A Debut Writer Reflects on the First Year

The other day my son, home on break from his sophomore year, shared a big realization. He was bummed about how he did in one of his classes. It was a hard class and he'd worked his butt off but the bummer of it was that there were things he could've done to improve his performance--things that he didn't figure out until the end of the semester.

The TAs, for example, offered help sessions that weren't simply help sessions--but mini classes, where crucial information was given out, and all along, the professor had been offering students the chance to redo homework assignments.

Somehow, my son had missed these opportunities. The help was out there, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't on his radar.

Because I am the type of mom who hears something like this and ends up making a connection to writing, I told my son about the Hero's Journey. (Some other day I will blog about how this kind of thing probably drives my kids crazy.)

But anyhoo, there's a point where the hero leaves the comforts or discomforts of the Ordinary World and crosses the threshold into the Special World. This new world has a whole different set of rules and challenges that the hero has to learn in order to navigate through successfully. See, it's like college, I told my son. It's like anything in life. Whenever you move onto another stage--school, job, marriage, whatever--there are rules and challenges and things you've got to figure out in order to be successful.

What's nice is that you don't have to flounder alone. In the Hero's Journey, the hero has a mentor. That's what my son needed, I told him, a friend who'd been through this Special World pressure cooker of a college and who could share the crucial bits of wisdom and experience.

As I was blathering about this and watching my son's eyes glaze over, I had a flash of myself crossing over the threshold into Publishing Land. This year as a debut writer has been a big-time introduction into another world.

And I am so grateful for the mentors I had along the way.

Now I'd like to pay some of this back to any writers out there who are on the verge. So without further blathering, here are the crucial bits I learned this year:

1. Make connections-- with other writers, librarians, bookstore folks, and teachers. Do this NOW, wherever you may be in the publication process.

Why this is important: My connections to bookstores led to book launches and signings. Teachers invited me to visit their classrooms. Librarians asked me to speak and teach workshops. My communication with other writers led to interviews and guest blogs and blurbs on my book. Writers have shared helpful info about contracts and speaking opportunities too. All of these are real connections, by the way. Many of these people have become my good friends.

Corollary to number one: Make a list of contacts--every single person you have ever interacted with who might be interested in your book.

Why this is important: Some of these people will read your book and love it and want to help you promote it. I have been truly amazed and humbled by the responses I've gotten from family, friends--both old and new--who've stepped up to help me.

2. Interact on social media. Dip your toe into a few sites-- Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr etc. (New to the Twitter game? Here is THE best description of it I've read, from YA writer Patty Blount) Be a lurker for a while until you figure out the rules of social etiquette for that site (believe me: there ARE rules, even if they aren't explicitly posted, and people will gleefully let you know when you break them).

Why this is important: the party line is that social media is the way to promote your book. This is true-ish, but there's so much more to it than telling people to buy your book (by the way, NEVER do that.)

Social media is a way to find out the news in this business. I follow editors and agents, publishing companies, other writers, readers, reviewers, bloggers and librarians. These people post on social media about books and everything related to writing, reading, and marketing. Social media is how I've found out about conferences, book awards and deadlines, reviews and interview opportunities. It's a cool community, where a writer can feel not so alone struggling though a revision or reeling over a bad review or worrying over an impending book deal. Also, you can share your love of books with other book lovers.

Be careful though. It is a GIGANTIC TIME SUCKER. 

Corollary to number two: think about the "interacting" part of social media and how you want to present yourself online. Whether you consciously consider it or not, you DO have an online persona. How will you respond to negative reviews? To good reviews? How will you handle blogger requests for ARCs and/or interviews? If you are a blogger/reviewer yourself, will you review books by writers you know? What if you don't, um, like those books?

A word about dealing with bad reviews. Most writers say they don't read them. In fact, many writers don't read any of their reviews. Last year at this time, I didn't understand this policy. Each time a review or rating went up on Goodreads, I'd read it and experience a brief high. Someone I don't know likes my book! This was my dream come true goal--to have readers read something I'd written. Here's what I figured out along the way: the book, my book, is out of my hands now, being read or not being read, being loved or not being loved, being gushed about or being immediately forgotten. There is a certain point where the newness/excitement/nausea/horror fades.

