The Best Advice

I suppose you have heard the old saying, "Learn the rules, then and only then, can you break them." I don't know if this is true or not. I think it depends on the writer. Telling people you are writing a book is a bit like telling people you're pregnant. (Sorry guys but the moms will understand.) The moment you tell people you're pregnant the horror stories come out. I was in labor for 10 days! They had to have five men stick their hands up there and yank the baby out. I nearly died. My ankles and face swelled so much I looked like the blueberry girl from Willie Wonky. Or my personal favorite, "Once you get pregnant, you'll never be slender again." (This said while drinking two colas and eating three snack cakes.)

When you tell people you're writing a book, the horror stories start. No one under forty gets published, you might as well wait. You have to know someone or you'll never get published. You need an MFA/PhD to get published. No one will take you without an agent. Agents won't rep you unless you're published. Outline? No, it's too contrived. No outline? You'll have to rewrite the entire book~no one ever writes a good book without an outline. Then people ask what you're writing and when you tell them, they get to tell you how no one is buying that. Or how that will never sell.

Next come the questions that mirror: when are you due? Haven't you had that kid yet? Are you still pregnant? They're: when's your book come out? Have you sold it yet? Are you done writing it yet?

Finally- no matter what you decide to do just like hospital or home birth- you will do it "wrong." Sign a contract with the big six? Wrong. There will be people standing in line to tell you why your choice was bad. Decide to Self publish? Wrong. There will be just as many standing in line to tell you how bad that is. Decide on a small press? OMG! How could you do that?

If you've read this far you either know exactly what I mean, or you suspect you'll understand someday.

My best advice to writers of all stages is this: Relax, be open to learning, be open to changing as much as you comfortably can and understand that everyone's journey is different. Which means that everyone and no one is right when they give you advice. It's your journey. Have fun with it. If it's not fun, it's not worth it. Cheers~

Anxiety and High Drama

Creative people live for drama. To the friends and family members who are horrified by my sometimes too loud outbursts, and over emotional thinking, I say, "I'm a passionate person." I try to hide it. Really, I put a lot of energy into appearing as normal as possible but the drama pops out of me. I get so excited my hands shake. I get so mad I have an all out crying, stomping, shouting tantrum. I get so sad there is no consoling me...over something as little as a rejection letter. "Get over it," people mutter. Said people are not creative. Said people do not bleed into a computer and then send out queries because said people are afraid of rejection. But, I digress. The point being that creative people often use anxiety and high drama to prevent themselves from being creative.

I have a friend who has a terrific idea for a middle grade book whose hero is a boy in a wheelchair. She won't write it, though. Why? Because when it makes the NY Times list her entire life will change and she doesn't want the responsibility. I know at least three people who can't get farther than the first three chapters of a book because if it's not perfect something awful will happen. Something so humiliating and terrible that their stomachs pinch and their hands shake and they go back to the first page because this time they might get it right. For my Master's degree program you must write and polish and defend a genre novel. Having done all this over two years, when it comes time to put that novel on a CD and leave it in the school library for others to read, the students balk. "No, it's not ready." Trust me, folks, it's never ready.

"Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time (and the terrible things that might happen if we did), we fail to pursue it part-time--or at all."~Julia Cameron

Ex: I can't be a writer and raise children. I can't take a class and keep my job. If I hit the NY Times list--and I will--I'll be busy touring and my spouse will leave me.

"Most...creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain and occasional heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction." ~JC

Oh, how I wish these quotes from Julia Cameron's, The Artist's Way, were not true. But they are. Our own fears and passions keep us from doing something daily to live the creative life we were born to live. The scary thought of "What will people say?" or "Will I have to start wearing flowy skirts and bangle bracelets?" "Will I have to quit my job, leave my family, move into the deep city, stay up late, smoke dope and hang out with intellectuals?" Or worse~ "That agent rejected my book, now she hates me." "That editor is laughing at me and telling her entire staff how awful my work was."

No wonder we freeze up, run away, keep putting obstacles in front of our creative soul. Stop the madness. Take a deep breath. Blow it out slow. Put that all aside and ask yourself, "what small thing can I do today-right now- to feed my creative soul?" I can open a word doc and write a title. Can't figure out a title? Use someone else's title. Don't stop. Write a sentence. Write a paragraph. Read a craft book, one page a day. Attend a workshop. Make a space-however small- to create. Push through the doubt and keep going-step by step, page by page.

