Rules for Writers(and wannabes)

One item that is always on my desk is a copy of Diana Hacker's book, Rules for Writers.  I just bought myself the sixth edition of the book after using my old one to death.  The book is a must have for teachers, librarians, students and anyone who decides to play with words.  It's full of information on grammar, punctuation, usage, research...anything technical you'd want to know.  What it doesn't have is how to deal with the problems that come along when you want to be a professional writer. (I do think the title is a tad misleading, don't you?)  There are no rules for wannabes, so I figured I'd take a crack at it.

Rule #1:  Realize from the outset that the road to publication is bumpy.  Bumpy? That's an understatement.  If you're like me you have a full time job.  And a family. And a house.  And no matter how much your family says they will support your endeavor, they still need you, so interruptions will never go away.  The job?  Well, eating is good.  Paying the bills is good.  I need my job even if I would rather spend my days working toward becoming a published novelist and the reality is that even after I get published, I'm  keeping the job. At least for a while.  So the short version of this rule is this:  many things will get in the way of your writing; you have to deal with it.

Rule #2:  Your friends and family will think your first completed work is amazing.  Many will think this even if it sucks.  Do you know why?  Because you wrote a book.  For most people writing more than ten pages of anything is a feat.   If you've written 300 hundred pages of story, even if it's the most ridiculous drivel, they'll tell you that you are the second coming of Dickens.  Keep their praise in perspective.  They love you and want you to be happy, so try to find people who are more objective to evaluate your work.  It's fine to get opinions from friends,  and yes, they can be valuable, (I've gotten some great feedback from friends) but also get opinions that are constructive, that are technical and that may require you to rethink your story.

Rule #3:  Getting an agent is harder than writing a book.  I mean this.  It's hell.  If you thought getting through the sagging middle of your story was tough, getting an agent makes writing a full length novel feel like child's play.  Oh, the agents try to make you feel like you're the one in control here.  The rejection  letters and e-mails come back with things like "I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a pass"  or "I'm not the right person for this" or "You deserve someone who will totally commit to this project."   When you break down agent speak these mean,  "I don't think your project will sell."  Publishing is a business and agents are supposed to sell books to make money for you and for themselves.  If an agent doesn't think a book will sell she will not accept you because you turn a pretty phrase.  There are always stories of people who found the agent of their dreams and sold their first book in record time.  Those people are the exception, not the rule.  Be prepared for rejections.  Lots of them.

Rule #4:  Trends do sell and while everyone always says to write the book of your heart, people buy trends.  One thing in particular is bothering the hell out of me, and it has to do with the YA market.  So I will say this: don't try to write for the Young Adult market unless you have a YA voice.  Where did this come from?  YA lit is hot.  Ever since Stephanie Meyer birthed the Twilight series full-grown from her dreams, YA  has surged.  Some agents only want YA authors.  However, I can tell you as a high school librarian, not everyone is cut out to write YA.  I've read more junk in the past two years than I care to tell you about.  I've also read some really good work.  You need to have a strong teen voice, so no matter how hot the trend is, no matter how much you think you should do this, be honest with yourself.  Don't write YA because you see it as a way to sell a book.  Write YA because that is what you were meant to do.

That honesty thing goes for everyone. If you write to a trend, any trend, that's fine, but make sure you are writing honestly.  Agents, editors, and readers will thank you for it.

Rule #5:  Your ego will be battered. You will feel like a failure.  There's no way around this.  But if you really want to be a writer, don't give up.  Don't ever give up. Just remember your three "R's":   Rethink, rewrite, resubmit.

I have a query letter that is failing me miserably.  It's time to rip it apart and start over.  I have my books, my ideas and my nerve all ready to go.  Wish me luck.

The Flashing Cursor

I have this idea in my head, but I’m having trouble getting things down on paper. So I spent the last two hours staring at a flashing cursor and writing things in my notebook.  I have character names, ages, and professions.  I’m having trouble with the location, but I think I’m staying local in this one—it will cut down on my research.

