Writing is a way of life. If you’re going to commit to being a writer, and you seek success as you have defined it, you’re going to have to prepare, study, act. Learn to observe with a writer’s eye. Ask “What if?” about everything. Be empathetic about people so you can craft three-dimensional characters. Be true to yourself, but also expand your boundaries. Live large, for only then can you write books that connect in a big way.
Do not go gentle into that good night ... Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
—Dylan Thomas
Brett Favre, one of the best quarterbacks ever to play the game of football, was supposed to be over-the-hill at forty. But in 2010 he finished what was probably his finest season. He almost got the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl.
In the NFC championship game against the New Orleans Saints, he took a beating. He was on the turf constantly, sometimes under 380 pounds of beef. In the second half, he twisted his left ankle, limped off the field, got retaped, and came back into the game. Except for a couple of turnovers by his teammates and one ill-timed interception, the Vikes would have won. It was an inspiring performance that added to his legend.
Robert B. Parker, creator of the character Spenser in his detective series, and one of the most prolific authors of our time, died that same year, at the age of seventy-seven. He was supposed to be over-the-hill, too. Some critics thought he was, but most readers did not. Parker was turning out books to the very end, and not just in his Spenser series. He had other series going, including Jesse Stone, which Tom Selleck successfully brought to television. He also wrote stand-alone novels and Westerns.
He was reportedly about forty pages into a new Spenser novel when he suffered a heart attach and died at his desk.
For a writer, that's the way to go.
For a writer, not to write is death.
At the age of ninety-seven, Herman Wouk, one of America's greatest storytellers, scored another publishing contract. For him, not writing was unthinkable. So he never stopped.
Favre, Wouk, and Parker refused to go gentle into that good night. To write well, there has to be a part of you that is determined to rage, rage against the dying of the light––and against rejection, criticism, and the slough of despond.
You've got to have some attitude.
Now, this attitude is not the same as arrogance. Arrogance shouts and gets tiresome pretty fast. Attitude is just as ornery, but it's quiet. It does its work and keeps on doing it. It wants to prove itself on the page, not via the mouth. And it refuses to give up.
A knock on Parker in the latter phase of his career was that he wrote too much, sacrificing quality. That's between him and his readers. He wrote, they bought, they enjoyed, and maybe some got frustrated. But the relationship was lasting, and the man was doing what he loved.
If you love to write, you'll find a way to do it. No one can promise how it’ll turn out. No one can guarantee you a publishing contract. But you'll never get close if you don't rage a little, if you don’t turn that rage into determination to keep writing, keep going, keep producing the words.
My grandfather and my mom both wanted to be writers. So they wrote. My grandfather wrote historical fiction and ended up self-publishing a few stories. I remember him being proud of it, and his books pleased the family.
My mom wrote radio scripts while she was in college during WWII. I have a whole bunch of them, and they’re quite good. She worked on a small local newspaper when I was a kid. I remember, when I was twelve or so, finding a short story she wrote—a sci-fi kind of thing—that had a cool twist ending. She never got it published, but it influenced at least one young writer––me.
What I'm saying is, do not go gentle onto that good page. If you want to write, then write, and make it a write-or-die kind of thing.
You'll never know where your writing will go unless you actually write it. It's the best way to live. At the very least you'll know you're alive. You won't walk around (as Bill Murray says in A Thousand Clowns) with that wide-eyed look some people put on their faces so no one will know their head's asleep.
Rage a little, throw the heat, write.
There is no one to stop you but you.
So get out of your way.
Since 2009 or so, the so-called midlist at traditional publishing houses has dried up faster than a mud patch in the Serengeti. The bleached bones of writers who did not earn out are scattered in random configuration. On the parched ground near a scorched femur can be seen a message scratched in the dirt, a last call from a thirsty scribe: Help! My numbers suck!
I've heard from many friends and colleagues about traditionally published writers––some who have had relationships with a house for a decade or more––seeing their advances drop to record lows, or not being offered another contract at all.
And then what? What happens to these foundering careers?
Two writers give us answers. The first is Eileen Goudge, a New York Times best-selling author. She had a soaring career in the 1990s, and even a power marriage to superagent Al Zuckerman. That's how I became aware of her. Zuckerman wrote a good book on writing blockbusters where he recommended reading Goudge's Garden of Lies. I did and enjoyed it, and read another of hers a bit later on.
So I was gobsmacked when I read a post written by Goudge about her travails as a casualty of commerce in a blog post on writer and editor Jane Friedman’s blog.1https://janefriedman.com/leap-to-indie/ It describes what happened to her and many other writers this way:
I know from my husband, the aviation geek, that when a plane goes into what’s called a death spiral, as it reaches a certain altitude and succumbs to the pull of gravity, it can’t pull out. The same holds true for authors: fewer orders results in smaller print runs, a smaller marketing budget and lackluster sales, then a smaller advance for your next title, and the vicious cycle continues. In short, you’ve entered the “death spiral.”
The cold, hard truth is this: If the sales figures for your last title weren’t impressive enough to get booksellers to order your next title in sufficient quantities to make an impact, you’re basically screwed. It doesn’t matter if your previous titles sold a combined six million copies worldwide. You’re only as good as your last sell-through.
