There are times when a writer is stuck, not because of a lack of content, but due to fear that their work isn’t good enough for anyone else to read.
Writing, in some ways, is an act of love. Our stories—our children. We craft and care for our stories and our characters—the wonderful as well as the hateful. Sharing your writing with the world is hard. It takes bravery. What if it’s not good enough? What if someone…hates my child?
Handling Rejection
Rejection is part of the writer’s career. At some point you have to get used to it. Don’t give up. Instead, use rejection to better your writing.
Whenever potential publishers or agents turn your story down, it isn’t personal. There’s always a reason. Perhaps:
Your Title or title/subtitle isn’t grabbing their attention.
The content isn’t what they are looking for right now.
They are receiving better writing, and yours needs more work.
An agent feels the work is good but doesn’t have anyone to pitch it to at the time.
It’s also possible that they not getting your vision. Many wonderful stories have initially been rejected. J.K. Rowling’sHarry Potter was rejected many times. She pinned her first rejection letter to her kitchen wall to remind her of what she had in common with some of her favorite writers.
Here’s how to work around rejection:
Steps to take whenever receiving unhappy notifications.
Breathe and put on your rationality hat: Being distraught is to be expected. Allow that feeling to happen and then let it slide away after processing your emotions. Do not type angry and hit send. Sometimes typing what you really feel in a separate document that will never be sent can be therapeutic, just don’t send it.
Ask for suggestions for improvement: If after reading through your work as well as the publisher’s or agent’s guidelines you still aren’t sure why your work was not a good fit, ask for suggestions. You may hear crickets, but if you don’t ask, you’ll never know. You might get lucky and receive a response.
Everyone gathers rejection letters. Learn why your work wasn’t a good fit and keep moving forward.
Dealing with Anxiety While Writing
The story is too complicated
Sometimes it feels like a story is so full of twists, turns, characters, and subplots that you’ll never be able to work out the ending. Anxiety creeps in and you freeze.
Complicated books, especially series, take a lot of time to plot out.
Possible Solutions
Look at the story one piece at a time. Start small. Write a story idea with a limited word count, under 1000 words. Divide your story into three parts, beginning, middle, and end. You can expand the story from there.
Try writing prompts for practice and a change of pace. There are many online sites for these prompts. This one is promising.
I can’t get started
Writing a book is a big undertaking, and there’s more than one way to do it. You could spend years pondering all your options.
Possible Solution
Make a roadmap including:
What your book is about
Who are your readers
Problems solved
Benefits offered (for nonfiction books)
A basic outline. Even if you don’t usually outline your story, a few points on an outline will help with organization.
Don’t overthink it. These suggestions will get you started.
The story is taking too long to write
Are you a plotter or a pantser? It’s helpful to know what kind of writer you are.
Do you need structure to write your work and feel at sea unless you have step-by-step happenings before you get down to writing in earnest? Then you are a plotter.
If you write as inspiration hits you while figuring out What happens next? as you write, then you are a pantser. One who basically writes by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants.
Many writers are a combination of both.
Still stuck? Try NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a non-profit organization that promotes creative writing. In its annual, international event participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. Authors write "pep-talks" to cheers other writers on.
I didn’t think that I could do it, but I tried anyway and managed to write 50,000 words in a month. There’s a lot of encouragement for the participants, and you are only competing with yourself. I found this well worthwhile, and empowering.
Another possible solution
If your story has taken you in too many directions, it’s helpful to use story planners. This one is free for one story plan and there is a membership for more. There are many other options available online.
Here’s an article that lists the ten best story planning programs along with their pros and cons. Story Planner is #6 on this list.
Examples of novels that were a long time coming
If you are writing fantasy that requires in-depth worldbuilding, the story will take a goodly amount of time to complete. The research needed for historical fiction may also take more time than anticipated. (Beware of the rabbit holes you may fall down while researching. They are wonderfully distracting and get me every time.)
Consider J.R.R. Tolkien. It took him more than ten years to complete the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings. He wrote between teaching sessions, day-to-day responsibilities, and had to deal with the paper shortages due to the Second World War. Then, there were the many rewrites.
“One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.”
