Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 39

Earn Six Figures as a Writer With This One Weird Trick

Photo by Porapak Apichodilok

Today’s guest post is by Allison K Williams (@guerillamemoir). Join her for the three-part class Build Your Developmental Editing Business, beginning on Wednesday, November 1.

“I went with a small press, but I didn’t need my book to pay the bills.”

“It was a nice rejection, but ‘great voice’ isn’t gonna pay the bills.”

“A lot of really great writers still aren’t getting paid enough to pay the bills.”

In a writers group online, my colleagues commiserated—about how hard it is to sell books, about the “memoir industrial complex” that promotes a very few big-deal successes while other authors shell out thousands for classes and editing and invest their time in “building platform” that is still statistically unlikely to get a book deal. Over and over, I see this phrase: pay the bills.

While enough to pay the bills is a perfectly valid colloquialism for “an amount of money that emotionally balances the time and effort I’ve put in,” it’s also a terrible goal. I mean, first, screw this pay the bills crap, why not aim for a life-changing amount of money? If you’re aspiring, reach high. But more importantly, very few authors earn enough to pay the bills in any meaningful way.

Do the math. A generous six-figure advance—we’ll go with $200,000 to make it easy—often gets doled out in four chunks: on signing the contract, on submitting the final manuscript, on publication, and then some months after publication. Usually those chunks are about a year apart. Deduct 15% for the literary agent, 30% for taxes, and congratulations, you’re paying the bills with $27,500/year. Just enough to disqualify a single adult for Medicaid in most US states.

Most full-time writers pay the bills with teaching, speaking, offering classes, freelancing, or as magazine/newspaper staff. Most writers making a living are part of a two-income household, in which writing means less childcare than temping and fewer parking problems than adjunct teaching.

You already know this. And I’m not here to amp up our collective bitterness at the unfairness of our calling. I’m here to say it’s possible to pay the bills as a writer, with one weird trick.

I am a writer. I’m also an editor, a retreat leader, a webinar teacher and a public speaker. I love all of these things—nothing makes me happier than a writer discovering their voice—and they are all possible because the foundation is writing. They also all focus on the reader. The person who needs what I have to teach, write or talk about, and how I can serve them.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m proud of my income. But I sure do tick off on the Excel sheet which day of the year I hit my goal, and if I can make it earlier in the year than last year. As an editor I get to watch TikTok nuns, listen to Kae Tempest and analyze Legally Blonde and it’s all on the clock. I’ve worked from Starbucks in Hong Kong, the tallest building in Vietnam and my mother-in-law’s porch in Jamaica, and coughed up $17 for airline wifi to send back time-sensitive edits over the Atlantic Ocean from business class. When I lead retreats, I’ve learned to allow two days before and after with room service and a spa, to top up my own emotional reserves after tending to writers for a week.

I live this life due to one weird trick: generosity.

I give away about a third of my time to literary citizenship. Even if a writer didn’t sign up for my paid class, if the agent I used on an example slide might be the right agent for them? I’m sure going to tell them when they post on Facebook about finishing their book.

I listen a lot. I jot down what writers love, what writers complain about, what writers fear, what writers hope. We make ourselves approachable when we listen, and we make ourselves hire-able when we are approachable.

I write a lot, and I don’t worry about undercutting my book sales by sharing knowledge. Dealers have always known: give away a sample of your very best stuff, and you’ve got a customer for life. Given how many authors I work with who are writing about their struggle with addiction, I’ve seen this secondhand. I’ve seen this firsthand in my years of work as a street performer. When my partner and I appeared on Dragon’s Den Canada (known as Shark Tank in the US), we began our presentation with, “We have developed a product so compelling, we can give it away on the street, and people line up to hand us money even though they could leave with no penalty.”

The investment we won was six figures. We paid the bills.

The second part of generosity is sharing with your colleagues, not just your audience. When I was a trapeze artist, the industry of performing at corporate events was very secretive. Established performers didn’t want to tell newcomers what they billed, for fear of being undercut on the next bid. Then we all complained about how newbies were setting their prices too low.

The newbies didn’t know any better. Someone had to tell them, and that was me. After a slightly shady club manager called for quotes for Kristin Bell’s birthday party, I called every aerialist I knew in a three-state radius to say, “This is what I bid. I think he’ll try to lowball you.”

We all made more money, and not just on that gig. Now we all knew the going rate. We could choose to bid higher or lower, to compete on quality or on price.

Every time I’ve shared concrete, actionable information, on how to write, on who to pitch, on how much money to ask for, on where to find clients, on how to close the deal, and shared it for free, it’s come back to me sixfold.

Perhaps you prefer to limit your human interaction, or know that giving away a big chunk of your professional time is not for you. You can still make six figures as a writer, if you are so dedicated to your literary craft that your work is about the reader’s need to understand humanity; or you write genre fiction with the reader in mind and learn how to work Amazon ads. (Jane just wrote about how self-publishing authors are outstripping traditional authors on income, by a lot.)

My life changed when I realized how much generosity could do that protectiveness, isolation and fear could not.

That’s the magic formula to make a six-figure living as a writer. Focus on your customer, your client, your reader. Give away a substantial chunk of what you do and make it the good stuff. Help your colleagues up the ladder. Share what you love, as freely as you can.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us beginning Wednesday, November 1, for the three-part class Build Your Developmental Editing Business.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Parade

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author Joni B. Cole, author of Party Like It’s 2044: Finding the Funny in Life and Death.

All hail the newly published author. Or not.

A few weeks ago my new book came out, a collection of literary humor essays. You would think given this is my seventh book (from six different publishers), I would be well prepared for this momentous occasion. And in some ways I was.

In the month or two before my book’s release I bought new eyeglasses that make me look more writerly. I also gave the Whole 30 diet a try and, yes, I modified it to the Whole 5 because I cannot not enjoy a glass or two of wine on weekends, but the point remained the same. I wanted to be well prepared for my upcoming author events and I knew from past experience that presenting is a lot more enjoyable if I can not only wear my favorite nice jeans, but also manage to zip them.

I also did a few other things, like update my author website, refine my talking points for book-group discussions, contact regional bookstores and libraries that might want to host a reading or talk, and query writing conferences about teaching workshops on the craft of essays. Last, but hardly least, I sacrificed hours of binge-watching all the TV shows I had missed while writing this new book so that I could research niche publicity opportunities (blogs, podcasts, Facebook writing groups, etc.). My understanding was that I would need to pitch these places myself, knowing that my publicist at the publishing house was already overworked and sick of me.

All this to say, as my pub date neared, I felt ready for the launch of my book. I felt confident. I felt, dare I say, full of myself, and rightly so! The pre-publication buzz (at least in my small circles) had energized me. The head of marketing at my press had actually used the word “commercial” to describe the book. (A first among my various titles.) And the back cover of the book glowed with positive blurbs from highly respected authors, some of whom I didn’t even know, and who didn’t owe me any favors.

What could possibly go wrong? I just hoped when the accolades poured in and the sales figures soared, all this success wouldn’t go to my head.

Then the book’s pub date arrived and… No marching bands. No floats. Some nice bunches of balloons.

For context, I should share that I am not what you would call a “big-name” author, though I am a seasoned author who has been described as a “writer’s writer.” On a related note, while I love my current publishing house for its commitment to quality and diversity, it’s not one of the Big Five, not like, say, Penguin Random House where the lovely (truly) publicist Bianca regularly emails me the nicest queries to see if I would like to interview any of her authors on my podcast—“Sending you big hopes and wishes that you will consider [insert big-name author] as a guest on your show. And just let me know if you’d like a finished hardcover copy!” (Yes, Bianca! I would love a hardcover copy!)

All this to say, if I am being honest about the whole parade thing for my own new release, I knew I’d probably set my expectations way too high, though a midlist author can dream. But what did take me by surprise were several other things that happened (or didn’t happen) in the weeks following the book’s release.

