Tag: writing process

It’s a common piece of writing advice that is frequently attributed to William Faulkner: “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” And it sounds cool – a little bit of murder, a little bit of love. But … what does it really mean? Is it just for novelists who need to off their favorite character somewhere within the story?

That’s the most common misinterpretation of the advice: that it calls for a literal – or at least literary – death. That aspiring authors need to read up on fight scenes or medical terminology and autopsy reports. That well-loved characters need to be offed and then mourned, perhaps in the spirit of reaching a word count goal. It’s actually a bit more brutal than that.

Your darlings are the things that make you not want to hand over your work to an editor. The parts you know you’ll resist changing, even if the comments come back and make it clear that no, this won’t be publishable until you do. The words, phrases, or ideas you’ll cling to because yes, this does indeed seem like a fine hill to die on, thank you very much.

Sometimes the comments you get back tell you about other people’s darlings. I had a manuscript returned that asked me to get rid of every single instance of “Therefore.” There were only two, but someone, somewhere, had killed this person’s darlings in the past and it was a lesson he remembered. Therefore (I know, I know) he had to make sure no one else allowed his darlings to live.

Other times it’s a lot harder than searching your document for a single word and finding substitutes. Your entire proposal can be a darling, and it can be rejected outright. Or, of course, there’s “revise and resubmit” in which you’re confronted with a list of changes, and you have to get out your ax. Or at least your red pen.

It’s a balancing act. Clearly whatever you wrote will not be published at this venue exactly as it is, but presumably you want to see it in print there, since you submitted it. Usually, upon first read-through of the comments, some of them even seem reasonable. They might feel like easy changes. Yes, of course I can do A, B, and C. A change here, a tweak there, and you’re working your way down the list exactly like you’re supposed to. Until …

Your darling.

Now, you don’t always have to accept and implement the comments and suggestions with 100% agreement. There is space for a conversation here: I understand where you’re coming from, but I made these choices for this reason. But, more often than not, there’s still some sort of issue that has to be changed. The sticking points where you’ll just be told to revise and resubmit again – or take it elsewhere because clearly you’re refusing to play the game according to the rules – unless you do something about it.

That. That’s your darling.

I, for one, am a fan of copying and pasting my darlings into a separate document where I can pretend they live out a happy life. On a farm in the country, perhaps. Where I could totally visit, if I really wanted to. And where they can live on, unchanged, while I negotiate the feedback and do my best to keep my ego in check (because just look at how darling my darlings are!).

Kill off your characters if you have to, but they’re not your only darlings.

What about you? Do you know your own darlings? Are any of them absolute sticking points?

Okay, we don’t really like talking about this part: rejection. Putting your work and ideas out there means giving other people the chance to say “No thank you.” Or “I love this but it doesn’t belong here.” Or “This is a form email.” (I mean, I kind of assume most of them are, but I got one that proclaimed it loudly.)

A couple weeks ago I got three rejection emails. Within seven days. That’s not very fun. On the glass-half-full side it means I’ve been putting my stuff out there a lot, but when you do that … you open yourself up to the possibility of three rejections in a week.

If you want to get published, you run the risk of rejection. So: how do you deal with it?

I have someone that I text with every single rejection. This started because he teased me that I didn’t have enough rejections, so I decided he had to know every single one. It’s not just about annoying him with texts – it’s about how he reacts.

He “judges” the rejection on whether or not it “counts.” Form letter? Yes, okay, that’s a “real” rejection. But if it’s got any sort of encouragement in it, like a revise and resubmit, it doesn’t. He focuses on the good parts and shoves them in my face and makes me go “Yeah, okay, fine, I don’t suck as much as I first thought.”

He also gets any good news texts, too, and this might be the more important part: even if he’s envious of my good news, he cheers me on. Lots of people just … can’t do that. So if you’re going to annoy someone with your rejection texts, make sure it’s someone who’ll be excited for you if you get a response that isn’t a rejection.

I also have a group who gets updates on a more relaxed schedule – usually about once a week. I can whine and complain and sort of get the “failure” idea out there so it’s not such a big deal. (They, too, are more apt to be “Wait how many things have you sent out???” and not secretly keeping a tally of my shortcomings.)

So: have your crew. Have the people who respond to your rejections the way you need – snark and dismissal work best for me, honestly. Then it’s not such a big deal. It’s just all part of the process, and they’re all rooting for me to get the successes. (Seriously, this can be difficult to navigate. Lots of people respond to good writing news with something like “Oh cool. My cousin is published.” Which totally deflates you because then it’s not special anymore. You want the people who will cheer for you, however small the steps, because man, sometimes they feel really small.)

