Posts by Greer Macallister
It’s easy to be insecure as a writer. Or it’s hard not to be. At our worst, we compare ourselves constantly to others, feeling like we should be more successful, or more prolific, or more adventurous, or any one of a hundred mores.
In conversations with writer friends, one wish I hear over and over is the wish to write faster. To go more quickly from the idea of the book to an actual, put-it-in-the-reader’s hands book.
I’ve long been an advocate of writing a sloppy first draft, getting words on the page as fast as possible so that you can move into the next stage of fixing those words and making them better. But that isn’t for everyone, and I thought I’d present a counterpoint to my recent piece on how to set a daily word count to improve your writing speed.
Focusing on word count exclusively as a measure of progress while you’re drafting can definitely have its downsides. Here are three:
It can encourage the wrong kind of progress. Particularly if you don’t plan out your book beforehand–or if, like me, you always outline the book but then always diverge from the outline–the danger of taking a wrong turn part way through the draft and then feeling like you can’t turn back is pretty dire. Progress in the wrong direction isn’t progress at all.
It can discourage other–just as useful–kinds of progress. You reward what you measure, right? And if you’re fixated on increasing your word count, there’s a very good chance that you’re not doing the other things necessary to improve your book. Which might be fine if you’ve done a ton of research in advance and you’ve built enough time into your schedule to do a deep dive on editing later, but some people just don’t work that way, and it can be a real struggle to want to edit and have to tell yourself “Not today.”
It can backfire, bringing progress to a halt. Some people just don’t benefit from goal-setting, especially an inflexible goal like a specific number of words you “must” write in an hour, day, or week. If you’re the kind of person who implodes when you don’t hit a mark you’ve set for yourself, you definitely want to stay away from the hard-and-fast word count goals I posted about last month. It can be all too easy to miss the word count one day, then the next, then tell yourself you might as well give up completely. Sometimes it’s just better not to put yourself in that position.
That isn’t to say that word count doesn’t have its place. But its place may not be in your life, and even if you’re an avid fast-drafter like me, you have to know when to set aside the numbers and focus on the words themselves.
Q: Have you had times that trying to hit word count goals didn’t work for you? What did you focus on instead?
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Unfortunately, in word count as in life, there is no magic number. This applies both to the overall number of words in your manuscript (How many does it take? Enough to tell the story) and the daily word count goal you may want to set for yourself during the drafting phase. While some writers do just fine with “write as much as you can,” I’ve found over the years that I, personally, benefit from setting a more specific goal.
Want to see if a daily word count goal works for you? Here are three ways you might go about setting your personal number. One of these might resonate more than the others. Or it’s possible that your own best strategy may vary between these options – what works often depends on what type of story you’re writing, what stage you’re at in the process, what else is going on in your life, and much, much more.
High and ambitious. This is the type of goal many writers experience for the first time in a NaNoWriMo-type setting, trying to slam down a sloppy first draft in a specific amount of time at any cost. As you well know if you’ve done NaNo, it takes 1667 words each day to write 50,000 words in a month. For most writers with social lives and/or families and/or day jobs, this is a pretty brisk pace. But if you find you work really well under pressure, even self-induced pressure, a daily word count goal of 2000 or 3000 or even 5000 words might give you the kick in the pants you need to put big numbers on the board. Or there’s…
Modest and achievable. You’ve heard that slow and steady wins the race, and this is definitely another method with high potential for some writers. If you just want to chip away at the draft in bite-size chunks, a modest goal (often 500 words a day) enables you to feel that sense of achievement and forward motion without burning yourself out. Did you know that if you write 500 words a day, you can have an 80,000-word draft in under six months? That’s pretty fast, all things considered. Or you can try…
Schedule-driven. Whether you have a delivery date set by your agent or publisher or you just want to get through a draft for your own reasons, the third way to set a goal involves more math. Are you 30,000 words into a novel that you’ve already completely planned but you feel like you’re stalling out on the actual writing? You can get to 90,000 words in just one month, but you’re going to need to aim for 2000 words a day. Only 10,000 words into a planned 100,000-word novel you’re writing from an approved proposal and you’ve figured out that you need to get it to your agent in three months in order to make your publisher’s deadline in five? 30,000 words a month is 1000 words a day if you write every day, or if you’re only writing on weekdays, that’ll be about 1500 per. Look at the numbers, work backwards, do the math. Simple! (Much simpler to set the goal than to achieve […]
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A new year is a great time for beginnings. You might make traditional resolutions or embark on new goals or habits. I’m doing some of that myself, on matters writing-related and otherwise.
