Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Should You Join a Critique Group?

I recently joined a critique group. Those who know me might think that's weird. I've been published professionally for more than 20 years. I've done my share of teaching and should know how to do this by now. And I have a built-in critique group with my co-author sister Kelly.

So why do I need the tsouris?

Three reasons really. First, just because you've written some books doesn't mean it gets any easier. Second, I now have a second home in the suburbs of the ebook Wild West and you need all the neighbors you can find out here among the wolves and cacti. And third...I'm lonely.

We'll get back to that last one in a second.

But let's ask the main question here: Are critique groups worth it? Worth it in time, energy and the bruising your ego will surely take? Should you expose your hatching to the cruel world to be pecked at before it's barely had the chance to sprout feathers let alone wings?  (Whew, labored metaphor alert there).

I used to think critique groups were a waste of time. Maybe that's because early in my writing life I got involved in one that was really bad. We met at a local bar once a month. (first mistake: combining wine and whine). The members weren't very good at articulating what was wrong (or even right) in stories and a one guy was really defensive about being rejected by the "Manhattan cabal." That's what he actually called New York publishers. I left the group after two sessions, figuring it was cheaper to get depressed at home with a bottle of pinot.

But I think writers are better these days at taking constructive criticism. Maybe it's because the new world of self-publishing has stripped us of the delusions we might have about how easy it is to write (and sell) a book.  Maybe it's because in these days of change and turmoil, good editors (even those in the Manhattan cabal) are worth their weight in gold. Whatever the forces at work, I think we're seeing a shift among writers, a new willingness to get help and get better.

So I've come to believe that a critique group can be one of the best tools a developing writer can use. Even experienced writers can benefit from them. But there's a bunch of caveats that go with this. And I'll get to those in a second too.

First, let me tell you about my little group. There's four of us and I was the last to join about two months ago after one of the group, Christine Kling, literally sailed off into the sunset. (She's an avid sailor and decided to pull up anchor and cruise the Caribbean, though she's back now). That left Sharon Potts, Neil Plakcy, Chris Jackson...and me, the new cucumber.

We meet every two weeks at a Starbucks but in the week prior we send each other our 10 pages. We each then read and "red pencil" our comments on the pages. We use Word's TRACK CHANGES function. It's an editing program that lets you insert comments on a document. Track Changes is a little hinky to learn at first but it's a cool tool. And most editors in publishing are now using it for their author revisions and expect you to know it as well.

Why just 10 pages at a time? Well, too much makes you skim over surfaces. You can really focus down on a book's problems if you take it in small bites.

What things? We try not to nitpick and line-edit. That's for second and third drafts and hopefully copy editors. What we try to help each other with is the Big Picture. Where the plot is going into the ditch, where the character development is lacking, and what --- and this is important -- to the cold eye seems confusing. But we try to stay flexible. We made an exception to our 10-page rule last week for one of our members. She is struggling with a very complex thriller. Her plot had become a hyrdra-beast and she wanted help simplifiying it. So she gave us a concept and we went from there.

At Starbucks, we pick one author to critique and we take turns going over our Track Change comments (we bring printed-out copies to give to each writer). We also encourage the other critiquers to jump into the conversation if they want to add something to the point at hand. These sessions run about four hours, three lattes and at least one pee break.

Have they helped me? Immensely. I am working on a new Louis Kincaid series book and after I offered up my opening chapter, I was told the tone was completely at odds with where I had left my hero in the previous book. That was a major revelation that has made me rethink my first six chapters. I also came to realize I've lapsed into a lazy habit of underwriting. My critique mates want a little more description and detail from me. (Ironically, my sister tells me the same thing). I also learned my treatment of my series backstory (always a tricky thing) was deficient. I was mentioning characters and situations from previous books that weren't explained enough in the present one to stave off confusion.

