Tag Archives: creativity

Procrastination. Don’t go there.

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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Writers want to write. Our heads explode if we don’t (or other messy things happen, trust me). But for some reason, when we get time to devote to our passion, this often happens:

WRiteTheBookWhat’s the answer?

Set an appointment.

Every day at an appointed time, work on your novel. If you’re writing draft and are suddenly not sure what to actually write, go back to your plot and character notes and do some What If-ing with a notepad to get back on track.

Half an hour a day can accomplish one page of 300 words. If you can do that five days a week for 50 weeks of the year (take a fortnight’s holiday on me!) you can write a 250 page manuscript of 75,000 words.

Most people fail to finish a novel because they waste time editing the opening. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard an unpublished writer say “I can’t go on unless the beginning is perfect!” I’d be holidaying in the Seychelles right now! Published writers keep writing until they get to The End, and then they edit.

So, my “take homes” for today are:

  1. Write every day
  2. Don’t start editing until you’ve finished the book in draft

Arguments, insights, tweaks? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

A short dream workshop with Sophie Masson

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

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I’m excited to be inviting Aussie fantasy author Sophie Masson to share some writing tips with us today. But first a little about Sophie:

Sophie portrait blue and redBorn in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in Australia and France, Sophie Masson is the award-winning author of more than 50 novels for readers of all ages, published in Australia and many other countries. Her adult novels include the popular historical fantasy trilogy, Forest of Dreams (Random House Australia). Sophie has always had a great interest in Russian myth and history, an interest reflected in several of her books for younger readers. Her latest Fiction novel is TRINITY: The Koldun Code (Book One)

Sophie is also a teacher of writing, and her book By the Book: Tips of the Trade for Writers is full of practical and entertaining tips on the craft, business and inspirations of writing. From using your dreams to craft great fiction, to writing dream outlines to attract the attention of publishers, from knowing how to make the most of literary festivals to understanding how magical characters tick, from coping with reviews to being inspired by fairy tales, By the Book is bursting with practical, entertaining and illuminating tips on the writing life. Written by an author whose career spans more than twenty years and more than fifty books published, this book offers advice for writers both new, and not so new.

Sophie has very kindly offered to share an extract from the book:

A short dream workshop by Sophie Masson

From time immemorial, human beings have dreamed–every night we go into what one of my sons’ friends once referred to as ‘those brilliant eight hours of free entertainment.’ And from time immemorial, writers have used images or scenes from dreams, or entire dreams, to enrich and expand their creative work in waking life. I’m certainly no exception. My night-imagination has always enriched my day-imagination. Several of my short stories have started directly as dreams, for example, ‘Restless’, a chilling ghost story I wrote not long ago, began as a really creepy and unforgettable nightmare. Another disturbing story, ‘The Spanish Wife’, a vampire story set in the 1930’s, started as a dream in which someone said, very clearly, ‘No-one took any notice of him till he brought home a Spanish wife,’ and that turned into the very first sentence of the short story. Images and scenes from dreams have also gone into my novels, and in one case, a very vivid and intriguing dream inspired an entire six-book children’s fantasy series of mine, the Thomas Trew series. It’s not always fantasy or supernatural stories that have sprung out of dream-compost for me, though; everything from family stories to thrillers to historical novels has benefited from it.

Over the years, I’ve learned quite a few techniques on how to best use vivid, scary, tantalising or intriguing dream sequences in my writing, and how to investigate them for best effects. Here’s a short workshop based on some of the techniques I’ve developed over the years:

*Think of a dream you’ve had. Any dream. It doesn’t have to be anything exciting or unusual. Go back over the dream-scenes, as if you were a police witness being asked to remember an event. Who was in it? What did they look like? What were they wearing?

Were they people you knew or strangers? Were there any animals in it? What sort? What was the setting like? Indoors, outdoors? What could you see? Smell? Touch? Hear? Taste even? What were you in it—a participant, a helpless observer, a godlike figure?

