GENREALITY

Here’s something I’ve had on my annual goal list for the last few years:  Stop comparing myself to others.

It starts early, out of necessity, because we look at other writers and their careers for clues about how the business works and how to break in.  We ask for advice from writers who’ve been there and follow their leads.  But that also gives us a way to gauge our progress.  And as the saying goes, there’s always someone doing better than you.

Comparing ourselves to others is so easy to do, especially when it’s so hard to judge your progress in the publishing business.  But we have numbers.  What’s your print run?  What are your sales numbers?  How does your advance stack up?  We’re trained from early on to compare ourselves to others:  Who gets picked first for the dodgeball team? (Although I hear schools avoid that sort of thing these days.)  Test scores are so easy to compare, and to use to arrange us into neat little grids and graphs.

Writers’ blogs make it way too easy to compare on a day-to-day basis.  Writers post daily word counts — and it seems like they’re always more than mine.  (I figure if anyone is writing less they’re too embarrassed to post.  I don’t post because I’m too embarrassed by my low numbers.  And I’ve found that the more I focus on daily word counts, the less productive I am.)

Publishing is an industry that has lots of awards, lots of bestseller lists, lots of rankings, everything from the number of stars on an Amazon review on up to the Nobel Prize for literature.  We all want those gold stars.

We have a “grass is always greener” mentality.  I have writer friends who get a ton of critical recognition and are constantly nominated for awards.  I celebrate their successes, and I’m secretly a little bit envious.  Which is tough, because I know they look at my career and the New York Times bestseller label and feel exactly the same way.  Interestingly enough, our problems — worrying about sales numbers, deadlines, self-promotion, publicity, etc. — are the same.  All those extraneous measurements of success are just that  — extra.  They ultimately don’t mean much.  But that’s what we focus on.

I haven’t figured out how to overcome this all-too-human impulse, which is why I’m still putting it on my goal list.  I try to focus on my own work and doing the best I can — writing the books I want to write, telling my own stories, and celebrating both my successes and those of my friends.  I remind myself:  This is not a race.  There’s no finish line and no big trophy.  And we’re all in this together.

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Pinch-hitting here at Genreality gave me two reactions. I’m thrilled at the opportunity. But I also immediately asked myself what I could contribute. Since I’ve been a writing pro for five years and have experience with both new markets in epublishing and traditional markets, I have a background that’s very relevant to the changing times.

So for my first post as a substitute, I’m sharing 10 things I’ve learned about the writing biz.

1.  Keep your day job and your benefits as long as possible. I didn’t have this option; I started my writing career working around a special needs child and getting a “real” job and putting her in daycare was not an option. But if it is an option, understand that it doesn’t make you less of a pro. It actually goes a long ways to protecting your pro career by buying you time to wait for the right deal instead of latching onto one that might not be a good fit because you need the money. And once you’re paying for your own insurance and supplying all your own benefits, your costs increase significantly. Unless you can sell enough books per year to make up the difference in salary and benefits, it can make a lot of sense to hang onto that corporate position. The myth that having a day job means you’re less serious about your career or in some way a lesser pro than somebody who doesn’t is just that, a myth. The hard reality is that bills don’t wait for six months while you wait for a publisher to pay. Unexpected medical expenses can sink you. And you’re at risk for making the wrong call for your long-term career goals in order to meet your immediate needs.

2. Don’t expect anybody else to care about your interests the way you do. Your agent might be the nicest person in the world, but he/she has interests that don’t include you and sometimes might directly conflict with yours. Same for your editor and publisher. You can respect the people you work with (and if you don’t respect them, don’t work with them) and you can listen to their input and consider it, but at the end of the day, your publishing career is yours and it’s up to you to make the best choices you can for yourself.

3.  Sometimes the best you can do is make a well-informed and hedged guess. This business is full of unknowns. If you second-guess every decision, you’ll make yourself crazy. You can only make choices based on what you know at the time. Do your best to investigate the real risks and benefits, make your call, and know that sometimes you’ll make the wrong call. The possibility of a mistake can’t be allowed to paralyze you.

4.  Writing is a business. If you want to be an artist more than you want a viable career, publishing may not be for you. Or you may be happiest self-publishing and having complete creative control. Only you know what will make you happy. Sometimes achieving a goal and getting a taste of what you wanted makes you realize you need to readjust your goals or reevaluate your plans. Sometimes life changes and impacts your plans. If you know your values and goals and make choices that are in alignment with them, you can find a good fit or make one.