What's really good about getting this kind of feedback is not that they are trying to tell me how to write my book. It's that this will save me valuable time. In rewrites, of course, but also later when I am deeper into the plot. It's like hiking through a forest. Alone, I might have gotten far into those dark woods, realized I had  lost my way back on that first turn, and now I have to backtrack to find my way out. Without falling off the ridge.

My hiking mates aren't telling me where to go. They're just keeping me on the path I have already chosen.

So, is a critique group for you? I can't answer that, of course. But I can pose some questions for you:

1. What kind of group do you need? Ideally, face-to-face. If you can stay within your genre, also good but not essential. Good writing is the same whatever the genre. But I'd stay with fiction. Non-fiction folks have their own unique needs.

2. Where are you in your skill level? You need to find like-minded writers but it's always better if you can link up with some folks who've been published. As the saying goes, you want to play tennis with someone better than you or you never improve your game. But be willing to take the heat. If the group seems like a mere pity-party -- ie, everyone bitching about their lack of success -- get out as soon as you can. It's cathartic to exchange tales of woe but it should be limited to small-talk after the hard work is done.

3. Where can you find a critique group?  If you're isolated geographically, there are online groups but it's pretty gnarly out there, almost like cyber-dating. (There's one group, Ladies Who Critique, that's females-only).  Start here for a list. The best way, I think, is through writers organizations. I found my group via contacts I made through my Mystery Writers of America Florida chapter. If the organization doesn't offer critiques, network and start one yourself. All you need is two or three other committed people. Here's some good advice on starting your own.

I can also give you some advice on how to handle yourself if you do decide to join a group:

1. Make a commitment. You'll get only as good as you give. If you join up, be willing to spend whatever time it takes helping the others with their WIPs. Nobody likes the guy who shows up at the party empty-handed, drinks all the good booze and sits in the corner with nothing to say.

2. Be tough but kind. The best editors I've had always know how to make revision letters sound like they are really praise letters. They always tell you what you did brilliantly before they smack you upside the head and tell you where you royally screwed up.

3. Don't get defensive. We are all soft-shelled about our writing but if you can't take constructive criticism, don't join a group. Hell, don't even try to be a real writer for that matter. At our last session, I got defensive about fried pickles. My hero Louis orders a basket of fried pickles. It was one throwaway line but one of my critique buddies wanted more about the pickles. (It's hard to explain but she was right.) I spent five minutes trying to justify why I didn't want to write more about those friggin pickles. Later, I realized it had nothing to do with pickles and everything do to with me being prickly.

4. Don't ever say "Yeah, but..." This is a variation on No. 3. One of your critique mates says, "I can't figure out what is going on in this scene where the guy is stealing the fried pickles." And you say, "Yeah but if you just wait until chapter 26, it will all be explained."   If someone is confused by what you've written you should listen to them.  Misdirection is a great writer's tool. But it is not the same as confusion.

5. Don't get depressed. Having folks tell you what is wrong with your story is not easy to hear. But a good critique group can be really inspiring.  It can teach you that all writers struggle, that first drafts are never meant to be perfect, and that you can, despite what all the demons in your head are whispering, fix it. Yeah, you might feel like that guy in the picture at the beginning of this blog -- that's Prometheus, who Zeus tied to a rock and sent down an eagle to peck the guy's liver to shreds. But you can also get a big dose of camaraderie through a good critique group.
And that brings me back to my last point -- the thing I said about feeling lonely.

We all do, right? We sit here in our old yoga pants and Bob Seger t-shirts, poking away at our keyboards, hoping this STUFF we are storing away each day might actually coalese into a book and be read someday. We surf the internet, read articles about how to improve our craft and blogs about how to market them. But sometimes, as that great western philosopher Bruce Springsteen says, all we really need is some human touch.


We need to know we're not alone. We need to hear other footsteps behind us on the path.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

The Kid Stays in the Book


Tell me if this ever happens to you:

You're typing along, and you're hearing the voices in your head. It's a couple of your characters, chatting away. And you find your fingers flying just trying to keep up so you can record it all.

