11 Wednesday Sep 2013
Harlequin Enterprises is the biggest publisher of romance in the world, and when their Australian digital-first arm – Escape Publishing – puts out a blog to let writers know how publishers would prefer them to behave, it’s sensible to take notice!
Click on the link below to find out how to interact professionally with a publisher, and note the actions that sabotage a writer’s reputation so you can ensure you’re not doing any of them yourself.
30 Friday Aug 2013
For writers who aren’t already subscribed to my blog at louisecusack.com, my latest post is on…
The Guilty Pleasure of Solitary Writing
If you have a passion for creating stories but struggle to find time for them, take heart, inspiration is at hand!
06 Wednesday Mar 2013
Tags
behaviour, cats, contracts, entitlement, getting published, inspiration, motivation, passion, publishing, writers, writing
I’m cat sitting this week: two dear 18 year old ladies called Winnie and Millie, both of whom know and like me. Apparently these old girls have been together for most of their lives, and as they’re the same breed and size you’d think there would be some similarities in personality, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Winnie, the paler of the two, is like a timid little mouse. She makes no sounds at all, runs behind lounges when you want to pat her, hides out in the back shed during the day, and often misses out on food because she hangs back. Millie on the other hand is like a force of nature. She’s loud and proud! The darker of the two, she meows around the house in the middle of the night (in a Kathryn Hepburn voice) if she’s either lonely, hungry, bored or a bit achey. She stands beside the milk bowl until you put milk in it. She stands beside the sliding door to the upstairs deck and waits until you open it so she can sun herself – in both cases meowing if you don’t attend – and generally going through life with this amazing sense of entitlement.
I was having breakfast on the deck this morning, watching the two cats: Millie rolling around the deck admiring the ocean view, watching the Willie Wag Tails flit about, and warming her coat with some gentle morning rays. Then there was Winnie, hiding under a chair in the dining room, looking like she’d love a pat or a bask in the sun but not game to come out. What happened to her sense of entitlement? She’s just as deserving of love and sun and food as Millie. But she doesn’t get any because she’s scared.
As a writing mentor and author myself, I’ve met hundreds of writers, both published and unpublished, and I’d be an idiot if I hadn’t noticed patterns of behaviour in those who get published and those who don’t. Unfortunately it’s very much a Millie and Winnie situation. Talent is definitely not the deciding factor.
Millie writers are distinguished by a sense of entitlement. They stand at the milk dish or the sliding door expecting to get what they want (read: submitting to publishers, agents & competitions and believing in their right to be published). If they get a rejection or are ignored, they don’t walk away, they meow louder (submit to more competitions, agents and publishers) knowing that sooner or later their needs will be met. Millie writers will eventually get published.
Winnie writers, however, are usually crippled by self-doubt and hide behind talk about how hard things are, how few people are getting published, how fickle the industry is, how crappy their writing is. Winnie writers don’t submit their work confidently and regularly because there’s a soundtrack in their head that says What’s the point. and how can they become published if no-one sees their work?
Now I’m not suggesting that any old rubbish will be published if you only persist. Of course you have to learn your craft and continue improving. This conversation isn’t for beginner writers, it’s for those who should be published by now. Beyond talent and writing skill, how do you develop a sense of entitlement? Firstly, work out why you think you deserve to be published. Have you been writing for ten years and have worked damn hard? Are you innovative? Talented? Fabulous at editing? Stir your ego up. Get it on the job. Be a little grandiose in your own mind. Then write that down an put it where you can see it all the time. Mine is:
I’M THE MOST CREATIVE WRITER I KNOW
Purely my opinion but I believe it, and it gives me a sense of entitlement, particular in the fantasy genre. Of course I don’t usually advertise that because I don’t want people to think I’m a tosser. But I’m sharing it with you because defining why you deserve to be published will motivate you to write, to submit, to weather rejection, and to ultimately succeed in your career.
Don’t take no for an answer. When I was unpublished I had the Apollo 13 rescue statement pinned to my computer: Failure is not an option. Get cranky if that’s what it takes, but beyond the anger define why you damn well deserve to have a book with your name on the cover. Get a little Millie swagger happening (in your own mind, don’t share it with others or they’ll think you’re a tosser too!). You’ll be surprised by the results.
