Writers in the Storm

Kathryn Craft
Turning Whine Into Gold 

It’s true: after years of growing to trust the blogging team here at WITS, someone is finally going to spill the bean-counter’s beans. Read on, because there’s more to getting rich than this sure-fire technique:

Write major selling points in their own paragraphs—in red!

Among the top ten reasons people seek publication for their work is the possibility of making some real money at this gig. After all, you have worked so hard. (And so have so many others, but it is not expedient to think about them just now.) Your friends think you can do it. (They also thought you could be a cowboy or a firefighter, two other high-income occupations, but it’s not expedient to think about that just now, either.) The riches will go to someone, so why not you?

Waiting for your bestseller royalty check to auto-deposit. This is the American Dream.

Or is it? If we’re being realistic, a “financial score” in today’s publishing world pales in comparison to pre-2008 values. Hey, I wish it were different. But the market has spoken, and when the budget is tight, most people value a double-shot soy mocha latte over a book purchase.

When such economic realities get you down, turn to these standards of wealth that the bean counters forget to measure. I want you to rest assured:

You’ve already been getting richer from your writing.

Let us count the ways:

1. You’ll meet people who excite you.

This isn’t the first consideration for many introverted writers, but it is one of my favorites. My writing friends think about life deeply, they feel deeply. They are my kin—and yet each of us notices different aspects of the human condition and filters it through different predispositions. Color me jazzed.

2. You will go to new (tax deductible) places

I feel certain Dr. Suess was speaking of writers when he titled his children’s book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! There are any number of exotic places I may not have visited if it weren’t for my writing. Lest you think Maui and Hudson, Ohio are not equally exotic, I beg to differ. A curious mind will find fascinating, quaint, rich detail wherever it goes.

3. You will enrich your thought life

Reading, films, concerts, lectures, theater, museums—these are all ways to escape the keyboard, to learn and refresh. Yet once my mind is deep into a new project, the culture with which I interact makes a personal and necessary contribution. As the scrawled notes on my collection of church bulletins and programs would attest, these experiences become a way to enrich and stimulate the creative mind.

4. You will enhance family relationships

Tme spent alone can improve relationships by forcing you to set boundaries. Writing time is you time—and especially for married women with children, this is an important precedent to set. Your writing puts needed reserves into your patience account, and much-needed interest into your personality account that you can withdraw to engage loved ones who may have previously assumed that you fold laundry and clean all day. I’ll never forget those years, drafting my practice novel, when my teen would come home from the bus stop, perch on one of the deep windowsills in my office, and ask, “So Mom, what is happening with Autumn today?”

5. You will stimulate your mood

In her book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron says scientists have shown our brains light up as if the events in our novels are happening to us. Frugality alert: this is cheaper than a cocaine habit, and ends better. Plus, in our fraught political climate, any investment that adds to our emotional assets is a bonus.

6. You will gain wise inner advisors

Most storytellers write to discover what we do not yet know, and we do that through our characters. Mine live within me beyond the end of the novel. More than once I’ve thought, “What would Marty Kandelbaum do in this situation?” On one hand these are friends of convenience—they were born of thoughts and needs and quandaries specific to a certain time in your life—but they also taught you lessons that you will never forget.

7. You will improve your citizenship

If a writing life is the American Dream, how does it benefit us as Americans? We writers are the Good Samaritans or problem solving. When we hear of others who are butting up against conundrums that stop them in their tracks, we writers say, “Cool!”—then steal their shoes and walk around in them until we’ve replotted the story and shared a lesson in doing so.

By these seven measures, your life is already so much richer because of writing. So here’s my advice:

To get even richer, go do more of that.

Please share in the comments: Besides money (because bragging will just make the rest of us feel bad), how has writing made you rich?

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About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft  is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy, and a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft. Her chapter “A Drop of Imitation: Learn from the Masters” was included in the writing guide Author in Progress, from Writers Digest Books. Janice Gable Bashman’s interview with her, “How Structure Supports Meaning,” originally published in the 2017 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, has been reprinted in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, both from Writer’s Digest Books.

I've read so much about how video blogs are the next big thing. I swore I'd never do that. I mean, come on. I'm old, I'm fluffy, I don't think well on my feet, don't know anything about the tech involved, and I say 'anyway' all the time.  Oh, and I'd have to do my hair and makeup. Other than that, sign me up!

