Licorice-flavored Brain Slugs and Faulkner

*Warning: This week's post is NSFW due to language. (In other words, it's J's turn!)

I have the Pod to myself this week. A is off giving a tour of an uncharted world. M has a queue of characters lined up for therapy. So this week you, dear readers, have to contend with the Resident Evil. Muwahahahahahaha!!!

What shall we discuss? Autopsy procedures? Crime scene screw ups? Sadistic serial killers and the women who love them? My hatred for the color pink? All of these are worthy topics but I'd actually like to offer up a bit of an explanation behind something that has been mentioned a few times on the blog already. If you read A's post in which she bared her writerly soul (and you should), then you undoubtedly read the following quote from yours truly:

"Pull your head out of your ass. Trust the story. Trust yourself, and WRITE, damn it!"

Yes, I said this. Yes, I stand behind it. I even have a version of it taped to my laptop as a reminder. While the meaning behind the statement is obvious, I still feel the need to explain how this simple phrase has become the unofficial official motto of the Ninja Peas.

It all started about a year or so ago when M was having a minor meltdown as all writers have from time to time. We all reach a point in a project where we hate everything we've written, everything we're currently writing, and everything we're going to write. In short, self-doubt slithers in like an alien slug, crawls undetected up our spines and burrows deep into our brains until we wake up one morning and question everything we've ever done, thought, planned, or plotted, and all we have left is a sudden and inexplicable love of elevator music, licorice jelly beans, and Faulkner. (If you know me then you know I detest all three. Yes, a former English major doesn't like Faulkner. Oh, the horror.) In an effort to help my friend and writing partner, I offered the best advice I could give...in my own way, of course. She has since passed this along to A and thus the unofficial official Ninja Pea motto was born.

Motto on J's laptop

Now this may sound like a bunch of self-aggrandizing bullshit. It's not. I'm fully aware of my insignificant place in the publishing world, and in the universe as a whole. However, I do know a thing or two about self-doubt and how it can kill a writer. So I'd like to offer up a little bit of hard-earned wisdom, not because I feel the need to stroke my own ego, but because if I can soften the blows for someone else (especially my Peas) then I will. No one can spare any writer the hard knocks. Those come with the territory and must be experienced. That's reality. But that doesn't mean you have to face them unprepared.

1. Pull your head out of your ass. Basically, as writers who actually want to see our names on bookstore shelves, we can't afford to have an obscured view of the publishing world. We can't have romanticized ideas of what it means to be a writer. We don't lock ourselves in a room for a few hours and fart out a manuscript. We write. We edit. We rewrite. We break down. We cry. We wail and gnash our teeth. We curl into blubbering balls of goo. It's normal. Writing is work...and yes, it's fucking hard work. It's not easy to live in your own head with imaginary people in a fantasy land for hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. But it is easy to get caught up in the minutiae of plotting, character arcs, and world building and forget to actually move the story forward by throwing words at the page. We have to pull our heads out of our asses and remember why we do this to ourselves so that when the self-doubt slugs creep into our brains and start doing the Electric Slide to elevator music we can blast them with AC/DC. Self-doubt slugs hate AC/DC.

2. Trust the story. The story knows where it needs to go. It's your job as the writer to guide it and make sure it's hitting certain check points. This is where the fucking hard work comes into play because you may not know all the check points. Yes, you've planned them out in advance but as often happens, the story wants to go in new directions. Don't fight it. Let it happen. Everything can be fixed in the rewrite phase, which by the way is more fucking hard work. Let the story do the Macarena. Unleash the screaming monkeys. Just don't stop throwing words at the page.

3. Trust yourself... This is the hardest part for many writers, thanks to the self-doubt slugs. Those little buggers feed on licorice jelly beans and leave slimy black residue in their wake. This residue eats away at the brain and causes the writer to question her ability to not only tell a story but to even form a coherent sentence. The slime cripples. Every writer has a different way of combating the slime. For me, walking away is the best defense. When the slime reaches critical mass, I shut down the laptop and walk away. I close up shop and spend a day or two on the couch either reading or watching Disney movies. Self-doubt slugs hate it when we read. Books are salt and it shrivels the slugs and dries the slime to a flaky and easily vacuumed powder. Disney movies are also great for this and not as big of a time investment as a book for when you're in a deadline crunch. Oh, deadlines...slugs love them. Have a liberal supply of salt handy.