And if you have twenty minutes to sit with a coffee and watch this amazing TED talk, I promise it will show you practical ways to become more like Millie and less like Winnie…
01 Tuesday May 2012
Tags
Anne Lamott, books, cart before the horse, creativity, doing the work, first draft, getting published, literature, process of writing, procrastination, psychology, writers, writers block, writing
As a writing tutor, mentor and manuscript assessor, I meet a lot of writers who want to be published. Unfortunately a proportion of them spend far too much of their creative time putting the product (book) before the process (writing) by researching publishers and asking questions about how to submit a manuscript or how to publicise it through social networking and blogs, before they’ve even finished their first draft! This behaviour might sound grandiose, but in fact it’s a procrastination technique that’s very often caused by a lack of confidence.
The bottom line is that unless you’ve written several novels and are assured of your ability to complete the book and edit it into something publishable, my advice is to delay talking to publishers or agents until you have a finished product to talk about. I’m a big advocate of thinking about what you want (and not what you don’t want), but you have to be practical. You have to do the work. The bald truth is:
Writers write.
It sounds impossibly simplistic to say that, but it’s the most important thing I can teach writers. Write. Make notes about your characters, your settings, your plot, write character diaries, and when you have enough momentum, write scenes and chapters and push the story forward relentlessly until you get to The End, resisting all procrastination urges and any unhelpful perfectionism that’s telling you to go back and edit for grammar and flow, or stop to research that insignificant minor detail that will probably end up being edited out of the finished manuscript anyway. Keep the flow going. If you’re stuck on a plot point then leave a hole and leap forward because there’s a good chance that what you write next will help you discover the missing piece. If that doesn’t help, stop writing draft and go back to character diaries and backstory.
But stick with your characters and keep writing about them in whatever form you have to until you can get back to your draft. Rack up word count. Flex those writing muscles until you can’t stop thinking about your characters and they invade your mind while you’re hanging out washing or driving kids to school. Allow your first draft to come out imperfectly, so long as you capture its essence. As Anne Lamott says in her beautiful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.” and “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
Unfortunately most writers have the perfectionism gene, and from what I’ve seen it’s the #1 reason that we procrastinate. Subconsciously we get a dialogue happening that says, If I can’t do it perfectly on the first attempt, I mustn’t be a real writer. I’ve even had clients who’ve been so paralysed by perfectionism that they can’t write a thing, and all because they’re comparing their first draft to a book they bought and read the week before. As if there’s no such thing as editing! The reality is that a first draft is edited several times by the author before the manuscript is submitted, then several more times by the publishers. It’s like comparing a pile of self raising flour to a gourmet mudcake from a boutique bakery. Crazy. Yet writers do this to themselves. Completely unrealistic.
Concert pianists, in comparison, are well aware that they must practise the scales for years, getting their fingers nimble and laying down those pathways in the brain that say This finger placed there produces that sound. Writers are no different. We need to write so we can lay down pathways that say This word combination represents the experience I want to convey. Our job is to take our vision of the story and to translate that into words on a page which a reader’s imagination will then recreate into a similar vision in their own mind. It takes years of practice to get the right word combinations to create the right experience for the reader, and this is what’s called developing the craft of writing (completely different to natural talent). There’s no getting around it, you have to write a lot to develop your craft. And you have to stop beating yourself up if you don’t get it ‘right’ on the first draft. Remember: The art of writing is rewriting.
Sure, you need information (how-to books and workshops) so you know how to write, and you need feedback (manuscript assessment and critique partners) so you can hone your skills, but the vast majority of a writer’s time, no matter where they are in their career, should be spent doing the work: writing.
So my advice this week is to write. If you really do want to be a published author, you must set aside time to practise. And if perfectionism is a problem for you, watch this video and see if it inspires you to let it go, at least while you’re writing first draft!
Have you ever been plagued with self doubt? Thought your writing was utter rubbish (when it wasn’t)? I’d love to hear how you overcame it. (Link to Getting Published Part 1: Making the Commitment)05 Monday Dec 2011
Tags
books, focus, procrastination, protect the work, psychology, social networking, timing, writers, writing
Even writing mentors have their own mentor and I saw mine on the weekend. She cares about me and she also completely understands the fact that marketing books has changed enormously in the fifteen years I’ve been published, but the one piece of advice she gave me was the same thing she’s been saying to me for twenty years, “Louise, protect the work.”
