To quote the genie in Aladdin, “There are a few provisos, a couple of quid-pro-quos…"
Pimp out somebody else’s work – this can be a favorite author, blogger, post or book you’ve read, a wonderful teacher or just someone who had profound influence on you as a writer or a person. Please limit your comments to one work. AND
Promote one of your projects that you’re excited about – a hobby, a blog, a book, or a new direction your writing is taking you. You decide. Just tell us about it in the comments! (Please restrain your enthusiasm to just one of your WIPs.) The rest of us will jump in and “ooooh and ahh” at you, and likely promote your project even further because we’re just so darn excited today.
We'll start things off by doing some P&P with the gals here at WITS...
Fae Rowen launched her amazing PRISM series into the world and she's hard at work readying her Keep Sphere series. Two words: Space Battles! Find out more at her website, http://faerowen.com.
Jenny Hansen just got her world rocked by Jennie Nash's class at CreativeLive: Write Your Book - Start Strong and Get It Done. If you watch the class, you'll see Jenny in the front row of the audience! Currently, Jenny is hard at work on a memoir she describes as "Like WILD, but with pregnancy...and funny." You can enjoy her silly fun at her personal blog, More Cowbell, or read her latest post here at WITS, Top 10 Success Tips from Cheryl Strayed.
Julie Glover recently finished draft one of a novella co-written with award-winning author Christina Delay. She's also writing a cozy mystery, and although she doubts she'll finish 50k words in July, she's throwing in with Camp NaNoWriMo for inspiration, encouragement, and accountability.
Laura Drake wants everyone to know about a fantastic retreat and coaching by the incredible wordsmith, Susan Donovan. She has a sweet little Casitas in New Mexico, and amazing coaching to whip your WIP into shape!
Laura's next novel is due out in December, but available for preorder NOW!
See? Easy-peasy. Only one of us wrote this, but all of us are represented - that's the spirit of P&P.
Don't be shy -- tell your pals!
We are open for as many entries as you want, and you're welcome to send anyone who reads great stuff our way. We want to hear about it! Be sure to peruse the comments. You might find a few things you like in the plethora of pimping that’s about to ensue.
Thanks again for making WITS one of the top writer’s blogs. We appreciate you!
Over the last few months, I've shared "Top 10" lists from several authors on the topics of writing and success. This month I chose Cheryl Strayed, author of WILD (one of my favorite books), because she has so much practical wisdom to share about life. For years before WILD gained popularity, Strayed moonlighted as Rumpus advice columnist, Dear Sugar, answering questions about life and love, sex and marriage, about dysfunctional families and the importance of healthy boundaries.
Here are ten of my favorites gems from Cheryl Strayed on success, in life and in art:
1. Every book is inherently full of possibilities.
In WILD, Strayed recounts her 94 day journey on the Pacific Crest Trail where she pushed her body in an effort to heal her spirit. The trail was the thread that ran through the book and she built off that. Your book could be about war or mermaids or housewives but you will decide what goes in it, based on the lesson you want to impart or the "why" of your particular story. Be open to the possibilities.
2. "Success" is a subjective term.
As Sugar, she wrote, "You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
3. The world owes you nothing.
One of Cheryl's most famous quotes is, "You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding. There is no why for which cards you get. They just are. Earning a living, even in ways you find unpleasant, will give you faith in your own abilities." [Amen, sister!]
4. You can find peace in the "obliterated place."
In her Rumpus column, Dear Sugar spoke with a father who had lost his son to an impaired driver. She called that deep well of grief "the obliterated place."
"The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna...The real work of deep grief is making a home there. That’s now your world, where everything you used to be is simultaneously erased and omnipresent." She said, "You go on by doing the best you can, you go on by being generous, you go on by being true, you go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on, you go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days, you go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage."
5. Self-pity is a dead end road.
"Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out."
6. How to get unstuck.
So many people, writers or not, feel stuck. Like they couldn't possibly move from the place they are now to where they want to be.
Strayed says, “This is how you get unstuck... You reach. Not so you can walk away from [what or who] you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours — the one that includes the loss...but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really effing hard to get there, but you can do it.”
The person she gave that advice to had lost a child. Most losses are less than that - loss of hope, identity, dreams. We can move beyond them to the place where we don't feel stuck.
7. Be gentle with yourself.
Strayed believes, "You will not write well from a position of shame. You are creating something out of nothing. Be gentle with yourself while you create. Only when I'm gentle with myself can I actually let go and do the work." She must forgive herself for any lapses so she can get back to doing the work.
8. Write.
The only way to be a writer is simply to write, then write some more. Keep the faith that your work is meaningful and just WRITE. If you can only write one day a week, write your heart out that one day. Write as often as you can and never give up.
9. Writing teaches you resilience.
"You can only take each day as it comes," says Strayed. "Sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed, and every day is different. Resilience means you come back to the page to chase the dream for one more day."
10. Embrace "Motherfuckitude."
In this interview, Strayed mentions "the Art of Motherfuckitude," and explains what that sentiment means to a writer. It all began with a Dear Sugar column, where so much of her wisdom first came to light.
She told a young twenty-six year old writer, "I thought a lot of the same things about myself that you do...That I was lazy and lame. That even though I had the story in me, I didn’t have it in me to see it to fruition, to actually get it out of my body and onto the page, to write, as you say, with 'intelligence and heart and lengthiness.' But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked."
