Eight Secrets Which Writers Won’t Tell You

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on her Aliventures site on 4/12/11.

A few years ago, I’d look at published writers and think that they were somehow different from me. After all, their books were gripping and fluent – unlike my stumbling attempts at first drafts. Their blogs had hundreds or thousands of readers.

They were real writers. And, deep down, I was afraid that I could never really become one of them.

But as I’ve taken more and more steps into the writing world, I’ve realised that my perception just doesn’t match up to the reality. Writers – at all levels – have just the same struggles as you and me.

I’m going to go through eight secrets. Eight things which all writers know – but which you might never hear them admit.

 

Secret #1: Writing is Hard

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. (Gene Fowler)

There’s a myth – not just in the writing world – that if you’re good at something, it’ll be easy. And established writers, me included, do have writing sessions where the words flow smoothly.

The truth is, though, that writing is hard. Some types of writing are tougher than others – I’ve written before about Why Fiction is So Hard to Write. But almost any type of writing will cause some sort of resistance – getting started is never easy. And very few writers, however experienced, can turn out a great draft first time.

Use It: Getting started is nearly always tough. There’s nothing wrong with you if you find it hard to sit down and write. But like exercise, once you get going, it gets easier.

 

Secret #2: We All Struggle With Procrastination

 

Read the full post on Aliventures.

 

Editors’ Post-NaNo Tips for Revising Your Novel

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This post by Corina Koch MacLeod and Carla Douglas originally appeared on Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer on 11/19/14.

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and if you’re participating in the festivities, you’re chained to your computer in an effort to blast out a 50,000-word first draft. Thanks for coming up for air to read this post!

When your draft is completed, you’ll need to revise it. And how you revise your writing will depend on

– your prewriting and planning style
– the kind of book you’re writing

But first, an explanation of what we mean by revise.

 

What is Revising?

The prefix “re” means again. To revise is to re-vision—to look at your writing again, hopefully from the perspective of a reader. To bring something new to your writing, you need to give it time to breathe. Revision involves waiting.

In How to Make a Living as a Writer, James Scott Bell recommends airing your writing for three weeks. That means sticking your NaNo draft in a drawer on November 30, and vowing not to look at it again until the winter solstice. If you take Stephen King’s advice, you’ll be pulling out that first draft on Valentine’s Day.

After the recommended period of rest, you’re ready to work on your first draft.

 

What’s Involved in Revising

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

1 of N does not equal N And Never Complain, Never Explain

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 11/21/14.

Arrghhh. Math. Sorry, but it’s the best way I can explain this concept. What this formula means is that just because you can go to the bookstore and buy a best-selling book written by so-and-so, the famous writer, that does not mean you can write a similar book and get it published. What I’m talking about is those people who sit there and complain that their book is just as good as such and such and, damn it, they should not only be published but have a bestseller. Also, those people who look at book number 5 from a best-selling author and complain about how bad it is. Yes, there are many book number 5’s from best-selling authors that if they were book number 1 from a new author, would not get published. But the primary thing that sells a book is author’s name. I’ve always said Stephen King could write a book about doing his laundry and it would be on the bestseller list. Stephen King earned being Stephen King and to misquote a vice-presidential debate, I’ve read Stephen King and you ain’t no Stephen King. Neither am I.

Another thing people do is they see a technique used in a novel and use the same technique, and then get upset when told it doesn’t work. They angrily point to the published book that has the same technique and say, “SEE.” Unfortunately, what they don’t see is that that technique is part of the overall structure of the novel. It all ties together.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO – Good Habits & Motivation

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This post by Dee White originally appeared on her Dee Scribewriting Blog on 11/8/11.

Last year when I did NaNo, I got off to a flying start and had around 20,000 words written in the first week.

I was driven by the pressure of getting those words down. My mind was full of the writer’s greatest question, What if? But in this case, my “What ifs” had nothing to do with the story I was writing. I worried, What if I got sick and didn’t feel like writing for a week? What if my hands got too sore from typing and I couldn’t type anymore? What if I ran out of ideas? What if something happened to my computer?

So I felt like I needed to get it all done upfront just in case. It meant long hours, not much sleep, less family time and too much stress.

