What Goes Around...

Check back here every Wednesday for a few thoughts on the craft. Here are today's:

Wednesday's Writing on Writing...
It’s Amazing how time speeds as you grow older. When my parents used to talk about “twenty years ago,” it seemed a different era. Now “thirty years ago” rolls easily off my tongue and seems like yesterday.

Yesterday, while emailing my old friend Sammy Tippit (left), I was reminded of when Sammy (left) and I met in 1972. He was a 25-year-old street preacher in Chicago and I was a 23-year-old editor of a Sunday school paper. I did a story about his having been arrested for passing out tracts in front of strip clubs and interfering with traffic (in other words, impeding business).

Sammy was acquitted, of course, but I clearly recall being overwhelmed by the sold-out nature of this young man. He had become a believer in Christ while a gifted university student, then simply surrendered his entire life to God.

Sammy would go anywhere and do anything to spread the news of salvation. He became the subject of my very first book and remains my spiritual hero. Thirty-seven years later, Sammy and I have raised families, enjoy long-term marriages, and are grandparents many times over. We have been friends this whole time, and for the past twenty or so years I’ve also served on the board of his international ministry.

Sammy has lost none of his devotion and fervor. He still goes anywhere preaching Christ, actually preferring the hard places. He visits several continents every year, flying thousands of miles and seeking no fame. Those who hear him preach say that he could enjoy a huge
constituency if only he would preach in the States about half the time each year.

But Sammy goes where God points him.

My relationship with Sammy is just one of the benefits of a life of writing. Here are we two dingalings more recently.

Writers Conference Tips

Check back here every Wednesday for a few thoughts on the craft. Here are today's:

Wednesday's Writing on Writing...

Take it from one who has been to dozens of writers conferences over the last nearly 40 years in capacities ranging from first-time attendee to speaker: there are ways to maximize your experience.

I hope you’re planning to come to the Christian Writers Guild’s Writing for the Soul™ conference in Denver in February [featuring Philip Yancey (left) and Max Lucado (below); check out the details at http://www.christianwritersguild.com/], but regardless where you go, you’ll be happier and more productive if you follow a few simple guidelines:

1. Plan your itinerary carefully and don’t include errands and intermediate stops that may make you late or wonder if you’ll be late. There’s enough pressure at a conference without adding to it.
2. Get as much sleep as possible the night before you leave home; it may be the last time you get enough for a few days. You’ll need every ounce of energy you can store.

3. Plan to arrive with time to spare so you don’t have to start running as soon as you show up. Leave time to settle in, gather your materials, find the meeting rooms, and get ready to learn.

4. You’ll stay up late enough with the scheduled activities, so resist the urge to stay up even later, despite all the new friends and acquaintances. If you’re a zombie by day two, you’ll regret it.

5. Choose your workshops carefully and buy recordings of the ones you hate to miss. If you need to skip one for a nap or an appointment with an editor or speaker, do it.

6. Bring a little more money than you think you need. If you still have it by the end of the conference, reward yourself by buying that extra book or resource you didn’t expect to find.

7. Don’t trust your memory. Take lots of notes and, if a speaker particularly inspires you, buy the recording , too. It’s a small investment for an experience you can re-live whenever you want to.

8. Bring business cards that include your address, phone, and email address. Be prepared to exchange cards with many new friends.

9. When meeting with an editor or speaker, be prepared, plan to make just a point or two, and do a lot of listening.

Writers conferences are almost always feasts for the senses, but it’s easy to overload. Everything is new and unforgettable, until you try to rehearse it in your mind on the way home.

Free time is built in, so strive to make every general session. Often the speaker you’ve never heard of turns out to be your favorite.

Hope to see you in February.

Wednesday's Writing on Writing...

Check back here every Wednesday for a few thoughts on the craft. Here are today's:

The Subjective Writing Game
As you progress along your writing path you will eventually find dissonance – conflict among the so-called experts on how or why to do or not do something. Don’t be put off. Take it as yet another indication that aside from the Word of God and common sense, little in this life is absolute.

My son and I are in the film business, and if there’s anything Dallas and I have learned while trying to steer Jenkins Entertainment through Hollywood’s choppy seas, it’s that nobody knows anything.

Everyone tries to say they knew what picture would be best of the year or which would be a stinker and why. But the same people who produce a classic will follow with something abysmal.

So when I tell you that I don’t recommend self-publishing except in rare circumstances and that I never recommend subsidy publishing, and yet you are compelled to do one or the other, do it.

The purpose of the Christian Writers Guild (http://www.christianwritersguild.com/) is to take would-be writers past the hobby stage, past dipping your toe in literary waters.



We exist for the serious student, the writer who wants to be legitimately published, to compete in the marketplace of ideas, to sell his or her work rather than pay to have it published.

And yet for my father’s poetry, I self-published.

For the story of my wife’s 100-year-old grandmother, I self-published.

I didn’t fool myself that this was legitimate publishing or in any way connected to my career. The fact is that only family and close friends were interested in these books, and it meant enough to all of us to honor the subjects by having the books made available.

