David Prever2013-05-19T02:14:07-04:00David Preverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=david-preverCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David PreverGood old fashioned elbow grease.A Novel Written by Lunchtime?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25877092013-01-31T02:04:14-05:002013-04-01T05:12:01-04:00David Preverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-prever/
Just observe the growth in speed-related events. Speed dating has been joined by speed networking. There are speed presentations - the Japanese Pecha Kucha with 20 slides in 20 seconds; a wet dream for attention deficit junkies.
This month's Wired magazine has a feature on Zhang Yue, of China's Broad Sustainable Building. His firm offers a nice line in 30 story skyscrapers, erected in only 15 days. If they knocked it down tomorrow, even Rome could be rebuilt in a day. Or a couple of weeks.
The fast-track even now applies to sport. At the London 2012 Olympics, much was made of Helen Glover's astonishing success in the rowing, from obscurity to a gold medal in just four years. What took her so long? .
Gordon E. Moore's famous computing law - which sees processing power roughly doubling every two years - has pervaded every area of our lives. Nothing worthwhile is worth waiting for, which is a dreadful shame, and which brings me to The 30 hour novel and National Novel Writing Week or NaNoWriWee - which should win an award in it's own right for most annoying acronym of all time.
NaNoWriWee is the brainchild of the folks at Kernel magazine and a spin off from National Novel Writing month - NaNoWriMo - the US festival that encourages attempts to knock out a novel in 30 days. In their defence, the folks at Kernel admit that 'nothing of serious literary merit' is likely to come of out of this. And they acknowledge the need for relaxation or reflection in writing. So why bother? It started out as joke, apparently and I suspect it will end up as nothing more than that.
Anything that focuses the mind and forces wannabe authors to sit down and type something, anything, has to be applauded. Dickens was spot-on when he wrote "procrastination is the thief of time, collar him." Thinking about it, he would have loved NanoWriWee, but for the rest of us, a novel in 30 hours, how is this possible?
It isn't. Any successful author will tell you a manuscript needs time to breathe. It's the biggest learning for newbie writers - Ernest Hemingway's timeless advice that there's no such thing as writing, only rewriting. The words don't flow perfectly the first time. They land on the page in an ugly clunky mess, before the idea reveals itself, often weeks or months later, in the same way that a sculptor chips away a block of stone. The analogies with art are endless.
Malcolm Gladwell's was right about his 10,000 hours - the compelling idea that it takes that long, or thereabouts, to master anything worthwhile. Have we really evolved to a stage where we hope to master everything overnight?
Where does all of this come from? Life expectancy may now be longer than ever, yet we seem desperate to cram more in. But perhaps we need to re-discover the pleasure in the natural order, to embrace the old-fashioned idea that if something is worth doing well, then it's going to take time. Lots of uncomfortable, unfashionable, waiting for something magical to happen, time.
A novel is no exception. Great writing, a story worth telling, needs to be laid down like a decent wine. A manuscript should to sit in a drawer or on a computer desktop folder for a while before it's ready to be brought back to life. Those wonderful words that you crafted for Chapter One, can look a whole lot different a few weeks later. The key ingredient that can't be rushed in writing, is perspective.
With all of this in mind I propose NaNoWriYe. Take a year - take longer if you need to. By all means speed-write some words. But then have the confidence to walk away, live some life and do something different. Then come back to them with fresh eyes and new understanding.
Like so many things in life, great writing always looks different in the morning.
David Prever's debut novel, The Blood Banker, can be found on Amazon
www.DavidPrever.com]]>Self e-Publishing Comes of Agetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17590172012-08-09T19:00:00-04:002012-10-09T05:12:04-04:00David Preverhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-prever/
For some people, eBooks are the devil incarnate and nothing but printed-paper will do. We probably had the same debate about the demise of quill pens and typewriters (I still miss the tangled ribbons and wonky carriage levers).
This is understandable. Books represent the sum of all human knowledge. But I've yet to find a person who's read an e-book and said it would have been a better experience in paperback or hardback. I'm not in the least bit surprised. Try it once and you're hooked by the ease and convenience. You also discover that the story or subject matter is what's most important, which is just as it should be.
The late Douglas Adams put this best: "Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food."
The popularity of e-reading has also meant that self-epublishing has finally lost it's stigma. This week's New York Times eBook bestseller features four self-published authors with seven novels in total between them.
Amazon has levelled the playing field. In the eBook world it makes no difference whether you're published or not.
In the last four weeks my own self-published novel, The Blood Banker, has been downloaded 20,000 times, reaching number five in the Thrillers chart alongside David Balddacci, Stieg Larrsson and the rest. It was a surreal experience leading to wasted hours starring in disbelief at the screen. I hesitated before going it alone. Now I'm wondering what I was worried about.
During that time I have not once been asked if The Blood Banker has been sold to a publisher (it hasn't). Put simply, nobody seems to care. Or rather, eBook buyers don't care. They're led by price, title and cover, description, reviews and rankings.
The often repeated argument that self-publishing removes the 'gatekeepers' leading to a deluge of awful books, is misplaced. There is some ropey writing out there, of course, but the wisdom of the crowd actually works; half a dozen bad reviews and your book will sink fast. The do-it yourself e-author is taking a huge risk
This should all be good news for the book trade, not the end of days that most seem to predict. Kindle Direct Publishing has effectively become the new slush pile. What's happening is that authors are being made to work harder before asking for the big investment that printing and marketing their work demands. Manuscripts can be crowd-tested before they land on literary agents' and editors' desks. What could be better than an author with a ready-made readership?
So will this lead to the death of books? I doubt it. Remember the fear that VCR's in every home would mean the end of cinema? The tipping point will come, however, when it no longer makes economic sense to run the printing presses; it's the same debate that's taking place in newspapers. Inevitably this will make it tougher for so called 'mid-list' authors who might have once landed a deal, but the best will still break through.
For ambitious writers there's no longer any excuse to wait around for a publisher to come calling. Self-publish on Kindle and if the book is as good as you believe, the phone might ring. Every author craves that nod of approval, even the self-published success stories.
And if the phone doesn't ring, you've lost nothing. Taking the Amazon route doesn't mean giving up on the big dream of seeing your book in print in bookshops worldwide, on great smelling real paper pages.]]>