Why Should I Pay?

We live in a world where we hear that the best things in life are free–and yet we pay money for more and more goods. Once upon a time, you’d never have paid for water, right? Now, we believe that the only good water comes in a bottle and costs at least a $2.00.

I live in New York City, which has an excellent water supply and I love that. It’s a luxury. I don’t need to pay for water.

So why should you pay for responses to your writing?

Because, alas, good critiques don’t flow from any city taps. You can find generous writing groups and friends and family who will give you precious help. But you won’t get serious copy-editing or line-editing from friends. It’s a skill. I charge from 4 cents to 10 cents a word, depending on what you want and need and can afford and I spend my work hours working for you, not a half hour before I run to the gym.

As for critiques, you don’t want too much advice and you don’t want bad advice. Sometimes we just need a magical word or two from a friend, or a kind stranger on the train. And sometimes we need concentrated professional help–whether to massage your stiff neck, redirect your career, perfect your tennis game, or preserve your marriage. The choice here is not all that different. Do you want “tips” or hours of expertise?

I read a funny comment on a writers’ list-serve this morning: Marry an editor! It’s true: Writers need people in their lives who will give them huge amounts of time and attention.

Paying doesn’t guarantee excellence. But paying should mean that you will both be focused on the job. You may find that you up your game when your cash is on the line. Ask yourself: Will I do my best to deliver a publishable manuscript? Will I make good use of the response I get? It’s an investment.

On the other end, a professional editor wants your good word-of-mouth to grow her business and should see her work for you as part of her mission in life. A good editor knows she’s damn good and will prove it to you. She has a bigger stake than a volunteer.

So I’d recommend that you get all the free help you can, and then hire an editor if you can afford one. I also take my own advice. For my own novel, I paid. Every writer needs an editor. Better writers need better ones.

Unless You are Moses…

There’s a myth of the talented writer–really, of any artist–who produces brilliant work on the first try, maybe over a few sleepless days or weeks.

She brings that outpouring to the public, which anoints her as a new talent.

No book reviews discuss the two or three unpublished novels that usually preceed the “first novels.”

The myth is that real writers don’t need editors or editing. They barely revise.

The myth has religious roots. According to it, beautiful language and insights come to us by inspiration, a word related to breathing. If you’re truly good, says the myth, you’ll breathe in your life and breathe out art. Like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who claimed to have translated a buried book on golden plates, we transcribe voices or discover complete works within ourselves. Joseph Smith didn’t need an editor or editing, and neither did Moses.

It’s true that when you write, you experience magical moments when the words and insights come fast, seemingly from nowhere. Those heady times keep you going. You feel in touch with your true self. Why would you want or need to second-guess yourself or ask someone else to change what you produced when you felt most alive and authentic?

The reason is that, oddly, it takes skill and practice to be yourself on the page.

As a reporter, I’ve interviewed Nobel Prize winners and experts who talk to the public every day. Even people who are skilled at presenting their ideas repeat themselves and make grammatical errors. They say things that don’t make sense and skip necessary details and wander off into tangents and use the wrong word or terms their audience won’t understand. They misrepresent even their emotions: they may sound cold when they feel tender, angry when they feel detached, and false and sentimental when they feel passionate.

That’s why a good journalist picks quotes carefully.

As a writer, you owe yourself the same consideration. Of all the words you put down on paper, you need to pick the best, most revealing ones.

You need to learn when you aren’t making sense or are skipping necessary details or wandering off.

You need to revise.

Unless you are Moses, your finest words will not come to you the first time you listen.

 

 

 

Choose An Indie Press

We tend to focus on the big-name publishers like Random House or Knopf. But there are thousands of other well-respected presses with long histories that I would be proud to see publish my own writing. The difference between a “small” or “indie” press and a “vanity” press is whether you must pay the publisher. You might choose a “vanity press,” for convenience and service, over self-publishing.

An indie press should have good relationships with distributors that will get your book into stores. An indie press can also release your book in an electronic form and help you with marketing it online.

