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A long, sobering, useful article here on writers and their hopes/expectations of editors: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-fantasy-editor/
Fortunately or not, we are rapidly moving away from the early 20th-century model of “genius editors,” moving back to the old model in which the writer is responsible for the quality of his or her work—period. Frustrating and liberating at once! And maybe making supportive circles of writers like this one more valuable than ever.
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Where are you all? Probably where I am: swamped with work-work (not poem- or story-creation) and so not posting as I promised myself I would. The writing life, eh?
Well, in the hope that you are all writing AND SUBMITTING YOUR WORK, here’s an honest but encouraging take on that process:
https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/how-to-read-between-the-lines-of
Enjoy!
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An absolutely fascinating article tracking the evolution of writers’ careers. Don’t miss it!
The Making of A Six Figure Author: How Authors Evolve With Their Income
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A little update on my writing life. I’ve been taking a cue from Nikita and have begun week four of The Artist’s Way. While I may not be working on story, I am writing daily and that is an improvement. I appreciate the spiritual nature of the book very much, and I use the chapters for my daily “morning” pages often written in the afternoons. I feel good about this. This week I actually began revision on a middle grade novel I started some time ago. Progress is tiny, but it is progress.
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Sally!!
I’m so excited to hear this! The Artist’s Way was a complete revelation for me. I also really appreciated the spiritual element of the book, and the way it was meant to draw us in from different practices and walks and complement it. It brought me a lot of solace and wisdom, especially these days. It is such a bright spot to hear you’re getting progress out of it too.
Even just writing the morning pages (whenever we can manage!), is such a treat and really does get those juices flowing. Tell us about the novel you’re picking back up!
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Nikita,
Thanks. I’m only in week four, even though I started about seven weeks ago, but I’m still going and that is progress.
I have a couple of chapters of a middle grade novel with young girls and horses. The main character and her cousin live in different horse worlds, one western and one English. They have to figure out how to respect each others’ worlds, in order to keep the closeness they had when they were little girls.-
I firmly believe there’s nothing as gut-wrenching as those stories about girls who were close when they were younger trying to keep their tenuous world together! I’m actually writing something that’s very different in plot, but with the same sentiment. My main character is arrested at a queer bar in the 1950s, and tries to maintain her closeness to her very straight-laced sister, who was her best friend growing up.
I love me some girls-becoming-women drama! You know I’m always here if you need someone to read it 🙂
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An interesting list of “how to write” books. Many good ideas scattered among them, I’m sure!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/17/stephen-king-anne-lamott-10-books-how-to-write
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Professor Hutchison,
I have read both of Lisa Cron’s books and I found them interesting. There are some good bits in there, especially about using internal struggles to help drive your characters. I think I prefer Mckee’s Story or William Bernhardt’s Red Sneaker Writers Book Series when it comes to structure and understanding how character and plot intersect. I also like Angus Fletcher’s series of screenwriting lectures from Great Courses.
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Hi there!
I don’t think we’ve “met” yet, but I just wanted to introduce myself. I absolutely love your surname :). Russian language was my undergrad degree and I lived in Moscow for a few years after graduating!
Anyway, I’ve never read the ones you picked out of the list and recommended; I’ll have to give them a go! I can never read enough on writing.
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Hi, Bill! Glad to have you aboard. Just want to say that I’m getting a “Can’t Find the Site” message on your website. I’ll check later but thought you should know. I’m looking forward to fishing around in it!
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The Artist’s Way is on that list, and let me tell you – I’m on Week 10 of it right now and it has very thoroughly changed my life! I can’t believe it!
I seriously can’t recommend it enough, for everyone here. Super revolutionary (if a little woowoo at times).
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Nikita,
I need to get off my metaphorical duff and get that book and do it. I have it on audio book, but it isn’t the same as the hard copy staring at me on my desk. How has it changed your life?
Sally-
Wellll, I listed it all last night in my journal – one of the tasks was to answer that very question! I am so much more open to just trying new things with my art, and am more receptive to opportunities as they crop up. I feel brave enough to look at my pieces in progress with a critical eye, and trust that it’ll improve. I also am actively reaching for community and making, constantly.
