The Rookie Writer Show

Last week in Episode 016 we talked about Fear Lists and Stoicism. The main idea there is to put as much energy as possible into things we can control instead of squandering it on things we can’t control. Through this, we can make steady progress toward making peace with the fact that while we don’t have control over what agents, publishers, book buyers, book critics, or movie producers are going to like or do, we do have control over our process and (at least to some extent) how we use our time.

Good news.

All of these things that we sorted into piles of “get crack-a-lackin‘ on this” and “get zen about this” were likely mostly external things: other people’s actions and responses, your actions and responses.

But what about the internal stuff? The fears themselves? Or the critical or defeatist thoughts? What can we do about them? Well, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that no matter what you do, sometimes crappy and hurtful thoughts are going to arise in your mind. Anyone even remotely familiar with meditation has probably heard the metaphor that your mind is the sky and your thoughts are the clouds. The trick is to be the sky and let the clouds float on by without judgment and fully cognizant of their impermanence. The good news is while you don’t always have control of what will float up, you do have some control over which ones you invest in.

My all-time favorite coach is Tom Crean, who now coaches men’s college basketball at the University of Georgia. Before that, we were lucky enough to have him at Indiana University for almost a decade. My kids attended his summer camp for kids as many times as I could get them there, not because I was banking on their future college basketball careers, but because of Coach Crean’s focus on character, teamwork, sportsmanship, effort, and mindset. You know, all the reasons we have sports in the first place. (He seriously is the best.)

One of our favorite things that he used to say at these camps was “Every dribble counts, campers. Every dribble counts.” Now on one level, he was talking about a basketball skills tactic about making sure your movements are deliberate and productive (much like we might urge ourselves to make every word count).

However, it also reflected a broader mindset. One that dovetailed nicely with another of his oft-repeated expressions: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.” It’s important to be mindful of your actions (all those seemingly insignificant “dribbles”) whenever you can and make them as productive and helpful as possible, because all those little actions, those small practices make permanent habits and tendencies.

But, come on, it’s basketball. There’s only so much you can control in a basketball game. You can set up plays and hope your teammates will be there. You can break down film, study the tendencies of the players on the opposing team and have an educated guess about what they might do. But when that ref throws that jump ball in the air and the players swat at it, it’s game on. And anything can happen.

A writing life is like that unpredictable basketball...

Recently, I feel like everywhere I go I’m seeing references to Stoicism. Tim Ferris has a bunch of great TED Talks on this. (My favorite is: Why You Should Define Your Fears Instead of Your Goals). He’s a huge fan of Stoicism, describing it as “a comprehensive system for doing many, many things.” He doesn’t really expand much on what the “many, many things” are, but he does offer one really relevant feature of Stoicism for our purposes:

It helps you to train yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control and then to focus on what you can control.

If you can do this, you’ll be able to keep your irrational emotional responses more in check. This will allow you to make decisions and move forward with more clarity and purpose. Okay, I know, yada yada yada. Let’s go with an example.

Let’s say you’ve been waiting for a response from an agent or journal who has had your work under review. You’re really hoping this is going to be a game-changer for you. It’s easy to get locked up while you wait, to obsessively check your email, to spend lots of time analyzing what the length of time could mean, etc. If you apply the stoicism approach to this situation, you would recognize that once they have it in their hands:

* you have no control over how long the review process will take or whether or not they choose to accept it at all, but that * you do have control over what you do with your writing time. So you could be sending it out to other outlets or agents or starting a new piece of work altogether.

One response (the understandably emotional one) stalls you, the other, more stoic one moves you forward.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you may be thinking, “Ah, but that’s once they have it in their hands, right?! What about all the many things you could do before you send it?! What about all the things I need to know and/or do so that my work can be perfect and therefore impervious to rejection of any kind?!

When Fear plays dress up, its favorite costume is Perfectionism. It seems so…virtuous. And so easily confused with Professionalism, which actually is virtuous.

