Writers in the Storm

by Tari Lynn Jewett

Last year, my first book #PleaseSayYes, was published in a limited edition, boxed set with other authors. When I got my rights back I decided to indie publish that book, and write four more to make it a series. I knew it would be a learning experience, but I had no idea exactly what it was that I would learn.

I’m excited to be here to share 10 Things I learned Indie Publishing My First Book. In descending order, just for fun: 

#10. No matter how many books you’ve read, workshops you’ve attended, classes you’ve taken, friends you have that have successfully published tons of books, and shared their brilliance…you still don’t know enough… 

Don’t get me wrong, I knew when I decided to indie publish this first book that I still had a lot to learn. But I’ve always loved reading and writing. I devoured books from the time I could read, and turned nearly every job I’ve ever had into a ‘writing’ job. I wrote for magazines and newspapers for fifteen years, and I’d written fiction as a hobby, long before I began to write fiction for publication. All my friends and family thought I should write a book. 

I got serious about writing fiction for publication, and took craft and how-to classes and workshops. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. When it came to indie publishing all that I knew was that you wrote a book, put a cover on it and loaded it on Amazon.

That sounded easy enough...

# 9. It’s vital to join professional organizations, take classes, attend conferences, network, do everything you can to learn about and keep up with the changes in your industry.

Indie authors have done something amazing. They’ve reached out to each other through organizations, social media, conferences, etc., in a way that I’ve never seen before. And they share! Yes, they share what they’ve learned about publishing, business, and marketing. They also work together to promote and support each other. 

So, while you won’t learn everything from other people, you will learn more than you even realize you need to know by finding other writers who indie publish, and other writers in your genre. And not just writers! There’s a world of cover artists, editors, formatters, personal assistants, all out there sharing what they know…with you!

# 8. There is no ONE right answer. Get all that you can from experienced friends and colleagues…and when they conflict, choose what works for you.

One indie bestselling author is a pantser, another is a plotter. An author who’s making triple digits on her books says put everything in KU, and another… also making triple digits is doing it by going wide. You don’t know what KU is? Or what it means to go wide? You’ll learn this from other authors. And then, you’ll make educated decisions about your career. 

# 7. Don’t give yourself a tight deadline for your first books.  

What? You planned on doing a pre-order and gleaning all you can ahead of time to try to make a bestsellers list? As I said, there’s no one answer that’s right for everyone, but I’m so glad that I haven’t yet written my deadlines in stone.

Working on my first cover was a back and forth process that took longer than I expected…because I wanted it custom. I can write a draft pretty quickly, but revisions, not so much.

I also went back and forth with my formatter several times. The man is a saint. No matter what I screwed up, he’s yet to call me an idiot, and some of the things I did wrong were really embarrassing. But you don’t know what you don’t know until you have to do it! 

So, I’m not yet ready for pre-sale, and I know it now. Maybe after book 3, or 4. I might even wait until the second series.

# 6. Writing and editing are the easy parts.  

So far, I’m spending less time writing and more on the mechanics. And by mechanics, I mean learning what I need for formatting, about copyrights, and the need for two covers: one for print, one for digital. I've learned to have the book formatted twice, how to upload my books and how to price them. Pricing is much more complicated than I ever knew! I also had to learn the difference between ISBN numbers and AISN numbers and whether I need both. And did I talk about copyright? Because seriously, that’s lots of fun.

# 5. Hiring professionals for editing, cover art, formatting is imperative. 

If you want to produce a professional work, you must hire professionals. Otherwise, it’s probably smarter to submit. Indie publishing and traditional publishing are both legitimate choices, but if you submit your work traditionally, you’re going to have a professional editor, cover artist and formatter to put out your book. Why would you not do the same if you indie publish?

Even if you are a professional cover artist and can do your own cover, or even your own formatting, I recommend you always hire your editors. Just like a doctor shouldn’t treat himself, a writer should never edit their own work, even if they’re a professional editor. Again, just my opinion.

# 4. Thankfully, nothing is set in stone. 

Well, unless you’ve scheduled a pre-order on Amazon. That’s pretty much set in stone. But if your book isn’t selling, you can change your cover, tweak your blurb, find a new editor. Because you’re doing this yourself, you can always change things. 

# 3. You’re not just a writer, you’re a business person, a sales person, a marketer, and you better learn to love social media. 

