Scott William Carter

The long days of summer are here, and the family is busy as usual.  Swimming lessons, pony camp, Safety Town camp, fun at the park, running through sprinklers, birthday parties, backyard barbecues, bicycling with our tandem bike and our bike trailer, riding the motorcycle to work, camping in our new tent trailer — between working and everything else, there’s hardly time to take a breath.  The writing productivity is still not quite what I’d like, certainly not what I’d like for where I want to go, but it’s getting there.  Another book coming along soon.  Meanwhile, head over to The First Book and check out some of the new interviews.  In the last few weeks. we’ve profiled Shana Burg’s A Thousand Never Evers, Stephanie Kuehnert’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Julie Kramer’s Stalking Susan, and Caitlin Kittredge’s Night Life.  The blog continues to be fun, fairly low maintenance, and hopefully proving to be worthwhile for the authors.  (Each interview gets 600-1000 readers the week it comes out, and then more over time.  It’s not in the 600,000 readers a day range that a place like DailyKos gets, but hopefully it’s worth the twenty minutes investment of time the authors put into the interview questions.)

Speaking of blogging, a discussion’s popped up a few times online, and then again in a private listserv I’m on, about the value of doing a blog to a fiction writer with professional aspirations (and by that, I mean a fiction writer who wants to sell their work for money and reach a large audience while doing it). 

Here’s my take:  if you enjoy doing a blog, would do it anyway, and you’re not an idiot lambasting editors who rejected your work, it probably won’t hurt.  In fact, there are a few people (here’s one, here’s another, and here’s one more) who’ve shown it can help your career at least a bit.  If you can do it in a way that is very focused and very limited with your time, as I did with The First Book blog, it can be a good thing, too.  But as a rule, no.  In fact, the vast majority of fiction writers with professional aspirations would be much better off spending that time writing fiction rather than spending it on their blogs. 

However, all blogs are not equal.  The term blog has come to encompass a huge variety of styles and types, everything from the teenager blogging about his problems getting a date to the prom to the freelance journalist writing about Kosovo.  It applies to someone like me, who posts, at most, a couple times a month, to a the hugely popular Gizmodo, where you’ll find at least three or four posts an hour.  It applies to my friend, who blogs beautifully but irregularly about her life and her son’s battle with Autism.  A blog is a tool; how it’s used varies greatly.

Me, I’m never going to be much of a blogger.  It’s just too easy for me to waste time doing it, and I know for a fact that it takes time away from my fiction.  There’s little to no evidence that it will lead to greater sales; most writers with popular blogs work them very hard, and most of them have a platform or presence in their chosen field that gives them as much exposure as their blog, so it’s nearly impossible to qualify exactly how much impact their blog might have on their sales.  So for me, it’s always going to be a very tiny part of my writing output.  And if it wasn’t a least a little fun, I wouldn’t do it at all.

Yes, you’ll hear the token writers who say “I wouldn’t have a career without my blog because such-and-such editor read my work on my blog and asked for it.”  Yes, it does happen; and yes, it’s as rare as lightning striking someone on the head on a sunny day.  If you hear that comment and think you, too, should be blogging so you can be “discovered,” then you’re not taking the right lesson from it.  What you should be thinking is that these writers weren’t getting their work out in front of enough editors, otherwise they would have had editors knocking down their doors for their work.  Usually, when I press such writers, they admit that they weren’t actively submitting their work, or that they gave up after a handful of rejections.  

Remember, however, that this is all regarding professional fiction writers. If you write for fun, just want to build a little audience for your work and see what happens, there’s nothing wrong with doing a blog.  In fact, there’s lots of reasons to do it — making new friends who share a common interest, networking, etc.  I’m not anti-blog at all.  I’ve read some beautiful writing on blogs.  But if you’re a fiction writer who hopes to someday make a living from your work, and you’ve got this idea put into your head that you really should be doing a blog, that it might be hurting your career if you’re not, that’s pure bunk.  You’re going to develop readers by writing great fiction, not by writing great blog posts.  Believe me, nobody perusing the book stand at your local grocery store is going to care at all whether you blog or not.  Blogging can also be the ultimate time waster and the ultimate writing avoidance tool.  It’s why I don’t have a comments section on my own site.  It would be one more thing I’d obsess about, and I’ve already got too many things to obsess about it as it is.  So you’ve got to know yourself, too, and if you do blog, do it in a way that works for you.

