Luc Reid

On The Willpower Engine, my blog about how self-motivation works, I've put up a new post called Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers, where I dig into some of the most effective ways a writer can keep motivated through a project. I'll be adding more writing-specific posts in the future, for instance, possibly one on troubleshooting writing motivation. Any suggestions for other motivation-related topics for writers?

There's a handy book called How to Write Funny, edited by John B. Kachuba (how could a man with a name like that not be interested in humor?), which I think was recommended to me by Eric James Stone (don't worry: he's not as reputable as he looks on his home page). What I've read of it so far is interesting and useful, but it was also a bit depressing at a certain point. In one of the pieces included, humorist James Finn Garner is quoted as saying "Anything written prior to 1960 meant to be humorous, no one reads anymore. Or am I wrong?" For a couple of days, I thought he wasn't wrong. Then a couple of exceptions occurred to me, big ones: Mark Twain on the one hand, and on the other, Shakespeare.

Knowing that there are exceptions, it makes me wonder what really makes humor stand the test of time. Maybe it's just the problem of any writing standing the test of time, amplified by the fact that so much humor is based on current ways of looking at things or current events. After all, it's not very much fiction that people are still willing to read 50 years after it's published (it's hard enough to write fiction that people will read 5 minutes after it's published).

I'd like to go ahead and make some insightful observations here about what kind of fiction stands the test of time, but honestly, so far I don't have any clear sense of it. Yet it is informative to think about these two exceptions, Twain and Shakespeare, especially since (apart from a hell of a way with words) I don't know that there's much that they have in common.

The first thing I take away is that most humor is forgettable--even very, very funny humor--and yet it is still invaluable. How wonderful is it when someone gets you to laugh? It's an obvious and magnificent gift. This tells me that regardless of whether my humor will be forgotten in a few decades or, hell, a few years, it's still worth writing strictly for the benefits it may bring today.

The second is that there are at least a few people (I'm sure there are examples other than Shakespeare and Twain) whose humor lasts. This tells me that it's worth me trying to make all of my writing--humor, serious fiction, non-fiction, and so on--meaningful enough and substantial enough to last. Whether or not it actually will last ... well, I can't count on that happening. But no one ever climbed a mountain by avoiding inclines. I think I'll try paying special attention to the inclines and try to steer my steps in that direction.

If you're interested in seeing examples of my humorous--or attemptedly humorous--writing, you could try my radio commentaries or perhaps this or this on The Daily Cabal.

For some time now, I've been doing intensive study of self-motivation, bringing together information from a variety of schools of psychology (not to mention neuroscience and physiology) to gradually understand better how people get from wishing they did a certain thing to doing it. If you're interested in the subject, check out the new site where I'm blogging my findings: The Willpower Engine.

John Brown, one of the best people I've ever met at analyzing successful writing and writerly practice, has blogged a concise and right-on-target post called Finding Your Audience (and getting paid) that does a very good job of giving the basic information you need if you've just finished something and aren't sure what to do to try to get it published.

To what John has said, I'll add a couple of related ideas that can be very helpful in keeping your writing on track:

- If you keep trying to improve your writing, you'll continue to improve forever, so no project you do will ever be perfect. Decide when the story is close to the best you can make it. Then, in the words of Pat Lundrigen, "you must DECLARE VICTORY (yes, in all caps) and send it out."

- As soon as you send one thing out, start writing something else, something you care about. This will assist you in not going insane.

I'm writing this post on an AlphaSmart 2000. "A what?" you may reasonably ask. AlphaSmarts are one of the most useful writer's tools I've ever come across. Here's a picture.


You may well be asking yourself what possible benefit a decade-old plastic word processor with a four-line calculator-style display and for the love of Pete, not even a cut-and-paste feature could possibly have for a writer. My answer to that is: "bang! You're writing."

Computer word processing programs are wonderful: don't get me wrong on that count. But they come on computers, which means that they take several minutes to start up and then load the document in question (and longer if you have a slow-booting monstrosity like many of us have), and they are absolutely bristling with distractions: games, e-mail, the Web ... honestly, how often do you start up a computer and do nothing at all apart from writing? On an AlphaSmart, writing is all you can do. You pick up your AlphaSmart, and literally two seconds later, you're staring at a the blinking cursor, ready to type.