Below are seven lessons I have learned (or relearned in some cases) about what to really expect when a new book is published.

1. Expect to be vigilant. My gosh, the number of little screw-ups I kept encountering in the first weeks after my pub date. In the editorial reviews on my book’s Amazon page, for example, the name of one of my reviewers was misspelled (though it was correct on the book cover). Amazon also failed to include a link to the Kindle edition, an oversight which was finally corrected a month and four days after the book’s release.

Other snafus? Reviewers who had agreed to do write-ups about the book are still waiting for their “advance” copies. Closer to home, one of the bookstores where I have an upcoming event ordered my book two weeks after the pub date, which (briefly) made me rethink my call for buyers to “shop local.” (After checking in with two different sales clerks, I got a nice note from the owner explaining the oversight—“For some reason, the order was coded as backorder cancel, and since it was not yet released it did indeed cancel.”) Whatever the hell that means.

These snags and others—none of them big deals, but still—reinforced that it was up to me to pay attention and be proactive in helping to address any problems.

2. Expect crickets. A bazillion new books come out every day, and the day after that, and after that, all of them clamoring for their own parade. So when I didn’t receive congratulatory notes about my new book from some of my closest friends, or those writing students whom I have taught and nurtured, sometimes for years, well, of course I understood. People are busy with their own lives, their own writing projects. You can’t just stop everything to, say, dash off an email, no matter how much it would mean to that friend or teacher. That’s why I’d like to tell all those people in my life who have yet to acknowledge my new book the same thing my mother often said to me, which always had the desired effect: “I’m not mad…just disappointed.”

3. Expect to fall back in infatuation. By the time I’d finessed every sentence of my manuscript, then reviewed the copyeditor’s notes, then proofed the page proofs, then made a few more tweaks (a no-no after page proofs but you can’t just unsee a word you don’t like), then re-proofed the page proofs (a necessity, thanks to all my last-minute changes), there was one thing I knew for sure. I was sick to death of my book! But then it went to print and a couple months passed and the actual book arrived in stores. Tentatively, I opened a copy to a random essay and started reading. Who wrote this? I thought. My gosh, I like this writer!

4. Expect to find a typo. Miraculously, I have not found a typo in my new book…yet. (Refer back to my comment about proofing and reproofing.) But of course just putting this brag in writing means that now the cosmos is going to plant a typo somewhere in the collection, and one thing I know I can expect is that I will hear about it from some punctilious, well-meaning reader.

5. Expect unexpected reader responses. Like this response from a lovely woman who wrote to tell me she LOVES my book. “Why?” she clarified in her email, “Because I can read it out of order just like I read the Bible!” In addition, despite my misguided belief that this was a book primarily for women, several men have surprised me with thoughtful appreciations. And then there was this response from a formidable academic who told me over breakfast, “I got your book. I wouldn’t have chosen that color for the cover.” And…I thought, expecting a bit more of a reaction. But that was all she had to say, which was unexpected but perhaps for the best, given how this woman terrifies me.

Bookshop • Amazon

6. Expect to find your happy place in one of the least expected places. I’ve delighted in the arrival of every email from someone who applauds my book. I’ve basked in the glow of a good Amazon ranking, however fleeting. And how fun it has been to blab about me, myself, and I during book events, and on a variety of podcasts and author interviews. But those temporary highs can’t compete with my real happy place, which—surprise, surprise—is still at my desk, working on my next collection of essays, while my cat rests her head on the edge of my keyboard.

7. Expect to let go of any expectations. As a bit of a control freak, at least when it comes to my work, I have reluctantly accepted this lesson. But even I can understand that if you rid yourself of expectations, then you don’t have to feel disappointed or hurt when they aren’t met. On the other hand, well, you just never know, which is why I’m still holding out for a parade. So cue the marching bands, fire up the floats, and start blowing up lots more balloons!

First-Page Critique: How to Elegantly Reveal Character Motivations

Photo by Alice AliNari

Ask the Editor is a column for your questions about the editing process and editors themselves. It also features first-page critiques.

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)

A summary of the work being critiqued

Title: The Siren Dialogues
Genre: Literary fiction

When Libby Levine is assigned a story on renowned photographer Tanner Bixby, she sees an opportunity to prove her writing chops and win a promotion. As a bonus, the photographer has a vacation cabin on the same island as her boyfriend, Jasper. But Bixby has a surprise agenda: he’s looking to find the long-lost love of his life—who he claims is a mermaid.

When a mysterious, half-conscious woman washes up with the tides, Libby forms an inexplicable bond that challenges what she knows about herself as well as her past decisions and true loyalties. With the arrival of a hurricane, the woman fully awakens and reveals her true nature. And Libby must summon all her power to choose who and what she wants to become and who she’s willing to betray, or run the risk that someone else might choose for her.

From the writer: I’ve had questions whether to present this as literary fiction with magical realism or magical realism with a literary bent. I’ve also wondered if beginning the book with a duck hunt is off-putting to some readers? This is a book that has gone through many iterations over multiple years and I am anxious to get it into the world! Are the character motivations clear? Is the voice engaging? These are some of the big questions I have.

First page of The Siren Dialogues

Libby

Libby angled her flashlight beam over Jasper’s tall, lean frame and the wagon load of decoys and gear bumping along the boardwalk behind him. The beam caught the eyes of one of the decoys, a mallard duck carved from wood, bringing it to life just as a warning gong echoed from a buoy and a ship in the distance issued a long, low response. The early morning hour was alive with sound and magnified over the body of the bay. Even her new duck boots made a satisfying slap against the wooden boards. She turned up the collar of her field coat and patted the pockets. Notebook on one side, gloves on the other. She’d need both to capture the day.

Normally she kept her work and personal lives separate. Elizabeth in the city and Libby on the island for her weekend escapes to Jasper’s cabin. This time was different. Soon her new client, the famous photographer Tanner Bixby, would arrive. She would chronicle his stories for a new photography book and give context to his vision. Her boss, Diane, was taking a chance on her and she planned to come through.

Jasper dropped the wagon handle at the dock and hopped into his boat. He switched on the running lights and the engine hummed to life. His was the last craft left in its slip, all the summer people gone back to the city and their boats put in dry dock. He grasped her by the wrist as she stepped from land to water with only the floor of Jasper’s boat between them. Her blood thrummed beneath Jasper’s long fingers. “Easy does it, Libs,” he said.

She squeezed before letting go and settled on the gunwale. Port side, she reminded herself. Port left red like Port wine. Starboard right green. She looked over the side to see if she’d gotten it right and there was the red blaze of the navigation lights in confirmation. The truth was, she was glad this trip would be different. She’d been with Jasper over a year now. Maybe it was time to shake things up.

Continue reading the first pages.

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for submitting the first several pages of your novel for a critique. I’m especially intrigued by your subject matter. Back in 2020, when The Washington Post noted that “mermaid mania is coming around to books again,” I wondered if it would wane. Instead, interest has grown, and mermaids are featured in several new books for readers of all ages, at least according to HuffPost. To be competitive in the current publishing market, you’ll likely need a progressive twist on the mermaid (or siren) archetype. If The Siren Dialogues is anything like the comparative title you mentioned, Julia Langbein’s well-reviewed American Mermaid, then you are in a strong position.

Opening your novel with a duck hunt is also, in my mind, a plus. Although some agents and editors might be opposed to the idea of hunting in principle (this one included), it is an American pastime. And while I can think of a few contemporary books that depict some form of hunting (C.J. Box’s novels, Helen Macdonald’s heart-wrenching memoir H Is for Hawk), none come to mind that are about duck hunting, specifically. If your novel is set in a region where hunting is common, or if your novel could be considered historical fiction, then you would be justified in leaving it intact.

