Lilith Saintcrow

It’s time for a Friday post. But this Friday, I’m going to do something a little different.

From now until teatime–4pm PST here at Casa Saintcrow–I’ll be checking in over at the Deadline Dames regularly and answering your questions about writing in the comments. I figure most of you have listened to me pontificate for long enough, and this will also give me an idea of what sorts of things you’d like me to cover in future Friday Writing posts.

Now, we’ve got to have some rules (more like guidelines) to keep things from devolving into anarchy, right? I like anarchy as much as the next girl, but the guidelines, they are a necessary evil.

RulesGuidelines

* Comments are closed here. Go to the Deadline Dames site HERE and ask your questions.
* Play nice. I reserve the right to ban or delete.
* The subject today is writing. If you have questions about my work, check my FAQ.
* Don’t ask me if I’ll read your novel/short/query/whatever or do critique. Please.
* You guys know me. My advice is geared toward the people who want to hopefully aim for making a living from writing for publication. If your aims are different, fine–but keep in mind I’m going to answer according to my lights.
* No honest question is too silly. But please understand if I fall behind on replies–it’s not personal, I have a finite amount of time today.
* Have some fun and offer your own expertise! Mine is not the only route, and I’ll get just as much from this as you will.

All right. You’ve got some questions, I’ll answer as best I can. Pick my brain. Let’s tango.

The Dame Smackdown proceeds apace! Remember, if I–I mean, WE, if WE–win, I’ll post an excerpt of Jealousy or Heaven’s Spite. So if you ever wanted a signed Jill Kismet, now’s your chance!

I have been astonishingly productive in a million ways this morning, none of which involve writing and all of which have grated on my Very Last Nerve. Some days one just needs the Administrivia Mallet to play whack-a-mole with all the varied and nibbling responsibilities of daily life.

But I got home about half an hour ago, crossed everything off my task list, had a quick lunch, and am ready to spend the afternoon luxuriating in writing. I am hard at work on Dru 5, and feeling that subconscious easing that means the Muse has figured out the story even if she’s not going to tell little old me yet. Which means I just have to relax, put my head down, and grind out the words. And the Muse, that tricksy wench, will take care of the rest.

This is the handwaving part that I call “when the magic happens.” Because really, that’s what it feels like. The book takes a left turn, bumping off the road I thought I had mapped, and starts jolting into terra incognita. I’m left hanging onto the dash and praying while the Muse laughs, lights up a cigarette, and shoves the accelerator all the way down.

Yeah. So if you need me, I’ll be over here in the passenger seat, scribbling furiously.

Over and out.

There are Issues. My Friday post is not forthcoming this week. Here, have some links instead:

* Steven Pressfield on “Do It Anyway”. Yes, you knew I’d agree with this.

*The inimitable Judith Tarr with 10 Ways To Prove You Didn’t Do Your Horse Homework

* Stacy Deanne on trad vs. self-publishing, and where writers are actually better off.

* I often get writing links from Wyrdsmith’s Smart Things; her link roundups about writing are always worth a peek. (And I’m not just saying that because she sometimes links me. Honest!)

And a big shout-out to Jess Hartley. I can’t say why in public, but OMG SQUEEE!

For those of you worrying, nobody’s hurt and everything’s pretty much fine. There’s just…ARGH. Sometimes the argh gets in the way of the blog. Regular Friday writing posts will return next Friday. Thank you, and good night.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. I particularly liked Dame Toni‘s post this week.

First news, then your Friday writing post!

* MetaFilter saves two young women from (highly-probable) international sex trafficking. A drop in the bucket…but so completely awesome, and the best use of the Internet EVER.

* Events! On Sunday I’ll be at PSU for the Ooligan Press Write to Publish event; on Tuesday I’ll be at Beaverton Powell’s with Ilona Andrews and fellow Dame Devon Monk. Details are on my events page! I know some of you have emailed me about the events but I’m swamped, I’m sorry. I won’t have a chance to answer.

