Writers in the Storm

Aimie K. Runyan

You have a new book out in the world. Huzzah! You should definitely be celebrating. Whether this is your tenth book with a Big 6 Publisher, a new book with a smaller house, self-pub, or your very first foray into publishing, you need to celebrate this accomplishment.

Millions of people want to write a novel. Only a tiny fraction ever finish one. An even smaller fraction of those go on to publish it. Uncork the good bubbly and celebrate with your loved ones. If you glean nothing else from this article, let it be that.

But aside from a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot, I’ve laid out some things I found useful that I want you to consider when launching your book into the world:

1. It’s OK to feel a little depressed on launch day.

It’s a moment you have been waiting for, perhaps your whole life, and it can feel very anti-climactic. There is still laundry to be done and children to schlepp around. Even if you launch an instant bestseller, it’ll be awhile before life really changes.

2. Set aside time for promotion.

Yes, you should be hard at work on your next book by the time you launch your latest, but set aside time for blogging, social media, interviews and more. If you don’t your work in all areas will suffer and you’ll just be stressed.

3. Be responsive. 

If people email you to congratulate you, post a cover of your shiny book just arrived at their doorstep, or post a review on their blog, make sure to reply and share links as appropriate. People like to be acknowledged, and it will earn you loyalty from your readers.

4. Do read reviews.

This is contrary to a lot of advice, but I believe in keeping an eye on what people have to say. The key is to take none of it personally. If you see a trend, consider paying it some heed. There is no such thing as a flawless book, and if you can learn something from the reviews, go for it.

I also read to flag for spoilers and abusive comments—anything that could legitimately turn a reader away. But an important caveat: never engage a reviewer personally. If you think a review needs to be removed (and this is rare), let the moderators know and hope they’ll do the right thing.

5. Don’t freak out about the bad reviews.

Many of us feel like a bad review is a rite of passage. They lend believability to the good reviews (readers know it’s not just our friends and family reading the book!) and they might steer away others who might honestly not enjoy your book. The trick isn’t just to find readers—you want the right readers, or the bad reviews will just multiply.

6. Don’t obsess over your numbers.

Yes, there are a zillion metrics to follow—sales rank, author rank, Nielsen numbers, and more. All that math is absolutely enough to kill anyone’s creative spark. I’m not saying don’t look. I’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite if I did, but try to set specific times to check so you don’t drive yourself bonkers. Keep yourself busy and productive—and away from the computer—if you struggle with this. Family excursions are my go-to for this. It’s impossible to worry about rankings while you’re chasing kids around the zoo. I promise.

7. Take time to pamper yourself.

A massage and a nice lunch can take away any launch time jitters, but a bath and a glass of wine can do almost as well. Personally, I treat myself to an evening at the movies all by myself. It’s a favorite indulgence of mine, and I can’t check my phone for two whole hours.

8. Talk to other authors.

Especially those you think have experienced a similar publishing journey in the same genre. They can give you tons of insight into what to expect. They will also let you know that much of the neuroses you’re experiencing are all totally normal. I’ve found that one very long Facebook Message chat with a friend from the same publishing house is one of the kindest things I’ve done for myself this month.

9. Thank your publisher and agent.

A lavish gift isn’t expected or necessary, but I like to send a little something to thank my house and my agent for all they’ve done. Something for the whole office, edible, and book-themed is my usual MO.

10. Do have a launch party.

Give your friends and family a thank you for all their support, and give them the chance to celebrate your success!

 

What do YOU do to cope with early-launch stress? We want to hear from you!

 

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About Aimie

Aimie K. Runyan writes to celebrate history’s unsung heroines. She is the author of two previous historical novels: Promised to the Crown, and Duty to the Crown from Kensington Publishing. Her upcoming novels Daughters of the Night Sky (available now as part of Amazon First Reads!) and Girls on the Line will release from Lake Union Publishing in January and November of 2018. She is active as an educator and speaker in the writing community and beyond. She lives in Colorado with her wonderful husband and two (usually) adorable children.

James Preston

There’s an old joke about a tourist in New York who asks a native, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall.”

They say to lead off with a joke, right? Well, I’ll lead off with half of a joke that’s older than many of the Writers in the Storm readers. (And notice I did not say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”)

When I was in junior high my parents wanted to encourage me to do arty things. After all, Maggie Preston, one of my aunts on my father’s side, was a well-known painter. Well, I’m not. There was a brief spate of clarinet lessons and after a lot of work I got it to make a noise like a duck. Nobody was sorry when I switched to piano. Which leads me to an anecdote about a concert pianist who said, “If I miss a day of practice I can tell. If I miss two days my coach can tell, and if I miss three my audience can tell.”