My bigger concern about the opening is that the exposition may be getting in the way of the action. Your pitch clearly explains that Libby is embarking on a duck hunt with her boyfriend, Jasper, and photographer Tanner Bixby, whom Libby is to interview for her work. But in your pages, this information becomes blurred, due in part to such descriptions: “The beam caught the eyes of one of the decoys, a mallard duck carved from wood, bringing it to life just as a warning gong echoed from a buoy and a ship in the distance issued a long, low response.”

This line is wonderfully evocative, but it’s also on the long side, and it’s the second line in the book. If the wooden duck isn’t relevant to other events in this scene, and if it isn’t meant to symbolize other inanimate creatures that later come to life, then might this sentence be trimmed or removed?

The boardwalk might not be necessary to mention here, either, since it comes up later in the chapter when Libby hears Bixby’s footfalls pounding the wooden boards. In fact, the first paragraph might work just as well if Libby and Jasper are already on the boat rather than preparing to board it. This setup would enable you to focus on how Jasper is waiting for his friends while Libby is anticipating the arrival of Bixby.

Aside from streamlining the opening paragraphs, I would encourage you to better integrate some of the boating terminology into the story so that it sheds more light on Libby’s motivations. For example, did Libby get “settled on the gunwale” because she believes that sitting on the upper edge of the boat will give Bixby more space to spread out? If so, then it’s no wonder that she is startled when he later “plopped down next to her, upsetting the boat’s balance.”

Or you could have Libby reflect on the day that Jasper taught her the difference between “port” and “starboard,” how the glass of wine he handed her helped her remember, “Port left red like Port wine”—if this is at all accurate? If not, perhaps she can be upset that he’s never explained to her why metal wings are positioned below the hull and aft wings, how he acquired his Russian Volga hydrofoil—or why he enjoys hunting an animal that she could never harm?

If it’s true that Libby once said hunting is “cruel and unusual punishment,” as Topher later reminds her, then you might briefly delve into why she’s seeing Jasper, if they have conflicting beliefs. (Such an explanation would have the added advantage of addressing your concern that some readers will find the duck hunt off-putting.) The line at the end of the fourth paragraph about how Libby has been with Jasper for a year and “it was time to shake things up” makes for a terrific cliffhanger, but right now it’s unclear how Libby feels about him and what kind of change she has in mind.

Another way to further strengthen the opening is to reassess when to bring in the siren. Currently, the point of view switches from third person narration about Libby to the siren’s first (and second) person narration rather suddenly, just as readers are just getting to know Libby. Assuming that you’ve chosen a dual narration for the novel that alternates between Libby’s and the siren’s point of view, it should be easy enough to space out their sections, bringing in the siren sometime after the last line of this excerpt, when Libby declares that she’s “hungry and ready for anything.” Until then, you could potentially foreshadow the siren’s appearance by incorporating a few more light touches of magic to Libby’s section. For example, maybe she notices something inexplicable moving about in the bay, or that the early morning moonlight has a silver glow? The delightful passage later in the chapter, about the “salve that washed away the residual layers of [Libby’s] city self” and how Libby “loved … letting go of one self and embracing the other, as if she were a mythical creature transforming to its true nature,” should make for the perfect lead-in to the introduction of the siren.

As for your question about whether to present this as literary fiction with magical realism or magical realism with a literary bent—perhaps you don’t need to include either descriptor? Since you say that your novel is written in the vein of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, the recipient of numerous literary awards, agents will assume that your work is literary as well. What would be more helpful is to indicate how your writing is similar to Ozeki’s, whether in terms of setting, theme, or tone. The other comparative books you’ve chosen, coupled with your title, suggest that your work is speculative. Since “magical realism” is often associated with contemporary Latin American writers, maybe it’s best to avoid this term, focusing instead on the “magical elements” of your novel? Your many impressive publications and accolades, including your Pushcart Prize nomination, also speak volumes about your craft. Be sure to mention them in your bio, as they are certain to garner interest from agents.

Best of luck!

—Sangeeta Mehta

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)

How to Use Brain Waves to Enhance Your Writing Practice

Photo by DS stories

Today’s post is by writer, speaker and coach Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Thursday, October 26 for the online class The Psychology of Memoir, Part 3: Completing Your Book.

Insights are the juice of a writing life that take us from not knowing to a god-like understanding of our stories. They feel like a lightning striking inside you and often cause you to say things like a-ha and that’s it!

While you can’t crack your head open and press the insight button, you can set the stage for insights to happen, and for you to do more organized, heads-down work.

To get started, let’s look at how your brain waves work.

Brain waves 101

Your brain’s neurons emit electrical waves as they communicate with one another. The five brain waves, from slowest to fastest, are delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. Understanding which ones support specific writing activities can not only enhance your writing life, it can prevent you from unwittingly robbing yourself of that precious juice.

Delta (1–4 Hz) is the slowest brain wave pattern. In adults, they occur during deep, dreamless sleep. When you get adequate deep sleep, you feel refreshed, focused, and ready to take on the day. Good sleep hygiene, which includes things writers might begrudge, like limiting caffeine after 2:00 p.m. (the horror!), shutting off electronics that emit blue light two hours before bed, and setting a regular bedtime, can improve how much deep sleep you get.

Theta waves (4–8 Hz) are the second slowest. They occur during REM sleep and play an essential role in memory formation. They also occur on the edge between sleep and awakening, and are sometimes seen as the gateway to the subconscious. This wave state is associated with creativity, intuition, daydreaming, and fantasizing.

Alpha waves (8–14 Hz) occur when we’re in a state of wakefulness but not really concentrating on anything. When your brain emits a healthy level of alpha waves, you’re more likely to feel relaxed and in a positive state, two things needed for insights to happen. According to neurofeedback practitioner Jessica Eure, “A healthy, robust alpha frequency allows us to tune in to ourselves and tune out the external world a bit while still being fully awake. This allows us to visualize things in our mind’s eye.”

Alpha and theta brain states are great for gathering ideas, making unique connections, or tuning in to what your subconscious has to say. That’s why Julia Cameron encourages writers to not just write in the morning, but to write as soon as you wake up. A groggy mind has access to those theta waves.

Beta waves (14–30 Hz) are fast and active. They occur when we’re in the wide awake state needed for focus and concentration. Harnessing your low beta waves (12–15 Hz) can help you organize your thoughts and increase your productivity. But sometimes we have too much beta, or the beta brain waves we experience are at higher frequencies. High beta states (14–40 Hz) are associated with stress, irritability, anxiety, worry, insomnia, racing thoughts, and being jumpy and hypervigilant. When we’re operating in high beta, the busyness of the brain can make it harder to focus.

Gamma waves (40–120 Hz) are the fastest of your brain waves. They coincide with periods of intense learning, problem solving, and decision making. They also appear alongside alpha and theta during states of flow.

Many factors affect the composition of our brain waves, including genetics, head injuries, illnesses, trauma, stress, and even the medications we take. You can’t reprogram your brain to have more or less of a specific brainwave without treatments like neurofeedback or strict, often hours long, meditation practices, but you can make the most of what you have by engaging the right brain waves for the appropriate writing task.

Capitalizing on your brain waves

For your brain to function properly, you need to take good care of it. According to Eure’s colleague, Dr. Rusty Turner, “The best things we can all do for our brains are exercise, eat well, disconnect from technology, and have good sleep hygiene.” That’s step one. Next, try to engage the brain waves best suited for your writing session.

If you’re generating new material, spend some time in your upper alpha or low beta brain wave states. This happens when you’re relaxed and feeling both wide awake and focused. (More on how to do this in a minute.)

