Before we listened to radio on our iPhones and iPods (and Zunes?), before we listened to our music on Pandora, internet radio, satellite radio, and genius playlists, before there were music stations on our cable and satellite television, there was radio.

You might not listen to radio except to catch the weather, traffic, news, talk, or a game now and then.

There’s little reason to listen to most radio stations any more because they all sound the same and the amount of local programming continues to shrink.

At one time there was a rule that you could only own a handful of AM, FM, and television stations. There weren’t these big chains that own a ton of stations nationwide and a block of stations in one market. In the old days it was a big deal if a company had both an AM and an FM station.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What’s on the radio has changed, but one of the bigger changes has been in the devices we listen to it on.

In the old days there was a dial. You know like the theme song from the TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati” says “up and down the dial.”

You would tune into a station by rotating the dial until you got close and then slowly turning the dial until it sounded clearer while pointing the antenna in the right direction for better reception.

In those days, it was harder to flip between radio stations and that meant that radio stations were programmed differently. If I could get you to go to bed with our station then chances were you would wake up with us in the morning. So stations that ran baseball or basketball games at night knew that a big portion of their audience would wake up with the morning show. If I was a progressive rock station I might do commercial free complete album sides at ten so you’d wake up with my morning team.

The morning team would give you some reason between 7 and 7:40 to tune back in between 9 and 10 because if I could get you to tune in at the beginning of your work day then I might keep you all day at work.

For the restless who were spinning the dial every time there were ads or news, I wanted to be the first station back into music so as you rolled by my station we would reach out to you.

You know what changed everything?

Radio buttons.

Some stations adapted. Some stations stopped giving approximate dial locations like 101 and replaced them with the more digitally correct 100.7. These stations knew that listeners had buttons for them and for their closest competitor so the way they programmed changed.

The world is changing. Are you changing with it or are you still spinning dials in a push button world?

Three years ago I was editing for a technical publisher and launching a new series that was very special to me that focused on the other side of their lives. NaNoWriMo was coming up so I tied myself to their coat tails and encouraged people who didn’t want to write a novel to try a non-fiction book.

I said then, and I say now, the point of the exercise is for you to have a dedicated period in which to find out if you can write that book you’ve always wanted to write. The point is not to get published. If you want to get published, that’s great. But the mark of whether or not you are successful this month is simple:

Did you put words on a page?

At the end of the month you’ll know more about yourself. Each day this month you need to take some time to write. Some days the pages will pour out of you and some days it will be a struggle.

When I started this project as PragProWriMo I wrote:

“You’ll have a pile of pages or you won’t.

“On one hand, if you don’t, then you are one of the many people who wants to have written a book but doesn’t want to write a book. There’s nothing wrong with that. In a month you’ll know if that describes you or not.

“On the other hand, you might find that you love writing. You’ve got something to say and you love the hard work it takes to craft words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into passages that people want to read. Then you are meant to write a book. You won’t be able to stop. You still might not be able to publish your book, but that doesn’t keep you from being an author who has written a book.

“In between those two hands are the vast majority of us. We write when the planets align. We have blogs but weeks or months might pass between our posts. We can participate in this month of writing by posting a solid blog entry every day for the month of December. Then we might go back to the once in a while or we might continue.”

I’m going to work on a short technical book this month. It’s a proof-of-concept for a series I’ve been talking about starting for almost a year. I was just in the process of putting it off again because I have an book on iOS programming I’m writing for someone as well as other projects in progress — but I’m up for embracing this time-boxed month long sprint.

Join me.

On the other hand, I see an awful lot of whining online about things that the poster considers a FAIL that doesn’t seem to be that bad at all.

Last night I got involved with someone discussing something they were just incensed about. Yes – I know better – I just couldn’t help myself. I’ll consider that a “FAIL” on my part.

This person was upset that local television station had moved their coverage of the US Open from channel 19 to channel 43. “FAIL” he posted.

Really? Both channels are free broadcast channels owned by the same company. If you can get one channel you can get the other. So I tweeted back to the complainer and asked how it was a FAIL.

He explained to me that this was a big event with a world-wide audience and millions and millions of dollars involved. He was absolutely right. Though this might not matter to our local television stations. They looked at their Monday night line up and decided which channel would be better served by running their regular programs and which would accommodate the US Open.

And so I FAILed again. I asked who lost out? The audience? No. They could watch on either channel. Advertisers? No.

He explained that he had lost out. He turned on the channel he thought it was on and when it wasn’t on he assumed they were in a rain delay so he missed much of the match.

I came to my senses and stopped replying.

But what happened to our resourcefulness? The US Open isn’t on the channel we thought it would be on. Don’t we flip around a bit? Don’t we check the listings? Don’t we … oh never mind – we immediately tweet about the television station’s FAIL.

I wanted to tweet “Take a step back. Take a breath. The FAIL might be you.” But it never is.

Some people will blame this on social media. “We never did this before there was Facebook, My Space, and Twitter.”

Of course we did.

I had a friend in college who told me that the electric company was shutting off his electricity.

Really? The power company woke up one day and decided to mess with you? What a FAIL.

