Working With Editors: Begin With The End in Mind

by Jason Tudor

I’ve worked with editors most of my life. I’m thankful for this. My writing has grown stronger because of editors. Editors are the gatekeepers to being published. It’s important to understand what an editor wants and how to give that to him or her. I’ll steal from Stephen Covey: “Begin with the end in mind.”

As a writer, I realize I am one cog in the publishing process. True, I create the content. But I am just that – a content creator. There are millions of others in the market who can create content. There are thousands who submit. There are hundreds of those editors can replace me with.

So, it behooves me to be cooperative in the editing process and understand the big picture. First, I want to ensure my copy is as clean as it can be. Spelling and grammar aside:

• I want the thing to be rock-solid from beginning to end.
  
• I want names to match. I want them to be spelled correctly.
  
• The plot line should make sense from front to back. There should be continuity, rhythm and pace.

In other words, I want to do my due diligence on the copy before it reaches someone else’s hands. Anything else makes me careless and irresponsible.

There’s also the idea of being courteous and responsive to an editor’s needs. I may be working through several revisions before my story gets to print. I try to ask smart questions. I also try to remember that an editor is helping me get my copy to print; not hinder that process. So, keeping cool when someone is cutting “my darlings” and can be challenging, but is important to the end product.

Which brings up another valid point: editors have bosses, too. So, in looking at that bigger picture, I force myself to understand that there are bigger agendas in play and sometimes, the editing process will be longer or shorter depending on that process. I also realize that anything can change during that process; I’m obligated to what is printed on the contract. So is the publisher.

Besides, the company’s paying me. I’m a contracted employee. It wants first rights to my published work because it believes it can make money from it. Why would I want to do anything other than help that process along and, in fact, improve it as I go? It doesn’t mean I want to lose my independence as a writer. It simply means I want to give my work the best chance at reaching a buyer’s hands.

As an aside, I also want to understand the publisher’s process. In doing the query process, I do a bit of research. However, there’s probably more under the hood then what’s learned in the query process. How much do you really know about your potential publisher, its titles, its reach and its staff?

This isn’t usually possible when you start, but i know it’s probably okay to ask questions as I go along. I also want to know a bit about the publisher’s marketing strategy. For one, I don’t want to do something counter to that when the times comes for me to start my own marketing.

Working with an editor is one step in getting a story to print. Beginning with the end in mind and keeping the numerous steps and challenges that exist not only for me, but for the people who work with my story along the way, helps ensure success.

Worked with editors? What’s your experience?

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Jason Tudor is an author and illustrator who lives in Bavaria. He retired from the U.S. military after 21 years of service as a journalist and public relations specialist, where served as editor for four weekly newspapers and was a senior staff writer for the U.S. Air Force flagship publication, Airman magazine.

He is a moderator at Absolute Write’s forums and serves as a guest blogger for The Furnace, primarily talking about comic books, pop culture and more. Recently, An Army of Ermas added him as a guest blogger. He is also a three-time first-place recipient of the Department of Defense’s Thomas Jefferson writing award; and is the receipient of better than 100 civilian and military writing, photography, and illustration awards. On his website jasontudor.com, he talks about writing, editing, social media, public relations and personal items.

This post originally appeared on Jason's blog.

Things to Think About Re:Blogging

by Elana Johnson

Okay, lean in a little closer. Closer... closer... Okay, that's a little too close. *grins*

I've got secrets on how you can make your blog easier, faster and more entertaining to read.

Let's start with the basics.

1. Your blog layout.

• Consider carefully before you use a black background. I used to have a dark bluish one, and I loved it. But I realize it's hard on the eyes, and I like light backgrounds much better.
• Absolutely no neon type, please. I'm begging.
• How big is your font? Too small, and I'm skimming from second one. I won't squint to read your blog.
• Look at your white space. Consider the principles of design found here. (Yeah, I teach these in the computer lab. So sue me.)
• Look at the length of your paragraphs. Huge blocks of text intimidate me. They make me think I'll be stuck on your blog reading and re-reading that monster graf for the rest of my natural life. And that's never good.

2. Your blog content.

• It's important to create a schedule and stick to it.
• Post meaningful content for your target audience.
• Lastly, consider the length of your post. I try really hard to stay under 300 words. I'll freely admit I skim uber-long posts.

3. Your blog audience.

• Be yourself. Share a bit of personal stuff without going overboard on the big 3: Religion, politics or sex. Right? Right. Remember your blog audience.
• Rants should be saved for private Skypes, chats or emails. Remember your blog audience.
• Share about your book, successes and whatnot without shoving it down our throats. We all want to celebrate, but we don't want every giveaway to be your book. We don't want every post to be your book signing schedule, etc. Remember your blog audience.
• Give your blog audience what they want. Don't know what they want? Figure it out. Then deliver. For this, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes of all time. You can insert anything you want for "street sweeper." Writer. Blogger. Whatever.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tell me what you like about blogs. How are you doing on your blog layout, your blog content and your blog audience? Do you consider all three of these things? If not, maybe you should...

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Elana Johnson writes for the QueryTracker blog when she's not authoring her own personal blog posts or her latest young adult novel. She is represented by Michelle Andelman of Lynn C. Franklin Associates.

This post originally appeared on Elana's blog

On Books, Blogs, and Marketing

by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

In the last several months, I’ve seen a handful of blog posts with negative statements about marketing and bloggers who “market” their blogs and blog-related projects, and the Twitter conversations about this topic seem endless. It seems that, for a certain subset of the blogging community, “marketing” is a four-letter word, and the bloggers who eschew it are somehow more authentic or noble than those who embrace it. It also seems that many bloggers don’t really know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about marketing.

Marketing gets a bad rap. People hear “marketing,” and they start thinking about slimy used car salesmen in bad polyester suits.

But here’s the thing: at its core, marketing is simply about creating awareness.

Yes, marketing is often about creating awareness of a product or service, and that awareness is the first step in a strategic plan to get people to buy the product or service (that’s the SALES step, which is different from marketing), but marketing is key. Marketing is about affecting how people think about something, and you have to affect attitudes before you can affect behaviors. (You have to make me aware of the new item on the menu, and you have to affect my attitude about it, before you can get me to buy it.)

But marketing is not always about a product or service. It is not always about leading up to sales.

Marketing is about creating and affecting awareness, and it’s not just businesses who use marketing. Non-profit organizations, charities, schools, etc. all use marketing to make the public aware of them and to affect the public’s perception of them (hopefully in a positive direction) in order to gain support, funding, you know the drill.