I recently launched two novellas called Crashpad and Buzzkill. (Insert high-priced commercial here.) I talked about them at some length at a signing at a great independent bookstore in Orange, California called Book Carnival. I talked a bit, read an excerpt and answered a lot of questions, some of which were about the background (they are period pieces set in the 1960’s on a college campus), and a few questions were on how to do it because, as with any audience, some of the listeners wanted to write.

Well, I’ve studied, of course. But mostly I’ve written. Words on paper. You’d think that was obvious, right? Maybe not so much. The point is that all of those folks who tell you to write every day are right. However . . . Not even Stephen King gets up every morning and knows exactly where the next scene is going. At least, I don’t think he does. But he writes every day, oh, yes, he’s there at the typewriter or the word processor or with a notepad putting one word after another, because that’s what writers do. They write.

Is all of it deathless prose that jumps from his page to the New York Times list? Of course not. Ray Bradbury says he wrote every day for sixty-nine years. Writing every day does not have to mean a new chapter in your novel, though that would be nice. 

I had a writing teacher and reviewer named Paul Bishop. Paul is a now-retired LAPD officer and talented writer. Look for books like Citadel Run and Tequila Sunrise. He told me a story about a writing class he taught and a woman who came up to him afterward, thanked him, and said, “Now I’m almost ready to start, just as soon as I know exactly what the entrance to the FBI building in Washington DC looks like.”  My guess is she’s still waiting. 

So, you think, “Write every day,” and you get up one morning and Urk! no ideas, the old brain is thinking about breakfast or does the car need gas. So what? That concert pianist does not play Bela Bartok every morning first thing. No, she runs scales. (During my piano lessons I got to where I could do that and I’ll bet if I sat down today with only a little fumbling around I could do it again. Muscle memory. Your writing muscle is like that.)

Here are some ways to write every day even when your muse is off shopping.

Much of the following is based on writing prompts developed for the State of California by, among others, my wife Nancy and Fae Rowen (yes, the Fae Rowen who is one of the founders of the blog you are reading now). 

Write a letter from your main character to you. Mine might go like this: “Hey, James, this is Jane. How’s it going? I got all my classes for once and didn’t have to stand in line very long to register. I’m taking Psych 101, and . . .” 

Write a paragraph about your character’s life before the event that started the story. Alternatively write a paragraph in which one of your  characters describes their life before this initiating event. My hero is a man named T. R. Macdonald, a guy who was a very successful broker/analyst in New York until, well, here’s what he would say about his life “before”: Mostly I’m a technical analyst, or I guess I should say I was. Anyway, I was at my station on the trading floor watching three screens and talking in the phone when Bernice, my boss’s Executive Assistant pushed her way through the crowd and pointed urgently at the blinking light on my phone. Until then I’d been a winner: Trader of the Year, fat bonus, Porsche Carrera (provided by a grateful company), stuff like that and it seemed to matter, you know. All it once it changed like a dip in a candlestick chart when somebody unloads a big block. Bernice told me my wife, who I’d left behind in California, had been hospitalized with a drug o.d. You know, I looked at the screens and I couldn’t remember the names of the equities or the client. 

Whoa, when I wrote that I learned something about how Mac felt. Ok, it’s not deathless prose, but I got in touch with him in a new way. 

Write — from a character’s viewpoint — what happened after that event. For me, this might be the reaction of Walter Dalrymple to Macdonald’s return to California. (Side Note: Walter takes center stage in the novella Crashpad.)

Will these exercises find their way into a final draft? Probably not, but so what? I doubt there are recordings of Jascha Heifetz tuning his violin. It flexes the writing muscle. 

So you sit down and your mind is as blank as the page. Write, “I can’t think of anything to say. Why is that?”

“Shaquille O’Neal accepted the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award in 2000, he quoted Aristotle: 'Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.' Classicists might quibble with Shaq’s translation of The Nicomachean Ethics, but in our view he was right on the money.” (Excerpt from What the Numbers Say by Derrick Niederman & David Boyum) 

There are many ways to practice. I have listed only a few.

Share some of yours. If you have none, take a stab at one of these and tell us about it.

Writing that blog response is, after all, practice. 