What’s even more dispiriting is that you’re perceived as a “failure” by publishers when your sales haven’t dropped but aren’t growing. You become a flat line on a graph. The publisher loses interest and drops the ball, then your sales really do tank. Worse, your poor performance, or “track” as it’s known, is like toilet paper stuck to your shoe, following you wherever you go in trying to get a deal with another publisher.
Goudge details some of the things that happened to her, on both a personal and corporate level. One of them is fairly common: a key executive or editor, who is your champion, leaves, gets laid off, or moves to another company. You become an “orphan” at the house and your books don't get the attention they used to.
All these things were “crushing” to Goudge. She says she felt like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Every time she got close to something good, the ball would be snatched away.
A writer friend of hers told Goudge she should go independent. She resisted at first, but the friend simply asked, “What's the alternative?”
So Eileen Goudge jumped into the independent waters, more than a bit nervous about it. But then she discovered something wonderful:
My creative wellspring that’d been drying up, due to all the discouragement I’d received over the past few years, was suddenly gushing. An idea for a mystery series, something I’d long dreamed of writing, came to me during a walk on the beach in my hometown of Santa Cruz, California, where I lived before I moved to New York City. Why not set my mystery series in a fictional town resembling Santa Cruz? ... I immediately got to work. I was on fire!
Goudge is professional enough and has seen enough to know that nothing is rock-solid certain in a writing career.
Was it worth it? Only time will tell. Meanwhile there it is, beating in my breast: that feathered thing called hope. Something I thought I’d lost, regained. Something to celebrate.
Hope. I like that. Worth celebrating indeed.
Another casualty of commerce is a friend of mine, Lisa Samson. I've known Lisa for fifteen years. She is one of the most naturally gifted writers I've ever met. She's won numerous awards. She has the respect of critics and a loyal following of fans.
Right around the same time Goudge published her post, Lisa posted to her Facebook page:
Dear Friends,
All good things must come to an end, the saying goes. I, however, like to think that all good things continue to evolve. For twenty-two years I have been writing for the inspirational (read: evangelical Christian) market, and it has been an honor and a privilege. True, with the artistic strictures and the increasing necessity for a platform, it has had its share of frustrations for a novelist who simply wants to explore an art form, but sharing stories and getting to know readers as friends, hearing how these words have been used to encourage, inspire, affirm, and even challenge, has been a thrill. ...
Lisa talks about the changes in the publishing world, how publishing houses now expect authors to do most of the marketing themselves. And then there is the cold, hard economic facts of life to think of as well:
I was recently offered a contract that was insufficient for me to support my family. A real step down from the previous one. And that is all I will say about that matter. It wasn’t personal, I realize, but it was severely disappointing to have worked faithfully for two decades only to have your work go down in value to that point. I wish money didn’t matter, but it has to, and that saddens me. I'm still intensely grateful for the time I spent writing for that house and the people there who are, quite simply, wonderful. But traditional publishing is a business, and I'm no good for the bottom line no matter how much I'm personally loved, and good feelings don't keep the lights on over here at my house.
Lisa admits to discouragement (as any writer at this point would), but she has a response. A deeply spiritual person, Lisa has enrolled in a massage therapy program with the aim of bringing relief to cancer, hospice, and Alzheimer’s patients.
In other words, there is life away from writing. That's a crucial lesson for all writers to learn. Heck, for any professional.
Will Lisa write again? She isn't completely closing the door, and my prediction is yes. She's too good and has too much inside her not to share more stories. But she's not brooding over it. She is too busy giving of herself to others.
These two writers are strong and resilient and have chosen brave paths.
So can you. When discouragement hits, as it will, know that you are not alone and that life still offers you options.
Grab one, and go for it.
For years I've bought my Apple products at the big Apple store near my home. It's located on the second floor of a large shopping mall. It majestically dominates the middle of the mall and, being near the food court and Coffee Bean, has arguably the best location in the whole place. There is even a walkway bridge that leads strolling shoppers from one side of the mall directly over to the large, open, and welcoming Kingdom of Jobs.
Some time ago my wife and I were walking through the mall when I spotted a sign alerting us that a new store had just opened. It, too, was located just off the food court. I said, “Let's go over there. I want to see it. It must be near the Apple store.”
Not just near, but directly across from the Apple store, at the other end of that same walkway bridge.
You may have guessed that it was a new, gleaming Microsoft store.
And if so, you would be right.
I could not help noticing how, um, similar the store looks to Apple's setup: lots of tables with laptops and tablets and phones. A help desk modeled after Apple's Genius Bar. Sales staff in brightly colored T-shirts like their counterparts across the way, complete with nametags hanging around their necks shaped the same as the Apple crew's.
A year ago there was a story about Apple going after Microsoft’s bread-and-butter market: i.e., business. Now it seems Microsoft is giving Apple a run for its money in the consumer market.
I note that the Microsoft space is just one-third the size of the Apple store, but it has shown up. It is here.
Game on.
Competition. It's good. Because it generally makes the free market a better place for consumers.
It also makes an individual stronger.
I grew up playing competitive sports. It taught me some lessons that I've carried with me my whole life, including the writing part. Here are three:
You cannot change what talent or physiology you're born with. When you get into competition you find that out pretty fast.
