This happens all the time. It's actually a great motivator to get you writing. You read something that has gotten great reviews, maybe a movie deal, and it's terrible. At least, it is to you. But it might be useful for you to look at this book more objectively and try to figure out what it has that you can learn from. A great plot? A great concept? Good cover art? Good marketing campaign? (Sorry you don't have control over the last two). But you can learn even from bad books. And one thing that I have always believed is that it doesn't matter how many other good writers there are out there, or how difficult it is to get published. If you are better, if you are so good that an editor, upon reading your manuscript, says--I don't care who this person or who they murdered--I have to buy this book. Then you will be published. So, don't think about how bad a book is. Think about how good yours is.
For me--always the character. But I love novels that are character-based. My husband is the opposite. He could care less how interesting a character is. He wants plot. And maybe some "sensawonda." For me, though, the best novels combine great character and great plot. They may not be equal in both areas, but they don't give either one up. And I think in the end it doesn't matter which comes to you first. Let the other build as you work. For plot, I always ask myself what is the worst thing that can happen to this character next. And then I write it. For character, if that's what you lack, you might ask--what character would be most damaged by these events? And write about them.
I get asked this a lot because I have five children ages 4-12, and I've been writing for ten years, since my oldest was very small. I wrote through pregnancies (and mine are miserable with depression), through financial hard times, through Christmas and New Year and birthdays, and through the death of a child. I need to write, I think. I feel like in the life of a stay-at-home mom, it was important for me to have something that was permanent at the end of each day, to prove to myself and to the world that I mattered. I woke up at 4 a.m. eight months pregnant to write sometimes (I don't stay up late because my brain turns to mush at 10--I'm a morning person). I woke up sleeping babies to synchronize naptime so that I would have an hour to myself every day. I took one day off a week (Sunday), but I wrote every other day without fail. It kept me sane after I gave up my position at the university. See--they were wrong!
Not all writers I know are driven this way, but most are. Otherwise they would be able to keep normal jobs and not care how their time was used, so long as they were paid. Maybe what I describe isn't something that you can manage. That's fine. You're not a bad person if you need more than five hours of sleep at night. But everyone can take ten minutes a day and write something. One page. If that's all you can do, it's still three hundred plus pages at the end of the year. That's a novel. Not one you can sell, maybe. But it's a start.
Until very recently, I wrote mostly during naptime and had a goal of 3,00 words a day. Once I had written that much, I considered myself "finished." There were times that I had a couple of projects going at once, and I'd get up early to work on one and then work on the other later, but I rarely got in more than that 3,000 words. It felt like a creative limit of some kind.
This year my youngest is four and in preschool, so I've had the chance to write all day on some days. I've found that I have been able to get out up to 15,000 words in one day, though normally it's more like 8-10,000. It's slow and steady, not in rushes or bursts like it used to be, which I kind of miss. But who can complain about 50+ pages a day? In the last 3 months I wrote about 350,000 words. So maybe I hadn't hit my limit? Or maybe with my kids more independent and me able to sleep more, it has gone up?
When you find yourself taking out a single word here or there, it's probably time to get a fresh perspective. Or if you have time, set it aside for a few months, and take it out to read again then. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's ready to be published, though, only that you can't figure out what's wrong with it. If you can still see a problem with a character's motivation, or a weak spot in the plot, or if you know that a certain scene is wrong--then don't send it out. Always make it the best you can before you let anyone else read it. Because it's utterly unfair, if someone else has gone to the effort of reading your entire manuscript, to say to them after their critique--I knew that already. If you knew it already . . .
I'm going with my Winston Churchill answer here: "Never, never, never give up." If you want to be a writer, write. No one can stop you. Being published is a nice prize, but just like the winner of the marathon isn't the only runner out there, you should take pride in finishing a manuscript just like someone training for a marathon takes pride in finishing a long run. It was hard work. And it has a value all its own, unrelated to winning any race. It makes you stronger.
As to giving up on a particular manuscript, I have tried to do it many times with many novels. Some stay dead and some won't stay dead. I haven't necessarily sold those that I want to resurrect, but I keep thinking they're just not quite good enough yet. Someday . . .
Critique groups can be great. Fresh eyes all the time. Except when they stop being fresh eyes. I think most critique groups, unfortunately, are only really useful for a couple of years. After that, they are just friends sitting around talking about writing, with maybe some words in front of them to base their old, predictable pronouncements on. Now friends are great, and writing friends are very special indeed. But don't confuse them with people who will be able to help you fix your novel. And by the way, no one can really tell you how to fix your novel anyway. Not even your editor. They can only tell you what they think is wrong. Your job is to figure out how to fix it, and it may surprise you when you discover it.
