What Kind of Writer to You Want to Be?

At at pivotal point in my writing career, my agent posed the question that serves as the title of this post: What kind of writer to do you want to be?  The answer was easy.

More than twenty years ago my brother handed me a book of short stories called Bad Haircut. “You have to read these,” he said. “My friend Tommy Perrotta wrote them.”

I hadn’t known Tom at all, but I vaguely remembered my brother hanging out with a bespectacled, red-headed kid who was whip smart and the bane of many a teacher in our school. He was also a feisty football player, despite being one of the smallest kids on the team. And he’d done the impossible for a kid from a blue collar area like ours—he’d attended Yale and taught at Harvard.

When read the stories, I was struck by the authenticity of Tom’s voice and the accessibility of his work. They were about people like my mom and dad, my classmates and friends, the people who ran the small businesses in my tiny home town. They featured teachers and postmen and a guy who drove a hot dog truck. They were characters I knew and recognized; they lived in houses like mine and had jobs like my Dad’s. They were stories about me.

I’ve been following Tom’s career closely ever since, ridiculously proud of this home town boy who showed me how it’s done. Part of the reason I finally sat down and wrote my first book was Tom’s example. If Tom can do it, I thought, so can I.

Several years ago the librarian in my home town convinced Tom to come back and do a reading. She had planned and plotted for a year, and kept the whole thing under wraps until the very last minute. Seats were at a premium, but they weren’t filled by literati. Instead the audience was made up of senior citizens, Tom’s old friends from high school, his former football coach, and a few starry-eyed teenagers, my son included. He read from Little Children, answered questions about the movies, and reminisced about eating Italian food from the local deli. It was hard to reconcile this funny, self-deprecating man with the famous author who writes for the Times magazine and rubs elbows with Kate Winslet. For a couple hours that night, he was just Tommy, back home to hang out for a while. 

Sure, I'd love to emulate Tom's career. Who wouldn't want such extraordinary success? But more importantly, I'd also like to emulate Tom's sensibility--eyes on the stars, feet on the ground, heart in the right place.

A previous version of this post appeared on Red Room.

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, was selected as a Best Cozy of 2013 by Suspense Magazine. The second book in the series, The Wedding Soup Murder, is scheduled for release in September. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives in central New Jersey, with her husband and two of her three sons.

NaNoWriMo For The Rest of Us

I have a confession to make: I’ve NaNo’d. And I’ve NaNo’d badly.

I know the rules for National Novel Writing Month. It’s all about the word count. The aim is to bar all excuses and get that first draft down. Goal is 50,000 words in the thirty days of November, during which you mark your progress in your NaNo profile.

For the past three years, I’ve used NaNo to plump up the word counts of my side projects while working on my Demimonde series. But I’ve never hit my 50k goal. Not once.

The biggest obstacle to getting my first draft down isn’t writer’s block or inspiration or ambition. Plain and simple, it’s time. I work full-time outside the home (as well as inside the home, thanks to my wonderfully over-active family life). My writing time is at a premium: solitary mornings between school bus and work, waiting time while kids are at judo, a few hours on my days off.

I’m willing to try any system that forces me to sit down and write. This summer, I participated in a Fast Draft with a group of writers, during which we wrote in sprints with support from each other. I had a major deadline to meet and the week-long event fueled my drive to meet it. (For more on my experience with Fast Draft, read this.)

The annual NaNo is another tool I try to use, but I always feel like I join in with a handicap.

Think thirty days is too short a time to write a novel draft? Try ten. That’s all the time I have to participate. I suppose if I could write 5k a day on each of those ten days, I’d have it made. Although I have never actually managed that, it does provide me with a theoretically plausible goal. That’s why I NaNo each year—there’s always hope.


NaNo: The Winners

I envy those writers who win their NaNo. I see their proclamations and their nifty I WON badges all over the place and I invariably end up scolding myself for not trying harder. But I don’t scold very hard or very long because, while I was never a definitive winner, I usually got good work done.

And NaNo’ing isn’t just designed to give writers an exercise in endurance or inspiration to get those latent stories written. Our WriMo books aren’t always meant to hide away in drawers and on hard drives. I’ve read accounts where writers went on to finish the books and get them published. You can see the lists of books that NaNo participants have published, many by traditional houses.
 
Stuff like that is inspirational. More so, it's intimidating for the rest of us.

Sure, there are loads of NaNo winners, and heaps of success stories for the books that made it to the light of day. But I was never one of them. I’ve never hit 50k in a month. I’ve never ended up with a first draft by November 30th. That’s why I feel like a bad NaNo’er.

My project in 2011 fared pretty well, with just over 30K for the month. I might have actually written a little more, but I was doing final edits on the first Demimonde novel, which came out the following March. NaNo 2012 was completely abysmal by comparison; I simply wasn’t committed to the project because I was busy promoting the first Demimonde book while editing the second, which was due out in six months. I think I spent more time revamping my NaNo profile than I did writing.

This past November, my edits on the third Demimonde book had been submitted early and I was between projects. I had space to breathe and think about an unfinished project that had been brewing in the back of my head. Although I only spent six days on NaNo 2013, I managed 15k words, plus a synopsis. (I think the synopsis impressed me more than anything because books are easy, by comparison.)

Three years, three projects, and none of them “winners”.


The Rest Of Us

But I didn’t lose. Not by a long shot. Despite my shortcomings, I think there may be hope for me yet because I decided NaNoWriting doesn’t have to be limited to a single “Mo”.

