Working one-on-one with first- time memoirists and novelists at various summer writing work- shops over the past many years, I often find myself needing to de- liver the hard news. Perhaps the most difficult lesson I have to pass along is this:
Once you are done writing your book, you arenât really done writing your book. When I say this, foreheads inevitably furrow. Faces fall.
Being reminded of just how much effort is required even after youâve put a period on the final sentence of the final chapter of a multi-year project can be deeply discouraging.
Because yes, revision does take effort and time. It neednât, however, be painful.
The blank page is a frightening void. An early draft, however, filled with words â all pointing in the right direction, but in need of some tender loving care â can be exhilarating. Words are like clay: You can push them around and make all manner of shapes with them. And clay reminds us of childhood. And childhood re- minds us of the time when we were the most playful, most creative, and least haunted by voices telling us we canât do things well enough.
In other words, you can approach revision with your head low and your shoulders tensed, thinking, âBoy my sentences are so sloppy and wordy, and everything seems slow. All in all, Iâm a pathetic failure.â
Or you can approach revision thinking, âHey, hereâs my chance to get it right. Letâs play around.â
Too many areas of life donât afford you a second chance, but writing does, and you should see that as a good thing. So, hereâs my advice:
FIRST: GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING
Once youâve found an ending to your novel or memoir, look back at your opening impulse. These two moments should be connected, either by a direct line of action and reaction running through the entire book, or through the cur- rent of emotion. Sometimes these two moments may also be linked by setting, by imagery, or through a recurrent metaphor. There is no steadfast rule, except that if the be- ginning and ending donât feel coupled in any significant way, you need to rethink plot and structure.
Remind yourself that a book begins with a question: âHow will she overcome this unforeseen challenge?â or âWill this experience change him in some significant way?â The ending doesnât always answer the question fully, but it should connect, and though the beginning doesnât ask the question explicitly, it should plant the seed.
THEN: EVERYTHING IN THE MIDDLE
Yes, everything.
Locate the emotional undercurrent of your book â what I like to call the Invisible Magnetic River â and review every word, image, metaphor, scene, character, and chapter. Look for scenes, even those you labored over for days that may no longer have any utility to the story, or images and metaphors that â though not poorly shaped â donât fit the overall flow. Though it is heartbreaking to delete twenty pages of honest effort, this momentary agony is far more desirable than settling for a book that limps or sputters somewhere midway.
FINALLY: THE SENTENCE LEVEL
This part is the most fun for me, honestly, though perhaps I have an odd sense of what is enjoy- able. I love reading the manuscript through from beginning to end, every sentence, one at a time, OUT LOUD.
Listening to each sentence, feeling it inside of my mouth as I speak it, identifying words I use too often, finding phrases that fall flat, is an opportunity I donât have in every- day life, in spoken conversation. Getting it right just feels good.
Often I improve a sentence by speaking it out loud, then trying another pattern, substituting an- other word, and then speaking the revised sentence out loud. My ear is frequently more helpful than my brain in identifying simple awkwardness and in recognizing the more vexing problem of sentences that sound good but say little.
Of course, there are days that re- writing can be a slog, just as writ- ing can be. There are moments in revision that I think Iâll never find the solution, moments of despair and discouragement.
But overall the process is invigorating, and when working well, invigorating for both my prose and my story.
The difference, in my mind, be- tween writers who are successful in finding an audience and those who struggle, is when and where in the revision process a writer throws in the towel and settles for âgood enough.â
Learn to be just a bit tougher on your own work than the toughest editor you can imagine, and you just might find that agents and editors suddenly love your book.
When I teach, I like debunking the mythical dictates carved in the Styrofoam pillars supporting the shrine built to deify the Real Writer. (Picture the Lincoln Memorial, but itâs Ernest Hemingway up on that throne, fountain pen clenched in a fist as big as a Thanksgiving turkey.) Thereâs a reason, I point out, that novelists do not have to pass exams to practice their trade. Architects and sea captains, sure. Surgeons, you bet. Why not novelists? Simple: Our form of malpractice wonât kill anybody. The worst we can do is bore you silly, fail to suspend your disbelief, make you waste a little money. So we get to do this thing we do by whatever rules and rituals we devise.
Prominent among those dictates (close on the heels of Write every day) is Write what you know. Which holds true, admittedly, to the extent that every journey begins at home. But I like Grace Paleyâs retort: âWe donât write about what we know; we write about what we donât know about what we know.â Write what you want to know, and start out pretending you know a lot more than you do. Surmise, invent, and bluff your way through it as far as you can. Flex your imagination. Why else are you here?