One last point, and one you may think is counter to everything I’ve just said (but really isn’t):  I do think that every fiction writer with professional aspirations should have a regularly updated Web page, just so your readers can find your work.  It’s cheap and easy, so there’s no reason not to do it.  Heck, for $8/month, you’ll get more than you’ll ever need.  I don’t think you’re going to pick up a lot of new readers this way, but it can help the readers you do have find even more of your work, and that’s a good thing. 

• There’s nothing better than listening to an author you enjoy read his or her own work — if that author knows how to read for an audience.   I’m currently listening to Neil Gaiman’s M is for Magic on my MP3 player, and he really does bring his fiction to life.  Gotta love that English accent, too.   
• If you’re a serious writer who needs help getting your craft to a publishable level, or even a professional writer whose career has stagnated, then you really should check out the workshops taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith here on the Oregon coast.  Every few years, they do a slate of workshops, and they’re in one of those phases now.  They’re pros, having made their living from their writing most of their adult lives, and so you’ll be learning from people who have actually walked the path.  I can’t recommend them enough.  Be forewarned, however:  they’re not for the faint of heart.  You should only consider attending if you’re serious about writing commercial fiction — and by commercial, I mean fiction aimed at reaching the widest audience possible.
• Check out the The First Book blog.  Sara Hantz is up with her book, The Second Virginity of Suzy Green.  A snippet:  “I’d been writing chick-lit for a couple of years, when in November 2005 I decided to try a teen-lit. After writing 3 chapters I did what you’re not meant to do and started to send it to agents, to test the water. Ooops!!! That’ll teach me. The story seemed to hit the right nerve because straight away five agents asked for the full manuscript and six for partials.”

Up this week on The First Book:  Jenny Gardiner and her debut novel,
SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER.  Go read the interview.  Fun stuff.

The traffic has been steadily increasing on site, which is great for all the authors over there.  There’s no reason to do this unless it’s helping writers.  You may have noticed that I made some changes to the design.  There were some things that bothered me about the old design — the main one being that if you linked to an individual interview, you lost the sidebar.  So I switched over to this design and made a few other improvements, too.  Don’t worry, I don’t plan on being one of those obsessive types who changes the design every few months.  It really was for functional reasons.  When I came up with this idea, I wanted to keep it simple since I don’t have much free time as it is, but I still wanted to do something that would 1) help writers — my way of paying forward, 2) help keep me up to date with what publishers are coming out with these days, and 3) raise my own Internet profile in a way that wasn’t obnoxious.  I think it’s accomplished all three things, while providing interesting information for readers, writers, agents, and editors.

Other stuff:

• My goal of writing 1000 words every day, no exceptions, has paid off big time; my productivity is back where it was before my Second Child Drop Off.  I wrote a post a while back on the differences between a project writer and a process writer, and it’s clear I’ve got be a process writer right now.  But man, the pages do add up when you’re cranking out three or four every day.  It feels good to be rolling again, and what’s really great is that I think I can even do better. 
• If you’re a newly pregnant woman or know one who is, consider buying my friend Jodi Neelin’s little book, The Pregnasaurus.  It’s a great little book, funny, charming, and touching at the same time.  Think of it as a children’s book for adults.

I decided I needed to do a reality check on whether my 50% drop in writing productivity since my son was born was really related to that event, or whether it’s just been a convenient excuse.  It’s true that finding time to write isn’t as easy as it used to be, and it’s true that life is just plain harder than it was before, but if I’m waiting for life to get easier, I have a feeling I’m going to be waiting a long time.  I needed to challenge my excuses and see how well they held up under more objective scrutiny.

