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L asks:
Could you please post a section on your website providing tips to novice writers (like myself) on how to successfully get your novel out there. I’m very curious to read your query letter.
Your wish is my command. Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a few posts on the writing industry and bits of writing and publishing advice. In the column on the right, you’ll find several of my favorites listed under “On Writing and Publishing,” including the query letter that landed me my agent six years ago. Keep in mind that these posts have been written over the better part of a decade. Some things that may have been true (or at least more prevalent then) might have changed. For instance, when I queried my agent, she was one of only a few agents accepting electronic queries. Now, I believe that’s the norm.
Regular blog readers, if there’s a post of mine you think belongs on this list but isn’t there, let me know! (You can find a lot of them under the tag “writing industry“.
And if there is a burning writing or publishing question you have that isn’t answered on that list, let me know that as well. I’m always happy to do more!
Last night, my pal Pam Bachorz and I were supposed to participate in a chat on worldbuilding at yalitchat.org. Unfotunately, neither Pam nor I are a member of that particular organization. We were confused and thought we were participating in a Twitter chat using the hashtag #yalitchat. Oops.
Anyway, I felt bad that we missed out on the chat and so I thought I’d give anyone who wanted to chat and wasn’t able to the opportunity to try again. So this week on the blog we’ll be doing a worldbuilding Q&A. Go ahead and ask your questions in the comments, and I’ll answer them in the comments. And maybe Pam will come by, too. I don’t know. I haven’t asked her yet.
And to make it extra fun, I thought we could do a giveaway. Everyone who asks a question is entered into a contest to win either a copy of RAMPANT or ASCENDANT (winner’s choice).
Before we start, I thought I’d give a little overview about my personal take on worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, in my mind, is not something that belongs solely to the realm of speculative and paranormal fiction. It’s something that every writer worth his or her salt engages in. Intricacies of setting, of the relationships between characters, of the world they live in — that’s all worldbuilding. If you set your story in an office building and the office manager decrees that Fridays are casual dress days, that’s worldbuilding — you know why? Because then when you have your main character score an interview for a much better job on a Friday afternoon, you have to find a way for her to sneak her suit in so everyone else in jeans doesn’t get suspicious about what shes up to. Which brings me to:
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #1: There must be rules.
Vampires are allergic to sunlight. People who know how to use The Force can move things with their minds. You can use magic to do anything but bring people back from the dead (this appears to be one of the few rules in the Harry Potter universe). “There can be only one.” I don’t care what the rules are, and I don’t care if the reader knows them all — or any of them. Maybe figuring out the rules is part of the fun of reading. (Wait, I take that back. Tell the reader at least one or more of the rules. Give the poor guy a toehold!) But the writer had better know the rules. Which leads me to…
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #2: Break the rules only at great peril — and if you have it under control.
The best known examples of doing this the right way are in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy used to explain the rule of its world in the start of every episode: “Into every generation is born a slayer, one girl who has the power to blah blah blah the vampires.” ONE. One Slayer. If Buffy dies, a new slayer is called. That’s the rule. Except, Buffy brilliantly bends that rule, because prophecies are for losers. People don’t die the way they used to, and what’s technically “dead” isn’t permanent in today’s world. So when Buffy briefly drowns at the end of the first season, another slayer is activated. And then there are two, which makes for a LOT of lovely plot twists in seasons two, three, and four, when you see what happens when two very different slayers are at odds with one another.* And then they break the rule all over again in Season 7 when Buffy decides that the whole idea of a bunch of potentials waiting around for a Slayer to die is ridiculous, and gives them ALL Slayer powers, which leads to a big awesome battle at the end of Season 7, and which I’m sure leads to some good plot twists in the comic books — I haven’t read them — but did lead to one very interesting episode of Angel wherein Angel and Spike are forced to battle a crazy and abused Slayer. So yes — that one broke the rules in a good way.
But, you have to lay the groundwork for breaking that rule. You have to have Buffy go, “Let’s cross the streams and see what happens,” (another excellent rule-breaking moment). It has to be important and it has to be game-changing. Otherwise, you’re going to alienate your reader. You’re going to have midichlorians on your hands, or you’re going ot have that random moment where Neo controls the robots in the real world and then NEVER DEAL WITH IT EVER** and your die-hard fans are going to be saying, WTF, George Lucas? WTF, Wachowskis?
So, to reiterate, if you’re going to break the rules, you better know what the rules are, how you plan to break them, and how you plan for that to complete change the game in the world you’ve created. Which leads me to
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #3: There must be a reason.
Not only must there be rules, there has to be a reason for those rules. It doesn’t have to be a good reason, or a fair reason. (The rules in my killer unicorn world are misogynistic and dangerous, and that’s kind of the point for me.) But there has to be a reason, if only because you must have a reason to mention every thing you mention. There has to be a reason you made them vampires. If not, why aren’t they just men, or elves, or ageless liver-eating mutants who live in air ducts? If there’s a magic wishing well on the princess’s property, she’d better, at some point, do something more than draw water from it. This is not unlike my favorite advice from Chekov about the gun on the wall. There HAS to be a reason. There has to be a reason that you made the choice you did. Sometime in the future, I will be discussing this in great detail. And there must be a reason that your magical element has the rules it does. It doesn’t have to be a good reason. Maybe the vampires in your book are not allergic to garlic, but you wrote that in because you really like the idea of Dracula working in a pizza parlor and taking a nip of the guests who’ve had too much chianti, which, naturally, wouldn’t be possible if they couldn’t deal with garlic. In the movie The Lost Boys, there’s a rule that says there are “half-vampires” who have all the qualities of vampires but don’t become full-fledged until they kill someone, and can be turned back if you find the head vampire and kill him. This is a weird and unusual vampire rule (though not entirely unlike Mina Harker’s experiences in Dracula, where she is freed from her trance only after the death of Dracula), but is very important to the plot, since the main character is one of these half-vamps, and so is his sexy girlfriend.
And here’s an example of how solid worldbuilding can help you in your writing. In an early, early draft of Rampant, (it wasn’t even going to be called Rampant then) I had magical closets. That’s right: magical closets. The characters could stand in front of the closets and think about certain things and when they opened the closet doors, the things they needed would be inside. This had a lot of backlash for them, in that if they stood in front of the closet and thought about how dangerous unicorn hunting was and about all the hunters who came before them who’d probably died for the cause, then opened the door, they’d drown in a pile of bloodstained clothes belonging to old hunters.
This was a Bad Idea. As the worldbuilding for the story solidified, I realized that to keep it under control, I had to limit the rules of the magic in the world to two things: hunters and unicorns. Everything everything everything had to be about the relationship between a hunter and a unicorn. Not clothes or wood, not things magically appearing or disappearing. If I wanted magic in the actual setting, I needed to relate it back to my primary magical constructs: The body and soul of the hunter, the body and soul of the unicorn, and how those two things intersect. Therefore, if I wanted magic, it had to be magic MADE from that mystical connection between hunter and unicorn. If I wanted magic in my nunnery, it had to be because the walls were made of unicorns, and the hunters (and only the hunters) could feel that. But once I had nailed down that this was my primary, inviolate rule, it became pretty clear that the magical closets and their room-of-requirement style voodoo had to go.