After generating and revising that new material into something that makes sense, you’ll need to figure out what it means, why it’s significant, and how it connects to other things you’ve written. You can’t force these insights to happen by poring over your work. That’s because the more you focus on a problem, the more you worry about it, which engages your high beta waves. Instead, step away from your work and focus on engaging your alpha waves, with the occasional help from theta. This is where morning pages can come in handy. While Julia Cameron sees them as an emptying of the trash so you can get to real writing, giving yourself permission to wander into story territory soon after waking might help you solve your work-in-progress’s biggest problems.

Meditation is often touted as the way to prep your brain for writing. That’s because meditation calms the brain and encourages alpha and theta wave brain states. But meditation doesn’t work for everyone. In fact, it can be detrimental to trauma survivors and can feel like failure for anyone whose brain has a lot of spindly high beta waves.

If this is you, skip the meditation and instead focus on breathing activities like alternate nostril breathing. This exercise will engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps with the formation of alpha waves. Other activities that can help you engage in alpha wave states include warming your hands and feet, getting a massage, taking a shower, and walking in nature.

For editing activities that require a high level of wide-awake focus, give your low beta waves free rein. If you’re getting enough sleep, all you’ll need to do is take a walk, especially on a brisk day, to wake your brain up.

If you’re working on a large-scale problem that requires deep focus, gamma waves are your ally. While the best way to access them is sustained long-form meditation, there’s a hack you can use to access this and other brain states: binaural beats.

Binaural beats are two tones set to specific frequencies, or hertz, that you listen to simultaneously. Studies show that listening to binaural beats can help you temporarily access specific brain waves, though this doesn’t teach your brain to go there on its own.

While you can purchase a binaural beat app, a simple YouTube search will give you plenty of options. To see if binaural beats are right for you, do the following:

Grab a set of stereo headphones.Choose a playlist set to the frequency best suited to your task.Listen for approximately 30 minutes while you’re doing a set task.Notice how you feel. If it’s helping, keep it up. But if you feel agitated, unfocused, or depressed, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means that frequency isn’t right for you.

I personally like binaural beats set to music, though others feel best when all they hear are the specific tones. Mixing it up helps me maximize my brain waves and harness those juicy insights that keep me at my writing desk. My current favorites are this gamma wave mix for hard core editing, and a dreamier cognition enhancer when I want to find the stillness needed to create new work. If you give this a try, leave a note in the comments to let me know what you discovered and how this affected our writing process.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Thursday, October 26, for the online class The Psychology of Memoir, Part 3: Completing Your Book.

Why I Prefer to Read Fiction without Lessons or Messages

Photo by Steve Johnson

Today’s post is by writer, podcaster and editor Wayne Jones.

In an episode from the second season of The Simpsons in, yes, 1991, Homer hopes that allowing Bart to donate his rare blood type for a transfusion to save Mr. Burns’s life will result in a substantial financial reward. When they receive only a thank-you card, Homer writes an angry letter to his boss, who ultimately does reward them—but with a huge Olmec god’s head carving that of course is of no practical value to the family. A debate ensues about the moral of the story, but Homer concludes there isn’t one: “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened!”

I feel the same way, though not dismissively like Homer. I don’t read fiction to be taught anything. For sure, there may be things in fiction that depict the way things are (or should be) in the world, but if that seems like the author’s main purpose, then for me it’s a hard no, as the kids say.

What I want in fiction is a virtuoso demonstration of the use of our messy, malleable, beautiful language. I want to see clichés avoided and in their place fresh, strong, exuberant images and descriptions and stories. I want the author to pay attention to how they are saying something even more than to what they are saying. One of the characters in the great short novel Lord Nelson Tavern (1974) by Canadian writer Ray Smith dismisses Jane Austen because all she wrote about were “the absurd concerns of silly small-town girls in England around 1800.” Another character disagrees, because regardless of subject matter, the important aesthetic for Austen was that everything was “closely observed and accurately rendered.” Again: it’s not the what that counts but the how.

Perhaps the icon in defending fiction lacking messages is the great American writer Vladimir Nabokov, who chose to push back against ridiculous claims made about his character based on some people’s reading of Lolita (1955). Modern editions of the novel now generally include an afterword, “Vladimir Nabokov on a Book Entitled Lolita,” in which he states:

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.

No morals, no messages. The John Ray whom Nabokov refers to is the fictional writer of the foreword to the novel, who says the exact opposite of what Nabokov believes: “for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson … ‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”

A few weeks ago I began re-reading the short stories of another great American writer, Raymond Carver, whose fiction was published mostly in the 1980s and 1990s (the movie Short Cuts is based on his stories). There isn’t much that’s offensive in the subject matter of Carver’s writing, and certainly nothing close to pedophilia, but there’s also not a single lesson to be found in or between the lines of his extremely spare prose. There are scores of examples. “Kindling” (1999) is about Myers, a man “between lives,” who rents a room in a couple’s home. The story presents the interactions of the three of them as well as the daily routine of the couple, which Myers adapts to. He starts writing things in a notebook, and the story ends after he writes an entry, and: “Then he put the pen down and held his head in his hands for a moment. Pretty soon he got up and undressed and turned off the light. He left the window open when he got into bed. It was okay like that.”

That’s all. Whether this story has a message or a theme depends, I suppose, on your attitude toward fiction, whether you need it to say something in order not to be pointless. I could imagine a reviewer talking about the “theme of adjustment” or the “strong message about resilience and adaptability.” For me, though, these just seem like so much contrived aggrandizing, and I cringe at how such reductions always risk ignoring the real beauties of the story: the tone and pacing, the carefully chosen dialogue, the portrayal of character in just a few actions or words, and so on. I see an analogy in how some people view abstract painting. They ask what it means. Or they say that they can see this or that item from real life in it, just as you might see clouds form something that looks like a face or a teapot or the shape of Newfoundland.

The lack of messaging is not just a hoary technique of the past. The young American writer Tessa Yang, author of the short-story collection The Runaway Restaurant (2022), says in an interview that she doesn’t “write fiction with morals or messages in mind,” and the subject matter is about as far removed from Raymond Carver as you could imagine. In “Night Shift,” a young woman takes a pill to try to keep herself awake, and soon she’s talking to a small green dragon who’s sarcastic and tells bad jokes and riddles. But there’s no “just say no” and no “moral in tow.” Pretty much the entire collection is like that.

When I was a student at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s, I took a course from Northrop Frye, a self-effacing scholar who had read pretty much all of Western literature and made a name for himself with his book Anatomy of Criticism (1957). I was a shy guy then in my early twenties and during the whole term had the courage to ask him only one question, but the answer stuck with me. I forget the details, but he made the distinction between writing (like nonfiction) which is a “structure of belief” and literature, which is a “structure of the imagination.” I still make that distinction. Fiction, short stories, plays, whatever—they are not works which aim to make you learn or believe in something real. Instead, they follow the open and very broad “rules” of the imagination. The skill of the writer can transform just a bunch of stuff that happened into something pretty beautiful.

What It Means to Make Your Story Relatable

Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and educator Deborah Williams.

If you’re a serious writer, chances are good that you have a battered copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird on your shelf (or, if you’re like me, maybe you’ve committed large chunks of it to memory). But when my first-year college writing students read Bird by Bird, they’re almost always coming to the book for the first time.

Because I’ve taught approximately eighty-gazillion first-year writing courses over the course of my teaching career, I can pretty much predict how the students will respond. Many of them (particularly the international students) will be bashful about the chapter called “shitty first drafts,” because they’re anxious about saying “shitty” in front of a teacher. Many of them will feel deep kinship to the chapter on “Perfectionism” because they got into college (for the most part) by being good at school—and that requires a certain level of Type-A behavior.

“It’s like I feel so seen,” someone will say, to which their classmates will nod in vigorous agreement. 

“I can just totally relate,” someone else will say.

That’s when I pounce: “You can relate? You feel connected? How many of you are sixty-something, born-again Christian, recovering-addict, single-mother, dreadlock-wearing white ladies from Northern California?”