I was a great six-foot three-inch shooting guard on my high school basketball team. What I didn't have was hops. I could not dunk. If I had been six foot nine inches, maybe I would have made it to the NBA. At my height, though, I didn't have enough spring in my sticks.
So I determined to work as hard as I could with what I had. I managed not only to play at the college level, but for many years after that in recreational leagues and pickup games, just for fun.
The same goes for my writing. There are some writers out there who seem to have such a way with words that it makes me feel like a caveman carving symbols on a rock. But that just makes me want to work harder at my craft.
What talent you have is not up to you. What is up to you is what you do with it. Do you want to be someone who writes and gets paid for it? Then work at your craft. It's quite common that the harder worker overtakes the more gifted, but indolent, athlete. See Rose, Pete (look for him under “Baseball,” not “Gambling”).
Once in the game, give it your all. Never quit.
In 1916, the Georgia Tech football team played little Cumberland College. The score was 63-0 after the first quarter. The final score was 222-0. Look it up.
At one point they found a Cumberland player wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the Georgia Tech bench. When they asked him why, he said he feared his coach would put him back in the game.
You're going to suffer through disappointments. That's part of the writing life. No matter how bad it gets, though, stay in the game. The great thing about writing is you are the only one who can stop you. So don't stop you.
Desire and determination trump disappointment. Learn what you can from setbacks. Maybe you need to work on characterization, or dialogue, or plotting. There are abundant resources to help you in every single area. Join a critique group. Go to a conference.
Just don't wrap yourself up in a blanket and never play again.
Don’t waste any time comparing yourself to other writers, envying their successes (or secretly hoping they fail). That’s wasted energy. Sure, entering your book in an awards competition stacks you up against other colleagues. But don't let losing (or even winning for that matter) mess with your head.
Instead, always concentrate, with all your creative might, on the page in front of you.
And forget about luck. I don't believe in believing in luck. Those who believe that bad luck is the reason for not making it are like that geezer with three days' growth of beard at the end of the bar. “I coulda been a contendah, but da breaks wuz against me!”
What good does that do?
Instead, keep fighting.
Rocky Marciano was one of the greatest boxers of all time. He won the heavyweight championship of the world and never lost a fight his entire professional career.
But his start was not so promising. Marciano, nicknamed the Brockton Blockbuster because in his youth he delivered big blocks of ice for the Brockton Ice and Coal Company, had incredibly strong arms. And those muscles were heavy; the muscles used to hold his arms up were not as developed.
The result was that after a few rounds Marciano's arms began to sag, giving his sparring partners greater access to his face.
Instead of quitting, Marciano came up with his own training routine. He went to the local YMCA pool and practiced throwing punch after punch underwater. He got a heavy bag that weighed 180 pounds (most heavy bags weigh about fifty). He threw punches at that bag for hours ... with bare fists. Needless to say those fists became solid granite and his arms become pile drivers.
The result? Marciano's record was 49–0, forty-five were knockouts.
He once said, “I was willing to make sacrifices. Even while traveling, when there were no facilities. I would spend hours in my hotel room working on my strength. I wanted more than anything to be a fighter. Then I wanted to be a good one, and after that a great champion.”
What do you want, dear writer? What are you willing to sacrifice?
Not everyone is born with an iron will. But you can develop it. If you take baby steps every day––writing, studying, editing, writing some more––soon you'll be making longer strides.
There's an old saying in boxing that you have to keep punching, because you always have a puncher's chance.
So when you get knocked down, get right back up. Keep punching that keyboard. You always have another chance.
As a young man I found Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling helpful. It’s considered a classic of the sales-training genre. Lots of folks have given the book props for helping them get ahead in other professions, too.
The title is also apt because I definitely thought myself a failure as a writer when I was in my twenties. The stuff I wrote didn’t work the way I wanted it to, and I was told that’s because you have to be born a writer. You can’t learn how to do it.
For ten years or so I accepted that I would never make it in this business.
So I did some other things. I moved to New York to pursue an acting career. I started doing off Broadway, Shakespeare, avant-garde. But after a while I wondered why I wasn’t being offered a starring role in a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark (they gave it to some guy named Ford).
During a visit back to L.A., I met this gorgeous actress at a party. Knowing I’d be returning to New York soon, I only waited two-and-a-half weeks to ask her to marry me.
Shockingly, she said yes.
After we were married, I decided it might be a good idea for us to have one steady paycheck. Since Cindy was the more talented of the two of us, she continued with her stage work while I applied to law school.
In my third year at USC Law I interviewed with a big firm with offices in Beverly Hills.
Shockingly, they hired me.
Later on I opened my own office. I then found out I had to be a businessman, too. I had to learn entrepreneurial principles. So I started to read books on business, and one of these was Bettger’s.
A few years went by and the desire to write, which had burned in me since I read Tarzan of the Apes as a kid, came back to me. Bettger’s principles helped me along that path, too.
Frank Bettger was a former big-league ballplayer who went into the insurance game. After initial failures he started wondering if he really had what it took to be a good salesman. He decided to find out what others did. He began to apply a set of practices that helped get him to the top.