So I set myself a new goal:  write 1000 words a day for a 100 days for a total of 100,000 words.  I decided I would try my best to hit 1000 words every day, but if I occasionally missed, I could do 2000 the next day to catch up.  The words could be novel or short story words, but they had to be fiction, and they had to be new. 

Well, the jury’s still out on whether I’ll meet the challenge, but I did 13 days for 13,000 words and only had to do a 2000 word day once.  During that time, not only did I work the full-time day job and do all the normal family and household/yard stuff, I also did all the following in that 13-day span:

• Spent a day helping give my daughter a pony party (with a real pony!) for her fifth birthday
• Went to the zoo with my family, eating up a Sunday
• Took an afternoon off and went on a coastal hike with my sister, who was visiting from NY
• Visited with my father for an afternoon and evening Saturday, who was visiting from Hawaii
• Spent an afternoon and evening out at the coast guest-speaking at a writer’s workshop

So all in all, a busy time, not crazy-out-of-my-mind busy, but an ordinary level of busy for how my life is now.  What did I learn?  I learned that through it all, I could write at the pace I’d like to be at — a pace that will help keep me in track with my goals.  There were quite a few days where I was writing late in my office, dead tired, but I was able to write.  I produced pages.  I learned that I could write and still have a social life, still have time for books, still have time for movies.  I also learned that through it all, I still wasted gobs of time. 

That last lesson was the most painful. 

So yes, life is harder, no denying that.  But the time is there.  It just has to be used more effectively, which is what I’m focusing on now. 

A few other things:

• Speaking of that writer’s workshop, I had a great time out there on the Oregon coast.  I have lots of experience talking to groups because of my day job, but I was much more self-conscious talking about writing, but the writers seemed to get something out of it.  Mainly, it was about how to switch agents from a newer writer’s point of view (and from one who hadn’t even sold a novel at the time), but the the conversation ranged all over the place.  Great fun.  And I learned a few things that made it worth the trip all by itself. 
• John Scalzi has some great thoughts on why YA science fiction/fantasy sells better than adult science fiction/fantasy — and also why writers in YA are paid more than their adult-writing counterparts.  Here and Here.  Great stuff. 
• Now I know why I’m not happy all the time.  I should be a church-going conservative.  Hmm  . . . Nah . . .
• Along those lines, a private Einstein letter confirms he really was an atheist, and that he only spoke of God as a metaphor for the laws of nature.  I wish he would have been more clear when he was alive on this matter, as Richard Dawkins has done, but it’s nice to know.  
• Check out The First Book.  Two new writers up there since the last time I posted, both with great stories about their journeys to being published authors.  How long will I keep doing this?  Who knows, but I’m going to try to keep it up until I’ve done at least 100 of them — which should be about the time my own first book comes out.

Finally, a picture that explains why no matter how many places I visit in this great country of ours, I just can’t get myself to live anywhere else.  This is Cascade Head, where I recently hiked with my sister:

Sometimes I amaze myself at the lengths I will go to avoid writing. I often write during lunch at the day job — in fact, it’s one of the most reliable places I can find time to write these days, sadly. Today, when I should have been writing, I was suddenly struck with the dire need to buy new brown socks from the local Bi-Mart. I was halfway to the car before I realized what I was doing.

Yes, it’s true I need new brown socks, but was it really all that urgent? Not really. In fact, one of the things I hate is going to the store to buy one item, because it seems so incredibly inefficient. It was writing avoidance, pure and simple

I still haven’t figured out why exactly I do this. Writing is, after all, something I love. But I have noticed that writing avoidance increases when I’m in that middle part of a book, the part when a lot of the early passion has subsided and the rush I get from writing the end is still a ways off. It’s something I have to guard against. I may love writing, but it can also be damn hard at times, and the harder it is, the more my subconscious mind devises ways to help me avoid actually cranking out the words.

