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Archive for the ‘Arts’ Category

The ABC Trifecta of Writing: Art, Business, Craft

Posted in Arts, Writing, tagged , , , , on August 11, 2011| 9 Comments »

I’m writing this up in my hotel room at the SCBWI conference. I just heard an amazing keynote speech by Bruce Coville, who was in part saying what I said in my blog post last week about influence and never knowing how your actions will affect others. Only he said it in a more articulate and developed way and threw in several musical theater references for good measure.

He also gave many tips for writers, and something he said jarred a useful insight loose in my brain. He talked about the importance of art, craft, and business sense. All in one speech. I’ve been thinking about each of these subjects a great deal, and you’ve seen some of the results of that thinking here on this blog. But the speech gave me some much needed cohesion.

Sometimes I feel like art has become something of a dirty word among many writers. If we’re serious about writing (and oh, are we ever serious), then we discuss craft a great deal. Sometimes we even bite the bullet and talk about business and the industry in ways that are more thoughtful than reactionary and more intelligent than just following the herd. (Sometimes we freak out instead.) We can be inspirational within certain boundaries. But art. Yes, art is a loaded word.

When we hear others speak about art, perhaps we imagine the dilettante artist who never actually writes anything. Or perhaps we think about those who start with a message and try to slap their audience in the face with it. Or perhaps we think of something inaccessible, like the serialist movement in music that I was talking about on Tuesday. The starving artist comes to mind, the irresponsible flake who needs to be talked down from the ledge by the long-suffering editor, the tortured soul who has a room filled with crumpled pieces of paper (see the recent movie Limitless, in which the writer portrayed has nothing to do with reality whatsoever).

And yet, this is not how art needs to be, and this is not how we must define ourselves as artists. Art doesn’t have to mean any of these things. Instead, it is an essential leg in the tripod of the writer.

Here’s how the system works: A good grasp of craft means that we produce sellable and marketable works, which helps our business. It also means that we have the tools at our disposable to create art that works, that really does evoke emotion and help us see the world differently. Craft is essential.

A good grasp of business means that we can get our work out into the world. This facilitates its purpose as art to communicate. It’s also always nice to avoid being screwed and to get paid for our work, which helps us continue both our craft and our art.

An acceptance of our work as art keeps us inspired. It encourages us to keep improving our craft so that we can achieve more through our words, and it challenges us to learn the business side so that we can achieve greater impact.

Lose touch with the business aspect and we cannot support ourselves or get our work out into the world. Lose touch with the craft aspect and we cannot write well enough to be effective. Lose touch with our work as art and we flirt with a sense of futility and forget to take risks.

I tend to neglect the art aspect that reminds me of my purpose and pour all my energy into craft and business. This choice, I tell myself, makes me a serious writer.

But I am wrong. My best work doesn’t happen when I only have two of my cornerstones. It takes place when I remember all three and dare to write bigger. It takes place when I accept that I am a businesswoman, a craftsperson, AND an artist.

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Can Blogs Be Art?

Posted in Arts, Music, Writing, tagged , , , , , on August 9, 2011| 7 Comments »

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about art: how art can be defined, what its possible purposes are, what I am trying to accomplish personally as an artist. This exploration began many years ago when I was a student musician: a singer, a songwriter, and a composer.

In my music program, we spent a year on music theory that looks beyond the standard Western tonal palette. Our curriculum began with late 19th century composers like Wagner and Debussy, which I very much enjoyed studying, and then progressed to atonalism, serialism, and other 20th century classical music (including John Cage, Philip Glass, etc.). We also spent a quarter studying 20th century music history.

After I finished this course of study, I went on to take a few composition classes and seminars and began to consider more seriously the question of why. Why do so many cultures include music as an integral component? Why do so many of us like to listen to and/or produce music? What was I trying to achieve with the music I was writing?

