Force For Good

http://elitedaily.com/news/world/j-k-rowling-pens-letter-to-girl-who-survived-family-massacre/698490/

I discovered this article today and had to share it.

We've discussed on this blog before Why You Will (Probably) Never Become As Famous As J. K. Rowling, and I'm not here to rehash this. But on the 1/7 billion chance that I, or anyone who reads this does, I would like to say that that's how you do it.

There is nothing that can really make the situation for Cassidy Stay "alright". Since I belong to the same faith as Cassidy I know that she knows that she is going to see her entire family again. That this isn't the end. That doesn't change the fact that they're all gone.

It's a horrible tragedy, but I think that Rowling's actions are beyond admirable. She can't make the situation alright, like I said, but she did something to try to make it just a little better. If there's any chance that any of us could be as famous as Rowling one day, I hope that we could do something like that.

Personally that's a bit of a dream for me. If I could accomplish anything with my writing, I want to make someone's life better. Give them hope for a better day, encourage them to keep living and fighting, to make the best of everything. I want to be a force for good in any way that I can.

I suppose maybe that's why this article hit me so hard, because Rowling's doing what I hope to be able to do some day. What we should all hope to be able to do one day.

Reblog: How to Do Your Chores in 12 Easy Steps

So today was my first day at a job that I'm going to be doing on Saturdays. We know a newlywed couple who both work full time and she has physical disabilities so too much physical exertion is painful, so she's hired me to help her clean up on Saturday for a few hours. I'm pretty good at cleaning other people's stuff, and I need money (lots of stuff to save up for), so it's a pretty good fit.

However, while I am good at cleaning other people's stuff, I am horrible at cleaning my own. I'm lazy, I get used to the mess and dealing with it, if I ever do decide to actually go and clean I'll get distracted or I'll realize just how much I have to clean and start trying to clean too many things at once, or I won't clean up cleaning up (as in putting away the cleaning materials). 

Which leads me to my reblog.

This is a brilliant little article that I found once, and it's just an awesome blog in general.

How to Do Your Chores in 12 Easy Steps by Nathan Bransford

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/05/how-to-do-your-chores-in-12-easy-steps.html

"Step 1: Start a novel

Step 2: Write 50 pages in a month

Step 3: Write 5 pages in the next two months

Step 4: Stare at the screen

Step 5: Despair

Step 6: Open a closet

Step 7: Eye cleaning supplies longingly

Step 8: Clean every square inch of your apartment/house, marveling at how much more fun you're having than writing your novel

Step 9: Find a filing cabinet, organize it

Step 10: Find tiles, scrub them with a toothbrush

Step 11: Run out of things to clean, return to computer

Step 12: Stare at the screen in a freakishly clean living space"

And the funniest thing about it?

I can't count how many times it's worked for me.

Reblog: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses

I had some time today because I didn't have any homework, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to work on my novel. In doing so I decided to look up a favorite article of mine, and realized that I should probably share it with all of you! I love some of the ideas that it proposes.

Darcy Pattison's "The Incredible Shrunken Manuscript: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses". http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/31-FE3-NovelRevision.html

"Without reading a single word of your novel, I can tell you some of its strengths and weaknesses by using the “Shrunken Manuscript” technique. The technique was born accidentally several years ago, when a friend asked me to critique her manuscript. We were a bit short on money at the time and I didn’t want to print out a couple hundred pages to read. Instead, I single-spaced the manuscript, reduced the font and then printed it out.

What I saw amazed me. Chapters that covered ten pages were now encapsulated on just three pages. It was easier to see how Act I led into Act II. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages to check a fact, I had only a couple dozen pages to go through.

I decided to be really radical. I eliminated all white space at the ends of chapters and reduced the font to only 6-point, or even 5-point, until I had an entire 50-60,000 word novel in less than 30 pages.

I’ve heard the complaints: you can’t read a manuscript at that font size. You don’t need to. .

How to Use the Shrunken Manuscript Technique

Here’s how the process works. Identify something you want to visualize about your manuscript. I often ask students to identify their five strongest chapters, with strongest defined in any way they think is helpful for their manuscript. Then, take a bright marker and put an X over the strongest chapters. Yellow markers don’t tend to work as well as blue or pink. Finally, lay the manuscript on the floor in three rows with about ten pages in each row.

Now, step back and observe.

For example, if you have two strong chapters at the beginning and three strong chapters at the end, you have the dreaded sagging middle problem. If you have two strong chapters in the middle and three at the end, then you must question the opening: perhaps you started the story too early. An absence of X-ed chapters toward the end means you need a better climax.

At first, students were skeptical that this Shrunken Manuscript technique worked. But they were working in groups, and within each group, writers had exchanged and read manuscripts. When I identified one story as having a sagging middle, I asked the writer’s group if that was true of the manuscript. They said yes.

So, what are the rules of the Shrunken Manuscript? Actually, everything is arbitrary, based on rules I made up as I worked with the technique.

1. 30 pages. For me, 30 pages are about all I can take in visually at a time. Manuscripts up to 60,000 words can be shrunken to 30 pages; sometimes you need to put the story into two columns, which shrinks it even more. For manuscripts over 60,000 words, divide the manuscript in half and repeat the exercise for each half.

2. Mark 5-6 items. In 30 pages, it works well to mark 5-6 successful chapters. You could do more or less, but then you start to fudge on your criteria for a strong chapter.

