Six Things New Writers Can Learn In Six Months

For all the communal aspects publishing fosters, writing is still a solitary profession that requires its adherents to develop themselves as much as they develop their storytelling abilities. This can be difficult, as we are all victims of our own neuroses, hang-ups, and habits. For example: I have a big issue staying focused on one project, which often leaves me having to deal with three different manuscripts, and invariably, I will only focus on two of them. I'm working on this, but the thought came to me that there were six things to share that might help my fellow wordsmiths better commit themselves in a healthy, happy way. I would never dare to say that these are universal; they are just ideas, and like all ideas, they should only be considered if they add to your process.

1. MEDITATION

I first learned meditation from a physician my family patroned, named Dr. Z (I cannot remember nor spell his Russian last name). Like Dr. Z, meditation helped me with a lot of the anxiety that comes with people in a situation where people treat you like you are damaged. Meditation helped me later when I decided to dedicate myself to it in relation to my writing. I like to work fast, and I expect faster results, but unfortunately publishing is a slow, arduous process. Being able to slow down, clear your mind, and stop thinking is a pivotal skill both for writing and for life. We are flooded by our senses every moment we are awake and asleep, and with writing, it is multiplied. We become so ingrained within our characters, our stories, and we sometimes forget to take a step back. For me, meditation is that step back. Anyone can do it, and it only has as much of a spiritual component as you allow it, and you can do it as long as you like. It is an open practice.

There are a lot of resources where you can learn meditation, but here's a simple introduction to the basic technique:

Find a comfortable place to sit where you won't be bothered by noises or distractions. This could be your writing area (which for me is my entire apartment. I'm a bit nomadic.) Sit in comfortable position, using whatever you need to do so. I use a Zafu pillow. Close your eyes, and empty your mind of all thoughts or, if you are very active, picture yourself in a setting. I usually go to a place like this:

Count your breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Nose In, Mouth Out, Nose In, Mouth Out. In the beginning, try to get at least 15 good breaths before you open your eyes. This will calm you down, and in time, help you see the world and your work more objectively, as well as your writing. Which leads us to...

2. YOUR WORK IS NOT YOU (EVEN THOUGH IT IS)

One issue that really plagues me is separating myself from my work, often taking criticism more harshly than I should, and in some ways, delivering it. First, no writer or reader should criticize another for who they are, but it is completely fine to constructively criticize the work, even if it is as simple as "it's not for me." Learning to separate these two things is incredibly important.

Now, this idea is a bit of misnomer. Of course your work is about you--you wrote it, and whatever you write, it is a reflection of how you feel, your experiences, and your beliefs at the time of the writing. Still, it is important to remove "you" from assessing the quality of what you put out. As I have said before, rejections can be a great thing for a writer if they go about assessing why they were rejected in the right way.

Here's an exercise: next time you get a rejection, sit down with the rejected work and read it differently. Act like you are not the person who wrote the piece, but a constructive critic who has never read it. This will open you up to new details you might not have noticed in your previous proofreading, ways to better the story, etc. There is a multitude of wisdoms to gain in doing this.

3. FINISH YOUR WORK

One would think that this would be a given for new writers, but every day I hear so many writers I come across lament their inability to finish a manuscript. Among the things I am speaking of here, this one might be greater in importance than the second point above, so let me clear:

Finish your stories.

So many people get into the Craft of Writing thinking that it will be a simple enough business to finish their first book, let alone a simple short story. The act of writing is arduous, being a combination of physical, mental, and emotional stress much like a real job. Sitting in a chair hurts me. I don't stop thinking about what I should be writing. I sometimes cry when I am done with a story. Putting in work is putting in work, and finishing a story gets you past a huge hurdle that the majority of writers never even attempt to leap. Finish your stories. It is the only way you can find out what you really need to work on.

4. READ CRITICALLY FOR PLEASURE

This one will take a bit of explanation.

When one decides to become a writer, they often forget to remain a reader. However, things change quickly when one takes up the craft. Speaking for myself, getting involved in the process of writing initially made reading fiction a much more labor-intensive task. I often found myself breaking down the style of the writer I was reading, looking for imperfections I wanted to avoid in my own work. This can take a lot of fun out of the act of reading, but with a few little tricks, it became a joy again.