But then a few things happened. I read that in January 2016 Facebook announced there are more than eight billion video views and more than 100 million hours of video watched on the platform daily. 

That's an amazing stat, but it doesn't negate even one of my arguments above.

Then I ran across this video: 

https://youtu.be/y3yRv5Jg5TI

Oh my God. I'll bet I've watched that 9 times by now, and she has almost a million hits on it (more, after today, I'll warrant). Do I judge her for being goofy? Hell no. She's badass. 

Dammit, this woman just negated all my arguments. 

I eased into this the same way I convinced myself to write my first book - I'd write the book, get it out of my system, then hit delete!  NO one would ever have to see it. Boom.

Well, knowing how that turned out last time, I should have known this strategy wouldn't work. But I told you I'm a slow learner, right? 

Anyway, I thought if I could be entertaining (always tough, given people's varying tastes), and offer people something they could use, maybe this could work. Maybe I'd get my name in front of people. Maybe I could even sell a couple of books.  

Maybe being the key word.

I Googled how to do this, and there are a ton of articles out there.

I decided on a few key things:

• I'd do a craft/writer's life vlog - I teach workshops and classes - I have something to say!
• I'm cheap. I'm not buying special equipment. But I own an ipad, and it takes great photos...
• It has to be entertaining - I'm a bit of a dork, and I live somewhere that, though I think it's awesome, my friends think I'm crazy for moving from Southern California to Midland, Texas (think flat-ugly-oilwell-arewethereyet kind of country). I could show the awesome and odd about where I live!
• They can't be too long - people are too busy for a lecture. The first one, since I had a lot to cover about the set-up, was seven minutes. I'm trying to keep the subsequent ones about four minutes each.
• I'd have to get over myself. If they're looking for fashion advice, or runway models, they wouldn't be clicking on my vlog anyway, right?

I wanted interaction - to be sure I was answering questions that people actually had, I went out on Facebook and asked. Boy did I get questions! Everything from, grammar, how I like my coffee, plotting, how to do descriptions, to wanting to see what I wear in the morning to sit down and write.

Nowadays, if you own an iphone, or an ipad, recording a video is pretty easy. Still, I made mistakes. Here's a few tips, so you don't:

• Exposure. In bright light or shadows, it may not get it right. Tap on the shadowy part to brighten it, tap on the bright part to darken. Who knew?
• Focus. The regular setting is good - it usually focuses on faces (you can tell, because there's a yellow box around the focus point). If you want it to focus on something else, tap it until you see the yellow box. But be aware, this will also change the exposure.
• Shoot in Horizontal mode - now they tell me. You'll notice in mine, below I didn't do that. And it screwed up the sign I wanted to show. It showed when I was recording, but the black bars covered it in the recorded version.
• Trim. Start before you think you need to, and stop after. You can edit it with a simple free software (I used MovieMaker, but there are a bunch out there)
• A video is too large (usually) to email. Enter the amazing Apple. They'll do a video drop to an email. But usually, it's easiest to just upload it to Youtube (or FB) directly from your ipad. Boom.

So, I went for it. Here's my first posting - technical difficulties, silliness, bystanders and all. I then did two more (you can sign up to get email notification of new installments, either on my website, or on Youtube. 

AND, I just talked to Alpha Dog's Uncle Bob. He owns 3 longhorns! So expect to see one from a pasture soon. I just hope he wasn't pulling a Yankee's leg when he told me they're docile!

Is this going to work, long term?  Not a clue. Am I having fun with it, so far? Oh hell yes!

So, what do you think?  Would you ever try vlogging? Or are you in camp OhHellNO?

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About Laura

Laura Drake is a city girl who never grew out of her tomboy ways, or a serious cowboy crush. She writes both Women's Fiction and Romance.

She sold her Sweet on a Cowboy series, romances set in the world of professional bull riding, to Grand Central.  The Sweet Spot won the 2014 Romance Writers of America^®   RITA^® award in the Best First Book category.

Her 'biker-chick' novel, Her Road Home, sold to Harlequin's Superomance line (August, 2013) and has expanded to three more stories set in the same small town.

In January, Laura released her first Women's Fiction, Days Made of Glass.

