Just about three years ago, following the birth of my first daughter, I decided I better get my act together and starting living the dream I held in my heart. For me, there would be no integrity in raising a daughter to follow her dreams if I failed to show that I believed in the concept! Since that time, another daughter arrived along with a dog and a job outside the home. And, YES! I am a published writer of nonfiction (even penned a few short stories).

What got me that far is a set of guidelines I call  The Writer’s Five Ps (Passion, Perspective, Priorities, Process, Present-mindedness).  The Five P’s keep you focused, help you navigate through the storms that rise in life and make it possible to manage all the things that are important and special in your life without feeling burned out.

The Five Ps have kept my writing center-stage on a day-to-day basis. (For many aspiring writers, that’s half the battle). Still, I’m not quite where I want to be with my writing dream: to publish fiction.

In the pages of VanderMeer’s BookLife,  I heard my own voice call  to me:  “I want a book life, now!”

Not surprisingly, my  inner critique (The Burglar) answered, “How’s those FivePs workin’ out for ya, now?”

Contrary to Burglar’s modus operandi, I didn’t need to abandon the Five Ps. I just needed to rethink how I put them to work. BookLife helped me put the Five Ps to work strategically. Rather than just using the Five Ps to navigate my way through family life and get my butt in the chair everyday, I integrated VanderMeer’s approach with the Five Ps to put me on the path to my book life. In the three weeks since I began, I’ve done the following:

1. wrote a stronger mission (artist’s statement)
2. set more concrete long and short-term goals (achieved the following specific goals)

• my website is being redesigned
• a short story is under review for publication
• gained clarity on plot for a stand alone novel and developed concept for 3-book series
• secured a new column in a west coast magazine

I am a happier writer, still ranking high on the parenting chart (ask the kids) and I am more effective at change management.

I’m confident that my book will be in print or on an e-reader before the end of 2012  (I figure, if the world does end, or the great white light shines upon us, why not go out with a bang!).

You can do the same. Don’t let your inner Burglar rob you of your dream or cause you to abandon methods that have been working for you. Do use the voice of that inner critic to assess how your methods are working for you and what else you may need to get where you really want to be– to get a book life!

(Thanks, Jeff, for inviting me to share my experience as a Writing Parent on her way to getting a BookLife!) KMR

Karen M. Rider is a freelance writer specializing in holistic health and metaphysical subjects. Her interviews with visionary thinkers such as Caroline Myss and Wayne Dyer have been published in regional and national publications. Karen also contributes to The Writer magazine. She is an accomplished advertorial copywriter serving holistic /healing arts practitioners and “soul entrepreneurs.” She resides in Connecticut with her two spirited daughters and  (one very patient) husband. Karen is working on her first novel- a story of metaphysical suspense set at Gillette Castle in Connecticut.

BookLife makes you think strategically and tactically about your creative works. While The Writing Parent’s Five Ps (Passion, Perspective, Priorities, Process, Present-mindedness), help you keep writing center-stage on a day-to-day basis, BookLife provides a larger context for your writing dreams. The Five P’s keep you focused, help you navigate through the storms that rise in life and make it possible to keep all the things that are important in you life in your life, without feeling burned out. The strategies and tips in BookLife bring you deeper in your perspective, priorities and process because it forces you to look at your creative work in a much larger context.

In the meantime, check out this essay by Shawl on “Appropriate Cultural Appropriation.

For some of us, the attractions of another’s culture can hardly be overrated. Within the context of speculative fiction’s reputation as “escapist” literature, getting away from one’s own traditions and background may seem like a good idea. Surely to find that much-prized “sensawunda” sought by genre afficionados, we must leave behind what British fantasist Lord Dunsany called “the fields we know?”

But what if the realms beyond these fields are populated? One person’s terra incognita is another’s home. What are we to make of the denizens of these exotic lands? And what will they make of us, tramping through their yam patches in search of the ineffable, and frightening their flocks with our exclamations over their chimeric beauty?

To collapse the metaphor, readers looking for something “different” in fantastic fiction, and authors who attempt to supply them with it, often turn to mythologies, religions, and philosophies outside the dominant Western paradigm. Then, not too surprisingly, people who practice these religions or espouse these philosophies or descend from those who constructed these mythologies object. Their culture, they complain, is being misrepresented, defaced, devalued, messed with. Stolen. Often, said culture is the only resource remaining after colonialization has removed all precious metals from the ground, or the ground from under its former inhabitants feet, or, as in the case of the African slave trade, when it has assumed ownership of those feet themselves.

[SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen the movie Up in the Air, you may want to skip this post.]

I don’t own a television and rarely get to the movies, so I tend to mentally drift into a happy fantasy world, one in which I imagine Hollywood has finally started to reflect the everyday human diversity you find merely by driving off a movie lot onto the L.A. streets.

My fantasy world is not, however, one in which all Hollywood releases have become great works of art. So I’m always pleasantly surprised to encounter an exceptional movie like Up in the Air. You get strong writing, sharp dialogue, superior acting, and even the occasional unpredictable plot twist. You also get timeliness, since its topic is corporate downsizing.

What you don’t get so much is diversity.

I should probably provide some context, because, after all, if the movie were set in Maine, and featured a man driving all over Bangor firing people, no one remotely familiar with the state would be surprised if the guy’s boss and coworkers were all white.

However, given that protagonist Ryan Bingham lives in the Midwest and jets all over the United States firing people, this is a remarkably white movie. His coworkers, his boss, his lover, his siblings, and their friends and families—white. Racial diversity is pretty much confined to the characters being fired, which gives the unfortunate message—oubtless unintentional, but still present—that minorities exist to be fired.

Even worse, the character who reacts most negatively to being fired is a black woman.

While watching Up in the Air, I could just hear the gears grinding in the movie-makers’ heads: “We need to include an important black character. I know! She can be the character who commits suicide and causes one of the main characters to change her life!”

She’s just there to die and change a white character’s life? Well, I will agree that she’s certainly an important—even pivotal—character in Up in the Air. But she’s still a token.

You could even argue that, though this is a mainstream movie with no fantasy elements, she’s just another “magical negro”, present solely to facilitate change in a white character.

How do you avoid tokenism? It’s not terribly complicated. In the case of Up in the Air, it doesn’t even require changing the suicide’s race.

All that’s required in Up in the Air is mixing some diversity into the non-downsized section of the cast. Some nonwhite coworkers would be nice. Bingham’s boss could be African American, or Samoan, or Hispanic; you could make his sister’s fiance’ East Indian or Native American and add some people of color to their wedding guests. You could even make one or both of Ryan’s siblings into non-white adopted sisters.

Even better, you could make one or more of the movie’s three main characters a person or people of color.

Yeah, I know. What a starry-eyed dreamer I am, expecting Hollywood to present an interracial romance in a movie without making that movie about interracial dating. What a happy fantasy world I live in, thinking Hollywood would risk even as little (by its standards) as $25 million (source, Los Angeles Times, ) on a film with a nonwhite male or female lead.

Still, that leaves the third major character, Natalie Keener, “a fresh young Cornell graduate who has recently graduated at the top of her class [and has introduced a software system to] fire people from a remote location over the internet” (Internet Movie Database, ). There’s no reason she couldn’t have been African American.

No reason except, perhaps, that it didn’t occur to those casting the movie that a hotshot computer-savvy Cornell valedictorian could be black.

However, since as a writer reading this you’re probably not casting a Hollywood movie, you’re free to mix it up in ways Hollywood can’t or won’t.

It doesn’t take a lot of work. It just takes a little thought.

And you don’t even need to do that little bit of thinking in your first draft (though it could certainly make your rewriting task easier).

I would love to say that I’m always mindful of diversity in my fiction writing. But, when left to their own devices, my first drafts lapse readily into a remarkably white and straight state.

So I just rewrite. Which I have to do anyway. And so do you.

If you were thinking about seeing Up in the Air, go. It’s a strong movie, one you can simultaneously enjoy as a viewer and learn from as a writer, in its strengths as well as its failure.

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are guestblogging here on Booklifenow all this week. Their book Writing the Other is a remarkable exploration of character, situation, and perception. It’s a recommended text in Booklife – JeffV

Cynthia and I want to begin our joint stint as guest bloggers here by sharing an excerpt from Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, the book we wrote together based on the workshop we co-teach. The excerpt will help you get into the spirit of our upcoming posts, which are going to riff on related topics

First, we’ll define a couple of the terms we use:

The unmarked state—Possessing demographic characteristics considered “unremarkable” by the dominant culture.

ROAARS—This is an acronym we created to talk about a group of differences from the unmarked state that are, in this culture, considered to be deeply significant differences. These differences are: Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion, Sex.

Keep those concepts in mind as you read the book excerpt below. – Nisi Shawl

Parallax: Who is Looking at Whom?

