Betting on the right horse

 



Lately I've been writing book proposals for other people, and when one went out, two publishers responded right away. One offered a decent advance; the other wanted the book, but didn't want to pay for it.

 "I've never sold a book for nothing," the agent wrote.

 The editor was indignant; wanted the book and whined about uncertainty. The agent said that acquiring mss. ought not to be going for certainty (buying mss. that are like other best-selling books etc.) but "betting on the right horse."

 I love that idea! And not just because it reminds me of John Steinbeck saying,

"Publishing makes horse-racing look like a stable, secure business."

Betting on the right horse is a good way to think about my own books, too -- though for me it's like owning a horse as well as betting on one. If you muck out the stalls etc. yourself, owning a horse is a lot of work. And so is writing a book. You have to really love the creature to make all that work worthwhile, whether it wins the race or not.

Process (and yes, this is a rewrite - and an example of step#5 too)

   

I sent my novel off to my agent last week -- electronically, but towards the end I can read it more objectively on paper, pencil in hand to make comments.
Now I'm using the time and energy I would normally be spending  on my book to sort through my possessions; donate, sell, and throw out throw out a lot (thank you for going through my shoes with me, Alvina!); and find a new place to live.
I'm going to blog about that (not here, on my personal blog), both as a way to get other people's ideas and remember what I saw.

But first: I want to write down what I learned about my process from this, mainly so I won't forget but if it's interesting to anyone else, excellent.

1. Love the idea myself, and test it before I start writing  -- Raold Dahl did that, sometimes for a YEAR. By test it, he meant: think about it, attack it from every angle, to see if there's enough there to make a novel and if it will WORK. Disappointing as it is to realize that an idea I'm really excited about just won't make an exciting, interesting book, better to figure that out before rather than after spending a year or more writing it!

2. Get to know the characters -- at least the main character. More may emerge as the story develops, but I think it's a mistake to start writing until the main characters are as clear to me as, say, the characters in THE LITTLE HOUSE books (who have always seemed like real people to me, people I actually knew)....both Noel Streatfield and Dianna Wynne Jones said they spent at least 6 months getting to know the characters before writing.

3. For me, first drafts are the hardest and most painful parts of writing. I flipflop between things just coming and being very excited; and times when NOTHING comes, or what does seems so bad that I think I'm wasting my time, this doesn't even make any sense, no one is going to read it ever....blah blah.
That second feeling is hideous and painful, but it just goes with the territory-- and I need to accept it. It doesn't mean I'm doing anything wrong -- every writer I know has it.

I also need to just accept that in the first draft I really don't know what I'm doing (that comes later). Writing a book is like jumping off a cliff without a parachute -- you just have to have faith that one will blow by and you will grab it.

Also, when something just COMES, even if it doesn't seem to make sense or fit in at all with the story as I then know it: trust it. If it comes with energy and conviction, it belongs in the book and I'll figure out why and how later.

The worst thing I can do is give in to those feelings of hopelessness; the best -- work on the book every day -- even if "working" means just sitting with it, clueless about what happens next; trust what just comes; and resist the urge to chatter when I don't know. WAIT.

4. The real book emerges in the second draft. Again, once I start it -- don't stop. If I keep at it, all the baffling blanks in the first draft will get filled in. And I do mean "get filled in," if I write every day, and get into that state of thinking about the book all the time, I see what should be happening in all the scenes that WERE boring.

5. Wait to polish until the third draft--polishing done before then (except for the first scene which I do think is really important: it sets the tone and the voice)  is  a waste of time. If I've polished something, it's harder to take it out-- and by the third draft, a lot that's in needs to go.

New motive for BIC

   

I have been silent because I bought a tiny piece of land on a remote Scottish island and put this hut on it. The site and garden are still in progress: the hut has to be attached to the ground or it will blow away: it's that windy here!

I still can’t quite believe it’s mine....owning a house (if the hut can count as a house!) and having a garden are deeply satisfying--so satisfying that it's hard to see how people have both ever do anything but garden and decorate. I have been planning and imagining this hut for MONTHS and  love it even more than I thought I would.Here it is outside from all four angles (still a bit messy: the piles of dirt will go into my flower beds, herb garden, and lettuce patch; the solar power wires underground).

The little stone byre is mine, too, and holds all the things the hut can not -- even the solar panel. It is my dream to make it into a little house with a big bathroom, open fireplace right in the center of the room, galley kitchen, and sleeping loft. But for now:

 Bed with big storage drawers underneath-- it's high both for more storage and so I can kneel on it and look out the fanlight to the sea. There are houses out that way, too, so I wanted privacy AND the ocean view. (I'll post the views out all the windows as a separate post.)

 The wood stove and the kitchen behind it, work space and eating table to the right. The big box is for storage and slides out of sight.

