Month: September 2013
You’d think it gets easier to write a book after the first two or three have been published, wouldn’t you? Well, it doesn’t. Ask any writer — each book throws up a whole new set of problems and headaches and makes you feel as if you’ve never written anything remotely sensible or insightful in your life.
Sad, but true.
I’ve just published my sixth full-length novel, in addition to short stories, a novella and some picture books, and nearly all of them have been hell to write in one way or another. I console myself with the thought that if writing were easier, everyone would want to do it. After all, it’s one of the few jobs you can do without changing out of your pajamas. No wonder we love it so much.
The thing I find hardest is plot. Any story arc I manage to squeeze out of my walnut-sized brain is always an emotional arc – protagonist starts off selfish and sad and ends up altruistic and happy-ish, or at least a bit wiser. But as to HOW that happens – to be honest, I don’t really care all that much. This is when I need a team of James Patterson-style clone-assistants or James Frey’s writing factory drones. “Fill in the story,” I’d command imperiously, and then go back to sleep.
But they probably wouldn’t do it right. Which would make me cranky. And I wouldn’t be satisfied with the result. So I’d have to go back and think about it some more, tear my hair out, phone my agent and sound mournful, tell my husband I’ve lost my touch and we’re going to starve, phone up all my writer friends and ask if they have any plots they’re not using right now, and eventually, drag some miserable bit of story kicking and screaming into the world, slap it onto the pre-existent emotional arc and pray it works.
A fair amount of cutting, pasting, patching, invisible weaving, and airbrushing comes next, and at the end of months of agonizing misery, voila! A book crawls and scrapes and limps its way into the light.
“Wow,” says the sweet guy interviewing me for a literary festival some months later. “You make it look so easy.”
And I deck him.
Read MoreWe’re thrilled that we’ve managed to successfully twist the arm of an former WU’er, bringing him back for a guest post, because he is a favorite of ours! Please welcome Yuvi Zalkow, who’s here to tell us about a new project–and a few significant revelations. Enjoy!
I’m very excited to be visiting Writer Unboxed again after my departure. Let’s see if I still remember how to write a blog post…
I’ve been in this transitional period for at least a year now. My book came out last year. I stopped doing my I’m a Failed Writer video series about a year ago as well. I’ve left those comfortable places to learn and experiment with new forms, new writing styles, new voices. And new failures.
I am working on a new novel that is more of a stretch for me than I ever imagined. It is forcing me to step out of my own neurotic comfort zone (and into other characters’ neurotic comfort zones). I’m digging into these characters living in rural Georgia in 1938. Not as easy to tap into their minds as it was with my first novel’s character (named Yuvi Zalkow) who was struggling to write a novel. My new audio and video series is still a work in progress and doesn’t yet have the exact form I’m striving for. I’m particularly nervous because now I’m trying to capture other people’s stories as well as my own. For a sneak peek, here is a video (that I’m going to officially publish this week), which captures a few things I loved about my conversation with writer Kristen Forbes. She has some cool things to say about how she writes her emotionally powerful essays and I’m trying to use her words to think about that middle ground between over-outlining and under-outlining a piece of work:
This project still scares me. My biggest fear: nothing I create will have an effect on others. That I’ll never connect with another person through my work. That I’ll never tap into that voice that I maybe momentarily had in the past.
I’ve been given lots of advice during this phase.
Read MoreOctober 3rd marks the publication date for Printz Award winner Meg Rosoff’s newest release, Picture Me Gone, in the U.S. The book, “about the relationship between parents and children, love and loss,” has recently been been longlisted for The National Book Award! (Go, Meg!)
We’re so pleased Meg is with us today to tell us more about it in this Take Five interview.
Q: What’s the premise of your new book?
Meg: An English father and his daughter fly to NY state to look for the father’s best friend — who’s left his wife and young child with no explanation.
Q: What would you like people to know about the story itself?
Meg: It had a funny genesis — I hadn’t been writing for ages, and then I figured I’d better convince my publisher I was working, so I wrote a blog about the main character of my “new book”, which didn’t exist. I called her Mila. But there was no “new book.” A couple of months later, when I was really starting to panic and hadn’t written a single word, I took my dogs to the Heath as usual, and a cute little dog ran up to me, all friendly, and when I looked at its tag, it turned out the dog was called “Mila.” I figured it was god telling me to get to work, and I went home that day and wrote the first line — “I was named after a dog….” And then suddenly whole book was in my head. I love it when that happens. Ie, once. It’ll obviously never happen again.
Q: What do your characters have to overcome in this story? What challenge do you set before them?