The answer, I decided at the time (and it still holds true for me), is communication. Music is a way of communicating to others; of evoking a response, often emotional; of taking something we’re familiar with and translating it into something new, or of exposing us to something new that is outside our own frame of reference. Music can tell a story, something that happens especially frequently in vocal music (my other focus at school) but can also happen in purely instrumental music (listen to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique for an excellent example of programme music). Music can make us feel a certain way: when I’m watching a suspenseful TV show, it’s often the music that makes me jumpy before anything has even happened on-screen. Music can share universal experiences or distill unique experiences in a way that are more relatable. One of the reasons I adore musical theater as much as I do is because it combines the dramatic potentials of theater with the emotional resonance of music, while remaining accessible to a more general audience than opera often does.

Unfortunately a lot of the music composed in academia, the new Classical music of the 20th century, didn’t seem to me to be very accessible at all. In fact, at the time it baffled me because the goal of communication often seemed very absent from it. Indeed, serialism in particular seemed like a game played with numbers that had very little to do with actual sounds at all. I realize now that I wasn’t seeing the complete picture; I believe even the most experimental pieces were trying to communicate. The problem, for me, was that they were communicating with only a select group of people who were educated enough in music to be able to understand them. I was in that group, yes, but what about everyone else? Imagine the equivalent of throwing out an old common language and writing in a new language; you will only be able to communicate with the select group also versed in the new language. So what we are talking about then is the question of audience. If art is communication, then considering a given piece of art’s intended audience becomes very important.

I also approach writing as art, and therefore as an act of communication. But in pursuing that line of thinking, I realized there are many forms that written art can take. We have the obvious: novels, short stories, plays, poems. But we also have the slightly less obvious (at least to me): letters, blogs, Google+/Twitter/Facebook. Am I saying everyone’s Facebook account is art? I’m not sure if I’d go quite that far (although feel free to make a case for it in the comments). I’m saying it can be art; it has the potential to be art. I’ve certainly created art through letters/emails, in which I create an idea, a vision of who I am and what my life story is. And then on the flip side there are the banal and mundane emails that are just a recital of facts or a quick way to make plans.

I’m in love with this great art project, in which a photographer traveled around the country taking photos of people’s refrigerators. I think about this project all the time because I am just blown away by the coolness of it, showing the stories of these random people through one photo. To me, this is art—it turns my assumptions around, it evokes emotion in me, it causes me to see the world around me in a different way.

So then is this blog art? It certainly tries to do those same things. Some of you will think I’m being pretentious by labeling my blog as art, but isn’t it interesting to think about? I like to think of each essay being a small piece of a greater mosaic—I wonder what it will look like when it is complete. I wonder what picture I will have created. I get excited just thinking about it.

What is art? Is it in the eye of the beholder, the creator, or both? Is it about intention or execution? What does art mean to you?

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Forever Sixteen: Perpetual Adolescence

Posted in Arts, Science fiction and fantasy, Writing, tagged , , , , , on August 2, 2011| 18 Comments »

I have the pleasure of announcing that my story “Forever Sixteen” is now up on Daily Science Fiction’s website. I’ve been very excited ever since I sold the story back in March, and I’m thrilled that it’s now available for everyone to read.

 

The main character is a girl whose aging and development has been arrested so that she remains sixteen years old (if you want to know why, you’ll have to read the story). What would it be like to stay sixteen forever? On the one hand, we live in a society that is obsessed with youth and appearance, so the idea of being able to retain that youth (and implied health) is quite attractive. On the other hand, would you really want to be sixteen for the forseeable future? I didn’t even have huge high school traumas and I’m still not overly enthusiastic at the thought of remaining a perpetual teenager.

Going wider, this premise can be seen as a metaphor illustrating the tension between the desire for stasis and the need for change. We live in a world that is constantly changing, and we’re constantly changing within it. It’s natural for us to want to impose our control on such chaos, to attempt to preserve the status quo. So many of us fear change (and I’m certainly no exception), even when the change is largely positive in nature. And yet, what if that potential for change was taken away from us? What if everything really did stay the same, even our own bodies and the hormone levels coursing through them? As much as I sometimes dread change, this story illustrates one of my true nightmares: the attempt to suspend change.