One of the ancillary pleasures in writing fiction, however, is finding out stuff; ârealâ stuff; stuff you never knew before; stuff you need to know if the story youâre telling is to hold up as true. Curiosity is the apprentice to your imagination. Yet I have found that the longer I can put off my research, the stronger and tighter my stories are. This is personal, of course; maybe you, setting out to write the great modern Western, need to pack up and live as a Wyoming cowhand before you can write a single word. Herman Melville went on an honest-to-God whaling voyage â no luxury cruise â before sitting down to write Moby-Dick. I hasten to add that I am not writing historical fiction, so the broad context of my work is the world we live in now; nevertheless, I delve deeply into my charactersâ personal histories, which means Iâm facing history with a capital H. I may need to find out about, for instance, the rationing of farm equipment during World War II. (Wars of the last century have influenced the lives of my fictional people as dramatically as they have the lives of actual people.)
I wonât deny that laziness factors into my method. Years ago, I loved nothing more than a good excuse to roam the library stacks. Now, even heading down screen to Safari seems like a chore when all I want to do is hang around with my characters, eavesdrop on their secrets, and get them in trouble just to find out how theyâll endure (or not).
In every story, I challenge myself to create characters outside my know-it-all zone, but never arbitrarily. Though I may not understand why, I will have felt a deep curiosity to inhabit the psyche of a wildlife biologist, a pastry chef, a Guatemalan gardener, an elderly widower, a music critic, the devout Catholic mother of two gay sons, a cancer patient, a cellist, a lonely film star, an insolent young man bent on what he sees as constructive anarchy.
To know their passions, preoccupations, and afflictions, I have researched the infrastructure of wedding cakes, the culture of a 1960s summer camp for teenage musicians, the pathology and treatment of AIDS in the 1980s, the training of Border collies, the politics of water rights in the Southwest, the conservation of grizzly bears â but I began by writing from instinct and hearsay. The problem with doing research too soon is this: If I uncover too much captivating knowledge in advance, I cannot resist including it, nor can I tell when it dilutes or distracts from the story Iâm trying to tell. If, on the other hand, I must pack it into the brimming suitcase of an existing story, only the pertinent details will fit. (The vast lore I uncovered on the variously eccentric traditions surrounding wedding confections was hard to leave behind, but because I was working to authenticate an existing scene, the narrative had only so much give.) The story must be the boss of the research, not the other way around.
I like doing my research live, using people as sources whenever I can. And sometimes those people find me. Years ago, while struggling to craft a character living with the after-effects of head trauma, after reading medical journals had left me more confused than informed, I was called for jury duty â where I happened to meet a stranger who In every story, I challenge myself to create characters outside my know-it-all zone, but never arbitrarily. had gone through an experience parallel to that of my character. I conducted some enormously fruitful âresearchâ over lunch breaks from the courthouse.
Inevitably, you miss things. If youâre lucky, people who read your work early on catch those gaffes before itâs too late: the clam sauce with onions, the cello seated behind the flute; an idiom or a gadget or a popular song deployed before its time. Sometimes, however, alternative facts wind up in print. In Three Junes, I began by using memory and guesswork to describe the surroundings of a Scottish country home, an essential setting, knowing Iâd fine-tune the details later. Several drafts later, I consulted a guide to British birding, overwriting my placeholder blue jays, robins, and cardinals with yellowhammers, chiffchaffs, and collared doves. Botanically, however, it turns out I wasnât so thorough.
There I was, out on tour, closing my book after reading to a small audience, when a hand shot up, emphatically. âExcuse me,â said my questioner, âbut please see page 117. It isnât possible, you realize, for the womenâs final at Wimbledon to fall within the month of June. And, on page 47, can you tell me what a dogwood tree is doing in Scotland? Dogwoods grow only in North America.â He was holding a copy of my book sprouting a thicket of Post-Its. He was my first of a certain kind of reader. I want to hug and slug these people at the very same time. They are, after all, devoted to the truth.
Okay, so he had me on Wimbledon â a necessary torquing of reality that I had hoped no one would notice. âBut as for the dogwood,â I said, keeping my cool, âthere were these American houseguests who, wanting to make a memorable impression on their Scottish hosts, and knowing how much they cherished their garden, smuggled a dogwood sapling in their luggage as a house present. The climate proved perfectly hospitable. The guests were invited back. Next time, they brought a pair of blue jays.â
History that downplays individual experience â that focuses exclusively on movements, economic forces, social developments, and the like â can be worthwhile and enlightening, but itâs never going to make very compelling reading for non-specialists. People are interested in people, so they like to see how the larger forces of history shape â and are shaped by â recognizable, specific persons with stories all their own. As a narrative historian, I therefore face a lot of the same challenges that a novelist does. Iâve got to find characters whose life histories will allow me to express what needs expressing, and who are in and of themselves fascinating to read about.
