Posts by Jeanne Kisacky
It’s after he’s asked me the question for the third time that I stop following the developing plot line in my thoughts, mentally plug back in to reality, and replay the words that have been spoken repeatedly in my direction.
“Can you pick up dinner on the way home?”
It’s an easy question, with an easy answer, which I give him right away. He’s used to living with a writer, so instead of an argument about my lack of attention, he just gives me an eye roll and a heavy sigh because it took three tries to get that simple answer. Only three. Not five. Or six.
But then, he’s used to the perils of living with a writer.
All the writers that I know have supporters–the people who enable them emotionally, intellectually, professionally, and even financially–to continue the quest for a life as a writer. I’ve had many conversations with other writers that express gratitude for what these supporters provide. I’ve seen many similar posts in the WU Facebook group. Sometimes, however, it is good to acknowledge our supporters—whoever they may be—directly, and to recognize them for their patience and at times bottomless good humor. Below is my gratitude list, acknowledging what my supporters deal with.
If you see yourself in any of these situations, then please take the time today to say thank you to one of your supporters.
Could you Ask that Again?
There are periods in writing when the work takes over a writer’s consciousness. Some call it ‘immersion,’ or ‘flow,’ or being ‘in the moment’. Whatever you call it, it means a writer is more deeply enmeshed in his or her thoughts than in the surrounding physical world. This complicates planning daily existence. It is why my supporter asks me the same question three or more times before getting an answer. And that can get frustrating very quickly. Over the years we’ve learned to minimize arguments with a simple strategy. I tell my supporter when I’m at a stage that requires me to go deep and get lost in my fictive world. This lets him know that slow answers don’t mean I’m ignoring him and he can be more patient. Then he’s able to wait until I plug back in to reality before he asks the question. He isn’t repeating himself, and I’m not feeling neglectful.
Seesaw Confidence.
Friday, 9am. Comment to supporter—I just finished re-reading what I wrote last night and it’s brilliant. I’m genius. I’m the next great writer.
Friday, 9 pm. Comment to supporter—I just re-read what I wrote this morning and it’s dreck. I’ll never finish this. I can’t write. I should just give up this crazy idea and live a normal life. There’s nothing wrong with just living.
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I recently received a critique of a work in progress that suggested I alter the point of view (POV) from distant third person to close third person. It was good advice, but it meant facing another rewrite of what I thought was a completed manuscript. I told myself I could do it—after all, it would just be wordsmithing. I would leave the scenes as is, just go a little deeper into the characters’ psyches. I would not, of course, be rewriting entire scenes or large-scale plot details.
Before I started on the revision, I did a little research to augment my basic understanding of the differences between distant and close third person. I found numerous blogs and articles (links to some of the more helpful ones are at the end of the post) but I came away with three takeaways about close third person POV:
I set a schedule to finish the editing in two months—one chapter every two to three days. Each chapter was told from a different characters’ viewpoint, so I expected the editing would simply bring more life to the book by making each character more vivid.
Editing the first few chapters went smoothly, but they were strong chapters with clear motivations, conflicts, and actions. Three weeks into the editing, I got to a part of the manuscript that was not as strong. In particular, I got to the chapters told from the viewpoint of a female protagonist who had played a decisive and active role in the opening chapters, but who then became passive in later chapters as events played out on larger stages. I had struggled with those chapters and that character’s passivity through many revisions, and while I had given her more to do, the chapters were still flat.
When I started rewriting those troubled chapters, the simple editing became something far more complex. It was as if the closer POV gave that character back the voice that had been suppressed, and she was not about to sit passively still while chaos rained down upon her. She became active, not passive. And every time she chose to do something rather than let things be done to her, she created new plot elements, entire storylines, new possibilities that would echo through the work to the end.
I stalled out on the editing because it was becoming far more change, and far more work than I had bargained for. At a loss to know whether to stop or to continue, I sat down and just re-read the manuscript, to figure out whether it was worth all the work.
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For a moment when work isn’t so demanding. For an hour when the tween stops putting up full resistance to simple requests for help. For a day when negotiating the family schedule doesn’t take high-tech gadgets, extensive three-way discussion, and caving on core values as to what, exactly, constitutes a good meal. For a week when the to do list actually grows shorter.