And you stop reading reviews.

3. Figure out what kinds of book festivals are going on in your area and apply to be a part of them. I was lucky, and many opportunities fell into my lap. Another writer told me about an annual bookfair in Ohio that I'd never heard of. A bookstore owner told me about a book festival in a nearby city. A person I used to teach with was on the board of a different book fair and they invited me to apply. None of these things were on my radar last year at this time.

Why it's important: book fairs and festivals are a way to sell books, of course, (and you will sell a lot at some and maybe not so many at others). But they are also a way to meet other writers in your area and to make connections with readers, many of whom are teachers and librarians--which can lead to other opportunities. I met the woman in charge of programming at the Thurber House at a book festival, for example, and this fall she asked me to present a writing workshop for them.

Side note: you will not know about every single thing going on, and there will be some missed opportunities. Oh well.

4. Find your balance between writing and promoting. This is incredibly difficult and I know I still haven't gotten it right.

Last year my agent gave me some advice. I asked her what my goal was and she said point blank that I had two: Earn back my advance and sell another book.

Everything I've done this year, everything I've taken on or passed on, I tried to keep these goals in mind. To earn back my advance I have to promote my book. To sell another book, I have to, uh, write one. The difficult thing, I've learned, is that these two goals don't quite work together. Promoting takes time. Travel. Money. There are details to work out and email correspondence and phone calls.

But writing takes time too--long stretches for pondering and dreaming and drafting and revising and brainstorming and reflecting.  And there's another part of this balance equation too that I haven't touched on--my day to day life, where I have a family and a house to clean (or not clean) and meals to cook and pets to walk and de-flea.  

How do other professional writers do it all?

I do not know. But I promise, dear writers and readers who have been following me as I travel along on my journey, I will tell you as soon as I figure it out!

Teen Guest Post: WHO AM I? by Sidney C.

As promised here, I'm hosting a guest blog series called WHO AM I? and have invited teen writers to contribute.  

And a shout out to my artistic teen neighbor Courtney Berger for designing the awesome banner.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who Am I?

by Sidney C., guest blogger/artist

If your life was drawn out,
Tell me,
What would I see?
You were given a blank canvas
To create who you want to be
But others have folded you
Into a bird with no wings
Can’t you see?
You’re locked inside a cage
Why not set yourself free?
You’re crumbling, broken.
You keep quiet
Your pain remains unspoken.
These thing that you’ve started,
They’ve become a routine.
Two things:
Who you are and
Who they want you to be
And you’re stuck right in-between.
You want to change
You really do
But there is no way, it seems
What if no one likes the real you?
But then you see it
Just like it's in your dreams
Life is a map without a compass
You’re a ship without a sail
You’re a bird with clipped wings
It’s your choice to choose
You can hide behind something fake
Or let yourself shine through.
You realize you were never really alone,
And you kind of always knew,
That there was someone watching over you
Waiting for you to see
That the only person worth being is the one you were meant to be.
After reading this maybe you’ll see,
I like who I am.
I like being me.

Ah, the Joy of Playing around with a Messy First Draft

I used to hate revising. In school I wrote papers the night before. Revising, in my mind, meant looking over the spelling before turning a paper in. In college when I took creative writing workshops, I still didn't understand revision. I'd write my stories in a burst (typically, the night before).

There'd be talk in class about what could be done to make a story better. "In the revision, you could try this," the professor would suggest. "Or you might think about this." I'd nod and take notes, but I never bothered to try any of those suggestions. To me, the story was done. I was bored with it and ready to move on. Maybe I'd apply what I learned to the next story I had to write.

I didn't truly understand revision until I heard a talk about it at a writer's conference. The speaker, a guy named Andy Gutelle, pointed out that many beginning writers struggle with revision. They have their finished draft in front of them, and they start from page one and edit along, tightening up passages or cutting a few things, fixing punctuation and typos. But this isn't really revision, he said.

