TEN STEPS TO BECOMING A NOVELIST

By Erin Cashman

Since my debut novel, THE EXCEPTIONALS, was published, the question I get asked the most is how I became a writer. What I’ve discovered is that most people don’t want to hear about how I used to sit up in a tree and write stories when I was in elementary school. They want to know how I wrote a book and saw it through to publication. Each author has his or her own process. This is what works for me:

1.      Write a novel. This seems obvious, but it is actually quite harder than it seems! It takes countless hours and fierce determination to see it through. At times you will have inspiration, other times you will trudge through the muck. You will be brilliant, you will be cliché. The important thing is that when you are done, you will have finished a first draft of a novel. If you are like me, when you write the words The End you will be incredibly proud and fairly certain that your manuscript is amazing and will require little revision. YOU WILL BE WRONG.

2.      Put your novel away. DO NOT LOOK AT. Leave it for at least two weeks, preferably a month. Then, read it again. If you are like me, you will be fairly certain that it is the worst piece of crap that anyone has ever written. I try to take a first pass without revising, but just marking where the story drags, which characters are really just there to move the plot, and places that don’t work.

3.      Now comes the real work – revising. Revise, revise, revise.

4.      At this point, I interview my main characters. I ask the same questions all the time, such as: What is your deepest fear? What is your darkest secret? If you could meet one person in history who would it be? I always discover that I don’t know my characters as well as I thought. You will be surprised by what you learn.

5.      Take your new found insight and go back and revise again, focusing on fleshing out the characters as much as possible.

6.      Now you have poured your heart and soul into the manuscript, and you feel that it is pretty damn good. Read the whole thing out loud. You will know immediately when the dialogue is flat or artificial sounding. You will not only pick up on errors, but phrasing that might be grammatically correct, but off for some reason.

7.      You may think you are done – but you’re not. You need a fresh set of eyes on your novel. And by that, I don’t mean your family or friends. Find a writing group or critique partner. I just did this recently, and I wish I had done it years ago. It makes a huge difference. It is not easy to sit in your writing group and listen to people pull apart your baby. You will have the urge to defend your boring or one dimensional characters, who, by now, are very real to you, and explain your convoluted plot. Bite your tongue.  Take notes. LISTEN. You don’t need to take all of their advice, but pay attention to the big picture items. If your partner or group doesn’t really care about your main character, you need to fix it. Spend a day mulling over their advice.

8.      Revise, revise, revise.

9.      When you feel like your novel is the best that you can make it, put it away for at least a week, and read it out loud again, from start to finish with as few interruptions as possible. I usually start on a Saturday morning and finish it by Sunday sometime. Are you crying during sad parts? Swooning during the romance scenes? Is your heart racing during suspenseful parts? If so, you are done. Congratulations! You finished!

10.  Rejoice! As Tom Clancy said, “Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.” Whatever happens now, whether you send out queries letter in hopes of publication, submit your manuscript to your agent or editor, self publish, or simply share your masterpiece with your family and friends, celebrate your accomplishment. You are a novelist.

____________________________________________________________

      Erin Cashman is a YA author. Her debut fantasy novel, THE EXCEPTIONALS, was published by Holiday House in 2012 and named a Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year. You can find her at the group blogs The Enchanted Inkpot, BookPregnant Blog, and on Twitter,Facebook, and her Website

So How's the Book Coming? or Why You Shouldn't Talk to Non-Publishing People About Publishing

by Mindy McGinnis

Those of us interested in publishing have heard it - publishing is slow. And you can hear it, believe, and know it - but until you've actually experienced it, you can't quite respect the amazing molasses flow that it truly is. I've written before about why it takes so long for a book to make it publication, so that's not what this post is about. Instead, this concerns how to talk to people outside of the publishing bubble about... publishing.

Quick answer: you just don't.

Seriously. Do you think someone actually wants to hear about how long it took you to go from first draft to final edit? Does your neighbor really care how long your edit letter was? Does your mom want to hear about the sex scene that just had to go? Um, probably not.

So, for example - I signed the contract for NOT A DROP TO DRINK two years ago. Yes, two years ago (hint, it's still not out). At that point in time it was in fact, a finished book. It wasn't polished and edited. It hadn't gone through first pass pages or copyediting. But it was a book with a beginning, a middle and an end - and that was two years ago.

It's been through some experiences since then, lots of little morphs and changes. Some commas sliding away, some periods slipping in. A few cut scenes that weren't necessary in the first place, some combined dialogue and shaved tags. Essentially at its core, it's still the same book it was two years ago. It's just shinier and better.

