Category Archives: Writing. Practice.
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The Myth of Overnight Success (and why it’s bad for writers)

by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

You know it when you see it: that author everyone is talking about all of a sudden. One day, you’ve never heard of him or her, the next minute, J.K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen or someone whose name is now almost household appears out of the void of obscurity (to you). And because of the explosive nature of success, it looks as though t this success happened instantaneously. This person tossed off a book, found an agent and bam, a month later: bestselling magic!

But…it’s a myth. Overnight success is an especially damaging myth to writers.

Many years back I had the pleasure of interviewing authors for my radio show Word by Word, and as a contributing editor at Writer’s Digest Magazine. For a writer who is also a groupie of writers, it was one of the highpoints of my writing life. I spoke with hundreds of writers (including some of my faves: Aimee Bender, Isabelle Allende, Tess Gerritsen, Chuck Pahlaniuk Louise Erdrich, TC Boyle, Yann Martel). What I learned both from speaking to them, and also in my own long slog toward publication of my three books, is that overnight success is an utter myth. Not only is it a myth, and I mean for writers specifically, it’s a dangerous one to any writer who truly wants to make a career (by which I don’t necessarily mean money), and here is why:

Practice: Writing is a craft, and though talent can take you far, the only true way to produce anything good is through practice. Lots of it. A painter of landscapes I met once said she had to paint “miles of canvas” for every finished painting, and I think it is the same for writers. We must write libraries of words. Even if you are a beacon of shining raw talent, you probably have a trick or two to learn, a habit to curb, or a new way of writing you’d like to try out. I think writers age like fine wines, personally, and the more you polish, the better. And there’s all this pressure in the digital age to get books up fast and then faster, which often does you a disservice. First drafts can be written in a rush, but subsequent drafts need a bit of time.

Polish (with help): All of the authors I interviewed had a writing partner, a writing critique group, or an editor they worked closely with. They did not rely upon their own eyes at all times to catch what wasn’t working. Because they sought feedback, these authors also did revisions of their work. Some of them did many, many revisions. And while the word often terrifies newer writers, I firmly believe that real writing—real craft and certainly polish—happens in the revision.

Persist. Every writer I interviewed was famous for a “breakout” book; while this was their first published book, it was actually the author’s third or ninth written novel. Which was all to say if your first book doesn’t make magic, I beseech you, by the mother of all holy things, keep writing!

The moral of the story is: Overnight success comes after walking a road over time of practice, and persistence. Nothing is ever wasted as a writer. You’ve walked another step toward another mile. Anything else is rushing, and you know what your mother taught you about haste making…

 

 

 

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Dispatch from the Cheryl Strayed Writing, Truth & Community Event

After all these years of meeting, interviewing and even becoming friends with published authors, you’d think I would have lost my habit of getting starstruck. But nope! I’m a big dork when it comes to meeting a literary idol, or even just a literary person I admire. And of course, when a book becomes as big a hit as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, it’s easy to believe the person behind the writing is no longer on earth.

On the contrary, Cheryl Strayed was so much on earth she helped ground me back into some very basic things I’d not exactly forgotten about writing, but perhaps gotten cocky about thinking I already know them so well. So here are my few tiny insights gleaned from her lovely workshop, the talk she gave and the writing exercises she led us through.

  • Stories live in our bodies. Our own stories, and those of others. For many of us writers, the act of writing is a necessary pressure valve, to release these rambling stories onto the page.
  • What is the big question driving your writing that can become universal, beyond you? For Cheryl it was “How can I live without my mom” which turned into “How can I bear the unbearable?” I’d have to say mine is something like: “Why was I abandoned/neglected?” Which translates into: “How do we learn to take care of ourselves in the world?”
  • It’s perfectly okay to write a story terribly. Cheryl’s words were “It’s better to write a book that kind of sucks than none at all.” In this, she’s talking about first drafts, about getting those words out.
  • BUT: until you strive to make “art” out of the experience or story, it’s just a bunch of words or journal purge. She wasn’t talking about genre or snobbery either, she was saying that there are two things: 1) The messy, beautiful imperfect experience and the profound act of writing that down, and 2) Shaping and crafting that story to be able to speak to others in a meaningful way. If you don’t shape it, you can’t expect others to FEEL what you’re trying to elicit.
  • Revising is the way you make that beautiful shape and meaning.

That’s enough for today. I’m looking forward to reading her novel Torch and savoring her Tiny, Beautiful Things column as Dear Sugar.