This year I decided to pace myself – to take the risk that something might come up, that I might have a bad week, that for some reason I might spend a couple of days writing nothing,

And I have to say it’s all working better for me. The ideas are flowing easier because the brain isn’t under so much stress, the body feels better because I’m not using caffeine to keep it upright. And although I’ve written way fewer words than last year I feel calmer and more positive that I will reach my goal of 50,000 words.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO

So what are my 10 tips for NaNo so far?

 

1. Set yourself realistic goals. Don’t go for ‘pie in the sky’. If there’s no way you can write 2000 words in a day then don’t expect it of yourself.

 

Read the full post on the Dee Scribewriting Blog.

 

Don't Pay to Self-Publish

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 11/23/14.

My name is Joe Konrath, and I write fiction.

I’ve sold over a million books by self-publishing.

You probably were searching for “how to self-publish” or something similar and my blog came up.

This post for all newbie writers considering self-publishing. While it would be extremely helpful to you to take a week and read my entire blog to get a full understanding of how the publishing industry works, here’s the most important thing you need to know:

DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now you can certainly pay people to help you publish. Freelancers such as editors, cover artists, book formatters, proofreaders, and so on.

But when you hire a freelancer to assist you, you keep your rights.

That’s very important.

When you write something, you own the copyright. That’s automatic, even if you don’t register with the copyright office.

Copyright means exactly that; you have the right to copy it, to distribute it, to give it away, to sell it. You own those rights.

But if you pay someone to publish you, you GIVE THEM YOUR RIGHTS.

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR RIGHTS.

There are many publishers, called vanity presses, that exist to prey on writers who don’t know any better. These presses are sometimes part of big, recognizable publishers, and it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that if you pay hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, you’ll be published by a major press.

The truth is, major presses PAY THE AUTHOR, not the other way around.

I have sold books to major publishers, and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then I had to hire lawyers to get those books back so I could self-publish them. Because I make 10x as much money self-publishing as I did by selling my rights to publishers.

If you are looking to get a publisher, do your research.

Check out David Gaughran, Writer Beware, and Preditors & Editors. They have a lot of information about publishers you should avoid.

Learn all you can about vanity presses. Don’t get suckered in.

Ask questions. Seek answers. And DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now some Q&A.

Q: I saw an ad for a publisher. Are they legit?

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

The Three Kinds of Scenes, According to Mike Nichols

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This post by Dana Stevens originally appeared on Slate on 11/20/14.

“There are only three kinds of scenes: a fight, a seduction or a negotiation,” the protean director Mike Nichols, who died yesterday at age 83, liked to say. It was an idea he often returned to in interviews, often appending as a coda this bit of advice from his former comedy partner Elaine May: “When in doubt, seduce.” It seems an astonishingly simple formulation on which to base a six-decade career spent moving effortlessly from stand-up comedy to theater to film and back to theater again, racking up landmark achievements in every field while always somehow keeping a finger on the pulse of what America was ready to see, needed to see, at that political and cultural moment: the sexual frankness and chilly suburban satire of The Graduate, the impassioned labor activism of Silkwood, the anguished vision of HIV-ravaged gay culture and Reagan-era indifference in Angels in America.

The best scenes from Mike Nichols’ films are seductions, negotiations, and fights all at once. He delighted in moments of high theatricality, intricately blocked verbal showdowns between characters with multiple clashing agendas unknown to each other and sometimes to themselves. But he also excelled at framing such moments cinematically, making the camera movement and music and editing all matter as much as the (always excellent, often world-class) acting.

 

Read the full post, which includes illustrative video clips, on Slate.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

What If Novels Were Treated Like Business Books?

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This post by Roger Tagholm originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 11/13/14.

After attending the FT Business Book of the Year ceremony in London, Roger Tagholm wonders “what if novels had subtitles like business books do?”

You could call it an overdraft of words. There seems to be an unwritten rule that business books have to have lengthy subtitles that seek to explain what the book is about. The shortlist for this week’s Financial Times McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award, which was won by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century on Tuesday night at a dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, afforded some perfect examples (though admittedly, not the winner). Deep breath. Here goes:

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Suveillance by Julia Angwin (Times Books)

House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi (University of Chicago Press)

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton)

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Bantam Press)

If novels were treated like this, we might see:

Atonement: How Making up Stories Can Make Amends for Past Wrongs and Be a Force for Healing by Ian McEwan (Vintage)

 

Read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Magical Thinking: Talent and the Cult of Craft

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This post by Michael Bourne originally appeared on The Millions on 11/18/14.