They laugh. They’re pretty emphatically not any of those things. They’re eighteen and nineteen, from any number of countries and across the United States, and they probably won’t take another writing class after this one (which is a required course). Almost none of them want to “be writers”; in fact, most of them are headed towards majors in STEM or business.

These “relating” moments demonstrate to my students (and to me, again and again) that connection gets established in the nitty-gritty, in the small nuggets of lived experience. Sure, we all feel love, anger, joy, anxiety—but we recognize ourselves in the particulars. When Lamott describes her anti-writing voices, for example, she characterizes one of those inner critics as a stoned William Burroughs, who tells her that she’s “as bold and articulate as a houseplant.” The description makes me and my students laugh in recognition: “I thought I was the only one who felt that way,” one of my students said. Lamott’s specificity comforts us—we are not alone—even if, like my students, you have never heard of William Burroughs.

I ask my students to show me their “I can relate” moments and then we focus on how that sentence or that section works. Those moments don’t happen by magic, I say; those moments get made. They’re a product of craft. (Okay, and a tiny bit of magic.)

Here’s what we discover, again and again, when we talk about Bird by Bird.

Pour the concrete

Lamott uses concrete, tangible nouns; Bird by Bird is a master class in “show, don’t tell.” Readers watch as she procrastinates by peering at herself in the mirror to see if she needs orthodontia; we share her pain when she talks about recovering from a tonsillectomy. Even the title of her book comes from a concrete moment: her brother, then in middle school, freaks out about a report on birds that was (of course) due the next day. Her father’s advice to him? Take it bird by bird. She builds on her brother’s freak-out with her own experiences, using the example of writing restaurant reviews for a now-defunct magazine: “I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, xx them out, try again … and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an X-ray apron.”

Panic as a lead apron: who doesn’t recognize that feeling?

Action!

As the students point out relatable moments, we look at Lamott’s verbs. Yes, she uses some forms of “to be,” but more often than not, she uses one-word action verbs. Action verbs are like Spanx for your prose: they tighten, streamline, hold it all together; they provide visual cues that preclude the need for adverbs. Stephen King, famously (adverbially) insists that the road to hell is paved with adverbs. Allison K Williams, in Seven Drafts, suggests using adverbs only if the adverb provides some quality of surprise: yelling quietly, or smiling angrily, for example.  The distractions that bedevil Lamott before she sits down to write turn her into “a dog with a chew toy, worrying it…chasing it, licking it … flinging it back over my shoulder.” Now, I’m not a dog owner, but I can see all this happening—and I connect it to my own urge to do all the laundry when I’m on a deadline.

You talkin’ to me?

Throughout her book, Lamott refers to “we” and to “us” almost as often as she uses “I.” The people she’s talking to are writers and students of writing; she’s not talking to her church community, or to members of AA, or to the PTA. Who is your “we” to whom you’re trying to relate and how can you make that clear? Are you talking to other parents? Survivors of a trauma? Writers? Teenagers? As much as we writers might hope and wish and imagine that our words are for everyone … probably they’re not. Thinking about your “we” is going to help you think about how to craft concrete moments that will bring your “we” into your prose.

And who are you?

In thinking about the “we,” it can be tricky to determine how much to divulge as the narrative’s “I.” My students often say that a key “relatable” element comes from Lamott’s willingness to make herself vulnerable—showing us how she wrangles to stay focused. “I never feel like she’s scolding me,” one student said. And yet, even as she’s making herself vulnerable, Lamott makes clear that she’s writing from years of experience. She knows enough about herself as a writer to trust her own process and as a result, she gives us permission to find and then trust our own processes.

What level of disclosure feels right to you? Can you push that boundary just a tiny bit further, to the very edge of what seems possible? It’s at that tipping point, often, that we find those moments of connection that make reading so powerful. Even if you’re writing fiction, knowing your own vulnerabilities can make your characters and your scenes that much more resonant.

In writing memoir, that level of vulnerability and disclosure gets trickier, because your story probably involves other people who might not want to be revealed. Lamott, again, has an answer, which is that if people wanted you to write nicely about them, they should have been nicer to you. It’s a flippant response—but is she wrong?

Relatable doesn’t mean likeable

There are always a few students in class who find Lamott’s humor aggravating; they say that she makes them feel stupid. They admit that some of what she says resonates, but they don’t like her.

Their response raises a question: do we need our characters to be “likeable”? (I’m going to sidestep the entire issue of whether anyone ever asks this question of male characters, or male writers, for that matter.) Think about characters you’ve encountered who resonated with you. Was it because they were paragons who always made the right choices? We might think that what we want when we read are role models, but reading about role models often makes me feel like I’m reading a lecture or a sermon; to use my student’s word, I feel scolded. Connections emerge in the struggle, in moments of transition, as a character tries to chart a new path. That’s where we find recognition, connection, and exploration.

In the novel I’m working on, the central character is a fictionalized version of a (long-dead) writer whose work I’ve admired for years. It’s hard not to make her do everything right, because I don’t want my literary hero to make mistakes. But the story exists, I remind myself, in her stumbles. That’s where I have to locate my action.

Zoom in

Think about a trip you took where you ended up with a bunch of snapshots of bridges, buildings, trees, and landscapes in your photo roll. Those are pretty pictures, sure, but after a while, they all blur together. Was that the beach in Maine or the beach in Maryland; was that pretty tree in San Francisco or Japan? Put a few people in the photo and suddenly it’s a story, one that we can write for ourselves even if we don’t know the people involved: those kids are too close to the edge of the waterfall! I would look better in that dress! We hiked that same trail!

That’s not to say that your writing (or your IG posts) shouldn’t have moments of reflection and stillness, which I’ve started calling “zoom out” moments for my students, who have grown up amid the endless digital/visual stream. Too many of those, though, and we’re looking at your story from a drone’s sky-level view, like a David Attenborough nature documentary that never hones in on the snow leopard and her kits.

Where to zoom out? That depends, in some ways, on how you choose to define your “we.” Your audience will need different types of zooming out, different levels of generalization and abstraction. Lamott talks to us as if we’re all in her writing class; we’ve been invited into that room, as it were, and so her levels of abstraction are all designed with the aim of helping novice writers become more confident. When we trust our own process—when we recognize that we have a process—the little procrastinatory moves, the shitty first drafts, the vexed question of how to make our perfectionist selves be quiet, all become easier to handle. Her abstractions, and then her specific and vulnerable scenes of her own struggles, help us to recognize ourselves so that we can get our words—ourselves—onto the page.

Amazon’s Orange Banner: The Anticlimax of Achievement

Today’s post is by author Jen Craven.

In a world where success is often measured by external markers and symbols, the pursuit of status symbols can be alluring. Whether it’s the coveted “bestseller” label for authors, or a blue checkmark next to your name, these symbols often come with the promise of prestige and validation.

Confession: I was among these seekers, dreaming of how incredible it would feel to see that orange banner on my book’s Amazon page. Number one. Bestseller. It would be the peak of success, the culmination of years of work and energy.

A writer can dream.

And then I got it. One week after my latest book launch, I woke on a nondescript Wednesday to my novel as the #1 new release, orange banner and all.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience a rush of giddiness. I was on top—figuratively and literally. This was the same badge of honor that adorned so many of my favorite authors’ books. Legit authors with legit careers. Now I could say I was alongside them? Incredible!

And so I blasted it out to social media: Woohoo! I hit #1! [insert string of celebratory emojis]

Congratulations came pouring in, and I reveled in being on the receiving end after cheering on other authors for years. It felt good and fun and all the things.

You might think that’s where the story ends, on a high. Sort of. But not exactly.

Not long after posting my exciting news, a weirdness settled in my gut. Was I really making such a big deal about a silly orange banner? It felt a little like carrying a designer handbag just for the logo. You know it’s what everyone wants, but there are plenty of better bags out there.