From here on out, I think I’ll refer to writing avoidance as “looking for new socks.”

Of course, writing blog posts can be a form of writing avoidance, too. Sigh . . .

Elsewhere:

• Check out the The First Book Blog: New York Times bestselling writer Lisa McMann, author of Wake, is up this week. If you enjoy these mini-interviews, consider posting a link on your blog or website. The more web traffic these authors get, the better.
• Doug Cohen, assistant editor of Realms of Fantasy, has an interesting blog post (and online poll) about writers factoring in whether a magazine accepts email submissions (or only postal ones) into their criteria when they’re deciding on where to submit their work. Frankly, looking at the poll and the comments section, I find it astonishing that so many writers use that as a criteria at all. I can’t say that doesn’t factor into my decision making a little, but it’s waaaaay down the list after such things as 1) how much the market pays, 2) the size of its readership, and 3) how much prestige it offers. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths writers will go to hurt their own careers. If you want your work read, you try to get it into the best market. Period.
• Have you been reading Andrew Sullivan? If you want some relief from the madness of the mainstream media, look no further than Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, published at the Atlantic Online. I don’t always agree with him, but I frequently do, and his comments during the political season have helped me keep some perspective on this whole silly process.  It’s also made me realize how useless the mainstream media is becoming. 

I wrote a post not long ago about my recent realization that the number of words I wrote on a daily basis over the past six years amounted to a little over 500, or about two pages.  And while I meant this to be heartening, in the sense that you really can accomplish quite a lot even in tiny bits so long as you’re consistent, I realized it may have left people with the impression that I personally have been consistent in my writing habits.

In fact, the truth is far from it. 

I averaged two pages a day, but there were many, many days I didn’t write at all.  These were balanced out by the days that I wrote between 5000-10,000 words.  There were some days I wrote more than what I had written in some months.  This is not something I’m proud of, but it’s partly due to the state of my life and it’s partly due to my personality.  When I really get into the throes of a project, not just with writing but with anything, I tend work on it obsessively until it’s finished.  In other words, my tendency is to be a project-oriented person rather than a process-oriented person.

What’s the difference?  A process-oriented writer usually writes every day, some fixed amount like two pages or five pages or ten.  A project-oriented writer often may not write for days or weeks at a time, but when they do, they may work around the clock until the project is finished.  There’s no right or wrong to either approach, and actually, most writers are probably a mix of the two.  The beginning writer is probably best served by being mostly a process writer, because the beginner hasn’t yet developed the writing skills or stamina to be able to sit down and crunch out 10,000 words.  Building those writing muscles takes time.  This is why you hear so many writers telling you to write every day.  But I do want to say that not all writers do this, that, in fact, a huge percentage don’t, and if you’re one of those people, you shouldn’t beat yourself up all the time that somehow you’re failing to become a Real Writer because you’re not writing on a daily basis.  The real truism, if you want to get better, is that you must write more, however you go about it, and that in most cases the more you write the faster you will get better and the sooner you will achieve success.   (I should also add that whether I write 1000 or 10,000 words a day, my actual writing speed is pretty consistent).

There are dangers in both approaches, however.  The problem for the project writer is that it’s easy for those stretches between projects to get longer and longer without you realizing it.  This is especially the case if you have a challenging life which can prevent you from getting to the keyboard as often as you’d like.   One of the chief dangers for the process writer is burnout.  Writing daily can soon feel like drudgery.

The solution?  Well, as I said before, I don’t think any writer is just one or the other.  Most are a mix of the two.  When I got very serious about the craft six years ago, I made a commitment to write every day, and that commitment was necessary to breakthrough all the inertia that had built up over the years.  But over time, I’ve drifted into becoming more and more of a project writer, which is probably closer to my personality.  My problem lately is that life has become so challenging that it’s easy for a few days between writing sessions to turn into a few weeks.  This is not good.

