Michelle Richmond

Why It’s Sometimes Okay to Quit

As a child, I hated horseback riding. I took lessons, though, because my mother wanted me to, and because I was under the impression that girls were supposed to like horses. The day after my twelfth birthday, during my riding lesson, our horse reared back, and I fell off. I landed on my back on the ground, but that was just the beginning of it. I can still remember watching the horse struggle in the air above me before she fell backward, her body slamming down on top of me, grinding the bulky Western saddle into my eighty-pound frame. She rolled around on top of me, trying to get up. Looking back, I’m amazed that I suffered only a broken pelvis and fractured hips.

Months later, after my body had (for the most part) healed, I confessed to my mother that I was not and never had been enamored of horses. I did not like the way they smelled, I didn’t like mucking the stalls, I hated the clouds of dust rising from the horse’s flanks when I brushed her. Most of all, I did not like lying beneath a horse while it rolled around on top of me. “I don’t want to ride anymore,” I said, lying flat on my back in a hospital bed, my legs in traction. “I quit.” Fortunately, she did not tell me to “get back in the saddle.” I have lived a relatively horseless life, and that has not bothered me one bit.

My high school career began at Mobile Christian School (Mobile being a city, not a state of being). A few weeks into the first semester of my freshman year, I got sent to the office for wearing orange socks.For this offense, I was shut in a room with the varsity football coach who, acting on the orders of the principal, told me to bend over. The coach, clearly mortified, gave me a couple of weak smacks with the wooden paddle that was reserved for juvenile offenders like me. The school called my mother only after the corporal punishment had been administered. “I quit,” I said. “I’m not going back.” The next day, I enrolled in the public school, Murphy High. A couple of months later, Murphy made national news because the district was so underfunded, students had to bring our own toilet paper. Despite the financial difficulties, it was a terrific school. My teachers were amazing. Did I ever regret quitting the private school that meted out spankings to girls in short plaid skirts? I did not.

In tenth grade, I quit youth choir because the songs they made us sing were terrible. “Contemporary Christian,” it was called. All pep, no feeling. Lots of poorly thought-out rhymes. Bad robes in unappealing shades of burgundy and pink. I told the choir director I’d stay if he’d let us sing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” He was tolerant but unconvinced. Have I ever regretted my decision to quit the youth choir? Not once. Eventually, I quit the Baptist church altogether. I discovered that life is better with more wine and less guilt.

In college, I had a string of odd jobs. One involved pulling auto parts at a warehouse for $3.75 per hour. It was sweltering hot, the ladders were rickety, and at five foot two, even with the ladders, many of the parts were beyond my reach. I hung in there for a week; then I quit. Remorse? None.

Another college job involved opening a convenience store in Northport, Alabama, at five in the morning. For this I was paid the more amendable sum of $4.25 per hour. One morning, alone in the convenience store, I heard shots ringing out from the crack house across the street. That day, I quit. I never looked back.

I briefly worked at a small airport in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My responsibilities included calculating fuel for small aircrafts. Math has never quite been my thing. Fuel, as it turns out, is important. It only took a few days for me to realize the folly of this situation. I quit; the pilots did not complain.

Right after college, I quit a waitressing job in Knoxville, Tennessee, after the owner slipped something in my drink and the chef took humiliating photos while I was unconscious in the storage room. Soon thereafter, I found a job as a copywriter at an advertising firm. Quitting a bad thing led to a good thing. Once again, no regrets.

Over the years, I quit a variety of things for a variety of reasons: I quit the pill because it made me fat. I quit Bikram yoga because it made me stink and did not bring me anything akin to peace. I quit Moby Dick, three times. In the early nineties, I quit an engagement. Thank goodness. I quit the MFA program at the University of Arkansas and transferred to the University of Miami, because I wanted to live on the beach. I loved living on the beach; I did not love living in Arkansas. I knew then, as I know now, that life is too short to live somewhere unappealing.

While I was living in New York City, I quit wearing shoes that hurt. My husband and I quit New York City to live in San Francisco, because San Francisco has good air and good food and good views, and it made us very happy. A couple of years ago, I finally quit trying to do fancy things to asparagus, because, as it turns out, most vegetables, including asparagus, taste better steamed, with a little butter and salt, without the bells and whistles.