The first of these practices was enthusiasm. To sell successfully, you have to be enthusiastic about your product, your prospects, and life itself. You need to exude joy, because the alternative is gloom, and gloom doesn’t sell.
Bettger noticed that even if he didn’t feel enthusiastic, he could still act enthusiastic, and soon enough the feeling came tagging right along.
When I discovered you really can learn the craft, I got as excited as a man in the ocean who finds a plank to hang on to and then spots a lush island in the distance. It was enough to infuse joy and hope into my writing, and those two things alone started to improve it.
Another practice Bettger mentions is a system of organization: make plans, record your results. When I got my first book contract, I hadn’t thought through what I’d do for a follow-up. So I got organized. I began planning my career five years ahead, kept track of who I met with and pitched to, who I wanted to meet, and scheduled projects accordingly.
I’d already established the discipline of writing to a quota, but now I started keeping track of my output on a spreadsheet. (See “The Ten Characteristics of Highly Effective Writers,” chapter seven, for advice on tracking your writing output.)
Next, Bettger summarized the most important “secret” in sales: Find out what the other fellow wants, then help him find the best way to get it.
This got me thinking about pleasing readers. In college I was heavily influenced by the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al). Their writing was idiosyncratic and experimental. But I figured out early that idiosyncratic did not necessarily connect with a large audience.
I knew I could write solely for myself, ignore genre, and be hip (though a lot of the time it was artificial hip). But I wanted to make a living at writing, so I backed up and looked for points where my own pleasure met with readers’ desire for a good story.
Still, I needed more self-confidence. Bettger wrote that the best way to increase confidence is to keep learning about your business. Never stop.
The same holds true for writing, both the craft side and the business side.
If you are set on traditional publishing you need to know: What are publishing contracts like? What terms are you willing to accept ... or, more important, walk away from? What are the characteristics of a good agent? What can you realistically expect in terms of editorial and marketing?
If you are going to self-publish, do you have a plan? Do you know what you need to know? Are you putting in a systematic effort to find out? Are you a risk taker?
In my business life I have dedicated at least half an hour a day to reading about business principles, and thinking and planning. I do the same in my writing life. I read every issue of Writer’s Digest. I enjoy books and blogs on the craft. My philosophy has always been that if I pick up even just one new technique, or if I see something familiar from another point of view, my work has been worth the effort.
There’s a lot more packed into Bettger’s book, but I’ll close with the part that helped me most, both as a businessman and as an author. It’s his chapter on Benjamin Franklin’s plan for self-improvement.
In Franklin’s autobiography, he writes about his desire, as a young man, to acquire the habits of successful living. Franklin chose thirteen virtues, such as temperance, resolution, frugality, justice, and so on. He made a chart and concentrated on one virtue for a week, thereby ingraining the habit. Proceeding in this way, he could go through his list four times a year.
Bettger followed this plan by choosing thirteen practices that would help him as a salesman, such as sincerity, remembering names and faces, service and prospecting, and so on.
I did something similar with my writing. I formulated what I call the critical success factors of fiction (see the next heading). By concentrating on these serially, I hoped to raise my overall fiction competence. Today I would describe these as: plot, structure, character, scenes, dialogue, theme, and voice/style.
Bettger’s book helped me at two crucial points in my life––when I had to run a business and when I made the decision to pursue my writing dream. In both pursuits there are challenges aplenty. Sources of inspiration are critical. I’m glad that ex-ballplayer was around to fire me up.
The following seven areas cover everything about the fiction craft. I advise all serious writers to objectively test themselves in each area, then design self-study programs to elevate each one, starting with the weakest.
A self-study should involve reading craft books on the subject, studying novels that do one or more of these particularly well, and writing practice scenes and getting feedback.
Do this systematically, and your writing will kick up several notches, guaranteed.
Plot is the collection of events in your novel, which form the overall narrative. It should all add up to a character’s struggle with death.
Remember, death is of three types—physical, professional, psychological.
How your plot events line up is a matter of structure. I call structure “translation software for your imagination.” What I mean is that readers need all that wonderful story material you have in you—the heart, the passion, the intensity—to be presented in a way they can follow and relate to.
All writing teachers, whether they admit it or not, espouse the three-act structure: beginning, middle, and end. The middle (or muddle) is the second act, and the longest part of the story.
Yes, you can play with structure, but know this: The further you get from traditional structure, the more you move toward the “experimental” novel. There’s nothing illegal about that, but just know that experimental novels rarely break out.
Characters are, of course, the lifeblood of fiction. All the twisty-turny plot elements in the world won’t matter to readers if they are not bonded to a character they care about.
Many approaches and techniques for creating characters are out there. Some writers like to create massive backstory documents or answer a list of questions. Others prefer to create on the fly as they write.
Whatever method you use, you want your characters to be “rounded” (E.M. Forster), which means “capable of surprising us in a convincing way.”
Scenes are the building blocks of your novel. A plot is a collection of scenes, and scenes presented structurally form the narrative.
A scene has its own internal structure: a POV character has an objective. That objective is met by obstacles (which make for conflict). And eventually there’s an outcome.
Your default on outcomes should be a setback. It makes the situation worse for the protagonist. Sometimes, for variety, the protagonist succeeds in the objective, but that victory ought to lead to more trouble down the line.