But sometimes -- and this doesn't happen very often -- I am typing away and I actually SEE people come onto the screen in my head. These are people I have not summoned, characters I have not accounted for, and it's like, wtf, who are you? You don't belong in this story. Somebody throw this bum off my set!

But they don't leave. They hang around. And they start whispering, "forget them, tell my story."

The first time I got visited by one of them was during the writing of our third book, "Thicker Than Water." This is a story about a dirtbag con who murdered a girl and twenty years later gets out of prison and kills his defense attorney. His son Ronnie hires our hero Louis Kincaid to clear his father's name. I was writing a scene in which Ronnie was talking to Louis and suddenly, in my head I heard the screech of air brakes. My fingers froze over the keyboard, but I said, okay...

So I wrote that Louis heard a school bus braking outside. A second later, a boy was in my head, whispering to me. But he was so sullen and closed, I couldn't hear what he was saying. I didn't like him. I almost ignored him. But then I gave in and wrote him into the scene. Suddenly, Ronnie had a son named Eric.

The kid hung around for 300 pages, moving in and out of the plot like a small ghost. I didn't have a friggin' clue why he was there except to make the dirtbag con, his grandfather, look even meaner. I kept wondering if Eric was just what I call a clutter-character, and that I needed to heed Elmore Leonard's famous advice to "cut out the stuff readers skip over." But I let Eric stay. Then, on page 363, Eric said something to me that changed the whole book. He said:

"Can a kid get in trouble for something he knows?"

Damn. It came together in a blinding flash, the whole key to the book. This kid was it. We had to go back and redo the bread-crumb trail of clues to make it work. But this kid held the final great twist of the plot in his hands. And without realizing it, for hundreds of pages, I had been giving Eric motivation and layers that set up everything for the ending. Or maybe Eric had been giving them to me.

I now call this serendipity. I have learned to welcome these intruding wraiths. I have learned to trust them. Because they are the ones you didn't build. They are the ones who came on their own. They are the ones that bring life to your story.


I just have to learn to listen more carefully when they come a callin'.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Dutch's Treat: Ten Rules of Writing


Elmore Leonard is gone. A moment of silence, she intoned gravely.

If you don’t get where I am going with that opening line then you definitely need to read on – at least as far as Nos. 3 and 4 below. The rest of you can go play Spider Solitaire if you’d like, but I’d really like it if you stick around. Because today, I’d like to talk about Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing. 

Now I have to admit right off here that I haven’t read a lot of Leonard’s books; he’s one of those titans whose stuff is part of my cram-course in belated crime education. (I just downloaded "Glitz" on my Kindle in fact).  But like all writers, I’ve heard that he’s a master stylist, the Picasso of crime fiction, whose dialogue, in the words of one critic, is "like broken glass, sharp and glittering."

But do his rules hold up? Well, I think this is a good time to go back and take a look. And I'll be the first one to admit, I have broken almost all of them. 

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

I opened my book ISLAND OF BONES with a woman so desperate to escape her killer that she took off in a skiff in the middle of a hurricane. But generally I agree with Leonard here that in too many books, weather is a metaphoric crutch meant to telegraph the hero’s conflict or a mood of foreboding. (Blatant self-promotion alert: We have published the eBook of BONES this week.  Click here to read my "weather" opening -- or you can even Click here buy the darn thing for $2.99!.)

2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

Sigh. Broke this one, too. In my book A THOUSAND BONES, I am telling the story of Louis Kincaid’s lover, Joe Frye. The entire book is a flashback to Joe’s rookie year but I felt I had to connect it to Louis so I book-ended it with a prologue (wherein she tells Louis about a crime she committed ten years ago) AND an epilogue (wherein Louis accepts what she did). But again, I think prologues are usually unnecessary; they almost always indicate the writer is not in control of back story or the time element of their plot (linear is almost always best). Or the writer tacks on a prologue where he throws out a body to gin up suspense because the early chapters are slooooow.