This is the part that’s hardest for most of us. I had no idea when I started this several years ago, that social media was going to become such a big part of my life. Honestly, just like almost every writer that I know, all I want to do is hide in my library and write books. I don’t want to be a salesperson. And I don’t want to feel like a pusher, or pimp for my books, but if I don’t tell people about my work, who will? And sadly, this is one thing we now have to do whether we’re indie or traditional authors. 

The part that is easy to love is the readers. They talk to you, they want to know more about you, and they want to know more about your characters, and that makes the social media part more fun. 

# 2.  I LOVE having control.  

I had no idea, because truly all I want to do is write, but I love that I get to pick my editor, make decisions about every detail of my cover, and every word of my blurb. If it doesn’t work, it’s on me, but if it does, well that’s on me too. 

# 1. I have the best job in the world. 

There is nothing I’d rather be doing at this point in my life than writing. And after putting out my first book, and learning some hard lessons, I still want to do this. Will I publish traditionally? I hope so, but I’ll probably always indie publish as well. Book 2 #FireworksintheFog is releasing in just a few weeks, and the learning curve is still steep, but it’s worth every minute. 

So, those are just 10 of the things I learned indie publishing my first book. Oh, believe me, there were many more, but it would take a book to write all of them…and maybe someday I will, and I’ll probably indie publish it! 

If you're an indie author, what lessons do you have to share? If you want to be an indie author, what are your most pressing questions?

About Tari 

Tari Lynn Jewett lives in Southern California with her husband of nearly thirty years (also known as Hunky Hubby). They have three amazing sons, a board game designer, a sound engineer and a musician, all who live nearby. For more than fifteen years she wrote freelance for magazines and newspapers, wrote television commercials, radio spots, numerous press releases, and many, MANY PTA newsletters. As much as she loved writing those things, she always wanted to write fiction…and now she is. 

She also believes in happily ever afters…because she’s living hers. 

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by Barbara Linn Probst

Before I became a writer, I taught students who were getting advanced degrees in clinical social work. One of the questions that always came up was whether a clinician could effectively counsel someone if she didn’t share their experience. Did a clinician have the ability—or the right—to presume that she could help someone struggling with issues that she couldn’t understand “from the inside,” such as domestic violence, anorexia, or racial discrimination?

There are arguments to support both answers to that question. On the one hand, there’s the addiction recovery model, which is based on the idea that “those who’ve been there” are in the best position to help. On the other hand, as I would point out to my students, did that mean that I—as a white, urban, female, baby boomer—had to limit my clinical practice to people exactly like me? That didn’t sound right. It implied a world of stereotypes and separation that contradicted everything I believed in.

The answer that I found most useful, over the years, was based on two complementary principles. First, acknowledge what you don’t understand. Ask and learn. “Tell me what it’s like for you.” Respect the client as the expert on her own life.

And second, excavate what you do understand, even if it’s not evident at first. As I told my students: “I might not know what it’s like to feel worthless and ashamed because my father is incarcerated. But I do know what it’s like to feel worthless and ashamed. Something in my life has made me feel that way. It doesn’t matter what it is, specifically, as long as I can dig down and connect with those feelings. They’re human feelings, and we all have them.”

It’s exactly the same with writing. But the principles require a bit of translation.

We’ve all heard the injunction to “write what you know.” That’s like the idea that a therapist will do her best work with people whose experience most closely resembles her own.

And we’ve all heard the counter-arguments. If we were limited to writing what we know, directly, then a female writer could have no male characters. There would be no fantasy or historical fiction. That’s obviously not what the injunction is meant to connote. Taking it that way is far too restrictive.

However, there’s another pitfall to the notion that we must turn to our own experience as source material for our writing. You might say that it’s not restrictive enough. That is, it requires a caveat or two.

“Write what you know” does not mean you should turn your own life into fiction—or, more subtly, use writing for personal catharsis. My first (terrible) manuscript did just that, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was drawing on my own painful experiences, ostensibly because that was the material I could write about most authentically, but actually because I still needed to work through them.

In other words, I was writing about my experience, rather than writing from my experience—from the human truths I’d come to understand. Those truths can deepen a story. They can tell me, if I listen, what my characters might feel and do, even if I’ve never been part of their world.