But I am considering a big change.  My unsold manuscripts, the one I’m shopping now and the one that almost made it, were contemporary single titles.   One is 110,000 words and one is 95,000 words.   The stories are complex, multi-layered, have a good group of characters and are getting me nowhere.  So I’m wondering if I have to bite the bullet and write for the category market.  My word count would drop some, my stories would be more focused and I might actually have a chance to sell. 

The problem is I don’t know if I can do it.  I’ve made it a point to start reading more 'traditional' romances.  Sorry lit snobs, no bodice rippers.  Instead of my usual fare of Luanne Rice, Kristin Hannah and Susan Wiggs, I’ve been devouring Kristan Higgins (love her books), Jennifer Crusie, and Susan Mallery. They write well, their characters are vivid and the stories are fun and well-crafted. The books tend to be a little shorter, have fewer sub-plots and fewer characters.  They write straight romance and they are funny.  Really funny.  And I don’t know if I can be funny.  Damn.

You want an abusive ex-husband?  Done.    An orphaned kid? I can do that.  A stalker?  I’m your girl.    But I don’t know if I can write humor. 

The flashing cursor awaits.  I have the idea, and a general sense of how I should proceed.  I’ve even mapped out a simple plot skeleton, which I never do, to keep me on track.  I’ve eliminated extraneous tragedies, and I’ve basically decided that the female main character has only one enemy in her quest to find true love—herself. 

Kind of like me in my quest to be published.   Damn.

    

Age

I’m not a big shopper, but I do like nice things and once and a while I treat myself to a pretty bag or a pair of designer sunglasses.   I don’t like paying full price, so I shop sales and I get alerts from some great off-price websites. My favorite is RueLaLa.  If you don’t know about RueLaLa, let me know and I will fill you in, but the short version is I will find beautiful, designer items at their two day boutiques that I can actually afford. (Two kids in college, need I say more)  I love when Rue has a Vera Bradley boutique, or when Kate Spade comes up for sale and I’ve gotten my daughters some beautiful clothes.

However, today was an eye opener for me and a wake-up call that I was indeed getting older. Rue has an expensive skin care line in one of their boutiques today. You know, creams and lotions and cleansers.   Anti-aging products and make-up designed to fix our flaws.  It was all there.  It was pricey stuff and I could get items at good prices.  And I got excited.  Really excited. 

I got excited over moisturizer.   Oh. My. God.

So the question is: why?  Why am I excited at the prospect of getting some expensive remedy for my crow’s feet?  And the answer is simple: I’m fighting the aging process with everything I have.  I have no problem with getting older as long as I don’t look older. I sincerely doubt I’d have actual surgery, that’s just me, but I'm not above using other methods to keep my skin looking young.

What else am I doing? I’m going out in a little while to join a gym.   I want to lose some weight and feel fit.  I’m healthy and I want to stay that way.  And if any of you actually believed all that, I have a bridge to sell.  You want to know my biggest motivator?  My 30^th high school reunion is coming up this summer and while I have no delusions that I will be slipping into a single digit dress size any time soon, I would like to look better before I face these people.   I’m vain.  That’s it. The fitness and the health are nice side benefits, but I don’t want to be embarrassed.  And the thing is, I don’t know why I care.  I haven’t seen most of these people in thirty years.   I have a long list of accomplishments, both personal and professional and that should tell people who I am.  But yet I worry and I think so much of it is tied to the insecurity I felt when I was in high school.  I wasn’t bold, I wasn’t brave and I worried all the time about what people thought. 

We've forgetten how we felt when we were seventeen, but I have a feeling those memories are rushing back for a lot of people right now.  Maybe it’s not a bad thing.  If it gets me to exercise, I know I will feel better.  I’ll be able to climb the hills where my daughter goes to college and not feel winded.  My surgically repaired knee won’t give me trouble and guess what—I won’t just have to limit my purchases to bags and sunglasses and skin creams on my favorite sale sites.  Maybe I could buy a dress, or a pretty sweater or a belt.  Wouldn’t that be lovely?

