At some point, we’ll have a story that isn’t selling but in which we—in our more-mature professional judgment—still believe. Sometimes, rejections are no-fault. The story is perfectly good but for some reason beyond our control, it doesn’t fit the market. I’ve gotten my share of notes along the lines of, “I like this story, but I just bought one like it from Big Name Author.” Other times, the market itself has changed. What was hot yesterday is unsellable today. We may have written the world’s most brilliant Regency romance or space opera or angst-ridden teenage vampire novel, but no one in New York wants it if the sales figures for that particular type of story are dismal. Similarly, no publisher may be willing to take a chance on something that’s too different, no matter how well-written it is.
What do you do when you’re sure this book is not merely good, but the best thing you’ve ever written? Before electronic publishing made self-publication inexpensive, you didn’t have much choice. You cried, you wept, you muttered curses at everyone from your agent to the owners of the chain bookstores . . . and you set it aside in the hopes that market conditions would change. This has happened many times. Change is the one constant in life. Lesson Two: Patience Prevails.
The operant phrase is an echo of what you do with a trunk story. You wrench that wonderful story out of your mind and you set it aside. You work on the next project, perhaps in a different genre. You go on.
Epublishing has changed the game because now you have the option of bringing out that hard science fiction novel or cozy steampunk mystery or police dog story yourself. Tempting as this is—and it is often a great idea—I want to insert a word of caution. The very ease of epublication has the potential to lower that professional-quality threshold. Yes, that book may not have sold because it was unusual or the timing was unfortunate, but it may also not have been competitive in quality. When we bring out books that don’t fit the narrow confines of traditional print publishers, we owe it to our readers and ourselves to carefully discern whether the stories are truly the best we can offer. This is never easy, even for those of us who have been in the business a long time. That’s why we need editors and colleagues to “keep us honest.”
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The Writer’s Life
Where Do You Write?
Non-writers often have wildly romantic and equally wildly unrealistic visions of how we work. Or rather, where we work.
“If only,” sighs the aspiring writer, “I had a cottage on the beach, a mountain getaway, an office . . .”
In your dreams, the working writer sniggers.
Well, yes and no. The bottom line is that if you are driven to write, you will find a way to do it, regardless of convenience or preferences. We all agree it would be wonderful to have a comfortable space, state-of-the-art computer equipment, an environment free from noise and interruptions, perhaps with an inspiring view of natural grandeur. If we put our writing career on hold until we have such a place, chances are we will never get anything written. Life doesn’t often provide us with such luxuries, and they are indeed luxuries. Writing is a function of internal drive, not external setting.
I’ve written on a typewriter on a rickety table in the corner of the living room or longhand in a spiral notebook sitting on the floor in the same room as my kid’s karate class. When I was in high school, my idea of hanging out with my friend was to sit on her bed, each of us with a portable manual typewriter, pounding away at our stories.
Technology has given us more choices in location as well as medium. I’ve hauled my first, incredibly heavy laptop into doctor’s waiting rooms, coffee shops (this seems to be a common strategy), libraries (ditto), hotel rooms, and more. A netbook gives me even greater mobility with its lighter weight and brighter screen. These devices are conveniences, not necessities.
I’ve noticed over the years that I go through phases of preferring one location over another: the stability of a desk and desktop computer; the portability of a netbook, the insulation of a room with a closed door, the expansiveness of being outdoors. I rarely stick with any one place exclusively. I find that changing locale is not only good for me ergonomically but is mentally refreshing. I get a “different view” on the story in question. I like to move around, muttering under my breath, when I hit a rough patch (and woe betide any family member who mistakes this for not-working!)
I live in a very beautiful place (a sunny meadow surrounded by redwood forest) and in good weather my afternoon writing sessions take place outdoors, on the back porch beside a cascade of blooming roses. However, I must constantly remind myself that as pleasurable as this is, it is in no way essential. The moment it becomes a distraction, I need to take myself back inside or off to the library, anywhere that will re-direct my focus to what is really important—getting that story down on paper or phosphors. If I allow my ability to write to become dependent on the weather, I am setting myself up for disaster. (On the other hand, it is lovely to have access to a quiet spot while my husband is practicing his clarinet in the next room!)
Sometimes, I’m more focused and less distractible than at other times. I like to phrase it that way instead of “scatter-brained and hair-triggered.” While it’s helpful to be able to move to a quieter or less perturbing environment, I need to be mindful that it is not where I write, or with what medium, but the priority I give to my work that makes the difference.
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Writing without Electricity
Winter storms bring power failures on a regular basis to my neck of the woods. Despite the best efforts of the CalTrans tree trimmers, branches will fall, trees will topple, and mud will slide. The neighborhood of my first house, where I lived as a single working mom, once went without power for three weeks during a previous winter. The story is that after a couple of days without refrigeration, everyone got together for a huge barbecue. Alas, I missed it, for it was before I moved there. I think the longest I went sans electricity was a week. My daughter, our Japanese exchange student, and I survived pretty well with flashlights and candles and oil lamps, the propane fireplace for heat, and showers at the home of my day-job supervisor.