But instead of focusing on the nitty-gritty, practical aspects of becoming a better writer, today I’m offering a more inspirational take: I want to tell you what I wish for you, a writer, this year.
No matter where you are in your writing career, you can always improve your writing craft. And if your goal is publication, no amount of inspiration will replace the need for hard work, persistence, and flexibility.
But writing also benefits from just a little magic. We are alchemists, illusionists, creators. We make our work from nothingness. Why shouldn’t we make wishes too?
Q: What’s your wish for yourself or other writers in the coming year?
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This month’s post takes its title from a long-running off-Broadway show. I’ve never seen the musical myself, but the title is one of those phrases that just sort of hangs out in the arena of general pop culture awareness. As I was thinking about the current state of publishing, it struck me as the right way of expressing a particular trend.
I love you, you’re perfect, now change.
In a way, of course, it’s not a trend at all. Authors in traditional publishing, and to a certain degree those who self-publish as well, have always been asked to thread a particular needle: your books need to be enough like proven successful books to strike a chord with a large readership, but they also need to stand out from the crowd. Debut authors come up against this with their first idea—how will publishers describe the book to their acquisitions committees, to sales teams, to bookstores, to readers themselves? Mid-career writers also get a brand of it—how do you ensure that the readers who loved what you’ve written so far will also love your next book and the book after that? We’ve always been asked to do the same thing but a little differently.
But the need to change seems more prevalent now than ever before. Soft sales in many areas over the past few years are creating even more tension and worry on publishing teams. Authors who’ve been comfortable publishing in a particular groove are now being asked to think about heading in a different direction. If an author whose historical romances you’ve loved for years happens to pop up with a contemporary murder mystery with an illustrated cover, it might be their choice, or it might be something their agent or editor asked them to do.
I love you, you’re perfect, now change.
As an author, on one hand, this seems frustrating. If you’ve put a lot of work establishing yourself in a certain market, spinning off in a different direction can be uncomfortable or even impossible. Most authors can’t just flip a switch and come up with a killer idea in a new genre, not as easily as they can brainstorm ideas in a subgenre they’ve been writing and reading in for ages.
On the other hand, what an opportunity, right? For years, we’ve been hearing the advice that once you establish yourself as a certain type of author, you should stick to that genre to keep your readers happy. But most readers read more than one genre—and most authors are certainly capable of writing more than one. From my personal experience trying my hand at epic fantasy after years of writing historical fiction, I found it immensely freeing to let my creativity loose and not be bound by pesky facts like whether a small-town sheriff’s office would have had a telephone in 1905 or what year sequins were invented.
Some of the greatest success stories of publishing in the last 20 years are from writers who became known for a particular type of writing but then struck out in a new direction with a new idea. Rebecca Yarros with Fourth Wing. Taylor Jenkins Reid with The Seven […]
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Many years ago, as a writer fresh out of grad school, I was precious with my ideas. After each new idea I had for a book, I worried it would be the last good idea I ever had. I swore friends to secrecy before I would even tell them what I was working on; when I found out a friend had shared the manuscript of my first unpublished novel with a mutual friend, I was furious. Not because she hadn’t asked my permission, but because I was struck with fear over what now seems like a silly question: what if that friend steals my idea??
Needless to say, my attitude about ideas has changed over time. I never worry anymore that I won’t be able to come up with an idea ever again. Time has shown me a few things about book ideas in general, and my ideas specifically:
Not all writers work the same way, of course. And having plenty of ideas is not […]
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Once upon a time, there was a contest that asked people to write a novel in three days.
(The Three-Day Novel Contest still exists, actually – I looked it up, and it takes place annually over Labor Day weekend! A little late to get started for this year.)