I have discovered that in every book I write 1/3 of the way in I freeze and think, "this is horrible. No one will read it. It's a bad idea. I can't write." I push through anyway by giving myself permission to write terrible, horrible, no good stuff. I tell myself no one is reading this but me. I write the next page. Then things pick up and I go along happy and merry until-yep 3/4 of the way through the book. The end is coming up. I'm afraid there isn't enough story. It doesn't work. It's no good. Again I have to take a deep breath and write the next page and the next page. I give myself permission to write a book that is too short or too long. I write. I revise. I polish. I query. I send it in. I revise more. I send it in again. I cry. I scream. I am petrified. I imagine all the terrible things. I write anyway. Bit by bit I create. It's in the doing that we actually live.

So...I've spilled my fears and dramas. What are yours? Care to share?

How to Write Right

"You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it." ~ Doris Lessing

I love this quote. As genre writers it is easy to get caught up in page counts, trends, "rules," contests, etc. Especially in the current environment when multi-published authors, what used to be called mid-list authors, are struggling with the newbies to sell work. Publishers are struggling to stay in business. Editors are losing their jobs and turning into agents and advances are so low that agents can't support themselves full time. It feels like desperate times and as writers we can get caught up in it all. I've been in a mood lately to say-"Stop the madness!"
Take a deep breathe and a step back. Ask yourself why you started writing in the first place. Was it love of words? Love of story? To get the characters out of your head? (This doesn't work-when you get done with one another pops up. sigh.)

Were you lured in by people telling you that you are a good writer-gifted even? Did thoughts of success on the scale of Nora Roberts or Stephanie Meyer twinkle before your eyes?

Do you find yourself with a bitter taste in your mouth- wondering what the heck happened. Or are you still desperately chasing trends, beating yourself up every time someone else sells?

Again, I say, Stop the madness! Stay with me here-take a deep breathe and let it out slow.

Now-let's review. 1) You are a gifted writer. You are. Believe that. But there are a lot of gifted writers. Just as their are a lot of gifted singers-some make the top forty, some make it to opera or Broadway, some sing at Disney world or on cruise ships and some sing at church. Each are as valid and gifted as the next.

2) Be yourself. Nora is Nora. That spot is already taken. Your friend who just sold three vampire books-that's her journey not yours. Stop trying to imitate.Yes, imitation is the highest form of flattery and we kid ourselves by saying-well, if it worked for them it will work for me. (This feels true when more than one friend sells in something you don't write. You start to second guess. You start to wonder if perhaps you should change over to YA steampunk. Of course, you'll have to research it and such because you were working on a cozy mystery...)

3) Live your life. Get a job, meet with friends, take a walk-you can't write about life if you are holed up in a closet pounding out four or five books a year in hopes that one of them sticks. Go into the city and watch people. Interview people in small towns. Discover occupations and the sorts of people who work them. If you are stuck at home with small children or job hunting, take walks. Make note of the seasons as they pass-the scents, the sights, the temperature of the air against your skin, the sound of lawnmowers or trains or traffic, the taste of water or seasonal fruit. All these things will make you a better writer.

And finally 4) celebrate your victories great and small and celebrate the victories of others. Life is too short not to have a party now and then. Or at the very least some virtual champagne and chocolate.

Cheers~

Writing through stress

Okay, so I cheat a bit. This topic came straight from a chat I attended for the Master's program last night. But so many people showed up to talk about stress that I thought it might be a good topic to address today.

Let's face it there are many things in life you have no control over. As writers, we love to have complete control over the lives and worlds our characters live in and, after a while, we get frustrated when the "real" world does not act the way we think it should. We throw conflicts into our characters lives to drive plot and create character growth but conflict in our own lives drives us mad. We tend to procrastinate. An "I'll deal with it later" attitude would get cut from our character's lives because there is only so much room on a page. Perhaps we should think of that in our own lives. There are truly only so many days in your life-if we turn into Scarlett O'Hara and say "Tomorrow is another day." We slow down the pace of success in our own lives and slow down our character growth, thus creating our own stress.

Sometimes we create our own stress-procrastination, poor eating, lack of vitamins or exercise- because we are bored. Stress gives us something to think about or do, but these kinds of stresses can effect our writing and our own personal character growth.

Sometimes we put stress on ourselves to live the perfect life to be the perfect person. We've all grown up in a world filled with advertising. The successful person washes with X soap. The healthful person has the white smile and the crazy flat abs. Everyone in "Ad land" lives in huge up-to-date houses. They all fill their weekends with less spending and more doing-single handed remodeling bathrooms from gutting to tile and grout to plumbing. Our yards are supposed to be picture perfect. Our cars well maintained and always clean. Our kids should have every toy, eat perfectly nutritious foods, enjoy cookouts and games and cakes the size of New England. How do we reconcile this with the size of our paychecks? With the age of our homes? With the bills that are due? With the slowness of old computers?With kids who get sick or have tantrums or parents who get sick and need care. With family members diagnosed with cancer. With deaths of loved ones due to war or accidents or flesh eating bacteria.

