Not Not-Writing

By David Abrams

Last Wednesday night, I stood in front of thirty high school English teachers at a restaurant in Bozeman, Montana, ready to deliver my prepared talk, "How to Tell a War Story."

Before I began, I held up my cell phone.  "You'll excuse me if I check my email one last time before I begin," I said.  "I'm waiting to hear whether or not the government shutdown is officially over."

I, along with the rest of the country, was holding my breath, shifting uncomfortably on a bed of pins and needles, as the inane, insane, and utterly needless staredown contest in Washington, DC wound to a close until one player finally, FINALLY blinked.  [Yes, as a Writer-With-a-Day-Job, I am also a government employee--the public affairs specialist for the Western Montana District of the Bureau of Land Management (part of the Department of the Interior); I, along with all the other employees in my district, save one (our law enforcement ranger), were furloughed on October 1.]

By the time I'd finished talking to the English teachers, the deal had finally cleared Congress and was headed for President Obama's desk.  I was both relieved and a little melancholy.  I was happy to once again be getting a paycheck, but I was also ruing the days I'd spent during the past two weeks Not-Writing.

You'd think I would have spent all that "free time" putting pen to paper, productively working on all the writing projects which were clanging like fire alarms in my head: the novella, the short stories, the one-act play, even the epic revisions I should be doing to my second novel about the midget Hollywood stuntman.  But no.  Apart from a few false starts at sentences here and there, I spent my furlough Not-Writing.

I should have been more productive during those first weeks in October.  I had such high hopes, but I only ended up disappointing myself.  I'd be lying if I said that as I watched the evening news on September 30, with the clock ticking down to the fiscal year deadline, I wasn't already forming plans to get a lot of writing done during the shutdown.  We writers always envision these kind of gifts of long stretches of time spread before us like a Hawaiian luau buffet.  Shipwrecks on deserted islands (with a typewriter and reams of paper), prison sentences, even stay-at-home recoveries from broken arms--these are our fantasies which we decorate with ambition and determination.

I am, however, the worst--the absolute WORST--at self-discipline.  I cave so easily to distraction and surrender with a white flag before idle temptations have even fired their first shot.

And so, I spent my available writing time in early October not writing.  I didn't do nothing, of course.  In all other regards, I was productive.  I helped my wife organize her vintage furniture shop, I read books, I fixed our home theater system in the basement, I picked up sticks and leaves from our front yard, I attended a couple of book festivals, I gave a couple of interviews to blogs and C-SPAN's Book-TV.  I kept busy to the point of distraction...and a thin layer of dust built up on my laptop's keyboard.

In her brilliant, beautiful new book Still Writing, Dani Shapiro urges me to block out interferences like the Internet, email, laundry, baking, sorting files, filling out insurance claims, or whatever pulls me away from the writing task at hand:

Sit down.  Stay there.  It's hard--I know just how hard--and I hate to tell you this, but it doesn't get easier.  Ever.  Get used to the discomfort.  Make some kind of peace with it....When I sit down to meditate, I feel much the same way I do when I sit down to write: resistant, fidgety, anxious, eager, cranky, despairing, hopeful, my mind jammed so full of ideas, my heart so full of feelings that it seems impossible to contain them.  And yet...if I do just sit there without checking the clock, without answering the ringing phone, without jumping up to make a note of an all-important task, then slowly the random thoughts pinging around my mind begin to settle.  If I allow myself, I begin to see more clearly what's going on.  Like a snow globe, that flurry of white floats down.

I love Dani's book and for the past two months, I've been using it as a motivator, a propellant to push me to my desk and get my ass in the chair.  I begin each morning by cracking open Still Writing like it was my scripture reading from Our Daily Bread.  But for all of Dani's wisdom and gut-honest accounts of her own writing life, I still felt myself go limp with inertia these past few weeks, while at the same time self-distractions raged like a blizzard in my snow-globe head.

Here's the thing: the more I don't write, the more I don't write.  The longer I go without pulling fresh words from my head and putting them on the page, the more I wallow in self-pity and depression.   Not-Writing begets Not-Writing.

Until finally, one day, I hit a wall of self-loathing and try to pole-vault over this wall to whatever waits on the other side.  Which, hopefully, is Writing.

I do all sorts of self-motivation exercises.  I read Dani Shapiro's inspirational Still Writing.  I write a poem about the trees outside my office window.  I Tweet things like "When I punch myself for not-writing, I remember @JoyceCarolOates is somewhere writing her 3rd short story of the day & I'm refueled w/ fire."  Whatever it takes to convince myself that I'll never "find the time to write."  Instead, I must make the time to write.

