Writing
Eric San Juan
December 8, 2009
This piece from The New Yorker is well worth reading if you’re on the wrong side of 35. Which probably sounds pretty insulting to people on the wrong side of 35, but keep in mind that I am one of you. Which is why my bones ache. And I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night. And I want those damn kids off my lawn. Anyway, this excellent piece notes, “Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.” But does it? Not according to University of Chicago economist David Galenson: (Galenson) looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems…
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Eric San Juan
December 2, 2009
So I’m writing last night, plugging away at my work in progress. Working on this major action sequence, a series of four or five brief chapters that (hopefully) string together like a Spielberg setpiece. Think the truck scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Minority Report and you have the idea. And right in the middle of it, this character … he died. I didn’t expect him to die. Hadn’t included it in my outline. Hadn’t plotted for it. But he’s there and this situation arises and I realized as I was writing, “He’s not going to make it, is he?” And he died. I don’t regret the unexpected death. Turned out to be the ideal resolution to his story arc. The exact place…
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Eric San Juan
November 20, 2009
In a previous blog post I pointed out that authors do not make a lot of money. And that’s true. They don’t. The reality is that you DON’T simply write a book and watch the money start coming in. Not unless you hit a one-in-a-million publisher feeding frenzy for your book or accidentally write the next Harry Potter. Instead, you write a book that will eventually provide you with a modest amount of money — and “modest” may very well mean, “enough to finally get that tune-up you’ve been putting off” — then you do another, and another, and another, because if you don’t you’ll have to get a day job. Which is something most authors have, anyway. Literary agent Rachelle Gardner recently did a…
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Eric San Juan
November 18, 2009
The Kindle, the Nook, the this, the that. The makers of eBook readers are pushing pretty hard to make them the next iPod, only with words instead of tunes. Word of mouth tends to be very positive, too. Me, I just can’t jump on board yet. The price of entry is still too high — over $250 for the low-cost model — and the price of books on it is, in my opinion, absurd. You’re generally paying $9.99 for a new release, which is fine if you’re a person who needs to have a book right now, but is still several dollars more expensive than a paperback edition. That’s right. The virtual copy can cost more than a real, physical copy. As far as I’m…
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Eric San Juan
November 4, 2009
I’ve already mentioned that I’m working on a dystopian science fiction novel. It will be, I hope, Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell thrust into a Stephen Spielberg film. That’s the aim, at least. I’ve had some rough nights where the words just don’t want to come (and those that do are crap), and other nights when things click and I’m at the edge of my seat, wondering what’s going to happen to our protagonists. Wait, shouldn’t I know what’s going to happen to my characters? Well, yes and no. I’m writing with an outline, but it’s pretty loose. It’s a series of milestones the characters and/or plot must reach (though even those milestones can change in the course of the writing). A general roadmap…
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