*If you did something supernatural, like flying, what did it feel like, physically? (I’ve often had flying dreams and in them I feel a strong pull in the chest, arms stretching. Once I even woke up with what felt like an actual slight ache in the arm muscles—very spooky indeed!)

*Were there any machines in your dream? If so, what sort?

*Did anyone speak, and if so what did they say? Many dreams in my experience are like silent movies, with thought-subtitles and maybe some music, but a few have dialogue, even if it’s often minimalistic and quite enigmatic.

* Knowledge: Do you know why you were in that particular place, at that time? If you had some supernatural ability, did you know why? If there are interesting objects or gadgets in the setting of your dream, do you know what they can do, and why, and who made or used them? Backstory is very often missing in dreams, but is very important in a story, even if you only spend a few lines on it.

*Now, once you’ve written down as many descriptive details as you can about what was there in the dream, think about what wasn’t there, and write that down. While you were dreaming, did you know for instance why you or other people were doing things(even if it was a kind of weird dream-logic?) Did you understand the sequence of events? Was there a sense the dream was moving towards some conclusion, or just randomly jumping about? Motive, continuity and plot—all very important in actual stories—are often missing from dreams.

*Think of your own self in the dream, however you appeared in it: did you recognise yourself? Did you feel it was fully you or something that was only partly you, or a stranger? Did characters behave randomly? Character development is usually absent in dreams too though it very much needs to be present in a story.

*What about the setting? Were there things missing: for instance, if you were in a house, were there doors? Windows? Furniture? If you were outside, was anything odd: for instance trees growing upside down, or a wall of water appearing out of nowhere?

*Now put those two things together—the things that were there, the ones that weren’t—and you have the beginnings of a real story framework, where the wild imagination of the night and the more disciplined one of the day cross-fertilise and turn into something amazing and wonderful.

bythebookcoversmall_1Thanks Sophie! I’m so looking forward to putting these tips into action. If you’d like to buy a copy of By the Book by Sophie Masson, you can source it here:

Australian Society of Authors or via Amazon if you have a kindle eReader.

You can find Sophie Masson here: Website  Facebook  Twitter

And if you’ve every turned a dream into a story (as I know Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight) I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Happy writing!

Prioritizing your Passions

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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As a writing mentor, I’ve heard plenty of clients say they “just can’t find time” to fulfill their creative dreams and write a book or even finish a short story. In the real world, aspiring writers might need to work a forty hour week to pay the bills, or fill their day caring for their family. That doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy to invest in what really lights them up.

If this sounds like you, and you’re wondering how you can carve out time for your own dreams when everyone else wants a piece of you, grab a coffee and watch this 5 minute video from the fabulously inspiring and vivacious Marie Forleo, on how to prioritize what’s really important to you:

Do you have a favorite way to prioritize your dreams and ambitions? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below:

Transition: you’re not delivering a baby, you’re writing a book

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve had a revelation, and it’s going to resonate with mothers who remember that totally confusing moment during delivery called transition. It comes before you’re ready to push, and it feels like your brain just isn’t connecting with your body properly. You’re uncomfortable and confused and restless, but aren’t sure how or where to move. At this point, even the most circumspect woman can swear or grunt or do things that don’t seem to be under her control.

Believe it or not, for some writers there is a moment in drafting the story that feels like transition. I had one today. Instead of sitting quietly and writing, racking up word count, I kept getting up and going into the kitchen, not knowing why, making coffee I didn’t want, going out and checking if the washing was dry. I even found myself in the front garden with scissors, apparently getting flowers for the house. I have no idea why.

I am now in the study with the door shut (to keep myself in) and instead of writing draft I’m writing to you. But I didn’t want to lose the epiphany.

I’ve suddenly realized that this moment in the story that I’m about to ‘birth’ is what hangs everything together, and I’m just about to get it. If it was a conversation, I’d say, It’s on the tip of my tongue. I can’t see the words yet, or the actions my character is about to take, but they’re momentous. I’ve suddenly realized the whole book turns on this scene, and I had no idea until I got into it. Intellectually, nothing has changed. The hero still knows he’s going to have to kill the heroine to save his world, and he’s determined not to fall in love with her. They’re about to have sex for the first time and he wants it to be bad for her so she won’t like him, so there’s no chance she’ll get affectionate, because that’s his best chance for keeping her at arms’ length emotionally.

