Taking Your Story to the End of the World

Amidst all the madness about the world supposedly ending today, I came across this amazing video, which shows artist Zack Smithey painting while Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is performed in the background. What struck me most was how he paints such a beautiful piece of art, but along the way he adds so much paint that it runs and covers other parts, and in the end, he allows the entire thing to be obliterated. I found myself getting very anxious watching this, wanting him to preserve the lines that were already there, worrying when he sprayed paint across the parts that were already "done," not wanting him to ruin it and to safeguard it forever.

You can see where I'm going with this.

I realized as I watched this video that I'm way too protective of my characters and my story lines. I lead them through danger, but I get a nagging sense that I'm still holding their hands. I'm pretty good at cutting out whole parts and revising dialog and such, but once I've written a story line, it's very hard for me to go back and take another path instead. And I simply cannot imagine throwing the whole thing out and starting over.

And yet, the only way you can get the richness of a great story, or the tension that makes us root for your characters, is to put them in real discomfort and peril, not to keep them safe, and to go back to the parts that are already "done" and layer on those details that really bring your story to life. You must be both the creator and the destroyer. You need to be willing to take your story and your characters to the end of the world...and if necessary, obliterate everything.

In short, you must become detached from your work, even as you create it with painstaking love and care. You must detach yourself from what you want from your characters, where you want the story to go, how you want your story to be received by readers, and how successful you hope it will become. Only then, when you write as fearlessly as this painter created and destroyed his work, can you be free to write the best story you can possibly write.

It's a tall order, but at the very least, we should have it in the back of our minds as our goal. As an exercise, I'm going to spend some time today pretending that today really is the end of the world, and then I'll see what I write. I suspect it's going to make a difference in how my characters behave and where I take them. If you try this exercise, please comment and let me know how it worked out for you. (If you're still here, of course.)

aaaaand...Action!

If you're a writer, chances are you have struggled through moments of such doubt that you have almost completely lost hope. It's essentially a crisis of faith, in yourself or your ideas or the publishing industry. Those moments where you feel like you don't have it in you to stare at the blank page another day, to rewrite that scene one more time, or to send another query letter. Moments where you feel like there's simply no point to it anymore.

The cure to those moments, I've found, is action. If you're stuck with a blank page, take action and give yourself permission to fill the page with nonsense just to get the words flowing. If you're struggling with a scene, ask yourself whether you're trying to make too much of a point or are caught in dialogue that's going nowhere. Instead, write an action scene to get things moving again. Likewise, if you feel like you'll never be published, polish your query again and send it to another agent anyway, and do some research into indie publishers or self-publishing. Knowing that you have options is very important for keeping your hope alive.

The amazing thing is that there's almost a magical alchemical reaction that occurs with action. The moment you take action, motivation begins to seep through your veins. It causes your characters to wake up and do and say interesting things again. And the nonsense words slowly make way for the pearls that were stuck behind a dam of hopelessness. Because when action works its magic, you start to have hope again, which causes your faith in yourself and the world to return, which leads to the motivation to take action again. It's a wonderful upward spiral.

So when you're feeling like you just can't motivate yourself to take action, the cure, ironically enough, is to take action. Don't pour a drink and mope. Don't call a friend and complain. Close your web browser and email program, turn off the TV and the phone, and just act. Because even if the action you take isn't the right outcome in and of itself, it will kick off the motivation cycle that will lead to what you truly want.

Go ahead. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but hopelessness.

Here we go!

You may have already heard the news, but self-published authors are finally "making it."

Thanks to a huge rise in ebook sales, authors like Amanda Hocking, who writes paranormal young adult books, didn't have to give up her dream after failing to get a publisher interested in her work. Instead, she started publishing ebooks, and the rest is history.

Check out the story here:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm

This is exciting news for those of us who have chosen the self-publishing route. And although I truly believe there will always be a place for traditional publishing--just as there will always be a place for traditional record labels--it's no longer the only game in town.

So dust off that manuscript that's covered in rejection letters, put away the query letters, and start writing your book. There's never been a better time to get your writing out there into the world, and never a better time to do it without the limitations of traditional publishing. Just be sure to take the necessary steps to create a professional, well-written book (see my previous posts for some tips), and take the plunge.

Here we go!

