An Embarrassment of Riches

A lot of people assume that writing is a solitary art, but the truth is they couldn’t be more wrong. The act of writing itself may be solitary and can be blissful for that very reason, but there are always people helping the writer along, giving them the gifts they need to succeed. This month we’ve heard a lot of personal stories about the greatest gifts we’ve received as writers, and I was surprised at the amount of breadth and depth both that the posts contained. Below are links to any you may have missed, or in case you want to revisit them.

  1. A Good Mentor is a Gift from the Gods by Kristin Luna
  2. Backing by Colette Black
  3. The Friends Who Stayed by Mary Pletsch
  4. The Fan Club by Evan Braun
  5. Your Gift, Should You Choose to Accept It… by Evan Braun
  6. The Gift of a Different Path by Dylan Blacquiere
  7. The Tools You Use Can Change Everything by Clancy Metzger
  8. Mean Salvation by Ace Jordyn
  9. The Gift of Fortitude by Holly Dawn Hewlett
  10. The Gift of Scorched Earth by Gregory D. Little
  11. Blood, Sweat and Hooked on Phonics by Nathan Barra
  12. Writing Friends by Megan Grey
  13. Solitude – A Lonely Gift by Ace Jordyn
  14. The Impact of Mere Words by Gregory D. Little
  15. Feedback is a Gift by Jace Sanders
  16. One Saturday with Sean by Tristan Brand
  17. Your Book – As a Gift by Mary Pletsch
  18. Rothfuss and Praise by Matt Jones
  19. Cannot Publish in Ignorance by Frank Morin
  20. Outside, in the Office by Kevin J. Anderson

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s posts as much as I did. As we close out 2013, we’ll begin 2014 with a month of posts in which we set our various writing goals for the year. I hope you’ll keep stopping by!

 

Kevin J. Anderson: Outside, in the Office

As we close out the year, we thought it would be a good time to revisit this guest post from Kevin J. Anderson, a reminder that while you should be writing, this doesn’t necessarily mean your butt has to be planted in a chair to do so. This post originally ran on April 9th, 2012, but the advice it offers is timeless. We hope you enjoy, and please check in again tomorrow as we look back on The Greatest Gift I’ve Received as a Writer Month here at Fictorians.

A guest post by Kevin J. Anderson

kevin-bioEverybody knows the best way to get writing done: put your butt in the chair, fingers on the keyboard, eyeballs on the screen…and type.

Unfortunately, with distractions everywhere (kids or pets demanding attention, phone ringing, email popping up, toilets that need cleaning…), the butt/chair/keyboard/monitor setup isn’t always the best way to be productive.

Maybe you need to think outside the keyboard.

I regularly write, and publish, an average of 300,000-500,000 words each year.  To me the word “office” is only a loose term for the place where I get my writing done.  I can sit in a bustling coffee shop with headphones on, and disappear into my story.  I can take notes on the paper tablecloth in an Italian restaurant.  I can write anywhere.

Most importantly, I have trained myself to write using a hand-held recorder while walking along beautiful trails, sinking into my imaginary worlds and characters. Yes, I talk to myself.  It’s like telling stories around a campfire, engrossed in the plot, speaking aloud, letting the sentences roll off my tongue as my hiking boots roll off the miles.  That way I can accomplish my exercise and sightseeing while being productive at the same time. A day in the mountains, forest, or desert is a day at work.

Sometimes other hikers I meet on the trail aren’t quite so accepting of my work methods.  More than once I’ve been the recipient of angry glares.  While climbing around the Flatirons near Boulder, a man snapped at me, “You shouldn’t be working out here.  Just enjoy nature!”

(As if the two are mutually exclusive?)

At a campsite on the Grand Mesa, I was surrounded by tall trees whispering in the wind, near a rushing creek.  I had my laptop out on the picnic table, reveling in the glorious surroundings as I edited chapters.  Another camper felt compelled to march over to me.  “Turn that thing off!  You’re on vacation.”

Personally, I thought he should mind his own business, but more important he was making a completely unfounded assumption.  The fact is, I wasn’t on vacation.  That was my work day.  While other people are doomed to go to the daily grind in a “dilbertville” office complex with fabric-walled cubicles, ringing phones, office gossip, and endless meetings, I get to do my work out in the Colorado mountains and canyons.  There, I am inspired rather than distracted, all my senses filled with input (some of which is even relevant to the story I’m writing).