Jean Auel’s historical fiction, The Clan of the Cave Bear,began as a short story. That story became a manuscript of nearly 500,000 words. Too long for the publishers. After several rewrites she found a publisher willing to work with her.
“The story led to research, the research fired my imagination, and the wealth of material made me decide to write a novel.”
Obstacles are everywhere, but you can do this! More suggestions can be found in Part 1.
Do you use story maps? What is your favorite one? How do you deal with anxiety when writing?
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About Ellen
Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon chapter book series with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, MG Magical Realism/ Sci-Fi.
This post came to my email. I thought it would lead to some fun discussion, so I asked if we could share it here at WITS. With Johnny's permission, here's some (hopefully bloodless) food for thought!
-- Lisa
And now over to Johnny:
The Setup
So here’s a little story about me.
When I wrote my first book, I had no idea what I was doing. I just kind of followed my nose and wrote whatever struck me, but that didn’t get me anywhere productive. For a long time, that first book was just me telling the antics of individual characters, not paying much attention to making it all connect. It wasn’t a story, in other words. It was just a lot of stuff that happened.
I kept at it, though, and soon enough I figured out that stories needed a compass from the beginning. For years, variations on that basic plan refined themselves: I’d start with a beginning (crazy, I know), then STILL would follow my nose … but now I’d keep asking myself throughout the draft how I could move the larger plot forward. That’s how the Fat Vampire books were written, how Unicorn Western was written, how The Beam was written, and a whole lot more. Even when I was co-writing with my constant partner Sean Platt who kept me on the rails, I never really knew where the story would end up. Still, unlike that first book, I finally at least had an idea where it was going.
Learning How to Write
Fast forward almost ten years. Now I’ve got like a hundred books under my belt, writing at a pace of around 1.5 million words (1.5x the full Harry Potter series) every year. You write 15 million words and you figure some things out, such as “what works for you.” So yeah. By then, the wheels were greased. I knew how to tell stories, and because of it I never cared when I got stuck. I knew, from plentiful experience, that the answer was there somewhere … and every single time I hit a wall in a story, the answer absolutely was.
But after years of teaching writing and podcasting about writing and writing books about writing and hosting live events of all sizes for writers, I started to get a lot of other people’s advice and processes in my head. I started paying attention to story structure, because that’s what a lot of people did. I started to think in three acts, knowing exactly where the First, Second, and Third Act needed to start and finish. I heard over and over again about story devices and themes and who knows what else. I’d never cared or thought about those things before. My stories had them, but they had them accidentally. I could dissect my books after the fact and find all that good stuff in them, but it came from my gut, not planning.
Doing it Right
After hearing all that advice, though, I began trying to think about a lot of my previously-from-the-gut stuff in advance. I wanted to write better and better books, and that meant growing as a creator. Growth presupposes change. I couldn’t keep doing things the way I’d been doing, could I? No. I needed to keep experimenting, keep changing things up, keep trying new things to get better.
That’s what all the conventional wisdom said, anyway. The way I used to write, I’d decided, was wrong. I just didn’t know better. Moving forward, I started to think about genre — about not mixing genres together, because that was wrong. Certainly I shouldn’t write in several different genres; that right there was especially wrong. I thought about point-of-view and what was “allowed” and “not allowed,” because I’d been doing some of that wrong, too. I shouldn’t meander in my writing: focus was better and meandering was (again) wrong. I needed to think about theme, to make sure theme got in there ahead of time. I hadn’t been doing that, or hitting the proper act markers, or a dozen other things … and all of that, too, was wrong.
Yeah. Well. That was 2020, 2021, and 2022, and most of what I published during those years were books that’d been previously written. The few books I managed to actually write in those years were laborious and tedious. In the end, I think I cleaned those projects up so that by the time they hit the bookstores, they were pretty good … but they were also very difficult. Very not-fun. Very trying-so-hard. All of my writing flow was gone. The FUN was gone. I wrote far, FAR fewer words in those years, and very little of it was enjoyable.
Changing Things Up
I got sick of it. Something had to change.
And so, a few months before 2023 began, Sean convinced me to forget all I’d learned. To just say FUCK IT to the “right” way of doing things and instead let my freak flag fly like I used to. It took some practice to unlearn all the “proper” things I’d learned about writing, and instead write from the gut like I used to, but now I’m right back in my doing-it-wrong, totally-inappropriate groove. And I’m happy to report a few things to you:
The “wrong” way I write is a lot easier and creates much better stories in the end.
