Business of Writing | Jordan Rosenfeld

National Keep Your Chin Up Day For Writers

My dear friend Erika Mailman, author of two great novels: Women of Ill Fame and The Witch’s Trinity, has started a movement and I’m thrilled to host her wonderful idea here: A day for writers to remember to keep their . Erika helped me keep my chin up more than a few times during the writing process of what would become Forged in Grace, as well as some of the tough, early days of motherhood. So tut, tut writers, don’t despair, chin up!

by Erika Mailman

A year ago, I established (in my own mind, and on this blog) March 19 as National Keep Your Chin Up Day for Writers. I was responding to a friend who was exhibiting despair on Facebook about his writing career after decades of trying. The original post is here.
A year later, that guy has spent serious amounts of time with a Hollywood actor who is working on producing a film based on his novel. He doesn’t need the pep talk anymore!

But many people do. Writing is the most serious “spec work” there is. We can spend years on a single novel, with not a bit of encouragement other than our own sincere belief that it can find an audience. Our work is often lonesome, unless if we have the focus and poor hearing to work in cafes and other public spaces. We’re driven to write, and we hope that when we reach “The End,” a literary agent will be eager to represent the work, an editor will fall in love with it, and it will see its way into print.

It’s difficult to get published these days, as countless mournful forums on the internet testify. It used to be hard, and the gatekeeping was stringent. But these days the hatches have been battened down and fewer books find publishers. It’s the economy. It’s the book industry.

But we have to keep our chins up. We never know when good news is coming. And if it makes anyone reading this feel better, out of all my published acquaintances–from undergrad to grad school to writing workshops and retreats–only one has had an effortless path. (Hint: his book was about kites and jogging just a little bit faster.) I know dozens of people who hit the bottom of despair’s tank…but their feet found purchase at the bottom and let them drift back up to the surface. We can’t give up when our feet are itching to shove against that dank interior and rocket us to air, to gusty inhales.

Chins up. Believe in yourself, in your craft. If you are genuine in your search to improve your writing and tell a compelling tale, then publication will come. It may not be for this novel. It may not be for #2 or even #3. But devoted workmanship and a steady diet of reading others’ quality work will yield results. For everyone who is craving publication today, acknowledge the desire and reassure yourself that you are doing everything possible to make that happen, by:

A. Sitting in the chair, eking out sentences until the book is done
B. Spending serious time and thought in revising–not just rearranging sentences and fixing commas, but truly re-evaluating scenes and how characters behave
C. Encapsulating the story in an elegant paragraph you embed in the query letter
D. Researching the correct literary agents to send it to

“Yes” is a word we delight in hearing. We can’t hear it with our chins buried in our chests.

The original post, and her blog, can be found here.

* * *

Erika Mailman is the author of two historical novels, The Witch’s Trinity (Random House) and Woman of Ill Fame (Heyday). She is a writing instructor through Mediabistro.com. Currently, her blog represents a hodgepodge of things she’s interested in: witchcraft news, suffrage history, Old West prostitution, and the history of Oakland, California. Her column on Oakland’s history for the Montclarion newspaper ran 1999-2011 and was the best gig ever: paid to research stuff she was fascinated by.

Dare Greatly: Make Your Own Path

One of my dear friends sent me the lovely quote below by the great Theodore Roosevelt. It struck a chord I’d already been thinking about–namely that as writers we are often waiting to be discovered, stumbled upon, magically brought into the light with the kind of overnight success that only a very few people ever see. And when that doesn’t happen, it’s too easy to give in to despair. How many times have you, or someone you know, had to be “talked off the ledge” of certain failure? Countless times. We see success as a thing that is supposed to happen all at once, in one big dramatic explosion, rather than a series of steady, but consistent, efforts.

On the other hand, there are all kinds of people throwing themselves into the “arena” as Roosevelt says, whether or not they have talent. They don’t give a hoot who says what.

Which will you be?