You already know what I’m going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway: Your work is going to get rejected and bashed and have all kinds of terrible things thrown at it. If you’re a writer, you’ll do the work anyway, because that’s who you are. That’s one of the reasons you’re here.

I offer this heartfelt plea: Please, please, please don’t let your fears stop you from working or from submitting your work.

I’m a huge fan of tools. Below are a couple of my favorite for helping manage fears. Equip yourself with either or both of these tools and see if they help you manage yours:

* Facing Your Writing Fears by The Rookie Writer* Rewrite Fear Worksheet by Sage Cohen

Okay, muster up some courage and go face those fears! You’ll likely find there are a lot more harmless chipmunks scurrying around and making a bunch of noise in your mind’s Forest of Fear than dragons. Besides,

Whether you’re…

* a pantser or a planner, * prefer a messy desk or one that is always photo-ready, * prefer digital files or the old fashioned kind, * write your drafts using a pen and paper, dictation, a typewriter, a word processor, or a computer…

…you need the following five systems to make your writing career happen.

1 TIME/WORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS – If you’ve been listening to the show, you’ve heard me encourage you to find time for your writing by getting very intentional about your schedule and tasks. Now that you’ve freed some hours up for writing work, think about how you’re going to use them. Set up clear, reasonable goals for your work and do your best to stick with them. Depending on how you’re wired, you might choose a deadline and then work backwards to figure out how much you need to do every working day between now and then to achieve it. Or you might just enjoy watching the words stack up, appreciate the practice of creating some number of words every day. Either way, track those wordcounts! Some people like to get really meta about it and try out different times of day and writing conditions to see what helps them produce the most work. Others are just squeezing it in when they can and don’t have the luxury of tweaking their times and locations. Whatever motivates you to get the words down is the best approach for you. Remember, though, that if you want to put your work out into the world, there’s more to it than just (just! ha!) writing your story. David Mamet suggests you do one thing for your art every day and one day for your business. Depending on what stage you’re in, you might be tempted to spend all of your time working on your art by focusing on taking classes or revising your “work in progress” (or WIP). However, try to remember to mix in a little of the business end of writing, even at the beginning. Quick and simple things can add up. Spend a few minutes reading up on industry trends. Jot down a contest or agent you’d like to submit your work to in the future. Network on a facebook group for writers of your genre. The best way to ensure that you regularly write and attend to your writing business is to have a time/work management system of some kind. There are more options than ever for helping you track your time and work. I’ve used both physical planners and electronic ones and have liked both. I will never tell you there is one perfect way to keep up with your schedule. I can urge you to try different methods until you settle on one that works for you at this stage of your life.

2 IDEA & RESEARCH MANAGEMENT SYSTEM – Ideas and valuable research details will often come to you at odd, inconvenient times. To make sure you have access to them when you need them, it’s helpful to have a system that both catches your ideas quickly/easily and stashes them long term. If you’re truly old school, even the proverbial cocktail napkin can work. However, it all hinges on whether you have an effective way to keep track of all of them. You can do better. If you lean more analog, consider following the example of Anne Lamott, who shared in her beloved writing book

HOT TIP: If you only click on one thing here, this is the one: The Key Book Publishing Paths: 2019-2020 by Jane Friedman, the guru of all gurus when it comes to the writing business

Traditional Publishing

* Best if you want to be certain to be eligible for traditional awards and prizes and/or want to have the best chance of seeing your physical books in bookstores* Best if you don’t have resources available upfront – you’re paid before your book is released, more commonly known as an “advance,” which you must “earn out” (read: pay back) before you collect any royalties from sales of your book* Requires the most persistence/resilience – usually requires that you secure an agent before you can submit your manuscript to publishers, though some smaller presses will allow you to submit your manuscript directly to them* Requires the most patience – the book industry can move at a glacial speed