Revision begins by looking at the entire novel at once. It asks big questions like:

What is this story about?
Who is your main character and what does she want?
Do all of your scenes contribute to the arc of the story? Does each one develop your main character and/or move the plot along?

He suggested revising in layers. Read through the book asking the big questions and then read through it again, zeroing in at the scene level, and finally at the smaller sentence by sentence level.

I had never thought about revision in this way. I was used to writing short stories, where I could hold the entire picture of the narrative arc in my head at once. Scene, scene, scene. Character, conflict, realization.

I had never done that with a novel. It's too big! But it made sense. Writing a first draft is often an exercise in discovering what it is you are writing about in the first place. Your initial idea can change a little or a lot. Characters that seemed important disappear. New characters emerge. Strands and subplots fade away. Revelations plop in out of nowhere.

Starting from the beginning and zeroing in on grammar errors is not going to help you get your novel into shape. To do that, you have to see what you actually have on the page (as opposed to the initial vision of the book that you hold in your head).

It's not a pleasant experience to read your first draft through for the first time. The fear going into it is that it's going to be a horrible, unfixable mess. What ends up happening, I'm happy to tell you, is that it IS kind of a mess, but it is fixable.

If it makes you feel any better, other writers go through this too:

"All writing," says Jane Yolen, "is about the gap--no that chasm--between the expectation and final product. Expect it, sidestep it, move on."

How do you DO revision, though? How do you take a big thing like a novel and see it for what it is--all the characters and strands and scenes and meanderings?

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird describes printing out every page of a draft and spreading it all over her apartment.

Other writers write out their scenes on index cards.

(this is from YA author Nova Ren Suma--working on a draft at a writer's retreat)

They create elaborate maps.

(Check out Laurie Halse Anderson's revision road map. If you want to know more about Laurie's revision process, see her blog on her website Mad Woman in the Forest) 

They write on their walls.

(This is a wall in William Faulkner's house. Yes. Even Faulkner's novels did not spring from his head fully formed.)

Revising is like doing a puzzle. With your first draft complete, you've got most of the pieces out of the box and spread out on the table. You turn them over, examine what you have and think about how they might fit together. You chuck out the pieces that don't seem to belong to this puzzle. You assemble and realize which pieces are missing.

Uh oh. A character disappears? I'll rewrite the scenes at the beginning and take her out. A sub plot begins on page 100? Let's see if I can work that in earlier.

This can be fun or painstaking, angsty or exciting, depending on how you look at it. It takes time and work to put together a puzzle. Also, unfortunately, they don't come already assembled.

This is the truth about the work that is involved in writing a novel. It takes time. It takes logical thinking. It takes leaps of faith.

I heard David Wiesner speak at a conference this summer. He's an author/illustrator who's known for his award winning picture books Tuesday, Flostam, and Art & Max. He told us about his latest book, tracing the steps he went through from idea to development to revision. It was fascinating.

One day, he said, a very cool idea popped into his head. It was an image of a tiny spaceship landing in a child's sandbox. He immediately drew the picture and began to storyboard out the story arc. He showed us the sample and it seemed pretty good to me, but Wiesner said it wasn't right.

He drew the story out again, beginning with the spaceship in the sandbox. Still not right. And again. Again. He put the failed manuscript away. He wrote another book. He came back to it. Each time starting with the spaceship in the sandbox. That was the originating idea and he couldn't let it go. But for whatever reason, it just didn't work.

He quit on it again. He wrote other things. During a break he watched his cat not play with his toys. He wondered what a cat would do if he found a tiny spaceship. He drew out another story board. That story, after multiple revisions, became Mr. Wuffles. 

Check it out. It's clever and hilarious. It came to be because David Wiesner did not give up on his story. He let go of the original idea and took a leap of faith.

His parting words: Don't just think about an idea. Do the work.

PS. Anyone who would like my notes from Andy Gutelle's revision talk, email me at jodycasella (@) yahoo (.) com

I confess that I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to writing...

Also, probably, when it comes to life. (But I will leave that confession for some other day.)

