Why Building a Writing Habit is Essential

WARRIOR OF THE WORLD, which comes out January 8 2019, is being featured in a Goodreads giveaway until November 27! Great opportunity to win one of a hundred free copies! Kensington has also started a reader Facebook group called Between the Chapters. Lots of great giveaways on there - along with author chats. I'll be doing one in January, so join up and enjoy the party!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is one I suggested, on the idea that “Even When You’re Not Writing, You’re Writing.”

It's a good one for NaNoWriMo month, because there's so much fierce focus getting words on the page - which is something I absolutely believe in. NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month, for the uninitiated) is fantastic for building a writing habit, something that's essential for being a writer. There's a lot of reasons for this - as it's something I talk and blog about frequently - but one of the things that building a writing habit does is it allows your mind to work even when you aren't.

This can get dicey because people can be so good at denial. I can't tell you how often someone has said to me "I've got the entire book written in my head - I just need to write it down."

If you have written books, you know very well how much is packed into the space of that hyphen. If you haven't written a book, and revised it, preferably several of them, then you might not realize what a huge disconnect there is between those two ideas.

This is because WRITING IT DOWN IS THE HARD PART.

Seriously. It's hard. So difficult that most people never make it to the other side of that hyphen. Or they start and never finish.

Writing the story down, getting it right, is where all the craft, skill, dedication and perseverance of being a writer come in. You can market your little heart out, but if the story isn't there, if you haven't gotten the words down and refined to the utmost agree, you've got nothing to sell readers. 

This is why authors build and maintain writing habits. You don't get better until you write A LOT. Some say a million words to get there and I think that's probably a reasonable number. That means that even if you "win" NaNoWriMo and write 50,000 words in the month of November, you've still got 95% of the work to do to get to the point where your writing begins to hang together and actually be *good* - or, put another way, do NaNoWriMo for 19 more months.

Ouch, right?

By that I don't mean you have to write 50K/month for two years, but if you spend two years writing consistently - whatever works for you, whether every day or not - then you'll be getting somewhere. That can be offputting, but every successful writer I know has some version of that as part of their story.

The best part is, once you build that writing habit, something magical happens: the story really does begin to write in your head. Even when you're not actually putting words on the page, part of yourself is brewing the story, so that when you go to write, it's there for you and flows out.

BUT!

This is a really huge BUT -

Remember that this is on the OTHER SIDE OF THE HYPHEN. If you think the story is all written in your head, but you've never written and *finished* an entire book, you're very likely kidding yourself. There's just no way around that.

So cheers to all in the middle stretch of NaNoWriMo! This is when it starts to feel grueling. Remember that you're building a great habit. Keep it up!

No Crossing the Streams

This is what wildly inaccurate reviews feel like. You press the publish button, something goes clunk, a review for a book that bears remarkably little resemblance to yours comes in, you blink, and you wonder what the hell just happened.

In this case, an aged Cuisinart lid gave up its seal, and here I am, wearing a gritty, smelly slurry of chicken liver and feline supplements. The only option for this was a washdown of the kitchen and a shower.

Recovering from a review that deliberately twists, misreads or otherwise misinterprets your writing is a little harder. On one hand, you want to correct the misconceptions, but holy cow. Where to even start?? Not to mention that it's thankless. On the other hand, there's that pesky truism about the book being the purview of the author and reviews being the purview of the reader and ne'er should the twain meet. It's sort of a Ghost Busters quote. "Don't cross the streams."

Am I saying you just have to sit on your hands when someone butchers your story in a review or blog post? Yep. Do not respond at all. That way lies madness. Your only real option is detachment. Develop the means to convince yourself that the moment you hit publish, your book is no longer yours. You've flung it out to the wide world and it now belongs to anyone and everyone who reads (or misreads) it. 

Remember this vital fact: a review says as much or more about the reviewer than it does about your story. Someone ripping up your story when all the other reviewers seem to like it? It's because you wrote the idea that reviewer has been nursing, but not writing, for decades. Someone assigning events to your story that aren't there? Reflection of the crap storm of their lives when they read.

A few of us on this blog have seen what happens when an author engages a reviewer who got the facts of a story dead wrong. Never, ever, ever have I seen it end well, no matter how respectfully the author approached the conversation. So just don't. If inaccurate reviews twist you up, DON'T READ YOUR REVIEWS. Not even kidding. Know your limits. 

And then, finally. Trust your readers. In the single instance when someone confused one of my books with -- I don't know -- a hallucination maybe and wrote a review based thereupon, other reviewers called them out in their reviews. You can't count on that, of course, but plenty of reviewers hate seeing factually inaccurate reviews, too, and will take pains to correct the misunderstandings. And that's super complementary, I think. 

Embracing the Hostile Read

There's an old saying, "No text can survive a hostile read." 

I also like this exchange from the West Wing, when Sam Seaborn is told that a passage from a speech given by the First Lady has angered an activist group.

SAM: I don't see it.
CJ: You have to want it to see it.