So my life, right now, dictates that that I veer back into being more of a process writer who occasionally allows himself to be a project writer when I’m in the throes of a particular project and want to finish it.  Translation:  I need to write at least a couple pages every day, but now and then I’ll schedule all-day writing sessions.  In my mind, this gives me the best of both worlds.  I keep my writing muscles sharp by writing on a near-daily basis, but I don’t keep myself chained to it.  I’ve also come to like the fallow periods of not writing, because I’m able to re-charge my writing batteries.  Of course this only works if there’s writing on both sides of that fallow period . . .

So if you find that writing has become drudgery, or that you’re not writing enough, try varying your project/process approach a bit.  I’m doing that now (back to a thousand words a day for me), and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.   

Ever since I got serious about writing — which dates back to January 2002, I remember it well – I’ve been pretty compulsive about tracking my progress.  I’ve got spreadsheets up the wazoo.  It may seem a bit anal to some folks, but think about it this way:  if you were a factory that made gizmos, wouldn’t you want to have good reliable data on how many gizmos you made a year, your sell-rate on gizmos, and just where in the world your gizmos were going? 

My spreadsheets help me not only maintain a professional focus with my writing, they help me stay honest with how hard I’m working at it.   It’s too easy to pretend you’re a writer if you’re not keeping track of how many words, pages, and manuscripts you’ve produced.  I don’t want to pretend.  I want to be.

Anyway, I was updating one of my spreadsheets when I came upon a number that surprised me.  For the last six years, I’ve written 1,136,341 new words of fiction.  Yay for me — more than a million words of fiction!  That’s a lot of short stories and novels.

But hold on a minute.  If you divide that number by the number of days (365*6=2190), you get . . . 519 words a day.

Which is roughly the equivalent of two manuscript pages a day.

That’s all.  Just two pages a day. 

Food for thought.

A friend of mine who’s recently had a number of editors request his manuscript asked me how I created a sense of urgency among agents and editors when I was sending out The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys – since that was something I mentioned to him when I talked to him at a recent writer’s workshop, about the value of creating a sense of urgency.  I was going to answer him directly, but I thought my thoughts on this might benefit other writers, too. This is just my opinion, of course, and what I think worked for me, so take it for what it is. Other writers may have different experiences.

1. Have a great manuscript. I know it goes without saying, but well, I’m saying it anyway. Nothing you do will matter if you don’t have a great manuscript. However, remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and where one person sees a diamond in the rough another sees only a lump of coal. There is no book ever published that was universally liked. Once your writing gets to a publishable level, it’s always about taste. 

2. Perfect your query, but also modify it for each agent or editor. Nobody wants to feel like they are getting a form letter. Even one or two sentences at the beginning of your query that’s tailored to each particular editor or agent helps a great deal. It could be about a book they sold that’s similar in tone or feel to yours, or a client they represent that writes similar books. A workshop or conference where you saw them speak.  Just something to make them feel like you didn’t just boilerplate your query.  Think small talk, but don’t pander. And make it real.

3. Be aggressive! In less than a week, after I decided to get serious about marketing Water Balloon Boys, I sent out 32 queries to both editors and agents. Not all at once, but staggered over the week. And not just to any editors or agents. I did my research. Yes, it’s hard work, and yes, it’s exhausting. But I’m fully convinced it’s a numbers game. There are many, many reasons why agents and editors don’t ask to see books, and only a few of those reasons have to do with the quality of your manuscript. (As far as how to research, check out my Resources for Writers page. It’s a place to start.)

4. This one’s probably going to be controversial, but I’ve come to believe it’s true: You don’t want an agent who won’t take email queries. Yes, you can make exceptions, but they better be heavy hitters with lots of bestsellers on their lists.  However, the agents most new writers are most likely to get — and the ones who will usually be the best fit — are the younger agents, the ones hungry to grow their careers. If they’re not taking email queries, they are behind the times. They are not serious about building their client base, because they run the risk of missing out on great clients.