As a former fiction writer (or, as Walter Isaacson teasingly called me in the New York Times a few years ago, a âlapsed novelistâ), Iâve seen the task from both perspectives, and I can tell you that the narrative historian has, in some ways, the harder job. Yes, we donât face the yawning terror of the totally blank page every morning (that daily existential crisis), but we also donât have the luxury of creating elements from whole cloth to add dimension to a dullish character or enliven a lagging plot. We can only draw on the raw material offered up by the historical record. Of course, many popular historians of the past had no qualms about inventing freely â details, dialogue, scenes â whenever the historical record was lacking, but the new school of narrative history insists on higher standards of scholarship. In other words, we canât just make it up.
So when deciding on what characters to focus on in my books, I look for people who (A), were at the center of the important issues of the day, (B), were complex and interesting in their own right, and (C), were also well documented in the historical record. That last criterion is important. Memoirs, letters, newspaper interviews, diaries â any kind of account in which a participant in the drama tells what happened in human, on-the-ground terms â are critical for me, since they give me the concrete details I need to bring people and events to life. (Incidentally, since a lot of my main characters are colorful types who frequently wound up in court, transcripts of trial testimony have been particularly useful.)
Naturally, all of these documents can be as unreliable as any other sources in the record. Accounts are only as trustworthy as the people who give them, after all, so I find myself constantly having to judge how much to believe in any given source. Often Iâll talk about this decision-making process in the end-notes to my books, which I see as a kind of running commentary on how I used the historical record to create the book, for those who are interested in seeing how the sausage is made.
The three criteria I mentioned were important considerations when I chose the main characters around whom to base The Mirage Factory. William Mulholland, D.W. Griffith, and Aimee Semple McPherson were all central to the story I wanted to tell, representing the three forces â which you might shorthand as Water, Celluloid, and Spirituality â that allowed Los Angeles to grow up in a place where no big city has any right to be. Theyâre also intriguing, multidimensional people with character flaws as big as their talents. And they were all extremely well documented in the historical record. All three wrote autobiographies of a sort (although Mulhollandâs was very short). Each left behind a fairly comprehensive archive. And as highly visible public figures, they were covered extensively (in McPhersonâs case, one might say âobsessivelyâ) by the local press in their lifetimes.
So narrative historians have definite limits on what they can do, particularly when telling stories that involve people for whom the historical record is skimpy or incomplete. Thatâs why I sometimes have to take a pass on a book idea that might seem irresistible at first glance. If the material isnât there to give the characters and events the kind of texture and dimension required, the idea wonât work, no matter how interesting the story may be in outline. Fortunately, though â thanks to the hard work of archivists who keep developing more sophisticated ways of cataloguing and searching their collections â the amount of raw material available just keeps growing. Itâs up to the narrative historian to choose wisely.Â
I love it when readers say to me, âAfter I finished your novel, I went straight to Google to figure out what was true and what was made up!â Thatâs exactly why historical fiction is my favorite genre: In a good story, I become immersed in a different time period with people Iâd never meet otherwise, who are living through situations that are unimaginable today. After Iâve turned the last page, Iâm eager to discover the nuggets of truth buried within the work of fiction.
My fictional characters are built around the framework of historical fact. Once I have an idea for a setting for my book â The Doll- house is set in the Barbizon Hotel for Women and The Address takes place in the Dakota apartment house â I do a deep dive into the research of the time period (1950s for The Dollhouse and 1880s for The Address, although they both feature contemporary plotlines as well). I read everything I can from that era, including newspapers, magazines, fiction, and nonfiction. I also interview experts, like architectural historians who specialize in the Gilded Age, or women who lived in the Barbizon Hotel for Women in the â50s and â60s.
Thatâs when the ideas start to pop. While researching The Dollhouse, I learned that when the Barbizon Hotel for Women was turned into luxury condos, a dozen or so long- time residents were moved into rent-controlled apartments on the same floor. Great set-up for a book, I thought.
I read a harrowing newspaper article from the 1950s about the rising heroin epidemic, which was often blamed on bebop jazz musicians. What a great contrast to the rarified world of the hotel, with its guests in pearls and white gloves, right? So in my plot, I sent one of my characters downtown, where she got mixed up with some seedy characters.
I used the same approach while working on The Address. I discovered that in the 1930s, a âlady manageretteâ ran the Dakota. That gave me the idea for one of my characters: a housekeeper named Sara Smythe who gets an unexpected promotion early in the novel.
