And trust yourself. That's what I would tell Luke if I were Yoda. Or anyone's mentor, for that matter. I have been barraged lately by would-be writers coming to me or other authors or editors or agents, looking for validation. Or who have been crushed by something that a critique partner told them. Or who have posted sadly about giving up on any of the forums I occasionally poke my head into.

All of them ask the same sort of questions. They sound like so:

- should I be writing?
- will I ever be good enough?
- is this what I really ought to be doing?
- are they right when they say I should do something else?
- is it too hard to do this?
- is it time to give up?
- is it worth it?

All great questions. And you know the only person who can answer these questions for you?

Yoda.

No, I'm kidding. You. You're the only one who can answer these questions. You can ask other people these questions, of course, and everyone will answer you, usually with something exceptionally reassuring sounding, but they are all just guessing. Because you're not going to believe them. Not really. Not unless they agree with what you already secretly or subconsciously think.

The other day, someone asked me if my path to publication had been easy, and I shrugged and said, "Yeah, I guess so, comparatively." But on the plane trip back home, I started thinking about this statement. Looking at it objectively, I don't think it was that easy. I just did a quick search in my current e-mail inbox and found 95 e-queries that got rejected. That was since September of 2006. Before that, I had 40 from my previous email account, and before that, I did paper queries. I chucked most of those when I moved (I used to save them), so I only have about 25 of the rejection letters from my pre-2005 querying life. But that is only a tiny percentage.

When I finally did get editor interest on my first novel, the editor took it to the acquisitions meeting and returned with the news that he couldn't convince them to take it. I had no other leads.

And let's talk different kinds of rejections, shall we? I love to create music, create art, and write. When I was in college as a history major (because I thought teaching history would be a nice thing to do while waiting to make a living at something creative), I tried to get accepted into college piano lessons, college drawing classes, and a creative writing class. I failed to get into any of them. My piano playing wasn't good enough, the music department said, for further lessons. My art portfolio wasn't sophisticated enough, the art department decided. And I wasn't an English major and my writing just didn't show enough promise to get into a creative writing class (I fantasized for a long time about the day when I would rub these decisions in their faces)(these fantasies usually involved me springing into the Creative Writing professor's office with a copy of the latest New York Times and shouting "Oh ho ho look who is on the list and WHO ISN'T!?")(This fantasy somehow lost its appeal long before I actually made it onto the list).

Do you see what point I'm trying to get at here, with all the subtlety of a Jack Nicholson movie? I keep seeing authors and artists fall by the wayside, crushed by external forces that don't even care if the person is crushed or not. They just want said smashed person to leave them alone. None of those rejections were personal, not even the ones that said my portfolios sucked. They really just were trying to do their job and guess who had the most potential because their resources were limited.

And they guessed wrong.

And that's why you can't trust other people's judgment on your hopes and dreams, people. Only you can decide when you've had enough, if it's worth it, if you're doing the right thing. They might be able to decide when you get published, but they can't decide for you when you stop trying.

I think of myself like a deep sea fish. I mean, not regularly, but at this moment, I do. The pressure of the ocean once you are way deep down where it's cool is absolutely crushing. But deep sea fish don't get crushed. Why not? Because the pressure inside them is just as strong, pushing back on the world around them. At any point in my career -- those early nos when I was just learning how to write, or those middling nos when I just got form rejections, or those late nos, when I made it to acquisitions and then failed to get published -- I could've given up and let myself get crushed and given up.

Guess what? The world wouldn't have cared.

And I'm cool with that. My dreams are only my own. They are not anyone else's concern. I don't count on anyone else in the world to value them, other than my husband. Absolutely nobody in the world has any responsibility to ease your creative pain, make your writing journey easier, help you along the writing path, or otherwise not trample you like a bug with juicy green insides. That doesn't mean that no one will, it just means no one has to. And it means you can get by without others too, if you yourself have the tensile strength to withstand those crushing oceanic pressures of the creative life.

So here's where I go back to the Yoda part. Why are aspiring authors and artists looking to the outside world for verification of their purpose in life? Trust yourself. Trust your own instincts, your own dreams. I'm not saying trust yourself to know that your writing doesn't suck -- you can't. I'm sorry, none of us can. But you can trust yourself that you will eventually get to where it doesn't suck. And you can trust your opinion that it will be worth it when you get there. And that it is worth the hours you're logging to improve your craft and learn about the business.

And what if that voice inside you is always shouting that it isn't worth it? What if you're turning to the outside world for verification every week? Maybe it is time to quit. If writing is not making you happy, if you don't like the process, if you are crying all the time over rejections (I cannot remember crying over a single one), then why are you doing it? I think some people do it because they think the world will look at them as a quitter. Trust me, the world won't care. It sounds heartless, but they won't. The person you write for is you. And I think some people keep doing it because they've always done it and they can't imagine wasting all those hours spent trying. Nothing's a waste -- it's all character development. For you. I officially give you permission to give up if you want to give up.