Ironically, now that I'm back to work at the government job, I'm once again rising at 3:30 a.m. and getting some writing done.  Maybe I need that squeeze of deadline, that ever-narrowing window of time in order to get motivated.  Whatever it takes, I suppose.

Here's a shot of my home-office desk--my second-story lair where I do my early-morning writing.  This was taken two days after I went back to work:

Notice the copy of Still Writing which is close at hand

That Moleskine notebook contains the first draft of what I've tentatively called "FOB Sorrow."  These past few days, I've made some nice progress on that novella about soldiers hiking on foot from one end of Baghdad to the other in order to attend their sergeant's memorial service:

      We keep walking—through the dust, through the thirst, through the rising heat, and now, through the growing crowd of Iraqis who are starting to fill the marketplace with their goats, their dishdashas, their cooking smoke.
      We are hungry.
      None of us had time to grab chow this morning before we stole the Humvee and none of us thought to grab an MRE from the back seat after it broke down barely two miles outside the Entry Control Point.  And now our stomachs think our throats have been cut.
      We round a corner and push forward into the marketplace.  Skinned goats hang on ropes.  Pyramids of pomegranates, figs, neon-yellow mangoes.  Two men crouch over a grated fire, turning puddle-shaped slabs of naan with their bare hands.  We can smell the sweet yeast and it drives us crazy.

When I type paragraphs like that, I feel rejuvenated, envigoured, shot full of determination.  In fact, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my soldiers in that Baghdad neighborhood.  I have words to pull from my head.  My hands are on the pole vault.


David Abrams is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic, 2012), a comedy about the Iraq War which Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic” and named a Top 10 Pick for Literary Fiction in Fall 2012.  It was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.  His short stories have appeared in Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013) and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand (Press 53), anthologies of short fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com

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.

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      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

It’s Not Just Words.

It’s Not Just Words.

Back in the day, almost as far back as when man was first learning to harness fire for his benefit, I used to write screenplays. I started my writing career with a stage play, then immediately switched to writing movies (yes, the play was that terrible). I wrote movies for many years. Had some very small successes, many huge failures, but I loved the heck out of it.

Now I write books. My debut novel, Untold Damage, came out on April 8^th of this year. Next April will see the second Mark Mallen novel, Critical Damage.  A lot of people liked my debut novel, and that is super-duper awesome as it took me about ten years to learn my craft, get an agent, and then get a publishing deal. One thing that everyone who reads the book agrees on, outside of liking Mallen (which bodes well for a series, right?), is that the book is very visual. And that’s where we come to the point of this post: writing with a visual style.

And just how do you do that, you ask?

You write in all forms.

Screenplays. Plays. Even poetry can teach you something. Screenplays are all about movement and action, with as little dialog as possible. Plays are the opposite, they’re mostly dialog, BUT, you also have to have a sense of where you want the actors, what you want them to do as they’re talking. That’s great practice for setting your scenes and writing about things as simple as a character moving from one room to the next. Poetry can teach you how to find the right metaphors, find the BEST possible word to draw your word picture.

You can find screenplays all over the Internet. It’s not a hard form to get the hang of, but it’s a very difficult form to master. Very few ever do. Obviously you can also find plays everywhere on the ‘net. Through writing screenplays, I learned not only how to write in a visual manner, but also how to tell a story that contains a strong forward movement and pacing. Through writing the one stage play that I mentioned earlier I learned SO MUCH regarding what good dialog is, and isn’t. (mostly isn’t). Through writing poetry, I learned how to better use metaphors to make the scene in my head match the scene I was writing.

I’m being very serious here, if not a bit convoluted, hahaha. Bottom line: If you want to be the best, most visual writer you can be, open yourself up to writing in different forms. Heck, even spend some time writing Haiku. Writing a Haiku REALLY shows the power of just the right word.

It’s this looking at words, sentences, and the story form in entirely new ways that will take you far. 

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. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.com and at needlecity.wordpress.com.

Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?

By Erin Cashman

I am a pretty organized person. I love my to-do lists. Sometimes I write things on my to-do lists that I’ve already done just to cross them off! I love the immediate feeling of accomplishment. I also make to-do lists for my husband and children, which largely go ignored. In high school, college, and law school I was the queen of outlines. I felt in control, knowing what I needed to know. Everything was boiled down nice and neat, with bullets, highlighting, and Roman numerals.

So when it comes to writing, I want, no I yearn, to be a plotter. Each time that a new story idea pops into my head and won’t go away, filling my mind with dialogue and settings and characters, I sit down with a crisp, clean pad of paper, and start my outline. I make a list of characters with brief descriptions, and I write not one, but two outlines -- one of the entire book, and then I outline the first five or six chapters in detail. I keep this notebook next to my laptop, and then I start to write.

