Holly Robinson's Blog, page 14

How Radio Saved My Life

 

My husband and kids always know where I am by following the sound of my radio. I listen to it when I’m folding laundry, putting on makeup, washing dishes, knitting, soaking in the tub, or scrubbing the bathroom.

I don’t have a fancy radio. Far from it: mine is a plastic, battery-operated transistor radio similar to the one my grandmother, who lived to be nearly a century old, used to carry between her kitchen and bedroom, most often tuning into cranky AM talk radio shows. That radio was Grammy’s lifeline to the world.

Similarly, radio has saved my life, or at least kept me sane during some complicated times. I bought my first radio with babysitting money the year I started middle school. It was pink and white, received AM and FM stations, and was small enough to sit on my nightstand. I blasted pop music from its tinny speakers; that music got me through first crushes and heartbreaks.

In high school, I traveled to Argentina as an exchange student; I left my pink radio behind but inherited another cheap transistor from my host family. I suffered from culture shock and discovered BBC broadcasts in my desperate attempts to hear some English. After a month or so, though, I began listening to Spanish stations to practice my language skills.

Everyone in college had fancier radios than mine: boom boxes that doubled as tape players, Walkman radios that played cassettes, or, later, radios with built-in CD players and small televisions. After that, we were on to laptops and iPhones and iPads.

However, I have always had a transistor radio, then and now, no matter where I travel. When I worked as a nanny in Spain many years ago, I relied on the radio to tell me when it was safe to go out because the Guardia Civil had stopped attacking student demonstrators. During the year I taught school in Mexico, I listened to my radio on the roof as I hung up laundry or sunbathed, and developed a taste for the kind of heartbreak best conveyed through Mariachi music.

In my late twenties, I trekked through Nepal and sat each evening next to solar-powered or battery-operated radios in tea houses with Nepalese women who squatted in their brightly striped aprons, all of us gasping at certain dire news reports or tapping our feet to the same music.

These days, I am most likely to travel to our summer house in Prince Edward Island. There, too, I have a transistor radio in the kitchen, where I happily give up BBC for CBC Radio and all of the news updates from across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. How else, for instance, would I hear about the lobster truck overturning on the highway in Saint John, or know about the fiddle festival in Rolo Bay?

There are obviously more high-tech ways to connect with the world in 2015. Whether we want news or music, we can program a device to deliver exactly what we want, when we want to hear it. Yet, somehow the allure of the portable transistor radio endures for me. I love the fact that I can’t program my radio or do anything with it but listen while my hands are busy, constantly being surprised by what I hear next.

The post How Radio Saved My Life appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Why I Don’t Cook

 

The first time I ever cooked for my husband, Dan, I fed him lasagna made with no-boil noodles and a jar of sauce. The first time he cooked for me, he opened what looked like an empty fridge, produced a smattering of ingredients, and somehow created an entire Chinese feast of pot stickers, stir-fry and veggies.

I should have admitted right then that I couldn’t cook. But he married me anyway, and it took me nearly twenty years of marriage–during which I have melted through pots (even a Le Creuset, once), forgotten to put flour in cake recipes and even set toasters on fire–before I finally gave up believing that this rudimentary skill was within my capabilities.

“You just don’t care about food,” Dan points out. “That’s why you don’t pay attention in the kitchen. You’re always cooking by remote control.”

It’s true that I often leave a pot on simmer and forget all about it until the smoke alarm goes off. But I love food! In fact, after two decades of marriage to this miracle worker in the kitchen, I can scarcely stand to pay money for food in a restaurant because Dan has taught me to recognize the difference between crap and not crap on the table.

I have tried everything to learn to cook. I follow recipes, but somehow there are always steps that trip me up; for instance, the cookbook author might assume that I know how to poach a chicken or what “fold” means. I do try to help my husband and learn from him, yet the art of chopping things in evenly matched cubes or slices eludes me. (In his most generous moments, Dan calls my salads and stews “primitively creative.”)