3. Make your own key. While I like to mark chapters with a marker, others use stickers, glitter, beads and more.

4. Mark anything you want. The technique is flexible and can be used to consider anything in your story. Here are some suggestions, but feel free to adapt as needed:

• How often do the protagonist and antagonist go head to head? The conflicts should be spread out consistently through the novel and it must definitely happen in the climax scene. 
• Where does a certain character appear and how much space is devoted to that character? Here, you wouldn’t mark entire chapters, but scenes in which the character appears. What’s useful here is that you can easily see proportions. If Character A only appears in short scenes, so only 10% of the story (or 3 pages total) features Character A, then A shouldn’t be the main character.
• Dialogue versus prose. Because dialogue is often short, it tends to leave open space on the shrunken manuscript, making it easy to gauge if you are prose heavy or dialogue heavy.
• Does your setting vary across the story? Use different colors to mark the different settings. Often, writers want a setting to recur, with the subsequent events in that setting contrasting or supporting the previous events. This allows you to pinpoint exactly when the settings occur in the story.

In other words, this technique is good at evaluating the big picture of a novel, the overall structure, pacing, interactions. (See complete instructions on Shrunken Manuscripts here.)

I wondered if there were other useful techniques for seeing the big picture, and this is what I found.

Spreadsheet Plotting

Scott Westerfield and Justine Larbalestier use an adaptation of a spreadsheet to track a novel’s plot. Larbalestier says, “A novel is a large document containing a whole world with a population that can range from one (boring navel-gazing novel about a man trapped inside a unicycle) to billions or more (space opera where the Empress of the universe destroys a whole planet and the reader follows the last day of each inhabitant of said planet). Keeping track of all of that is tricky.”

Basically, you can decide to track chapters or scenes. Then for each scene/chapter, you fill in columns that ask Characters Present, Goal of Scene/Chapter, Setting, Timeline, Action v. Sitting Around, Word Count, and virtually anything else you want to chart. Depending on how obsessive you are, you can play with the spreadsheet software and do things such as highlight character names in different colors. Be sure to use consistent terminology, such as always calling a place “the picnic area,” and not changing it to “the park.” If you stay consistent, then you can use the spreadsheets sorting capability, letting you see at a glance how many scenes/chapters take place at the picnic area.

Both the spreadsheet plotting and the Shrunken Manuscript Technique are useful for revising a long novel because you can see different items at a glance. But they aren’t the same.

Shrunken Manuscripts can show you proportions at a glance, for example, how much space is devoted to Character A. You can find out the same information in spreadsheet plotting, but you must add up numbers: it’s not visual. With Shrunken Manuscripts, it’s also easy to mark multiple issues at one time by using different colors or other keys.

Spreadsheet plotting allows you to scan the actual content of chapters just by glancing down a column.  If you have one column for the emotional impact of a scene/chapter—perhaps assigning a 1-5 for emotional content—you can easily identify how the emotional arc is progressing. So, either content or progressions (plot, narrative arc, character arc, or emotional arc) are easier with spreadsheets.

From Shrinking to Exploding

On the other hand, when Kirby Larson, winner of the Newberry Honor medal (given to the most distinguished book published in children’s literature that year) for Hattie Big Sky, hit a wall in her writing, she took it to heart.

With the help of her friend and co-author, Mary Nethery, she taped large sheets of paper around the walls of her office. Then around the room, she wrote the major plot lines and started working with them. After two days of working BIG, she had her plot and working outline for revision done.

Working big or small, changing the manuscript’s size helps an author see the story better.

Characters

We’ve talked about techniques for seeing the overall shape of a story. What about techniques for seeing different aspects of the story? Here’s one for characters. Everyone knows that characters should run a story and that interesting characters make for interesting stories. But did you put an interesting character in your novel right from the start?

Read the first five pages of your story. Done? Stop!

Turn over page five and write down everything you know about the main character from those first five pages.

Does your list look something like this?

• 20 years old
• secretary
• likes red nail polish

If that’s all you know after five pages, you’re in trouble! By the end of five pages, readers should know much more about your main character, or they are likely to abandon the story. By page five, I like to be able to list at least a dozen unique characteristics, bits of trivia about the character, likes or dislikes, life issues, fears, etc. Do you give the reader a hint about the character’s inner life, not just a physical description? Do you give the reader a view of the setting through your character’s eyes?

By the end of page five, the reader should be hooked—by your characters.

Suggestion: Repeat the evaluation for a section near the middle of the book. Maybe you need to throw out the first couple chapters because you were learning who your characters are. If the results are just as dry and sterile though, you’ll definitely want to study characterization.

Dialogue

The difficult thing about dialogue is that it simulates speech, it begs for the ear. One way to test your dialogue is to pick a section of your novel with lots of dialogue. Remove the actions, thoughts, and speech tags, rewriting it as a play or script. Then, ask a couple friends to read it aloud. If you have the capability, either audiotape or videotape this reading.

Here’s an example from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, Chapter 9, with all speech tags and actions removed:

Grace: Oh, there you are. Come, dear, let’s go to your room and I’ll fix your hair.
Grace: Have you eaten?
Turtle: Mrs. Baumbach made me a dinner.
Grace: Your poor father’s probably starving; he’s been so busy on the phone, changing appointments and all.
Turtle: Daddy’s eating in the coffee shop; I just saw him there.
Grace: I think you should wear your party dress tonight; you look so pretty in pink.
Grace: You know, sweetheart, I’m rather hurt that you won’t tell your own mother about your clues.
Turtle: My lips are sealed.
Grace: Just one eensy-beensy clue?
Turtle: N-n-n.