I have written a STAR WARS novel with Han Solo and Princess Leia at the polar cap of an ice planet while snowshoeing up Quandary Peak, a 14,265-ft mountain in central Colorado.  I’ve written DUNE novels with Brian Herbert — all of them set on an arid desert planet — while trudging through the Great Sand Dunes National Park.  I’ve written about ancient ruined alien cliff cities for my “Saga of Seven Suns” while exploring Anasazi ruins in Mesa Verde.

It’s the next best thing to being in the exotic locales of my imagination.

So don’t be fooled by the stereotypical picture of writer slaving over a computer at a desk.  If you feel too self-conscious to talk to yourself and dictate finished prose, then just mull over ideas, characters, history and take notes.  Or if that doesn’t work, just try a different place-take your laptop (or even a pen and paper notepad…they still function) and go to a coffeeshop where people don’t know you, or hide in a library carrel.  My wife even sits in a car in a parking lot and dictates into her recorder when she really needs to get something done.  Think about going into the “writer protection program” and disappear for a while.

For me, the way to do it is to get miles away from anybody looking for me.

So if you see me on the trail talking to myself, intent on something inside my head, remember — I’m not on vacation, I’m working.  And I’d rather be working here outside on the trail than in any other office in the world.

Guest Writer Bio: Kevin J. Anderson is the author of more than one hundred novels, 47 of which have appeared on national or international bestseller lists. He has over 20 million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader’s Choice Award, the American Physics Society’s Forum Award, and New York Times Notable Book. By any measure, he is one of the most popular writers currently working in the science fiction genre. Find out more about Kevin at Wordfire.com.

Cannot Publish in Ignorance

Road SignI love the theme this month and the stories that have been shared.  It reminds me that we all struggle in life and in our chosen profession.  I do wonder if any non-writers reading these posts might assume we’re all lunatics sharing our stories in an online Writers Anonymous meeting.  We’ve proven it’s a tough, crazy journey on the road toward publication, but we keep plugging away, pursuing the dream, chanting, “Keep at it, and we’ll get there.”

Well, we’ll get there as long as we’re open to learning and growing.  As they say, “Continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.”

So we’re either on our way, or we’re nuts.

Growing up I always dreamed of being a writer and I hand-wrote hundreds of pages of drafts as a teen-ager.  But life got in the way and I pretended to be normal and pursued other interests through college and the first years of family and career.  Then through a series of events in 2004 the desire – the need – to write reignited, and I embraced all those imaginary friends I’d been pretending not to listen to for so long.

I remembered some cool ideas I had worked on all those years ago and thought, “Yeah, I’ll just write that.  I read a lot, so how hard could it be?”

Now almost ten years and millions of words later, I laugh every time I think of that naïve wannabe writer sitting down and typing out those first words, “It was a dark and stormy night. . .”

Actually, those weren’t the first words, but they might as well have been for how terrible they were.  But I didn’t know better so I wrote, and then I re-wrote.  For almost four years I worked on that monstrous first novel that stood at about 300,000 words despite multiple re-drafts.  I confidently sent out query letter after query letter to agents, and accumulated scores of rejection letters.

A wiser man might have quit at that point.

Actually, a wise man would have quit after his wife read the first frantically written 80 pages the very first weekend.  With love in her eyes, she said as kindly as she could manage, “This stinks.”

But real writers are slaves to the Muse, or we are tired of people looking at us funny when we talk to ourselves.  Or maybe we’re just a lot more stubborn than most people, so I kept writing.  The problem was I had no idea why the book wasn’t selling.  I had no clue what was wrong with it.  I mean, my mom loved it, so it had to be ready.

I didn’t even understand enough about writing to work on other projects on the side.  I was blind, stuck in a place I could not get out of, but didn’t realize it.  Think Maxwell Smart, but without Agent 99 to bail him out.

Thankfully I found a way out of that rut of insanity.  I took the Professional Writers Workshop from David Farland.

Amazing.  What a revelation.  They actually train people to write!  I’d been doing it all by pure gut instinct for years, and proving why there was a better way.  In that writing workshop, Dave took the time to meet with me over dinner and discuss my project.  Using small words, he explained some of the reasons why the book would never work – like it was waaaay too long.  I learned many things in that class and some of my blind spots were revealed.

What a milestone!  I finally understood some of the reasons why I was not yet successful.

If I were really humble, I would have appreciated that much honest insight into my many writing flaws.  What really slapped me in the face though was the magnitude of the challenge I faced:  Either walk away from the entire writing gig, angry that the industry didn’t understand a brilliant talent like mine – walk away offended and console my wounded pride by thinking “they’re just not ready for so much pure awesomeness.”