Yes, I understand all their objections, that taking email queries makes it incredibly easy for any Tom, Dick, or Harriet to submit a manuscript, but so what? Rejecting email queries is also incredibly easy: “Thanks, but this one’s not a good fit for me,” and then hit the Send button. No sticking a letter in an envelope. No walking that letter to the mailbox. This is the way of the future, folks. The agent I ended up going with (the amazing Rachel Vater of Folio) read my query, asked for the manuscript, read the manuscript, and offered representation all in twenty-four hours. 

A postal letter wouldn’t even have made it from Oregon to Ohio in that time.

Is it any coincidence that Rachel is quickly becoming one of the hottest agents out there, with a growing number of clients hitting the bestseller lists? I think not. Her response to my query is indicative of the type of agent she is — one who’s agressive when she finds a project she believes in.

One other point: not one of my 32 queries was sent by postal mail. Not one.

5. Don’t stop because a few of them have asked to see it. That’s the worst thing you can do. Remember, you must believe you have a hot commodity. Everybody wants it. If everybody wants it, why would you stop when only a few people have asked for it? The best way to create a sense of urgency among editors and agents is to have many of them wanting it at the same time.  Think about eBay. What happens to the bidding when more than one person wants the same thing?

6. Always include at least the first five pages of your manuscript. I do this even when agents and editors don’t ask for it. There are a couple reasons for this. First, most writers write crappy query letters and most editors and agents know this. But lots of writers who can’t write query letters can write great books — which means that no matter how bad your query letter is, no agent or editor will be able to resist at least glancing at your opening pages.

I know this is hard to believe, but 99% of manuscripts are rejected in the first five pages even if the whole manuscript is included. If you haven’t hooked an agent or editor in those first five pages, you aren’t going to hook them. Sorry, but it’s true. However, the flip side is also true: if you have hooked them in the first five pages, there’s a decent chance that you can get them to read the rest of the manuscript. Why? Because you got them across threshold from looking for a reason to reject to looking for a reason to represent or buy. That change in mindset makes all the difference.

Important:  unless they ask for the pages as an attachment, don’t do it that way.  Include it in the body of the email directly below your query.  You’ll have to reformat it, but it’s worth it.  That way, if they’re not interested in reading the pages, no harm, no foul.  It didn’t clog up their inbox or get flagged by their spam program.  Being aggressive doesn’t mean being annoying. 

7. Don’t promise an exclusive. If they don’t ask, don’t mention it. If they ask, be honest. Tell them you appreciate their interest, but unfortunately you can’t offer an exclusive at this time. You’ve just started querying and you’ve already had a fair amount of interest. However, you promise to immediately let them know if there’s an offer of representation and to give them time, if they’re interested, to let you know why he or she would be the best agent for this project. Then you go ahead and send them the manuscript (by email or snail mail, depending on how they ask for it). 

Here’s the important point, and the point that probably gives new writers fits: if they decide to pass because you didn’t offer them an exclusive, you don’t want them.This means that 1) they’re too busy to take on a new client, 2) they’re not an agressive enough agent, or 3) they probably don’t believe in the concept of your book enough, which means you already have an uphill climb with them.

Some agents, especially ones who have been in the business a long time, are legitimately too busy to be the kind of agent that an up-and-coming writer needs. They might have a number of bestsellers on their list (and they know where their bread is buttered), they might have personal problems, or they might just be truly buried. In any case, they’re not the right agent for you.  A good agent can make all the difference, but you are better off having no agent than a agent who isn’t right for you.

Remember, for the most part agents are like Realtors. Their job is to help you sell an already sellable project. Why would you want an agent or editor who isn’t excited enough about your project to compete with other agents or editors for it?

8. An agent offers representation. What do you do?You listen, ask questions, and try to determine if they’d be a good agent for you at this time in your career and with this particular project. Sure, you want an agent who will be with you long term, but the most imprant thing is that they’re right for you now and with this current project. Everything else is hypothetical. Then tell them that you’ve had lots of interest in the manuscript, and to be fair, you need to give the others an opportunity to make their pitches. Any good agent will completely understand this. It’s a business, after all. You tell the agent that you’re going to give everyone until such and such date and then you will make your decision.

