Enjoying the Ride

If you've been out of town or off-grid for the last few days, then you probably missed hearing about Neil Gaiman's commencement address to graduates of the University of the Arts.  Even if you've heard about and/or listened, it's a speech well worth listening to again.  So, go ahead; I'll wait.




Now, there's a lot in this particular speech worth focusing on, especially the stuff about making your own rules. On the other hand, I'll be honest: I did that way back. Figured out which rules I could break and the ones I had to stick to, and then acted accordingly. Would I have gotten further faster if I'd stuck to the rules back then? Again, being honest? The answer is no. I did stuff you weren't supposed to, but I'd gone by the rules for a while, gotten nowhere, and decided I couldn't be doing any worse , so . . . why not? Of course, it also might have been that what I'd actually written before wasn't what it needed to be to break in. But I don't necessarily believe that either because I'd been playing by the rules with stuff that kept being routinely rejected--but which got accepted, pretty much right away, once I decided to break the rules.

But that's not actually what I'm writing about today. Nor do I agree with every single one of Gaiman's points because, honestly, you really DO need to a) be a pro, b) be on time and c) be turning in good stuff. I don't know anyone at this stage of the game who can be an absolute schmuck and yet be so totally brilliant that everyone just puts up with it . . . but then again, I don't move in the same circles as Gaiman and King and anyone else who's a mega-bestseller.


No, the part of Gaiman's address that I breezed right past--but which was, for me, the most important part--and something I still need to focus on is that whole enjoyment thing. It's really fascinating that while I heard it, I didn't "hear" it and it took a friend to point out to me what I'd missed. That's because he knows me, very well, and I'd just been stressing about everything I needed to get done in x-amount of time. He knew what he was hearing and how to rein me in.

Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell you: I'm a glass half-empty girl. Nothing's ever quite good enough nor do I believe that anything good--except my husband--lasts (and there are days when I wonder how much longer he'll put up with me). Call it a Freudian thing, or a result of being a kid whose dad was in a coupla different concentration camps, but I just don't trust that good things won't evaporate. I guess you could say that I'm not a look-on-the-bright-side kind of gal.

I tend to stress. I tend to do exactly what Gaiman talks about. I am ALWAYS thinking ahead to the next day, the next book, the next project, when I just MUST get a new book out there . . . all that stuff. Any enjoyment--even the accomplishment of FINISHING A BOOK (which is HUGE, guys, HUGE)--only lasts for a small span before I get restless, need to move on, have to edit. That kind of thing.

Now this type of restlessness is very good for, say, a medical student. An intern. A doctor, who's always leapfrogging ahead, thinking down the road, trying to figure out what might help someone in distress. In psychiatry, you're always in multiple times at once: in the moment with your patient; in their past, trying to tie what you're hearing to what's come up before; and in the patient's future, thinking about you might do or suggest that will help down the road. But in terms of actually ENJOYING the moment--the fact that I'm holding a book I wrote in my hand?

Well, I do . . . and I don't.

I remember when all I wanted was to publish a short story. Then, it was I'd like to keep on publishing short stories. Then, it was holding a book I'd written in my hand. Then, breaking out of work for hire and into seeing my own stuff in print. Then . . . You get the picture. It's very Roseanne Rosanneadanna: always something.

I also think that I breezed past that part of Gaiman's address because I must have some fantasy of what making it to that point entails. Unlike Gaiman, I don't have long signing lines and all that; I'm not a tenth of the way to where he was when Stephen King gave him that advice. Putting aside the fact that if Stephen King liked ANYTHING I'd written and told me so and then gave me advice, TOO, I'd probably have a heart attack . . . I think that Gaiman's inability to take the advice points up a fundamental insecurity we writers have--and, maybe, always should.

