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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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Craft

NaNoWriMo: Let’s Write Together!

 

NaNoWriMo: Let’s write together

 

The idea here is to start a novel from idea generation and go all the way (hopefully) through the agenting process, the publishing process, marketing . . . everything that happens along the way to your very first author event at your local independent bookstore.

 

I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen or not; we’re just getting started! But that’s the goal.

 

I’m going to be gearing everything we do toward that ultimate goal of finding representation from a literary agent and then hopefully traditionally publishing your novel. If that doesn’t happen, that’s okay, we will shift gears and we will self-publish it, and we’ll be talking about all those things every step of the way.

 

It seems like a good idea to write something accessible to more people if I’m going to do my job as an instructor, or as a mentor, or as a coach for writing. I need to make this process and story as accessible for as many novelists and aspiring writers as humanly possible.

 

Again, the idea is I’m starting from zero. I’m going to go to a couple of photo free photo websites (pexels.com and unsplash.com), look for an image that speaks to me—that I find compelling or that inspires me—and we’re going to write a novel based on that image. The final story may change and shift and morph throughout the writing process; that’s fine, that’s normal. But you’ll be along for the ride every step of the way as we talk about structure and plot and pacing and characterization and dialogue and description and white space and all those things that go into novel writing.

 

One question I do see a lot is, “Where do you get your ideas?” or “How can I get ideas to write?” This is one thing you can do: go to a free photo site and just surf around and see what compels you, see what grabs you. (The other advantage to doing that is if we end up going the self-publishing or independent publishing route, this image can become the basis of a great book cover.)

 

I found this shot of a girl sitting on a skateboard with sort of a do-rag thing going on:

 

photo credit:

Olia Danilevich

 

She’s got kind of this Mona Lisa smile going on. She is somebody I would write about.

 

I also like this girl by herself at a carnival or fair of some kind. She doesn’t look like she’s very happy, but there’s this prominent image of the ferris wheel in the background:

 

 

photo credit:

Hannah Busing

 

That’s interesting to me. Why is she there? Why is she by herself? What happened in the moment before?

 

 

Even as I scrolled through many images, I already started mulling ideas about these two images. How can how can they be related? How can they be in relationship?

 

As these posts continue, we will also talk about outlines: should you outline, should you not outline, should you be a pantser or an outliner . . . all these kinds of things we’ll discuss but right now, all I need is something to get the fires burning.

 

Here is the story idea I came up with:

 

I have decided that these two are friends, and they have been friends for a long time, but the girl in the carnival picture perhaps has depression or is struggling with something at home. Some external force is is acting upon her. They go to this carnival, she meets a boy and he’s a carney—maybe he operates the one of the games. She falls for him and decides she’s going to run away with him to the carnival, or follow him to the next town or whatever. Her friend on the skateboard is like, “Not by yourself, I’m coming with you!” She has her own baggage, but I don’t know what that is yet.

 

And it doesn’t matter, because now we have three characters and a story.

 

I have no idea where it’s going, but this is how it works. So that’s where we’re going to leave it for now. Thank you very much for reading, and we’ll see you soon!

 

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Review + Writer Takeaway: Midsommar

A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

A New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never one went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1h 23m or of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 

See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

 Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.

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How Does an Agent Know in 10 Pages If I Am Worthy?

“I can tell from the first page what genre your novel is probably going to be. If I’m wrong about what genre it’s going to be based on the first page, then, honestly . . . there’s probably something with the writing that the writer needs to look at.”

 

I saw this question on Quora the other day: how does a literary agent know from the first 10 pages if the novel is worthy or not?

 

First, let’s discuss the meaning of the word “worthy.” What exactly does the writer mean when she says “worthy?” Presumably “worthy” means worthy to be published: is it a good novel, is it a good story, is it something marketable it’s something that an agent would be interested in, is it something an editor would be interested in?

 

The issue we have here is, your first step in querying agents and editors is to make sure you are querying the correct person for your work. You don’t want to send a horror novel to someone who exclusively represents romance, for example. In this instance, the literary agent knows from the first page, and certainly by 10 pages in, whether or not you have submitted the right genre to that agent or that editor.

 

Most novels are going to be able to establish their genre well within the first 10 pages, and often within the first page. I run a service on Fiverr where I critique the first page of people’s novels, and every once in a while someone will say, “Well, but how can you tell from the first page if it’s any good?” It’s because when you read as many manuscripts as I do, (never mind how many agents read!) and this many books, this many query letters, I can tell from the first page what genre this is probably going to be. If I’m wrong about what genre this is going to be based on the first page, then, honestly, there’s probably something with the writing that the writer needs to look at.