The one who waits and despairs.

Or the one who jumps into the arena and does the work?

You can’t let criticism stop you; there will always be critics. But your writing career is yours alone. Nobody cares about it more than you do. Nobody will work for it harder than you will.

“It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man
who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while
DARING GREATLY
so that his place shall never be
with those timid souls
who know neither victory or defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Grace, What’s in a Name. Guest post by Becca Lawton

Who doesn’t love the name Grace? It was bestowed at birth on the incomparable Grace Kelly. It rings out in the moving English hymn that everyone, amazingly, seems to know. It carries a sense of ease—indeed, its first definition in the American Heritage Dictionary is “seemingly effortless beauty or charm.” A secondary meaning is “a virtue or gift coming from God,” rendering grace divine as well. Grace derives from the Latin gratia—“favor, thanks”—and the Sanskrit grnati (“he praises”). Therefore the very name Grace cobbles up splendid emotions and big shoes to fill.

Grace is the name of Jordan’s protagonist in her debut novel, Forged in Grace. The label conjures both origin and destiny for the sweet-natured Grace Jensen. She is empathetic in the extreme, not only graced by her name but also saddled with it, as her extreme empathy sets her about her incredibly demanding life’s work.

Grace’s gifts were forged in a demon fire from which she emerged chastened and changed. The fire (and you must read the novel to get the details) leaves her scarred and highly sensitized to the pain of anyone she touches. She’s not only wounded but blessed with the power to heal. How fitting that this lovely character with the virtuous name chooses to use her talent for the good of others. How gracious and graceful that she turns toward the silver lining of her horrific scarring. How much we root for her, and in our rooting learn empathy for those around her, people we might otherwise judge, dismiss, or shun.

Both author and character seem born to their gifts of understanding, and they wear them well. As Jordan has said in an Indie-Visible interview about Forged in Grace, the extreme empathy she shares with Grace leads both of them to identify so strongly with the pain of others that they “sometimes can’t figure out where their own pain begins/ends.” Jordan admits that extreme empathizers have trouble, too, letting go their own struggles as they involve themselves in the struggles of others. “Unless we learn new strategies,” she says, “we’re screwed.”

Grace, and her author, are people whose lives are large enough to bring love to the lives of others. There’s empathy not just in the protagonist and her creator but also in every page of the book. Grace could have been screwed, as Jordan has said, but she finds love and her livelihood rooting for others. We in turn root for both Grace and Jordan for the healing they can bring our world.

Forged in Grace reminds me that fire is monumentally healing and cleansing. It anneals. It transforms. It kills or cleanses and often does both. Grace, the character, embodies everything good about fire. She has to journey to reach her place of understanding, but who among us does not? I won’t say this story has a happy ending—I won’t reveal that much. But I will say that Grace lives up to her name, and, as readers, our empathy for her goes on and on.

***

Rebecca Lawton is an author and naturalist whose essays, poems, and stories have been published in Orion, Sierra, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Shenandoah, Standing Wave, THEMA, the acorn, More, and other magazines. She has received the Ellen Meloy Fund Award for Desert Writers, the Redwood Writers Award for Poetry, and other honors. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes—in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Becca was among the first women whitewater guides on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon and on other runs around the West. Her essay collection on rivers and the guiding culture, Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital), was a San Francisco ChronicleBestseller and ForeWord Nature Book of the Year finalist.

Her novel, Junction, Utah, is represented by Sally van Haitsma of van Haitsma Literaryand is available as an original e-book.

Currently she is collaborating with Geoff Fricker, photographer, on a book about the Sacramento River and California water projects for Heyday Books. Sacrament will be released in late 2013. She is also writing a short story collection, What I Never Told You: Stories on Water.