Richard Kimble in The Fugitive gets into a hospital to dress his wound (without being seen). He succeeds. But his decency at the end of the scene leads him to help a wounded guard, and that in turn leads to the authorities’ discovery of his whereabouts, and the chase continues.
After reading many manuscripts at conferences over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that dialogue is the fastest way to improve a manuscript. It’s also the fastest way to sink a manuscript.
Great dialogue is compressed, differentiated among characters, and has a certain zing. I’ve written an entire book on the subject, How to Write Dazzling Dialogue.
Meaning, or theme, is a “leave behind” in every novel. The only question is whether you are going to be intentional about formulating it.
Some authors begin with a theme in mind. Others find it after they’ve finished a draft. Still others give it no thought at all, letting the story play out as it will.
My opinion is that knowing the meaning of your story, at whatever point that knowledge comes, and weaving that meaning naturally into the plot, makes for the best reading experience.
To help get you to the meaning, imagine your main character twenty years after the events of the plot have occurred. Ask this character why she had to go through all that trouble? What life lesson did she learn that she can pass along to the rest of us?
Voice is one of the least understood aspects of fiction. All agents and editors say they want to find a “fresh voice,” but don’t know how to define it.
Here is the definition:
Character background and language filtered through the author’s heart, and rendered with craft on the page = voice
Think about it. Study it (I’ve written a book on voice, if you want more: Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing), and take your fiction to the next level.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Somebody Up There Likes Me starring Paul Newman. It’s one of the great boxing films, a biopic of middleweight champion Rocky Graziano. We talked about him earlier, but there's a lot to be learned from boxing
Graziano grew up in the toughest of neighborhoods, the lower East Side of New York. As the famous boxing writer Bert Sugar put it, “Graziano was raised on the Lower East Side, where both sides of the tracks were wrong.”
He was a tough street kid, a delinquent whose father made him box his older brother to the point of tears. The one thing he learned growing up was to punch.
He was in and out of reform school, and in and out of the Army. When he finally needed a way to make some money, he turned to boxing and became a legendary knockout artist. Eventually, he won the World Middleweight Championship, but it was not easy.
His opponent was another great champion, Tony Zale. Zale had defeated Rocky in their previous fight, and in this one he again savaged Graziano. The referee was about to stop the fight, but Rocky’s cut man managed to stop the bleeding.
It looked like it was curtains for Rocky Graziano once again.
But the one thing he could do was punch. And there was no quit in him.
In the sixth round, he put Tony Zale down for good.
He had that puncher’s chance.
My friends, this is true for anything you want to do. You have to keep punching. The only other option is to give up.
Do you have quit in you?
Then dump it. Because if you keep writing, keep learning, keep growing, you have a chance to make something of this writing life.
As discussed in the opening section of this chapter, I've always loved those writers like Herman Wouk who never stopped writing, who kept on pounding away until the very end (Herman had a book come out at the age of 97). I want to be like when the deep winter of life rolls around. Still writing. Still dreaming. Still publishing. Thus I was intrigued by a story with the provocative title “Is Creativity Destined to Fade with Age?” by Tara Bahrampour of The Washington Post.2http://www.vnews.com/lifetimes/9566509-95/is-creativity-destined-to-fade-with-age It begins:
Doris Lessing, the freewheeling Nobel Prize–winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism who died recently at age 94, was prolific for most of her life. But five years ago, she said the writing had dried up.
“Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever,” she said, according to one obituary. “Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”
Lessing had a stroke in the 1990s, which may have contributed to her outlook. Does that mean older writers are destined to have a dry well? One researcher cited in the article (Mark Walton, author of Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond) says No:
What’s really interesting from the neuroscience point of view is that we are hard-wired for creativity for as long as we stay at it, as long as nothing bad happens to our brain.
Another researcher, Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco and author of Soft-Wired, a book about optimizing brain health, added a caveat:
[R]epeating the same sort of creative pursuit over the decades without advancing your art can be like doing no exercise other than sit-ups your whole life.
[One-trick artists] become automatized, they become very habit-borne. They’re not continually challenging themselves to look at life from a new angle.
This is one reason I love self-publishing options. Writers can play. We can go where we want to go without being tied to one brand or type of book. We can write short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and series. When I'm not working on suspense, I like to challenge myself with a different voice for my boxing stories, my kick-butt nun novelettes, or my zombie legal thrillers. I'm currently planning a collection of short stories that will be of the weird Fredric Brown variety. Why? Because I can, and because it keeps my writing chops sharp.
This appears to be the key to this whole longevity business:
Older artists can also be galvanized by their own sense of mortality. Valerie Trueblood, 69, a Seattle writer who did not publish her novel, Seven Loves, and two short story collections until her 60s, said age can bring greater urgency to the creative process.
“I think for many older people there’s a time of great energy,” Trueblood said. “You see the end of it, you just see the brevity of life more acutely when you’re older, and I think it makes you work harder and be interested in making something exact and completing it.”
People with regular jobs usually can't wait to retire. A writer should never retire. Fight to be creative as long as you live. Do it this way:
I think all writers should, at a minimum, have three projects on the burner: their work in progress; a secondary project that will become the WIP when the first is completed; and one or more projects “in development” (notes, concepts, ideas, character profiles, etc.). This way your mind is not stuck in one place.