And you can write virtually anywhere on an AlphaSmart. I've owned mine for only a week, and already I've written in a cramped airplane seat with the person in front of me leaning all the way back, held in one hand while walking down the street, in a chair with the AlphaSmart sitting on my crossed legs, in bed, on a bannister beside a restaurant door as I thought of an idea on the way out ... well, I could go on, but suffice it to say that in cramped spaces, brief windows of time, locations with no flat surface, and many other situations that would not work with a laptop, an AlphaSmart will let you write. In fact, you can use an AlphaSmart pretty much anywhere you can use a pad of paper, with the improved writing speed and electronic availability of a digital file instead of a page full of ink for your trouble.

AlphaSmarts are also easier to carry around than laptops, weighing about as much as a hardcover novel and being only about 50% larger. They're rugged, they save your work automatically, they can be turned on or off at a moment's notice, they offer eight files to switch between at the touch of a button, they run hundreds of hours on a few AA batteries, they find and spell check, and they will dump information (albeit slowly) to either a PC or a Mac. Having an AlphaSmart means that within moments of thinking "Hey, I could do some writing right now," I can actually _be_ writing. Oh, and AlphaSmart 2000's go for less than $30 used on eBay.

They're not perfect for everything. For instance, only in a special circle of Hell would a person do substantial edits on an AlphaSmart, given the slow scrolling and lack of cut and paste features (although the newer AlphaSmarts have more features, like built in typing lessons, dictionary, and thesaurus as well as cut and paste--which still would not make it a joy to edit intensively on them). Yet this isn't a complaint: AlphaSmarts, as far as I'm concerned, are for cranking out words, not for editing or any other writing-related activity that doesn't involve clattering away on the desktop-style keyboard.

You don't necessarily have to buy one of the old AlphaSmart 2000s. The newer Neo has the niftier features I mentioned while still retaining all the benefits of the older AlphaSmarts, and the Dana is essentially a Palm Pilot in the form of a big keyboard and a wide screen. For what I do with them, though, an old AlphaSmart 2000 is perfect. Even pads of paper allow you to doodle: the AlphaSmart, in a way, is the ideal object on which to just plain write.

LITTLE TECHNICAL NOTES: To transfer files between an AlphaSmart and a Mac or PC, you need to buy a cable that plugs into the computer as though the AlphaSmart were a keyboard--and in fact, an AlphaSmart can be used as a keyboard if you like. Once connected, you send the file from the AlphaSmart and have to wait while it appears on the screen as though it were being typed by a supernaturally fast typist. You can buy a special cable depending on whether you use a PC or a Mac, or you can do what I did and get a Male PS2 to Male PS2 cable and connect that to a PS2 Female to USB converter (about $16 at RadioShack, and please note that the little green kind that look like they should do the job don't work for this purpose). This allows you to plug your AlphaSmart into either a Mac or a PC, as you like. Or, if you have an infrared-capable AlphaSmart and your computer has an infrared port (it looks like a little black plastic window), you can send information back and forth to the AlphaSmart by infrared, skipping the cable altogether.

I'm a member of the Daily Cabal. Here's a brief blurb about our Friday the 13th accomplishment:

Cabal of Science Fiction Writers Posts 500th Daily Story

Friday the 13th of February, 2009, a group of 13 science fiction and fantasy writers called The Daily Cabal posted its 500th story online. The Daily Cabal has posted a free, previously unpublished story of 400 words or less every weekday without interruption since it launched on March 26th, 2007.

Most Cabal stories are either science fiction or fantasy. Recent stories include "The Tungsten Lama’s Weekly Webinar," "Hollywood Goddess," "In the Elevator with Albert Einstein," and "Math for Witches."

The Cabal is the brainchild of writer Rudi Dornemann and writer and editor Jeremiah Tolbert. Its members are responsible for scores of professionally published stories in addition to books, articles, and poetry. All 500 Cabal stories published to date are available on the Cabal Web site at www.dailycabal.com , and the group can also be found on Facebook.

---

May I just say what a surreal thing it is to be part of a small group who have collectively written 500 stories (albeit very short ones)? That number makes my mind reel.

How many of the stories are mine? 81. I'm hoping I've learned some things, and I'll find out soon whether or not I did, since I plan to go on a story submission jag starting this weekend, making use of some of my massive inventory of work (which does not include the 81 Cabal stories, which I consider already published).