5.  Your life should include writing but not revolve around it. You need time for your friends and family, time for yourself, time to take care of your health, time to read, time for hobbies. If you let writing eat up all that time, not only will you wear yourself out (and possibly write yourself out), you’ll be less resilient when you have career lows. Every career has ups and downs, nobody just has a straight upward progression. If your career is all you have, it’s time to make some life changes or you may be in a real personal crisis when a career crisis hits, making you less able to cope with the downturn and plan your next move.

6.  Surround yourself with smart, resilient people. Even though I’ve lived in relative isolation from other writers, the internet has allowed me to connect with writers and readers, to learn from people who have more experience than I do, to stay informed about changes in the market and see who is experimenting with what, and the results. Not only does it help to have community, you can avoid re-inventing the wheel. And we become like the people we associate with. So if you want to make smart choices, be resilient, and have career longevity, find people with those qualities and hang around them. I’ve been learning from Lynn Viehl and Holly Lisle since I made my first sale. Their advice via their blogs has been invaluable. Lately I’ve been reading Penelope Trunk’s blog because she has a great handle on what it takes to be successful in today’s business environment, and the difference in values and viewpoints between Gen X and Gen Y.

7.  Don’t take it all too seriously. It’s only a book. It’s only a career path. If your book tanks, if your career derails, it’s not the end of the world. Truly. See #5. It’s so easy to have tunnel-vision, to place so much importance on the outcome of this book, that deal, that when things go wrong it’s devastating. Things go wrong. They do in every business, and writing isn’t special and protected from bad things happening. We care so much about our words, our work. But we have so little control over the outcome. This can make us crazy.

8.  The publishing business really can make people nuts. That’s been a theme in these ten points, but it deserves one of its own. It’s because we have limited autonomy and limited control, but total responsibility for the outcome. If you at least know the business can make you crazy, you can compensate and be careful about getting too caught up in it. Following every trend, paying attention to every bit of news is a straight path to the nuthouse. Be informed, sure, but don’t obsess. Don’t lose sight of your goals, your values, what you want to do. If everybody says it can’t be done, ignore them and find a way to do at least most of what you want.

9.  We’re creative thinkers. This means we can apply creativity to business problems and come up with innovative solutions. Creativity is not limited to the ability to plot and write a novel. Business can benefit from creativity, too. Don’t discount your business abilities and leave that up to other people because you’re “just a writer”. You’re also an independent business person and uniquely gifted with the ability to come up with solid ideas.

10.  Writing fiction for a living really is a worthwhile goal. After five years, it’s still the only thing I really want to do. Writing a book is still the only thing I’ve ever done that fully engaged me and took everything I had. It’s the only job I’ve ever had that hasn’t gotten boring after six weeks.

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Let me tell you about the last couple of weeks in my world.  I went to Europe for Thanksgiving (swoon!).  Landed in Barcelona and traveled along the Mediterranean coast for 10 days, touring Carcassonne, Provence, ending up in Nice, with a quick trip to Monaco.  The weather was perfect, the food was good, and I drank plenty of great wine.  Before the trip, I worked super-hard to finish my two December 1 deadlines so I wouldn’t have any work hanging over me and I could really relax.

When I returned November 30, I had a lot of mail waiting for me, including — literally on my doorstep — the copyedited manuscript for my stand-alone fantasy novel coming out next year.  Also waiting was the editorial revision letter for my second young adult novel.  On top of that, over the next week I received the editorial revision letter for the eighth Kitty novel (which I had turned in right before the trip); proof pages for two short stories, one of which was the wrong version of the story (they’d mistakenly used an earlier version); and a short story revision that I should have done two months ago but I let it slip through the cracks.

By Thursday I wanted to flush my brain out of my skull.  So much for relaxing.

I have a theory that all my editors decided to clean their desks off before the holidays.  I mean really — I turned in all of these projects at different times, they’re on different schedules, there’s no reason except Murphy’s Law that they all should have come back to me at the same time.  On the other hand, I’ve learned something.  (Well, two things, really.  I’ve learned that I may be trying to juggle too many projects at once.  I might want to work on that.  But that’s another story.)

The important lesson here:  It’s unhealthy to spend too much time focusing on what’s wrong with your work.

That sounds so obvious, yet it’s another one of those items that I’m only just now articulating in any kind of useful way.  By their nature, revisions and copyedits are tedious, requiring massive attention to detail.  Revising a novel means peeling back the layers, analyzing the structure, figuring out not just what isn’t working, but why it isn’t working, and if the problem is maybe linked to a different part of the novel entirely.  (For example, if the climax isn’t believable, it’s probably because it hasn’t been set up well enough earlier on.)  The whole point of the revision letter is so the editor can tell you everything — and I mean everything — that isn’t working, from a character who isn’t convincing to a scene that strains credulity.  Copyedits are high-pressure because it’s your last real chance to make changes to the book, and someone has gone through with a red pencil showing you exactly how little you really know about grammar and spelling after all.  You have to suppress the urge to call up the poor copyeditor and say, “No, really, I do know the difference between ‘break’ and ‘brake,’ I don’t know how I let that slip by, I feel like an idiot.”