A friend of mine makes distinctions between an author and a writer. Authors live in Author-Land, a lovely alternative universe where they rest on accolades, hob-nob with influential people, are quite fun at parties, tell super stories--but don't write a darn thing, or--if they do--not a lot or very good anymore. They live on what they've done. Think . . . Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner . . . or any writer who's effectively stopped writing but still has THE NAME.

Then, there are writers: people who grind it out, like golfers, every day. They do the work. They produce. They're in the trenches. The thing is, I think Gaiman was being a writer: someone who had to look ahead to the next book, the next paycheck, the next series . . . whatever. I think that, if he's honest, Stephen King was and might still be that kind of writer, too: a man who could live on Author Island but has both the drive and the inability to stop writing. Both are successful precisely because they never could NOT look ahead to the next project. Oh, and yeah, they write well.

But you understand what I'm saying. Most of us will always be only as good as the next book, which means that being in the moment and enjoying the ride take as much work as . . . well . . . the work. For me, there's the flip-side, too: when the writing is going well, I BLOODY LOVE IT. There is NOTHING in the universe I'd rather do--and then I am enjoying the ride. So, maybe, enjoying the ride is about enjoying the process of writing: the craft, the discovery, the desire to push oneself just a little harder, try something just a little different. Failing sucks, no question. But when you succeed--when you KNOW you nailed it--there's nothing finer.  What's even better is when you get to share this with other people; when you entertain them with the world you've created. Enjoying THAT ride is just as important.

I think the take-home here is figuring out what "the ride" is and means to you, and understanding that the ride may change over time as you mature as a writer and go further along in your career. Recognize that enjoying the ride may mean something as profound as holding a bestseller YOU WROTE in your hand or allowing your SO to drag you to a movie because you've put in a hard day, sweating over that keyboard.

So, be flexible. Enjoy. And, remember: it's never a bad day when there's cake.

Seven ways my antagonist is way tastier than a cookie…

By A.G. Howard

Just like the best heroes and heroines, every antagonist needs layers so they won't be cliché, aka: a cookie cutter bad guy who’s like all of the other desserts at the buffet.

Here are seven ingredients that I'm hoping will set the mystical Morpheus, my naughty hotty in Splintered, apart from the other cookies:


1. He has wings.

Granted, there are lots of faerie stories where the bad boy has wings. But the way Morpheus “got” his wings is a bit different. Not to mention he uses them for more than flying. At any given point in the story they might become: a shield, a cape, a weapon, shade from the sun, and lastly and most fun, a means of seduction.


2. He thinks he’s a rock star. Could be because he bears a stunning resemblance to a smokin’ cult phenom: Brandon Lee’s The Crow.

Whatever the case, he has no self-esteem issues. In fact, he’s downright arrogant and narcissistic at times. But it only makes him more loveable; just ask him. ;)


3. He has unique quirks. For one, he collects moths by the thousands. Not only living ones, but moth corpses to embellish his hats. Which leads to his fashion obsessions. Morpheus, despite his obvious masculinity, is partial to retro-renaissance fashion. He’ll take a crushed velvet suit with lacy cuffs over a pair of jeans and t-shirt any day. Here’s an example of something he might wear on a casual afternoon strolling around Wonderland:

4. He dabbles in dreams.

This characteristic actually inspired his name … well, there’s one other contributing factor, but you’ll have to read the book to discover it. Heh. The Morpheus in Greek mythology is the god of dreams and has the ability to take any human form and appear in someone’s sleep. His true semblance is that of a winged daemon. All the more reason for my bad boy to have wings.


5. He has a  hidden soft spot for the heroine, Alyssa. It makes an appearance from time to time, but he tries to cover it up with self-adulation and snarky remarks aimed at Alyssa or her best friend/secret crush, leading back to point #2:

6. He’s the master of weaseling deals through word manipulation. Like most fae-related creatures, Morpheus has a penchant for word wizardry: he takes everything said as literal, and twists it this way and that, making it mean what HE wants it to mean.


