Tag Archives: readers

October 1, 2012 · 9:22 pm

Let me tell you my publication story

I’ll just get it started here.

I’m just one of those people who always wrote. Long narrative poems full of excitable adjectives and labored rhymes when I was ten. Whole novels in pencil about wild horses when I was eight. A rather strange novel a friend said was full of homoerotic subtexts (she didn’t use either of those words but that’s what she meant) when I was sixteen. A lyric prose/poem about my equally strange infatuation when I was twenty-five.

You’re not really going to hear about any of those, so stop salivating.

I had a labor of love. I won’t go into the details (I said don’t salivate). I wrote and wrote on it, version after version, convinced it was a story worth telling, for at least ten years. At one point, I went away for a month to do nothing but write. Wrong. I produced drivel. Of my beloved character, whose voice I had so carefully echoed in a hundred typed pages, a friend and sweetly masochistic reader said, “I got sick of hearing him whine.” Back to wondering what this story was about and why no one loved him like I did. My best reader turned out to be my sister, who said of a later and less annoying draft, “This is a character sketch, not a novel.” Back to drafting. Make some things happen. Let people get killed. Joy.

It came out to 700 pages. It had a wonderful beginning. I knew the day I wrote that first paragraph I had nailed it. It had an existentially tragic and profound ending. I had a feeling I hadn’t nailed that, but I was stubborn. My character’s glorious adventure had to end in an abyss of ironies. Only then could I be writing a great novel.

(Truth #1–or have I already listed some truths?): Endings are HARD.

So I began the Sisyphean task of sending bits of it out to the editors listed in Writers’ Markets. I don’t think in those days one wrote query letters; in any case, I didn’t know I should. You know how that effort ended. You’ve been there.

I don’t begin to remember any of the rejections I got.

Then I discovered writers’ conferences. The next chapter begins.

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Filed under Myths and Truths for writers

Tagged as getting published, learning to write, publishing, readers, writing novels

September 1, 2012 · 9:05 pm

Help!

The motto of the writers’ group I attend each month is “Writers Helping Writers.” As much as I believe we do help each other, and as much as I would never be without a writers’ group, finding the right kind of help can be a nightmare for a writer.

My group can do a lot of wonderful things. It can tell me when I’ve written an ambiguous sentence. It can tell me when it’s not clear who’s talking. It can tell me that (not when because they usually are) the chapter is really easy to follow and maybe even interesting. It cannot tell me whether my book is working or not.

See, I don’t write short stories. This is not a boast. I wish I could. I keep sort of poking at the possibility. But my mind doesn’t traffic in elliptical elegance. It likes narrative and jumbles of cause and effect and explosions portended by the long, spitting self-immolation of a lit fuse. Moreover, I realized long ago that in order to write a decent short story, you had to work just as hard, know your characters just as well, understand a whole universe just as completely, as to write a novel, and you did all this for just possibly fifty bucks. Who wants to work that hard for fifty bucks and maybe some free copies? Must be somebody who loves language more than I do. And to love language more than I do, you have to be pretty extreme.

I sometimes write poems.

But back to the point. When you write novels, you take a chapter at a time to monthly meetings. If you have a book with forty-four chapters, you’re talking about forty-four months to get through it all. Nearly four years. During this time, group members come and go; the newer ones can’t even understand what the chapter is about because you don’t have an hour to catch them up on what they’ve missed. Even the mainstays have a tough time remembering what happened in last month’s installment. It’s useful to know that what happens in a given chapter rings true, but it would be nice to know whether the character arc is proceeding apace and whether the themes you thought you were building actually exist. Can’t tell that from writers’ groups.

That said, a writers’ group is essential. You can’t tell that you’re not making sense until someone tells you you’re not, and writers’ groups are wonderful at saying, “I can’t visualize this setting from your description”; “On page 2, you told me these two people didn’t like each other, but on page 4 they seem to be buddy-buddy”; “I don’t know why she said that, seems odd in this context.” Etc. Important feedback. Essential. But I’m pretty good at those kinds of things. I’m not good at plotting. My plots turn byzantine and, in the words of one reviewer, “dilute the suspense.”

So if writers’ groups are limited in what they can offer, what?

For the future: I do know some ways to get that next layer of help.

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Filed under writing novels

Tagged as learning to write, readers, writing, writing novels

August 26, 2012 · 6:53 pm

How to Write a Failed Novel, Part 2

You can believe in Myth 2: Good writers don’t need help. All they need is genius. As a student of mine in a college writing course once wrote in his evaluation, “Writing is about showing your genius to the world.”

Oh, yeah?

All right, there are geniuses out there. I’ve never taught one. But I’ve taught lots of students who thought they had genius. If I didn’t swoon over their writing, I was revealing my philistine ignorance. Only geniuses know genius when they see it.

I just remember too well when I thought I had a flicker of genius, and how painfully I learned that I don’t.

What I did learn, and what I tell students: You don’t know what you’ve written until somebody reads it and tells you.

This isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes a reader tells you things about something you’ve written that you never dreamed you were saying, and you find that you don’t mind saying it at all.

Another way of putting it: Texts belong to readers. Once that page leaves your hands, they’re going to do with it what they like. You thought it was about the power of love; they think it’s about surviving betrayal. You thought it was about truth; they think it’s about family. They don’t write you back and ask. They read the way they want to read.

Here’s a quote that I now use to open my syllabus each term:

“The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.”

–Alberto Manguel, The History of Reading (qtd. in Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read 12)

All writing depends on the generosity of the reader. How many of us, when we write, ever really think about readers that way?

And if you haven’t read Reading in the Brain, I highly recommend it. A wonderful window on what goes on in our heads when we read.

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Filed under Myths and Truths for writers

Tagged as learning to write, readers, writing, writing novels

January 29, 2012 · 8:05 pm

There’s something gained. . . .

It’s not that I didn’t gain anything from this experience. Now, when I teach creative writing (which I do less often than I might, because so many people in my program want to do it), I know what to tell my students not to do.

Here’s Rule Not To Do #1: Don’t write for yourself.

I can hear the shrieks of protest now.

I suppose I do need to qualify. If you hate what you feel you have to write, why do it?–unless somehow you discover that you can make a million dollars by forcing yourself to do it. But yes, above all, if you’re to keep doing it without becoming rich, you have to enjoy it yourself; you have to take some pleasure from what you’re doing. I’ve read plenty of testimonials from people who say that they succeeded as commercial writers by writing the kinds of books they’d like to read.

But in the process of doing that, they’re putting themselves at least somewhat in the minds of readers. That’s the key.

Because the easiest way to write a failed novel is to do what I did: Write what you love to hear yourself saying. Write what sounds just lovely every time you read it aloud. Admire your metaphors, your sentence rhythms, your choices of such idiosyncratic, tantalizing words. Write what you like to hear.

I tell my students, whether they’re writing fiction or research papers or magazine articles, that once they leave college, nobody ever again has to read a word they write. They have to give people a reason to commit even five minutes to hearing what they have to say. In college, your teacher has to read it, your classmates have to read it–but once you’re out, you have to compete with reality shows on TV (at this historical moment, I use American Idol as my example–or Dancing with the Stars). When readers give you their time, they’re giving you something precious. You better earn it. If you’re one of those lucky folks for whom what sings in your ear sings in everyone else’s, more power to you. That wasn’t the case for me.

So remember that writing is communication.

I have to admit I still have trouble finding the exact line between what I want to write and what I want to communicate. But when I wrote my failed novel, I think I was just too far my side of that line.