Meg: I never consciously set challenges for my characters, but in this book the challenge was part of the premise: figure out why Matthew left home. Was he a child molester or a murderer or a gambler or or or….WHY? I had no idea for ages and ages. Of course the real challenges kind of emerge in the writing — the subtle psychological ones that tell you what the book was really about. I never really know what the book is going to be about until it’s finished.
Q: What unique challenges did this book pose for you, if any?
Read MoreIt’s the end of the month and that time again—the Twitter-tastic roundup. For the sake of readability, I’ve highlighted the top three tweets in each category with Writer Unboxed (#WU) hashtags. Peruse the goodies and if you’d like to see more in any given category, click on its hashtag and you’ll be inundated with helpful links.
PUBLISHING NEWS
(#WUPrint)
"Ether for Authors: What Happens When Everybody’s a Critic?" via @Porter_Anderson http://t.co/RDB6f2RXFt #WUPrint
— Writer Unboxed (@WriterUnboxed) September 24, 2013
"Man Booker Prize To Accept Entries From Any Country" via @nprbooks http://t.co/sCzS3Wn0Xr #WUPrint
— Writer Unboxed (@WriterUnboxed) September 19, 2013
"Libraries are trusted spaces, but this doesn't mean they have to stay the same" @guardian http://t.co/5eJeKI6way #WUPrint
— Writer Unboxed (@WriterUnboxed) September 24, 2013
AGENT ALERTS
(#WUAgent)
Read MoreYou, dear writer, are going to fail. Miserably.
Until you succeed.
You will be alone.
Until you are embraced with open arms.
We are going to make fun of you (giddily.)
Until we come to respect you.
We will find every tiny flaw in your otherwise decent story.
Until it grabs our hearts and makes us fall in love.
We will do the worst thing possible for way longer than you expect: we will ignore you.
Until we can’t stop thinking about you, and talking about your work.
We will use you as a scapegoat for our own sense of inequity.
Until we strive to become more like you.
We will take pot-shots at you. Making fun of things that are none of our business.
Until you stop caring about those things.
We will grossly generalize what your work embodies, misconstruing it whenever possible.
Until you ensure we “get it.”
Dear author, we are not going to make this easy for you.
Read MoreHere’s a homework assignment I have given to comedy-writing students from Nicaragua to Norway, and now I’m giving it to you. Whether you’re a comedy writer or not, I think you’ll find it useful, and fun. Here it comes. Ready?
Between now and tomorrow morning, go out and do something you’ve never done before. Anything. I don’t care what.
The great thing about this exercise is how it kicks you out of your comfort zone, or assaults the comfort zone of others, or both. When that happens, you’ll experience some powerful emotions. You’ll also find something funny. Almost guaranteed.
If you’re really gung ho, you’ll do the exercise twice: once, right now, before reading what others have done and what I think it all means; and then again, later, after we’ve had that discussion.
People predictably solve this problem either in terms of breaking personal rules of behavior or breaking social norms. One woman in Canada had a civil conversation with her ex-husband – something she had never done before. She used the excuse of “it’s homework” to unburn a certain bridge. She understood that the exercise gave her permission to do something she had long wanted to do: It changed the “rules” of her relationship with her ex-husband and provided a new way to engage him.
Here are some other things people have done.
An Irish Protestant visited his local Catholic church, a place he had always considered verboten.
A certain woman in Sydney lay down across the sidewalk to see if people would ignore her, and they did.
Occasionally there’s a wise-ass who says, “I didn’t do your homework, which is something I’ve never done before.” Which is bull, but whatever.
A lot of people kiss strangers or buy them drinks or meals. It’s liberating, it really is.
Read MoreRenee Swindle is author of Shake Down the Stars, a novel I loved so much I immediately friended her on Facebook and asked if I could interview her.
I’m not the only one who loved it. RT Book Reviews said “This novel is a true gem. Beautifully written, it’s full of emotional impact that touches the heart without weighing the reader down. Themes of love, loss and addiction will reach into the soul.”
And author Elizabeth Gilbert recently recommended it on her Facebook page.
Renee and I had a great email chat and I found it very inspiring that after writing two novels that didn’t sell (after selling her first) she used those experiences to find her voice and work on the novel she was meant to write. I hope you are inspired too!
[pullquote]Looking back, I wrote those two novels while doing my best to sound and write like anyone except me. I’m not sure who I was trying to be—Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Stephen King?! But writing those two books helped me discover my voice—or come back to my voice, depending on how you look at it. [/pullquote]
Shake Down the Stars is about a parent’s worst nightmare happening—the death of a child. Yet, in part because the death happens 5 years before the novel begins, you manage to write very humorously and yet still poignantly about a grieving woman. How did you pull that off?!