You can’t just mail your manuscript to the big New York houses; you’ll need to get an agent first. But indie presses will accept unsolicited manuscripts and are more likely to take on a book that a mainstream house will consider too risky. They may be looking for experimental or shocking work, but not necessarily. The widely-popular novel The Time Traveler’s Wife was first published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing. Water for Elephants was first published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

For a comprehensive database of small and independent publishers, go to Duotrope.com. Before you send out a manuscript, look at the publisher’s list and see if you sense a similarity in taste. In your cover letter, you’ll want to say, sincerely, that you chose this publisher because you admire the books it brings to the public. Make sure that your manuscript is truly ready for serious readers. You’ll need to copy-edit it carefully or hire a copy-editor and you may first want a critique from a writers’ group or a professional editor.

Your imagination, story, and writing skills will sell your novel or memoir, and your knowledge and insight will sell your non-fiction. But taking care of the details and getting high-quality help will ensure that you’ve given your work its best chance. All writers–at all levels–need editors.

Only people with little knowledge of writing or the publishing world think that they can pour out their hearts, mail Random House a fat mound of paper with typos and weird margins that no one else has seen, be received with open arms and go on to make millions. It’s a lovely fantasy. Write a short story about that writer! With the fantasy off your chest, you can take your next steps.

Being Yourself–On Purpose

It’s a funny phrase, “Be yourself.” How can you not be yourself?

I like the phrase “being yourself on purpose.” I’m going to be myself, the good and the bad, but if I intend to be myself, I can highlight the good.

One way to be yourself on purpose is to find the routine that is you and stick to it. Routine is the secret to better writing. Find a time that you can write every day. I wrote my first novel on a half hour bus commute. I wrote my second novel by waking up an hour earlier each morning. I write my journalism assignments by setting my own deadlines, well ahead of the deadline assigned by the editor, whenever possible.

Play around with it, and stick with the routine that works best. Many writers think they have a complicated psychological reason for “writer’s block” when the problem is simple: they’ve changed their routine or haven’t found the right one. If you haven’t found your routine, ask yourself, When do you think about your writing project? Just before you go to bed? In the morning when you wake up? Or after your shower and breakfast? Be attentive to the details and create forty minutes close to that time.

Write Like a Poet

Whether you are writing an op-ed, business paper, nonfiction book, memoir or novel,  being alert to the sound of words is essential.

There is poetry in all effective language, even if it is not organized on the page to look like a poem.

Words are not just their meanings; they are sounds. As such, they can have the emotional power of  music. I believe that brain chemistry will one day explain what poets know, that words arranged with full use of their musical qualities allow us to think and feel simultaneously in a unique way.

Music with good lyrics isn’t the same, though related. And no one can argue with the power of “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”!

So why is it that most people today feel cut off from poetry? That’s a big topic. For now, as writers let’s recall that nearly everyone knows the lyrics to a favorite song and language is king among rappers and at poetry slams.

Even old-fashioned poems can still hit a popular nerve:  W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” captured a wide audience when it was recited in the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Another popular poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Events like 9/11–or the death of Princess Diana over a decade ago–produced outpourings of poems scrawled on walls or safety-pinned onto teddy bears and bouquets.

Many people who do not ordinarily read poetry turn to it when mourning a death or lost love. A friend I’ll call Lily discovered the Robert Frost poem “Reluctance” during a painful break-up in her twenties. When another affair ended decades later, she sent the poem to her ex and found herself repeating its conclusion like a mantra: “Ah, when to the heart of man/Was it ever less than a treason/To go with the drift of things,/To yield with a grace to reason/And bow and accept the end/Of a love or a season?’”

Treason. Reason. Season. Rhyme links disparate themes. It’s a mental jump from treason to reason, helping us step (not jump) ahead emotionally in the process of getting over anger.

A metaphor describes one thing by calling it another, again linking our minds and emotions. Here, love is a season. The comforting message is that love will come again, as spring follows winter. The message is more comforting because it is unstated.