I messaged an author friend. “Self-promotion is hard. I feel sort of icky.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

Another friend expanded the sentiment: “Celebrate the crap out of that banner. You earned it!”

Had I? According to the algorithm, yes. Numbers-wise, my book was entitled to the label. But what did it mean? Was my book “better than” so many others? Better than my friends still riding the querying roller coaster or putting out independent titles?

In a word, no.

And that realization brought with it a swift helping of imposter syndrome. It suddenly felt braggy to be shouting my accomplishment from the rooftops. How cringey to be obsessed with a marker that could disappear the following day. To get it was one thing, but to outwardly promote it? Ew, gross. What I’d once envisioned would be such a pinnacle moment, felt anticlimactic once the high wore off, and if truth be told, I was a little embarrassed for putting so much stock in it. What did such values say about me?

For aspiring authors, the dream of becoming a bestseller is often a driving force that keeps them burning the midnight oil. The idea of seeing your book’s name on the New York Times bestseller list is a powerful motivator, and rightly so. Achieving such a status symbol signifies not only creative success but also the potential for financial gain and widespread recognition.

However, once the dream becomes a reality, authors often find themselves grappling with a sense of emptiness.

“Yeah, it was sort of weird,” a writer friend who’d experienced something similar told me. Turns out, the label of bestseller is, in many ways, fleeting. Books rise and fall on those lists, and the euphoria of hitting the top spot can quickly give way to the anxiety of maintaining that status or the realization that it hasn’t fundamentally changed much at all. We’ve all heard of the sophomore slump, right?

But back to the Instagram post with the ecstatic caption. In the age of social media and personal branding, self-promotion is unavoidable to a degree. After all, many authors view their writing and books as a business. While it’s a necessary part of the journey, it often comes with a sense of awkwardness. Around book launches, I find myself wanting to apologize: Yep, I’m posting my book link again, sorry! Sorry to bug you, but would you mind leaving a review?

Then I remember the words of my wise friend: Books don’t sell themselves.

So, what’s the antidote to the anticlimax of status symbols? It might lie in the pursuit of intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, rewards. For many authors, it means writing for the love of storytelling, not just the pursuit of bestseller status. For others, it might mean finding joy in the process, not just the end result.

All this to say, holding the #1 spot was a cool experience, and it felt damn good, but at the end of the day, I call to mind the hundreds of incredible books I’ve read that have never seen that orange banner. Do I think less of them? Certainly not. And that’s the reminder I carry with me moving forward.

Yes, I’ll continue to celebrate reaching personal benchmarks and outward successes—there’s a difference between being proud and being boastful. But I’ll also operate with the mindset that status symbols do not define my worth or my creativity. The true fulfillment comes from within, from the satisfaction of pursuing my passions authentically and the joy of creating something meaningful.

After all, orange doesn’t go with everything.

How Connected Settings Give Your Fiction Emotional Depth

Today’s guest post is by writing coach, workshop instructor, and author C. S. Lakin (@cslakin).

The characters we create in our fictional stories do not exist in a vacuum. We writers, aware of this, create places as stage sets or backdrops for the plot. But all too often these settings are ordinary and boring.

Sad but true, setting in fiction is mostly ignored. It’s as if writers feel they must sacrifice attention to setting to meet the needs of the plot—get the story moving!—but nothing could be further from the truth. The more real a place is to readers, the easier they can be transported there to experience the story.

Whether setting is a huge element in your story because of your premise or not, you can make it powerful and impacting by choosing each place carefully. And by creating what I call “connected settings.”

Connected settings are places with emotional ties to the protagonist or other characters. Connected settings evoke specific emotions that hold meaning and charge the scenes with a unique energy.

For example, it may be that the setting is symbolic of some past life event and serves as a reminder of what happened and the feelings associated with it. Imagine a character being asked to an important business lunch in the same restaurant where his girlfriend turned down his marriage proposal. Even though time has passed, maybe years, an echo of that hurt and rejection will affect him while he’s there and, in turn, will influence his behavior and mood.

Placing your characters in environments where emotions are triggered can also heighten inner and/or outer conflict. If you’re feeling tense in a school principal’s office, discussing your child’s misbehavior, your defenses might shoot up and cause you to take a combative stance—all because you yourself spent many hours in such a situation during your turbulent teen years.

So, how do you go about creating these powerful settings?

Think about the key moments in your novel when your character has the greatest insights, pain, confrontation, or despair. Consider the traumas or difficulties in your character’s past and imagine the places she would have experienced them.Keep in mind the subliminal power of mood. Sensory descriptions, lighting, weather, and universal symbolism all play a part in setting the emotional tone of a scene. By carefully selecting words and imagery that evoke specific moods, we layer more emotional impact via the setting.Consider the high moment of your scene and the plot point you are going to reveal. How should your character feel at the end of the scene? How do you want your reader to feel? What is the best setting to drive home that high moment?

Let’s see how these three points come into play in the powerful scene in the movie Minority Report in which the protagonist, John Anderton takes the female Pre-Cog, Agatha, to his former home, which his ex-wife, Lara, still lives in. This is perhaps the moment in the movie in which John faces the most pain, despair, and insight (point #1).

John and Lara broke up years ago because their son was kidnapped and presumed murdered. Now, they hardly speak to or see each other, but John needs a temporary refuge for Agatha in order to solve a crime. I have little doubt this whole scenario was invented just so the couple would be in the same room to face the loss of their child.

Lara and John talk in their son’s room, and for a brief moment it’s as if the fast-action plot comes to a screeching halt in a moment of incredible poignancy. This scene is the very heart of the movie. It’s a highly unexpected moment—for the viewer and the estranged couple. For Agatha stops them in their tracks by saying, “There is so much love in this house.” She then “sees” the future their dead son would have had, recounting, “He’s ten years old … he’s surrounded by animals. He wants to be a vet … he’s in high school. He likes to run. Like his father. …  he’s twenty-three and in love …” And on and on she goes, seeing this future that could have been—likely would have been. The mood and tone of this moment is intense, unexpected, shattering and magnificent, all at once (point #2).

Although what Lara and John hear breaks their hearts, it somehow breaks through their pain, so that by the end of the movie they get back together and Lara’s pregnant (but not until a lot of suspenseful minutes pass on the screen!). That scene, so powerful due to the characters’ emotional connection to setting, is paramount in John’s character arc. It is the scene that propels him to the place of needed healing. Without it, he would never get there. He would wallow in misery and drugs forever.

How does John feel at the end of this scene? Utterly broken and yet strangely relieved to drench himself in the pain he’s been burying for years. How does the viewer feel? Tremendously compassionate and empathetic over what John and Lara have gone through (point #3).

Could any other setting have had such a powerful effect on the characters or viewers? What could be more painful than sitting in your dead child’s bedroom, amid all those memories—the sweet memories before the tragedy? How do you think that scene would have emotionally impacted the characters and viewers if Agatha said those words to Lara and John in a crowded Starbucks? Don’t answer that.

Every scene in your story serves a purpose. It’s a stepping stone in your character’s journey, a puzzle piece in your plot’s mosaic. But crafting connected settings is a skill that requires careful consideration and a deep understanding of your characters and plot. Here’s an exercise to help you:

Pick one of your scenes (whether written or at the idea stage).Identify your POV character’s goal for the scene—what must he do, learn, or achieve?Jot down what you want him and the other characters involved to feel.Next, imagine 5 different types of settings where this scene might take place, ones that fit the story and are logical locations for your character to visit. Make a list. Often the settings that come immediately to mind are the most obvious, but with a bit of digging, some more creative and interesting choices can be unearthed too.Once you have a few options, look at each potential setting in turn and think of how you can describe the location to evoke a specific mood that will make your character’s emotional reactions more potent. Tension can be a factor too. Depending on what is about to happen in the scene, you might want your character to feel off-balance. Or maybe you wish to lull him into a false sense of security so he doesn’t see what’s coming. Either way, the details you pick to describe the setting will help steer his emotions.Finally, think about what the character will learn, decide, or do as a result of what happens in the scene. The setting can act as an amplifier for this end result simply by surrounding the character with emotional triggers that will lead him toward that decision or action.

