The Muse Myth and Other Musing about Writing

Anyone who believes the drunk author fallacy that alcohol fuels great writing is just a drunk looking for an excuse to drink. Hemingway was a mentally ill suicide and a drunk so he’s not a role model any of us should emulate. He wrote successfully in spite of his problems, not because of them. Alcohol and drugs are just a modern version of the romantic muse myth that inspiration will magically happen and write your story for you.

Writing is HARD.  It is sit on your butt in front of a computer for long periods of time.  It is years of learning craft, editing, and honing your stories. None of that is fueled by drugs or alcohol.

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Some writers believe that you must physically experience something before you write it. There's nothing wrong with this, but writing is about the imagination and informed research.  I've never beaten anyone to death, gone diving in a lake, or flown a space ship, but my characters have done all these things, and I've never had anyone say I wrote these things wrong.  It helped that I researched carefully and asked experts to read it when I wrote about real world experiences I'd only researched, not lived.  

But nothing can replace the emotional experience that an author needs to create characters.  You don't have to murder someone to write from a murderer's viewpoint, but an understanding of rage and the fear of being discovered for something bad you've done, no matter how minor, must inform that viewpoint.  

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Craft can be taught, but the ability to tell stories and create real people can only be honed. Some are natural storytellers, some create real people, and the real geniuses can do both as well as add magic to the page. Those who have neither ability can still write novels and stories, but those stories are instantly forgettable and leave a reader searching for something with more substance to it.

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I was considered a decent poet before I started writing fiction, and they are two different disciplines with different rules. The only real similarity is in the important choice of words.

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The MFA has its value. It teaches literary writers how to craft stories for NY literary editors, and the teachers have contacts within the NY literary community. Lots of money can be made if one of its graduates hits the current sweet spot of taste.

In most cases, a MFA is totally useless for a genre writer, and the writer will have to relearn how to write for that market.

Anyone who wants to learn to write genre would be better served by many of the excellent online writing schools for specific genres as well as courses from various RWA chapters.

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Being unpublished is the perfect time to experiment with different genres and sub-genres. That's how a writer discovers their own strengths as a writer and their own voice. 

From my own experience, I tried for years to sell in category romance (Harlequin and Silhouette), and I even had two very successful category authors as mentors, and I simply couldn't sell in that market. It took me those years to figure out that I would never sell there because it was counter to my voice. I rewrote some of those books as I wanted to write them, and they won fans and numerous awards. 

Once a writer's published in a specific genre or sub-genre, she will be trapped, for the most part, in that market, and it would be a very sad thing if she discovers another type of book she'd prefer to write.

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“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”  Lady Bracknell, Act 1, “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde.

In a book on playwriting I read some years ago, a famous playwright talked about what is tragic.  He said that if an elderly widow loses one of her sons, it is a great tragedy and the audience cries.  If she then loses a second son, the audience weeps.  If she loses a third, the audience begins to laugh because the line between the tragic and the ridiculous has been crossed.  

That First Book

One of the writing sites I follow had a question from a new writer who hasn’t finished his first book but had questions on putting that book out as self-published.  Here is my reply.

First and foremost, write the dang book.  

Second, edit the dang book yourself.  

Third, get decent beta readers or a critique group who like your genre and listen to their comments.  If more than one notes the same problem, rewrite accordingly.  Otherwise, if the advice feels right to you, follow it.  If none of the advice feels right, you need to rethink your attitude toward your writing.  Arrogance has never produced good books.  

Fourth, hire a good content editor to help you fix your book, then a good copy editor to fix those typos and grammar problems.  Pay attention to what they do and learn from it so you won’t make those mistakes again.  

Finally, seek advice on self-publishing. 

A few things not included in these steps.  The writing craft is learned in the same way as the skills needed to play a sport.  You will not produce a great book without those skills any more than someone who has never played basketball can become an instant professional.  Practice your skills, and find good teachers to help you.  It will be worth it in the long run.  

Also realize that very few writers produce a salable book the first time.  Most are dreck, and the first book you put on the market will define your career, particularly if it is the first book in a series.  Your other books may be much better, but, if that first piece is dreck, it will prove costly because readers won't read them.   

They Say Our Books Are Garbage

There have always been controversies on the Internet about why some kinds of books aren’t included in the “best of” or some other list where a group doesn’t include books by women or popular genre novels.  