In August 1954, just months after he graduated from Harvard, John Updike had his first story accepted by The New Yorker. He was 22 years old. Three years after that, having spent a year studying drawing in England and two years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Updike gave up his office job and set out his shingle as a freelance writer. For the next half century, he pumped out a steady stream of award-winning novels, poetry, criticism, and stories, often averaging more than a book a year.

Updike was an excellent student — all A’s from 7th to twelfth grade, summa cum laude from Harvard — and a ferociously hard worker, but he had little formal training in the craft of writing. In fact, as Adam Begley notes in his recent biography, Updike, the future two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner was rejected, twice, in his bid to take English S, Harvard’s most prestigious creative writing class taught by Archibald MacLeish. Yet from 1957, when he left the staff at The New Yorker until his death in 2009, Updike supported four children through two marriages without ever holding down a job other than writer.

Interestingly, Updike’s mother, Linda, was also a writer. Like her son, Linda dedicated her life to the craft of fiction, spending 25 years revising Dear Juan, a ponderous historical novel about the Spanish explorer Ponce de Léon, which remains unpublished to this day. She did eventually publish 10 stories in The New Yorker, along with two story collections (one posthumously), but Begley goes to some length to assure readers that without her famous son’s help rescuing her stories from the slush pile, they likely never would have been published. “I had only a little gift,” Linda once told an interviewer, “but it was the only one I got.”

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

Writing a Book? What if HOW You Tell the Story is More Important Than The Story Itself?

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This post by Ash Ambirge originally appeared on The Middle Finger Project.

I know your dirty little secret. (Not that one. God forbid anyone on the internet finds that one out.)

You want to write a book.

This means three things:

You’re paralyzed with fear that it’ll suck.
It’ll suck so bad that the entire world will snub you and right after that, they’ll revoke your social security number and put you on display as an example of what NOT to do as a human.

You’ve gotten really good at procrastination.
“I should really potpourri that one cupboard underneath the sink in the powder room in preparation for the guests we might have over for New Year’s 2015. Better now than never!“

You worry—like 24 hours a day worry—that no one will care what you have to say.
You don’t even feel important enough to sit in the dunk tank down at the local fair, let alone write a book and have anybody care.

The good news? People look in the medicine cabinet, not in the cupboard underneath the sink. Duh.

The bad news? You will always feel this way…no matter how many things you’ve written, and how many people have loved it.

 

Read the full post on The Middle Finger Project.

 

I Am Not For Everyone (And Neither Are You)

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This post by Jessica Lawlor originally appeared on her site on 11/17/14.

You know what can really hurt sometimes?

Getting negative feedback about something you’ve created. Losing followers online. Unsubscribes from your newsletter. Hearing that someone has said something mean or untrue about you.

Here’s an example: last week I crafted my first-ever Get Gutsy blog community survey. For the most part, the results have been fantastic. I’m learning A TON about what you want, what you enjoy and what could make the Get Gutsy experience even better for you.

However, on the flip side, there have been just a handful of comments that made me stop in my tracks and go “HUH?!” But after that initial sting and singing “Hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate” in my head a couple of times, I tell myself to get over it.

I remind myself of the following:

I am not for everyone.

As much as I’d love for everyone to like me and my blog, it’s simply not the case.

We cannot let the opinions of others’ define our worth.

You are not for everyone, too.

 

Read the full post on Jessica Lawlor’s site.

 

The Creativity Myth

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This post by Kevin Ashton originally appeared on Medium on 10/29/14.

In 1815, Germany’s General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

In other words, Mozart’s greatest symphonies, concertos, and operas came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down.

This letter has been used to explain creation many times. Parts of it appear in The Mathematician’s Mind, written by Jacques Hadamard in 1945; in Creativity: Selected Readings, edited by Philip Vernon in 1976; in Roger Penrose’s award-winning 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind; and it is alluded to in Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 bestseller Imagine. It influenced the poets Pushkin and Goethe and the playwright Peter Shaffer. Directly and indirectly, it helped shape common beliefs about creating.

