Long-term Careers

Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog is a treasure, a gift for writers, readers, and especially aspiring writers.

Have you read this excellent series of posts from authors with long and productive careers?

You can find them all HERE. 

This morning, I caught up with a few.

HERE IS SOME of what K.L. Going says about changes she's seen. 

The last line of this passage is worth contemplating (the "bold" for emphasis is mine):


When I first started out, it was a big deal that I simply had a website. I had certain fun features I’d update periodically, but there was not any expectation that there would be new material every week or every few days. There was no Twitter or Instagram. It took very little of my mental energy.

(Beach Lane, 2017)

But over the years, social media venues have bred like rabbits and it’s hard not to get caught up in each new trail, not knowing which ones will pan out in the long run.

It’s too easy to spend all of your creative energy on coming up with clever or prolific posts instead of writing new books.

These days, there’s a much higher demand to do marketing well.

Also, feedback on your books comes instantly from many sources and it’s detailed. It feels personal.

In the past, there was a general sense of a book’s reception, but there wasn’t that kind of instant reaction from Joe Smith in Washington, D.C. who gave your book a certain number of stars.

General feedback is wonderful because it can help improve your writing skills for future books, but specific feedback can feel disproportionately important even when it shouldn’t really have any impact at all.

Friendship

My week was filled with bright kids asking great questions.
Four Skype sessions later, I'm still pondering what they said about THE WAY TO STAY IN DESTINY.
 
For example:
Are any of your characters based on real people or named after real people? How do you figure out what a character would say?

What does "Oh my stars!" mean? Are you from the south, or something?
(This always cracks me up because it never occurs to me that kids don't know some of the totally normal sounding things I say/write...)

And mixed together with all the writing questions I regularly get asked (and never mind answering) was a new one:

"Do you know any other authors and what do you talk about when you get together?"
(Totally not answering this one. My lips are sealed.

Another question made me wonder. This is only the second time it's been asked, and both times I could tell the student had thought hard about it. It wasn't one of those "How much money do you make?" off-the-cuff questions that teachers and librarians caution kids not to ask.
(But they sometimes do.)

This young reader asked why Theo, a boy, was friends with Anabel, a girl, and what made me write about friendship and friends and especially boys and girls being friends. 

I have the answer to that. Or at least an answer.
One is because purely from a writing sense, it's nice to work in both girls and boys in a novel, especially those who don't exactly fit the mold. Theo plays the piano AND baseball. His new friend Anabel wants no part of her dance class but is possibly a sports fanatic. 

In THE WAY TO STAY IN DESTINY, Theo was adrift. He was someplace he'd never been before. He felt like an outsider. Every single time I talk about my new book and ask students what helps you fit in when you are brand new to a place, they know the answer: Find a friend.

Been there, done that, right? Haven't we all felt like we didn't know the ropes until we had one person to show us the way?

I grew up in the kind of small southern town where everybody knew each other. I had friends whose grandparents were my own grandparents' friends. That's me in the corsage and my best friend since (before!) birth next to me. We were college roommates, bridesmaids for each other, and we're still best of friends. But I've also been that newcomer, so I know how it feels not to fit in. 

(In fact, I still know every person in this photo, including the too-cool-for-school boy on the trike)

A friend, yes. That's what a good book can be. But also a way to figure out how to make a friend. How to be a friend.  

Frankie and Glory? Anabel and Theo? And in my forthcoming book, there's a girl who befriends a boy, and the two attempt to figure out the world together.

Makes perfect sense to me.


(Here's a link to a blogpost by one of the terrific librarians who invited me into her class via Skype)

And one more photo. 

My friend and I still talk a lot about our shoes.

  

Great Advice/ Happy birthday, Leo ladies.

Happy Birthday, fellow Leos!
Sue Monk Kidd, Kirby Larson, Liesl Shurtliff
and I almost share a birthday. And probably a whole bunch of others I'm leaving out.
(Leos should stick together. We are fierce.) 

I hope some of their Writer Mojo rubs off on me--
on all of us this month!