We’ve all heard the old saw about how the only sure things in life are death and taxes. But whenever I hear that, I always think that in reality, the only sure thing in life is change. Life may trundle along on an even keel  for a while, even for many years, but ultimately something will happen to disrupt its direction.  Sometimes we choose the change; sometimes it chooses us–like death, a natural disaster, or a shift in politics or the economy. Sometimes we have to fight for change, like the protagonist of my story. And sometimes change comes at a high price, at which point we are called upon to decide: how high is too high?

On a more personal note, this story is one of my own favorites. I don’t know if this is true of other writers, but I definitely have the stories I’ve written that are especially meaningful to me and stay close to my heart. Right now I have three of those special stories, and this is one of them (the other two are still looking for homes). The fact that my first pro sale was made with this story in particular makes me feel especially pleased.

So tell me: would you want to stay a teenager forever?

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Writers are Super Heroes

Posted in Arts, Writing, tagged , , on July 19, 2011| 41 Comments »

I have a writer friend who is having a bit of a tough time right now, and I am writing this for you. (You know who you are.)

It is okay, natural, and possibly even healthy that you are having trouble embracing your writer identity right now. Take your time about it–it’s an important identity to get to know. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: your writer identity is like your super hero identity. Yes, I’m serious. Right now you’re learning to find the super hero within.

On the outside, writers may appear like normal human beings. Some of us are frumpy or bad dressers, some of us need haircuts. Many of us wear spectacles. Some of us have unexpected hair colors or holes in our bodies that weren’t there when we were born. Some of us have a clear affinity to steam punk and corsets, others to shapeless T-shirts with geeky slogans on them. A lot of us are introverts, and we can often be found with our noses stuck in a book (or a smart phone, or a Kindle, or…). But all of this is just a facade, a way to divert attention from our secret identities.

All writers are super heroes. We fight ignorance and apathy, loss of wonder and despair. We entertain people who deeply need to be distracted from pain or sickness. We make people think of consequences, both of personal actions and society’s decisions. We remind people of what it is to be human, both the good and the bad, and we inspire people to strive for the best.

Many writers live in the stars. We dream of times past and future, reinterpreting what has happened and twisting together visions of what is to come. We deal in possibilities, in vast heroics and small personal acts of courage, in envisioning worlds that we hope for and fear. We keep the spark of ideas alive, even ideas that aren’t enjoying their time in the public spotlight, so that someday when we need them, they will still be available to us.

We create characters who take the proxy role of mother and father, husband and wife, best friend, diabolical arch-nemesis, and noble mentor. We teach people how to live, how to survive through hard times, and how to die. We serve as society’s mirror and conscience simultaneously.

Sometimes we get tired. Sometimes we fall short. Sometimes we feel like we’re not really super heroes after all, and we don’t belong in the Super Hero League of Awesomeness. Maybe we lack some credentials, or maybe we don’t know the right people, or maybe we’re not good enough yet. Maybe not enough people read our stories or buy our books or follow us on Twitter. We are unsung, unappreciated, without creative mojo. We toil away in our anonymity and obscurity, wondering if what we’re doing even matters.

But oh, my friend, when you ask yourself this question (as I know you will, because we all do), answer with a resounding Yes! It is the lot of a super hero to be handed thankless tasks and toil away with little personal reward. But we continue because of our conviction that it matters; that we can, in our own humble way, make a difference.

We give the world its voice. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

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Choose Your Own Adventure

Posted in Arts, Life, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on July 12, 2011| 13 Comments »

I’ve been feeling all organized because last weekend I made a list of topics for my next several posts. And then this morning I read a blog post offering some misguided writing advice. (No, I’m not going to link to it. I’m sure way too many writers read it as is.) Cue complete topic derailment.