Resources

* The 5 Year Plan to Becoming a Bestselling Author (Course) by Thomas Umstattd Jr. and Jim Rubart* How to Get Published – 6 Steps to a Traditional Publishing Deal by Jon Reed* Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published by Jane Friedman

Indie Publishing

* Also known as “Independent Publishing” and “Self-Publishing”* Has emerged as a viable option since 2000* Best if you like to have creative and business control over your work. No gatekeepers or support staff – you make all the decisions and do all the work, though you can (and should) hire help in the form of editors, cover designers, etc. Organizations like Reedsy and New York Book Editors can help with that, as can print-on-demand distributors like IngramSpark, BookBaby, and Blurb book aggregators like Draft2Digital, Smashwords, Gatekeeper Press, PublishDrive and StreetLib * Authors keep a higher percentage of the profit from book sales and retai...

The IDEA concept discussed in Episode 009 helps us figure out which tasks, responsibilities, hobbies, and commitments we can Ignore (for now), Delegate, Eliminate, and Automate. Arguably our biggest responsibility, however, is to our own health. (Tough to do much of anything if you’re not here on the planet to do it.) Here, the tools in the IDEA kit are not all equally useful.

It’s not a great idea, for instance, to ignore your self-care. And you can’t really delegate it or eliminate it. But you can automate some of the activities around your self-care. And for some of us, finding a way to minimize our day-to-day decisions by automating some of them leads us to make better decisions about our health and leaves us more gas in the decision-making tank for other pursuits.

I got to thinking about this after going down a reading rabbit hole where I learned a bit about the habits of billionaires. Not really a thing I’m usually overly interested in, but in the end, I was grateful for the perspective I gained on a couple of things.

I am using “Zuck” as my catchphrase as a way to represent the tips I picked up from Mark Zuckerberg and the other billionaires that I read about. (I do this mostly because it’s more fun to say “Zuck your Meals” than say “Musk You Eat That” or something.)

Some ideas for you to mull over:

* Zuck Your Meals – Think about automating some of your meals to reduce the amount of energy you expend around deciding what to eat, what ingredients you need for it, etc. Bonus points if you decide upfront to choose meals that reflect your nutrition goals. For example, if you’re looking to get more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains in your life, can you decide to eat oatmeal and fruit at breakfast and salads for lunch everyday? I personally like to leave one-third of my meals (usually dinner) as the “wild card.” But, honestly, when we really get in the weeds with sports around here, even that can be a chore. During those times, I like to have a standard weekly dinner menu we can more or less count on so that I don’t have to expend the energy figuring out how to fuel us between sporting events. You know: Meatless Mondays (pasta, usually), Taco Tuesdays, Panini Wednesdays (Hey, we can’t always have alliteration on our side!). Anyway, you get the idea.* Zuck Your Shopping – If you’ve already zucked your meals, this part is automatically easier. How can you make it even easier? How about using the new pickup features at places like Target or Kroger? Perhaps an Amazon subscription that just shows up more or less when you need it without much additional input from you? What about trying out one of the food/meal delivery services, like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, or one of the 92 other ones that popped up during the time you were reading this post?* Zuck Your Clothes – I like to think of this one as Project Fonzie. I’m dating myself, but if you were a Happy Days fan, you knew what Fonzie was going to look like every week: jeans, white t-shirt, leather jacket. He was rocking the capsule wardrobe/minimalism thing before it was a thing. Maybe as with the zuck your meals example, you shoot for two-thirds of your wardrobe being capsule items that work perfectly for the majority of your day-to-day experiences. Have some fun with that last third. Whether or not you’re ready to embrace the minimalism/capsule approach, subscribing to one of the personal shopping subscription services like Stitch Fix or Trunk Club (or again, one of the dozens that launched in the last ten minutes) c...

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“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath

If you want to be a writer, you want to be rejected. That’s all there is to it. To say that you don’t want rejection is like someone saying that they want to play football without ever being tackled. Or someone saying they want to play baseball, but only if they hit every pitch, every time (and preferably over the fence).