But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. This was first shown in 1856 by Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn and has been confirmed by other scholars since.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

Just the Right Word is Only a Click Away!

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 11/17/14.

How are your word usage and spelling skills? Try this quiz to find out.

Would you say, “Please join Kerry and me” or “Please join Kerry and I”? Do you lay down or lie down for a nap? Should you rein in or reign in your impulses? Did chaos rein or reign in the classroom for the student teacher? The homicide detective arrived at the scene of the grizzly (or is it grisly) murder. How did that effect (or is it affect) you? What was the effect/affect of that show on your kids?

Did the elicit or the illicit lovers have a discrete or discreet rendezvous? Do you insure, ensure, or assure that your seat belt is fastened? Do you hone in or home in on a problem? Do you say “He got his just desserts” or “He got his just deserts”?

Which is correct, “between you and me” or “between you and I”? Do you peak at a mountain peek or vice-versa? And do those juicy bits of gossip peak your curiosity or pique your curiosity? Do you pore over or pour over the details of a document? Did the singer damage her vocal chords or vocal cords? What’s the difference between continual and continuous? allusion and illusion? aural and oral? idyllic and ideal? further and farther? a gourmet and a gourmand? fictional, fictitious, and fictive? jibe and gibe? e.g. and i.e.? bizarre and bazaar?

What are the main differences between American and British spelling? Do Canadians use British or American, spelling, words and expressions? And what the heck is “codswallop”?

And for you fiction writers, what are the word length guidelines for flash fiction, short short stories, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels? What’s the difference between an antagonist and an antihero? What’s a crucible in fiction? How about dramatic irony? How is a metaphor different from a simile? What’s a McGuffin?

 

Read the full post, which includes answers to these and more usage questions, on The Kill Zone.

 

The Writing Class

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This essay by Jaswinder Bolina originally appeared on Poetry Foundation on 11/12/14.

Sometime in the early 1970s, my parents got into a still-infamous row after one of them splurged two dollars on a houseplant the other insisted they couldn’t afford. That spat took place a few years before I turned up, but they’ve laughed about it so often, I almost remember being there. It fits into my real memories of other squabbles they had in that shabby apartment we lived in on the north side of Chicago, the worn green carpet in its kitchen, a claw-foot tub without a shower in its single bathroom, scuffed paint on its walls, their arguments tumbling through whole evenings. It fits into my memory of what money meant to their otherwise happy marriage. Sundays we’d go in the used Oldsmobile from one market with a sale on tomatoes to the other where a gallon of milk sold for 10 cents cheaper. On the way home, we’d forgo the bright new gas station for the gloomy old one where unleaded cost a few cents less.

These are some of the ways my immigrant parents survived recessions, layoffs, and the disappearance of entire industries from the U.S. economy. This is how they earned, saved, and invested enough to move us into a brick split-level house with a two-and-a-half-car garage in the suburbs by the time I started secondary school. Though my father clocked into the same hydraulics parts plant as a machinist for more than a decade and my mother did data entry for an hourly wage at a financial publishing company, they could afford to buy me a set of encyclopedias and an Apple computer. They could pay for tennis lessons and give me a stereo system with a CD player and a double-cassette deck. They could send me to the private academy instead of the public high school.

This is how I lived a socioeconomic reality almost entirely separate from theirs. While my parents scrimped and stressed daily as part of the working classes, I went to a school with honors societies, study abroad programs, and AP courses. I went to college. I managed to turn my philosophy major into a high-paying job at a software startup south of Silicon Valley. Higher education had kept its promise of onward and upward mobility, which seemed easy enough in the bloated turn-of-the-century tech economy. Still, after less than six months at the startup, I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. This didn’t make sense to my mother and father. Though we were far removed from the ragged apartments of my childhood, their class consciousness remained rooted in those earlier struggles. It told them we weren’t the kind of people who did certain kinds of things. Abandoning a salaried job with stock options for a graduate degree offering little hope of future employment or reliable income was chief among these, but I liked the integrity in my plan. If a degree in poetry dumped me into bohemian poverty, I thought, so be it. At least I was being earnest in my pursuit. I was that kind of people.

 

Read the full essay on Poetry Foundation.

 

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.