A few years ago, I’d been struggling for two years with a novel I was writing on contract, unable to find my way, when I finally confessed to my editor that the book just wasn’t working. “Do you think you could write something else?” she asked. Strangely, that simple solution had never occurred to me. After all, I had invested 300 pages and hundreds of hours in the book, and the thought of abandoning it seemed obscene. But I took my editor up on her offer. I quit the failed book, the bad book, the book that simply was not working. Days later, officially released from the unwieldy mass of my failed manuscript, I started from scratch. Blank page, new premise; new characters, voice, and setting. The freedom proved exhilarating, and the result was a much better novel than the one I’d been tied down to, the one I had been so reluctant to quit.

Our impulse as human beings is to finish what we started, to overemphasize our investment and continue along the path to which we’ve committed, no matter what. Our impulse as writers is to attempt to salvage the words, to make good on the promise we made to ourselves when we penned the very first line. While there is beauty in perseverance, and while there are, of course, some things you shouldn’t quit, some things that are more than worth the long and arduous journey, sometimes the best thing you can do, in stories as in life, is let something go, and give yourself the freedom to begin again.

Think of one thing in your life that isn’t working. Not something that is simply difficult, not something that is challenging but worthwhile. No, I mean something that adds no meaning to your life, something that adds unnecessary pain or unhappiness or outright despair with no hope of self-improvement or valuable public service or future positive return. Now, repeat after me, “I quit.” Commit to the end of this thing you are quitting. Watch the space open up in front of you. Begin again.

Book Writing – Should You Outline Your Novel?

People are always asking me if I outline my novels before I begin.

Never.

I work associatively and thematically. For example, The Year of Fog is a novel about a missing child. But to say it’s a novel about a missing child is somewhat misleading. The major plot line of the novel is the search for a missing child. But the novel also tackles a few other things: memory, photography, and first love.

As I researched the novel, I wrote up small pieces, one to two pages each, about memory: memory case studies, interesting facts about memories, how memories are recorded and stored, etc. All of these items, I kept together with one paperclip. Thus The Paperclip Method was, inadvertently, born. My work on photography included quotes and research from Henry Horensteins classic text, Black and White photography, memories of my own time spent in darkrooms as a college student, notes on the use of the camera that my narrator, Abby, used (the Holga), etc. Another paperclip.

The first page of any stack is just a blank white page with a handwritten identifier: Photography, memory, the search, Jake, Emma. Eventually, all of the stacks go on the dining room floor. It looks something like this. My cat Phoebe loves this part of the process. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I can hear her moving things around. Seriously.

Believe it or not, that mess of papers on the floor of my dining room is now in galleys over at Random House. Which is to say that, what looks like nothing does become something, if you just have the patience to see it through. For the longest time, as I was working on that novel, it didn’t look as though it would ever come together. For the longest time, I was ready to give up. But then, in the end, it did. The process I’ve grown to trust once again paid off.

So, if your outline is giving you a headache, if your plan has gone all awry, take a step back. Ditch the outline. Write two pages about something that matters to you. Tomorrow, write another two pages. Keep at it. Eventually, you’ll have enough pages to spread out across your dining room floor.

Want to put The Paperclip Method into practice? Learn more about the method here.

The Copyright Problem: Three Myths That Are Killing Literary Culture

via Wikicommons
1. Writers just want to be read.

I recently heard a young woman at a party say that writers don’t mind when their books are downloaded for free on the internet, because “writers just want to be read.”

As a working writer who pays my mortgage and buys groceries and sends my kid to summer camp with the proceeds from my books, I can tell you that this isn’t true. While I do want to be read, that isn’t my primary concern. My primary concern is making a living.

2. Writers don’t need to be paid for their work.

Let’s say you design and produce a T-shirt. Let’s say you sell the T-shirts for $20 each, and with the proceeds from these T-shirts, you pay your rent, buy coffee, pay off your student loans, pay the electric bill,go to the movies, buy a beer at the corner bar, etc.

Now, you may give your shirt to a few friends in order to drum up business. That’s called marketing, and it’s not much different from when publishers send out review copies of books to newspapers, magazines, and influential bloggers. You’re willing to give away a few shirts in the hopes that it will lead to sales.