Working here is hard--not only because of the charms of decorating and gardening, but because of how much fun  it is to chat with people. For DAYS before I actually started writing, I tried -- and attached signs to both gates saying

"Writing -- please, no visitors."

I felt like a fraud since I wasn't writing; but as someone kindly said when I admitted that,
"Putting up the sign is the first step."

Not that it always worked--someone else (someone I was glad to see, I am not complaining!) knocked on the door and said with a smile:
"I saw you moving around so I knew you weren't writing."

But, finally, I AM writing-- something just clicked into place and I'm back in the novel, rewriting it for what I hope will be the last time before it goes back to my agent.

And knowing that people can see when I'm not writing is actually really good. As Jane Yolen advised Jarret in a hilarious video he made about the writing life,
"Jarret. It's very simple: BIC. Butt in chair."

The sign may be the first step, but that is definitely the second.

LibbyKoponen.org

Excuses, prize (book or chocolate) and new end date

   



I've asked the other Blue Rose Girls, and the contest now has a prize and lasts longer:

• the prize is the BRGs book of your choice, signed and  of course mailed to you OR  chocolate, dark or milk, also your choice.....if you want to stay anonymous, you can still enter -- if you win, just email us your name, address and prize choice.

• the new end-date is  April 1.

Send us your 50 word story as a comment -- all (or maybe I should say, ANY! -- it's two days and no one has entered anything) entries will then be posted all together so readers can vote. The winner will be announced on the blog.

How long does it take to write 50 words???? When my friend emailed ME about the contest, my first reaction was to start an email explaining why I couldn't....my second was just to write the damn thing.

That took less time than the excuse.

Perhaps I can extrapolate? I can and will -- and even if no one enters the contest, something good will have come out of it for me (if I remember this the next time I am telling myself why I can't write).

Writing, weight, will power

   

An article in the NY TIMES once said we only have so much will power.

I hadn't read the article but I guess I believed the idea because I distinctly remember saying to myself: okay, you don't have to do anything else -- use all your willpower to finish this novel. Eat whatever you want: just finish. 

So I ate things I had never allowed myself to eat in my adult life (we're talking mango icecream, pasta etc) and I gained 30 pounds. I did get the novel finished and published, too.

But for OVER TEN YEARS the weight stayed on. Now I have lost 5 pounds, according to the doctor, not just me. Not all of it is from recent efforts -- this is since I last went to the doctor. But still: 5 pounds in the right direction. And I have continued to lose since that visit a few days ago!

The rest of this post is about HOW. I experimented with different methods and have finally found a way to lose weight  that:

a) works for me. When you're over 40 this is really hard! When I was young, I would just not eat for a few days and lose 5...that doesn't work when you're older....though when I added up the actual calorie count of what I USED TO eat in a day, why I wasn't losing weight became all too clear. Yes, it's harder when you're older but at any age those calories added up to too many!

b) I can stick to

What works for me is tracking exercise and calories. I wear a device called a Fitbit that measures how many steps I take in a day, stairs climbed, calories burned. After lunch, I log in what I've eaten -- Fitbit then tells me  how many calories I have left in the day. (Whenever you come near your computer, Fitbit automatically enters how many calories you've burned.)

I experimented with different ways of eating, including:

* vegan lasagna for dinner (so yummy! so healthy sounding! and, alas, when you really add it all up, so high in calories!)

*not eating all day so I could have a nice dinner 

*juice fasts

etc (other idiotic ideas)

What works:

* SMALL breakfast (less than 300 calories) -- usually, quinoa (which I love -- for those of you who don't know it: the Aztec super food! has MUCH more protein than other grains as well as a delicious nutty taste) with a few currants or dried cranberries (when trying to lose weight, QUANTITIES of these kinds of things count -- "a few" = 1 TBSP), and tea with almond milk (only 40 calories)....if I'm not hungry when I wake up, tea only and breakfast later

*lunch (I never want to stop what I'm doing or trying to do for lunch) is always quick: 2 of our local pasture-fed eggs, higher in protein, lower in bad cholesterol than free-range eggs -- either in what I call a fusion omelette  or egg salad on a lot of lettuce

*IF I need a mid-afternoon snack, which usually I do not: spicey lemonade (home-made: maple syrup, red pepper flakes, lots of lemon juice0): perhaps not for everyone but I like it a lot

*dinner is a HIGHLY delicious, high quality protein: really fresh fish (if there is any interest, I will post detailed instructions), lamb, chicken, or beef and green vegetables; salad only if I have the calories left for it. I find that if I have a high quality protein for dinner, I don't eat after dinner....if I must have something sweet, herbal tea with honey.