Use metaphor well and move your reader. Cliched and mixed metaphors have the opposite effect. Our emotions shut down.

We’ve all been taught to avoid repetition. It’s a good rule, unless you use repetition well.

Repetition can be soothing, like the rocking of a chair or a child’s lullaby. “That’s why we say ‘there,there,’ instead of just ‘there,'” says the poet Kate Light.

Another kind of repetition can be energizing. Think of the repetition in sermons in black churches or Churchill inspiring the British to resist the Nazis: “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.” We shall fight, we shall fight – perhaps along with the rocking cradle, we feel the love that gives adults courage.

The key here is that the language builds to a crescendo, as in martial music.

As your editor or copy-editor, I will alert you to ways you can finetune the music under your words.

How Much Should I Pay An Editor?

I’m glad so many people write for the love of storytelling and language. Editors are essential to make a book publishable and worth reading, but they can’t guarantee you sales or a profit.

The truth –and I’m not sure it’s a “sad truth”–is that most writers will not ultimately make money on their books.

So when you pay an editor, you are investing in yourself and the glorious enterprise of literature. You can think of your books as an entrepreneurial venture, with high odds to overcome, and see editing as part of the cost.

But it may not make sense to weigh the cost against a possible sale or profit some day. You will learn a great deal simply by seeing how another trained intelligent reader responds to your words.

I’d compare the cost to the price of paying for a therapist, a decorator, a tutor, a personal trainer, or anyone else who makes your life better.

Think about what you want. Do you want a directional edit–someone to look over the whole book at a high level and work with you on structure, pacing, plot, character (or authority and thoroughness for a non-fiction work)? Do you want a line-edit: an editor who will help you sentence by sentence, looking for readability, awkward phrasing, and consistency? A copy-editor to polish your manuscript before sending it to agents or self-publishing? Each of these types of edits will have a very different price attached.

The standard page is 250 words. Depending on what you’re looking for and how much work you need done, an editor could charge anywhere from $2 to $10 a page.

Remember that your friends and family can give you their reactions, which may be invaluable, but they already know you and will read the sound of your spoken voice and personality into the words on the page. Sometimes they’ll be too “nice” and hold back on negative feedback, or they’ll have their own ideas about what you should do and be too pushy. A professional editor is more objective. She will tell you frankly and clearly what she thinks but won’t overwhelm you. If she’s editing your sentences, she understands that you may accept some changes and not others. The process will bring you the sense that you’ve given your work your best shot, and have been heard and respected.

Also remember that everyone, including brilliant scholars, top journalists, literature professors and novelists with many books behind them, need an editor. If you’re a good writer, you need a better editor. The best writers need the best editors. I will do my best to live up to your work!

My Favorite Book About Being A Writer

There are many books about writing. They inspire with the example of their eloquence as well as their advice.

A book (or a blog like this one) about writing can be your secret friend.

My favorite book of this kind is called Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Neither of the authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are primarily writers, although the book is beautifully written.

And their observations about making “art” struck me as completely apt to writing.

At the time I found it, I was not a beginning writer. I had been slogging away for more than a decade, and my chest relaxed a little at the opening quote, from Hippocrates: “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Then the book begins: “Making art is difficult.”

Unlike so many others, this book acknowledged my difficulties and didn’t seem overly optimistic. It wasn’t written to sell books.

Many years later, the truths in this book still seem true to me.

Much of your work will seem a mistake.

“To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.”

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”

The big danger is quitting.

“Those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue–or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.”

“Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when the lose the destination for their work–for the place their work belongs.”

“Quitting means not starting again–and art is all about starting again.”

The best way not to quit is to find comrades and develop and stick to useful habits.

Share your work in progress with other writers or with a writing coach or editor. If you write best in the mornings, stick to the routine. Wear the same pair of slippers that seemed to make you write so well the other night.

“The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over–and that means finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.”

Keep revising.

“Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press….Lincoln doubted his capacity to express what needed to be said at Gettysburg, yet pushed ahead…”

“The piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.”