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Fiction based on Fact: Parallel Universes

I have never liked writing about my own life for an audience. For thirty years I’ve kept journals where I barf out the details of my own personal dramas, whine and cry and turn to myself for answers. I journal in the same way that I exercise—because it helps me feel better, but not because I really like it. But I write fiction because I have a need to make stories—to provide a grid of meaning—to truths and experiences that do not have a clear meaning as they happen. I’ve written the occasional memoir piece, but those always have a way of feeling untrue—or rather, factually inaccurate. And since I believe that every memory filters experience differently anyway, at the end of the day it is easier to just write fiction, where I always have the license to make things up.

So I haven’t quite known what to do with the fact that what I’m writing now—which has come out of me in a gush, 40,000 words in two weeks so far—is very much based on my life. That is to say, it tells a version of the story of my life. A parallel universe, if you will. Nobody in the story is exactly the person they are based upon. My narrator is not precisely me, and what happens to her did not literally happen to me. And yet I know everything she feels, and I can feel in my very cells the complex conflicts of all the people around her.

Memoir writers  often worry that the people they write about will not like what they write. That they will hurt, offend, annoy, or worse, damage a relationship. And yet, the only way to tell this story truly, was to model my characters after real people. When I say “model” I mean I borrowed key elements—sometimes a manner of speech, or a way of life, or features, or passions or being in the right place at the right time in my actual life to fit the story’s needs.

No one in my family has to be embarrassed that I am revealing family secrets or pointing fingers. If anything, this story begs for me to bring a compassionate eye to every character, to explore these complex characters without judgment, but curiosity. I’ve come a long way from being the blaming child who bottled up anger over what happened to her. I understand now, decades away from those years, that everyone’s intentions were good, that they did their best. But what’s more, I realize that for all its chaos, the people I grew up with left me with a rich artistic and intellectual legacy that I’m not sure I would have had in a different family.

So, while I still don’t like writing about my life, I love writing a novel that pays tribute to borrows from the raw experience of my life and the people in it.

 

 

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80s Flashback: Mining the Past for Writers

To my surprise, the most commented on thread on my Facebook page this week was on what boys wore in the 80s. Specifically wealthy Caucasian boys, which I needed for my WIP, though asking the question opened the wardrobe doors to my own sartorial fascination, mostly with brands my family couldn’t afford: Guess and Esprit and Izod and United Colors of Benneton.

The novel I’m working on takes place in 1984, and though I lived it, I don’t remember a lot of the details (I was only 10). But with some prompting, it all came flowing back in: Izod and polo shirts with flipped collars; acidwash; Vans and day-glo colors. Lace tights and gloves, jelly bracelets, high-tops. Boys with bleached bangs and oh my, the music.

I’ve spent the weekend listening to an 80s pop station to put me back in the mood, amazed at how my body thrills to those synthesized beats and echoing male vocals, or the extra chirpy/syrupy female vocals. It’s strange how potent the trappings of the 80s is to my memory.

The irony is that the 80s were not an actual happy time in my life. I shuffled back and forth between my divorced, working parents, a latchkey kid babysat by afternoon TV. There was addiction at every turn, a lot of adults hanging on to life and livelihood by their fingernails (I’ll save the gory details for the book).

And yet the entire gestalt of that time—its gaudy fashions, its pop culture, its angsty John Hughes movies that made Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson into idols—is something I feel incredibly nostalgic about, and which has been powerfully helpful in drawing the setting for this project.

It just goes to show that even when it’s hard, it can be useful to one’s writing.

What period of time has you captive, whether you lived it, or wished you did?

Okay, Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun just came on, and I’m going to do a circuit around my house and prove her right.

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Failure and Chaos–Coping Strategies for Writers

Failure is one of the most common feelings among writers. There are so many opportunities for failure, from rejection, to a work in progress that doesn’t come together.

Every time I see a status update from a hardworking writer that says something like, “How did I ever think I knew how to write,” or “My novel hates me” I always think: you’re right on track.

And that track is NOT failure.

I’ll tell you why.

Creation is an act of chaos. I’m sorry to pull out the birth metaphor but if you’ve ever seen one, human or animal, you know they are messy, wild affairs full of moaning and fluids and pain and frustration. Frankly, writing is no different. The act of creation requires starts and stops, going forward and back. Writing material that you will not use. AND, let’s not forget something else–anything new is full of thrilling, marvelous wonder. If children popped out of the womb speaking French and doing math tables, no matter your spiritual point of view, you have to ask: what’s the point, right? We create because it is full of wonder and awe even though it hurts a lot, or at the very least often causes grown adults to wander around in public muttering to themselves and eating themselves into donut comas (no? just me?).