By carefully choosing settings that trigger emotions, intensify conflicts, and evoke specific moods, you infuse your story with vivid, unforgettable scenes that keep readers engaged from the first page to the last. Have your settings breathe life into your characters and amplify their emotions, so that your story will linger in the hearts of your readers. Embrace the power of connected settings and watch your fiction come alive.

How Can I Set Aside the Cacophony of Writing Advice and Just Write?

Image by Goran Horvat from Pixabay

Ask the Editor is a column for your questions about the editing process and editors themselves. It also features first-page critiques. Want to be considered? Submit your question or submit your pages.

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)

Question

I attend webinars and online conferences, to learn the craft of writing, though I was a poet in another life back when getting my BA. I was raising a child so hedged my bets by double majoring in developmental psychology and creative writing. Hedging my bets gave me less craft lessons.

Now, an empty nester with a lot of time on my hands, I’ve carefully added authors and writing coaches I follow. I used to follow anyone whom I thought could give me the best answers on writing/memoir. Now, though, my inbox is filled with newsletter advice I can’t possibly find time to read. I want to stick with the two and I know and trust: Lisa Cooper-Ellison and Jane Friedman.

Searching for the one author whose advice is the “key” is fruitless. Yet after a conference I still tend to follow a few speakers and their newsletters. Any advice on how to keep to a couple authors and editors I trust and stop the bouncing around between editor to editor and and settle into a chair and write?

—Elizabeth Undiluted

Dear Elizabeth Undiluted,

The great news here is that you already recognize what you need to do: Sit down and write. So why can’t you?

The answer lies in whatever underlying needs, fears/anxieties, and/or feelings of responsibility have been driving you to bounce around. And I must admit, as a long-time advice giver (who has no shortage of qualms about my position as one), I can be at fault in this predicament, along with my colleagues, at making people feel they need to stick around for my guidance.

Let’s cut to the chase: You can get by fine without it. Nothing bad will happen if you stop. Maybe you’ll take a little longer to figure out specific craft challenges. Or perhaps you won’t be as sharp on some business issues. On the other hand, you’re likely to have dramatically less anxiety that you’re doing things wrong, or that conditions in the market aren’t favorable for your work, or that you’re inadequate to the task of marketing and promoting. (A lot of inadequacy that writers feel is driven, IMHO, by advice givers.)

That’s the short answer, but here’s the longer one that explores specific reasons you might be avoiding the writing chair.

You have fear of missing out.

Speaking personally, I keep logging onto social media platforms I don’t care about and subscribing to countless newsletters because I feel like I’m going to miss out or become uninformed. That said, it’s literally my job to be informed about what everyone’s talking about in the writing and publishing community. But is it your job? Probably not.

It’s highly unlikely you’re going to miss out on a piece of valuable information or knowledge that would dramatically change your writing fortunes, which you seem to realize. It’s more likely, in fact, you’re going to come across harmful information from people who have no business giving you advice. Most important, a lot of the lessons to be learned about writing come from doing it, from the practice, from showing up. So that’s priority number-one. Everything else is secondary to supporting that effort.

That said, I think your strategy to focus on one or two people you trust is excellent. This gives you some reassurance that if there is something you probably ought to know about, one of these people is likely to bring it to your attention. Or you could ask them to point you in the right direction if a specific need or question arises. (I swear I would say this even if you hadn’t mentioned my name as one of your preferred sources! And thank you for that trust.)

The other thing I’d suggest is that the best advice and guidance still tends to come in either book form or class/workshop form, brought to you by experts you know and trust (or that have been recommended by the experts). This is not to discount the many wonderful newsletters, blogs (like this one!), social media accounts, podcasts, and so on that offer advice. But let’s be honest: Most of it is disposable. If it’s not bringing you joy, if it’s not something you actively look forward to (and especially if it’s something that feels anxiety producing or a burden), it’s time to let go of it.

You need more knowledge to tackle your writing challenges.

You mention that hedging your bets gave you less craft lessons, which implies you don’t feel as schooled or as advanced as you would like at this point in your writing life. I would dig deeper into this feeling, if it’s there. Is there something about your current writing project that you’re feeling ill-prepared to tackle? Are you feeling deficient in some area? Is there a weakness you wish you could eliminate?

One of the reasons writers avoid writing is that we don’t know next steps on a writing project. Maybe we’ve written ourselves into a corner or we don’t know where the story is headed and can’t figure out the answer. So when you sit down at your desk, you have no clue where to begin. Or you simply procrastinate to avoid the unpleasant feeling of being stuck.

If you can pinpoint what the writing problem is, then I’d look for books that might help you with a breakthrough. Or, if you have the resources, you could consider hiring a professional editor or coach to help you through the impasse. Alternatively, a class or workshop can help for less cost if you’re surrounded by both a great instructor and sharp students.

There are some writers I meet who simply fear messing up and try to gather as much advice as possible before they even begin. Unfortunately, the writing process is more or less defined by messing up and starting over. Writing is revising. Good writing advice can help you avoid the serious pitfalls, or bring clarity to a confusing process, but creative work of any kind is going to involve countless bad ideas. It’s important to work through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. (And hopefully you’ve gained enough self-awareness to know when you’ve moved past the bad into the good.)

You want to be a good literary citizen—you owe it to these people.

Maybe you’re appreciative of the speakers, teacher, editors, and coaches you’ve learned from. You want to support them, so you subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on social and try to engage. It’s a way to be a good literary citizen, to see and be seen—all good things when you’re trying to make your way in the literary community.

But at some point, your writing has to come first. And you’ll outgrow some of the people you used to learn from. A lot of writing advice, by necessity, is for beginners. It tends to get less useful over time as you become more experienced. The people who give advice know this. No one will get offended if you silently drop away. (And if they do, I humbly suggest they have a lot to learn about the business of helping writers!)

Not writing is more enjoyable than writing.

Writing is hard work. I mean, yes, it can be enjoyable, but it’s the joy we take in doing challenging work. It requires mental focus. For memoirists, there’s often the additional challenge of emotional drain.

So it’s natural to look for other things to do instead, especially activities that are writing adjacent, like reading writing advice or gathering with other writers to talk shop or joke around.

We all need a break and we can’t be writing all the time. But if you develop a habit of avoiding the work, especially by reading writing advice or attending conferences and classes, ask yourself why. Then read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, if you haven’t already, to delve deeply into the psychological challenge of producing art, to recognize how we all pretty much do anything to avoid such work.

You’re trying to prepare now for future problems you don’t have.

Don’t focus on problems that exist downstream. Focus on the problem that you face now. The experts will be there when you need them.

Imagine that you haven’t read a piece of writing advice for five years. You haven’t subscribed to any newsletters. You have no clue what you’ve missed. But you wish you had their insight on some new challenge or the next step in your journey. Go to Google and search for your favorite expert’s name, plus keywords related to the problem you’re facing. Presto.

Parting advice on advice

If you think you have this problem, you probably do. But sometimes I find that writers feel guilty about things that they shouldn’t. They’re in fact making great progress! Except they have this ideal in their head of what a real writer should be doing, and they’re not meeting that ideal. Or there’s just a general feeling of “I should be writing more.”