And then I never look at the outline again. The characters hijack my brain, and I follow them down dark and twisty paths that lead me into unchartered territory. My villain is actually just a bit of a rogue. The nice, milk-commercial cute guy has a dark side.  My main character isn’t flawed in the way I thought. And secondary characters evaporate. New ones pop up. I dream about these characters, their voices fill my head during quiet moments, and months later I have a draft. A terrible, awful, messy draft. I have not followed my neat outline, or even glanced at it. My story arc is more of a zigzag.  But I know my characters better.  I know what their deepest desires are, and what they are trying to hide from me.

So I revise, and revise and revise some more. I write huge amount of back story that I cut. I write tangents that I cut. I write endings that I cut. I write and write and write, and I cut and cut and cut. But with each draft my characters reveal more of themselves, and I learn what makes them tick. Right now I am actually on my eleventh draft of a novel! But I’m not sick of it yet, and with each pass I like it better. By the time I’m finished I am pretty sure I will have cut as many words as I’ve saved. It is a very time consuming, inefficient, torturously painful way to write a novel. But it’s the only way I can.

So, I have come to realize that in most areas of my life I’m a plotter. And I really want to be a plotter when it comes to writing. I love the orderliness of it. I love starting on page one and knowing where I’m going to end. But try as I may, I’m not a plotter.  I’m a pantser.  The only way I can really know my characters is by writing about them. It’s everything I don’t like – messy, unorganized and chaotic. But it’s just how I write.

What are you?


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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

Run, Baby, Run. Write, Baby, Write.

by Amy Franklin Willis

2013, I completed my first half-marathon.  That’s 13.1 miles.  I am not a runner.

I do not possess the classic “runner’s body”—i.e. all hard, pointy edges of lean muscle and solid compactness.  At forty-one, I am round, curvy, soft, fleshiness.

In college I was on the rowing team.  But that was twenty years and three children ago.  Over the past decade I ran short distances to forestall the middle-age gut intent on wrapping itself around my waist.

As 2012 drew to a close, an ad for the Bay Area women’s running store See Jane Run’s half-marathon featuring Champagne and chocolate caught my attention.  Champagne and chocolate are among my top all-time combinations, above Laverne & Shirley re-runs and below “beach cottage.”

When my eldest daughter expressed interest in doing the marathon together, I committed, entranced by visions of us crossing the finish line simultaneously, cue Chariots of Fire theme music.  Those visions evaporated in to the mist—discarded next to my fantasies of a perfectly clean and organized home and a bottomless well of maternal patience--when our training runs proved that my fourteen year old ran at a slightly faster pace.  In short, she left me in the dust.

For the first half mile, I maintained contact with Georgia, her slender, classic runner’s shape always just ahead in the distance.  But then her muscles would warm and her pace would quicken and my muscles would warm and my pace would stay the same and I would have to content myself with a shouted, “Make sure your cell phone is on!”

Two months before the race, we got serious and tackled a nine-miler around Lake Chabot and then a relentlessly boring, unmarked 11.5 mile trail along the Hayward Shoreline—for the first four miles I told myself it was the Cornish coast of England and I was running towards my thatched roof cottage but my rational self caught on quickly and said, that is the San Francisco Bay, Amy, and you are running this trail so you can run the race and not embarrass yourself.

We logged over one hundred and fifty training miles.  And during those interminable stretches of aloneness and unpluggedness—running at Lake Chabot offered preening wild turkeys, a great egret surveying the water, and a brush rabbit huddled alongside the trail that distracted me enough not to require pulsing digital beats in my ears—I recognized the singular truth of running.

The only way to fail was to stop.

To cease putting one foot in front of the other.

And, in fact, the only way to rest the burning, fatigued muscles was to run faster, to reach the end more quickly.

Before 2013, I had never run distances longer than three miles but this business of just slogging through, quarter mile after quarter mile, struck me as very similar to writing novels.

Novels are the marathon of the writing world.  People, generally short story writers, argue that other types are more difficult and I think this is complete and utter nonsense.  Sustaining a coherent and interesting fictional story over the course of eighty-thousand some odd words is a uniquely challenging endeavor not meant for the meek.  It takes days, weeks, months, and more often than not, years to get a novel done.

You begin with an idea—a character who intrigues you, a situation that puzzles you, a setting you want to memorialize within a story.  The writer has no guarantee she will finish.  No assurance the idea can grow and stretch and bear the weight of three hundred pages without collapsing in to the ash of might-have-been stories.  One never knows what obstacles narrative will present us.   A character who does not perform as the plot requires.  A structure that is impossibly complex.  An unsatisfying resolution.  