I’ve already written about writing advice in the past, but the more I think about it, the more I think this issue isn’t confined to advice about writing. It isn’t even confined to advice about artistic pursuits. Over the years I have certainly received a great deal of advice about basic life topics, some of which has thrown me for a loop and later proven to be completely wrong. (My favorite? “Oh, Amy, you just have delusions of grandeur” in response to me having big artistic dreams. Way to try to ensure they’ll never happen.)

Add to this the undeniable fact that I sometimes give what could be construed as advice right here on this blog, and I feel almost obligated to write the following.

Read, learn, listen to other people’s point of view and feedback. Think about what people say, try out various ideas. Don’t automatically assume you know the one true way to doing anything. But ultimately, DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. Do what you need to do (assuming that what you need to do doesn’t involve anything blatantly illegal, of course). And more than that, do what works. Advice, even the more strongly worded variety, is merely a suggestion that we can take or leave according to our own inclination. Even if it’s good advice, we might not be ready to implement it. And if it’s bad advice, we might accidentally harm ourselves or take the plunge into regret that I talked about last week.

That’s one of the really wonderful things about life. We get to choose our own adventure. Sure, we can’t control everything or even most things, but within our small scope of decision, we act as our own kings and queens.

It’s not such a leap to believe that creative types need to follow their muses and express their personal integrity and vision of the world in their art. But what if we take a step farther and consider ourselves to be art and our lifetimes to be our canvas of expression? The expressions “Follow your heart” and “Follow your gut” are close but incomplete representations of this kind of life. Follow who you are, and even more, follow who you wish to become.

Choosing to live this way can mean leaving a lot of the advice behind. The Backbone Project has really opened my eyes to this. Why do people care whether I drink alcohol or not? Why do they care (especially women!) if I self-identify as a feminist? Why do people want to change my writing process? Often I think the answer is that they don’t actually care about me personally at all. Instead they are seeking to validate their own way of life and their own choices. Instead of following who they are and finding a sense of rightness in that, they need reflection from the outside world to reassure them. Instead of deep and subtle thinking, they allow themselves to fall into the black and white thinking trap: I’m right and you’re wrong. Because this doesn’t work for me, obviously it won’t work for anybody. Something needs to be fixed; you need to be fixed. If I have a big bad problem, that means you must not have any problems at all or else you’re trying to compete with me, but it doesn’t matter because my problem must be the worst. (Or flip it around: if you have a big bad problem, that must mean my own problems aren’t important at all.)

Don’t take my advice about this, though. Think about it, and make up your own mind. Choose your own adventure. Turn your life into art with every choice you make.

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Inspiration: Anne of Green Gables

Posted in Arts, Life, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2011| 7 Comments »

A few weeks ago I was asked to write an essay, and the only requirement was that it should be inspirational. At first I wasn’t too worried: People had told me they found my essays inspirational in the past, so it was obviously something of which I am capable. Then I started to overthink and wonder if I could be inspirational on command. And finally I was given a more narrow topic (kindness) and the rest is history.
In that middle stage of overthinking, I asked myself what I find inspirational. And the first thing I thought of was one of my favorite books, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.
I want to be Anne Shirley (the protagonist) when I grow up. I’ve wanted to be her since the first time I read the book, which I received on my ninth birthday, and I imagine I will always want this. Possibly one of the biggest compliments someone could pay me would be to compare me to Anne. (Not that this will ever happen, since people don’t tend to go around comparing people to fictional characters. Except for Fred from the TV show Angel. I get that comparison a lot.)

Why do I love Anne? She’s wildly imaginative and creative, she’s intelligent and ambitious, and she always has good intentions. But she’s not perfect; she makes mistakes all the time, and she has character flaws that she struggles with (her temper, her vanity, her tendency to look before she leaps, an imagination that is occasionally a little bit too good). Her imperfections make her human, make her someone I can aspire to be. Perhaps L.M. Montgomery included so many faults because of the conventions of that era’s children’s literature to include morality lessons, but to me it never comes across as preaching.