And now, onward.

I’ll be speaking somewhat about this at the Write to Publish event, but I also want to talk about it here. Last week’s post was pretty metaphysical, and this one will be half metaphysical and half practical. That’s fair, right?

There are two qualities I believe are essential for a writer, when you strip everything else away. If I were to reduce being a writer to two things, these would be what I’d pick: persistence, and seeing. Today I’m going to talk more about that persistence. (The seeing post kind of cuts close to the bone, so I’m holding that back. For now.)

A lot of the practical advice I give–make time for your writing, do it every day, never stop learning, keep refining, keep writing–have their root in persistence. I find myself often returning to Matthew Hughes’s No Surrender speech, and I can’t for the life of me remember the first person who said writers must have “near-pathological persistence.” Truer words, my ducks. Publishing is a game where the more pieces you have out on submission, the more finished works you have, the greater your chances of someone, somewhere liking something enough to charge money for it.

I am naturally stubborn. (I prefer to refer to it as a survival trait.) When I started aiming at publication, failure was not an option. The situation was dire. We needed money, my kids needed to eat, and I couldn’t afford any type of child care. There are a limited number of things a woman can do in such a situation, so I picked something I’d be doing anyway–writing–and promised myself that no matter what it took, no matter what I had to learn or how hard and fast I had to learn it, I was going to succeed.

The critical components were my willingness to work hard and my willingness to learn. The right kind of steady persistence eats away at hubris. (Besides, one can only be rejected so many times before one figures out hubris is so not a trait that’s going to get you there.) I set out to be taught. I did tons of research on publishers, agents, what separated a good agent/publisher from a scam, how to behave professionally. I wrote steadily and obsessively. I did not really care what I had to write in order to get paid. I only wanted to write as well as I could for as long as I could and get good enough that someone would pay me.

I’ve caught a lot of flak for stating openly my belief in everyday writing, in constant effort. I haven’t cared much, because I know for a fact that without the daily effort I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell. If I gave up on the daily effort, I was dead in the water. And we would starve.

I don’t mind starving, but I’ll be damned if I let my kids go hungry.

I’m going to draw a metaphor here–one I heard, I think, from Malcolm Gladwell. Say you play the piano. You practice hard every day for ten years. Will you become a Chopin or a Mozart? Not likely.

But you will become the best damn piano player in a 200-mile radius, or at least close to it. Which makes it easier to get a gig. The persistent practice prepares you to take advantage of every opportunity to play for cash that comes your way, no matter how small–and each gig you play is a chance to expand your network, impress someone, and get more gigs.

You do not have to turn out a NYT bestseller on your first round. You just need to get good enough, widen your options, and persist one more time than the rejections.

I couldn’t afford to fail, and it gave me the strength to keep going after the rejections reached a stack as high as my knee. I wrote serial stories, I worked slush and submissions editing, and when my chance came–when a small publisher said, “I like your work but I’m not the right publisher for it. Do you have anything else?” I was ready.

Boy howdy, was I ready. Not only was I ready, but when the editor/publisher came back and said, “I can take this piece, but only if you make these revisions…” I was more than ready to learn how to take my revision lumps.

What resulted? A four-book contract and the start of my career. Every hard-fought inch of success I’ve had since that moment, I trace back to being ready when the call came. And I was ready because I’d persisted. True, I did not even allow myself to think there was another option. For this reason I don’t consider it bravery–I don’t think there’s a lot of bravery in having utterly no choice. Privately, I think I was stupidly lucky in not even daring to think of failure; it would have bled off much-needed energy.

You only need to persist one more time than you are rejected. Every book in every bookstore, everywhere in the world, is the product of someone who gave it just one more shot more than the number of rejections they’d received. Sometimes in life you need to learn when to give up–like, for example, when your date says no. (But that’s–say it with me–another blog post.)

