American Novelist
Earlier this summer, fellow author and friend Rachel Abbott graciously interviewed me for her blog (you can read that interview here, by the way), and I am pleased to return the favor. Rachel’s detective/suspense/thriller novel ONLY THE INNOCENT has been an Amazon UK sensation, reaching #1 in the Kindle Store (Paid), as well as #1 … Read more
For as long as I’ve been writing—over 20 years professionally now—I’ve collected articles on writing, handwritten snatches from books on writing, examples from great authors, as well as my own tips, tricks and hard-won wisdom on the art, and I’ve kept it all in a series of composition notebooks titled “Notes on Writing.” These notebooks … Read more
The other day, after publishing the second novel in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series—The Rich Are Different—I pulled a giant plastic crate labeled “Dakota Stevens Stuff” out of the closet. This crate contains notebooks, early drafts, and reams of research for the first book in the series, A Real Piece of Work. As I started to … Read more
The second book in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series by Chris Orcutt, The Rich Are Different, is now available for Kindle on Amazon. In February, I started re-editing the novel, and five strenuous months later, it’s finally ready. In the last month alone, I went through the manuscript half a dozen times. I wanted it to … Read more
If I were merely interested in selling copies of the second Dakota & Svetlana adventure, The Rich Are Different, I would probably release the novel now. According to reviews of the first book, there is certainly a demand for the second. And by the standards of most readers, not to mention many other writers in … Read more
Because of a recent pharmaceutical spam attack on some of my websites, I am in the midst of moving this blog and DakotaStevens.com to another hosting provider. These sites will look bad for some time. I ask for your patience. It will take me a month or more to rebuild both DakotaStevens.com and Chris Orcutt, … Read more
Every morning while living in Key West and Cuba, Ernest Hemingway rose early to write, and every afternoon he went out cruising and fishing on his yacht, Pilar. There are many articles out there, including this one and this one, that detail what Hemingway did during his afternoons on the Pilar, as well as how much the … Read more
While in the post office the other day, a couple of postal workers who bought A Real Piece of Work complimented me on the writing. “It reads so smoothly,” one of them said. “It seems like it’s effortless for you,” said another. Then they asked what I was up to now. I told them, “Reworking … Read more
Greetings, readers. Today, for the first time in the history of my blog, I’m making somebody else the focus. Today I’m going back to my roots as a newspaper reporter and interviewing Jeff Bennington, creator of The Kindle Book Review and author of a new book about the indie publishing phenomenon, The Indie Author’s Guide … Read more
Back in late November 2011 when I released A Real Piece of Work, I promised to release book #2 in the series, The Rich Are Different, once book #1 sold 1,000 copies. When I wrote that, I was convinced it would take me at least 10 months to sell that many copies (an average of … Read more
Last week I said I would report on the results of my 2 “free days” on Amazon’s KDP Select: the total number of free downloads, as well as the number of sales of A Real Piece of Work in the days afterwards. So, without further ado, here are the numbers: Free Downloads (approx.): Day 1 = … Read more
The big problem facing writers today is finding a balance between writing and self-promotion. I’m currently doing a free promotion of my Kindle mystery novel, A Real Piece of Work, and I’ve discovered that it’s easy for tweeting, posting to Facebook, and blogging and the like to take over your life. Meanwhile, in my own … Read more
According to the new, social-networking philosophy of book promotion, one of the most effective ways of building your audience is to give away copies of your book. Of course the old-school part of me—the part of me that has been paid for my writing ever since I was a cub reporter—bristles at this. I don’t … Read more
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a mystery novel, a mystery novel that only one agent and zero editors believed in. This mystery novel was read by editors at top publishing houses including Dutton, Harper, St. Martin’s Press, Harcourt, Tor and Poisoned Pen. It was even read by a major movie studio. Yet none of … Read more