In the beginning, the writer can also not anticipate what the outside world will throw at her.  She may be diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.  She may divorce her spouse.  She may lose her job.  She may temporarily take leave of her senses.  Her children may experience physical or mental crises.

Each one diverts her from the writing.  From the story.  From finishing.

On race day, the weather report predicted record highs for parts of the Bay Area and, most troubling, no cloud cover. Georgia and I trained in low 70s temperatures with abundant cooling fog.   The See Jane Run course was set on the quasi-island of Alameda, a small city attached to Oakland by drawbridges and fragile stretches of land, and thus typically prone to breezes off the San Francisco Bay and the Oakland Estuary.

As I hit the first mile and a half of the race, three truths emerged:  in my nervousness, I neglected to put sun screen on either myself or Georgia; the sun appeared intent on burning stubbornly hot and bright for the first half of the course; and lastly, the race was going to be much more difficult than I imagined.

Novel writing is a grind.  The only way to complete one is to make the pages pile up.  I force myself through this by using daily and weekly word count goals.  Printing the pages and seeing their vertical height grow is the only way I know to push forward through the story.  It’s the structure I impose on a task that feels all too loose and magic-like, subject to the idle winds of procrastination and despair.

The middle is the worst part.  In the race, miles six through eleven felt like twenty.  I was beginning to tire—hamstrings pulling ever tighter; multiple water blisters forming on my right foot, disappointment that the course wound through bland office parks and covered acres of steaming blacktop, the sun leaving a swath of my right arm blazing.

Mile thirteen nowhere in sight.

In writing, the middle is where I lose my mind and my faith.  It’s the point in the story where everything gets complicated and is not at all like you thought it might be and the ending you originally had in mind is now, clearly, not going to work.  The writer may say to herself, What have I done?

And this is the dangerous part.  The part where she is most likely to give up.  To stop because it has become too hard.

At the start of the race, I found a pacer—a person who carries a sign with the miles per hour pace she promises to keep and who functions as your beacon in the midst of five thousand running bodies trying to throw off your pace.  I thought, yes, this is a pace quicker than my usual but surely I can do it.  And won’t it be better to run with this group connected to her?

I couldn't keep up.  My race pace ended up two minutes slower than my normal training pace.  Why?  No idea.  The heat?  Concern about failing to finish?

Around mile seven I settled in to a pace far behind the last of the pace ladies.  It was just me and a small Wonder Woman doll tucked in to my belt for inspiration.  It was the speed I could manage.

When I hit mile eleven, I rejoiced.  I knew I could finish the last two miles.  The course curved next to the bay and nearby home owners held hoses over their yards to give runners a cooling mist.  A young girl of seven pointed a hose at me and I ran through it grinning, my arms thrown open wide.  People held up signs of encouragement as we passed—“U Hella Inspire Me”--and the clang of cowbells rang out.  A man in his forties and his teenage son gave me a high-five, yelling, “Finish strong.  You’re almost there.”

A novel requires fortitude.  And when one passes through the valley of the shadow of the middle, if you can keep going, keep putting one word after another, the end will rise up before you.

If you are lucky enough to have people cheering you as your near it, all the better.  If not, you cheer yourself.  You see the end coming.  You write it.  You collapse.  You celebrate.

Fifty feet from the finish line I caught sight of my six and ten year old daughters and my seventy year old mother.  The long wait finally over, they hooted.  They hollered.  They jumped up and down.  In that moment, the six stinging blisters and the tight hamstrings disappeared from my consciousness, making room for joy.

And then I saw my wife and my oldest.  Georgia had arrived fifteen minutes earlier.  The “I Ran for Chocolate” medal already around her neck.

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Amy Franklin-Willis's debut novel The Lost Saints of Tennessee is out in paperback now.  She is writing more and running less this summer.

The Road to Publication Is A Long & Bumpy One

by Erin Cashman

I gained a lot of weight with my first pregnancy. So much that I closed my eyes during weigh-ins at the doctor’s office. I didn’t want to know the numbers on the scale. After I had my third child, I started dieting and exercising, and after many months of limiting my chocolate and ice cream intake (torture!), enduring aerobic classes, power walks, etc., I finally lost most of the weight. Many people asked me how I did it. Surely I knew some secret. A half a grapefruit before meals? Eating anything I wanted but stopping at 4? Eating only purple food? No one wanted to hear the truth. Lately several people have asked me about how I became published. But, like my weight loss, what they really want to know is what’s the secret. These writers (and I used to be one of them) have written a book, queried countless agents and editors, and still have no publishing deal. There must be a secret they don’t know about. Well, I’m here to tell you that there isn’t. The road to publication is a long one, filled with pot holes, detours, and road blocks.