At the beginning of the first book, Anne’s had a really hard life. She’s a poor orphan who has spent all of her life in and out of various dysfunctional foster families and institutions. Her schooling has been irregular, and she hasn’t been treated particularly well. She has every reason in the world to be hard, bitter, distrusting, and unpleasant. No one would blame her if she felt depressed or discouraged. But instead, Anne reframes her own life and takes control of her own story. She uses her imagination to create her own best friends and to make her world more beautiful. She notices and appreciates the little things. She has a warm open heart and the ability to find kindred spirits everywhere she goes, even when the world doesn’t initially appear very friendly. She bravely learns from her mistakes and keeps moving forward. She rises above her initial circumstances and goes on to create a life for herself filled with love, friends, scholarship, and beauty.

Through Anne’s story, we get a glimpse of a better world. One of the recurring plots in the first three novels (those are the ones I’ve read over and over because I can’t quite handle the idea of Anne grown up after college) is how Anne affects the people around her. She meets people who at first glance are difficult and curmudgeonly, and she influences them for good. She has such an open, kind heart herself, and she spreads it to the people with whom she interacts. She charms people with her refreshing sincerity and genuine good will, and she brings out the best in them. In the world of Anne of Green Gables, kindness and good intentions prevail.

I don’t believe that this idealized world is the one we actually live in. But it is the world that I wish we lived in, and my vision of it inspires me to do my little part in bringing it closer to reality. I want to be like Anne, bringing hope and beauty wherever I go and lighting up the world with my presence. I want to emerge from adversity still in touch with the joys of life and determined to learn from my mistakes. I want to inspire others the way Anne (and through her L.M. Montgomery) inspires me.

What’s the first thing to come to mind when you think of inspiration? What are the books or movies, characters or real-life people who drive you forward? What inspirational influences do you think have been especially critical for you?

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Buying Happiness

Posted in Arts, Life, Society, tagged , , , , , on April 7, 2011| 12 Comments »

Photo by Werner Kunz

I attended a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, and I had a conversation that’s become stuck in my mind. I was talking to a friend who was foregoing travel for a period of time (maybe a couple of years) in order to save up for a car he really wants. He said something like, “I always prefer spending money on things instead of experiences because I can keep on having great experiences with material objects for a long period of time.”

This statement caused me to begin questioning the culture of consumerism and my own relationship with the materialistic world. If questioned, I would have answered the exact opposite of my friend, that I prefer to spend money on experiences because those experiences will make me happier and more engaged in my life as a whole. There’s even research supporting my viewpoint.

But it’s not that simple, is it? I like material things as well as anyone else. My husband and I own a house, and we just purchased a new car since my old one (a ‘95 Corolla) has become finicky in its old age. Plus I have my three consumer weaknesses: books, sheet music, and clothes & jewelry. Hence the main storage problems in my house are bookshelf space and closet space.

I remember when I was starting my studio business, and I had to strictly prioritize my budget to make my earnings stretch. I allowed myself to buy sheet music (within reason) because I used it in my business. I only bought books on special occasions (thank goodness for libraries), and pretty much only mass market paperbacks even then. I did go clothes shopping, but I was careful to visit stores like Mervyn’s, Target, and Ross, where my money would go a lot farther.

In return for this thrift, I allowed myself experiences that I desperately wanted. I always allowed myself gas money if I wanted to drive somewhere to visit friends or enjoy a particular sight. I’d occasionally splurge on a dinner out with friends. And I’d save everything else for my annual trip abroad—the experience of travel and seeing other cultures was my highest priority. Sometimes I wished I could buy “pretty” things, but more often I worried about unexpected medical expenses taking away my travel budget. Experience trumped all.

One year, however, after I had received some gift money, I splurged and bought the complete set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. I was so excited about this purchase, and I don’t even know how many times I’ve watched those DVDs—over and over, and I’m sure I’ll be watching them many more times in the future. So I understand what my friend meant about material objects giving lasting pleasure. What about a good piano? Does that count as a material object or do we purchase what a piano represents: the experience of making music? And driving in an expensive car (like my friend wants) is a completely different experience than driving my rattling old Corolla.