7. He has phobias. The most important thing in the world to Morpheus is his freedom. Nothing terrifies him more than being bound and powerless. This is something he has in common with Alyssa, which makes their relationship all the more complex, especially when her freedom threatens his own.

~~~

I've found that the layered villains/antagonists -- the ones with a variation of ingredients -- are the most affecting to me personally. Maybe because when they’re humanized and given relatable motivations and fears, I’m taken to that place of personal introspection where I question if I were in a similar situation, would I take on the same characteristics and make the same choices?

Often, I even start rooting for those antagonists in spite of my disdain for their actions, hoping that they’ll somehow redeem themselves in the end. The best books not only have fully developed heroes/heroines, but antagonists too. Because nobody wants a dessert buffet loaded with nothing but stale sugar cookies.

So, who are some of your favorite antagonists from recent or past reads, and what ingredients set them apart from other antagonists you've seen?

All photos supplied by Photobucket.com and VampireFreaks.com

We Creatures of Habit

Otto Dix once said, "All art is exorcism." In his case, he was grappling with the demons that took up residence in his brain after World War I



but he could have been talking about any struggle to make meaning, and let me tell you why.

Right now, I'm on this major mission after meaning. I know because I've been having a TON of examination dreams. You know the kind: where you wander into an exam and realize you haven't studied all semester? Where that calculus might as well be Swahili? I've had a couple of house dreams, too, and just last night/early this morning, I jerked awake from a real doozy about a patient--no one I recognized--for whom I apparently kept no record, no notes, did no exams, etc. It was, when you get right down to it, the perfect nightmare: me as a study in--and the very picture of--incompetence. To my credit, just before I woke, I was rearranging my office, moving things into the light, giving my animals--ANIMALS?!--space, digging through old records and beginning to right some of what I'd been doing wrong.

Now, being a shrink and having done some training in psychoanalysis--all those years of staring at acoustical tile, financing my analyst's vacations and free-associating about, well, things better be good for something--I tend to pay attention to my dreams and more so than, say, a deck of tarot cards or a horoscope because dreams are internally generated and chockful of symbols both peculiar to me and somewhat universal. (For example, house dreams are, by and large, commentaries on the dreamer herself. All those messy rooms, dilapidated furnishings...) I know myself well enough to understand that my dreams reflect what I'm worried about. In this case, I'm in the throes of beginning a new novel which is . . . well, let's just say it's kind of different and my self-doubt's a little high. Okay, okay, you win: it's off the charts. Yet I sense some daylight here. In the dream, I did at least understand my mistakes and was working to correct them. In fact, I woke thinking that I really had to declutter my desk, move the printer, take a bunch of books back to the library . . . And these are all signs I recognize. I breathe a little easier when I've cleared the decks, tidied things up, given myself some space. My dream's telling me that, too: although the jury's still out on what those animals mean, my brain's saying, among other things, that I need to give myself both a new space (the book) and SOME space (to cut myself a bit of a break; the sun's gonna come up tomorrow, betcha bottom dollar, there's tomorrow, yada, yada, yada).




Which brings me to writers and their quirks, habits, rituals and superstitions--and, no, they're not all the same beast, IMHO, although they may come to be loaded with the same emotional valence. For example, my paying attention to a dream is not, I think, the same thing as the ritual I follow pretty much every morning: up by first light (and frequently before), brew that pot of coffee, answer some email and read a bit of news (all standing up, by the way, and in the kitchen where I can look out and see the sun rise and which birds are coming to the feeder). But by 7:30 a.m.--8, at the latest--I better be writing-writing, or I start to get this crawl-out-of-my-skin feeling. I become very uneasy. Not starting work by a certain time feels like . . . bad luck.

I'm not alone here. Nearly all writers have habits, rituals, etc. There are famous examples. Ernest Hemingway had a lucky rabbit's foot he used so long it was nothing but sinew and bone by the end. (But contrary to the mythology, Hemingway didn't ALWAYS write while standing:



although he supposedly claimed that "Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."