As the author, I knew all that and so did my hero. What I didn’t know, what’s clear to me now, is that the way he treats her when they make love will change everything between them. Not the plot. That will play out as relentlessly as duty commands for them both. Not even the romance which is also destined to follow a certain course because of their attraction and respect for each other. What will change is the dynamic between them, the nuanced and very human relationship that two people form when their lives are dependent on each other and things are complicated!

As the author, I’ve waited for this moment and dreaded it from page one. The characters in this novel are more ‘alive’ than any I’ve written in the past, and while part of me is elated to be pushing them into dangerous territory, another part of me dreads that I won’t be able to keep them who they are meant to be, who they were ‘born’ in my mind to be.

My revelation was realizing this was exactly the same way I felt before each of my children were born – dread and unutterable thrill warring inside me, pulling my mind one way and my body another.

SitAndStayI know I have said “Sit and stay!” in the past, encouraging writers to develop a consistent writing routine by showing up and being ready for the story to download through their fingers. But there are also times when you simply can’t stay, when the turbulence shows you that a story’s pivotal moment is about to be born.

Respect that. Give it the space it needs. Grunt if you need to. Swear. Cut flowers. Put the kettle on three times and forget to get out the coffee cup. At some point that ‘uncomfortable in my body’ sensation it will funnel into an imperative. The need to push.

The need to write.

Mine’s here now. I’m off! Wish me luck…

Motivation + Time = Maximum Productivity

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’ve chatted to writers all year, and some have had a fabulous 2013. Some, not so great. One of the things I’ve noticed (not just this year, but every year) is that those writers who have a strong motivation to write, seem to get more done.

It sounds like a no brainer. If you’re dieting for no good reason, mud cake looks good. If your wedding is in three weeks (or your book launch) and you need to fit into that special dress, carrot sticks are the new chocolate.

So motivation – for characters and for writers – is key. And at the start of a story when the idea is fresh and the potential sales appear JK Rowling-ish, delusions of grandeur can take you far. As a mentor, I never knock writers off their lofty fantasy pedestals. It motivates them to get up early and work late (creating the time factor of the equation all by themselves). In fact, I encourage writers to pick a fantasy moment: walking the red carpet, getting a big advance payment in the mail, opening the box full of advance copies of their book and loving the cover, and then milking that fantasy for five minutes every day, wringing every bit of happy/ relieved/ satisfied/ thrilled emotion they can out of it. That builds motivation too.

The reality may end up looking like this:

The Bentley you thought you'd be buying with your first advance

The Bentley you thought you’d be buying with your first advance

Here Bentley, Here, Bentley. Good dog!

Here Bentley, Here, Bentley. Good dog!

So reality can dent your confidence, and therefore your motivation. How do you pick yourself up when you’ve had rejection in the past, you’ve lost perspective on your story, and you’re starting to doubt that it will ever get published, and if it does, that anyone will bother to read/ like it? Perhaps life itself has dealt you a crap year and those muddy glasses are making everything look terrible, including your writing.

Dear Manuscript, you look like this...

Dear Manuscript, you look like this…

Sometimes you have to start back at bedrock and just work at making yourself happy. My experience as a mentor has shown me that happy writers are productive writers and I reject the cliché that starving/troubled artists write the best work. We all experience life’s ugly moments. Some writers unfortunately have had more pain than others. And yes we do draw on memories of those dark times to bring our stories vividly to life. But we don’t have to be experiencing that pain now to be writing our best. We simply need to be good at remembering what it felt like, and luckily for us, really bad moments seem to be engraved in our memories!

Publishers and agents want to work with productive writers, those who can create saleable novels year in, year out, building readership and thereby sales and profits for all. If you can get happy and stay happy, you’ll have your best shot at being that author. The delightful side-effect is that you’ll also be a fab person to be around, and family and friends will stop doing this when you walk in the room:

Has she made her word count? Is her eye twitching. For godsakes, Marg, whatever you do, don't mention the manuscript.