So that’s not gonna happen.

In baseball, the absolute best hitters of all time miss it about twice as much as they hit it. Ty Cobb still holds the top spot, and he failed to hit the ball about 63 times for every 100 he went to bat. (Bear in mind, every other major league baseball player who has ever played has failed even more than that.)

But, remember, sometimes they hit it. And it’s spectacular!

In the September 2016 issue of The Writer magazine, Keysha Whitaker took a look at acceptance and rejection rates in an article entitled, “The Science of Submission.” In addition to tracking her own submissions over the course of several years, she interviewed prolific writers and checked in with Duotrope. The lowest acceptance rate she encountered was 2% and the highest was 22.5%. Duotrope reported that the writers who tracked submissions through them averaged around 5% acceptance rates in a given year.

Those Ty Cobb numbers are looking pretty good right about now, amIright? Only failing two-thirds of the time looks pretty good when you’re looking at getting a “no” 95 times out of 100 on average.

But don’t get demoralized quite yet. For starters. bear in mind that these are averages. Focus instead on the wisdom offered by the Duotrope spokesman quoted in Whitaker’s article:

“We’ve seen time and time again that dedication pays off. From what we see, the authors who are most successful are the ones who just keep submitting no matter what and keep track of all those submissions.”

Resilience generates its own magic. There’s an old saying that a professional writer is just an amateur who never quit. Hang in there. And when you get a little glum about it all, spend some time on some of the links below and remind yourself that everyone gets tackled. Everyone swings and misses. Even the greats.

* Since it was published almost six decades ago, To Kill a Mockingbird has consistently polled as the most beloved book in the English language (occasionally edged out only by The Bible). While you keep that in mind, read this and remember that it wasn...

If you’ve listened to this week’s episode already, then you know that life threw me a curveball, and I lost about three hours of time I’d set aside for creating my podcast this week. It left me less time to freak out about the quality of my audio (and less time to indulge my propensity to overedit). It also left me less time for show notes and image creation and links.

And yet here it is!

Even in its imperfect form, it still makes the two most important points I could make about the “perfect” time to write. (You knew there wasn’t one when you clicked on it.)

1 Do What You Can, Where You Are, With What You Have – Even if you make the most perfect plan to create writing times and are diligent about thinking through every commitment you have, allowing for extra time, based on years of experience, something will still throw your week out of whack. It’s life. Don’t sweat it. Find the pockets of time to try to make up for the writing time you lost, and maybe ease up on your perfectionism a tad. Those little pockets hold a lot of magic. I like to think your muse appreciates your commitment and effort in those moments and oftentimes offers a little extra inspiration.

2 Set Reasonable Deadlines for Yourself and Then Keep Them – If you can, find a block of time (an hour minimum, but shoot for something like an afternoon or even longer) and take a look at your big-picture goals. Ask yourself what you’d like to accomplish with your writing over the next one to three months. If a big block of time isn’t in the cards right now, keep that exercise in mind for the future and just focus on this week or this day. What kinds of little deadlines can you set for yourself that you can meet? Bonus points if you have deadlines in each of the three areas Gabriela Pereira describes in DIY MFA: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community:

* Writing (e.g. Can you commit to adding even one page to the project you’re working on? Can you revise even one page of your magnum opus? Can you find an outlet or agent that might be a good fit for your work?)* Reading (e.g. Can you read one chapter of the book in your genre that you picked up? Can you find one article for research for your story?) * Community (e.g. Can you research local and online writer’s organizations to find one that might be a good fit for you? Can you reach out to one person that you think might be a good fit as a critique partner? Can you read one newsletter or attend one meeting?)

In coming weeks we’ll be talking about other tools like pomodoros, word sprints, word tracking, time tracking/analysis, etc., but if you can get these two concepts under your belt first, it will open everything up for you.