And we, all of us who talk about and review books on our blogs, are engaged in marketing every single day.
Sometimes this is obvious, as when we participate in blog tours or review books we receive from publishers as part of the marketing campaign (the effort to create awareness) for a new or forthcoming title. Certainly, we are marketing when we feature guest posts, interviews, and giveaways for books we believe in. That’s one of the benefits of being a blogger and having an audience—we get to throw our weight behind the books and authors we believe in, and WE ALL DO IT. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s the same idea as sitting down to lunch with a group of your friends and telling them about this book that they just HAVE TO READ (and that’s marketing too, folks) but you’re sitting at a really big table.

What we don’t always acknowledge is that even when we’re reviewing backlist titles, classics, or less well-known books, we are STILL engaging in marketing. The act of posting information about these books—about ANY books—in the public forum of the internet is an act that, by its nature, changes the public’s awareness and perception of them. If you post about a book that even one person who reads your blog has not previously heard of, or if your review changes even one person’s mind about that book (making them either more or less inclined to read it), you are engaging in marketing. (And yes, even negative reviews are marketing; you are still affecting attitudes about the book, just in the opposite direction than most marketing efforts attempt to.) We may not think of our reviews of backlist and less popular titles as marketing because we’re not posting them in partnership with a publisher, publicist, or author who asked us to do so, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.

With book blogging, books are most often the product we are marketing (read: creating and affecting awareness for), but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, our blogs are the product. And sometimes, WE are the product.

And that’s where it starts to get hairy. I get it that many people don’t like to think of themselves as products. It can feel icky.
But if you use Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or any social networking site to discuss your blog or your book reviews, you are MARKETING your blog. Even if you just post links to your blog on that site or include your URL in your member profile, you are marketing your blog. When you comment on other blogs (an act that is likely to introduce others to you and your blog), you are marketing. It’s a passive form of marketing—allowing others to discover the link without your directing them to it—but it is still marketing. Your simple presence on something like Twitter is an act of marketing in that it creates a public awareness of you (and often your blog) that would not otherwise exist, and how you interact there continually affect and shape the public’s perception, regardless of whether you’re being strategic in those interactions or not (and, for the record, I think that most of us are not).

If you are a blogger who is also a writer, and you are trying to get published, and you include information about your writing projects on your blog or you discuss them on Twitter, you are marketing yourself as a writer. You are creating awareness of your writing in hopes that it will cause someone to act differently (in this case, by looking at your writing and maybe publishing you). Even if you are not knocking on doors, emailing, or tweeting directly to agents, you are passively creating awareness of your writing and of yourself as a writer, and that’s marketing.

Those of us who participate in blog tours and work with publishers, publicists, and authors to coordinate book reviews and related features are often engaged in the act of marketing ourselves. We first have to make these publishers, publicists, and authors aware of us (often done passively, just by having a blog that can be found on in the internet, but sometimes more actively by engaging on Twitter, etc.), and then we have to affect how they think about us by writing solid, well-crafted reviews and being reliable. We build relationships with them and hope they come to think of us as the go-to bloggers for specific kinds of books, bloggers who will write honest reviews and present even our negative opinions well.

And guess what? The way we want to be perceived by the people with whom we interact and cultivate relationships? That’s our personal brand. And WE ALL HAVE ONE (even when it includes a distaste for marketing and branding).

You may not think you have a brand,—and I’ve seen MANY bloggers make disparaging remarks about branding and marketing on Twitter, which, hello, is a PUBLIC FORUM in which you affect how others perceive you— but if you have a public presence anywhere, you have a brand because your presence alone gives people a reason to think about you, and how they think about you—the image you project and the way you are perceived—is your brand.

Even if you do not have an online presence, you have a personal brand. All of us who work in public, who cultivate a professional image, who have relationships within our industries, and who work to be thought of in a certain way by our peers, have personal brands.

And this is all to say that marketing and branding are not, by their nature, bad things. We all do them all the time, even when we are publicly disparaging the very concepts.

I don’t care what you choose to do with your blog or how you choose to interact on Twitter. I don’t care what kind of image you cultivate or whom you form relationships with. I don’t care whether you work actively to market your blog, yourself, and the books you believe in or if you just post them publicly and allow people to discover them.

I just think it’s high time that we acknowledge what marketing really is (and what it isn’t) and get beyond the naive idea that one can have an online presence without engaging in any form of marketing.

I work in marketing. I like it, I believe in it, and I think it is vitally important to think about how our actions come across in public. But really, I’m just SO OVER hearing people talk about how much they hate marketing and branding when they are having the conversations in VERY public forums and using the conversations to create awareness (hello, marketing) of their dislike for it, which, whether intentionally or not, attracts a certain audience and shapes perceptions. If you’re talking about how much you hate marketing, you’re doing it because you want people to be aware that you hate marketing, and you want to be thought of as someone who doesn’t engage in it. You are marketing your personal brand as someone who is anti-marketing. Oh, the irony…

And, as my mother would say, that’s your little red wagon to pull.

But I’d encourage you to start thinking about it.

You have a brand. That’s a fact. And you can either take control of it or allow other people to shape it for you. This doesn’t mean your interactions need to be calculated and strategic (in fact, I’d argue against that), but it does mean you should spend some time thinking about what your blog means, how you want people to think about it (because they DO think about it), and how you want people to think about you.

Anyone who has a professional life (and being a student DOES count) thinks about (or should think about) these things all the time, and bloggers, whether we hope to use our blogs as a platform to something else or not, should behave professionally if we want to have any hope of gaining legitimacy in the industry and being thought of us real contributors who work, each in our own way, to keep the written word alive.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Rebecca is a twenty-something bibliophile who works in marketing and spent 2 1/2 years as a bookseller and bookstore event planner. She reads and reviews literary fiction, memoirs, an eclectic smattering of nonfiction, and whatever else strikes her fancy. She has a major thing for John Irving, the opposite of a thing for Nicholas Sparks, and a deep appreciation for well-placed snark.

She has a partnership with her local independent booksellers Fountain Bookstore for cross-promotion of author appearances, store events, the #fountainreads Twitter-based book club, and book giveaways.

This post originally appeared on The Book Lady's Blog.

On Editing Experience

by Adam Slade

I'm an author of predominantly fantasy fiction, often with a humorous bent. I have been known to stray into other genres, but fantasy is where my heart is. While I'm new to professional editing; I.E. working with an editor, I'm happy to talk about my experiences so far.

