Submitting a Novel: Proof That Time Stands Still

What do you call the period of time that spans the day you submit your novel to the moment you hear back--thumbs up or down--from an agent or editor?

Back in the day (pre-email), the time between mailing a query letter (or partial or full) and getting a response could be weeks... even months. I know this from years of calendar-watching experience. These days, however, thanks to email, you can get your rejection in minutes. This I also know from personal experience.

In either case, I believe that that period of time is known as "eternity."

It doesn't get any better after you've been published. In fact, there's the added pressure that accompanies a sophomore effort. As soon as you send off the manuscript you've obsessed over for two or three years, those inner demons start happily planting the fields of negativity and uncertainty that line your neural pathways:

• "S/he hates it; that's why you haven't heard." 
• "They're all gathered around your manuscript, pointing and laughing."
• "Do you really think this is better than the first one?:
• "That was your one shot, kid. This one is going to finally expose you as the fraud, the one-hit wanna-be writer."

The best advice I've received for handling this situation came on the day I learned Bill Warrington's Last Chance would be published. I learned it from Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of Penguin Group. "Have you started on your next one?" she asked, soon after we'd met. I mumbled something about experimenting with a few different ideas. She shook her head. "No," she said. "You need to get started on the next one right away."

She was right, of course. I did. And a few weeks ago, I finished it. And I'm starting on the next one. Right here, smack dab in the middle of eternity.

De-obsessing

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye."

Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD

***

 For the past two-and-a-half years, I've been obsessed with the internal and external lives of the characters in my work-in-progress. I finally finished the story and sent it off to my agent. And so begins the waiting. And yes, Mr. Petty, the way-yay-ting is indeed the hardest part.


In the meantime, I've been fiddling around with some new story ideas. But what's surprised me is how much I've already let go of the characters that I've lived with 24/7 for a thousand days or so. Oh, I know I'll be spending plenty of quality time with them after my agent and editor read and (please, God, please) accept the manuscript. But in my mind, the characters are pretty much pacing the waiting room, bags packed. They're itching to escape the danger of yet another change to their appearance or motivation. They're tired of words being put in their mouths, of constantly being asked if their actions and reactions are realistic or "in character."  Some of the secondary characters are especially nervous, knowing that if it's decided they're not pulling their weight in pushing the story forward, they'll fall into the already over-crowded pit managed by that Charon of the keyboard, Delete.

I'm eager to make sure my beloved characters are in the best possible shape before sending them out into the world. But for quite awhile now, they've been the uninvited guests at the King house, occupying my thoughts in the early and late hours and, more often than not, during breakfast, lunch and dinner. They've dominated the conversations on "date nights" with my wife, and my children are becoming less and less tolerant of my grumpy battles with the main character. It's nearing time to say good-bye.

It will be nice for a while. A bit freeing, actually. But I know that soon things will start to get a little too quiet around here and it'll be time to meet some new friends. In fact, just this morning while shaving, I met an interesting character in a terrible predicament who needs a place to stay for a day or so. Or maybe a thousand.

Revision Update: How Novels Turn Into Short Stories

Well... not exactly. But you get the idea.

My first draft was up at about 110,000 words. Today I completed the fourth draft, and the word count is down to 93,743.

Not every one of those 16,000-or-so cuts hurt... but a lot of them did. Still, the story is a lot sharper and stronger as a result--which, of course, is much more important than word count.

Draft Four is now in the hands of my First Reader. Will there be a Fifth Draft?

Revision Update: Draft Three Complete

Big day today: I completed the third draft of my next novel. It's now in the hands of my first reader, my wife, Joanne. This is the first time she's read the entire story. Until today, she's only seen Chapter 1. My biggest challenge will be to resist hovering nearby while she reads.

And continuing with my strange fascination with the effect of my revisions on word count, as you can see from the graph below, the third draft claimed many of my darlings.

