Things I wish someone had said to me

Oh, joy, it’s teaching time again! How do you take what I’ve learned over decades and boil it down into a half-hour presentation? That’s the hard part of preparing a workshop for beginning writers. I’m not saying that I know everything, or even a lot, but I have been at this for a while and I’ve picked up a fair bit of information about how to write well. Whether I follow it or not is a topic for another day.

However … I have to come up with something for next week. I’ll be reading at the Ladner Pioneer (April 3) and White Rock (April 4) libraries at around 7:00 pm, so come on out if you’re in the area.

So what can I say? I may as well start with a few tidbits I wish I’d had under my belt at the beginning. This would be tidbit number one.

As I see it, if you’re going to sit down and write your first book, just go for it. However, it’s a bit like hiking. If you take along a bit of equipment, you’ll enjoy the experience a whole lot more.

The fact that you’ve got some nugget of inspiration is a given, or you wouldn’t be edging up the keyboard with that glint your eye. I’m not going to talk about inspiration, because it’s unique and precious and it can never be wrong. My only advice here is to hold it tight.

However, there are a couple of things to check into at the same time that you’re writing. Note that I say at the same time and not instead of. Lots of times it’s more fun to talk about writing than to actually do it. Bad author, no cookie. Your first job as a writer is to set a schedule and to actually put words on paper. The rest, including laundry and your day job and maintaining healthy relationships with your friends and family, is secondary to that, at least when you’re on deadline.

So when you’re not writing your pages for the day, think about this: How important is it to you to get published with a conventional publisher? Are you writing for yourself and maybe a few friends? Are you writing for the self-published market? All of these are legitimate goals, but keep in mind that the wider an audience you’d like for your work, the more attention you’ll need to pay to the publishing marketplace and how it works. An author actively pursuing commercial success—whether they’re self-published or writing for a big New York house—has to do a lot of thinking about where their book fits with current trends. That’s not to say it has to be exactly on trend, but you should know what makes your baby the same as or different from everyone else’s baby. Once you know where you fit in among all the genres and sub-genres, you can decide whether or not you’re happy with that choice.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you whether it’s you’ll be more commercially successful if you are original or stick to a tried and true formula. I can say that traditional publishing is usually more comfortable with something they know has appealed to book buyers in the past.

So, it’s never too early to start looking around at what other writers are doing to appeal to the kind of reader you want. Find writers whose work is kinda sorta like what you want to do. They are a great jumping-off point for your research. As well as reading their books, you can go look at their web sites, read magazines like Publishers Weekly or Romantic Times, and get involved with discussion groups on places like Goodreads. When you go to pitch your book to an editor or agent, one of the first questions they’ll ask is, “Who do you write like?” This is how you start getting ready for that moment.

Because, trust me, if you keep at it and do your homework, that pitch appointment will come.