March 1, 2013
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- cleansing, empathy, fire, Grace, healing, meaning of names, transforming
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Make a Stab at Measuring Up

Writers, here is the ugly truth: readers live in an all-encompassing “now” when they read your book. They don’t know, and most probably can’t fathom, the amount of work, emotional agony and shades of artistic angst that went into the making of your book. They don’t think about how you will feel when they post their critical review on Amazon or Goodreads. In fact, when reading, I’d venture that most readers don’t even consider you at all—there is not so much an author as a free-floating, amorphous deity of creation that zapped the book into being like something off an old episode of Star Trek.

While at first this realization is painful, I’m only reminding you to push you to do two things:

1) Work harder
2) Surrender

Those two things may seem like the opposite of one another, but they’re not, bear with me. Work harder because you can, because your reader will not give you the benefit of the doubt—she will either slip into your dream, or not.

Work harder because it feels good to be proud of your own work

Because if you don’t, someone else surely is

Work harder even if you’re publishing your own work independently; you want to rise to the top

Because writing is good for your brain waves

Work harder to remind yourself writing IS work, worthy of recognition

Because apprenticing oneself to an art is a worthy act

Work harder because then you can say you’re doing work you love

Or as the venerable Richard Bausch says far more elegantly: “It’s hard to [write well] even when you’re not striving to be as good as the great ones who preceded us; so we might as well go ahead and make a stab at measuring up. When we do that, we respect the form, and all those who practiced it so well. We honor it. And the time spent feels good, even partaking of virtue.”

Surrender to the fact that once you stop working, and let the writing go out into the world, you can’t control what readers will think or say.

Not to sound like your mother, but really, if you’re proud of it, if it makes you feel good to share it, if you worked hard, those kinds of comments won’t matter as much. They won’t press a tender spot inside you that says I should have done more. I could have done more but I stopped.

There’s also a third point.

3) What’s the hurry?
Unless you have a terminal illness, an ultimatum from a spouse, wager from a fellow artist, baby about to be born, etc…really, what’s the hurry? Why not take another step, another pass, another CLASS even, to get your story to the place where, when the demanding, impatient or even cruel reader vents his ire, you will stand back, survey what you created and say: “I worked hard, and I’m proud.”

Call Me Coach

Despite the bad rap that comes with the title, as a kid I always wanted to be teacher’s pet. Not just for the praise; it seemed that to get more time with one’s teacher was to be closer to the source of learning itself—and I was a Hungry Learner.

It’s from this standpoint that I approach writing coaching. I’ve been doing it for years now, but calling it something else (editing). Fact is, the hungry learner inside me has an alter-ego known as the Eager Teacher. Each year that I edit more writers’ manuscripts I learn more about how hungry writers are, too, to write the best material they can write, to imbibe and learn the craft on a level that a writing guide can’t provide alone, or when a college course is too expensive.

I am not the kind of coach who will have you read affirmations or help you manage your time (both of which are wonderful and necessary, don’t get me wrong). What I am is your own individualized teacher—listening with rapt attention to your struggles with writing, and then turning around and crafting lessons and strategies specific to YOU and your individual needs as a writer. I’m a lifeline and a sounding board, too, for when your ideas are stuck or frustration has you caught.

My coaching is, essentially, your chance to be teacher’s pet, to be in the Master Class of You, designed for you, shaped by you, and constantly open to alterations by you.

Think it’s right for you? Here are my packages (this info will soon go up on the Editor/Coach page):

Coaching Packages:

In general, each week of a coaching cycle consists of: 1 lesson, with 1-2 assignments applied to either a work-in-progress or new material, individualized review and critique of the work turned in, and a follow up coaching call by phone or skype. Schedule can be modified to meet your personal needs.

Coaching Package #1: The Starter
4 hours, $250
1-2 lessons
up to 5,000 words edited
2-30 minute coaching sessions (or 1 hour)

Coaching Package #2: Getting Serious
8 hours, $425
3 individualized lessons
up to 10,000 words edited
4-30 minute coaching sessions (or 2 hours)

Coaching Package #3: The Next Level
12 hours, $650
5 lessons
up to 20,000 words edited
8-30 minute coaching sessions (or 4 hours)

Coaching Package #4: The Commitment
24 hours, $1225
8 lessons
up to 40,000 words edited
16-30 minute sessions (or 8 hours)

Coaching by the hour is another option.