We’ve all been swept into the world of a story, knowing that the author herself wasn’t a member of the French resistance or part of an orphan train. Certainly, the author did extensive research so the external details would be accurate. But no doubt she did “internal research” too, tapping into the human emotions that transcend time and place.

In short: My own experience can guide how I render the story. But it should not guide how I structure the plot.

Ask yourself: Are you writing about your experience or from your experience? How can you tell?  Here are some guidelines that can help.

• Can
  you imagine people you know asking if a character in your book is “really” you
  or “really” someone you both know? 
• Do
  you believe that no one else could truly tell this story?
• Visualize
  your novel as a memoir. Would it work equally well?
• Do
  you feel deeply connected with your protagonist’s struggle, despite the ways in
  which you differ?
• As
  you were writing, did you feel as if you knew, intuitively, what your
  protagonist would say or do—even though you’ve never been in her shoes? 
• Did
  the passages of interiority come more naturally to you, while you were writing,
  than the external events of the plot?

If you answered “yes” to the first three questions, you may be writing about your experience.

If you answered “yes” to the last three, you may be writing from your experience. It’s not always so clear-cut, of course—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with semi-autobiographical writing, as long as you do it purposefully and call it by its proper name. 

One of my writing teachers, the wise and generous Sandra Scofield, told me recently: “There’s no harvest so bountiful as one’s own pain.” The image of a harvest is a good one, I think. The pain—whatever struggle, loss, shame, rage, and despair one has experienced—can be fertile soil.  The crop doesn’t consist of quasi-autobiographical accounts of that pain. It’s whatever you, as a writer, can bring to life from the mysterious combination of soil, light, water, and air.

It’s a delicate, two-step process. First, we take what is personal, particular to us, and search for its universal essence. Then we take that universal essence and embed it in a new particular—a character, an event, a fictional world.

That’s the miracle of writing.

What about you? 

Is there something from your own life that has enriched a story you’ve written? Are there dangers, as well as benefits, of drawing on one’s own experience?

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst is a writer and researcher living on a historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her forthcoming novels (Queen of the Owls, April 2020, and The Sound of One Hand, October 2020) tell of the search for authenticity, wholeness, and connection. In both novels, art helps the protagonist to become more fully herself.  Queen of the Owls has been chosen as a 2020 Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection.

Author of the groundbreaking book on nurturing out-of-the-box children, When the Labels Don’t Fit (Random House, 2008), Barbara holds a PhD in clinical social work and is a frequent guest essayist on major online sites for fiction writers. To learn more about Barbara and her work, please see http://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/

Julie Glover

I'm a huge fan of the original Gilmore Girls. Or really, a huge fan of the scriptwriters on that show. While the lines were delivered perfectly by the wonderful actors, the writers were the ones who crafted the dialogue that set the show's tone, deepened the characters, and popped off the screen.

Whether you're a fan or not, settle in with your popcorn and let's pull some principles from scenes of Gilmore Girls to apply to our own novels—thus creating dialogue that keeps readers reading and coming back for more.

1. Represent, don't reproduce, real dialogue.

All too often, we writers think we need to speak like our characters would in real life. But think that through.

In real life, people stammer, interrupt themselves, interrupt each other, pause to recall someone's name or hunt for the word they want to use, repeat pet words over and over, default to cliches, and fill their dialogue with "verbal graffiti" (um, uh, like). That does not make for seamless or engaging reading.

Some have pointed out that no one in real life speaks as wittily and quickly as Lorelai Gilmore. To which I reply, "So what?" Her dialogue feels real enough—true to who she is and how she engages with the world—and keeps the viewer engaged. Take a look at this scene that happens the day after Rory Gilmore, a normally straight-laced college student, gets arrested.

https://youtu.be/brkTiPXHxUQ

How compelling or entertaining would that scene be if the mom stopped to think up her next witty line, added a bunch of ums or likes into the conversation, or just asked how her recently-arrested daughter was doing? Not very.

As Alfred Hitchcock said, "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." So cut out the dull parts and represent rather than reproduce real conversation.

2. Have a purpose for dialogue.

It seems at times in the show that Lorelai and Rory were talking just to hear themselves talk. But the dialogue always, or almost always, achieved something.