Parallax is an astronomical concept that we’ve adapted to literary usage. The original idea can best be illustrated by performing a short, easy experiment.

Gaze at an object some distance away. If you’re indoors, look for something across the room from where you sit or stand: a picture on a wall, or a book on a shelf, perhaps. If you’re outside, choose an object in the middle distance: a tree, or a building not too far off, rather than a mountain, for instance. Hold one finger up so that it covers whatever it is you’re looking at. Now close your left eye. Open it again and close your right. Does your finger seem to shift in relation to the object you picked? That’s because of a shift in parallax. The slight change in the perspective from your left to your right eye results in an apparent change in the position of what you’re looking at. And the perceptual change is larger when you’re looking at something closer to your eyes—your finger—than something more distant—the picture or book in the background.

In terms of “Writing the Other,” slight shifts in your viewpoint characters’ positions vis-à-vis the unmarked state will change how they look at the world, at themselves, and at the concept of the unmarked state.

In fact, in addition to the dominant culture’s version of the unmarked state, each of us carries around our private take on what is “normal.” This definition adheres much more closely to our own specific characteristics.

Sometimes people apply this definition so inappropriately it’s almost funny. When Nisi first came to Seattle, she hired a cab driver to take her around to all the places she was considering renting. The driver was a white male with long, slicked back hair. He looked like he weighed 80 to 100 pounds more than she did. A crucifix dangled from his rearview mirror. Over the course of the afternoon they spent together, he advised Nisi as to what parts of town she should avoid: the Central District, for instance, an historically black neighborhood. As for Capitol Hill, known for its unconventionally clothed and behaved inhabitants—“You don’t even want to know what they get up to around there,” the driver claimed, referring, probably, to the prevalence of same-sex couples.

Remember, Nisi is black, and has slept with other women. So why would this man expect her to be uncomfortable in these neighborhoods? Well, because he was uncomfortable there. Obviously Nisi was just like him, because she was a good person: she’d been polite to him, laughed at his jokes, and conformed in plenty of other ways to his expectations of how a good person acts. He had, in the words of linguist MJ Hardman, conferred “honorary whiteness” on Nisi (personal communication).

Depending on their immediate context, your characters may perform similar mental acrobatics when thinking of those they come in contact with—or when thinking of themselves. They may identify with the dominant unmarked state though lacking its characteristics, or they may reject it—conditionally and partially, or without reserve. They may be conscious of privileges they lack or possess due to their ROAARS traits.

In the 1980s, Cynthia read a story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The title of it escapes her, but she will never forget the actual story. It may be the most astonishing work of fiction she’s ever read—although not for a good reason. The flaw she finds so memorable is a flaw that illuminates parallax.

The story was set in Maine. The protagonist was a straight Maine lobsterman. His best friend was a gay male bed-and-breakfast owner who’d moved up to Maine from New York. As she read, Cynthia spluttered with ever-increasing incredulity. Finally, she shouted aloud: “A Maine lobsterman would never be best friends with a New Yorker!”

***

That’s all for now. If you’d like to find out why Cynthia, who identifies as a Mainer, felt so affronted by the idea of a lobsterman from her home state befriending a New Yorker, you’ll want to read the rest of the book. It came out from Aqueduct Press in 2005 and is still available online from the publisher and other online booksellers.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming… I left my favorite observations for last. I live in the Puget Sound area, so the fact that I’m a huge fan of Apolo Ohno should come as no surprise. I do appreciate a golden child whenever he or she does come along (complete with awesome attitude), so I must also confess a fondness for snowboarder Shawn White. How can we not live in awe of these two Olympians? Here is what I took away from each of them over the last couple of weeks.  

◊ Find your sanctuary. 

Who doesn’t admire Shawn White’s personal half-pipe situation? He made the decision to keep his edge by investing in a remote training facility he customized for his own needs, and clearly it paid off for him. He pulled out and perfected brand-new snowboarding tricks at this year’s Olympic games that no one could even imagine doing until last week. 

Okay, I’m not suggesting that we all go buy multi-million dollar writing labs in Antarctica that we have to visit via a private helicopter service. Let’s face it, who has the coin for that? 

But I am suggesting that, if you don’t have a good place to write regularly, you should consider finding one. Often that means taking ownership of one corner of your house, but it can also mean claiming a period of time in which you ask your friends and family to leave you alone. Sanctuary is not only about locating a designated physical space, but about finding the inner space you need to sit comfortably in your creative zone. This should include the careful consideration of your personal time and energy. 