In general, the characters in my stories are all fictional. That gives me room to play around with them, get them into and out of trouble, and not feel constrained by a true historical figure. Exceptions do occur, though. Nelly Bly, a fabulous reporter from the 1880s, makes a quick appearance in The Address. As a former journalist, I couldnât resist. And both buildings were touched by famous, tragic figures. Sylvia Plath stayed at the Barbizon Hotel in 1953 and wrote about it in The Bell Jar, and John Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota in 1980.
In both those cases, I felt it was important to mention the association, but not linger there. For example, I set the modern-day timeline of The Address in 1985, when Strawberry Fields first opened, as a way to respectfully touch upon the tragedy without making it a major part of the story.
A couple of times Iâve had to slightly fudge dates of real events in order to make the story work. When that happens, I mention it in the authorâs note at the end, where I also list many of the resources I relied upon. My hope is that readers will continue on in their journey to learn more about the past, and enjoy it as much as I did.
The novelist William Dean Howells once famously remarked that his friend Mark Twain was not a writer who performed so much as a performer who wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, this astute observation also holds true in Twainâs nonfiction, a form that would seem to put less of a premium on both invention and performance. To read the passages from The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi collected in this volume is to understand that Twain didnât lose much sleep over the idiosyncratic demands of fiction versus nonfiction. Both offered numerous and varied opportunities to an inspired, indeed unparalleled, bullshitter. To be sure, many of the set pieces that are included in the Everymanâs Library volume of The Complete Short Stories â âBuck Fanshawâs Funeral,â âThe Story of the Old Ramââturn up in this volume as well. Classifying Twainâs work into fiction or nonfiction is something we do for our own convenience; his convenience was to ignore ours.
So, are the events chronicled in Roughing It â which details Twainâs journey by stagecoach to the Nevada territory, his stint there as a silver miner, and his apprenticeship to the newspaper trade â true? Once asked that same question about one of his own stories, David Sedaris replied, âTheyâre true enough,â and itâs easy to imagine Twain saying the same thing about his youthful adventures in the American West. We know he traveled to Europe and the Holy Land as a correspondent, so itâs not unreasonable to suppose that at least some of what he reports in The Innocents Abroad actually happened. I suspect, however, that the literally true parts are those he wasnât able to improve on through embellishment or outright invention. For Twain, âtruthâ was not just elastic but indeed designed to be stretched. He learned this lesson early on, writing for western newspapers. He explains the job to great comic effect in Roughing It, where, as a cub reporter, he wrote a story about a wagon full of immigrants attacked by Indians. At first, fearing that other reporters might recount the same story, he sticks pretty close to the facts, despite his conviction that the story could be improved upon by straying from them. Later, though, when he learns that the owner of the wagon meant to continue his journey the following morning (leaving no one to contradict Twainâs account), all bets are off . His next draft describes an Indian fight that âto this day has no parallel in history.â This is Twain weâre talking about, so itâs likely that he also exaggerated the extent of his exaggerations, but still. Buoyed by praise from the paperâs editor, he expresses a willingness to murder every immigrant on the plains with his pen if âthe interests of the paper demanded it.â Thus the low bar of truth is established: true enough. For him. For his editor. For the paperâs readership.
ONCE ASKED THAT SAME QUESTION ABOUT ONE OF HIS OWN STORIES, DAVID SEDARIS REPLIED, âTHEYâRE TRUE ENOUGH.â
His approach to fiction was basically the same. At the beginning of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says that readers may have heard of him if theyâve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which âwas made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.â That first assertion, itâs worth remembering, was both the truth and a lie. The book was actually âmadeâ by Samuel Clemens, and the parts Mr. Clemens âstretchedâ were the parts that needed stretching, beginning with his own identity as Mark Twain. Again, Twain is not so much a writer, at least as the term is used today, as a storyteller whose primary duties are to the narrative and its audience. No story is likely to be instructive if it isnât entertaining, and the best way to gauge whether itâs working or not is to watch it land with an actual audience, a lesson Twain learned long before he gave his first public lecture.
In A Tramp Abroad he recounts his first ride on a Mississippi steamboat as a ten-year-old boy. Falling asleep, he has a terrifying dream that the boat is ablaze, and he rushes into the ladiesâ salon, still under the nightmareâs influence, screaming âFire!â The ladies there knew better, of course, and they advised him to return to his cabin and dress, lest he catch cold. Itâs a revealing memory. The humiliation of his story playing so badly, his audience rejecting both the tale and the teller, is still fresh in Twainâs mind twenty-five years later as heâs writing Tramp. Just as telling is the reason he recalls the episode in the first place. Heâs in Germany watching a production of King Lear, where the actor playing the title role âraged and wept and howledâ across the stage. Twain admires the performance but feels sorry for the actor, who has to wait until the end of the act for his applause.