What she means by this is do the book first, then everything else second. I’m an intelligent woman so you’d think I’d be able to do that. I’ve run my own business and also run businesses for other people. I’ve had a variety of jobs before I came to writing and time management has been easy. So I’m not sure whether it’s procrastination that sees me Tweeting when I could be writing, or simply the fact that there are some days when I can’t stick to my “No Internet until 2pm” rule because I’m expecting an email from someone. So at 7am I’m on the Internet downloading emails and invariably one will link to a website and before I know it I’m tweeting or blogging or linking to other people’s blogs or Retweeting. An hour or two can pass before I realise what’s happening. An hour or two when I could have been writing or editing. My friend Lisa at Twine Marketing has told me I need a timer beside my computer, set to 20 minutes. I think she’s right.
At the Romance Writers of Australia conference in August there were a variety of panels and workshops on how to promote your writing, and some authors said the only way they could be productive was to severely limit their Internet time. I remember US paranormal author Kelley Armstrong saying she didn’t blog. It was 600 words she could use in a story. She Tweeted instead and had Forums on her website where her readers could interact.
Successful authors need to find a way to “protect the work” by prioritising it. Because if there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that the best form of promotion is to write a good book. And the next best form of promotion is to write another good book. Everyone from agents to publishers to publicists will tell us that the work itself has to be what sells us, and that all the bells and whistles in the world won’t help you have a long and successful career if you can’t write well. So I know the book is paramount, but I also know that I can’t hide in a cave. So it’s easy to get distracted by people’s recommendations to Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or Paper.it because these things might eventually lessen the amount of time needed to manage social networking. But the trouble is that it takes time to check them out, time to set them up, and time to manage them. Then before you know it, something even better comes along (as well as more social networking media) and you’re off and running again.
It feels like that. Running. As if you have to catch something. When what I’d really prefer is to write an awesome book and have it act like a magnet, drawing people to me. So this is an ongoing dilemma for me. Not something I can readily solve. But I hear my mentor, and I try. Would love to hear other writers comments on how they work, what they do and what they don’t do to protect their work. I know I’m not alone.
04 Thursday Aug 2011
Posted in Writer's Self Sabotage
Tags
Welcome novelists (published and unpublished). I thought I’d begin with some painful honesty. I’m pretty sure I’m procrastinating. Ten thousand words away from the end of a novel is an excruciating time for me, and I hate to let my characters go. So instead of typing until I get to The End, I’m here setting up a new blog. My first subject is hiding in plain sight – procrastination, and how it shoots you in the foot.
Almost a decade of mentoring other writers has introduced me to many versions of procrastination:
Home duties: spring cleaning, re-ordering cupboards, replanting garden beds (when I start on the oven I’m at Def-con 2)
Pretend writing work: unnecessary correspondence/promotion, too much researching, hours on social networking, or otherwise crossing the boundary of how much time you normally allow yourself for ancillary writing tasks
Mr/Ms Helpful: Agreeing to help friends/school/family when you don’t need to
Life changes:Gym membership, new job that involves moving house, launching into internet dating, proposing to your long time partner, deciding it’s time to have kids
Basically anything out of your ordinary routine of work/life balance (assuming you have one). Activities mentioned above are a drop in the bucket. There are thousands of ways to procrastinate, and yet surprisingly, only two causes – fear of success or fear of failure.
Fear of failure is easy to identify, because most of us have it. Rare is the author who’s racing to send their manuscript off and have it possibly rejected. It’s only those of us handing in contracted books who feel any measure of certainty, and even then we might be up for revisions. But why, I hear you asking, would anyone fear success? Why indeed, but I can confidently assure you it’s widespread.
I remember a time before my first novel was published, watching the Mel Gibson movie Ransom and feeling sick. All my fantasies of being a “well respected, wealthy, International best-selling author” were suddenly in question. Did I want to be richer than Stephen King if it meant someone might kidnap one of my precious children? I don’t think so! And you might imagine this sort of thing is easily rationalised and dealt with on an intellectual level, but so often what the head knows and what the heart feels are two completely different things. So while I knew intellectually I could keep my children safe, my ever-fearful mother’s heart wasn’t convinced. Easily identified now, but that shot me in the foot for a good couple of years, so every time I’m tempted to procrastinate, I ask myself “What am I scared of?”, and I’m asking myself that right now.
While I’m here, I’m also asking you. If you’re not where you want to be, if you’re procrastinating or shooting yourself in the foot in other ways, ask yourself, “What am I scared of? What aspect of my dream author life doesn’t sit as comfortably as the adulation of readers, the fat bank balance and the satisfaction of creating stories?”
There’s something there. There’s always something there. Finding it, facing it and defusing it is how we learn and grow.
Good luck with your self discovery. Let me know how you fare.
