the writing life

So What Do I Do Now?

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This post by Wendy Lawton originally appeared on Books&Such on 2/10/15.

How often do writers encounter a wrinkle of one sort or another and wonder, “So what do I do now?”

When I was writing my very first middle grade book on an obscure figure from history I was shocked to find my character featured in another middle grade book by a well-known children’s writer. I was devastated. I figured my story was already done. My big question was, “So what do I do now?” Happily I stepped back and realized that the story treatment was very different from mine and that my concept offered a series that was a unique presentation. I kept plowing forward and not only finished the book but found a publisher for the series.

We come across many a situation where we ask the question. Let me describe a couple. . .

Wrinkle: Say you are a writer who has been slaving away on a steampunk novel only to read that steampunk is dead in the water.

So what do I do now?

 

Read the full post on Books&Such.

 

Indie & Trad Publishing & Flying Monkeys On The Yellow Brick Road!

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 2/12/15.

As you negotiate your journey through the wonderful world of publishing, be careful of those flying monkeys as you gaze in the crystal ball of your career path.

Don’t take anyone else’s monkey as your own! We all are on our unique yellow brick roads to Oz, whatever Oz might be for each of us.

Lately I’ve run into some new writers at conferences who eventually whisper to me they’ve signed a traditional deal, but they’re afraid to mention it to anyone because they get castigated. The attitude seems to be that if the book is good enough to get a book deal, then self-publishing makes more sense.

What a change in just a few years when people would break open a bottle of champagne upon getting a book deal. Now one almost dares not mention it for fear of being ridiculed for not taking the indie route. There are some indie authors saying they will never go back to traditional publishing; the key phrase is “go back”. It’s curious that a lot of us who have been successful as indies actually started in traditional publishing, giving us a distinct leg up; along with a thing called backlist.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write

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This article by Shane Snow originally appeared on Contently on 1/28/15.

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index:

I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Hemingway. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. That’s when I was really surprised:

Apparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary-schoolers.

Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine.

 

Read the full post, which includes many informative graphs, on Contently.

 

Productivity For Writers: 5 Ways To Become More Productive

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 1/29/15.

Some of the most common emails I receive every day include: How do I find the time to write? And how do you get everything done?

While I don’t write a book a month (at the moment!), I do get quite a lot done!

[Time poor and want to finish a book in 90 days? Click here for a free video series from Self-Publishing School.]

I published 4 new books in 2014 in ebook and print, plus I had another one completed and on pre-order, so technically 5 books in total. Plus, I published books in German, Spanish and Italian, as well as several in audio format, resulting in a total of 19 new products for sale in 2014.

Plus, a lot of blog posts and podcasts which I hope you found useful 🙂 So today, here are some of my tips on productivity for writers and a resource I think at least some of you will find useful.

 

(1) Schedule your time

We all have 24 hours in the day, and we all have to balance the real life stuff with the writing. Before I was a full-time author-entrepreneur, I would get up at 5am and write, then go to work. After the day job, I would come home and get on with building my online business. We got rid of the TV so I would have more time to create, and I spent every weekend working. I was so focused on leaving my job that I cut out everything that got in the way. I was driven to schedule my time incredibly well in order to fit everything in.

Now, as a full-time author-entrepreneur, I still have to schedule everything. You might have noticed that I blog, podcast and speak professionally, as well as writing books. It’s just as hard to get everything done, let me assure you!

So I’ll admit to being a chronic scheduler! But seriously, it is the only way I get anything done.

 

Read the full post, which includes five additional productivity tips, on The Creative Penn.

 

Susan Straight On Learning To Write Without A Room Of One's Own

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This essay by Susan Straight originally appeared on the The Los Angeles Times on 4/9/14.