More Revisions, More Mayhem

People have been asking how my novel's going. Here's a visual update of the third draft so far, based on word count:

My Kind of Town(s)

Given my recent luck with delays and canceled flights, I can't say I'm looking forward to heading off to LaGuardia Airport on Thursday. But I am excited about my destinations.

On Friday, I'll be signing books at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. I've also been invited to be on a panel Saturday morning with several other authors. Our topic: "Books on Families and the Peer Cultures of Our Times." It's been awhile since I've had to answer questions from an English teacher, never mind a room full of them. But I'm really looking forward to it.

After the panel, it's up to Milwaukee for an afternoon (2pm) reading and signing at the one and only Boswell Book Company. If you're in the area, please come by! It's a great indie bookstore.

Unfortunately, I'm flying back to LGA that night, so I won't have time to to re-discover some of the beers that made Milwaukee famous... unless, of course, there's another delay or cancellation.

Not That I Asked Him: A Son's Advice

While I was pouring my fourth cup of coffee this morning, my son mentioned that he had read my past few blog posts.

"And?"

"If you want people to buy and read your next book," he said, "you might want to stop whining about how hard it is to write and how much trouble you're having with the story."

Hmmm. Anyone else wanna weigh in here?

Writing the First Draft: Don't Look Back

Yesterday I completed the 250th page of a my projected 350-page novel. This had a sort of milestone feel to it, so this morning, instead of working on page 251 as I knew I should, I decided to reward myself by flipping through the pages completed thus far. Result?

Artist's rendering of my expression after perusing the pages of my work-in-progress

Allow me to share with you some of the thoughts of my inner critic.

"Wow. That opening sentence will grab approximately no one."
"Excellent scene! If only you had written it in English."
"You do understand the concept of a timeline, right?"
"This is a novel, not a run-on sentence competition."
"The logic flow in this chapter is impeccably flawed."
"Is there a cliched expression you haven't used yet?"

Fellow writers, if you're in the middle (or beginning or near the end) of your first draft, do yourself a favor: Do not look back. Keep going until it's finished. There will be plenty of time afterward to make whatever changes are needed to silence the inner critic. But if you let that critic get to work too soon, it becomes all the more difficult to carry on.

I Can Not Not Write. Not.

I enjoy reading articles and interviews with writers about the writing process. Inevitably, the writer is asked, "What would you do if you couldn't write?"

The answer that knocks me out of my chair, ROFLMA-style, is, "I can't imagine not writing."

Really? As a full-time writer, I can most definitely imagine not writing. In fact, I spend a good deal of my writing time not writing. I believe it's a Newtonian Law of Physics: the more time available for the written word, the fewer words written.

Why the seeming contradiction? In my case, the explanations are as logical as they are numerous. For example, I have bookshelves. These bookshelves hold many books. These books are of varying height and width. How can one write when yesterday's arrangement is no longer satisfactorily aligned with the creative pathways?

I also have a desk. Pens, notepads, coffee mugs (see pic), more books, aspirin bottles, and a variety of other items must be rearranged, put away, or used to sharpen my stacking-items-of-different-shapes skills before I can focus properly. I also have a dog who pretends to sleep contentedly at my feet when I know she is just dying to go on a four-mile walk. I have a Facebook page that needs face time; a twitter account that needs tweeting. Have I mentioned that I have fast-growing fingernails? Before you know it, it's the cocktail hour. And it is very bad karma indeed for a writer to ignore the cocktail hour.

And, oh yeah, there's the fact (for me, anyway) that the writing process itself tends be a wee bit painful.

So why do I do it? Beats the hell out of me. All I know is, when I'm finished not writing, I just can't help myself.

What about you? Can you not not write? If not, why not? (Extra points if you can figure out that question. I can... not.)

New Cover Part II

The new cover was developed by the talented artist and illustrator Jim Tierney. I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the other covers he submitted.

In this first one, I like the road leading... perilously but eventually... to a new day. (Or is it setting?)

 

 "Walking Bill" below will grace the back cover of the new paperback.