Review your own work.

“Your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book and it is yours alone.”

“Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.”

“Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you heistate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.”

Stay true to yourself.

“You make your place in the world by making part of it–by contributing some new part to the set….Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”

Be brave.

Brave is not the same as fearless. You will be afraid if you are taking risks.

“Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind.”

Do I Need An Editor?

Hiring an editor is no substitute for doing your own editing.

But once you revise, you may want to call on the services of a professional who has mastered the skill of editing, which is not the same as writing. A good editor will bring out your ideas in your own voice.

Many of the greatest works of literature exist in their current form only because of an editor. The Great Gatsby is a famous example. F. Scott Fitzgerald decided that he would write it more carefully than he had written his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, which were both commercial successes. He ended up discarding most of his early drafts. When he did send a manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Perkins told him that the novel was vague, and Fitzgerald spent the next winter revising it.

Editing is no guarantee of commercial success. The Great Gatsby sold many fewer copies than Fitzgerald’s earlier books after it appeared in 1925. Two decades later, during World War II, the Army gave away copies of the novel to US soldiers, and Gatsby began to take its place as one of the greatest American books.

Scott Fitzgerald had huge talent. But he knew that to produce lasting work, he needed to revise more and to heed his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

A copy-editor will polish your prose, correcting punctuation and stylistic or grammatical errors. Maxwell Perkins gave Fitzgerald a critique. A critique includes useful comments on how your manuscript could strike different readers. It may offer suggestions on how you might make it more effective. If you are writing a speech or article, you want to be clear, eloquent,  focused and persuasive. In a novel, you need characters and a plot that will hold the reader’s attention from beginning to end.

 

Do You Write To Be Read?

We’ve all wondered how Emily Dickinson could write her poetry in near-complete solitude.

It’s less commonly known that even Emily sought an important reader, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and once wrote him that he was “The Friend that saved my Life.”

The two only met twice, and Higginson is said to have told others that he never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much.”

Yet they maintained a correspondence for 25 years until her death in 1886. She sent him almost a hundred poems, with their strange punctuation and power to penetrate the heart.

Higginson was famous as a man who hated capital punishment, child labor, laws depriving women of civil rights, and slavery. Emily was a radical in her heart and mind. Higginson was radical in his speeches and published writing and even took a little action. (For more on their fascinating story, read White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple.)

So yes, even Emily Dickinson sought one person who could understand her.

For years I resisted blogging. I had been trained to think that one should allow the public to see only highly polished work. The idea back then was that you spent years, decades, honing your craft with a small circle of confidantes before you expected public attention. After all, no one expected audiences (other than friends and family) in their apprenticeship years as a violinist, ballerina, tennis player, or singer. Those are physical skills, which makes a difference. But writing depends on insight and insight comes with the years. It is also a technical skill.

For almost a decade, I rarely sought to publish, though I did give my work to loyal, responsive and insightful friends. I was also enormously lucky to have a mother who wrote and supported my ambitions. And I hired teachers, a short story writer and a poet, to read my work and meet with me one-on-one. When I did begin to send out my work, I had some success.

I am now a blogger, and like all bloggers, I’m excited to see my stats. Sometimes I get large numbers of “views”—unheard of numbers of potential readers judged by our pre-Internet standards.

But the real joy is in the one-on-one connections that can be made. If you hire me as your writing coach or editor, I will carefully copy-edit, line-edit, critique, or brainstorm with you. I hope to give you all the benefit of the compassion, insight and expertise others have shared with me. Meanwhile, I hope you will seek your artist family in literature, in writing groups, book groups and online.

That one-on-one connection can be with yourself. In my own life, the appreciation that has most surprised me has been my own–many years later. I read my stories and poems from years ago and feel comforted by the wisdom of that child. She knew me.

And that’s when I understand how Emily was able to go so long in near-solitude.

Writing is a form of love. Self-love and love of others, and as we see in other relationships, the two intermingle. We love ourselves through our love of others. We love others through our love of ourselves.