I have a sign I picked up while on Broadway a couple of years ago. It says “Quiet on the set.” Originally I hung it on my office door handle to indicate to my family that I was recording a podcast file. And they understood that to mean I needed for people to honor my need for silence and stop barging in on my session. Now I use that “Quiet on the set” sign as an indication that I am not available because I am writing. (I also use it to mark when I’m meditating.) 

I don’t hang it out there for 8 hours at a time; usually I use the sign for up to an hour’s worth of time composing new work, but only when I know there will be people in the house. It works. 

Another thing that works for me when I write “offsite” (usually in a local coffee house) is the use of earbuds while I’m writing. I don’t even listen to music; I find music too intellectually stimulating when I write. But I wear the earbuds anyway, to send out the signal to folks in my small town that I’m not available for chatter. Where I live, you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone you know, so the chances are high you’ll run into a friend or colleague or neighbor every time you leave the house. The earbud strategy works as well. 

It’s not a selfish or bad thing to ask for sanctuary; it’s perhaps the one tool that will allow you to keep writing when conditions don’t otherwise permit it. But you have to have the nerve to insist on it. And remember, you do not need permission to take time for yourself. 

The cost of my investment? An $8 souvenir and a pair of earbuds attached to either my phone or my laptop. No, it’s not a Shawn White multiplex, but it’ll do. And it does. 

◊ Stay classy (with a nod to spec-fic writer Jay Lake, who frequently uses this term in his tweets!). 

"Apolo Ohno's speed skates" by Mark Pellegrini (2008)

Okay, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure US speed skater Apolo Ohno didn’t push that other guy down in the 500-meter race last Friday night. It looked to me like he was pulling his hand away from the hip of the Canadian racer when that skater lost his blade edge and slid into the padded wall. Physics 1010 suggests that, if you’re pulling your hand away from something, you really can’t simultaneously push against it… Unless you’re superhuman, I suppose. And maybe Ohno is… 

But when Ohno crossed the finish line in second place, you could see it in his eyes: this race is not over yet. It’s because he’s learned over more than a decade of competitive racing that the sport is subjective, people will fall and mess it up for all the other skaters, and playing dirty may or may not have anything to do with it. 

When the reporter from NBC asked him about it later, he was honest: he thought it was a bad call. But did he whine and complain that the Canadian judge was playing favorites? No. He ultimately said, laughing, “I just need to skate faster!” 

How cool is that?

Remember the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan scandal from the 1994 Winter Olympic Games at Lillehammer? I could see why viewers might hold a bad opinion about Harding; she behaved pretty immaturely and, when the truth came out about the conspiracy to assault Kerrigan, that sealed the deal. It’s widely agreed: Harding performed an unforgivable act of corruption.

But if you recall, Nancy Kerrigan wasn’t especially classy about taking her silver medal that year, either. At the awards podium, she didn’t show an appropriate amount of honor and respect to Oksana Baiul, who she clearly felt took “her” gold. 

Sorry Nancy, but this is not the attitude of a superhero.

Miss Kerrigan, take note: Last week, Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette’s mother died before Joannie’d had a chance to take the ice. Rochette went on to skate her personal best and took away a bronze. Now that’s what I call gracious and classy to the end. 

How does this pertain to writers? 

If you see a writer you don’t admire winning a prize, you should still give them credit and move on. The awarding of prizes, like the adjudication of short track speed skating, is subjective. Sometimes the rulings will be fair, sometimes they won’t. Coming out publicly with your displeasure gives the appearance of sour grapes, but even more importantly, it doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll publish your work in that venue or others now or in the future. 

I’ve seen writers tear down other writers in this way and it’s so painful to watch. Listen, if you’re bitter enough, and you make your bitterness public enough, editors may even avoid working with you. Remember, they read everything… including the boards on the web. 

The truth is that sometimes judges do call a fair match and if you’re surprised, it might be because you, as a writer, are not open-minded or sophisticated enough in your craft and process to see that there are many, many ways to do something right.  And sometimes, as Ohno points out, that’s just the breaks of the game. There’s also the very real possibility that our work is really not as good as that of the writers we dislike. Who among us are that objective about our own work? I’d guess close to 0%. 

You could mire yourself in criticism of other writers, slander contests, pass judgment on the judges themselves… or you could use the unfavorable outcome as your motivation to do your personal best next time. What did Ohno do? He shed the loss, focused his energy on the following relay, and assisted his team in bringing home a bronze medal. What did Rochette do? She pushed through the pain and performed for all the right reasons, without using her grief as a crutch. 