Here's the thing about writing anything: everyone is going to come at it with their own biases, their own take.  Once you send it out into the world, you have no way to control how people are going to take it.  And, more specifically, if people are going to want to misread your text, bring their hostile read to you, you really have to just take it.

I'm not saying this to address any specific or recent review-- in fact I've been quite pleased with the recent reviews for THE WAY OF THE SHIELD-- but more as a sort of zen reminder that people will find the things that they connect to, that they can interpret with their own biases, and even though it doesn't match my intentions... that doesn't matter.

I'm kind of arguing for "the death of the author", I know, but the point is, all I can do is put it on the page.  If the reader finds something there I didn't intend, that's how it is.  In fact, I think it's great to embrace that, and see what I can learn.  Isn't that what it's about, after all?  Constantly trying to learn, grow and improve?

That's my goal, at least.
--
Hey, are you in the northeast?  What are you doing next weekend?  Me, I'm the Special Guest at PhilCon!  If you can, come on out, and come say hello!   

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

It's Tuesday, November 6th. Here in the US, it's Election Day. 

Whatever your political opinions, go VOTE. 

When Reviews Get It Wrong - *Really* Wrong

This was my view from the bed this morning when I woke up. The mountain bluebirds love this water fountain - and they always feel like a good luck visitation to me!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Dealing with an almost willful misinterpretation of the text."

It happens to every author. Probably to other artists, too. Hell, I even remember this sort of thing happening in the corporate world. Someone points to a problem in a document you produced, explains how it's wrong and why. And then you sit there, blinking at them, and wondering how on earth to respond since they ENTIRELY MISUNDERSTOOD AND IT'S NOT INCORRECT AT ALL.

It's kind of bizarre when it happens in a book review - and can be super upsetting when the reviewer pans the book because of it. I'm not talking about the reviews where the reviewer misspells the characters' names or gets some nuance wrong. Those are irritating, but whatever.

This is this kind of thing where they say "I hated this book because in the end it turned out to be all a dream and that kind of thing kills the story for me." An understandable critique in most circumstances.

Only...

It DIDN'T turn out to be all a dream and they misread.

Or misunderstood.

Or willfully misinterpreted?

Sometimes I wonder. And it's not just with my books. I've seen willful misinterpretations of classics or famous books that have me shaking my head. Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to gaslight people - give wrong information to create confusion.

When it happens with my books? Yeah - I often *really really really* want to explain. Not even to refute the negative review, because whatever, but to clear up their obvious confusion. But, the author rule of thumb not to respond to reviews unless invited to holds true.

Also, I do believe that most interpretations of a story belong to the reader. If the story lives in their head in a certain way, that's up to them.

BUT... I do have a little trick for dealing with stuff that feels like willful misinterpretations. At my next opportunity, I blog about or otherwise discuss that plot point or character, explaining something about it that refutes the misinterpretation, or explains that aspect of the story as I intended it. Just my little way of fact-checking and putting the good information out there, in case anyone wants it.

Scary Books? Read Bird Woman!

To close out our scary books week, I first have to say that I don’t read horror as a rule, or watch scary movies. As others have said, with my vivid imagination, the images and the scares stay in my brain wayyyy too long after I’ve finished the reading or watching experience.

I could give you a list of non-horror books that I found to be scary in other ways, on the topics of climate change, ebola-like viruses and the like, but that’s not really what we were going for with the theme, not in a week that included Halloween. (I wore a rainbow colored wig with a unicorn horn and purple ears BTW, to the delight of my toddler grandson….I also may have eaten a few too many Nestle Crunch bitesize bars…)

There is one scary book that always comes to my mind immediately when the topic arises and that would be Jeffe Kennedy’s Bird Woman. Here’s the very terse blurb: A psychological thriller set in the Pacific Northwest, the true story, told in essay form, of an encounter with the paranormal: a vengeful goddess in the Pacific Northwest.

It scared me to death when I first read it a number of years ago and I still remember it vividly. If you haven’t read it, go forth and do so!

I used to be able to read Stephen King and enjoyed his books quite a bit. Not all of them – some were totally not to my taste but for example, The Shining was one of my favorites. If I had to pick a second scariest book I ever read, it would probably be something by him, except I had to stop reading him years ago. I don’t know if he got even more ‘horrific’ in his writing or if I just got older and less able to shed the horror after reading it like most people do, but there was one novel of his (the title of which I’ve blocked from my brain frankly) where I spent an entire night having nightmares and couldn’t get his imagery out of my head. So I was done. Kudos to him for being such a powerful writer but I can’t even crack open any of his novels any more.

I do re-watch the TV movie version of “Langoliers” on occasion. For some reason I quite like that one…

Another book that stayed in my memory was Barbara Michaels’ The Crying Child. That one still gives me goosebumps. Not that she was writing horror, per se, but the power of some of the scenes really got to me. Ammie Come Home was another of her books that I read and re-read. She could spin a good tale with romance and an HEA, but scare me a bit in the process!

I think the common elements that scare me are a small group of people (maybe even just two people as with Jeffe's book), stuck in an isolated locale (islands seem to terrify me in this regard) and an eerie, threatening otherworldly presence bent on doing evil.