Now, let’s say a bunch of people—a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, half a million—come to you and say, “Hey, you should give us that shirt, because we’ll wear it, and when we wear your shirt, it’s going to be good for you.” What would you say? You’d probably turn them down. You’d probably point out that creating the shirt took time, effort, and resources. Maybe you went to university to learn the skills that went into making that shirt. Maybe you worked at McDonald’s for a few dollars an hour while you were figuring out how to arrange your life in a way that would allow you to do more fulfilling work. You’d probably point out that you didn’t make that shirt just to give it away. You need to sell the shirt, because that’s how you make a living, and, no matter how good-looking or smart or self-contented these free-culture advocates are, the mere fact of them wearing your shirt does absolutely nothing for you. It’s good for them, maybe—free shirt—but it is most definitely not good for you.

Authors make a living by selling our books. We write books that we hope will be good, books that we hope will be meaningful, but we also write books that we hope people will buy. We do not go to the store and walk out with a new pair of shoes or a new baseball bat or an ice cream cone without paying for them. We don’t expect the taxi driver to drive us to the airport for free, and we don’t expect the tech guy to fix our computer for free, and we don’t expect the piano teacher to give our kids piano lessons for free. We understand that when a service is provided, it is good practice to pay for it. We hope that others will show us the same courtesy. When increasing numbers of readers decide they’re going to get our books for free by illegally downloading them, and when increasing numbers of libraries lobby for the “right” to lend digital copies of our books to anyone, anywhere, without paying author royalties, authors don’t make a living.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, The Slow Death of the American Author, Scott Turow points to the offshore pirate sites that offer illegal downloads of copyrighted works. Google and Bing serve ads to these pirate sites, and subscribers pay a fee to download content, so both the pirates and the mega-corporations are making big money off of the books they had no role in creating. Kim dot com gets another Rolls Royce, Google tops up the multi-billion dollar coffers, and PayPal gets a huge chunk of the pie. The prize goes to the middleman. Yay for them. The only ones who aren’t making money off of those books are the people who wrote them.

If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I’d be on my way to jail. And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like “Don’t be evil,” they do the same thing.

The only people who can legitimately say, “Authors shouldn’t be paid for their books,” are people who go to their job for free. I don’t know many people who do that. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t know any. There’s been a rallying cry among certain academics and librarians who say that copyright is anti-culture, that all books should be free to all people, but I don’t know a single professor or librarian who doesn’t get paid to show up to the university or to the library.

Traditionally, libraries purchase a hard copy of a book, which they then lend out to their patrons. I happen to be a longtime fan of libraries and the services they provide to the community. As an author, I have accepted the fact that I only receive a royalty on the copy the library purchases, not on the lending (although in Europe, authors do receive royalties each time their books are lent). Unlimited e-book lending is an entirely different ballgame; by effectively ensuring that no reader will have any incentive to purchase an e-book, ever, it erases a huge chunk of the author’s royalties.

If you happen to be a professor or librarian who believes that information, including copyrighted books, should flow freely with no compensation for the creators of that information, or that publishers should offer books to libraries for free or next to free, or that soft copyright laws are essential to democracy, I urge you to put your money where your mouth is: the next time you receive a paycheck, return it. You are just happy to be able to go to work, right? You don’t do it for the money. It also bears saying that libraries need content, and the content comes from somewhere, so when libraries lobby against fair payment to authors, they are lobbying against their own existence.

3. Writers make so much money, they shouldn’t mind if their books are illegally downloaded.

Advances for mid-list authors—that is, the vast majority of authors—are far from a living wage. The advance for my first book was $2,000. As I wrote the stories in the collection over a period of eight years, I wasn’t exactly raking it in. My second book, which took a much more reasonable three years to write, received an even smaller advance of $1,000—or about $333 per year. My third book, which took me more than four years to write, received an advance of $25,000, as did my fourth book, which, fortunately, only took one year to write. Obviously, during those years of writing I was making a living in other ways—from working at a tanning bed salon right out of college to selling credit processing machines all over New York City to teaching. For my next two books (neither of which has been published yet), I received a much bigger advance, but this only happened after I had proved myself by turning that $25,000 advance into a book that sold nearly half a million copies.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend $50,000 is the average advance for a book by a midlist author (in fact, the average midlist advance is rapidly declining). Let’s say the book for which you receive a $50,000 advance takes three years to write—which is fairly normal among writers. You receive your advance in increments—upon signing, upon delivery of the finished product, upon hardback publication, and upon paperback publication—so the advance is spread out not only over the years it takes to write the book, but also over the years when you are waiting for it to be published, and then waiting for the paperback release. So if it takes you three years to write the book, the advance is spread out over a period of about five years.