Part of the problem, too, is that I find grocery stores exhausting and intimidating. I treat each trip to the market as an excuse to speed walk and burn some calories. Who doesn’t have better things to do than grocery shop? Inevitably, though, that leads me to bring home unpalatable foods like “no salt” crackers, fruit so out of season that it might as well come from Mars, or cuts of meat fit only for my Pekingese.

Dan, on the other hand, goes food shopping the way I shop for books. He surveys the produce with a practiced eye, buying only foods grown locally and in season. He has his own herb garden and has valiantly tried to teach me the difference between all of those plants with little green leaves. (Believe me, you don’t know the meaning of the words “primitively creative” until you’ve sampled my peppermint spaghetti sauce.) But, left to my own devices, I eat like a ten year-old, with mainstays like peanut butter sandwiches and grilled cheese, while Dan is apt to whip up a salad nicoise with seared tuna at a moment’s notice.

This winter, in a last-ditch attempt to learn how to cook a healthy meal, I even bought a Groupon coupon for HelloFresh, the food delivery service that not only delivers food to your door for healthy meals, but actually divides out the portions in little containers or bags—even sending a single scallion, say, or two cute little plastic fish filled with a teaspoon of soy sauce each, to prevent mistakes in measurement. The recipe cards have pictures for every step.

I was in heaven! I made edible food and was stopped from becoming a lifetime HelloFresh convert only when Dan pointed out how much money these meals were costing compared to buying bulk at the store.

“But I want to make meals!” I protested.

He finally took pity on me and did the thing we probably should have done all along: Dan started creating step-by-step weekly menus for me, breaking the recipes down into baby steps compatible with my knowledge base. Most importantly, he ends my involvement in each recipe before it’s possible to do any harm. For instance, he’ll ask me to get the water ready for the pasta he will throw into it when he gets home, when we make Emeril Lagasse’s fettucine with cream sauce, prosciutto and peas.

“I would hate that,” one of my friends, a great cook, announced. “He’s telling you what to do.”

I laughed. “He’s telling me what to do only because I asked him to,” I said. “That’s a big difference.”

I still can’t claim that I cook. But I can say, with complete confidence, that I can get water ready for pasta, and that my husband loves me for trying.

The post Why I Don’t Cook appeared first on Holly Robinson.

A Survival Guide for Women Writers

 

Whenever I speak to aspiring writers at libraries or bookstores, I inevitably hear stories like these from women:

“I used to write, but then I had my kids and quit.”

“I just retired from my job, so finally I have a little time to write.”

“I’ve been working on my novel for about ten years.”

“I would have started my book sooner, but my mom was ill and needed me.”

Listening to the job and family responsibilities women are shouldering makes me wonder how any women write books at all. It also makes me recall a time, about twenty years ago, when I was in their shoes—a writer with a toddler and another baby on the way, a husband, a house, and a part-time job—and attending talks by authors who had “made it.” Whenever possible, I asked how they managed to shoehorn writing time into their busy lives. I wasn’t even worrying about publishing at that point; I simply wanted to figure out how to find time to write.

At one talk by a famous male mystery writer, who I shall not name here for fear that you’ll go set his house on fire once you read this, I asked how he managed to write with two small children at home.

He raised an eyebrow. “Easy,” he said. “I have a wife.”

“I have a husband,” I pointed out, confused.

Now he grinned. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

All right, I didn’t slap him—not because he didn’t deserve it for such a flippant response, but because I knew there was truth in what he was saying. My husband is one of those step-up-to-the-plate guys who does the lion’s share of the cooking, believes children need their dads, and pretty much is a team player even when it’s time to do laundry.

However, I am the family caretaker, in the sense that I am the one scheduling pediatrician appointments and haircuts, attending sports events, taking my widowed mother out for Sunday drives, etc. I love doing all of these things, but let’s admit this right now, if only to ourselves: a woman’s work is never done, because our children and parents and great aunts and best friends and even our neighbors next door all have needs, and we respond.

Therefore, when it comes to a choice between something perceived as “frivolous,” like writing or painting or following any other artistic passion that neither makes us money nor improves our beauty or fitness, we tend to shove that activity down lower and lower on our “to do” lists until it falls off completely. It’s very hard to tell your child, who wants to play Monopoly, “Oh, no, honey, sorry, Mommy has to work on her book this Saturday.”

