Tag Archives: Articles

June 24, 2014 · 10:04 am

Effective Habits, Part II

So the second effective habit Barbara Wallace talks about in her article in the June 2014 edition of RWA magazine is about establishing structure as a writer. Structure, when used here, doesn’t mean how you construct your stories. It refers to being consistent and regimented in how much you want to write every day.

Writing goals are wonderful yardsticks when you write. They can be anything from a daily word count, to how many scenes you want to do a day, to how many chapters you want to get on paper in a given time frame. On the days that I don’t go to my paying job, I routinely set a goal of 1000-2500 written words. They don’t have to be perfect, they just have to get written down. This translates, when I’m working on my WIP, to about 8-10 pages per day. Some days I write a great deal more, but I never write less. And if I’m not pounding it out on the novel, then I’d doing it in this blog. Most of my blog entries average between 600 and 900 words, so that’s a fair chunk of writing still, on those days the WIP isn’t going smoothly. Every November a competition called NANOWRIMO occurs. The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is to write AT LEAST a 50,000 word novel in the month. I’ve done it for the past two years and both times I’ve exceeded the word count simply by setting a daily goal and sticking to it NO MATTER WHAT. This is the key to structure: doing what you’ve set out to do no matter what.

Many writers who are lucky enough to actually support themselves with their writing and do not have to have outside employment to survive, will all tell you the same thing: they treat writing as their 9-5 job. It may not occur exactly in those hours, but the reality is they work full 8 hour days or longer on their craft. Sitting down at the typewriter/laptop, and producing words-sentences-pages every day is how writers ,who are successful, write.

I’m a terrible deadline-er. This means that, 1. I hate deadlines, 2. I have never, ever, made one, and 3. I hate deadlines.I was that kid in school who always had their summer writing assignment done before july 4, who always had the term papers ready to be handed in at least a month before they were due, and I never studied the night before an exam. Never. I always had the full studying done long before that. In my adult life this hatred of deadlines shows its head in similar ways:  I amortized my mortgage so my house was paid for decades before it was supposed to be. I pay cash for most things because I do not like that monthly credit card statements that says “minimum due now,” and I am always ALWAYS early for work. How does this apply to writing? Well, if you give yourself daily goals, you will never be in that deadline crunch when you are furiously typing those last, critical pages for submission, and you can have the luxury of reading, re-reading and revising the work to make it the absolute best you can do.

Structure is a good thing. To a writer, it is essential.

 

 

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June 12, 2014 · 11:31 am

A little luck and a lot of hard work

I never dreamed about success. I worked for it. ― Estee Lauder

Icons are icons, whether writers or uber-business moguls like the lady quoted today. You don’t get where you want to get in life without a lot of hard work. Hard, finger-splitting, muscle making, soul growing work.

I’ve been asked to edit a piece I submitted for publication with the hope  that once I do, it will be good enough to warrant publication. So, I’ve been arduously typing away these past few days, rewriting, editing, editing some more, and trying to live my normal every day  life as best as I can. Because, you see, I don’t just want this to be good enough for publication. I want it to be the best I can make it. I want to feel, once the last word is typed, that this was truly the best  job I could do, that I gave it everything I could, and that I made it better than good enough.

A difficult task, to be sure.

My words, my thoughts, my ideas all have one thing in common: they are MINE.  My babies. I gave birth to them, nurtured them, then when they were ready, let them go. When I let them go out into the world to be read, I can’t help feeling trepidatious that they will be judged harshly. No parent wants to hear anything “bad” about their child. You always feel as if you failed in some way when someone makes a harsh comment about your baby.

I feel exactly the same way with my written words.  Like a wild mamma lion protects their young -sometimes to the death- is the way I feel about my words. My hard work, my soul growing work!

But, as with children, sometimes you have to let them feel a little pain, face a little judgement, in order for them to grow to be bigger, stronger, better.

So, today I struggle with the edits, hating to change or delete one word, one thought, one scene, in order to make the work good enough.

No, scratch that. Not good enough. The best it can be.

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June 3, 2014 · 9:33 am

Rejection, Part 2

“After rejection – misery, then thoughts of revenge, and finally,oh well, another try elsewhere.” Mason Cooley.