Strayed sees the unifying theme of any writer's life is an intersection between resilience and faith.
"The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. So write... Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker."
Strayed's Dear Sugar advice column was both painful and uplifting in its naked honesty. How do you bring that naked honesty to your writing? Which of these ten bits of wisdom resonates the most for you? Which ones do you struggle with?
About Jenny Hansen
By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 18+ years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.
I was a contest addict. Or, if you’d prefer, a contest whore. Either way, I’ve had a lot of experience with writing contests. I’m not entirely reformed, but I’m going to share a little about my feelings on the pros, some cons, and why I think you should consider using contests to become a better writer and advance your career.
I’m going to start this post in a way I didn’t originally anticipate and talk about why YOU shouldjudge in writing contests. There are several reasons I recommend writers judge their peers work.
First, you can learn from the score sheets and seeing what they want you to look at in the body of work. It’s always easier to see the “errors” in others’ work than our own, so judging can teach you a lot.
Secondly, it’s about giving back. Don’t you appreciate those who didn’t say they were too busy, had too many kids, or not enough experience and helped you? That giving back is part of what makes the romance writing community unique and special. Besides, if everyone entered but didn’t volunteer to judge, then contests would have to shut down. Spreading the workload ensures contests continue and improves the quality of the feedback.
Lastly, by judging in contests—especially if you judge in your genre in contests you don’t enter—you can get a glimpse of what others in your genre are writing and see how they’re doing to compare your own writing with other unpublished writers.
Next, I want to debunk the idea that contests are too expensive.
There are lots of contests out there. You can search the web, but as a romance writer, I’ve mostly entered RWA® chapter contests and the RWA Golden Heart®. The fees can be as low as $15 or up to around $35 for RWA members.
I have judged in a lot of contests and typically spend no less than four hours per entry. Contests have a minimum of two first round judges, most have three, some even have four. I’ll do the math (since most writers don’t like to) and say that if you have three judges spending only three hours each on your submission, that’s nine hours. Divide that into the average of $25 for a contest $25/9=$2.78 per hour—for three pairs of new eyes and input on your writing. Considering that I paid over $100 to take a continuing ed college class and the instructor gave me feedback consisting of about four words per assignment (“great hook!” or “interesting characters”) the feedback I’ve gotten from volunteer contest judges is worth every penny of the contest fee.
If you’ve entered a contest or two (or more) or even talked to some contest veterans, you’ll hear they are a crapshoot. Writing is subjective. Sometimes the judges know less about writing than you, but you can still learn what resonates with them as readers. Others simply may not like your story or style. That’s okay. No one bats 1000 or hits 100% of their free throws.
I can attest to the frustration of contradictory feedback or the judge who says you got something wrong even though you’ve done your research (or lived the life). However, even those judges may have valuable nuggets, so don’t discard their comments without considering them after giving them a few days to settle and read them again.
The key to growing as a writer is learning AND application. Just as watching baseball doesn’t mean you’re a skilled player and listening to music doesn’t make you a singer, reading books doesn’t make you a writer. But those things can help you recognize talent and what works. We don’t know how much we don’t know or what we don’t know when we start writing. As a beginner (who thought I was pretty darned good because people would listen to my stories,) I had a lot to learn about writing: point of view, active versus passive writing, character goals, motivations and Conflict (with a capital C.)
You can hear speakers, read craft books, listen to podcasts. Still, judges can take you to the next level with a targeted comment and an example in your work about not needing dialog tags with action tags or reducing gerunds (since I was not an English major, I had to look up that word), prefacing which kills tension, amplifying dialog, or putting stimuli before response. Are you going to learn all that from a contest or two? Not likely. Most writers need to evolve and that comes in stages. However, each comment can get make you a better writer and improve your chances of getting published or building a loyal fan base and that is well worth the price of a dinner out.
Contests can still benefit those who’ve mastered craft and story structure. One of the perks of contests are prizes. Sometimes it’s only a certificate or plaque. It might be a little cash or a free class or chapter membership. Some contests offer published author critiques or mentorships. Another perk is that most contests have agents and/or editors as final round judges giving you a chance to skip their query slush pile if you final. It’s still a long shot to get a request—like finding that perfect match on EHarmony or Match.com—but it does happen and if you aim to publish traditionally, you want to open as many doors as possible.
I know that contests have helped me improve my craft and storytelling skills. The affirmation of being a finalist helped carry me through the realizations I still had a lot to learn and the query rejections. My Golden Heart final caught agent’s attention and helped me sign with a top selling agent.
What about you? Hopefully, I’ve got you considering the benefits of contests. I’ll be sharing a follow-up post on how to pick the right contests to get the most out of them based on the stage you’re at in your writing.
Have you entered any contest? If not, why? If you have, what was the best or worst thing about your experience. If you’ve finaled in one, how did that feel?
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About Tracy
Tracy Brody started her writing career with screenplays, then switched to novels. She's written a military themed romantic suspense series focusing on the Army Bad Karma Special Ops team—who's love lives are as dangerous as their missions. Her three completed manuscripts have all finaled in the Golden Heart and she won for Romantic Suspense in 2015 & 2016. She's a member of RWA, Carolina Romance Writers, the Kiss of Death, and the Golden Network.
She is represented by Helen Breitwieser of Cornerstone Literary.
