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Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I?
1) No two projects are alike, and there’s no rhyme or reason as to what kicks your ass and what’s a breeze to work on. You may think you know what’s in store for you when you begin a book, but if you do it right, you have no idea.
2) If you’re bored, then the reader is too. Only write the interesting parts.
3) There is very little about any story that can’t be fixed by spending a lot of time thinking up a frickin’ incredible reason for why a character would do the thing you want her to do. There’s very little that can be fixed if you don’t have that reason.
4) Unless something extraordinarily cool happens while a character is walking/driving/otherwise transporting themselves from one location to another, don’t write that scene.
5) Ditto for all scenes describing personal hygiene activities.
6) Character is king. Character is queen. Character is jack, ten, and ace of spades. Concept is phenomenal, but it can only take you so far.
7) It’s a thousand times easier to write a new book than to sell a bad book.
 Every time you think you’ve got this writing gig down pat, you’re in real trouble. Beware of complacency.
9) Every story is better with a little romance.
10) If all else fails, throw in an explosion. (Or a phone call.)
(PS: My book will be out in ninety days!!!)
What do you all think of my little spruce up? I’m trying to make it match my cover, much as the blue matched my last cover…
So it’s Monday, which I think is the perfect time to discuss those minor annoyances. Let ‘em rip here.
Here are a few of mine:
1) Skirts and pants without properly defined waists. I’m pretty slim, but I’ve got big Italian, child-bearing hips. Ergo, waist. ergo, all of my clothes have this…. gap around my waist which totally ruins the line of my outfits. I was trying to wear this new skirt the other day, and when I put on a tank top over it, the waistline bunched up and bulged out like I had some sort of saucer sticking out of my side. So annoying.
2) There’s a new trend on blogs and whatnot to purposefully misspell the word “the” as “teh” in order to denote emphasis… ironically. Not quite sure what the point is, but I think it’s full of “teh pretentiousness.” Plus, it makes life very dificult for me, because, as I think you all know, I mis-type the ALL THE TIME. Teh, hte, you name it. I also mis-type because as becuase and it’s as ti’s and and as adn and about a thousand others. I am really not in the mood to have my typos mocked by cyber-hipsters.
3) Books with little fonts and/or little margins. I just bought this book that everyone has been raving about and it’s 464 pages and nice and fat but then I open it and I see that the font is all cramped. There’s very little white space between the lines, if that makes sense. And small margins. Anyway, it’s hard to read, and I’m looking at it with this sinking feeling in my gut, because I know that even if this book is as worth it as they say, it’s going to be very difficult for me to read.
4. When you put your iPod on manual update and then think you’ve updated all the new songs on teh CD (damn, there I go, you see?) you just imported and then learn that you only did the first song on the album and now you have to wait until you get home tonight to listen to the
song that was the reason you imported the album in the first place!
So those are mine. Anyone else feel like sharing?
 Introducing a new feature here on Diana’s Diversions. Random Antipodean Photo Day. I’m subjecting you all to a few of the pictures I took while abroad. You know. Occasionally.
So here I am at the peak of the Kepler Track, which is one of the “Great Walks” of New Zealand, and one of the three Fiordland walks (the other two were Milford and Routeburn tracks). This was towards the end of our trip, when we’d gotten a bit Kiwi in our tramping abilities. We went fast. So fast in fact, that when we couldn’t get either cabin space or tent space on the trail (as is very common during the summer high season), we checked out the trail profile map, determined that the coolest part of the track was the climb up to Luxmore Hut, and decided to do it in one day.
Without our packs, we were able to go pretty fast, though probably not as fast as the runners who do the “Kepler Challenge” every year. We started out early in the morning, powered up to the peak of Luxmore (with a small side trip to the caves), hung out for a bit, enjoying the gorgeous day and even more gorgeous scenery, then started back down again. By the time we got to the steep descent, the sun was going down (New Zealand, due to its high latitude, has very long days in summertime), and we were pushing our luck. So we ran down the mountain.
I kid you not.