But I also give you permission to shake your head indignantly at the next rejection and to use it as fuel instead of water for your fire. Mark it up as another physical example of you pursuing your goals -- an unsent query gets no rejections -- and find out how you can make the next rejection a little more personalized. All the nos in the world don't matter if you are looking inside yourself for the answers.

Seriously, Skywalker.

I have been answering a lot of questions lately -- interview questions, article questions, questions in fanmail, questions from writers -- and there’s one sort of subset of questions that I get all the time, so I’m going to answer them here. It’s these:

“How do I start writing my book? How do I write my novel? How do I finish my novel? Do you have a daily routine? How much work do you do before you start writing your novel? Should I get a degree in English? Do you edit while you write? How do you get around writer’s block? How do you get past the “this feels silly” thoughts?”

All of these questions are really one question: “How do I write a book?”

And the answer, which I will explain in depth, is a simple two-parter:

1 - You decide to.

2- Butt in Chair.

Now, since I can hear the disgruntled sighs from here, let me ‘splain. First of all, my process will never be your process, because I am me and you are you. The most logical and best writing process is the one which most perfectly meshes with your personality. So for me, in all things, I want to know where I’m going but not too much about what I’m going to find on the way there. You’ll be different. Somehow. I promise.

Anyway, I can tell you, however, that those two principles stay the same.

I’m sure you guys are tired by now of hearing me harp on the fact that the spoken and written work makes your intention real. So if you say that you’re a confident person, you’re halfway there. If you say you’re going to write a novel, it makes it real.

Not this: “I have a novel inside me.”

Not this: “I will write a novel when I have more time.”

Not this: “I will write the novel when I figure out how to start.”

No. This is what you say: “‘I’m writing the novel. Starting now. Not only that, but I’m finishing it.”

And then you open up two things on your computer. First of all, the blank word document, where you type in a working title (ODDS BODKINS: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A HOMICIDAL FAERIE) and the date. And then you open up your calendar. And you find out which days you can carve out regular hours of time to write. It can be an hour. A half hour. A whole day. Whatever you can manage, as long as it’s regular and your brain can look forward to it. I wrote LAMENT while working full time -- every Wednesday night I wrote from 8 p.m.-10 p.m. until the novel was done. When I got closer to the end, I added Sundays from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. That’s not a lot of time.

I didn’t check my e-mails during that time. I didn’t browse the web. I wrote my novel. I thought about it all week long, and then I wrote because that was the only time I had. Those four hours a week.

Time is not what you need. Intention is what you need. I read somewhere that John Grisham wrote his first novel on legal pads between court cases (one wonders if his clients suffered when he got into plot snarls).

Which brings us to principle two. Butt in chair. You can tell people you’re working on your novel. You can tell us you have it all out in your head. You can tell us that you know everything about all of the characters.

Great. Fantastic. I’m happy for you.

Talk’s cheap, unless it’s dialog and it’s adding to your word count. If you want to write a novel, your butt has to sit in that chair. Do not angst about whether it sucks. Do not edit as you go along. Just do it.

Now don’t get me wrong, most people do need some form of organization. There are a very tiny number of people in the world who are true pantsers -- that can write by the seat of their pants, no outline, no synopsis, no plan. In my experience, there are far more people who think that they are pantsers. In reality, even the most spontaneous of people require some kind of structure (and I consider myself very spontaneous). This is where your personality comes in. How do you structure the rest of your life? As I mentioned before, I like to have ultimate goals but not a lot of structure on how to get there. So for me, it makes sense to have the idea, figure out the ending, and then write a two page synopsis that is very loosey goosey.

For others, they write detailed outlines that are ten or thirty pages long. Some make lists of scenes. Others do post it notes. Anything that gets you reasonably certain that you can travel happily through the plot on your way towards a logical ending. This is also when I put together my playlist, because I’m working out what sort of moods and themes I’m tackling during the novel. I spend a lot of time staring off into space. I also only spend a few days doing this. This process has to be finite, because while it’s important, it’s also not writing. It’s planning. It will never make a novel appear. Because while it looks like work, it is not really Butt in Chair.

I plan my plot. My characters, I keep in my head. Which is to say I carry a pretty dim view of character synopses and summaries and questionnaires. The only prep work I’ll do for my characters is to sometimes have them dictate a page-long history of their life to this point, in their voice, to help me figure out what they sound like.