Notice first, that Turtle doesn’t answer each time Grace, her mother, speaks. Dialogue isn’t just about the words used, but about the interchange between characters and that can involve silences.

Listen to the recording and evaluate the dialogue: Are the intonations natural, not forced? We don’t need explicit transitions like repetitions or explanations; instead, the intonation provides the coherence needed. Grace sounds overly cheerful as she tries to placate her daughter and worm the clues to the story’s mystery from her. Turtle sounds straightforward, until she realizes her mother’s intention and then resorts to monosyllables. Grace is characterized as a person who will flatter and be kind to get what she wants. Turtle is characterized as a perceptive person who sees under the surface to her mother’s intent. Short sentences are fine. Though none are used in this selection, even sentence fragments can be used effectively in dialogue, if the intonation patterns are right.

Another quick exercise is to cut-and-paste one character’s dialogue into a separate file. Read through it for consistency, making sure the character sounds like the same character throughout. You can tell this is Character X, not Character A. Or, without identifying the character, ask someone who has read your novel to identify the character who is speaking. If they guess the wrong character, you’ll want to look at that character’s dialogue closely in the next revision.

Scenes

Finally, a quick check of your scenes is a good place to start evaluating your novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Scenes are contained units of action with a beginning, a middle and end. Sometimes, one scene takes up a chapter and other times, several scenes combine to create a chapter. Scenes open with some sort of conflict, which gives characters a goal for the scene. The middle complications intensify the conflict and the ending usually features a disaster, somehow making the situation worse for the character. Scenes usually include four elements: action, dialogue, narrative and interior thoughts.

Did you write in scenes? To find out take out a chapter of your novel and put a box around the scenes. Yes, take out a bright marker or pen and mark up the chapter, boxing every scene.

For example, in Lizzie Bright and Buckminster’s Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, Chapter 3 has these scenes:

• Turner’s father, the minister, punishes him for several misdeeds. (2 pages)
• Turner suffers in his room from the summer heat. (Half page)
• Turner survives supper without a misstep. (One page)
• Turner watches the sunset and almost likes Maine. (Half page)
• Turner seeks a place where he “can breathe”; he goes to the seashore. (2 pages)
• Turner meets Lizzie Bright, who teaches him how to bat Maine-style. (6 pages)
• At supper, Turner is lectured by his father, until his mother steps in and stops it. (2 pages)
• Turner heads to the hay meadow to play baseball, but a rainstorm stops the game. (1 page)

Several short scenes build up to the longest scene in which Turner meets Lizzie Bright, a black girl, and they become instant friends, something that will cause trouble throughout the rest of the story. Notice that Turner is at the center of each scene and each scene contains conflict, both big and small. For example, when Turner meets Lizzie Bright, he is throwing stones. She calls to him and in his surprise, his last stone is thrown overhead and comes down and hits his nose. It bleeds and his bloody shirt will get him in more trouble with the minister. In his pain, Turner refuses to answer Lizzie Bright’s questions, so she thinks he is an idiot. Besides the overall problem of not liking Maine and befriending the wrong person, Turner has smaller conflicts within the scene itself.

Could you divide your manuscript into scenes? If not, don’t panic. You’ve just discovered something about your style of writing. Many writers take a more meandering route toward a novel; however, those who write in scenes tend to write stories that are more focused, more tension-filled, more emotional. I’d recommend you at least try writing in scenes and see if it fits your style and your story. A good place to begin is Sandra Scofield’s, The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer.

The point of these exercises is to change the context for the story, from large to small, something that will make you, the author, see the story differently. Writers are too close to their own work to see the shape, to understand when and where to revise. But these methods of looking at your novel’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a starting place for your revisions."

Reblog: If Only I Had Connections

Yes I know I posted something less than little over 12 hours ago, but I just discovered this article and it just so happen to relate pretty perfectly to the last post, Hard Work is Hard :(. 

It's a long reblog. But trust me, it's well worth the read.

"If Only I had Connections", by Rick Riordan, Bestselling Author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, Heroes of Olympus series, and the Kane Chronicles series. 

A few notes on getting published, for what it’s worth, expanding on some of the tweets I offered yesterday morning. Much of this I’ve said before, either on the blog or on my website, but many aspiring writers are interested in figuring out the enigma of getting published, and I don’t blame them.

I don’t offer these ideas to burst bubbles or discourage, but I think it’s always best to have a clear picture of what you are dealing with.

The assumption:

The main reason I’m not getting published is because I don’t have a foot in the door. If only I knew an agent or an editor or someone important to give my manuscript the attention it deserves, I would get published.

My take on it:

Connections, at best, might get you a slightly longer and more polite ‘no.’ They help much less than you might imagine.

The first time I got published, my only connection was a local novelist whose six-week writing course I had taken. I paid her to line-edit my first manuscript, which was very helpful, and which anyone can do if you’re willing to pony up the time and money. Most communities have adult education classes in creative writing at local colleges or high schools.

At any rate, when the time came to query agents, I asked permission to use my teacher’s name, then wrote in my query letter that so-and-so, author of x novel,suggested I contact this agency. Did this help? It’s hard to know. I got many, many rejections from agents. The agent who eventually accepted me as a client had never heard of the novelist who recommended me. She just liked the premise of my book. After I got an agent, she shopped it around and got rejections from thirteen publishers before one said yes. I considered myself lucky. My first manuscript was published! That’s better than many aspiring writers manage, but I certainly had no inside track.

