Let it Marinate
I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since third grade when I put on a puppet show for my class. When I turned forty, I figured I better get it in gear. As a teacher, I had the summers off so I got out my legal pad and set out to write ten pages a day with a goal of finishing a first draft by the end of the summer. Amazingly, I stuck to it, sometimes scribbling twenty pages a day. I was basically winging it, giving my self a brief outline at the end of each day’s work, but when I finished, I had no idea how to fix what I had. The next year I bought an Apple 2C computer, which helped a lot, but I wound up typing rather than revising. I needed help, so I reluctantly paid the three hundred dollar fee the Scott Meredith Literary Agency charged for a critique. What the heck. What was more important than my lifelong ambition?
A couple of months later I got my critique. The first sentence was encouraging. “You are an uncommonly gifted author.” But the next twenty pages tore me a new one. I had no idea what a through line was. My novel was basically picaresque, whatever the heck that was. A lot of it didn’t sound like my novel, however. It was only later, when I started reading writing gurus like John Gardner that I realized that Meredith’s readers were using “boilerplate.” New authors make the same mistakes. Why not take a few shortcuts?
What I really needed was encouragement, and one sentence about being uncommonly talented wasn’t enough. I didn’t know about writers’ groups and would have assumed that they were more experienced than I was anyway, so I put everything on hold until I retired from teaching. It was then I discovered writers’ conferences. I went to one at Splitrock on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus,, one in Rapid City, South Dakota, and another in Iowa City, what I thought was the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Most the people I met there were even less experienced than I was, so they weren’t too helpful. All of these workshops also used the same format: the coordinator would make an assignment and the next day mostly everybody would read aloud and get peer critiques. It’s hard to follow along, even when you have a hard copy which most often we didn’t. Probably the most helpful thing I found was a book entitled, THE WEEKEND NOVELIST by Robert Ray. It helped me get to know my characters and outline my novel before I started writing. It’s still the best writers’ book I’ve found and I’ve read dozens as a member of the WRITER’S DIGEST BOOK CLUB.
Okay, so when I retired I started writing with a passion. I finished another novel, SOLDIER’S GAP, and rewrote it a couple of dozen times before I sent to a freelance editor, William Greenleaf, whom I found at the back of the Writers’ Digest magazine. He was great. He did a page by page outline of what was good and what was not so good, with just the right balance of encouragement and criticism. I also tried the Loft, a writers’ help group in the Twin Cities, and finally, Dave King, a freelance editor who wrote SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. Dave and I did a partial line edit.
By the time I was ready to submit to agents and editors, most publishers had stopped taking unsolicited (over the transom) manuscripts. You had to have an agent, and agents want manuscripts that will sell. You can find the legitimate ones in NOVEL AND SHORT STORY WRITERS’ MARKET. Never, I repeat never, look for an agent on the internet. I sent off about a hundred queries with only a few nibbles. Most didn’t like the psychic element in my novel, not that there’s that much of it.
Then along came e-books and I thought I had a shot since Sara Anne Freed, an editor at Mysterious Press, had been reading my work with encouraging feedback. She recommended Time Warner e-book imprint iPublishing. Somehow I wound up submitting my book to a company called iPublisher, now known as Bookpublisher.com. You guessed it. It was a self-publishing outfit like iUniverse, and it cost me some heavy bucks. But I wanted to see my book in print, and I wanted to go through the process of editing, picking out a cover, checking galleys, and so forth. It was fun. The problem was, at that time, was that you don’t get any promotional help. I got exactly one professional review. I also managed to scrounge up two signing sessions at bookstores, where I sold a whopping dozen books, about a dozen more than I thought I would. Bookpublisher.com did put my book on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNobel.com, where it still resides today. I even managed to earn a four-and-a-half star rating with nine reviews. one recent. I sure could use a few more. Hint, hint.
Since then I’ve written five more novels and about thirty short stories (available on authors den) mostly written for WRITERS’ DIGEST contests, and I’ve been working on a new novel entitled, STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS, some of which is posted on authors.den.