First up, I'll go through the steps that came after I received my acceptance email and signed my contracts (read 'em carefully, folks!).

Shortly after I'd stopped running in tight circles squealing like an overexcited toddler (this process took a couple of days), I was sent a "Welcome Pack" which contained details of how Lyrical works (house rules, contact details for various departments etc), and requests for some contact details. A little while after this, I was assigned to an editor. The way Lyrical works is that a bunch of editors read each approved submission and then decide who gets to work on it. I like to think that they all loved my book and fought like rabid animals to get the opportunity to work with it.

What? I can dream!

So, the fabulous Cynthis Brayden-Thomas emailed me announcing that she would be my editor, and attached a couple more files for me to peruse. The first was a form asking for details about cover art, blurb, taglines and the like, and the second was a check-list. This check-list detailed all the common errors encountered in manuscripts (excessive adverbs, head hops, ) and some info about house style rules. Cyn gave me a deadline for getting them complete, and I got crackin'.

Note - Not all publishers do the "pre edit" thing. Lyrical do, and their reasons make perfect sense; why make an editor do what you should have done before submitting?

Thankfully, I'd done most of the things on the check-list before submitting, so I had the manuscript back to Cyn in plenty of time so she could begin on the scariest part of the whole "book making" process... Revisions! Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuun!!!

Well they worried me, anyway.

Waiting for the first set of revisions was akin to... um... having a plaster you had to rip off a particularly hairy place... but you couldn't rip it off until you got an email from your copy editor.

Ok, that didn't work. Lemme give it another go. It's like waiting for a train... a train containing ninjas...

Damnit.

Alright, I give up. Waiting for the revisions is almost as bad as receiving the email containing them. (Ooh, I'm finally up to the part LW wanted me to talk about, and it's only taken me a few hundred words and a handful of bad jokes.)

Another note - There is a fairly common misconception that an editor is there to "fix" everything, from spelling, to grammar, to gaping plot holes. This is not the case. First of all, if you submit a MS full of spelling and grammar errors, it won't be accepted in the first place; publishers and editors are busy bunnies, and don't have time to fix what you should have fixed before you submitted. Secondly, if the editor did sort all the mistakes themselves, the changes wouldn't be in your voice and you wouldn't learn to pay attention to similar issues in the future.

So, revisions. In my case, they were very easy to follow and understand. They went a little something like this:

Minor changes like word substitutions were made using "Track Changes,"* so it was a case of reviewing each and clicking accept or reject. In my case there were quite a few, as I had to go from UK spellings to US.

Larger changes were in "Notes"* at the side of the MS. Most of the larger changes were along the lines of "I don't think this works, for this reason. How about you try this?"

In the case of the changes I didn't agree with, I added a note under Cyn's note and moved on. I believe that, by the end of the revision there were no more than 2 or 3 of those.

* (Track Changes and Notes/Comments are available in both Word and it's free alternative OpenOffice. I use the latter.)

Despite the lovely Cynthia's reassurances, the first time I opened the MS, it looked like an immense amount of work to get done before the deadline. Once I'd been through it once, accepting or rejecting the word substitutions and making the minor changes, it turned out there wasn't so much to do. In my case the minor stuff took up 75-80% of the time, and was more tedious than difficult. The larger notes (regarding passages that could be reworded, or consistency issues) took a little longer, but even those weren't particularly difficult. After all, it was MY book I was working on; I knew the story and how best to change it without losing anything (in other words how to retain my "voice"). Once the revisions were done with, I emailed the new version back to my editor and began the wait for the second set of revisions.

(Insert more failed metaphors here.)

In the mean time, I received both my cover art and blurbs, then came my second set of revisions. These were basically the same as the first set, but there were considerably less changes to be made. Most were house rules issues that had been missed the first time around, but there were one or two minor changes (re-ordering of sentences etc) required too.

As I write this post, this is the point I'm up to. Once the edits are complete, I shall send the MS off to Cyn, who will read them through. Ideally, there will be no further edits required. If that is the case, the MS will be sent to the line editors, who will go through the work word by word, making sure everything is as good as it can be. Think of them as a "second opinion." Once that process is complete, they send the MS back to me and my editor and I read through and sign off on the changes.

Next comes what's known as the galley edits. These are the very last part of the editing process. It's where I submit my dedications (family, friends, pets) and acknowledgements ("I'd like to thank the Academy..."). After that, it's merely a matter of waiting (im)patiently for the book to come out!

So, that's it for me, I think. I hope I covered everything, but if anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer them.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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A voracious reader since childhood, it was only a matter of time before Adam Slade began work on a few books of his own. A lover of escapism in all its forms, his books are generally grounded in fantasy and often contain elements of humor, horror and suspense.

When not reading or writing, Adam, a self professed geek, loves nothing more than blasting away bad guys on his computer, browsing forums, or chatting to friends over the internet. Occasionally he attempts all three at once, which generally results in headaches.

His first novella, A Reaper's Tale, will be available May 17th.

Learn more about Adam at adamslade.moonfruit.com, follow his writing adventures at Editing Hat, or read his serial PI novel at Gumshoe Casefiles.

This post originally appeared on Writer Revealed.

In Defense of the HFN Ending, or Why Some Characters Simply Can't Ride Off into the Sunset

By Margaret Carroll

My first two novels were tender romantic comedies (The Write Match and The True Match, both from Avalon Books). The characters remind me of people I knew in my youth: they were wholesome and fun, ready to set the world on fire with a Bachelor’s degree, strong work ethic and a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan.

The heroines in those books were easy to like and better still, from a writer’s perspective, easy to work with.

When I began writing thrillers, the gloves came off. Avon/HarperCollins released my two debut novels of suspense back-to-back this fall. I showed an early draft of Riptide to my good friend Rubin Carson, a playwright who lives in L.A.

“I hate her,” Rubin said of the main character, Christina. “She’s a victim and she’s dreary and no fun.”

How do you make a cheating alcoholic wife seem fun?

My Riptide heroine actually has a lot in common with the heroines of my earlier romantic comedies. She’s smart, still in the prime of her life, and pretty. She wants a good life, a devoted husband and beautiful home. However, she lacks any sense of adventure (this is where backstory comes into play, but I’ll get to that later) and this in turn prevents her from having much of a work ethic.

In my real life, I don’t like victims. I roll my eyes when I see a news story about a morbidly obese person suing McDonald’s for luring them to buy unhealthy food. My blood boils every time CNN interviews a homeowner who blames the bank for the fact that he is defaulting on a mortgage he had no busy taking out in the first place.