BONUS

I wanted to add a little extra food for thought. I was able to pull this off today because of the two main concepts discussed above, PLUS:

* I sat down and got right to it. I didn’t check my phone first, which would have derailed everything, I’m sure. And I got up a little earlier. * Experience is its own reward sometimes. Because I’ve been showing up and meeting deadlines, the work comes a little easier. I’ve picked up some tricks and skills that I didn’t have when I started The Rookie Writer Show. I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off back in May.

Until next time, happy writing, people!

In the first two “Who/What” episodes, we spent some time thinking about whether we wanted to be a dreamer/pre-writer, a hobbyist, an amateur writer, or a professional writer and explored what kind of stories we might like to tell (AKA genre). Today, we’re going to demystify sales categories and get a sense of where we might imagine our books landing.

THE BASICS

Before I dig into specifics, let me say this from the outset:

Like genre, these sales categories are simply tools to help authors, publishers, booksellers, and book promoters find the right readers for their books and to help readers find the types of books they like to read. You should write the books you want to write, the kind that you feel passionate about and that you tend to read.

Now onto the details! It’s tough to beat an infographic. P.S. Literary Agency did such a good job with this one, I thought I’d lead with it.

Following is some additional information on each of the categories:

CommercialUpmarketLiterarySometimes Also Known AsPopular FictionGenre FictionMainstream FictionCrossover FictionBook Club FictionSample AuthorsJames PattersonNora RobertsDan BrownCeleste NgElmore LeonardGillian FlynnToni MorrisonColson WhiteheadDonna TarttPrimary FocusEntertainmentThe Blending of Art and EntertainmentArt/CultureWriting StyleUsually widely accessible and faster pacedLanguage, style, and themes more elevated, but still widely accessibleOften more willing totake risks with form and languageGenre NormsUsually adheres to themSometimes follows some of themMay toy with themor ignore them If the categories were applied to the fashion world, they would be…Your Favorite Local Mall’s Mainstream StoresLocal Boutiques and/or The Stores at the Fancy Mall New York Fashion WeekSomeplace You Might Find ItPaperback Section of Grocery StoreBook Club MeetingEnglish Class# of Agents Seeking Books in the Category (2019)29563429

TO KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD WRITE, PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU READ.

The biggest clue as to what you should write is always as close as your bookshelf. If, for instance, you devour contemporary spy thrillers, but never read historical fiction, think twice about trying to write historical fiction, right? The same goes for these sales categories.

Don’t feel like you need to write literary just to be taken seriously, and don’t think that you have to write commercial fiction to make any money. There are lots of exceptions to every rule of thumb.

And, most importantly, understand that any story can be written and do well in any of these categories. Annie Neugebauer does a good job demonstrating this in her article “The Differences Between Commercial and Literary Fiction.” She offers examples of books with similar topics and storylines done with different underlying approaches and shelved in three different sales categories. For example, each of the following books has a plot heavy on intrigue and suspense:

* commercial example: Loves Music, Loves to Dance, Mary Higgins Clark* literary example: Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov* upmarket example: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

Everybody’s busy and overwhelmed, so how do you fit something as big as writing into your already jam-packed schedule? Start with a good IDEA!

I – IGNORE: Are there things that you can put off for a little while? Not EVERYTHING needs to happen right this very minute. For instance, we moved to a new house three years ago that has a much larger yard. Our old house had a tiny, in-town lot, and I invested a lot of time in the landscaping. I pretty much went all in and filled the yard with perennials, fruit trees, and the like. I mulched. I made and installed pavers for winding paths. You get the picture. When we moved to our new house, I decided to hold off on getting to work on the landscaping. In addition to the fact that we went from a small yard to acreage that was seriously daunting, I had a realization that at this point in my life landscaping simply isn’t a priority. My kids are very active, and I’m often attending their games in the evenings and on weekends. I’m also not willing to yield any of my daytime work hours to landscaping right now. Days are strictly for writing. Since my time is booked, for the time being, I do the bare minimum. My husband and I will likely be empty nesters before you know it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if our green thumbs came back with a vengeance. We’ll probably fill a decent amount of our evenings and weekends with gardening and landscaping pursuits. For now, though, my thumbs (green or otherwise) just have to be team players. They’re needed on the keyboard helping me to pile up the words.