Now email anyone who asked to see the manuscript and anyone you’ve queried who hasn’t passed on it telling them that there’s an offer of representation on the table.You tell them you value everyone’s time, and you know how hard agenting is, so you want to make sure that anyone who’s interested has a chance to make his or her pitch to you. Then you give them your deadline. A week is ample time. An agent who really believes in the book will get to it in a week.

9. For me, this spurred a number of agents into action, and in the end, I had multiple offers of representation.It also spurred a number of agents to pass on the project. But that’s fine. That’s what creating a sense of urgency will do — it speeds up the process. Fast rejections are no different than slow rejections. However, a fast acceptance generally means extra enthusiasm, and in this business, there’s no substitute for having an agent or editor with enthusiasm for your project. I happen to know that Rachel Vater is incredibly busy, just buried in queries and manuscripts, and so her fast response time gave her bonus points in my mind. 

10. What if, instead, an editor offers to buy the book? What do you do? You thank the editor and tell them you’ll have your agent give them a call (even if you don’t have an agent). Congratulations! Now you have a huge bargaining chip you can use to get the agent you want. Be forewarned: you still want an agent who is right for you. Call the agents on your dream list and interview them. Take your time. Publishing moves at glacial speed. Taking an extra few days or even weeks means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Closing thoughts

I actually signed with an agent before I had an offer from an editor, but I will say this: marketing my work aggressively was one of the chief reasons the editor who ended up buying my book even heard about it in the first place. If I had been passive, if I had sat around waiting for agents or editors to get back to me before marketing it to others, it’s doubtful this particular editor would have even heard about it.

Of course, that’s a story for another day . . .

Had a great time attending the Denise Little workshop on the Oregon coast this past weekend. Since Kris and Dean hadn’t done any workshops in several years, it was like a reunion for many of us, though I met plenty of new folks, too. Among those in attendance were Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Phaedra Weldon, Steve Mohan Jr., Ken Scholes, Adrian Phoenix, Peter Orullian, Loren Coleman . . . the list goes on an on.  A very talented bunch.

That’s one of the reasons I like Kris and Dean’s workshops so much. It’s not just the teachers (who are fabulous). It’s the students. There’s nothing better than being surrounded by a lot of writers who treat the craft as seriously as you do. Believe me, that’s a rare thing. The focus was on writing for anthologies, and I certainly learned a lot about that, but I also got a reminder on a very important lesson — one that I needed right now.

Everybody’s got excuses not to write. Everybody’s got excuses not to meet a deadline — whether it’s in a workshop or in real life. But no matter how good your excuse is, there’s always another writer who’s got a better one, and they met their deadline. So when I hear myself trying to reach for an excuse, and I’ve certainly got plenty of good ones (a day job, two young children, etc.), I’m going to ask myself if I want to be one of those people who uses excuses as justification for not writing, or instead one of those people who does the work anyway and then uses those challenges as a bragging point. “Hey look,” you can say, “I was sick as a dog and my bank just called to say I’m bouncing checks, but I still wrote ten pages.”

That’s not say some excuses are good reasons to not write — there’s plenty of awful things I can imagine happening that would stop me from writing. It’s just that it’s always my choice whether I allow them to stop me or not.

On another note: go check out The First Book blog. Up today, Kelly Simmons and her book, Standing Still. A snippet: “I’ve never been one of those people who has to have a certain kind of pen, or notebook, or desk. If I’d waited to have all the right things I’d never have written a word.”

Here at Mutterings Central, I’m pretty honest about my goal to eventually make a living writing fiction.  It doesn’t mean I’m unrealistic about it, or that I’d be willing to put my family at risk to achieve it, but it has been and will always be one of the ways in which I measure my success with my writing career.  It’s not the only way, nor is it the best way, but it is important.  It’s something I work toward — whether it takes years or decades. 