My debut novel, The Exceptionals, was published last year. It was my third finished novel. It took eight long years from the date I started writing my first novel until my third one was published. And six years of writing, revising and editing two different manuscripts, querying agents and submitting partial and fulls until The Exceptionals sold. I asked the writers here at Book Pregnant what their experiences were. Most of us have written at least one other (often several other!) book that never was published. So, like me, our “debut” novel is really our third, fourth, fifth . . . you get the idea. Several BPers (as we call ourselves) found an agent, but the agent couldn’t sell that manuscript. One author worked on writing and revising her book for seventeen (yes, seventeen!) years. Two different agents tried to sell her manuscript but were unable. Finally she sold it herself. Another worked on her novel for eleven years, and she had two different agents and two different editors. In fact, many of the authors in this blog have had more than one agent. As Lydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine told me: “Shine was not my first book, or even my second or third, that I got through a FIRST draft of, however it was the first book I got to a FINAL draft of.”  One writer told me that the reason he thinks his debut novel (not his first finished manuscript) sold was that he had thirty years of rejection behind him, to learn from.

And that’s the key. To learn from the rejections. Maybe the novel needs more revising, maybe the plot is too convoluted, maybe the characters aren’t compelling enough. Take a long, hard look at your book and try to find areas for improvement. Why do I tell you all this? To depress you? No. Exactly the opposite. There is no trick. There is no a secret that we published authors know that you don’t. If you hope to be published one day, work tirelessly on your manuscript. Revise and edit, and then revise and edit again. Join a critique group or find a critique partner if you can, a fresh set of eyes (not a friend, or a family member, but another writer!) can make a huge difference. Sometimes I know the story I’m writing so well that it’s hard for me to see the problems with it. Read everything you can get your hands on. Devour books. It will help you “know” if something doesn’t ring true or is stale or cliché. And most importantly, don’t give up.  We didn’t!
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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

How Does Your Garden Grow? The Ugly Monsters Hiding In Your Plot

by Mindy McGinnis

Spring has most definitely sprung, and I'm going to follow up Barbara's wonderful gardening post with one of my own.

We've all got 'em. Those ideas that spring up in the middle of the night from a dream, or right before bed, and suddenly it's like somebody poured MiracleGro on your brain and those seeds of a story have turned into a novel without a lot of help from your gray matter. And sometimes, a seed that we purposely planted sits there calmly looking back at us, unsure of what it's supposed to do, while we stare back at it, wondering what happened to the MiracleGro nozzle. For everyone's benefit, I decided to share a picture of my garden.

So you'll notice the planned stuff - strategically placed clumps of daffodils and tulips (story ideas), a carpet of muscari to set it all off (little blurbies of dialogue flying out all over the place), a stone bench for me to rest on when I can't make it those last two steps to the car (chapter end). Those tulip and daffodil type stories are the best. The idea went down into the dirt of my brain and came out a season later in boom and ready to go - all I had to do was enjoy it.

But if you look close you'll also notice things like - THIS GUY:

In the Midwest we call that a "barn cat," which means a wandering stray who eats my food and lives in my barn, and I let him, cause he keeps down the mice population. But this particular fella has tangled with something bigger than a mousey once or twice, which is why (as you can see) he no longer has any ears. He's feral as hell and ugly like Satan, and he just loves to plop himself down in my nice garden and ruin the view. I've got a name for him, but I can't share it on the blog.

I've got a few stories like that. They've taken up residence in my brain, among the daffodils and tulips. They eat my food and I try to give them medicine but they spit at me and refuse any kind of assistance. They're always going to be ugly, and feral, and they're always going to be taking a crap in the flower bed of my brain and then looking at me like, "What you go gonna do about it?"

If you look again you can spot: THIS LADY:

She's another rover, a wandering butthead that decided my five acres should be her home. I got close enough to ascertain she was female and caught her skinny rear in a live trap and had her fixed.  She shows her thanks by refusing to acknowledge my existence. When she wandered onto my property she was all bones and big eyes - crazy big eyes, oogly-googly. So I named her Ugly. Over the years Ugly has turned into a sleek machine. A groomed, efficient hunter, Ugly's midsection now sets off her eyes nicely and she's turned into the best looking outdoor animal I have.

I've had one or two ugly, unmanageable ideas morph into something awesome once or twice. I just had to set that trap and show them who was boss. After that, they fed off what was leftover in the brain and took their time evolving into something better than what they were. They like to show off by setting themselves down nearby THAT GUY and saying, "See? And you thought I was bad?"