Alas, for now, anyway: no potatoes, no pasta -- vegan lasagna seemed like such a good idea on paper but always left me feeling hungry and thus eating after dinner. A nutritionist told me once that eating in the night is a sign that you haven't had enoug protein during the day and in my case this seems to be true.

Perhaps it is some kind of atavistic cavewomen wake-up-in-the-night-hungry? Go-out-and-kill-something! response.

It is also really helping:

1. To PAY ATTENTION to what I am eating -- not eat as an adjunct to another activity.

2. Not to have chocolate, nuts, or hard cheese in the house -- only feta, to be crumbled SPARINGLY on salad.

3. To say as a mantra that feeling slightly hungry is a sign that fat is being burned! -- but always eat something before I get really hungry.

4. To never ever eat or drink wine (which I do have with dinner) after dinner....water or herbal tea only!

A nice bath with some lavender in it helps too.

What works for you? Please tell -- the mantra came from a blog reader!

(yes, we've talked about this before, there does seem to be an almost fatal connection between writing and weight)

PS (off topic) Thank you, you in Australia, for what you told us about Frank McCord in your comment on my last post!

First readers

   

Yesterday I finally finished* the first draft of my novel and printed it out, planning to sit down, pencil in hand, and mark it up.... and I now find myself reluctant to read it. But that's another topic. (Any insights into it welcome, though.)

When I do read it, I'll answer the questions I'd like someone else to answer, subjectively and honestly:

• Where did you want more?
• Where did you want less?
• What did you really like?
• What DIDN'T you like?
• What made you laugh? cry?
• What confused you?
• Bored you?
• What did I explain that I didn't NEED to explain?
• Did you want more background information/backstory?

Those last two questions maybe only other people CAN answer....I really struggle a lot with them always.

These next questions I wouldn't ask anyone else, but I will also be reading for where I could:

• make the writing better, sharper, more vivid

• increase the intensity and drama of scenes (or eliminate them all together!)

• speak more in my own voice -- I really like it when OTHER writers do this, and find myself sometimes not doing it enough

• shift (or not shift) the POV...I tend to go inside the main character's head too much --often, it's more interesting to the reader -- at least, this reader, and after all, I have to love this before anyone else can! -- to stay OUTSIDE

 

I'll scribble the answers in the margin quickly, without pausing to think. Thinking can come later! These first reactions are most valuable when they come from the gut.

When MY eyes start to skip over something, I will cross it out.

What do YOU want your first readers to tell you? I say it in the plural because one of the many things that surprised me at the end of the book VERITY was how many first readers she had.

 ____________________
*I thought it was finished, but there were lots of little things that I wanted to add -- I was surprised by how many and by how quickly I wrote them. I guess it was easier than usual because they'd been niggling at me for awhile.

Roald Dahl interview and hut

     



You can listen to Roald's Dahls' answers here. The interview was given in 1988, two years before his death, in the gypsy caravan (or shepherd's hut?)

in his garden. The interviewer was Todd McCormack.

WHAT IS IT LIKE WRITING A BOOK?
When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process.

HOW DO YOU GET THE IDEAS FOR YOUR STORIES?
It starts always with a tiny little seed of an idea, a little germ, and that even doesn’t come very easily. You can be mooching around for a year or so before you get a good one. When I do get a good one, mind you, I quickly write it down so that I won’t forget it, because it disappears otherwise rather like a dream. But when I get it, I don’t dash up here and start to write it. I’m very careful. I walk around it and look at it and sniff it and then see if I think it will go. Because once you start, you’re embarked on a year’s work and so it’s a big decision.

HOW DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH?
I had a kind of fascination with the thought that an apple-there’re a lot of apple trees around here, and fruit trees, and you can watch them through the summer getting bigger and bigger from a tiny little apple to bigger and bigger ones, and it seemed to me an obvious thought-what would happen if it didn’t stop growing? Why should it stop growing at a certain size? And this appealed to me and I thought this was quite a nice little idea and [then I had to think] of which fruit I should take for my story. I thought apple, pear, plum, peach. Peach is rather nice, a lovely fruit. It’s pretty and it’s big and it’s squishy and you can go into it and it’s got a big seen in the middle that you can play with. And so the story started.

WHAT IS YOUR WORK ROUTINE?
My work routine is very simple and it’s always been so for the last 45 years. The great thing, of course, is never to work too long at a stretch, because after about two hours you are not at your highest peak of concentration, so you have to stop. Some writers choose certain times to write, others [choose] other times, and it suits me to start rather late. I start at 10 o’clock and I stop at 12. Always. However well I’m going, I will stay there until 12, even if I’m a bit stuck. You have to keep your bottom on the chair and stick it out. Otherwise, if you start getting in the habit of walking away, you’ll never get it done.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THAT MOMENTUM GOING WHEN YOU ARE WRITING A NOVEL?
One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, the you are in trouble!

