Tag: apprentice authors

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Craft

Battling Writer’s Block

Battling Writer’s Block

6 Tips and 1 Big Secret

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Before we address your writer’s block, we need to consider what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you do.

More specifically, where do you want your career to go?

If you are currently at the hobbyist level, meaning you love writing for fun and have these characters you enjoy working with, that’s great. Maybe you make maps and character drawings and post them on your favorite website. But today, you’re stuck, and you’re looking up how to fight writer’s block.

Or are you are a writer who fully intends to get paid for your work? We have to address writer’s block from a differently if so.

Here’s the reality:

If you are someone who writes fiction to make money, you don’t get writer’s block.

You don’t have the luxury of writer’s block. Whether you are going the traditional route, the indie route, or hybrid, you’re doing it at a professional level in exchange for funds. You are a professional writer.

You may experience “project” block, as my friend Michael Stackpole says. You might be working on a project and get stuck for a moment.

The solution? Go to another project.

Most of my writer friends in the indie world have more than one project going at any one time. Maybe your urban fantasy isn’t working for you this morning, so you shift to your YA romance. For those in traditional publishing, if you’re doing a book a year, you still probably have more than one project going because you don’t know which one will sell.

In any case, you’re a professional. You are expected to craft fiction for your audience. There’s no time for writer’s block.

I recently wrote a 90,000-word novel in three months. The first month was for research and outlining. The other two months were for writing. Almost every day, I got up, looked at where I was, figured out what part of the story I was in, and dove in. I wrote 2,000 to 3,000 words a day.

And I followed an outline.

When you’ve crafted a really good outline, you don’t get writer’s block. You’ve already prevented it by spending the time up front to test your story.

You might get tired, which is different. Physical or personal setbacks are not writer’s block.

When under contract for that novel, I overwrote as much as I could. That way, I built in time for unforeseen events. I wrote as much as I could when I was in “the zone.”

I beat my deadline by a week.

Let’s talk about the more fun side: What if you’re working on something as a hobbyist, enthusiast, or apprentice? When you’re stuck, here’s what I recommend.

Get out of your space.

You probably have a space that you typically write in. If the routine isn’t working for you, you need somewhere new. Go to a library, a park, a coffee shop, or even a different room in your home. Change your visual and sensory perspective to kickstart your creativity.

Get to the good scene.

There’s no rule that says you have to write in order. Write what excites you the most. If you find some scenes you dread writing, maybe those scenes should not be in the story.

Engage with your favorite media.

Watching favorite movies, reading favorite books, listening to favorite music, or reading poetry can be really good for breaking up a solid logjam in writer’s block. But don’t mindless scroll online. Be deliberate in your engagement. Choose media that you truly love.

Your Voice was influenced by movies, by media, by songs, by other things that you’ve read. So invest back into those. Go read your favorite book. Take an hour, make your favorite food, sit in your comfy chair and get back into the thing that led you to today.

Other authors, other storytellers, guided you to today. Revisit them, hang out with them, read them, watch them.

Which is not the same thing as, “Well, Tom said take a couple hours…” and look at YouTube.

No, no, no, no.

Don’t go to YouTube. Don’t go to TikTok. Don’t go to any of these places. Don’t mindlessly scroll and call it work. That’s not work. You know it and I know it. I’m talking about the deliberate, intentional act of taking an hour or two hours to relax, get back in touch with your self, get back in touch with your heroes, your mentors, and then see how the scene progresses.

Go outside.

A ten-minute walk or just being outside can change your mindset. Engage with your surroundings deeply, using all your senses. Be safe, obviously. But get out. Get out and get moving. A ten minute walk. A 30 minute walk can change all kinds of things.

Put your phone away. Don’t put your earbuds in. Just walk as you’re walking.

Or if you can’t walk for any reason, be outside and just sit. But as you’re sitting or as you’re walking, notice and take note of the things around you. But dive deep! Don’t just look at the pretty flowers. Stop. Literally smell those roses. Smell the snapdragons. Touch them. What’s it feel like? What does it remind you of? Listen to everything.

If you break off a twig from a tree,  what does that sound like? What is the texture of that little stick that you just broke off? What does it smell like?

Get that stuff into your brain. Don’t worry about your book. Don’t worry about the scene. Just get those sensory things going. I’m confident that when you sit back down, you will find a new sort of freshness to the writing.