I want to call CNN and ask what about the rest of us working schlubs? The ones who tighten our belts, drive beater cars and never take our kids to Disney World, all so we can pay our bills on time each month, and still have enough left over to pay taxes to bail out those Wall Street bankers who got rich pushing junk mortgages on any idiot who walked through their door?

But I digress.

That’s me the Working Schlub talking. Me the Author has trained herself to listen up when the T.V. news comes on with a shot of someone doing a ‘perp walk’ with a voiceover explaining that he/she has been caught fill-in-the-blank (running a Ponzi scheme, taking time away from their elected position to sleep with prostitutes, refusing to talk to investigators after plowing their Escalade into a tree, or talking their way past the Secret Service into a White House state dinner, and so on).

I pay close attention and read all I can about them because if you’re going to write suspense, troubled people are all you’ve got to work with. You need to be able to write about people who haven’t seen the inside of a place of worship or a therapist’s office or the working end of a food drive kitchen in their adult lives. The ones who would make you plant a wall of Arbor Vitae if they moved in next door. The weirdos, fanatics, drunks, junkies, perverts who need props for an orgasm, bullies whose biggest asset is their ability to pick a lock or test the quality of cocaine simply by dabbing some with his/her pinkie finger, and . . . you get the picture.

These are the people who mess up their lives badly enough to warrant a starring role in one of my thrillers.

So that I, the writer, can give them personal growth and a character arc of which they should be proud, or kill them off as I see fit.

How do you make them likeable?

To some readers, they never will be likeable. There are plenty of readers who only read books with HEA endings. I can relate. I’m like that when it comes to movies. I go to a movie theater maybe once every three years. When I do, it needs to be good and fun, not too deep, not too sappy and not too dark. Tom Cruise, vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger or Will Farrell work just fine.

But there are lots of readers with varying interests. Lots of them want a story featuring a main character with many facets and who is going through tough times. I think of the artist Toulouse Lautrec, who painted prostitutes and shed a beautiful light on them through his medium, even though they were people most of us would have rushed past on a street.

For me as a writer of suspense, the most interesting characters are the ones with the biggest problems. Life and death can hang in the balance. Suspense is built right in. They have the longest distance to go in terms of character development. They can do a complete 180-degree turnaround inside 400 pages in a way that someone whose life is already on track can’t. It’s rich fodder for a writer.

The challenge is, how do you make them likeable? You find common ground. Everyone wants to live the best life possible. They want their needs to be met. Even people on Death Row don’t give up on this. It is why, in my opinion, almost all of them make a statement during their final moments of life. They can’t fulfill any need at that point other than to try once more to be understood.

So, if you’re me and you’ve set out to tell the tale of a scheming, ambitious, alcoholic, two-timing wife who may have hired someone to kill her husband, how do you make her worth reading about?

Start by showing the reader that all she really wants is the same things they want: love, respect, honor and security.

She just goes about it the wrong way.

Why?

This is where backstory enters into it. I really love using backstory. I agree with popular wisdom that backstory does not belong early in the novel, nor should it take up page after page of the book. Of course you can name a number of awesome writers who break the rules (Anita Shreve comes to mind, mostly because I’m a rabid fan who has read just about everything she has published and she is always top of mind when I think about the craft of writing suspense). Used judiciously (for those of us who are not Anita Shreve), backstory clarifies motive for your main characters.

Which in turn should give a voice even to hard-drinking alcoholics (Christina Cardiff in Riptide) or wife-beating neurotics with bad skin (Dr. Porter Moross in A Dark Love).

Which begs the question, where is the rainbow at the end in a book with characters like these? Do they ride off into the sunset? Fall in love with somebody who is going to drop to one knee and whip out a two-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring to replace the one they’re about to hock to pay their legal bills?

Um, I don’t think so.

The story has to be true to its main characters. The ending has to be organic to the plot (sheesh, did I just say that?). If you’re going to write about troubled people (and again, these are the ones who give you a suspenseful ride along the way), then HEA for them is probably going to be HFN.

A heroine who is shopping around for caskets and dealing with an inquest into the death of her (very recently) departed husband, is not likely to have a good old-fashioned rompin’ stompin’ lovefest in the arms of Bachelor Number Two.

At least not in my books. A happy future for one of my girls is pretty much in keeping with the advice Oprah gave Rihanna: take some time on your own and get to know yourself. My heroines are likely to be brushing themselves off at the end of the book, ready to take a good hard look at themselves and start over. Maybe, for the first time, grow up.

And did I mention the one element that makes HFN so much fun? The heroine in my books always has a handsome new man in her life, some great guy who can handle a strong woman and he’s just waiting and hoping she’ll find some time in her schedule one day soon to explore the possibilities with him.

Next time around, her love interest will enhance her life, not detract from it.

Call it what you want. That kind of ending, for me, is better than a rainbow.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Publishers Weekly named Margaret Carroll’s debut thriller, A Dark Love (Avon/September 2009) one of the top five mass fiction titles of 2009……”Carroll develops what could be a stock story of an abusive marriage into a pulse-pounding romantic thriller with a strong, inspiring heroine determined to save herself." The book also has been nominated for a Rita award from Romance Writers of America. Winners will be announced at RWA’s annual general gala on July 31, in Nashville.

Learn more about Margaret at www.margaretcarroll.com.

Getting Reviews

by Jessica Faust

When it comes to publicity, the first thing to do is talk to your publisher about where they intend to send your book for reviews. Typically, at least with newspapers and magazines, a review copy of your book should be sent six months prior to publication. Blogs and web sites obviously have much, much shorter lead times, and waiting until you have final books will work just as well.

I would also work with your publisher to come up with a list. If you have places you’d like to see review your book, places your publisher might not consider, you should definitely let them know. There’s a good chance they’ll send the books for you. I think some of the best reviews are not those that are necessarily geared toward books. A lot of our cozy mystery authors, for example, have had great success with their books because they got the word out to those crafters who might be interested in what they’re writing about outside of the mystery.

