Category Archives: A Writer’s Life

10 Things I Believe About Writing

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With all the uncertainty in our economy and in the publishing industry, in particular, I thought it might be important to talk about the passion we all share. It’s the basic thing that drives us with such conviction. Whether you read books or create them, novels can lift our spirits, tug at our imaginations, make us believe in the impossible, and take us for a journey into the past. (Talk about a cheap vacation!) They dole out justice when it feels as if there’s none and they transcend international borders, making this a small world after all.
If you’re an aspiring author, I believe it’s harder to get noticed by traditional publishers these days, yet with the digital boom in e-books, I feel there is even greater potential for getting discovered in a whole new way that still feeds our addiction. So take heart. Below are my thoughts about writing and what I’ve learned on my journey.
1.      Tell YOUR story, your way. If you have enough drive, you will discover a unique story that you must tell. If you’re lucky, more stories will follow. Ideas for books can be a contagion worth embracing. Since you use your life’s experiences to filter through your characters, scenes and settings, only YOU can tell this story. How cool is that?!
2.      Develop a tough skin. There will always be negative people telling you that you can’t write or reviewers who think you should quit. Screw ‘em. If it matters to you, you will learn from your mistakes and keep doing what’s important to you. And if anyone thinks a book is easy to write, let them try. In fact, please be our guest.
3.      Be picky about your critique buddies. They can be invaluable if you find the right person or group, but too much of a good thing can dilute your voice. Whatever your story, this is your book. You must have a sense of who you are as a writer in order to push back on any advice that doesn’t fit you and only you can be the judge of that.
4.      Find the time to write regularly. Even if it’s only a few hundred words or a page a day, set attainable goals but don’t beat yourself up if life gets in the way. Write because it matters to you.
5.      Focus on the basics. Writing is the only thing you can control. Selling your project, promoting it, dealing with proposals, these things are not in your hands and can become a mental road block. When things get tough, your writing is the backbone of your passion.
6.      Keep writing. While you have a proposal out, don’t wait by the phone or the mailbox. Get on to that next project and learn from your last one. Push the envelope of your craft, because you can. It’s great to find success in a trend, but why not BE the trend?
7.      Trust your talent. As human beings, we all have self-doubt. Some hide it better than others. We all deal with it, but the voice and talent you have shown with each new project will follow you. Trust your ability to tell a story. Your basic talent will sustain you.
8.      Make the words bleed. If the story is worth telling, it’s usually because of the emotion you have to convey. Write what you fear, what you love, what you hate. Man has been telling stories since drawing on cave walls and within those stories has been the thrill of the hunt, the profound sorrow of death, or the joy of good fortune. Emotion connects us all, regardless of any language barrier.
9.      Support other authors. This is your world. Our world. We’re not in competition with each other. We’re up against people who choose video games or movies over books. Make them see how powerful the written word can be, how it triggers the magic of our imaginations. Books are brain food.
10.  Find a way to deal with rejections. They will come, in one fashion or another, whether you’re published or not. Rejection comes in all forms. Create a ritual to dispel the negativity and move on, but if you don’t risk rejection, you’re not getting yourself out there enough. Find a happy balance and keep writing. Not many feel passion for what they do. Count yourself lucky to be one of us, TKZers.
Since we all share the love of books and writing on TKZ, please share any words of wisdom that gets you through the tough times. What keeps you going?

Winning

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James Scott Bell


What makes a winner?