I ‘ve been through some down times, mostly when I thought I had an agent, or when some editor thought it was helpful to denigrate my work. (That’ll put a crimp in your style.) I guess I’d like to close with a pep talk. Never ever give up, and it’s surprising how good some of the stuff you write is that you thought was total garbage, if you just give it a chance to marinate.
A couple of months later I got my critique. The first sentence was encouraging. “You are an uncommonly gifted author.” But the next twenty pages tore me a new one. I had no idea what a through line was. My novel was basically picaresque, whatever the heck that was. A lot of it didn’t sound like my novel, however. It was only later, when I started reading writing gurus like John Gardner that I realized that Meredith’s readers were using “boilerplate.” New authors make the same mistakes. Why not take a few shortcuts?
What I really needed was encouragement, and one sentence about being uncommonly talented wasn’t enough. I didn’t know about writers’ groups and would have assumed that they were more experienced than I was anyway, so I put everything on hold until I retired from teaching. It was then I discovered writers’ conferences. I went to one at Splitrock on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus,, one in Rapid City, South Dakota, and another in Iowa City, what I thought was the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Most the people I met there were even less experienced than I was, so they weren’t too helpful. All of these workshops also used the same format: the coordinator would make an assignment and the next day mostly everybody would read aloud and get peer critiques. It’s hard to follow along, even when you have a hard copy which most often we didn’t. Probably the most helpful thing I found was a book entitled, THE WEEKEND NOVELIST by Robert Ray. It helped me get to know my characters and outline my novel before I started writing. It’s still the best writers’ book I’ve found and I’ve read dozens as a member of the WRITER’S DIGEST BOOK CLUB.
Okay, so when I retired I started writing with a passion. I finished another novel, SOLDIER’S GAP, and rewrote it a couple of dozen times before I sent to a freelance editor, William Greenleaf, whom I found at the back of the Writers’ Digest magazine. He was great. He did a page by page outline of what was good and what was not so good, with just the right balance of encouragement and criticism. I also tried the Loft, a writers’ help group in the Twin Cities, and finally, Dave King, a freelance editor who wrote SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. Dave and I did a partial line edit.
By the time I was ready to submit to agents and editors, most publishers had stopped taking unsolicited (over the transom) manuscripts. You had to have an agent, and agents want manuscripts that will sell. You can find the legitimate ones in NOVEL AND SHORT STORY WRITERS’ MARKET. Never, I repeat never, look for an agent on the internet. I sent off about a hundred queries with only a few nibbles. Most didn’t like the psychic element in my novel, not that there’s that much of it.
Then along came e-books and I thought I had a shot since Sara Anne Freed, an editor at Mysterious Press, had been reading my work with encouraging feedback. She recommended Time Warner e-book imprint iPublishing. Somehow I wound up submitting my book to a company called iPublisher, now known as Bookpublisher.com. You guessed it. It was a self-publishing outfit like iUniverse, and it cost me some heavy bucks. But I wanted to see my book in print, and I wanted to go through the process of editing, picking out a cover, checking galleys, and so forth. It was fun. The problem was, at that time, was that you don’t get any promotional help. I got exactly one professional review. I also managed to scrounge up two signing sessions at bookstores, where I sold a whopping dozen books, about a dozen more than I thought I would. Bookpublisher.com did put my book on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNobel.com, where it still resides today. I even managed to earn a four-and-a-half star rating with nine reviews. one recent. I sure could use a few more. Hint, hint.
Since then I’ve written five more novels and about thirty short stories (available on authors den) mostly written for WRITERS’ DIGEST contests, and I’ve been working on a new novel entitled, STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS, some of which is posted on authors.den.
I ‘ve been through some down times, mostly when I thought I had an agent, or when some editor thought it was helpful to denigrate my work. (That’ll put a crimp in your style.) I guess I’d like to close with a pep talk. Never ever give up, and it’s surprising how good some of the stuff you write is that you thought was total garbage, if you just give it a chance to marinate.
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