See? It sounds selfish, and perhaps it is, from the child’s point of view. Or from the point of view of your spouse or partner, who secretly believes you aren’t going to publish anything anyway, so why not just go to the movies, or the big sister and brother, who the child then bothers because you’re no fun, and who can’t believe Mom won’t drive them to the mall because she’s working on another dumb book.

The one moment that changed my writing life more than any other happened soon after I met that mystery writer, fortunately. It was at the Boston Public Library, where I went to see political activist and writer Grace Paley speak to a packed house. Despite the crowd, Paley graciously spoke to everyone who approached her after the event.

After telling Paley how much I adored her short stories, I asked the same old question: “How did you manage to get any writing done with young children at home?”

“I didn’t,” she replied. “I used day care.”

It had never occurred to me to pay for day care while I was writing fiction—after all, it wasn’t like my husband and I had a lot of cash to spare—and yet, I realized right then that I had to find a way.

And I did: I took on more paying work and set aside some small amount of money every week so that I could hire the woman across the street to look after my children for a few hours each week while I wrote. I felt guilty, of course—what sort of debutante was I, thinking that I deserved this luxury, when nobody seemed much interested in buying my stories or novels?–but, looking back on my career now, I know that was the single most important decision I ever made as a writer.

You might not be in a position to do that. You might be a single mom scrambling to pay the rent, or a middle-aged mother trying to put kids through college, or someone whose elderly parents seem to need you 24/7. What then? Here are some survival tips for women writers:

Believe that Writing Is Work.

It may seem that your writing is a hobby, especially if you’re crafting the kind of fiction that only literary journals might be interested in publishing, but writing is work. No published writer has managed to get into print (or even online) without countless hours of labor. Yes, it’s a labor of love, but it will take you hours to perfect your craft. Give your work those hours. And, when you doubt the merits of what you’re doing, remember that you, as a writer, are in effect a cultural historian. Where would our culture be without artists?

Value the Process

Even when the writing is going badly—as it so often does—believe in the process. You can’t learn to ride a bicycle without pedaling the damn thing yourself and falling off a few times. Scraped knees and elbows are signs that you’re learning. So are rejected manuscripts.

Give Yourself Deadlines

It’s easy to take ten years to write a novel when you don’t have deadlines, or to stop writing altogether. Find a way to put yourself on a writing schedule. This is probably best done by joining a writing workshop, which you can do for free or at a very low cost. Check out local community college classes, adult education centers, libraries, online writing courses, bookstores and coffee shops that host open mics. Or start your own workshop and make the deadlines firm for members.

Find a Community

Yes, writers spend a lot of hours alone. We love our sweat pants and flannels more than anybody. However, it takes a village to publish a book, from writing critiques to advice about agents and the publishing process. There are writers living near you even if you don’t know them yet. Find them by attending author readings and literary festivals.

Ignore the House

Sometimes, it feels like the house is like another child, doesn’t it? Always whining about dirty floors and cluttered counters, it can get on your nerves. Set yourself time to write each day—early morning before you go to your job, or at night when the kids are in bed, or every Saturday afternoon, whatever works—and during that time, closet yourself in one clean corner of the house and ignore its pleadings about the vacuum. If anyone in your family complains about the mess, you know what to tell them: “I’m writing, sorry.”

Defect from Your Family

This is probably the most important advice I can give any aspiring woman writer: leave home. I don’t care if you borrow a friend’s empty kitchen while she’s away for the weekend, sign up for a writing retreat or rent a motel room, but find a way to get out of your house and think, even if you don’t get much writing done when you first try this. Your family will survive, and if you can find a way to do this on any sort of regular basis, you will find it easier and easier to remove yourself from the swirling Bermuda Triangle of infinite domestic duties. Soon, you will embrace this meditative writing time, and it will become easier to make the almighty leap between caretaker and woman writer.