The other important thing here is the fact that these are not general announcements to the world (or my social media). Have you ever heard “Don’t make it public unless it’s permanent”? Good advice. You don’t want to annoy someone who comes across your twitter feed, for example, and get them in a bad mood when you might end up proposing something to them in the future. And even good news, especially good news with a long processing time, might not stay – you don’t want to announce something eagerly and overshare, only to have to retract it later. Even with an offer, not everything works out.

So basically I follow two rules when it comes to rejection: 1) I don’t keep it to myself, and 2) I don’t announce it to the world. I’ve got my people, my team who’ll soothe my ruffled feathers and tell me to bounce up and get back out there so that, eventually, I can do the big public “Look what I did!” announcement.

Rejection is part of the process, even we don’t like to talk about it much – my support staff is a small group, thanks – and it’s something we all have to deal with. The important part is figuring out what approach is going to work for you and help you keep moving forward.

It’s the most common slash dreaded question for all writers: “where do you get your ideas?” And it might seem simple, but there are layers to it. It’s not just “where do you get your ideas?” but “where do you get ideas that are good enough to be published?” Really, how do you find an idea that someone else is going to look at … and then agree to put in the time needed to work with you on it?

I’m with Stephen King on this one, or at least on half of his advice for fiction writers: you have to read a lot. In grad school they tell you to look for the gap – the thing that nobody’s talking about – but it’s a bit trickier than that. You have to make sure it’s a real gap and not just that you haven’t personally read about it yet. So you can’t identify a gap, stop reading, and immediately start investigating it.

What I’ll do is write the idea down immediately. I’ve got plenty of notebooks – this one is actually a cover for four different notebooks (and my husband added the engraving on the front for me), which can help me keep my ideas separate – and when a lightbulb goes on, I’ll write it down. And then keep reading. Both of those are equally important, since I don’t want to forget my brilliant insight … but I also want to make sure it is indeed brilliant before telling the world. (Or at least before writing up a proposal.)

The next step is usually some serious time with Google. I remember going to propose an early Stephen King paper for the Pop Culture Conference and thinking “There’s no way nobody else noticed this!” This is the connection between Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes that ended up as a chapter in The Modern Stephen King Canon, and even up until the Q&A session at the end of my presentation, I was sure someone was going to stand up and tell me of course they all knew it. They just weren’t talking about it because it was so darn obvious.

The thing is, even if I can’t find someone who’s made the same connection I have, I’m still never convinced that my idea is actually original. If little me could think of it, then someone else more brilliant has to have already come up with it … right? So I keep looking, and even when I send out a proposal, I’m waiting to hear back that actually, of the 20 people who responded, 15 of them had exactly the same point, sorry, thanks for your time.

This is my other notebook. It’s a Leuchtturm 1917, and a gift from my husband. He said he picked it because he’d seen Neil Gaiman call it his favorite. (The leather cover is completely custom – my husband printed it all over with a map of Whitechapel.) It’s my more recent notebook, and you can see from these pages that it’s set up to almost force you to do what I’m already doing: keeping a lot of notes on a lot of different things, but trying to stay organized.

All the pages are numbered so you can fill out your index as you go or as new ideas occur to you. This helps me take it a step further beyond “having an idea” and “being pretty sure the idea is original” to “brainstorming more about the idea.” By putting the main thought at the top of the page, this leaves a whole lot of open space to be filled. Then I can shift to having more thoughts about the idea, supporting it and making more connections as I continue to fill in the gap.

Again, we’re back to that difficult step: you won’t actually know for sure if your idea is interesting enough to other people until you actually show it to other people. But you can take your time in developing it to make sure that the gap you think you see actually exists, and isn’t simply a gap in your reading.

If you ever come across someone asking “Why isn’t anyone talking about this?” the answer is usually “Because you’re not reading the right people.” Once the idea strikes – as you write it down before it can get away – your job is to make sure you’re not missing out on that conversation. You Google, and you comb through bibliographies, and you talk to people, and you satisfy yourself as well as you can that you’re not just missing it. Then you develop that idea – use your lightbulb to look into all the corners of the room, maybe – and take a deep breath and put it out there.

But mostly … you read a lot. And then a lot more.