What does it take to be a writer: A room of one’s own? A weakness for words? To celebrate the Festival of Books, we asked five celebrated authors to recall a turning point in their evolution as writers. First up is Susan Straight, recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ 2013 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

I wrote the stories in my first book by hand, in these places: at the counter of the Mobil station where I worked in 1979, between customers, eating beef jerky and stale cashews out of the nut mix no one ever bought from the cloudy glass compartments beneath my notebook; sitting on a huge rock at the beach in Rosarito, Mexico, in 1983 after my husband fell asleep in the tiny hotel where we spent our two-night honeymoon, writing in my notebook; sitting at a card table in married student housing in 1984 in Amherst with the small blue Smith-Corona my mother had given me for high school graduation; in a pale green 1980-something Fiat with brakes that went out all the time, upon which occasion my husband would have me sit in the driver’s seat and pump the brakes while he was underneath the car in the gravel driveway of our house back in Riverside in 1988, and I held a notebook and pen, writing.

 

Read the full essay on The Los Angeles Times.

 

Corrections Are Good: How to Take Critique Like a Dancer

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This post by Kim Bullock (link goes to a site for Carl Ahrens, a major character in her current novel) originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 1/30/15.

My daughter, who had not known a plié from a tendu until age nine, was understandably terrified when she entered her first class at one of Dallas’ most prestigious classical ballet schools.

She had been the prima dancer during her one year at a beginner studio, performing front and center in the recital. “Work hard and you can go anywhere you want in the dance world,” her teacher had told her privately after ballet lesson number three. I was in the room at the time, and I watched that spark of a dream ignite in her eyes.

I feared her passion for dance might be snuffed out by trying to compete in a room full of girls who had been on tiptoe since toddlerhood, but my sensitive perfectionist emerged from class dry-eyed and grinning. She did chinés turns all the way back to the car, narrowly avoiding trash cans and hedges.

As she twirled, she rattled off an extensive list of things she had done wrong in class that day: everything from her hyper-extended elbows to her weak turnout and lazy fifth position. Her old teacher had apparently failed to correct her bad habits, so she would need to relearn everything

Though she did not seem upset in the least, I had to ask. “Did you receive any roses with all those thorns?”

“She didn’t name my butt. If it sticks out when you plié, she’ll give it an old man name,” my daughter explained. “The girl next to me was told to ‘put Fred away’ three times.”

 

Read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

2014: Some (Honest) Publishing Numbers, and (Almost) Throwing in the Towel

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This post by Kameron Hurley originally appeared on her site on 12/31/14. Note that it contains strong language.

About this time last year, GOD’S WAR, which had been out in the UK for a solid seven months, had sold just 300 copies there, and every single major publishing house had passed on THE MIRROR EMPIRE, the epic fantasy novel I thought was the most marketable thing I’d ever written.

I was, to be blunt, pretty fucking devastated.

A lot of people think that once you publish a book, that’s it – you go on publishing books. The publishing world opens its arms to you and welcomes every book like a precious squealing babe. The reality is that publishing your first book is when the real work starts. All that time you spent leveling up your craft, on dealing with rejection, on editing and revision: that was just a warm up for the crushing reality of life day-in, day-out as a published author.

In early January of this year, I was getting ready to shelve THE MIRROR EMPIRE and take a break from writing for  a while, and come up with something somebody wanted to read. I knew MIRROR EMPIRE was a good book, which was frustrating: it was just a good book nobody wanted to buy at the moment. I needed to wait for the market to shift. The plan was I’d just hold onto it until somebody at some house got a new job – new editors have different opinions. Maybe somebody would buy it some day. In the meantime, I had no project idea that was more marketable than this one, so… I was going to need to take some time to recover from my disappointment and write something new. Another slog of a year, I figured, with no new book coming out, again.

Like a lot of Night Shade Books debut authors caught up in the spiral of near-bankruptcy and eventual sale, my work had suffered from declining sales, especially the third book. RAPTURE had sold low, just 2,000 copies, only about 350 of which actually showed up on Bookscan. Low sales like that give editors on the fence about a project a good reason to pass. The performance of that third book was not helping MIRROR EMPIRE.

 

Read the full post on Kameron Hurley’s site.

 

Among The Disrupted

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This essay by Leon Wieseltier originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 1/7/15.

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)
Read the full essay on The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Note that The New York Times may move this material behind a paywall in the future.

