It’s Not Just Words.

It’s Not Just Words.

Back in the day, almost as far back as when man was first learning to harness fire for his benefit, I used to write screenplays. I started my writing career with a stage play, then immediately switched to writing movies (yes, the play was that terrible). I wrote movies for many years. Had some very small successes, many huge failures, but I loved the heck out of it.

Now I write books. My debut novel, Untold Damage, came out on April 8^th of this year. Next April will see the second Mark Mallen novel, Critical Damage.  A lot of people liked my debut novel, and that is super-duper awesome as it took me about ten years to learn my craft, get an agent, and then get a publishing deal. One thing that everyone who reads the book agrees on, outside of liking Mallen (which bodes well for a series, right?), is that the book is very visual. And that’s where we come to the point of this post: writing with a visual style.

And just how do you do that, you ask?

You write in all forms.

Screenplays. Plays. Even poetry can teach you something. Screenplays are all about movement and action, with as little dialog as possible. Plays are the opposite, they’re mostly dialog, BUT, you also have to have a sense of where you want the actors, what you want them to do as they’re talking. That’s great practice for setting your scenes and writing about things as simple as a character moving from one room to the next. Poetry can teach you how to find the right metaphors, find the BEST possible word to draw your word picture.

You can find screenplays all over the Internet. It’s not a hard form to get the hang of, but it’s a very difficult form to master. Very few ever do. Obviously you can also find plays everywhere on the ‘net. Through writing screenplays, I learned not only how to write in a visual manner, but also how to tell a story that contains a strong forward movement and pacing. Through writing the one stage play that I mentioned earlier I learned SO MUCH regarding what good dialog is, and isn’t. (mostly isn’t). Through writing poetry, I learned how to better use metaphors to make the scene in my head match the scene I was writing.

I’m being very serious here, if not a bit convoluted, hahaha. Bottom line: If you want to be the best, most visual writer you can be, open yourself up to writing in different forms. Heck, even spend some time writing Haiku. Writing a Haiku REALLY shows the power of just the right word.

It’s this looking at words, sentences, and the story form in entirely new ways that will take you far. 

Bay Area resident Robert K. Lewis has been a painter, printmaker, and a produced screenwriter. He is a contributor to Macmillan's crime fiction fansite, Criminal Element. Lewis is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers, and the Crime Writers Association. Untold Damage is his first novel. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.com and at needlecity.wordpress.com.

A Few Things Authors Should Keep in Mind While Navigating the Wonderful World of Book Clubs.

If you’re a soon-to-be published author, you’re probably a little nervous about presentations and book clubs. Okay, maybe you’re terrified. (I was!) Among a million other things, you might be wondering…

Do real authors worry that someone will ask a question they can’t answer? Do real authors make sure they're wearing socks with no holes in them in case they’re asked to take off their shoes in someone’s home? Do real authors worry their mind will go blank in the middle of a sentence? Do they worry they’ll be compared to other novelists? Do they spill their wine and talk with spinach in their teeth? 

I’m here to tell you that, yes. Yes, they do.

Before my debut novel, THE PLUM TREE was released last year, my stomach churned when I thought about book clubs and presentations. Although I was excited about meeting readers, I wondered what would be expected of me and worried that people would change their mind about my work after meeting me in person. After all, how could an overweight grandmother with anxiety-flushed cheeks and trembling knees have anything important to say? And her book? It must have been a fluke.

Then I read an interview featuring Jenna Blum, author of THOSE WHO SAVE US, where she said books clubs helped dispel her fear of talking about her novel in front of strangers. What? Über-talented Jenna Blum, one of Oprah’s Top Women Authors, was nervous too? That was when I began to think maybe I’d be all right after all.