This is something that Philip Roth seems to have taken to heart (walking a half mile for every page he finishes while standing). On the other hand, Mark Twain liked his bed




and, if you can believe him,Truman Capote wrote lying down (so the movies--while fabulous--have that wrong):

INTERVIEWER
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don't use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

On the other hand, Capote enjoyed being a celeb and, for his time, was a master of the outrageous.



Dickens arranged the items on his writing desk just so--dueling bronze toads, a bronze dog thief with pups stuffed in his pockets, and a green porcelain tea cup filled with fresh flowers, among other things. (Dickens seems to have had a touch of OCD, too, needing to touch things a certain number of times, but that's another story.) Legend has it that Carson McCullers always wore a lucky sweater when she wrote, which one can only hope she washed.

I could go on, but you get my point and these are only the tip of the iceberg. Do a search and you'll find stories--some of which are probably true--about the habits, superstitions and rituals of writers as various as Stephen King, Anthony Trollope, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Freud . . . the list goes on and on.

Now, is it so amazing that writers have rituals or habits or superstitions? No, and like I said, I don't think they're all the same beast. I believe that a habit can BECOME a ritual and that ritual can become loaded with all sorts of (largely personal) significance, like that coffee mug you just have to use every day or your special pen, or--my personal favorite--a piece of jewelry that symbolizes your current project. (I've had the devil of a time finding one for my current WIP. I sense what I'm looking for/groping toward. Just haven't found the piece that speaks to me quite yet...)

But people are pattern-machines. Our brains are wired to make associations and find meaning in randomness; to generate order out of chaos; to take an ill-defined stimulus and attempt to give or fit it into a story. The behavior's got a fancy name--pareidolia--but it's the basis of dream analysis, you get right down to it. After all, your brain only has a certain set number of images and memories culled from everyday experience. Depending on what's going on, your dreaming mind, that enormously complex, meaning-generating machine, will cycle through and cobble together images it knows will get your attention. Or, to take all the woo-woo out of it, a dream is nothing more than your brain's attempt to associate what you've gone through that particular day with prior experience. Think of a dream as analogous to a computer trying to find the right--or similar--folder in which to insert a specific file, and you catch my drift.

If you think about it a second, this kind of pattern-seeking is to our evolutionary advantage. Nice to predict when that saber-toothed tiger might be on the prowl, for example, and it helps if you understand that the thing with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth contained within something vaguely circular is the face of a person, not a coconut. It is why people inevitably see faces in random dots or, as here, in the rocks and hollows of a crater on Mars




which "really" looks like this under different light at a different angle and with different resolution:




It's why our brain sees a woman's body clinging to this tree,





searches for faces in clouds:




or, depending on your point of view and circumstance, the Devil:





And, by extension, this explains why people structure highly-evolved, codified rituals and rules into things called mythologies and religions--because we are all, each and every one of us, seeking to establish meaning out of chaos. People are hard-wired to seek patterns in randomness. We even know where, in the brain, it happens (the ventral fusiform gyrus, to be precise). So we can't help ourselves. We are the creatures who develop habits in order to survive. It's just the way we are.

By extension, if you think about this for a second, you can readily understand why people like artists and writers develop rituals and habits, need to have things just so, or attach meanings to what are at first random acts later strung together to become an indispensable part of their routine: because we are trying, mightily, to give shape to the jumble of images and emotions that are stories and put them down in recognizable form.

Or put it this way: when I was in practice, I thought of my job as one of helping patients find the words to tell their stories. Well, we writers are no different. Our job is to fish all those words out of our minds and string them together on a page, in a certain order. We struggle with this all the time, and it's exactly why young writers are always looking to more established writers for those magical tricks: lucky charms, quirky habits. Writers create order out of the chaos of their minds, not an easy task by any stretch.