Has she made her word count? Is her eye twitching? I can’t look.

So here’s my tip for the end of the year, to wash away any unpleasantness from 2013 and set yourself up for a cracker super-happy ultra-productive 2014. Make up a list like mine (takes five minutes in Microsoft Word) and sit down with a pen and paper and fill it in. Honestly, I had thirty done in ten minutes:

One hundred fabulous memories from 2013As you remember each fabulous thing that’s happened to you in the year, no matter how small, it will trigger happy feelings, and before you know it you’ll be glass half full instead of glass half empty about everything, writing included. My list included everyday things like:

  • Standing on the verandah watching a thunderstorm
  • Eating a perfect lime slushy on that really hot afternoon
  • Watching the Aussies win the Ashes on tv (cricket, for those who don’t know)
  • Laughing at the cat that time he rolled in his sleep and fell off the chair
  • Watching Meg’s eyes light up when she talked about her new home

I also included some personal peak moments that really meant something to me. So you get the idea. Fill up the list, really feel the emotions, reliving all their splendor as you write, then make time with your morning coffee each day to have a glance through it again and let the happy memories make you smile.

I pinky-promise it will help you let go of the negativity that weighs you down and squashes your creative inspiration. Then you’ll be all set up for a fabulously successful, productive, satisfying and fun 2014.

Go for it!

Getting Published Part 2: Doing the Work

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Writer's Self Sabotage

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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)

The hidden value of critiquing

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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What can you do if your manuscript has a problem you can’t pin down?  Simple.  Critique someone else’s.

The benefit might not seem obvious, especially when you’re busy and it feels like you’re wasting time helping someone else, but trust me, you’re helping yourself.  Writers are notorious for not being able to edit their own work successfully (let’s face it, that’s why publishing houses pay editors to work on our stories).  But what you might not know is that the easiest way to find your own hidden problems is through uncovering the flaws in someone else’s story.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been doing a manuscript assessment for a client and have been typing on their report something along the lines of “There isn’t enough tension in this scene.  The main character should have overheard that conversation so they could be stressing about the danger coming up.  Then they might make mistakes because of their fear and that would make things even worse for them.”

Remember, Rule Number One for plotting is “Make things worse for your characters.”

So at the point that I’m typing something into a report, I’ve often have a light bulb moment and realised that whatever I’m typing is exactly what’s wrong with a section of my own manuscript that doesn’t feel right.  Maybe I’ve got a character who doesn’t realise the danger that’s coming up, and things would be worse for them if they did.   Alongside this revelation I might even get a flash of insight into how I could fix that, but before you start worrying, its never a ‘copy what I’ve just suggested to the client’ fix.  My subconscious has far too many ideas of its own for that to ever happen, and the fix has to be organic to my own story and believable for the characters who inhabit it.  So a copy fix would never work.  But finding the source of the problem.  That’s gold.

‘Mirroring’ is a concept as old as the Vedic scriptures and as new as modern psychology, where you have an emotional reaction to the trait in others that you can’t see in yourself.  It works with editing as well.  I used to think my light bulb moments were the result of The Universe looking after me, attracting manuscripts that had the same problems I needed to address in my own.  But now I think it’s the work of my subconscious mind.  I find lots of ‘areas for improvement’ in manuscripts I assess, and only occasionally have light-bulb moments, so that tells me that my subconscious is filtering, looking for ways to help me, and I like that!  A lot of bad things are said about the subconscious mind, and many people fear their unconscious beliefs and attitudes are influencing their behaviour.

Maybe that’s true, but there’s also a positive side.  For a writer the subconscious is the seat of creativity.  It’s the magical, thrilling swirl of everything you’ve ever seen or heard or smelt or touched or tasted, every crazy fantasy, every naughty impulse, every skin-bursting moment of bliss.  It’s the left hand of the damned and the kiss of a fairy princess.  It’s the pure adoration of a mother who holds her baby for the first time, and the gut-wrenching grief of loved one’s death.  Every moment of your life is witnessed by this amazing storehouse, and for those of us who create story it’s the pantry where we select the ingredients for our banquet, either with a recipe as plotters do, or using intuition if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer.

