Memory fails, and I think I might have discussed awards sometime back, but I recently had a discussion with another well-known author about contests, and the mega-selling New York Times writer made a couple of good points.

“I like awards because I’m a little selfish. I enjoy seeing my work recognized and the truth is, they look good on my wall and in my office. They go hand in hand with the satisfaction of a job well done, and that’s exhibited by my body of work itself.”

I agree completely.

Neither he nor I came from the Participation Trophy world, and value well-earned recognition. It’s the inspiration that feeds souls.

I was a baby-teacher way back in the late 1970s when that idea of Trophies for Everyone was announced in a staff meeting.

“Each child who participates will get a trophy,” said my moronic starter principal. I worked under several great educators, but this guy phoned it in with two tin cans and a string. Though I have to admit, participation trophies weren’t his idea, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. “It’ll make the kids feel better to take something home for their effort, and will build their self-esteem. There will be no losers.”

Even though it was a faculty meeting, and I was an adult, I raised a hand as I was taught back in elementary school. “No one will try as hard if everyone gets a trophy.”

“The winner’s trophy will be a little bigger.”

“If everyone wins, no one wins. Let em put it this way, once they get out in the real world, they won’t be handing out trophies for a job well done. They’ll distribute paychecks, and there will be no reason to try harder than others, if everyone gets the same amount.”

He blinked once. “You can put your hand down now. Any other questions?”

“Yep. Why did Nixon get us in bed with Communist China?”

“You’ll have to ask the government teacher over there. Now, moving on, some of you are backing into your parking spaces, and that gives our parents the wrong idea that you’re in a hurry to leave school once the day is done…”

All right, I come from a generation who likes to win. I was once cheated out of a first place ribbon in an elementary school three-legged race when the binding came untied after my partner and I crossed the finish line, but I don’t hold that against Coach Mankin (I really do).

One of my grandsons was cheated out of first place in a rodeo mutton busting contest last year. He held on for the full eight seconds, but another competitor took home the buckle because her parents were part of a prominent local family. I knew we’d lost when I saw they were all in their Sunday best and were already lining up for a photo even before the winner was announced.

But back to awards for writing, my friend was right. For authors struggling for recognition in a crowded and confusing landscape, awards offer credibility and a somewhat elevated status for others to see. With 11,000 books releasing every month in this country, these nods toward hard work and creativity help us gain recognition in a firehose output of new books.

I’ll be at the Will Rogers Medallion Award ceremony this time next week, and I’ll find out where my novels The Broken Truth and The Journey South fall as a finalists in Western Modern Fiction, and Western Traditional Fiction categories, respectively.

The awards won’t be accompanied by a check, only by the satisfaction that they were deemed worthy by my peers. That’s what I’m after.

There are two Spur Awards on my wall from the Western Writers of America association. Many of the traditional westerns I read as a kid proudly proclaimed they were Spur winners. As an adult I looked for that recognition on the covers of their books.

I wanted one of my own.

I count six Will Rogers Medallions in my office, and no matter if the above-mentioned novels win Gold, Silver, or Bronze, two more will look good in this collection, in my opinion.

I was also honored with a Benjamin Franklin for my first novel, The Rock Hole, and John Gilstrap and I learned a few years ago that we’d won the Kops-Fetherling International Book Award for our work. I still don’t know what that one is, but the gold award seal is nice.

I once took first place in a photographic competition. The photo was a silhouette of my cousin leading his horse into a barn. I had to wake him up late that morning after he’d been out all partying all night, and simply getting him to walk in a straight line was a challenge. The horse cooperated and only required a couple of carrots.

By the way, that barn, the hallway they’re in, and the often patched tack room on the right figured in more than one novel through the years.

Winning that little contest helped spur me on to an extremely successful side career in photography. It lit a fuse that still glows from time to time.

I now have my sights set on a Bram Stoker Award for Comancheria next year. If I win, great. If I don’t, I’ll know that I was in the company of great authors. That’s enough, but I don’t want a participation trophy. Only the real thing, because…

…a respected book award reaches out to both online and store browsers saying, “This is a great book, and worthy of your time and money.” It helps readers weed through the thousands of books that figuratively sag the shelves every year.

It also builds personal self-esteem in an extremely competitive business, and are a way to let other authors know that people out there value your work. Awards come with a word of caution, though.