At one point last week I was staring at all this work on my desk, realizing that I was about to spend the next month or so looking at all the things that are wrong with my books, and trying to be objective about other people telling me everything that’s wrong with my books.  Not cool.  Some hair pulling may have occurred.

So, what’s the remedy?  How do I tell my brain and my self-esteem that my writing doesn’t actually suck?  Well, I’m writing something brand new, a science fiction short story that’s completely different than everything I’m revising.  I’m going to try to spend a limited amount of time each day on the stack of revisions, both to keep my perspective fresh and to keep myself from wallowing in despair too much.  I’m going to try to make sure I don’t spend all my time and energy on this one difficult aspect of the process.

I’m also listening to lots and lots of holiday music, which always makes me happy.  And yesterday I went to the grocery store and picked up the ingredients for baking approximately nine million Christmas cookies.  That’ll cheer me up.

Happy Holidays!

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It’s November.
It’s NaNoWriMo.
It’s time to buckle down and get some work done.

Yes, this is what I’ve been telling myself each day for the last 4 days. Yet, I’ve got no new words written. Why? Well, I could use the disaster of my bathroom renovation that’s going on right now as an excuse, or the fact that everyone I work with seems to be sick so I’m picking up more hours in the bar right now. (Immediate $’s in my bank account is a good thing) I could say I’m focussing on my health (again) and actually going to the gym often so that leaves little time to write….and while all of those things are true, they are not the reason I’m not writing.

I don’t know what the reason is. I even have a deadline for November 15th. Usually a deadline will give me a lot of motivation. Yet, I’m not feeling it. I keep sitting down to write, then getting up to clean the house, feed the cats, feed myself. anything to keep me from writing. I’m sure it’s a phase, and I’ll get over it. I’ve been here before, and sadly, I’ll probably be here again some time, bit for now, I want to whine. Does this happen to you? Do you know why? C’mon people, help a fellow writer out and share your writing woes so I don’t feel so alone.

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‘ The angry man will defeat himself in battle as well as in life. ‘ -Samurai Maxim

I remember years ago (Ok, maybe a decade or so) when NO FEAR t-shirts were a huge thing.  Everywhere I looked I saw people with these weird saying on their t-shirts. Some were funny, some were stupid, but some were very inspirational, to me anyway.  The thing is, I still remember what mine said. I could only afford one of them, as with most trends they were expensive.  Mine said, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

At the time I was into martial arts, and being a big 5′4 female, the saying appealed to me.  Now, as a writer who took some time off, parted ways with her agent, and lost touch with her editors, I’m finding myself drawn to the old adages that fired me up and kept me motivated when I was training full time.  With writing my height doesn’t matter. But how fast and how agile I am does. Maybe not physically, but mentally.

It’s too easy in this industry to let yourself get caught up in wanting what other people have. To look at another authors cover and wish it were yours, to hear them rave about their editor (or agent, or publisher) and wish they were yours. I’ve been jealous in the past when friends win contests, or get a higher advance than me, and I’m sure I’ll be jealous again in the future. But never do I wish them ill will over these things. Never do I deliberately get on a website or blog and trash their books, or them, because I wish I had what they have. Not only is that bad bad etiquette that can be harmful to your career, but it’s harmful to your creativity and your own psychological stability.  By doing that you’re only  defeating yourself.

It’s easy to say negativity breeds negativity, but it’s easy because it’s true.

If you want to be successful as a writer, you have to learn to focus on what you are doing, not what otehrs are doing. And if it seems like others are getting the things you want, then work harder – and not at taking them down, but at bringing yourself up.  If you look at Nora Roberts name on the best sellers list every week and get angry because you want it to be your name there, that’s fine.  But don’t run around bashing her in hopes of hurting her career. (No, this isn’t somethingI’ve seen happen, it’s just an example) Instead of using your anger in a negative way by sniping at a big dog, harness that energy and focus on your own work.  Fight for what you want by writing a story that will stand out, one that will grab readers and not let them go.

Remember that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog.  And as long as your fighting to to better yourself and your work, to pull yourself up and not someone else down,  you’ll continue to grow and improve and move onward and upward.

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