 

Every Sunday night at 6 p.m. Pacific time, we host a live stream called First Page Sunday. We use my first pages or first pages from published novels or first pages that have been submitted to the show, and we read them and give a quick—very friendly but professional—critique about that first page. More often than not you will be able to tell what genre this story is going to be based on the first sentence, certainly in the first page, and never mind 10 pages.

 

By 10 pages into any book we should be well-established into what kind of book this is going to be, because in those first 10 pages, you’re establishing character; you’re establishing tone; you’re establishing voice; and a really good writer is probably even going to introduce the main conflict of the story. We may not know what it is for sure, but it’s probably going to be there at least in the background if not introduced outright.

 

If you think about some of your favorite stories and go back and read the first 10 pages, you will probably start to see that we know who the main character is; we know that they are headed into some kind of trouble, and hopefully (more often than not) they’re headed into trouble because of a choice they have just made that is going to forever alter the trajectory of their life. All of these things, generally speaking, are going to occur in the first 10 pages. If none of those things occur in the first 10 pages, then that’s how a literary agent is going to say “This isn’t ‘worthy.’”

 

Using the word “worthy” here makes me feel as though the writer believes that something can be objectively good or objectively bad; objectively worthy or objectively unworthy. That’s simply not true. There is, simply and frankly, no accounting for taste. That’s something writers will face when submitting to any agent.

 

Maybe you have written a romance novel, a traditional contemporary romance, and it has a happily-ever-after (HEA) ending. All of your friends say it’s good, your beta readers, your critique partners . . . everybody says it’s great. You send it off to 20 or 30 or 50 agents and they all reject you. Oh my god, you’re not worthy!!!

 

Right?

 

Of course not! That’s absurd. Don’t ever think that.

 

(aside: Do as I say not as I do…)

 

The fact that your awesome romance novel has been rejected by 20 or 30 or 50 agents doesn’t mean you’re not worthy; it doesn’t mean the story isn’t worthy of being published. It means a million different things that you have zero control over. Maybe the agent was having a bad day. Maybe she just got five other manuscripts that sound a lot like yours. Maybe she’s not sure if she’s gonna be keeping her job or not. Maybe her mom and dad are really p.m. sick and she has to care for them and so she’s more focused on that at the moment.

 

There are so many different things that go into an agent choosing to represent or not represent a novel. One of them—and please listen carefully to this—that you cannot ever control is simply this: maybe it wasn’t a good fit.

 

I promise at some point in your career, if you’re going in the traditional market, you will get rejection letters that say “It just wasn’t a good fit.” Every writer who gets that rejection says, “Oh my god! What on earth does that mean??”

 

It means it wasn’t a good fit.

 

There were agents who p.m. passed on Harry Potter. Who said, “This isn’t a good fit.” You might hear that story and say, “That shows them! They didn’t pick up this smash hit! I bet they wish they’d picked up Harry Potter, hahaha!”

 

The reality: In terms of wishing they had that kind of money? Sure, of course they wish they had that.

 

Do they wish they’d picked up Harry Potter? Probably not. They said no because it wasn’t a good fit.

 

That is something we writers and authors need to accept and really get into our bloodstream. Sometimes it is literally that simple. I’ve gotten rejection letters from agents and editors like, “This is awesome, I love it, you’ve got a great voice! . . . It’s just not for me.” So you move on. You can’t bother getting upset by it.

 

By page 10 we ought to know who the main character is, an idea of what the conflict is going to be, and the voice and tone of the novel. The lesson here is to make sure that your tone and your voice is consistent. That’s one of the takeaways I want you to have when you start your novel, wherever you end up choosing to start it. You’re establishing a world and you establish that world on the first page. There’s no escaping it. Whatever it is you’re establishing on that first page needs to carry through the rest of the book.

 

I opened up my science-fiction book club novel—Hounded, by Kevin Hearne—and on page one, there is no question what type of book this is going to be. (The link will take you to the book’s Amazon page, where you can Look Inside.) I don’t know the main conflict on page one but I know the tone, I know the protagonist, I know what he’s capable of, I know the world that we’re getting into. Hearne is able to put all of that into the first page. By page 10, we absolutely know where the story is going.

 

That’s just good writing. Whether you subjectively feel it’s a good book is up to you. I’m going to finish the book, and I may end up not liking the book; that’s up to me as the reader. But was the job accomplished? Yes, I think you can critically look at the book and critically determine whether or not Kevin Hearne has done his job as the writer.

 

Keep writing!

 

(And if you need more advice and feedback on your work, consider joining us at Patreon for only $5 a month.)