I wonder how often when we’re spending money on something material, what we’re really buying is the experience the object represents. I think I’d personally still prioritize straight-up experience expenses over more object-oriented ones: a night at the theater, a delicious meal, being able to spend time with non-local friends, traveling around the world. But perhaps my friend and I aren’t so different in our thought processes after all.

In which case, here’s the lesson I’m taking away from this: if I am making a purchase, I will try to remember to stop and consider what experience a given object represents, and then decide whether it is an experience that I truly want and that the object will actually deliver.

Objects are never going to be what makes me the happiest, however. My husband, my dog, my friends, intellectual stimulation and challenge, music and stories—these are the most important to me.

Which do you prefer—spending money on experiences or physical objects? Care to share a particularly memorable experience or purchase? I’m all ears.

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Writing Fiction is Easy? Don’t Make Me Laugh.

Posted in Arts, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2011| 14 Comments »

“Anyone can write popular fiction… You just tell a story that everyone likes.”

Does this quote make anyone else’s blood boil? This type of talk makes me want to be alternately scathing, snarky, and pitying. I got it from an essay by Kat Howard, about her chance parking lot encounter with some fellow who made light of her post doc position in medieval and speculative literature.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and that most (if not all) of my readers understand how truly challenging and difficult it is to write a novel, whether it be mainstream or genre, adult or children’s, an epic tome or a light-hearted romp. And I don’t want to get into the genre/literary question, so let’s please not go there.

Instead, I’m going to break down this statement. Anyone can write popular fiction, can they? Let’s take a look.

Writing Fiction — Lifestyle — What It Takes

1. Hours upon hours of sitting by yourself doing the writing. Not to mention the research. Not to mention the revisions. Not to mention the nit-picky copy editing.
2. Avoiding the lure of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Farmville, MMORPGs, Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. so you can actually do said writing.
3. Carving the time out of your already busy life, in which you’re also expected to have a day job, take care of your family, clean and do chores, and deal with life’s multiple disasters and time sinks.
4. Smiling and nodding when people say patronizing things to you. Explaining kindly and gently that building a writing career takes a long time, and no, it won’t make you rich. Alternately, getting into a lot of arguments.
5. Thinking about your story in the shower, while walking the dog, while doing the above-mentioned cooking and cleaning, while driving from point A to point B, and while you should be sleeping.
6. In your copious spare time (ha!), reading tons and tons of books, both in and out of your genre. Not to mention your nonfiction research materials.
7. Dealing on a daily basis with rejection and maintaining a positive upbeat attitude, a can-do spirit, and continued forward thinking to the next project.
8. Reading unpublished work from other writers of roughly your same level (at least in theory), learning how to both give and receive critiques

Writing Fiction — Craft — Required Understanding

1. Characters. This includes understanding every character in your book, knowing their back story, knowing their mannerisms and how they speak (word choice, etc.), knowing what they would know, knowing their motivations (what they want) and making sure you’re consistent about it. You need to keep your POV consistent over the course of the book, whatever you decide (first, close third, omniscient, etc.) Your protagonist needs to be sympathetic in some way. He/she/it needs to be a driving force in the novel, not a passive character who is only acted upon. Also your protagonist and probably other characters as well need a moving and well executed character arc, in which they grow and change and react to events and are different by the end of the novel.
2. Plot. This includes knowing how to structure a novel, making sure there is interesting conflict, making sure the stakes are periodically raised and the conflict builds over the course of the novel, knowing what your main narrative engine is, as well as keeping track of subplots and planning the correct number of them. Also the plot needs to hold together and make sense (no plot holes, please), you need to know the purpose of and conflict in each scene. You’ve got to keep the pace up (make stuff explode or whatever) or it will get too boring. This would also include making sure the continuity is sound and that the scenes happen in the correct order. You must make sure you create a hook at the beginning to draw the reader into the novel, and you aim for achieving emotional resonance and a certain closure at the end of the novel (unless it’s in a series, in which case you’re busy thinking about the overall series arc as well as the novel arc as well as deciding whether the novel needs to stand on its own or not).
3. World building. This is understanding how your world works. This includes the magic system, which needs to have rules and costs; geography, especially of a secondary world or another planet; economy; political system; social structure and mores; religion; technology level as well as any invented tech; magical creatures and/or aliens and how they differ from humans; and various existing infrastructure. Then once you’ve created your world, you have to get it across in the novel without over-utilizing info dumps or slowing down the pace.
4. Prose. This is being able to use the English language passably well, which is surprisingly difficult, even for native speakers. This includes knowing as many grammar rules as you can cram into your brain and then knowing when to break them. Points to remember include the following: eschew adverbs and speech tags other than “said” and “asked” and minimize speech tags in general. Vary sentence structure. Try really, really hard not to overwrite or use too many adjectives for your really shiny setting. Remember that you do have to say something about the setting, though. Try not to overuse words such as “that” or “really” or the “to be” verb. Use active verbs, but not too many weird verbs or it’s distracting. Spelling skills also help as spellcheck won’t catch all your mistakes.