WHAT IS THE SECRET TO KEEPING YOUR READERS ENTERTAINED?
My lucky thing is I laugh at exactly the same jokes that children laugh at and that’s one reason I’m able to do it. I don’t sit out here roaring with laughter, but you have wonderful inside jokes all the time and it’s got to be exciting, it’s got to be fast, it’s got to have a good plot, but it’s got to be funny. It’s got to be funny. And each book I do is a different level of that. Oh, The Witches is quite different from The BFG or James [and the Giant Peach] or Danny [the Champion of the World]. The line between roaring with laughter and crying because it’s a disaster is a very, very fine one. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he’s broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it’s not a joke anymore. I don’t know, there’s a fine line and you just have to try to find it.

HOW DO YOU CREATE INTERESTING CHARACTERS?
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good have people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books. I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

HOW DO YOU INCLUDE HORRIFIC EVENTS WITHOUT SCARING YOUR READERS?
You never describe any horrors happening, you just say that they do happen. Children who got crunched up in Willy Wonka’s chocolate machine were carries away and that was the end of it. When the parents screamed, “Where has he gone?” and Wonka said, “Well, he’s gone to be made into fudge,” that’s where you laugh, because you don’t see it happening, you don’t hear the child screaming or anything like that ever, ever, ever.

HOW MUCH HAS LIVING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE INFLUENCED YOU?
I wouldn’t live anywhere else except in the country, here. And, of course, if you live in the country, your work is bound to be influenced by it in a lot of ways, not pure fantasy like Charlie with chocolate factories, witches, and BFG’s, but the others that are influenced by everything around you. I suppose the one [book] that is most dependent purely on this countryside around here is Danny the Champion of the World, and I rather love that book. And when I was planning it, wondering where I was going to let Danny and his father live, all I had to do, I didn’t realize it, all I had to do was look around my own garden and there it was.

ROALD DAHL ON THE SUBJECT OF CHOCOLATE:
In the seven years of this glorious and golden decade [the 1930s], all the great classic chocolates were invented: the Crunchie, the Whole Nut bar, the Mars bar, the Black Magic assortment, Tiffin, Caramello, Aero, Malteser, the Quality Street assortment, Kit Kat, Rolo, and Smarties. In music the equivalent would be the golden age when compositions by Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were given to us. In painting it was the equivalent of the Renaissance in Italian art and the advent of the Impressionsists toward the end of the nineteenth century. In literature it was Tolstoy and Balzac and Dickens. I tell you, there has been nothing like it in the history of chocolate and there never will be.
_______________________________________________________

I find what he said about writing being like a long, long walk through a landscape and not seeing the whole book until you're standing on a high hill at the end very encouraging. As I write things often I don't know what I'm doing -- or where I'm going -- only now at the end (I am ALMOST done with my last chapter!) do I see what is important (to me, anyhow!) in what I've written.

To Roald Dahl, "everything fit" (but maybe that was after rewriting?). I will have to take out some things and rewrite others in order for the whole landscape to work -- but that, as a friend said, is what revisions are for!

The idea of stopping for the day when you know what is going to happen next is one I had read before (in some Hemingway essay or biography). But Hemingway didn't explain it or admit the part about being stuck if you don't do it -- so I GET IT when Roald Dahl says it.

Hurray for Roald Dahl and children's books!

Differences between published and unpublished mss.

     




Lately I've been coaching people writing fiction, and have noticed some big differences between published and unpublished manuscripts.  The first 4 can all be corrected if the writer wants to take the trouble to correct them; the next 3 three I think depend upon having some talent......

The list helped me fix my OWN writing and I sent it along to one of the people I coach, too. He also found it helpful -- maybe some of you will.

If you disagree with some or can think of others I haven't mentioned, PLEASE comment.

1. Published writers use dialog to move the story along or develop character. Unpublished writers use it to take up space or give the reader information that could be more economically given in some other way.

UPWs almost always let their dialog go on way too long. Conversations in books (unlike conversations in real life!) should end as soon as their dramatic purpose has been achieved.

2. PWs give readers just the right amount of back story/information about the characters and situation -- not too much, not too little. UPWs tend to either give WAY too much -- telling us all much more about the characters' pasts or the present situation than we need to know -- or so little that we are completely confused.

3. Simiarly, UPWs often spend more time describing a scene/setting it up than letting it play out. PWs concentrate their energies and our attention on what happens -- and in every scene, something does.

4. UPWs introduce characters, facts, situations and then abandon them without developing them or bringing them to a conclusion. PWs make sure that if there is a gun lying on the table, it goes off, or fails to go off, or gets confused for the murder weapon or plays some other role in the story. Otherwise, why mention it? Similarly, if they describe a character in Chapter 4, that character has a role in what happens. He doesn't just get introduced in a paragraph of backstory, stroll in to ask about the weather, and then disappear.