Challenge yourself to think of at least 3 small things and/or 1 big thing you can ignore right now.

D – DELEGATE: Are you doing things that someone else could be doing at least as well, if not better? Sometimes our ability to delegate is limited by our resources and situations, but sometimes we’re just stubborn or in the habit of doing something. Are there things that you have become responsible for and/or in charge of by default or habit? How many of these things really require that you do them? Example: For a long time, I did the grocery shopping and most of the errands because I had the most flexibility during the days and could go when the stores were less crazy. I actually hate grocery shopping and errands. I often find that when I enter a store, time seems to speed up. By the time I leave, I realize I’ve wasted a fair amount of time (and decision-making energy) wandering the aisles. My husband offered to take over the job and grab what we need for the next day or two on his way home from work a few times a week. When our son started driving, he would look for any opportunity to drive, so we started sending him to pick up the odd ingredient. Guess who we recently put in charge of grocery shopping around here: the 16-year-old. Either my husband or I do the menu plan and make the grocery list, but our son (and sometimes his younger brother) are sent to go pick the actual items up for the week. My son learns some life skills, and I have more hours back in my week to spend on things like writing and self-care. Our family is made up of a bunch of pretty stubborn DIYers, so we’re not great about hiring out tasks. I can see that it would be a game changer around here if we would/could, though! One last tip: Back when Dr. Phil was still on Oprah, I remember him having an exchange with a woman in the crowd on this topic. She was saying that she would love to have more help, but that her husband folded the towels wrong, for instance. His answer was (paraphrasing), “Either make peace with how he folds the towels or fold them your damn self.” Keep that in mind when it comes time to delegate. Time is not limitless. Would you rather have a book at the end of the year or perfectly folded towels, for example.

In an effort to dispel some of the myths about writing, we broke down the stages of writing in last week’s episode. We’re building on that. While you go through these stages, you don’t have to go through them alone. In fact, it’s way better for both your mental health and the quality of your work if you don’t! Following are some of the people you might find helpful in your writing squad. You are unlikely to need all of these people at every stage, but just know that they’re out there. And keep an eye out for the ones who’ve been missing for your life!

1MENTORS/TEACHERS TO HELP YOU LEARN CRAFT – Ideally, you can take a class in person, but also consider signing up for a class online. Some are more interactive than others. University and continuing studies classes will usually be highly interactive, while classes put out by the platforms below are likely to be less interactive. You might also dip your toe in the water by searching on YouTube for videos. Try searching “new writer” or use the hashtag #authortube to find a cache of writers offering their advice for free. Many authors offer classes through Teachable, but sadly this platform isn’t searchable.

* YouTube* Udemy* The Great Courses* MasterClass* CreativeLive* Many writing organizations also offer classes. See the show notes for Episode 006 on Genre for a list of organizations.

2EXPERTS TO HELP YOU RESEARCH – Librarians, people with expertise in subject area or setting, etc. Start local, but remember you can cast your net wide.

* “21 Resources…” by Ramona Rice

3 WRITING COACH/MENTOR – For a lot of us, finding this person might mean that you have to settle for a “Virtual” coach or mentor, and that’s okay. I eagerly await new podcasts episodes from Ann Kroeker and Gabriela Pereira, and many, many people look forward to season after season of Writing Excuses. I also make sure to catch all of Sarra Cannon’s YouTube Videos and classes. If you decide to hire a writing coach, go slow. As far as I know, there isn’t any accreditation organization for writing coaches. A google search will yield lots of results, but make sure to ask for 1) references and 2) a free assessment/session to give yo...