That was an awesome day. A 24 mile long, awesome day.
Today, I’m discussing an unusual phenomenon — books that start too late — over at Romancing the Blog. Check it out!
In other news, some friends and I were having a discussion about what constitutes proper blog posts for writers. What sort of thing would you least like to see on a writer’s blog?
a) Stories of my wild lost weekends.
b) Whingeing about how poorly the writing is going.
c) Intimate details about my sex life.
d) Discussions of religion and politics.
e) Dear Lord, woman, all of the above!
Several days ago, my friend Ally Carter posted about the moment she decided to become a writer. This is a question writers get a lot, and we all seem to have some sort of pithy answer to it, most often involving some variation of “I was always writing stories…”
Well, I was. When I was in second and third grade, and one of our weekly homework assignments was to write sentences including our vocabulary words, I wrote stories instead. I filled an entire book full of vocabulerific stories about a girl named Susie. Later, I used spiral bound notebooks to write more “books.” (Most of these were never finished, and if they were, they were very short.) One time in middle school, I pretended to be sick (sorry, Mom) for a few days in order to stay home and write the beginning of a book on my DOS Word Perfect about a teenager whose family’s exchange student steals her heart. In high school, I plotted out several romance novels, and a big epic fantasy, and wrote a bunch of short stories. In college, I wrote more short stories, a bunch of fanfic, and the beginning of a contemporary romance novel which completely derailed due to a romantic comedy being released that summer with the exact same plotline. Big sigh.
Unlike Ally, when I was a child I didn’t realize that there was a chance that I couldn’t be a writer. No, no, that kind of discouragement came in college. In college, I was taught that unless I wanted to win a Pulitzer or something, I shouldn’t write fiction. I dated boys who thought it would be better if I stopped writing about sex and started writing something more innocuous to their political aspirations: children’s books, perhaps?
These relationships ended badly. They’d end much worse if I knew those wankers now.
So I had always been writing, always assumed that writing a novel and getting it published would be something I’d end up doing someday… until I got to college, and realized how hard it was to actually write a book worthy of publication, how few people managed it, and how many fewer actually turned it into a living. If it was so hard, and even if I managed it, would be worthless unless I was Salman Rushdie or similar, then it probably wasn’t somethign I should do. I should think of something else.
I spent a lot of time thinking of something else. I spent so much time doing that, that eventually I earned a degree in Geology. But I was no scientist. I was no forest ranger. And, much to the dismay of my school’s narrow-minded career counseling services, I was no consultant, I-banker, or law-school applicant. Junior year, I took a class called Wilderness in the North American Imagination, which is an incredible experience and one of the top three classes I took at Yale. One of our major projects for the class involved looking over texts in the rare book library about the creation of Yellowstone National Park, and using those original sources to write a paper about the development of the U.S. park system. Included in the files were many letters from early visitors and surveyors with the USGS in the park.
I failed to write a term paper. Instead, I wrote an epistolary novella from the point of view of the correspondant to whom those letters were addressed. She was a well-to-do young Englishwoman, appalled that her little brother, the painter, had gone gallavanting off to the American West to live in a tent and make art of bubbling mud pots and geysers. But he slowly seduces her with images of the gorgeous landscape and description of the freedom to be found in the American wilderness, and eventually, she decides to look for herself. It was a mystery and a romance and it included all the relevant factual info about the creation of the park service. The instructor gave me an A+ and wrote “If I could write like you, I’d be a historical novelist.”
A year later I was whining to my new boyfriend (who I would later call Sailor Boy) that I didn’t know what to do with my life. I gave him my paper to read. He read it while I sat there, and then he said to me, “I don’t know why you’re pretending you want to be anything other than a writer.”
The statement was true on such a fundamental level that I was struck speechless. I had been pretending. But I would stop. The next semester, I took my first creative writing course. It was a disaster, but I’ve spoken of that before. The point was that I wasn’t going to pretend anymore. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be the kind of writer I wanted to be, and I wasn’t going to apologize for it.