Write something else.

If you’re stuck, work on another project or take one of your characters and put them in a new, challenging situation. This can reveal new aspects of your characters and invigorate your creativity.

If you don’t have another project on on the back burner, take one of your characters from this current project and put them in a locked concrete room with some of their character, either one of yours or a character that you like from literature or movies

Lock them in this room and let them start talking to each other and just see what happens. One of my favorite stories about this, about breaking writer’s block, is I took a 17 year old girl who was an artist from my novel ZERO. I put her in a room with a 30 year old space pirate and locked them in a concrete bunker just to see what would happen.

You’re never going to read that scene, because it’s never going to be published . It was just a three-page thing that I wrote really quickly. But the dialogue revealed so much about both of those characters that there are still little elements of that scene in those two books. It’s weird, but it works. Just throw them in a room, see what happens.

Remember, if you’re a professional, you need to think about writer’s block differently. If you’re just a hobbyist, don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get there. But if you’re at the professional level or planning to be, your approach to getting through writer’s block will change because your livelihood depends on it.

I hope some of this is helpful. Leave me questions or comments. I’m just glad you’re here, and we’ll do this again soon. Take care.

If you found this article helpful, may I point you to STORYCRAFT. Ten hours of hanging out with two successful hybrid authors, talking about everything from story structure, to approaching agents and dealing with traditional contracts, to the highs and lows of indie pub. Check it out: https://tomleveen.store/b/storycraft

Categories
Craft

How To Deal With the Frustrations of Writing

How do you deal with some of the frustrations that come with being a writer?

We suffer beneath many frustrations. There’s the frustration writers block. There’s the frustration of not having enough time to do the work we really want to do. Of course, the ultimate frustration is not having our work published, or perhaps worse: having a published book, but no one’s buying.

I’ve dealt with, and continue to deal with, all of these frustrations (and many others). After wrestling with these frustrations myself—in my own mind, on paper, wandering around the kitchen at 2 AM speaking into my phone—there is one solution that continues to come to mind. It is great and wonderful and terrible in its simplicity:

Keep writing.

I know. That’s probably the most . . . well, frustrating answer I could I have given to you or me. There are plenty of other actionable items we could add to this list: you could take courses, or spend money on Facebook ads for your book, for example. You can read books and articles like this one, and watch YouTube videos about any topic under the sun related to your frustrations as a writer. God knows I have.

But the one solution that I keep coming back to is that I must write.

Gary Vaynerchuk points out that if you really want success with the thing you love to do, design a process you love. There are no guarantees in any pursuit, whether that’s law, medicine, creative arts, financial work, you name it. So, you’d better come up with a process that you really enjoy. I really enjoy the process of writing novels. All of those frustrations I listed at the top of this article are still true—sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis all at once. But I still love the process of writing.

If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you probably do, too.

With no guarantee of financial or emotional success, how do you deal with all of those frustrations? You keep writing. You write because, as Stephen King points out, to not write is death. More than once in the last decade, I have considered quitting altogether. I have thought about going back to school, getting a graduate degree . . . “I’m just going to work full-time at a library or somewhere.” (That’s not a bad gig by the way.)

The problem is, the thought of never writing another word of fiction chills my heart. I already know that I may never ever publish with a New York publisher ever again. But in this day and age, there is no excuse not to write the things that we love and share them with the world. The internet has utterly and forever changed publishing. Find your audience, and you will be fine.

I am not trying to diminish the size or weight of those three frustrations, or the many other frustrations I didn’t even list. They are real. They hurt sometimes. They can cause distress. But if you are a writer, the only way forward is to keep writing. Perhaps we need to try a new genre, or a new format. Maybe it’s time to take a class in poetry, or essay writing, or creative nonfiction. I have taken these classes and gotten a lot out of them. More than once, they’ve reignited my desire to continue writing. I am also not dismissing all of those videos and courses I mentioned. They can be very powerful as motivators, or to inspire us to try something new and different.

Through it all, we must write. We must not just merely suffer anxiety, but rather be anxious to set forth to tell our stories.

If we cannot or will not do that, then the frustrations have won. Let’s not give them the satisfaction.

I say this at the end of most of my articles and posts about writing, but today, it takes on a slightly more serious meaning:

Keep. Writing.

I mean it.