I have read hundreds of books on writing. Conservatively figuring an average of 15 per year, over 24 years that makes 360 books on the subject. Books on voice, style, grammar, plotting, dialogue, point of view, syntax, narration, description, characterization, novel writing, technical writing, short story writing, nonfiction writing, query writing, getting an agent and … Read more
This one is for you readers. For those of you who took a risk on a relatively unknown quantity (me) by plunking down cash for my PI/mystery novel, A Real Piece of Work. For reading it, and for expressing your love of the book to everyone you know. Your words of praise for the novel … Read more
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass THE OTHER DAY, I wrote that I was going to “take it easy” when it came to self-promotion, but you know what? Screw that. I don’t want to take it easy. I don’t want to be modest, humble, or self-deprecating. I’ve done … Read more
Friends, Romans, Countrymen: I’ve received dozens of messages from would-be book-buyers who say, “I’d love to read A Real Piece of Work, but I don’t have a Kindle.” NOTE: You don’t need a Kindle to read my novel. With the FREE Kindle Reader app, you can read it on your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Droid, Windows … Read more
A common piece of advice given to writers is to envision your ideal reader and write your book to that person. And although I didn’t do that when I wrote A Real Piece of Work (I wrote it for myself first and an audience second), I did have in mind one reader whose attention and respect … Read more
What did I learn from publishing the first novel in my new detective series on Kindle? A lot of disjointed things that would take too much time and brainpower to construct into a narrative (I want to get back to, you know, writing), so I’m going to present them to you as bullet points: (NOTE: If … Read more
The short answer is this: A writer writes to be read, and the two P.I. novels I wrote that were sitting on my hard drive weren’t being read by anyone. I wanted people to read them, to be entertained by them. That’s why I wrote them, and that’s why, after running them through the gauntlet … Read more
Farewell, my beloved feline Muse. Writer Chris Orcutt’s eulogy to his faithful, beautiful cat of 9 years, Sweetie.
I had big plans for this blog entry. BIG plans. When I originally envisaged this piece, it was going to be a 5,000-word polemic on the difficulties of being a writer in the internet age. I was going to sketch a detailed contrast between what was involved in being a writer 80 to 100 years … Read more
Walking into the diner yesterday, I glanced at the honor box containing our village newspaper, The Millbrook Round Table, and was shocked to read the following headline: Round Table Publishes Last Issue, Closes Its Doors I was numb as I went inside and had my two cups of black coffee. Part of me wished I … Read more
A while back, I got in an online argument with another writer. He was proffering financial advice to writers, in effect saying this: “I made $164,000 last year as a writer, but I’m the exception, so whatever you’re doing now to earn a living, don’t quit your day job.” The originality of his message blew … Read more
I’d like to share some thoughts about index cards. My new writing, with the exception of blog entries of course, is happening on index cards. The fact that this is how my hero, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote all of his first drafts is purely coincidental. Over the years, I’ve used index cards as ways of encapsulating scenes … Read more
Quite a while ago, my good friend Jason started a Twitter feed about his cat, Sockington. The feed has not only become extremely popular, with over 4,000 followers, it’s also become famous to the point of being featured on a New York Times blog. To keep up the illusion that the cat was making constant Twitter updates, Jason … Read more
Today I opened my email and found a lovely note from a fellow writer, La Belette Rouge. She wrote to tell me that a blog entry I had written a while back (this one on “Preparing for Success”) had kept her up all night thinking, and that it had inspired her to write her own … Read more
“All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.” — V. Nabokov, … Read more
He didn’t go to a fancy Eastern college. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had virtually no formal education at all. However, his study of the Bible and the law, as well as his personal and professional hardships, turned him into one of the best writers in American history. We all know the story of Abe’s Gettysburg … Read more
Whenever I’m in the middle of rereading it, the novel Lolita casts such a spell on me that I often forget I have it on my person. Given its subject matter (a pedophile pining away for a pre-pubescent girl), this isn’t a very good idea. Given its subject matter, the book should have a plain … Read more