When my husband and I bought our current house, one of the first things he did was to install a 10 kW standby generator. I attributed this action to testosterone poisoning, although I did appreciate “all the conveniences” the next time the inevitable happened. However, no system is foolproof, and the generator battery failed one winter just before it was due for its yearly maintenance. We had an interesting couple of days (wood fireplace, aforementioned lamps, etc.) but what struck me most about that experience was how many things I love to do that don’t require electricity: read, play my piano, walk the dog, snuggle with my sweetie, work in the garden, knit socks . . . and write. That got me thinking about power failures and where power comes from.
The power to tell stories doesn’t come from electricity or teachers or publishers, but sometimes I act as if it does. I come up with all kinds of excuses for not settling to write. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, I’m hungry, I’m sleepy, I’m restless, this book will never be any good . . . Ack! The power’s out! I can’t use my computer!
I learned to write stories in longhand and can still return to that medium without difficulty. I use it when I’m stuck on a scene because the kinesthetic and tactile experience of pen moving over paper involves my brain on a different level than keys going clickity-click. Not everyone makes that switch easily, and that’s okay. We’re all different. But generating pages is only one aspect of writing, the one most vulnerable to power outages.
One of the limitations of production quotas (so many pages per day, a novel in a month, that sort of thing) is that so many other “pieces” of writing don’t involve putting words on the page. When I worked a full-time day job, I’d walk during my lunch hour. I’d plan out the next scene—or the scene I was most interested in at the moment—recite lines of dialog aloud, and act out the parts. In other words, I’d play. Have fu
n with it. Discover bits of detail and twists of action that I had no idea were there. A beautiful day and a winding road through successive groves of oak, eucalyptus and redwood (my lunchtime route) made this experience pleasant, but were by no means necessary—you can do it anywhere. Just exercise discretion about the reciting dialog aloud if you’re on public transportation.
I keep a notebook (see “The Magic Notebook”) for each writing project and an ongoing general writing journal. I use the notebooks for “writing through” plot problems, working out genealogies and time-lines, drawing maps and flow-charts. The journal’s for cool names in search of characters, story ideas, that sort of thing. Sometimes, a half-hour spent noodling through the work in progress or dreaming about the next one can make the difference between a day of frustration and excuses and one that, while not enormously productive of written pages, supercharges me for weeks to come.
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Interruptions
When I first started writing, way back in fourth grade, I worked on one story at a time. It never occurred to me that it was possible to have multiple writing projects in different stages. As I got older, the pile of stories begun and then abandoned grew. I noticed how rare it was for me to return to a story once I’d run out of steam. I either wrote it all the way through or it ended up on the Pile of Doom. Through high school and college (summers), I completed more of what I began. My gift to myself after graduating college was to write a novella, and after graduate school, I finished my first novel. (All of these were utterly unpublishable, but they had beginnings, middles, and most importantly, endings.) I was still at the stage of On/Off writing.
Shortly after my first child brought joy and unanticipated chaos to my life, my writing career shifted into a new gear, with both fanzine publications and my first professional short story sale. Over the next decade or so, I had to learn a new mode of writing: On/Off/On/Off/On . . . . For one thing, I often had only very short periods of time in which to madly type out the scenes I had been rehearsing in my head. For another, I was writing both novels and short fiction. Sometimes I’d stick the shorter works in between drafts of the novels, which was helpful in terms of “clearing my head” so that I could return to the novel with fresh eyes. Sometimes I had a specific market and deadline for the short story and had to set aside the novel in whatever stage it was in. I would do just that, with no special preparation, and then re-read what I had written to “come up to speed.” Most of the time, that would be sufficient to jog my memory about what I intended to come next. Occasionally I’d be left with the vague and disquieting feeling that I’d forgotten some brilliant plot twist or other element. Such are the risks of being a “pantser” (writing “by the seat of the pants”) instead of using outlines.
Gradually I made more sales, novels as well as short stories, and improved my skill at alternating projects in different stages (Project 1 first draft, Project 2 outline, Project 1 revise, Project 2 first draft, rinse and repeat). I experimented with sequential leapfrogging and with handling different projects at different times of day (mornings for revision, afternoons for first drafts, or vice versa). So far, so good.
Then life handed me Interruptions. Non-negotiable Interruptions. The good ones involved having to drop whatever new project I was working on for reviewing copy edits, revising to editorial feedback, or proofreading a book in production. It simply isn’t professional to tell your editor, “Yes, I know this book has a tight deadline, but I simply can’t set aside this on-spec novella, so you’ll simply have to wait until the muse takes a vacation.”