So - fast forward to... oh let's say any day of the week last month when a very nice, sincere, random person (no, this isn't directed at anyone, it's happened about 2,000 times) says, "Hey! How's the book coming?"

The honest answer - It's already came and went. The book is finished. It existed in its entirety two years ago. It's existed in it's final stage for nearly six months. It stopped "coming" and has in fact receded to a far point in my head where I have to go fact-check occasionally when talking about it to people, because I've written two other books since I worked on it last.

But I can't expect people outside of publishing to understand that. Just like an eye doctor can't expect me to understand how my glasses help me see, and why I absolutely cannot get my head around how a cell phone works, even though I'm sure there are people out there whose job it is to understand that.

Likewise, it's not the average person's job to understand that the book about to come out in a few months isn't something you're still working on. So, when people ask me "How's the book coming?" I smile and say, "Great!"
_____________________________________________________________

Mindy McGinnis is a YA author and librarian. Her debut, NOT A DROP TO DRINK, is a post-apocalyptic survival tale set in a world where freshwater is almost non-existent, available from Katherine Tegen / Harper Collins September 24, 2013. She blogs at Writer, Writer Pants on Fire and contributes to the group blogs Book Pregnant, Friday the Thirteeners, From the Write Angle, The Class of 2k13, The Lucky 13s & The League of Extraordinary Writers. You can also find her on Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook.

The Road Can Be (Very) Long

I was asked recently how long had it taken me to get published. When I gave my answer, the person who’d asked me fell over in shock and cracked their egg open.

I started writing fiction back in 2002, after writing screenplays for about seven years (Maybe eight. Can’t remember. Too many wine bottles ago now). So if you start from 2002, then it took me over ten years to get here.

Ten. Years.

You know how many rejections that adds up to? How many failed novels?

Let me talk about "just" the road to publication first. To do that, we have to go back four years, to May 2009 when I finally landed an agent. Before that happy moment, I’d been writing, and writing, and then writing some more for about seven years. Six days a week, averaging forty-eight weeks a year.

You know, whenever I think back to that summer of 2009, I laugh. I was so naïve. I really thought that I’d be published immediately. Or six months, tops.

Um…. Not quite.

It’s a special time for me now. My debut novel, UNTOLD DAMAGE, has finally arrived on bookshelves. Almost exactly sixteen months from the day that my agent emailed me: “Um, dude? Your cell isn’t working. Call me.”

Sixteen months. Woah, right? That’s a pretty unfathomable amount of time.

Let me just say here that I understand that everyone’s road will be different. Some shorter. Some longer. Back in 2002, I really had no idea of just how long that road could be. No idea of how much effort, sweat, and perseverance it would take to go from the road marker of learning the craft of fiction writing, to the road marker of getting an agent, to the road marker of getting published.

And to think that the book that eventually got published wasn’t close to the one that hooked me up with my agent! No, that book didn’t sell. Got close, but never made it over the hill.

The book that did get me over the hill, UNTOLD DAMAGE, was written out of pure desperation. Seriously. The earlier version of the book, as I said, hadn’t sold. I needed something else, something new. I eventually (after months and months of sweating) found that “something else”.  I sent this new version of the first Mark Mallen book off to my agent. And wasn’t I floored when she said she loved it! I mean, I’d hoped she would of course but by that point, about 2.5 years down the road after hooking up with her, I wasn’t sure at all whether she would dig it, or dig me a ditch to go die in.

But, she loved it.

And how did I hook up with my agent? The person who is not only my advocate in the industry, but is also a great listener when I’m freaking the F out over something?

Well, the “getting the agent” part of the journey started with a killer query, naturally. Back in the early spring of 2009, I queried the agent who would eventually sign me. And let me just reiterate here what you probably already know about query letters: they’re really SALES letters. A query tells the reader why they should look at your book. I sent the infamous "nudge" email about six or eight weeks later.

My future agent got back to me almost immediately, thanking me for the nudge and asking to see the rest of the manuscript. So I sent it.

And then I waited.

Waited a couple weeks. Sweated every day that went by. I know we shouldn’t sweat those moments, but I did. What can I say? 

 She got back to me at the end of those two weeks saying, “Let’s seal this deal, dude!”

And that was it!

But, it wasn’t.

This current version of the book had to get polished first, off notes that my agent sent me. Then it went out to publishers. We got responses back. No sale, but some very good feedback. And so after a pow-wow with my agent, I rewrote the book again. Then it got sent it out again, and…

… and then after more "close but no cigar" responses, it was over for that version of the book.

Then what happened? Well, that book got completely rewritten. I gutted it. Put in a new foundation. Added new plumbing. Changed where the windows were situated, and also how the light hit the upstairs deck, and…

… and well, you get it.