Sending out copies for review is similar to querying agents. You send them whatever they want. Some might be happy with PDF files, while others will probably prefer hard copies. Either way, in addition to the galley, you’ll also want to send along a cover flat or copy of your cover as well as information on you and any marketing the publisher is putting behind the book.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Jessica Faust is a literary agent and cofounder of BookEnds, LLC, and prides herself on working closely with her authors to make their goals come to fruition. Her areas of expertise include historical, contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and erotic romance, urban fantasy, women's fiction, mysteries, suspense, and thrillers. In nonfiction, Jessica specializes in current affairs, business, finance, career, parenting, psychology, women's issues, self-help, health, sex, and general nonfiction. While open to anything, Jessica is most actively seeking unique fiction with a strong hook, and nonfiction with creative ideas and large author platforms.

Originally posted on the BookEnds, LLC blog.

Writers, The End is Near: Four Ways to End a Short Story

by Edward G. Talbot

"This is the end. My only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end"
- from "The End" by The Doors, 1967

In my humble opinion, that song is one of the truly great rock songs. The mixture of pleasure and pain it describes applies to more than just lost love and killers and death. Sometimes when we writers are working on a story, finishing the story can be bittersweet, or even just plain bitter. And sometimes we get near the end and we have no idea how to finish it, especially with a short story. In this post, I've outlined four possible ways to effectively end a short story.

There are more ways to end a story other than these four of course. And there is often overlap between the different ways. But if you are stuck, a look at these may help unstick you. Even if you aren't stuck, they may give you some ideas. Anyway, here they are:

The Twist Ending

Add something a bit unexpected right near the end. If you have listened to or read Edward G. Talbot, you'll know that we like to end stories this way. It works for many genres. The one thing you have to be careful about is not making it too unexpected so the reader feels like you just threw it in there. The reader needs to feel that it's consistent with everything else in the story

There are so many ways to implement this concept. You see it all the time in suspense movies. Jeffrey Deaver is a master of this with his thrillers. A really good example is in James Patterson's second Alex Cross thriller, Kiss The Girls. The killer turns out to be the FBI agent who was working the case. It's just possible enough that the reader buys it and feels a chill at the betrayal.

The twist can also be subtle. My friend and fellow podcaster Scott Roche recently released an e-book short story called Bitter Release about a soldier trapped in a cave with only memories and a case of absinthe. Roche gives us a subtle twist literally in the last line that ties the surreal feel of the story together very effectively. I can't say more without spoiling the story.

The Resolving Action

In action, mystery, thriller, and suspense genres, this is probably the most common ending. The line between a resolving action and a twist ending can be blurry, but a resolving action to my mind tends to be more expected, more like a traditional climax. This can be a major action like a bombing or a killing, or it can be something simple that punctuates the story.

A good example is in Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor", where a plane crashes into a joint session of Congress, making Jack Ryan the President. That's one serious resolving action. Or in our own audiobook New World Orders we resolve the chase that has at one level been going on for the entire book. I won't give the details, but it definitely ends with a Resolving Action.

On the other hand, you could have a story where a woman has killed an abusive husband and is struggling with guilt and the story could end with some symbolic gesture regarding letting go of it. That is a bit of a cliche, but it wouldn't seem like it if done right. You get the idea.

The "Story" Ends Itself

This is very common in literary stories. Ask yourself, "What is the story I am telling the reader?" Stephen King in his book On Writing talks about knowing what the story is as the key to all good writing. What is it on a high level that is interesting enough to make people keep reading? The story itself may have a built-in ending.

Seth Harwood uses this technique to perfection in his short story collection A Long Way From Disney. In story after story he has characters or feelings or some tension (or all three) to tell you about, and they end when he has finished telling you that particular story.

Another example is the movie Titanic. There are basically two stories, one how all the characters react to the sinking/tragedy and the other is how that tragedy impacts Jack and Rose, who have fallen in love. The movie ends with Rose casting the necklace away (a resolving action), but it could have simply ended with Rose finishing her tale and the viewers really understanding how that brief time impacted the whole rest of her life.

So once you understand what the story is you are telling, the ending may simply present itself. In some ways it can be easier in a short story because there are usually not very many threads in the story. The flash story that Jason wrote for our Intercast podcast - "Alive" - ends with the main character jumping out of a building. That is no surprise to readers, as the whole story builds to it. You could call it a resolving action, but in this case it's more of a simple completion of the only place the story could have gone. James Melzer's ebook story PTS does something similar. Nothing in that story is a surprise, and it ends with action, but again, it's the only place the story could have gone.

The Intentionally Ambiguous Ending

I like this one, but in my opinion it is the hardest to pull off. The problem is that most of the time the reader wants resolution. In a longer work, it's possible to leave questions unanswered for a sequel, but that's not the same thing - that's not really the ending. It generally only works when the "story" is the tension or some interpaly between characters, and the resolution doesn't matter.

I tried it in my short story "Transition" in the Intercast Audiobook, where the tension between outgoing and incoming U.S. administrations and several different middle eastern governments led to a climax where one group in the U.S. government was about to launch a nuclear strike and another was trying to stop them. The story is about how close we could get to nuclear holocaust with only one or two overt acts leading to it - whether nuclear holocaust actually occurs or not is irrelevant to the story. I actually got a couple of extremely positive comments about how I did this, but I also got one negative for not telling people exactly what happened. This kind of ending will not please everyone, but I do think it can be done effectively.

There are many other ways to end a story, or variations on the above techniques. Tell me about some of your favorites in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Edward G. Talbot is the pen name for a collaboration of two authors, Ed Parrot and Jason Derrig, as well as work published by Ed Parrot alone. Ed Parrot is the public face of the duo.

Talbot's first novel, New World Orders, was released in 2008 and is currently available only as a free audiobook on their web site. The book is a thriller about a global warming conspiracy far different than those envisioned by either political party.

The humorous short story collection "A Funny Pair of Shorts" was released for kindle and other ebook formats in March 2010. In 2010, Talbot expects to release a thriller novella as well as a second ebook of shorts, this time in the horror genre.

The Edward G. Talbot philosophy can be summed up with the slogan on their web site: Heroes don't always win. Villains don't always lose.

This post originally appeared on Ed's blog.

A Matter of Ethics

by Nathan Bransford

Over the weekend, the New York Times "Ethicist" wrote a rather controversial post defending the ethics of illegally downloading an e-book when you own the hardcover.

The Ethicist writes:

Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod. Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you've violated the publishing company's legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you've done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

Aside from being quite surprised that Ethicists are in the habit of encouraging people to break the law, I found this to be an astounding and irresponsible response.

It's one thing for an Ethicist to remind a reader that they are within their ethical (and though I'm not a lawyer, likely legal) rights to create their own e-book by scanning their book into a computer strictly for personal and not-for-profit use. This is the proper CD-ripping analogy. It's taking something you own and converting it to another format through your own time and effort, whether that's making an electronic file or taking a book apart to wallpaper your house.