Sure, this isn’t fair, but it’s a sad fact of life that popular fiction and women writers never seem to get the respect they deserve.

My question about these controversies is why should we give a rat's ass what they think?

"They" are like the father who will never give his approval because he doesn't have it in him to give it.  "They" have their own agendas.  "They" need someone to look down on, and women writers and popular genres are easy targets.  We also make such a lovely squawk when "they" bully us, and they love that.  

"They" also will not ever read or buy our books so why are we wasting our time seeking their approval?

I can more than take care of myself when someone I meet denigrates popular genre.  I will raise my eyebrow in my best Spock impression and proceed to pound them into dust with my academic credentials and my extensive knowledge of genre theory.  I will wow them with my enthusiasm for the genres I love.

But I don't usually bother when "they" start spouting their usual nonsense because it isn't worth the trouble.  

So You Want to be a Published Author

 When I tell people I am a published novelist, a vast majority tell me they will write a novel when they have the time.  

Most firmly believe that anyone can write a novel since celebrity idiots write bestsellers.  (They are ghostwritten by someone else.)  All they need to do is sit down and write to the finish which should take a few weeks at most.  They believe that grammar, punctuation, and spelling will be taken care of by some editor so they won't need to learn those skills.  The novel will then be sold almost instantly to a big publisher for a huge amount of money, become a bestseller and a major motion picture.

Sadly, these people don't have a clue and are shocked when I explain how many years it takes to learn your craft to be publishable, how many hundreds or thousands of hours you will be sitting on your rear in front of the computer while everyone else is out having a life and fun, and the classes you will probably need to hone that craft.  

Once you have a well-crafted novel, you will spend a few years, if you are lucky—most aren’t, trying to get an agent or editor to actually read some of your work. You will discover that you are not only competing with other new writers for a slot in a publishing schedule, but with writers who have been published multiple times.  

If you finally make that sale, you will most likely be given a pittance as an advance, the book will be thrown into the market with no advertising, no book signings, and absolutely no glamor, and you will be lucky to sell any other book because your book will most likely sink like a stone into oblivion and you won't see another penny from it.  That is the fate of most first books.

Only a very few are able to escape that dismal ending to their dreams by making money and creating a true career as a writer, and the money is rarely enough to make a living so they need a supportive spouse with a lucrative job or a trust fund so they can afford to write full time.  

To be successfully self-published, you must hone your craft to the point that the traditionally published must achieve, then you must also develop the skills and soul of a used car salesman to shamelessly slog your books, and you must learn business skills since you are now your own business.

When I tell these would-be authors the truth of the matter, as I have learned being in and around the publishing business for over thirty years, they decide that they should buy a few more lottery tickets because they have a better chance at making big money doing that, and it's a lot less work.  

Dissed Writers Fight Back

 QUESTION: I am so tired of being sneered at when I tell people I write. How should I handle this?

Artists have always been met with idiocy and blank looks. It's our lot. We ARE different, after all, but different is good! Without the artists and other creative people, the world would be a bleak place.

For some reason, especially in America, writers and other people with brains are treated with contempt. It's the dumb jocks who are the norm. Painting yourself blue in midwinter and rooting for your football team in an open stadium is normal, but you are weird if you write or read books, or go to sf conventions, or belong to the SCA. Personally, I beg to differ. 

I've discovered that my enthusiasm can win over those blank stares. The trick is to believe in what you are doing and who you are. If you give those people with sneers or blank stares the power to define who you are, then you've lost, and you are nothing. 

Instead, believe in yourself and what you are doing. Writing is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and if you succeed only a little, be that success a finished short story or a few chapters of a novel, then you are a success. Glow with it, and no one can belittle you. 

Writing the Same When We are Different

QUESTION: Why don't authors keep writing the same kind of book? Some of my favorite romance authors have switched to different genres, and I HATE it.

There isn't a simple answer. Here are a few possibilities.

* Failing markets. The writer's genre starts losing readers so publishers want fewer books, and fewer books are sold. An example is historical romances.  Its established authors branched out into contemporaries, paranormals, and suspense novels to continue making a profit at their writing. 

* Respect. Romance authors, in particular, get no respect from their non-romance peers, and this gets really old. Non-romances also have more professional cache. 