Some entries require a submission fee. This often comes out of the writers’ pockets, but many times publishers accept that responsibility.

Just because you win first place or gold, doesn’t mean your book will sell any better. There are no guarantees in this business. However, it’ll look good on a resume.

Judges are human. They might see something different in your book, be it good or bad. I’ve judged a number of contests, and when my list was compared to other judges’ opinions, they might not have been the same.

So why bother in the first place?

Personal validation is the best reason I know of. If you see it as that, and no more, you won’t be disappointed.

By John Gilstrap

Every parent has confronted some form of the same horrible moment when their child declares their desire for the unobtainable. Perhaps it’s the skinny, five-foot-four high school junior who wants nothing else in life but to be a professional football player. Or the 13-year-old aspiring ballerina who cannot walk across the room without tripping over her feet. What’s the right call here? Do we tell them the truth and shatter their dreams or smile and say supportive things, knowing that they will fail? We love them more than life itself, but coaches and lessons are expensive. And c’mon, there’s the opportunity cost of the time lost not pursuing something where they’d have a better chance of success (and which might more closely fit with the plan we’ve always had for their lives).

Do we presume failure and shut the door on their unlikely dreams, or do encourage them and hope for a Rudy moment? (If you don’t recognize the Rudy reference, stop reading right now and go watch the movie. With the family. Bring Kleenex.)

Now, let’s take it a step farther (further? I’m never sure). You’ve exhausted the carefully collected 529 Plan money to see your son, Billy, graduate with honors from a prestigious engineering school, and during the celebration dinner, he announces his plans to go to New York to try to be an actor on Broadway.

Or his plans to take a year or two off to work at a coffee shop while he writes the mystery novel that’s been floating around in his head.

I’m going to take a guess at what what your initial reactions would be:

• Like hell you are;
• I’ve raised an idiot;
• Do you realize how much money we just dropped on your education?
• You’re going to starve.

But Billy is no fool. He’s thought through all of these objections. He’ll come back with:

• I’m only young once. This is the best time to take chances.
• It’s just me. I don’t need a lot of money. I’ll find a way to feed myself.
• Mom and Dad, this is my dream. If it doesn’t work out, engineering will still be there for me.

This is where you tee up the failure speech:

• The entertainment business is brutal. It tears people up and spits them out. It’s soul crushing. (All of this coming from articles you’ve read, having never actually attempted to live the life you’re trashing.)
• You were born to be an engineer, not a writer or performer. (Translation: We’ve spent a lot of money on our dream for you. We’ve told all our friends that you’re going to be an engineer. They’re going to roll their eyes and scoff when we tell them that you want to do this. Just as we’re doing right now.)
• Even people who are successful can’t maintain their success. Even if you can sell that first novel for a lot of money, it might not sell through and your career could be over. Even if your first song is a hit, there may never be a second song. You don’t want to risk the humiliation of being a one hit wonder, do you?

Finally, when Billy goes forward with his stupid plan, you hope he’ll fail early and spectacularly enough that it will set his head straight. Even if you keep a good poker face, your real thoughts will likely shine through.

You will launch your beloved son into his future armed with the knowledge that pretty much everyone who’s ever loved him has their thumb on the scale for him to fail. Those aren’t the words anyone speaks, but Billy can hear the “I-Told-You-So Chorus” being rehearsed in the wings.

And in his heart of hearts, no matter what he says, Billy expects to fail as well. Let’s face it: The odds are woefully stacked against him. Of the tens of thousands of hacks who push books out every year now that gatekeepers are gone and self-publishing is easy, how many actually make enough to buy a decent meal, let alone fund a lifestyle? Ditto the thousands of members in the Screen Actors Guild who make little more than pocket change. Who the hell is Billy to think he can succeed when so many others fail?

The answer is simple. Billy is better than all those hacks. He just needs to make the world realize it.

He can start by projecting success. Billy didn’t make this shift from engineering to the arts on a whim and a desire. Yes, he has passion, but he also has talent. How does he know? Because he does. He knows when his stuff is bad and because of that, he knows when it’s good. In the arts, that’s what talent is. True talent. Having it is the key element that separates him from the dreck peddlers. It’s what separates Broadway from dinner theater.