The post A Survival Guide for Women Writers appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Why Writers Shouldn’t Read Their Own Book Reviews

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Any artist knows that reading reviews of her book/play/movie/art gallery opening is bound to lead to pain and frustration. Why? Because even if the majority of the reviews are stellar, it’s the poor reviews we will end up focusing on, and doing so can paralyze us with doubt. That’s what just happened to me.

I didn’t mean to read my reviews. I really do know better. But I’m in that funny nether world, simultaneously waiting for my editor to read my manuscript-in-progress and preparing to launch my new novel, HAVEN LAKE. It’s a nether world where the air seems thin and hard to breathe, because I’m feeling so anxious about sending my new book into the world.

Then I made the mistake of going on Goodreads to look for reviews on a book I was thinking of buying, and realized there were already reviews of HAVEN LAKE written by people who’d won advance copies doled out by my publisher, NAL/Penguin.

Gulp.

Let me say first that I am grateful to anyone who reads books these days–especially any of my books. And, okay, yes, there are a number of great 5-star advance reviews that made me sit up with pride and smile. But of course I couldn’t help wallowing for a bit in those “other” less-than-stellar reviews and worrying that the book will sink like a stone. One disgruntled reader wrote, for instance, “I am not sure what genre this novel falls into. It’s not art, that’s for sure…if any of the elements had been explored in depth, it might have transcended its potboiler nature.”

This was followed by another reader saying, “I was looking for a tense mystery…but instead HAVEN LAKE was a book that focused on character emotions and development.”

Two different readers, two completely different takes. One reader thinks my novel is too much of a potboiler, while the other believes there is too much emphasis on character and emotions, slowing down the plot.

What’s true, and what’s not?

Neither. Every book is a unique, individual conversation between writer and reader. The truest thing about art is that it’s subjective in nature. One viewer’s favorite movie is another person’s yawn, right? And some art gallery visitors are drawn to examine the abstract contemporary paintings, while others spend their time ogling Matisse.

So what’s a writer to do?

Not read reviews (though of course we all slip up), for starters. We also have to remember that, especially in a giveaway contest, it’s hit-or-miss. Our books are being sent to many readers who love winning free books—who doesn’t?–and might not otherwise be included in our ideal target audience.

At the end of the day, writers can’t worry about what readers think, want or buy. We have one job, and one job only: to follow our passions and put words on the page, creating books that we, ourselves, feel proud to have written.

How Do You Kill Your Darlings and Lose 100 Pages?

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In his iconic memoir on writing, Stephen King says, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

In my case, I haven’t just killed my darlings. I’ve conducted a bloodbath. A slaughter fest. A series of gory Halloween-style chainsaw moments that would make even Stephen King cover his clever eyes. And it was all to make my editor happy before she ever saw the book.

 

 

I’ve had to do this sort of thing before. My new novel, Haven Lake (April 2015) landed on my editor’s desk at 498 pages. When I told her how long it was before I sent it, she groaned and winced. (I had to imagine the wincing, since we were on the phone, but maybe she was frothing at the mouth.)

“Well,” she sighed at last, “we’ll do our best to trim it down.”

Haven Lake has two primary settings–the Berkshires and the Massachusetts North Shore –and features three different points of view, two mysterious deaths and Vietnam as a backdrop. Trimming was done painstakingly by both of us, sentence-by-sentence.

With my new work-in-progress, Chance Harbor, I tackled three points of view and three settings—Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton and Massachusetts. This book, like my others, is an emotional family mystery, but even I didn’t correctly foresee how many skeletons would come tumbling out of the closets until they clonked me on the head. And I wrote the synopsis!

When I finished the manuscript for Chance Harbor two weeks ago, it was 599 pages long and weighed more than my Pekingese. I called the editor in a panic to convey the bad news.

There was a long pause. I imagine she was counting to ten. Or maybe 599. Then she said, “Give it to me at 499 pages and I’ll read it.”

The book was due in a week. I had no recourse but to hole up in one of my favorite writing retreats—a cheap rented condo on the icy coast of Maine—and bring out my machete. I couldn’t imagine how to begin at first, since I loved every scene and character and sentence in the book. Gradually, though, I began spotting things I could jettison.