Within a year, I’d written my first 60k category romance manuscript and joined RWA. I’d gotten a steady gig at my newspaper and written my first cover story. At the time, this process seemed to take forever, but now I know that writing gestates slowly. One year is not so bad. (This is the kind of maturity that develops between 22 and 27.)
That moment on the couch with Sailor Boy (that couch has a starring role in Secret Society Girl, by the way) was one of the plot points of my life. It was the moment I decided, irrevocably, that I was kidding myself if I said I wanted to be anything else but a writer.
This day last year was another plot point. I signed a contract with my agent. She began submitting the manuscript. Within a week, I’d have a two book deal, and nothing would ever be the same again.
But it woudnl’t have been possible without that moment on the couch in my boyfriend’s dorm room when I decided that, come what may, I was going to be a writer.
There’s been a lot of discussion on various industry blogs and email loops about hiring “freelance editors” to review manuscritps before submitting them. I’ve always come down on the side of NOT hiring freelance editors, sometimes getting in huge debates with people who tell me that it’s the only way to get your manuscript looked at, and that I must be one of the “lucky few” who actually has an editor willing to edit my manuscript, and that I’m being naive to believe that this isn’t the way the industry works. Apparently, I’m blind, and everyone who gets a book published has it “professionally edited” before sending it out. (Actually, I’ve heard from more than one agent that the term “professionally edited” on a query letter is a big red flag reading “amateur.”)
Let me say this first, that I have nothing against people who run freelance editing companies, or having “critique services” or whatnot. I know a few of these people and I’m sure they give out fine advice, advice that may be very helpful, advice that I’m sure I would approve of if I were to hear about it.
Let’s leave those respectable, “good” critique services out for a moment and focus on the others. The crap services. The scams. The ones that have been written about time and time again as being wretched money pits willing to take authors for everything they are worth and return light proofreading or worse, ruin the book. Stories I’ve heard about nightmare editing scenarios usually contain one or more of the following elements:
1) Writer was charged enormous amount.
2) Writer received only basic grammar assistance in lieu of any substantive editing.
3) Writer received BAD grammar advice that made writer question editor’s knowledge of English language.
4) Writer received completely “written over” manuscript, such as final product was unrecognizable, and written to editor’s preferences rather than what writer was trying to say.
5) Writer made changes according to editorial suggestions, and got no further with submission process than had before.
Obviously, these are bad bad things. Run away from all scam artists. If you are even THINKING of hiring a book doctor, go here and read it, learn it, love it, before you make step one in the direction of paying anyone any money. I don’t advocate the use of these services at all, and only reluctantly suggest using the good ones in a last-resort situation.
With a “good” editing/critiquing service, you are likely to avoid a few of the above-mentioned problems, especially the one wherein the writer is getting bad grammar advice, etc., but nothing is going to help you with number 5. The best book doctor in the world can’t give you the “magic fix” for you manuscript, no matter how much you pay them.
I’m a tightwad, and so, when I spend money, I want results. Everyone who I’ve hired to do something for me in my writing career, I’ve hired because they can provide a service that either I can’t do myself or I can’t get for free or through trade. Furthermore, I don’t pay them until I’ve got a result. When I hired an agent, she didn’t get paid until she made me money. When I hired a web designer, he won’t get paid until we’re done with a website (which is looking so good, btw, y’all. I can’t wait until you see it!).
I can’t see a book doctor doing that. I could pay them for a critique, sure, but it’s not necessarily going to be something I could use. And I don’t like the idea of spending money on something I can’t use. For instance, if my agent procures for me a publishing offer, and I decide that it’s a bad contract and I don’t want to take it, the agent does not get paid. This is not the case with a freelance editor. You see how messy this can be?
Yes, indeed, a freelance editor is a pair of “fresh eyes” on my manuscript, but then again, so are my critique partners. So is Sailor Boy. So is my agent. So is the editor I sell the manuscript to. And if I choose not to listen to my CP’s suggestions, then I’m not out cash.