So yes, we write to be read. You too are one of those essential readers, a Friend who can save your Life.

Find the Sweet Spot of Blissful Challenge

The flow state of utter absorption comes from a balance of goal-seeking and ease.

For me, it happens when I’m doing yoga, dancing or writing. I feel vibrantly alive and content, satisfied that I’m being my best self.

I’m in the “flow,” a term coined more than 20 years ago by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Athletes use the phrase being in “the zone.”

A flow state is special, moments that come to most of us only once in a while. But you can have them more often by stretching yourself and mastering skills that use your personal strengths.

If you’re a writer, one reason to stay on a schedule is that it tends to help you get into “flow.” When I am writing a novel, I look forward to my next time at my work. I associate writing with a particular kind of relaxing, though I might write for hours at a stretch at the end of a long work-day in an office. Yes, it was that good! Sometimes. Often.

I’ve gotten into flow states while editing, rather than writing a first draft–in fact, it may happen more often because the goal of a polished paragraph or finding the perfect word seems within reach. I’ve even felt flow while copy-editing!

My friend Yvonne remembers feeling flow while practicing gymnastics at 12 years old. “I was by far the pudgiest girl on the gymnastics team and the least naturally talented, but I took classes and practiced every day,” she recalls. Her stepfather even made a gymnastics mat out of old scraps of foam so she could train at home. “I worked out on the homemade mat for hours upon hours until it was dark, not finishing until I got that side aerial and the back semi nailed,” says Yvonne. “Having a goal that stretches you, but is also doable—that is exhilarating. Nothing mattered except me and the acrobatics I was dead-set on doing.”

We emerge from flow happier, and with a stronger sense of identity. When Yvonne needs strength today, she recalls the determination she had at age 12 on that homemade gymnastics mat.

Flow isn’t only found in physical activities and favorite pastimes. Some people are lucky enough to get into the zone at work, making them more likely to both perform well and feel satisfied. My friend Rebecca loves teaching 3rd and 4th graders, especially when she tries new lesson plans that capture her—and her kids’—attention. When Rebecca is “in flow,” she says, the kids respond with more energy and enthusiasm. “At the end of the school day, I’m exhilarated,” she says.

A class of vibrant kids is a clear example of the feedback that aids flow. Think of it like feeding off of each other’s energy. Sometimes, however, the feedback is more subtle. My friend Steve, a composer, says that his feedback comes from the notations he’s making. He sees how his notes “turn into music,” on a day when things are flowing well.

“Most of us don’t have luxury of finding jobs and activities that exactly match our strengths,” says University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson, Ph.D. The answer, he says, is to look for ways to bring your strengths—traits such as kindness or creativity—into your day.

Another strategy: If you’ve got a list of dull tasks to do, get creative by making up challenges for yourself that can help you get in the zone. For example, if you’re a blogger, limit the number of words in a post and see how creative you can get or dive into an engrossing topic you’ve never written about before. If you’re a chef—whether at a restaurant or for a hungry family—set out to create a dish without any butter or oil or with vegetables you’ve never tried before.

Gordon Lawrence, author of “Finding the Zone: A Whole New Way to Maximize Mental Potential,” traces flow states to the natural curiosity of babies, who become completely absorbed and delighted when exploring. Adults, like babies, are stimulated by novelty, but you’re most likely to experience flow as an adult when engaged in a skill in which you already have some mastery.

You are most likely to feel “in the flow” when you pursue clear goals that are challenging but within reach. You’ve found the sweet spot between boredom and frustration. As you go about the activity, you enter a feedback loop that gives you the information you need to get closer to your goal. You lose track of time and awareness of your own body and may even forget to eat or stay up into the wee hours of the night.

If you find that you’re not enjoying your writing time, try breaking down the job into smaller tasks. Make an outline and check off each section when you’re done. Resolve to write a particular passage of dialogue–and no more–by the end of the week. The key to experiencing flow is to choose a goal that’s both meaningful to you—and within reach. For you, that may be writing your book.