So is it weird or odd or crazy for writers to be superstitious beasts, or adhere to certain habits and patterns, or have their lucky talismans? Not at all. This kind of neuroplasticity leads us to develop associations: ah-ha, I was playing Van Halen when I had that great idea; or I used this typewriter to write my first successful novel and now I'm going to write every novel on this same typewriter(Cormac McCarthy); or hey, I was eating an apple under L'Arc de Triomphe when I figured out how to get my character from A to B (Alexandre Dumas). Or--in my case--I must start writing by a certain time every day or I get very, very uneasy. I must write a certain number of pages (and do, unless there's an earthquake), or I get uneasy. (Worse, the writing loses its vitality and the characters start to die in my head . . . but that's another post for another day.) In the end, I am uneasy because I am breaking with habit, and I have developed a habit because what I'm trying to do is make sense of disorder and chaos.

In the end, there is no right answer about which ritual to follow, what habit will lead to success. If you think that doing a three card reading from a tarot deck is an important way to start your day, have at it. If you want to write in the buff, that's fine, too (Cheever wrote in his boxers), but do pull the blinds and make sure the heat's on. Whatever you choose, remember this: if you expect to be a writer, you must write. How you get into that groove--how you pull together the chaos in your mind--is entirely up to you.

No magic involved.

****

On a completely different note, my new YA novel, DROWNING INSTINCT, has its book birthday on Feb. 1. YAY!






To celebrate, I'll be giving away a signed hardcover. The giveaway is open to residents of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia, and will start at midnight (EST) 2/01/12 and end Wednesday night, 2/08/12, at 11:59 p.m. (EST). Be sure to stop by my blog beginning at midnight (EST) 2/01/12, and check out the Rafflecopter entry form for your chance to win.

My Monster & Me

A couple months ago, I saw this play, "Seminar." To be honest, it took some convincing to get me to actually walk into the theater. I think my husband was afraid I'd develop PTSD or something, and for good reason as you'll find out. In the end, I was glad I went, not because "Seminar" was the most AMAZING play I'd ever seen--although I was in the front row and so caught every flare of Alan Rickman's nostrils--but for some of those bon mots: perfect sentences uttered in just the right way which captured some essential truth.

IMHO, one of the best sequences is pretty early on and begins here around 1:41 and ends right at 3:00. Actually, I'd encourage you to sit through the whole thing, but if you only make it through that short segment, that's fine. Take a sec and settle in for a look/listen. Go ahead; I'll wait.



Hey, there, back so soon? Well . . . didcha catch it? Yeah, that fabulous sentence: "If you're defending yourself, you're not listening." Now, why do I think that's a superb line?

Because: what he's talking about is ego.

Ego's been on my mind recently. See, a fan had gotten in touch and, long story short, wanted my input on a school project. Right off the bat, I wanted to decline. I am very leery of these kinds of requests, not because I am evil person and worry I won't be able to resist an inclination to savage someone. No, just the opposite: I empathize, quite a bit. I understand the guts required to show your work to someone else--and how hurtful criticism, even well-intentioned and on the money as humanly possible, can be.

In the end, though, I agreed. I was as gentle--and as truthful--as I could be. When there was some good stuff, I said so, but I also pointed out when what and how something had been written effectively got in the way of the story. Believe me, I really sweated this thing. Nothing I pointed out was done lightly. I agonized over the tone, the words, the phrasing. I even considered punting, saying something frothy that would be innocuous enough--but that wouldn't have been right either.

So I sent my short critique. To this fan's credit, I got a nice thank-you note. Was he thrilled that I hadn't loved the story? Of course not, but he was civil about it. But you could tell that my take wasn't what he'd been expecting or wanted to hear. Would he recover? Sure. I'm only one opinion, and he'll roll with it.

But all that got me thinking about all those times my ego has taken--and continues to take--a beating. This is inevitabile when you're a writer or any kind of creative sort; when you send your work out to be judged. Heck, that's as true for a secretary as it is for a painter. However dissimilar the settings or scenarios, they all share a common thread: ego and, by extension, self-confidence can save your life, or destroy your career.