I don't write horror obviously but here's a snippet I shared last week for Halloween from one of my books, Mission to Mahjundar, where I took the Aztec god of death and adapted him to becoming an alien deity and then made my characters confront him. I'm pretty sure I wrote this particular sequence to get said deity off my mind because when I stood in front of a statue of him myself, in a museum in Mexico, the pure evil that radiated from that effigy was breathtaking. This scene is just the beginning of their encounters with the alien god...

Scariest Inside My Head

You want to know what's truly terrifying? Moving for the second time in one year. Seriously. The moving truck shows up tomorrow morning at 9AM. And I'm still stuffing shit in boxes. Does anyone else think inanimate objects breed overnight? Cause I'm pretty sure my stuff is propagating. There's no other explanation for why I'm still not done packing.

Okay. Seriously. Books. Scary books. Oh my dear friends. I am so amused you believe I can be trusted with frightening material. I can't.

Reason: I'm a wuss. Fact 1. I have mental health to guard. So I have to curate what gets fed into the mental systems cause those gears are kept turning by a trio of geriatric hamsters. They faint easily. 2. If I wanna get the crap scared out of me, or suddenly decide I want to peer unrepentant into the darkest soul of humanity, I need only turn on the godsdamned evening news. 3. I have an obsessive brain. Give me a single terrifying image and it will be seared into my grey matter for all my days.

Is anyone old enough to remember the movie An American Werewolf in London? Very opening of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) our heroes are attacked on the moor. One of them is killed. The final image of the attack is the dying man, torso torn open, rib cage exposed. I STILL SEE THAT SHOT. D'you know how old that movie is?? I didn't sleep for three nights after that nonsense.

Worse. I can still describe to you the scenes from shows that terrified me as a child. They weren't even supposed to be horror films. They were science fiction. In the 1960s. When science fiction meant that someone was going to die horribly. I was five when The Omega Man came out and ensured I would refuse to walk into a dark room until well after I was 10 years old. So yeah. There are things I don't need carved into my brain, thanks.

But hey. If you're a wuss like me. Try The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. YA. One faintly creepy scene. Kept me up half a night. But it was fun.

The book that scared the crud outta me

Once upon an autumn, I was a lone weirdo in a gothic Texas family. Like, I read a lot of Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien, and everybody else in my family went bow-hunting and two-stepping and listened to Merle Haggard. My parents clearly didn't know how to shop for me, and my newspaper route paid crap money, so I supplied my book habit at yard sales and the public library five-bucks-for-everything-you-can-fit-into-a-paper-sack sale.

I wasn't old enough to stay at home on the long weekends when the family all went deer hunting, so I got hauled along to leases out west of San Antonio, usually some rocky windswept ranch, usually to murder wildlife, which was very much not my thing.

On one such trip, I brought along one of those library-sale paper sacks full of treasures books.

One of those books was called The Amityville Horror.

The rest of the camp went out on a hunt right before twilight, because deer come out to forage at sundown, and that's apparently the best time to kill them. If someone "got" a deer--i.e., shot one-- they had to wait until the hunt was over to go out and find the unlucky creature and, if it wasn't dead yet, put it out of its misery. Sometimes the search-and-finish could last for hours, long after dark.

I almost always stayed behind in the camper. And read books. It was glorious.

Except that one time. With that one book. 

I didn't know it then, but the evening hunt was pretty successful. Several deer were "got," and several searches ensued. I was alone in the camp with only the wind for company for miles and miles of dark Texas night. Just me and my delicious readable.

I considered myself fairly brave as far as books went. At least, I hadn't read one that stopped me from reading others. King and Koontz and Poe and Susan Cooper, not to mention all those collections of ghost ship stories and unsolved mysteries, had inured me to losing my shit over a book. I mean, they were just books. Just in my mind. All made up, fantasy stuff. 

Right?

So I snuggled down in a sleeping bag, cracked open The Amityville Horror, and read blithely, bravely, decadently.

For those who haven't read the book or seen the movie (movies?) this starts off innocently enough. Normalish family moves into a house. It's a nice house, kind of fancy even, with a boat house. But (SPOILERS!) it's haunted as hell, and freaky stuff starts happening, and the dad goes a little crazy, and suddenly there's a demon pig in a rocking chair up in the attic. 

Which was when something scratched on the side of the camper. 

I kid you not. Something was out there. Scratching. Low, near the ground. Right below my camper window. A sound that was not the wind. It was close.

Scratch, scratch.

Remember, every human person was out in the night wilderness killing Bambi.

So what was scratching out there?

I sure as hell wasn't going to go outside and investigate. And I could not, could not just keep reading.

Demon. Pig.

That was totally a demon pig outside.

I closed that book, shoved it way, way down the sleeping bag, and huddled there in the camper, listening. Terrified. For hours.

Family got back eventually, skinned their kills, and iced down the meat, and then we all went to bed. Next morning, after I slept not at all, I woke up and checked out the side of the camper.

There were scratches on the side. True fact.

Never did finish that book.

(Happy Halloween, y'all.)