Then, I think, when one of those miracles happens, I will have time. Time to enjoy my daughter’s fast-dwindling childhood. Time to travel. Time to read. Time to do everything that I’m not doing now because I have to do other things that other people have asked or paid me to do. But most of all, I think that when one of those miracles happens, then I will have time to write.
I’ve been an idiot. Waiting will not bring any of that to pass.
Life is a roller coaster. My life track is being formed in front of me one second before I careen onto it. I am always one track-second away from the final crash. And that, my dear fellow writers, is the only lull that our delicate beings ever encounter with absolute certainty. That lull does not bring us any closer to doing all the things that we are not making time for now.
A close family member recently experienced that final crash. That jarring tragedy proved without a doubt that death does not bring satisfying closure or tidy completion. Just a passing and a painful pileup of life debris left behind for the survivors. Going through that debris brought me face to face with the inevitability of the daily undone–the cumulative consequences of what an individual chooses to do, and not to do, every hour of the day.
In the aftermath, I have been facing down a life-altering truth. My entire existence has been built on rewarding myself with time to do what I love only after all the work is done. And, after having been raised to be responsible and to believe that hard work will lead to a payoff (someday), I have signed on for far more work than I can ever finish. If I keep on this path—waiting until the responsibilities are all met before there is freedom to do what I enjoy—then that huge mess, the weight of the undone, will hold all the fun. All the joy.
That means that the way to live is to make the time, not wait for it.
I am writing this blog as a means of coming clean, and of having others hear my intentions, and to keep me honest. I am about to alter my life.
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In the last year and a half I’ve gone through several project milestones on a non-fiction project–completing the manuscript, wading through final edits, poring over proofs, and waiting for it to be published. The milestones came with tight deadlines which were additional workloads on top of the usual day job and family schedule. Getting it all done was exhausting but surprisingly energizing. I had to work at an intense pace, with extreme focus. I got Efficient (Capital E intended) at getting through the daily requirements so I would have time for the manuscript. I jettisoned unnecessary commitments. I let my spouse take on more of the daily chores. As I immersed myself into the writing, inspiration seemed to come hand in hand with the overload. I saw more and more connections, reached better insights. And then, after each deadline passed, I was euphoric, hopeful, excited, . . . sad.
What? Sad? What was wrong with me? I had no reason, no excuse, no justification to be sad. And yet there was no denying it. After each deadline, instead of getting up early to write I was sleeping past the alarm. Instead of being efficient at getting through the day’s requirements so I could have time to write in the evening, nothing got done. Not even the day’s basic non-writing requirements. It was a low almost equivalent to the writer’s high I had been on.
My initial response was to invalidate the sadness. To tell myself how lucky I was and that I should get over it and on with life. Not surprisingly, that approach was an utter failure. It simply added guilt to the lethargy.
It took only a little research to discover I was not alone in my experience. In fact, according to a 1987 New York Times article by Charles Salzberg, I was in exalted company. Writers including Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Larry McMurtry, and Joyce Carol Oates (among others) experienced versions of what Salzberg termed ‘postwritum depression.’ Allison Winn Scotch wrote about it on our very own Writer Unboxed. A google search for ‘post-publication depression’ offered a host of other articles–some satirical, many serious. This brought me to a very helpful realization. Post-project depression is NORMAL. It might even be necessary, a way to replenish the batteries before tackling the next project, the next deadline.
What would change if I called my experiences a post-project recovery instead of post-project depression?
Read MoreThere is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Image credits at end of post.
It is common advice that a completed first draft is far more important than the actual quality of that first draft. Writers are universally urged not to get sidetracked by editing while writing the first draft; all those imperfections will be resolved in the later drafts.
Completing the first draft is essential, but I think that this universal advice needs tempering. There is a synergy in first drafts that needs to be honored, a magic sense of focused story promise that informs the later shaping of the work. A ‘crappily written’ but complete first draft with that synergy is a joy to revise; a ‘crappily written’ first draft without that synergy is an aimless bog of revisions. The goal of any first draft is not just to type ‘The End’ on the last of a sequence of pages, but to have embedded within those sequential pages the details and clarity necessary to make subsequent revisions purposeful.