The fact is, buying a hardcover (or CD or DVD or paperback) does not grant someone the right to own a work in all platforms in perpetuity. I mean, this: "Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform" is an extraordinarily sweeping opinion. Any platform? Should we get the paperback for free when we buy the hardcover? Should we be able to get into the movie for free when we own the paperback? Those are just different platforms, right? Should I have shoplifted the DVDs when I switched over from my VHS collection? What exactly are we talking about here?

An e-book is a fundamentally different product than a hardcover - it's searchable, it's electronic, it's portable, it doesn't weigh anything. It allows you to do things that you can't do with a hardcover. Not everyone obviously thinks it's an improvement, but I think we can all agree that it's a different product. They may be the same words, but it most definitely is not the same thing.

It may seem like it's a trivial distinction to make when the resulting file from scanning yourself vs. pirating a book is potentially almost the same, but that's where the line between ethical/legal and unethical/illegal is drawn for a reason. In the first version, you're adding the value yourself through your own effort (just as taking notes in your own margins adds a form of value). By downloading a file illegally you're misappropriating that added value from the only people (the publisher and author and e-booksellers) who are legally and ethically entitled to profit from it. That's why we have copyright law. That's where we've chosen to draw the line.

This is all completely setting aside the question of whether publishers should bundle hardcovers and e-books for sale - lots of people have expressed a desire for a situation where you, say, pay $2 or $4 or however much more for a hardcover and get the e-book for free. It's a great idea! I suspect the fact that isn't yet possible for most books is because of the logistical challenges involved, but it's one that I hope publishers will continue to explore.

But the fact that it's not yet possible as a matter of course doesn't then justify theft - I mean, I personally think it's a great idea for supermarkets to sell peanut butter and jelly together for a discount, but if my local supermarket doesn't do this it doesn't mean I get to shoplift the jelly.

This is also setting aside the justifications people come up with when it comes to piracy - that people buy more when they pirate, that piracy does not necessarily equal loss of sale, that stealing a digital product is not the same thing as stealing a tangible object etc. etc. Look: we live in a society where the seller gets to determine the terms of sale. If it really is financially advantageous to allow things to be readily available for free or very cheaply or unencumbered with DRM let the sellers (the publishers and the authors and booksellers) make that decision. If it's better financially for the parties involved, let the market move in that direction. Support the companies who have policies you like with your dollars, not through illegal activity.

The electronic era is full of possibility as well as potential downfalls, and I think we need to get past the idea that an electronic format is value-less relative to print. It has value. It is a different product. You can add that value yourself by converting something you bought, or you can pay for a new file.

If you're stealing that value by downloading someone else's e-book illegally: it's copyright infringement.

It really is a matter of ethics. Oh. Also the law.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Nathan Bransford is a literary agent with the San Francisco office of Curtis Brown Ltd. and the author of JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW, which will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers in 2011.

This post originally appears on Nathan's blog.

Murder Your Darlings

By Lara Ehrlich

“Murder your darlings,” advised Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

This statement might mean different things to different people. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was a writer, so let’s consider his suggestion in the context of writing, and disregard the other, messier implications.

To narrow this down even more, suppose that darlings = sentences. We can use this equation when revising our manuscripts: When we come across a sentence that makes us think, “Oh, now that’s a lovely, lovely sentence I have written there”—we must kill it.

Gasp.

I agree that’s a little extreme. We all love books with beautiful sentences. But we’ve all read a book in which the author is so attached to her language that she sacrifices its meaning for beauty.

While we don’t have to kill all of our beautiful sentences, we should consider each one in the context of the overall book. If we find a sentence that’s in the book ONLY because it’s pretty, it shouldn’t be there. It’s already dead.

This is not a new idea. Countless writers have shared their own variations of “Murder your darlings,” including Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov, and Georges Simenon, who said, “I cut adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it.”

I’ve had these words in mind as I work through the third draft of my novel THE HERO.

THE HERO was full of sentences I thought were pretty, but upon closer inspection, did nothing for the book. I wrote a lot of them before I figured out the plot. I wrote a lot more before I really knew the characters. And by the time I had a whole manuscript of sentences, the entire book had changed on me, and many—so many!—of my darlings had to go.

What happened is this: the audience changed.

THE HERO began as a satirical story about youth sports in America aimed at adult literati. A somewhat sardonic narrator told the story in omnipresent third person point-of-view, skipping through the minds of the kids, the coaches, the parents, the championship officials, and a roast pig.

THE HERO is now a young adult novel told in third person point-of-view, from the perspective of just two 14-year-old boys, Junior and Chris. The deeper I dug into their characters, the more Junior and Chris drove the language. Their voices shoved the sardonic narrator right off the page.

This narrator worked when the novel was intended for the literati, but it became all wrong when the audience shifted. This satirical voice began to intrude on the characters’ perspectives. Instead of narrating from within their heads, it narrated over their heads.

Changing the audience of the novel meant streamlining the language and cutting way, way back on the satire. Gone are my irreverent witty descriptions. Gone are my circuitous sentences.

And now the book has become something very different. I have sacrificed some of the fancy literary style to go deeper into the characters. Now the book has a new style that’s drawn more from the characters’ point-of-view than from mine, which is at once scary and exciting.

It’s exciting because the third draft of THE HERO is closer to what it should be. And it’s scary because I am so attached to the language that it’s physically painful to summon the courage to strike when needed.

I will admit that I couldn’t bring myself to kill my darlings too dead. I pasted them all into a separate “Notes” document for safe-keeping. As I approach the end of the third draft this week, the book is a trim 65,000 words.

The “Notes” document is 127,000.

My poor darlings.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Lara Ehrlich is currently finishing revisions to her first novel, THE HERO, which she expects to begin querying in June 2010. When she’s not writing, she works as the Publications Coordinator at Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Lara is a graduate of Boston University and the University of Chicago.

Visit Lara online at www.LaraEhrlich.com.

Writing (and Reading) about Sex

by Randy Susan Meyers

I tried to think of a, um, sexier title for this post, but they all sounded, um, icky, and the last thing I want when I’m writing about sex is an ick factor. Writing about icky sex: terrific. Writing icky about sex: terrible.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since Pia Lindstrom, an interviewer from Sirius Radio, shocked me out of my I-can-handle-any-question mood when she asked something to the effect of:

So, I was surprised by how much sex is in your book. You did it so well. People say it’s hard to write about sex. How did you do it?