As I Lay Dying
(Oh, dear gods, kill me now.
Don't make me read this crap!
Salt! I need the fucking salt!)

4. ...and WRITE, damn it! This is self-explanatory. Throw words at the page. They don't have to be good words. Those come in the rewriting phase. But you can't rewrite what you don't have. The self-doubt slugs are going to try to turn you into Faulkner. They will try to make you write like this:

"The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision." - (As I Lay Dying 3.2)

Do. Not. Listen. To. The. Slugs. They. LIE! This is not good writing. This is the work of an overrated hack. (Yes, I said hack.) Just write the path is straight, worn by years of foot traffic, and cuts across the cotton field. BUT only if it's important to the story! Move the action. Move the characters. Move the story forward. Don't get caught up in the minutiae.

The first draft should be dirty and gritty and raw. You clean and polish and cook it later. The best way to combat the slugs is to write quickly and not give them time to burrow into your brain. Once they've become entrenched, they're hard to get out.

So... Pull your head out of your ass. Trust the story. Trust yourself, and WRITE, damn it!

Peas out,

J

Alexis Bares Her Writerly Soul

Today I'm opening myself up. I'm going to share with you a writing process in which I'm currently submerged. I'm sharing the good and the bad... and the embarrassing. This process has been arduous, uplifting, depressing, at times overwhelming. It has taken research, planning, a willful refusal to give up, and a certain inclination toward OCD. The process to which I refer:
Submitting Your Work.

In early March of this year, I completed {for the sixth time... don't judge me} my manuscript. It's something I'm proud of {most days} and something that, despite my best efforts, refuses to let me give up on it. {I've written and re-written it over several years, learning for the first four re-writes, then fixing my mistakes and paying for my hardheadedness for the next two}. I realize that as my first novel its chances for failure are high. But I truly believe it has potential to be something great. I'm passionate about this story, and I believe I'll have readers who feel the same.
My only hurdle? 
Translating that passion into something I can convince agents and editors to invest in.

So, in July 2011, I attended Thrillerfest with my fellow Peas, where I pitched my story to a number of agents. It was an incredibly intense experience.

Now, I'm the first to admit, I can get in my own way when I'm speaking about anything important to me. No matter how much I prepare, no matter how well I know what I want to say, inevitably, in the moment I'm supposed to speak, my emotions go on attack. Nerves build nests in my throat. Adrenaline sparks behind my eyes, short-circuiting my brain so that the message meant to pass to my tongue comes through static, and falls jumbled off my lips. My heart climbs toward the nerve nests like a cat hunting a bird, as an evil voice starts running commentary on scenarios, all negative, of how this will play out. I scramble to ignore all of it -- to remember the wording I worked for hours to perfect in the hope that I can salvage it from the scraps I've already spewed into the open air...

But somehow, on that day, after one or two flubs and desperate scrambles {that still resulted in requests for partials, thankfully} I got my shit together. By the end of the two hours, having seen a total of twelve agents, I had ten requests for pages, and two requests for the full manuscript. It was exciting. Thrilling.
...Terrifying.

I had never had this much success in pitching my book before. I'd submitted queries for version three or four back in 2008, but I'd known they'd fail not long after I sent them out {thanks to the criticisms of members at AbsoluteWrite}. And fail they did. But that was 2008. I'd been through several revisions and one very deep self-relfection-inducing writerly-wake-up-call since then. I know now the importance of a synopsis -- for myself as much as for the pitch -- and how the hell to describe my story in a single paragraph. {And hearing, in person, those Agents' reactions to certain parts of my pitch was a huge help in perfecting it}. And it seemed to make all the difference.

So, in August, after some major polishing to the requested pages {just, ya know, to be sure} I sent off my work to the first ten agents.