If there is a reason to self-publish, do it. Just don’t associate it with success in your writing career.

Some writing coaches challenge their students to see who can rack up the most rejection slips in three months. I’m sure the motive was to get them interacting in the marketplace, trying to sell their stuff. But I hope no CWG mentor ever suggests that method. Our goal is to teach you to
avoid rejection slips.

Learn to write great queries and proposals.

Write articles based on meaty interaction between you and an editor, and see how many sales you can rack up. Leave the collection of rejection slips to the hobbyists and you’ll be on your way to becoming a real professional.

Big Deal Tomorrow Night...

At the Christian Writers Guild, tomorrow evening at 8 Eastern Time, we’re offering a live Webinar of one of our most popular workshops. We call it the Thick-Skinned Manuscript Critique, in which I show actual editing on anonymous manuscript submissions. Writers at our annual conferences consistently tell us this is a most-helpful approach, because editors don’t have the time (or the responsibility) to tell them what is specifically wrong with the manuscripts they reject.

Here I do just that. Doing a heavy edit and re-write (and brief commentary) on the first two pages of each of 6 different submissions, I walk you through what an editor would do if he or she had the time or the responsibility to tell the truth about the writing itself. Their job is to find publishable, purchasable material. At the Guild, we feel it’s our responsibility – and most helpful – to be specific and say why something is working or not working, salable or not salable.

If you’d like to sit in and watch on screen, I think you’ll find it valuable to your own writing. You’ll have the ability to interact too, asking questions live.

CWG member cost is $25; non-member cost is $45, and we’ll go for an hour or a little more.

Remember, this is set for tomorrow night, Tuesday, November 10, at 8 p.m., Eastern Time. You’ll see my smiling mug during the intro, then you’ll see the manuscripts and what has been done to them, then me again for the Q&A session.

The best way to get in on this at this late date is to contact the Christian Writers Guild directly, either by email (ContactUs@ChristianWritersGuild.com) or by calling (866) 495-5177 and asking for Janice or Leilani.

Hope to have you along tomorrow evening.

Babysitting in LA...

Sam (8) amused.

Resting his sore neck on Grandpa's back.

Smiling at Grandma.

Elle and Grandpa keeping the doctor away.

Maya (6)

Elle (Beanie, 4)

Elle

Overheard at girls (age 4-6) soccer: "Other way! Other Way!" "Kick it to a Blueberry!"

Wednesday's Writing on Writing...

Check back here every Wednesday for a few thoughts on the craft. Here are today's:

Reading While Writing

Whenever I’m on deadline, I like to be reading another book at the same time. It’s seldom a novel, as I look for something wholly aside from what I’m immersed in writing. The reading allows an escape from the 24-hour-a-day obsession with my own story without throwing me off track.

Once I read Into Thin Air, the account of an ill-fated Everest ascent. Another time I read The Endurance, the fascinating story of a legendary Antarctic expedition.

While writing Armageddon in the Left Behind series, I re-read Sol Stein’s How to Grow a Novel. The subtitle is “The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them.”

The cover refers to Sol (right) as “a successful editor, novelist, and award-winning teacher of writers” and to the book as “a workshop in book form.”

Having been to one of Sol’s fiction weekends, I found the description apt. Only because I found him so accessible in person am I brazen enough to call by his first name a man twenty years my senior.

A few years ago the Modern Library convened a panel to name the best nonfiction books of the 20th Century. Two books Sol edited made the list. But he is more known for his nine novels and the countless others he has edited.

Examples of stuff I learned reading Stein:

— “In the early stages of developing a story, it pays to root the story in an experience that was an emotional marker in your life.”

— “Some writers suffer while writing. I regret their pain, and am glad to report that as one masters the craft, the pain ebbs, and the pleasure of being able to control the result can bring the second-greatest pleasure of life, the creation of text that arouses the emotions of distant readers.”

— “The engine of fiction is somebody wanting something and going out to get it. And if you let him get it right away, you’re killing the story. He can’t get it because a mountain or a man is in the way, nature and human nature in opposition to achievement. Without that opposition,
fiction is a vehicle without an engine.”

— “You can begin with a flash fire in the kitchen that endangers the entire house (melodrama), or you put a pot on the boil, bubbling and simmering, as you show your characters acting in a situation that is slowly alarming, a conflict developing into the big event that will hold the reader curious, concerned, perhaps even enthralled, gripped as if glued to your story for its duration.”

Writers must be readers, so read something good while writing your next project.

Post Production Video Blog from "What If..."

This is the footage from a recent test screening of a rough cut of "What If..." in North Carolina. We also got audience feedback, which was extraordinarily positive. The audience was asked to fill out a survey that included, among others, two key questions: "How would you rate the film?" and "Would you recommend it?"

The average Hollywood film scores a 55% "Excellent or very good" and "Definitely recommend" on those questions, and 65% is considered a good score. We were fortunate to receive an 85%, which bodes well.