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is one thing—generating a complete first draft in one month, as thousands of people attempt every November—but the three-day novel (https://www.3daynovel.com) is a whole different ball of wax.
To generate a 50K-word first draft in a month, your pace is 1667 words per day.
To do the same in three days instead of thirty? 16,667 words.
(Assuming you write 20 hours of each day for three days, which would be insane but also maximize your writing time, that’s 833 words per hour. Writing 17 hours a day leaves more time for sleep, but ups your hourly count to 980 words each hour. Good luck, y’all!)
The fast first draft isn’t for everyone, and the three-day novel definitely isn’t. But as a writer who loves to pour on the speed when circumstances allow, and someone who produces an insanely messy first draft even when I take my time and write slowly, I find that setting a blistering pace is absolutely the best way for me to get a big chunk of that first draft on the page.
If you want to give it a shot, here are my three favorite guidelines for putting the most words on the page as quickly as possible.
(Three-day novel not guaranteed.)
Set goals, but don’t obsess. Yes, you’re trying to get to a certain number on a certain schedule. Yes, it will probably help you focus if you chunk up the goal into smaller pieces (10K before dinner on Day 1, 35K before bed on Day 2, etc.) But getting obsessed with hitting those goals precisely will mess with your head and your productivity. And if you set out to write 50K words in three days and you only get to 30K? That’s still 30K words you didn’t have before! Congratulations.
Generate without judgment, but don’t cheat. There are ways to crank up your word count without generating text that has a chance of making it into the finished novel. When I officially entered the Three-Day Novel Contest back in the early 2000s, I definitely did things I knew didn’t make sense for a finished novel. I included song lyrics. Encyclopedia entries. I had my protagonist, a college professor, walk across his campus and think about every building he saw. These are not things that make for riveting reading. In a second draft, they would come out anyway. Try to minimize them in your first draft, even when you’re going for speed. (But if you type something and later think, I shouldn’t have included that, do NOT go back and delete. We are not deleting here. That’s not how this works.)
Start early, but don’t start from scratch. There is a very specific moment in a novel’s development when I can write a thousand words in an hour […]
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Dearest Gentle Readers,
Hopefully those of you who enjoy televised programming have had the chance to finish the third season of Bridgerton on Netflix. While I always try to relax the writer part of my brain when I read or watch other people’s writing, it can be tough! Inspirations, observations and lessons keep sneaking through. So while I primarily enjoyed Penelope and Colin’s story for its own sake, I also noticed a few things that I felt might be useful for my own writing — and maybe yours?
Warning: spoilers for the entirety of Bridgerton Season 3 abound below!
The end isn’t always the end.
At the halfway point of the season, the key couple declared themselves to each other and the hero proposed marriage to the heroine. End of story, right? Nope, raising the stakes — because once Colin swore his love for Penelope, she had all the more reason to fear the revelation of her identity as Lady Whistledown because she might lose Colin as a result. You don’t want to give your characters everything they want early in the story, but neither do you want to hold off all the major action for the story’s climax. Ebbing and flowing action does wonders.
Villains need reasons.
One of my favorite writing guidelines (I won’t say rules) is that the villain is the hero of his own story, and it applies here to Cressida Cowper. She does a bunch of lousy things, endangering our favorite characters with her machinations from the first episode of the season to the last. Yet the show is careful to humanize her and show why she does what she does, struggling to escape a life she hates. No one sets out to write a cardboard villain, but many of them end up that way if the writer doesn’t do the work of giving them a complete set of circumstances, goals and desires. Sorry about your aunt, Cressida.
Use your cast.
With a sprawling cast like Season 3’s and the way that Bridgerton is structured, we spend a lot of time checking in on characters who’ve already had their day in the sun (Kate and Anthony) and future featured players (hey there Francesca), even if their plotlines sometimes feel like so much wheel-spinning (that was a lot of Benedict, in every sense). You may or may not have a cast this sprawling in your writing — my historical fiction doesn’t, my epic fantasy absolutely does — but when you do, it’s important to ask yourself a key question whenever you need a character to provide an action: can someone the audience already knows do this? We had to meet a lot of new people, but the action also got some goosing at key times from Lady Danbury, the Queen, and even Penelope’s mom, Lady Featherington. It’s going to be easier for your readers to keep track of characters you’ve already introduced, so if you’re going to bring in someone new, make sure they’re essential — and make them memorable.