Over the next few months, I racked up six rejections. I took it in stride {for the most part}. Each rejection praised my characters, the world I'd created, and, most importantly, my writing.
...With the exception of one, whom I could only describe -- even before the rejection -- as scary and kindof a *insert bad word here*. This agent addressed me as MISTER Lampley, then had the audacity to say I was rejected for my writing, which, based on his excellent attention to detail *I'm being sarcastic* he definitely did not skim *still being sarcastic*. {Like I said, "for the most part"}.

They just couldn't risk a chance on the story because of the market.

Now, I'll be honest, even though I was prepared for rejections, and even though they were {all things considered} really positive ones, I started feeling rather dejected. How do you fix that? Tell me there's a gaping hole in the plot or you hate a character. I can work with that. But how do you fix, "I loved it, but the market..."? I still had a re-working of the end of my book to deal with, but instead of dealing with it, I slumped. Despite my rock-solid conviction {built over years of work and dreams} that I was doing what I love, that the hard work was worth the reward I still couldn't see on the horizon -- I started questioning myself. I let doubt in. And that doubt led to several months of inactivity. I started a couple stories, momentarily filled with the excitement of a new project. But I never got past the first few pages.

And then, on February 28, M sent me an email.
Subject: "Do this!"
Inside was a link to a contest, for which the deadline was just two weeks away. The contest was open to those with a completed manuscript in any genre, hosted by an agent who, I knew, was on my list of potentials. I still had those edits for the last chapters on my to-do list, and wasn't feeling totally confident, given that I would need to go through the entire thing for proofing with M's notes {which she'd nearly finished on the entire manuscript} but I knew the opportunity shouldn't be passed up.

So I asked her the one question I needed to know: "But is my book actually finished?"

To which M responded {in short}:
"Alexis, my writing partner, my dear, my friend. I do this with utter compassion and love.  *slaps you once firmly across the face* Please, wake up!
I mean... you've finished it 212 times!  ...  Make one push through for proofreads -- tighten and clarify just a tad (something you could certainly do by March 15 if you set your mind to it -- I've seen you accomplish much more in shorter time).  ...  And in the immortal words of Jeannie Holmes... Pull your head out of your ass. Trust the story. Trust yourself, and WRITE damn it!"

Whether it was the metaphorical slap in the face, or Michelle's innate confidence in me, or Jeannie's immortal words of writerly wisdom... I did get my head out of my ass and write.

It took almost the full two weeks and one "sick day" to finish the chapters and proof/edit the entire thing, but I did it. And I felt really good. Scared. Nervous. But good. I was once again confident in my ability as a writer. I entered the manuscript into the contest, and, since I'd finally reached the milestone of completion {again}, I sent the manuscript to the two agents who'd requested it at Thrillerfest.

The contest winner has since been announced, and it wasn't me. I've heard back from one of the two agents with my full manuscript, and am waiting, with hope, for the other's response.

In the meantime, with hope for the future but being mindful to stay realistic, I had begun the exhaustive task of writing out my Agent List. I went through my Writer's Digest Guide to Agents {not the actual title} and wrote out all the Agents I could potentially submit to, including what they were looking for and how well that fit with what I wrote, where to contact them, submission guidelines, etc. Though I started the list more than a month ago, I'm still not finished. I wanted to be sure I picked the right agents and agencies for me, so I've been going back through the list, looking up each agency, and gathering more/up-to-date information on each one. It's a time-consuming process. And an interesting study in how quickly my emotions can change. Looking through agency submission guidelines and agent bios has become a reflection of the entire process. One agent bio will have me thinking I'm sure to be exactly what they want. Another will have me thinking my big break will be with that other book I've started. A third will have me questioning why, on earth, I'm even going to all this trouble in the first place.

But if this process has taught me nothing else, it's that this flux of emotion and belief are just that: fluctuations. You're gonna have your ups and downs. It's a roller coaster. And it's up to you to decide if you want to take the ride. No matter how down I get, no matter how hard things are or how bleak my prospects look sometimes, I still want to take that ride. Even if all I gain is the memory of the experience {and a solid metaphorical slap}.


*Peas Out*