It’s possible I could change how I look and still worry.  Wrinkles, dress sizes? It might not matter.  I might still be an insecure mess where high school is concerned.  But for now, I'll let the insecurity motivate me. It’s not hurting anyone and in the long run it will help me.   

What did I buy today?  Make-up.  It made me happy and it made me realize that some of the things we experience when we're young never go away.  They go dormant and sneak up on us when we least expect it.     I will never look seventeen again.  I will never look like my yearbook picture, but then again neither will anyone else. 

Maybe this all means that I'm still a work in progress.  I'm not done growing or changing. So it's possible the insecurity I'm feeling is a good thing if it pushes me to better myself and deal with some of the demons. There are times in our lives that we have these personal epiphanies. Something triggers self-awareness.  The birth of a child, the death of someone important or facing your past can bring on a sense of understanding about who you are and who you want to be.

For the most part, I'm happy with the person I am. I have a wonderful husband, great kids, good friends and I do good work that I care about. Not a bad lot in life, even with some extra pounds and wrinkles. The challenge now is to embrace how I got here and accept the fact that I still have a way to go.  Don't we all?

I'm still joining the gym.

Tweaking

Sorry about the format changes, but I wanted to tweak the look of the blog.  Well?  What do you think?

Submissions, rejections and sleepless nights--oh my!

Sleepless nights.  We’ve all had them.  We toss and turn and watch the minutes click by on the clock.  It can be one of the most frustrating experiences.  We have to sleep to function the next day and each minute, each hours makes it harder to fall asleep.  We get tense, our minds race, we get agitated and then forget it…all chance of sleep is gone.

I can’t sleep right now. (Obvious, huh?) My darling hubby is out cold, bless his heart, but not me. So instead of watching the late-night Olympics,  here I sit, in my comfy chair at the computer writing this entry about not sleeping.  Ironic.  What I will do is open a manuscript I’ve been working on.  This book has giving me trouble for a while.  I like the characters, but they haven't been talking to me. I'm hearing some whispers, but I need these guys to start screaming so I can finish telling their story.  I’m 50,000 words into it and now I just don’t know where to take them.  When I joke about the voices in my head, I’m really not joking. Try not to let that scare you.  In order to write, to be that character, I need to hear them.  I take what I hear and put it on the page.  I don’t have novels come to me in a dream like a certain sparkling Vampire writer, but I do see images; I hear how my characters sound, I imagine what they smell, taste and feel, and it becomes a story. 

I've been doing this for a long time.  I always wrote.  My dad will mention from time to time how when I was a toddler I would take books off the shelf in the living room and write my name on the title page.  There is a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations out there someplace with “Jbon” scrawled in it.  I think that’s telling.  I always knew, even at two years old, that I would be an author. Why should I wait to get my name in a book?  But now I am waiting… and waiting…and waiting.

So here I am, it's the middle of the night and I’m waiting for these characters to start talking, but I’m also waiting for rejections.  There it is: the revelation.  Honestly, it's waiting for the rejections that's keeping me up at night.  I’ve got a bunch of query letters—some with pages, some without—floating around with agents and I’m waiting for them to get back to me and tell me that they just aren’t right for my project. I have gotten one request for a partial, but other than that, I’ve gotten a lot of things that say, “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m afraid I have to pass.”  Depressing, discouraging and yet I keep trying.  I’m proud of the book I’m shopping around right now.  It’s good work, but I have to find the person who agrees with me.  That’s the hard part and that’s what has my brain on overdrive.

I could quit.  I could pack it in and find something else to do with my time.  But every time I think about doing that, there’s a whisper, a voice pushing me to tell the story.  And I give in.  I crumble and sit at the keyboard and I write.  I follow this damned dream.  It may be futile, I may never get published, but I have to believe in myself before I can get anyone else to believe in me.  