I don't know why this is such a big revelation. Maybe because you think--or at least I thought--that when I got to a certain point, after I'd written a certain number of books, gone through the process enough times, I'd get to the end and, um, KNOW WHAT I AM DOING!!!

All the years that I was writing and rewriting and submitting and absorbing rejections and then repeating that fun loop, I kept thinking I was on the verge of understanding how it all worked, like there was some magical answer to becoming a published writer and once I figured that out, Wah lah! I'd cross over to the other side. And just Be There, I guess, smiling and waving and signing my pile of books for adoring fans.

I had these turning points along the way, mini revelations about writing and how my process worked, and whenever I'd figure out something new, I'd cling to it like it was a life raft.

I must write 1250 words per day.
I mean, 1500.
I mean, 2000.

I must revise as I go and make my draft as perfect as possible the first time through.
Who am I kidding? I should write without worrying where it will go and revise the mess later.
I'm an idiot. I should have made an outline.

But after ten "finished" manuscripts, more than 10,000 hours of time spent on writing, and one published novel, there are times when I still feel like a novice.

Every day is hard to sit down and write, to rework or to let things go, to plan or to allow my words gush out.

Every day there are distractions. The internet. The dishes. A horrifying college bill to pay. My daughter's forgotten lunch that must be brought to school. The dog yakking on the carpet.

Every day there are things that can potentially derail me. Before it was stuff like a rejection. A pass from an agent or editor who had requested something. An agent quitting. An editor changing her mind. Now it's a meh review or a  bizarrely fluctuating Amazon rating.

Blah di blah di blah.

I could go on about the inner angsty-ness, but I am starting to bore myself, so I will spare you.

Here is something I DO know:

There IS a magic answer.

Something that makes the doubts and the distractions and the outside evaluations disappear.

Something that I actually did learn along the way and know for sure.

Something that ALWAYS works when I am angsting or stressing or reeling.

It is the one and only thing that I can control as a writer.

I sit down. I open up my lap top.

I write.

In Which I Return (briefly) to My Dream Job

When I was fifteen, my dream job was to work at a department store and sell perfume. I have no idea what that was about. I don't even like perfume. Maybe I thought it sounded like easy work--lounging behind a glass counter, arranging bottles, spritzing people...

The jobs I ended up with were so far away from that perfumy vision, it's laughable. I chopped whole chickens in half at York Steakhouse. I scrubbed pizza pans at Papa Gino's Pizzeria. I flipped steaks at Ponderosa. I busted my butt waiting tables at TGI Fridays and Perkins (jobs I still have nightmares about). At the end of my shifts, let's just say, I did not smell like perfume.

When I was in grad school, a friend of mine suggested I apply for a job where he worked, a bookstore. This sounded like a cool gig. I knew how to work a cash register. I wouldn't have to wear a grease-spattered polyester uniform. I had what I thought was an extensive knowledge of books.

What I didn't have was much experience with bookstores, unless you count bopping into one of those Walden Books places at the mall every Christmas to pick out a yearly calendar. Up to that point, I was a total library fan girl.

But man oh man, the first time I stepped foot into the Davis Kidd Booksellers store in Memphis, I swooned. 100,000 + books. Bookcases upon bookcases. Tables piled high with stacks. And more books lining the walls. Comfy chairs. Cozy nooks. Pillows.

Oh! a book-loving, nerdy, poet-writing grad student could get lost for days in a place like that. I loved everything about working at Davis Kidd except for one rule: we were not allowed to read on the job. I confess that I did. Unpacking boxes of fresh new books and arranging them on the shelves, geez, how could you not stop to read the blurbs on the backs?  Or thumb through the pages. Or, um, read a couple of chapters?

My co-workers were the coolest people, fellow book lovers, many with advanced degrees or students like me (like I?) See, if I were still working there, I could ask any grammar question, and someone would know the answer. This was before the internet, before you could ask your phone any question in the world and get an almost instantaneous answer. No, children, before the internet, before smart phones, you had to just sit around and wonder what the answer was.

Or, you could call Davis Kidd Booksellers and a clerk would tell you.