The real world is messy and unpredictable and most of the time our own character growth is hard-unlike those we write about. Fantasy and reality are so wide apart we are stressed by the differences.

For some writers, stress fuels their passion. The more going on the better they write. For others, stress freezes them in place like a deer in the headlights. Goals, dreams, deadlines slip away.

How do we combat this?

First off find out what is your optimal amount of stress. What causes you to work better without over whelming you. Use this as your best indicator. Try not to stray to far one way or the other from this. Next, organize your life and prioritize your actions based on your personal stress baseline. Finally, do your best with your health-I don't mean lose those 40 pounds today. I mean get up and take a ten minute walk around the block. Drink water. Ensure you get at least 7 hours of sleep a night. And, when you have to, feel free to do something silly, like step into your coat closet and scream your head off.

Remember you can't control the stress that comes your way-but you can control how you react to it. Find your base line and live the life that works best around it. Not the false life of advertisements, or the "You have to do x to be happy or published" life of others who want to control you. Think of your life like the pages of your book and edit thoughtfully.

These are some of my tricks for combating stress. What are yours?

Hanging on when life gets in the way

May starts the busy social time of the year. From now until August, there are graduations, first communions, confirmations, end of school banquets, anniversaries, weddings, retirement parties, birthdays, picnics, barbecues the list goes on and on. Not to mention conferences and conventions, marathons, concerts, I think I made my point.
Sometimes you have a situation like someone who recently said to me, "I volunteered to do X but my life suddenly fell apart." Life happens. Divorce, job loss, family illnesses, selling a house, moving, are we supposed to keep writing through that? Really? How does a writer stay on track when the world suddenly takes over?
"It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer." ~ Gerald Brenan, "Writing," Thoughts in a Dry Season: A Miscellany, 1978
While this is true, oh, my goodness the freaking pressure of that thought when life takes over or falls apart. Perhaps this is more true for female writers as we feel the social pressure to volunteer and contribute more. Guys, am I correct? The question for today is how do you do it? How do you stay out on the writing ledge when the whole world seems to be pushing you off?
There are tricks. No, really, there are, but they take work and commitment. So the first question to ask yourself is: How important is writing in my life right now? Is it a source of income? Am I a closet or hobby writer, working on stuff no one is allowed to see? Is writing what I cling to when everything else goes south?
If writing is not bringing you money or keeping you sane then it's lower on your list. Give yourself permission to take a sabbatical. Seriously no one is judging you here. So what if your best friend just sold and you "feel" farther behind on your goals. Trust me no one is keeping score. They are not going to put on your headstone, "here lies what could have been a famous best-selling writer if they only tried."
If writing is your business, treat it like any other job. No matter what. Give it 20 to 40 hours a week. If illness or moving or divorce take over, how would you handle them with a different job? Take a sick day. Take a vacation. But, you say, I am not as creative when I'm filled with worry. If you have a deadline, do your best. Plow through. You might surprise yourself. Some people work better under pressure. Even if it's not your best work you have editors and agents to help you. Use them.
If you aren't making money on your writing, yet, but writing keeps you sane the last thing you need in a high-pressure busy time is to give up the one thing keeping you alive. Find the time to write even if it is in the car on the way to an event, write or speak into a recorder. Squeeze out five minutes here, five minutes there. Write on envelopes, scraps of paper, your hand. Give yourself permission to daydream-that counts as writing. Take notes, create scene outlines, have conversations with your characters, allow your creativity to live in the small spaces of your life. Think of it as a life preserver in rough seas. Cling to it. Give yourself permission to not have super big goals, like hitting the NY Times List or selling to your dream agent/publisher. Instead create small goals, a scene, a sentence, a critique or contest. Be proud of what you are doing. Do it for yourself. Don't worry about what others are doing. The fastest way to madness is to compare your life to others.
Most importantly don't beat yourself up over not winning the brass ring someone you know just grabbed. They have their own obstacles to face. Life is not a race. Writing is not a contest. Trust that when things settle down you will be able to have larger goals and meet them. Or at least have fun trying.
Writing is like running a marathon with no finish line. It is a mental game with yourself based on your talent and your willingness to learn, to fall and to get back up. Give yourself permission to walk when you need to, and run when you can. Be proud of what you do no matter how you do it. Because you did it your way. The very truth of the matter is no two people's journeys are the same. So, figure out how to enjoy the journey you are living and forget the rest. It is the only true way to live the life you want.
Cheers~