I know I'm not dealing with anything major here. This isn't life or death, or world peace, but it's important to me. I have a lot of myself invested in this.  Now, if I can get my characters to start talking up a storm that would be perfect.  I could forget about the submissions and the rejections and worry about the story.  The story is at the heart of all of this and believe me, that’s always much more fun.

Snow Days

Do you remember how it was?  The flakes would start to fall or you’d hear the forecast and you wondered if you would have school the next day.  The pajamas would be turned inside out, we’d say a prayer, get all our homework done and then wait. We’d listen to the radio in the morning, to the endless list of schools, and hope we didn’t miss hearing ours was closed.  When the word came, it was bliss.  When I was young it meant playing outside, sledding down the street, building a snowman or having a snowball fight. In high school it meant blessed sleep.  Now, it’s all about time.

I wonder if we ever get over it.   I have a snow day tomorrow. My second one in a row and I am so very happy.  It’s one of the perks of my job that if the roads are bad, more than likely I will not have to go to work.  I can sleep in, stay in my pajamas all day, catch up on my reading, or clean a long neglected closet…whatever I want. I know I could be one of those people who have to brave bad weather and go to work regardless.  My best friend is a nurse and she will be out on the road at 5:30 tomorrow morning to get to work for her 7 am shift.  

I’m lucky and I know it.

What always surprises me is how teachers are about snow days. We compulsively check websites to see if the district is closed and when the call comes, there is a massive status update on Facebook.  We’re giddy and as bad as the kids. I guess that’s part of the personality, part of us that never grew up. I can live with that; being an adult is tedious.

For me, tomorrow will be a quiet day.  My kids are older, so I won’t have to keep them occupied. My son will sleep in, my oldest daughter will make her way to classes, and my husband will go to work. As I nurse a cup of coffee, I’ll worry about my middle girl braving the hills at Lehigh to get to her 8 am class. Then I’ll decide what to do with my found time.  In this world where we are slaves to our BlackBerry's and our schedules, finding time is a luxury and something we should do for ourselves more often.  Once in a while, the weather does me a favor.  

I could attack one of those neglected closets, and Lord knows there’s plenty of laundry to do, but I’m thinking, maybe, I won’t make a plan and just see what happens.  After all, it’s a snow day--a gift.  I can do anything I want.

Art and Life

Last night, I watched a few of the senior drama students agonize over their own productions in our annual showcase called "Director's Cut."  The kids write, cast and direct the one act plays and, of course, there were tears, misunderstandings, frustrations, angry words and confusion, but in the end it all worked out and the plays went well.  I won't say the productions were perfect--adorably flawed would be a better description, but overall they did a good job.

The senior directors learned a lot from the experience and some of it had to do with the people in their lives.  They learned who was easy to work with, who respected others and that sometimes working with your friends isn't all it's cracked up to be.  They learned that if something appears easy, there is usually a tremendous amount of preparation behind the scenes so it will look that way.

Producing the shows ended up being a good life lesson for the three directors because they learned that life is all about layers.  What people see, whether it be a show, a paper for a class, a display in  a mall, a movie, a book, or a night out with friends, each "thing" has some complexity and if it goes well it's because something went into making it so before hand.

Last night, as they walked out of the theater feeling good about how the shows went, I hope they remember how hard it was and that the good feelings came from the hard work and the frustration of getting those layers in place. I hope they realize that they put themselves on the line, that they risked failure and succeeded.

Taking chances, leaving our comfort zone and really embracing risk is when growth takes place.  I'm a firm believer that I will be "growing-up" forever. There will always be new challenges, new things to learn and new ways to put myself out there. The young directors just began their adult journey, learning more about the people in their lives and about themselves.

It's a beginning and as they look down the road they should see that their lives will be made up of layers, just like the plays they directed--there will be a cast of characters, things to juggle and problems to solve.

And there will always be something new to learn.