I'm not lying. We got calls like that all the time.

We also hosted story times and author signings. We chatted with customers about the latest bestsellers, classics, and forgotten gems. People browsed around, listening to music and sipping coffee.

Bookstores, sadly, tragically, are struggling, and many are going out of business. It's hard to compete with the low prices and convenience of Amazon. And more and more people are downloading books on e-readers. I'm not knocking this practice. But I do so hope that we'll still have places for book-loving people to gather and browse.

This Saturday, Nov. 30, is Small Business Saturday. Author Sherman Alexie put out a call to fellow writers to support their local independent bookstores. Shop. Volunteer to work. Hand sell books. So, that is what I am going to do.

You can find me at my favorite bookstore in Columbus--Cover to Cover Bookstore.

Please come out and say hello. I promise I will not be reading on the job.

What Happens When the Birthday Celebration Gene Skips a Generation

Today is my mother's birthday. She is turning 70, which is a milestone as far as birthdays go, and clearly something to celebrate. For my mother all birthdays are a good excuse to celebrate.

I wrote recently (here) that if there is such thing as a Cleaning Gene, I did not inherit it. Well, if a Birthday Celebration Gene exists, I missed out on that one too.

My mother tried her best to instill a love for birthday celebrations in me. When I was growing up, she always threw me a party. Nothing over the top--when I was a kid people didn't go nutso over birthday parties like they do now. No themed parties or gift bags or bouncy tents--but my mother always baked a cake. She always invited my aunts and uncles and cousins over for a party after dinner. I had a big candle that had the numbers all the way to 21 on it.

My mother started this tradition on my first birthday, burning the candle all through the party until that year's number disappeared. Every year she brought the candle out and lit it. Now that I'm thinking about it, this is pretty impressive--that she remembered it, that she could find where she'd stored the thing. I can barely remember where I store my Christmas tree ornaments.

The year I turned 21 was the first year I celebrated my birthday away from home. I was staying at a college friend's house for the weekend and unbeknownst to me, my mother had mailed the last remnant of my special birthday candle there. She called the friend's mother and gave detailed instructions--this was it for Jody's birthday candle. That number 21 needed to be burned to keep up with the tradition that had been going since I was a baby.

I don't know what my friend's family thought about all this. But let me tell you, they burned that candle for me. That was the year my mother started a new tradition.

I was born at 11:42 in the morning, and she called me at that exact time to tell me the story of my birth and to wish me happy birthday. Every year since then, if she is not with me at 11:42, she calls me.

Sometimes this tradition has veered into bizarro-land. IE, the time my mother was driving along and realized it was nearing 11:42 and she had to pull off the highway to find a payphone. (This was before cell phones.)

Or the year I turned 24 and had a job interview for a teaching position at a high school. I was sitting in the principal's office being interviewed when the phone rang. The principal answered and nodded and smiled, while I sat there thinking maybe it was normal for an interviewer to have a chatty conversation with someone on the phone during an interview. The principal kept smiling and nodding and then she handed me the phone.

It was my mother.

She had just explained to the principal that it was 11:42 and it was my birthday etc. I nearly died of embarrassment. But the principal thought that entire thing was a hoot. (PS. I got the job.)

Over the years I have tried to live up to my mother's birthday celebrating example. My husband and I threw parties for the kids when they were growing up. Some of these were even over the top bashes. As the kids have gotten older we've had smaller celebrations. The kids didn't seem to mind. We go out to dinner. Maybe invite a few friends over. I bake a cake.

Things have really started to taper off lately, and a couple of years ago I hit rock bottom. My daughter was turning 14 and she was busy doing stuff and I was busy doing stuff and I asked her what kind of cake she wanted me to bake her and she acted like she didn't care and yadda yadda ya, and the next thing I knew, it was the night of her birthday and I had nothing. NOTHING.

Okay, I did have a couple of candles. Which I duct-taped to the counter.

Not my proudest moment as a mom.

While I am confessing shameful things, here's one more: I have no idea what time my mother was born. Today is her birthday and I can't call her at the exact time because I don't know what that time is. Until this moment, I have never even thought to ask her.