Which leads me to my last big rule:
Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #4: The more fantastical the fantastical elements are in your story, the more you have to ground everything else.
This is where I’m especially glad that I use the term “personal.” Your mileage may vary on this, and lord knows there are many beloved stories where this isn’t the case. But as my friend Carrie Ryan says, you get a certain number of gimmes in a book. Use them wisely. If you try to shove too much magic into a story and you fail to ground it in reality with either setting, characters, background info, laws of physics — what have you, people aren’t going to buy it. And gimme points aren’t even. Someone writing a book about vampires has a lot more gimme points left over than I do, writing a book about unicorns. Because people are familiar with vampires — to say “oh, this is a vampire book” might be only one gimme point out of a hundred. For me to say “oh, this is a book about killer unicorns” — people are already skeptical going in. That’s 40 gimme points. I only have sixty left to play with.
So what do you do? You limit the magic. You make the characters oh so much more human and lifelike. You don’t all of a sudden introduce elves or magical closets on top of whatever else you have going on. You make sure that your reader has something safe to retreat to whenever the supernatural element of the story starts to erode their willing suspension of disbelief.
So those are my first few rules. Question away!
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* That a new Slayer isn’t called when Buffy dies again at the end of the fifth season always made Sailor Boy and I wonder if the “Slayer Line” isn’t now flowing through Faith — which would make sense because Faith was called after Kendra died, and the “extra Slayer” is really Buffy. But all that was negated in season 7.
** I really REALLY hate the subsequent Matrix films.
The incomparable Tamora Pierce talks about why she writes books for young women:
Why do I write so many strong female characters? When I was a kid, 7-8 books out of all books written for kids through teens had boy heroes. Those that had girl heroes showed them at “feminine” pursuits, or if they were a little feisty, a male hero had to bail them out by book’s end. Only the historical novels had strong girls; most of them “settled down” by the end. I was reading “boy books”: TREASURE ISLAND, TOM SAWYER, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I encountered fantasy, I had the same problem: virtually no girl heroes. The ones I found, adult women all, settled down, hated other women, or died. I didn’t understand why there were no girls (or those that existed were severely compromised) in the adventure books, so I began to write what I wanted to read: adventure books with girl heroes. As a published YA writer I came along at a time when that was what booksellers, parents, and librarians were looking for, and along with some other writers, I found my place in publishing.
Pierce’s work is what laid the groundwork for books like mine. If her Alanna books weren’t still sitting on the shelf in every bookstore almost three decades later, no publisher would take a chance on Astrid, or Katsa, or other female heroes of teen fantasy. I write the books I do because I could never find enough of them growing up. I read and re-read Greek myths and fantasies like The Horse and His Boy because Aravis Tarkheena was a warrior woman, and they were few and far between. (It was much later in life, sadly, when I discovered Tamora Pierce and other writers like her.) We have been enjoying (for the last four or five years) a wonderful influx of these kind of books. The current discussion of whether or not boy readers are getting the shaft is… not entirely accurate. I didn’t see “but what about the girls?” whines when it was all Harry Potter all the time. Girl readers were expected to love Harry, or make do with Hermione (who is awesome, it’s true), but people seem to accept that girls will read “boy books” and not vice versa. (I think sometimes you can sneak ‘em in, especially if the writer is a boy, like Scott Westerfeld’s Tally Youngblood in the UGLIES series). I have very few boy readers. My dad, however, adores my books, but he’s in large part responsible for my love of warrior women, so there’s that.
The whole essay is worth a careful read, because Pierce also discusses the way you can get a boy interested in reading a so-called “girl book” (hint: talk about the decapitations, not the girl finding love), and since she’s been in the biz for a while, she knows this conversation pops up every few years. For myself, I think it’s obvious from all my published books, action fantasy and chick lit, that I’m interested in exploring the way young women interact with society, so women’s issues do find a way to worm themselves into my books. I am doing it purposefully, but it is purposefully for ME — it’s what I find myself drawn to writing. (I am finding that is less explicitly the case in the book I’m writing, though that’s a bit of a one-off.)
Speaking of what a writer wants to (or should) write, yesterday I read this fantastic essay by my friend Marianne Mancusi, about how maybe you shouldn’t write what you love if you find you aren’t great at it.
I hear, over and over again, authors and editors and agents urging writers to “Write what they love.” But I’d argue this is not necessarily the best advice for everyone. While some of you may love to read the genres you’re equally talented at writing in, some of you may find your writing strengths lie elsewhere.
And if so, my advice is to not fight it.
For me, I’m best at comedy. I can easily whip up quirky characters and odd situations and pop culture references galore. And when I’m writing comedy my hands fly on the keyboard and sometimes, I admittedly even make myself laugh out loud, wondering where on Earth my brain conjured up that particular joke.
But for many years, I fought against my natural light style. I tried to write bigger, deeper, more epic novels with dark themes and alternative dimensions. I wanted to be that author with the kick-ass cover of a woman in leather, wielding a sword in a dark, twisted world. Because that’s the kind of book I’d pick up in the bookstore, over the one with a silly cartoon cover and a quirky title. But I’m just not that author. I’m the cartoon cover kind.
A couple of things: you could have bowled me over with a feather when I first read this essay, since I would never have categorized Marianne that way at all. She’s one of the most versatile writers I know. Everything she does, indeed, has that signature snark and pop-culture touches, but she can do light contemporary romance (such as her excellent GAMER GIRL) as well as post-apocalyptica (my other favorite book of hers, RAZOR GIRL). That they both have the word “girl” in the title is pure coincidence, because they are very different books.
Also, who doesn’t love zombies with a touch of fun? I do! (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and I’m salivating for the upcoming Jesse Petersen series.)
So aside from thinking that Marianne is wrong in her estimation of her own talents, I think she has a very good point, here:
Now that’s not to say you can’t include certain beloved themes in your book. You just have to give the story your own voice and twist. For example, I knew I wouldn’t be great at writing a straight medieval. So instead I decided to bring a teen King Arthur to the 21st century in my upcoming novel “The Camelot Code.” He Googles himself and learns his true destiny and decides to join the football team rather than go home and pull the sword from the stone. So, in this way, I was able to incorporate something I love–medieval fantasy novels–with something I’m better at writing–light, humorous young adult fiction. And in doing so I was able to create my own sort of genre mash-up. (After all, where else are you going to find Morgan La Fay accidentally agreeing to a Brazilian wax…)
Sometimes we have to figure out how to write what we love, or, as my other pal Julie Leto might put it, how to incorporate the book our voice into the books of our heart. RAZOR GIRL, for instance, works for me because it utilizes Marianne’s familiarity with genre conventions (the titular Razor Girl is actually a genetically-enhanced warrior created by her father, who was obsessed with William Gibson and cyperpunk stories — Gibson wrote about the “original” razorgirl Molly MIllions), and light teen voice allowed her to tell a post-apocalyptic story using her strengths as a writer. She poignantly juxtaposes scenes of a zombie-infested wasteland with scenes from the before time, when the main characters Molly and Chase were very different people.
