Writers in the Storm

Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed something disturbing on Facebook—lots of my writer friends have been attending writing retreats. Why disturbing? Because I haven’t been able to go to any (cue violins).

I read once that a writing retreat is to creativity, what a good nights sleep is to physical well-being.

With the way my last few months have rumbled down the speedway of life, I haven’t been getting much writing done, or sleeping for that matter. Going away for a retreat was out of the question. But I had a week of kiddo-at-camp coming up.

A little creativity, a lot of flexibility and, voila, I had a personal writing retreat. Here’s how:

1) Redefine your expectations for a retreat

Mine started as this …

Redefined to this …

Time and finances dictate what’s doable. If you can get away to that first picture (or whatever retreat location floats your creative boat), please take me with you.  ;-)

Time and finances dictated a different scenario for me. And that was okay. I chose to write on my front porch with the blooming Jasmine plant and dragonfly chimes. When the weather didn’t cooperate, I moved to the sunroom with the water fountain, blooming orchids, and the paintings I’d brought back from Bermuda.

If you can write with distractions, try a coffee shop or a park. Maybe the pool if you want that “vacationy” feel (and assuming it’s summer, probably not as inspirational in the dead of winter). If you need quiet, try the library.

My WIP revolves around horses, so one of the days I took my notebook and went to the stable.

2) Commit to yourself

I had limited time for my “retreat.” Camp was from 8-4 so whatever I was going to do, had to fit within that time. First thing I did was canceled all appointments for that week, except for a pedicure (that was part of the retreat plan but more on that later).

Whatever time you have, make sure it’s yours. This isn’t the time to have your teeth cleaned or get the oil changed in your car (unless your manuscript calls for an oil change in a scene and then you can chalk it off to a creative-inspiration writing spot). Your time!

3) Set your goals

Write down what you want to accomplish within the time you have. Be realistic and specific. Don’t set yourself up for overload. You shouldn’t need a vacation to recover from your retreat.

I’m not known for being realistic in my goals. Specific very much so, but I always think I can get more done with the time I have. This part tested how flexible I was willing to be.

For each day of my retreat week, I wrote down the hours I had. Then made my list and prioritized. I ended with the following: write 6k in my WIP, read one craft magazine, catch up on blog posts, sign up for a kid lit one-day conference, finish the novel I’ve been reading.

And there was one more thing on the priority list: relax. Crazy concept, right? See how I managed to justify to myself the time for a pedi? Relaxing and doing “nothing” are valid goals. After all, sometimes the best thoughts come when we’re not trying to force them. So I read the novel and relaxed. Oh, and came up with a fix for a plot problem that had been torturing me for a couple of weeks.

4) Be prepared

Make sure you have what you need handy before you set off for your writing destination, even if it’s only another part of the house. Don’t spend your precious writing time running up and down stairs, although if exercising is a goal, I suppose that could count.

• Laptop charged, especially if you’ll be outside without access to an outlet
• Charger if you’ll have access to an outlet
• Any instructional or inspirational material you reach for on a regular basis
• Music or noise canceling headphones
• Pens, highlighters, sticky notes, notepad, etc.
• Gummy bears or whatever munchies get you through the creative hiccups

5) Unplug

I see some of you twitching!

Remember what we said at the beginning—this is your time to dedicate to your writing. Unless one of your goals is social media, you can survive for a few hours without internet. Trust me!

Close your browser and turn off email notifications. Put the phone away or at least turn it to stun so you don’t have the constant pinging of texts and emails. Between the kiddo rock climbing and family concerns, I had to keep my phone near by. I turned off text and email notifications though. And I didn’t answer any calls that weren’t family related.

Since I hadn’t put social media as one of the priorities, I only gave myself an hour each day. An hour AFTER I finished writing.

Guess what? After the first hour on Monday fighting the must-check-email twitch, I was fine. Not one twitch the rest of the week.

Confession time: I did open a browser a couple of times but only to look something up for the WIP. I totally resisted checking in with Facebook and Twitter. Honest!

After my retreat week, I had almost 8k of shiny new words—my goal was 6k. Score! I’d read one craft magazine the entire way through. Oh yeah! I signed up for that one-day retreat and even sent in my picture book manuscript for a critique. Rocking the retreat. I read a handful of blog posts that had been open in my browser for dare-I-confess a couple of months although not nearly all that I’d hoped. And I made it to the ¾ mark in the novel I was reading. Still progress.

The top priority got done plus some. Best of all, I did indeed feel renewed energy for writing. I reconnected with my WIP and the blog posts gave me some overdue “craft” inspiration.

"A writing retreat is to creativity, what a good night's sleep is to physical well-being." Very true. Now if I could just figure out how to master the good night's sleep.

Your turn … any retreat DIYers? What tips do you have for making a Stay-retreat successful?