 

 I like April in the one below, but not nearly as much as the April on the final.

 

Here's another sun that raises the question: rising or setting?

 

And because I love it so much, here's the final again:

Easy for Me to Say

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never..." Winston Churchill

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it." W.C. Fields

This is a tough week for a lot of writers. I'm thinking specifically of the writers who found out yesterday that they will not be advancing to the next round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest... and the writers who were eliminated in the first round... and those who will be knocked out of the running during the rest of the contest.

This is the contest that, to my surprise and amazement and eternal gratitude, I won in 2009. (Two years ago already?!) So I know the reaction to any comment I make about the need to keep trying, to not give up, might be, "Easy for you to say." As a matter of fact, I do try to avoid saying it because a lot of writers are sick and tired of hearing someone tell them to "buck up." But because this contest draws so many entries from so many extremely talented writers, I'm hoping a quick recap of my decades-long affair with rejection might help someone get back to the writing desk a little more quickly.

While I've wanted to write a novel since I was six or seven, I didn't realize that dream until I was fifty-five. Before I saw my name on the cover of a novel,  I wrote three other complete novels and dozens of short stories and poems that collected enough rejection slips to influence the stock prices of Boise Cascade and Weyerhauser. I've experimented with every approach to writing imaginable. Just try to name a writer's guide or advice book I haven't read. I've taken online writing courses and have tried several different "creative writing" software programs. On the advice of a potential agent, I paid an ungodly sum of money to a book doctor to help me get my novel ready for publication. That novel that was rejected almost as quickly as my check was cashed. On the advice of a different potential agent, I rewrote one of my novels as a screenplay. Have you seen the movie yet? Me, neither. I continued rewriting, reformatting, even re-genre-ing. And still the rejections poured in, every one of them a poke in the eye, a body shot to my self-confidence.

And here's an update: It doesn't end when you get published. There is absolutely no guarantee that my next manuscript will be published. And while the majority of reviews of my book have been, thankfully, positive, the ones that aren't--like the one I read the other day wherein the reader-reviewer expressed disappointment that I wasn't a more talented writer--do, in fact, sting. Getting published did not make my skin any thicker.

But if you're a writer and not someone who simply wants to be known as a writer, you'll keep going. You'll keep collecting those rejections, learning what you can from each one, but ultimately believing in your own hunches, your own voice. You'll put aside that nagging feeling that there are a few hundred other, more productive uses of your time than agonizing over a blank screen or piece of paper. You won't blame. You'll try not to complain. You'll just keep your butt in that chair and keep writing.

If you're not a writer, you won't. Now that was easy for me to say.

Immersion Writing

Enjoyed this from Michael Chabon, quoted in this month's Poets & Writers:

"To do your very best work as an artist, whatever the discipline, takes complete immersion in the work. You need to get caught in the slipstream, to draft along behind it as it carries your forward. You get into a state where, even if you're not writing, everything you see, read, hear; every place you go; every newspaper you pick up; every conversation you chance to overhear feeds the work, because you are so saturated in it."

A Cathedral Full of Fire

Thanks to a fellow tweeter, I came across this great article in the Guardian featuring writer Michael Cunningham. One quote in particular stood out:

"I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in mind. I think of lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest. You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full fire--that contains a novel so fast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realize, no, it's just this book. And it has its strengths, it has its virtues, but there's nothing about the Crimean war, there's nothing about interstellar travel. It says what it says and that's it. And it joins all the other books in the world."

This sums up how I feel about my current manuscript. It is already so much different from what I had in mind when I started and what I wrote in my first draft (previously known as the Vomit Draft). I've already eliminated entire chapters, killed off some characters I thought would play central roles, and have even changed some of the key motivators driving the main character to do the (often stupid) things he does.

Despite how frustrating that may sound, however, I find the process invigorating. The story is becoming a story, not an attempt to become the Great Novel. The characters are becoming who they will be, and chances are they aren't going to be Madame Bovaries (apologies, Gustave) or Brothers Karamazov or Willy Lomans. All I can do, at this point, is get the story down, and be grateful if it's given the opportunity to "join all the other books in the world."