I am often asked in interviews why I am still so active in RWA, given that I don’t write romance novels. For years, I tried to write romance novels (I have four of them sitting under my bed), and though my rejection letters would praise my voice/prose/characters, the romance wasn’t quite clicking for them. But then I wrote Secret Society Girl, which, while not a romance novel, ended up being a hit with its readers because of the romance within its pages. Lesson learned: it’s not that I can’t tell a love story, it’s that I’m better when it’s a subplot, and when the book exists out of the genre conventions of the romance novel.
But, like Marianne, I still love romance novels, especially historical romances! But I regularly write with a published historical romance novelist, and the work I see her doing to make sure every word in her book is historically accurate — yikes! Makes me glad I write books set in the 21st century.
I recently came out with my first historical short story, and I had to do a ton of research — about clothing, about inheritance law, about marriage law — to be able to work my way around what was actually a pretty straightforward plot. I specifically chose to set the story in a country where they don’t speak English so that any non-standard word usage could be chalked up to “translation” rather than “but the OED says they weren’t using that word then!” (Quoth my historical writing friend: “Cheater.”)
My love of historicals, romance, and post-apocalyptica combine in my current work in progress, the much-teased post-apocalyptic retelling of Persuasion. But it took years before I figured out exactly how to tell such an unusual story in a voice that worked for me and for what I do. Sometimes it takes getting creative, as Marianne did with her upcoming Camelot Code, another book that was a bit in the making.
I truly believe you can write what you love if you make it your own — and that, as Tamora Pierce says, you should write what you love, because it always is your own.
I stumbled across this essay by an MFA graduate a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it for a bit. I do not have an MFA, though a few of my friends (both published and unpublished) do. I had been rather skeptical about them for many years, owing primarily to the fact that the one creative writing class I took in college was taught by an Iowa MFA (widely regarded as the best program in the country) who hated genre literature and was currently — when not teaching a bunch of 20 year olds to read Flannery O’Connor and write just like the good people at Iowa had taught him — getting his law degree from Yale (which is widely regarded as the best program in the country). I assumed once he mastered his JD, he’d be toddling off to a medical program at Johns Hopkins. But I digress. If he wanted to go around collecting degrees, that was his business (and Fannie Mae’s).
What bothered me was that he hated genre. He actually kicked a girl out of class once for turning in a fantasy short story. My first story for the class was, I now think, in the genre of what would later be called chick lit. The girls in the class loved it. The boys “didn’t get it” — spurred on in their mental block by the teacher. That was how the class worked. The teacher would deliver his judgment (“this is not a genre class!” “I’m not sure why this girl is having such a problem with her boyfriend, all he wants her to do is give up her personality and principles to impress his parents”) and then the rest of the class would be set along those lines, and it would take a lot for any of the students to disagree with his pronouncement — especially since he would argue every point a dissenter made, while just nodding and agreeing with one of his pets.
I became very skeptical about workshopping and basically wrote my final short for the class as a ghost story in protest. (In my meeting with him to discuss the story, I referenced Hawthorne and Poe, and he gave me a B+). But my friends with MFAs assure me that this dude was just not a great teacher, and that workshopping isn’t usually such a draconian situation. Indeed, my closest friend with an MFA wrote a magical realism book while in school.
Back in 2006, soon after I sold my first novel, two of the folks in my circle of friends got into MFA programs. All of a sudden I started reconsidering. I got as far as discussing the matter with my editor and agent, who both gave me the incredulous response of “but you’re already selling.” Four years on, I wish sometimes I had at least explored the possibility of some “master classes” like Clarion, though I suppose it’s never too late. And I have attended near-monthly workshops and more than a dozen craft-focused conferences for the past ten years which have also taught me a lot. I’ve also enjoyed the company of brilliant critique partners and received fantastic editing from my editors. So there’s that.
Living the writing life for the past decade has, in general, given me the opportunity to learn a lot of these lessons that the essayist lists on the fly.
1. Don’t play it safe.
Absolutely. This advice takes many forms: a) don’t write the hot genre you don’t like just to break in, because it’ll show, and if it doesn’t, you’ll be stuck there and once you start writing what you love, your backlist will be useless; b) don’t save all the “good stuff” for the next book; c) bleed on the page — make the worst possible thing happen; d) don’t give all your interesting characteristics to your secondary characters… the list goes on an on.
2. Don’t assume that just because one person hates your writing and the other person loves your writing that your writing is “confusing” or “conflicted.”
More like it’s a sign that you have a powerful voice. I’ve come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to like my writing. It’s a matter of taste. In today’s world of reader blogs, amazon “reviews” and Goodreads, you get the pleasure of post-publication “workshopping” — often from readers who perhaps are not the most discerning, or who aren’t quite able to put a finger on why a certain book didn’t resonate with them, and so cling to something they read in another book review or heard in an English class once. It’s okay. You’re not writing for someone who doesn’t “get” you. If you try, you’ll probably fail, and lose the readers who do get you at the same time. If you ever start feeling bad, go read the one-star reviews of your favorite novels. It’s not just you.
3. Don’t feel like you have to implement every suggestion into your work.
Coming on the heels of #2 above, I imagine this has a lot more resonance to someone in MFA-workshopping mode, but it fits even for me. I get various advice from my critique partners, editors, agent… and then there are the emails from readers, or, better yet, the book bloggers who choose to frame their “reviews” as if they are tutoring the author as to what they should do in their books. Writers can go on all day about these if you catch them at a bar. But one thing I’ve learned is that though editors and critique partners are almost always spot on about identifying what’s not working in your book, they aren’t always right in telling you how to fix it.The best thing to do, when tackling a revision letter, is to find all the problems, then implement your own solution. Sometimes what looks like two different problems (“it starts off slow” and “I don’t really feel like I understand the main character”) are actually the same thing (“if I make her plight more relatable, you’ll be on board with her sooner”).
4. Don’t read just for fun.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t agree with this one at all. Further, I’m surprised that anyone in an MFA program even believed its converse to start with. The educational system in this country is massively good at drumming “reading just for fun” out of you. Many people who think nothing of watching seven consecutive episodes of Law & Order or going to see Avatar or being a devotee of a weekly sitcom or buying a tabloid to read on the beach would balk at buying a paperback mystery, science fiction or romance novel. Television shows or magazines are “escapes” but popular fiction is “trash.” I’ve attended parties and watched folks chat at length about the latest Judd Apatow, then turn around and call chick lit “trash.” Apparently, if entertainment comes in the form of black text on a white page, it’s held to an entirely different standard.