Um. Um. Um. Now there was a question I hadn’t been asked before. Sex is included in my work. (Ask my mother-in-law. When she read one of my earlier works—an in-the-drawer-book—she told my husband that I wrote ‘sex novels.’)

Wait! Before you run to the bookstore in hopes of getting a fun sex novel, save your money. Buy something by Jackie Collins. The sex I wanted to convey in The Murderer’s Daughters was the gritty emotional side of the bedroom; the stuff we hate to admit is true.

I had to answer Pia (and fast.) How did I write about sex?

By praying no one would ask me about it.

By telling myself that my husband knows I am not writing about him (except for the good parts, of course.)

By realizing that writing about sex isn’t about insert Tab A into Slot B—it’s about the emotion behind the writhing.

By remembering what Elizabeth Benedict said in her wonderful book, The Joy of Writing Sex:

Benedict: A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.

It’s easier to write about sex when it’s ‘bad,’ when the character is damaging herself through the act, or using sex as panacea or cover-up, than it is to write about good sex. Perhaps it’s a variation on Tolstoy’s famous aphorism about happy families vs. unhappy families. All fantastic sex is remarkably similar in how it lights up the brain, while “I gotta get through this somehow” sex is a textured way to reveal the problems in a relationship, which leads to Benedict’s next point:

Benedict: A good sex scene should always connect to the larger concerns of the work.


When writing about my main characters, sisters Lulu and Merry, I wanted to show them reacting in wildly divergent ways to the same trauma (the murder of their mother by their father.) Naturally, their experiences of sexuality were defined by that horrendous act. If I wanted to reveal the ways they were affected by witnessing their mother’s death, I needed to go into their bedrooms, and not in a polite manner.

Benedict: The needs, impulses and histories of your characters should drive a sex scene.


Most readers can tell when in a sex scene, the writer has stepped away from the character and inserted a boilerplate moment. It’s easy to understand why a writer might avoid writing deeply about sex. Nobody’s comfortable with the idea that readers who know them might think they are reading a page from the writer’s life.

Which means, if you want to be true to your reader, you have two choices. 1) Take the readers off your shoulder and be willing to go all the way (sorry about that—couldn’t resist) in revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly, or, 2) Skip the sex and use the f a d e – o u t.

Benedict: The relationship your characters have to one another—whether they are adulters or strangers on a train—should exert more influence on how you write about their sexual encounters than should any anatomical detail.


Can I just say how much I hate clinical words in novels? I want writers to capture the inner monologue so well that there is only a very small space between character and reader. Thus, for me, the clinical terms leap out from a page as though the writer is shouting. It becomes a ‘look at me’ moment, rather than a ‘be in the character’ moment. Unless, of course, the character is a sex-ed teacher.

What goes on in a character’s mind as Tab A meets Slot B? Are they actually describing their partner’s body? In The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey, the following passage of a couple embarking on their first sexual encounter reveals the emotional and physical relationship of this particular couple without a single clinical detail:

From then on it was all haste and confusion. He undid a few buttons on her blouse and left her to manage the rest while he wrestled with his own clothes. She undressed quickly, eager to be hidden between the sheets. Edward, clumsy with his underwear, took a few seconds longer. Then he was beside her, the whole shocking length of him, and they were clinging to each other. It seemed to Dara that they were struggling to surmount some huge barrier—the barrier between not being and being lovers—and they must do whatever necessary to get over it.


From this passage, the reader immediately knows that Dara is not chasing an orgasm and that she is bringing to this encounter a truckload of emotional baggage.

This is what I want from sex scenes—secret glimpses into the soul, which are possible only at our most vulnerable moments: when we break apart and when we come together—and sex is often a time when those moments collapse into one.

Writing great sex is sort of like having great sex, I suppose—losing yourself in the truth of the moment. Except when you’re writing, you get to go back and edit it until the moments are just exactly what you want.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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The dark drama of Randy Susan Meyers’ debut novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, published by St. Martins Press in January 2010, is informed by her years of work with batterers, domestic violence victims, and at-risk youth impacted by family violence. She was raised by books, in Brooklyn, where she could walk to the library daily. Each book she read added to her sense of who she could be in this world. Reading In Cold Blood at too tender an age assured that she’d never stay alone in a country house. Biographies of women like Marie Curie and Elizabeth Blackwell opened doors to another world and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn taught her faith in the future. Learn more about Randy at randysusanmeyers.com

This post originally appeared on Randy's blog, Word Love.

The Writer's Middle Finger: Part Four (When You Lose Hope, Or, Hey—Don't Aim That Thing at Me!)

by A.S. King

You don’t have to be an unpublished writer to lose hope. It happens all the time to all sorts of writers. Maybe you’ve just received your 50th agent rejection letter, and no matter how many times you read the “I really liked the writing and the premise” part, all you can see is YOU SUCK AND I HATE YOU.

Maybe you’re on submission and you’ve just received your 20th rejection from an editor, and no matter about the fact that your book went all the way to the editorial board, all you can see is OUR MARKETERS SAY THEY CAN’T SELL THIS, THEREFORE YOUR BOOK IS STUPID AND WILL NEVER SELL. (Though I find that one especially annoying. If a plumber said that he couldn’t figure out how to put different types of pipes together, you’d hire another plumber, right?)

Maybe you’re a published author and your house told you that they won’t buy your next book unless you take out the spaceships, and the book is solely about spaceships. Or that your editor has been fired and the new guy hates all spaceships. No matter the fact that you’ve published X number of books, got rave reviews, landed on lists, all you can hear is YOU WILL NEVER GET ANYWHERE IN THIS BUSINESS BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT NORMAL.

I hear a lot of writers talk about how they lose hope mid-way through writing a book. “This sucks!” they say. Boy have I been there. I’ve been in nearly all of these situations. (No spaceships yet, but that’s coming, I’m sure.)

When You Lose Hope

So what do we do when we lose hope? We find hope. And how do we do that? Of course, I’m going to tell you to use your writer’s middle finger. The thing is—when hope is lost, that finger is often on vacation. Perhaps it’s seeing Europe by rail or lathered in oil down near the Equator. Most likely, though, it’s right there on your hand, mocking you.

Yes, you. Your finger on your hand, mocking YOU. It’s telling you that you’ll never find an agent, or a publisher. It’s telling you that you’ll never get a freaking break in this business. It’s telling you that you are a horrible writer, and that you should go back to college to become a biophysicist, like your uncle told you to back in 19XX. It will say anything to save you from this roller coaster of self-esteem and heartbreak. It is being logical and practical.