Is it too late? Can someone who clearly has not been blessed with a Birthday Celebration Gene start a new tradition?

Hmm. Okay.

Right after I post this blog, I will call my mom and ask her. And if the time has already passed, I will make a note of it for next year. In the meantime, "Happy birthday," I will tell her. And later today I will bake a cake. I will poke 70 candles into it and present it to her.

It's not every day that it's someone's birthday after all.

Pushing Through the Mushy Middle

As promised (here) I'm back to give my middle of the month NaNoWriMo pep talk. Saturday I spoke to a group of gung-ho authors hunkered down at the Thurber House for a Columbus area write-in, and Wednesday night I met with writers at the local library in my town. I was blown away by the number of people who showed up for both of these sessions.

Everyone and their mother seems to be participating in NaNoWriMo this year.

Okay. This is a slight exaggeration. I am not signed up for NaNo this year. And neither is my mother. But it does sorta feel like there's been an uptick of interest. (Just checked and there are almost 300,000 people plugging away on novels according to the NaNo site.)

Many of those people may be floundering around at this point in the process.

All of that energy and excitement you had on Day One--the cool ideas, the interesting characters, that brilliantly worded first line--all of that tends to fall away on like Day 5 or 6ish, and suddenly the ideas seem dumb, the characters are meh, and what the heck were you thinking? the first line is ridiculously pretentious.

But I am here to tell you to keep writing anyway.

Some people say that writing a novel is like driving through Texas.

It's a freaking long trip and maybe your car will break down, or you will get lost, or you will veer off the road to avoid hitting an...um...armadillo. You'll wonder if you should turn back, quit driving, and perhaps check out the condo rentals in this little town in Texas where your car has overheated.

Don't.

Have your car tuned up by a local mechanic, get a bite to eat at the Waffle House next door, then get back into your car, set your GPS, and go. New Mexico is only like, 400 miles away.

Wait. What were we talking about again?

What I meant to tell you is KEEP WRITING. As Robert Frost famously said: "The only way out is through." Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Who is the poet Robert Frost to be giving us advice? He wrote poems for God's sake, which everyone knows are MUCH MUCH shorter than 50,000 word novels.

Sigh. Somehow these "inspirational" talks of mine always devolve into commiserating with people about how HARD it is to write a book. Yeah, you're going to have finish this first draft and it's going to be a big messy thing and you're going to have to revise it. Multiple times. And then it's likely never going to be published. Blah blah blah, and instead of being inspired, everyone's depressed.

I promise I did give these hunkered down writers what I hoped were a few practical helpful tips.

The big one, something that has helped me in the past, is to take a look at the Hero's Journey. For those of you who have not heard of it, the Hero's Journey is basically an outline behind every story ever told. The hero leaves the comfortable (or not so comfortable) Ordinary World and sets off on his real (or psychological) journey.

Along the way he meets friends and fights enemies. He learns the rules of the Special World and faces his demons. At some point he approaches danger and what seems to be certain death, but he fights that battle and emerges with his reward.

In the end he returns home a changed person.

There's more to it and you can read about it Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Another helpful resource is Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey.

Many writers use the Hero's Journey template to structure their books. I see it more as a guideline, though, something to keep in the back of your mind while you are writing, especially if you are the type of writer who does not outline extensively before you begin. If you're stuck, it can't hurt to see where your main character is on his journey.

And it can't hurt to see where YOU are on your Writing a Book Journey.

If you are mired in the mushy middle--if your story has veered off and what you thought you were writing about has turned into something else, or if your main character has disappeared, or if new characters have mysteriously plopped into the narrative on page 100, or if the realistic novel you thought you were writing suddenly evolves into a Sci-Fi thriller--there is no quick fix, no magical secret.

Worry about that stuff later. Make a note to yourself and move on. Get back in the damn car and keep sputtering down the road.


PS. If you're really blocked, you can always kill a character or blow something up.

Tune in next month when I give you every trick I know for revising your messy first draft and for one day, possibly, hopefully, getting it out there into Publishing Land.