Now that’s staying classy. 

Thank you so much for reading. Don’t miss out on my previous posts this week, as well! TGIF, 

Tamara  

Everything I’ve learned about writing this year I’ve relearned by watching the Olympics [series Part One] 

Everything I’ve learned about writing this year I’ve relearned by watching the Olympics [series Part Two] 

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Tamara Kaye Sellman Tamara Kaye Sellman is director of Writer’s Rainbow Literary Services. 

 Photo credits: Images used in this post are the property of Tamara Sellman or have been licensed for blogging use under the public domain or the Creative Commons.

◊ Expect to earn your medals every time.

Snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis kinda blew it in Torino. She hotdogged her way to a second place in women’s snowboard cross when she had the gold medal practically around her neck on that last slope.

Jacobellis has had to live that down for the last 4 years and went to Vancouver hoping to redeem herself. It didn’t quite happen: this year, she DQ’d in prelims and had to duke it out for 4^th place, even though her odds of taking home a medal were just as certain as they had been in 2006.

I’m not judging. It’s gotta be tough to perform in such a public mainstream arena because, frankly, if you fail, everybody knows about it. Even people from the mainstream, who really don’t know the bigger score in such a specialty sport. For Jacobellis, it’s her 2009 first place ranking in World Cup ladies snowcross that folks overlook while calling attention to her failure in 2010.

Writers have it slightly better: if they fail, usually they just get rejected and no one but the writer and the prospective publisher are the wiser. Still, failure can be self-destructive. There isn’t a writer alive who has been rejected who doesn’t see “No” as evidence of failure.

But failure isn’t always what it looks like. Sometimes a good writer doesn’t fail so much as they lose to another–usually better–writer in competition for the same publishing real estate.  As an editor, I’ve had to reject perfectly successful stories from good authors because other authors have already beaten them to the punch. It’s unfair and editors hate to have to send good writing away, but it happens.

The bigger, more common reality, however, is not the tragic story of the near-miss, but this: just because you have published one manuscript does not guarantee that you will publish all of your manuscripts. Every time you submit your work, you enter it into conditions which you can’t completely predict or control. Just because you may have landed your work with one publisher doesn’t mean you’re going to walk into a publishing house in the future and sign the dotted line with your next manuscript without first submitting your new work to intense scrutiny. Your next manuscript, and the one after that, and so forth, will have to earn its way and survive on its own every time.

That’s not to say there aren’t some conditions you can control: your effort to make your manuscript the best ever, your careful consideration of markets, your voice and style are things you can focus on to improve the success rate of an individual piece sent out into the world to find its place.

But there are always going to be conditions you can’t control: the competition, the amount of space available for work like yours, the practical needs of an editor that go beyond the value of a well-written manuscript. The sooner you make your peace with this reality, the better.

Lindsey Jacobellis didn’t fall out of the snowboard cross universe because she failed at the Olympics, after all. She just didn’t win that particular race in Vancouver, just as you will not publish every single manuscript you submit to that particular publication. What to do? Keep going and remember, you win some, you lose some.

◊ Sometimes you have to ski blind.

German sisters Susanne and Maria Riesch had big hopes of sharing the podium this year in alpine skiing. Maria took the gold, while Susanne ended up in a collision that cost her the chance to join her sister.

Susanne’s “failure” mirrored the “failures” of many other world-class skiers at this year’s Olympics. Deteriorating slope conditions and visibility issues were a major contributing factor for many, with luck being a larger-than-usual part of the equation. It’s risky business, skiing when you can’t see ten feet in front of you.

But anything worth doing requires an assumption of risk, and those who take the chance–though they are likely to fail big–are also likely to win big.

So it goes with writing. It’s important for writers to stretch their skill sets beyond what they know they can accomplish. Leading a successful writing life is not only about publishing every piece you’ve ever written. After doing this a while, you can find yourself in a rut on the safe path, where you risk parodying yourself. Writers who dare risk to stretch their skills also take a chance at failing big. 

Chicago mystery author Sarah Paretsky ventured from her VI Warshawski series to write Ghost Country, a magical realist departure which, though it received high acclaim, did not seem to go over well with her established readers. She took a risk and lost some readers, but found others. For instance, I had not read a single of her mysteries before I read Ghost Country, and I found I really liked her street-level feminist narrative style. I’d read Paretsky again. No doubt Paretsky learned some things about herself as a writer in the bargain, things that may have improved her VI Warshawski series.

