The three best pieces of advice I've ever received.
One of the secret superpowers of most authors is advice-giving. Especially in the romance industry! I have time and again met with authors more than willing to sit down and offer up to wannabe writers (who we all were at one point in time) as well as our colleagues those pearls of wisdom gleaned from a long and hard road to where we are now.
Some advice, of course, will be more helpful than other advice – after all, there is no map for an author's career path (trust me, I've been looking). But some things are universal, and really helpful when trying to remove the 'un' from in front of your 'published author.' Thus, I give you:
Three Great Pieces of Advice I've Been Given about Writing
DON'T save it for the second book.
(source: I got this piece of advice from a seminar at a conference. I really wish I'd saved that hand-out.)
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
"Oh I just came up with the awesomest plot twist!"
"Fab – will it work in your WIP (work in progess)?"
"Yeah, but I'm not putting it into my WIP – I'm saving it for the next book."
Right about now, your friend is looking at you peculiarly, because you don't have a next book. You only have this one work that you will hopefully finish and be sending out on submission. Why are you holding back?
Like most writers, ideas come at me fast and furious, and generally, without much in the way of reasoning or form. I can write them on note cards and store them away for later, but I find it far more productive to put those ideas into my current story and see where this new element will take me. Case in point: when writing Revealed, I had this idea to set a story at the Sir John Soane museum in London – a townhouse stuffed with antiquities, to the point you have to walk single-file through the rooms. But I thought it wouldn't fit into this book – it was too much of a mystery, Night at the Museum/Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler-style idea. But I decided to give it a try anyway… and the scene where Marcus and Phillippa meet in a library overstuffed with antiquities, replete with sarcophagus, ended up being one of my favorites in the book, and setting the tone for my hero and heroine's relationship.
DO know your its from your it's.
(source: many, many copyeditors)
Confession time: I have terrible grammar. For no other reason than I simply never bothered to learn the rules. My most flagrant violation has always been writing "it's" when I mean "its", or vice versa. It's such a small thing, I would say to myself. Honestly, who cares?
The truth is, I used to think that being a slave to grammar would mess with my natural 'flow.' Besides, as the as-yet-unpublished-wannabe-writer-I-used-to-be would say, when the book finally sells, an outside copyeditor will go through and correct all of those pesky its/it's.
But here's the rub: I have, on more than one occasion, turned in a manuscript and been chastised for my lack of adherence to that particular rule. While I find the difference between its/it's negligible, the people who were being paid to assess whether my work was good enough for publication found it annoying, and worse, distracting.
This was a hard lesson learned, but learned it was: Pay attention to form. Pay attention to the rules. You want to submit the best possible product your can, and that means learning the rules everyone else knows. Once, I corrected the its/it's in my manuscript, it was no longer distracting and those people reading it could focus better on the story.
There is a secondary benefit to paying attention to the rules: you learn to love them. You learn to enjoy words and grammar and style. You learn that stuff has names. Syntax. Lexical chains. Diphthong. You learn that what you thought of as your 'flow' is actually highly constructed, and when you recognize that construction, you can refine and repeat it in the same way symphony composers create phrases that repeat and build over the course of the piece – and suddenly, your writing becomes music.
DON'T give up.
(source: Virginia Kantra told me this at a conference before I was published, while she was signing a book for me.)
This is a piece of advice I have actually given before, but before I was the one doing the giving, I was the recipient of this particular gem. And it is perhaps the most important of all.
While you are unpublished, the only person driving you to write is you. You are going to get criticized. You are going to get rejections. You have to pick yourself up and keep going.
When I finished a complete draft of Compromised, I began submitting it to agents. I had submitted to twenty agencies before I landed a 'yes.' (For the full story of how that happened, read this.) What if I had stopped at nineteen? I wouldn't be a working writer today.
A caveat: when I say I finished a complete draft of Compromised, it in no way meant I was done writing. While I was submitting, I was also refining and revising, entering chapter contests to get outside opinions, and revising some more. Don't finish the first draft and think that you're done. Don't give up on your manuscript, or yourself.
Again, these are pieces of advice that I have found useful, and latched onto in my quest for a writing career. Of course your mileage may vary, but I hope you find them equally useful. And remember, if you find yourself in a quagmire, and need a little advice, you are more than welcome to ask me in the comments. I can't promise that what I tell you will work for you, but I promise any advice I give did, at one time, work for me.
Until next week, sweets, happy reading!