The second time I launched a series, Percy Jackson, I still used no connections. I intentionally sent out The Lightning Thief anonymously, under the pseudonym Ransom Reese. I wanted the manuscript to sink or swim on its own, without relying on the people I knew in the business (though honestly, I didn’t think those connections would make a difference either way). The result? Lots more rejections from agents. One agent liked the premise enough to give it a shot. She had better luck with the publishing houses than I had the first time around, but it had nothing to do with who I was or the people I knew. It was all about the book.

No agent or editor will say ‘yes’ to you simply because they know you and think you’re a nice person. Publishing is a business – a bizarre, sometimes maddeningly convoluted business, but a business. If an editor takes a risk on a novel, his or her job is on the line. The editor has to love the manuscript and believe it will sell. Whether or not you have a personal connection is irrelevant. In fact, I’d venture to guess the submissions that editors dread most are from people they know. It makes it awkward to say no, but ‘no’ they will say, unless the novel is dynamite.

Similarly, agents have to make money by representing books that sell. They build their reputations by finding new authors who turn out to be successful. Whether or not they know you -- that means nothing. I recently spoke with an agent about writers’ conferences. Often I will encourage aspiring writers to go to such conferences, where you can listen to editors and agents speak about the business, schmooze with publishing industry types, and practice making your pitch. I asked this agent if meeting an author in person affected her decision to represent them.

The answer: no. At best, a personal meeting will assure that she would agree to look at the query letter and sample chapters (which she would do with any project that intrigued her). But if the idea or the writing did not ‘wow’ her immediately, she would reject the project just as fast. I then asked how many new clients she had found at writers’ conferences, since she had attended dozens. She looked rather sheepish. “None. Not one.”

My point: no number of connections will get a bad first novel published.

The flipside to this may seem radical: A good novel will find an outlet one way or another, whether you know someone or not.

Yes, agents and editors say no 99% of the time. But remember they are activelylooking for great writing. That’s the whole point. They would be in heaven if every novel that came to them read like The Next Big Thing, or even just a moving novel with quiet appeal. The sad fact is (and every editor and agent I’ve ever spoken to will quietly confirm this) most submissions they get are nowhere near publishable. The writing is clunky and garbled, showing a poor command of grammar and style. The ideas are tired and cliché.

I hear the embittered writers out there, because I used to be one of you. You’re thinking, “Ha! That description sounds like the last bestseller by X #1 New York Times novelist I read.” Sure, we’ve all read successful books and wondered how they got published. Taste is purely subjective, right? “Why, I could write better than this!” we confidently declared. Easier said than written.

Even mainstream or genre blockbusters, so easily dissed, have some quality that made them successful in the first place. The pacing is good. The plot has twists that no one else has quite mastered. The settings and characters are memorable. Most of all, there is a certain level of technical competence to the writing. Even if he or she isn’t Shakespeare, the writer knows how to craft readable prose. This is no small feat, nor is it something that every (or even most) aspiring writers can do.

When an agent comes across a novel that reads like . . . well, a real novel, it is a rare and joyful event. The agent will not care if they know you. They won’t care if you are twelve years old or ninety years old. They will get on the phone and offer to represent you.

Which raises the awkward question: “Um,” you say, “but my manuscript is amazing and awesome and I write so well! Why have all these agents said no to me?”

Explanation 1:

It’s possible you are writing a book that the publishing industry would find difficult to sell. If the editor doesn’t see an audience for your story, he or she will most likely say no. A story about your grandmother’s struggle as a waitress in Louisiana in World War II? Well . . . aside from your immediate family and/or waitresses in Louisiana, who will want to read this? Maybe they will! Maybe you’ve managed to elevate family history into an art form, touching on the human condition in such a way that it will leave readers everywhere in tears. But the market is flooded with memoires that simply didn’t catch on. Everyone thinks they have a family story that the general public is dying to read, just like people so often think their guests are dying to see their pictures from their recent trip to the Grand Canyon. Most of the time – not so much.  We are not interested in your story just because it’s your story.We are only interested if you somehow find a way to make it our story.

In a similar vein, if you write Cyberpunk zombie novels set on Mars and involving dinosaurs, the publisher may have a hard time marketing such a novel. (Hmm, actually it sounds pretty good to me!) These niche markets are small and difficult, unless again you somehow manage to make the story appeal to a broader range of people.

Explanation 2:

Taste is somewhat subjective. We all know that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels were rejected by numerous publishers. In retrospect, I’m sure those editors feel like idiots. Some publishers rejected The Lightning Thief, too. The less said about them, the better! But to be fair, editors have to go with their guts. They have to feel a strong connection with the novel in order to accept it. Once an editor acquires a book, they must defend it to everyone in the company. They have to represent it to the sales and marketing team. They have to fight to get the book a proper cover and a proper marketing budget. Most of all, they have to fight to even get the other people in the company to read it and be excited about it. You can’t do this unless you are wild about the book. Sometimes, books are simply sent to the wrong agents or editors.

To solve this, be very careful when submitting your work. If you write romance, make sure you are only sending to agents who love romance. If you write books somewhat similar to X author or Y author, find out who represents those authors and try those agents. If nothing else, this shows the agent in question that you have done your homework. Agents, in turn, try to be careful about which editors they submit manuscripts to, but they aren’t always right or successful.

So what if you target your submissions carefully, and still the agents and editors are ignoring you? Is this because you are so far ahead of your time, so avant-garde and original that no one recognizes your true genius?  Well, maybe. Or maybe . . .