Here’s a list of everything I’ve done since beginning the book in January (pandemic slowed my roll and turned this three month thing into a six month one…):
– I finished a short story I’ve spent nearly 2 years on (and dramatically revised it until it’s essentially a new story)
– I started another story
– I finished novel edits
– I submitted a Zoom play for consideration
– I re-taught myself guitar
– I wrote new songs with my husband
– I taught myself the glockenspiel
– I’ve started dreaming bigger about my career and future
– I’ve decided to move to Spain in the next 12-24 months
– I started a new yoga habit
– I did a whole alkaline body cleanse
– I asked for a raise with one of my clients
– I quit a “safe” client that wasn’t serving my further ambitions
– I got back involved with community theater
– I started studying Spanish again
– I finally started advocating for my own schedule instead of catering to others’It’s a long list, but that’s all the ways I’ve grown in six months! I would have been happy to do a third of that in a year before the book! Everything just feels so possible. It’s a revolution, seriously. And those health things may seem irrelevant, but they feel so closely aligned with my creative capacity. I can’t add enough exclamation points!!
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That is an impressive list, Nikita! I wish mine were that ambitious. I think I’ve said before that my journal-keeping has always been desultory at best, but I suspect it would give me a boost to keep track of the apparently random writing I’ve been doing. I do have little clutches of poems and one essay-spinoff of a talk I gave a couple of years back out to 11 journals. How did that happen?! The pandemic, of course: my sad rebellion against the virus….
Keep up the great work!
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I think the pandemic has made a lot of us turn inward, and that looks different for everyone. Honestly, the breadth of that list is something I can pin on having clinical anxiety. Stillness unnerves me, and in this self-quarantining period I’ve been finding ways to soothe myself by busying myself.
That’s great that you’re reworking old things and making poems and keeping on! It’ll all happen when it happens :). It always does.
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Haha, thanks for saying that! I like to be thorough. You should absolutely order the book – that epiphany will come barreling through to you.
Yes! Spain! I’ve wanted to move somewhere else for a long time, and Spain checks all the boxes. I plan (barring the pandemic sitch) to visit early next year, and then start preparing for a move there with my husband soon after. Fingers crossed! His first language is Spanish, and I’ve been practicing mine for a bit now, so the language aspect of it should be pretty easy, which is another tick in Spain’s favor! -
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¡Hola! Joe,
Long time no post…thank you for the two articles; they inspired quite a bit of introspection. I haven’t ever thought of myself as a perfectionist even though my wife and kids have told me through the years that they think I am. For example, they argued that my perfectionist tendencies were evident in the ways I built custom motorcycles. I countered that building a machine within design tolerances was the pursuit of quality not perfection, as well I reminded them I couldn’t be a perfectionist because I believed nothing, or nobody was perfect. Writing has revived those claims (accusations? Ha!). OK, so, maybe I am a bit of a perfectionist, but I see nothing wrong in pursing perfection though I know I can never achieve it. I think of that pursuit in terms of the Japanese principle of shibumi, which some interpret as the art of effortless perfection. However, at no time have I ever considered the pursuit of perfection an affliction nor has it ever been the source of procrastination, fear, anxiety, or (shudder) writer’s block. Which is not to say I haven’t experienced, as George Saunders says, a story that “locks up and you get stuck.” I am experiencing that right now. For the past few months I’ve been working on a piece that began as a short story in Short Story class, evolved into a novella in Novella Writing class, and is now a novel. But I’m stuck. I keep writing but at a certain point the story locks up. Thanks to the Saunders interview article (muchisimas gracias, Joe!), I feel like I now have a strategy: Keep working and get out of the way of the “below-the-surface part of the mind…so it can assert itself more freely.”
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I don’t know if anyone here is afflicted with perfectionism, but the excellent writer Elizabeth Tallent has been for many years–and she’s managed to write and complete a memoir about it. Check out this review of her book and count yourself lucky if this particular shoe doesn’t fit.
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I am so guilty of this – and the way the quotes allude to the glory that’s just out of reach speak to what I’m attempting to work through now. I have a goal this week to finish a short story I’ve been working on for nearly 2 (two!) years now. It’s not that I haven’t worked on it, it’s that I understand I can do better, if I only put a few more hours into it.
I thought writing as a job and cranking out articles on topics I love would help, but instead I find myself spending hours on an article, aching over each syllable…for a vibrator company.
It’s exhausting. The past few weeks I’ve thought a lot about the way perfectionism has held me back, and in just a few weeks since trying to break that habit, I’ve finished two songs with my husband (that I wrote), auditioned for two plays, and picked up a novel I started last year that I’d been too scared to dive back into. It’s a slow road to recovery, but one I’m learning to let myself embrace.