Or I could admit that first attempt amounted to the scribblings of an uneducated beginner not even smart enough to take a class for four years, and all the hard work I’d poured into that novel counted as practice.  I’d written enough to qualify a couple times over for ‘the half million words of crap’ we’re told new writers need to complete prior to writing anything good.  Over-achiever all the way.

So I had that going for me, which I took to mean everything I write now will be awesome.

Bottom line, the goal remained:  I will be a professional writer.  So I had to choke down my pride and, after surviving that, I took my first major step wearing big boy writer pants.  I acknowledged that first epic fantasy story could be treated as an Epic Fail.

Then I threw it away.  All 1000+ pages of blood, sweat and tears.

And I started again from scratch.

Out of pure stubbornness, I didn’t even start an entirely different story.  There was a little more blood to squeeze out of that first stone.  I loved the core of that original idea, so I salvaged some of the world building, some of the characters, and the nucleus of the conflict.  Then I redesigned the plot from the ground up.

Like building modern-day Rome on top of the ancient catacombs.

The resulting story is infinitely better than the original, and I’m now working with an agent to try to find it a home.  And instead of waiting forever for that sale to happen, I’ve actually moved on and since written three other novels and e-published one of them.  Four others are in various stages of outlining, all of which I plan to complete next year.

Still plenty of blind spots, but I try to identify them one at a time.  It’s more satisfying that way and a lot less painful – like lancing a single blister instead of performing open heart surgery on yourself.

Still, it was that first major awakening that salvaged my writing career.  I’ll always be grateful to David Farland for beating me down so thoroughly (in a nice way).  Now that I can walk again, I’m a better writer for the experience.

And now I’m looking forward to paying forward the favor.  You may find me roaming the halls at conventions and workshops, looking for blind spots to destroy.

It’s for your own good.  Some day you’ll thank me.

Rothfuss and Praise

Patrick Rothfuss While I was in Brighton for the World Fantasy Conference, I was given the opportunity to hear Patrick Rothfuss read from one of his novels at a nearby bookstore.  Patrick did a great job and his humor and wit worked well with the foreign audience giving him plenty of material to work with.  By sheer chance I was given a seat in the front and after the reading I decided to stay sitting and wait while everyone else lined up to get a book signed.  What happened next amazed me.

While it wasn’t my intention to eavesdrop on all the conversations, fans are really passionate people and they’re really hard to ignore.  In the time I was there, I was witness to some incredible stories about how the stories Rothfuss created have inspired and improved their readers.

One story spoke of a girl who followed Kvothes lead and decided to go travel the world.  Another fan started taking piano lessons after hearing how music was able to move people in the books.  Patrick, each time, would look humbled and truly grateful at the words and the sentiments.  It was beautiful to watch and inspiring as a distressed author.

My work has been hurting since I would put other tasks before my writing.  They’re all important, in my mind, but the other tasks had deadlines and people waiting on me.  These tasks would always take priority, and I would just tell myself that I could just write tomorrow.  My intentions were good, but it turned into a perpetual postponement of my work.  I needed a deadline that would give my writing a fighting chance against these other things that seem to fill my time, and as I starting thinking back on that night in the bookstore the idea occurred to me.

Everyone always says you need to write for yourself.  This is true.  Don’t lose the love and passion that goes into your writing.  Don’t let it become just a job.  But don’t let that stop you from looking forward to your work being consumed and truly loved by others.  Let that be a motivation that helps keep you moving.  Others are out there waiting for that little push that will make their lives greater.  When you finish your work, people will read it.  Readers will reflect on their own lives as they do so.  They’ll put themselves in the place of the protagonist, and wonder why they aren’t out there playing an instrument or traveling the world.  They’ll wish they could draw, or sing, or dance like the illusion they paint in their minds eye does.  And, in that moment of vulnerability where the hero exceeds expectations and the emotions are riding high, they’ll cheer for that image that is shining in their heads and do something about it.

Let those people become your deadline.  They’re out there waiting.  Waiting for you to finish your novel.  Waiting for that push.  Waiting for your work.  Write for yourself.  Write to tell the story only you can tell.  Write to inspire.  Write to change the world and keep writing until it happens.  Someday, you’ll be sitting in a bookstore surrounded by fans and some troubled author will watch and even that will inspire someone.  They’re waiting for you.  Go do it!

Patrick Rothfuss’ Worldbuilders Charity is in the last week of their Christmas Fundraiser. Go consider donating to help make the world a better place!