I have my own–though far more humble–experience with taking risks with my writing. I took one summer off from my writing group and wrote a weird story I couldn’t categorize (I learned later it was magical realism). I took it to my writing group in the fall; they hated it (except for the one fan of magical realism). But I blindly stuck to my guns and sent it out into the universe anyway. It became the first short story I ever published, and it earned me a Pushcart prize nomination and Rosebud magazine’s accolade as one of their best published stories for that year. Who knew? Not me. I was “writing blind,” but the reward I took away was all I needed to keep going, to keep writing even when a rejection from one of my favorite magazines came only a couple of weeks after I’d found a home for that first oddball story.

Remembering that risks can often lead to great rewards can be motivation enough for writers. And don’t forget; you’re less likely to break a leg while trying something new! Even if you don’t succeed right out of the gate, you’ll still have more opportunities to turn your luck around. The Riesch sisters will compete again for the shared podium, Sara Paretsky continues to be successful, whether writing mysteries or something else entirely, and I’ve published more than one piece of writing since that fateful day in 1996, so take heart: assuming risk may not guarantee success but it will guarantee opportunity.

Coming Friday: “Find your sanctuary” and “Stay classy.” See you then! 

Tamara 

Everything I’ve learned about writing this year I’ve relearned by watching the Olympics [series Part One]

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Tamara Kaye Sellman Tamara Kaye Sellman is director of Writer’s Rainbow Literary Services. 

 Photo credits: Images used in this post are the property of Tamara Sellman or have been licensed for blogging use under the public domain or the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Anticipating the content of my posts this week has been rather challenging: there’s so much to write about! But it came to me on Saturday as I realized my interest in the Olympics was beginning to wane. 

I’d seen all I needed to see of curling, short track speed skating, downhill, bobsled, snowcross and the like. But the Olympics always linger in my mind long after the network has packed up its cameras and talking heads and returned to regularly scheduled programming. 

Witnessing (live or on TV) the prowess of the world’s athletes is always inspiring to me. I grew up in a sports household (baseball, basketball, track and field, gymnastics, soccer, football, softball, volleyball, tennis have all been played with regularity by at least one member of my immediate family), so I’m already in the practice of appreciating the work that goes into excelling at sports. 

But the world’s finest athletes perform with a caliber and grace that takes human experience beyond what it means to be fit or a sound competitor. These are the titans of the modern day, and like the titans of the past, the masses can’t help but idolize them as the demi-gods they truly are. 

This week, I offer the series, “Everything I’ve learned about writing this year I’ve relearned by watching the Olympics” in three parts. As writers, we have cobbled together our own hopes and dreams for becoming the future titans of the literary world. We have much to learn from athletes, and this Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll give examples that show how writers can learn from the trials of Olympians.

Today I’ll talk about discipline and perseverance. 

◊ Say no to say yes. 

"Madrid Snowzone" by Saliendo del Cajón (2007)

Every single Olympian had to set aside large chunks of their life in order to prepare for competition, often relocating to train at a facility far from home. They also made the conscious choice to give up certain things, like favorite foods or TV or seeing their family, in order to do so. 

Writers have it a little bit better than that: they don’t have to leave behind their entire family for months on end to go to a special facility to write. Granted, writers may take a week off here or there and go on a writing retreat. But they can also opt for a home office or a coffeehouse or the daily commute on the train to achieve their dreams and return to home’s comforts every day. 

There are some things writers need to give up in order to have a writing life, though: time and energy. Novels don’t finish themselves, after all. A hockey player may need to skate sprints or block pucks repeatedly for hours; so will a writer need to put her butt in the chair and write as much and as best as she can. Some days, it will come easily; other days, the work will be excruciating. The rule is, for both the athlete and the writer, to keep going. Discipline and focus are the tools that empower folks to say no in order to say yes. 

Next week, if you are almost done with a short story first draft, say no to that Oscar party (and set your DVR) so you can say yes to finishing the draft.  Got a batch of revisions you need to complete by Friday, but you don’t have time? Make it a priority anyway: cancel the book club you were going to visit midweek to cull time to implement your manuscript’s changes. Get up early to revise your manuscript on your day off. Take your work out in the sun with you, should good weather happen for you this week. 

Keep your eyes on the prize and don’t let things that really don’t matter get in the way. You can watch the Oscars later; you can send your reading comments ahead of time to the book group; you can get your work done and enjoy the sun. This is how success happens: by setting priorities, staying focused, and being flexible. It all starts with saying no and meaning it. 