Maybe it was my steady diet of frozen chicken pot pie and wine. Or the fact that it was too cold to venture outside, even to the gym across the street. At any rate, I managed to whittle the book down to 480 pages in three days. In doing so, here’s what I learned about the art of murder by red pen:

Look at flashbacks first. Do you really need them all? Your characters are revealing things through dialogue and action, so you probably don’t need all that back story. Be parsimonious in your explanations and let your characters do the work.
Next, cut scenes. You don’t need to move characters in a linear way from one place to another. For instance, I discovered a scene where my character was driving here, then there, then stopped for dinner, drove some more, then finally arrived at her destination. In cutting, I went from her start point to her end point, with only one sentence between.
Ditch as many useless “he said,” “she said” identifiers that you can, if it’s obvious who’s speaking in dialogue scenes.
If you describe a character’s hair color or manner of speech once in a book, for the love of literature, don’t keep repeating that. Think of something original or don’t describe the character physically at all.
Eliminate descriptions of emotion unless they’re original, too. Minimize off-the-shelf phrases like “she shuddered” or “his forehead broke out in a sweat.” You can probably convey your characters’ emotions through their actions and dialogue.
Many, many chapters (and even entire books) start in the wrong place. Look at every chapter and find a more exciting place to start it—like in the middle of an action scene, where a character is just picking himself up after a bar fight, or when there’s a knock on the door.

Now take out your machete, sharpen the blade and start slashing! Just watch out for your shins.

Walk through Your Imperfect Holidays

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It’s easy to be miserable after the holidays. Maybe you created a perfect holiday with your family, and you’re grieving now that family and friends are leaving.

Or maybe you meant to create a perfect holiday, but obstacles intervened: feuding family members, money, illness, work deadlines.

In my case, I’m often melancholy at this time of year because ours is a blended family of five children. My husband and I have been married almost twenty years now, so I should be used to the fractured fairy tale of our family life. Yet, a part of me always, always wishes that things could be simpler.

At the same time, I’m joyful when any of the children come home. Now that they’re older, we get odd mixes—this year, for instance, we just had the three boys, because the girls are living too far away—and I’m always enormously sad when we all go back to our routines.

This holiday season, I’m combating my emotional flu by making the holiday less grand in the scheme of things. In other words, I didn’t strive for perfection: we bought fewer gifts, chose a smaller tree, made a simpler dinner, saw friends without having a big holiday party.

In addition, I made it a point to walk somewhere every day where there were no cars or stores. And I took whoever was home with me.

It was English weather in New England, and by that I mean rain, rain and more rain. Oh, and lots of mud to go with it. But I didn’t care. I made everyone put on their boots or jump over puddles if they insisted on wearing sneakers. And, if nobody went with me, I walked alone with the dog, enjoying the solitude.

Two days before Christmas, for instance, when our youngest son was visiting a friend and our oldest boys hadn’t yet arrived, my husband and I hiked to the top of Old Town Hill in Newbury in the drizzle, and I was awed by the startling beauty of red berries popping out against the greenery and birches. The sparkle of raindrops on branches was better than any Christmas lights.

 

 

On Christmas Day, we opened gifts and then the three boys hiked with us through the Audubon Sanctuary in Ipswich, where we held out handfuls of seeds for the greedy chickadees and nuthatches and forgot all about the sweaters and CDS and electronics we’d unwrapped that morning. Birds are winged miracles, and to hold them in your palm is something not soon forgotten.

We’re still walking, my husband and I, as we do the laundry and restock the fridge after the last of our friends and family members have departed. Today we went to Bradley Palmer State Park, where we marveled at fresh-cut trees felled by beavers for a magnificent dam, and the distant howls of a coyote pack as we snapped through ice crystals on the rutted paths.

 

The New Year beckons, and with it will come work, routines, normalcy. And, I hope, more moments like these interludes in the woods, where we can remember that we are just creatures, after all.

We don’t have to be perfect. We only have to be.