The incorrect, seat-of-my-pants, genre-ignoring, convention-ignoring way I used to write is also a hell of a lot more FUN.
Words flow. FAST. I’m currently writing two books at once, putting in more words each day on each of them than most “prolific” writers get on just one project. That was impossible during my “correct” years.
And most importantly, “wrong” feels so right to me. The stories unfold as if they’re already there and I’m just discovering them. The magic is back. Good stuff happens.
Hard Learned Lesson
So, my friends, I’m happy to report that Johnny is back and as incorrect as ever. I’m happy to report that although a lot of well-intentioned learning came my way throughout the course of my career, so far it seems that I was originally right all along.
Maybe the way I work won’t sell as many books as doing it right. Maybe my books are weird, or too long, or refuse too ardently to fit inside a single genre or understandable box. I don’t really care about those things. My books are me, and that’s all that I’ve decided ultimately matters.
And so I’ll leave you with a lesson I learned the hard way: If you happen to be a creator like I am, I’d like to encourage you to learn what you can … but in the end to ultimately trust your gut. It’s smarter than you know.
The Discussion
What do you think? Have you struggled to write "correctly?" What has your experience with writing correctness been? How do you feel about trusting your gut in writing?
-- Lisa Norman
About Johnny
Johnny writes fun, page-turning, layered, and most of all “inquisitive” fiction — stories told in many genres and ways, united by a curiosity about life’s biggest questions.
Whether the tale itself is about invading aliens, overweight vampires, or ordinary people in mindbending situations, Johnny’s stories always live on two levels. The first is the surface, where vivid characters come to life to undertake the most extraordinary adventures. The second level, however, is deeper: diving into the corners of reality itself, or just the shadowland of a fractured mind.
If you like Christopher Nolan’s movies or Michael Crichton’s books, you’ll be right at home in the Truantverse.
Originally from Ohio, Johnny and his family now live in Austin, Texas, where he’s finally surrounded by creative types as weird as he is.
One of the most rewarding parts of the craft of writing is being able to share it with another writer. Many young writers write in isolation but could benefit from having an older, more experienced writer step in for a little guidance. It could accelerate their writing ability and help them see writing as a career.
Perhaps you have time to take a younger writer under the wing? Maybe you have worked with student writing clubs or volunteered at the library where you interact with teen writers and want to know more strategies to connect with this elusive demographic. Sound interesting? Read on!
Becoming a mentor, whether in a formal sense or simply as an act of being present in a young person’s life, can also be very rewarding for the mentor.
How to be the best mentor ever!
Keep an open mind
Teens love to use shock factor. Always have and always will. It’s one way they can sniff out whether you are going to really hang around long enough for their real persona to come out and play with writing. Casual swearing, talk about sex, drugs, and music-you-probably-don’t-like could be a way a teen is testing you, to see if you are open to topics that they want to write about. To see if you will enhance or hinder their creative spirit.
Establishing boundaries is important but listen to them first. If an adolescent is too off topic or the subject makes you uncomfortable, tell them so. Define the task you hope to accomplish by offering what you can talk about: writing, editing, finding a solid story line. Guiding the conversation back to those goals can help build a productive and meaningful mentorship.
Be aware of bad days
The teen brain and emotional set is full of fast-moving hormones. It may behove you to remember that they could be polite and put together one day and just a disaster the next. Show interest in their state of being, but continue to focus on writing and see where that goes. Having a lot of emotion can be really nice on paper. Try directing them to write about the bad day they may have had through the eyes of a character.
If your mentee is very upset and unsettled, perhaps ask them to write a journal entry. Offer them to write a brain-dump and get it all-on-paper which they can then shred or safely burn in some metal waste basket.
But if they are overwhelmed, just being present may be enough. Always suggest talking to professionals for additional help if the kiddo you are mentoring is constantly down or shows signs of not bouncing back.
It’s okay to ask if they have a trusted adult to talk to already. They may offer that they have a therapist or that they get life advice from their aunt, neighbor, pastor, or another grown-up in their life. Feel it out and let them know you care but keep it about writing.