I don’t know! LOL! I think it helped—immensely—that the daughter’s death occurred five years before the start of the novel. In the first draft, the daughter had only passed away the year before, so my idea to incorporate humorous moments wasn’t working at all. By starting the novel at a later point in time, the story became more about discovering how the narrator, Piper, would ever find joy again. It became more about how she was dealing with loss, which freed me to use lighter and funnier moments. It did take a few drafts, though, to get the balance just write. Some drafts were too dark and heavy; some were too funny and lighthearted. At any rate, I absolutely love that readers have said they both laughed and cried while reading it. That’s exactly what I was aiming for.
Read MoreToday’s guest post is by Sabrina Ricci: author, e-book developer, and entrepreneur. Her startup, Write or Read, is a subscription site for e-books that gives readers access to a wide variety of titles and helps writers build their platform and become more successful. Sabrina earned her M.S. in publishing from NYU, and while she was in school became interested in e-books and self-publishing.
It’s fascinating how much the publishing industry has changed in the past three years . . . I started self-publishing and working on my startup to get a better feel for the process and figure out how to best help writers. For this particular article, I loved hearing Hugh’s techniques for marketing. There are so many articles about using social media and being constantly online trying to find new readers. But it’s nice to know that other approaches work, and that they allow time for authors to do what they love best: writing.
Check out Sabrina’s blog and her books; follow her on Twitter @sabsky and find her on Facebook.
The Year of the Reader: How One Successful Indie Author Marketed His Work Up the Bestseller Lists
Hugh Howey, author of Wool, has sold at least a million and a half books.
You hear about it more and more frequently these days. A successful indie author creates a bestseller and is able to quit his day job to pursue his lifelong dream of writing. But how does an author get to that point? For Howey, it was a combination of strong storytelling—Wool went viral and sold 1,000 copies per month before he even started actively marketing it—and innovative, subtle marketing.
Unlike some indie authors I’ve talked to who have had successful marketing campaigns using social media and reaching out to new readers, Howey has a slightly different approach: he only contacts existing readers.
“I try not to at any time tell new people to check out my work,” Howey said. “I spend all my time interacting with existing readers. And I find that to be much more effective because the only way you’re going to have any kind of viral growth is with readers telling other readers about the work.”
Howey said he neither enjoys nor has the confidence in his work to constantly promote it and tell strangers to read it.
“No one wants to listen to a writer talk about their work,” he said.
It’s All About The Readers
In early 2012, Howey posted a YouTube video of he and his sister doing “The Time Warp” dance from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the middle of Times Square, NY, as a thank you in honor of getting his 100th review of Wool on Amazon. He had promised the dance to his fans a while back, and one of his friends waited to be the one to post the 100th review.
“She wouldn’t let me forget,” Howey said. “At the time I had a very small readership, so I had no idea it was going to be seen by lots of […]
Read MorePhoto by lilivanili
Today’s guest is Katharine Britton, author of the recently released LITTLE ISLAND (September 3, 2013, Berkley Books/Penguin). Little Island, her second novel, is a family drama about four generations who gather for a weekend on their small island in Maine. It doesn’t take long for the tragedy that has defined this family to resurface—and for painful secrets and old resentments to emerge.
According to New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer,
Katharine Britton’s Little Island flows with such luscious writing I wanted to slow down to savor it and a plot so compelling I tore through the book as if I were reading a page-turner mystery.
Follow Katharine on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
How to Please Your Editor—Without Losing Yourself
My first novel was (note the past tense) about two sisters, ages seventy-two and eighty, estranged for sixty years who reunite in their childhood home on Boston’s south shore. The story unfolded in shifting time frames, with chapters alternating between the 1940s when the sisters were young, and present day. An editor liked the story and was interested in buying the manuscript, with one or two changes: She suggested I make both sisters younger and the older sister nicer. Since this was the first bit of interest I’d had in a manuscript (twenty-five editors rejected my first one) I considered her advice and realized that, one: if I made the changes, the story would be stronger and, two: if I didn’t, she would reject it.
I made the sisters fifty-eight and sixty-seven, set their childhood in the 1960s (making the estrangement forty years rather than sixty), and softened the older sister. The editor bought the manuscript, and then suggested I change the title.
My goal was to be a published author. False pride was not going to help. I had to be practical. Still, I wouldn’t have made the changes if I hadn’t agreed with them.
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I was withdrawing deeper into myself, isolating myself from my surroundings, settling into the routines—the inflexible routines—I have before each match and that continue right up to the start of play.
This is from Rafael Nadal’s sometimes surprisingly candid book, Rafa, written with John Carlin. Listen for that light, self-effacing Majorcan accent, our Mediterranean catch of the day, emphasis mine:
I repeat the sequence, every time, before a match begins, and at every break between games, until a match is over. A sip from one bottle, and then from another. And then I put the two bottles down at my feet, in front of my chair to my left, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court. Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.