Writers, by contrast, are used to silence. Their applause, if theyâre lucky enough to get any, comes long after their âperformanceâ has concluded, in the form of reviews. True, authors who publish serially may to some degree interact with their audience. When readers loved Sam Weller in an early installment of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens was happy to expand his role as the novel progressed, but thatâs hardly akin to telling the same stories on stage night after night, as Twain did on his public speaking tours. Each audience provided him with valuable insight into what worked and why, allowing him to revise the material accordingly. His first public lecture triumph near the end of Roughing It is described almost completely in terms of the crowdâs appreciation. The audience is with him from the start, he tells us, even the jokes heâd judged to be inferior faring âroyally.â Near the end, though, the material grows more somber and serious, and Twain tells us that the âabsorbed hushâ that fell over the audience âgratified me more than any applause.â Indeed, heâs so pleased by the reaction that he canât help but smile, which the crowd took as a cue to laugh, thus ruining the moment.
Later in life, Twainâs relationship with his audience would grow more complex. In Life on the Mississippi, he admits that being a river pilot was the best job he ever had, because the steamboat pilot has no master, whereas writers were âmanacled servants of the public.â That said, no writer ever courted his audience more assiduously nor drew more confidence and pleasure from public adulation (Twain courted honorary degrees, too, and shamelessly.) Indeed, one suspects that it was from his audience, as much as the work itself, that Twain derived his sense of accomplishment and well-being.
WRITERS, BY CONTRAST, ARE USED TO SILENCE. THEIR APPLAUSE, IF THEYâRE LUCKY ENOUGH TO GET ANY, COMES LONG AFTER THEIR âPERFORMANCEâ HAS CONCLUDED, IN THE FORM OF REVIEWS.
Itâs worth pointing out that the world has changed since Twain left it, and our attitudes towards âtruthâ and âfictionâ have become more rigorous and stern. Mislabel your novel as a memoir (or allow your publisher to do so) and youâll likely find yourself in a world of hurt. Twain was no great fan of fraud and deception, but like Melville he understood that the world was steeped in both, and moreover he harbored more than a little admiration and affection for its charlatans. Reading Huckleberry Finn I often wonder if I judge the King and the Duke more harshly than their creator intended. At the very least Twain wouldâve understood that people who get conned are often complicit in their own deception. Just as important, he would have recognized the paradox inherent in labeling some stories âmade upâ ( fiction) and others âtrueâ (nonfiction). Interestingly, audience often plays a role here, too. When you claim that a story is invented â especially one as elaborate as Twainâs were â people will naturally suspect you of telling the truth (Come on! You couldnât have made that up!). Conversely, when you claim to be telling the truth, those same folks shift gears and suspect you of lying (Surely you embellished this!). Storytelling thrives in this fundamental para- dox and often resists any attempts at clarification.
âMark Twainâs Nonfictionâ first appeared as the introduction to Mark Twainâs Collected Nonfiction: Volume 2 (Everymanâs Library, 2016)
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Food is one of my top five favorite things in the world. Maybe even the top three. But if I have to be honest, itâs probably in the top two. That says a lot about me. Likewise, food can be used to say a lot about your characters.
Whatâs for Dinner?
Do you know what your characters eat? Does the reader know?
Food can be more than sustenance. It can be used as a tool, a prop, something to show instead of tell. The main characters in my first novel, My Lovely Wife, live in a gated community, eat organic food, and use almond milk instead of the real thing. When one of them chooses to eat something like a hot dog, thereâs a reason for it. Food can be used not only to show a personâs character, but also their state of mind.
Do they eat when theyâre stressed, or not eat at all? Or do they eat different foods? All of this can say a lot about a character.
Something to Do
Funny thing about characters ⊠they have to do things. Eating can be a big part of that, but it doesnât have to be fluff.
Imagine two characters meet at a coffee shop to discuss a topic integral to your story. Maybe one lost a job, or their spouse is having an affair, or maybe theyâre having an all-out war with a neighbor. The dialogue may be the most important part of this scene, but it doesnât have to be the only important part.
For example, if both characters order the same thing â say, medium lattes â thatâs hardly notable. Or if what they order isnât mentioned at all, it becomes irrelevant.