Nothing wrong with it. I had my dissertation bound by a vanity press. But it's not being published nationally. There may be a reason that your book will not have a national interest. That's fine. But if you think it does, don't publish with a vanity press just because it's not good enough yet. Make it good enough.
I felt like this for several years. I think it just means that you're really close, and you have to keep going. I've known a lot of writers who got really close and then gave up. I guess their priorities changed. That's fine. But don't give up because you think the publishing industry is against you. I always use sports metaphors, but if you're a runner in high school who is the top in the nation in your age, say doing a mile in 4 minutes, that doesn't mean that you will be a professional athlete automatically. You may be very close to the top, but when there are five hundred people who are that close, you've got to get even closer.
Very funny. I can hardly stop laughing. I'm working on it, OK. I'm a writer, not a web designer. But the problem is, I want to be able to add content when I've got a moment, and I'm a bit of a control freak. So you get this.
Maybe. I think some books might be sold that aren't that good, purely because the author had some kind of connection with the publisher. But I never wanted to just sell a book. I wanted to have a career, and you don't do that by writing badly and focusing all your energy on making connections. You do that by writing well, and stopping in at a conference now and again, if it fits in your schedule. And maybe having an agent or somebody else helping you along.
I secretly think also, whenever I hear about someone who has sold a first novel miraculously, without spending years in an apprenticeship of learning, that they are going to have a hard time later on. This is sometimes true (but not always). If you have only ever written one novel, and it gets published, it may be difficult amidst all the hype to write another. You may doubt whether you have another in you. But if you've written 20 (and I had, by the time my first novel was published), you don't have any doubts. Whether you can write another good one, I suppose, is still debatable.
The better question for me is--how do you turn off the ideas? I have trouble focusing on only one book at a time, because as soon as the rush of the first draft is over, the voices in my head stop demanding that I work on that novel, and demand that I work on another one. I think ifyou're sturggling with ideas, you're either not reading enough, or you're not sitting down and staring at the screen long enough. That's really boring, and eventually, your fingers start typing, even if it's a letter to a friend. Hey, that's writing, too. And novels have been born out of less.
I never worry about this, primarily because my ideas are just so bizarre that I don't think anyone else could ever come close. On the other hand, even my ideas are based on something. So don't worry about people stealing from you. Just do it better than anyone else ever has.
Probably time to put that novel away. Any time that I am dreading sitting down to work on something, it is always a clue to me that something has gone wrong in the novel writing process. There is a mistake somewhere, and it may be twenty pages ago, or it may be two hundred. (I'm a little better now at listening to that dreading feeling, so I don't have to delete so much). But that feeling means that you need to stop and either fix the problem (if possible) or go on to something else. Don't ignore it! Your subconscious is where all your best ideas come from and if you squelch it early in your writing career, it won't come back to help you later on. And believe me, you need it. It will also write scenes for you that are so perfect you know they didn't come from your brain. But they did!
Well, if it was easy, maybe you wouldn't want to do it so much. And also, writing is very complex. It's not like brushing your teeth, where you can list the steps out, and by doing them, write a perfect novel. Besides, who wants a perfect novel? It should be imperfect. That's where genius lies. Do what's hard, let it change you. Comedy or drama-- they're both equally painful to write. But I think sometimes it's what you have to write, and can't write as well as you want to, that will be what you are remembered for.
Write the first draft anyway.
I used to love the first draft. I felt like I was connected by my fingers to another world. I could get lost for hours on end in the new world I was creating and never saw any flaws in it or felt any need to go back and fix what I had done the day before. I didn't worry about what would happen next. It was that same joy and loss of self that I felt while reading.
But for some reason, probably because I am a better writer and my inner editor won't shut up, this doesn't happen very much anymore. I write a few pages, stop and think. Fiddle. Delete. Write another page. Worry. Go get a snack. Get out another page. Think about how this is all crap. Wonder if anything I ever write will be published again. Try reading a book. Write a few more pages. Wonder where I went wrong in my life. And so on.
Rewrite anyway.
I used to hate rewriting. It seems strange to me now, but the problem was that I had no idea when I was rewriting something if I was making it any better and that was terrifying. All that precious time, and I didn't know if it would "work." I can look back now and see that I was not rewriting "right." When I rewrote, I was basically falling back into my "first draft" loss of consciousness (as Barry says, "channeling voices in my head") and would often end up with a completely new manuscript with the same character names, but otherwise no recognizable parts to the first version. No wonder I was afraid it wouldn't be any better!