“But,” I hear you say, “I don’t have an editor or agent (or the ones I do don’t critique my manuscript). My partner isn’t interested in reading my books or just says, “Great, honey,” to everything I show him/her. And I can’t get good critique partners. All the good ones are paired up. I don’t have an option! I HAVE to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to a freelance editor to get my stuff in shape.”
Do you? Do you really? I know plenty of published authors, and I don’t know a single one who has ever used a book doctor. If this is the industry standard, then I must be waaaaay out of the loop. Authors I know use first readers/beta readers/critique partners/etc. to help them hone their manuscripts.
And lest we forget, the opinion of a critique partner, or a lover, or a neighbor who is a librarian, or a freelance, editor, or even an agent, is not the be all or end-all of opinions. To paraphrase J. Steven York:
Ultimately the only opinions about a manuscript that count are yours and the person who can actually buy the manuscript. Your mother cannot buy the manuscript. Your workshop cannot buy the manuscript. Your agent cannot buy the manuscript.None of which means you can’t listen to these other people, but the responsibility to apply (or not apply) their opinions is ultimately yours.
Let me add that your freelance editor, no matter how much you pay them, cannot buy your manuscript. Which means that their opinion, learned and studied and experienced and intelligent and well-reasoned as it may be, might mean crap to the aquiring editor at the publishing house. And you’re still out the money.
And my final argument against using freelance editors, even good ones, is this: are you willing to make this a habit? You people, who think that aquiring editors don’t vet manuscripts… do you realize that by hiring a freelance editor instead of creating and maintaining a network of trusted CPs and beta-readers, you are condemning yourself to a lifetime of nickel-and-dime bills every time you have a story. If you’re a genre writer, and you’re writing a few books a year, do you really want to operate in that manner? It’s April now, and so far this year, I’ve critiqued more than 1500 pages of work from my critique partners. They’ve critiqued several hundred of my pages. We’ve also had beaucoup brainstorming sessions (I don’t know what hte going rate is for that) and lots of repeat business. Are you going to pay for each of those, every time, forever?
The argument I hear in response to this is often, “No, once they teach me how to do it/once I sell, I won’t have to go to them again.” This person believes one or more of the following:
1) Writing is like a light switch. Once it’s turned on, you can do it. all it takes is being shown what to do once.
2) Their work was unacceptable before paying to have it edited, but magically acceptable after paying to have it edited, and once they sell, they will magically be able to turn out saleable work without having it edited anymore. Their publisher either won’t notice the difference, or won’t care. After all, once you sell, everything is perfect!
Oh, if it were only true!
So for these reasons, I do not advocate hiring freelance editors, though I’m sure and positive there are many good ones out there. I’m also sure that this post will generate much discussion and testimonial from people who have used these editing services to wonderful results, or from people who run these editing services, and so on and so forth. Which is fine. More power to you guys.
However, I retain my opinion on this matter. Don’t spend money on an editing service. Keep looking for a good critique partner. And then, if you really really really in an emergency situation need a professional editor, look for another critique partner. And then, if you really really really in an emergency one-time situation need a professional editor and another critique partner won’t do, be very very careful whom you choose.
And don’t believe anyone who says that “this is how it’s done.”
Note from Diana: Last week, my good friend and mentor Julie Leto posted an amazing note to some of the members of my local RWA chapter. I asked for permission to repost it here.
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I wrote the following as a post to a list I belong to called the TARA Book Challenge list. TARA is my local RWA chapter and I’m the “oldest” member in that I’ve been around the longest. I joined when I was merely…oh…don’t make me do math…a graduate student. First year. You do the subtraction without a handy calculator.
This list was established because every year, the members of our chapter have the chance to put $10 in the pot and challenge themselves to finish a book in a year (actually, about 10 months.) At our Christmas party in December, the ones who succeeded (we lug our manuscripts to the Yacht Club) have their names in the drawing and the winner gets half the pot. It’s a nice chunk of change around Christmas time, believe me. Two years ago, an industrious member started a Yahoogroup for the Book Challengers and this group has become one of the most inspiring groups I’ve ever been on. We report in once a week with how many pages we’ve written and project our goals for the next. Some people, like me who have deadlines, report large outputs. Forty pages here, sixty pages there, etc. Some report one or two pages. A lot are in between. Some report nothing. We support each other, but we also dole out the tough love, which is where my post came from.