But what if one character orders a plain black coffee, and the other orders a jumbo cinnamon roll with an extra-large salted caramel mocha? And which ordered which? Does the one with the problem order the food, or is it the one who has to listen? Either way, the scene just became a lot more interesting.
Cook or Burn
The preparation of food is as important as the consumption of it ⊠or so my friends tell me. I do not cook, not ever, and anyone who knows me is grateful for that.
If I said the same thing about character, it would tell you something. The same applies to characters who cook all their food from scratch, using only ingredients from the farmerâs market. Or maybe your characterâs idea of cooking involves pre-made sauces and pre-cooked meat, because they donât have the time to make homemade marinara sauce.
Kitchens are places where people gather in life and in books, so use the location to your advantage.
To Drink or Not to Drink
Alcohol has at least as many uses as food, if not more. Going out for a drink is another thing for your characters to do. Bars are also where people meet, flirt, and â as often happens in fiction â decide and plan to commit crimes. How much or how little a character drinks, and what they drink, can tell the reader a lot.
But thatâs not all alcohol can do. Characters can change when theyâre drunk. The shy become bold, the calm become angry, and the happy start to cry. Some drink to the point of blacking out, only to find themselves in a mess the next morning.
Or picture this scenario: A group of colleagues go out drinking after work. As the night wears on, and the group becomes more intoxicated, people start to flirt. They start to say things they shouldnât. Maybe they gossip about their boss and other co-workers. Secrets are revealed, embellished, repeated.
One of the characters â letâs say a man â goes to the bar to get another drink. He orders a club soda with lime. Unlike his colleagues, he hasnât been drinking at all. Heâs just pretending to be as intoxicated as they are.
Now itâs not just a night out, itâs something deceitful â maybe even sinister. Alcohol can do all of that, if used properly.
Enough is Enough
This is not to say food can be used to show everything, nor should it. While Iâd like to spend the majority of my time eating bonbons and bacon cheeseburgers, I donât. Neither should your characters.
Food is one example of how everyday activities and needs can be effectively used in fiction. Itâs not the only thing. It may not even be the most interesting thing. Itâs just one of the many tools available to tell your story.
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Hereâs the thing about writing, or more specifically, about being paid to write: itâs a job.
Of course, you could describe it in more romantic terms: it could be calling, or a vocation. Or perhaps your mind has a more prosaic bent; perhaps for you itâs an itch that needs to be scratched. There are reams and reams of twitter conversations on the topic of why writers choose to write; if you go looking for those Iâm certain youâll find
one that matches how you feel. But if youâre actually getting paid to put your stories down on paper, then whatever else you might call it, one thing is certain: itâs a job. I admit that I may have a more businesslike approach to writing than most given that I also work part-time in fund management, but I truly donât see why the principles that are relevant within a mainstream workplace wouldnât apply also to writing. So on the principal that you have to fake it before you make it, here are my top three pieces of somewhat businesslike advice for the writer who wants their writing to be more than just a hobby.
- You have to go to work.
This is the most important one. Even if you arenât (yet) being paid, you must believe that you deserve to be paid and act accordingly. If you have only certain hours in the week when you can write, ringfence those hours. Sit down and write in those hours, regardless of whether you feel like it or not â if I always waited until I felt like writing, I would still be writing The French Girl â and make sure the environment you do that in lacks other distractions. (For my part, Iâm extraordinarily unproductive at home because sometimes even doing the laundry can seem more appealing than opening the laptop, so I usually write in cafĂ©s.) Donât allow anything else to steal your writing time â after all, you wouldnât accept an invitation to coffee at a time when you had to be in the office, or your boss might very well fire you. You are your boss now. You have to be tough, and you have to make yourself go to work.
- Create a polished product
For the content of your work to earn proper consideration, it has to look the part. Your manuscript might be the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the rough, but agents and publishers get thousands of submissions â why would they spend time on one that isnât correctly formatted or lacks proper punctuation and grammar? All those things scream amateur, and nobody wants to waste their time with that. Find out what the submission guidelines are for the individual or organization to which you are submitting (which will almost certainly be on their website) and make absolutely sure you meet those requirements. Oh, and proofread your work. Very carefully.
- Know your market
You may have the most wonderful crossover chick-lit/gothic/cyberpunk novel ever written, and there might be a publisher out there willing to take a chance on it ⊠but I wouldnât stake my career on it, and you shouldnât either. If a publisher isnât sure how to market your book, or whether thereâs even an audience for it at all, they wonât take a leap of faith on it. Have a clear idea of the genre you are writing within and what the readers of that genre expect. As my wonderful agent once told me: save the interesting genre-bending for book five, when you have a devoted readership who will follow you anywhere. (Clearly there are books, and writers, which have defied this last piece of advice and done astronomically well, but those are the exception rather than the rule.)
