I Heart My Agent

Last week, I finally had a chance to breathe from a whirlwind summer I hadn’t forecasted. (This summer was going to be the relaxing one, I told myself last May. Ha! Joke’s on you @jamieweil the Universe tweeted back in July.)

In that minute, I thought, “Hey. What happened to my manuscript? I sent it to Rachael (that darling under the umbrella) after she sent it to me and I fixed it and she said good and then I sent it back and…where is it again?”

I know the power of thoughts. I try to interrupt those sessions that take place around the conference table in my mind. I fail. Anne Lamott writes about it in Bird by Bird. It’s that part of every writer that likes to have multiple discussions in their head, usually flavored with self-doubt.

Immediately, I did that thing. Crap. She hates it. She threw it away. In the spam folder. Then, my cheerleader voice. Don’t be ridiculous. She loved it. She said you brought it up to a whole new level before. Why would she suddenly hate it? Then, my zen buddhist. All things in perfect time. Then, my hysteria voice, which may or may not be in menopause. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. (No place else can you get away with that many “thens.” Let’s hear it for blogging.)

I sent her a note, “Not to bug. Just checking on the timeline…” More word ingredients. Same flavor.

This is why I love her. “NO–BUG! I’m so insanely busy…there’s no better time to be an advocate for yourself. If I don’t contact you with a list by next Wednesday, BUG! Please!”

VOICES in unison: See. We told you. (What? Hunh?)

Just knowing I’m not the only one whirling around like the Tasmanian Devil relaxes me. The candor, the kindness–knowing someone else is in it with me and in a bunch of other places at the same time relaxes me somehow and let’s the zen buddhist voice sound through: all in perfect time.

Thanks, Rachael Dugas, for being in it.

Chasing Eagles

 When I was in high school, my English teacher, Mrs. Jones, was hated by many of her students. Not me. I loved her. I thought she was wise, and smart, and had enough persnickities to start her own Persnickety Store.

One of the reasons I loved her so much is  she made me believe in my writing. The way she did this was with “eagles.” (She was a staunch conservative and I see this now as subliminal training into the Republican  Party.) If a paper was returned with a gold eagle on it, it meant I was “published,” and she sent the papers out to everyone as an example of good writing. Extrinsic motivation at work right there in Anderson Union High School GATE English.

Flash forward MANY years…

Last week when my agent Rachael sent back my edits with a “GOOD FOR YOU” and “I’m so proud and pleased,” I got all eagly all over again. Gold star. A +. I started planning my first book signing. Boy, was I pleased with myself.

Then I had this conversation.

Ego: Ha! I nailed it.

Higher Self: When will you learn?

Ego: Learn what? Did you not see how she just said I brought the whole book up a level? Where’s the Cristal? Pop the cork!

Higher Self: We have so much more work to do with you.

Ego: Buzz kill.

My best work happens not when I’m trying to impress or seek validation or hunt down Eagle stickers. My best work happens when I’m opening myself up and allowing the story to flow through me from some place far greater than me. I am but a willing servant, a conduit. It’s SO not about me.

When I get all stuck in my ego and think I’m so clever (which is hard not to do when somebody says in one way or another, “You’re such a good writer”), my writing pretty much inevitably sucks eggs. It’s distracting, it doesn’t flow, it doesn’t honor the story. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be.

It’s important for me (crucial, even) to keep myself open and present to each moment as it passes by. To be an observer of the eagle and feel its energy as it soars through the sky serves me better than to covet the gold symbol that says I nailed it. If I can do that, while keeping my world in balance and joy–to serve people with what comes out of my fingertips in a way that makes their life better somehow–then that, my friends, is why I’m here.

Best Writing Advice Ever

E.L. Doctorow said once that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Anne Lamott followed that up with, “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

But if it were this simple, why do we have the constant debate about outlining vs. following the story? Every time I turn around someone is blogging about one or the other as the answer to the holy writing trinity. Here’s the answer.

There’s no one answer.

Writing is so not about absolutes–and that’s the hard part. If there was one formula, one way, every MFA program across the country would be teaching it. Second grade teachers wouldn’t puzzle over, “How the hell are we going to teach these kids to write? I don’t even know if I know how to write?” (We actually had those conversations when I was teaching at one of the top elementary schools in the country and it’s not like we weren’t armed with masters degrees and curriculum.)

We get through school with some teachers (and later editors and agents) telling us we’re amazing and some telling us we suck eggs and we ought to just hang it up. (They usually euphemize.) It’s a very subjective medium. Just join writers (critics, librarians, parents) in a discussion of published books they think are pure genius or crap and you’ll generally get a divided room.

So what’s a new writer to do when writing a first novel? On the first draft of my first novel I followed the advice of Lin Oliver, co-founder of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The reason I did that was that I’d happened upon her workshop as my first ever and she talked about plot structure that day. She’d come from Hollywood (television) and had learned the 3 Act structure and that’s how she did it. A short time later I met the late Blake Snyder at Book Expo America. He was a third generation screenplay writer and author of Save the Cat. What a great guy. I really liked him. He was funny, nice, and he pitched random people at Starbucks on his ideas.