3.  Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.  The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

Have broken this one, too. But only with the greatest trepidation. I’ve used “shouted” and “asked.” But I'm convinced that if you feel compelled to use something stronger, that means that what you are putting between the quote marks ain’t up to snuff.

4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said''... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''

Guilty again. I have used “whispered,” “shouted” and “asked.” But I always hate myself in the morning.

5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

I hate exclamation marks! But yes, I have used them. Mainly when I have someone shouting. And what’s worse, I have probably written, “Get out of here!” he shouted. 

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'' This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

I have never used “all hell...” That’s really amateur hour, akin to "little did he know that..." But yes, “suddenly” has appeared in my books. I didn’t realized what a stupid tic it was until I re-read Leonard’s rules. Suddenly, “suddenly” looks really bad in my chapters. And I now see that the action feels more immediate without it.

7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''

We did this in our first book “Dark of the Moon.” Set in the deep South, we felt compelled to drop some “g’s” and use some dumb idioms, and at least one reviewer took us to task for it. Here’s the thing: Dialect is hard on the reader’s eye. You can convey the feeling of it by judicious word choice, mannerisms, and sentence rhythm. We are in the process of preparing “Moon” for eBook and this has given us a second chance to go back and rewrite things. So y'all can bet we’re fixin’ to fix our mistakes. 

8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

Whew. Finally, one sin I don’t commit. I am a strong believer in less is more when it comes to character descriptions. I think if you tread too heavily in the reader’s imagination, you stomp out some of the magic from your book. Here is how I let readers know what my heroine Joe Frye looked like:
She had a flash of memory, of sitting next to her dad in a gymnasium during her brother's basketball game, watching the cheerleaders.
I'm ugly, Daddy.
You're beautiful.
Not like them, I'm not.
No. They're easy to add up. They're plain old arithmetic.
So what am I?
Geometry, Joey. Not everyone gets it.
 9.  Don't go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

This one is hard for me because I love to write setting descriptions. But I have learned to pull back some. The best advice I ever heard on this comes from Coco Chanel who said you should put on all your accessories and then take almost all of them off before you go out. So yeah, I over-describe but then I go back and pare it down.

10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

Like all writers, I struggle with this one. When we’re deep in the writing zone, we can fall in love with the sound of our own voices. And sometimes, a passage will come so hard that you just can’t bring yourself to delete it. But you must kill your darlings. Lately, my sister tells me I am “underwriting,” so maybe I am pulling back too far. But I still think it’s better to leave ‘em wanting more, not less.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I have nothing to add to that last one. It might be the single best piece of writing advice out there. If you're working too hard, your reader will as well.  Here's the quote that hangs over my desk: "Easy reading is damn hard writing."  It was good enough for Nathaniel Hawthorne -- and Dutch -- so it's good enough for me.



Friday, September 6, 2013

When Titles Go Bad

Okay, we’re starting out today with a quiz. No Google-cheating for the answers either. Here are the original titles for some books. Can you guess what they wound up being called? (answers at end).

The Last Man in Europe
They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen
Fiesta
At This Point in Time
Wacking Off

Now, let’s talk about what you call your book. Because this is the most important marketing decision you will make and frankly, given the quality of some titles out there, we all need some help on this front.

The naming of books is a difficult matter.
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
when I tell you, a book must have three different names.

Apologies to T.S. Eliot but we’ve found that his rhyme about naming cats works for books. Kris, at one point in her life, had sixteen cats and published sixteen books. Weird stat, huh? Got us thinking  about how important a name is when it comes to your book.

