Circle of Fire Virtual Tour; Advice for Young – and Not As Young – Writers
Sorry I didn't post for you guys yesterday. I'm not kidding when I tell you that I have THREE writing projects going right now – and those are just the ones I'm actively working on. I have at least three more in various stages of planning, and sometimes, I'm not gonna lie, it's all a little much. Figuring out how to split my time so that I can still be accessible to readers, write all the things I want (and need) to write, and still be the mother I want to be (because it's still the most important job in the world to me). Being a single mother makes it all more difficult. There's no one to pick up the slack, no one to clean the house or spend extra time with the kids when I'm under deadline, no one to tell me I'm doing okay when I feel like I suck as a mother AND a writer.
I figured this was a good time to to address the question I'm MOST often asked on tour; What advice would you give to aspiring writers?!
Truly, I never feel qualified to answer this question. Most days, I feel like I just got lucky. The only thing I'm sure of is that I worked my ass off. Beyond that, I can only offer the following;
1. Read as much as you can. Seems obvious, but I have to reiterate. Something happens in your brain when you're reading – even if you're not aware that it's happening. You're processing stuff. How a good story feels, how the sentences are structured, even grammatical rules you'll never actually remember as rules.
2. Write as much as you can. And not just fiction. Every little bit of writing you do – school papers, newspaper articles, sales letters (I was always the first to volunteer for these when I worked in corporate America, geeky little writer that I was!). It ALL makes you better.
3. LIVE as much as you can. Every experience you have – every boring trip to the doctor's office, exhilarating new adventure, fight with your parents or children – is a chance to file away material for your work. You can't accurately describe fear, love, anxiety, boredom, excitement, pride, unless you've felt them.
4. Be consistent. It doesn't matter what your schedule, what matters is that you make one. Life is just too busy and too many things can conspire to keep you from your writing. You have to have some kind of plan, even if that plan changes from time to time. I write at least 10,000 words most weeks when I'm drafting. During the school year, I write over 3,000 a day Tuesday through Thursday. It works for me because my kids are in school and busy with their own stuff, and then I can have four days to unwind, work on other things (like promotion) and spend time with my children. But I had to come up with another system for summer, because it just didn't make sense for me to spend six hours a day holed up in my office when the kids are all home. So I've been writing 2,000 words a day, every day, in two one-hour bursts. And it's working! Sometimes I fall a little short, but I've still written 18,000 words in the last ten days. And let's break it down further. Let's say you only write 1,000 words a day, five days a week (a thousand words for me on a good day is about an hour, two hours on a bad day). That's still a 90,000 word book in just over four months. That's more than two books a year if you write only 1-2 hours a day, five days a week. And what if you wrote 500 words a day, five days a week? You would still write a book in about 9 months. And you'd only be working 30-60 minutes a day. So you see what I'm getting at, right? You have to commit to your writing. It has to be more important to you than an extra hour of sleep or an hour of TV or whatever. I'm a single mother of four kids. I'm under contract for two books, working on another project, and another yet to be sold project with many more in the pipeline. But if you told me to find an extra hour in my daily schedule, even now, I could and would find it – if it mattered enough to me.
5. Give yourself an extra incentive to write. When I was writing Prophecy I was too broke to have more than one computer. In fact, I was too broke to even have an Ipod. I wrote on the only computer we had in plain view of everyone in the house. But I listened to CDs on an old Sony Discman and I always had a stash of dark chocolate in the drawer. I actually looked forward to tuning out the rest of my life for a few hours by listening to film scores, sipping tea, and writing.
6. Tune out the noise. I was a member of several online writing forums when I was trying to get published. Some of them were super helpful and supportive and some of them were just plain toxic. But none of them was actually writing. I had to make a conscious effort to log off and focus on writing, because it sometimes seemed like I was "working" when I was talking about writing. But since I wasn't getting paid to talk about writing and talking about writing wasn't getting me closer to publication, I had to remind myself that it WASN'T THE SAME AS WRITING. I valued the camaraderie (and still do) and still dropped in from time to time, but I was very careful to meet my writing goals, too.
7. Eliminate negative people as much as possible. There are those who will support you and believe in you, and those who will go out of their way to tell you how impossible your dream is (and this is true of anything, not just writing). Sure, getting published isn't a common occurrence. Of all the people who submit their work to agents, only a fraction will secure representation. Of all the authors who submit their work to editors, only a few will secure a contract and even fewer a big one. But my feelings about this are best summed up in a conversation I had with my son about his music. He said something like, "Maybe it's egotistical, but when people tell me I only have one in a million chance, I just think, 'yeah, I know. I'm the one'." I realized that was the way I'd always thought about it. One in 10,000 or one in a million. It didn't matter. I would be that one. Now, I wasn't delusional. I was perfectly prepared to write 20 books if that's how many it took, to keep working, to keep getting BETTER. But I never doubted that I would do it. I always believed. And if you don't believe in yourself, who will?
8. Don't quit. And there's a caveat I'll get to in a minute. It can be a VERY long road to publication and even success once you get there. It took J.A. Konrath 10 books to become published. It took Scott Westerfeld 11 novels to hit the bestseller list. But they didn't quit before they got there. Not everyone is meant to be a published writer. It is wonderful and magical and so rewarding – and sometimes lonely and terrifying and very unstable. But the best advice I ever heard when it comes to writing and quitting is this; go ahead and quit – if you can.
If you can't, you're really a writer, and quitting isn't an option anyway.