Let's look at a seemingly pointless conversation, and then I'll address why this dialogue really matters in the episode.

https://youtu.be/arF5pRh0ing?start=36

In this episode, Lorelai goes out on a date with a man she met at an auction and it turns out to be a bust. As she explains to her daughter, the man went on and on about his car and the wine list until she was nearly bored to death. Plus, he had no sense of humor.

Yet in this opening scene, Luke goes on and on too. He rants about the young families in his diner, and his gruff attitude toward public nursing makes him seem far less desirable than the man Lorelai later meets. By seeing her amused and engaged by Luke, we get that this unlikely character is a better fit. This dialogue sets the story's tone, reveals their character, and foreshadows the main conflict to come. It's also somewhat entertaining.

Ask yourself why your characters say what they say. How does each line of dialogue matter to the overall plot or scene goal? What does the reader learn about the characters or the conflict? And if at all possible, get dialogue to pull double-duty, having it achieve more than one goal.

3. Tailor dialogue to character.

A common pitfall in writing dialogue is making your characters sound too similar. But how we speak arises from various factors, including geography, gender, age, race/ethnicity, culture, personality, and worldview.

Some of my favorite scenes from Gilmore Girls involve the community meetings conducted in the fictional town of Stars Hollow. Note how the individual voices vary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn1gv-01z5I

Even in this short clip, you can see the personalities of many who spoke, from the anal-retentive mayor to the grumpy, ball-capped diner owner, to the tenderhearted teenage girl (Rory), to the humor-loving, sarcastic mom (Lorelai). If you knew nothing else about this whole series, you'd still get a flavor of the characters from this snippet.

Likewise, use dialogue in your story to show the uniqueness of each character and deepen the reader's sense of who they are, as well as what matters to them.

4. Use subtlety to express feelings.

Sometimes the best way for your characters to communicate what they're feeling is to avoid saying it or say it such a subtle way that only someone who knows the character really understands what's beneath the surface.

Emily Gilmore, the main character's mother, is a take-charge, never-let-em-see-you-sweat woman who shows how much she loves her husband in this touching scene in the hospital following his heart attack.

https://youtu.be/g9Gy4e571HU

All that fuss about the bedding is her way of saying "I love you, Richard Gilmore." And in turn, he responds to her need for reassurance with the funny-yet-sweet line, "You may go first."

Look for original, indirect ways your characters can express what they're thinking and feeling. And, in line with the previous point, make their way specific to who they are.

5. Include subtext.

When it comes to subtext, novels are superior to shows. Unless a movie or TV show includes a narrator's voice, a character's unspoken thoughts must be implied through body language, facial expression, and words spoken aloud. Authors have the added benefit of internal dialogue on the page.

Still, we can see how important subtext is through this scene from Gilmore Girls. It's a turning point in the show when daughter Rory comes home after having accidentally stayed out all night.

https://youtu.be/wNTnaJdkfA4

Lorelai was a teenager when she got pregnant with Rory, and she brings all that past into the present. Since the writers showed us the first conversation between mother and daughter (Emily Gilmore with Lorelai), we can almost hear Lorelai's thoughts and emotions in the second conversation between mother and daughter (Lorelai to Rory). Giving every word spoken aloud that much more oomph.

What our characters say is important, but often in light of what they don't say aloud—that is, what they say to themselves about the conversation, visceral reactions they have, emotions and memories they experience. So consider carefully what you put between the quotation marks. Add subtext to give your dialogue more emphasis and power.

Make Conversation Count

You're probably not writing a Gilmore Girls type novel, but all of us will have dialogue in our stories. Make sure what you include isn't dull, distracting, or distant. Instead, make conversation count by:

• Representing (not reproducing) real dialogue;
• Having a purpose for dialogue;
• Tailoring dialogue to character;
• Using subtlety to express feelings; and
• Including subtext.

What have you learned about writing great dialogue from shows you've watched?

About Julie

Julie Glover writes cozy mysteries and young adult fiction. Her YA contemporary novel, SHARING HUNTER, finaled in the 2015 RWA® Golden Heart®. She is also co-author of the Muse Island supernatural suspense series, which begins with Mark of the Gods, under the pen name Jules Lynn.

When not writing, she collects boots, practices rampant sarcasm, and advocates for good grammar and the addition of the interrobang as a much-needed punctuation mark.

Julie is represented by Louise Fury of The Bent Agency. You can visit Julie’s website hereand also follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.