5. It is amazing HOW MUCH HAPPENS in a well-constructed novel. Many amateurish attempts simply contain too little -- they're too slight to be interesting.

6. PWs write about people who come to life in the readers' minds -- their characters seem real, we care what happens to them. UPWs' characters are hard to tell apart or remember, or they're unconvincing -- they seem made-up/flat/fake and we don't care what happens to them (and often,  not much does -- see #5). Conveying what a person is like with a few well-chosen details IS an art, but being interested in other people and noticing things about them is a really good start!

I remember an amateur writer -- a doctor -- who was incredibly good at this, even though he had no writing experience. For example, he described a character as dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, and adding the comment that on anyone else, it would have looked silly or affected; but on him, it looked natural and stylish. Later in the scene, when this character replied to something another character had said, the narrator commented that he couldn't tell what he was thinking:
"His was a poker face."
When, later, this same character saved the day with a really brilliant move, it all fit, we believed it -- because the author had chosen the right details to describe him/let us know what he was like.

7. Some writers (both published and unpublished, IMHO) simply have nothing to say -- and these people shouldn't be writing at all, or should wait until they've thought of something.

8. PWs
"Use the right word, not its second cousin." -- Mark Twain

Some UPWs just plain can't write: they misuse words, make grammatical mistakes, are incredibly wordy, use way too many adjectives, always embellish the word "said" or avoid it in favor of words they consider more interesting -- which is like avoiding the word "the".....

This (#8) can be corrected by a little work on the part of the writer: using a dictionary (not a Thesaurus, a dictionary), mastering the concepts in a book like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, simply paying attention!

Of course, #8 can also be fixed by a good editor, but it's been my experience that those who commit #8 also do so many of the others that I don't think any editor is likely to bother. So the ms. will never get that far.

____

Lastly, I hope this doesn't sound snobbish: I did begin by admitting that MY writing, especially in the earlier drafts, contains some of these things ...and maybe that brings me to one more:

9. PWs usually rewrite -- many, many times. UPWs seem to think one draft is enough, and when it isn't, they give up.

One of the hardest things about writing is that YOU JUST DON'T KNOW -- maybe those who give up are saving themselves a lot of wasted time and energy (if writing something that never sells is a waste of both). Or maybe they're missing the chance to find out, or get something great out into the world.

There are no guarantees, and until you've done your very, very best work I don't think anyone can tell you.

Mine at last!

     

This came today, from a friend on the island:



I don't know if you can see it, but the sign says "SOLD" -- sold to me.

The plot I own is TINY, and behind the tall stone wall. It looks out onto the fields on the right -- and the ocean.

I plan to plant it with meadow grass and wildflowers, and IF I get planning permission, put a shepherd's hut on it. Shepherds' huts were used in the lambing season by shepherds, which is why they have wheels. Mine will look like this one -- but it's a bit bigger (7.5 x 16), dark green outside, a yellowy cream inside; and it will have more windows.

If I don't get planning permission, the builder will ship it here (to America). Either way, it will be the perfect place to write and I'm thankful to have it.
And I am thankful for the land, and for the magical months I've already spent on the island.

And so this has something to do with children's books: Raoul Dahl did all his writing in a real (original) shepherd's hut. His I think was bright yellow but I will have a better chance of getting planning permission with a more conservative color: British racing green will suit the landscape better anyhow.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Questions about the editing process

     



As an author who submits to editors and a professional editor myself, I have questions for people on both sides of the editing process.

My first question is mainly  for editors but thoughts from others aare more than welcome: what do you do when you write an editorial letter and the author argues and refuses to make the changes?

Not that editors are always right, and I don't claim to be!

Authors: what do you do when an editor makes a suggestion that is just plain wrong? And what happens? How do you work it out?

And what do you do when an editor, instead of suggesting, just goes ahead and writes new material? (This happened to me recently with a publisher when *I* was the author and I will leave how furious and frustrated I was to your imaginations.)

Nice finds

     

"Anne and her family lived alone on an island. She enjoyed having tea time with her friends the spiny lobster and baby hawk." National Geographic, August 1938

You never know what will turn up. I found these images while doing research for my novel -- by the way, it's NOT about a girl who lives alone on an island! But but the rock behind her figures prominently in the story. It is almost 3 billion years old, far older than these circles of it:

The Lewisian Gneiss Stone Circle at Callanish on an Early Autumnal Morning, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, by Lizzie Shepherd  .... her other images are amazing, too, and well worth looking at full-size!  