Interesting: the Kindle 2, just announced by Amazon, has a feature I didn't even think of: text-to-speech. Having heard a brief sample, it doesn't sound too bad for synthetic speech, and it would mean that any book I buy as an electronic book would automatically be a sort of poor man's audiobook as well, with the advantage over audiobooks that I could switch back and forth between reading and listening as I liked. It's still not nearly enough to make me think I can spare $359 for one, but it's enough that if I had money to burn, I'd certainly consider burning it on a Kindle 2.

I've appreciated the varied and interesting replies to my last post about writing and Digital Rights Management ("DRM"), which have brought up some of the most difficult questions about this idea that I'm putting forward, that in order for writers to be able to get paid, DRM on eBooks (that is, built-in ways to prevent or at least hinder free copying) is necessary. The responses haven't had the effect so far of convincing me that DRM is a bad idea for eBooks, but it has made me think of what might be a workable solution.

First, let me say that I'm looking at all of this as both a writer and a reader. As a reader, I want to be able to buy a book once and read it forever; I don't want technical problems to threaten my library; and I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to read something I've already paid for. As a writer, one who has made a few decent sales (including one non-fiction book) and who hopes eventually to make a living from writing books--something that's currently very difficult, but not impossible--I want to be sure that there's a way for me to sell my books and that whatever structure is in place to get me paid, it works well enough that I can afford to devote a lot of time and energy to writing those books.

From a reader's perspective, traditional DRM doesn't seem important. The only major advantage for the reader is that maybe if writers are getting paid properly, there will be more good books out there--but from the reader's perspective, that probably doesn't seem very pressing. This post suggests an additional advantage DRM could offer readers.

Of course there are hardware manufacturers and publishers and especially electronic retailers involved here, too, but their concerns all have to do with getting the writer's work to the reader, so let's concentrate on just the readers and the writers for now.

In general, the biggest argument against DRM seems to be that it provides positive things for the seller but only negative things to the buyer. Here's a DRM proposal that actually helps the buyer, while taking away some of the biggest nuisances. I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with it. It's account-based DRM.

What I mean by "account-based" is that when a person buys a book, that person gets a permanent license to read that book on any eReader device they own, from a smart phone to a dedicated eReader to, who knows, their wide-screen TV with a little black box attachment. Computers might or might not be included; that would be mainly a technical issue.

This "account-based" idea is different from what's usually talked about when people talk about eReader DRM, which is "device-based." That is, much of the thinking about DRM has been that when I buy a book, I get to read it on the particular device I bought it for and nowhere else.

With account-based DRM, each device would be registered to a particular person, and one person could have multiple devices. The books the person buys would be stored on the electronic merchant's servers, so that the devices don't have to keep the books in memory, and any book I've already bought can immediately be downloaded to any device I own, or all of the devices I own. Here are the advantages over device-based DRM:

- If my eReader gets lost, stolen, broken, or upgraded, I immediately have all of my books available on my replacement reader. This is an improvement on both physical books and on eBooks that are freely copiable once purchased: I always have a free backup available of my entire library, with no effort required on my part.
- If I like to read on multiple devices, there's no barrier: I can immediately download and read the same book on as many devices as I own
- There's no danger of me losing my library because of problems with my reader (although of course we have to be able to have confidence in the retailer)
- If I sell a device, resetting the account on the device means I'm not selling all my books, too. These devices would have to be built so that changing the account on the device would erase or lock all of the books that were bought on another account.

And of course DRM would only apply to books that aren't in the public domain: the complete works of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and the biography of Ben Franklin and the Tao Te Ching (in older translations) could be made freely available to everyone at no charge.

There's also no reason account-based DRM can't exist alongside shareware-style books, books that can be downloaded for free and that readers can pay for if they want to contribute.

And not every book has to be handled by the same kind of DRM. For instance, one commenter pointed out that technical computer books are often most useful to read directly on a computer. If account-based DRM couldn't be reliably set up on computers, that might suggest that those kinds of books would need a different model; I'm sure there are other examples. Yet for the great majority of books, account-based DRM could work very well.

Obviously this approach isn't perfect: no approach to this very complicated and multi-sided problem is. Any kind of DRM can be hacked, for instance, but it's worth noting that people are much more likely to pass around things they can easily copy themselves than to retrieve hacked versions of things. We see this with software, where many consumers are willing to borrow a friend's installation CD but aren't willing to download hacked software from a pirate site (while other users will happily used hacked software).