On Discovering Yoga and Writing a Novel

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I lowered myself to the mat and felt every joint complaining.

“Honor your intentions,” the instructor was saying. “What intention are you bringing to the mat today?”

“Just to be able to get up off the mat again,” I muttered.

I never intended to be here, on this yoga mat. Yoga, I always thought, is for sissies. Or maybe for Californians. I’m a runner, a hiker and a backpacker. Or, in bad weather, a gym rat. I lift and climb. I don’t bend and stretch.

That’s for sure. My downward dog looked like it was dying, compared to that showoff next to me in her spandex and braids, her butt in the air. My Happy Baby pose was a dead opossum.

Meanwhile, the instructor looks like she’s floating. “If you can’t hold the bottom of your foot, hold your thigh or your calf,” she croons. “Make this accessible. Have a conversation with your body.”

My body wasn’t interested in conversation. It was too busy yelling.

“We are chest breathers,” the yoga instructor said. “Make this moment, this time on the mat, about filling your body with the oxygen it needs. Focus on your breath.”

Oh! She was right, I realized the next day, as I was charging through my grocery store and Christmas shopping lists. I was practically panting from stress. I made myself stop and have a cup of tea.

Gradually, I am discovering that yoga isn’t only about breathing and posture, but, like everything important in life, it is about intention. About embracing everything this moment has to offer. And that’s having an enormous impact on my writing.

In my work life, I’m a novelist on deadline. A tight deadline. I’ve been trying to wrestle my characters into submission, warning them that they’d better behave or we won’t make the editor’s deadline. They were fighting with me until I began asking them the same simple question my yoga instructor was asking: “What is your intention?”

In this way, I discovered that one of my characters had been unfaithful to her husband. She was trying to understand why she’d stayed with him despite having fallen in love with another man. Another character needed the time and space to understand why she’d abandoned her daughter.

“Make this accessible,” I begged the women who lived in my head, the characters I wanted to see come alive on the pages of my book. “Breathe.”

Sure enough, as I stopped trying to force them, they did. Instead of sitting at my laptop for hours at a time, feeling frustrated because everything I put on the page was crap, I took deep breaths and let the words flow without worrying about what they looked like on the page. That could come later. Right now, I just want the plot and characters to be accessible to me.

I also started taking more breaks. Instead of hunching over the laptop all morning and then through lunch, too, I got up, stretched and walked the dog. Yesterday I was outside, wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood at my Pekingese’s pace, when I saw my way through to the end of the book. It was as if doors had opened to show me a whole new room. Or maybe a new world.

That’s exactly it, with yoga: it opens doors and windows to let in the fresh air. To remind you that you are not important or extraordinary or even necessary. You are just you, living in the world for a short time, honoring your body and mind so that you can love and do good work while you’re here.

 

Where Do Novels Come From? Author Yona Zeldis McDonough’s Inspiration for You Were Meant for Me

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One of the best things about social media is that it lets us connect to people we wouldn’t ordinarily meet.  One of my favorite new online pen pals is Author Yona Zeldis McDonough, a fellow author at New American Library.  Here, Yona spills some surprising secrets as she describes what inspired her to write her newest novel, You Were Meant for Me.   Enjoy!

 

 

For me, writing a novel usually begins with a character tapping me on the shoulder, urging me to get the story down, and to get it right. In the best of times, I feel more like the conduit than the creator—pretty heady stuff. But the inspiration for my most recent novel, You Were Meant for Me, came to me in a different way: an actual news event in which a man found a newborn infant on a subway platform and eventually ended up adopting him.

I found myself returning to the story again and again. What had driven that baby’s mother to leave him not in a hospital, police or fire station—safe havens, all—but on a subway platform? And what random stroke of luck or divine intervention averted all the horrific ends to this tale—and there could have been so many—and instead turned it into one of salvation and grace?