It's called Lewisian Gneiss, pronounced "nice." It comes in different colors, but is (usually? almost always?) striped:

 

Gneiss, from http://pig.sty.nu/photos/lewis_autumn_2010/gneiss_Rocks) 

Okay, back to work! It's hard to draw the line sometimes between time-wasting and research, but I THINK I'm getting better at it. Maybe one way is to stop once you've found out what you really need to know and save the rest for later?

Over my desk

The beginning of this was familiar to me, but the nots at the end -- not even needing to believe in yourself, always feeling a "divine dissatisfaction" that keeps you marching -- were new. They are what I find most helpful now.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” -- Martha Graham

I don't think artists are any more alive than other people, but love the idea that discontent "that keeps us marching." In me it translates into  "I can make this better on the second draft." Logically I know that hardly anybody gets it right on the first one, though like many writers, I believe that for everyone else, it flows easily and that only I plod along.

Often I think that the only part of writing I can control is the sitting down and doing it....or in the great words of Jane Yolen, "BIC -- butt in chair." (btw Jane! If you ever read this blog! I am in Scotland too and have been since mid-April.) But Martha Graham reminds me that I can also TRY to "keep the channel open" -- focus, concentrate. 

This a friend has over HER desk and I've put it over mine, too:

"The place God calls you is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

I like the idea of writing from that place, or rather, trying to! Whether I can or not, the quote is a good reminder to write about what matters to me. It reminds me not to be satisfied with chatter,  but to write only when something that feels important   -- true -- right -- just comes.


That doesn't have to be anything deep or heavy, things that are funny and fun are needed, too. They're just as important as serious things. Maybe MORE important -- yes, I know grim dystopias are popular now, but there is a need for lighthearted joy, too. As Matilda said,
what was wrong with CS Lewis was that there were "no funny bits. Children are not so serious as grown-ups and like to laugh."

What do you have over your desk that inspires or encourages you?

Your image of the week?

Linda Wingerter brought these beautiful eggs she'd made (photograph by Alvina) to an Easter party.

Eggs have been used to celebrate birth and spring for thousands of years in many cultures -- in ancient Egypt they dyed them and children rolled them (some people think this is where Dolly Madison got the idea for the White House Easter Egg party); in China red eggs celebrate a baby's first month of life.

This past week, some children in town made these string eggs and their mother shared them with me:



They also made these, using onion skins to make the patterns and dye the eggs:



So, I choose these eggs as my image (or images) of the week. I think they say better than words can my hopes for this spring, and new starts. What are your images of the week?

Books that hold up and books that don't

Some friends and I were talking about re-reading books we had loved as children, and how some hold up and some don't. For me, LITTLE WOMEN really held up -- but someone else found all the mother's lectures and Louisa May Alcott's own preachiness really annoying. I did, too, but I still love the book anyhow and suspect that as a child, I ignored those parts the way I ignored much of what the adults in my life said.

Some books that did hold up for me:
The Secret Garden -- I may even love this MORE now, even though I never could get as interested in Colin as I was in Mary, AND liked her better before she became nice
The Hobbit -- especially the scene with the trolls,and when they are first riding into Rivendell
very old MADs, from the late 1950s and early 1960s--they still make me laugh out loud
fairy tales
nursery rhymes
the d'Aulaires Abraham Lincoln
--to name a random few. I could go on and on, but what's going to be most interesting about this post is what other people think.

I also reread a Giant Golden book called ASTRONOMY and could see why I liked it so much, but as an adult, I didn't read every word. Maybe as a kid I didn't either! I was sad, though, to see something I don't know if I noticed as a child: that the scientists and astronauts were always men of European ancestry -- and that even the children doing simple experiments were white boys. People -- men and women -- with dark skins appeared in skin-tight outfits stretching their arms to the moon. Once a woman in a neat suit, hat, and gloves looked at a meteorite with her children. The text talked about MEN going into space someday.

If I get impatient with PC things, I will remember this book and its not-so-subtle message. I hope I ignored it the way I ignored the preachiness in LITTLE WOMEN but I wonder....

What didn't hold up:

Alice in Wonderland -- this wasn't one of my FAVORITE books as a kid, but I did like it a lot. I thought Alice was really smart and both loved and admired the way she always tried to figure everything out. When I reread it as an adult, I realized with dismay that that was supposed to be funny! I also found the book too boring to finish.

Then there were some classics that I could never get into as a child and can't now--like Carl Sandburg's short stories for kids. One was in a beloved, literally loved-to-pieces anthology illustrated by Garth Williams called THE TALL BOOK OF MAKE BELIEVE (this story was NOT by Carl Sandburg -- it's "The Very Mischief"):
Although I read everything else in that book over and over and over, I could never finish the Carl Sandburg story. It just seemed pointless and kind of stupid -- the kind of silliness some adults think children like. I also hated (and still hate) Aesop's Fables.