Writing for publication, however, is not one of those times. Persistence does not guarantee success. But it gives you a fighting chance to be ready when the call comes, so that you can leap on your chance and grab it instead of regretfully watching it slip through your fingers.

Don’t ever give up.

Good morning! It’s a rainy, windy day here. I like wind and I like rain, especially if I’m snuggled up nice and safe inside. My writing location has shifted to an office chair and a tiny laptop holder situated where I can see out my front windows. The street is endlessly interesting, and I can see a good chunk of sky and trees. Most of this move has been made necessary by some hip irritation I’ve been experiencing. For some reason, losing seventy pounds through diet and exercise has aggravated a small piriformis issue; I’m using my body differently and I’m sure both the piriformis and my iliotibial bands are unhappy with me. Nothing will solve it but rest, stretching, and taking care of how I use my body. Grrr.

I also need a massage. Dayum. Anyway.

Sean Ferrell has a great post up about his writing process. Being who I am, this little chunk of it particularly stood out to me:

I write every day. Especially when I don’t feel like it. Especially when it’s not working. I can always choose to not use something that I wrote and that I realize later is the wrong tone, doesn’t fit, contradicts other parts. I can’t decide to use something that isn’t written. I can’t use something that is still in my head. Better to have something come out half right than have all of it perfectly in my skull.

I’m glad Sean mentioned this. I happen to think disciplining oneself to write every day, even if it is in very small chunks some day, is critical. (But we all know how I feel about that.) You can’t edit when you don’t have raw material, and better half right than not done at all. True, true words.

The other half of the coin is taking care of one’s sustainability, filling the well inside your head and making sure you have enough emotional and physical energy to run on. This is the difficult part for me. I tend to mortgage bits of myself and run until I hit a breakdown, which is not healthy. I’ve learned several tricks to compensate for that little tendency of mine, all of them directed at making me take care of myself. I felt bad about this until someone said, “Why? They’re strategies for self-survival, and they sound like workable ones. Quit wasting time feeling bad about them and focus on bolstering them. Self-care means you’ll write longer.”

Amen.

Anyway. Enough of my lecturing. I had my first rock climbing class this weekend. It was a belay certification, and I have my belay card now. Part of the class was climbing so everyone else could get practice belaying. We each took several climbs and “falls”, some intentional and some not, to learn to trust the rope and our belayers.

It was awesome.

I don’t like heights. They don’t terrify me the way small airless spaces do (if you ever meet me in an elevator, just be prepared for the fact that I’m not going to talk until I’m outside the metal cube. There’s no AIR in there.) but I still don’t like them a whole hell of a lot. Yet when I’m clinging to a rock wall, I don’t think about the space underneath me. I think solely about the next hold and how to hug the face of the rock. My concentration narrows to a single physical point, and for someone who tends to chew mental leather until the flavor’s all gone, that is a relief. I can tell that climbing, for me, is going to be one of those blessed activities like running, where my brain stops eating its own tail and focuses outward.

I can’t wait for the next climbing session. There’s also a bouldering class; after you take it you can go in and boulder on the bottom of the rock wall anytime there isn’t a class. I hear this gets you into great shape for climbing. I can already tell I’m going to be working out plot problems while clinging to holds. Awesome.

After the belaying class, one of my classmates looked at me. “You know, for someone who’s so nervous about climbing, you sure didn’t hesitate much.”

I thought about it for a second. “I don’t tend to hesitate.” At least, I thought, not when I’ve got a bunch of people looking at me and a wall to climb. All my hesitation comes before, while I’m looking at the wall and wondering whether or not I should do this. “Ive got two speeds,” I finally said. “Full stop or dead ahead. Mostly dead ahead.” And it’s true. Once I put my hand to the first hold, it’s like drawing the sword. You make your cut. You commit fully. Once your hand grasps the hilt, it’s too late to back out. You’d better be ready to tango.

Writing taught me that. I’m not sure it’s good for climbing, but in the interim, I’ll take it.