The rest, to me, is just the procrastination before you really start writing. It’s not even really planning, because characters you figure out through their actions -- through writing. The character sketches and questionnaires and doing Facebook quizzes in their personality? It’s because you’re afraid the novel will suck. So you do all these little tricks and summaries and detailed descriptions of your characters’ hair colors and birthdates and drawings of the characters riding bicycles, and all of that is fine, I suppose, but you and I both know that it’ll never get the novel written. Trust me. I’ve been there. Learn from my years of bad not-writing behavior.

What gets a novel written is writing it. And feeling silly and feeling like it sucks and still keeping on writing it. Will it be rocky and uneven? Well, duh. That’s what revision is for. But you can’t revise until you have a finished draft. And you can’t have a finished draft until you write. BUTT IN CHAIR.

Be honest with yourself. I think most people know when they are making excuses and procrastinating instead of really doing proper groundwork.

So that was my grand novel-writing butt-kicking post.

I highly suggest you shut down the internet now and get started.


;)

I was inspired to write today's entry by a thread on the children's writer forums over at Verla Kay's, aka the Blueboards. I hang out there pretty frequently, and over the weekend, someone posted a thread wondering whether they should stop writing. They had been getting lukewarm reviews of their books already out and were felt like if that was their future, they weren't sure they wanted to go on -- it wasn't the life they'd imagined for their books and themselves. And they were looking at the instant big hits and feeling discouraged.

I already posted my response to that particular situation on the thread there, but it made me want to babble momentarily about self-doubt, self-confidence, and creative types. And how creative types react to negativity.

It seems to me that in the course of my travels as a colored pencil instructor and portrait artist and author that I've encountered two types of creative people. The ones that get crushed when they get told "no" or when someone close to them gets what they really wanted or when life events come up and get in the way of their creative life, and those that seem to actually feed off the negative events and turn them into positive things.

The thing is, as a writer, you need to be the second. It's a business where "no" is the default answer: agents looked for a reason to reject, editors just not thrilled with a project, critique partners telling you your latest project is just not salable, etc. And it's a business where jealousy is rampant. You slave away for years on a project, and someone else writes a book in 3 months. You submit to endless agents and get endless rejections, and a member of your f-list gets four agent offers in two weeks. You sell your book for two thousand dollars, and your friend sells hers for six figures. You don't get a tour, someone else does. It is too, too easy to compare yourself to the writer in the next blog over. And then, finally, there is the stuff that always gets in the way of writing: kids, money, time, always time.

And I watch people get crushed under this weight every day. It literally eats them alive, the negativity. But here's what I've figured out.

You'll only ever be as good as you tell yourself you can be.

If you tell yourself that you're never going to get better, guess what, you won't. I can one hundred percent guarantee yourself that you won't. You will never make a goal that you never set. And you almost always make the negative ones you set for yourself. And telling yourself you're not getting any better is setting that as a goal. Not to get too airy-fairy here, but as a writer, you ought to know this: words have power. Choose the right ones. Turn the negativity of your doubts into a positive challenge for yourself. I will get better. I will learn to characterize better. I will unlock the secrets of beautiful prose, stunning character growth, etc. The next book will be better.

And then, the jealousy. Look. There's always going to be someone better than you, richer than you, published faster than you, toured more, whatever. Always. Instead of pretending that they aren't there, or wasting a single second on jealousy, turn it around into a positive. It's what I do. When I see someone who has gotten something that I'd love for myself, I grin because someone else's day just got made, and then I let myself ackowledge that I'd love that for myself, too. And then I figure out how to make it happen. Jealousy is infinitely useless. It's worse than useless. It will destroy you, I promise. But goal setting and have someone else make a concrete example of that goal? Completely positive. Absolutely better than having an abstract goal. There it is, right in front of you! Before I got published, I used to google for people's publication stories. I loved reading them. Because one day, I knew it would be me.

Don't give jealousy a single second of your time.

And finally, life events. I know how hard it can be to write when you're low, when there's money problems, when you have no time. I have two little kids, remember? And I was working full time when I wrote LAMENT and SHIVER. It would have been so, so easy to just say "this is too hard. I don't have the time. I give up." And that would've been the end. But those unwritten words festering inside me would've eventually poisoned me. I need to write. I wanted to get published. More than anything, I wanted to do it full time. So when my husband said "you have two minutes here and two minutes there and two minutes over there -- find a way to squash them together", I knew he was right. I carved out two hours ever Sunday and wrote 5-10K words each week. Because my brain knew that that time every Sunday was always writing time, it worked on my story all week long and saved up a huge burst of energy for that one little time slot. I made a positive out of a negative and . . . yeah, now I write full-time, and I can actually pay the bills when they come in. Very exciting.

So please, creative types. I know you're passionate and fragile and volatile -- that's what makes us us -- but don't let yourself be one of the thousands of people who let negativity stop them or even slow them.

And now I'm going to go. It's hard for me to sustain seriousness for this long.