Please use the “contact” form at top to inquire about getting started!

10 Reasons why Writing Matters: Creating a Second Path

I think it’s safe to say that I am on a mission. As is typical of me, I didn’t know I was on one until I was deep into it. It has been inspired by working with writers for the past decade, and watching the publishing industry suffer its growing pains, not always in a very pretty or predictable way. The fallout is that writers seem to get more discouraged more often than they used to when I first started editing and coaching. It’s gotten me to thinking a lot about the purpose and power of writing, fiction or non-fiction alike. If the only reason we set out to do it is for the belief in a big contract with a mainstream publishing house, we might easily lose hope and faith as that journey unfolds because it is rarely a straight line, and it is rarely fast. So join me on what I’m calling “the second path” of writing, where we explore the many soulful, healthful reasons for writing that can help make your writing practice a daily act of joy :

Creativity has been proven to have positive effects on health, self-esteem and vitality
Writing is good for your brain, creates a state similar to meditation
Writing hones your powers of observation, giving you a fuller experience of life
Writing hones your powers of concentration and attention, which is more fractured than ever thanks to technology and TV
Writing connects you with others through blogging, writing groups, live readings, and self-publishing outlets like Scribd and Smashwords.
Through writing we preserve stories and memories that may otherwise be lost
Writing entertains you and others, and having fun is an important part of good health
Writing strengthens your imagination, and imagination is key to feeling hope and joy
Writing helps heal and process wounds and grief, clearing them out
Life is too short not to do what you enjoy

Sage Cohen Uses Both Sides of Her Brain: So Can You

Sage Cohen first slipped quietly onto my radar via Christina Katz, (whom many of you know as Writer Mama). I quickly friended Sage on Facebook and watched in awe at her productivity and grace, all the while becoming a new mother. She continues to inspire me with the publication of her third book: The Productive Writer, which speaks to both the artist and the business person in every writer. Join me for a Q and A with her now about learning to place as much importance on process vs. results, using both sides of your brain, structuring your time wisely, and much more.

JR: What inspired you to write/create The Productive Writer?

SC: My first book, Writing the Life Poetic, was published by Writer’s Digest Books. When I learned that another editor at WDB wanted to publish a book focused on organization for writers, I pitched it and they bought it. As we got under way, the topic fanned out a bit and morphed from “organization” to “productivity.” It’s been a really fun and relevant topic for me, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to share my ideas with readers.

JR: One of the things I love best about your book is that it couples strong work ethics with what you might call more “artist-friendly” concepts like building a writer’s “blueprint” and “embracing fear.” How does this blend of right and left brain help writers be more productive?

SC: In my experience, the best strategies and tools are not effective when layered on top of the shaky foundation of bad habits and attitudes. So, my goal is to help people create the writing lives they want by first understanding who they are, how they think and work and vision and plan best, and then engaging these strengths to get the results they want.

I invite readers to answer questions such as: What motivates me? What do I most want to accomplish? How much time do I have and how do I intend to use it? What do I want to produce? How do I define productivity in my writing life? What did I just do that worked, and what strategies do I want to reinvent?

Once the reader has a clear picture of her own writing goals and work style, she can choose and use the tools and techniques that are best suited to her. I also offer a range of strategies for identifying and managing resistance along the way—such that even procrastination and fear can be channeled productively.

JR: In Chapter 16 you discuss the importance of not always relying on external validation. What are some first steps a writer can take to start validating herself even in the face of rejection or not yet achieving publishing goals?

SC: I think the absolute most important thing is to stay focused on and committed to your love for your work. If you’re writing because you have to—because you’re called to—then what So-And-So thinks about your final product is going to be far less relevant than that YES feeling you get when you’re engaged with your craft. This clarity of commitment is a safe harbor a writer can always return to.