Coping with Professional Jealousy

Several years ago, when I was writing some children’s stories, I asked a friend to read them and give me her feedback. I had read her novel several times and given her a lot of feedback, so I was completely unprepared when I got her email saying she just couldn’t bring herself to read my stories, because she felt sure I’d be successful and it would only shine a light on her own “failure.” Of course, anyone who has read this blog knows that I don’t think not getting published is a failure, that the act of writing a book is itself a huge accomplishment. But not everyone sees it that way, and she just wasn’t able to move past her disappointment.

Despite the surprise and hurt I felt at the time, something truly wonderful came out of that experience. I realized that I never wanted to be keeping score with other writers, that I never wanted to hold back out of worry that someone would be more successful than I was. I was at a crossroads: I could either decide to say to hell with everyone else and never reach out to anyone again, or I could open my heart.

Thankfully, I chose the latter. I love helping other writers and giving them feedback and guidance, and usually they’re wonderful to work with. A few times I’ve gotten no more than a cursory thanks or haven’t heard from them again, and it’s hard not to feel regret at the hours I spent on someone else’s work that could have been spent on my own.

But that’s not the point, because it’s not about me. By opening my heart and helping others, I am contributing to the flow of creativity in the world. And I think that if you truly care about your art, contributing to that flow is the entire point. If you’re focusing primarily on what you can get for yourself—money, recognition, whatever—you are not going to be the best writer you can be. Only by opening your heart can you receive the full power of your muse, which suddenly makes professional jealousy seem pretty ridiculous.

So if you find yourself experiencing a pang of envy when your writing buddy lands a publishing deal, try to remember that his accomplishments are also yours, and that whatever efforts you put into helping him polish his writing are part of what made him successful. If you read a book you really enjoy, instead of comparing it to your own work, email the author and tell her how much you liked it, focusing on feeling joy for her success as you compose the email. I’ve done this with a few authors, and they all really appreciated it and wrote back. Even one wildly successful author responded--it took her a year, but she eventually did write back, and she too was grateful for my email. By supporting other writers, we become part of the flow, which helps remind us that we’re all in this together, and that there really isn’t such thing as being an outsider.

And remember, if someone becomes jealous of you, don’t close your heart. On the contrary, open it wider and keep the flow going, continue to offer your help where you can, and wish them all the success in the world.

Coming Home to Your Writing

I've written a lot of posts about the process of writing, of courting your muse, finding time to write, and so on. A big part of what we do as writers is find a way to do the thing we love when we don't feel like we love it so much anymore.

I have just awakened from a very long dry spell. I missed writing, but most of all, I missed the powerful drive that was behind it, making me long for the end of the work day so I could get home and write. I wasn't feeling it, and so I didn't try to force it. I waited.

And now, slowly, the desire is returning. I wrote a half a page yesterday, and a half a page the day before that. I don't know if it's any good, and I don't care. I'm just cautiously optimistic that it's coming back. The feeling is very much like getting close to your partner again after you've been fighting or estranged--a tentative, breathless sensation.

I've learned over the past 20 years with my soulmate that all relationships, no matter how perfect, go in waves. We have times where we really do feel like one person, like there's no division between us, and we can talk and laugh and are completely on the same page with everything. Other times, I feel like I have no idea who he is, and when we're fighting, it can be really hard to remember what I liked about him.

But when we come out of one of those troughs and reconnect, the feeling I always have is that of coming home. And my relationship with my writing is no different. Sometimes my muse and I aren't speaking, but I know it's temporary and that we'll come back together again soon.

The important thing is to keep the faith and not lose patience with yourself. Don't start beating yourself up about how you're not really any good--or how you weren't ever any good to begin with. The wave you happen to be in right now, whether it's a 100-foot tidal wave or a very deep trough that exposes the ocean floor, does not define you as a writer. It's just where you are right now. And when the time is right, you'll come home to your writing again, to enjoy the feeling of the words flowing out of you like magic spells, shaping the world you're creating and carrying you away on the next adventure.

Developing a Gratitude Practice

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice.
- Meister Eckhart

In my family, Thanksgiving day is about spending time with extended family, stuffing ourselves with delicious food, and giving thanks for the things we have. But what I've come to discover through my journey as a writer is that giving thanks should not happen once a year but every single day.