As I mulled over these questions, it occurred to me that the story was working on another level as well, one that was both mythic and archetypal. The foundling, the infant abandoned and rescued, is a motif that occurs over and over in literature and can trace its roots as far back as the Bible. Wasn’t Moses himself a foundling, set in the ark and concealed in the bulrushes by his mother, whose fear for his life was so great that she was willing to give him up to save him? And wasn’t Moses rescued by the most unlikely of saviors, an Egyptian princess who found and then raised him as her own?

It was the Moses connection the clinched it for me; this story was too good, too juicy, to leave alone: I had to write it. But because I am a novelist and not a journalist, I made several major changes along the way. I turned the man of the real story into Miranda Berenzweig, a single woman who has not thought of having a child but whose biological clock is nonetheless ticking loudly. I changed the baby boy to a girl. And unlike the real story, in which no one came forth to claim the child, I introduced the birth father, a successful black real estate broker who did not know he had a daughter. Once his paternity is established, he steps up to claim her.

This plot turn raised issues about what makes a good or fit parent and once again, brought the novel into Biblical territory, more specifically, that of King Solomon who adjudicated between the two women who came to him with an infant each swore was her own. Each of my characters has a claim to the baby as well but which claim should prevail? That was what I attempted to work out on the page.

Novels can come from surprising sources and lead to equally surprising destinations. I did not know that by reconfiguring a contemporary news story I would find my way to two of the ancient stories that help form the backbone of Western civilization, and that those stories in turn would offer a surprisingly modern lens through which to view the world.

The Biggest Mistakes a Writer Can Make

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Every month, I join Nevertheless Writers, a cross-genre group of five writers, to discuss writing and publishing at local libraries and schools. My favorite part of the evening is always the question-and-answer session, where everyone from teenaged writers of fantasy novels to aging hipster poets chime in with questions and information.

Last night, one question provoked so much discussion that I thought I’d share it here: “What were your biggest mistakes along the way to publication?”

I made so many mistakes along the way that I thought I’d offer a roundup of them to help aspiring writers avoid stumbling into the same muddy potholes that nearly swallowed me whole:

Don’t Pass Up Opportunities. One of the writers on our panel, middle grade author Elizabeth Atkinson, tells a great story about a contest she entered to give herself a deadline for finishing a manuscript. That contest didn’t lead to publication, but it helped her find an agent because one of the judges happened to be an editor at a publishing house, and she wrote a note saying she’d like to see the book again if Elizabeth revised it. Another member of Nevertheless Writers, mystery writer Edith Maxwell, also found an agent through a contest. I entered an essay writing contest and, although I only earned honorable mention, that gave me the confidence to start submitting essays to national magazines. Eventually an editor bought one of them, and that opened the door to my career as a magazine writer. Now I wonder what would have happened if I’d been entering different contests—maybe, say, contests for first novels? Would I have been publishing my fiction sooner? My point is this: opportunities are everywhere. Check out Poets & Writers and other magazines for contest announcements. Even some publishing companies sponsor them. You might think, “Oh, I’ll never win that,” or, “That deadline is too tight for me.” But how do you really know you won’t win? What would happen if you did? I’ll tell you what would happen: you’d start building a solid portfolio that could eventually lead to an agent and bigger publications. The message: If you see an opportunity, grab it.

If An Editor Shows Interest, Follow Up. When I sent my first novel around, I received several editorial letters from editors who thought my work showed promise. All said basically the same thing to my agent: “If she decides to revise this novel, please send it to me again.” Now, did I revise that novel and resend it? Unlike my wiser friend Elizabeth, I did not. I was too inexperienced back then to know that, when you’re writing, the real magic happens during the revision process. That particular novel is still sitting in a file cabinet in my office. Looking back, I wish I’d had the chops to dig back into it and resend it to the same editors to prove that I had the staying power to work on a manuscript until it was ready for publication.

Don’t Listen to People Who Make You Cry. I majored in biology and was headed to medical school until I took a creative writing class senior year and decided to become a writer instead of a doctor. (Oh yeah, baby. My parents were thrilled.) I had no foundation in literature, so I went to graduate school for a Master’s in Fine Arts in creative writing to get one. One of my teachers there—a revered, award-winning fiction writer—made me cry when he told me my writing “has the depth of a television commercial.” What he was seeing in me was something I only realized later: I love writing commercial fiction, specifically, emotional family mysteries. That particular literary lion didn’t think much of that kind of writing, and it took me years of wrestling my way through writing literary novels (that still remain unsold) before I realized, hey, I don’t like to read this stuff, really. Why would I write it? I needed to be true to my own voice.