In the end, I prefer those tulips and daffodils that are naturally beautiful, and require little work. But those irritating, ugly ideas have their place too - if nothing more than to remind me of the effortlessness of the first type.
________________________________________

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.

10 Not-So-Great Steps of A Writing Ritual

by Mindy McGinnis

A lot of people ask me how I write, or even how does one start writing. Unfortunately the answer to that last question is incredibly simple and horribly difficult at the same time.

You just sit your ass down and do it.

Beyond that, I know a lot of writers have different rituals that they go through before they dive in for the day. Some like to have music playing. Some must have a cup of tea or a particular kind of snack before they begin. Others light the same kind of scented candle, or write in the same room at the same time of every day.

But the pain in the butt thing about writing is that no one trick works for everyone. It's not like your baseball swing where someone can say to you, "Look, you've got your feet set wrong," or, "Your not turning your hips." Writing doesn't work that way. Every one of us has to find our own set of rules or rituals that can turn us into successful authors.

Too often I hear aspiring authors asking those with agents or deals how they do it. And that particular person's trick probably isn't going to work for you... because it's theirs. For example. I'm going to share with you my tips and tricks for writing success, and you'll probably see right off the bat that my ritual is not for you. Or probably really anybody besides myself.

1) Nap often. Once you get sleepy there's no point trying to write anymore. I don't care if it's 1 PM or 1 AM. You need your sleep. Take a break.

2) When you reach a critical scene, make a random phone call or check your email because you're absolutely certain that you can't deliver this time.

3) Write in your bed, right before bed. Ignore the clock. It's 3 AM and you have to work tomorrow - screw it. You had a nap earlier.

4) Don't name your characters right up until the moment you have to type their names for the first time. Then just sit back and say, "Hi, what's your name?" They'll tell you.

5) Let your cat sleep right on top of your chest while you're writing, so that you have to peer over his fuzzy ass to see the laptop screen. It keeps you warm and builds harmony. Also, it will sharpen your typing skills.

6) Pretend other people don't exist for long periods of time. They actually don't, because you're in fantasy land now. You can text them later. This won't build friendships or strengthen family ties, but it will make your ms longer.

7) Resist getting up to pee right up until the moment when you damn well better. Some people don't like the distraction of a full bladder. I call it inspiration.

8) Make sure you drink a lot of water before you lie down to write, so that you won't make the excuse of having to get up later because you're thirsty. Sure, it leads to the bladder problem mentioned in number 7, but the bathroom is closer than the kitchen. Think time management.

9) Randomly check your Twitter feed every now and then. If you hit a dead spot, or aren't sure how to bridge to the next scene, pop in on your Twitter buds. If you follow a lot of fellow writers, chances are someone else is having the same problem, or else has become convinced that they suck. Return to your ms knowing that you're not alone in this. We all suck sometimes. It's OK.

10) Read back over the last 3 or 4 pages that you wrote the night before to place yourself, but don't edit as you go. This is your first draft, your "word vomit," as I call it. Get all that out of your stomach -- apply your brain to it later.

That's it, friends. That's how I write. It's a collection of anti-social, UTI-inspiring, sleepy logic, but somehow... it seems to work for me!
_____________________________

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.

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.

Just Say No!

by Mindy McGinnis

From a young age we're taught a very simple phrase- Just Say No.

Don't be afraid to reject drugs. Stand up for yourself. Make it clear you're not interested. Walk away. But it seems that if you continue to apply this lesson to innocuous solicitations as you get older, you risk social alienation.

What am I talking about?

Random Kind Person: How would you like to be on The Something That Really Matters A Lot Committee this year?

Mindy: No.

Someone With No Time Constraints: We'd love to have you in the Collection of Various Sorts of Folks, we meet right after school, so surely you could come, right?

Mindy: No.

Really Cool Book-Type Person: I'm starting an adult book club, would you be interested?

Mindy: No

When you read the above statements, I kinda come off like a bitch, don't I? And while that's a debatable point, what it comes down to is that there are only so many minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in the week, weeks in the month, and months in the year. I've got time constraints like a sassy nun's got a chastity belt, and adding more shit to the shinola in order to make nice doesn't fit into my worldview.

I started out trying to say it nicely, and be polite, the way my German momma wants me to.

Mindy: Well, that doesn't really work for me. Wednesday nights I have a knitting class. 

Gleeful Response: Oh but that's OK! We can move to Tuesdays or, meet in the mornings even!

Mindy: I'm not sure. I'm awfully busy right now.

Cheery Smile: Oh it's not all that time consuming, half hour meetings at the most!

I've even tried honesty:

Mindy: I don't think I can. See, I'm a writer, and I need that time to write.

Oblivious: You can just bring your paper and pencil with you, and write during the presentations!