About Orly

After years of pushing the creativity boundary in corporate communications, Orly decided it was time for a new challenge. Three women’s fiction manuscripts later (plus a handful of picture books), it’s safe to say she’s found her creative outlet.  When she’s not talking to her imaginary friends, she’s reading or at least trying to ignore everyone around her long enough to finish “just one more paragraph.” Orly is the founding president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.

You can find her on Twitter at @OrlyKonigLopez or on her website, www.orlykoniglopez.com.

 

 

Last week, I saw an infographic in GalleyCat titled, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 10 Tips for Writers, and was so inspired. What if he'd never written his books? What if there had been no Hobbits and no Gandalf, no Legolas or Frodo? The world of story would be an entirely different place.

Our stories matter. They really do.

10 Tips from the “Master of Middle Earth”:

1. Vanity is useless.
Truly, Tokien wrote his books to please himself and answer the writer inside him. He expected them to go “into the waste-paper basket” after they left his desk, not live on in popular culture. I'm not saying we don't need to learn good story craft however, if you entertain yourself, at least you know one person that enjoyed the hell out of your book.

2. Keep writing, even through adversity.
It took the man SEVEN years to write The Hobbit. He balanced a demanding day job, illness, and worry for his son who was away in the Royal Navy. I'm reminded of Laura Drake, her brick wall, and her 400+ rejections.

3. Listen to critics you trust.
When his editor said, “Make it better,” he didn't throw the advice away. He read and re-read, and he tried his best.

He credits listening to knowledgeable feedback, and working to make it better, for what he considered the best scene in the Lord of the Rings: “the confrontation between Gandalf and his rival wizard, Saruman, in the ravaged city of Isengard.” Oh, and the editor he listened to? C.S. Lewis, the creator of the Chronicles of Narnia.

4. Let your interests drive your writing.
Tolkien's original interest was in languages. He took that and created new languages, and then an entire culture, around it. Our own contributor, Kathryn Craft, was a dancer, choreographer, and dance critic. She tapped all that experience to write The Art of Falling, exploring themes of love, dance, friendship, and distorted body image. that passion and truth will resonate with readers.

5. Poetry can lead to great prose.
When he could not express his thoughts in the prose he wished for, he wrote much of it in verse. Authors as diverse as Charlotte Brontë and Langston Hughes started in poetry before moving to longer mediums. Next time you get stuck, you might try Tolkien's trick of writing your scene as a poem first.

6. Happy accidents.
No matter how much you plan, happy accidents occur on the pages of every book. Jennifer Crusie calls it “the girls in the basement,” saying they hand her up treasures as she writes. Others might call it “the muse.”

One more kick in the pants from our own Laura Drake:  If you don’t put your butt in the chair and do the work, you won’t have any “happy accidents.”

7. Dreams give us inspiration.
All of us have dreams so strong, they push us to the page. But what about literal dreams? Angela Ackerman at Writers Helping Writers did a great post called How to Mine Your Dreams for Story Gold.

When Tolkien dreamed of drowning, he channeled the experience into motifs and prose for his stories. His "letters" describe how that drowning dream morphed into the drowning feeling of Mordor’s invasion of Middle Earth and the drowning of Isengard.

8. Real people make great characters.
Tolkien drew on real people to populate Middle Earth. You can draw on people you know for your stories as well. Real people do amazing things, both big and small, and rarely do they recognize themselves on the page. It’s a win-win for authors.

9. You may be the next bestselling author.
Tolkien did not expect the acclaim he received from his first book, The Hobbit. He felt like it was a happy accident. Here are fourteen bestselling books that were repeatedly rejected by publishers. You won't know until you send it out. Perhaps your cross-dressing unicorn superheroes will be the next phenomenon. (Yes, I made that up.)

10. Books you write may seem trite.
We can’t see our own work. A scene we find melodramatic, the reader might find moving. Tolkien believed that if you learn some craft and pour your heart and imagination onto the page that the work will resonate. I believe that too.

What tip would you love to pass on to other writers? It can be one you received from someone else, or a philosophy of your own. Let's inspire each other down in the comments!

 

Note: Here's a link to Tolkien's work in its entirety. The aforementioned infographic summarized material from a wonderful post by Roger Colby at Writing Is Hard Work, outlining his research on writing advice shared by the Lord of the Rings author in the book, “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.”

About Jenny

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 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA or at Writers In The Storm. Jenny also writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.

photo credit: kugel via photopin cc

Susan Spann

As summer fades, an increasing number of authors will find themselves on submission and, hopefully, in the enviable position of evaluating publishing contract offers. In light of that, I’m kicking off my autumn contract guest posts a little early.

Authors have plenty to watch for when evaluating a publishing deal, but one of the most common dangers is also one the author might not see: an abbreviated contract that omits important clauses and protections.