It was settled. I’d outline. I bought poster board and colored sticky notes. I stuck packets everywhere for my brilliant ideas. Scenes were all over my house in errant places for months. And in the end, I rewrote it all in the first rewrite and it didn’t represent the outline at all. Sigh.

When mentor and friend, and oh–Edgar winning YA novelist–Charlie Price told me how he wrote, I decided to try that. This is the E.L. Doctorow School of Writing. Charlie would say, “Just peer in the window at what’s happening in this scene.” I loved that! And, as an only child who used to plant recorders behind the couch at my parent’s cocktail parties starting at age 6, I had that voyeuristic streak anyway. It was a natural progression. If I just listened to my characters, they’d tell me what was happening.

That’s the approach I’m taking on my current novel. I have the outline in my head, of course, but I’m trusting the story. No poster board or sticky note scenes. It’s definitely more fun even if, as outline afficionados would have you believe, it takes me more time on the flip.

Follow your intuition and know this for sure–in writing, as in life, we are here to explore a diverse buffet of options. It’s how we grow. It’s how we discover. It’s how we create.

Writer Jealousy

It’s a topic not frequently chatted about openly among writers. I’ve been to an embarrassing number of writer conferences and not once have I seen it on the menu. But I’m willing to bet it’s touched every writer in some way at some time somewhere along the journey. And when nobody else is listening, my writer friends confirm my suspicions.

I think it starts in high school with the English teacher who passed out the A/A papers to all the other poor writing students who only dreamed of seeing perfect scores assigned to their deepest thoughts? These, I realize now, were the first unofficial reviews (classmates rolling their eyes) of a published work–the assignment–from my publisher–English teacher, Mrs. Jones. I recently dug through an old chest of papers from 30 years ago my mom had been saving in her storage shed and found some of those A/As (not all of them mine, mind you). Why did I save random papers for 30 years from classmates I can’t even remember? Because these were held up as the best. I remembered those feelings of inadequacy if mine wasn’t the chosen one. Pangs of jealousy.

But there was also an issue on the other side. If mine was the chosen one, that, too, was slightly awkward. It wasn’t as if the teacher passed out “The Perfect Paper” and everybody threw love and gratitude the author’s way for the great care she’d taken with her similes. No. More like, “Whatever. She probably copied it.” Still, that was certainly better than the alternative.

As an adult, I notice these concepts still alive in the lives and thoughts of writers. Who gets published. Who doesn’t. Who gets an agent. Who doesn’t. Who self-publishes. Who gets picked up by a publisher. Who leaves a publisher to self-publish. Who writes in a very commercial way (vs. literary) and makes lots of money–and makes lots of writers say, “But the writing is crap.” Good reviews. Crushing bad reviews. It never stops.

The theme has snaked its way in to night time drama. Have you seen “Girls” on HBO? Aspring writer Hannah is recently out of college as an English major. (Been there.) She does a brief internship at a publisher, but when real life calls, she needs to get a job that actually pays. In Season 1, Episode 9, she is not amused when the crappy writer in one of her classes (you know the one–there’s always one) publishes a book which is wildly successful. At the big book bash party which she forces herself to attend said writer comes up to Hannah with this really awkward, “How’s your writing going? I know it must be hard when it doesn’t come naturally to you. It just pours out of me.”

Hannah, according to her English professor, is a great writer, but horribly insecure about her writing. This insecurity seems to flow through writers like the ink through their printers. Internal critics abound. Hannah sulks, realizing she’s not disappointed with crappy writer girl, but rather with herself for her own unrealized dreams.

I’ve felt this–like everyone around me is winning and I’m not winning. One time, I went to a conference and agreed to be the carpool driver and pick people up, go early and help, and take people home. (Good karma, right?)  Both my riders won top honors at the conference. I won squat. That was defeating. I wanted to throw my manuscript in the trash. Wait–something more dramatic. Burn it at night in a fire in an abandoned field while sobbing.

Once I got myself together, here’s how I decided to look at that: it’s getting closer. It’s in my car, and it’s almost to the driver’s seat. “It” is recognition. Validation. Somebody likes what I wrote. Because in the end, that’s why we do it, right? We want people to like what we write.

But becoming a master writer takes time (10,000 hours, right Burl?) It takes dedication and consistency. It takes focus. And damned if you can’t buy these things at Rite Aid. You need to dig in deep, be willing to be vulnerable, honest, and observant. Oh, and, work really, really hard BEFORE (and by before I mean in case) you get paid. All this, and yet everyone I know wants to write a book.

Today, I work at appreciating exactly where I am when I’m there. I respect and admire the A/A novels I read and am grateful to learn how language can be used in a way that tells a story so well because that is my goal, too. I feel genuinely happy inside when my writer friends do well–sell a book, get a great review, get recognized in some way along the process–no matter what part of the process I’m in at the moment. I am grateful for my mentors and am grateful when I can mentor others. What I think this means is I’ve become more secure in my own abilities. I know what needs to be done to become a better writer, and I love the process–reading, writing, growing, rewriting, rewriting, crying, rewriting.

If you’re pre-published, enjoy the waiting room. It comes with its own set of perks. Appreciate when your friends have success. What you appreciate, appreciates, and before you know it, it’ll make its way to the driver’s seat.