The other choice a writer can make again and again throughout his career is to focus on and appreciate her process, rather than her results. For instance, if I’m striving to have poems published in a certain publication, when I drop that envelope in the mail, I celebrate the fact that I got three poems written and polished, sealed, and sent according to specs and in time for the deadline. In short, I appreciate myself for doing everything I could to move toward that goal. The rest is out of my hands.

Along these lines of process (versus results) thinking, I look at every rejection not as an end point of failure but an opportunity to try something new that might work better. And I invite readers to do the same, because there’s always a seed of opportunity in every so-called “failure.” In chapter 20, I share “My Writing Success Log” that’s designed to help writers track what’s working, what could work better, and what they intend for the future. Having a written record of your determination to succeed is a powerful way to stay motivated and grateful for all of your hard work.

JR: You say in Ch. 6 “Consciousness is the first step toward change.” Tell us how this applies to writing.

When we know what we’re doing well––or poorly––we then have an opportunity to either repeat what’s working or start experimenting with alternatives to attitudes or behaviors that are not accomplishing what we had hoped.

For example, let’s say a writer starts using the daily time log that I recommend for a few weeks. He discovers that it typically takes him about an hour to write 1,000 words of rough-draft fiction. He sees also that he spends at least three hours a week on Facebook. He is surprised to see both how much time he was wasting online and how quickly he was able to get words down on the page. He decides to cut his time online down to one hour/week and commit to writing 2,000 more words every week. He continues to track his time and his results, fine-tuning his process and goals from there.

JR: I think your publishing story is a very inspiring one, as you are a poet first, and it might not seem intuitive that you would go on to publish writing books…was it a surprise to you as well?

SC: You bring up a very interesting issue of identity here. It is true that I have identified as a poet first and foremost, and then as a writer of other genres later. Yet, fiction and essays, strategic content and thesis-driven papers have all shaped who I am as a writer. My major in college was comparative literature, and I have been writing marketing communications and advertising content professionally my entire adult life.

In a way, the unfolding of each of my identities as a writer has been surprising––because writing has always been so intimately entwined with whom I am. Realizing that I was “a poet” in my early 20’s nearly knocked me off of my chair. And each succeeding revelation about the various writing realms I have named and claimed has been equally stunning.

I always expected that I would write books, but didn’t have a clear picture of the trajectory for doing so. In the movie The Secret, Jack Canfield explains that he drove in the dark all the way from California to New York, seeing with his headlights only 200 feet ahead of him at a time. This is how it was for me in arriving at the doorstep of authoring books. I got clear about my destination, took small and consistent steps in that direction, and was surprised to find myself clear across the country in no time at all.

JR: Tell us something that you learned in the writing of this book that was unexpected…or anything else you’d like to say that I haven’t asked.

SC: I learned that it isn’t necessarily any easier to write a second book than it is to write the first! For me, it was like first training a Labrador retriever and thinking, “I have the hang of this master-of-the-pack attitude.” Then you get a German shepherd puppy, and you find that none of your training accomplishments translate to this new relationship. Instead, you have to start at ground zero to adapt yourself to this dog’s herding instincts, hair-trigger fear of just about everything and hard-coding to chase cats and squirrels. I was reminded that in any writing project, we are always a beginner finding our way in new terrain, no matter how many days or years or decades we have been sitting down to the blank page.

***

About Sage Cohen

Sage Cohen is the author of The Productive Writer (just released from Writer’s Digest Books); Writing the Life Poetic and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. She blogs about all that is possible in the writing life at pathofpossibility.com, where you can: Download a FREE “Productivity Power Tools” workbook companion to The Productive Writer. Get the FREE, 10-week email series, “10 Ways to Boost Writing Productivity” when you sign up to receive email updates. Sign up for the FREE, Writing the Life Poetic e-zine. Plus, check out the events page for the latest free teleclasses, scholarships and more.