No. It turned out that he hadn’t paid his bill in months. But still…

So when our phone went out the other day we first checked that our bill had been paid. It had. Then we called the company for repair. The recording told us not to check back for a week as it could take that long. That’s probably a FAIL.

My eyes usually roll back in my head when I hear that, and this was no different. The author was someone I knew and he was writing about people I knew.

Sort of.

He changed their names a bit and some of the details but the Priest in his book named Patrick Fitzgerald was a thinly disguised version of campus chaplain Gerald Fitzpatrick.

The hardest one to swallow was the protagonist himself. Actually in the book the protagonist was a female but it was clearly based on the author’s life when he was a younger man. This was a change that that stretched the limit way too much.

The inner dialog just didn’t work.

Kim, who typed up the novel for the author, kept telling him gently that a young woman just wouldn’t think or say the things that this young woman was saying and thinking. The author would quietly protest “but I did think and say those things”. And he had.

It doesn’t matter.

Just because something happened doesn’t mean that it’s believable. It might have happened and be believable or not and it might not have happened and be believable or not. It doesn’t matter.

The story must first and last be believable.

“I can’t believe this,” I rant, “we could write the end of this show.”

Kim nods.

Of course, we’re both wrong. As it turns out, we did correctly predict every twist and turn in the rest of the episode, but there’s no way we could have written that show. Writing is hard. This is even true when we’re talking about bad television shows that miss their mark.

Maybe television is too hard. What about a book? Judging from the book I’m about to stop reading … not so much.

I love Nero Wolfe mysteries so a friend suggested I read one written by someone other than Rex Stout. This friend has given me great recommendations on many obscure books but I’m having real trouble getting into this one.

The author is clearly talented. The characters are well-drawn. The dialogue is believable. If he were writing his own book with fresh characters I would keep reading.

But this isn’t the Nero Wolfe and Archie I’ve come to know. There’s a lot I learned about Wolfe and Archie by reading between the lines. There are things I know about them and their relationship and habits that I inferred.

I think the same is true of this other author. He drew conclusions about the characters and setting and forgets that these largely went unsaid and so in his version of the stories they are going, um , said.

So as I struggle through this process of finding my voice again, I have to remember that what isn’t said is as important to the reader as… well, you know.

It happened while editing others. I loved editing. Editing is all about helping your authors find the story they want to tell and helping them tell it.

The editor is a cover band. Night after night, bar after bar playing music that sounds just like a dozen bands whose music the audience came out to see. When you help an author find the right phrase or revise a chapter — you do it in his voice not your own. The audience is buying the book with his name on the cover, not yours.

Whether you’re a musician or an author, it’s great training. You learn the literature. You learn to play or write in different styles.

I stopped editing books a year and a half ago. I stopped editing websites years before that. I loved editing. Who wouldn’t like covering Zeppelin and Floyd six nights a week?

Along the way I lost my voice. I stopped sounding like me. It’s time to fix that.

The only way to recapture my voice is to start writing again. I need to write every day so that my voice knows where to find me.

I’m sure it will. It always has.

Seth Godin explains in his Domino Project post “Dr. Seuss [...] refused to take an advance from his publisher. He wanted his publisher to have the same incentives he did.”

I absolutely agree with this sentiment but disagree with the conclusion.

My incentives are to write the best book possible, to bring that book to market in an attractive package as quickly as possible, sell the book at an attractive and reasonable price, and to have the target market know about the availability of the book.

Initially, most of the work on a book is mine. At some point the editors, tech editors, copy editors, typesetters, etc. from the publisher will get involved. In the beginning I’m the only one working on this project.

I don’t need the money from the advance. Well, let’s say that another way – an advance is not a gift, it’s an upfront payment for money we are betting the book will earn. If I’m not optimistic that the book will earn out the advance then I shouldn’t be writing the book.

To me the advance is a commitment on the side of the publisher. They are saying that they think it will earn at least that amount and that they would like to see this book written and published. Without an advance, they can sign all sorts of books they aren’t truly committed to. As long as we haven’t reached the stage where they are committing resources to the project, then there is little reason for them not to sign books they have no intention of publishing.

I recently turned down an offer from a publisher. I’ve written for them before and like them and believe in them. I like the editor I would be working with and loved the project. I turned them down because they decided not to offer me an advance.

They would not could not pay up front

So I said “Sir, not to be blunt,

If you don’t think this will earn out,

Then we should stop and think this out,

This book, good sir, we should not do.

It’s bad for me, it’s bad for you.”

Really it was as simple as that. If they didn’t think I would earn out the advance they had originally offered me then they didn’t believe this book would sell very well and we shouldn’t be engaged in this project. I made a quick calculation that I could sell this book directly in the iBookstore for one third of the price they were going to charge and earn out the advance if I sold fewer than one thousand copies. I’ve decided if I can’t find one thousand people who want this book then I shouldn’t be writing it. Their calculation was, no doubt, different.

An advance is one way the publisher shares in the commitment and shares in the risk. Dr. Seuss didn’t take an advance, but he had a good deal of clout that most of us don’t have.