And there's potential for readers getting around the DRM in other ways, for instance two friends always buying books in one's name and having both their eReaders registered to that person. Of course, if they ever terminate this arrangement, one of them loses every book they've bought. And so on. Yet compared to no DRM at all, the potential for abuse is very small.

There's even a further step that might not be workable, but that's very tantalizing: transferrable, account-based DRM. With such a system, every eReader would need to be able to check in regularly with the network, perhaps every time it opened a DRM-enabled book, or perhaps just every time they connected for another purpose, like to download a new book. In compensation for this pain in the neck, readers would be able to transfer ownership of eBooks, so that you could loan or give a friend a book you've read in exactly the same way you can with a physical book. If I'm giving you a book, the check-ins with the network are necessary to ensure that book is removed from my eReaders when it's transferred over to yours; otherwise I could just "give" the book away and yet keep it on my eReader, which is no DRM at all.

What might be ideal is to offer most books as either transferrable or not, and the buyer would get to choose which kind of DRM they preferred. If the book were not bought as transferrable, then the eReaders wouldn't have to get "permission" from the network to view the book, ever. If the buyer wanted to be able to transfer the book, then they could opt into the network check process and have the right to loan, give away, or perhaps even sell their used eBook.

All of this assumes a certain eBook retailing structure and certain kinds of hardware and software--all of which would be pretty easy to adopt, especially at this early stage. Account-based DRM offers much more flexibility than device-based DRM and offers more benefits to the reader than it does nuisances. And unlike no-DRM solutions, it provides a clear and workable path for writers to get paid along the lines of paper books, which means writers can afford to devote more time and energy to writing good books, which then benefits the readers.

In fact, a sound enough DRM system could ensure that writers get paid more for books while readers pay less--even while publishers and electronic retailers are getting their fair share. The real revolution in electronic books has less to do with convenience and markets than it does with simple economics. When the costs of printing, shipping, and returning paper books vanish, the economics of bookselling, which has been a tricky business for decades now, become much simpler, fairer, cheaper, and more lucrative to everyone involved. The only people who lose out are paper mills, printers, and logging companies, and honestly, there will always be buggy whip makers going out of business as new technologies move forward. But now I'm just preaching the glories of life in the information age, which is a topic most of us have settled our minds on long ago.

There's a lot to say about the future of books (and other kinds of writing) on electronic readers. John Siracusa gives a lot of useful background and insight in this article, including the interesting observation that the iPod is an electronic reader waiting to happen (the hardware and software are all ready; only the selling model and a decision from Apple to enter into the line of business are needed). The Kindle also seems to surviving, even though it's not exactly taking the world by storm.

But this post is about digital rights management (DRM) for books (not for short fiction, articles, etc.: that's another topic). As far as books is concerned, DRM controls this question: as electronic readers become more and more common, will people be able to share books with friends for free, or will each reader have to buy their own book?

The implications for writers and publishers (who have other things to worry about, such as whether someone else will swoop in and become the gatekeeper of book popularity as the business changes) are pretty huge. If books can be copied freely and immediately, will anyone even be able to make a living writing books? After all, it seems to be the case that any time anything valuable can be copied, regardless of legality, a large number of people do actually copy it.

"Oh pshaw," you may reasonably say. "Music has been digital for years now, and musicians are still able to make a living." Siracusa makes a partly music-based argument about DRM for electronic books, saying that it is inconvenient for legitimate consumers, that the content is easily pirated, and that anyway DRM has been proven to be untenable in the digital music market.

It's true that the digital music revolution is the closest thing we have to a preview of the digital book revolution, but there are some things that are fundamentally different between music and books, and it seems clear to me that these exact differences spell out why DRM doesn't work for music but is crucial for electronic books.

1. Musicians can make a living even if they give their recorded music away. Writers can't.
Yes, it appears that as digital music and unrestrained copying take over the market, musicians in many cases are no longer going to make as much money selling their recordings: it's just too darn easy to get a copy of the recording from a friend who already has it. Interestingly, this isn't all bad news: yes, it's decreased income from sale of recordings, but it's also increased exposure for the musicians involved, who can thereby draw larger audience to their performances. In other words, small- to medium-scale musical acts will make their money the way they always have, by performing.

Writers can't perform. All we have are the books. If those are free, we don't get paid. If we don't get paid, we have to take other jobs, which leaves us much less time to write, which not only limits the amount of work we can sell, but also how good we get. The way you get better at writing is by writing a lot and challenging yourself. Doing much less of that means less good writing gets out there.