How to get to a synergistic first draft? Step 1: Know what your writing process is and honor it.
Two Basic Writing Processes—Trimming and Embellishing
In my experience writers, like artists, tend to fall into two basic writing patterns—those who trim and those who embellish. Michelangelo took solid blocks of stone and carved away the extraneous pieces; Degas added clay and materials bit by bit to an armature to build up the forms that were later cast into metal. Writers who are trimmers take a first draft and then tighten and cut until it is focused; writers who are embellishers generate a bare bones full draft and then flesh it out until it is complete.
These differing writing strategies—trimming or embellishing—have consequences for what kind of first draft is needed.
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This post is not about what content to include in a query letter, it is about how it should ‘sound’–the professional tone the letter should take. It discusses how to address an overburdened agent, editor, or publisher in a manner that makes them consider you a potential business partner, not a supplicant, a novice, an egomaniac, or desperate. That increases the chances that your query letter will actually get read, perhaps even all the way through.
In my day job, I work with a researcher who gets dozens of unsolicited email requests daily—for a job, for a position, for help, for collaboration, for reviews, for submissions, for purchasing equipment, for endorsements, for public appearances. While these inquiries are not quite the same as author queries, after wading through mountains of these unsolicited requests on a daily basis, I’ve developed a short checklist about what to do and what not to do in basic letter-writing terms to keep your message from getting immediately rejected. If some of the suggestions I am about to offer seem commonsense, or even ludicrously obvious, all I will say is that I have abstracted all of the examples of what not to do from actual received inquiries.
Put Yourself in Their Shoes:
The goal of the query letter is not to tell the addressee what you want or need; the goal of the query letter is to convince the addressee why they might want to work with you. Don’t write about how badly you want to be a writer/make a living as a writer/become a bestseller/change the direction of literature. Lots of us want that (LOTS!). Stating it in a query letter simply puts extra social pressure on the reader, which does not increase the desire to continue reading.
First Sentences/Paragraphs.
The decision of whether or not to read a letter all the way through happens within seconds. The opening should sing, better than the fat lady ever did, and in your voice. The first sentences determine whether any more of the letter gets read. The first paragraph establishes whether you have done your research, are professional, would be someone interesting (and sane), someone who might be a good collaborator, and whether you can pitch your work, not your dreams.
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The transformation of publishing as a result of the proliferation of e-books and self-publishing is an inescapable topic these days. As well as making every writer face the devil’s choice of whether to go traditional or go independent, this transformation has also created a new spinoff industry–you—the writer and author. Providers of author services are a growth sector of the economy.
As the director of advertising on Writer Unboxed, I’ve been thinking about how the development of author services further changes the job of being an author, adding responsibility for being an educated consumer of those services, but also what it means for blog owners.
Writing advice and advisors have always been around, but now, as well as ‘how-to write’ guides, there are DIY manuals for designing your own cover, formatting your own book, editing your own book, managing your own promotion. If you don’t want to go the full DIY route, you can buy a bunch of author-targeted software or you could hire some help–book cover designers, editors, book promoters, book formatters, packaging agencies, book advertisers, booksellers, marketing advisors, story ‘doctors’, indexers. The list could go on.
Many of these services have existed for a long time, but the providers traditionally worked directly with publishers. Some of these services are brand new, a product of the new e-book revolution.
All of them would like to gain your attention. Yes yours, because you, dear Writer Unboxed reader, are their niche market. Their intended clientele. Their bread and butter. And, yes, sadly, in some instances, their mark.
As with any industry, many of these service providers offer a valuable service and expertise, care about their reputation, and operate according to above board business practices. As with any industry, where there is money to be had, some of the service providers are out for the money. By whatever means they can get it.