Then we went back out on submission. And that leads me to here: having UNTOLD DAMAGE out in the world on bookstore shelves. Over three and half years after getting an agent. Or, if you prefer, a bit over ten years later if you start from when I began writing that first novel.

It’s finally come to fruition. All that work.

And like I mentioned earlier, I realize that it won’t take this long for everyone. Hell, it might take even longer. What I’m trying to say here is that you have to be prepared to play THE LONG GAME. From beginning to end. And in order to get there, you never give up on your goal: for every query you get back that’s a pass, you send out another. Every manuscript that bombs, you write another. Every time you feel like you can’t do it one more time, you do it one more time. Every time you get hit in the face with it all, you get up and keep going. If you want to write to be published, then you have to prepare for the long haul. As I’ve said, it may not always be a long process. But nine times out of ten?

It will be.

Bay Area resident Robert K. Lewis has been a painter, printmaker, and a produced screenwriter. He is a contributor to Macmillan's crime fiction fansite, Criminal Element. Lewis is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers, and the Crime Writers Association. Untold Damage is his first novel. The second novel in the Mark Mallen series, Critical Damage, will arrive April, 2014. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.com and at needlecity.wordpress.com.

Weighing in on Writing and Publishing

Brenda Bevan Remmes

by Brenda Remmes 

I have had a lifelong fixation on publishing a book.  At the same time I’ve fantasized “skinny” as somewhere in my future. The two ideas co-habitat together in a strange sort of paradigm.

The book writing thing…it ebbs and flows.   I go through moments of brilliance (at least in my thinking) and then suddenly sink into jabberwocky as if I live in Wonderland.  In fact, Wonderland is an ideal place for fleshy authors.

I get up every morning and flip on the computer in one continuous motion as I walk by my writing desk to the bathroom. I live by the rule that extra pounds of dirt and grime have mysteriously weighted down my body during the dark hours of the night and I take a long hot shower to rid myself of what I know will tip the scales unfairly.   Then, unclothed (completely stripped down…. …I’ve stopped even wearing nail polish) I mount the scale and get my first daily dose of  “Whew, it’s not too bad”,  or  “OMG, that can’t be.”

 My husband duplicates this morning adventure on the truth monster in a much more whimsical fashion, fully clothed.  What a show-off!   After forty years repeated morning after morning, the same words always follow.  He climbs on the scale and I mouth with him, “Oh, down another two pounds.  I wondered how I did that after all that ice cream I ate last night?”  I’ve considered divorce over that one morning exchange, but habits are hard to break and dissolving a marriage requires far more time and energy than I  have.  I am much too busy writing jabberwocky. 

My computer is now humming, even if I’m not. I clothe myself in weighty garments that add an additional fifteen pounds and proceed to read the last few pages that I wrote the day before. “P-lee-se, tell me it ain’t so.  Did I really write that?  What was I smoking?”  I start to slash and burn wishing that I could delete excess fat as fast as I can a days’ worth of work on one chapter.

I’m weighing constantly.  Too many words here, not enough description there.  Did I show or tell?  Are the words dank and stale or shimmering with their own individual pearls of imagery or symbolism?  I know I write as well as many commercial writers, and not as well as literary MFAs who annually attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. But I’m getting better.  Even Hemingway gets three out of five from some Amazon readers.

Success came fast and easy for me and then vanished overnight one day last October when  my editor broke a two year contract.  It was all too good to be true. Like winning the lottery, and two years later being told your game was rigged.   It hurt, of course, but I’m not as naïve as I once was to the publishing business.  Everyone has to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then neither does the novel…at least not for that publisher. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad novel.  It means the publisher put it on a scale for potential profit and the book didn’t carry enough weight for the long haul.  The irony, of course, is I’ve always looked for a scale that would mitigate weight.   Be careful what you wish for.

Adam Gopnik writes in a recent Talk of the Town in The New Yorker, (3/18/13) “The future of writing in America – or, at least the future of making a living by writing – seems in doubt as rarely before.  Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped:  anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches.   It has never been easier to be a writer, and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.”

I have been a convinced Quaker for more than thirty years now.  Quakers have taught me the value of patience.  I didn’t get it right away, but I’ve learned in the presence of weighty Quakers much more humble than I.   When you’re not sure what to say, say nothing. When you’re not sure what to do, step back, seek clearness.  Over the years I’ve found this to be a healthy process every time I begin to doubt myself.  Philip Gulley, one of my favorite Quaker writers, wrote on his web site last week, “The world cares little for our convenience.  It does not care that we expected one thing and were given another.  Reality is no respecter of our expectations and demand. I pray this year, for myself and for each of you, that the gift of flexibility, for that wonderful gift of elasticity, for the ability to deal constructively, bravely and lovingly with the unexpected changes we face in  life.”