◊ Remember that not everyone will appreciate what you do. 

"Curling stones on rink with visible pebble" by Felix (2007)

I fell in love with curling while watching the 2002 Olympics in Park City. I still love its strategy and precision, the dedicated teamwork, the sport’s intellectual nuances. 

No, curling’s athletes may not be rock-solid muscle machines, but they perform with amazing finesse, possess hawk-like vision, and show more dedication to their dreams than many people I know. Still, they get a lot of flak from the press for not appearing to be rock-solid muscle machines. 

Why? Because it’s hard to understand curling’s challenges just by watching. You can’t see the benefit of training in their bodies, though it’s there. Badminton, marksmanship, golf, and ping pong are also difficult sports, but they don’t necessarily get the same respect from the viewing audience that skiers and runners and swimmers do. 

But curlers and marksmen and ping pong players and golfers and badminton teams don’t really give a hoot about what the audience thinks. To have fans cheering for them is merely the icing on the cake; ultimately, these kinds of athletes are not doing it for the fans, they’re doing it because they have well-tuned skills and want to compete with the best of the best. 

This bodes true for writers as well: poets of rhyming verse, experimental prose aficionados, bloggers, folks who bend genre, children’s authors, short story writers, citizen journalists, and many, many others. How many times have you heard a nonwriter say, “Well, I could’ve written that!” Except that they didn’t. Because, really, they can’t. They have no real idea how hard it is to do what these writers do. So writers who vary from the popular, bestselling forms may have to endure a lot of judgment from people who really don’t know better. 

It’s not easy to write anything, whether it’s a bestselling novel or popular genre or flash fiction or a villanelle. It’s even hard to write a bad manuscript! But it’s even harder to write well when the culture around you doesn’t truly appreciate your chosen form. 

You have to find a way, like the curlers, to slough that off. The way to do that is to hang out with like-minded others, honor the leaders in your chosen form and genre, stay focused on what it is you want to accomplish, study from the masters at every opportunity, and then give it your level best. You may never find a huge fan base for what you write, but just as there are fans for curling, there will be fans for what you have to say as well. 

Coming Wednesday: “Expect to earn your medals every time” and “Sometimes you have to ski blind.” See you then!

Tamara

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Tamara Kaye Sellman

Tamara Kaye Sellman is director of Writer’s Rainbow Literary Services. 

Photo credits:Images used in this post are the property of Tamara Sellman or have been licensed for blogging use under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. 

For example, one of the biggest faux bits of logic I’ve been seeing is that “If the mass market paperback is $7.99, why can’t I get the e-book version from the get-go at that price?” Well, the fact is $7.99 for mass market paperbacks only works if you’re printing tons of books. It’s also important to note that many authors never get their books published in mass market format because the publishers rightly have estimated that based on hardcover and trade paperback sales, that particular book won’t sell enough copies in mass market. So they don’t reach the $7.99-a-book threshold, which includes the print-a-crapload-of-copies threshold.

Other examples show a basic misunderstanding of distribution, or of the fact that the actual physical printing of a book is a fraction of the cost of producing a book.

But what I find most inexplicable is the level of venom directed by some readers at publishers, and by extension writers, like some kind of scam is being perpetrated upon them. It’s especially ironic given that the book industry is usually dealing in unit sales of an individual book of under 20,000 copies, whereas other forms of entertainment like movies and music are dealing in unit sales of over 100,000 copies. In other words, there’s not much room for price discounts.

What’s led to this sense of entitlement? Here are some possible factors, beyond the basic fact of there being lots of free content on the internet.

—The proliferation of free book downloads offered by publishers and writers.

—The constant attacks on copyright, and thus the overall idea of “ownership”, on highprofile blogging platforms and websites.

—General attacks on software limiting a user’s ability to copy an e-book, especially attacks that don’t do so in the context of respect for the creator’s wishes or need to make money from their work.

—Deep discount pricing of e-books by entities like Amazon to encourage the sale of e-books.

—Google’s book scanning project, which, under the guise of “fair use”, has made significant portions of hundreds of thousands of books available online with no regard for the rights of the writers of those books.

Have these factors led to this sense of entitlement? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about. It’s also worth noting that we often cause problems for ourselves as authors by thoughtlessly adopting whatever hot new media idea pops up on the internet. In some cases, I think we begin to contribute to our own disenfranchisement in doing so.