Explanation 3:

That well-written, brilliant manuscript of yours? Uh . . . how to say this. It’s not as well written or brilliant as you think it is.

It is exceedingly hard, nigh impossible, to be objective about our own work. You have to believe in yourself and your own talent. You have to have a thick skin and persevere in the face of rejection. But you also have to listen to criticism if that criticism seems well founded. If twenty different agents have told you ‘no,’ something is wrong, and it’s probably not with the publishing industry for failing to acknowledge your brilliance. For some reason, your query letter isn’t getting their interest. Your sample chapters are not grabbing them.

It may be (I cover my head to avoid bottles thrown at my face) your writing simply isn’t there yet, and/or you haven’t found the novel you need to write.

I said earlier that my first novel-length manuscript was accepted for publication, and that’s true. But that wasn’t the first thing I wrote. I started writing short stories when I was thirteen. For years, I submitted stories to magazines and collected rejection notes. I would dabble with manuscripts only to give up halfway through. The truth was, I wanted to get published, but I had nothing much to say, nor did I practice writing enough to say things well.

It’s a Zen thing. You have to forget you want to be published in order to get published. At least, that’s how it worked for me. I went into teaching. I kept writing just for fun. Then, one day, the story I needed to write came to me. I was homesick for my native city of San Antonio. I’d been reading a ton of private eye novels. I decided to ‘visit home’ by writing a detective novel set in San Antonio. Suddenly, all these disparate things came together – my pleasure reading, my writing, my knowledge base, my yearning for home. And ka-bam. As I wrote Big Red Tequila, I knew it would be my first published book. It just felt different from anything else I had ever written. It grabbed me. It compelled me to write. It wasn’t something I could fake or force. It simply happened.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a lot of hard work. I went through a full two years of edits, and it was still rejected many times.

After it was published, it did only modestly well. A private eye novel set in San Antonio didn’t appeal to a vast audience. I kept my day job. I gnashed my teeth at the unfairness of the publishing world. Why wouldn’t more people read my work? Why wouldn’t the publisher promote me better?

But in truth, I still hadn’t arrived. I was publishable, but I wasn’t yet good enough at my trade to be truly successful. That took another ten years. Finally, another novel grabbed me. The Lightning Thief combined all my skills at writing, all my years teaching middle school, and my desire to tell a story for my son that would keep him interested in school at a time when he was really struggling with ADHD and dyslexia. The ingredients all came together, and I was ready and skilled enough to capitalize on them. Finally, I managed to create a story that appealed to a lot of people.

Looking back, I see now that the only variable I could control – and the only one that mattered – was my own craft. Connections did not matter. Perseverance did. Practice did. And learning to accept that maybe, just maybe, I still had a lot to learn about writing. I still do, for that matter.

I firmly believe that quality will be recognized. It may not be immediate. It may not be through the channels you expected, or in the way you expected. But if you truly have a wonderful manuscript, it will find a publisher. It will find an audience.

You do have to accept, however, that sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes the manuscript you have written is not, ultimately, the manuscript that will make you successful. I needed seventeen years to get published, and ten more years before I could become a full-time writer. Maybe your quest will be shorter than mine. I hope so! However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the world of publishing is against you. Publishers very much want to find new, exciting novelists and make them famous and filthy rich. But that requires a brilliant compelling book. Sometimes we convince ourselves, “Hey, I’m that guy! I’m brilliant and compelling!” But maybe we’re not – at least, not yet.

One thing I’ve discovered. People who believe they are awesome and wonderful at their profession are often . . . not. People who have more self-doubt, who question themselves and are always examining what they did wrong and how they might do better – those folks are often better than they think they are, and they are much more likely to improve. It’s a difficult balance, between self-confidence and self-reflection. No wonder writers are a little barmy. But it is an important balance to strike.

So What’s the Secret Formula?

There isn’t one. There is no shortcut or path to success that will circumvent years of hard work and uncertainty.

So many times, aspiring writers have asked me to lunch to ‘pick my brain.’ They have the impression that I have some secret knowledge to impart. Some of my magic will rub off. If I just put in a good word with the agent, or read their book and gave them a blurb, their career would be made!

Sadly, I have no magic. I don’t know anything you don’t know. I just have more practice banging my head against the wall of the publishing industry, wringing my hands, and staring at blank screens. You can have this wonderful experience, too!

Blurbs – those little quotes on the covers of books – help very little if at all. I’ve been blurbed by wonderful authors. I’ve blurbed many other authors. I have yet to see any evidence it affects sales at all. In fact I recently came across a novel blurbed by none other than J.K. Rowling. A dream endorsement! The novel was one I’d never heard of. It was languishing in the bargain bin. No one, not even the Mother of Wizards herself, can wave a magic wand and make you a success.

“So, yeah!” you are saying. “Great pep talk! Thanks a lot, Riordan!”

But in a way, this knowledge can be reassuring. You aren’t missing anything. There is no secret being hidden from you. You are not being rejected because you missed a meeting of the Secret Society of Successful People. You do not need to know a publisher or an agent or Rick Riordan to get your novel published. You just need to labor long and hard, like all the rest of us, until you build your chops, pay your dues, and find the novel you need to write.

It’s human nature to look for shortcuts and easy answers. The twenty-billion-dollar diet industry is counting on this! Everybody wants to believe a secret food or pill or no-pain program will make you healthy and attractive. Nobody wants to hear the truth – eat less, exercise a lot – because that’s hard.