Of course, writers would make something even if books could be freely copied. The problem is that writing is already an extremely difficult way to make a living, and cutting out a significant amount of a writer's income could easily make the difference between being able to write full-time or not.

By the way, I'm not addressing the question here of whether writers might somehow sell more books by making their work freely copiable. I'm very skeptical about the idea, but if it did somehow work that way, that would certainly be a meaningful argument against DRM for eBooks.

2. Music by its nature is always copiable--but books don't need to be.
Yes, we've always had the ability to copy books with photocopiers, and these days we can use scanners and OCR to "steal" books and recirculate them--but hardly anyone does, because it's a huge pain in the butt, whereas illegally copied music is everywhere. One reason for this is that all you have to do to copy music is to plug a recording device into the audio output--and virtually every audio device has some kind of output, if only for headphones.

Not so with books. The electronic readers don't have to output books anywhere, so they don't have to be copiable at all--not even with scanners, unless you can make a good scan of a long succession of Kindle screens.

The Achilles Heel of DRM for music has always been that there are very easy ways to get around it, and have been since the introduction of cassette tapes. Electronic books, if delivered to specific electronic readers, don't have to have this vulnerability: electronic readers do not need to output anything anywhere except to their own screen. DRM for electronic books could actually stick.

3. People want to listen to music on a variety of devices, but don't need to read from a variety of devices.
When I buy a CD, I will sometimes want to listen to it on my computer, sometimes in my car, sometimes on a boom box or stereo elsewhere in the house, and sometimes on a portable device, with headphones. Music needs to be copiable or portable so that I can listen to my music wherever I need to, whether that's on a set of headphones while riding the subway or over a set of huge speakers while throwing a party. True, iPod docking can get around this for some situations, but it's unlikely that listeners will be willing to adopt the iPod docking approach for every single music device they own.

With books, by contrast, we're used to them being discrete objects that we always read in one place. We don't have the changes in scale that we have with music: we don't need tiny type to read in the subway and huge type to read at parties. Reading things off the computer screen provides few advantages over reading something off an adequately-sized electronic reader while sitting at the computer. If I buy an electronic book, I'd be perfectly satisfied to be able to read it only from one device, because I would be very unlikely to use more than one electronic reader device (unless people take to using larger readers like the Kindle in the main and smaller readers like an iPhone while on the go, which is admittedly a possibility). Therefore there's no major, pressing reason for a license to read a book to be something portable that can be transferred from one device to another.

One potential wrinkle has to do with buying new electronic readers. What if I buy a Kindle tomorrow but want to trade it in for a new iReader in 2012? That's clearly a problem, but not an insurmountable one. It may just be that my older books will stay on my Kindle and my newer books will go on the iReader. There could be other solutions (for instance, a means to register the new device with the new seller and get a new download of already-purchased books after a verified erase of the books from the old device). This is a problem worth pausing over, but it's not the kind of thing that kills an industry.

To clarify a fine point, let me quote from Siracusa's article, in which he says "The consumer ... is the intended recipient of the 'message,' whether it be a song or a video or text. He must be given all the tools required to decrypt and consume the information!"

Siracusa here is thinking of the music model, where the consumer has multiple devices where the music will need to go. If we free ourselves from that model and think of an eBook sale as a license to read a book on one specific device, then we realize that it's not the consumer, but rather the consumer's eReader that needs the decryption tools.

I'm not implying that electronic books would be immune to piracy, but the simple fact is that most of us will not be hacking hardware to get free books.

Recent reading and discussion have brought me to the strong conviction that regular, deliberate writing practice is key to becoming a brilliant writer--even for those of us who have achieved at least a little success already. I'm sure I'll have a post (or half a dozen) on this subject soon, but for now if you don't mind taking that as given, there's another question that comes up very quickly for any committed writer: how can we get in regular practice writing when it's already hard to squeeze in time for actual writing projects?

One way to do this was brought up by John Brown, who shares my enthusiasm for analyzing what makes writing work: he recommended doing writing practice when not writing. For instance, I could be breaking down the structure of a book or movie in my head while driving or doing dishes.

In addition to this very good idea, I came up with three other possible approaches. Here they are.