 

So the other half of the joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”

 

James R. Preston is the author of the Surf City Mysteries. This October he launched Crashpad and Buzzkill, two novellas set on a college campus in the 1960’s.

Christopher Lentz

It came to me as I watched the musical Gypsy, the story about Gypsy Rose Lee, the top stripper of her day: great writing is a lot like a great strip tease. Before you think I’m vulgar or just plain creepy, think about it. The stories you love best—and your best stories—do an outstanding job of deconstructing and delayering the main characters. Strategically. Methodically. Sensually.

In the film and Broadway-stage musical versions of Gypsy, three stage-weary strippers give their hard-learned advice to a girl who’s about to strip for the first time. They explain the secret of their art as they sing You Gotta Have a Gimmick. The point of the song is that in stripping (and in writing) you need something special to stand out and be memorable. You need a gimmick, often called a hook. (To watch and listen, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wErVF7QwIY)

We know readers like tropes. But they love tropes with a twist. And to twist a trope, we need to tease and tantalize our audience.

A well-choreographed strip tease—and a well-revealed main character—is all about making the audience want more and then not giving it to them. At least not in a rush…or a story-stopping data dump. That simply would be exhibitionism, and few people like flashers.

Using those three ladies and their gimmicks, let’s see what this means for us:

• Miss Mazeppa bumps it with a trumpet. Miss Mazeppa strips while wearing a gladiator outfit and blowing a horn. It’s hard not to notice her. If you want your main character to be noticed and empathetic, she must be heard and must stand out from the other characters. It’s your mandate to make your readers care about her and root for her. You need to make her relevant and relatable, but not always likeable.
• Miss Electra makes it sparkle. It may not be as easy as flipping a switch, but making your main character shine despite the conflicts and obstacles you bombard her with is your job. You must do your best to make her not just electrifying, but more and more electrifying as you reveal her backstory and push her to her black moment. Electra has twinkling lights embedded in her costume. Your main character’s sparkle can be in her voice, her eyes and, most importantly, in her heart. Turn up her wattage as her story progresses.
• Tessie Tura does it with finesse. Tessie claims to be a trained ballerina who’s hit hard times and slid down the show-biz ladder from vaudeville to burlesque. It’s her grace and poise that set her apart. As a writer, what makes you stand out? You only have 26 letters to work with (if you write in English). The words you pick, the analogies and metaphors you employ, and the word-pictures you paint separate you from every other author. So, write freely but edit wisely.

Now let’s talk about Magic Mike. It’s also about the beauty of bodies in motion, but the roles are reversed: men exist to be looked at and women—for the most part—do the looking.

Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Like their female counterparts in Gypsy, the male strippers use gimmicks too. There are glitter-covered raincoats, cowboy outfits with check-baring chaps and convincing police-officer uniforms. And there’s the young virginal ingénue too.

Just like the heroes you write, these strippers are the husbands your readers never had and the dream-boat guys who never came along. They are THE fantasy…on the stage, in a world of blinding spotlights and pounding music. And that’s the ultimate tease, isn’t it? They cannot be touched. That’s usually the rule. But there are usually a lot of rule breakers in a strip club—and in our novels.

As you flesh out your heroes, they become more than flashy facades. They have scars. They have hopes. They want a happy ending. And usually, they have hearts of gold.

Ensuring that you have a gimmick, a hook or a trope twist is good for your stories and good for your entrepreneurial writing business. It’s just like what those three Gypsy strippers sing about (music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim):

You’re more than a mimic
When you got a gimmick
Take a look at how different we are 

If you wanna make it
Twinkle while you shake it
If you wanna grind it
Wait till you refined it 

If you want to pump it
Pump it with a trumpet
Get yourself a gimmick
And you too can be a star

 

Yes, you too can be a star. Strip your main characters down. Peel away their layers. Tease and taunt your audience. Heck, go ahead and strut down that runway and show your readers what you’ve got.

 

Do we push our characters out on an imaginary burlesque stage? Do we make them bump and grind as they reveal their true selves…dreams and motivations and all?  

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About Christopher

Christopher Lentz is a matchmaker, midwife and murderer…when he’s writing historical and contemporary romances. His stories are about second chances, misfits who find ways to fit in, and how love changes everything.

Lentz made his mark as a corporate-marketing executive before penning the Blossom Trilogy (the first two installments are available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W2I61PQ and https://www.amzn.com/1548539945). Please visit www.christopherlentz.org.

Featured image photo credit: Warner Bros.