It is full of shit.

If you’re writing books, you probably didn’t get there by following logic. It just happened one day, right? You read a book that inspired you to a degree that you couldn’t NOT do it. You had always dreamed that you’d try, so now you’re trying. There is nothing logical about writing books. Not as an aspiring writer, and not as a published writer. It’s a crazy thing to do, really.

Hey—Don’t Aim That Thing at Me!

Your writer’s middle finger is here to support you on this crazy path, yes. But it will test you when you lose hope. It will turn against you the minute your brain has the first speck of doubt. It will mock you to make sure you’re serious. This business is not for the weak, the lazy or the easily-spooked. Though doubt is a normal part of the process, you can’t do it too much, or else you will never finish writing a book, never query enough agents, and never write another book even though there really was nothing wrong with the last one.

I’d like to stop here for a minute. You read that correctly. There are plenty of fine books that are never published. I can’t tell you if yours is one of them, but it’s a fact. Yours could be one of them. And I’m not talking first books here. I’m talking about this happening any time. There are people who’ve been on Oprah’s book club who have had to put beautifully written books back into the drawer. It happens.

Who’s to say that book won’t one day see the light of day? You don’t know. I don’t know. By the time the day comes, you may say, “No way is that book coming out of that drawer.” This has just happened to me, actually. It’s not that the book in the drawer is awful. It isn’t. It’s a good book. It’s just that the book in the drawer is old. It’s been in there with seven or more other books that are far inferior and frankly, they’ve rubbed off on it. But the good part for me is: I don’t really care. When I put the book in the drawer, I broke off our relationship and moved on. Since then, I’ve written four other books. That’s what writers do, right?

Well, it’s what we do when we have hope. When we don’t have hope it feels like the worst thing in the world because we feel like fools. Foolish dream-chasing twits. We say things like, “Oh man, did I really say that books are like snowflakes? That I wanted to make a blizzard? Gag me with a Drano-dipped spoon.”

Mocking yourself and doubting yourself and beating yourself up are all normal things. You just can’t do it a lot when you’re out of hope. You might start to believe yourself. You might talk yourself out of the coolest job (whether paid or unpaid) in the whole freaking world. That’s when you need to turn the finger around and point it out again, build yourself a safe little middle finger fort where you still rock, and no one is mocking you.

You may be completely crazy (you probably are) and illogical and impractical and stubborn and delusional, but you’re on a mission, remember? Write what you want to write, write well and write often. Cry when you have to, swear a lot and try not to aim that thing at yourself, okay?

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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A.S. King’s short fiction has appeared in a lot of great journals and has been nominated for Best New American Voices. Her first young adult novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs, was published by Flux in February 2009 and was an ALA Best Books for Young Adults pick, a Cybils Award finalist and an Indie Next List pick for teens. Her next novel, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, is due in October 2010 from Knopf. Learn more about A.S. at her website www.as-king.com.

This post originally appeared on Red Room.

ON REJECTION: The Long and Whining Road*

by Necee Regis

*Okay, I admit I didn’t come up with this blog title on my own. I stole it from a lecture that writer Bob Shacochis recently gave at Bennington College in Vermont: “REJECTION; A GIFT OF SCHADENFREUDE (or, The Long and Whining Road).”

While visiting Bob and his wife in Tallahassee last weekend, I learned that Bob has just completed a new afterword for The Immaculate Invasion, his chronicle of the 1994 military intervention in Haiti. The book is to be republished this year, and I asked if he’d be interested in doing an interview for Beyond The Margins.

“Sure,” he said. “But read this first.” He plopped the REJECTION document on the dining room table and disappeared into his office.

I was confused. Bob was writing about rejection? His first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1985, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. The rest of his resume is filled with publications and prizes, for his fiction and non-fiction work. But in the rough and tumble publishing world, as in dating, looking “good on paper” never tells the whole story.

In 1999, when Shacochis’ longtime editor and friend walked away from the business, he decided to leave his publishing house, Viking. Then “something unimaginable happened.” Penguin, the other half of Viking publishing, took all his books out of print. All of them! It took him two “very demoralizing years” to get the rights back to his own books.

Of course this hasn’t kept him from a new project, a novel-in-progress that at 630 pages sits on a shelf in his living room, as tall as a wedding cake.

To be clear, Shacochis isn’t one who sits around thinking about rejection. The Bennington lecture was “an opportunity to think and write about issues I otherwise wouldn’t think or write about because they get in the way [of writing].”

After reading his lecture, with several examples of editors who rejected books that went on to become literary triumphs, I described to Shacochis a scenario where a friend had a brief face-to-face critique with an agent who declared her protagonists as “smug” and “superficial.” What would he say to that?

“That person is very lucky they didn’t have to wait eight months for the same response. There’s plenty of time to be a crybaby when your reviews come out. In the meantime, you move ahead with fierce determination,” he said.

He speaks from experience.

“How would you like to be called an idiot in the pages of the New York Times Book Review?” he wrote in the Bennington document. “It happens. How would you like your mother to phone you up crying, as mine did, because she had just read a front page review of your latest work in the Washington Post Book World that labeled you a coward and a man consumed by hate?”

Um, no thank you. Then again, it’s hard for me to imagine Bob as a man consumed by hate, especially as I watched him cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his coffee steaming on the counter. Ornery? Maybe. But consumed by hate? Ridiculous.

“It’s not a hobby for weak people,” he said. He turned the bacon, letting it crisp. ‘It’s not an environment for anyone with ambivalence about their goals in writing. You’re not competing with other thin-skinned people. It’s a competition with Margaret Atwood, with John Updike, with Barbara Kingsolver. If you want space for an audience you have to push them aside—or stand next to them.”

I opened my mouth to ask a question. Closed it.

“Writing takes the same concentration that an Olympic athlete needs.” He sat to eat and read his email. I turned back to the document on the table.

“And this particular avenue of learning never ends, because the rejection never ends. It will always be a part of your writing life. Always. You don’t get used to it, you learn to endure, you insist on survival, and you keep in mind that living well isn’t the best revenge. Writing well is the best revenge.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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Necee Regis is a frequent contributor to the travel and food sections of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Her writing has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times, American Way Magazine, Spirit Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and the literary journal, Tin House. Her subjects are food and travel, and everything around the edges of these topics.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Margins.