Typically, these production schedule interruptions run from a few weeks to several months, depending on the publisher’s schedule and the amount of work required. A few scribbled notes sufficed as memory aids for whatever work I was in the middle of. 2013 was different. Because I had four novels and a short story collection scheduled, I ended up with nonstop revision/copy-edit-review/proofreading for almost eight months. And I was in the middle of a new novel I was very excited about, one of those “attack novels” that just carries you along as it writes itself. A few notes wouldn’t be enough to re-capture that momentum. So before I closed the folder for that book, I spent several days brainstorming and writing down every idea that excited me about where the plot should go, what crisis points the characters would face, and what emotional notes I wanted to hit. This wasn’t the same as an outline because I wanted to keep as many options open as possible. I wanted a playing field rich in possibilities. If I’m working from an outline, I’ve already gone through the process of discovery, or a close enough approximation thereof so that I can trust what I have already created. This novel, unlike those I sell on proposal these days, did not have an outline. So when I return to it, I need that original exhilaration and fermentation of ideas more than I need “this comes next.”
The second sort of involuntary interruption involves an inability to write. Not “writer’s block” or, as Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff put it, “writer’s gap” (you know where you want to end up, you just have no clue as to how to get from here to there), but a crisis that brings all creative activity to a halt. It can be internal or external: depression, the death of a loved one, serious illness, trauma, natural disaster, criminal legal proceedings, child custody disputes, or anything that rocks us so deeply that the connection to our creative selves is fractured. This happened to me following the first parole hearing of the man who raped and murdered my mother. I went through a period of several years of not being able to write (or, for much of it, to read fiction); all my very tenuous focus went toward surviving from one day to the next. Every unfinished project stayed that way, and nothing new got started.
Eventually I recovered enough to look around at the shards of my career and start picking up what I could. I wrote some new stories, which helped me to rediscover the focus necessary to tackle a novel-length work again. I had a few projects “from before” in various stages of completion. One novel that was at submission level eventually sold (#2 out of 4 for 2013). Another I relegated to the trunk, on the advice of my agent, as too scattered and episodic to succeed. A couple of novelettes remain in their folders with a few “from before” rejection slips. I have no idea what to do with them. They have promise but serious flaws as well. I can’t get my head back into the space in which I wrote them, and I don’t think I want to.
The thing to remember is that when we return to projects suspended because of crisis, we do so as different people. Interruptions due to crash-and-burn deadlines may strengthen critical skills, but they don’t generally cause us to reach deep into ourselves and emerge stronger but scarred. I’m not the writer or the person I was when I drafted those shorter pieces or that fractured novel. I’ve changed irrevocably and can never return. My life has been put back together in a different shape, with a different vision. Maybe at some time in the future, something in those stories may speak to me, but the solutions I come up with then will be very different from whatever I might have done “from before.”
Sometimes interruptions are just that–a diaper that needs to be changed right now, a revision your editor wants next week. But sometimes they aren’t so much interruptions as they are sideways quantum slips, leaving our lives and our work forever altered.
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When Writing Friends Aren’t
Elsewhere on the net, a talented new writer made a comment about the damaging effects of another person’s behavior. We can encounter destructive relationships in every area of our lives, but when it comes to our creativity, they can be particularly nasty.
Some people write in isolation. Either they aren’t naturally sociable or they find that critical feedback simply isn’t helpful. Most of us, however, create some type of support system at some stage of our careers. Often it’s early on, when we’re struggling to learn the craft. We may find a face-to-face group or an online workshop or other network of fellow novices. The Internet provides a wealth of opportunities to meet
such people, as do conventions.
Most of the time, beginning writers are honestly trying to help one another. We may make mistakes as we learn how to give useful critical feedback or make idiotic suggestions about marketing, but the basic relationship is one of good will and support. Success, however small the sale, becomes an occasion for celebration. When one member improves, we all feel encouraged.
Trust is a crucial element in such groups. We work hard to learn to accept criticism, to not be defensive, to take time to think through the comments. While this vulnerability makes us more teachable, it also leaves us open to manipulation and abuse.
Sadly, sometimes the people we thought were our friends and supporters, our colleagues and conspirators in the adventure of creating and publishing stories, turn out to be our most insidious adversaries. Sometimes the alarm comes in the form of a sinking feeling, a sense that verges toward futility, after a discussion with a particular person. Other times, we realize that once again, we have been lured away from time in which we intended to work. Often we have no idea how that happened. We want to think well of our friends; we believe their words even when their actions speak differently.
The whole issue of jealousy and sabotage on the part of those we have trusted with our creative process, those we have relied on to be both honest and tender with us, is complex and troubling. I can’t do justice to all its aspects here. The first step toward healthier boundaries is realizing what is happening and that we are not alone. It’s happened to most of us.
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