Is it going on a web cam and shouting Winning?
Is it having a lot of money?
Is it owning a lot of things?
Let me contrast a couple of writers for you. (These writers are composites, BTW, so don’t ask me to name names).
The first writer has had a couple dozen New York Times bestsellers in her career. She is not shy in saying she found a formula that sells a lot of books. And she keeps cranking them out, two or three a year now. Her publisher is very happy about this.
But her readers are beginning to feel like she’s just “mailing it in.” And in secret she’ll tell you she can virtually sneeze out a book, and does. She spends a few hours a week writing and never edits her stuff. She just turns it in and lets the publisher do the rest. Which gives her plenty of time to travel to her chateau in Gstaad. Or to go to conference appearances, where she plays the diva in a way that even Joan Crawford would have applauded.
She has money. She owns things.
But is she a winner?
The other writer is someone you probably haven’t heard of yet, but those who have read her books have not been able to forget them. While she writes in a certain genre, and is prolific, her novels never have a cranked out feel. That’s because she cares about the writing too much. She cares about her readers too much. She could mail it in, but there’s something inside her that makes her constitutionally incapable of putting out junk.
She doesn’t have as much money as the first writer. Nor does she own as many things.
Is she a winner?
I’ll tell you what, you can’t get away from ancient wisdom. Buddha, Confucius, The Bible, the great philosophers . . . they have all been telling us that just having money and owning things does not make you a winner. In fact, if you’re not careful, they can shrivel you up into a thing that blows away like dried grass in a windstorm.
But this second writer, she can feel things the first writer no longer does (or perhaps never did). She feels the intense pleasure of working and caring and crying and laughing over her writing, of seeing things happen on the page that she knows are worth more than a million cranked out passages that exist just to earn more money so the author can own more things.
Is she a winner? Oh yes. And so is any writer in any genre who does more than just mail it in.
I’m talking about a writer who is courageous enough to have some skin in the game, and who isn’t in this business just to make money and own things. If the money comes, that’s great, that’s awesome. We’re not turning that down. But this kind of writer will never let it go to her head or her keyboard. She will refuse to do that to her readers.


In one of my favorite movies, The Hustler, Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie Felson, a pool shark from Oakland who wants to be the best in the world. To do that he’ll have to beat Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), who hasn’t lost a match in fifteen years.
At the beginning of the film Eddie does play Fats, and is winning. But some hubris on his part leads to carelessness. At this point Fats’s manager, Bert Gordon (played with Faustian precision by George C. Scott), tells Fats, “Stay with this kid. He’s a loser.”
Well, Eddie does lose, and he’s back to the bottom of the heap. In a bus station he meets a woman named Sarah (Piper Laurie), who is also at the bottom. She drinks. She’s been abused. Yet she and Eddie forge a relationship and he moves in with her.
One day he asks her, “Do you think I’m a loser?” He tells her about Bert Gordon’s remark. Sarah asks if Gordon is a “winner.” Eddie says, “Well, he owns things.”
“Is that what makes a winner?” Sarah asks.
Then Eddie tells her how it feels to play pool. How anything can be great, even bricklaying, if a guy knows what he’s doing and can pull it off. “When I’m goin’, I mean when I’m really goin’, I feel like a jockey must feel. He’s sitting on his horse, he’s got all that speed and that power underneath him, he’s coming into the stretch, the pressure’s on him, and he knows. He just feels when to let it go and how much. ‘Cause he’s got everything working for him––timing, touch. It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a really great feeling when you’re right and you know you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I’ve got oil in my arm. The pool cue’s part of me. You feel the roll of those balls and you don’t have to look, you just know. You make shots nobody’s ever made before. I can play that game the way nobody’s ever played it before.”
Sarah looks at him and says, “You’re not a loser, Eddie, you’re a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything.”
What makes a winner? It’s not money and it’s not owning things. It’s feeling that way about something.
Like your writing. Have you ever shed a tear over it? Have you got some skin in this game?

Coping with Visitors

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Yesterday morning, we said goodbye to our visitors who’ve been in town for a week. No, I don’t mean visitors from outer space like on the TV show, “V”. These were close relatives and we were happy to see them. Although we offered them a room at our place, they chose to stay at a nearby hotel. We went to shopping malls, took a stroll down Las Olas Blvd, and ate lunch overlooking the beach. We ate out every night except for one when I cooked at home. My added weight attests to these good meals.  
Fortunately for me, our guests weren’t early risers so I had most of the mornings free to do my writing quota. It worked out well that I had guest bloggers scheduled on my site over that period of time, because I lost my afternoons when I usually work on marketing. It must be infinitely more disruptive when you have company staying in your house. So I am wondering what you do under those circumstances. Do you forsake writing completely and vacation along with your guests? Do you wake up early to get your pages done? How do you cope with the need for alone time that afflicts all writers, or don’t a few days of revelry bother you?
Sometimes it’s nice to get a break in your routine. Vacations and conferences bring a change of pace. Having company from out of town gives us a chance to act like a tourist in our home environment. It can be refreshing (or annoying) depending on the guests, if we have any work deadlines to meet, and how their daily habits coincide with ours. One thing is certain: it’s always nice to get the house back to normal after the company, no matter how desirable, leaves.                                   
Now that they’re gone, though, it’s quiet and lonely here. Can’t we have our cake and eat it, too?