Richard Koman Fiction Book Coach

09/14/2024

https://richardkoman.medium.com/theyre-eating-dogs-811ede632463

09/14/2024

09/01/2024

After a wonderful day in SF, we finished at Greens Restaurant!

09/29/2023

It’s important to realize that publishing has changed. Traditional publishing has gotten much more difficult and many agents no longer edit. The editor you are assigned may not be the best editor for you. The marketplace is more difficult, too. Book sales are down for both traditional and self-published books. Your book must really shine. And a developmental editor can help with that.

Bestselling and award-winning author Caroline Leavitt shares why it's okay to hire a developmental editor and not keep it a secret, including how developmental editors help a manuscript shine, where to find them, and more.

09/15/2023

Don't know if anyone wants to go down this rabbit hole with me, but I’ve been watching this Yale course on YouTube — The American Novel Since 1945 taught by Prof. Amy Hungerford. If you’re as much as a lit geek as me (or at least I want to be), here’s the intro lecture to get started.

An occasional foray into the study of literature

09/12/2023

There are four million books published every year. Obviously, the vast, vast, vast majority of them are self-published. And the vast majority have those have zero or near-zero sales.

Obviously.

Well, why would you expect any different?

In a piece titled, The Reason Your Self-Published Book Will Fail, online writing teacher Tim Denning says:

"It feels like everyone’s secret life goal is to publish a book.

"People get so romantic about the idea. “One day I’m going to grow up and write a book on the topic.” We even think the book might become a screenplay or get mentioned by Harvard University in a study.

"These fantasies are so ridiculous for someone like me who works in the industry.

Only if you build an audience will they come

09/09/2023

Putting constraints on your writing can magically make your voice come into focus. Try writing without adjectives (you already avoid adverbs, I'm sure.) Here's a more complex constraint from the great writer George Saunders. I took a few cracks at this and it is pretty fun.

The exercise: Write exactly 200 words using only 50 unique words. (Here's a little app to keep you honest: https://first-fifty.vercel.app/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

George says:

“Why does this exercise work? I’m not sure. The constraints have something to do with it (the 50-word limit and the exacting — 200, not 199, not 201 — word count). When a person is doing this exercise, her attention is on those constraints, which means she’s approaching things differently than she normally would. The part of her mind that would usually be thinking about her themes or preserving her style or the piece’s goal or her politics is being kept busy counting words. Which allows another part of her mind to step forward, a less conscious, more playful part.”

So here's one of my efforts. Would love to see yours!

Unsung hero that he was, he could not shrink from the challenge. Would
not have wanted to since to do so would have demolished his sense of himself. His self belief was forged in one beautiful play, a diving grab at the third base line which ended the rally, leaving them loaded and won the game.

Would that he could have ended his pursuit then. That men would have belief in the line he wanted forged. One third of himself was at play and one third in pursuit and one third ended in himself, stranding a beautiful unsung challenge. From the base to the self, he, himself, was diving in, leaving a beautiful belief he could have demolished — which would have forged them in pursuit of the unsung game.

Ended, forged, demolished, he was leaving, loaded, diving, one play, one game, one rally, not a hero, not beautiful, not himself, not of men, one self, one sense, so wanted, so beautiful — since not one of them could shrink from the grab which was, to them, his one pursuit of belief, of himself.

He would play at the game, himself at third base, and he could play, wanted, himself, a hero.

08/03/2023

https://open.substack.com/pub/magicnovel/p/stop-writing-like-a-writer?r=2ne796&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post