 

Sex Scenes In Novels: Autobiographical or Imagined?

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This article by Jon Stock originally appeared on The Telegraph on 3/5/13.

Authors risk the ridicule of friends whenever they write about sex, even if it’s pure fiction, says spy writer Jon Stock.

Authors are often urged to write about what they know, but does this apply to sex scenes? Should they be based on personal experience – cue sniggering from friends, family and fellow authors – or drawn from the realms of pure fantasy?

The novelist Julian Barnes claims in an article today that modern writers feel a commercial obligation to include sex scenes and then struggle to write them. Chief amongst their many fears is the assumption that readers will conclude they are in some way autobiographical.

According to Barnes: “Writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones that the writer might be giving him- or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sexual act, that it must already have happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

I noticed that people began to look at me in a very different way after the publication of my 2009 espionage thriller, Dead Spy Running. The genre has certain requirements: exotic locations, gritty hero, labyrinthine plotting and, of course, sex.

 

Read the full post on The Telegraph.

 

Setting Up A Regular Writing Schedule

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This post originally appeared on Creative Caravan Club on 1/8/15.

Are you trying to write a novel within the next few weeks or months, but you just can’t seem to stick to a regular writing schedule?

The following tips will work for anyone who wants to write a book within a short period of time:

 

1. Set up your writing time as a regular appointment with yourself.

Plan specific times you will write each week, then write down these times on a calendar or day planner, just the way you would any other appointment.

 

2. Break down your novel, short story, or article into small chunks.

If you’re writing a novel, break down each chapter into scenes. Then schedule time to write just one scene at a time.

 

3. Give yourself some slack while you’re committed to completing a big writing project, like writing a book.

Save some of your other writing for later. You want to plan, start and finish your book within a short period of time. You won’t be able to do that if you also try to write a million other things.

 

Read the full post on Creative Caravan Club.

 

Fanfiction Made Me a Better Feminist

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This post by Anna Andersen originally appeared on Medium on 1/17/15.

I write about gay relationships between fictional characters. Here’s why other women should take that seriously.

My best writing, the stuff I’m most proud of, is also the writing that makes me the most ashamed. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

I’ve been a writer since I knew what the word meant: poems and short stories and unfinished novels litter first notebooks, then hard drives into my young adulthood. I’ve got bona fides to spare: half an MFA in creative writing, published poetry in my twenties, essays and book reviews on my CV.

But I didn’t find my creative voice until recently, when I started working in the least respected genre imaginable: fanfiction. Specifically, slash fiction — erotic stories about same-sex fictional characters. My slash of choice is Dean Winchester and Castiel, Angel of the Lord, from the TV show Supernatural, a pairing referred to in fandom by the handy portmanteau “Destiel.” In fandom parlance, I “ship Destiel”: in my stories, Dean and Castiel fall in love over and over again. Sometimes, their romance takes place in the world of the show, but often it’s set in alternate worlds where they’re firefighters or teachers or high school kids, baristas or bartenders or bakers. Wherever they are, whoever they are, they end up together, and usually have explicit sex along the way.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

These Days, Writing Isn’t A Career. It’s A Rich Man’s Hobby

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This article by Toby Young originally appeared on The Telegraph on 1/16/15.

Writing’s always been lopsided, but it’s got a lot worse in the last decade

I envy William Hague. Not the £2.5 million country house he’s just bought in Wales, although that would be nice. Rather, the fact that he plans to spend his retirement writing books.

These days, you need a substantial private income – or a public sector pension – to be a full-time writer. Last year, a survey of 2,500 professional authors found that their median income in 2013 was £11,000. That’s a drop of 29 per cent since 2005 and significantly below the minimum salary required to achieve a decent standard of living.

The writing game is notoriously lopsided, in which a small handful of bestselling authors earn a fortune and the vast majority live on scraps, but it’s got worse in the past decade. “You’ve always been able to comfortably house the British literary writers who can earn all their living from books in a single room,” says the author Will Self, whose own royalties have tailed off in recent years. “That room used to be a reception one, now it’s a back bedroom.”