Writing is the same way. Like dieting, it is something many people talk about doing, many people try to do, and very few will succeed at. Like the weight loss industry, the creative writing industry will try to sell you all sorts of secrets and tricks and special insider knowledge. The truth is a lot less appealing and glamorous. Writing is hard. Not everyone can do it. It requires a combination of innate talent and lots and lots of practice and endurance. It also requires the right story, and publishing that story at the right time.

Most people will not get published. Most people who do get published will never make a living at it. These are simply facts. But your chance is as good as anyone else’s – assuming you have the talent and the story and the drive to put in the hours, days, years to hone your skill. It doesn’t matter who you know or what writers’ group you belong to. It doesn’t matter where you got your degree, or if you even have a degree.

So forget about shortcuts and magic coattails. Forget about meeting so-and-so, who might introduce you to so-and-so. It’s all about the quality of your book. Now get out there and make a quality book.

Oh, right . . . I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing.

Be Wrong As Fast As You Can

It's only week two and I've already failed on my Resolutions.

But you know what, that doesn't meant that it's over! If you give up after one mess up, you're never going to accomplish your goals!

And I do have a legitimate excuse. 

I had to move this week/end. 

The landlords kicked us out for renovations, so we had to get out and get out we did.

Guys. Don't ever move. It's not worth it.

And because of the move, this post is probably going to be a little lame. It's a reblog. We had to read this article in English and I think it's absolutely brilliant and worth the read. I think there are more than a few of you that will really be able to connect with the author and take his advice to heart.

"Be Wrong As Fast As You Can"

by Hugo Lindgren, for the New York Times, January 4 2013

Here’s a partial, redacted-for-the-sake-of-my-dignity list of stuff I once aspired to write but never did: a “Mamma Mia!”-esque rock opera called “Bastards of Young,” based on the songs of the Replacements. A sitcom set in Brooklyn that inverts “I Love Lucy,” so that the wife plays the stable, amiable breadwinner while her lovable loon of a husband hatches ridiculous schemes, often involving the production of artisanal goods. A thriller about the ultimate rogue trader who concocts a single, diabolical transaction to blow up the financial system. An HBO show, called “Upstate,” about a burned-out corporate raider who returns to his hometown outside Buffalo to save his father’s failing liquor store and ends up trying to rescue the whole town from the double scourge of unemployment and alcoholism. Too depressing? How about this: A reality show in which retired hockey greats like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier compete against each other coaching teams of — ready for the deal clincher? — inner-city kids who’ve never been on ice skates.

If you had the time, believe me, I could flesh out these ideas for you, explain their origins, describe in fine detail my vision of the characters and plots and how it would all coalesce into something awesome.

Or not. For at least 25 years, I’ve been serial daydreaming like this, recording hundreds of ideas in a sequence of little notebooks that I have carried around and then stacked in a shoe box in my closet, a personal encyclopedia of undone to-do’s. Sometimes, when I’m searching for something in my closet and I see the box, I have a flashback to my first-grade report card: “Hugo has the gift of a rich, active imagination, but needs to work on his follow-through skills.”

My situation, I know, is not unique. Who doesn’t have big plans they never get around to acting on? Everybody swaps ideas with his friends about the excellent TV show they’d make or the groundbreaking movie they’d write. And a couple of my grand schemes got an inch or two off the ground — an agent lunch, a pitch meeting, a trip to L.A., a flurry of e-mail filled with exclamation points — though never much higher than that. And along the way, I also became editor of the magazine you are now reading, so it’s not as if I became mired exclusively in a world of delusional ambition. It’s just that for way too long, I held on to the fantasy of a completely different professional life, and I can’t help wondering why certain creative endeavors just seemed impossible to make happen.

I know, writers have been complaining for eons about the weight of their burden, and it’s not attractive. But I’ve been around it long enough to know that writing anything good that’s longer than a paragraph isn’t easy for anybody, except for maybe J. J. Abrams. You can’t explain how people do it. Some of the most successful screenwriters, novelists, television producers and rock-opera librettists I know are about a hundred times lazier than I am. They take long afternoon naps, play lots of pickup basketball and appear to accomplish little or nothing for months at a time. And let me tell you, their ideas do not all crackle with scintillating originality.

So what am I missing? What is that elusive thing that turns some people’s daydreams into their next novel for F.S.G.?

#

Earlier in my professional life, as I began to do all right as an editor, I naïvely discounted it as something I never intended to stick with. A respectable occupation, I thought, while preparing myself for the Masterwork of Spectacular Brilliance that would eventually define me.

One of my pet theories about why I could never actually produce anything of brilliance was that I was cursed with a comfortable existence. What might have been my creative prime was spent in New York City in the 1990s, a flush time for the young and college-educated. Magazine-editor jobs paid O.K. and were relatively easy to get, especially compared with now. Maybe I would’ve been better off in the 1970s, when a young person with ambitions like mine had to take a hard job as a means to his artistic ends. Would such sacrifice, I wondered, have sharpened my desire to make it as a writer?

All you have to do is read Mark Jacobson’s classic New York magazine depiction of cabdrivers in the 1970s to know that’s a joke. The story is about nighttime cabbies who aspired to be actors or poets or playwrights. Jacobson was one of them. His original plan was to drive three nights a week, write three nights a week and party one night a week. But as he watched his fellow drivers get sucked in to the working life, he realized how the daily grind slowly robbed them of their dreams.

“The Big Fear,” Jacobson writes, “is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.”

