Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Thanks to the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education for having me speak at your annual Town Hall meeting. This post is for you.

First, two articles on what psychologists call “sudden insight.” While I cautioned against getting too excited about that Eureka! feeling (aha! means “pay attention to this” not necessarily “I’m a genius”) those moments are still important and fun.

Aha! Favors the Prepared Mind (courtesy of ScienceDaily)

The Eureka Hunt by Jonah Lehrer (.pdf of article from The New Yorker)

Second, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor emerita Leslie Owen Wilson has a nice, brief overview of the eight aspects of divergent thinking.

They’re all important, but personally I think fluency (the ability to generate a lot of ideas), risk-taking and curiosity are the most important. Volume, fearlessness and an appetite for knowledge will take you far.

Third, the opening credits to Katamari Damacy, a Japanese video game (aka 59 seconds of pure divergent thinking):

Finally, divergent thinking is nothing without convergent thinking. We often discount the creative contributions of analytical thinkers, but without focus, limits, and consensus, then divergent thinking can lead to creativity for creativity’s sake. You can—and will—do better.

Good luck.

A big thanks to Wolverine for stopping by my class the other day. We’re listening!

Click image (then click again) to enlarge

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present:

Auto-Tune the News

Have a great weekend!

Writer (and early DCWYTBMA adopter) Doug Mack has a delightful audio slide show up on the Travel Channel’s World Hum website.

The piece is called What You Can Still See in Paris on $5 a Day. It’s a tight, funny encapsulation of his (as of yet unrepresented) travel memoir EUROPE ON FIVE BAD IDEAS A DAY.

Doug has also taken the initiative and built a well-designed website for his book project, in which he uses the 1963-1964 edition of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day to retrace the European odyssey undertaken by his mother in the late 60s.

Please take a minute to support Doug’s efforts. He’s doing all the right things.

I recently developed a new exercise for the creativity class I teach through the University of Minnesota’s Compleat Scholar program. The exercise is cumbersome, but if you can survive the grind it pays big dividends.

Your task is to design a civilization from the ground up.

1. Make a series of columns labeled Food, Settlement, Government, Arts, etc. (You might want to orient your page sidewise, use multiple sheets of paper, or a whiteboard.)

2. Under each aspect of your civilization make two sub-columns labeled Method and Beliefs.

3. Brainstorm the methods for each civilization aspect.

4. Brainstorm the attitudes and beliefs the people of your civilization might have about each civilization aspect.

You will end up with something like this (click twice to enlarge):

Now comes the fun part.

1. Pick a method and a belief from one of the columns. Look for a combination that makes you smile or frown.

2. Start imagining what a civilization built on that method/belief pair might be like.

In class, we started with Artistic Fishing. We imagined what it would be like if a culture believed that fishing (as opposed to painting or literature) was the highest art form.

3. Pick other methods and beliefs and see what happens to the civilization.

In the Artistic Fishing example, we talked about how a tribal, pre-technological civilization might view fishing as an art for spiritual reasons. But when we imagined Artistic Fishing in crowded, technological society, we ended up with museums filled with bass boats.

4. Make it real. Whether your civilization starts out rational or absurd, keep working the methods and beliefs until it has its own internal logic.

We had a wonderful example on Monday where someone imagined a civilization of telepaths that lived in trees. The high status people at the top passed down their garbage to the level below, who had to live on the castoffs of the rich. Then those people passed on their garbage to the next level below and so on, and all the while no one says a word.

Finally, as with all Awesome Writing Prompts, if you’re reluctant to post your answers, I’m always happy to take a look offline.

A reader writes:

I haven’t yet put my [Publish-on-Demand] novel up, and I was wondering about agents. I’m sending out query letters (yes, I’ve read what you have to say about those). Will having this novel out there in POD form damage my ability to get an agent? I’m not sure the current attitudes towards these publishing outlets. For so long there has been a stigma against vanity presses and I don’t want that kind of reaction. But I also want to be someone who is . . . well, I don’t know the word exactly, but waiting around for the magic of an agent seems inadequate these days.

First, I will answer with Photoshop:

[Thanks to daneilmmfx for the raw image. Click this link to visit his site and make your own Hollywood sign with proper font.]

Second, with words:

As I can’t tell from your question if you’re worried that your POD novel will sour your chances for getting an agent for the POD novel, or for other projects, I’ll answer both.

It’s very, very, very rare that a self-published book gets picked up by a mainstream publisher, but it does happen. Christopher Paolini’s ERAGON is a famous example. (Want some old news? Here’s the 2003 Seattle PI story on Paolini’s deal.) But it’s not like ICM has a department devoted to finding the next POD-to-traditional hit. Most will politely decline.

As for future project interference, I think it all depends on how you play it.

You will lose points by saying this to an agent:

“I self-published PINEAPPLES ARE PICKED SOUR: The Fleecing of the American Hospitality Customer because ignorant, hot-shot cretins like you were blind to my genius.”

