I remember self publishing my very first book. It was a children’s book, and was the result of a complete family effort. My wife and children helped me illustrate it, and I was very excited to get it out.

I managed to talk a number of friends and neighbors into buying the book and felt that it was a success.

Since then I have had a number of people ask me when a book can be considered a success? I think that the answer to that might be somewhat individual, but getting a book finished and published feels like a great success to me, no matter how many times I have done it in the past.

This article by Nanci Panuccio really hit home. It made me think again about successful book writing. I hope you like it. You can read the original post here: http://emergingwriters.us/writing-success-redefined/

How do you measure your success as a writer?

Is it by how much money you earn from your writing?

Is it the publishing contract? Nailing an agent?

Sure, those are external markers of success.

But what does success as a writer mean to you?

Years ago, when I began writing in earnest, a dancer friend and I had an interesting debate.

She asked me how a writer could consider oneself successful if he or she didn’t write a bestseller that sold millions of dollars.

My friend was a wealthy widow in her early fifties who spent her days pursuing passions full tilt. In addition to ballet, she studied piano privately in her home driven by the sole ambition to play her favorite piece of music, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Which to me sounded like the purest, most reverent reason to pursue a musical instrument.

Publishing was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. I was more concerned with learning to write something worth reading.

Pretty much like her goal to play Rhapsody in Blue.

I reminded her: Both of us took our dance practice seriously, even though we didn’t aspire to dance in the American Ballet Theater. We’d both performed on small stages and neither of us had become rich from doing so. In fact, we’d sunk hundreds and hundreds of dollars over the years in dance lessons and dance gear.

Did that make our pursuit any less successful? Wasn’t it enough that we were stronger, more flexible, more buoyant with every lesson? And that we got to do this thing that made us feel deeply connected to music, to our bodies, to ourselves?

Didn’t she find enormous accomplishment in learning piano? Without a booking at Avery Fisher Hall? Did the absence of getting paid, or even the goal of getting paid, make her achievement less triumphant? Wasn’t it enough that after five years of deliberate daily practice, she could play Rhapsody in Blue almost without falter, and was becoming more fluent with the keys every day?

I thought she was a remarkable success.

She didn’t see the connection. When it came to writing, she believed money was commensurate with quality, the logic being that if a writer isn’t selling books, that must mean nobody wants to read them. To her, proof was in the sales.

Publishing is a worthy goal. It pushes us to write the best we’re capable of.

But when we chase the holy grail of publication, it’s not really money we’re after. Or fame.

What we really crave is validation.

We want to finally earn the right to call ourselves a writer. How else can we legitimize the enormous amount of time we spend taking a project from its nebulous beginnings to gleaming finished product?

But a story or book will fail or succeed on its own terms. Whether it sells or how well it sells has little correlation to quality.

In the end, it is your satisfaction with the work that determines its success.

Anyone who believes you’re not a successful writer until you’ve scored a major book deal is missing the point.

They’re focused on the end result. Not your experience of doing the work. Which is really the biggest payoff, in my view.

We just need to remind ourselves why we’re driven to write in the first place.

We write for what we discover we didn’t know about ourselves. To luxuriate in what it means to be alive and human, with all its messiness, pathos, frailty, and beauty.

Writing can be exquisitely empowering. Because we get to interpret and shape the narratives of our own lives and our own past, rather than let someone else interpret it for us. We get to explore our own relationship to what we’re writing about which can be a deep, scary excavation into self awareness and self acceptance.

We want our voice heard.

Writing connects one heart to another. What elevates writing into a work of art is that, ultimately, it allows both writer and reader to feel seen.

We long for this connection.

Amanda Palmer says this:

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

That’s the real validation most of us crave.

Success is not just about hitting the apexes.

It’s the multitude of small successes along the way. Success to you might mean that you get to do this crazy thing that makes you feel more alive and more fully expressed than just about anything else. That despite all you’ve got going on in your life – kids, a career, the day-to-day busyness of living –  you still devote time and energy to writing something that deeply matters to you.

If you’re writing anything – a story, a memoir, an essay, a novel – your work is already a success.

Because it’s there on the page. That’s huge. Because there are scores of people who dream of writing and never sit down to actually do it.

You’ve made the commitment. You’ve taken the risk. Which is something to celebrate already.

Even if your manuscript gets rejected by agents and publishers, yes, it is still a success.

Because you’re learning from that failed draft. You’ve written something complete and whole. This in and of itself is a major gain. And it’s only from writing that rejected manuscript that you’re gaining the nutrients to write a better book next time.

Writing something worthy of publication is a marathon. Not a sprint.

As Richard Bausch says:

Just try to make contact. Two pages a day adds up to more than 700 in a year. So don’t expect anything but the effort and learn to do that over time. Good things will happen.