My big fear, of course, was that I was becoming an editor. I won’t lie. For a long time, I considered this an unacceptable outcome. I don’t know if anyone ever told me, “Those who can’t write, edit,” or if I made that up on my own, but that little aphorism haunted me. Meanwhile, my grandiose writing projects were all going nowhere for the same tedious reason. The minute I tried to commit them to paper, or otherwise turn them into something tangible, my imagination coughed and sputtered like the cheap Renault convertible my girlfriend drove in college. I’d write a bit of dialogue using that miraculous software that automatically formats it into a screenplay for you, and I’d be instantly paralyzed from the neck up. Here was incontrovertible evidence that I wasn’t half as good as I imagined myself to be. The voices I heard so clearly and powerfully in my head became inert and alien on the page. I was surprised by how mortally embarrassed you can be by writing something nobody else will ever read. Even looking back over those one- sentence descriptions of TV ideas in the first paragraph of this essay, I am humbled by how inadequately they convey the vividness they had as I conjured them. It’s like hearing a recording of my own voice. That can’t be how I sound. Oh, but it is.

#

I recently saw a Charlie Rose interview with John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar, about the creative process behind his movies. Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Hugely successful people tend to say self-deprecating stuff like this when they go on “Charlie Rose.” But I heard something quite genuine in Lasseter’s remarks, an acknowledgment of just how deep into the muck of mediocrity a creative project can sink as it takes those first vulnerable steps from luxurious abstraction to unforgiving reality.

I could never forge through this. My confidence always collapsed under the weight of my withering self-criticism. I couldn’t bear the awfulness and keep going. Even as I’m writing this essay, I have to stop myself from scrolling back to previous parts and banging my forehead against the keyboard as I see how short I’ve fallen of my expectations. My mind goes uncontrollably to whether it might be better to scrap the whole thing and write a different Riff — like, I’ve got a few stray ideas in my notebook here about the glassy office tower they’re building next door to where I live and how it obliterates what’s left of the spirit of Greenwich Village. Or about this ’80s band called Talk Talk that started out making bland pop hits like Duran Duran but then rejected fame and made a couple of crazy, weird, beautiful records until mysteriously vanishing. That Riff will practically write itself, I just know it.

A promiscuous imagination like this is dangerous for writers. As an editor, I can see that clearly. I know that the next brilliant brainstorm is never going to be the one that will just write itself, any more than the last one did. Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up. Magazines give me a healthy, satisfying amount of creative license, as well as a very defined responsibility. Journalism keeps my imagination from flying off into the ether. At the core of everything is reporting, a real event. And editing allows me to collaborate with people whose talents make up for my weaknesses, especially writers who don’t seize up at the sight of a blinking cursor.

At the same time, the protracted period of realizing all this has been necessary. Struggling with my own creative process has helped me appreciate the difficulties that others go through, while fighting to subdue my own self-criticism has left me open to the possibilities of fledgling ideas that look wobbly out of the gate. Daydreams, weirdly enough, have made me a better editor.

Plus, if I’d understood this all perfectly when I started out, embraced editing right from the beginning, I’d be ready to move on to something else now. Like maybe I’d open a civilized sports bar that served only bourbon and sold vintage Pendleton shirts —

But now I must contend with my editor for this story, who just stopped by my office to see when I’ll stop beating my head against the keyboard so he can get this to the copy desk. There’s no chance of backing out now. He insisted it wasn’t as dreadful as I feared, gave me good advice on how to end it, and also remarked that my reality-show idea is not bad, but does it have to be about hockey? Well, no, I said, suddenly diverted into fantasy land, the conceit could be broader, maybe about how to coach amateurs more generally, so that the competition changed season to season — badminton, bobsledding, roller derby, square dancing. Rock operas!

We had a laugh and then got back to work.

ReBlog: My Overnight Sucess

I really have to apologize the fails, guys. Neither of us has been that active and for that I'm sorry. And this one isn't really much of a post either, it's more just me copy and pasting an amazing post from Rick Riordan. He really is a pretty awesome writer. Great story concepts, good characters, love the wit and humor, and the end of the last book? SO BRAVE. Such a brave brave man. I don't think I'd have the guts to pull that ending.

Here's the link so you can check it out yourself:

http://rickriordan.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-overnight-success-reposted.html

And here's the post:

Sometimes I like to go back in time and re-read my blog posts from many years ago. This one, originally published in 2007, made me feel especially grateful. Back then, the Percy Jackson series wasn't even finished yet. The Titan's Curse had just come out. I was starting to feel like an actual bestselling author, but I had no idea what was in store for the future. Now, my books are exponentially more successful, and I'm exponentially more thankful for the good fortune I've had. But this blog post still resonates. Getting to where I am was an incredible amount of work, and I still take nothing for granted. I *still* worry that no one will show up when I do an event. I'm re-posting this because it might provide some perspective, and maybe some hope, for other struggling writers out there. Believe it or not, I've been where you are, and I know how it feels!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2007

MY OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

At a recent event, someone asked me, “How does it feel to be an overnight success?”

The question took me aback. I had no idea how to answer, but I was struck by how drastically perception can differ from reality.