Gaining your attention, let alone your patronage, is not easy. In a business where the standard legend is that all it takes to get published (and make millions) is to crank out some content, generate a file, and put it up for sale at one of the on-line booksellers, these author service providers not only have to reach their prospective clientele, they have to convince them that hiring a service provider is more valuable than DIY’ing it. Most people know when they need a lawyer. Not everyone knows when to hire a developmental editor, content editor, copy editor, or proof reader. Whether to hire a book packager or software that will generate the proper format for an ebook ‘automatically’ is equally unknown. That means even legitimate service providers have to be aggressively persuasive about the need for their services. That can make their promotional tactics more extreme–promising more for less or using gimmicks to get the prospective client’s attention.
For the author, this makes it absolutely critical to do due diligence before hiring any service provider or buying any service product. Ask for referrals from previous clients. Ask for a sample of work before you buy the whole package. Be clear about what services are and are not being provided. Advertising is a means of getting your attention, it is not a contract, a promise, a certainty.
Writer Unboxed is front and center […]
Read MoreI don’t tell my ‘academic’ colleagues that I write fiction. I don’t talk much about my non-fiction writing to my fiction-writing community. I LOVE e-readers because they don’t reveal whether I’m reading a steamy romance, popular history, angst-ridden literary novel, nineteenth-century article on hospitals, or an idiot’s guide to something technical that even my nine-year-old already knows how to do.
Why do I do this? Why hide my reading and writing habits? Am I ashamed of something? Scared? Yes, of course. But of what?
In switching between genres I’m scared of crossing social boundaries—of entering unknown, perhaps even unfriendly, territory; of not knowing the rules of acceptable behavior; of feeling like an outsider; of being judged, teased, criticized, left out . . . wait, this is starting to sound like conversations I’ve been having with my daughter about playground interactions.
So, does this mean genres are the literary equivalent of cliques? Hmmm. Bear with me for a little while on this.
First off, I’m not saying cliques (or genres) are good or bad in and of themselves. They exist. I’m also not interested in examining the varying characteristics of different literary genres. I do want to examine how we use them, what we potentially get from them, and what we lose by them.
Read MoreIt is daunting to be an unpublished writer amidst the stellar cast of this blog site’s regular contributors. It is even more so when in their actual presence. At the UnConference in Salem I recently had the pleasure of meeting a number of the regular blog contributors, and of hearing their insight, wisdom, and practical guidance for writing good fiction. Each of the sessions was valuable, each had a takeaway, each was enjoyable, and each was top notch. And yet, processing the sum total of all that input proved a challenge I was not quite ready for. By the middle of the conference, the sneaking thought in the back of my mind that had been plaguing me for months was becoming less sneaky. Should I give up trying to be a writer? Would I be better if I stopped?
The first days of the conference were exhilarating. I went to numerous sessions and I left each one jazzed about the new strategies for curing my ailing manuscript. I stole time in the evenings to apply the recommended literary treatments. I reworked the first page, to give it story questions and draw the reader in. I looked for the story underlying the plot as a means of better focusing the scenes. I strengthened the inciting incident in my protagonist’s past, which kept him from getting what he desired in the present. I made sure each page had microtension. I analyzed my deepest fears to find the place where my voice would come from and tried to focus that onto the page.
By the third day of this inundation I went to sleep believing that all I had to do was continue to apply the proper dosage of the various literary ‘treatments’ and my story would soon be glowing in healthiness. My manuscript would be cured. I woke up in the middle of that night and knew, with the absolute terrified certainty that only comes with three a.m., that in fact I wasn’t curing my manuscript. I was treating it, yes, but in a manner that looked only at individual symptoms and not at the bigger picture.
I had become a literary hypochondriac.
Read MoreLately, I’ve been feeling like my life is living me. I have dreamed of being able to make a living as a writer since I was a teenager, but after several years of being a stay-at-home parent/part-time writer, I have recently taken on a new day job. Since I started spending a large chunk of my time in an office, I have been struggling with the feeling that I have given up on my dream of being a writer.
During the early months of my new job, when that feeling was particularly strong, a couple comments on a benign post on the Writer Unboxed Facebook group nearly brought me to despair. The post asked people to tell how long they’d been working on their WIP. The answers varied–from weeks to months to years. Some commenters expressed the opinion that spending years on a work without publication was a waste of time. I have been working on the same unpublished work for several years, so that comment hit hard.
I’ve spent the last few months arguing with that commenter in my head. This post is my answer, and an explanation of why it bothered me so much.