As writers, we're constantly thinking about the next step. How can I rewrite that scene so it flows better? What is going to happen next in the plot? Where should I be advertising? When will that agent get back to me? Will that agent ever get back to me? And even when everything goes right and you publish a book, people immediately ask you when the next book is coming out. It's like we never get a chance to stop and enjoy what we've done.

That is, unless you develop a gratitude practice. You see, if you keep looking toward the next thing, you will never stop and enjoy what you've done, and then what's the point of it all? Instead of focusing on what you haven't done yet--and feeling despair for what you might never be able to do--it's critically important to focus on what you have done. Every day. You can post it in your Facebook status ("I'm at 25,000 words! Woo hoo!") or just quietly to yourself ("I have written three chapters. That's more than most people ever write. I am doing it!"). You can go back and read what you've written, marveling at the words on the screen that you created. And you can go back and read reviews and feel gratitude that your work is out there in the world.

Perhaps one of the best times to practice gratitude is when people ask you how your writing is going. My answer is always the same: "Great! I'm having so much fun with it. Writing novels is such an amazing experience." If people say "How are sales?" I answer in a similar vein: "Really good. It's so incredible to me that my book is out there in the world and people are reading it." Because that's what truly matters: my book is out there, people are reading it, I'm getting some nice reviews, and I'm still writing.

So try focusing every day on the things you've already done, whether it's acknowledging that you wrote a single page or have written a complete book, whether a friend sent you a nice email about your latest draft or a positive review appeared on your favorite blog. Practicing gratitude for what you've done will give you a surprising boost of energy. Whereas thinking about all the things you haven't done can make you question whether you're really cut out for this, focusing on what you have done reaffirms that you are already a writer.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

A Work in Progress

On our way out to the desert a couple weeks ago, I caught a glance of my face in the side mirror and was surprised to see how much I’ve aged recently. I froze for a moment, fully aware that I was standing at a crossroads and had two options:

1. Freak out and make myself miserable, spending the rest of my life fighting the inevitable, or:
2. Roll with it.
   

Maybe it was because I was in such a happy, relaxed state of mind—we were on our way to Burning Man, after all—but miraculously, I was able to step through door #2. I decided that I am a work in progress, and that nature is going to continue to mold me and paint patterns on my skin in its own way, so I might as well embrace it. And really, I like the idea of being ever-changing. The Mona Lisa is always exactly the same, century after century, and just hangs there in an environmentally controlled case in a museum. I don’t want to be preserved--I want to live. It’s a radical notion in our society not to cling to our youth, which of course makes it all the more appealing to me.

I’ve found a similar joy in treating Rising Shadow as a work in progress. In the last year since I first published it, I’ve learned a ton about writing, publishing, cover design, marketing, and young adult fiction. The beauty of having self-published using print-on-demand is that as I learned ways to improve my writing, I was able to make little tweaks to the book and upload the latest files. I have had over 50 reviews of Rising Shadow, and along the way, I got incredibly useful feedback, starting from the very first blogger review on the fabulous blog P.S. I Love Books.

If you make little changes that don’t affect the page count or resize the book, you can still use the same ISBN. But if you’re going to make more major changes, you’ll need a new ISBN. Recently, I went through Rising Shadow from cover to cover and did a thorough edit, hacking out anything that wasn’t necessary, tightening up the dialogue, and taking all the great feedback I’ve gotten to heart. I’ve redesigned the cover and am working on a consistent design concept for all five covers. So I’ll be using a new ISBN for the second edition of Rising Shadow, but since they sell ISBNs in packages of ten, I have enough for two editions of each of the books in the series.

That opportunity to revise my story has been one of the things that makes me so glad I self-published. The fact that you can learn from your readers and improve the story, that it’s not set in stone once it’s out in the world, is a wonderful thing. Of course, there comes a time when you have to let it go and move on, and the second edition of Rising Shadow is my final version. But it’s been a fantastic journey, and I’m so grateful to all the amazing people who took the time to read and review my book and shared their insights with me. As my birthday approaches in a couple weeks, I feel so grateful for all the people I’ve met through this process and for making the wishes I made when I blew out the candles last year come true.

So I’m looking forward to blowing out one more candle this year, to seeing where this journey takes me, and to getting book three finished. Because although Rising Shadow will finally be done, the series is definitely still a work in progress.

Just like me.