Were you moved by our colleague Robin LaFevers’ recent Writer Unboxed piece? Her 3-D piece. On Discipline, Dedication, and Devotion.
I was moved. Because she used the Oxford comma in her headline. I may ask for her hand in marriage.
I was also moved, you’ll be relieved to know, for two other reasons:
[pullquote]It’s about giving free rein to your obsessive and personal tics and possibly unsavory interests. —Robin LaFevers, On Discipline, Dedication, and Devotion[/pullquote]
Earlier this month in New York, it was borderline unsavory when some of the commentators at the US Open chuckled at how Nadal refuses to step on a line on the court between points. He always steps over the lines, not on them. Chuckle all you want. He has some $60 million in prize money. Makes you want to step right over some lines, no?
Watch Nadal play for 20 minutes and you’ll be familiar with that trademark series of fast moves he makes at the baseline before each point. Personal tics on parade. He plucks the left shoulder of his shirt. Then the right shoulder. His shorts get a tug. The sweat is wiped off his nose. His hair is pushed back over his left ear. His nose gets another swipe. His hair is pushed back over his right ear. Only after all this will he play a point. Every time. Same moves. In the same order.
Greg Garber at ESPN has written that Nadal looks like a baseball manager sending signals. I think it looks more like he’s genuflecting. Those moves are prayer.
What’s going on out there on the tennis court is a lot like what LaFevers is saying might need to happen at our desks.
Read MoreTrained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.
The challenge: does this narrative compel you to turn the page?
[pullquote]Storytelling Checklist
Evaluate this opening page for how well it executes the following 6 vital storytelling elements. While it’s not a requirement that all of them must be on the first page, I think writers have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are. The one vital ingredient not listed is professional-caliber writing, a given for every page.
[/pullquote]
Let’s Flog Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
And now for something completely different to flog: a 28-year-old sci-fi novel that is at the top of The New York Times September 8, 2013 bestseller list of paperback mass market fiction. Ender’s Game was first published in 1985. I remember reading it, but back then I never thought about the opening page. Following is what would be the first manuscript page (17 lines) of the Chapter 1 in Ender’s Game.
“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listen through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”
“That’s what you said about the brother.”
“The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”
“Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.”
“Not if the other person is his enemy.”
“So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”
“If we have to.”
“If the buggers get him, they’ll make me look like his favorite uncle.”
“All right. We’re saving the world, after all. Take him.”
* * *
The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, “Andrew, I suppose by now you’re just absolutely sick of having that horrid monitor. Well, I have good news for you. That monitor is going to come out today. We’re going to take it right out, and it won’t hurt a bit.”
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of (snip)
My vote and editorial notes after the fold.
Read MoreI don’t know why it always surprises me. I’ve been here before. And I was warned before my first time. Those ahead of me on their writerly journeys said it again and again: “The waiting is hell.” And yet I find I have to relearn it. Every time.
Waiting.
Hell.
As fiction writers, at some point we all go through it. And in some way, shape, or form, the fate of our work hangs in the balance. Whether it’s being beta-read, edited, or submitted, having your manuscript out in the world is like placing a little piece of your soul in the hands of others. Oh, I know I’m not supposed to care, that I should divorce myself from concern over subjective opinions. I know I should let go of the outcome and move on. Maybe it’s easier for you. Maybe you can hit send and shrug it off and forget about it.
I tell myself I can. And some days it helps… a little. Other days I realize I’m just kidding myself.
And what do we do when the wait is over? For me, each time it’s been the same. I absorb the feedback, trying to focus on the good news but totally internalizing the bad. I celebrate and/or wallow. Then I dive back in, feverishly revising the work based upon what I’ve learned. Only to start the process all over, sending it out again. And to end up waiting. Again.
A Literary Uni-tasker
The sage advice I often hear regarding waiting is: move on. Start another project. Begin writing the next one.
I think it’s brilliant… if you can manage it. I’ve tried but, unfortunately, I’ve found I can’t. When I am in a story, I find I must totally submerge myself. It’s never easy in the beginning, but once I’m immersed, I’m good—life is good. My writerly flame burns bright. (Submerged and burning, you ask? Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but I need fire to harden my point).
I’ve long had an idea for a novel which would be a total departure for me. I’ve even jotted quite a few notes. I’m excited about it. So for my most recent waiting period, I thought I’d attempt to outline the new story. Not only could I not submerge, I’d hardly gotten my feet wet before my thoughts strayed back to the story I had sent out into the world.
To Avoid Counting Flowers on the Walls of Hell
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