The misery part of the above quote I totally agree with. After my most recent rejection I did the following, not necessarily in this order: cried, ate a package of Milano cookies, cried, cursed the person rejecting me, cried some more but now howled, too, ate two chocolate donuts then two more, cried, cursed the air and then fumed.  After fuming I moved into seething, then cried again, not because I was upset about the rejection, but because I had now moved into embarrassment over it. I was ashamed that I had told people about my potential good news – based on what I was told by the person reviewing my work – and now I had to tell these same people that I had – gulp! – been rejected.

Red faced, trembling lip, crimson eared, embarrassed.

I wasn’t able to tell anyone for a week. Seven days I held all that emotion in, stuffing it with bad food and mentally castigating myself. Life I said in my  previous post, I had to talk myself off a proverbial ledge.

And then, the final part of the above quote filtered through all the hurt and the rage and the humiliation of failing. I woke up one day and decided that this wasn’t going to dissuade me from writing, that it wasn’t the end of the world or of my writing career, and that today was a new day.

A little Scarlett Ohara-ish, but true.

If we were to quit every time we failed at something, new inventions would never be discovered.

If we were to give up on love every time our heart was broken, we would never know the joy of rebirth that new love brings.

If I quit every time something I’d written was rejected for publication – no matter how much it hurt or how wrong the rejector was about it – I wouldn’t be at my laptop right this second typing this.

So, tomorrow is another day ( Thanks, Scarlett for making me realize that!) and there are more places to submit to and different people to read what I’ve written.

Rejection hurts. This is true. But it’s not the end of the world.

I have to go exercise those damn donuts and Milanos off now.

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June 1, 2014 · 1:16 pm

Rejection

“Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.” James Lee Burke

To write about this topic is stomach-upsetting for me. I am the penultimate expert on the subject of rejection: in my personal life, in my work, in my career, and in my writing. I joke that failure is a familiar friend to me, but that rejection is my sworn enemy. I can deal with failure because I know that out of it will some day come  success. Rejection, on the other hand, is a form of failure that is so much more personal and ego-devouring, that when it hits me, it throws me into the bowels of depression, and I have a very hard time clawing my way out of its clutches.

I could quote chapter, book and verse on the number of ubersuccessful people who suffered rejection before ever  seeing their proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. 27 publishers rejected Theodore Giesel’s first book. Stephen King was rejected 30 times before his first book sold. Supposedly, Jack London received over 600 rejection slips before he ever sold a story. The list goes on, but one thing they all had in common was that rejection did not mean the end of their desire to write. It probably spurred it on just to prove the rejectors  wrong.

Obviously, I’m writing this today because I, too, have suffered another writing rejection. And it hurts. Like hell. This time I was so confident that something good was going to come out of my submission – based on what I was told by the person I was submitting to –  that when the final rejection came, with no explanation of why, I was devastated. Beyond devestated, actually. I had to talk myself off a ledge. A  proverbial one, but a ledge just the same. To be rejected, to have my work rejected, my thoughts, my ideas, the way I write the words, is soul-killing. I could barely put a sentence together for a while because every time I opened my mouth, all I wanted to do was wail, “Why??!!”

A little overly melodramatic, but true.

I’ve had a few days now to get over the hurt, shock, annoyance, dismay and anger.  I no longer want to make a phone call and say vicious things to the person at the other end about their heritage and schooling. I’ve pulled myself back in from the ledge to my writing room. I am still having a little difficulty with the “Why” but for now, I will ignore that question and ask myself this one: “Where do I go from here?” The easiest answer is back to my laptop, so that is where I am today.

And where I will be every other day I have the time opportunity to be. I will not let this latest rejection steal my joy about writing. And it is a joy. No one should ever be allowed to rob you of that.

To quote one of the smartest women I know – my friend Jill – who is quoting her father when she says, “every thing happens for a reason.” This is so true. I don’t know the reason now, but I am confident I will someday. As the James Lee Burke quote of above tells us, this rejection is dues I am paying that will some day, some way, be translated back into my work.

Want to talk about your rejections??

 

 

 

 

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May 27, 2014 · 8:19 am

Failure, Part II

“Develop success from failure. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” Dale Carnegie

For those of you who don’t know who this influential and superbly brilliant man was, I suggest you GOOGLE him or open the name link above. Many of Dale Carnegie’s teachings in his breakthrough book How to Win Friends and Influence People can be directly related to whether or not you consider yourself and your writing as successful or as failures.