Critiquing is another way you can access the intuition/subconscious realm and hone in on your hidden weaknesses.  It works every time for me.  Give it a try.  At the very least you’ve helped someone else.  And remember when critiquing that the rule is to point out two great things for every one ‘area of improvement’, and don’t put on your bossy boots.  It’s just your opinion, after all.  But do remember to have a notebook beside you for jotting down insights about your own work.

You’ll be surprised.

I promise.

Writing in the zone

08 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’m writing in the middle of a thunderstorm.  There’s a coconut palm between me and the thrashing grey ocean, and huge heavy branches are tearing off and crashing to the ground.  Coconut are thudding to earth.  And I’m in my study, tapping on my keyboard, lost in another world.  The wilder the wind gets, the more my characters connect with what’s happening to them, as if my anxiety level about damage is leaking into their reality, affecting their nerves.  And things are happening in the story that might not be happening if I was writing on a tranquil day with a sparkly blue ocean and a Simpson’s blue sky.

What am I to make of that?

I’m a seat of the pants writer so I don’t have a plot to follow.  I have a thread of connection between myself and the characters who’ve chosen me to tell their story.  Some days the connection is so tight I feel as if I am them.  Some days it’s a slippery invisible strand I can only brush against in frustrating glimpses.  But my world is connected to their world.  My emotions are connected to their emotions.  When I listen to Rachmaninoff I “see” their world more clearly.  I have no idea why.  I just do.  So I feel my way through their world, using my intuition and my attention and my emotions to coax their story into my mind and through that into my fingers and onto the screen.

It’s more an act of faith than a carefully crafted technique.  It teaches me to listen and to feel.  And sometimes to remember.  I haven’t always connected to characters through my own stories.  I began connecting with other people’s characters. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was a landmark book for me.  It had everything I’d ever wanted to read in a novel: action, adventure, characters thrust into a strange new world (a continuing theme in my own writing), a love story, and a young central character whose morality was above question, yet whose circumstances tested that morality at every turn.  Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” was the book that gave the sub-genre a name.  It also taught me that I was selecting books because I wanted to read about a character who saw the world with fresh eyes.  I still do.  And the Twilight series affected me profoundly in ways I’m not yet able to articulate.  Bella was a stranger in a very strange land, seeing her own world anew through Edward’s eyes.  That much is clear, but why I felt so ‘connected’ to her world and her troubled love story is still a mystery to me, as I imagine it is to a lot of readers.  But I enjoyed the books immensely.  In all the novels that have affected me profoundly I’ve connected with the main character and felt their journey.

It’s what I want to do for readers of my own novels, and that can only be achieved if I can connect with them first.  So while they have their storm of emotions to deal with, I have a real-life storm happening, and I’m more grateful than I can say for the synchronicity that brought me turbulence at the time when my characters needed it.

Again with the FAITH, but when you have it rewarded again and again it teaches you to trust in it.

A significant day

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Ramble

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Had one of those days yesterday you wait a decade for.  I signed a three book contract with Pan MacMillan’s digital publishing arm Momentum Books.  Early next year they’re re-releasing my first fantasy trilogy “Shadow Through Time” into a worldwide market.  My first eBooks.  My first time as an International author.

Back in 2001 when those novels were first released as print books into the Australian territories, eBooks were a novelty and I had no idea that a decade later the world would be awash with eReaders, and that you could walk into BigW and buy a Kindle.  Of course I’d dreamt of an International readership.  I think most authors do.  But the print books hadn’t sold overseas, and after a while they went out of print.

Am I allowed to give myself credit for never giving up on them?  For loving those characters and knowing that readers who’d never met them would love them too?  I’m sure you’ll give me permission for that.  In a way this deal is like being a mother and watching your child fulfil their potential, because it’s painful for a writer (or a mother) to give up on people they’ve created, and it usually only happens when it hurts too much to hang on.  Here I can thank my mother for my perseverance.  From a young age I saw her dealing with our out-there family and I realised she simply would not allow herself to give up on a child, no matter how badly they might behave, how they might disappoint her or not live up to her expectations.  I grew up with the example that you love them still, dammit!  And you hope.