You know a book is a favorite of yours when you have multiple copies of it, and you find some of those copies in the oddest of places: under the couch in your field coat pocket under the car seat in the box of cat toys (cats, too, appreciate good literature) in a knapsack in … Read more
Back in 2000-01, when this blog phenomenon began to take off, my dear friend Jason Scott Sadofsky encouraged me to start one of my own. He helped me set up the domain names, gave me space on his server, and soon thereafter NotWriting.com was born. The Orcutt weblog followed a couple of years later. Whereas … Read more
The first time I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac. It was a cold March day 15 years ago, and I was in a McDonald’s in Norwich, New York, eating lunch, when a passage took me by such complete surprise that I started choking. Reluctant to suffer … Read more
“Writing is rewriting.” — Ernest Hemingway Yeah, yeah, I know the story about the last chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—that he allegedly rewrote it 39 times before he was satisfied with it. I say “allegedly” because I’ve also read accounts in which he rewrote the last page 39 times, and others … Read more
We live in a time of word saturation. Written content of all kinds—blogs, stories, articles, essays, this blog—is freely available for downloading, printing, emailing to friends, or, in the case of some of my former students, copying and passing off as your own work. For a long time I was resistant to offering any of … Read more
Like a lot of writers, I keep a stone on my desk to use as a paperweight. But mine has a special meaning to me because it’s a chunk of granite from one of the quarries my grandfather and great-grandfather worked, and every time I look at it, I’m reminded of how far the Orcutts … Read more
I’m in the middle of polishing my latest novel, and because I find the process so onerous, I’ve decided to take a break from it and write about it instead. Polishing should in no way be confused with editing. When you edit, in addition to moving passages around and trying different ways of saying the … Read more
Yesterday I alluded to John Gardner’s book on writing, The Art of Fiction, and casually mentioned syntactic slots. Since then, I’ve received a few emails asking me what these are. I’ll do my best to explain. Mind you, although I taught college English for several years, I am not a grammarian. That being said, let … Read more
I never get sick. I mean never. The last time I was sick was three years ago with a cold, and just before that, a herniated disc. Which is why I don’t know what to do with myself today because I’m sick. But even though I was sick, I wrote today. You can count on … Read more
Toiling away on index cards has a way of putting things in perspective. Whether you’re hunched over a cubicle deep in your local library, or lying on your stomach atop your bed with the cards spread around you, scribbling on 3″x5″ pieces of paper forces you to immerse yourself in the process of writing. It … Read more
On a snowy day in January, I wandered into a Borders bookstore and did something I always do when I’m seeking answers—I let synchronicity guide me to the right book. I found it, or rather it found me, and its message was exactly what I needed to hear at that time. The book is Do … Read more
Over the past year, I’ve become obsessed with the writers of paperback noir/crime/sleaze novels from the late 40s through the 60s. Having now read at least 100 of them (no small feat, considering how difficult they are to find), I can say with authority that these guys knew better than any other authors of their … Read more
No, I’m not referring to the sick practice of using razor blades on myself—although there have been times when I’ve been tempted to. I’m talking about cutting words. A month ago, I received the most helpful rejection I’ve ever gotten from an agent. The agent, who shall remain nameless, said that while my novel was … Read more
Here’s the thing with pencils and typewriters—they never go out of date, they never need updated software, and they never require virus protection. Three years ago, I found I was spending a lot of my writing time making my computer usable. I had an iMac, of course, which was great, but for a portable I … Read more
On July 17, Mickey Spillane, creator of the infamous Mike Hammer PI series, died. He was 88, and by all accounts he lived a pretty cool life.
In addition to writing several bestselling novels that readers adored, Spillane played a mystery writer on the 70s TV show Columbo, appeared in several commercials for Miller Lite beer, and married a hot second wife, Sherri Manilou, who posed for the cover of his novel The Erection Set.