So, I let my Irish side have a go and I went with the concise, slightly rude, you-can't-explain-me-away answer that those anti-drug assemblies taught me years ago: No.

While our amazing e-friendships and networking reminds us that we are not alone in our journey towards authorship, the fact remains that the act of writing is a solitary endeavor. We need our time, we need our space, we need to get into the groove and hit our stride to make the words start flowing. 

So don't be afraid that you won't be invited to the next Nice People Gathering or Coalition of Really Useful People. Stick to your guns, write your books.
_________________________________________

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 9, 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.

101 Tips for Writers

We're celebrating our 101st post here on Book Pregnant with 101 tips for writers! Dive into our past posts for some great pointers, and look for more from all of us in the months to come.

1-9 Nine New Year's Not-Resolutions for Writers

• No one sticks to resolutions--but hopes for the new year? Sure. 

10 Stop Writing

• Sometimes the best way to move forward with your WIP is to walk away from the computer and stop writing. The best ideas and solutions may come when you're taking a drive or a walk, and you can listen to your imagination and not focus on your word count.

11 The Best Piece of Writing Advice-Thanks to My Mentor

• How to find your way back to the story in your novel.

12 The Next Big Thing

• Where do you find inspiration for your novel? Don't discount your own family history which can inspire your novel.

13 The Ghost of Novels Past

• Write What You Love! Love what you write, write what you love. 

14 What Cancer Has Taught Me About Writing And Living 

• Seize your passion and write your heart out. Laugh, love and live. Live deeply. Smell the salt air, caress the butterfly wing, stare into the October sky. The more you live, the more you will be able to write.

15 Write Naked

• The second book comes with a whole set of new pressures and it's hard to write from that gutted-open place once your first book is out in the world, but we have to figure out a way to write like no one's watching. 

16 Why Not All Books Should be 50 Shades of Grey 

• Although erotic fiction is, pardon the pun, hot right now, not all books should be titillating. Almost all people have sex, but that is not what every story is about. When writing you have to decide what is important to include and what is important to exclude. What would the point of view characters share? How would they experience that moment? Would they tell their secrets? 

17-20 Three Ways Non-Writer Job Skills Can Help as You Publish Your Novel 

• Did you have other jobs before you sold your book? So did most of us! Here are three ways you can apply the skills you learned in previous positions to your author career!

21 Getting Book Pregnant 

• Most writers don’t enjoy querying—but you can’t find an agent without this process and that means writing the dreaded query letter. REMEMBER a query letter is a tool and tools need to be USED to get a job done--so stop over working your letter and send it. 

22 So You Found An Agent? Yay! Welcome to Hell 

• Finding the agent is the least stressful part of the publishing process. 

23 Books, Blogs and BFFs: How One Thing Leads to Another 

• Once you have a concept for a book find a community of other "pregnant authors" to support you! 

24 Writers Write 

• When you're discouraged about rejection after rejection, remember why you're a writer! Writers write because they love to. So don't give up! 

25 Once You Sign With An Agent, The Wait Is Over (Oh, I Crack Myself Up!) 

• It may take a very long time, but the perfect agent for your book is the one who loves it and sees its potential as a saleable book in the current market. Keep trying, keep querying, and wait for that right agent. 

26 Being Unreasonable 

• It takes an unreasonable person to make the journey to publication. You must accept staggering odds, rejection, criticism, and bad reviews. And you must want it enough to persevere. As unlikely as it is, you must be unreasonable in order to succeed. 

27 Confessions of an Anxious Novelist 

• Anxieties on the eve of publication are normal.

28 The Importance of a Great Editor 

• A great editor can take your book and make it better in many ways. Trust her advice, but also trust yourself. 

29 Evolution Of A Book Cover 

• Get the Cover you want. Don't be afraid to push for the cover you like.

30-40 You’ve Sold Your Novel and Don’t Have ESP? Ten Things You Should Do ASAP

• A list of ten things you should do as soon as your novel is sold! 

41 Rabbit Test, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Me 

• Reasons why--or why not--to have a blog. 

42 Premature Delivery 

• Once a book is bought writers have less control than they think - make sure to find a community to support you! 

43 Setting Priorities on the Journey Towards Publication 

• You're finally published -- learn to put Amazon rankings, reviews and sales in perspective. 

44  Conquering My Fear of Book Presentations 

• Use your passion for your novel to get over your fear of public speaking. 

45-56 Writing Anxiety 

• Eleven tips for controlling your inner critic. 

57 DIY Promotion 

• How to promote your book without losing your mind. 

58 Book Baby Two 

• It’s very common for writers to have a weak second book; publishers refer to it as a ‘sophomore’ book. Some ideas for making that second, stressful pregnancy a success. 