Writing Popular Fiction that Everyone Likes — Good luck.

1. In order to make your fiction popular, you have to sell it. Unfortunately, being able to sell something is not necessarily the same skill set as being able to create something.
2. Ability to write and deliver pitches, queries, synopses, and basic summaries of your book that will make random people on the street want to read it instead of getting on with their lives. Also organizational ability to keep track of it all, including short story submissions, workshop/conference deadlines, and market research.
3. Social media and promotion! Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, keeping up-to-date on the latest trends, recording a podcast. Being interviewed for blogs, radio programs, and podcasts. Writing guest posts, being active on forums, making a book trailer, always presenting your best possible face to the public. School visits, public readings, convention and conference appearances.
4. Being lucky enough to write in line with the current zeitgeist and have your novel come out before it ends.
5. Having your publisher decide that your novel is SO AWESOME that they’re going to pour big marketing dollars into its production and promotion. Getting good bookstore placement. Getting into many bookstores at all. Having your cover not suck. Getting big names to blurb the novel. (Please note that many of these things are outside the writer’s control.)

What did I miss? Feel free to kvetch below. Even being incomplete, I think my list makes it clear that writing a novel is never easy, and writing a really good novel is even harder than that. I rest my case.

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Desperation is not your Friend

Posted in Arts, Life, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2011| 8 Comments »

Last week we talked about thinking of writing as a business, which includes educating ourselves about the industry and making informed choices. Today I want to talk about something that keeps us from making clear-headed business decisions. 

Desperation.

Desperation rears its ugly head for most writers, often (although not exclusively) toward the beginning of a career. We want so badly to be published, to be chosen, to have public validation that we aren’t wasting our time. We want to get our words and stories to the public. We want to be able to tell our friends and acquaintances, “Why, yes, I have an agent now. And Big Publisher XYZ wants to buy my novel.” Or “Why, yes, my indie-published novel is on the Kindle Best-seller List now, thanks for asking.” We want to know that we’re moving forward with our craft and not staying stuck in a hellish holding pattern. We want we want we want.

Some amount of ambition and desire for success is healthy. It might keep us on a daily writing schedule or encourage us to continue sending out those queries. It might motivate us to improve our craft or take a workshop. But it’s so easy to cross from these helpful impulses into the dark side of desperation.

The danger of entering that desperate place is that our decision-making process becomes impaired. Instead of making practical, well-reasoned decisions, we’re suddenly willing to do almost anything to see our work in print. We’ll sign with an agent even though we either haven’t done thorough research on the agent’s history or have a bad feeling about the working relationship. We’ll sign a publishing contract even though it offers poor terms. We’ll rush into self-publishing our novel electronically without enlisting first readers and/or editors to help us make the book the best it can be. We’ll say something best left unsaid on the social media of our choice because we’re so stressed/insecure/jealous/upset that we just can’t help ourselves.