That makes the annual income for that book $10,000. With that, you need to pay for child care so you can write the book, pay your mortgage, buy the groceries, etc. In order to make this work, of course, you need another job, although that other job is the reason it takes you three years to write a book. It also helps to be married and to therefore be in a two-income family. If you’re a trust fund baby, like most successful writers were until fairly recently, you’ll be fine. (There’s a reason that only independently wealthy people wrote and published books before the mid-twentieth century.)

Only after you have earned out your advance do you begin earning royalties. For a $50,000 advance, you’ll have to sell close to 50,000 books to earn out the advance. If you don’t earn out the advance, you don’t get royalties. Also: if you don’t earn out the advance, the publisher doesn’t see you as a viable investment, and your next advance is a) much smaller or b) nonexistent.

The fact is, very few authors are making the big bucks. Stephen King is, of course, and so are Danielle Steele and J.K. Rowling (which is not to say that these authors are not also losing huge sums of money each year to illegal downloads), but the vast majority of authors make far less per hour than the barista at Starbucks or the person flipping those admittedly amazing burgers at In n’ Out. So when you say, “If I download this book for free, it doesn’t really hurt anybody,” you’re wrong. It hurts the person who made it.

I assume that most of the people who read this post do not illegally download books, music, or movies. But if you are a person who does that, I ask you to do one thing before you download the next book or song from a file sharing site: take a moment to visualize yourself reaching into that author’s purse, or that musician’s wallet, and stealing money. Are you comfortable with that image of yourself? If so, go ahead; download away.

Why this should matter to you. If you’ve read a good book in the past few years, if you’ve read a book that moved you, a book that enlarged your world-view, a book that changed you, if you have ever read a book that made you want to be a writer, then remember where that book came from: an author who lives in the same world in which you live, an author who cannot download lunch, blue jeans, or an apartment for free.

How to End a Story

Stories are like relationships: the beginning is always so much fun, and the ending is fraught with turmoil.

When I sit down to start a story, the first sentence just sort of comes to me. The second sentence too. If I’m lucky, the third swiftly follows. The inimitable short story writer Kate Braverman once told a group of enraptured graduate students (they happened to be my students, and she was wowing them with her general exuberance and wonderful strangeness) that she channels her characters. A bit like spirits, some linguistically gifted version of the returning dead. They speak throughher and onto the page, as if she isn’t even there.

I, unfortunately, channel nothing. It is all rough work after sentence three. By the time I’m in the middle of the story, I’m feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Where am I going? Where have I been? Have I gotten lost in the labyrinth? Probably, yes.

Somehow, I find my way through. The characters do things. They meet with hardship and grief, or maybe they just meet some swanky fellow in a bar or a Laundromat. They get into trouble, maybe out of it. Probably not. I find myself feeling that they have done all they can do. Not much more can be said. The action has fallen. We have all had our dénouement (which, by the way, is a French term meaning untying, from Middle French desnouement, from desnouer – to untie – from Old French desnoer, from des- de- + noer meaning to tie, from Latin nodare, from nodus knot.) And here we are in the labyrinth again, attempting to untie the knot, unwind the rope, escape the not-so-fun funhouse.

It’s time to write our way out.

One wants to resolve things, after all.One feels a deeply human need toconclude. After the falling action, there is often something more. Something unexpected. And here we come to what I have been meaning to say all along: a good ending is layered. The reader thinks she has discovered everything she can possibly discover about a story, but then: another image appears, another paragraph hums along, another question begs to be answered. One is left with the feeling of having walked out of the dark theatre into the light, only to realize there was something else playing after the credits, some secret part of the film, some final moment. You can hear it through the door, vaguely, but you can’t get back in. You’re not sure what you’ve missed, but you’re certain that you’ve missed something, that the reel kept on playing, the story kept on going, after your departure. You were only an observer, a brief malingerer, there but not there. The lives within the story carry on.

Michelle Richmond is the author of four books of fiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Year of Fog. She is the creator of the Guided Workbooks for Writers series.

Author: Michelle Richmond

Why It’s Sometimes Okay to Quit

Book Writing – Should You Outline Your Novel?

The Copyright Problem: Three Myths That Are Killing Literary Culture

How to End a Story

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