So let me introduce you to both a necessary evil and real life-saver:



This is my Ego Box. As you can see, it has gotten quite a workout and it's a little the worse for wear because the monster it's designed to contain has tried chewing its way out on a number of occasions.






Now, my husband made this life-saver for me years back. He took great care in the construction, leaving nothing to chance. There's a nice little blankie to keep my ego snuggly and warm;





a comfy cushion;





and, even, a set of instructions--




because, clearly, my husband understands the monster we're talking about here:



Honestly, it's a tribute to my ability to tame my inner snark that I DIDN'T correct his grammar. :-)

The box is also useful for squirreling away little bon mots for the proper care and feeding of this beast:





And I'm only half-joking.

Believe me, learning when to box your ego is tough because listening to criticism--and shoving back the impulse to defend yourself--is not only a real killer but a balancing act you must master. You must embrace the paradox: perfecting the ability to stand your ground and know when to push back while also truly being receptive to suggestions which might improve your work because, as I've said before, not every word you've written is gold. Not every sentence deserves to live.

Achieving this is hard. It's a skill that requires practice and you will relapse, frequently. True story: maybe a month or so after I'd sold the ASHES trilogy, my editor sent comments and questions about the first book. Now, we'd only spoken on the phone for about five minutes before this, so I didn't know him well and wasn't sure what to expect. His edit letter started out okay--I've got it somewhere but am too lazy to dig it out right now--and he said nice things about what an awesome book I'd written, what an awesome trilogy, that kind of thing. Some nice superlatives. So I was, you know, feeling the love.

But then I took a look at the actual letter-letter, the real nitty-gritty, the guts of thing: page after page after page of questions. Lots and lots of questions. Over eighty some-odd, as I recall. (And, mind you, we're not talking copy-edits either).

Well, the more I read, the more I could feel my mind unraveling, my ego shriveling, my hat size going back to normal and then shrinking to something closer to a thimble.

And then I felt like this:



Yes, like a small, emotionally-disturbed child. I don't think I was lying on the floor but pretty close. Then, as now, it was my very wise husband who stood over me as I puddled on the floor and said, "Dear, get a grip. He bought the book."

Oh. Hey. blink-blink, sniffle That's right--and, yes, I'll have that martini now, thanks.

Or, put another way, a pro writer-friend said, "Are you kidding? This is GREAT edit letter! Don't you realize how much he loves this book? Why would he waste his time otherwise?"

Oh. Hey. Yeah.

In retrospect, I understand that I had made one of the worst mistakes that a writer, or any creative type, can: I'd let my ego get in the way.

Now, I'm not talking about being grandiose. I'm not a pompous person by nature. In part, that's because I've spent a heck of a lot of time around doctors and, in particular, surgeons, who can be a snarky and competitive lot: true experts at the art of making sashimi of you, the sniveling excuse of an intern. Granted, many surgeons cultivate ego as a survival skill. Think about it. If you don't believe you're amazing beyond belief, why ever would you cut someone open and go mucking around in there? It took me years to understand this. (Another true story: we interns called this very ballsy vascular surgeon "God." It fit.)

Am I excusing pomposity out of hand? No. But I do understand that ego has its place. As a writer, you must believe in your work.

But . . .

You are not perfect. You are not a god. Neither, for that matter, are editors or teachers or other writers. (What goes on in writing groups and classrooms and workshops is a post for another day. Talk about watching egos in action . . .) Yes, it takes guts to send your work out there for strangers to shred. There is nothing more soul-sucking than opening the mailbox to find another rejection. I am convinced that successful writers are masters of the arcane art of masochistic objectivism: the ability to read through a sound thumping of your work while doggedly searching for a gem or two--if you can only find it in all that blood.

I've had the very good fortune of having splendid editors and copy-editors who aren't afraid of using that flea comb to get rid of every nit. That doesn't mean that I don't lose patience or roll my eyes or scream at the monitor . . . but I scream at the monitor. Their job is not to make me feel better. Their job is to make the story better. If they can't turn out a quality product, they won't have a job.