There’s certainly plenty of writers who don’t think this is important — in fact, I find it amusing how many writers who do make a living writing fiction discourage others from trying to do the same, not for nefarious reasons, but because they know how hard it is — but I don’t think I’d ever be satisfied until I at least gave it a shot. 

What some of these writers may not realize is that the goal of making a living from your craft is not a rational one, any more than trying to become an Olympic gold medalist in archery is rational.  Few worthwhile goals are rooted in rationality and logic.  So trying to dissuade someone by telling them it’s more logical to keep your day job and write on the side is rather pointless.  That’s like telling someone she should fall in love with the guy next door becuase he’s an accountant and good for her when her heart flutters at the sight of grease monkey down the street working on his Mustang.  And who wants to live in a world ruled completely by logic anyway? 

So that brings me to what I wanted to write about:  who to share your dreams and goals with, and how much you should choose to share.  Especially in the beginning, I’ve come to believe it’s very important that you get unflagging support from those you share your dreams with, and if you can’t get it, then it’s better that these people remain in the dark.  Let them think you just do that “writing thing” as a hobby —  or better yet, don’t let them know about your writing at all.  I’m now at a point where I’ve achieved enough success that it serves as a bullwark against the doubters and the skeptics, so I can afford to be a little more honest about it, but even I’m careful.  Why?  Well, let me tell you about an incident that happened to me a couple years ago at the day job.

I work at a small university in technology support, helping with online classes and such.  A new colleague, the director of a program on campus that also had some oversight with online classes, invited me out to coffee.  It was just a meet and greet deal, a chance to socialize.  This colleage, let’s call her Karen, said at one point, “Scott, you seem like a talented guy.  I’m surprised that you’re not in graduate school or trying to work your way up the ladder.  It seems like you could go far.”

I made the mistake at this point of letting my guard down.  (Maybe it was the poppyseeds in the muffin.)  I told her that while I liked my day job, and it was a perfect fit for me, my overall goal in life was to become a professional fiction writer, so I deliberately chose a job that would help me achieve that goal — a job, that while challenging and interesting, was one I could leave behind at 5 p.m with a clear conscience and maybe even squeeze some writing in during my lunch hour.  So while I didn’t fault anyone from “working their way up the ladder,” I focused that time and energy on my writing. 

She nodded in agreement, the conversation moved on, and I didn’t think anything more of it until about a year later.  My program was being transferred under another director, and unbeknownst to me, he asked a number of people on campus about me and what they thought of me — Karen being one of them.  Pretty much everybody said glowing things about me, but Karen had some “concerns.”  You see, we worked together on a grant-funded program a few months after that coffee meeting, and even though it seemed, from my point of view, to go quite well, apparently she didn’t think my work was up to snuff.  And she told my boss this.  In fact, she told him quite a bit more, that, in her words, “my priorities were elsewhere.”

This is not the way to get off on the right foot with your new boss.  At his request, we had an airing out meeting, the three of us, and when she got defensive — probably realizing how shallow her criticisms were — she brought up my comment about my goal of becoming a professional fiction writer.  It was a low blow, and I think my new boss saw through it, but the damage was done and the doubt was in his mind.  I had to make sure I worked extra hard to prove to him that her concerns, however irrational, were unfounded.  And I think I did.  But at a time when our university was making budget cuts, it was not the kind of thing I wanted in the back of my boss’s mind.

Both of those two have left the university (in fact Karen had lots of personal problems, which I think, in retrospect, contributed to her warped perceptions of me), but the lesson remains.  Be careful who you share your dreams with.  While I wish it weren’t true, there are lots of small-minded people out there who will try to use them against you if the need arises.  This isn’t to say you shouldn’t share your dreams and aspirations with others.  Sharing such things is how you develop meaningful friendships.  But it’s good to be cautious until you know whether someone can be trusted.