I know I’m not the only writer who works on more than one project at the same time, but I think I might also be an outlier. At a writing retreat it seemed like everyone else was amazed when one of the presenters said he’d have more than one in progress at any given time. I wouldn’t recommend it, exactly, but we don’t always have control over when special issues are announced or ideas strike. I do have a pretty solid idea of my personal limit, though, considering how many things I was juggling over the summer of 2019.

So last week’s writing post showed you the top of this index card, held on my bulletin board by my helpful star carrier pin (the lantern glows in the dark!). I wanted something more fun and cheerful than just a thumb tack because the list itself is anxiety-inducing. At the top, marked with the red checkmark, is the chapter from last week on the heroic criminal: final edits due on July 12, and hey look, it’s done! Except … there’s more underneath that bird.

In 2019 I took on more than I should have. It didn’t turn out to actually be too much, but … let’s not do that again. I had three book chapters due – heroic criminal, a chapter on IT, and one about post-WWI male violence (which can all be found here) and the book proposal for Media and the Murderer. Those were all planned. The last one on the bottom – “Stephen King likes to kill kids” – was a request from another publisher … which led to another book proposal. (That one got rejected with a suggestion for a shift in topic, but since I wasn’t the right person to write the new suggestion, I tore things down and rebuilt them into my upcoming book for McFarland.)

But that’s five projects going on in the same year. Not everyone can – or should want to – work on that many at once, but if you get yourself into a similar situation, there are a few things you can do to keep from running around in circles.

• Have a clear idea of what each project is about. This can be the abstract, the proposal, or just a sentence. What makes this one different from the others – especially if two of them might be similar enough to use the same sources? Make sure your main argument is clear in your own mind. My index cards are turned backward for the photo because hey, I’m protective of my little idea nuggets, but they’re summed up in a short phrase on my corkboard.
• Keep track of due dates. Each of the cards also has a date on it, and you can see on the printed sheet – a call for proposals – that I’ve got the due date for the proposal and the actual piece written large in red. When you have the big end dates in mind, you can work backward on where your project should be at any given time.
• Focus on one at a time. On any given day, I’ll make it my intention to work on one of those projects. Sure, ideas might pop up for another, but that’s what notebooks are for. Write it down and let it go. Focus on the project you really need to work on for today. (Don’t forget to jot down your other ideas, though. “I’ll remember it later” is often a lie.)
• Try to keep your projects in different phases. This, like having your main ideas very clearly spelled out, helps you switch back and forth between them without getting too confused. Of the four cards currently on my board, one is at the proofreading stage, one has been proposed and is in the “waiting to hear back” stage, one actually has an intended home and due date (the CFP), and the other is currently “just” an idea. This way you’re not trying to write two intros at the same time or trying to keep two methodologies straight. (Although once the editors have it, your timeline is in their hands and you might end up doing edits on two pieces at once.) As much as you can, control the stage of your project.
• Don’t forget to take a step back for the long view. It can be easy to get involved in a project, especially when you hit the really interesting sections, but don’t get lost in something and lose sight of your other commitments. That’s the main reason for my corkboard, which is near my desk: to remind me of the due dates. That way I can take a deep breath and, at a glance, see if i need to shift my focus for today to work on another project.

There are pluses to working on multiple projects at the same time – bored with one? Switch to a different one! – but it also takes a lot of discipline to make sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin. It can be hard to say no when an apparently perfect opportunity knocks, but it’s also important to know the best way you work and how much you, personally, can handle.

What do you do when you have the chance to work on multiple projects at once? How many have you worked on at the same time?

So you’ve done it: you’ve written something with a beginning, middle, and end. All the proper headings are in place. You’ve even combed over the citations to make sure you’re caught up on the current punctuation preferences. (Okay, you’ve resigned yourself to probably missing a comma or something.) You’ve done all the revising and editing that you can do on your own, but how do you know if it’s good enough to submit somewhere?

You have to – gulp – show it to someone else.

It’s a necessary step in the process no matter what. It’s even very logical: if you want someone else to read your work, someone else has to … read your work. It just feels safer in some sort of distant dream where it’s strangers far off somewhere eagerly devouring every word. Not … someone carefully reading it and holding the power of rejection in their hands.

I suppose, if you go for self-publishing, you can skip this step. It’s just all you, all the time, and nobody else has to see it until they’re far enough away that they can’t touch you. But publishing – especially academic publishing – means a lot of eyes are going to be on your work before it gets printed.

