Yesterday I spent the morning playing tourist in Asti, and the afternoon at the Turin Book Fair, where I occupied a chair in the Acheron Books booth. With my brother we had decided to treat the day as a vacation, and it was like that. Granted, today I am voiceless and we had to take a quick jaunt to the triage unit of the local hospital, but that’s nothing serious, and we’ll survive and grow stronger.
The morning in Asti was fun and relaxing – it being market day the place was busy and yet relaxed. We got there at 8 am, and we enjoyed the center of town while most people was still sleeping.
I have often written in the past about the impact that the first series of Mobile Suit Gundam had on my generation and on me in particular. I think the best evidence of how much it impacted me is the fact that I am still watching the cartoons – no longer as a start-struck teenager, not as an otaku (I never was that), but with an eye to narrative structure, themes, character arcs, patterns. It was a story with a large cast, that mixed action and politics, high tech and melodrama, and that maybe for the first time (certainly for the first time for me) portrayed war as something traumatic instead of romantic.
And a few minutes ago I was discussing with my brother how much I’d like to be able to collect the whole run of the Mobil Suit Gundam: The Origin manga, that has been published in a dozen high-quality hardbacks in English a few years ago. It would be like starting a mortgage, and I already have one pending, so I am quite reluctant, as you can imagine. And talking of mortgages, buying the whole run would mean spending exactly as a monthly payment for my house mortgage.
Therefore, no. Not straight away, at least. Not in one go. But…
There’s a discussion going, on a friend’s Facebook profile, about how Pay What You Want (PWYW) offers don’t work in Italy. The punters will simply get the stuff for free, because that is what everybody wants to pay. Someone comments that PWYW never worked anyway, and brings the example of that Stephen King novel that was released in 2000, and was a total failure.
I am not a Stephen King fan, but I remembered the thing from 2000, the ill-fated serial novel The Plant, so I went and checked a few numbers – and indeed, Stephen King’s PWYW experiment made him a meager 470.000 dollars. Total failure, right? The novel was never completed, and that is indeed a failure for a novelist (the rule is “thou shalt finish what thou start”) but the reader response was good: 70/75% of the people that downloaded the installments paid the suggested price of 1 buck or more. The Pay What You Want model worked.
I collect books about writing. I have at this point over 120 different titles on the subject, many in digital form, many in hard copy. Some of them are more useful than others, some of them are more entertaining than others, some of them I like better than others, each and everyone contains at least a little nugget of something that (I hope) helped me get better at the craft. I don’t think you can learn everything from a handbook, but maybe from a few dozens of them you’ll get enough tools to put together your own toolbox.
This morning I learned about the Humble Book Bundle “Write like a Writer”, and I happily shelled out 80 eurocents for the basic tier of the offer. The basic level includes a book I already own and that I highly recommend, The Tao of Writing, by Ralph L. Wahlstrom. This title alone is worth the expense. The rest is a selection of interesting How To books covering a few topics I am not very familiar with (like screenwriting) and a few I am familiar with (like writing non-fiction) that might still improve with the addition of new information.
Anyone willing to pay the full 15 bucks for the complete set will end up with 26 writing handbooks, and at that point they’ll have to chose whether to read or to write, but that’s always the problem, isn’t it?
Part of the money spent on the bundle goes to the National Coalition Against Censorship, and I think that’s a good thing, too.
I usually say originality is overestimated. I even write a series of articles in an Italian webzine that use that bit as a catchphrase. Being original is important, but you can’t copyright ideas – in the end what counts is not what ideas you rub together to spark a story, but how you use those sparks. What you do with the ideas, where you go with them, where you drag the reader and how. That’s what’s got to be original – the execution.
I just posted an article – in the Nuts & Bolts series – on my Patreon about ideas and themes – where to find them, how to use them. I’ll have to expand that piece, but it’s a start. And what happens when you don’t have original ideas? You use what’s at hand. You steal, borrow, recycle. It’s allowed – there’s a book in the best-seller list, quite good, called Steal Like an Artist. It’s quite good.
“Call me a science fiction writer, I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail your pet’s head to a coffee table. I’ll hit you so hard your ancestors will die. I’ll punch you so hard your grandmother will bleed. I’m a writer. There’s no adjective in front of it. I’m just a writer.”
Karavansara 