The project from 2011 didn’t just evaporate in the ether. I pulled it out this past summer and read through the unfinished book. I still loved the idea of the story and decided those 30k words were too much to let languish. In August, I resurrected the file and enlisted the help of a professional reference/fellow author/good friend and began investigating the details of the psychology in the story. I went on to finish the first draft in early October and revised over the next two months. Bugged a few beta readers, entered a few contests, revised some more…and today it’s ready for the eyes of an editor.

It took two years, but my NaNo ’11 book got written, got edited, and got submitted. Hopefully, it’ll get published, too.

Two years to a complete first draft. Not thirty days. And I don’t feel bad about it.


The True Spirit of NaNoWriMo

In the meantime, I carry a bit of NaNo around in my writer’s soul every day. I look forward to the NaNo emails that arrive throughout the year.

Right now we are in the "I Wrote a Novel, Now What?" months. A recent email addressed helpful topics for all writers, including tips on editing, participation in writers’ communities, and an invitation to a program on the subject of self-publishing.

Writing a novel isn’t a dash. It’s more like a relay race, and your novel is the baton. The first leg of the race is the first draft. Then, you pass the baton on to the edits and revisions, which make several more laps. The race still doesn’t end there; you hand the baton off to critique partners or beta readers. Perhaps you’ll pass it to an agent or the editor of a small press. Then the edits and revisions do a few more laps before reaching the finish line, where your readers await.

Does it sound like a lot of running in circles? Sure it does.  But never for one moment think you aren’t going anywhere. Even a spring can be straightened into a straight line—and the length of it may surprise you.

Some writers can get the first lap done in thirty days, during NaNoWriMo. I’m not one of them. But I do encourage every writer to participate. Don’t miss out on a fabulous program just because you can’t write for thirty days or because you’re sure you can’t get that word count down. You may not make the 50k goal and you may not earn a Winner’s badge, but you’ll have a new reason to sit and write, a source of encouragement and support, and access to helpful resources throughout the year.

In the long run, you just might finish that book, and edit it, and publish it. To me, that’s a huge win.



Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. Visit Ash at www.ashkrafton.com for news on her urban fantasy series The Books of the Demimonde (Pink Narcissus Press) or stop by the Demimonde Blog at www.ash-krafton.blogspot.com .

Quirks

The first day I entered the Internet (you know, when it was so alien we capitalized it, as if you were journeying to Mordor) I joined a group (I mean, a LISTSERV) for writers. The group was discussing the different ways they'd write, and someone said she "must have absolute silence in order to write."

I laughed until I had to wipe away the tears. Really? Absolute silence? (Bear in mind, I learned to write by hauling a 200-decibel electric typewriter to my future stepfather's house and typing while three boys under age ten watched -- and re-enacted -- late-night wrestling. Either that or after school on the New York City subways: to this day, when I'm writing longhand, I look up every three minutes, checking my stop. The first time I found myself writing in a library, I had to leave.)

But during that first online conversation, I realized that I too had my writerly quirks. I liked to write my novels longhand in spiral-bound notebooks, using only one side of the page (so I could make edits on the blanks) and with all the same color covers, and using the same pen until it ran out of ink. I liked looking at a pen and thinking, "My entire book is in this pen. I just need to stretch it out."

And I dared laugh at someone who required silence?

Writing feels mystical to those of us who create, so it makes sense we'd come up with our own quirks, the things we "need" to do in order to make the magic happen. To some extent, those are fun and harmless weapons against writers block. Do you need to write in purple ink? Fine, stock up on purple pens and produce pages of purple prose. (All alliterative, as an aside.) Nothing wrong with that.

But here's a caution: writing is scary in that we can't always control it. When we manufacture these quirks, they're an attempt to control the out-of-control. When we're not writing to our own standards, it's easy to say "That's because it's not perfectly silent" but harder to look at ourselves and say, "Something is wrong today. I need to push through this anyhow."

In other words, we can develop both helpful and unhelpful quirks. Unhelpful quirks place limits on when, where, how, and with what we can write. Helpful ones channel the writing in order to keep creativity on a higher burn.

For example, one writer told me she never stopped writing at the end of a scene. Even if only three words, she would start the next scene because she didn't want to begin her writing session with nothing. Other writers say they have to write something every day, even if only one sentence, because then they don't feel they haven't made progress.

Once the quirks become truly helpful, you'll notice, they're no longer quirks. At that point, they're disciplines.

There are as many ways to write as there are writers. What quirks have you found to reinforce your urge to write rather, than frustrate it?

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

Inspiration for the In-Between Times

I love the Olympics. I spend half my time wiping tears from my eyes during the coverage. To watch people achieve greatness that pushes the limits of the human body's ability moves me. It evidently moves others too because there is a big jump in ice skating lesson enrollment after the Winter Games and gymnastics classes boom after the Summer Games.

Why?

Because seeing others achieve greatness inspires us.

As writers, we need to seek out sources of inspiration. I don't mean just for premises. I'm referring to the kind of things that motivate us to keep pushing and learning our craft. To inspire us to not give up. Something or someone to give us a shove when we stall out.

Who or what is that for you?

For me, I have my amazing blog author peeps here, on QT, who kick my backside when I need it. I also belong to several local writers' organizations that hold monthly meetings. Just hearing about others' successes and difficulties inspires me to keep plodding along.

Recently, I hosted a retreat at my river house for twenty writers in various stages of the business from multi-published to aspiring. We had brainstorming sessions and brought in a creativity coach. We all came away with renewed enthusiasm. It's contagious, I tell you.

Writing is a lonely business at times. I want solitude and quiet when I write, but I've learned that it's the in-between times that are critical to my productivity at the keyboard.

Don't do this alone. Find something or someone that inspires you to keep going. Join a writers' forum like the one on QueryTracker. Become a member of a local writers' group.

Find inspiration for the in-between times.

Wishing everyone a fantastic, inspired week.

Mary