Writing is a process of discovery. 

You discover things about yourself, about your ideas and feelings. You enter into perspectives you may have always wondered about, and deepen your exploration of those you’ve known intimately all your life. You try on lofty propositions. You escape, you revel, you get weird (no? just me?).

Let me repeat: Creation is an act of chaos. And actually I don’t really mean “chaos” but rather raw the wild, bursting, daunting energies that the universe is made of. Wild stuff. Atomic stuff. Fundamental stuff. (No, I have no better word than “stuff” today).

If you are experiencing any one of the million feelings of failure and frustration in the process of writing a book, I’m sorry to break it to you that you are not failing. You are herding your own big bang into being; you are riding quantum possibilities.

You only fail if you stop.

 

 

Writers: Regain Lost Confidence

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Since the age of 8 when I began writing in earnest, I’ve lost confidence more times than I can count. Negativity—especially doubt, fear, self-loathing and rejection—sinks and pulls with extreme force. The writers I know (and I know a lot of them!) are exquisitely sensitive creatures, tuned to the tiniest shifts, the widest spectrum of emotion. Writers are people with The Big Array of antennae—open and thin-skinned against the constant signals of the world and its weightiness.

Recently, after publishing my novel to lovely reader feedback, one lousy review kicked my confidence in the teeth. And this time it ran deeper than my writing talent; it pushed all my centers: the fraud center, the despair center, it even barreled over my optimism center, usually so good at helping me rebound. It finally crashed and burned in my self-pity center, where I spent too much time stewing in the slime of feeling like aspects of my writing life were just unfair. Ugh–I cannot get out of that place fast enough.

The first step toward a better mood was to take time away to sink into my garden, where every tiny bloom and shoot, baby tomato and budding strawberry, feels like a personal success. (Funny that I would take pride in the growth of things that have very little to do with me, and feel defeated in the writing that is completely at my hand).

Soaking in the spring sunshine—which this weekend California was in the 90s—I thought: how many times have I coached a writer, client or friend, out of the mire of lost confidence? What are the first questions I always ask?

  • What brings you joy as a writer?
  • Why do you write?
  • What does writing contribute/give to you that makes you feel good/better/whole/purposeful?

Why those questions? They don’t focus on outcome, approval, validation or “performance.” These questions allow you to hone in on the soulful, deep aspects of writing that hopefully drive you. And in reminding yourself of what drives you, you can often shake free of the negative feelings that usually come because you haven’t reached a particular outcome, received approval, validation, or performed as you had hoped.

So today I offer you (and myself) those three questions if you have temporarily lost confidence. Negativity may be heavier, but all it takes is one good powerful lift in the opposite direction to help you up and into confidence again.

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Write Better: Plant a garden

I squat beside my garden bed, a satisfying ache in my legs, and look for new shoots asserting themselves in the soil. Every day the veggies in my garden are taller by miniscule amounts. The beans have sent out little tendril-feelers, so aware in the way they caress the green racks they’ll soon go scaling. The bright orange flare of a squash blossom halts me with delight. Every time I find a new sign of life, a thrill runs up me.

At night I take my wine glass out with me to water, almost as if I’m having a date—and it is sort of a romance, with newfound quiet and lengthening stillness. After days spent with information rushing at me in electronic streams, my garden is like a lover I can’t stop thinking about; I want to run my fingers over it, inhale its scent. Hours melt away as I tend to it.

Gardens are great for creativity, and not just because its seeds and blooms are metaphors for the creative process—my garden is urging me back to deep thought, to focused attention, to being present.

It’s sad that those things sound cliché, as though one must apologize for an urge to pull back from the noise. Yet writers need to do more than promote and blog and connect; writers need to tune in, to get quiet enough to connect with the words that lodge inside us. I can’t do that when my attention is being fractured. And frankly, as the mother of a young son, sometimes I forget what it’s like to even experience silence—or rather, the soothing noises of nature. My crepe myrtle tree is full of lively, boisterous finches; my neighbor feeds the big, barking crows next door that hold ragers on my front lawn so loud I can hear them from the back; the scrub jays squawk their displeasure at local cats—but it’s all a cacophony that feeds my mind.