As I mentioned previously, take ten writers and ask them what success means to them with regard to their writing and you will get ten individual, different answers. The same can be said of failure. I was at a writing conference recently and an agent said that if you have a writing blog, you need to have at least ten thousand hits per week to be considered a success if you are querying a publisher.  Ten thousand. Per week. I’ve had this blog up since february and I’ve had a grand total of 584 hits since then. So, am I considered a failure by this agent’s guidelines? Yup.

At that same conference I attended a session about social media. The maven at that one stated categorically that you need a minimum of ten-to-twenty thousand followers in order to promote your book through TWITTER. Anything less than that and you won’t generate any buzz about your books, which will translate into not making any money from non-existent sales. Again, I’m a failure in her eyes.

I left the conference considering my choice of writing as a boondoggle.

By the time I got back home, that thought went the way of the dinosaur and disappeared from the face of the earth.

Social media is a very powerful tool this days. I’ll admit that freely. If and when I have a book published I will certainly take advantage of my Twitter followers ( all 80 of them!  )and my Facebook friendships to help generate buzz and sales. But I certainly don’t consider myself as a writing failure because I don’t have hundreds of thousands of people checking in on a smartphone to see what I’m up to. No. Taking the above quote into consideration, I will post my successes along the way and HOPE two friends will tell two friends, who will tell two more friends, and so on and so on.

I still believe in my heart and mind that the best way to get people to read your work is to write a good story that they can’t put down and don’t want to. Everything else will fall  from that. I am not a failure if I write a good story.

Thoughts?

 

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May 26, 2014 · 12:48 pm

Failure?

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Henry Ford.

This has to be one of the easiest quotes I’ve found so far to relate to writing! Read on and see if you agree.

In my last post I asked what it means to you, as a writer, to have success or to be successful. Is it publishing a novel? Finishing one? What defines success to you? Every answer is a correct one because every writer is unique.

Failure, I feel, is the same. Just as every writer defines their success individually, I think  we define our failures in the same manner. For instance, if I enter a contest and don’t win it, isn’t that generally considered a failure? I failed at winning. But what if I told you I didn’t  get the overall win, but that the editor who scored me liked my premise so much she asked for a full manuscript? Wouldn’t that negate the idea that I’d failed?

To take that thought further, I submit the manuscript only to have it sent back to me with the explanation, “you need to do certain things to this before it will be acceptable for publication,” and then the editor details what I need to do for satisfaction. I failed at getting that story published as it was originally penned, but now I’ve been given the opportunity to revise it, to make it better, with the thought that if I do, it may be good enough to be published. So again I failed, but I was given an opportunity to succeed. Hence, the above quote.

I consider something as a failure when I haven’t seen it to fruition. When I haven’t finished a story. I can make excuse after excuse why I didn’t complete it, but the end result is the same. I failed to give full birth to an idea that appeared promising. I also consider it a failure if I don’t accept opportunities that present themselves to me. Every writing contest I enter has the possible end result that I will not win, that I will fail. But every contest I enter is filled with learning opportunities. Editors and agents usually make comments about every facet of the piece entered. I would only consider myself as failing if I didn’t take the constructive criticisms and do something positive with them. And the most positive thing I could do would be to make the story better.

I don’t even consider myself as  failure since I’ve never had a fictional adult novel published yet. I would only see myself as failing if I stopped trying to reach that goal.

Any thoughts?

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May 20, 2014 · 2:43 pm

Reading

“The first time I read a new book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before it resembles the meeting with an old friend.” Oliver Goldsmith 

This quote resonates with me because I have been known to read and re-read books, sometimes yearly. I’ve read Gone with the Wind once ever year since I was in college. I read every Nora Roberts book when it is first released and then when it is re-released. The joy I experience when I read The End in a book, is only surmounted by the joy I feel when I start a favored book again. It doesn’t matter that I know the outcome. What matters is that the story being read is a good one. And, like  Goldsmith alludes to in his quote, the meeting of the words again is like meeting up with an old and treasured friend.

Why do I write? I’ve explored this topic before, but today I can answer it in a little more depth by asking, “Why do I read?”

Why do we read? What compels us, as a civilized people, to record our words? Many reasons come to my mind, not the least of which is to be entertained. I enjoy losing myself in a book, its characters, its plot lines and twists. A good story, like a good story teller, is a commodity. Anyone can write a book. All you need is a basic command of the language and a plot. But to write a good story, one that lasts, tests the passage of time, that entertains, educates, and makes one think, that takes talent. I read nowadays to be entertained. In college, I read to be educated. When I was in grade school, I read in order to learn how to read: what the definition of the words were, what the punctuation meant. As a baby I was read to in order to calm me down and prepare me for bed.