Wait and wait some more
Processing takes time. Teens may tear into a topic or need to think it through. One of the most important aspects of learning is time. Let them think and write as they learn their own writing style and process.
Listen
The other most important part of learning and of a good mentorship is getting to know your mentee. Listening is not only hearing what they say, but it’s also about how they say it.
Does their greeting sound clipped and terse? Did their words match the tone of your conversation? Is their body language screaming “I JUST BROKE UP WITH MY PERSON!” when they are saying something casual about what they ate for lunch? Pay attention with all your senses and your mentee will appreciate your input more.
Use good communication skills
Repeat back what you think you heard. When working through difficult topics or simply getting to know your mentee, use good communication skills. A simple one is to parrot back a sentence or two that they tell you, to see if you understood correctly.
Examples:
“So, you mean to say that being even 1 minute late to first hour means you get a detention, but if it is third hour, you can be late 10 minutes and the teacher doesn’t care. And you don’t think that’s fair?”
“You like to wear Crocs but only with sweatpants. Did I hear that right?”
“There shouldn’t be fruit on pizza. Ever. Not even pineapple. Is that correct?”
Ask clarifying questions. There are many reasons to ask for clarification. Have you experienced these when someone went a little further to develop your conversation?
Try open-ended questions that allow the person you are talking to speak in any direction, including ways you didn’t anticipate.
Sometimes what the teen says can be left up to interpretation.
Or maybe they are using slang that you want to be clear about what it actually means. Remember the bad that is good, or is the good is bad? (Thank you, Michael Jackson. I will forever be confused.)
When the other person knows that you heard them can be magnified when you also care enough to make sure you understand them.
Examples:
“Could you tell me more about ____?”
“I want to be sure I heard you correctly. Could you walk me through that explanation again?”
“That must have been a difficult experience. (Or exciting experience, or scary experience…) What did that mean for you?”
Ask extending questions. Asking extended questions is a great way to show you are listening and interested. Simply pick a detail you wonder about and ask for more information.
Try using basic informative aspects to discover, who, what, when, where, if you’re not sure what to ask about. The conversation can take interesting turns when you start digging a little more.
Share about yourself less.
We have a tendency to get excited about sharing about ourselves when we start a mentorship. We want to talk about what we have done and what we can teach and what we think about our mentee’s situation. But sometimes it is better to just sit back and learn about the person we are working with more organically.
It isn’t impressive to teens to talk about your accolades, and it could result in an instant eyeroll. Even if there are legitimate reasons a teen can benefit from you, the relationship should come first. It’s just how they (and many adults) operate. They may have serious goals for writing, but if they don’t connect with you as a person, even the best writing advice and feedback will fall flat.
Try not to talk about yourself too much at the start of your mentoring. And after that usually only if asked once you have been asked for specific details. Remember mentoring can be very effective when the focus is on the mentee.
Final Thoughts
As writers, we tend to be introverts and hide away in our minds. This can make building a solid mentorship difficult and taxing. Perhaps these suggestions can help facilitate a valuable learning experience for both the writer and the tutor.
Collaborating with young minds is an invigorating and rewarding experience that I hope many of us can share with others. Mentorships help younger writers and impart our experience to them, but rich rewards are waiting for the mentor too. It is edifying to invest in a young person, and even more so if you let the process unfold with a mentee in the focal point.
Have you worked with a teen before? Have you tutored a young person in writing their stories? Tell us a rewarding experience you had or share who helped form your love of writing.
About Kris
Kris Maze works in education, teaching Spanish through stories. She writes for various publications including Practical Advice for Teachers of Heritage Learners of Spanish and award-winning blog Writers in the Storm where she is also a host. Maze published a YA dystopian novel by a small press in the summer of 2020. Lately, she has been entering and placing in writing competitions, such as NYC Midnight’s Short Story and Micro fiction contests. You can find her Sci-fi, dystopian, YA series, this summer and keep up with her author events at her website.
Check out her new Sister-Site KrissyKnoxx.com where the fun-filled horror and heart-felt chills creep through the darker side of her YA works.
A recovering grammarian and hopeless wanderer, Kris enjoys reading, playing violin and piano, and spending time outdoors.