For all the mistakes you notice, take the time to bask in the moments where you are just reading. When there are no mistakes, the reader simply reads, and though we are writers, we will always be readers first. Mark the places you really enjoyed, and the places you did not. Read deeply for lessons, for theme, constructions, character, everything; reading critically can be a wonderful experience if you go about it the right way. Make it about learning first, criticism last.

5. JOIN A GOOD WRITING GROUP

Like this one.

6. UNDERSTAND THAT PUBLISHING IS NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME... but The Craft is competitive.

It is easy to think that the publishing industry would be a competitive place as a new writer, but if you look beneath the surface, it is anything but. Here's what you need to understand: everyone around you wants everyone else to succeed (unless you make a colossal ass of yourself, which I am sometimes guilty of), and this is because we're working for the most wonderful resource there is in the world: readers. Readers like to read, so they aren't going to buy just YOUR book (if they do in the first place, which is another blogpost for another blog time.) They will keep buying the product we put out, all because readers are so wonderfully voracious.

At the same time, I think it is important for writers to have a bit of an competitive bent. This is just an opinion I hold to myself, but I want to write better than R.A. Salvatore, my literary hero. I want to write better than Jeff Vandermeer, the baddest MFer in Fiction today. I want to write better than K.V. Johansen, one of the most talented writers I have ever seen in Epic Fantasy. I want to write better than any other luminary I can name. I think every writer should look at their inspirations in absolute reverence, but also as bars you need to climb over. Anne McCaffery set bars. Lloyd Alexander set bars. Tolkien, my literary father, set bars. David Gemmell. Michael Moorcock. Robert E. Howard. Try to achieve more than your forefathers and foremothers did. We owe it to them.

These are practices, attitudes, and mindsets you can achieve as a writer in six months. They have been invaluable to my creative process over the years, and if they can add to yours, I hope you produce some of your best work.

So let's get to work.

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Poem: By Strands of Hair

I do not take often to writing poetry and presenting it in public, as I often find that reaction to it is so varied. I even once heard a poet say that "nobody could criticize her poetry because it was hers", to which I say "then keep it to yourself." The moment you put something out into the world, it is no longer just yours, but is open to interpretation and criticism by the audience-at-large. That's the cost of trying to live off your creativity, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. But back to poetry...

I wrote this in a free form style (as the only other style I am actually good at Sonnets in the form of Shakespeare, and mine are horrible.) The inspiration came to me one night in a hot bath I had drawn after painting along to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles. I used a bath wash that dyed the water a lovely shade of rose which put everything floating within it (including myself) in stark definition. One of my fiance's hair strands came floating along and from that was born this poem. It follows a 4,4,4,5 count by word, which I came up with during the same bath. The last stanza reverses it and follows a 5,4,5,4 count, again by word. Again, forgive me if this is awful.

"By Strands of Hair" by Jay Requard

By strands of hair
love found itself born,
mixed by fiery water,
a spirit of past aeons.

By strands of hair
therein found whole redemption,
the weight washed away,
a spirit laid to rest.

By strands of hair
cities would burn ashen,
blood would flow unhindered,
a spirit of wrath enthroned.

Yet by strands of hair,
the spirit chose otherwise.
By strands of her hair,
the spirit never faltered.


If you wish to let me know that you like this poem, you hate it, or if you have constructive criticism which *can* equal "stop writing poems", let me know below. Hope you are all doing well and see you soon!

Dealing with Critiques and Rejection

Now some people are probably doing a double-take when they read this opening statement, as it goes against many natural inclinations we as writers and human beings have.

Bear with me:

Critique and rejection are two of the greatest things that can happen to a writer, but they are only good for a writer if the writer themselves can see critiques and rejections for what they are: the chance to learn.

Nobody in the publishing business does it on their own, and nobody becomes a great writer by themselves. Writing fiction, in its most pure essence, is creating something new and beautiful from one's experiences, hopes, dreams, nightmares, as well as our lowest and highest natures. The type of writing a person does on a creative level defines them in all ways--therefore it makes total sense that having a your work critiqued as anything less than *perfect* or having that work rejected by a publisher hurts. To those with the wrong mindset, such a judgment or rejection isn't just about your characters or your story--it's about you as a person.