Most authors look at the standard-length (12-30 page) publishing contract with a combination of excitement, fear, and confusion. For those not versed in legalese (and, more precisely, Publishing-ese) the contract terms can range from “difficult to read” to “penned in Sanskrit.”

When authors see a three-page form, they often think “hey, this is great!” and “finally, a contract that makes sense!”

But beware…that way be dragons.

Publishing contracts run long because they have to deal with many legal issues. “Copyright” in a manuscript is actually a bundle of rights, each of which should be addressed in a proper publishing contract. Failure to deal with each of the relevant issues results in ambiguities, many of which will cut in the publisher’s favor (or, at a minimum, need a court to resolve—usually at great cost).

Recently, I’ve seen a number of “short-form contracts” which claim to offer authors a “better deal” than those being offered by “traditional, complex forms.”

Again, I say: beware.

These shorter forms do often include a statement of royalties due on sales (usually on a percentage basis), a grant of rights to publish, and a statement of the timing (often quarterly) when the publisher will send the author’s royalty checks. However, these shorter contracts are often missing a number of critical provisions that many authors don’t realize they need to look for. When a problem arises, the author goes to the contract, only to find that the “friendly short form” doesn’t address that issue (or, when it does, the publisher prevails).

Here’s a list of important provisions many short-form contracts don’t include:

1.  Complete statements of rights/reservations of rights. The shorter the contract, the more likely it is to simply grant the publisher “all rights” in and to the work “in all forms, formats, and territories.” Publishers don’t need “all rights” to a work. In fact, most publishers take print, ebook, and sometimes serial rights. Everything else should be open for negotiation—and at a minimum, those other rights (often called “subsidiary rights”) should be separately listed and addressed in the contract language. One-size-fits-all rights language is never the best option for the author, and always something the author should be watching for with an eagle eye.
2.  Author termination rights. Although most publishing contracts last “for the life of copyright,” that’s actually only the contract term if the contract isn’t breached or terminated earlier. Good contracts give the author several ways to escape if things go badly, including the right to terminate (and revert all rights to the author) if the publisher fails to publish, goes out of business, breaches the contract, and/or fails to sell at least a specified minimum number of copies in a stated period of time. Short form contracts often fall woefully short on author termination rights (if they mention them at all).
3.  Sales Statements. It’s not enough for the publisher to send the author royalty checks. Each check should be accompanied by a sales statement detailing the number, price, and other relevant information about the books sold, returned, and exchanged during the period in question. Not surprisingly, however, short-form contracts often skip right over the issue of sales statements—and unwary authors often focus on the royalty numbers, and forget the need for sales documentation until the contract is signed and the first (unexplained) royalty check comes in.
4.  Audit rights. The author should have the right to audit the publisher’s books and records (as they relate to the author’s work) at least once in every calendar year. Good audit language goes beyond this single sentence, too (we’ll deal with the issue in more detail in another post this autumn).
5.  “Out of Print” status defined and tied to sales. Short-form contracts often either omit the author’s “out of print” termination rights altogether (whoops…) or tie “out of print” status to “availability” – meaning that as long as an ebook version of the work exists, the book is never out of print. Unless an author is watching for this, it’s easy to miss the omission of out of print language.

 Note: this list is not exhaustive. There are many other important provisions which short-form contracts often omit (or fail to mention). I’ve listed the ones above as an example, to demonstrate just how dangerous short-form contracts can be for unwary authors.

Sometimes, publishers say that these clauses “aren’t needed,” or that authors and publishers should be able to trust one another to “do the right thing.”

SHENANIGANS ON THAT.

It’s true that publishers and authors should be able to trust one another, and that good publishing relationships do function like a partnership between the author and the publishing house.

However, it’s also true that good fences make good neighbors, and good contracts make for good partnerships—in publishing and elsewhere.

Never rely on any promise or representation which isn’t contained in the body of the contract. Contract law says that a promise which isn’t contained in the contract generally does not exist as part of the deal. (There are exceptions, but you should never rely on falling within an exception to the rule.)

And never, ever sign a publishing contract—especially not a “short-form” deal—without obtaining a professional’s opinion to ensure the contract protects your legal rights.

In the months to come, we’ll look at some other important contract terms, and how to protect your rights when you enter into a publishing deal.

In the meantime: have you ever seen a “short-form contract” (less than five pages long)? Did you notice any important clauses missing from the deal?

 Susan Spann writes the Shinobi Mysteries, featuring ninja detective Hiro Hattori and his Portuguese Jesuit sidekick, Father Mateo. Her debut novel, CLAWS OF THE CAT (Minotaur Books, 2013), was a Library Journal Mystery Debut of the Month. The second Shinobi Mystery, BLADE OF THE SAMURAI, released on July 15, 2014. Susan is also a transactional attorney whose practice focuses on publishing law and business. When not writing or practicing law, she raises seahorses and rare corals in her marine aquarium. You can find her online at her website, and on Twitter (@SusanSpann).