* Authorial control. Romance editors exert more control over the final product than in any other genre so the final product is often more of a collaborative effort. At a certain point in a writer's career, this can get really old, particularly when some kid in their first editorial job decides she knows better than an established writer.

* Boredom. An author spends months writing a book that takes you an evening to read, and she then starts another book. If every book is exactly like the last as some readers want, this process can become boring. The creative juices dry up. If the author doesn't change gears, the readers will be the next to be bored.

* Innovations. Genre, as a whole, doesn't stay the same. Romances have changed dramatically over the last twenty years, and woe unto the writer who doesn't change with it. 

* Bandwagon Syndrome. Some authors see a trend become popular, and they absolutely must write to this trend. 

* Changes in an author's life. Writing is an emotional process, and sometimes, things happening in an author's life make them change the direction of their writing. I have had friends going through an ugly divorce who could no longer write about everlasting love when their true love proved to be a cruel, manipulative jerk. One writer lost her young son to a sudden illness. When she started writing again, she turned to novels that expressed her faith in God. 

As much as writers want to please their readers, sometimes, they simply must change direction with their writing. 

Career Paths

Author career paths aren’t always the same.  Over the years, I've watched too many friends and authors I enjoy have their career, through no fault of their own, crash and burn over the idiocies within Big Publishing. (Dirty Big Publishing secret:  Everything is the author's fault even if the author had nothing to do with it.  A bad cover, a literal train wreck which wipes out most of the West Coast book deliveries for that month so sale numbers tank, a failed within-house promotion--all the author's fault.  Toss that author out.)

Most authors get back up, reinvent themselves with a new name, and start a new series, a new genre, or a new publisher.  I traded updates with a best-selling, award-winning friend at Christmas.  She's reinvented herself or started a new mystery series four times, and her newest very successful series has been cancelled because her publisher has decided to stop publishing fiction.  She's got her rights back so the next book will be self-published because she’s tired of publishers who can't get their own sh*t together.  

Other friends sold that first book that was their first book and blazed ahead like the golden children they were to finally hit a minor roadblock.  They got pissy and promptly quit writing.  

Sometimes, authors stagger up after yet another career hit because of bad luck or a publisher's ineptitude and walk away.  After over 30 years of being hit and yet another publisher destroying any chance for my new book’s success through their ineptitude, I walked away, and I'm okay with that. I decided I was too burned out to bother with self-publishing so I'm watching my publishers die, two in the last few years, and my books have disappeared off the virtual shelves. I'm fine with that, too.  

Publishing isn't for sissies, and it's okay to whine or walk away for your own sanity.   

What We Leave Behind

 The phone call woke me.

“You probably don’t remember me, but I’m (name removed).  I used to work for your parents.”

“Of course I remember you.”

“I dreamed about your parents’ store last night, and I wanted to tell you.”  She then proceeded to talk about the store, but she kept repeating the same sentence through the conversation.  “And your momma told me I could do anything well.”  

I’m sure over forty years has passed since my mother complimented her, but that one kind and generous comment had stuck with this woman through all those years.  

Our stories are like that.  Readers remember the emotional glow of a character who has achieved her positive goal, who chooses kindness over cruelty, who wins against darkness.  It’s what makes some stories memorable and others quickly forgotten.  

The light, not the darkness, is what many of us leave behind when our stories are finished.

When things are bad, remember that.  It is a wonderful legacy.

My Great Book Cull

If you’re a writer, you are surrounded by books.  It’s part of what we do as readers and writers.  Then, one day, for some reason like moving to a smaller space or a change in circumstances, some or all of those books must go.  For me, it was discovering that I was allergic to old books and book dust, and most of those book had to go.  This is how I did it.  

I was an English major through three degrees so I had easily a hundred hard cover and trade paperback novels from that part of my life. If these books were in public domain or I didn't care for them emotionally in the first place, into the library book sale pile they went.  As a specialist in the 19th Century, I pretty well cleared out my hard cover and trade paperback shelves.  

The more current fiction that could be bought as ebooks if I ever wanted to see it again went into the library book sale piles.

All those nonfiction research books I collected for a book I would write eventually about the States during WWII, the novel in Victorian England, etc., etc.  I knew deep in my heart that eventually would never come so those were given to the nonfiction librarian to keep or give to the library sale.  The book on the tunnels underneath London was the hardest because TUNNELS UNDER LONDON!  WITH MAPS! All the first editions of North Carolina writers and books on NC suffered the same fate, but the North Carolina Room librarian got those.  