Milk & Ink Anthology Benefit

Milk and Ink is here now, if you didn’t know already! This anthology of stories, essays and poems by writing mothers celebrates the intensity of being both mother and writer. It also will inspire all to recognize the power of living true to your passions and life purpose.

Milk & Ink focuses on the experience of motherhood, but it also speaks to everyone: fathers, daughters, and sons. This anthology, not only in its stories, but in its creation and promotion, seeks to acknowledge the need we have for one another.

Most important, though, proceeds of the project will be donated to Mama Hope, which supports women and children in Africa in a variety of projects.
To purchase copies you may visit one of the following links:

http://www.amazon.com/Milk-Ink-Motherhood-Eros-Alegra-Clarke/dp/1432762451/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288798848&sr=8-1

http://outskirtspress.com/webpage.php?ISBN=9781432762452

Dogged

In my mind I keep seeing this image: a tough, wiry dog hanging several feet off the ground by a rope that it holds clutched between its teeth. It carries its own body weight. It wiggles in circles, hanging on by the power of its jaw. What does it want? What is its goal? To win, to pull down the rope and the tree it hangs from with sheer insistence? I don’t know, but after the image the word “dogged,” pops into my mind, particularly the definition that means tenacious, persistent. For lately I have been thinking I am nothing if not dogged. And that to be dogged is both a virtue and a vice, depending on when and where. (The other meaning, is of course, stubborn)

I have been dogged in creating a career from the ground up, one that involves a piecemeal and patchwork process of seeking out sources and pitching dreams to the future, that requires a kind of juggling that, at times, feels like flaming swords rather than writing, teaching and editing. I always tell those who’ve asked advice that the only secret I know to any kind of success is to throw yourself at your goal, and once you are even remotely near it, to hang on and be a rabid creature of persistence.

But I am also dogged in pursuit of people, of ideas for novels. I’ve lived in a “new” town for four years now, but for some reason I feel as though I only just arrived. Maybe this is partly a waking up process that comes with my son suddenly not being a baby who needs me at every turn anymore. But it may just as well be that I have caught the scent of life lived with all of the other roles that come besides mother. A foreign, intoxicating scent of things done at night of literary or cultural merit. Things that inflate me with the same vigor as reading books with a flashlight in my bed did as a child.

And now that I have no college campus or workplace to facilitate an easy way to meet other people I’ve become a bloodhound of likeminded souls. And once I lock on, it’s very difficult to free me. Like that dog hanging from his rope I am determined to get to know some new people, and in the process I know that I must come off like a big, goofy mutt who knocks you over upon first meeting and then rudely sniffs your pants.

But better that than the one that stands growling behind a fence and never comes out, never brushes up against the things he wants.

I Discovered the Internet

There are days where I feel like I am the last person to the party. By the time I joined Myspace, everyone had moved on to Facebook. By the time I joined Facebook, well, thankfully everyone was still there, but they were also tweeting. And I was like, “hey, there’s this really cool place where you can connect with old high school friends called classmates.com…”

No, seriously…The point of today’s post is to express my awe and gratitude for what the internet has done for me and my writing, even if I am the last person to realize it.

I don’t think we can hold up the “technology isolates people” banner for too much longer at this rate. It may change how we interact, but it’s made me feel more connected and more supported than I ever felt before it. I was always lucky to have a wonderful community of writing friends. Now I have one that is several hundred people large. And what amazes me, on a daily basis, is how generous and willing people are to support each other. I’ve met lifelong friends this way, some of my best critique partners, and writers whose work I admire.

So this is just me saying, WOW, this is cool. Thank you. Thanks to all of you who read this blog, take my classes, hire me to edit your work, support my literary endeavors, spread word of mouth via one of a gazillion social networks, email me to tell me you read my books, share your stories, or just generally become my friend.

Thank you.