The writer's mind is housed in the body, so do what you have to do to keep the house in shape. Start small if you have to. Eat an apple every day. Drink more water. Walk with a small notebook and pen, ready to jot notes and ideas.
Write something every day. Even if it's just an entry in your journal. Know that what you write to completion will see publication, guaranteed. It may be via a contract, like Herman Wouk. Or it may be digitally self-published. Heck, it could be a limited printing of a memoir, just for your family. Or a blog. Writers write with more joy when they know they will be read, and joy is one key to memorable prose.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do so on your keyboard. Refuse to believe you have diminished powers or have in any way lost the spark that compelled you to write in the first place. If someone tells you that you just don't have it anymore, throw your teeth at them. Who gets to decide that? You do. And your answer is, I've still got it, baby, and I'm going to show you with this next story of mine ...
You're a writer! So write and never decompose.
This writing life has enough gremlins—rejection, bad reviews, economic uncertainty, short actors playing your six-foot-five-inch hero in a movie version—that a writer should be careful not to add his own. Here are ten ways you may be sabotaging your own writing.
Guess what? No matter where you are in your writing career you can always find a reason to be unhappy about it. You’re unagented and you want to get an agent. You’re unpublished and you want to be published. You’re published and you want to be read. You’re read but not read in the numbers you hoped. You’ve gone independent and your books aren’t selling enough to buy you a monthly mocha.
You can always find something to be unhappy about. What you ought to do is write more. When you’re into your story and you’re pounding the keys and you’re imagining the scene and you’re feeling the characters, you’re not camping out in the untamed country of unfulfilled expectations.
What good is it going to do you to look at somebody else’s success and hit the table and cry out for justice? Writing is not just. It just is. You do your work the best you can and you let the results happen, because you can’t manipulate them. You can’t touch them, you can’t change them, you can’t fix them. You can only give it your best shot each time out.
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
—Epictetus
Another thing you can’t control is your ranking on Amazon or the various and sundry best-seller lists. Sure, there are things writers do to try and “game the system.” The paid reviews scandal of a few years ago was one of the more egregious examples of this. But in the end, game playing is not worth the knot in the stomach.
Don’t worry about rankings and lists. Worry about your word count, plot, and characters. If you do the latter well, the former will take care of itself.
Another useless emotion which nonetheless seems to be a part of most writers' lives. Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Berg both lost friendships over it. Envy has even driven authors to set up sock puppet identities not merely to hand themselves good reviews, but to leave negative reviews for their rivals’ books.
The Bible says, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” (Prov. 14:30). Try to have a heart at peace by getting back to your story while, at the same time, developing the next one. That’s right. Become a mini studio. Have projects “in development” even while you work at the one you’ve given the “green light.”
... Or J.K. Rowling, or Michael Connelly. Wait a second. We already have those. And they are the best at being who they are.
Become the leading brand of you, not the generic brand of someone else sitting on the shelf at the dollar store.
I’m not saying don’t write in the same genre or don’t try to do some of the good things other writers do. We can certainly learn from those we admire.
But when we write, we have a picture in our heads, a sort of writer self-image. And if we imagine our books being treated like Connelly’s books, or we see ourselves in Los Angeles magazine interviewed like Connelly, we’ll just end up writing like a second-rate Connelly.
Do that and you stifle the thing that has the chance to set you apart—your own voice. That’s what needs to get out. That’s the thing that will keep your from the “same old, same old” reaction you’ll get if you’re trying to be the next Whoever.
That’s not the issue. The issue is, do you want to write? Do you really? Do you want it so much that if you don’t write you’re going to feel diminished in some way for the rest of your life?
You should feel like you don’t really have a choice in the matter. Writing is what you must do, even if you hold a full-time job, even if you chase a passel of kids around the house. You find your time and you keep writing. Keep looking to improve. You can improve. I’ve got hundreds of letters from people who validate this point.
Katniss Everdeen did not think she was good enough to win the Hunger Games. But she had no choice. The writing game is an arena and once you’re in, don’t waste precious time worrying about how good you are. Gather your weapons and supplies, and fight.
Fear of failing. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of what your writing might say about you. We are actually wired for fear. It’s a survival mechanism.
It has a good side so long as it is not allowed to go on. In fact, when you fear something in your writing, it may be a sign that this is the place you need to go. This is where the fresh material may be. What you are hesitant to write is in you for some reason. What is it? Write it out first, assess it later.
Once again, action (writing) is the answer. Emerson said, “Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.”
When my son was first pitching Little League baseball, he'd get upset when someone got a key hit or homer off him. This would affect the rest of his performance. So I gave him a rule. I told him he could say "Dang it!" once, and hit his glove with his fist. This became the "one Dang It rule." It helped settle him down, and he went on to a great season and a victory in the championship game.
When discouragement comes to you, and it will, go ahead and feel it. Say "Dang it!" (Or, if you're alone, exercise your freedom of speech as you see fit.) But time yourself. Give yourself permission to feel bad for thirty minutes. After that, go to the keyboard and start writing again.