In 2014, Laura realized a lifelong dream of becoming a Texan and is currently working on her accent. She gave up the corporate CFO gig to write full time. She's a wife, grandmother, and motorcycle chick in the remaining waking hours.

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Jamie Raintree

When I first started writing, I wanted to know all the answers. I consumed craft books, writing blogs, and the suggestions of writers further ahead in the publishing journey than I. I thought being a successful writer was just a matter of getting the right information. I thought if I could just learn everything there was to know, writing and a career in publishing would suddenly become easy.

You're laughing now, aren't you? But it was an obsession, and you know what? It actually kind of worked. I made great progress in my writing and career relatively quickly, but it certainly wasn't easy, and it was never as fast as I wanted it to be.

Over time, with all that knowledge I gained, I've been grateful to pass on my experiences through my blogs, workshops, and mentoring writers in my various writers groups. I often get questions from those who are in the phase I once was in--writers looking for THE ANSWER to eliminating the discomfort of...well, growth. Many of the questions I received have taken different forms, but the underlying sentiment has been this: how do I get through this frustrating phase as quickly and painfully as possible?

It's true that the writing life is full of times that feel hopeless and seem to drag on forever. One particular time for me was right after I signed with my agent three years ago. Up until then, I had it in my head that once I got an agent, life would be smooth sailing from there. No doubt I would land a book contract in no time and all the pieces of my dream would fall into place from there. (You're laughing again. I hear you.)

Instead, what happened was that I went into revisions with my agent. I was anxious to go on submission but even though I'd learned so much about writing already, it quickly became clear that I had so much more to learn. My agent taught me the importance of digging deeper into my characters' motivation, pacing, and organizing my scenes to create maximum impact. It was a time of great growth but also a time of great doubt. For as much as we tore the manuscript apart, I became sure I never knew anything about writing, and how did I get an agent anyway? That was a heartbreaking question I would have given anything to not have to face every day for a year--yes, an entire year of the revisions, and don't get me started about the year of being on submission.

As much growing as I did in my craft during this time, it was really the growing I did as a person that changed me and prepared me to humbly transition into the title of published author. It was probably the growth I needed to experience the most. Did all the advice I'd received leading up to and during this period help me? Absolutely. Did it point me in the right direction and save me from some wheel spinning and silly mistakes? Without a doubt.

But the more I experience of life, the more I come to understand that there's only so much one can learn secondhand. As much as our parents would love to pass on their 50, 60, 70-year plus experience and save us the trouble of figuring it out on our own, every generation starts fresh with their own challenges. As much as we wish the writers who have come before us could hand us the secret handbook, we are all on our own unique journeys, learning our own personal lessons, on our own specific time.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but...

There are no shortcuts.

And as much as it sucks, it's probably a good thing. One thing that we tend to undercut is the necessity of building our metaphorical muscles that prepare us for each new stage of the writing journey. Whether it be learning the writing craft rules so we know how to break them, or thickening our skin with those initial critiques so we can handle editorial notes and reader reviews later, every uncomfortable period we grow through is teaching us how to handle the next phase. If we were to skip past any of these phases, we wouldn't have the mental or emotional fortitude to cope with the challenges that arise.

It's the same with the writing itself. Trying to understand the concepts of story pacing before we've even written our first drafts is likely to lead to more frustration than simply working through it, one phase at a time. Even now, as I'm writing and editing the second book in my contract, it's a whole new phase. I've never written a book that has to "live up to" another piece of my work, which comes with all new challenges. If you're moving forward in your writing career, the new phases never stop coming so rather than trying to skip past them, our time and energy would be better spent learning how to move through them with grace and patience.

This may seem disheartening. It's not THE ANSWER. And it certainly doesn't make our lives any easier. But I also think you already know this to be true deep down in your gut. I also hope it will take off a little of the pressure you're putting on yourself to hurry up and be "there" already. (Preaching to the choir, I promise you!) Mostly, though, I think if you can learn to simply BE in each step of the writing process, you'll enjoy the journey more and feel more like a successful writer every step of the way.

 

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About Jamie

Jamie Raintree is an author and a writing business teacher. She is also a mother of two girls, a wife, a businesswoman, a nature-lover, and a wannabe yogi. Her debut novel, PERFECTLY UNDONE, will be released on October 3, 2017 by Graydon House. Subscribe to her newsletter for more writing tips, workshops, and book news. To find out more, visit her website.

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