 

Read the full article on The Telegraph.

 

Six Things Every Writer Needs to Succeed (Psst: MFA is not on this list.)

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This post by ML Swift originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 1/14/15.

When Therese asked if I’d like to scratch out an article for Writer Unboxed, I literally — in the most figurative sense of the word — stood up, turned around, and knocked the gold bricks out of my chair. Did I read her note correctly? Would I like to write an essay for the website I’ve worshipped for over three years, and — e’en if for a day, ere I’m shown the door fore’er — dispense Parker-esque aphorisms to the most respected minds in the industry, while at the same time, make a complete and utter fool of myself? Would I? Would I? I pounced on the keyboard: “Does a bear sh—?” Wait. Breathe. Backspace and delete. Respond as if it were as commonplace as “You want fries with that?”

“Why, yes, Therese, that would be lovely.” There you go. Classy. Mature. Professional. Kiss, kiss; hug, hug. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

By dinnertime, my euphoric ride on the Cumulonimbus9 had ended with a belly-flop to earth, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere, dusting off rainbows and gnawing my thumbnail like a piece of beef jerky. “Mike, what in the world were you thinking?” Actually, if you really want to get down and velveteen about it, I used a much more colorful, less Hogwarts-friendly expression.

You see, that very morning, Sharon Bially had written a post listing six criteria for an impressive writer’s resumé, and according to the stats, I was batting zero. Even worse, I didn’t foresee three of the six items making my five-, ten-, or twenty-year plan. Her suggestions, in order of my probable attainment (from “most likely” to “you’ve got to be kidding”) included:

 

Read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

Top 10 Tips On Overcoming Writer’s Block

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This post by Dylan Hearn originally appeared on Suffolk Scribblings on 1/14/15.

The existence of writer’s block is something that divides writers. Some say there is no such thing, others that they have suffered from it and often. Regardless of whether you believe or not, I don’t know of a single writer that hasn’t struggled at some point to get words on the page. I know I have. So here are my top 10 tips on overcoming this hurdle so you can get back writing again.

 

1 Sit down and be ready to write
If you are the type of writer who has to ‘wait for their muse’, then I can’t help you. You can’t write if you don’t want to write. We are often at our most creative when finding excuses not to do something. As Dorothy Parker once said, “writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.” If you can’t do this, nothing else will help you.

 

2 Set up a routine
Before I write I make a cup of tea. This ritual allows me to switch from whatever I’ve been doing or thinking about to focussing on the task at hand. I also like to eat biscuits, though I’m not sure if that helps or is just an indulgence. As people we like routine and are conditioned to do certain things in a certain way. Most of us have a morning routine to get us ready for the day. If it is altered our whole day feels out of synch. It’s the same for writing. Get yourself into the practice of doing the same things before you write and you will find writing comes naturally.

 

3 Allow yourself to write badly

 

Read the full post on Suffolk Scribblings.

 

After The Love Has Gone

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This post by Gina Holmes originally appeared on Novel Rocket on 1/9/15.

When the writing journey begins, we’re wide-eyed, hopeful and possibly frothing at the mouth to master the craft of writing, get a publishing contract, make a name for ourselves and maybe even change the world. Oh, yeah, and a Pulitzer would be nice … since we’re dreaming and all.

Then something happens. We actually do it! We get everything we thought we wanted, (except maybe the Pulitzer), but it’s not quite the happily ever after we thought it’d be. It’s work. Drudgery. Deadlines. Lackluster sales. Some great reviews, and some not so great. We get that industry nod we salivated about in our wannabe days in the form of a coveted award. After celebrating with our pretty little trophy in our pretty little dress, we wake up the next morning with all the same problems we had the day before.

I guess writing is a lot like romantic love. There’s a reason fairy tales end with the star-crossed lovers riding off into the sunset. Who wants to see them have their first fight over who’s doing more housework? Or watch them struggle to pay for that dream house? Or try to lose the baby or beer gut?

 

Read the full post on Novel Rocket.