Do you experience other people’s writing primarily as a writer, or are you able to turn off that part of your brain and just enjoy? Have additional takeaways after watching season […]
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As a young writer, I worried so much about my ideas. I worried that I’d never come up with any that were special enough to build a novel around; I worried that if I did come up with one, someone else would “take” it. Several decades in, I now have a more balanced view, which is this: the main concept of a book, its idea, may be important, but it is also only a tiny fraction of what determines whether a book works. And there are countless ways to take the same central idea and write it into a book… or books.
A few years back I had the idea that someone should write “a matriarchal Game of Thrones”, and eventually, I decided that person should be me. After I decided to veer out of my established lane, from historical fiction into epic fantasy, the next decision was absolutely crucial. Would I write this fantasy as a series or a stand-alone?
I’d faced a similar decision years before, actually, when I first learned about the real-life trailblazing private detective Kate Warne and decided to pitch the idea to my publisher. Would the version of her story I wanted to write fit better into a single book-length work, or should it be a detective series, with each novel focusing in on one case?
In one of these situations, I decided on a stand-alone approach, and in the other, a series. If you find yourself facing the same decision–unsure whether your new idea needs a book or a series to do it justice–here are some questions I recommend asking yourself.
Does the genre I’m writing in welcome a series approach? This was key in both of my decisions. While there are certainly successful groups and series of novels in the historical fiction genre–think Philippa Gregory or Ken Follett–these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. If I wrote a series about Kate Warne, it would shift more into the detective/crime genre vs. biographical historical fiction. Conversely, in the epic fantasy world, the series format isn’t just tolerated but wholeheartedly embraced, so in that case, a series was a natural fit.
Does the story I want to tell need a broad canvas? This is where two people writing about the same idea can have a very different view of the story. What interested me about Kate Warne was a specific period (namely, between her getting hired as the first female private detective and when she saved Abraham Lincoln’s life on his way to his inauguration) rather than the idea of her solving cases over the course of multiple years and multiple books. I didn’t need more than one book to say what I wanted to say about Kate. But once I decided to build a fantasy world consisting of five queendoms, the ideas and characters and plots and possibilities just kept piling up and up and up. I’m contracted for three books in the Five Queendoms series but could write so many more.
How long can this story and these characters sustain my interest? We often think about what our readers have the appetite for, but we also need to think about our own interests and appetites. Ultimately, if you think the market would devour a series about […]
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When publishing a writing advice post on April Fool’s Day, the obvious temptation is to make the whole thing about fools or foolishness, playing on the theme of the day.
I’m not going to do that.
Fooled you! Yes, I am.
Heh.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving writers advice on how not to be foolish. Don’t do ridiculous things like review-bomb your peers on Goodreads or make vast pronouncements about The Right Way to Do Things or send angry emails to agents who reject your work, telling them they’ll be sorry one day. Sadly enough, people do things like this all the time, and those people probably not the ones reading Writer Unboxed on the daily. Plus, there are always more ways to be foolish. I mean, the tag on your hair dryer probably says “Do not use while sleeping” because somewhere, sometime, somebody did.
So you know there are plenty of ways for us to put a foot wrong as far as our writing goes. What I thought I’d do instead is look at it from another perspective: are there any upsides to being a fool?
Turns out, I can think of a few.
Fool yourself into progress. Writing a novel is, more often than not, daunting. It’s a whole book! Tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand words! Phew, that’s a lot of words. But you don’t have to write them all today. Set yourself little goals. Can you write a few hundred words this morning? A few thousand? A scene, a chapter? Three paragraphs in the car? Five pages at your kid’s hockey practice? Make it a game. As the E.L. Doctorow quote goes, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You’re not writing a novel. You’re writing bits and pieces. It’s just that when you add those bits to those pieces, eventually, alakazam! Novel.