When Billy goes to a reading or a literary event, he makes it his mission to introduce himself not just to the author, but to the author’s agent or publisher or publicist who will likely also be there. If he attends a conference, he will sit among the cadre of authors he knows he will one day join. He will work the room in a way that only a confident person can. People will remember him not for being cocky or loud or even because he had a nifty idea for a book, but because he was interesting.

The entertainment business–of which writing is a part–is a business of relationships, and people love to help interesting people.

If Billy’s smart, he will stay away from anyone who sneers at his decision to pursue his dream, taking solace from the fact that those who sneer will be the same ones who want to take selfies with him after his dream proves to be successful. Billy should make a commitment to himself never to apologize to anyone for the artistic path he chose.

Everyone who has seen any level of success in the entertainment business started as Billy. They all share the common elements of talent, drive, focus, more than a little luck, and the ability to see rejection merely as a slammed door that opened a window.

A lot of Billys quit. Most, probably. They go home to the “I-Told-You-So” concert and complain that the industry isn’t interested in new talent anymore. They’ll testify without evidence that traditional media is dying anyway. The real route to success, they’ll say, is doing it all yourself because even if they buy your book, they’ll turn on you like jackals if the book under performs.

As evidence, Whining Billy will regurgitate the one-hit-wonder trope of their friend John who was really, really good. The industry paid him a lot of money, and got behind his first two projects. They sent him on tours, and while the books were bestsellers, they didn’t earn back the money the company spent, and now nobody will return his phone calls. Poor John.

Whining Billy glosses over the lede here–that John had a hit. For a period of time, however short, he got to live the dream. He got to see his name on bookshelves around the world. And while he beamed with pride of accomplishment, the world belittled him because he didn’t do it twice.

Perhaps Whining Billy–having quit and started a garage band, or maybe gone into teaching creative writing classes–was unaware of the fact that while John was having trouble getting his phone calls returned, he was still in the game making calls.

Yes, we’re talking about me now. And perhaps it’s pure hubris, but I never stopped believing in my abilities during the dark times. I never once saw rejection as personal. I understood the quiet happy dances performed by that handful of veteran authors who’d never made a fraction of what I’d been paid for those under-performing books.

I didn’t care that large elements of my extended family celebrated my slump because it’s what I expected of them. I think they had a lot to do with my desire to escape into fiction in the first place.

That noise doesn’t matter to me. I can’t let it matter to me.

To the outside world, it looked like my slump ran from roughly 2001 to 2006, but what no one outside of my very tiny circle of trust knew was that I had made the pivot of a lifetime. I was researching and writing my first and only nonfiction book–the first book ever to receive cooperation from the Army’s super-secret Delta Force. That book became Six Minutes to Freedom, co-authored with Kurt Muse, whose story it tells, and when it was done, we couldn’t give it away to the Big Five. (Nobody cares about Central America, Special Forces is overdone, neither of us is a “journalist” and therefore we’re not qualified to write the story.) I actually had to fire my agent over the book because she refused to represent it.

That’s when I remembered that Steve Zacharias, then a senior executive (now CEO) of Kensington Publishing had always been a fan of my work. My new (and better) agent, Anne Hawkins, sent him the manuscript, and he bought it. Boom! I was back in the game, and the research for that book provided the launch platform for the Jonathan Grave series.

The success of the Grave series allowed me to launch my Victoria Emerson Series, and now my Irene Rivers thriller series. That’s thirty books and counting folks.

And Six Minutes to Freedom is slated to be released by Netflix as a feature film in 2027.

The human tapeworms who troll the interwebs either spreading promises of quick riches through self/hybrid/vanity publishing or spreading rumors of doom and misery in the traditional world are lying to you.

Talent. Relationships. Persistence. The ability to tune out the naysayers. Those are four legs on the stool that defines success in the entertainment business. We talk a lot about tying your butt to the chair and writing. Well, yes, that’s important. But you have to get out there and meet people, too. Build relationships.

Your work has been rejected? Ah, that’s a shame. Get over it and try again. And again. And again.

Or quit. There’s no shame in that. Just remember that it was your choice to quit. Dismissive agents or cranky editors didn’t make you quit. You chose to quit.

And somewhere, you left and editor or an agent hungry for exactly what you’d written. After fifty rejections, you’ll never know if you would have discovered each other on your 51st query.