What about you? What has held up? What hasn't?

I'm especially curious about all the great children's books I've read for the first time as an adult, because I just don't know what I would have thought of them as a child.

(I am only listing authors who are dead in keeping with our blog's unofficial policy of not discussing work by living authors....not that we have ever even really talked about this, we just don't seem to do it.)

When is it time to give up on a ms.?

An agent told me recently that when she looks over her list, the mss. that ended up selling the best are the ones that took longest to place. What's the most number of times you or your agent have sent something out before it sold or you gave up on it?I love those stories of mss. that got rejected over and over, and then went on to become famous books -- here's a list of 14 books that became famous that were rejected over and over by publishers. Some I'd heard of, some I hadn't.....but I find it encouraging, especially the comments that must have seemed idiotic to the authors, like:
"Does anyone drown? [to the author of KON TIKI] Then it can't be very interesting."

But sometimes when a ms. doesn't sell, maybe it SHOULDN'T. Dear Genius has lots of stories about mss. that didn't quite work -- by people who then went on to write other things that worked brilliantly. For example:
"....I don't mean to sound cross, but I felt so hopeful when you left my place last weekend, and was a little depressed by the ms. when I read it (several times) this week...I wish I could be more constructive but until you do more on this it is pretty hard for me to be. I will say this: I think your first "chapter" can't be called "The Tiger," and you can't just say in two lines that this Frances was in bed and she couldn't sleep...."

Yes, it was the first Frances book -- published many rewrites later as Bedtime for Frances.

There is really no way for an author to know how it will turn out or which (worth working on or not) is true of a particular ms....what I have concluded about my own work is that it just depends on how interested I am in the story and TIME usually clarifies that. If, years after I first wrote something, I reread it, see the flaws, and want to fix them, I do. If I read it over, and think: "This is really GOOD! Someone ought to take it!" I keep sending it out, but with a different pitch. And if I read it over and wince, I file it or throw it away, thankful that it was never published.

And on an unrelated note: if anyone read the blog earlier today and saw the post about the "1 weird old tip" -- I was going to develop that into a real post by adding something about curiosity and fiction, but forgot that I had set it up so Blogger would publish it automatically. Sorry about that.

I think that post is a good example of something that wasn't worth working on further!

Happy birthday, Darles Chickens! (a day late)

"Procrastination is the thief of time" -- I never knew Charles Dickens said that, though it's one of my favorite sayings. He went on to add something I hadn't heard until yesterday: "Collar him!"

Excellent advice that he took himself: he never missed a deadline (even though he had weekly ones for many years) and once even climbed back into a crashed railroad carriage that was teetering on a bridge to get his due-at-the-printers-that-day ms.

The train fell into the river minutes later -- but he got his chapter in on time.

Interpreting editorial letters

As an author, I get editorial letters; as an editor, I write them.
How do you handle them when you're the author? How do you want the author to handle them if you're the editor?

As the author, I usually ask for clarification if I don't understand something. If an editor suggests a change, I feel that I have to do something -- that I can't just leave whatever it was as it is. But even if the editor has made a suggestion, I usually feel that I can solve the problem my own way. If I really like the editor's solution, I'll use it; if I don't, I'll think of my own. I always do something.

But I've heard of authors who just leave things as they are!

As an editor, do you think the author has to fix what you've commented on, or is that optional? And what about how the author fixes it? Are you annoyed if she doesn't do what you suggest, but solves the problem her own way? And what would you do if an author (this happens to me as an editor sometimes) interpreted everything you said as praise and didn't want to change anything?

Not to be sexist, but this does happen to me more with male authors: I'll send a letter saying what I liked, and then suggesting changes, and the author responds,

"Oh, you liked it! Great!"

When I'm the editor, I'm in a different situation from most people reading these pages, I think -- I'm being paid by the author to get the ms. into publishable condition. So what I do in that case ("that case" being when I've sent a long letter and the author responds only to the praise) is get blunter -- painfully blunt, sometimes.

So you'd think I'd be good at reading editorial letters, but not always! When I'm the author, letters from an editor I don't know can be really hard to interpret, and I've gotten it wrong more than once. So, anything anyone has to say would be helpful....

Lastly, I'm talking here about books that are under contract. Alvina's post (was it called Rejection Letters 101) on submissions was hugely helpful. It's easy to misinterpret those letters, too.

Books and money

Someone made a comment on Meghan's post yesterday that she was concerned not so much about the awards, but about "limitations that are put on new artists and authors BEFORE their work goes into print."

Changing the rules of awards wouldn't change that, though it would change the lives of the (few more) people who won. Publishing is moving more towards books the publishers think will sell large numbers of copies. For those of us who don't write those books (though to be optimistic -- who can ever really predict which books they are?), awards have huge financial consequences. Unless we win a major one, we can't make a living from our books. We have to work at other things if we and we alone are responsible for supporting ourselves.