Now, eight months after the release of THE PLUM TREE and a dozen or so book clubs later, I’m here to tell you Jenna Blum was right. Books clubs are a wonderful way to ease into the new and often-scary “public” world of debut authorhood. After all, what could be better than having excited readers ply you with delicious food and wine while they chat and ask you questions about your novel? Trust me when I say it gives you a much-needed boost and is a great reminder of why you spent all those lonely months and years staring at your computer and talking to the dogs. And yet, like every author, you’ll eventually learn that not every book club experience is the same. To give you a heads up, here’s a list of a few things my fellow debut authors and I have learned while navigating the weird and wonderful world of book clubs.

1) Book clubs are not always about books. Although it might seem a bit strange, some book clubs don’t read the books they’ve chosen. For them, it’s a reason to get together with friends—for food, wine and conversation. While that’s all well and good, and people are certainly free to do as they please, it can be a bit awkward for an author who expects to talk about her novel. The good news is, you’ll make new friends and, hopefully, because they met you in person, some of them WILL read your book. If you’re worried about what to do in a case like this, remember that nearly everyone is interested in the process of becoming a published author. You can always talk about getting your agent, copy edits, revisions, rejection letters, word count, publishing houses, and the first time you saw your novel on bookstore shelves!

2) Sometimes the conversation goes in one direction and stays there. I know of one book club meeting where the members were so certain the book was going to be made into a movie, they spent the evening talking about auditioning for their favorite parts. While I’m sure the discussion wasn’t what the author expected, I’ll bet it was fun! If this happens to you, go with the flow and enjoy the enthusiasm!

3) Every book club needs a leader and sometimes it has to be you. One of my author friends stood by the kitchen door holding her purse while the book club fired questions at her before she even had a chance to take off her coat! Although I’d like to think that the excitement of meeting a published author caused the members to forget their manners, I’m sure it was a little awkward for all involved. Eventually, the author said, “Let’s grab our snacks and take a seat!” From there, things went well. It’s important to remember that there will be times when you have to take charge. Don’t worry, everyone will be glad you did!

4) Sometimes you’ll feel intimidated. No matter who you are or where you came from, there will come a time when it feels as though everyone in the room, and I mean everyone, is better educated and more successful than you. You might feel silly talking about your little book. But guess what? When it comes to being a published author, (unless, by chance, one of the members is also published) YOU are the most successful person in the room. The book club members, whether they’re heart surgeons, college professors or political analysts, are in awe of your accomplishment. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have invited you! Try to remember how you looked at published authors before you became one. That’s how most book club members look at you. Smile and be proud!

5) People will think that because they read your book, they know who you are. Every now and then, some questions and comments will surprise (or shock) you. Just like in the real world, people will say what’s on their minds before thinking. And sometimes, just like in the real world, they’re only being nosy. Smile, do your best to answer politely, ( or even better, with a dash of humor!) then change the subject.  

6) If you’re feeling particularly nervous, it’s okay to bring backup. One author friend sometimes takes his wife to book clubs and she’s always a big hit. I’m sure partly because the book club members want to know what it’s like to be married to a published author! I’ve taken my mother a few times because THE PLUM TREE is loosely based on her experiences growing up in Germany during WWII. People love asking her questions. I always say the more the merrier, and I imagine most book clubs feel the same way. But remember, every situation is different. If there is a formal dinner being served or restaurant reservations are being made, it’s best to ask first. Most book clubs offer to pay for the visiting author’s meal, but you can't expect them to pay for your guest. As a side note, if the meeting is being held in a restaurant, order something easy to eat (unless you don’t mind slurping spaghetti while fifteen people watch) and be prepared to take most of your meal home. You’ll be talking too much to put food in your mouth!

7) Every book club is different. And that’s what makes them so interesting and fun! Here I quote an author friend: “Each one has its own flavor unique to the members attending. I love the challenge and surprise those unique differences present. It's a little bit like improv theater. At one meeting, to my amazement, the conversation became so animated between the readers it was as if I was no longer in the room but watching behind one of those two-way mirrors they use in police stations or child psychologist clinics. Finally, one of the members turned to me and asked—how does it feel to have a bunch of strangers talking about you and your book as if you’re not here? I was speechless. It took me a few seconds to finally nod and smile and say, "Oh, it's great, carry on." I was in author heaven.