Each year I do roughly the same thing. I call my father, spend some time with my wife and eldest daughter and end the day at my inlaws’ house celebrating with my father-in-law and other family members.

Tucked in the middle is a trip to the cemetery where I do some writing on a bench next to my youngest daughter’s grave. I never plan what I’m going to write. I show up and write what I feel.

I thought yesterday would be different. I headed off for the cemetery knowing what I was going to write about. There are two ghost stories I’ve been meaning to tell for years and I biked down to the cemetery with a notepad in my pocket intending to describe two ghostly encounters while surrounded by a field full of ghosts I’d never met.

It didn’t happen.

I should know better. Whether writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, I can only consciously shape the content so much. I might tweak a word or a sentence, I might move a paragraph, or I might abandon a line of exploration which is leading nowhere. I don’t seem to be able to write from an outline or follow a path.

Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, the saxophonist who helped define Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band and much of my youth, died Saturday night. I loaded up some of their music onto my iPod shuffle and biked over to the cemetery. Somewhere during the twenty minutes it took me to bike from my home to the grave, the story must have taken shape.

I don’t know how else to explain it.

When I sat down on the bench and took out my notebook, the words just seemed to write themselves. The ending surprised me and the title suggested itself.

The point is not whether or not the writing was good or bad. My point is that you have to show up to write, you have to be prepared, and you have to be open to what comes out — often it won’t be what you expect.

There’s a video on YouTube of a live performance from 2009 of Jungleland. The piano open set my pen in motion. The guitar solo pushed the story onto the page with a greater urgency. The sax, however, made me pause. Clarence wasn’t providing a soundtrack, he was speaking. It was the ghost of concerts past. As his final note gave way to the piano the end of the story was clear.

Sometimes as a writer I’m not sure what my role is. It’s as if I’m just there to write things down.

Show up, be prepared, be open, keep writing.

More on that tomorrow. Because folks will ask, here’s a link to the story I wrote yesterday. What I wrote is not the point — the point is how it came to be.

Today we’ll dream a little bit into the future. Imagine your book is in the bookstore and has made it onto the online sites. It’s just beginning to attract attention and, of course, reviews. Write four brief reviews that might appear on amazon.com

For the first one, write as if you are someone who liked the book for the right reasons. This book was written for you and you got a lot out of it.

Second, write a review from the point of view of someone who liked the book but completely missed the point. They liked the book for all of the wrong reasons.

Third, write a review from the point of view of someone who didn’t like the book because they completely missed the point. The things they didn’t like about your book aren’t really what you were doing in it. They just didn’t get it.

Finally, write a review from the point of view of someone who didn’t like the book for the right reason. They weren’t the target audience for the book and didn’t like it.

Go ahead, take a bit of time and write two or three paragraphs for each one.

Doing this exercise between the writing of the book and the revision should help focus you. You should be comfortable with the last review that didn’t like your book because they shouldn’t like your book. But that review is also telling you that you didn’t set up the book clearly enough and so some of the wrong people wandered in. Your book isn’t for everyone. You want to make sure that the people in your target audience know that this book is for them but you also want to help people who aren’t going to like it to move along.

The third review is problematic. This is a person who probably should have liked the book and maybe even wanted to like the book. You may want to reexamine the journey to make sure you were clear on where you were heading next at each step.

The second review is also a problem. Sure they liked the book and gave it a good review and lots of stars. That feels great. But you know you didn’t deserve them. Is there a way of turning this reader into a true fan who gets it without sacrificing those in the target audience? Probably not. If you try to expand the appeal of the book to include people not in your target then you may end up not appealing to anyone. That doesn’t mean that people outside of your target can’t enjoy your book. It means that they won’t enjoy your book if you change it’s core.

The first review is your compass in revision. It reminds you who the book is for and why.

Link to last year’s post

On failure: Tomorrow I’ll wrap up the month with some thoughts for those of you who reached your goal or who just got a significant amount of writing done. Today I want to take a minute to talk to those of you who think you failed.

I was Venkat’s editor on two books and he wrote both of them the same way. He spent months and months doing research and writing code. Then he took a couple of weeks off and wrote a chapter each day. My job was to quickly edit the chapters individually and get them back to him while they were still fresh in his mind so he could make useful revisions.

The art of refactoring.

He needed two things before he refactored. (1) He needed to have written something to refactor. That is the step you are on this month. You are generating the raw material that you will revise in the months to come. (2) A critical eye to help him see what needed to be refactored and perhaps how. In his case he had both his own eye and mine and later the help of technical reviewers.

Incidentally, there are different levels of refactoring. There is local refactoring for writers where you need to find a different way to say something or a better example or perhaps a good diagram to include. There is the chapter level refactoring where you decide something needs to be added, left out, or moved. And then there is the book level refactoring where you ask what the real goal of the book is and you ruthlessly reexamine everything in light of this goal.

Right now you are engaged in the act of writing. Soon you will be knee deep in the art of revision.

Link to last year’s post

Freezing leftovers: There are examples and explanations that didn’t quite fit into one chapter that you are able to use in another chapter. But at some point enough is enough. If you insist on using your left over material you will be harming your book and not helping it.