So enjoy the process.

Know that you’re getting better page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word. Look for those small, incremental strokes of improvement. Those small successes do add up.

Who is right, Stephen King or Orson Scott Card?

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Author often have a lot of advice for other writers. I appreciate that. I like to read books and articles about writing. I believe that getting to be a good writer is something that happens over time and with lots of practice and study into what makes good writing.

I have a number of writers that I look up to and look to as “mentors.”  I appreciate that many of them wrote books about writing.

One of those is Stephen King. He wrote a book called On Writing. Another author that I love is Orson Scott Card. He wrote a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I found some things out pretty quickly. Both writers have a very different approach to writing. Both writers have a lot of great advice and each contributed greatly to my knowledge as a writer. But what I had a hard time with was how each author said to go about getting the writing done.

Stephen King said that writing an outline kills creativity. That the story needs to cater to the characters and that the development of the characters trumps the plot.

Orson Scot Card, on the other hand, says to write a detailed outline. Spend the time on the outline and the story will pretty much write itself.

Which one is right?

The difference between the two can be explained with two different philosophies of writing. The Stephen King type of writing is called discovery writing. These types of writers get excited about people and situations that they find themselves in. These types of writers have more vibrant and beloved characters because they write the story around what they characters are feeling and how they make their way out of the situations. This type of writer has a hard time getting past chapter three, because they have “finally” discovered what the character is going to do, and started rewriting the first two chapters, again.

The outliners are planning writers. They usually have very solid plots and amazing endings. They usually write the story around what the characters have to do to advance the story. Their stories flow well, but may not produce the same connection between their characters and the reader. The outline writers often get tired of the story. They have already discovered what is going to happen and it is real work slogging through the details.

Brandon Sanderson in his Science Fiction Writing, English 321 course, found on YouTube, said not to think of it as a type of writer, but as tools. Each type of writing can be a tool because each type has its strengths and weaknesses. I have always idolized the outline writer, thinking that using the outline makes writing easier and faster. However, I have come to appreciate the discovery writing, especially when dealing with characters and their emotions.

I have been caught in both camps and have run into both sets of problems. I have had stories sit for some months because I couldn’t come up with how to transition my character from where they were to where they needed to be.

I have re-written the beginnings of many books again and again.

So which one is right? Probably both! Which one is wrong? Probably both!

Have you had experience with one or the other, or been caught with the weaknesses of one approach or another? I would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment.

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Who are your favorite characters? What has made them so endearing? It is probably the emotional bond that you developed with the character while reading. That bond doesn’t happen by accident. For a story and a character to resonate with you, you need to be drawn in emotionally.

As a writer you hear that all of the time. Make an emotional connection wit your reader. It sounds so easy and straight forward on the outside, but how do you really do it? How is it really accomplished.

This article by Nanci Panuccio really hits the nail on the head. Nanci explains how to make that emotional connection AND illustrates it beautifully. You can read the original story here: http://emergingwriters.us/writing-to-draw-readers-in/

Flannery O’Connor once said that, as writers, we can’t create emotion with emotion. We need to provide it with a body, to “create a world with weight and extension.”

Love on its own, for example, is too broad and abstract for the reader to feel.

If we write about something as ethereal as love without anchoring it in the physical world, we won’t connect emotionally to our reader. That’s because emotion exists beneath abstraction and explanation. It lives in the breathing world of the real, a tactile world we create when we selectively give weight to the objects of our story.

Sensory details trigger emotions in readers.

It’s pure biology. Our brain is multi-layered and although these layers interact with one another, each perceives and responds differently to stimuli. The top layer, the cerebral cortex, takes in, analyzes and categorizes sense information. Here’s where we reason, contemplate, reach intellectual insights and process abstractions. This part of our brain can understand the concept of love.

But it can’t feel it.

That ability resides deeper, in the early mammalian brain. This layer takes in information through the five senses, then produces a wide variety of sense responses within the body.

When a reader feels fear for a character, or anger at another, or dread for what might happen behind the parking lot of a mall, his mammalian brain is engaged.

So to blast through the reader’s intellect to his most primitive, gut level response, we need to bring our characters’ emotions out of the analytical, away from the general, beyond the abstract.

We need to recreate the character’s experience.

We need to see, hear, touch, taste and smell their world.

Take this excerpt from Suzanne Berne’s novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood.

In 1972 Spring Hill was as safe a neighborhood as you could find near an East coast city, one of those instant subdivisions where brick split-levels and two-car garages had been planted like cabbages on squares of quiet green lawn. Occasionally somebody’s Schwinn bicycle was stolen, or a dog was hit by a car that kept on going. Once in a while, we heard about a shoplifter at the Spring Hill Mall, six blocks away. But otherwise both the mall and the neighborhood always struck everyone as the most ordinary of places.

