Michael Logan

Novelist, Journalist and other things ending in -ist

Altered Ego – another new short story

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I wrote the short story linked to below specifically in response to a call by The Book Smugglers for superhero fiction. It made the longlist, but not the final cut. Now, I could shop it around, but I lack the patience. So I am posting it here.

Consider it a teaser for the upcoming paperback release of Wannabes, which deals with similar themes.

Enjoy, share, and encourage people to buy my books before I need to sell a child on the black market.

Altered Ego

The writing advice you never knew you needed, and probably still don’t need but are getting anyway

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I’m not one for giving writing advice. There is so much out there already, what works for one person does not for another, and I’m not exactly Kurt Vonnegut. However, when an aspiring writer recently wrote to me for advice, I found I had some to give.

The little voice in her head that told her she was a bad writer was crippling her, she was stressing about how and where to write, she could not stop herself editing the few words she had put down on paper, and she was afraid to develop her ideas in case she couldn’t do them justice. Essentially, she had contracted every strain of the virulent disease known as writer’s block.

That was exactly me six years ago.

When I wrote back, I realized that I have since developed very concrete methods for shaking off the writing doldrums. My way will not work for everyone, but I figured I may as well share it in the off-chance it helps break the writing deadlock for anybody who cares to read it. Please note that this is not about how to improve the quality of your writing. This is simply the method I have developed to make myself productive.

Here’s what I told her:

  • It’s really very simple. You write. You don’t stress about how good it is. You remember that you don’t actually need to show it to anybody if you don’t want to.
  • You remember that unless you have words on paper, you’re not a writer. You remember that if you don’t have words on paper, you don’t have anything to edit. You remember that editing is often what makes a piece of work shine, not the writing in the first place.
  • You understand that you can never do an idea justice. You understand that an idea only becomes a story when you write it. You remember that your first idea is just a seed, and it will grow into bigger and better ideas – or at least ideas that take you in a direction so different you can’t even remember why your original idea seemed so good in the first place.
  • You do not edit as you go along. You just get that story down from start to finish, no matter how bad you consider the prose or how ridiculous the scenes or characters seem. If you obsess about making each chapter or section perfect, you will find yourself, a year later, working on draft 32 of chapter one (as I did). Let the story and characters unfurl. Then you edit.
  • You remember that the voice in your head is what is stopping you writing, and you tell it to shut up while you’re writing. Later, when you’re done, you can let it talk again. But when you’re at your computer, or notepad, or cave wall, or whatever you have convinced yourself is your ideal writing environment, all you do is write.
  • You don’t judge the quality of your work until it is time to edit. You don’t consider what others will think of your work on that distant day of publication. You just write.
  • You understand that your writing is not you. It is just something you have written. If it turns out to be awful (at least in your view), it does not make you awful. It makes that specific piece of writing at that moment in time awful. You throw it out, if you have to, and start again. Or you put it aside and come back later and realize it really wasn’t all that bad.
  • You understand that the best writers often think their work is bad. You use that to drive yourself on, but you also understand that you will never reach your goal of perfection and learn to recognize the cut-off point.
  • You don’t stress about time or location or atmosphere or warm-up before getting going. You write: wherever and whenever you can. Telling yourself you need to block off a whole day, a week, a month is an excuse you use when you’re afraid to start. (This is defined as Resistance in the excellent War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Read it.) If you have 30 minutes in the morning, you write. If you have an hour at lunch, you write. If you wake up with an idea at 2am, you write. You scratch the itch whenever you feel it, instead of putting it off and losing your enthusiasm.
  • You don’t need to begin at the beginning. It can be all too easy to stare at a blank screen, wondering how to craft the perfect opening even though you have a stack of ideas for later scenes. Write what is in the forefront of your mind. It’s like journalism: often you will write the meat of a story, and then at the very end go back and craft the opening now that you have the whole story fixed in your mind.
  • Basically – and I’m pretty sure you’ve got this theme – you write!