So, learn to listen to critcism without bristling. Decide if and when what you're hearing is right or wrong, on the money or not--because just as they are your words, this is about you and your ego, too. That monster will get in the way and you will make mistakes. Trust me on this. But if you remember nothing else, remember this: crafting and presenting your story in the best possible way is your editor's and your publisher's top priority.

And it should be yours, too.

Three Steps Forward, One Step Back by Jennifer Archer

I used to teach a creative writing course at my local community college. The first thing I told my students at the beginning of the very first class each term was that I can’t teach them how to write – nobody can. What I can do is introduce them to certain practices that I and other writers use to work our way through a book. I suggest they try these and find which ones work best for them. Or perhaps even pull from some or all of the many tried and true methods to create their own unique process. 

Those of you starting out on your writing journey and quest to get published will undoubtedly hear and/or read all kinds of advice you "must" follow if you want to finish a book, get it published, and continue to publish. If this advice is spoken by someone who has walked the road you want to travel, pay close attention. However, keep this firmly in mind: The simple fact is, there is no right or wrong way to write a book – no process (as long as you keep moving forward) that will prevent you from getting published.

Don’t get me wrong – I'm not implying that any advice is bad advice. Much of what you'll hear/read is good. You should definitely listen to the suggestions of other writers and give them a try.  All I'm saying is that writing a book is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I’ll use myself as an example. Repeatedly, I’ve been told that writers should push through a first draft without revising. Vomit all of the words onto the page, so to speak, before we go back and clean them up. This is fine advice, and my own personal observation tells me that for most writers, it works quite well. For one thing, it does away with the risk of never finishing the book because you’re hung up on making Chapter One perfect and can’t move past that. However, while this might be the right process for most writers, it’s the wrong process for me. I’ve written one novel in this manner, and when I reached the end of the first draft, I had such an overwhelming mess on my hands I didn’t know how to begin to go back and “fix” it. Eventually, I threw it out and started over, using the process that has seen me through to “The End” with ten published novels, three novellas, two personal histories, and one non-fiction book. I call it the ‘Three Steps Forward, One Step Back’ method. Here’s how it works:

Each day when I sit down at my computer, I read over and revise the new material I wrote the day before. Then I write more new material. A scene, a chapter, or more, depending on the circumstances. The only rule to this process – and it’s self-made – is that I produce new material in each writing session. This ensures that I continue to move forward in the storyline rather than getting stuck  revising Chapter One, again and again. Does it take me longer to reach the end of the first draft than it would if I used the traditional “vomit” method most writers swear by? Probably. But I also end up with a much more polished first draft and a better chance of keeping my sanity intact when I start to work my way through Draft #2. 

Let me assure you that I’m not an anomaly when it comes to breaking this writing "rule." Dean Koontz has written and published dozens of novels by taking this approach to an even greater extreme than I do. In an interview at books.gather.comhttp://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977035786 (read the rest of the interview at this link)  Mr. Koontz says, "I work only on the computer and I do one page at a time. I work on a page 20, 30, 40 drafts, whatever it takes, before I move on to the next page. That way I feel that I've done as much as I can on that page and have nothing left to correct later. So that when I get a draft done, it has so much reworking during the course of it that I don't need to go back and revisit things." 

So if the most common approaches to writing a book feel wrong to you, don't despair! Try something else, and something else again, until you find the way that works best for you. As long as you continue to move forward in the story with each writing session, you're doing fine! 

Through Her Eyes is my latest book written using the Three Steps Forward, One Step Back method. It's also my debut Young Adult novel! If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll check it out. It’s currently available in hardback and for Kindle and Nook.  

 Happy 2012, and Happy Reading!

Jennifer’s Archer's website

Book Trailer for Through Her Eyes