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Uncategorized

7 Things I’ve Learned Since Publication of my First Novel

I’ve learned approximately 11.6 billion things since my first novel was published. Here instead are the biggies apprentice authors should know.

 

  1. Adore booksellers.

 

Most aspiring novelists don’t grasp how instrumental hand-selling at brick and mortar bookstores is to their career. Booksellers, if they like your book, will push it at checkout. (It’s called “hand selling” and I’ve seen it in action. These folks are uh-mazing.) They are asked their opinions all day by people coming to the store for one purpose: to buy books. Treat booksellers—from district managers to cashiers—like emissaries of the One True God, because as far as your career goes, they just might be. Don’t kiss up or be a boor (or bore); be yourself, but be your best self.

Also–buy from their stores and urge others to do so.

 

This advice applies to trad and indie authors alike. You want bookstores on your side.

 

  1. Make appearances. Free. At first.

 

Hand in hand with publishing YA and MG novels in particular are school and library appearances. Accept every opportunity to present your book or teach a class.

 

For free. Other authors disagree with me on this, and they are right to an extent.

 

The argument goes like this:  Every hour you spend not writing is potentially lost income. Make an English teacher happy, however, and you’ve earned a lifetime fan, with potential “little” fans coming in each year. Word of mouth may be more valuable than an appearance honorarium. My novels have ended up in classroom curricula after school visits, and you know what that means? Book sales.

 

Getting paid for school visits is comes toward the middle part of a career. For a first novel, it’s free advertising and PR. Books two, three, or four may be another story.

 

Local bookstores often can arrange school visits, and have a set amount of books the school must purchase; say, 10 to 25 copies. You may not walk away with cash in hand, but you just sold ten or more copies, and many potential fans—who blog and tweet about books and authors—just met you face to face. You can’t top that.

 

  1. Calm down.

 

Nothing moves more slowly than waiting to hear from an agent or editor. I lost many hours my first year in being overwrought, overdramatic, and overwhelmed by the fact that I controlled next to nothing. My advice:  Suck it up. Move on to the next project. Sooner or later your agent/editor will get back to you.

 

There is nothing wrong, however, with a polite email to ask how things are going. Underscore polite.

 

If they are straight-up not getting back to you…that’s a topic for another post…

 

  1. Push your novel.

 

Wanna sell a million copies of your novel?! Here’s the secret:

 

Tell people it exists.

 

Selling your book comes down to letting people know it’s available. Be your own best cheerleader. Have postcards and business cards on your person at all times. Be ready with an “elevator pitch” to give at a moment’s notice. Answer the question, “What is your book about?” in thirty seconds or less in a compelling way. Go back to your query letter and condense it yet again into a logline: “All X wanted was Y, but Z wouldn’t let her.” That’s a good framework to start with.

 

  1. Network.

 

Publishing is not a game of “who you know.”

 

But it is not bad to Know People.

 

I’ve never gotten a writing or speaking job because I happened to know the CEO of AAA Publishing Company or what-have-you. I have had doors open up because someone who knew me heard about a possible thing and let me know, or made an introduction, or gave someone a recommendation. That’s not that same thing as “My daddy owns Random House!”

 

Get to know your fellow authors, inside and outside of your genre. Go to conferences and conventions and introduce yourself around with an eye toward how you can help others. It pays off.

 

  1. Write more books. No, more.

 

Imagine submitting your opus to Dream Agent, who writes back, “Loved your voice, but this story isn’t for me. Do you have anything else?” This is your shot! Except . . . uh-oh, you don’t have another book to send her? Bummer. (And I don’t mean book two in that series you just sent her.)

 

So on that note: don’t put all your creative eggs in one vampire-urban-fantasy-romance-YA-with-series-potential basket. You are a writer; write. Write novels in other genres. Maybe your first won’t land you an agent, but your second—or fifth—might.

 

  1. Have something to say.

 

We all (hopefully) have something we are passionate about. Have something to say, and be able to say it well in public, like your book signing. Passion is more infectious than a stale reading from your novel, which is like reverse Shakespeare:  it was meant to be read silently, not performed aloud.

 

Consider skipping a reading in favor of talking about something that makes your whole face light up, and tie it to the plot or theme of your novel. More people will pay attention, and the applause may move from polite to thunderous.

 

Want to learn more? Climb this tree.