If this sense of reader entitlement proves to be pervasive or becomes the norm, then writers will be in a tough position, and the only way to make money on e-books will be to retain the rights yourself and self-publish–meaning you will also have to become your own editor, your own typesetter, your own distributor, etc.

Although you can self-publish more easily today than in the past, it’s not going to help you that much unless you are a celebrity like Wil Wheaton, someone with an existing high-profile platform like John Scalzi or Cory Doctorow, someone who is already a bestselling author, or unless you are prepared to basically become your own publishing house (involving a series of skillsets that most people don’t have).

In such a scenario, if e-books do eventually dominate the marketplace and physical books have only a fraction of their current market share, it’s entirely possible that unless this situation resolves itself into a compromise whereby readers actually show respect for the creators of the stories they love that we will see one of the largest mass extinctions of published writers in the history of literature. They’ll still be writing–but they’ll be largely invisible, and also unable to even dream of writing full-time.

My feeling is that it won’t get that bad, but we as writers have to do our best to make sure it doesn’t–by educating readers and doing our part as writers to make sure that our actions don’t contribute to the problem.

(For the best series of posts on the subject, including the Amazon-Macmillan fracas, visit Jay Lake’s livejournal.)

A few more thoughts about the discovery process, below. I also firmly believe that establishing goals in the right way–strategically and not tactically–will reduce your stress level as a writer and make it clear which things are important and which are not. I deal with setting goals in my book and in Booklife workshops. This fall, you can catch a full-on Booklife workshop in Seattle, a much shorter version in the San Francisco area, or just discuss these topics with me in Asheville.

How can you work on problem areas without being overwhelmed? Make a list of your strengths, your weaknesses, and those gray areas in between—things you’re not terrible at but not great at, either. Even though you’ve presumably had others help you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses to get to this stage, take this list and give it to a couple of friends or colleagues you didn’t include in your original analysis. Ask them if your list is accurate. After you’ve included their feedback, and been totally honest with yourself, do the following:

—Break the Strengths list down into subcategories, rating yourself in each, so you have a better idea of what those strengths mean. Stay aware of your strengths even as you work on your weaknesses and make sure shoring up weaknesses doesn’t negatively affect your strengths.

—Select two items from the Gray Areas list that you think you can easily improve and that would help your writing career. Make sure your short-term and long-term goals include ways to better yourself in these areas.

—Select one item from the Weaknesses list, even if it’s something that also scares you. Add elements to your short-term and long-term goals that give you opportunities to make this weakness a strength, or at least something you’re not bad at anymore.

—Select one item from the Weaknesses list that you don’t want to work on improving. This advice especially applies if something on your list scares you too much. Setting it off to the side is about preserving your mental health. You can always revisit it in the context of success with some other weakness.

Live radio interviews (which now include podcasts) fit into the category of a weakness that scared me to death. The first time I was on, I mumbled and I could hardly breathe. Because I was so nervous, I wound up saying something like “You’re as stupid as I want to be” to the host, which was meant as a joke but came off as insulting and bizarre.

The second time I was on the radio, it went fine. Until the host made a strange comment about whether or not I lived in a cave, which threw me off so much the rest of the interview entered a decaying orbit.

The third time, I got the hiccups from drinking too much coffee. I spent the whole hour making sure the cadence of my speech allowed me to turn from the microphone just as I was about to hiccup. This worked better for the interview portion than for the reading I did afterwards.

What was my particular remedy? I relied on repetition and experimentation. I just kept accepting radio and Internet podcast interview requests. I also experimented with different kinds of preparation. Eventually, the combination of finding the best way to prepare and doing more interviews made me more comfortable with the format. I can’t tell you I’m the best radio interview ever—I still get nervous—but when you hear me on the radio these days you’re
unlikely to say to yourself, “Wow! That guy was horrible.”

As for a gray area that I’ve turned into a strength, public readings fit that category. Unlike radio station show appearances, readings never scared me. However, I didn’t have a good sense of performance so my readings were serviceable but nothing to excite anyone. Over the past few years, I have worked hard to add an element of performance to my readings, along with humorous anecdotes. Part of that growth process meant watching myself
on video giving readings. Another part meant being more careful about my selection of material and how long I read. Now, most people come away from one of my readings entertained, and I generally see comments on blogs afterwards along the lines of “Wow — that guy really put on a good show.”

Not only will you remove stress from your life by confronting some of your weaknesses and gray areas head-on, you’ll also learn a lot in the process. Like anything else in your Public Booklife, you just have to approach it systemically and incrementally.