I think people should read “just for fun” (not least because it’s how I pay my mortgage). I think that writers, especially, should read just for fun, or they risk losing the joy in their work. Writers who read only what is “good for them” may get some screwed up notion in their head that they should only write a certain kind of book, maybe not the kind that is the best fit for their voice and their passion. I know this happens. It happened to me when I was in college and was being told that “genre” was a dirty word and that if I wanted to be a writer, I’d had better go after a Pulitzer and not a paperback romance.
In terms of “reading for craft” — which is the essence of her point — I think that comes with the territory. If anything, it’s hard to turn that off once you’re in the business. I relish the books that make me forget that I’m a writer, that are so compelling I forget to look for the man behind the curtain, to keep stock of the tricks of the trade the writer is using. Those are my favorite kind.
There are six more items on the essayist’s list. I’ll be back tomorrow to tackle those.
The comment thread on last week’s post regarding submitting your work regardless of what some other writer might say about its chances at publication has spawned a lot of interesting side discussions: about revising on the advice of an agent (who is not your agent), about what to do with a manuscript that seems too out of the box for the market, about the advisability of writing something that has a good chance of being out of the box, and many more topics that, although beyond the scope of THAT particular subject, are things that writers are deeply concerned with. Most recently, there was a comment from Beth Smith that naturally led into a post of its own:
“I suppose the next question is: to what extent should you think about marketing BEFORE you start the novel? Where do you draw the line between ‘protecting the work’ and not embarking upon a ‘hard-sell/no-sell’ project?”
The first thing you need to ask yourself is how you know it’s a hard sell project. I have two friends who happen to be New York Times Bestselling writers. Both landed on the Times list with books that were, pre publication, deemed “hard sell projects.” Friend #1 had this opinion of her project because she’d been trying to sell it for 10 years without much luck. It fell rather neatly between two very different genres. The publishers of the one genre told her it was too much like the other, and vice versa. They always cautioned her to remove the other element, to make it more fully of the genre they published. But she was in LOVE with this project and the marriage of the two genres, and so was everyone else who read it. One editor who read it was so in love with it, in fact, that a year after she initially turned it down, she dreamed up an innovative way to make it work in their publishing program. The book became a beloved bestseller.
Friend #2 had the opinion that her project was a “hard sell” for lord only knows what reason. Maybe someone on an internet forum told her that, since she hadn’t submitted it, so she had no professional opinion to go on. I know I certainly didn’t agree with the assessment. I was watching the zeitgeist carefully, and this fit right in. To be perfectly honest, I think she was afraid because she knew this one was “the one.” And it was, because she got an agent and a book deal in no time flat, and the book was a huge hit.
The moral of this story is: We’re not always as good a judge as we think we are. Friend #1 believed in her book. Believed in it more than I think I would have the power to believe in any of my books. Believed in it for ten years of disappointment. Friend #2 had to have some manipulative bitch secretly start submitting the book behind her back to get her off her ass. (Don’t worry, she thanks me now.)
And then there’s Friend #3. Friend #3 is not a bestselling author. However, she had a project she really believed in. A “book of her heart.” She tried to sell it for years to no avail. But she so cared for this project that although she continued to write far more profitable books, she put this book of her heart out through a small press, where it found a rabid niche audience and received several writing awards.
So… where do I draw the line? It depends on the book. If I were to write a “book of my heart” (which Julie Leto and Jo Beverly define in the above-linked article to mean “a book that invaded an author’s psyche so deeply, that she is ravenously compelled to write it, even if she knows it will not sell because it is not marketable. The book actually blocks the writer’s more commercial work”) then I don’t think anything would stop me from getting it out. But it hasn’t happened.
I love that Leto article. It pretty much describes my approach to my writing career. I don’t view this as a dichotomy. It’s not “book of your heart” vs. “book of your wallet.” For me, I love all my projects and they have all been a marriage of my writer brain and my business brain — they have been books that I know I could love and books that I thought would be marketable. That has been my luck.
Have I always been right? No. The fourth manuscript I wrote (the last one I wrote before selling Secret Society Girl, in fact) was a single title paranormal romance. This ms won a Molly Award, finaled in a bunch of other RWA contests, got a bunch of full requests from agents and editors, and was rejected by over 20 different illustrious members of the publishing world. To this day I cherish the rejection letter I got from one agent that explains to me that though well-written, the book possessed specific issues which would make it a hard sell in the paranormal romance market, and that it was her professional opinion that I’d be better off trying something else. I was not Friend #1, and this book was not Friend #1’s magnum opus. I chose to move on. Since the next book I wrote got an agent and a book deal in no time flat, I guess I made the right choice THAT time.
But, I wrote that book and edited it and submitted it and THEN figured out that I was barking up the wrong tree. That was seven years ago. Since I’d like to not repeat that mistake, now I try to figure out where my book might fit into the market before I spend a year writing and editing it. To do this, you must not only look at the books on the shelf (which might have been bought 2 years ago), you must see what is selling now. Today. You must subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace and see what people are buying RIGHT NOW. Do you happen to have a book idea that fits into that spectrum? Good. Now’s the time to write THAT book. Not some other book. THAT one.
I have lots of ideas. I keep a whole file of them. Sometimes ideas live inside that file forever with nowhere to go. The words “a retelling of Persuasion” have been in my idea file for years and years. About two years ago, the word “post-apocalyptic” somehow got jumbled up next to that idea, and they stuck. Last year, while casting around for something to write that wasn’t killer unicorns, I thought about that, thought about how much the YA market was loving its post-apocalyptic books, and decided that the time had come. That’s how I choose what projects to write. I look at the things I want to write, and then I pick the one that I think has the best potential on the marketplace.
The truth of the matter is that if we really really REALLY love a project, if it’s a “book of our hearts,” then whether or not it’s a hard sell doesn’t matter. In fact, we probably will never see it as a hard sell. Friends #1 and #3 were always mystified that the publishing world was unable to see their books’ potentials. In their own way, they were each right.
For me, the “hard sell” alarm is going to temper my love for the project. But I also know that one day there may come a book where I’m deaf to the alarms, just as my friends were.
And that’s a “your mileage may vary” situation, too. Some writers would say that I’m missing something if I don’t have some book that consumes my soul to write. Other writers would say that I concentrate too much on what I really want to write (like “weird” killer unicorn books), when I should just write a paranormal boyfriend love triangle like what’s burning up the bestseller list.
It’s possible that there are orphaned ideas in my file that would be big hits. Because here’s the flip side of this oh-so-eternal question. For every writer that has a beloved book be deemed a “hard sell”, there is another writer looking at the bestseller list or a big deal posting and going, “Wow, I totally had that idea.” But here’s what I think — we didn’t write it because we DIDN’T feel the love. We said to ourselves, “yeah, were-mosquitoes might be cool, but I’m really feeling that whole sea monsters in space thing right now.” And then, five years later when the writer of the were-mosquito book is jetting to and from her private island to Hollywood where her were-mosquito movie is being filmed, we’re happy, because we still love our sea monsters from outer space.