8) Some book clubs start with wine, continue to more wine, and finish with wine. This can be loads of fun or extremely awkward, depending on your temperament. In the case of one woman becoming so intoxicated she insisted the author examine her teeth, it was probably crossing the line a wee bit. But hey, to each their own. Everyone has their own version of entertainment! It’s best to laugh and chalk it up to experience. (and help with character building for your next book)

9) The best book clubs are those where the members are willing to share their personal stories. Here I quote another author friend—“Sometimes it can almost turn into a group therapy session. But it's interesting to hear how your book connects to their experiences, sometimes in very unexpected ways. In a book club, you get a chance to go beyond "I get it" and really get to know your readers.” For me, this is the most rewarding thing about book clubs!

10) Always be prepared to do a presentation. One book club I visited had rented a room in a historic downtown club. I was familiar with the building and assumed they would be gathered in one of the small side rooms. Imagine my surprise when I saw a sign that said the book club meeting was in the BALLROOM. When I walked in and saw the linen-covered tables, a buffet, and crystal chandeliers, I was certain there had been a mistake. Clearly, the ballroom had been set up for a formal party or wedding reception. Even the chairs were covered with white linen. As it turned out, FIVE local book clubs had gotten together to rent the ballroom, all to meet little old me. Imagine that. I quickly realized they were expecting a presentation and said a silent thank you to the author Gods that I had my notes and props with me.  

11) No matter what happens, remember that book clubs are supposed to be FUN!!  

Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?

By Erin Cashman

I am a pretty organized person. I love my to-do lists. Sometimes I write things on my to-do lists that I’ve already done just to cross them off! I love the immediate feeling of accomplishment. I also make to-do lists for my husband and children, which largely go ignored. In high school, college, and law school I was the queen of outlines. I felt in control, knowing what I needed to know. Everything was boiled down nice and neat, with bullets, highlighting, and Roman numerals.

So when it comes to writing, I want, no I yearn, to be a plotter. Each time that a new story idea pops into my head and won’t go away, filling my mind with dialogue and settings and characters, I sit down with a crisp, clean pad of paper, and start my outline. I make a list of characters with brief descriptions, and I write not one, but two outlines -- one of the entire book, and then I outline the first five or six chapters in detail. I keep this notebook next to my laptop, and then I start to write.

And then I never look at the outline again. The characters hijack my brain, and I follow them down dark and twisty paths that lead me into unchartered territory. My villain is actually just a bit of a rogue. The nice, milk-commercial cute guy has a dark side.  My main character isn’t flawed in the way I thought. And secondary characters evaporate. New ones pop up. I dream about these characters, their voices fill my head during quiet moments, and months later I have a draft. A terrible, awful, messy draft. I have not followed my neat outline, or even glanced at it. My story arc is more of a zigzag.  But I know my characters better.  I know what their deepest desires are, and what they are trying to hide from me.

So I revise, and revise and revise some more. I write huge amount of back story that I cut. I write tangents that I cut. I write endings that I cut. I write and write and write, and I cut and cut and cut. But with each draft my characters reveal more of themselves, and I learn what makes them tick. Right now I am actually on my eleventh draft of a novel! But I’m not sick of it yet, and with each pass I like it better. By the time I’m finished I am pretty sure I will have cut as many words as I’ve saved. It is a very time consuming, inefficient, torturously painful way to write a novel. But it’s the only way I can.

So, I have come to realize that in most areas of my life I’m a plotter. And I really want to be a plotter when it comes to writing. I love the orderliness of it. I love starting on page one and knowing where I’m going to end. But try as I may, I’m not a plotter.  I’m a pantser.  The only way I can really know my characters is by writing about them. It’s everything I don’t like – messy, unorganized and chaotic. But it’s just how I write.

What are you?