Thank you, Philip, for that gentle reminder.  Regardless of the way the scale tilts, I hear your prayer.

Writing Love

 By Barbara Claypole White

Those of us who write about love face a new dilemma. According to the 2013 judging guidelines for the Oscars of the romance writing industry, the RITAs and the Golden Hearts, the romance of a story is now twice as important as plot, character, and writing.

Where does that leave women’s fiction writers who cross over into the category of novels with strong romantic elements? Confused and struggling to define ourselves. Women’s fiction may be a shape shifter, but tell us romance is the most important part of our novels, and we're likely to give you the evil eye.

As publication day loomed, I was terrified that my book baby would be shelved under romance. Relationship stories, which are my thing, have always fallen between the thinnest of cracks. To complicate the definition, my characters find hope and love in the darkness of mental illness. Think Silver Linings Playbook with woodland garden settings.

The Unfinished Garden—TUG—sold to MIRA, an imprint of Harlequin, as women’s fiction. Despite various incarnations, it has always been the story of Tilly, a young widow whose grief has begun to twist into relentless guilt. Enter James, a charismatic, brilliant obsessive-compulsive who recognizes that Tilly is trapped in the world of obsessive thought. TUG is Tilly’s journey because of James. Without James—no life-altering epiphany for Tilly.

Before publication, I adopted the mantra, “It’s a love story, not a romance.” Then TUG launched—as an August romance pick at Barnes & Noble. My worst fear was realized: My debut novel was destined to be labeled romance.

I told myself it didn’t matter, but I was faking. Until I read my first romance novel and had my own HEA—happily ever after—moment. I consumed that novel in one weekend. “Go away,” I told the family. “I’m working.” And I was, because I was learning how the pros craft page-turning love scenes. It was like binging on English candy, which I do every summer within 24 hours of returning to England. (I miss wine gums something rotten.)

There’s no sex in TUG, there’s only one kiss, and because my hero is phobic about soil and my heroine is a gardener, it takes him a while to hold her hand. But from the moment they meet, Tilly and James have sexual chemistry. Their mutual attraction does not define the story even though it does help drive the plot. For at least one chapter, they’re on different continents. Tilly is wading through heavy-duty family drama, and James doesn’t enter her mind. In the romance novel I was reading, however, the sexual tension was up front and center on every single page. I was awestruck.

I learned something else, too: this romance writer was a master in the art of pacing, and boy, had I been struggling with pacing in novel two. After finishing her novel, I ripped apart my first nine chapters, which had been filled with introspection, backstory, and lovely descriptions of the North Carolina forest. “Back to the story,” I kept muttering.

The one complaint I had with this romance novel was the writing. It was littered with coursing and throbbing. But then again, I’ve read mainstream novels chock-full of chuckling. (Chuckle is my trigger verb. I detest it.) Writing is super important to me. I agonize over sentences and word choice. When I read Jodi Picout—whom I think of as the queen of women’s fiction, although she’s a genre bender—I am constantly collecting sentences that scream, “This is how you do it!”

So. Am I going to morph into a genre romance writer? No. But six months out from pub date, I have a new mantra: “I am one with the romance label.”  Hand on heart, I no longer care how readers classify TUG—provided they enjoy the story.  Much of my life echoes through my first book baby. I thought I knew every theme and every thread, but then it bounced out into the world and surprised me.

Two weeks ago, I had the biggest surprise of all.  Simply Books, the Harlequin Reader Service magazine, declared TUG number one in their list of Most Romantic Books of 2012. Tilly and James had even earned a rosy pink heart for being sensual. I was thrilled. I celebrated by toasting my favorite couple with Bombay Sapphire gin. And I’m pretty sure they approved.

Barbara Claypole White is the author of The Unfinished Garden (Harlequin MIRA, 2012), a love story about grief, OCD, and dirt. You can find her on Facebook.

“White…conveys the condition of OCD, and how it creates havoc in one’s life and the lives of loved ones, with style and grace, never underplaying the seriousness of the disorder.” Romantic Times 4* review

“Barbara Claypole White gives us a moving story about the challenges of OCD and grief combined with the power of the human spirit to find love in the most unlikely of places.” Eye on Romance.



“A fabulous debut novel, THE UNFINISHED GARDEN easily earns Romance Junkies’ highest rating of five blue ribbons and a recommended status for its unpredictable originality! So good!” Romance Junkies