I got a letter from an aspiring writer the other day with a question about the marketability of her work. Basically, she’d written a book that might be sold as an adult novel or as a YA novel. She’d written it as a YA novel, though, and was concerned when a bunch of other writers (who hadn’t read her book) told her they thought it would be a hard sell in that market. So she wrote to ask my opinion.
My opinion was, in short, that given that neither I nor these writers had read her work, and given that neither I nor these other writers were in any position to publish her work, that what we might say on the matter wasn’t worth a whole lot. The only person whose opinion actually matters is the editor who has received the book as a submission. And, given that the work was written and edited, there is absolutely nothing to lose than trying to get it to one of those editors.
The writer wrote back to me to say that her next step was to get a few more reads by critique partners so that she could get more opinions about how best to market it.
Not to get all Dean Wesley Smith here, but as great as I think critique partners are (and I do think they are great) they are helpful in an editorial way. NOT in a marketing way. They are writers. They are NOT in any position to buy your book, or to sell it to publishers. In the end, the only person whose opinion about the marketability of your book that matters is the one holding the checkbook.
(And, for those of you without agents, let me tell you: there will be times when you disagree with your agent. When you send them a project that you think is great and they tell you they don’t think they can sell it. And then it’s up to you to decide if you’re going to agree with them and try something else, get a new agent to sell it, or sell it on your own, or what. I’ve known folks who left agents over projects that the agent wouldn’t sell that went on to become NYT bestsellers. I also know writers who thank their agents every day for steering them away from projects that would have been a bad move for them.)
So if this is a book that is written and edited and polished, then stop asking other writers what their opinion is as to its marketability. Other writers can’t do anything for you. FIND AN AGENT who can sell your work to an editor. Agents can be much better than you at figuring out where your book best fits in the market. Maybe they had lunch with an editor the other day who said, “I’m looking for a book just like XYZ.”
When I sent the proposal to Secret Society Girl to my agent, I called it a YA novel. My agent in her infinite wisdom said, “Hey, I bet an adult house would really go for this.” And they did.One of the reasons writers need agents is that agents can sometimes see better ways to position a book than a writer can. It’s their job to do so. And sometimes, what is a YA novel in one market is not a YA novel in another. The Curious Instance of the Dog in the Night-time is a YA novel in the UK and an adult novel here. There are other books that are vice versa (like the Book Thief).
Here’s a short list of best selling, award winning, and critically acclaimed YA novels that have come out recently that, according to articles or blog entries I’ve read about their inception, either began life as adult novels in the writer’s brain or were originally marketed as adult novels before being sold or marketed as YA novels: The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert, Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr, Madapple by Christina Meldrun, Graceling by Kristin Cashore, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes (ETA: Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell)…. guys, the list goes on and on.
And what you take away from this is that sometimes, what “the market” is is only definable by what one particular editor at one particular house decides he or she wants to pay money for. We’ve all read books where we thought, “What brain donor paid money for THIS?” Heck, we’ve all read bestsellers where we thought that. But someone holding a checkbook thought it was marketable, and they were right. Which shows what I know.
I repeat: If you’ve written and polished the book, what a bunch of writers think about its marketability is not important. Submitting it is the only way you can get a real answer.
But, you may ask, how can I submit it without knowing where exactly it fits in the market? But that’s the best part! You can submit it to both places! You might be scared, because you’ve read agent blogs where they complain about having completely inappropriate work submitted to them (Vietnam-era sex memoirs to a YA agent) — but your situation doesn’t apply. In good faith you are submitting to a YA agent a book that you think is a YA novel. She might agree with you. She might not. In good faith you are submitting to an adult agent a book that you think is an adult novel. He might agree with you. He might not. It’s no different than you submitting this book believing that it’s the best book ever — they might agree with you, they might not. And what do you do if the agent reps both kinds of books?
“Dear Agent, I am seeking representation for my book TITLE, which is a blankety-blank thousand word novel about blah blah blah.”
Yes, if you are CERTAIN that you are writing a young adult contemporary fantasy adventure or a hard sci fi space book or a cookbook, or a memoir, or a memoir about a cookbook, then say that. But if you aren’t, there’s no rule saying you have to. To start with, an agent might disagree with you (mine did). Also, if you put yourself in a box from the beginning, an agent’s thought process might not even get so far as to disagree with you — he or she might just say, “Oh, I don’t think this works as a YA — reject.” But there’s no rule that says you have to check every single little box about your novel before you submit it. It’s okay to say “a novel” and let the agent decide that it’s a paranormal historical romance.
The important thing to remember is not to take yourself out of the game. Don’t avoid submitting a finished, polished novel because some writer who has no ability to pay you any money for said novel has told you a priori that it’s unmarketable. And if you get a bunch of rejections from YA agents or houses saying this isn’t a YA novel, then maybe look on the bright side of that — perhaps it’s an adult novel. Try submitting it there.
ETA: I’m bringing up Julie Leto’s comment here because it’s just so darn good:
“It kind of perplexes me when writers will come up with a thousand and one excuses for not actually submitting their work. Rejection doesn’t kill. All successful authors have had their share of rejections. If JK Rowling had worried about marketability, she never would have found a publisher for Harry Potter.
“I think some writers become so obsessed with getting it all “right” (to that dreaded rejection) that they make elemental mistakes. There’s one thing to research the market…but it’s quite another to use the market as an excuse not to submit.”
This is so true. When it gets to the point that you’re just asking a bunch of other writers for their opinion about something you haven’t submitted — this is different than “can you crit my work, can you help me with my query” — then what you’re really doing is called stalling.
Accept the fact that you WILL get rejections. EVERYONE gets rejections. You have to learn to accept rejections, because let me tell you, the number of rejections you get before a book sells? NOTHING compared to the number you get after a book sells. Afterward, you get rejectiosn from: 1) foreign markets, 2) Hollywood, 3) Any media outlet who passes on doing a story on your book, 4) Bloggers 5) random people on the internet with Goodreads, Twitter, and Amazon accounts, 6) and every single person in the world who does not buy or read your book. Get used to it now. Accept the fact that every rejection is nothing more than one person’s opinion. There could be 99 agents who tell you your work isn’t marketable, and one agent who says, “I can sell this to an editor with a checkbook” and does. Whose opinion matters there?
ETA: Also, everyone read Saundra MItchell’s follow-up post on the subject, because she had a similar experience.
On Thursday, I finally sat down and started work on my new book. See the word counter over there on the right? Pretty, pretty orange! Look at the way it creeps up on that vast swath of unwritten white!