When I first read this, I shared it on my blog. 
Years ago.
Sharing again here. Great advice from a fellow August author.

The Ten Most Helpful Things I Could Ever Tell Anyone About Writing

(Thinking about Kidd's collages reminds me of my Pinterest boards. That's where I gather things to help my writing. I'm not much of a collage maker.)

One of my favorites from her list of helpful things:

Hurry slowly.
"Getting the pace of a story right keeps me up at night. I have a horror of sitting on a plane, next to someone reading my book, and seeing her flip over to see how many pages are left in the chapter. You want a reader so caught up in the spell of a story it would never occur to her to pull herself away and count how many pages she had to read before she could stop."

A Template!

To write your novel with!

Of course, there's really no such thing.

But recently I found this "advice" buried deep in my files.

Here's the link:

http://www.authormagazine.org/articles/thayer_james_2009_12_16.htm

And remember my Nerdy Book Club post about TEN THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM KIDS ABOUT WRITING A BOOK?

Remember that dog?

Here's a funny thing from that article by James Thayer about your Main Character:

1)  They are kind when it counts. Not always, and maybe not mostly, but when it is important, the hero will do something kind. If nothing else he will adopt a dog, a common fictional device to salvage otherwise irredeemable heroes, which is called the Adopt A Dog Technique.

 I'm totally good with that.

Anne Tyler

Has a new book coming. What an absolutely gorgeous cover!

CLICK RIGHT HERE to read a super interview and essay from the Wall Street Journal about her and her writing.

Love this:

She treats her creativity as a leap of faith. She won’t read her reviews, worried that, good or bad, they will interfere with her work. Over her desk, where she writes novels in longhand, she keeps a quote from the poet Richard Wilbur, which reads in part: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.”



You might also like:

This, about her writing. 

And an Anne Tyler quote, from one of my very earliest posts:

"All really satisfying stories, I believe, can generally be described as spend-thrift... A spendthrift story has a strange way of seeming bigger than the sum of its parts; it is stuffed full; it gives the sense of possessing further information that could be divulged if called for."

Eavesdropping

All writers I know love to eavesdrop. I tell kids when they ask What Does it Take to Be A Writer? that they must listen and remember.

Or in my case, listen and write it down.

The best place for eavesdropping is one where you'll blend in. A train ride, for example.
I like to name characters seen on the train and imagine their stories.

Here's an exchange between a boy in a Yankee cap and another kid, possibly his older sister.

I don't think I'll be using this. Go ahead and steal it if you'd like.

BOY (as we pulled into the South Orange stop on the NJ Transit Mid-Town Direct to NYC):
"This looks just like New York!"

GIRL: You've never even been to New York.

BOY: "Well, it looks just like what I've seen on Cash Cab."


What's the best eavesdropping conversation you've heard? 
Or are you really going to tell me you never eavesdrop...

Check this site for even more confessions of writers eavesdropping.
http://teazurs.blogspot.com/2013/01/eavesdropping-its-your-job.html

How To Write

Pretty much everything you need to know about writing is 
RIGHT HERE.  ☜ (click this link)
(Well, almost.)

Love this. One of my favorites.

Ann Patchett, again

Yes, I'm a fan of everything I've ever read by Ann Patchett.
Recently, on a very long plane ride, I reread something I'd downloaded eons ago. And it was so worth a second read.

Do you know this little e-book?

THE GETAWAY CAR: A PRACTICAL MEMOIR ABOUT WRITING AND LIFE

For today at least, this is one of my favorite quotes from the piece:
"The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page."

You must own a Kindle or perhaps have a Kindle app on your tablet to read it. 
But it's only $2.99 as a Kindle Single.

Or you can see what others have said, and read their favorite quotes.

HERE: http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/words-of-wisdom-from-ann-patchett/

Or HERE: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/08/ann-patchetts-lessons-on-writing-from-byliner.html

Here's a longer piece from the publisher of The Runaway Car.
https://www.byliner.com/ann-patchett/stories/excerpt-the-getaway-car



Previous related Ann Patchett post:
What Now?