Thanks for this. A brilliant (and scalding) reminder to keep myself moving forward.
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A good cure for perfectionism here: a Paris Review interview with the amazing George Saunders, who struggled mightily to discover his natural voice. Enjoy!
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Okay, random thought. I’m currently on draft FOURTEEN of a short story. Does anyone else number their drafts? What’s your record number?
It makes me realize exactly how daunting a novel is…-
I tend to save with new file names with a new version number and a new date – but I still get confused. Maybe I need to rethink my system???
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I do distinguish between drafts. I work in Word and insert, in the footer of the first page only, this text:
Started on [date] | Revised [date and time]
The second field is inserted by choosing, under the Insert menu, the Date and Time… function:
I set it to automatically update, which it does each time I save the file. I don’t create a named new draft unless the content changes markedly—i.e., if it goes beyond basic proofreading. The “started on” date is static; only the revised date and time change. Every time I save a new version I change the filename, so that, for example, a draft called “NewsCycle.01” becomes “NewsCycle.02…” etc. I keep all the drafts in the same folder, which makes it easy to sort by filename if they get out of order.
I’ve found this useful with poems in particular because I find it so easy to veer off down a rabbit hole and, when I realize it, want to go back to an earlier draft. Whatever I do with the earlier draft becomes the latest draft of the text.
Just for grins, here’s the little poem called “News Cycle,” which believe it or not has gone through 11 revisions:
Howls. Unraveled guts. Boots steeped in blood.
The unsteady frontline cellphone footage tor-
tures our eyes like smoke from the pyres
burning heroes to ash at the end of the Iliad.For what it’s worth!
I almost forgot to add that I typically go through 20-25 drafts of a poem of moderate length–under 30 lines, I mean….
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Nikita,
I’ve never numbered drafts, but can attest to the multitudes I’ve done of any given piece. It strikes me as smart because only this morning I was searching for the latest draft of a piece and still, for the life of me, cannot find it. I found plenty of other drafts, but not the one that had the most recent work. Ugh.-
Gad, Sally! Did you ever track down that draft? If you keep them all in the same folder, you can sort the files by date (at least you can on a Mac; I’m sure you can on a PC but I’m ot sure how), and the most recent will show up either at the top or the bottom, depending on if you have them sorted in ascending or descending order. Let us know how it goes!
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I’d like to say that I have, but no. For the life of me, I cannot figure out where it disappeared to because I know it is on my computer.
I am trying to get out of a slump, so I’ve pushed it to the back burner for now. I had to get a bit of grip on myself and force my writing habit back into place. I still need to find the right publisher for my novella as the one submission I’ve made came back as “this isn’t for us” basically.
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Hi, friends!
Long time, no talk. Just an update that I finished a (very) rough draft of my novel, and have started the editing stage. It’s expanded from a short story I kicked around in grad school that I just couldn’t bring to life – that’s because it was supposed to be a lot longer. So far the editing process is kinder than the draft-writing process…but we’ll see how I feel in six months.
All in all, it’s really exciting to have just chosen to believe in myself enough to go for it, and I’m loving every minute of the journey. I even find myself picking it up on my “days off,” and editing it for fun/to relax; maybe I’m just a workaholic though.
Anyone else working on a longer piece like a novel, poetry collection, or nonfiction piece? I’d love to hear about your process!
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I’ll wade in here too. I’m beginning work on expanding a chapter I wrote of a short story or novel in the short story course. It’s been on the back burner for some time and I’m excited to get back into it. Horses and girls, which may be my forte.
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I love it! We have to know ourselves and what compels us, and if horses and girls are what you find yourself writing about over and over, then just lean on in ;).
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I’ll jump in. Yes, I’m working on what is turning out to be something close to a novella, or a “short novel” (as Katherine Anne Porter called them). It’s a story I wrote many years ago, which then weighed in at about 22 pages; I’m not up to 51, within spittin’ distance of 15,000 words. Too long! But it’s still growing, so who knows. Maybe it’s a novel?
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This is a useful but A-minus article: http://quarterlyconversation.com/live-the-freelance-life-9-tips-for-becoming-a-writer
The minus comes from the fact that the writer—who wisely chose to remain anonymous—commits an error that’s one of my pet peeves. The very first tip is to “Write Everyday.” Of course, “everyday” (one word) means “commonplace, ordinary, […] conventional, run-of-the-mill, standard,” etc. You do not want to be writing in these ways. What you want to do is write every day—i.e., daily.