How important? We found a marketing survey that asked readers what was the element that most influenced why they bought a book. Excluding Gigantoid Author Name (ie James Patterson can put his name on an Altoid can and it would sell) here is the order:
1. Title
2. Cover
3. Back cover
4. Flaps (inside dust jacket copy)
5. First few paragraphs of the book’s content
6. Price


First impressions count. And your title is like a business card, a quick but well-calculated introduction that you offer your reader that you hope will entice her to what to know more. It doesn’t matter if you’re traditionally published or doing it yourself, the wrong title can make or break your book – and you.

Going traditional? In your average publishing house, there will be many people with their hands on your book: editors, sales reps, marketing managers, publicists, even book buyers at the major booksellers will weigh in on the consumer appeal of your title. (Walmart threatened to not stock our book South of Hell because of the title; they backed off) Chances are your title will be challenged or even changed.

Going self-published? What you call your book will be entirely up to you so it’s really important to understand what a title needs to do. More on that in a moment. Let’s go back to T.S. Eliot for a sec. He says that cats have three names: the first is the one the family uses in every day life. Here is how this applied to our first book:

For us this was UNTITLED LOUIS KINCAID THRILLER NO. 1. That’s how it appeared on our contract. Eliot’s second name for cats is “fancier names that sound sweeter.” For us, it was The Last Rose of Summer. We loved this title. We thought it spoke volumes about the vestiges of Old South racism, forbidden love and death. But Eliot’s third cat name is one that's “particular, peculiar and more dignified.” This is the title your book really needs. For us, it was Dark of the MoonWe came upon that title after weeks of gnashing our teeth. Kris pulled Langston Hughes poems from the shelf and there was his poem “Silhouette.”

Some authors have “the title gene” and come up with the perfect names. Others lock onto signposts like Sue Grafton’s alphabet, John Sandford’s “Prey” or Evanovich’s numbers. Although we're not crazy about this approach especially since it has spawned some lazy gimmicks. (Hey, I’m going to write an erotic-suspense series! I just Googled condom names! Want to buy my book Vibrating Johnny?)

We know that authors struggle mightily with their titles. There’s even a award for the worst title -– and wunchaknowit, it’s awarded by the British. Bookseller Magazine gave their prize this year to Reginald Bakeley for his book Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop – and Other Practical advice In Our Campaign Against the Fairy Kingdom. The runners-up were:

How Tea Cosies Changed the World.
God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.
How to Sharpen Pencils.
Was Hitler Ill?
Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts


In twelve years of teaching workshops and doing critiques we have seen maybe one title that we thought really captured the book’s tone. So we know how hard this is. Here is our advice on titles, for what it's worth:

1. Capture your tone and genre. Go on Amazon and look up books similar to yours (cruise the genre bestseller lists). Words have inflection, mood and color. Choose them carefully.
2. Grab the reader emotionally. Two titles that do it for us: The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
3. Don’t settle for clichés. Yes, it’s hard to come up with fresh permutations on old standby words (especially in genre fiction where we rely on “dark” “blood” “death” etc.) But you have to find words that are unique about your story and draw upon them. Here’s a great title that twists a cliché word: Something Wicked This Way Comes.
4. Don't use empty arcane words that you think sound cool. Examples of bad titles: The Cambistry Conspiracy. (about world trade) The Hedonic Dilemma (about psychology ethics).  Penultimate to Die. (the second-to-the-last victim).  Don't worry...we made these up. 
5. Create an expectation about the story. You know why we love this title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? It makes us say, “Oh yeah, buddy? Show me!” and he does.
6. Be brief and punchy. Okay, we gave you a bunch of long titles we love but there is something wonderful about short titles and studies show most bestsellers have short titles: Gone Girl works. So does Tell No One, Lolita and Jaws (original title A Stillness in the Water).
7. Make the title work on other levels. This is hard but worth the brain-sweat if you can do it. Consider what these titles come to mean once you get deep into the stories: Catch 22, The Shipping News, Silence of the Lambs. But don’t get too clever. We love Louise Ure’s book Forcing Amaryllis and the title is brilliant because it is about a rape and murder. But do most understand that the title is from a gardening term about forcing a plant to bloom early?
8. Make a list of key words that appear in your book. Is there something you can build on? For our book A Killing Rain, the title came when we heard a Florida farmer describe that drenching downpour that can kill off the tomato crop.
9. Search existing works -- the Bible, poetry, Shakespeare. We found our title An Unquiet Grave in an 17th century English poem. 
10. Write 20 titles and let them sit for a week or so. Go back and read them and something will jump out. Find some beta-readers you can test with. Titles usually evoke visceral immediate responses. You will know immediately if they connect. 
One last thought: Don’t get emotionally attached to a title. It’s the worst thing you can do because your first title is usually, as T.S. Eliot said, a prosaic every-day thing. You can do better. Sweat out that great title that Eliot called the “ineffable, effable, effanineffable deep and inscrutable singular name.”