59 The Waiting Game 

• Publication day will come and then you will have to find something else worth waiting for. 

60-70 Live Author Appearances 

• Ten Tips to Surviving A Book Signing 

70-73 And Now The Book Store Reading... 

• Three Ways to Survive A Book Store Reading

74-81 AUTHOR INTERVIEWS: Staple of the Blog Tour and Terror of the New-book Mother 

• Seven tips to help you through a blog tour.

82 A Debut Author Learns About Libraries 

• Don't forget the importance of libraries to your books success! Make sure to introduce yourself at your local libraries. 

83 On Being Nice 

• Be nice. Always good advice, but especially when your trying to spread the word about your book! 

84-89 How To Get The Crap Out of Your Book 

• 5 tips for editing the extraneous out of your WIP 

90 Why Does It Take So Long to Publish A Book Anyway? 

• Be realistic about the length of your journey. 

91 Blubs-What Are They Good For? 

• It's nice to have complimentary comments on the front of your book, but there's more to the picture than this. 

92 NEIBA and NAIBA & Independent Bookstores

• If you have an opportunity to go to one of the trade shows for booksellers, jump on it. This is an opportunity to meet the people who will sell your book. 

93-101 Writing The Reader's Guide 

• Eight tips to help you provide that extra-special something for your readers.

Thank you to everyone for following us through our birth pangs, we hope you'll continue on the journey with us as we learn more along the way - from second books to third books... and onward!

The Next Big Thing

by Anne Barnill

Everybody wants it.  You know what I mean--the ‘big’ book, the one that sells like glasses of lemonade in the desert at high noon, the one that buds, then blossoms into a mega-book. A phenomenon.  Something like the Harry Potter books or Fifty Shades of Gray.  I’ll admit it; I’d love to come up with the next big thing.  My agent would love it even more and my publisher, well, I’m sure they’d be over the moon should it happen.

Chances are, though, it won’t.  Those ‘big books’ are a pretty rare occurrence and, unfortunately, completely unpredictable.   Not that people don’t try to guess which book is going to go viral.  After all, publishers are betting on books all the time; it’s part of the job.  They select books they believe will make money.  They pick books they hope will succeed beyond the writer’s wildest dreams.  But, even at its best, it’s a guessing game.  Try as they may, no one really knows what the next big thing is going to be.

The publishing world is changing so rapidly--ebooks, independent publishing, the internet, Amazon, fewer brick and mortar stores--publishers and agents aren’t quite sure what will happen next.  Some folks say the days of said agents and publishers are numbered as more and more writers take total control of their work, from creating the story to binding the book.  Others believe books themselves will disappear completely.  With publishing companies as one dish in a corporate smorgasbord, the pressure grows greater each day to satisfy the bottom line, to publish books that will make money—sure-fire hits.

Where does all this uncertainty leave the writer?  It leaves this writer confused and unsettled.  It also leaves me convinced that chasing after the ‘next big thing’ is akin to searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—sure, it may be there but it’s unlikely I’m going find it.  So, what to do?

Years ago, before I had published any books, I came to the realization that, for better or worse, I am on this planet to write.  It’s what I do and how I make sense of the world.  Last year, while under treatments for cancer, writing is what kept me sane.  The minute I could drag myself from the bed to the computer, I did so, knowing that, somehow, if I could write even one paragraph—chemo-brain and all—I was a step closer to being my true self, rather than the ‘invalid.’  The writing often felt like wrestling a bear because my brain didn’t work the way it had previously—I couldn’t remember words and often lost the sense of a sentence.  The work was frustrating because I forgot what I had written the day before and had to start at the beginning each time.  With all that, I am convinced I healed faster because I wrote.  I know my spirit healed faster.

Not only am I a writer, I write for the audience of One.  Once I accepted it was my job to mine my little vein of whatever talent I might have for telling a story, I realized the work was important to one person other than myself—The Great Creator.  And, whether or not my work was ever published, I was to write for the pleasure of this Creator. 

I still believe that.  I have certain stories deep in my soul that I want to write.  These stories are not the stuff of blockbuster hits—at least, I don’t think they are.  Who knows?  But they are my stories, tales that bubble up inside of me.  And I will write them.  I will write them because they are important to me, not because I expect to become wealthy as a result.  I will write them with love and respect, using everything I have to make them as rich and deep and beautiful as I can.  Most likely, they will be ‘little novels,” stories about people and what happens to them, how their hearts break open, how they mend, or how they are left with ragged edges.  I will never have time to write them all.  But I will try.  And I have made peace with the fact the next big thing will likely belong to someone else.  I will content myself with my stories; I am a writer.