By PJ Parrish

There are countless good non-fction books out there on how to write novels. They’ve come up in our conversations here mutliple times over the years. Stephen King’s On Writing is probably most quoted here. Sometimes for its basic advice on craft:

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

But sometimes for the personal truths he reveals that resonate with anyone facing a blank page:

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Man, I can relate to that one. Or I suspect any of you out there can who have heard variations of “When you gonna get a real job?” Or “Why don’t you write someone good?”

Another books on craft have illuminated my way through the craft caverns. I love Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting. Because we can all learn stuff from good screenwriters. One of my fave quotes:

You can be near the cliché, you can dance around it, you can run right up to it and almost embrace it. But at the last second you must turn away. You must give it a twist.

But my favorite book on writing is Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. This single quote helped change my writing style. It also helped me let go of my obsession with geometrically folded towels:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Okay, so I’m still anal about my linen closet but I no longer restack the dishwasher after my husband does it and when he helps me decorate the Christmas tree, I don’t rehang the ornaments after he goes to bed. I am still going to die someday, but at least I don’t fret about getting caught in old underwear when it happens.

Since I have been doing a lot of reading lately due to vacation, family business, and a bout with the RSV virus, I have also come to realize that novels have much to teach us about craft. Let me suggest just a few and what they have taught me.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book gave me two gifts: First, that theme is the backbone of every memorable story. Beloved grapples with huge social themes rooted in our complex history, but even our modest crime genre novels are elevated when the writer moors the story in theme. Beloved also taught me a valuable lesson early in my writing career: that I didn’t have the craft chops to handle a two-story plot. Morrison seamlessly toggles between two parallel stories; I learned that I had to abandon one of my early parallel plots to make my story work. Know your limits, perhaps?

Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.

This book drove home for me what Kurt Vonnegutt preaches: Every character must want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Character motivation is one of the pillars of great fiction, and Clarice Starling is a stellar example of how “want” must go beyond the superficial. What does Clarice want?

1. To catch Buffalo Bill before he kills Catherine. (classic ticking clock plot)
2. To prove herself among the male FBI trainees. (classic underdog story)
3. To impress her boss Jack Crawford (in the book a relationship is implied)
4. To live up to the memory of her beloved sheriff/father who was killed in line of duty.
5. To silence her own inner demons. After her dad’s death, she is taken in by a relative on a sheep ranch where she tries to save a lamb from slaughter and as punishment is sent to an orphanage. (A story she reveals to Lecter). The book ends with Clarice sleeping peacefully. (The movie ending is better, imho).

The five levels of “want” are criticial to our understanding of Clarice, as they represent a descent into her psychological oubliette — symbolically as unsettling as the horrific basement well where Catherine is kept hostage. This relates to an exchange between Lecter and Clarice regarding Buffalo Bills’ motivation:

What need does he serve by killing, Clarice? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

As writers, we must know what our characters want. Not just at the superficial level. We must be willing to explore the deepest dungeons of what they covet.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I  read this book 20 years ago on a trip to Chennai, India. It was August and it was so hot the aspalt steamed at night. There was something jarring in the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, in the cacaphony of bright colors, noise, and relentless press of too many human beings. In some moments, the city’s chaos felt apocalyptic. The imagery of McCarthy’s book haunted me:

Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. … The incinerated corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

There is one scene I cannot get out of my head. The man and boy, surviving cannibal “bad guys,” discover a cache of canned food in a cellar. They sit in the rubble and eat peaches, a symbol of the lost world and of hope. What did this book teach me about writing? That imagery is the lifeblood of any powerful story. Not just passages of description but of that one telling detail, that can encapsulate your entire theme — peaches. McCarthy’s spare but evocative imagery taught me to be braver — and briefer — in my own descriptions. Less is more. But the “less” must be more effective.

Oh geez. I’ve flapped my gums too long again. I have four other books I wanted to talk about here, but I’ve run long. Quickly: Rowlings’ Harry Potter books taught me that a swift-flowing and sure-footed plot can make up for meh writing. Madame Bovary gave me the courage to write a male protag. (Louis Kincaid, c’est moi!) Charlotte’s Web (yes you can — indeed, must — kill off a sympathetic character).

What novels have made you a better writer?