_________________________________________________________________

Erin Cashman is a YA author. Her debut fantasy novel, THE EXCEPTIONALS, was published by Holiday House in 2012 and named a Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year. You can find her at the group blogs The Enchanted Inkpot, BookPregnant Blog, and on Twitter,Facebook, and her Website

The Road to Publication Is A Long & Bumpy One

by Erin Cashman

I gained a lot of weight with my first pregnancy. So much that I closed my eyes during weigh-ins at the doctor’s office. I didn’t want to know the numbers on the scale. After I had my third child, I started dieting and exercising, and after many months of limiting my chocolate and ice cream intake (torture!), enduring aerobic classes, power walks, etc., I finally lost most of the weight. Many people asked me how I did it. Surely I knew some secret. A half a grapefruit before meals? Eating anything I wanted but stopping at 4? Eating only purple food? No one wanted to hear the truth. Lately several people have asked me about how I became published. But, like my weight loss, what they really want to know is what’s the secret. These writers (and I used to be one of them) have written a book, queried countless agents and editors, and still have no publishing deal. There must be a secret they don’t know about. Well, I’m here to tell you that there isn’t. The road to publication is a long one, filled with pot holes, detours, and road blocks.

My debut novel, The Exceptionals, was published last year. It was my third finished novel. It took eight long years from the date I started writing my first novel until my third one was published. And six years of writing, revising and editing two different manuscripts, querying agents and submitting partial and fulls until The Exceptionals sold. I asked the writers here at Book Pregnant what their experiences were. Most of us have written at least one other (often several other!) book that never was published. So, like me, our “debut” novel is really our third, fourth, fifth . . . you get the idea. Several BPers (as we call ourselves) found an agent, but the agent couldn’t sell that manuscript. One author worked on writing and revising her book for seventeen (yes, seventeen!) years. Two different agents tried to sell her manuscript but were unable. Finally she sold it herself. Another worked on her novel for eleven years, and she had two different agents and two different editors. In fact, many of the authors in this blog have had more than one agent. As Lydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine told me: “Shine was not my first book, or even my second or third, that I got through a FIRST draft of, however it was the first book I got to a FINAL draft of.”  One writer told me that the reason he thinks his debut novel (not his first finished manuscript) sold was that he had thirty years of rejection behind him, to learn from.

And that’s the key. To learn from the rejections. Maybe the novel needs more revising, maybe the plot is too convoluted, maybe the characters aren’t compelling enough. Take a long, hard look at your book and try to find areas for improvement. Why do I tell you all this? To depress you? No. Exactly the opposite. There is no trick. There is no a secret that we published authors know that you don’t. If you hope to be published one day, work tirelessly on your manuscript. Revise and edit, and then revise and edit again. Join a critique group or find a critique partner if you can, a fresh set of eyes (not a friend, or a family member, but another writer!) can make a huge difference. Sometimes I know the story I’m writing so well that it’s hard for me to see the problems with it. Read everything you can get your hands on. Devour books. It will help you “know” if something doesn’t ring true or is stale or cliché. And most importantly, don’t give up.  We didn’t!
_____________________________
Erin Cashman is a YA author. Her debut fantasy novel, THE EXCEPTIONALS, was published by Holiday House in 2012 and named a Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year. You can find her at the group blogs The Enchanted Inkpot, BookPregnant Blog, and on Twitter, Facebook, and her Website

The Road Can Be (Very) Long

I was asked recently how long had it taken me to get published. When I gave my answer, the person who’d asked me fell over in shock and cracked their egg open.

I started writing fiction back in 2002, after writing screenplays for about seven years (Maybe eight. Can’t remember. Too many wine bottles ago now). So if you start from 2002, then it took me over ten years to get here.

Ten. Years.

You know how many rejections that adds up to? How many failed novels?

Let me talk about "just" the road to publication first. To do that, we have to go back four years, to May 2009 when I finally landed an agent. Before that happy moment, I’d been writing, and writing, and then writing some more for about seven years. Six days a week, averaging forty-eight weeks a year.

