MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)

WRITING CRITIQUES: big pictures and piddling little points

Seth Godin's work on marketing isn't directed specifically at writers, but if you're a writer who wants help with book marketing and career building in the age of new media, you can't find a better source. His thoughts are concise and provocative. His books (the latest is Linchpin) are not just useful but also entertaining. And you've just got to love a guy whose web site tells you to click on his bald head to visit his blog.

Seth's recent Sentences, Paragraphs and Chapters post addresses a business issue, but his comments apply perfectly to writers and writing critiques as well. Too many workshops and critique groups focus on piddling little corrections rather than big questions. There's less risk of hurting the writer that way, and maybe less fear that raising those big questions will make us sound arrogant or presumptuous.

You'll notice I said big questions, not once but twice. I'm not necessarily talking about big criticisms, though sometimes they may be needed.

I'm talking about helping each other look at the totality of a book, a career, and a writer's gifts and goals as effectively as we help each other tweak the specifics of a scene, a line, or even just a word.

I also don't mean to suggest that copy-editing and proofing and general manuscript polishing aren't important. They are. But they're tasks separate from manuscript critique and revision...or at least they should be.

Let's not sit around making writerly small talk while we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's hard enough to keep little lifeboats like the S.S. First Novel afloat in these choppy seas.