Now when I rewrite, I sit with an editor or agents comments printed out at my side. I don't always have a specific idea of what scenes are going to need to change, but it is not an entire revisioning of the novel, the way it was before. I mostly add a lot, figuring that it's a lot easier to cut out than it is to add and the editor can get out an axe if she wants to later. If I cut out long sections, up to 40-50 pages, it is only when I'm going from first draft to second, never when I am at a stage that an agent or editor is looking at it. One of my books, The Stepmother's Story has three entirely different, almost equally good versions lying around because I had several editors really interested in it and once they made a couple comments on revision, I just veered off in a completely different direction. And that doesn't lead to a revised manuscript. It leads to a completely different one.
If you find that in order to address an editor's comments, you are going to have to completely rewrite a story, I would recommend against doing it. Because my experience has led me to believe that the novel you come up with will be so different that whatever led the editor to show interest in your initial manuscript will now be out of your new manuscript. Of course, when you're starting out, you're so eager to please, you'll try whatever an editor tells you. And it may be good exerpience in the end. Just don't come to me and say I didn't warn you!
I do this more now, and this is my main process of revision. It has to do with the way that I read novels, so I have to explain that first. I read because I love interesting characters placed in terrible dilemmas. I don't much care if they are in science fiction novels or fantasy novels or mystery novels. I skim a lot of the jargon of any of those books anyway. I don't care how the world "looks," how the character "looks" or what color the walls are. I once took an "AR" test on my own book, Mira, Mirror and got 8/10 because I couldn't remember what the color of eyes and hair on my own characters were. I actually have to keep notes on this so that I don't forget from one page to the next. Utterly unimportant.
But of course different people read for different reasons. And plenty of people feel like they are lost at sea if they don't have cues about hair and eye color and some sense of place while they read. In fact, when I reread books, I notice these details more, too. It's just in that first flush of love that I don't care about almost anything but dialogue. So, when I first write a novel, it is mostly talking heads. If I am able to get into that wonderful un-self-conscious mode where the words just stream out of my fingers, I write dialogue almost exclusively, without even putting in tags and just a few words at the beginning and end of chapters to mark what's going on generally. I think this is because I experience the world mostly aurally rather than visually. As a college student, I found that if a teacher tested only on what they lectured about in class, I never needed to open a book to ace the test. I had nearly perfect aural recall.
But after that first stage, I have to go back and add in the rest of the novel. In fact, almost every stage of revision that I go through is me adding more layers to the text. Very little taking away seems to go on and very little changing. I have to add backstory--a lot. I have to add in physical details consciously. Sometimes I draw myself a map to make sure things make sense that way. I add in taste, touch, and smell consciously, reminding myself that my pov hasn't noticed smell for several pages, so I should stick it in here. I also have to add in reaction. You know, when you have a great change scene, it can fall a little flat if you don't have a follow-up scene to prove that the change really happened. Or in a climax scene which I write in a huge rush, just to get it out, there aren't any moments of pause, any beats so to speak. So I have to put those in, too. Anyway, that's the way it works for me.
You are crazy to be a writer. We're all crazy. Join the club. And don't expect your family to understand, to bring you snacks in the middle of the night when an inspiration strikes, or to read every page of your latest work. That's not their job. And it doesn't make you better than them that it's yours. It's just makes you a writer. A crazy writer who will one day be someone they are proud of. But maybe not just yet.
I always like to tell this story, because I broke all the rules. And I guess that tells way too much about me . . .
Anyway, I had worked on this manuscript for quite a while, then set it aside, and got it out again, along with a friend's comments. I reworked it, then looked around for a list of publishers who hadn't already seen and rejected it. Holiday House was one of them. I looked them up in my Writer's Market Book, and they didn't have an acqusitions editor listed. So I sent a sample to "Acquisitions Editor," Which is supposedly a big no-no. Anyway, two months later, the "Acquisitions Editor," Suzanne Reinoehl at the time, wrote back to request the complete manuscript. And two months after that, she bought it. It was another several years before I sold another one, however.
With my first one it was through a friend of a friend who recommended someone. I sent off a query and some samples. Then I got a call from an editor, making an offer. And I said I wanted my agent to negotiate. So I called the agent-possibility back, gave him the weekend to think it over, and got very lucky. His name is Barry Goldblatt and he is a fabulous Mensch, as well as a good agent/matchmaker. (When you contract with an editor to make a published book, it is more than a little like getting married)
My second agent, Nadia Cornier of Firebrand Literary, I also got through a friend, Shannon Hale, Newbery-Honor winning author of Princess Academy who lives in Utah about thirty minutes from me. About a year before, Shannon had emailed to ask me about my agent, Barry Goldblatt. Her agent was retiring from the biz, so of course I told her how wonderful Barry was, with his client retreats and his fierce protectiveness, and I knew that he loved her work because he had mentioned it before and asked me if I knew her. So I was a matchmaker, too.