The paperbacks were both harder and easier.  They were also the most toxic to my nose so I had to be brutal.  The books that remained went into plastic, air-tight bins.  After a hurricane destroyed the library in one of the state’s coastal towns and my library asked for popular books to stock the shelves of a large mobile home, I sighed as I realized that all but a few of those books would make others far happier during miserable times than they made me in plastic bins.  Off they went. 

What remained.  A really good, huge dictionary suitable for research and flattening things, books I refer to often in my writing blog, a few research resources I still look at, books of extreme sentimental value like the novel dedicated to me and signed by the author who died several years later, and the cookbooks my mom and I used for many family meals.  The cookbooks are coming apart so I'm slowly making copies of the favorite recipes to share with the siblings and their kids.  

Now, I’m down to one small bookshelf in a room I never use, a plastic bin for the paperbacks, and another small shelf of cookbooks and other resources.  

So, moral of the story.  If I can do this, you can, too.  

Fantasy and Reality

 In my dream, I walked into the snack bar of the student union of my alma mater. Daniel, the hero of my first novel, sat at one of the tables. He melted me with a sexy megawatt smile and purred, "Hello, Penn."

The awake part of me cringed--Penn was the heroine's name--and muttered, "You're going over the edge, Byerly. Writing IS a form of schizophrenia." 

"Uh..., hello, Daniel." I sat down beside him and decided, to heck with mental illness, I was going to enjoy myself. 

Even after many years, that dream remains vivid. It was my first encounter with the gray shadings between fantasy and reality in a writer's life. I know the difference between the two, every writer must. I've also learned their interplay enriches my characters and my life.

Parts of me litter my novels like confetti at a party--Tony Chaucer wears the ratty man's bathrobe I refused to stop wearing, Ariel at five snuggles with my teddy bear, and David has my vermouth dry sense of humor. Those parts help my characters live.

But each character is more than just chucks of me. They have thoughts and wisdom I've never had. 

I've borrowed Daniel's genius for quick puns and dear Nelson's serene wisdom and faith when my own was sadly lacking. In this manner, my characters have given back as much as I've given them. Almost like real friends. 

Are you wondering what happened in that dream about sexy Daniel? We sat and discussed his own college days. You see, fantasy like reality doesn't always have the expected ending.

Starting the First Novel

 QUESTION:  I have an idea for my story, the characters, and most of the plot, but I’m afraid to start, and I really want to.  What’s my problem?

Forty odd years ago, I finally decided it was time to begin writing that novel I'd always wanted to write.  I started out with lots more advantages than the average writer.  I'd taken writing courses in college, I'd written poetry and short stories for years, and I'd been an English major.

Those first pages were nearly impossible for me.  I felt like I was writing it in my own blood.  Everything I'd ever learned about writing seemed to have vanished from my brain, and I struggled just to get words down on the page to tell the story I wanted to tell. I had absolutely no confidence in myself as a writer.  

Then about six months into writing and a fourth of a way through the novel, something clicked inside me, and I realized I could do this.  My confidence came back, and the story began to pour out of me onto the page.  I finished the novel in under six weeks.  

Yes, the novel had major problems, my craft stunk, and the novel wasn't remotely publishable, but I'd finished it.  I began to rewrite it using what I'd learned as I wrote.  The novel has never been published, but few first novels are or should be published.  They are practice rounds.  

Without the internet and all those online classes and experts as well as critique partners we have now, I had to struggle to figure out my craft on my own, and my first sold book was my seventh.  

The point is that most writers struggle with the writing.  It takes work and courage to put words on the page.  It takes even more work to make your craft competent.  But you have to start somewhere.  

Write the story and don't worry if it's not good enough. Rewriting can take care of the flaws.  Teaching courses and good critique partners can hone your craft.

If you have to write and have to tell the characters' stories, then the work is more than worth it.

Here's a favorite quote from Nora Roberts who has written a zillion books, all of whom hit the bestseller lists.

"I'm just starting [a new book] and the battle has already begun.  I don't think they ever go smoothly. It's work. It should be work.  It should be hard work. I think if you sort of sit around and wait to be inspired, you're probably going to be sitting there a long time. My process is more about crafting, working an idea through my head to see if it's a good concept." Nora Roberts in an interview with the "Hagerstown Herald-Mail."