You see…too many new writers get stuck in a revision rut and they never finish the book. You can’t much get any where in this business without finishing a book at some point, so here is what I said. I’ve been told it was very helpful, so have at it. If it lights a fire under your butt to stop revising and start writing…to stop being intimidated and start writing…then I’ve done my job.
This morning, I was thinking back to my first book. It was written in 1987-88, the year that I started graduate school and was substitute teaching as well. As my students did whatever busywork their teacher provided, I wrote. Wrote and wrote and wrote. In long hand. I then went home at night and typed my pages into my Apple 2e with the monochrome green screen…never deleting any scenes, never stopping to revise more than a word or two. I’d joined Tara (then the Florida West Coast Romance Writers), but there was no Internet to speak of and our meetings, held in the small town of Ruskin, were relatively short with one speaker and no time to socialize except during the long carpool over. In other words, my process was MY process. I was on my own (except for my writing partner, who never matched my output, and our process was never the same anyway.)
Never once did I throw away a scene. Never once did I start and restart the same book. Never once did I question the plot, characterization, point of view, etc. I just wrote.
Yes, I had a plot outline…a rather detailed one. I didn’t vary from it much since I had a partner writing other scenes. I had a hard-sell book (two heroines–one Latina–and a historical setting in 1891 Florida.) I was so stupid, it never occurred to me to stop writing this unmarketable book and write something an editor would actually buy. It never crossed my mind that my writing wasn’t up to snuff, that my hook wasn’t as compelling as it could be or that my voice wasn’t strong enough — likely watered down since I was writing with a partner. (Voice, what voice?) I never even heard about Voice–and I had a degree in Creative Writing.
I had no doubts. I just wrote, wrote, wrote.
Thank GOD. Ignorance is bliss.
And I finished the book (over 500 pages…historical romances were meaty back then) in less than a year, including the three months of historical research I did (pre-Internet). I did this while working full time and going to graduate school and maintaining a 4.0 GPA and dating my eventual husband.
There was a HUGE lesson in finishing that book. Things I can’t even verbalize now that I learned from taking characters from beginning to end. From experiencing their growth. Their emotional arc. From developing a conflict and letting it snowball over my plot. From penning a black moment (two actually, since I had two heroines!) From taking every plot thread and knotting them into The End.
Will I ever sell that book? Not if there’s a God. It’s horrid. But the learning I did during that process has served me well ever since.
It makes me wonder for you first timers need to just write the damned book. Stop questioning yourself. Stop worrying about SELLING. I will tell you that though that book never sold, it went to every major publisher. My rejections were not all form, either. I had several editors express interest and agents, too. But that wasn’t the part that mattered–the writing mattered…the actual DOING mattered. And the contacts weren’t bad, in the long run. But that was all after the fact. I could never have gotten to that point unless I FINISHED THE BOOK.
I have absolutely no regrets that I never sold my first book. In fact, I think it was a blessing. Not selling that book gave me time to get savvy about the business, to make contacts, to learn about my craft in ways I never would have if that book had sold right out of the gate.
I wonder if RWA doesn’t put so much emphasis on selling that we squelch the learning process of the actual writing. The writing and the selling are two different things. Personally, I don’t think you should graduate to selling until you’ve finished writing at least one book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…lots of writers sell their “first book” on proposal and go on to have fantabulous careers. My critique partner is one of them. Diana is another. Her friend Marley yet another. But guess what? Those really weren’t their “first” books. Not at ALL. I believe my critique partner had written at least four manuscripts prior to selling her first published book on proposal. Same for Diana and Marley. I think they were finally ready when they time came…but then, this is just my opinion. Of course, editors agreed with me, didn’t they?