Then I heard about Shannon's fabulous new book, Austenland and read it. Since we are clearly both lovers of Jane Austen and Colin Firth, I was interested to hear that Shannon was working with an adult agent, Nadia Cornier. I knew Nadia from a listserve, codex, for new speculative fiction writers, and she seemed to have done a great job with Shannon. So I sent her the novel that I wrote after being inspired by Shannon (and by all those romantic comedies I watch and think--I can write better than this!). I also sent her my grief book, and my knitting book. Three very different things, but it gave her a good idea of how scattered my writing can be and, I hope, of the strength of my voice. She cried, and laughed, and got out her knitting needles, all the responses I wanted. And then we talked contract.
So now Shannon and I are double agent sisters.
Will you pay me $200 an hour to do it? Because that's what I figure my time is worth. (Think about how expensive it is for me to make mac and cheese for my kids).
Ha! It's possible that you might, but I wouldn't count on it. The most optmistic scenario that I've seen is that you would make a living at being a writer, but not a very opulent one (unless you consider the perk of owning a lot of books as decadent a habit as I do). You can write to try to make money, and be disappointed. (This is a lot like entering a race in hopes of winning). Or you can write the very best piece that you can and feel the satisfaction from that. (Which is like setting an indivual goal for a race time, and achieving it). Set expectations for what you control. The rest--if there is any--is gravy.
No. I didn't do them for a long time. I'm only now becoming comfortable with them, and it is because I have finally figured out what I do best. I teach writing and revision my way.
You mean it's not me? :)
They most likely have contact information on a website. If they're on my recommended list, I've linked to a lot of them there. But if not, you write a letter c/o (that means "care of") the publishing house, whose address is on the copyright page of one of their books. It will get there eventually. They may write back or not. I've had some wonderful mentor relationship develop that way. But always be careful not to assume anything. They may simply not have time.
If it works for you, go ahead. I was told by a big-name author earlier in my career that I should always outline and that I should try to sell my books from these outlines. That way I wouldn't waste time writing books that I wasn't going to get paid for. But I tried to do it and it didn't work for me. For one thing, I find that the pleasure for writing comes to me only in that state of suspense when I don't know myself what is going to happen next. This also means that I am uncomfortable during a big section of the middle of the book, having no idea how I am going to get my characters out of the messes I am putting them into. But when I tried to outline, I just lost interest in the book. Or if I didn't lose interest, it was because my characters were so strong that they insisted on telling me what would happen next, and it wasn't what was in that outline. So all that work was wasted, anyway
As to the subject of selling books based on a proposal only and not on a finished novel, I know some writers who do this, but most of them have a track record already. If you're a first-time (or even fifth-time midlist) author, your publisher will most likely want to see a whole manuscript of at least one of the books in a series. And maybe even all of them. For myself, I realized quickly (after I sent in a manuscript that was unfinished to a contest--and they asked me to send the rest--in two months' time) that I was far too nervous of a person to want to write under pressure like that. I was the kind of student in college who wrote papers weeks and weeks in advance, bringing them to the teacher to see what kind of grade I was going to get and what suggestions they had for getting a better one. Until the teacher told me to go away and not bother them anymore. I think I'm like this with my novels, too. I don't want to worry about whether a book I'm contracted for is going to work or not. I want to know in advance that it will work, that the plot arc will play out perfectly. This is why I wrote all three books in my first Son of Arthur trilogy before I showed them to anyone. Who knows? I may eventually sell books before I've written them, but I have a big backlog. Ask my editor or either of my agents.
I think most writers are good at one particular part of writing naturally, and you have to work at the other parts more consciously. Nothing wrong with that. And what you work on now could become your specialty later. I think I am good at dialogue because I grew up at the bottom end of a large family. I didn't get to talk much,but I sure learned to listen. And with 11 kids all trying to develop their own distinct, strong personalities to overpower all the others, it seems like I got a good sense for how language is used in power struggles.
Every writer has to deal with this, no matter how good they are or how famous they are or how wealthy. And every writers deals with it in a different way. Some refuse to read reviews at all. Others only read the nice reviews. I think that a lot of writers feel like a book is their "baby," and in many ways it is. It can hurt to hear criticism about your child. On the other hand, in real life, if your child is having a problem, you want to hear about it. You have to hear about it. You need to decide how real the problem is and if it needs to be fixed long-term. That's the way I think you should treat reviews. Maybe they're way off and maybe they're not. You have to decide what's useful and what's not.