Fool yourself into confidence. Many of us are introverts, which can work great during the text generation and editing portion of the writing life, but tends to cause problems when you get to the publication part, where you’re supposed to a) tell people about your book or even b) stand up in front of gatherings of people and read from and/or talk about your book. The best trick here? It’s not about you. Pretend someone else wrote the book. What great things could you say about this book if your best friend wrote it? You’d rave, right? Even if it’s you, you can rave. And to get a bit more abstract about it, are you even you? You are Author Self now. Maybe Writer Self would rather crawl under the blankets and mainline that new Mandy Patinkin murder show on Hulu instead of going to a book event and facing down a crowd, but Author Self? She’s on fire. She’ll go do her thing.
Fool around with ideas. For you, idea generation might be the easiest part of being a writer or the hardest, but either way, jumping into a new idea with a sense of playfulness can really move you forward. Before you’ve written the book–before you’ve even outlined or written a synopsis […]
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For many years I’ve been up on a soapbox about how well-worn writing rules (“Show, don’t tell!” “Write every day!”) don’t work for everyone. But only recently did I realize I’ve been doing myself a bit of a disservice rejecting well-worn rules in my personal life.
Here’s an example. Like many of us whose formative years overlapped with the Aerobics Age of the 1980s, I’ve had at least one ear tuned to diet advice for several decades. And as with writing, there are countless rules that some people present as “musts” that don’t work for everyone. (“Never shop on an empty stomach!” “Always eat breakfast!”)
But recently, a conversation with a doctor convinced me to attempt to change my eating habits. Even while rolling my eyes internally at hearing so much advice I’d heard before about healthy eating, I did decide that it was worth trying out some of the guidelines from that conversation, even if I was skeptical about how effective they might be. After all, I’d heard them so many times before.
So earlier today, instead of snacking on the go (my default mode), I had a meal. I cooked myself a hot lunch and ate it from a salad plate at my kitchen counter. I drank a glass of water. I focused on eating and nothing else, and chewed slowly, savoring every bite. Afterward, I felt full and satisfied.
And then I thought, Dammit. I think it worked. How annoying is that!?
I’d heard the advice many times. But had I ever tried it? Had I dismissed it out of hand, telling myself That’s too simple to work or That might work for other people but it won’t work for me without considering giving it a shot?
Look, tomorrow I might make myself a hot lunch that I sit and eat from a salad plate on my counter and then look up afterward and say I’m still starving, this is ridiculous, I was right all along.
But today it feels good. Today I didn’t just dismiss an idea because it wasn’t a new idea. And I like that.
Like me, you might be disinclined to follow rules you’ve heard before. I’m not going to just write what I know, I’m going to tell instead of show if the story calls for telling, and I’m absolutely not going to write every day. But I can say all those things because I’ve tried all those things.
Any particular well-worn writing rule may not work for you, it’s true. But before you dismiss it out of hand, have you given it a try? Because in all these years of talking about how no rule works for everyone, I think I forgot the flip side: every rule works for someone.
Q: Does some, all or none of the best-known writing advice work for you? Which rules have you tried and rejected, or tried and embraced?
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Recently, I stumbled across the news that one of my MFA classmates is on tour promoting her new book. This isn’t, in itself, remarkable–while there may be a handful of people who get a Masters in Creative Writing solely to improve their craft, I’m pretty sure most of us do it to increase our chances of publishing at least one book-length work of fiction. I’m not in touch with this particular author, but she was the first of us to get published, way back in 2002, and the news that she has a new book out put a smile on my face.
But then my very next thought was: Wait. Is she more successful than me?
Now, this is a ridiculous question. The answer doesn’t matter. There is literally no one (including her, I would bet a million dollars) who is comparing our two careers to figure out who’s “more successful.” Let’s call her author A.
Author B, who we also took MFA classes with, had her first novel published in 2003. Several of her books have been New York Times bestsellers. I adore her work. And when I started down this–again, ridiculous–chain of thoughts about success and comparison, my next thought was, Wait. It’s definitely Author B. Author B is the most successful of the three of us.
Backing away from the specific comparisons, this is what my churning, competitive brain arrived at: each of us has succeeded in different ways. Author A has the most awards, the most literary reputation; Author B has sold the most total copies of her books, hit the bestseller list the most times. With my eighth published book coming out in August and one more under contract to follow soon after, I have more published books than either Author A or Author B–but without selling hundreds of thousands of copies or being awarded a single literary honor.