And thatâs it, except to add that writing is one of the hardest jobs Iâve ever had, but itâs also the most rewarding. I wish you the very best of luck. Now go to work!
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âHow did you finish it?â
Iâm asked some version of that question a lot, with âitâ referring to my debut novel, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. The question about the finish is not a request for a spoiler that would reveal the bookâs ending, but rather, itâs an inquiry about how one simply goes about getting the thing done. Every writer has his or her own process, so youâll find that advice on this question is equally varied, but there is at least one universal writing truth: Itâs not easy. For me, scheduling makes it less hard. I know, the topic of time management is not particularly sexy. A lot of us would much rather discuss craft, creativity, or the things that inspire us. But you wonât get far with those things if you donât master the more laborious, workaday side of writing.
Itâs true, it takes a certain compulsive drive to be a writer, but a lot of us still fall victim to procrastination or outright avoidance, particularly when the writing feels like a Sisyphean struggle â and in my experience, it feels like that a great deal of the time. It may be helpful to know that giving in to that urge to do anything other than writing in those moments is not entirely because of a lack of discipline. You may be able to put the blame on your brain. The New York Times recently reported on a study that found our brains can trick us into feeling an urgency to do less important, more immediately rewarding tasks like, perhaps, cleaning up that backlog of emails rather than taking on more difficult projects in which the finish is a long way off, as is the case with that novel thatâs been languishing on your desk or knocking around in your head â hence the need for scheduling.
There is the element of ritual in a good schedule, which can be a comfort. Showing up at an appointed time to a familiar place and performing your task â thereâs equilibrium in it. But donât think your schedule has to be perfect or meet some writerly ideal. It just needs to be habitual and workable for you. If a two-hour block after putting the kids to bed is all you have, then go with it. Early mornings before rushing off to your day job? Set the alarm accordingly. Many of us are quite adaptable when we need to be. In my case, I prefer working early mornings, but I usually only have time in the late afternoons and on weekends, so that is when I write. I also prefer quiet but, having worked in busy newsrooms for my entire professional life, I can handle a bit of noise.
So, find the time and â crucially â keep it for yourself and your writing projects alone. You are more apt to do this if you think of writing as what it is: work. And whether your workplace is at an office desk, the kitchen table, or a counter in a coffeehouse, showing up there without fail or distractions must be a priority. That may mean skipping that impromptu party, missing that movie with your friends, leaving that email backlog to another day. Writing is part of your routine. Your daily ritual. Treat it that way.
And even on those days when you canât get motivated (which will be more days than you might imagine), clock in. Keep writing, even when what you put on the page proves unusable or even shockingly inadequate (which will also happen more often than you might imagine). With every sentence, youâre finding your way. Youâre working on craft. And even when you canât come up with anything at all, stay with it. As you sit drumming your fingers on your forehead or staring off into the middle distance, puzzling over how to fill that blank page, youâre plumbing the depths of creativity. Youâll figure out what comes next. And if you donât figure it out during that workday, then maybe you will on the next one. Or the next. And here, I should probably make a note of this important fact: Inspiration works on its own schedule. So keep yours. I promise, the two of you will meet up in due time.
Check out Anissa’s book here:
In-flight magazines are my weakness. It doesnât matter how many books Iâve brought with me to read or how much work I have to do, on a plane I always end up reading the in-flight magazine, at least for the first leg of the journey.
A few years ago, the article that caught my interest was one about making your own luck. Iâm of Irish heritage so luck is a big deal for me. I pick up pennies, toss salt over my shoulder, have a horseshoe hanging in my house somewhere — you get the picture — so I was intrigued. The long and short of the article was that the people who are statistically luckier than the rest are the ones who are paying attention to the world around them. Hmm.
Fast forward a few months, I arrived in New York City to meet with my editor. I was there on other business but wanted to pop in and see where the magic behind the books happens. The visit wasâŠpeculiar. Offices were half packed, people were clearly moving around, and there was a sense of unease in the air the likes of which I had lived through once before during the recession as a librarian in Phoenix. In this case, my publisher had recently merged with another. It was clear that big changes were happening.
Normally, I would have been reassured by an âeverythingâs fineâ and a smile, but this time I knew better because I was paying attention. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked my editor directly what else she thought I might write besides traditional mysteries, since I now feared they were going to go the way of the Dodo. She observed that if I took all of the dead bodies out of my mysteries what I really had going on was romantic comedy and that she would be delighted if I would give that a go. So I did.