Don't think that I'm saying this is easy, by the way. It's not. I'll tell this story on myself from graduate school because it shows how hard it has been for me to learn to take criticism of any kind. My first semster at Princeton, I had to write 4 papers for the classes I was taking. 3 of the 4 classes used the paper as the be-all and end-all of the grade. The other used it for 75% of the grade. So they were important papers. An introduction to graduate school, which is pretty much about training you to write for your dissertation, and then academic articles for the rest of your career. I turned in my first set of papers and got them back in those manila envelopes, all sealed up. I took them home and hid them behind my bed for months without ever opening the envelopes or looking at the comments inside. I got my grades, but that was all I knew until we moved at the end of the year. Then my husband found the envelopes and realized that I had never looked at my professors' comments. He was aghast! He insisted on reading them then and there, on the living room couch. I hid in our bedroom, pillow over my bed, occasionally shouting out at him, "What did they say?" whereupon he would deliver his rendition.
When he was finished, I ran to get the papers, hurried out of our apartment to the trash incinerator, and threw the papers in. I did not even want the papers to be in the same space with me anymore. I was too traumatized. What had created this fragility? I guess so many years of being the near-perfect student. Or maybe it's my innate need to please? I don't know. When I got to the disseration part of graduate school, things got worse. I cried a lot when my advisor tried to give me helpful comments. And then, when I started writing creatively and going to a writing group, I kept getting comments from people like "Wow, this is so much better than the last thing you brought," which I took as a compliment until it went on and on--for years. And I realized how bad the first things I had brought to the group were.
Over the next six years before I got published, I got a lot of rejection letters, and I know that people say that a personal rejection letter is a good thing, but I got some kind of mean ones. I developed a pretty thick skin against that. It meant that someone didn't like my writing. Maybe it meant more than that. Maybe it didn't. I had to decide for myself if I should revise the manuscript before sending it out again or if I thought it would appeal to a different personality just as it was. Usually, I revised, but not always. It's the same with critics. Many times I read what they have to say, and nod my head. They are right. I wish I had done better. I think I am doing better now. But sometimes, it makes no sense to me, what they say. Then I shrug. And am surprised it doesn't hurt anymore. Still other times, when they criticize not my word but the opinions that are revealed in it, I think--yes. That is what I believe. You do not. And so? The need to please at last is gone.
I am always working on several things at once. At the end of 2006, I wrote two sequels to The Princess and the Hound which are tentatively titled The Bear and the Hound and The Hound's Daughter . I've also been working for a couple years now on Son of Arthur, the first book in a double trilogy set in Arthurian times, starring Arthur's son and his granddaughter. Authentic post-Roman England is my attempt, and I've had some fun researching. But mostly I love the character of a boy who is trying to live up to an impossible ideal, and succeeds when he least expects it of himself. Another probject is The Stepmother's Story, a dark version of the Cinderella fairy tale with the stepmother as a young woman as the star. Let's see, I have a cycle of short stories I've been working on for years, set in a Nazi America, called American Hitler, inspired by Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga and Margo Langaon's Black Juice. A novel called Touchstone about a girl from a mythical town where your occupation is chosen for you--except for her. She has to figure it out for herself, because she's a storyteller. There's a contemporary dark novel about a boy who is, well, The Dog Killer. And a lighter series called The Last of the Fairy Godmothers about a sixth-grade girl who is asked to be an apprentice fairy godmother, or there won't be anymore. Ever again. And a trilogy about time travel for middle grade.
I have recently started working on some novels for an adult audience (my husband says not to call these "adult novels") and some children's nonfiction, with my "other" agent, Nadia Cornier of Firebrand Literary. One is called The Man I Married. It's a romantic comedy like Pride and Prejudice, but for married people. It seems so unfair to me that all the romantic comedies out there are written for single people. My grief journal, Searching for Mercy is with Nadia, as well. And I'm hoping to be able to sell Not Your Mother's Knitting Book, a book that teaches kids ages 10-15 how to knit using a method I invented myself that requires only the ability to tie square knots, with no casting on or casting off, and no purling. You can make everything from a full-size quilt for your bed to a miniature octopus to a pull-string backpack for school.
Um, is that enough?
There are some wonderful websites with hints on writing in various stages that I would recommend, as well as my own section on writing:
I would also recommend some books on writing, which contain not just suggestions on the specifics, though they have some of those, but also how to think about writing, how to love writing and hate it, how it is to be a writer. These books are part advice and part memoir, and could themselves be used as examples of some of the finest writing in the language:
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