If this is the case, then you might not need to stop following advice givers, or unsubscribing from their newsletters. Instead, put guardrails on it and maybe you’ll feel better in control. Decide there’s only one time or place you’ll delve into all the newsletters with writing advice. You could set up a separate email account, or set up email rules and filters that file them away in a folder. Then, at the appointed time and place, browse for anything that looks juicy and enjoyable. And anything that doesn’t fit your needs or strikes you as manipulative clickbait? Delete with abandon and return to your writing.

—Jane Friedman

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)

How Can I Set Aside the Cacophany of Writing Advice and Just Write?

Image by Goran Horvat from Pixabay

Ask the Editor is a column for your questions about the editing process and editors themselves. It also features first-page critiques. Want to be considered? Submit your question or submit your pages.

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)

Question

I attend webinars and online conferences, to learn the craft of writing, though I was a poet in another life back when getting my BA. I was raising a child so hedged my bets by double majoring in developmental psychology and creative writing. Hedging my bets gave me less craft lessons.

Now, an empty nester with a lot of time on my hands, I’ve carefully added authors and writing coaches I follow. I used to follow anyone whom I thought could give me the best answers on writing/memoir. Now, though, my inbox is filled with newsletter advice I can’t possibly find time to read. I want to stick with the two and I know and trust: Lisa Cooper-Ellison and Jane Friedman.

Searching for the one author whose advice is the “key” is fruitless. Yet after a conference I still tend to follow a few speakers and their newsletters. Any advice on how to keep to a couple authors and editors I trust and stop the bouncing around between editor to editor and and settle into a chair and write?

—Elizabeth Undiluted

Dear Elizabeth Undiluted,

The great news here is that you already recognize what you need to do: Sit down and write. So why can’t you?

The answer lies in whatever underlying needs, fears/anxieties, and/or feelings of responsibility have been driving you to bounce around. And I must admit, as a long-time advice giver (who has no shortage of qualms about my position as one), I can be at fault in this predicament, along with my colleagues, at making people feel they need to stick around for my guidance.

Let’s cut to the chase: You can get by fine without it. Nothing bad will happen if you stop. Maybe you’ll take a little longer to figure out specific craft challenges. Or perhaps you won’t be as sharp on some business issues. On the other hand, you’re likely to have dramatically less anxiety that you’re doing things wrong, or that conditions in the market aren’t favorable for your work, or that you’re inadequate to the task of marketing and promoting. (A lot of inadequacy that writers feel is driven, IMHO, by advice givers.)

That’s the short answer, but here’s the longer one that explores specific reasons you might be avoiding the writing chair.

You have fear of missing out.

Speaking personally, I keep logging onto social media platforms I don’t care about and subscribing to countless newsletters because I feel like I’m going to miss out or become uninformed. That said, it’s literally my job to be informed about what everyone’s talking about in the writing and publishing community. But is it your job? Probably not.

It’s highly unlikely you’re going to miss out on a piece of valuable information or knowledge that would dramatically change your writing fortunes, which you seem to realize. It’s more likely, in fact, you’re going to come across harmful information from people who have no business giving you advice. Most important, a lot of the lessons to be learned about writing come from doing it, from the practice, from showing up. So that’s priority number-one. Everything else is secondary to supporting that effort.

That said, I think your strategy to focus on one or two people you trust is excellent. This gives you some reassurance that if there is something you probably ought to know about, one of these people is likely to bring it to your attention. Or you could ask them to point you in the right direction if a specific need or question arises. (I swear I would say this even if you hadn’t mentioned my name as one of your preferred sources! And thank you for that trust.)

The other thing I’d suggest is that the best advice and guidance still tends to come in either book form or class/workshop form, brought to you by experts you know and trust (or that have been recommended by the experts). This is not to discount the many wonderful newsletters, blogs (like this one!), social media accounts, podcasts, and so on that offer advice. But let’s be honest: Most of it is disposable. If it’s not bringing you joy, if it’s not something you actively look forward to (and especially if it’s something that feels anxiety producing or a burden), it’s time to let go of it.

You need more knowledge to tackle your writing challenges.

You mention that hedging your bets gave you less craft lessons, which implies you don’t feel as schooled or as advanced as you would like at this point in your writing life. I would dig deeper into this feeling, if it’s there. Is there something about your current writing project that you’re feeling ill-prepared to tackle? Are you feeling deficient in some area? Is there a weakness you wish you could eliminate?

One of the reasons writers avoid writing is that we don’t know next steps on a writing project. Maybe we’ve written ourselves into a corner or we don’t know where the story is headed and can’t figure out the answer. So when you sit down at your desk, you have no clue where to begin. Or you simply procrastinate to avoid the unpleasant feeling of being stuck.

If you can pinpoint what the writing problem is, then I’d look for books that might help you with a breakthrough. Or, if you have the resources, you could consider hiring a professional editor or coach to help you through the impasse. Alternatively, a class or workshop can help for less cost if you’re surrounded by both a great instructor and sharp students.

There are some writers I meet who simply fear messing up and try to gather as much advice as possible before they even begin. Unfortunately, the writing process is more or less defined by messing up and starting over. Writing is revising. Good writing advice can help you avoid the serious pitfalls, or bring clarity to a confusing process, but creative work of any kind is going to involve countless bad ideas. It’s important to work through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. (And hopefully you’ve gained enough self-awareness to know when you’ve moved past the bad into the good.)

You want to be a good literary citizen—you owe it to these people.

Maybe you’re appreciative of the speakers, teacher, editors, and coaches you’ve learned from. You want to support them, so you subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on social and try to engage. It’s a way to be a good literary citizen, to see and be seen—all good things when you’re trying to make your way in the literary community.

But at some point, your writing has to come first. And you’ll outgrow some of the people you used to learn from. A lot of writing advice, by necessity, is for beginners. It tends to get less useful over time as you become more experienced. The people who give advice know this. No one will get offended if you silently drop away. (And if they do, I humbly suggest they have a lot to learn about the business of helping writers!)

Not writing is more enjoyable than writing.

Writing is hard work. I mean, yes, it can be enjoyable, but it’s the joy we take in doing challenging work. It requires mental focus. For memoirists, there’s often the additional challenge of emotional drain.

So it’s natural to look for other things to do instead, especially activities that are writing adjacent, like reading writing advice or gathering with other writers to talk shop or joke around.

We all need a break and we can’t be writing all the time. But if you develop a habit of avoiding the work, especially by reading writing advice or attending conferences and classes, ask yourself why. Then read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, if you haven’t already, to delve deeply into the psychological challenge of producing art, to recognize how we all pretty much do anything to avoid such work.

You’re trying to prepare now for future problems you don’t have.

Don’t focus on problems that exist downstream. Focus on the problem that you face now. The experts will be there when you need them.

Imagine that you haven’t read a piece of writing advice for five years. You haven’t subscribed to any newsletters. You have no clue what you’ve missed. But you wish you had their insight on some new challenge or the next step in your journey. Go to Google and search for your favorite expert’s name, plus keywords related to the problem you’re facing. Presto.

Parting advice on advice

If you think you have this problem, you probably do. But sometimes I find that writers feel guilty about things that they shouldn’t. They’re in fact making great progress! Except they have this ideal in their head of what a real writer should be doing, and they’re not meeting that ideal. Or there’s just a general feeling of “I should be writing more.”

If this is the case, then you might not need to stop following advice givers, or unsubscribing from their newsletters. Instead, put guardrails on it and maybe you’ll feel better in control. Decide there’s only one time or place you’ll delve into all the newsletters with writing advice. You could set up a separate email account, or set up email rules and filters that file them away in a folder. Then, at the appointed time and place, browse for anything that looks juicy and enjoyable. And anything that doesn’t fit your needs or strikes you as manipulative clickbait? Delete with abandon and return to your writing.

—Jane Friedman

This month’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Plottr. Ditch the index cards and unleash your storytelling with Plottr – the #1 rated book outlining and story management software for writers. Use code JANE15 at checkout for 15% off. (Expires Dec. 31, 2023)