This is for the first timers out there who are struggling with the writing. Just get it written. Trust me, there is a lesson in there that you won’t get from any craft book, any workshop, any tape, any editor or agent appointment, any sale. You’re building a foundation that so many other wannabes will never have the material to maintain.
Think of that when you need some motivation, okay?
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And then I responded to her post:
This is why I love and admire you so much, Julie — because you just nailed it here, you nailed it EXACTLY.
(And no, it wasn’t my first book — The fun part is selling is that you get to toss the word “first” around as if you just woke up one morning and decided to be a novelist. First in this instance just means “first to be published.” I’d written four complete books, a novella, and more “false starts” than I can count on one hand, some that were longer than 150 pages! Marley has written ten.)
I meet a lot of writers who are writing their first book over and over and over again. I didn’t even JOIN RWA until I finished my first book, And though I submitted it to its target audience (Harlequin temptation) and got a nice rejection for it, too, I knew, I knew before I even finished it, that I could do better. But I had to write the whole book, first. You HAVE to write the whole book. You have to do it to prove that you can.
So I wrote another book, and then another, and then another. And with every book, I got better. I got better in a way that could not be quantified, just like Julie said. I learned things about my writing and what I wanted from my writing that is difficult to describe, and mostly pointless, because it isn’t able to be universalized. It was about my voice and my process and most of all, about my ability to finish a book, Because I finished that first book, it didn’t matter if I quit other projects or started over or was staring the most impossible book in the face and thinking “what in the WORLD was I thinking?” I knew I could finish it because I’d finished others.
And to follow up what Julie said about not concentrating on the selling, but on the writing: When I started writing Secret Society Girl, I wasn’t thinking about the market, because I didn’t know what the market would be; I hadn’t studied it exhaustively, as I had with the category books I’d written. So I just had fun with it. You need to write with a closed door. People will tell you what your book needs to be, but you need to ignore all that and just WRITE IT. Worry about what your book needs to be afterwards.
There is a world of difference between finishing a book and almost finishing a book.
I think it was Stephen King who said you need to write a million words before any of them are any good. Write the book, especially if you haven’t written any before, WRITE THE BOOK, and then worry about all the industry stuff.
In case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet signed up for my newsletter…
Here’s the big announcement: SECRET SOCIETY GIRL HAS A NEW COVER.
Altogether, now: Ooooooh, aaaaaah…
Really, isn’t it lovely? I positively adore it! I’m so excited and think this new cover perfectly captures the spirit of the novel. I’ve seen the mechanicals and there are all sorts of lovely details on the back and inside flaps that add such darling touches to the whole.
This cover is a better reflection of the book and is considered a better choice for marketing purposes. I’ve learned a lot about this business in the past few weeks.
But for those of you who loved the old cover, never fear! It will be living a long and happy life in my website design.
I feel as if I might have already done this one the last time it made its circuit, but what the hell. Jaci tagged me and I’ve been mean to her lately, so let’s give it a whirl:
Four jobs you have had in your life:
1. CD Factory floorworker
2. Food Critic
3. Field Observation Officer for hurricane clean-up
4. Copyeditor
Four movies you would watch over and over:
1. Working Girl
2. The Terminator
3. Swingers
4. The Empire Strikes Back
Four places you have lived:
1. Clearwater, Florida
2. New Haven, Connecticut
3. New York City
4. Cairns, Queensland, Australia
Four TV shows you love to watch: (this one’s a bit of a cheat since I don’t watch TV anymore)
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2. Project Runway
3. The West Wing
4. Joan of Arcadia
Four websites you visit daily:
1. Diana’s Diversions 
2. Amazon
3. Romancing the Blog
4. Miss Snark
Four places you have been on vacation:
1. Victoria, BC
2. Rome
3. Costa Rica
4. Idaho
Four of your favorite foods:
1. spaghetti with meatsauce
2. mint chocolate chip ice cream
3. peaches
4. hot mulled cider
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. New Zealand
2. Rome
3. Florida
4. San Francisco
Four friends I am tagging that I think will respond:
1. Colleen
2. Jana
3. Ally
4. Marley
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