Then one summer evening around five-thirty, just as business at the mall had finished for the day, a florist named Miss Evelyn Crespo carried a box of orchid corsages out to her car for a wedding that night. She had parked far back behind the mall in a row of spaces reserved for employees, below a two-acre wooded rise. That time of day, the mall’s triangular shadow cut upward across the hill like a wedge. As Miss Crespo slid the corsages into her back seat she heard what she thought was a cat mewing from the shaded half of the hillside.

The sun was in her eyes when she backed away from the car to look around. After a moment, the mewing came again, or something like it, a small, weak sound. Although she was a heavy woman, and the day was hot, she climbed partway up the rise toward where it flattened out, wading through the broken bottles, locust husks, and tangled creeper vines to see if the source of the mewing might be somebody’s lost kitten. When she didn’t find anything, she carefully edged back down toward the parking lot, once grabbing the branch of a laurel bush for support. Then she went inside the mall, locked up her shop for the night, waved to the hairdressers in the Klip ‘n’ Kurl hair salon, came out through the automatic glass doors to her car carrying the bridal bouquet, and drove off to Bethesda to deliver her wedding flowers.

Here’s what this passage can teach us:

Resist telling us how your character feels.

Instead, provoke your reader to feel by selecting concrete, vivid details.

Suzanne Berne never tells us Miss Crespo is scared. Because that would short-circuit our desire to feel it ourselves. Instead, she recreates her experience through sensory detail. She shows her grabbing the branch of a laurel bush for support as she edges her way back down the hill. We hear the small weak sound of mewing coming from the shaded half of the hillside.

We’re scared for her, a visceral response to concrete images.  

Slant the details.

Tangles creeper vines, broken bottles, the slanted hillside. The triangular shadow that cut upward across the hill like a wedge. Ominous indeed.

If Miss Crespo felt joyful rather than fearful, the selected details might be different. Instead of tangled creeper vines and broken bottle husks, maybe she’d see sun slanting through tall pines. Maybe a red cardinal alighting on a snow dusted tree branch.

In life, we select and slant details, too. Things that command our focus move to the foreground while everything else fades into the background. This field of vision is constantly shifting according to the way we feel in any given moment.

Juxtapose Details

Conveying emotion is, among other things, an exercise in point of view.

A view of the sun rising over the bay at the same exact moment will look different to a woman whose child is missing than to a woman who’s just fallen in love.

Notice how your own emotions often distort your reality.

In this excerpt from A Crime in the Neighborhood, ten-year-old Marsha is reacting to a series of upheavals; her father has just deserted the family to carry on a love affair with her Aunt Ada, and Boyd Ellison, a young boy in the neighborhood, has just been found murdered behind the Spring Hill Mall. Shortly after these two events collide, here is how Marsha observes the objects in her house:

I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things.

Most often, we aren’t equipped to fully comprehend, much less articulate, how we feel.

Emotions are loaded. And they’re pretty complex.

And we never feel one emotion or another, but several, often conflicting emotions simultaneously.  Love can be wrapped up in fear, disappointment, loneliness, even anger.

The world observed by your character can embody the full spectrum of emotional layers, feelings that the characters themselves are not equipped to articulate, much less understand.

So if you’re going to give us the contents of your character’s living room, ask if those details are anchored in your character’s consciousness.

What our characters pay attention to and how they perceive the world around them often reveal more about their feelings than an explicit explanation of their mood can.

The author doesn’t simply tell us Marsha feels sad about her father’s absence. Or fear about Boyd Ellison’s murder. She doesn’t tell us that everything Marsha’s learned to trust has been suddenly, irrevocably turned upside down. She lets the objects in her house carry those feelings. Her sadness becomes embodied in “scuff marks on the stairs,” in the “scorch at the back of the lampshade,” in the deep blue ink stain on the sofa cushion.

To say Marsha is sad is an understatement. By the way she observes the things in her house, we know she feels malfunctioned, damaged, broken, and stained herself.

There’s camouflage and, at the same time, revelation.

The narrator tells us something essential about herself, but by shifting the focus to the things in her house, she avoids self-pity and sentimentality.

Objects then can be figurative representations for what our characters can’t, won’t, or refuse to acknowledge or accept about their own condition.

Abstract ideas such as “grief,” “loss,” “abandonment,” “confusion,” and “fear” never enter the narrative. They’re not even acknowledged by the character. Yet these emotions enter deeply into us.

Try this free-writing exercise.

Bring yourself back to a moment when you felt fear.

Now bring it out of your head and into the physical world.