USING EXERCISES TO BOOST PRODUCTION
First, I wonder if some exercises can't be used in two ways to boost production, namely

1) Helping break through temporary holdups, and
2) Revving the writerly engine.

By breaking through writerly holdups, I'm thinking of the kinds of writing problems that get me off track, prevent me from writing usable material going forward in a project, or stop me cold. Examples of this would be things like not being able to write particular love scene convincingly enough or feeling that a particular plot point isn't working.

My idea here--an untested one--is that it might temporarily be worthwhile to work on the kind of problem I'm having rather than the specific problem I'm having. For instance, if I'm having a problem figuring out how my protagonist gets from point A to point B, I might give myself an exercise of "Write 10 thumbnail sketches of chapters in which some character inadvertently gets himself or herself moved from one place to another."

Then I would scribble out a few sentences of an idea about the Pope stowing away in a bread truck to avoid a situation which would publicly humiliate some other person, a few more about a teacher accidentally going on the wrong field trip, a few more about a son getting a letter from his mother on her deathbed in a distant country when he hasn't seen her for 20 years, etc. By the time I'm done, maybe the problem will have jarred loose, or maybe I'll have accidentally come up with a solution to it, or maybe I'll just be in the best frame of mind to solve it. And even if not, at least it's making productive use of my writing time rather than encouraging me to think about how much I need to wash the dishes or check my e-mail.

In terms of revving up the writerly engine, I'm wondering if it might be helpful to get into the groove for the writing day by looking at the most difficult or most appealing or most unfamiliar writing problem you're seeing in front of you and designing an exercise for that. For instance, if I'm about to write a chapter in which a lot of characters are talking at once, I could design an exercise where I do five different dialogs, the first one with four people and adding one each time.

Alternatively, I could do an exercise that's specific to my project, for instance coming up with ten probing questions and "asking" my protagonist (as of that point in the story) about them.

If you try it, let me know how it goes for you! I expect to try it myself soon.

Ideally, it seems that repetitive practice, since it's easy to jump into, could be a good mechanism for claiming writing time that otherwise might be avoided or start slowly.

METACOGNITION WHILE WRITING
One completely different approach is to keep some of my attention on my own writing process (that is, to use "metacognition," which is to say thinking about my own thought processes). Are there difficult problems I'm avoiding? Where is my interest strongest? How am I making my decisions? I know it sounds very distracting and effortful, but Geoff Colvin talks about it in Talent is Overrated, and this self-examination while things are in progress turns out to be a widely-used technique among top performers across fields, probably because there are certain things we can't really practice outside of actually doing a project, and it's not deliberate practice unless we're thinking about what we're doing. On the other hand, I'm sure it won't appeal to everyone.

PRACTICING IN DAILY LIFE
Yet another approach is to try hard to make other activities into writing practice. For instance, I'm working much harder these days to write my forum posts as clearly and familiarly as I would want to write nonfiction books. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes not, but it's excellent practice for me, and if successful will improve both my non-fiction writing and my posting skills. The same thing could be done with imagery in conversation or with reconstructing dialog in e-mails. John mentioned a rich opportunity of this kind for parents: making up bedtime stories.

The biggest obstacle for me in this kind of practice is laziness: because I can write e-mails without paying much attention to expression or organization, I often do, and I think that this is a lost opportunity for my non-fiction writing, just as leaving out description and metaphor from e-mails and conversation are a lost opportunity for my fiction.

*

If none of these approaches prevents practice from consuming your writing production time, it might just be that writing practice is best for times when you can't bear to work on your big project, or need a change of pace, or don't have anything due.

Predictions about how quickly new technologies will become popular--or whether they'll become popular at all--are notoriously unreliable, but seeing how electronic readers should within a few years be cheaper than $100 and as convenient and comfortable to read as regular books, it seems very likely that their convenience and the much cheaper price of electronic books compared to physical books will make electronic readers very widespread within 15 years--and maybe sooner.

After all, cell phone users went from 3% of U.S. households to about 60% in just ten years. Average consumers won't begin to become aware of electronic readers until they're already on a precipitous rise. Popular new technologies are typically adopted very quickly (see http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2008/02/18/adoption-of-new-technology-since-1900/ ) once the right conditions are reached.

But I don't see any reason why electronic readers should put publishers out of business. Certainly they will with some publishers, whichever ones are bad at adapting to the new market conditions, but they may be the savior of others, when suddenly the huge expenses of returns, paper, printing, and transportation vanish. We might still be getting most of our books from Borders and Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and they might be published by the same publishers, but they would have an electronic delivery model (in addition to print runs, though much smaller than current ones, for more popular books).