Well, after thirty mysteries in five different series, I had a rhythm going with the whole dead body, red herrings, multiple suspects, and you turn yourself around sort of writing hokey pokey. A straight romantic comedy with no dead body? Huh. Come to find out those dead bodies really move a plot along.
I frequently hear people say that writing romance is easy. Yeah, no. Iâm a child of the 80âs, one of the original latch key kids, who was raised on after school specials and sitcoms. I am incapable of having a problem that lasts longer than twenty-two and a half minutes because I run out of coping skills at the commercial break. Trying to write a one-hundred-thousand-word novel with legit conflicts between the hero and heroine that do not involve finding a dead body at any point? Oh, man, I had to dig deep. I had to raise my game. This was really hard!
Thankfully, the one mainstay I have is humor. Whether in life or in fiction, if I am not laughing I am tapping out — probably all of those sitcoms are to blame. Either way, I write the punch lines to the laugh track in my head, and I know itâs going well when I snort-laugh while writing. Iâve finished three romantic comedies now, and some commonalities have come to light in the fictional worlds, both mystery and romance, that I create. The characters are quirky, the settings cozy, the humor is on point, and the relationships are heartwarming, whether my characters are solving a crime or falling in love. When I stepped back and could see my voice working in both genres, it made me realize I could write successfully in any genre that caught my interest. Look out science fiction/ fantasy, here I come!
Iâll be doing a lot of flying in the next year and, believe me, Iâm going to be reading the in-flight magazine and paying attention.
Check out Jenn’s books here:Â
Thereâs something enticingly ambiguous about characters who hover on the fringes of social groups. Theyâre not strangers â they have a perfectly legitimate reason for being there â but theyâre excluded from the inner circle. They donât quite belong, and this can lend them a certain invisibility.
The neighbor who smiles over the fence; the intern who arrives at work first and leaves last; the acquaintance who joins the camping trip to make up numbers⊠these characters are finely positioned to observe the action and make their plans without having to reveal their own flaws in return.
 When we encounter one of these characters lurking on the social margins, delicious questions arise. Do they resent being overlooked, or are they revelling in the lack of scrutiny â even taking advantage of it? Does their position make them vulnerable, or powerful? Sometimes, as readers, itâs our desire to discover which of these outcomes will triumph that keeps us hooked.
If weâre sympathetic to our doesnât-quite-belong character, we might worry about the illusion of safety. An observer is only one step away from being a witness. An inadvertent glimpse of something wrong, or an overheard revelation, might catapult our outsider into a moral dilemma or a life-threatening situation. Will they choose to become a whistle-blower, or an accomplice? Will they intervene despite great personal risk, or will they flee?
Yet, with a few subtle words from the writer, how easily our sympathy slides into suspicion. Is our interloper hiding a murky background, an ulterior motive? Do they plan to stroll, unremarked upon, amongst the main players, right up until the moment they drop their mask and show who really has the upper hand?
The suspense created by these questions has a unique flavor. This is not stranger danger, nor does it focus on close personal betrayal, but it combines elements of each into something all the more slippery and unpredictable.
The balance between vulnerability and power in these characters can push a plot along at a rapid pace. And how much more claustrophobic it becomes if they take up a role inside our homes. Literature is rich with butlers and governesses, cooks and housekeepers, all afforded a unique view of â and unique access to â their employersâ private lives.
Is there an ultimate position that one of these characters can inhabit? How about caring for our most precious âpossessionsâ â our children? A nanny is often the person who keeps the familyâs life running smoothly, who holds the very family unit together. Almost, you might say, one of the family. Yet working under contract, of course, and subject to the whims of their employer, like anyone else.
Iâd like to suggest that an au pair could claim an even more almost-integrated role whilst still hovering on the social fringes. The name itself comes from the French for on a par with, emphasizing their equal status within the host family. An au pair is there to help with light childcare and household duties, in return for a pocket money-level of payment and the chance to experience a different way of life. The employer-employee relationship is blurred into something more personal, more familial, more altruistic. For a character who doesnât properly belong, this might be as close as they can get to pretending that they do.
In real life, of course, the relationship between au pairs and their host families is frequently a happy one. In fiction, however, we are instantly alert. Here is a seemingly defenseless character sleeping under a stranger-familyâs roof. Here is a character pottering around that familyâs home while the adults are busy elsewhere. Here is a character who hears the late-night quarrel, who sees the unguarded flash of emotion, who empties the trash can and closes the laptop and passes on the phone messages. Here is a character glimpsing â and hiding â secrets.
Here is a character both powerful and vulnerable, and we want to know how their story ends.
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