How do you handle your own cathedrals full of fire?

The Privileged Pain of Writing

Over on that delightful distraction, Facebook, one of my friends, Melinda Henneberger, expressed pseudo-annoyance with people who claim they just luuuuuuv to write. She later expressed the sentiments about writing I share: I prefer having written to the actual writing. One of  comments described writing as a "privileged pain."

Where do you stand? Privilege, pain, or both? Do you just luuuv writing so much that you would write even if you knew that you'd never get published, that no one was ever going to read your work? Is the drive to write so strong that you cannot bear the thought of going for more than a day or two away from the keyboard or pen and pad? If you were stuck on a desert island, would you write anything more than "Help!" in the sand?

Do you write in hopes of fame? fortune? an excuse to drink? a reason to flout the rules, cheat, act all artistic? Do you write because you want people to say, "S/he's a writer." Do you write with visions of your serious-looking mug on the back of a book, of people recognizing you as you stroll through malls, run through airports, search for seats at movie theaters? What's your excuse for the time you spend alone instead of in a soup kitchen, for spending more time with imaginary people than with your own family?

Samuel Johnson weighed in on the question this way: "No man but a blockhead, ever wrote, except for money." What say you?

Flypaper for Ideas

While we're on the subject of questions that come up during readings, another common one is, "Where do you get your ideas?"

The answer is that I have no idea. But when those ideas fly in from wherever they've been, I have two ways I try to capture them. The first is a Native American Dream Catcher, which I have hanging from the bookshelf over my desk. Bought it years ago on a family trip to Arizona. A somewhat more reliable method is a small, moleskin notebook. I try to keep this with me, along with a telescopic pen, whenever I'm away from the computer. The entries are rarely the stuff for full-length novels, but they often spark an idea for a scene or description. I was procrastinating this morning by flipping through my current "idea book," as my kids call it. Here are a few random entries:

- At airport, expired passport.
- Little girl on accelerating train, mimicking sound of accelerating train
- Richard Russo: "This novel is about how hard it is to shut your parents up after they're dead."
- Holes in rain boots
- Considering changing name of main character
- No longer considering it
- Wind chimes in back yard knocked off tree
- Chopin Waltz in A minor
- Lighting altar candles at St. Luke's
- My wife is in love with Clark Howard

Banal, no? But who knows: a character in some future story may have a wife who develops an obsession with a radio personality; an expired passport ruins a vacation and a relationship; a boy sets fire to a church. The point is to capture these ideas, no matter how innocuous they seem at the time. Something extraordinary can happen as you start to build on them. 

So go get your own Dream Catcher. In the meantime, though, answer me this: How do you capture those ideas for your next story/poem/novel before they fly away?

Pants on Fire?

At one of my readings, a young man asked if I agreed with the statement that all novelists are liars. My immediate response, perhaps to play the part of the incorrigibly rascally raconteur, was, "Of course!"

But I lied. I don't think that novelists are liars. Maybe at book readings *cough cough* but not in their writing. On the contrary, I believe the best fiction writers are truth tellers. They just try to get at a truth by making stuff up.

A few weeks later, a different reader referred to the chapter in Bill Warrington's Last Chance that recounts the sexual history of one of the characters, Mike."You obviously have had many sexual partners to write about it so convincingly," the reader said. I almost burst out laughing. Fewer scenes in the book required more of my imagination.

I've also answered the how-much-of-this-is-true question by insisting that there is nothing autobiographical in the book. And yet... I set the story in Woodlake, Ohio. I grew up in Lakewood, Ohio. (Not clever, I admit... but fun.) The family matriarch died of cancer when she was a young mother.My real-life mother died of cancer at a young age. The made-up Bill Warrington  is based on a not-made-up neighbor I came to like and admire before he passed away. He didn't suffer from dementia, but he had the Bill Warrington attitude in spades.