Where my ideas come from

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I’m often asked where I get my ideas for stories, and my usual answer is a shrug of the shoulders and an uncomfortable glance at the ground. If I seem a little shifty on these occasions, it’s because I am unable to provide a satisfactory answer. My best response is ‘everywhere and nowhere, from observing life and making random connections between seemingly unconnected events’.

If somebody were to ask me today, however, I would have a very different response. From dreams.

This morning, I woke up at 5am with a fragment of a dream still in my mind, and I knew instantly it was a great idea for a novel. Obviously I don’t want to give anything away in case anybody nicks it, but I sat up for the next hour to turn this sliver delivered up by my unconscious mind into an initial outline for a book that promises to be very dark indeed.

I almost didn’t do it. I was so tired that the temptation was to go back to sleep. Fortunately, I had a notebook and pen by the side of my bed and scribbled down a few lines, which woke me up enough to get to the computer.

I do wonder what would have happened if that notebook wasn’t there. Perhaps I would have gone back to bed and woken up in a few hours with no memory of the dream. I’m glad I didn’t. It just goes to show that ideas can come to you anywhere at any time and from any source. So keep your notebook or voice recorder handy!

Welcome to reality, folks

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While this Guardian article on writers struggling in a constricting publishing industry is well-intentioned, they probably could have picked better examples than Rupert Thomson and Joanna Kavenna. 
Thomson’s hardship is that he has to stop renting an office on the South Bank and must now build a garret in his London home to work. Kavenna once received a ‘low six-figure advance’ on two books, but now laments that between 2007 and 2010 ‘everything changed’.
Now, I don’t want to say these writers are not in a pickle in the changing publishing environment. An advance of 100k is not as much as it sounds given that this is paid out in chunks and is likely to represent the author’s only income for a few years. However, these two are not representative of the vast majority of writers. Both of them have been able to write fiction full-time, a luxury most authors do not have and have not had for a very long time.
The industry only really supports the top few percent, those for whom six- and seven-figure advances are commonplace. Let me quote from Prospects, the UK’s official graduate careers website:
“The annual average income for professional writers aged 25-34 from writing alone is only £5,000. A typical writer earns less than 33% of the national income. Approximately 60% of all writers have a second job, often in other professions such as teaching or lecturing. Many run writing workshops (including online), and professional critiquing services, or have other part-time jobs. Only 20% of writers earn their income exclusively from writing. Writers operate in a ‘winner takes all’ market (similar to actors) – the top 10% of writers in the UK earn 50% of the total income.”
Yes, advances are going down and the publishing industry’s knickers are thoroughly twisted as they figure out how to deal with declining sales and the march of the e-book (something, incidentally, the industry is doing a very bad job of so far as the big houses stick to their archaic publishing models). However, the situation for the average writer has not changed significantly.
Take my case. My first novel was published almost two years ago. For that work, I received a very low five-figure advance. This has been my only income to date (although I did just sell another novel to my US publisher). I know plenty of other authors who are bobbing along in the same boat, with neither oar, nor sail nor wind to push them towards the distant bank upon which money grows on trees.
The simple fact is that your typical author relies on other sources of income. Despite winning an award and having plenty of great reviews and attention for my first novel, particularly in the US, I am not going to make a living from writing fiction any time soon, if ever. So, I make my living from writing in other ways: journalism and communications the chief culprits. I write my novels in my spare time, if I have the energy and head space after a busy day at work.

This clearly isn’t ideal, as it hampers both the quality and quantity of my output, but the only way I can go full-time is to live under a bridge and wrestle with three-fingered Jack at the bins round the back of Asda for a can out out-of-date dog food with which to feed my kids. And let me tell you, Jack more than makes up for his finger deficiency with his willingness to bite in the clinches, so I’d rather not have to face up to him again.