Yes, it would be nice to win a big, life-changing award (when THE PENDERWICKS won, the author was able to buy a house for the first time in her life!) and live on advances and royalties. Who wouldn't love it?

But if you're a published author, is not being able to support yourself from writing really that bad? Anyone who is passionate, disciplined, and creative enough to illustrate or write books can think of other ways to earn money and make them work. Yes, it takes some time and energy away from books; and for most of us there isn't as much money in it as there would be in a "good" full-time job -- but it gives you more freedom than a full-time job does.

Maybe working at other things is even good for writing in the long run? Unless we have something to pull us out into the world, for many introverts (and most writers I know are introverts! Most illustrators too for that matter!) it's all too easy to stay home, do your writing, and only see a small number of people. And what do you have to write about if you spend your life doing that? Most novelists whose work has lasted were intensely engaged in the world in some way -- sometimes in really fascinating ways (Somerset Maughm and John Le Carre both worked for British intelligence, to name just two).

from the BRG archives: Does anyone do both brilliantly?

Quite often when adults hear that I write for children their first question is,
“Are you going to write an adult novel?”
This is always said very nicely, even eagerly, or in a slightly encouraging tone – as though children’s books are training wheels for the real thing.

I thought it was just something about me – but on NPR a few days ago Katherine Paterson said that people often asked her that, too. Why do people do this? Obviously, they think it's easier to write for children -- but do they realize how insulting the question is? That it implies that people only write for kids because they aren’t good enough (yet is often implied, too -- that's where the encouraging tone comes in) to write for grown-ups?

It’s not easy to write ANYTHING good – but I don’t think the age group that you’re writing for has anything to do with a book’s difficulty. It just takes a different kind of talent, or set of interests – and if anyone doubts this, think of how few people there are who have written great children’s books AND great adult novels. I really can’t think of anyone!

The closest is probably C.S. Lewis – I at least really like That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet; but are these books as good as the Narnia books? Louisa May Alcott and E.Nesbit both wrote trashy books for grown-ups, I’ve never been able to even finish any of them, and I’ve read their kids books over and over and over.

If you think this just proves the point that kids books are easier: Thurber's adult stories make me laugh (and still are read in literature classes), but I don't think anyone would still read the book about the Princess who wanted the moon(Many Moons ) if it weren't for the great illustrations. And Dickens and Thackeray would be out of print today if their children's books were their only books.

Robert Louis Stevenson did write for adults, and actually, some of his adult stories are pretty amazing (if you like well-written, well-plotted adventure stories) – but are they as good as the best poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses? I don’t think so. If you count YA, then I can think of one person: F.Scott Fitzgerald. His Basil and Josephine stories still make me laugh out loud. I especially love the ones about the ten-year old, totally obnoxious Basil (based on Fitzgerald himself), with his best friend who – no matter how crazy and impossible Basil’s ideas were -- responded to each one with an immediate:
“Let’s do it!”

But those aren’t BOOKS. Maybe there are people who write brilliantly for both age groups that I just haven’t read. If you can think of any, please put them in the comments! And another question: what do YOU say when adults ask if you’re going to write for adults? I usually just mumble no. No child has ever asked that question, by the way: they just say “Have you written any other books?” and of course, “other books” means – for kids. As it should.

Originally published February 24th, 2007

Writing a best seller

I've heard of three people who set out to write best-sellers and actually did: Ian Fleming, Robin Cook -- a doctor who measured his own pulse as he read best-sellers to see where it rose, and now, Amanda Hocking.

Amanda Hocking, according to that interview on NPR, had written about twenty novels, but was unable to get them published -- she thought maybe she was writing the wrong kind of book. So she went to Walmart and studied the best-sellers to see what sold well that she would be good at and enjoy writing. She came up with para-normal romance and has now joined that small group of authors whose books have sold over a million copies.

The analysis she did, I'm guessing, was only one (fairly small but maybe important?) part of her success. She sounded like a born storyteller--and certainly a hard, hard worker.

But the idea of taking that realistic look at what's selling and matching it up with your own writing strengths sounds like a really good one to me!

Even if most of us did that, we might not sell that many copies--I think to do that, you need to be not only gifted when it comes to creating characters people really care about and coming up with stories that keep readers turning the pages (those seem to be the main thing books that have sold super-well over time have going for them) but be lucky with your timing. It seems to me though that her analysis took some of the luck out of that: she didn't just keep writing -- she matched her strengths to the market and I think that was smart.


BEST SELLING BOOKS OF ALL TIME (impossible to know for sure--this is just one person's guess/estimate)

The Daily Telegraph's List