So... what do you think? Is there such a thing as pure fiction? Does it matter? And what was your most recent truthful lie?

How to Talk to a Debut Novelist

First-time novelists tend to be a sensitive sort. Getting published is often a lifetime dream come true, realized after years of solitary work and spirit-sapping rejection. This is why, once the book has finally been accepted, published, and released, any event even remotely related to the recently published (if yet unrecognized) work of art tends to bring out some of our more subtle personality quirks. A good review, for example, will send us on a fist-pumping, chest-thumping, air-kiss-throwing dance around the house as we begin composing the Nobel acceptance speech in our heads. On the other hand, anything less than five stars may send us into a self-doubting, self-loathing funk from which we may never emerge without the help of supportive family, friends, and several gallons of Ben & Jerry’s Triple Chocolate Brownie Fudge Supreme.

God help you if you live with one of these volatile souls. But even talking with one can be a tricky proposition. In the spirit of greater understanding and personal safety, please allow me to offer the following tips on surviving a conversation with a debut novelist:

DO fawn. You know that commercial for an anti-flatulent where a young, bespeckled woman touches the wrist of the product spokeswoman and says, adoringly, “I love your work”? Go for that. And don’t stop when the first-time novelist pretends to humbly brush off your admiration. That dismissive wave is actually a signal for more. Word helper: insightful, delightful, compelling, unique, brilliant.

DON’T ask about Oprah. It’s not enough to finally get a book published? You have to remind the writer of the incredible odds against reaching Ultimate Oz? Sheesh. Besides, most writers hate to self-promote—it’s too close to begging. (Note to Ms. Winfrey: Please oh please oh please?! I promise not to jump up and down on your couch.)

Read the rest here: The Divining Wand

What a Week!

It's been an incredible first full week since my book was released. Highlights included newspaper and magazine reviews, interviews, and a television segment filmed right here in my office. Best of all, I received wonderfully enthusiastic emails from complete strangers kind enough to take the time and tell me why they liked the book. 

I want to thank everyone who has been so enthusiastic in their comments and support.

I've also been fortunate to get some excellent attention... most recently from People magazine, which named Bill Warrington's Last Chance to its "Good Read" section in the August 23 section. If you're interested in reading what others have to say about the book, you can find recent reviews here.

 This week looks to be just as exciting. I'm pleased to be featured on Mia Starr's unique and inspirational blogs, Four Days a Week. Check out "Monday Musings" for a conversation with... moi. Thank you, Mia!

Speaking of blogs, I'm also honored to be a guest blogger this week at "The Author's Desk" on the Penguin USA site. Today's post: "Thanks, Not for Us."

Finally August...

... and after more than a year since I learned that Viking would be publishing it, Bill Warrington's Last Chance will finally be released. I don't mind saying that this has been one of the longest years of my life, but also one of the most rewarding.

There's no way to describe my feelings, which range from elated to terrified, so I'll just focus on what's ahead this month.

1. Release of the book. If you haven't ordered it online from your favorite bookstore, it will hit the bookshelves later this week or early next.
2. Television interview on August 21, New Haven, Connecticut. (News 8/WCTX MY TV9 -- 7:30 a.m. Yep, that's 'a.m.' )
3. First "official" book reading on August 22 at the LaGrua Center in Stonington, Connecticut.
4. Readings/signings at the Barnes and Noble, Minneapolis and at the Borders-Westlake, near my hometown of Lakewood, Ohio.

And away we go...

Book Release Countdown: Here But Not Yet There

 On Monday I made a joint presentation at Manhattanville College with my editor, Liz Van Hoose. Turned out to be a red-letter day for a couple of reasons. First, the presentation went really well. Second, Liz had that day received a much-deserved promotion. And third... let's see... I know there was a third thing...Oh yeah: Liz brought along two copies of the book!!!! Now being prepared for shipment and ready for release on August 9.