F is for Fear: A to Z Challenge

(that thumbnail looks like I'm about to karate chop my fears)

Getting what we wished for

Ah, here we are, the holidays**! It’s the time for wishing and hoping and dreaming. And I know what a ton of writers are wishing for: you want to have your books sell like *insert famous author here.* And sometimes we aren’t very good at paying attention to what that wish means.

I’ll admit, this is something I’ve wished for. More than once―okay, I’m human, I wish for this just about every time I pay the bills. But there’s something else that comes with it that is completely glossed over when it comes to writing success. With every person who loves the book, there’s someone else who hates it, and possibly vocally.

There’s a surprising amount of hate in the world of book reviews, and I toggle back and forth about whether it’s a good thing or not, and now we will talk about Twilight. I know about half of you just rolled your eyes. Twilight is a perfect example of a divisive book series. Either you love Twilight, or you hate it. Oddly, I suspect that most of the people who hate it actually hate other things about it than the book itself, but it has, for whatever reason, spawned a large pile of hatred aimed at the book. These come in the guise of book reviews and newspaper articles. These come as ed op pieces decrying the downfall of teenage girls. This hate trickles down and we all sort of shrug and say that it’s normal for a book to have its detractors.

After reading some of the reviews, I wish I could give Stephanie Myers a hug. People are vicious. And when it’s someone big like Twilight, everyone says rude things like “it doesn’t matter because she gets to cry into her bags of money when she goes to sleep at night.”

It’s like people feel it’s okay to be mean and rude because of her success. And this happens to all books.

When you put a book out into the world, you lose a certain ownership of it. You give it to the world with a big bow that basically says “Go ahead world, send me your worst―I dare you.” And the world sends back a smorgasbord of responses. Worst? Yup. Best? Present and accounted for. In the middle? Sure you can have that too. And if you’re the writer, all of it is right in your face. Good, bad, ugly. And the only response you can have is to grin and bear it. Sit back, thank the world in general, and pretend the mean reviews didn’t hurt your feelings. It’s nothing personal. Welcome to publishing! Everyone gets bad reviews.

So, maybe you’re sitting at home, wishing your books could be published, or maybe you’re wishing your books could sell like Stephen King, or Nora Roberts, or Stephanie Myers. Just keep in mind that you should always be careful of what you wish for. Also, get back out there and write! Your next book isn’t going to magically write itself!

Oh, and enjoy the holidays!

**Wait, is this an attack on Christmas? Nope! I know there's more than one super important holiday right about now and it takes too long to list all of them at the beginning of a post! Happy Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas, Blessed Yule, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Years, Merry Krishna! And that's not even close to representative of all the holidays people celebrate this time of year (that doesn't even cover the sampling from the readers of this blog alone), which is so amazing! Feel free to send me whichever holiday greetings are appropriate for the holiday you celebrate!

Hiatus break for Insecure Writer's Support Group

It's that time again, time to send our fears and insecurities out into the internet and hope they help someone else. If you've never seen one of these, I recommend heading on over to the Ninja Captain, Alex, and jumping on the Linky. Also be sure to check out this week's co-hosts Sheena-kay Graham, Suzanne Furness, and Laura Eno.

This month, I'm offering advice (or more specifically, advice I'm trying to give to myself).

Whenever someone asks me about writing, my answer is always “Just write.”

“But Rena, my novel about space pirates who steal ice to survive in a post apocalyptic Earth is crazy. How can I put all my time and effort into something so crazy?” My advice is always the same: Just write it (and for that specific example, also go watch the movie Ice Pirates, it’s a hoot to watch corny movies from the 80s!).

For most writers, it’s the fear of failure that quells their writing, keeps their words hidden in drawers and collecting electrons on hard drives. But over the last few weeks, I felt another fear: success (I didn’t actually gain success mind you, I just got some positive feedback). Success is a strange creature. I’ve spent most of my life practicing how to handle defeat gracefully. I never won the contest (second, I come in second and third all the time), and I was never part of the group to win sweepstakes, or take it all the way to the top. So I’ve practiced lots of defeat, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to practice success. It's like that quote "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." (you can go see a lot more detail about that quote and who said it here).

Realizing that success is just as paralyzing as failure has been really helpful to me (let’s just say I’ve had fewer chocolate attacks recently), but I decided that acknowledging an issue wasn’t good enough. I sat down and wrote a list of what real success meant to me. I outlined it—hey, I’m a scientist, I do nerdy things like make lists of my lists; I’m a lot more like Twilight Sparkle than Rainbow Dash, if you get my drift—I made sure that I included everything that would mean success to me. Some of it was crazy optimistic, like earn enough money from my writing to take my family to Disneyland (CRAZY TALK RENA!). Then I took that outline and I listed everything that I could do to make that success happen. I cut out everything that relied on someone else (like get an agent, and sell my book to a publisher), and focused only on the things I had real control over.

Do you know what that list boiled down to?

Just write.

Write this book. Revise it. Rewrite it. Query it.

WRITE THE NEXT BOOK. Revise that book. Rewrite that book. Query it.

Write the book after that. Revise it. Rewrite it. Hopefully I won’t need to query it (but you always need a query letter).

That’s right, my 12 steps to ultimate success is the advice I send to my CPs, my friends, and my sweet but shy niece who wants to write:

JUST WRITE.

Write everything that strikes your fancy. Write the dark places of your soul. Write your guilt at not writing. Everything isn’t going to be published, but every word committed to paper is one word closer to THE END.

I’ve heard successful authors quote numbers of words, and I’ve never seen someone quote a number lower than half a million words (and frequently, they quote a number greater than a million). Usually it’s something like “The first half million words were crap, but things got better after that.” (this isn't necessarily true, your early words could be great, but for most of  us mere mortals, it's a big freaking number).

Be those writers. Don’t quit. Write. If it scares you, write that. If it makes you smile at inappropriate times, write that. It’s a simple plan to success (again, simple doesn’t mean easy). Write this book. Write the next book. Revise, rewrite, work on your grammar. Write a book. Write a poem. Write a blog post. Write another. Write. Write. Write.