My So-Called Writing Life

Work’s busy, evenings I’m beat, and there’s always a lot to do on the weekends. I write for about an hour each morning before work on weekdays, and for a few hours on weekend mornings. So it’s easy to let slide an aspect of writing life that’s imperative to moving forward: getting published.

It takes an entirely different writing muscle to send out material for publication or agency placement. It doesn’t matter if you’ve attended the most prestigious MFA in creative writing program ever, all that learnin’ won’t help you place your brilliant writing. (Okay, an MFA can get agents’ and publishers’ attention more easily, but that’s another story for another blog post.) It’s after you finish your poem, story, or novel that a new sort of dogged creativity gets tested. Now it’s time to write the perfect query letter, research the agents and/or publishers that seem the best fit for your manuscript, and target the literary mags that best suit your stories. This is a full-time job. It can get immediately disheartening and even the small stuff can throw you off your game.

Recently I looked at my Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my query activity on the novel front, and submissions on the story front. For "A Little Disappeared," the novel I worked-shopped at Grub with Ms. X, I have about five or six queries still out to agents and publishers. I have about eight or ten instances of stories or novel excerpts out to literary journals. Some of these have been out for over a year.

I realize, looking at the sent dates, that there’s a new publishing biz practice. No longer will an agent, publisher, or lit mag guarantee a response. If the answer is no, you may never get a response. I suppose I understand this behavior, as they are getting more and more queries and manuscripts, and have fewer and fewer employees to handle the slush piles. Still, that great big NO meant closure, allowed me to move on to try again somewhere else. Now, with no real NO to work with, I need to remind myself to move on myself after, say, three months.

I always try to stick to a self-imposed schedule: send out a story or query once a week. But, after a few weeks I always fall off the wagon, either because my writing isn’t going well or the rejections become overwhelming. I recently showed a new story to Liz. She had some good ideas, and I rewrote the story. Then had my writing group critique the story. I got a good response and also some great ideas on how to make it better.

So, for the first time in a few months, I’m excited about sending out writing again, and this is bleeding over into trying to again place "A Little Disappeared", and getting back to my so-called writing life.

Muse and the Marketplace Update

I was alerted this week to the workshops I will be attending next week, and I’m happy with the choices:

- Marketplace Panel: The State of the Industry
- Eternal Rocks Beneath: the Relevance of Setting, with Lewis Robinson
- Building Character, with Stephen McCauley

Writing Groups, Conferences, and Critiques

A few posts back I talked about being in a writing group. We’ve met three times now, critiquing a total of a hundred pages each time (from one or two writers) while also discussing publishing topics and trends.

This past week we all got a glimpse of Randy’s new Kindle, and agreed that while Kindles and like-minded applications are convenient and fun, they will never replace the experience of browsing for, buying, and reading a paper bound item with printed text. Also, fellow-writer Stephanie mentioned that she signed up for the Manuscript Mart at Grub Street’s upcoming Muse and the Marketplace conference. During the Manuscript Mart, established editors and agents critique twenty pages of a writer’s work. I’ve been through the Manuscript Mart experience twice now with the first twenty pages of "A Little Disappeared," so I gave Stephanie some advice (don’t meet right before lunch when the editor has low blood sugar) and told her my experiences.

Which are these: the low-blood-sugar editor wasn’t enthusiastic about my writing. She explained that my novel structure bordered on experimental and the prose of my younger narrator read a little flat. I wasn’t prepared for this critique, so I was stymied. Had I been better prepared, I might have been able to ask better questions and get more out of our meeting.

Undaunted, a couple years later I came back with the same pages, newly revised, and signed up for an agent. The agent had a tough reputation but we seemed to hit it off. She liked my writing but had questions about my choices and wanted to know how the story ended. I answered her questions to her satisfaction and came away from the meeting with her business card and firm handshake. A couple months later, after I had revised my manuscript enough to feel comfortable sending it out, I contacted the agent and asked if she would be interested in seeing the complete manuscript. She said yes. I sent it off. After a few months I sent a series of prodding emails. I eventually I got a form rejection back from her agency.

Everybody’s Manuscript Mart experiences vary. I learned that editors are interested mainly in manuscripts they can publish; while agents spread their net wider in terms of knowing which publishers they think would be right for a particular story. There’s a learning curve to the publishing biz, one I haven’t mastered yet. This year I’m attending day one of the Muse and the Marketplace. If I had a manuscript ready, I’d sign up for another agent for a Manuscript Mart critique. Maybe next year.

But so anyway. The writing group meets again in two weeks it’s my turn to bring in pages. What to bring? I haven’t been working on a novel since last October (right around the time I started this blog) so I’ve been revising some stories. I have about five or six candidates for critique, and am excited to get feedback on short-form pieces. This is what I need help with: finishing. I get an idea, I write write write. But my endings are usually crap. And when I realize I’ve written a story with another crap ending, I lose all inspiration. So, I need more eyes to help me with this writing problem. And I need to take suggestions and critiques and actually incorporate them into the stories.

I’m excited about getting back to work on a novel, either starting a new one, or revising an existing one. On the other hand, I wish I could focus on shorter pieces to place more stories in lit mags, getting my name out there more. It’s an ongoing struggle. A compromise has been to try and turn excerpts and outtakes of my novels into stand-alone stories. This too has proved difficult, as I need to come up with frameworks for these sections that don’t always comprise a smooth beginning, middle, and end.

Are you a writer? Have you had similar experiences trying to carve out pieces of longer works? Let me know what works for you. And I’ll let you know how my next group meeting goes.