But, my friends, it is good to be rejected as a writer.

Rejection, especially from a good editor, is more affirming of where you need to go with your writing than it is about how developed you are or aren't as a writer.

Case in point: I am currently working on a story that was entitled Shallow Bay, which has now been reworked into the The Beast of Shallow Bay. This fantasy epic tells the tale of an old pirate named Ngala who sets sail upon The Mirror Sea on the quest for riches and rapine. On the way back from a successful raid, his ship The Lion is mysteriously trapped in the middle of Shallow Bay, with its deserted coast and the brooding jungles beyond the white sand shore. Trapped without fresh food, water, and harangued by the monsters of the deep, Ngala and crew must solve the mystery of their entrapment before it is too late.

This story was rejected five times, each by a SFWA pro-market. And yes, it hurt. I won't lie and say that I am not immune to being told that I was lacking, but when I finally got through that one-hour "moody"-period I always go through, I sat back down and really looked at the comments given to me. Out of all the people who rejected it, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited by the talented Scott H. Andrews, gave me the reasons why it was rejected.

First, the fact that I got a personalized rejection that was not a form letter was a big deal to me, because BCS could have just sent me a form letter and that would have been it. Instead, they told me what the problems were with the story.

And they were right on about everything they said.

I went back and found the section where there were pronoun errors, which my critiquers had missed, my first reader had missed, and more importantly, I had missed. In the end, the fault lay squarely upon me. So I sat on it a couple of months, and now I am editing to send back out. I can't send it to Beneath Ceaseless Skies again, but that publication will be one of the big reasons for why it gets picked up when it gets picked up for publication.

What those who are not as savvy to publishing have to understand--a lot of these publishers and magazines don't have a lot of money, so the spots that they can give out in their publications are limited, and believe it or not they do receive a lot of good stories. This forces them to have to look at every single detail and mistake and weigh it against other submissions, a process that is completely out of the hands of those submitting to them. It is part of the learning process of trying to get into this business and produce great fiction.

It is understandable to be angry when your work is rejected, but a real writer can't let that anger stop them from moving on and trying again. It may be an old axiom, but the ones who make it in publishing are the ones who try, try, try, and try again. Rowling was rejected hundreds of times before Harry Potter was published. George R.R. Martin was rejected 45 times before he even sold his first short story.

Don't give up. Toughen that "author's skin", remove yourself from the emotional side of it, and learn how to sit down and pick your work apart so it can become better.

This somewhat segue-ways into the area of critiques. Critiques aren't rejections, but in some cases they can feel as damaging to a writer as if they were actual rejections. This fact is compounded by the reality that quality critiques are hard to receive because depending on who you are working with the people around you may not have a good grasp of your genre or they may be starting out on their journey as a writer and really don't know a lot about writing fiction.

Sometimes it is hard to know which critiques are good for your work and which ones are might not apply. However, we can pay some attention to what makes a good critiquer over a good critique. Here are the seven aspects I look for in a good critiquer.

What Makes A Good Critiquer

1. A good critiquer is reader who reads your work critically and makes constructive suggestions to make the piece better while at the same time respecting the fact that it is your work.

2. A good critiquer does not try to rewrite or redefine your work to suit their tastes, as it is your work and not theirs.

3. A good critiquer comes prepared to critique.

4. A good critiquer remains professional and treats what they are doing as a job. Remember, the goal is to get your work ready to be published, and publishing is a business.

5. A critiquer never talks poorly of other writers or refuses to critique based on their opinion of other's skills. A critiquer is there to learn and to help others learn the Craft of Writing, and should come into a critique session with a positive and helpful attitude.

6. A good critiquer is constantly trying to improve their own skills as a writer, editor, and reader.

It goes without saying that not all critiques are equal in value, so therefore it is the job of the person being critiqued to unpack all of the opinions they are given and decide which ones provide the most value for getting their work toward publication. This takes a lot of time working in dedicated critique groups, building an honest rapport with its members, which sometimes means swallowing your ego and taking the time to listen to what your peers are saying.

In closing I would like to add one final reminder: sometimes hearing a "no" in publishing is the first step to hearing a "yes" that lets you into the industry. Try, try, and try again, my friends, and one day that "yes" will come.

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