So, despite the fact that until Thursday, I hadn’t written anything for the better part of a month, I don’t feel too bad. Because I have written over 70,000 words already this year. (Cf. the top word counter over there on the right — the one labeled MG — which is ALL ORANGE, plus “Errant” which never did get a word counter, and I don’t feel so bad about that.) And I did two rounds of revisions on the aforementioned MG.
(BTW, MG in this case does NOT stand for middle grade. People keep asking me that. Carrie asked me that, which I thought was especially weird, since she actually knows what it stands for.)
I’m still busy, though. I expect I’ll be getting some revisions on “Errant” and possibly a bit more work to be done on MG, not to mention the 1st pass of Ascendant that showed up here yesterday morning and is due at the end of the week. Like, today, before I can do any work on this new project (codename: PAP) I need to look into these first page proofs, put together a quick project proposal, and finish up the Rampant paperback extra content (yes, owners of the Rampant paperback get fantastic and exclusive extra content, including, but not limited to, an excerpt from Ascendant. Not to mention take Rio for a walk. Rio has been sorely neglected recently.
But I’m glad to have started PAP, and I’m really, really excited about the direction I’ve decided to take it in.
In other “life of the freelance writer” news, I really love getting surprise royalties. I say “surprise” because at this point in my career, most of my projects are just starting to earn out, so it’s still a new thing for me for royalty statements to come with checks attached. When I talk to writers who have been around for a lot longer than me, they do count their royalties as a larger and larger percentage of their income, and I know more than a few writers whose living expenses are entirely paid for by “evergreen” items on their backlists, which… wow, that just sounds like a dream come true.
Right now, the way I get to keep this job is by getting new work. I got two new contracts in January that will keep me employed for a while. As I said before, I have four all-new projects (two books, two short stories) coming out in 2010 (plus the Rampant paperback). And those are all parts of contracts that I signed anywhere from 2007 to 2010. In some cases, I was paid for those projects back in 2007. In other cases, I haven’t been paid yet.
I share this because I know there are a lot of writers and aspiring writers who read this blog, and they are curious about how the money part works. I think, in the beginning of your career, it’s important not to depend on royalties, and to really figure out WHEN you are going to get the various portions of your advance when you are planning out your work and your ability to go freelance.
For instance, say you have decided that your budget is $30k per year, and you can net $10k (i.e., after agent commission, taxes, and business expenses — or, just to make the math easy, let’s say we live in a world where those things don’t exist) for a book you wrote. So you think to yourself, “Easy, I’ll write three books.”
Au contraire, my friend.
Because you usually only get half of that advance upon signing a contract for those books (and some houses are going to thirds “upon signing”). So let’s say you do get a three book deal (in this magical world where there’s no agents, taxes, or business expenses) at $10k per book. You get the contract (anywhere from a few days to a few months later — and if you think I’m joking about the few months part, I know people who have waited a year on their contracts), and sign it and send it in and get your “upon signing check” — for $15k. Because 1/2(10k per book) x three books = $15,000.
Then, if you’re lucky, the D&A (delivery and acceptance) date for the first book is that same year (again, I know writers who get their D&A at the same time as their on signing check, because of contract delays), for what is sneaking into a lot of contracts lately, which is 1/4 of the remaining advance (and then another fourth on actual publication). So there’s $2,500.
So your total for year one of selling a three book deal for $10k per book is: $17,500.
In year two, you turn in book two, and see the publication of book 1. Total payments: $5000.
In year three, the same, for publishing book 2 and writing book 3: $5,000
In year four, you get your last little “on publication” check: $2,500.
And if you’re lucky, you do earn out right away and get royalties. But you can’t really count on that. And you never know when the earn out’s going to happen. It might happen right away. It might take four years. It might never happen.* So your $30,000 book deal takes four years to pay out.
You can also be lucky and get a compressed publication schedule, where they put all your books out the same year. But that’s pretty much up to the publisher to decide. and if that happens, what will also likely happen is that the publication of your first book is pushed WAY back in the schedule to give you time to write book 2 and 3. Whereas usually you might only have 12 months between D&A and publication, it might be 18 or 24 for book 1, and then only 14 for book 2 and 8 for book 3.
Oh, and you can’t cheat the system and “write quick.” So if your publisher has said that the D&A date for Book 1 is January 1, 2011, and then 1/1/12 for book 2 and 1/1/13 for book three, you can’t turn them all in in 2011 and expect to get paid for all of them. That’s why it’s D *and* A — they have to accept it. And they usually won’t until they are contracted to.
And there are other ways to make up the difference, for instance:
- write and sell something else to make up the difference.
- make more money from the things you sell (getting higher advances, selling subsidary rights, charging speaker fees to talk about the work).
- have an alternate income from old projects (this is where those royalties come in handy, or putting your out of print backlist on kindle).
- have another job.
- be of independent means.
Some of these things are easier to control than others. Most writers I know manage by mixing up all of the above. And sometimes you don’t even know they are doing it. That writer you know who has two books out a year? You don’t know if she’s ghost writing on the side, or doing copywriting or other freelance work that her name isn’t attached to.
You don’t know if I’m doing that.
______________
* Please note: If it never happens, you do NOT have to pay the publisher back. That is a myth. Also, it does NOT mean that you will never again get another contract. Also a myth.
The reason I haven’t blogged much this week is that I’m sick. I hate being sick. Hate hate hate. So when I’m sick, on top of feeling like crap, I’m in a pretty poisonous mood. At which point, it’s usually better that I just stay off my blog. Either that or share with you some real ranty mcrant-rants.
Don’t worry, I’ve spared you.
So what have I been up to? I’ve been reading. RITA entries and Golden Heart entries, mostly. I’ve been watching old romantic comedies on DVD. French Kiss is better than I remember it being. Overboard is not. I think it’s possible I’m just much more creeped out by the slavery aspects in the latter than I was when I saw it a long time ago.
I’ve also been reading many fascinating things on the internet. And I’m here to share them with you.
Justine Larbalestier’s blog vacation has made for some truly amazing guest posts. One of my favorites is the fabulous Lauren McLaughlin on how having a baby made her look at her fiction-writing in a totally new way. I really love the way Lauren is always so honest and forthright about her development as an artist. I think there are a lot of writers out there that feed into the myth that they popped out of the box full-formed, but that’s not the case, and reading articles like Lauren’s inspire me to talk more about my development as a writer. It’s also an interesting post because I always read the Cycler character of Ramie as being a person of color. (I see Filipino, actually — anyone else?)
My other favorite Larbalesti-guest post is from my newest object of professional-crushdom, Varian Johnson, on time management. Have I mentioned how Varian, upon hearing that we’d be at the same conference, brought me a bookstore newsletter that had an article about me all the way from Austin? As if I wasn’t already crushing on him because of the awesomeness that was My Life as a Rhombus. To wit: Varian’s books rock, and so does Varian. And so does Varian’s post on how he manages to be a civil engineer and a writing professor AND a writer AND help his (drop-dead gorgeous–I met her at the aforementioned conference) wife pick out granite countertops on the weekend. And here I am with a messy house, a fridge full of chicken soup and jello, and no other job but writing. I feel like such a slacker.
