writers, how many will have advice that doesn’t make things worse?
Does that number get higher or lower if you ask a hundred book designers?
If you’re after info about darning socks, it’s possible crashing a butchers’ convention isn’t your best move. Maybe let go of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and consult a sock darner.
Once Paul brought me aboard, we didn’t talk about software at all. We talked about what the best version of the book would look like. His idea was obviously perfectly fine, so I’d figure out the best way to do the rectangles once things got underway. But I thought those excerpts should feel like screenplay pages in more ways than just having black rectangles around them. I also thought the screenplay excerpts and the running text should exist in two different worlds, but without breaking the excerpts out of the main text flow (that is, not putting them alongside or nearby the main text, like you might do with illustrations/figures/tables).
Then there was a bunch of stuff that I decided was too “inside design” for this blog entry, so I’m breaking it out into its own blog entry. You’ll be able to read it here (not a link yet!) if you’re a book designer and want to tell me I did it wrong.
So anyway, back to Paul’s book
A really competent layout/production person might be able to persuade self-publishing software to do things that don’t already exist in its brain-dead templates – but if you don’t do lots of print layout all the time, you bought amateur design software, and you’re getting epigraph/colophon/rectangle advice from bike mechanics, you’re going to bust a knuckle open on the spokes and spend a lot of time in Urgent Care instead of riding.
“You need more expensive software to do complex layouts like this,” was one of the comments I saw on Facebook from a self-published author.
This isn’t a complex layout. It’s a simple layout with a fun twist.
“You can do it all!” self-publishers insist to each other.
And you can! If you’re doing a novel that contains no elements except whatever already exists in those template-driven self-pub programs, they’re probably all you need. Go forth and be bookful.
You’ve always been able to publish your own book, though. You could always do all your own car repair, tax preparation, nuclear fission.
If you’re a florist, I can do one of those things better than you, and we’re probably equals on the rest. Which is to say we’re terrible at them and life’s too short to get good. Literally too short, not just figuratively. We will die first, survived by a car with no engine, a pile of unsplit atoms, and an IRS audit.
What point am I making here?
I dunno, I’ve lost track of it too.
Oh, I remember.
What point I’m making here and why I care about it
Except for the long interlude where I raised kids and my print book/ebook work paid for their food and rent, my life has been spent as an artist among artists. Musicians, filmmakers, writers, visual artists…all kinds. That’s where my natural loyalties lie.
Sometimes the BS those artists are fed is intentional: Vanity presses, scammy agents, fraudulent managers, fly-by-night film festivals and screenplay contests.
Sometimes – though it’s still BS! – it’s not malicious: “Editors” who have a hazy, thirdhand idea of what editors do in traditional publishing; “audio people” who own Audacity but don’t know when/how/why to normalize a file or tell the narrator to sip some water; “voice teachers” who injure voices; "book formatters” who don’t know how to track small caps, make ebooks accessible, or balance a print spread (or even know you’re supposed to)…
Either way, fraudulence or incompetence, it eats away at the artist.
My hatred for this is literal and visceral. I care about it because that’s my personality. I don’t have a more nuanced reason.
And I guess to finally sum up my actual point:
Other writers do have useful information, but it’s got a limit that’s pretty tightly centered around the art itself. Everything about book publishing that comes after the writing (and maybe the cover art) is a trade. If you have a trade question and there’s any way you can ask a tradesperson instead of an artist, do that.
I know I can sound exasperated, so in closing, I’ll refer you to the name of this paragraph style, one of the 84 in Kill the Dog:
The paragraph style is called “benevolent yelling.” We’re exasperated because we care.
I hope you have a successful book. If you ask stuff here, I’ll answer it.