The most important thing a writer does, said the late Robert B. Parker, is produce. Don’t fall into the trap of writing a few words in a journal, lingering over the wonderful vibrations of being alive with the tulips of creativity budding within your brain, and leaving it at that.
You’ve got to get some sweat equity going in this game. I don’t mean you have to crank it out like some pulp writer behind in his rent (though I like this model myself). But you do have to have some sort of quota, even if it is a small one. Writing only when you “feel like it” is not the mark of a professional.
Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Next time that know-it-all says you just haven’t got the stuff to be a writer, smile and repeat this Latin phrase. And as he looks at you, puzzled, turn your back, get to your computer, and proceed to prove him wrong.
And plan to make the next twelve months the most productive of your writing life.
All writers, like most artists, are prone to highs and lows of the mind. One of the best things I ever wrote is a short story, "I See Things Deeply," about a crazy uncle who was a poet, and suffered for it. But—But!—in return he saw things most men never see. He experienced life in a way that was richer and more colorful than the poor conformists who trudge through existence in the tight shoes of the ordinary.
This is also the theme of Peter Shaffer's play Equus. I was lucky enough to see a production starring Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hulce. It's about a psychiatrist trying to help a disturbed stable boy with a horse fixation. In probing the boy's demons, the doctor is forced to look at his own rather dull life. What has he sacrificed by being so (to put it bluntly) normal?
At one point, he says, "But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than any I have felt in my life. And let me tell you something, I envy it. That’s what his stare has been saying to me all this time: At least I galloped, when did you?”
Still, there is a cost to such vision. A multipublished friend of mine recently wrote this in an e-mail (used with permission):
I do get blue and I do have doubts about being a fake or writing a good book. I get moody. I want to be alone at times. Other times I want to be a social butterfly. It's a constant battle and sometimes I win. Other times, I just let the blues take over and wait for the fog to lift. Then I go back to my own little world where they at least understand me. I'm no Zelda, but ... I sure understand her fears.
Furthermore, we writers have many opportunities to sabotage ourselves. There are a myriad of things we can get anxious about: Am I any good at all? Why did that reader give me one star? How can I get anybody to notice my book? Why can't I get an agent? Why is so-and-so doing so much better than I am? What's my Amazon rank today? That’s my Amazon rank?
So it seems that the "writing blues" are a necessary adjunct to the artistic enterprise. But there are some things we can do to keep them from running roughshod over us.
So you've self-published a novel and have only five downloads this year. First of all, realize you have been given a gift—the gift of getting your book out there for potential readers, of which you now have five (and, yes, we will count your brother-in-law). Start by being grateful that you can type, that you can tell stories, that your imagination is on the move, and that you can learn to be a better writer. Which leads to my next piece of advice:
The nice thing about writing is that there are abundant resources available for you to get stronger in the craft. When you work at something, you're being proactive. Activity is one sure way to drive the blues away. Do this: Take an objective look at your writing (you may need an outside source, like a freelance editor, for this). Determine the three weakest areas in your writing (Plotting? Style? Characterization? Dialogue?) and find resources on those subject that you can study. Practice the techniques you learn.
I guarantee it will make you feel better. I love the craft and still study it diligently, but also remember this:
You know all about the "inner editor" who needs to be silenced when you write. Don't think too much when you're actually composing. That was Ray Bradbury's great advice. He would start in the morning, and the writing would "explode." Then he spent the latter part of the day picking up the pieces.
Give each scene you write the most creative and wild investment you can muster.
Write hot. Then edit cool.
If you haven't already, sometime soon you'll get a case of the "review blues." You are in good company. No writer is immune. “If you were to ask me what Uncle Vanya is about,” wrote a critic of Chekov’s classic, “I would say about as much as I can take.”
Andrew Davidson got a rave review from Publishers Weekly for his debut novel, The Gargoyle:
Starred Review. At the start of Davidson's powerful debut, the unnamed narrator, a coke-addled pornographer, drives his car off a mountain road in a part of the country that's never specified ... Once launched into this intense tale of unconventional romance, few readers will want to put it down.
Yet Entertainment Weekly said:
Doubleday ponied up a reported $1.25 million for Andrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle––and if they were paying for just the unintentionally hilarious sentences, that would work out to about $10,000 per howler. This much-hyped book is eye-bulgingly atrocious ...
Knowing that no matter how good a book is, it will have critics, is sure to help you at some point in your writing journey.
Then there are sales blues. All writers (even the biggies) face the sales blues, as well as the envy blues, and the who-am-I-fooling blues and all variations thereon. Which is why many a writer of the past turned to the demon rum for solace. Bad bargain. Instead:
It works. Get those endorphins pumping.
Another thing I do between writing stints: lie on the floor with my feet up on a chair. Then deep breathe and relax for about ten minutes. The blood flows to the gray cells and gives them a bath. The boys in the basement get to work. And I feel energized when I get up.
You're a storyteller and the world needs stories––even if you have to slog through the swamp of melancholy to tell them. In fact, it may be that this very dolefulness is the mark of the true artist.
So stay true. Stay focused. And keep writing.
Not too long ago, I received a lengthy e-mail from a writer who has attended my workshops in the past. He gave me permission to paraphrase the gist of his lament.