Acting from a place of desperation is the opposite of acting from empowerment. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a traditional publishing structure or taking the indie path. In either case, desperation will lead to poor decisions (unless you’re very, very lucky). Desperation will tempt you to devalue yourself and your work and believe me, you don’t want to go down that path.

So what is a poor writer to do? Stop. Breathe. Try to convince yourself that you’re not in a race and you don’t have to hurry to the detriment of everything else. Avoid comparing yourself to other writers who are doing everything better, faster, with more shiny. Avoid it like the plague. Postpone any big decisions until you can talk yourself into a calmer state of mind.

And remember you’re not alone. I think writer desperation is very common, but we don’t always talk about it. I am writing this to tell you that I have felt it, I have been there, and I might very well be there again. All of the doubt and the waiting and the anxiety and the rejection and the lack of understanding–it SUCKS. Of course we sometimes feel desperate. But we don’t have to give the desperation the power to take over our lives. We can feel it and then keep going, keep trying, keep believing in ourselves. And we can do our best to make our business decisions based on the facts and our priorities instead of on a crazy-making emotional state.

Does anyone else ever experience writer desperation? Have any good tips on how to avoid it or deal with it once it’s happening? Please share!

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Embrace the Suck

Posted in Arts, Life, tagged , , , , , , , on March 17, 2011| 8 Comments »

When I decided a few years ago that I was going to get serious about my writing, I knew I was going to be writing novels. Novels were, after all, the bulk of what I read. I sat down and wrote a novel to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it.

That’s when I actually became serious about writing. I knew I had the discipline, I knew writing was something I enjoyed and found satisfying. And I fell in with a genre critique group and said to myself, “Oh, I’m supposed to be writing short stories too. Sure, I’ll give it a try. After the novel, how hard could it be?”

Cue the laugh track. Yes, I was being stupid, but I figured out my own stupidity soon enough. I wrote a short story, and it was very hard. So much worldbuilding for so small a project! It drove me nuts. And then I had to rewrite the story, and rewrite the story, and it didn’t matter how much I rewrote this stupid story, because it was never going to work.

Over the course of the next year, I wrote more stories (although perhaps not as many as I should have). At some point I got the bright idea that I should also be reading short stories. (I know. Genius at work here.) That entire year, I hated writing short stories. I actively disliked it. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it (probably stubbornness). I told myself that short stories didn’t matter anyway, because obviously I was meant to write novels.

Then I finally worked on a story that I enjoyed writing (probably not coincidentally, the one I just sold). I thought to myself, “Maybe short stories aren’t so bad. I mean, they’re annoying, but they have their good points.” I wrote more short stories.

Yesterday I found myself thinking, “You know, even if I got a book deal right now,” — for the record, this is impossible as I have nothing out on submission, but a girl likes to dream — “I’d still want to keep writing short stories.” I stopped and realized what I had just said, and shook my head at myself.

Why am I telling you this rather long story? Because so often we pigeonhole ourselves. Sometimes this can be useful to keep focus and make sure we’re prioritizing our goals, but sometimes we accidentally limit ourselves instead.

It’s especially easy to limit ourselves when we start something new and, surprise surprise, we’re not very good at it. It’s so easy to say, “I don’t like this anyway” or “This is too hard” or “I’m going to do shiny thing z instead.” I’ve seen this over and over as a music teacher. A lot of students thought they wanted to learn how to sing, but once they realized that singing is difficult, that it requires hard work and practice and dedication and failure, many of them would drop out. (Especially adults. It always seemed especially surprising to the adults.) A lot of my children students didn’t enjoy practicing the piano because it was hard and they weren’t very good. If they stuck with it for awhile, though, and were able to pass a certain threshold of competence, all of a sudden playing the piano became much more pleasurable.

I think a lot of pursuits are like this. When we’re starting out and don’t have many skills, it kind of sucks. But then as we start to improve, it gets more and more interesting and exciting. Remembering this helps us keep trying when we’re still in the stage of unpleasantness.

Has anyone else had an experience like mine? Care to share?

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