So yes, if you’re wondering, I am telling you to plant a garden. Or walk somewhere that you can hear your own breath and heartbeat, where the air smells like earth, where the light comes from the sun, not fluorescence.

I don’t know about you, but these spring and summer months are terrible for my output, but marvelous for filling myself back up with breath and earth and life and sun—from which to germinate new writing.

Milk & Ink: Guest post by Becca Lawton

Becca LawtonA strong mother-daughter bond lives at the heart of my new novel, Junction, Utah. The chief motivation of the protagonist, Madeline Kruse, is to save her mother Ruth’s life. Nothing could be more important than seeing that through—everything else Madeline does is superseded by her need to help Ruth. Of course how Madeline decides to do that is completely up to her.JunctionUtah_FinalCover_000

As we approach Mother’s Day, I can’t help but think about mothers. My mother, gone twenty-five years. Her mother, closer to her than any of us kids could ever be. My writer friends who are mothers—of which there are many. All this thinking of mothers prompted me to pull my copy of the anthology Milk & Ink from its place on my shelf over the past weekend. It was time to read the beautiful collection again, stories and essays and poems about the experience of mothering and being mothered. It was just that time of year, the way the fall prompts me to watch The Last of the Mohicans and the spring lures me to put baseball on the radio.

The mothers of Milk & Ink are joined together in this anthology like the rooms of a brightly lit home.

Lead editor Eros-Alegra Clark (of Indie-Visible renown—see below for a description of IV), editorial team members Jordan E. Rosenfeld and Tomi L. Wiley (also of Indie-Visible), created a powerful statement on motherhood and family that only gains more power with each reading

In the blood of this book, there is poetry. There is loss and joy. There are those who take responsibility for the lives they have started, and there are those who abdicate. There are mature mothers, meth mothers, teenage mothers, and “ghost mothers with only word-babies waiting” (Marilyn Kallet). There is the policewoman mother whose police husband was murdered in the line of duty, leaving her to puzzle out the raising of the son (Jordan E. Rosenfeld). There is the couple striving to help their open-hearted Asperger’s son adjust to “careless people.” (Marge Bloom)

There are passages of unspeakable beauty, too many to count, describing a mother’s view of the world and the world’s view of her. Eros-Alegra Clark:  “[My mother] left the scent of roses and dandelions in any room she passed through. It filled the emptiness where my fathers behind aftershave and gasoline-sweat presence should have been.” Christina Rosalie Sbarro: “I’ve been finding fragments of my heart lately, tossed among the hairpins and pennies by the washer; meant to, purple from the red shirts and blue towels that seem to endlessly make their way through the wash.” Tracey Slaughter: “Forever is never as long as you think it will be. It is only a clipping of wheat. It is a frond of light, and it falls. It falls.” Tomi L. Wiley: “I’ve always been a little scared of the shadows in this Valley, the tricks of light through tree in Glade. When I was little I wouldn’t move off the front steps and tell my shadow had disappeared beneath the porch, wouldn’t allow myself the cool relief of Sweet Creek water till the light was at a certain slant so I could see whatever swam beneath the surface.”

A story of mine is in this book, too, and I cherish the fact that its words are nestled among so many other brilliant and heartfelt pieces. It’s all so real—even the fiction. Especially the fiction. I’m honored to be in Milk & Ink. I’ll always consider my short story “Sipapu” as part of this collection first.

I’m posting this homage to the anthology now because there is still time to buy a copy before May 12. I highly recommend it to any reader who was brought to Earth by the sweat and blood and love of a mother—oh, yes, everyone. Every mother should be gifted this book. Every writer should read it. And if you’re like me, once you’ve begun digging into the stories, you won’t stop reading until you’ve turned each one over in your mind like a stone.

***

About Indie-Visible: www.indie-visible.com

We are a powerhouse collective of independent writers who use joint resources and collaborative social media to deliver quality books to the masses without pushing our work through a big house. We work with top notch editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and PR gurus, keeping all aspects of industry-related work within our ever growing family of freelancers, supporting a thriving community of entrepreneurs. We are real people, with a real desire to have real careers as best-selling authors. We’re reinventing publishing so that it works for us, and for our readers.