It’s a quote often cited when talking about how to manage your career as an author, but it’s worth saying one more time here: Comparison is the thief of joy.
You can compare yourself to any author you want; compare your awards and theirs, your books and theirs, your life and theirs. It’s hard to resist. But such comparisons won’t make you happy, and they aren’t the road to defining success for yourself.
Because your own definition of success is the only one that matters.
Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to have what I consider many successes. I’ve also had just as many reversals. My first novel, published under a different name, won me a big advance but such low sales I don’t expect to ever be published under that name again. (Pivot!) My debut hit the USA Today bestseller list but my second book didn’t. My first, third and fourth books have all been optioned for TV or movies but only one of the three has renewed the option so it’s still current, while the other two expired without further development. Good luck sometimes looks like bad and vice versa. There is no final “I’ve made it!” in publishing.
So I have to define success for myself, and I have. It doesn’t matter what other authors are doing, whether they were in my MFA program or not. The authors I’ve […]
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Traditionally, a new year brings us the opportunity for new beginnings. We make New Year’s resolutions about our health, our work, our relationships, or countless other aspects of our lives. And as writers, maybe we think a little harder than the average person about the word resolution, because hey, we like words.
The word resolution almost always comes with “New Year’s” attached, but what about its other forms? Being resolute? Or the act of making a resolution: resolving?
This year, let’s play with words. Let’s dive deep into their origins and let them inspire us. Because we’re writers. Without words, we wouldn’t have much to do.
Per Merriam-Webster, the transitive version of the verb resolve has eight definitions: seven currently in use, one obsolete. Let’s use all eight to power our writing in 2024. (There are also four definitions of the intransitive verb and three of the noun, but the line has to be drawn somewhere, right?) Resolve means:
1. To deal with successfully : clear up. Let us hope that all of our major writing projects fall under this definition this year. Many things are dealt with, but to deal with them “successfully,” that’s the trick. We should be so lucky!
2. To reach a firm decision about. Yep, just as tough, but just as important. Deciding to write a new book, deciding to leave an agent, deciding to self-publish–the ways in which writers have to make major decisions about our projects and careers are nearly countless. May your firm decisions this year be, if not easy, at least thoroughly considered and wisely made.
3. To declare or decide by a formal resolution and vote. OK, I admit that this one is a bit of a reach. But some of us hold leadership positions in official writers’ organizations, and I would say that contributing our time and effort to such organizations is a worthy effort. Being a great writer means more than just producing great writing. Let’s try to further the work of other writers this year, formally or otherwise.
4. Break up, separate; or reduce by analysis. Sometimes our big writing tasks seem too big to handle. May we recognize this year how to make those big tasks smaller and, therefore, achievable.
5. To make (something, such as one or more voice parts or the total musical harmony) progress from dissonance to consonance. If there’s a better accidental definition of a success in writing than “progress from dissonance to consonance,” I haven’t seen it. While some people produce messy first drafts, rewriting them to make them sparkle, and others work hard to make their first drafts shine before they consider them complete, we are all trying to make our work consonant (being in agreement or harmony.) May our work this year exhibit all the consonance we could hope for.
6. To work out the resolution of (something, such as a play). Or, say, a book. Writing a wonderful book almost always involves some struggle. Maybe you’re tangling with a complex thriller plot. Maybe your antagonist’s motivations are turning out to be tough to crack. Maybe your main character’s key relationships are taking more work than you thought you needed in order to fuel the compelling plot you want your book to have. Dive […]
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In the early stages of my career as an author, I used to think particular achievements would make me happy. Complete a novel? Awesome. Get an agent? Fantastic. Score my first publishing deal? Yippee! And I wasn’t wrong. All those things made me deliriously happy–for a while.
I’m not knocking my achievements. I do believe that they’re truly achievements. Every time I sell a new book I’m thrilled that I get to continue publishing my work and connecting with readers. Getting to the point where my seventh and eighth published books are scheduled to come out in the next year has taken a combination of hard work and good luck along with a hundred other factors, and I’m very, very fortunate to be where I am.