I’ve read about rock musicians who play free gigs for years in dingy bars – paying their dues -- before they get the one big break that attracts national attention. Suddenly, the artist is an ‘overnight success.’ No one has heard of him before, so even though he has been toiling for years, people just assume he appeared out of nowhere, a fully-formed rock star, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears . . . well, the tree doesn’t exist until we notice it. Thinking about my own ‘overnight success,’ I remembered one of the first book signings I ever did, ten years ago, when Big Red Tequila first came out. I was invited to Waldenbooks in a shopping mall in Concord, California. They set up a table at the front of the store. They allotted two hours. I sat there in my coat and tie and watched people pass by, steering clear of me like I was an insurance salesman. I gave directions to Sears. I explained several times that I wasn’t an employee at the bookstore and I didn’t know where the self-help section was. I signed a napkin for a couple of teenaged boys who thought the title “Big Red Tequila” sounded slightly naughty because it had to do with alcohol. I sold no books.

I remember the first book discussion group I did in Oakland. Two people showed up. And after that, a seemingly endless string of events for my mystery series – lots of empty chairs, apologetic booksellers, forced smiles. “Oh, it doesn’t matter if no one shows up!” I’d tell myself over and over. “It’s the signed stock and the publicity that counts!” Well . . . maybe. But I still felt like I was trying to fill a reservoir with an eye-dropper.

Most writers have stories like this. We dread the room full of empty chairs. I still have a deeply ingrained fear that no one will show up whenever I do an event. I am constantly amazed when I walk into a bookstore and there are actually people waiting for me.

When the Lightning Thief first came out, two years ago, I was a basket case. I had a feeling in my gut that this book was my big chance. And I also had a feeling that the big chance was slipping away. My family and I went out to the Bay Area to visit our old stomping ground, and I kept looking for signs that the Lightning Thief was making a big splash, getting some publicity, getting displayed prominently. No such luck. We stopped by several bookstores to sign stock. There was no stock. I did an event at one store (unfortunately, the day after the latest Harry Potter release) and the bleary-eyed bookseller’s only comment about Lightning Thief was, “Oh, it hasn’t gotten much coverage, has it?” One family showed up to hear me talk about my book. Two parents. One kid. I went back to the hotel room and curled into fetal position, thinking, “Well, that’s it. Nobody likes Percy Jackson.” My wife still teases me about that trip. She says, “If I could only go back in time and show you what was going to happen.” Still, at the time, I felt hopeless. It was another six months of constant touring and school visits before the Lightning Thief started gaining any traction at all. The Bluebonnet list from the Texas Library Association was the series’ first big break. Then it began showing up on other state lists, and word started getting around. Even after that, things were slow. I remember when Sea of Monsters came out, a year later, I was still having anxious conversations with my editor and agent, wondering what I could do to improve sales. Were we missing something? Was I wrong to think the series would connect with kids? It took almost two years before I really felt like things were turning around.

What made the difference? It’s hard to say, but it was a combination of factors. Most importantly, word-of-mouth. The series grew from the ground up, with one kid recommending the book to his or her friends. Booksellers and teachers and librarians started talking. I toured and did school visits relentlessly. The Sea of Monsters got on the Scholastic Book Club video, which was no small thing. The state reading lists started kicking in. And suddenly, just before the Titan’s Curse was released, the series seemed to reach critical mass and sales exploded.

But boy, it was a long time coming. I felt like I was clawing my way up a pit, tooth and nail. Am I complaining? Of course not. I’m just marveling at how uncertain I felt for so long. Nothing about the series’ success seemed inevitable. Even after I got the ‘ultimate break’ of being published for the first time, it was another eight years of writing while teaching full-time before I could go full-time as a writer, and two years more before I really felt like I was going to succeed. And still, who knows what will happen six months or a year from now? There are no guarantees.

As with any high-profile job, writing is judged by the exceptions in the field, not the average. When the general public hears the word ‘author,’ they think J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, James Patterson. They hear ‘basketball player,’ they think of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan. It’s an easy jump to think that all authors are like J.K. Rowling, and every basketball player is Michael Jordan. In fact, 99% of authors have never and will never experience anything like the success of the top 1%. Most writers, even if they manage to get published, never quit their day jobs. Most will never get on the bestseller list nor have their books made into a movie, just as most basketball players will never play in the NBA, and even those lucky few who do will never make the money of a superstar. Judging other books by the Harry Potter series is sort of like saying, “Well, that guy won the Powerball lottery, therefore everyone who plays should win the Powerball lottery.” That doesn’t mean we can’t dream. If a kid wants to aim at being a pro ball player, that’s awesome. If a writer wants to become the next ______ (fill-in-the-blank author), that’s fantastic, but it’s good to approach that ambition with your eyes open. It will most likely be a long, hard road with no guarantee that success will come. Exceptions are rare, which is why they get so much attention. For every well-known author you can think of, there are a thousand more struggling in the purgatory known as the “midlist,” and tens of thousands who are still trying to get published. And even those well-known authors probably struggled a lot longer and harder than you realize to get where they are.

I’m not saying this to gripe, or gloat, or whine. I’m just trying to provide some context, so when I tell you how grateful I am for the success of the books, and how lucky I feel, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. People ask me what I think about getting so much attention, and how it’s changed my life. It really hasn’t. I’m the same guy who sat in Waldenbooks for two hours, giving directions and smiling vacantly at a stream of shoppers who were trying to ignore me. I’m the same guy who stared at countless rooms full of empty chairs in countless bookstores for ten years. I am still amazed every time I get a crowd at an event. I take nothing for granted.

But you can’t really explain something like that in the middle of an event. It’s too hard to put into words without people thinking that I’m bragging or complaining. So the next time someone asks me, “How does it feel to be an overnight success?” I plan on smiling politely and saying, “It feels great.”