Speaking of the hard-working and prolific, another blog post I liked a lot recently was Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s take on the hated prologue on the Red Room. Lauren writes in half a dozen genres (at last count) and is as big a fan of the prologue as I am (her prologue count is 10/14, mine is 5/6). The prevailing opinion, however, is that one shouldn’t write prologues. Poppycock. What one should not write, under any circumstances, are bad beginnings, whether it’s labeled prologue, chapter 1, or nothing at all. (My prologues are rarely longer than a page, and are never labeled prologues.) For me, the prologues in my books that have prologues are all about setting a theme for exploration in the book, much like an epigraph of my own design.(Indeed, my only book that doesn’t have a prologue has an epigraph. So there.)
And, speaking of writing advice, a massive depository of such can be found in these two articles in the Guardian. It was interesting to read Elmore Leonard’s, which I either don’t agree with or disregard (perhaps to my detriment), especially given how much I always loved the advice I heard was his of “leave out the parts people skip.” However, apparently he wasn’t saying what I thought he was. I thought, you know, the boring bits. He thought, long paragraphs. Huh. I do like Roddy Doyle’s advice to give your work a name as soon as possible. I always find I work much better once I have a working title. It crystallizes my theme. Also, Geoff Dyer’s:
“Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.”
Which I think is very important for especially genre writers to remember. So often we fall into the trap of doing something because we believe (erroneously) that it’s expected by the readers. Have characters make the unexpected choice, have the unexpected reaction. Surprise the reader.
Richard Ford says, “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.” That was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, so I’m right there with Ford. Sailor Boy has thought I should be a writer from the word go. He bought me tickets to my first writing conference. He’s always been one of my biggest supporters. In fact, I was on the phone with him today about a new direction in my career, and he was really pushing me forward. I’m extremely fortunate.
Hilary Mantel advises: “Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.” So true. I was doing an interview recently, which asked what I’d write if I didn’t have to worry about money. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be offended by that question. Because the answer is the same damn stuff I’m writing now. I write books I want to write, and books I’d like to read, and I always expect that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Yes, I get paid for projects, but I’ve also turned things down that were worth good money because I didn’t want to write them. I think you can feel that sort of thing in the writing. Write for yourself, and the rest will fall in line.
I also love everything Jeannette Winterson says. There’s a lot of good advice in these articles, and a lot I think is ehhhh, but, you know what they say about opinions.
What else have I been reading? Well, there’s this laughable suit going on against JK Rowling. Man, people will do anything for a buck, I think. And PublishAmerica, a vanity publishing house, is now telling their authors that they will submit their supposedly good-as-the-big-guys “published” book to Random House, because (this is my favorite part): “Every writer dreams about becoming a published author. Once they have reached that goal, as you have, many dream of the next step up: to become a Random House author. Random House is one of the most prestigious publishing names. Their extensive operation a few miles from our own headquarters makes them virtual neighbors.”
So apparently every published author’s dream is to become a Random House author? (Disclaimer: I actually am a Random House author, and happy about it.) But I know lots of writers who are perfectly happy not being Random House authors and, when given the choice, chose not to become Random House authors in favor of better contract terms at, say, Penguin or Little, Brown. The whole letter is worth reading for entertainment value though. In passing, last I heard, PA was in Frederick, Maryland. Random House is located on Broadway, in New York City. This “extensive operation a few miles” away the letter is talking about is actually a Random House distribution warehouse in Westminster (yay, Google Maps). Hint: they don’t acquire manuscripts there. I feel sorry for the RH mailroom clerks who are going to have to deal with this influx of bound slush from PA.
And, last but not least, I enjoyed this blog post by author Kate Douglas on the challenges of breaking into a new genre, and how to stay published, even when you’re being published very well.
Okay, off to try some solid food. Wish me luck.
Note: Read this first.
I’m beginning to suspect that there is a new “get into college” book out advising teenagers that one way to stand out on their applications is to publish a book. I can’t imagine what else it is, because I’ve gotten a bunch of emails to this effect in the past few weeks. And I guess it’s not too surprising. I remember one piece of advice I read in one of those books, way back in the mid-nineties when I was applying to college, was to learn to play an unusual instrument, like the hammered dulcimer or the mandolin or the accordion, on the off chance some college admissions committee person would go, “wow, we really need a hammered dulcimer player in the freshman class, how many of those applied?”
Another theory is the “noble cause” theory. Most authors get letters from aspiring writers looking for advice. YA and kidlit authors, because that is their market, get letters from child and teen aspiring writers. There have been lots of articles out recently about how authors are inundated with such requests. Perhaps this whole, “I need to get published now to get into college” thing is an attempt by the aspiring writer to explain why their situation is more urgent and desperate and important than all the other aspiring writers’. I’m not like every other writer who needs all the answers so I can be published nownownow. I’m different. I need to be published nownownow or I won’t get into college.”
Thing the First: I Do Understand.
I know exactly how you feel. Every single day that I wasn’t published, I wanted to be published. I would look at the people who were published, and I would wonder why it wasn’t me. (For many years, it was because I didn’t have a manuscript, for the four years after that, it was because I didn’t have the right book at the right time in the right place.) It’s really, really hard to be patient. I know I don’t have the personality for it. The 27 months I had to wait between selling Rampant and seeing it on the shelves? Y’all, it almost killed me. Especially the last six.
But, looking back at it, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I’m glad I didn’t sell some of those earlier manuscripts, and that they can lie there under my bed on my hard drive, secreted away from the rest of the world. It was really really hard and every day I wanted to sell and every manuscript I wrote I wanted it to be my first sale… but as it turns out, there were more important things at stake.
There are a lot of people who sold back then, during those four years I was trying desperately to sell a book — who aren’t selling books anymore. There are people I know who sold books in bad deals where there book was put out with no support whatsoever and they haven’t been able to sell another book since. They are in a worse position than people with no books out, because they have the bad sales of that last book haunting them. It’s harder for them to sell something new than if they were just starting out, unpublished. The day I sold my first book, my agent called me up and asked me what I wanted out of my career. I said I wanted to write and sell books for a living for the next forty years. I’m in this for the long haul and every sale of every book I make I’m thinking about that goal. The same goal — to make this my career. To do this on a steady schedule and with an eye for growth, like any other business.
You only get one debut. Better make it the best that you can. I’ve talked to a lot of writer friends about this, and they all agree that they’d rather wait more years and come out with a really stunning debut that makes the world sit up and take notice rather than get whatever published, indifferently, and disappear into the morass of books that don’t even make a blip on the radar. It’s really hard to claw your way out of that. Which brings me to
Thing the Second: Getting Published is Not a Publicity Stunt
One does not “get published” as a way to “get into college,” and the more I hear this option being bandied about as a viable, and indeed, desirable path of action, the more I’m reminded of people who “get caught on a sex tape” as a way to “get famous.” Perhaps the association exists in my mind because the one person I ever heard of who chose to “get published” in order to “get into college” (as I talked about in my last post) was Kaavya Viswanathan, and she ended up with an enormous and horrific scandal on her hands. Probably more of a scandal than a sex tape.
