Writers in the Storm

Dr. Ann Garvin

“How did you get a book published?” I get this question from the check-out lady at the Pick ‘N Save’ to the mechanic who is fixing the air conditioning in my car to my dentist (but he always waits until I can’t speak so he can tell me about his book). The short answer is I became an expert on what you have to do to get a book published. The long answer can’t really be covered in a short conversation.

I realized that nested within this question are so many others and so began my idea for this post. I asked my writing students to make a list of perceived roadblocks to publishing, so we could talk about navigating these   This is a sample of what they came up with. When you read them do you see what I see?

• I don’t know if my writing is any good.
• I don’t know if my book is any good.
• I don’t know who to ask about either of the above two.
• I think I might be too old to start this.
• What are comparables? How do I pick comparables?
• How do you write a query letter?
• Who do I query?
• How would I classify my book?
• What’s a platform? What counts as a platform?

The answers to these questions require one-on-one conversations with each writer talking specifically about their project.

Everyone in the class wanted a nap and a cookie after this.

I get it.

I was a Girl Scout and one of the best things about being a Girl Scout was that there was a manual with checklists in it. If you wanted the Back Yard Fun or Gypsy badges you opened to those pages in the manual and got to work checking off boxes. Publishing isn’t that. There isn’t a linear check-list. It’s more like an Etch-A-Sketch where the writer has a vision and she/he must go back and forth over-and-over it again until the vision starts to look a little like a book.

Can this process be expedited? Can we skip a few steps and get there a little less frustrated and little more excited? The answer is Yes but you have to ask the right questions to the right people.

The thing is, before I wrote fiction, I was (am) a scientist. When I’m not writing or teaching writing I’m teaching research methods. The one thing you learn as a scientist is to ask the right questions from the right people.

This is tricky. There are so many people who are willing to give you advice. Everyone appears to be an expert when the fact is, some people are experts and some people are just trying to make a living. It’s all good though because this is a buyers market. You get to decide who you want to work with.

The five questions you really need to ask will take a little courage but writing takes courage so you’re already there.

1. What are you particularly qualified to help me with?

The right people will be clear about what they can and cannot give you. They are able to articulate what their expertise area is and what it isn’t. For example, I’m really good at shaping manuscripts, writing queries, and listing what is missing in an ‘almost there’ story. But, if you want to know where a comma goes. I am not that girl. The rules are a mystery to me. If you came to me for line edits I would give you the name of a line editor. I know my limitations and I’m not going to fix errors. That’s co-dependency and I learned that….oh, wait. That’s my next novel.

2. Have you worked as an editor or writer and can I check your references?

The right people are living, working, and excel in the field you are asking for help in. They should be able to provide success stories, references, and a relevant history. They may have edited a hundred manuscripts but have any of them gone on to being published? Ask that question. Maybe they had a best seller ten years ago but times change and so does the industry, are they currently publishing their own work?

3. Where can I see your published fee-schedule?

The right people are reasonably priced but are neither giving away their services nor over charging. They should meet the industry standards and any excess should be related to question number two above. If they have a chart on their website that compares prices to other services you know you have the right place. Their prices should be extremely clear so that no assumptions are made on either side. You know what they say, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

4. Will I get published after employing you?

The right people will not say, “I have the connections to get you published.” Nor will they say, “If you…you will get published.” They will make no guarantees at all except to give you what you paid for, their answer to this question should be, “No”.

5. Do you have teaching qualifications outside of what you yourself claim?

I mean, you can word that in a nicer way, but for our purposes, this is what you should ask. If you are taking a class you should take it from people who are teachers. They should have teaching qualifications or have students who recommend them. Their only claim to teaching shouldn’t be their own praise, “I’m a great teacher.” Some people are authors, some people are business owners and some people are teachers. There are even people who are all of these, you should find these people.

The thing is, you’re worth these hard questions. These questions take time upfront. Before I was a teacher, an author, and a business owner I read that the number one mistake people make on the way to their idealized future is impatience. I know this is true. Wasting time and money on sub-standard services is wasting your dream.

Nobody has all the answers, and no blog post can help you navigate all the roadblocks that exist between you and holding your published book in your hand Knowing the right questions to ask can help clear the air and help you find the people that hold the answers. Knowledge is power and in this case knowledge could mean publishing.