Because publishers are not just distribution organizations: very importantly, they are the ones who pick the work worth reading (not to mention marketers with distribution connections). There is far more material out there written than anyone could ever possibly want to read, and finding the stuff that really appeals to a lot of people is exactly what publishers try to be good at. Doing that takes a lot of work in sifting through talent and manuscripts, and it takes understanding of the industry.

With that said, I think there will be many opportunities for new star players in publishing once electronic readers are adopted widely, even one-person publishing houses (run by individuals who are very talented at discovering top notch books through slush or other means). Marketing and connections are not essential in a business where word of mouth is king.

And since distribution will become less important, the emphasis will be more on finding the gems, which suggests that that process will become streamlined. It may be that in future writers will do as actors do, and post book proposals on Web sites where potential publishers can sift through a massive central store of work with powerful electronic tools. This may mean an end to the "push" model of sending books out to publishers and change to a "pull" model of publishers seeking out books from a small number of sites that feature these projects. It also may pose a serious threat to the agent's role in this work, although of course a good agent does much more than get your book in front of the right editor--and even with a "pull" model, there may still be effective "pushing" from agents.

As electronic publishing ascends, though, there will be many, many more things published, and people will increasingly rely on pundits, social networks, and proven sources to help them find what they want. Which is why we who are writing now are lucky: we have a last chance over the next few years to make names for ourselves so that by the time electronic readers predominate, we already have a following and rise above the vast, shallow ocean of available products through our following and proven accomplishments.

More good news: I think there's every reason to expect that electronic readers will result in an increase in reading. Currently radio, ipods, television, and some movies have a huge advantage over reading in that they can be obtained on demand: if I'm at home and want to get the latest Paul Simon "album," I can have it within minutes. There are thousands of movies on Netflix that I can be watching in hardly more time than it would take to insert a DVD, and if my cable were plugged in, I could watch TV at any moment with one button push. By contrast, if I want a book, I have to order it from Amazon or go to a physical bookstore, unless I have a Kindle or something similar. How much cooler would it be for writers if I were having a casual conversation with someone on the train at the beginning of a 30-minute commute when someone mentions James Maxey's latest book with enthusiasm, and I can immediately purchase the book electronically (for much less than a paper book would cost) and begin reading it?

That's the other thing: in addition to instant access to books, electronic readers will also give us hugely reduced prices (eventually), because there are no costs for paper costs, printing, transportation, returns, stocking, floor space, etc.

Of course, this is awful news for brick-and-mortar bookstores, but publishers have a great opportunity, and it's very good news for writers--provided piracy can be kept in check.

We don't necessarily need to include plots in our stories. Some literary fiction has no plot and does fine, for instance. Vignettes don't have plots. Stories can be a tour of a fascinating place, or can delve deeply into character without really following a plot.

Of course, if we're writing mainstream or genre fiction instead of literary fiction, we may find that no one will buy--and few people will read--a story that doesn't have a plot. So here I'll suggest a definition of what a plot actually is, and lay out what I've learned so far about putting one together. Many thanks to friends who recently posed this question in a clear enough way that I realized I needed to think it out.

Caption per Mary Robinette Kowal, while critiquing an otherwise excellent story; photo stolen from http://www.bestweekever.tv/

My fellow Codexian David Walton has for some time maintained an extensive and beautifully-organized "Grand Index of SF Writing Advice." Don't let the title fool you: while there are plenty of articles listed there that deal specifically with fantasy and science fiction, most of the articles are hard-core, nuts-and-bolts, down-and-dirty, nitty-gritty, tried-and-true, generalized writing advice. (Sorry, I ran out of hyphenated descriptors there at the end: I had to stop at five.)

The articles David lists are from well-known genre fiction writers (Orson Scott Card, David Brin, Robert J. Sawyer, Mary Soon Lee, etc.), agents, editors, and a sprinkling of upstart neo-pros like myself and John Brown. They cover writing techniques, basic questions, the writing life, the business of writing, ideas, and a variety of other areas. Highly recommended stuff, especially if you're having a particular problem or question (can't come up with a good title, want to know how to write a query letter, etc.).