You will score points by saying this to an agent:

“I self-published PINEAPPLES ARE PICKED SOUR: The Fleecing of the American Hospitality Customer because I thought it was an opportunity to explore a niche market and gain experience promoting my work. I hope to apply what I learned from PAPS to my mainstream book experience.”

The real question here is whether or not you’re willing to do all the things you’ll need to do to make that POD novel worth your while. Check out the Self-Publishing Review and other sites that offer a similarly realistic view of the POD experience.

Final thought: Sometimes that novel that you can’t sell is the novel you can’t sell as your first novel. Lots of authors end up publishing out of sequence due to timing, subject matter, audience robusticity, etc.

One of the great joys of being a professional writer: Spontaneous Spring Break!

DCWYTBMA returns next week. In the meantime, please enjoys these freshly dumped links:

Nick Hornby on the perils of recommending books

The Daily Beast on “Twitterature“

The Minnesota Orchestra invites 60 people to play conductor for a day (audio version recommended)

For those of you who are interested in a more artistic take on “world building” please enjoy the City of Work

Because I take requests, #amazonfail (now with updated link to Clay Shirkey’s blog)

Finally, the awesomely bad video “Shine on Me”:

Count it!

Quick addendum to the recent posts about writing for magazines:

A number of you have e-mailed me asking how long a typical personal essay is. I say it depends on the publication, but generally they run between 1,000-1,500 words.

How do I know?

I count.

I don’t count every word in every article I read, but every few months I like to check in. If I’m going to pitch a new publication I definitely hunker down and count me some words.

Magazines change. They give less space to features (or more). They allow the short stuff in the front to grow longer, or they keep things extra tidy with “charticles.”

It’s possible to write for a magazine you don’t read. It’s also possible to write for a magazine you read, but don’t really understand. But you’re most likely to write for a magazine that you both read and understand.

One way to understand a magazine is to sit down and count words.

Magazines assign copy based on ad sales. More ads, more copy. Fewer ads, less copy. So ignore that letter from the editor about what the magazine cares about these days. If you really want to peer into a publication’s soul, count how they spend their precious words.

Thanks to comments to this recent post, the Awesome blog back channel chatter (i.e. my Gmail account) and my own life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to adapt the content and themes of a novel into an essay or an op-ed.

What follows is less a how-to than the beginnings of a mental framework for approaching this opportunity:

1. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t that different

Being a novelist doesn’t automatically qualify you to be an essayist, but they aren’t as far apart as they might seem. A good argument builds and progresses like a good story does. They both have beginnings, middles and ends. In each case you want tension, surprise, changes in emotional value, and so forth.

You may not consider yourself an essayist, but if you can shift your beliefs, then you may find that you’re more of a nonfiction writer than you think.

2. Overt is good

One of the nice things about essays is that they’re about what they’re about, and you can say what they’re about without being penalized.

In your novel, two characters are keeping secrets, but the reader doesn’t even know they’re keeping secrets until page 100. In an essay, you get to announce it right up at the top:

Here Is My Essay About Secrets and What They Mean Today.

3. The background becomes the foreground

In your middle-grade reader, two ten-year old boys have a complicated friendship. In your research, you discover (warning: I’m making this up) that in Ancient Greece children were assigned a friend in order to learn the value of friendship.

The insights you glean from your research into Ancient Greek arranged friendships is invaluable, but in your book it only realistically works as backstory. In this case, an essay allows you to put otherwise unusable material to work.

4. Finding the peg

Writing for newspapers and magazines is all about timing. The story that is irrelevant today is essential tomorrow. Succeeding at writing tie-in articles requires patience, diligence and opportunism.

You want to have your essay relatively ready to go. Then, when that story breaks about keeping secrets or strange friendships, you can start contacting people. You say, “Hey, you know how Obama keeps talking about the importance of friendship? Well, I have a personal essay about friendship that includes some little know facts about arranged friendship in Ancient Greece. Interested?”

5. Tie-ins can happen before, during or after

I waited until my book was out before I started pitching related essays. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Writing tie-ins to your book (whether it’s fiction or non-) is a great way to test out material, build audience, and mark territory. As I mentioned in post about author Jason Bradbury and his model robot, there is no need to wait.

6. Remember this is all optional

Is writing an essay based on your novel a good idea? Of course!

Is it also yet another opportunity to beat your head against the publishing brick wall? I’m afraid it is.

Don’t kill yourself trying to make this work. Wear this advice lightly, but be on the look out for opportunity.

I am honored (and pleased) to be invited to partake in a variety show this Thursday, April 9th at the 7th Street Entry.

Author and musician John Wesley Harding and comedian and author Eugene Mirman are the headliners.

I will be doing a shorter, more absurd version of the HEAD CASE slide show. (There will also be approximately 25% more swearing than usual.)

Also appearing:

Author and musician Laurie Lindeen

Poet Todd Boss

Musician Marc Perlman

Tickets are $15.

Doors are at 8:00 p.m.

Hope to see you there.