Read MoreEveryone who writes likely has a favorite book (or a hundred). And within those favorite books are favorite passages. My most often-revisited books fall open to specific pages, the ‘good parts’–those which hit an emotional high, or which spark a resonance within me, or even those that had me so completely enraptured in their literary spell that I forgot myself. I have re-read those passages so many times that they have become a part of my writerly being, and the best I can hope as a writer is that someday, someone’s well-loved copy of my book will fall open to a certain page.
Those ‘good parts’ provide important lessons. I am currently revising a project that has been in progress for more than a decade. I have set it aside for years at a time, unable to find the secret magic that would make it what I believed it should be. But this time around, I finally feel like I’ve found the work’s soul. The magic secret was to set only one clear goal in editing–to treat every passage, every sentence, every word, as a ‘good part.’ This requires looking at the work from the ‘inside,’ not the ‘outside.’
In prior attempts to revise this work, I had edited it with various specific goals in mind, all of which had to do with the work as seen from the outside. I was editing to reduce its scale or simplify the overall structure in order to make it ‘acceptable.’ This editing approach was the product of fear and uncertainty. The first (admittedly bloated and awful) draft was roughly 300,000 words. I cut it down to 220,000 and sent it to rather shocked beta readers. I cut some more. I watched other writers’ reactions when I mentioned it was down to 200,000 words, and I became focused on length. I was looking at the work as a product, something to be fit into a package. And it wasn’t fitting. I tried to make it fit, by breaking it into two volumes. But then there was no satisfactory ending to part one. I tried streamlining the plot, cutting characters, but the story lost its heart.
Now, I am doing what I should have done from the beginning.
Read MoreThis is the second of a two-part post that provides basic advice for writers on how to work with a graphic artist. In the first post I covered knowing what you want, finding the right graphic artist, and the basic graphic design process. In this installment, I will outline money issues and mention a few potential landmines to be aware of in graphics.
Money Matters
Probably the biggest hurdle to working with a graphic designer is the matter of payment. Money is hard to come by, and there are plenty of demands on it. Here are some suggestions for how to talk money with a designer.
Set a Budget. The best thing you can do to make money less of an issue while working with a graphic designer is to make a completely honest assessment of the funds you have available for design and be clear with your prospective designer as to budget amounts and flexibility or inflexibility. If you only have $100 and there will be no chance for that to increase, ask the designer if it’s possible to get the product you are interested in for that amount and no more. Plus, be sure to pick a payment strategy (see the list below) that works with not only the level of money available, but the flexibility of that amount.
Fee Strategies. There are a number of different strategies for how a designer charges for their work (for example check out this post). Choosing the right money relationship depends on how much work you are looking for, how flexible your budget, and how flexible the designer is on payment options, and the size and flexibility of the designer/design firm you are hiring:
Read MoreIn my last blog post, I promised to give more tips on how to work with a graphic designer, and I will (I promise), but not in this post. For the last few months, I have been immersed in editing, and my thoughts are not currently focused on graphic design but on writing. In particular, I’ve been struggling with how to stop banging my head against the same old walls and just to get the writing done.
Writers write. That is a truism we’ve all heard, but it encapsulates a gigantic catch. WHAT do writers write? The answer is different for every writer, and implicit within the current cultural expectations attached to writing is the idea that successful writers somehow know what to write. They know what others want to read, what will sell, what is cool, what is erudite, what sounds good. Maybe they do, and maybe they are also just lucky.
As one of the as-yet-unpublished blog contributors for this site, I cannot tell you how successful writers work, or how they know what will or will not be successful to their project. But I can (oh, yes, most definitely I can) tell you what does not lead to successful writing. So I am offering you my current zen-laced, nihilist-inspired approach to writing successfully. I am going to tell you what not to think about when you’re writing.
1. Don’t think about yourself and your life.
To write successful fiction, do not indulge in endless fantasies about what the piece of writing you are working on is going to do for your current state of existence. Dreaming about your perfect life after your WIP is done, published, and has sold millions more copies than J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and Suzanne Collins combined may be fun, but in my experience it actually is antagonistic to the mindset needed for telling a good story.
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