So I loved my characters.  And I hoped.  And I dreamed.  I kept dog-eared printouts of fan emails, and when I felt low I’d read them and think, “These guys loved my characters.  It’s not fair to give up on them.”  I shared my despairs and my moments of inspiration and elation with my writing buddies while I wrote more books and tried to get them published, and I weathered the well meaning inquiries of family and friends wondering “Whatever happened to those books?  And when are new ones coming out?”

Well now I can answer that question.  The trilogy that was so well received in Australia is about to step onto the world stage and within six months I’ll be getting fan emails from readers in countries I’ve never even been to.  Exciting doesn’t begin to describe, and the books I’ve written in between are now lined up ready to slot into various publishing markets.  In a weird way it’s like water behind a dam wall.  It just takes one breach to let everything behind it flow out.

So yesterday was significant for me.  Not just because I signed a contract for the first time in a decade, but because it taught me probably the most valuable lesson in my life so far: faith is rewarded.

Just that.

Never give up.

Writers, happy for no reason

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’m having one of those rare Squee! days where the sun is shining, the ocean is sparkling, a cool breeze is caressing my skin, the birds are singing and even the plants seem happy.  Stupid grin.  Singing.  The whole Disney deal.  And instead of leaving it alone and just enjoying the moment (or the day if it lasts that long) I have to know what made it happen, because it’s been a very ordinary morning – just editing draft, liking a particular scene I’d written and thinking there wasn’t much to change.  But 9am when I got up I had a spring in my step, was singing on the way to Marcello (my Italian coffee machine), and feeling happy.

Seemingly for no good reason.  My agent hadn’t rung me to say I had a new contract.  I hadn’t won any awards or even received a fan email (which is one of my favourite things, right behind whiskers on kittens).  So I made a coffee, put a load of washing on and went back upstairs to the computer, and by the time I got there I was singing.  “It’s such a perfect day . . .” (Lou Reed), but really channelling the whole Julie Andrews thing.  Surprisingly, unaccountably happy.

All I’d been doing was the same thing that writers do every day.  Putting words together.  Pulling them apart and changing them around.  Swapping some.  Deleting others.  Reading them aloud and changing them again.  But today it made me feel good.  Like a “real writer”, which is weird when I’ve had three books published.  However I know for a fact that seeing my name on the cover of a book doesn’t give me the same stupid grin that crafting a near-perfect scene does.  In fact, contracts, public appearances, reviews, even fan emails all come packaged with performance expectation and anxiety, no matter how many times I’ve delivered more than was expected of me in the past.  They’re exciting, but they’re also marginally scary.  There’s nothing of the pure happiness I feel today in them.

So now I suspect that it’s doing the work, not getting the accolades, that creates happy, and it reminds me of a blog post I read recently by an author I greatly respect: Kim Wilkins who also writes as Kimberley Freeman.

She called her post “The Romance of Work” and in it she says:  When I was a little girl, I read a book that would affect me profoundly. It was Gladys Malvern’s The Dancing Star, first published in 1944, an account of the life of Anna Pavlova, written for children… But it wasn’t the stuff about ballet that affected me so deeply, it was the stuff about work. According to the book, Anna Pavlova was obsessed with dancing. She practised all the time. She did it until her toes bled and she just. kept. going. This notion, that one could work so hard and push through barriers of extreme discomfort, really took hold of my imagination. From that moment on, I understood the incredible romance of work: diligent hours spent on something that mattered to make an outcome appear in the world.

Not only for me, but for a lot of writers, I think that’s the key to happy: “Diligent hours spent on something that mattered to make an outcome appear in the world.”

Doesn’t sound heroic when you say it like that, but devoting a year of your life to a novel you’re not sure will work is an act of faith, and it’s nice to think that the faith is rewarded with moments of pure joy.

That’s definitely something worth singing about.