Avoid Nesting. I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me at these events and talk about the novels or memoirs they’ve been working on for years. Or even decades. Yes, the magic happens in the revision, but at a certain point, you have to let your work go out in the world and be judged. For one thing, that’s the only way you’ll get real feedback. For another, if you do land an editor at a publishing house, that editor will probably have you revise the book anyway. Or, if you’re self-publishing, your readers will probably be reading for the story more than anything, and if they like your story, they will forgive small imperfections.

Don’t Hide in Your Hermit Crab Shell. Yes, writing is a solitary act and requires hours of alone time. You can’t really write a good book while you’re having conversation with someone else. In fact, I find it difficult to live the writerly cafe life simply because I get too distracted by all of the people and start eavesdropping. At the same time, it’s a mistake to think that writers work completely alone. If you can find a good writing workshop—either through a library, a bookstore, or by taking a class—that will give you deadlines for you work (very important, if you’re going to avoid nesting), and, even more importantly, a community where you can share everything from rejections to information about agents or book marketing. Besides, if you don’t get out and live life a little, what will you have to write about?

 

As NaNoWriMo Ends, Banish Birdman From Your Brain

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Recently I saw Birdman, the brilliantly, darkly comic movie starring Micheal Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor who formerly made it big as the superhero Birdman in an action movie franchise. The plot revolves around him writing, producing, and starring in a Broadway play adapted from a popular Raymond Carver short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and every aspiring writer should see this movie.

That’s especially true if you’re desperately hammering away at that novel you’re trying to finish for National Novel Writing Month.

As it happens, I’m not taking part in NaNoWriMo, but I might as well be. I have a book contract with Penguin for a new novel that I’m supposed to finish by January, and I’m only halfway done. Yikes.

This past weekend I took a mini-retreat to a cheap condo in Maine and knocked out 34 pages.

“Good for you!” one of my friends cheered when I told her I’d typed so many words that my hands were lame.

Despite this progress, I was glum, because I had let Birdman into my brain.

What do I mean by that? In Birdman, Michael Keaton is haunted by his former glorious self as a muscled, half-bird, half-man hero. (One of the many inside jokes in the movie is that Birdman is masked and looks remarkably like Keaton did as Batman.)

Throughout the movie, Birdman—sometimes in the form of a movie poster, and other times as an actual character in shots with Keaton/Riggan, once even standing up to pee in the same bathroom, wings and all—basically tells Riggan that he’s worthless. Birdman bashes his confidence on a regular basis, trying to convince Riggan to abandon his effort to produce a play.

For example, Birdman says, “People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.”  And “Now you’re about to destroy what’s left of your career.”

Every time Birdman did that confidence-bashing thing, I cringed, because a voice in my head has been saying I can’t write this new novel. My Birdman says things like this:

“Jeez, where did you get those tired metaphors? Talk about off-the-shelf, overused imagery! You should be ashamed to stoop to this.”

“Only a crazy person would write a chapter like that last one you cranked out. Or maybe a drunk.”

“Good thing your editor liked the last novel. Too bad she has to see this smelly disaster. Oh, wait. You don’t have a contract for another book after this one, do you? Too bad.”

Etc.

Watching Riggan battle his inner Birdman made me come home from the movie theater and march over to my laptop. I will keep going. This novel might not be great art yet, but it’s not done yet, either. Here’s the truth: You have to write a book before you can revise it, and you have to wade through lots of junk to get to the good stuff.

So that’s what I’m doing. Every day, I’m just sorting through more junk. It doesn’t have to be original or brilliant. That’s for later, when I start cleaning and polishing. Right now I’m just telling a story. My novel will take shape. All I have to do is keep breathing life into it.

Happy writing, everyone!