How does fear taste? How does it smell? What do you hear?

Reach for something tactile. What objects do you see that can be repositories for that fear?

Just riff on this for about ten minutes.

Don’t mention the fear. Go for images.

And if you’re up to sharing, so I can give you some feedback, post it in the comments below. Or email me here. 

As always, I love seeing what you create.

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 The Best Writing Year Ever

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I often contemplate, “what would make the biggest difference in my writing?” It usually ends up being, “Do MORE of it!” I have a regular schedule, but it is easy to get distracted. I have tried a lot of things to remove distractions and to make sure that I get the writing done. But these suggestions from Charlette Dixon hit the nail on the head. These seven practices will improve your writing by getting you doing more writing. I hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

This article is syndicated from http://www.wordstrumpet.com/2015/01/7-practices-to-create-your-best-writing-year-yet.html . You can read the whole story here.

I write a lot about motivation here.  Yeah, ostensibly I write about writing, and I do, but when I look back over all the articles I’ve posted, many of them are about techniques for getting words on the page.

That’s because I have a cement-firm belief, based on my own habits and years of teaching and coaching writers, that the hardest part of writing is getting your butt in the chair and keeping it there long enough to rack up a word count.  You can be the best, most elegant and clever stylist in the world, and if you can’t get yourself into a regular writing practice, nobody is going to read those elegant words.

Last year I wrote a lot.  I finished a 90,000 word novel, wrote 25,000 words on another fiction project, and completed lord knows how many words total in blog and newsletter articles.  At the same time, I worked with writers one-on-one through coaching and teaching and inworkshops.  So along the way I’ve figured out a few things about how to write regularly.  (Though these are subject to change–after all writing is a process, a vital, fluid process.)  So here are my recommendations for best practices to make 2015 your best writing year yet:

1.  Plan.I mean this in two ways.  There’s overall planning for you career.  What kinds of books do you want to write–memoir, romance, mystery, fantasy, YA?  What book will you commit to write this year?  And second, there’s planning for individual scenes.  I’ve found that I get way more writing done when I know where I’m going.  You may be a pantser, and god bless you if you are, and swear to me that you can just write and see what happens, but I am more productive when I know what’s up.
2.  Pre-write.Often it is as important to write around your project as it is to write on it.   Write in your journal or do Morning Pages.  You may resist this, thinking why should you take your precious writing time to work on something other than your WIP?  Because you need to get all the distracting crap out of your brain, for one thing.  Jettison the carping voice of the inner critic in your journal and you’ll be in a much better frame of mind for writing the real stuff.  And because you also will be amazed at the ideas and information that will flow through your fingertips, including tons of good stuff for your WIP.
3.  Schedule writing time.As I’ve written a gazillion times, I love to get up and write first thing in the morning.  I write Morning Pages and then go right to my WIP. (Lately I’ve also been scheduling at least one two-hour block of time on an afternoon as well.)  My buddy J.D. is a night-time writer.  If he tried to rise at 5 as I do and write he’d be miserable.  And if I tried to write at night like he does, I’d be asleep at my desk.  So figure out what works for you and do it.
4.  Separate the writing process from the rewriting/editing/revising process.They are two different stages of writing.  Period.  You’ll make yourself crazy if you try to perfect every word as you go, and you’ll lose sight of the bigger picture, too.  Later, after you’ve gotten all your words down into one gloriously messy first draft you can have fun honing and perfecting your scenes and words.  But only later.
5.  Write fast.This is my single best tip for success, guys.  Once you know where you are going and are working in rough draft mode, let it rip.  Don’t read over what you’ve written, don’t stop, write as fast as you can.  I believe that we all know way more about our stories than our conscious minds let on–and if you write fast you’re going to get all that good stuff from your unconscious out onto the page.  Writing fast is also how you will discover your voice.
6.  Find the joy.It’s supposed to be fun.  Lord knows, most writers don’t make enough on their books to quit their day jobs, so enjoy it for goodness sakes.  It is easy to get into the grind of a writing practice and see only the daily word count.  But pause for a minute in the midst of writing and remember how cool it is that you are a writer.  Because it’s the coolest thing in the world to be, bar none!
7.  Rewrite.I know, duh.  But you’d be surprised how many rough drafts I’ve seen through the years–words on the page obviously written fast (a good thing–see #5) with no attempt to go back and straighten things out.  I do see writers getting stuck in the Rewriting Forever Syndrome, loathe to let their babies go out in the world, and that’s not good either. But it is the rare piece of work that does not need at least one rewrite.

That’s all I’ve got for you.  It really is about sitting down and putting words on the page–that simple and that difficult.

What are your best recommendations for a regular writing practice?  Please share!

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