Answers to the quiz:
The Last Man in Europe (1984)
They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen (Valley of the Dolls)
Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)
At This Point in Time (All the President’s Men)
Wacking Off (Portnoy’s Complaint)

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

How to Handle Rejection

Last week was a good one.

We finished a chapter of the novella, nudging it up past 17,000 words. we got a nice little royalty check that will keep our dogs in kibbles for three months. We turned in the edits for the next Louis Kincaid novel on time.

This week...not so good.

Got some bad news about an upcoming project. Lost a foreign publisher. Can’t get any traction on the concept for the next book. The formatting on our Kindle eBook keeps screwing up the paragraphing. And some anonymous weasel-boy trashed us on Amazon.

You'd think after more than a decade at this writing biz, we'd be immune to the ups and downs. But we’re not. We still get discouraged and swing from ecstasy to agony. And like the cliché goes, we still go to bed some nights convinced we’ve used up all my good ideas and that the fraud police will cart us away in the morning.

We know we're not alone. All writers are like crabs without shells, that the slightest kick, the smallest snub, sends us into spasms of self-doubt. We know this so well that it is part of every writing workshop we teach. Get out now, we tell those who wish to be published, if you can’t take criticism and rejection at every turn. Your queries will be ignored by agents. Your manuscripts will be turned down by editors. Your book will be snubbed by reviewers. Barnes and Noble won’t carry you. You won’t get a paperback reprint. You’ll be remaindered.

Jim Hall put it in perspective for us once. His newest book had just come out to glowing reviews. One day, riding high, he was in B&N and saw a woman reading the first pages of his book. He couldn’t resist and went over to her and said, “I wrote that.”

She said, “So?”

Rejection and dejection. How do you cope?

How do you keep your head above the waves as you tread water? How do you keep putting one word in front of the other every day until you’ve finished that lonely journey of eighty-thousand words? We don’t have the answer but we've learned this much:

You find support

We're lucky; we are co-authors. When one of us is on the ledge the other talks her off. If you’re alone, then you need to find others who understand what you’re going through. You need someone who knows that when you’re staring off into space yes, you really are writing. You need someone who will slap you upside the head when you’re whining, tell you the truth when you’ve lost control of your plot, and buy you two really strong martinis when you get dumped by your publisher. This someone is usually not your mom or spouse. They love you too much, poor dears.

You focus in not out

It is easy to get eaten up with envy in our business over who got the big contract, who got the award, who got the prime Saturday panel at Bourcheron when you got the 9 a.m. Sunday slot. You have to tune out all this noise. When we was just starting out, one of the best pieces of advice we got was from Jan Burke. “Keep your head down and just write your books,” she said.

You have faith

You have faith that you love the process and that you would probably do it even if no one paid you another dime and had to stand out on the Kindle corner and give it away. You have faith that some agent out there will read your proposal and take you on. That some editor will feel the same way about life that you do and buy your manuscript. You have faith that, despite all the bad things going on in publishing right now, that readers still need good stories. You have faith that you can still write them.