When we only had real bound books and paper products to read, such as newspapers and magazines, reading was something we usually did in the privacy of our homes or at school. The techno-age, which  may end up being the death of paper, has allowed our civilization the  freedom to read at any time, any where, and to read anything. Books, magazines, periodicals, blogs, diaries, history, spreadsheets, anything that can be printed that needs to be read can now be uploaded and stored on a myriad of personal devices. People now read while standing in line at the grocery market, waiting for trains and plains, even while walking down the street – which can prove hazardous! And we still read for all the same reasons: to be entertained, educated, informed, enlightened, stimulated, and calmed.

I have a Kindle, a Kindle app on my Ipad and a Kindle app on my phone so I am never without my current reading material. NEVER. I remember a time when I went on vacation and had to limit myself to one hardbound book so as not to take up too much of my suitcase room. Now, I take my Ipad and I have thousands of books at my fingertips any time I want.

So. Back to why I read. Basically, I like to lose myself in characters that bare no resemblance to me and into plots that I will never find myself  embroiled in. For a few stolen hours I like to imagine worlds where love does concur all, good always triumphs over evil, and greed is not good. So because those are the sorts of books I like to read, those are also the sorts of books I like to write.

There’s an old adage that states “Write what you know.” If I were the one penning that concept, I would say, “Read and write what you like.”

I do.  Do you?

Any thoughts?

 

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April 19, 2014 · 8:41 am

When the past becomes the present

Okay, that title is a little obscure. This is the story behind it.

In my thirties, I pretty much made a living doing freelance article writing for newspapers and magazines. That’s how I made cash. I didn’t need to work because my husband’s salary was more than enough and we both wanted our child to have a parent at home, not both of them always working. At the same time I was writing a great deal of fiction – mainly short stories – and had lots of success with awards and publications. I was also harboring a secret: I was writing book length romantic fiction and murder mysteries. I never attempted to get them published. I wrote them simply for my enjoyment when I had a few hours of time to myself. I liked my stories and I didn’t really care if anyone else ever saw them.

Fast forward a few years and I went back into the workforce as a favor. I didn’t have the time to devote to any kind of writing – freelance or fiction – so I let it slide for about 15 years.

A few more years ahead now. One day I was downsized at my job. Not let go,  but my hours were severely cut. My daughter was gone and on her own, my husband was still working full time, and now I found myself with more time for myself than I’d had in a decade. There is only so much house cleaning and working out at the gym that you can do in a given day, so I decided to pull some of my old fiction stories out and reread them.

Here’s the part of the story that’s weird. I don’t even remember writing most of them. There was a four year window where I actually penned 8 full length novels – each  300- 400 pages. During this prolific time I was shuffling my daughter to school, dance class, karate class, etc. I was making entire home cooked meals EVERY NIGHT of the week and my house looked great. And I still managed to spend all that time writing. I had an entire series of books devoted to one family. I started rereading them last year after I was down sized. I couldn’t remember what I’d written so it was like finding a new author and a new set of works to delight in. Some of them were pretty good, I thought. A little dated, because they were written before Iphones and such, but I started reworking them and modernizing them.

Lo and behold, two of them won contests and the editors at two publishing houses asked for complete manuscripts. I’m waiting to hear back from them as I write this.

It’s a funny thing when your past endeavors come forth to the present. I wonder if I’d tried to submit them for publication back then if they would have been accepted.  Or, did I need to write them and then put them away, only to turn to them again at this stage in my life.  I’ll never really know the answer. Suffice it to say, I had a great deal of fun rereading and reworking them. If this leads to publication, so be it. If it doesn’t, I know I’ll still be writing into the next decades of my life.

And who knows: maybe I’ll find something in the future that I’m writing now and will be surprised by all over again.

Like I said: it’s weird.

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April 17, 2014 · 9:10 am

Individual Speech Patterns

Did you ever read a scene between two characters and not know who was speaking because they both sounded the same on the page? I have and it’s very disconcerting. Now, you can use speaker attributes,or tags, such as he said, or she asked, to denote who is speaking and this is a fine, tried and true method to delineate who is saying what. But no two people speak the same way, even members in the same family. They may use similar words or expressions, but the way they say the words is different. People are unique. Your characters should be, too.