Some are questioning whether the current model should change. One commenter on the Guardian article, stroppywriter, said the following: “There is disenchantment amongst writers because the editors, layout artists, distributors etc. still make a living out of the books, but the authors don’t.”
Is it fair that pretty much everybody else associated with the industry (and I would add agents to the list) makes a living, but the people they depend on to create the content that sustains them do not? Clearly the answer is ‘no’.
The alternative, however, would be for a publishing house to employ a stable of writers on a steady wage. How many writers would be prepared to do that? And what would it mean for creativity of authors who were then expected to churn out a book a year to feed the machine (which admittedly, already happens)?
I don’t see this shift happening. So, for the moment, if you want to be a traditionally published writer (or even your typical self-published writer—again, the top tier dominate the income in self-publishing) it is a model you are going to have to accept—unless, of course, you have a partner happy to support you in your creative poverty or are already fabulously wealthy.
So, I’m sorry you have to write in a garret now, Rupert. But you are still insulated from the reality the rest of us face.

How to Beat the Slush Pile #1 – Erotica

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You’ve all heard the advice about submissions to agents and publishers. Read the guidelines. Double space. Use a clear font. Be professional. Be courteous. Conform!

I say fuck that. Your standard approach is just going to earn you a slot in the wobbly slush pile, where it will fester for months underneath a thousand other novels written by other professional, courteous, conformist authors. You, dear writer, are special. Way more special than all the other special people out there. Why not show it to the publisher with a grand gesture that will inspire awe and ensure a six-figure advance?

Over the next few months, I am repeatedly going to creak open my scaly maw and reveal glistening pearls of writerly wisdom on how you can ensure your manuscript bypasses the slush pile entirely.

These amazing, and completely free, tips will be broken down by genre. First up, as you may have noticed, is erotica. I think this visualization of the moment of revelation on the editor’s part speaks for itself, although you may wish to include some hand sanitizer for whomever has to extract the document. And maybe some correcting fluid for the discoloured portions of the manuscript.

Please feel free to try this out, document the results and post them online so all the other writers out there can see just how powerful this technique is.

I wish you luck, and would like to point out that any court cases/beatings/issues with anal seepage ensuing from your decision to adopt this method are entirely your own fault.

Why Authors Shouldn’t Think Too Hard About Symbolism

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I love this story about a young student who wrote to authors asking them about their use of symbolism in their work.
What I find more often than not is that when I finish a piece of work and give it a last read, I discover many happy accidents of symbolism—which means my subconscious has been churning away and doing the work for me. Not that it particularly matters, in my view, as what I write and what somebody reads are two completely different entities.

Ray Bradbury told the student that each story is a Rorschach test, and I couldn’t agree more. People who read my work either credit me with too much intelligence or insight (something those who know me personally never do), or discredit me with far too much cynicism and downright nastiness. Always, though, these statements are made is if they are fact, which says a lot about the way every one of us is locked into our own subjective narrative of “truth”. 

Every reader (myself included) comes with their own set of experiences, assumptions and prejudices, and I believe we often approach a book with a pre-defined theory of what it is going to be about. And so, we then look for evidence to prove our theory: inflating the importance of passages or imagery that back it and conveniently ignoring those that do not. When that theory can’t be proven, it often seems to prompt a strong visceral reaction: ‘Because this book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, it is a terrible book.’ Or even worse, your symbolism is misinterpreted, as is the case with our fictional proctologist above who can only see a treatise on bowel-cancer prevention (which is a worthy goal folks, and something more authors should base thrilling plots upon) in my astounding work of literary genius.
As a reader, I try to come to a book with as few preconceived ideas about it as possible, particularly since publishers’ marketing pitches can be off kilter and lead me to expect one thing when in fact I am going to get another. With this strategy, I can judge a book for what it is, rather than for what it isn’t. But that’s just me, and even then I can completely misread a book.
Anyway, this all just goes to show that you can’t write a book with a certain set of readers in mind, because they are all individuals. Write for yourself and for the story, and let the readers make of it what they will.
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