Take my most intense process so far. A call went out for people who wanted to write about heroic criminals in American popular culture. A friend of mine sent it to me and I debated, but … well, rejection on a proposal hurts far less than rejection on a full paper, so I submitted. Even before something was really written, the two editors had their eyes on it.

They got too many submissions for their special issue, so they asked a number of us if we’d be willing to do book chapters. I agreed. First hurdle passed: someone liked my idea! Two someones, even. But now, try to follow the bouncing ball …

I wrote and submitted the chapter. The editors read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The peer reviewers read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The editors read it, commented, and sent it back. I revised the chapter. The publisher got it, formatted it, and sent it back. I made final small edits and clicked the final big button.

And that’s the main thing, right? It’s not just that other people are reading it – they’re going to tell you what to change. Between the editors and peer reviewers, I was getting feedback from five people. (Who didn’t always agree, but that’s a story for another time.) The point is that first, writing is never “good enough” – it’s just due. Second, people will always want you to change things, so you can’t go into it thinking you’re perfect anyway. And third … you have to show it to people.

It doesn’t have to be a submission straight off – you can show it to your peers or colleagues or anyone who might be interested in reading it – but there will always, always be more feedback once you submit it officially. It’s basically never going to be “good enough” to be accepted exactly as-is, but you won’t know if it’s “good enough” to be accepted at all until you show it to someone else.

What do you do to help yourself get to the point where you’re willing to show your writing to someone else?

Some days – the good days – writing seems to fly. The next word is waiting right there for you and you have a laser sight guiding you down the path of your argument. You don’t have to wait around for a thought because they’re lined up in a row for you to knock down like dominoes. Those are what I call “the fast days” because I can churn out my word count with no sweat.

But the other days … the slow days …

Those are the days when Anne Lamott’s famous KFKD radio station plays in your head. You suck. This was never a good idea. There’s not enough here to make any sort of point. And come on – you think some editor somewhere will want to read this? Nope. You’re delusional. And definitely not a writer.

So, to borrow from another of my favorite writers – Stephen King this time – we need hedges. Hedges against the dark.

Today I’m going to share five tools I have in my writing toolbox especially for those slow writing days.

Here are two of mine in one convenient photograph. The rest is just desk clutter that’s migrated to the same spot (and makes it look like I might have set up some sort of shrine to the writing gods).

1. My stuck duck. I got a whole bag of novelty rubber ducks last fall before National Novel Writing Month and my writing group each picked one out. Mine is named Abra Cadaver, and when I get stuck in my writing, I explain to Abra why I’m stuck, and why I’m stupid, and why it’s never going to work. She doesn’t judge. Her expression never changes. And, when I tell her why it’s not working, usually I figure out what I then have to do to fix it.
   
2. My writing candle. I have a few different kinds, all from Frostbeard Studio because they’re book-themed and just fun. (One of the scents in “Gatsby’s Mansion” is “Daisy.”) By lighting a candle within my line of sight even on the good days, it helps set up the mental association: when the candle is lit, I’m supposed to be writing. It helps with the focus.

3. A progress keeper. This one is for Book Four, which is due to my editor in October, and it’s super pretty because it’s so consistent. Most of mine aren’t, but it’s important to keep track of your progress no matter what. When you’re just putting words into a computer, the only evidence that you’re actually doing anything is that you have to scroll a bit further in the file next time. I make up these little charts where each square is 500 words and I color it in at the end of the day to give myself that visual proof that I’ve at least done something.

4. A break. Sometimes, as a wise woman once said, you need to simply sit there with butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. But, other days, I find that I actually need a break. I don’t have a strict writing schedule so I can always get up and go for a walk or do something else for a while, and then come back later, once my thoughts have had a chance to sort themselves out. The important part, of course, is that you do have to actually come back later. You can’t just get up and walk away forever. It takes some time to recognize when you need to force yourself to sit and when you can let yourself take a break, but writer, know thyself.

5. A new document. This one is probably the strangest because the blank page can be so intimidating when I start out, but I find that, on my slow days, I’m worried about “ruining” what I’ve written so far. I know it’s all in a computer and I can cut and paste to my heart’s content, but sometimes I still get a block. So I’ll open up a new file, name it something inconsequential, and start writing a section there instead. Once Abra and I have talked it through, it usually gets inserted into the working document, and then I can color in a square or two of my chart.

Whatever tools you use to keep yourself writing, don’t forget to back up your work. I email myself the file at the end of the day, no matter how much or how little I’ve written. This is especially important on the slow days when you’ve worked so hard to make any progress.

What do you do to help yourself through the slow writing days?