 

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About Ann

Angela Ackerman

Ah, backstory. According to many, this is the BIG BAD WORD in fiction. How many times have you heard someone say, “Backstory is bad, strip it from the scene!” or, “Backstory slows the pace, bogs down the action, and will only bore the reader.” Well, if you hang out at the same online writerly spaces as I do, probably you hear this said quite often.

But here’s the thing…Backstory is not the F Word.

In fact, it’s pretty dang important.

Part of the problem with blanket statements is that they can do a lot of damage. So, let’s discuss, and hopefully change a few minds about this sacred cow advice in the process.

Hidden Backstory vs. Visible Backstory

There are two types of backstory: hidden backstory, which is for you the author, and visible backstory, which is for the reader. Both are important, and both are absolutely necessary to build a successful novel.

Hidden backstory is all the great stuff authors need to understand about their characters, especially the hero or heroine. Among other things, this might be knowing the character’s passions and beliefs, how a skill or talent came about, who influenced them in good ways and bad throughout their life, the fears they grapple with, and the source of their deepest emotional wounds.

Knowing our characters intimately means we are able to write them authentically: every action, decision, and choice will line up with who they are deep down. But if we don’t take the time to chart our character’s backstory, we won’t know what makes them tick or why they do the things they do. Chances are, we’ll end up with a one-dimensional character that won’t hold the reader’s attention beyond a few pages.

Visible backstory is the hidden backstory the author intentionally shares with readers so that they better understand the character’s motivation. In other words, this type of backstory supplies context when it is needed.

For example, you could read about a character who avoids everything red: tomatoes, pomegranates, holiday sweaters—he even grows ill at the sight of blood. If the author shows him refusing to buy a couch because it is red or even throwing away a gift basket of beautiful red apples, it stands out as odd, unreasonable, and may even put readers off because they don’t get it. However, with a subtly added touch of backstory, suddenly there is context for this behavior:

Lucas traded his paint roller for a blue-smudged cloth, wiped his hands, and then pressed his knuckles into his hips to stretch. His back resisted the move to straighten, but stiffness couldn’t steal his grin. This was the third coat and hopefully the last, but it was worth doing. To give both himself and the house a fresh start, he needed to do this with his own hands. And now, midday light streamed through the window and glimmered off the blue paint, an expansive wall stretching across the room like his own private sky.

His gaze found a thin slash of old crimson paint at the top of the wall, and his lips flat-lined. Why the previous owners would choose such a hue, he couldn’t fathom, but he wouldn’t live in this house until all of it was covered. Twenty years had gone by, but the sight of that shade never failed to put him back in Gramma Jean’s pantry, with the damp rot and moldering fruit and rats scrabbling behind red-lacquered walls. Lucas could not look at the color without remembering the screams wrenching from his throat and the pain of his tiny fingers clawing at the door until they bled. Gramma Jean might have been long dead, but the memory of what she’d done, over and over, remained.

The doorbell chimed, and Lucas jolted his gaze from the red strip. Some time on a ladder with a small brush and it would be as if the red never was. If only the past could be so easily erased. He swallowed down the bitterness coating his mouth and threw on his best “friendly new neighbor” smile on his way to the door.

Now, with the addition of backstory, we see Lucas’ behavior for what it is: echoes of fear from a past trauma. Not only does this give readers clarity regarding his actions, it pulls them in through this personal doorway to an old wound that still pains him.

The reason why backstory is so frequently demonized is that it’s easy to be heavy-handed when delivering it. When showing an important moment from a character’s past sometimes we get so caught up in painting the picture for readers that we try and deliver a Rembrandt. The result is a painfully lengthy flashback, or the dreaded info dump, each the literary equivalent of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

No Dumping

With backstory, the trick is to only show what is necessary to supply context--no more, and no less. Tie it to the current scene, and to the emotions at play, so that it is seamlessly delivered along with the action. Choose powerful details to convey what you need to. Like the thin strip of red paint in the example above, think about what symbols in the setting can be used to create a doorway to the past. Make each word earn the right to be included. In this way, we can add depth and meaning without sacrificing the pace.

For a deeper look at how to using the setting to deliver backstory successfully, please reference The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces.

Do you have thoughts or questions about backstory? How do you slide it into your stories?

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About Angela

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, as well as four others including the newly minted Urban Setting and Rural Setting Thesaurus duo. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world.

Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site, Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop For Writers, an innovative online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

One of the most beloved chestnuts of writing instruction is that you should write every day. There are many reasons that writing advice-givers (of which I am one, obviously) give for this advice.

• You should write every day to gain discipline.
• You should write every day to gain practice.
• You should write every day to be more productive.
• You should write every day to encourage your muse to show up (a teacher told me that one).
• You should write every day to prove to yourself that there is no muse (a different teacher told me that one).

But recently, some friends of mine, writer and novelist Esme Weijun Wang and writer Jacqui Shine conversed about how “write every day” advice has really terrible ramifications for a certain group of people in particular: those with physical and/or psychiatric disabilities. Some people—like them and me—simply can’t write every day.

Does that make us failures at writing? Answer: No.

Yesterday, for example, was a day I couldn’t write. My brain was a fog because I woke up with a migraine. I could barely see my laptop screen. My mood was terribly low. I answered urgent emails only and did all work that could be done by rote—invoicing freelance clients, entering travel receipts into bookkeeping software, and other work that I save up for just the sort of days when I can’t write.

I anticipate these bad days because they’re so common. I save rote work for those days. After all, not every day can be a writing day.

As a creative writing teacher, I never tell my students to write every day. It would be hypocritical of me.

The ironic part of all of this is that I’m often told by others how “productive” I am. Sometimes, though, the words don’t sound very complimentary. I remember learning about the criticism of Joyce Carol Oates’s overly productive writing output, as though she spat out too many books for them to be any good. Stephen King mentioned Oates in his own writing on this subject for the New York Times in 2015, in which he noted, “No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.”

Nowadays, we, as a society, are guided by the nose by the cult of productivity. Productivity is the modern-day incarnation of the Puritan work ethic with a dash of iTech thrown in.

I do not like being called “so productive,” especially when the person uses the vaguely judgmental tone that implies that I’m churning out mindless, crappy writing in vast quantities. That’s not a compliment; that’s an insult. Even when the “so productive” comment is a legitimate compliment, I feel like I need to make an appointment with my doctor because maybe I’m manic and I can’t tell and I need to change my medication and is that why I’m writing so much lately help I CAN’T TELL.

Worshiping in the cult of productivity is bad for writers because it is bad for human beings. And if you are a human who also happens to have a reason that you can’t write every day—because you have a disability like me and my friends do, or because of some family or work responsibility, or whatever—that does not meet that you are not a good writer or can’t become one. Some suggest that writing every day is actually bad writing advice, per se.

So here’s what I suggest: let’s try really hard not to confuse productivity with discipline.

And discipline is what this is all about. Theri Pickens, a professor, writer, and colleague of mine, helped me summarize my thoughts on this point, and I appreciate it. She pointed out that I was really talking about the “illusory concept of productivity and how that’s different from discipline.” I said I owed her credit for my thesis statement. (Did you know that writing is often a collaborative activity? Now you know. Let’s explode myths all over the place today.)

You do not have to write every day to have discipline. You do not have to “be productive” to have discipline. To be honest, I don’t really know what “productive” looks like. Who sets that metric? Who decides what productive means? How many books means you are productive? How many blog posts and tweets?

So what does it mean to have discipline if we’re not focusing on being productive?

Only you know what having discipline means for you. For me, having discipline means setting goals, and doing my best to meet those goals, and having compassion for myself when I do not. Discipline, to me, also means regular practice. But regular doesn’t have to be every day. Regular only has to be regular enough to show that I am making a commitment to yourself.

Because we are what matters. Not someone else’s opinion of us, of our productivity, or of how often we write.

Do you write every day? Why or why not? What does "having discipline" mean for you?

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About Katie Rose

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, J.D., Ph.D., is a novelist, freelance journalist, and erstwhile law professor in Chapel Hill, NC. She is the author of the Entanglement Series, which includes ENTANGLEMENT, LOVE AND ENTROPY, and CHASING CHAOS, all from Velvet Morning Press. As a journalist, Katie contributes regularly to QUARTZ, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, THE (late, lamented) TOAST, DAME MAGAZINE, and more. She earned her master’s degree in creative writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she attended on a fellowship. She teaches creative writing through Duke University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and leads the Village Writers Workshops of Chapel Hill. She also works as a writing coach and developmental editor when she’s not writing her next book.

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