However, looking back over the years, the pattern I notice is this: leveling up to a new place in your career never means you’ve made it once and for all. It never guarantees you a place free from worry. It’s just that as you move forward, the things you worry about change. Great job on that first book deal–what about the second? You’ve landed at a publishing house you love–but what happens if your editor leaves? Readers flocked to your latest book, but you want to go in a different direction next–will they follow you?
I don’t mean to be discouraging! I actually find this freeing, in a way. Accepting that there is always some new challenge on the horizon has actually allowed me to be more philosophical and strategic about my career. (Resilience, perseverance and a willingness to adapt are some of the other factors I believe have gotten me this far.) There is no Holy Grail here. But there are, thank goodness, a bunch of smaller, pleasingly shiny grails along the way.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that throughout a writer’s career, no matter what path you take, there are only two things asked of us at every single stage. The first, of course, is to write.
The other? To wait.
Hence the title of this post. Writers in the process of publication are always waiting. Waiting on agents, waiting on editors, waiting for publication, waiting for cover designs, waiting for reviews, waiting for a verdict on the proposal for our next book, waiting, waiting, waiting.
This, too, I’ve decided to see as freeing. There will be periods in the process where forward motion is, if not impossible, not necessary advisable. The simplistic advice is always to be writing the next book, but there are sometimes reasons not to do that (like if what you’re waiting for is for that book proposal to be accepted or rejected.) I’ve talked in previous pieces about what you can do with your waiting time–sometimes fill the well with reading, sometimes do non-writing work, sometimes just rest and deal with other parts of your life–so I won’t repeat that here.
What I will say is this: you need to be okay with waiting. It may never feel comfortable, and I’m not promising that getting okay with it is guaranteed to lead to better outcomes, but I do think that the earlier in your career you figure out coping strategies for what to do with your waiting time, the happier you’ll be.
Q: Do you […]
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Like most other writers here at Writer Unboxed, I treasure the writing community we’ve built online. And like a subset of those writers, I’ll be spending this week in Salem, Massachusetts, enjoying the company of that community in person at the Writer Unboxed UnConference. I consider having a writing community one of the absolute non-negotiables of writing and publishing happily long-term — you don’t have to have an in-person community, but you need to have some kind of community, period.
If you’ve read my writing here over the years, you know I hate rules, and caution writers not to adopt other people’s “always” or “never” rules as their own without question. So why am I calling this particular thing non-negotiable?
Here are just a few things having a writing community can do for you:
Input. Yes, writing can be a solitary activity if you want it to be. You can write an entire book without ever speaking to anyone about it or showing it to anyone, and some writers prefer to do it that way. But getting feedback and input from other writers at some point in your manuscript can be invaluable. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, asking for feedback on loglines, getting a beta reader’s thoughts on opening chapters or completed drafts, or calling in a favor for one quick proofreading of your query letter before you send it off to agents, input from other writers can make your life better. So why not try it?
Knowledge. Not every writer you’re going to meet online will be your friend, just like with people in the real world. But the exchange of information within communities–like this very site!–doesn’t require friendship. All it requires is that you be in the same space (again, online or physical) with people who know things. So though there’s an overlap between support and knowledge–see below– you can get one without the other. I learned a tremendous amount from people in the Backspace online community once upon a time–just reading posts by published authors taught me the language and cadence of publishing, though none of those people would have the faintest idea who I personally am.
Support. Many writers are lucky enough to enjoy the support of friends and family, people already in your life who are cheering you on. But there’s a big difference between your roommate saying “This is great, you should be published!” and a fellow author saying, “This is great, you should query my agent!” Publishing at its worst can feel capricious and even cruel. Your grandmother can say that she loves your writing, but she isn’t likely to have a grasp of what it means that your book is or isn’t the lead title, or experience what it’s like when the editor who acquired your book announces she’s leaving, or know exactly what a publicist does and why you’re frustrated that they don’t seem to be doing it. When you hit bumps in the publishing road, the support of people who understand what you’re going through can be powerful, even essential, to keep you going.
Q: What else do you get from your writing community, in-person or otherwise?
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