Getting published is the start of a career. It’s MY career, And if you want it to be your career, too, you should take it seriously.
Thing the Third: Why “I Need to Get Published So People Know I’m Serious About My Writing” is Wrong
Alongside the “I need to get published now so I can get into college” emails are ones that are similarly phrased. These aspiring writers still feel they need to get published to up their college admission chances. However, they feel that, rather than a straight up publicity stunt, that they won’t be able to convince colleges that they are serious about wanting to be a writer unless they have something published.
No. Those are two different elements. One is something you control; the other is controlled by some people in an office building in New York City. One is the amount of effort you put into something, another is the level of success you have achieved. I am not as successful as other writers in my industry, some who have been working in this field for way longer than I have, and some who haven’t. Does that make me a less serious writer than they are? Nope.
And, as I mentioned in my other post, I was every bit as serious about writing before I was published as I’ve been in the four years since. That’s why I describe it that way: “I wrote seriously for four years before I got published.” I set aside time every day for writing, I sacrificed other things in my life for the sake of writing, and I pursued it in a serious. professional manner. I treated it like a second job, an apprenticeship, or, probably most accurately, as a course of graduate/professional study. I told members of my family who worried I’d never “get there” that it was like spending a few years in grad school. A career as a writer does not happen overnight.
And during all this time, all these years of laboring away on manuscript after manuscript, using nights and weekends and work lunches and commutes and vacation time to work and attend writing conferences, I was incredibly serious about my writing. I kept excellent records of where all that time and money and energy was going (partially because the IRS may have wanted to see it). There was no doubt that I was serious about it, and people in my life either recognized that fact or I wised them up to it super quick.
And I had a lot of writer friends back then, because I was so serious about my writing. Very few of them were already published. But you know what? They were all just as serious about their writing as I was about mine. Published or not, I found myself making close friends with other writers who were serious about their writing. And you know what else? Most of my fellow unpublished friends are now published, because they were serious about it. These people include: Jana DeLeon, Colleen Gleason, Wendy Roberts, C.L. Wilson, Marianne Mancusi, Elissa Wilds, and Marley Gibson. I have other friends, like Carrie Ryan and Erica Ridley (whose first book is coming out in a few months) who I met when they were unpublished, too, and I expect to see other friends of mine who are unpublished breaking through any day now. And I look back on those days, when we were all struggling so hard, reaching out for that brass ring, getting rejection after rejection and writing new manuscript after new manuscript, and I think it’s amazing. If I’d decided that those other unpublished people weren’t serious about their writing because they weren’t published, I would have missed out on some of the most valuable pieces of friendship and advice I’ve ever gotten.
Were there some people who weren’t taking us seriously because we were unpublished? Sure. Those people were wrong. Here’s how not to be serious about your writing: be so intent on publishing anything, now, so long as you’re “published” that you sell a book that’s not ready to a publisher that’s not right in a deal that doesn’t have the best interests of either the book or your career at heart.
Thing the Fourth: None of this Means I Think You Shouldn’t Try
By all means, keep writing (or not) as a teen and try to get it published (or not). If that’s what you want to do, then absolutely, you should do it. And as doing it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication, it is also by all means something you should let the colleges you’re applying to know that you are doing. (I talk more about this is the first college post.) And if you do get published in high school, fantastic! Congratulations! You are a very hard working, very talented, very dedicated young professional writer.
But please, don’t go about this as a college stunt. You are not trying to get published to get into college. You are not trying to get published to prove you are serious about writing. You are trying to get published because you want to share your stories with the world and/or you are really not good at any kind of stable career such as dermatology or accounting or horse-shoeing. At least, that’s why I am doing it. I have a sneaking suspicion farriers (horse-shoers) make more money than me. I know dermatologists do.
And if you are a teenage aspiring writer (as I was) and you don’t have any interest in seeking publication at this time (as I didn’t), don’t sweat it. Maybe you’re really busy with your volleyball team practices, or being on your prom committee and student council, or building the sets for your church’s yearly Christmas Pageant, or editing your school newspaper, or becoming an eagle scout, or working an after school job so you can afford to go to college in the first place. Colleges really, really, really like this stuff too.
And, because it must be said, you can still be a writer when you grow up. You can still be a writer when you grow up even if you never write a book in high school or college or whether you never go to college or all, or whether you never put a pen to a piece of paper until you’re fifty years old. There is no law against it, I swear.
The sun is shining, the sky is that deep blue it only achieves on cloudless days at the peak of fall, and the forest floor in Rock Creek Park has turned the precise color of Rio’s fur. She’s getting her hike today, but then we are bound inside (well, I am at least. She can play in our leaf-strewn backyard) while I apply myself most diligently to my writing tasks at hand.
Things I learned while writing yesterday:
- I really, really hate chapter titles. No, that’s not true. I love chapter titles. I hate it when I can’t think of them.
- Titles, in general, are not my strong suit. The only title I’ve ever come up with that stuck is RAMPANT. However, a few of my other titles were on my list of “come up with a list of a dozen alternates.”
- I really miss reading. I can’t wait to turn this book in and do some reading!
- When I am in dire straits at getting a point across in a manuscript, I occasionally lapse into omniscient Jane Austen-speak. (see 1st paragraph) Which doesn’t work at all here, as Astrid Llewelyn sounds nothing like Jane. I like to think it’s the ghost of Jane guiding my hand here, for all the good it does me.
Okay, so that’s what I learned with my writing yesterday. How about the rest of you? Have you been reading the NaNo tips of dynamic duo Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld?
Also, a big hello to the folks who stopped by from Meg Cabot’s and Ally Carter’s blogs. Hi there! You know, the topic of college admission might be one I hear about a lot because my books are set in college, and the young people who read them have obviously picked those books up because they are super-excited about college. I know I was in high school. I agonized over those application forms — who I was going to get recs from, what I was going to write my college essays about. (I ended up writing like four different essays and letting my advisor choose one, and he chose the one where I wrote about disgusting things that happen at dinner at my house — which just goes to show you that sometimes you don’t need to tell some tragic or inspiring story in your essay).
I would have killed to read writer blogs when I was in high school. I don’t know if they had them yet. (I think Scalzi’s didn’t even start until 1998). I devoured the few books ON writing I could find, as well as any forewords where the authors talked about their process. Occasionally, authors would come to my school and blow my mind. Which is not to be all “in my day I had to walk uphill in snow both ways to get writer tips” because, well, I lived in Florida and we had neither hills nor snow.
But yeah, things are much cooler now. Yay, internets.
So, to throw my hat into the NaNo tip ring, let me know if you have any questions by leaving them in the post below!
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