Semi-Serious about Writing
Nancy continues our series, Seven Semi-Serious Questions About Writing, in which the Book Tarts add to the morass of internet advice for writers by contributing their own forays into dumbassery* for your edification....
What was your worst mistake? You mean besides the time I left the Baggie in the trunk of my car and the campus police----
Oh, I get it. Sorry. My worst career mistake was probably staying too long with a publisher because I felt the editors were my friends and had my best interests at heart. Maybe this is a girl thing, I dunno. For years I stayed with those friends even after I learned that other houses were paying twice what I earned for the same kind of book. Once I finally made the jump, I realized there are friendly, talented editors everywhere, and I shouldn't have been afraid to leave my comfort zone. Publishing is, after all, a business.
What advice do you wish someone had given you? To keep working on my craft. I was an English major, a moderately well-read person, and after college I taught grammer on the high school level. Plus I every manuscript I'd ever finished was published as a book. For a long time, those credentials helped me delude myself that I knew it all. I even had the hubris to believe I didn't need to read the "how-to" books or attend seminars about writing---and I had some good reviews (mostly by amateurs who knew even less than I did!) to bolster my misplaced self-confidence. Maybe I thought learning more might jinx me or douse my creative spark. But being obstinate for so many years really held me back. Now I recognize that I will never know everything about the art of writing. Plus, the nature of what's good keeps changing. (Yes, Virginia, it does.) To stay in the game, I should constantly work at my craft and pay attention to the marketplace.
Who told you you'd never be published, and what would you say to them now? I never told anyone but my husband that I was writing my first book--to avoid exactly this scenario. I didn't want anyone sneering at me, so I kept my work a secret even from my mother until the first manuscript was finished. When it sold, I took everyone by surprise. (Yeah, okay, some people were dumbfounded.) But a few years later--after I'd written and sold a number of romances--a former teaching colleague said to me, "I've decided to write a book, too. I mean, if Nancy Martin can do it, I certainly can!" At the time, I wished her good luck. Twenty years later, I still send her the very best wishes on finishing that book of hers.
If you could steal ideas from someone, who would it be? Nora Ephron. And Carrie Fisher. Or, more likely (!) from a newspaper piece like this one.
Commas. Does anyone really care anymore? You're letting me vent just to get on my good side, right? Look: Just because you can speak the language doesn't mean you can write prose that's acceptable to a $25+billion-a-year industry. If a manuscript has spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors in the early pages, agents and editors have every reason to believe the rube---er--submitting writer lacks the skills to get to the top of the heap. Commas are a good example. Maybe America doesn't care about commas anymore, but if you want to be welcomed into the publishing profession, you need to learn the rules of punctuation. Especially if you're not a trained writer, journalist or English teacher, you need to educate yourself! For crying out loud, take a class at a community college. Buy a punctuation textbook. Keep ELEMENTS OF STYLE on your desk and read it once in a while. And trust me, you'll still have a lot to learn about writing. But at least you won't look like just another clueless wannabe on paper.
That said . . . my personal philosophy when it comes to commas is, "when it doubt, take 'em out." Because pop fiction readers prefer clear language whenever possible. If I have too many commas in a sentence, I know I should find a simpler construction to convey my meaning. That doesn't mean my ideas should be simple, of course. But my writing should be.
What do you do when your career isn't going well? Mope. Then I kick myself in the head and start reading. Yes, there's a lot of schlock selling out there, but that should give me confidence. And reading the really good stuff gives me inspiration. It's easy to blame your agent for lack of forward or upward motion in your career. Or your publisher for poor sales. But the heaviest responsibility for success rests on the shoulders of the writer who creates the product. No agent can market a book that isn't written. No publisher can make a blockbuster out of a novel that's derivative. Or lacks fresh ideas. Or features a concept that's muddy. If I feel I'm falling behind, I know I need to open my eyes and look at what's happening in the world and in the business. Like all popular culture, the publishing biz changes every week.
If you could start all over, what would you do? I'd get much faster to writing what I can write uniquely well. Once I stopped trying to write like everyone else in my genre and went with my own voice, my own stories and my own tone and sensibility, things took off for me. (It took a hell of a lot of pages and the input of readers, editors, agents and reviewers to help me recognize my own strengths, though!) It was a long time before I realized that trying to follow the rules, stay within the confines of the so-called "conventions of the genre" or copy other writers just creates mediocre writing. Added plus? Now that I'm writing what I love, I'm really enjoying myself!
Stay tuned for more enlightening words of wisdom from the rest of the Book Tarts!
* Dumbassery: Acts of dumb ass stupidity. (Etymology: Those brilliant minds at Smart Bitches. Points awarded to the first person to get this word listed in Wikipedia with proper citations to SBTB.)