 

 

The Day I Killed the Internet

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It was not a good week for just about anyone with eyes, ears and an internet connection. Oh, funny you should mention that, here let me explain: Monday night I received some truly awful, terrible, no good criticism–if vague and half-incorrect summaries could be call that–of my writing. Though I’ve had so much more good than bad, its poison dart made contact with my heart and suddenly all optimism and confidence turned dark and sour.  Tuesday morning, in a fug of negativity, I logged on to find out the results of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award to see who had made it to the semi-finals. Alas. I could not get online (nor did I make it to the semi-finals). Not on the computer and not even on my “smart”phone.  I even harbored the delusion that my terrible mood itself, with its weather-disrupting intensity, had somehow killed the internet.

Within hours, logic restored thanks to my friend with her police scanner, we learned there had been some fairly large-scale vandalism of the fiber-optic cables that provide internet and cellphone service not only to my town but ranging as far north as San Francisco. In light of other terrible US news, this hit a scary place in me.

I felt trapped with the poison of doubt, suddenly disconnected from all those I plug in to every day. In fear that I might never get it back, and who or what would I be then?

And like any addict, I went a little bit insane. I found that I could not do anything productive. Nothing. I tried to shop. I roamed my backyard like a rabid dog. I lay on my living room floor running over the list of things I was “supposed” to be doing. I moved things around on my desk. I stared at sticky spots on my linoleum. I felt as though I was underwater in a void of sound and activity; even the air felt thick and slow moving.

So I picked up my journal. Wrote a few sentences.

Watered my garden.

Read several chapters of this great book.

Played silly games with my son.

And realized, only about the very end of the day, that my world had actually not stopped turning.

That, in truth, after weeks of complaining of how busy and overwhelmed I was, a forced stillness felt, though I was loathe to admit it, damn good.

It is so rarely that I let myself do nothing, or do little.

And after just a taste of it, the internet was restored, and with it the tidal waves of information and electronic impulses that, while they connect me to a number of people, also, at times, pull me out of myself.

And so I’m left at the end of that brief, odd, collapsed vortex with an urge for less. So much less. A “less-ness” that allows for more presence, awareness, time.

I’m giving it a try. Letting go. Asking for more help. Taking more deep breaths.

Join me?

Practice. Polish. Persist.

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Artwork by Nikki McClure

In many copies of my first published book, Make a Scene– a  guide to that quintessential game-changing writing element, the scene–I often sign copies with the following epigraph: “Practice, Polish, Persist.”

It’s my own little chant of encouragement to new writers, the only mantra I think worth repeating over and over. Because let’s face it, talent alone does not a successful writer make. But what does it really mean?

Practice:

I learned to write a novel…by writing a novel. That’s right, after years spent reading and writing vignettes and short stories, I decided to try on the novel form without a class or a book. I knew I was writing a novel that would not likely see publication, but I also knew that there was never going to be a more practical effort than just doing it. I firmly believe that one can’t theoretically learn to write; you have to get your hands dirty.  And once I did so, I began to share that messy first attempt with other writers, who gave me hard but honest feedback. Then I took classes and read all the books. I shared stories for critique. I practiced at novel-writing the same way I practiced driving a car and many other things–with an imperfect, but consistent effort. The practice didn’t turn me into a perfect writer, it turned me into a committed writer who realized she had a long way to go and would do what it took to get there.

Polish:

After the practice, it’s tempting, especially after completing a draft, to feel as though you’re done. No one can blame you for wanting to toss in that towel after the grueling marathon that novel writing can be. But I quickly learned that the professionals in positions to publish know a rough diamond when they see one, and they aren’t going to grant you the love of your friends and family. You have to polish. You have to befriend revision and learn to edit yourself. Polishing is an on-going practice.

Persist:

And after you’ve learned the craft and know it inside and out so well you can teach it, there comes the truest test of all…if you want to see your work out there, you must persist. You must keep at it; whether “it” be submitting and finding an agent, or “it” be publishing your own work, if you stop or give up, nobody will do it for you. When it comes to realizing your dreams, that challenge is entirely up to you.

The fact is, what separates a successful writer from a talented one is always persistence.

Jordan E. Rosenfeld is the author of the debut novel, Forged in Grace.

About Jordan


Author of FORGED IN GRACE, Jordan E. Rosenfeld learned early on that people prefer a storyteller to a know-it-all. She channeled any Hermione-esque tendencies into a career as a writing coach, editor and freelance journalist and saves the Tall Tales for her novels. She lives in Northern California with her superhero-obsessed son, Psychologist husband and their tuxedo cat, Elvert.

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