This writer has worked on his craft for years and felt he was making progress. He produced three novels, and at a conference had good feedback from an editor with a big publishing house. This editor told him it was not a matter of if, but when, he would get a contract from them. He was invited to submit at any time.
That was three years ago. He has still not submitted anything.
What happened? He describes it as “paralysis by overanalysis.”
I cannot seem to get past the prison of being perfect in the first draft. Like writer’s block, it’s a horrible place to reside. Sometimes it’s paralyzing to start. At other times its critical negative talk in my mind remembering those sessions I attended.
The sessions he mentions came from joining a local critique group. Unfortunately this was one of those groups that was run by a large ego. The group sessions seemed mostly to be about “building themselves up by tearing down others.” Though this writer had great feedback from beta readers, his confidence was completely shaken as his pages were systematically massacred in the meetings. He finally left the group, but ...
... I'm left with a nagging residual feeling that whatever I am writing is not good enough. I continue to write and rewrite my first chapters, never satisfied they’re “good enough” to move on. Even though I've not lost the love of the story and series, I have lost confidence in my writing.
Finally, he asks:
Are we wrestling ourselves to be so perfect in a first draft we do not allow for a full first draft to later tackle or add (or subtract) to or from in revision? And why are we so pressured to get it perfect in the first draft? What can we learn or do to get out of that futile mental process?
I wrote him back with some advice. It is based on Heinlein’s Two Rules for Writing and Bell’s Corollary.
Heinlein’s Two Rules for Writing:
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
Bell’s Corollary
3. You must fix what you’ve written, then write some more.
Like the old joke goes: If you have insomnia, sleep it off. And if you suffer from writer’s block, write yourself out of it.
With the paralysis-by-overanalysis type of block, your head is tangling itself up in your fingers, like kelp on a boat propeller. The motor is chugging but you’re not moving. You’ve got to cut away all that crud.
How?
First, write to a quota. I know some writers don’t like quotas, but all the professional writers who made a living in the pulp era knew their value. Yes, it’s pressure, but that’s what you need to get you past this type of block.
Second, mentally give yourself permission to write dreck. Hemingway said that all first drafts were [dreck]. So tell yourself that before you start to write. “I can write dreck! Because I can fix it later!”
Third, do some morning writing practice. Write for five minutes without stopping, on any random thing. Open a dictionary at random and find a noun and write about that. Write memoir glimpses starting with “I remember ...”
If you’re an extreme paralysis case, try a dose of Dr. Wicked's “Write or Die.” This nifty little online app (you can also purchase an inexpensive desktop version) makes you write fast or begins spewing a terrible noise at you. Set your own goal (e.g., 250 words in seven minutes) and then go.
You are teaching yourself to be free to write when you write.
I always counsel writers to write their first drafts as fast as they comfortably can. This means:
The time to dig into a manuscript is after it’s done. Put your first draft away for at least three weeks. Then sit down with a hard copy and read the thing as if you were a reader with a new book.
Take minimal notes. Read through it with one question in mind: “At what point would a busy reader, agent, or editor be tempted to put this aside?”
Work on that big picture first.
Read it through again looking at each scene. Here is where craft study comes in. It’s like golf. When you play golf, just play. Don’t think of the twenty-two things to remember at the point of impact on a full swing. After the round is when you look back and decide what to work on in practice. And when you have a good teacher to help, you learn the fundamentals and you get better.
It’s the same with writing. There are good teachers who write good books, articles, and blogs, and lead workshops. Learn from them. Use what you learn to fix your manuscript after your first draft is done. When you write your next book, those lessons will be in your “muscle memory.” You’ll be a better writer from the jump.
And here I should issue a general warning about critique groups. As with everything in life, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you find a good, supportive critique group, fantastic. But know there are toxic critique groups, too. Those are usually dominated by one strong voice, with iron-fisted rules about what can never be done, like: Never open with dialogue! No backstory in the first fifty pages! Don’t mention anything about the weather in the first two pages!
Occasionally the overriding tone is set for ripping apart manuscripts and soon enough, if you’ve fallen victim to such a group, you’ll freeze up over every sentence you write. That’s what happened to this particular writer, my correspondent.
Paying for a good, experienced editor at some point is worth it. How do you find one? Research and referrals. An abundance of editors out there who used to work for New York houses have gone freelance thanks to past years of staffing cutbacks. The cost isn’t minimal. Expect between one and two grand. If that’s beyond your budget, then hunt down and nurture a good, solid group of beta readers.
The name of this game is production. My correspondent mentioned a writer he knows who spent eight years workshopping and conferencing the same book, until realizing it would have been much better to write eight books instead.
Make a book per year your minimum goal. If you want to be a professional writer you have to be able to do at least that. Is it easy? No. If it was, your cat would be writing novels. But as Richard Rhodes put it, “A page a day is a book a year.” One book page is 250 words.
Just write.
The good news is I got an e-mail from this author after I answered him and he had this to say:
I spent the bulk of Tuesday at the keyboard and wrote/fixed about 4,500 words in one of four sessions. I feel liberated and just wanted to thank you. So thank you. Your Rx for my dilemma has been like a reset button. One long overdue.
May it be the same for you, should you ever get a case of paralysis due to overanalysis.