Oh yes, I know that many dictionaries now fail to draw this distinction and accept “daily” as a meaning, sometimes even the first meaning, for “everyday.” But they are wrong. Just as they are wrong when claiming that “nauseous” (“causing nausea”) is the same as “nauseated” (“to cause or affect with nausea”). Whenever someone tells me, “I feel nauseous,” I don’t correct them, of course (that would be rude); I simply say: “You don’t make me sick.”
🙂
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Nikita,
This is a great list and thank you. I’m curious about your pitches. How do you format them? If you’re pitching that much, I bet you’re getting good at it. I have some non-fiction I need to get to pitching.
S-
Sally, I generally start with a reference to something about the particular publication (either an article of theirs that’s tangentially relevant that I enjoyed, or their commitment to values that I share, something like that).
Then I dive right into a pitch that’s short and sweet. An editor recently told me it helps to anchor the pitch to a point in time; why do readers need to hear this story *now*? I cap my pitches at 4 sentences MAX, but try and keep them 2-3. A good statistic or fact that makes it relevant helps.
Finally, I include a little about why I’m the person to write it, include my rate per word, and send it off. I use this website to help inform how much my rate is.Also, this hasn’t been foolproof! I often get radio silence. I know my ideas are good, but I think I need a little more authority (thankfully, a new freelance client I landed will change that!). But the thing that’s helped me the most is consistently reading articles on pitching, specifically articles written by editors, and making sure they’re dated for 2019. 🙂
For an idea of my numbers: I’ve pitched at least 20 articles since March and have gotten…4 clients from it. So a 20% success rate. Most of the time, I get no reply lol.
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I wish I could convey to students how important it is to develop this kind of routine, Nikita. Especially in the early stages of a writing career, having a reliable system is crucial. It’s natural, especially when pitching a short story or novel, to retell the story in a nutshell in the cover letter, but even in those cases the 3-4 sentence rule should apply. In the world of film they call it “the elevator pitch”—a statement that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride up in an elevator: the core situation (“The rebellious tween daughter of a widower in his mid-thirties goes missing”); the context (“Dad discovers that his daughter has been keeping her risky social media life secret from him while confiding in his brother, her uncle”); the complication (“The cops suspect dad may have murdered the girl because he seems clueless about her online activities”); and the climax (“A dark family secret and the daughter’s dire situation are finally revealed, leaving dad and the cops to race against time to save her life”).
This is my imagined elevator pitch for Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller Searching, a movie I highly recommend. I know it could probably be done better, but the point is … four sentences for a full-length film! The same could be done for a novel, and certainly for a short story or an article….
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Absolutely! I used to agonize over them pretty heavily, especially in the early ones. They were clunky and forced, kind of like how Joe M. had mentioned with over-writing his story. This is a chance for an editor to see what I got, so I’m determined not to blow it by trying to sound overly academic or smart.
I’ve definitely gotten better at these as I practice, and I send them before I can read through them fifteen times and wreck it – and that’s absolutely what’s landed me this latest client that I’m so happy about!
Also, I wanted to see that movie very badly and somehow missed it! It looks like such a creative way to use our contemporary technology.
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Hi, friends! I don’t know how many of y’all focused on nonfiction or were keen on it during our program, but this is a great list of 161 pubs to pitch to. I’ve been putting out loads of pitches (and getting many rejections, or worse, radio silence!). It’s great practice and *eventually* someone bites :).
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Hey Nikita,
Thanks for the list of non-fiction pubs; I also checked out the problogger link you posted–both are valuable tools–and then you top these off with the rates website link. Valuable tools, valuable info, things every freelancer (or in my case, freelance wannabe-Ha!) should know. A great-big thank you, Nikita.
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One of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the purposes and uses of an ongoing notebook. Also, a fine glimpse into a fine writer’s practice….
https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/7431/revising-one-sentence-lydia-davis
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Most of you, I imagine, have already felt the sting of rejection. This is just a reminder than many excellent writers have felt it, too:
“Perhaps We’re Being Dense.” Rejection Letters Sent to Famous Writers
I especially like the rejection letter to Stephen King….
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Here’s another “passing strange”* mini-memoir about an unusual corner of the writing life:
Spooky!
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