I have a friend who always thinks before answering a question. There’s never any knee-jerking in any response she gives. And she uses a modicum of words to answer that question. I have another friend who – like me – always knee-jerks, never thinks and speaks in a rapid fire fashion using up more words in the dictionary than most people know the meaning to. If I were to write a dialogue between the two I would never need to write a speaker attribution. You would know who is speaking just by the way I’ve written the dialogue. Your characters should be recognizable as well. If you have done your job correctly, and have laid the foundation throughout the story of how they speak – slow or fast, their tone – loud or soft – and the way they use words, your readers should be able to identify them during a dialogue scene.

Certain frequently used phrases, slang and dialect are all individual tags to indicate who is speaking as well.  Think of this statement: “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies!” If you are a Gone With the Wind fan, you recognize this as a sentence from Scarlet’s maid Prissy when Melanie goes into labor. Prissy is a slave. Poor, black and uneducated. If GWTW took place in the Regency period, you might expect the maid to be white, poor and uneducated, and her speech would sound something like this: “Oy dow’t know nuffin ‘bowt birthing babes!” Both sound uneducated. Take the same sentence and write it from Scarlet’s voice and it might sound like this: “But I don’t know anything about delivery babies!” Sounds different, doesn’t it? The well educated lady’s maid in England may  sound like this: “I’m sorry, but I am not acquainted with the necessary knowledge to assist a baby  into the world.” Sounds even more unique.

Where your story takes place, the locale or setting, will give you an indication of how the characters speak as well. The common ones are Y’all for the south, Mate for our neighbors to the north and Australia, Eh? for the upper midsection of the country, bloody and brilliant for our English friends. You can come up with many more individual phrases and words used in various sections of our world. If you have a Brit in your book, make him say common Brit phrases, and then try to have the Americans tell him the way they say the same word. That would surely denote who is speaking from who.

I am nosey. I’ve said this too any times now to try and deny it if asked. In my nosiness states I listen to how strangers speak. In a restaurant, at the mall, on airplanes. I enjoy hearing people talk because it is all fodder for my imagination and story telling. The next time you are somewhere pubic, listen to a few people have a dialogue. Note the speed – or lack of it – in the way they talk, the words they use – many or sparse – and any geographical dialect sounding words they say. See if you can translate that to whatever story you are currently working on. Write a couple of pages of dialogue without speaker attributes and have someone read it. Someone your trust and like. See if they can follow who is speaking without the tags. If they can, you have done a great job. If they can’t, figure out why not and how you can fix it. And I’ll bet you can fix it by doing any of the ways I’ve mentioned.

 

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April 8, 2014 · 3:24 pm

How well do you know your characters?

This is an interesting question, and one I’ve asked other writers in the past. If asked, would you be able to state your hero’s favorite food or color? Your heroine’s favorite memory from childhood? The inciting event that helped mold each of their psyche’s? This is heady stuff and, I feel, very valuable to know.

In a tangential way, this goes back to whether you  are a pantser or a plotter. I’ve admitted I plot everything, and that includes having full disclosure from my characters before I start typing. I need to know what makes them tick, what they like, dislike, loathe. What turns them on in life and what turns them on sexually. I need to be able to think in their heads when they are speaking, know what their reactions to events and circumstances would be based on past behaviors and motivations. If they have the capacity to change, and why or why not. I never want a reader to say “he wouldn’t say that!” or “Where did that come from? She’s never said she feels that way.” That’s cheating the reader, and will ultimately disappoint them.

I’m nosey. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I could talk to a rock and make it answer me. I’m that way with my characters, too. When I’m envisioning my heroine, I know what she looks like, who she got her upturned nose from, if her earlobes are attached or not. I can tell you how she felt when she wore braces and where she kept her diary hidden from her mother when she was 12. I know her secrets, her longings, her desires. With my hero, I can tell you how he felt when he was losing his virginity, who he resembles in his family tree, and how much money he has in his checking account. And I know the answer to this one very specific question for both of them: who would you die for. This sounds a little obsessive and believe me, it is. But the only way I know how to adequately show my characters to the readers  is by knowing what their actions and reactions will be, and why.

I heard someone say once that you should write up a series of questions for your characters as if you were going to be speed dating them. You can learn a great deal about people by asking just a few very well pointed questions. Like I said, I’m nosey. The more I know, the better I can draw the character.  The better the character is drawn, the more believable (s)he will be. And ultimately, the more believable your characters are, the better and more cohesive the story you can devise for them will be.

So, here’s to nosiness. In writing, it’s a good thing.

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