You know, whenever I think back to that summer of 2009, I laugh. I was so naïve. I really thought that I’d be published immediately. Or six months, tops.

Um…. Not quite.

It’s a special time for me now. My debut novel, UNTOLD DAMAGE, has finally arrived on bookshelves. Almost exactly sixteen months from the day that my agent emailed me: “Um, dude? Your cell isn’t working. Call me.”

Sixteen months. Woah, right? That’s a pretty unfathomable amount of time.

Let me just say here that I understand that everyone’s road will be different. Some shorter. Some longer. Back in 2002, I really had no idea of just how long that road could be. No idea of how much effort, sweat, and perseverance it would take to go from the road marker of learning the craft of fiction writing, to the road marker of getting an agent, to the road marker of getting published.

And to think that the book that eventually got published wasn’t close to the one that hooked me up with my agent! No, thatbook didn’t sell. Got close, but never made it over the hill.

The book that did get me over the hill, UNTOLD DAMAGE, was written out of pure desperation. Seriously. The earlier version of the book, as I said, hadn’t sold. I needed something else, something new. I eventually (after months and months of sweating) found that “something else”.  I sent this new version of the first Mark Mallen book off to my agent. And wasn’t I floored when she said she loved it! I mean, I’d hoped she would of course but by that point, about 2.5 years down the road after hooking up with her, I wasn’t sure at all whether she would dig it, or dig me a ditch to go die in.

But, she loved it.

And how did I hook up with my agent? The person who is not only my advocate in the industry, but is also a great listener when I’m freaking the F out over something?

Well, the “getting the agent” part of the journey started with a killer query, naturally. Back in the early spring of 2009, I queried the agent who would eventually sign me. And let me just reiterate here what you probably already know about query letters: they’re really SALES letters. A query tells the reader why they should look at your book. I sent the infamous "nudge" email about six or eight weeks later.

My future agent got back to me almost immediately, thanking me for the nudge and asking to see the rest of the manuscript. So I sent it.

And then I waited.

Waited a couple weeks. Sweated every day that went by. I know we shouldn’t sweat those moments, but I did. What can I say? 

 She got back to me at the end of those two weeks saying, “Let’s seal this deal, dude!”

And that was it!

But, it wasn’t.

This current version of the book had to get polished first, off notes that my agent sent me. Then it went out to publishers. We got responses back. No sale, but some very good feedback. And so after a pow-wow with my agent, I rewrote the book again. Then it got sent it out again, and…

… and then after more "close but no cigar" responses, it was over for that version of the book.

Then what happened? Well, that book got completely rewritten. I gutted it. Put in a new foundation. Added new plumbing. Changed where the windows were situated, and also how the light hit the upstairs deck, and…

… and well, you get it.

Then we went back out on submission. And that leads me to here: having UNTOLD DAMAGE out in the world on bookstore shelves. Over three and half years after getting an agent. Or, if you prefer, a bit over ten years later if you start from when I began writing that first novel.

It’s finally come to fruition. All that work.

And like I mentioned earlier, I realize that it won’t take this long for everyone. Hell, it might take even longer. What I’m trying to say here is that you have to be prepared to play THE LONG GAME. From beginning to end. And in order to get there, you never give up on your goal: for every query you get back that’s a pass, you send out another. Every manuscript that bombs, you write another. Every time you feel like you can’t do it one more time, you do it one more time. Every time you get hit in the face with it all, you get up and keep going. If you want to write to be published, then you have to prepare for the long haul. As I’ve said, it may not always be a long process. But nine times out of ten?

It will be.

Bay Area resident Robert K. Lewis has been a painter, printmaker, and a produced screenwriter. He is a contributor to Macmillan's crime fiction fansite, Criminal Element. Lewis is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers, and the Crime Writers Association. Untold Damage is his first novel. The second novel in the Mark Mallen series, Critical Damage, will arrive April, 2014. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.comand at needlecity.wordpress.com.