In an earlier entry, I talked about characteristics that might make a story rise above other stories, that make it stand out. To sum up that entry: really effective writing doesn't just do the job well, it also offers experiences that the reader craves and doesn't get elsewhere.

That craving part is the key in this entry. A good story is compelling; we already know that. Once you start reading, you're so wrapped up in the characters or problems or experience that you don't want to stop. But recently I'm coming to think consciously also about a story being attractive.

Here's what I mean: what would you say to a really well-written story with sympathetic characters, about a plumber trying to get enough customers to stay in business? Let's pretend that this hypothetical story is well-written in every respect: the characters are interesting and believable, the plumber's plight in trying to earn enough money to keep his family from falling apart constitutes meaningful stakes, the description is sharp and evocative ... still not interested? Well, maybe you are (in which case, it's a bad example), but I'm not. This might be a story that, after you've read the first 1,000 words, you can't put down because you've gotten so involved with the characters, but where it might fail is in getting you to start reading it in the first place, and then once you've read it in having delivered such a singular experience that you recommend it to all your friends. Because even if the story keeps you interested, who wants to spend their time wallowing in a plumber's financial woes? (Someone, surely, but not many people.) 

So the thing that's lacking in that hypothetically brilliantly-written story is the element of the attractive. The story needs to offer something that readers know they want. 

It might be wish-fulfillment: a down-on-his-luck plumber comes up with a new kind of faucet that makes him a millionaire overnight.
It might be a certain emotional experience: A plumber who has become cold-hearted from years with a badly-suited wife begins to remember what made life worth living for him when he befriends a deaf teenager. 

Or it might be a mystery or a puzzle: A plumber whose business is on the verge of failing finds a human finger in a customer's drain pipe, and has to figure out who the murderer is and who the victim is before the murderer realizes what he knows.

It might even be an entertaining voice, or a setting that makes people happy, or any of a number of other things.

How is this different from what I was saying in my earlier entry? The earlier entry was about what makes your story not just good, but remarkable. This entry is about what makes your story not just remarkable, but attractive. 

So a lot of things that can make a story remarkable can serve as an attractive element, but not everything that's remarkable is necessarily attractive, and not everything that's attractive to you is necessarily attractive to a wide range of readers.

The test for an attractive element is to imagine a casual reader getting a friend interested in the story. If someone were enthusing about the story to a friend, what would they realistically have to enthuse about? This is similar to a logline, a one-line movie pitch, but it's not about summarizing the story; it's about summarizing what makes the story worth reading. Here are some examples: 

"I just read this story about this plumber, and the character kept saying these crazy things ... it made me laugh so hard I almost threw up."

or 

"I read this beautiful story ... it's really painful at the beginning, but by the end I felt so uplifted I was practically dancing." 

or 

"Hey, you have to read this story I read about this plumber who finds a finger in a drain, and there's this complete murderfest going on, and he has to be like, this detective to find out who's doing it before they kill him and chop him up and, like, shove him down a drain. It's really gross, but it also like, makes you completely tense and paranoid until you get to the end." 

Probably not all of these appeal to you, but I hope that even if the examples fall short, the point is making it across: if you can't realistically imagine someone getting another friend excited about the story with a simple explanation of what they liked, then maybe there is no attractive element to your story.

You might notice the similarity of these enthusiastic recommendations to cover blurbs, and this is not coincidence: cover blurbs are an attempt to simulate a recommendation from a friend by having a (one hopes) well-known and revered person enthusing about your story on the cover of the book. There are few things that can sell a book or get a reader to read a story as well as having someone whose taste you trust recommend it to you with a reason you find meaningful.

There are some attractive elements over which you have no control. For example, a really good picture of a vampire on the cover is enough to sell a book to some readers, but very often authors have no control over the presentation of the book. Having the following as an author is also sometimes enough in itself to sell a book (think Stephen King or John Grisham), but for your name to have that effect, you have to attract a lot of readers and please them in the first place.

The attractive element is particularly hard to find because if you get someone to actually read your story, they may find that they like it a lot, that it's really good. But since you're putting your story in their hand and they're reading it because you wrote it and gave it to them, they aren't like normal readers. Normal readers might give your book or story a second or two of consideration, and if they don't find something that they really want, they will generally just move on. If your story has an attractive element that appeals to them, and if they get some glimpse of that attractive element, there's a good chance you will have snared them and get them to read the story, which if it follows through on its promises and is compelling, might get them to start telling their friends.