Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

It used to be that, for first-time writers, the best way to break into the publishing world was through writing nonfiction. Yet without a platform, today it’s difficult for writers to find traction in the market, and without a recognizable name, their personal stories, even if wonderful, are less likely to be purchased.

Let’s do an informal survey on nonfiction books.

• What are you interested in reading in the nonfiction realm?
• What have you liked in the past and why?
• What would you like to see published?
• What holes are out there, and what types of writers should fill them?
• How helpful has nonfiction been to your personal life?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

I’ve always loved memoirs. I’m interested in the personal, how and why people do things, and so a memoir provides me an opportunity to examine the writer’s life through his or her eyes. I even wrote a spiritual memoir several years ago and felt honored when one of my readers said, “I really appreciate how you just tell the story and let me draw my own conclusions.”

Testimonies have been a mainstay of Christian witnessing and publishing. Perhaps the most famous early book was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, which detailed the lives and deaths of the early Christians. More modern Christians made Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor, the story of her husband’s martyrdom with four others in Ecuador, a best-seller in 1957.

A memoir allows the writer to recount events through his or her own understanding. While you can argue with the author about what his or her life meant, you really can’t argue with what happened to that person. In his 90 Minutes in Heaven, author and survivor Don Piper doesn’t even bother trying to explain why he had no vital signs for an hour and a half. He believes he went to heaven, and while it doesn’t make logical sense, since we weren’t there, how can we argue with him?

Memoirs are of perennial interest to publishers, though their popularity can wax and wane with the public. The secret is the quality of the writing. Memoirs aren’t the same as an inspirational story of narrative nonfiction that recounts the events in someone’s life. Memoirs are more about the writer’s interior terrain rather than about the events that occured. What changed in the person from the start of the memoir to its conclusion is the question the book answers.

Some of the best memoirs pull no punches in exposing the author’s life. I enjoyed Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God, and many have commented about the strength of Mary DeMuth’s Thin Places. The author’s ability to express the near-unthinkable makes these works of special interest and value to a reader trying to make sense out of life. (My favorite memoir of all is not from the Christian canon, but it reflects Christian truth: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy.)

Long ago my honors English teacher said, “I don’t know why you kids bother to read fiction. You should read nonfiction. Not only is it even more amazing than fiction, but it’s also true.”

Reading memoirs, particularly spiritual ones, enables me to catch a glimpse of the unusual way God works in the lives of his followers. It encourages me, gives me ideas about how God might be working in my life, and shows me that each individual relates to life in a different, and often entertaining, way. Difficult circumstances remind me of people’s resilience and how I can trust God with my life, too.

And they’re frequently really great reads.

What memoirs have you enjoyed? Why?

What made you chose them in the first place?

What do you look for in a spiritual memoir?

Are you drawn to a famous person’s book more than an unknown with a fascinating, true story to tell?

Location: On the Road–Heading toward North Dakota

Weather: Sunny and hot

Will someone remind me that the next time I blog I need to write about happy things? Why is it I am always coming up with such upbeat themes as “Kiss of Death,” “QueryFail,” “Worst Case Scenario,” and “Career Killers”? I think someone needs to stage an intervention.

Oh well. . .

For the final day of this cheery little series on career killers, I want to touch on a subject that is connected to yesterday’s speed writing blog. Today’s career killer is impatience. If you’ve been in this industry long, you know that nothing will cause you to throw up your hands and walk away faster than impatience. If you are used to instant gratification, this is not the career for you. If you are in the habit of developing a plan and having each piece fall into place on your schedule, this is not the career for you. If you’d like to make a six-figure income right out of the starting gate–you guessed it–this is not the career for you.

As agents we talk a lot about career planning, but we always do so with a humble spirit because we know the truth of the old saying taken from Robert Burns poem,  To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men/ Gang aft agley,/ An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/ For promis’d joy!”

Yep, we know about the best laid plans when it comes to publishing.

Consider this comment I had from an editor a few weeks ago: “Let’s take things step by step. She should finish her manuscript and submit that. Then I’ll consider a proposal from her for a new contract.” Or, even worse, one I’m hearing more often these days, “We don’t want to look at a new proposal until the book is released and we can track sales for a few months.”

When you are trying to build a career not to mention building a readership, nothing is more frustrating than hearing that your publisher is taking a wait-and-see approach. If a proposal can’t even be submitted until the previous book is published and performing well, chances are that there will be more than a year between books. Frustrating.

But here’s the rub–if the writer gets impatient and decides to try to find another publisher, he runs the risk of breaking any momentum and continuity that may be building. A change of publishers needs to be strategic move, done at the right time and for the right reasons. During the building process the author and his agent have many issues to consider, and it may take an inordinate amount of patience. If the truth be known, career building is far more in the hands of God than in the hands of humans.

I love the verse from Ecclesiastes 7:8, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride.” Good advice for those of us in this crazy book industry.

Okay, now I need your help. What kind of happy topics do I need to blog about next time? Puppies and publishing? Chubby babies and equally plump advances? I seriously need an intervention.

Location: Books & Such Central Valley Office

Weather: Hot, hot, hot.

Yesterday was the 50th Anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s the perfect time to look at becoming a master of the craft of writing.

This week we’re going to examine some of the career killing mistakes a writer makes by being sloppy, writing too fast or being impatient. Fun topic, right? But an important topic– one that can make all the difference between success or failure. Today I want to talk about the most important thing of all for a successful writing career– mastery of the craft. Too many of the queries and proposals we see are not anywhere close to publishable yet. Some writers expect to open their word processing program, start writing and sell that very first book. It’s like a kid getting his first set of pipe wrenches and setting off to get a job as a construction plumber. You can’t skip the apprenticeship.

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book, The Outliers, where he focuses on what he calls the 10,000-hour rule. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin as follows:

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Gladwell tells success story after success story, each time adding up the hours the person invested before bursting onto the scene– a seeming overnight success. His analysis is eye-opening. I have a number of authors who also burst onto the scene seeming to be overnight successes. Jill Eileen Smith made the bestseller list with her very first novel, Michal and her books continue to rack up impressive sales figures. An overnight success? Jill spent twenty years writing and rewriting Michal. And that wasn’t twenty years on and off; she was a committed writer/ researcher. Jill put in her 10,000 hours many times over.

Lori Benton is a new client for me. Though I knew her from comments she often made on our blog, she came to my attention as the winner of the Novel Matters Audience with an Agent contest. As I read her entry I couldn’t believe she was an as-yet-unpublished author. Her writing was exquisite— so sure, so well-developed. Her manuscript exhibited complete mastery of the art of writing historical fiction. If she’d been writing long enough to achieve mastery why hadn’t she been submitting? Why didn’t she have an agent? It had me scratching my head. It wasn’t until I uncovered her story that I began to understand.

Here’s what she wrote in a blog interview with Romance Writers on the Journey:

“I wrote my first story when I was nine, and my interest in writing stories persisted in fits and starts throughout childhood and my teen years. But it wasn’t until 1991, when I was in my early twenties, that I realized the time had come to write the novel I’d always wanted to write. Just to see if I could do it. I did. It was a Celtic fantasy, and it was very long. The next logical step seemed to be… could I find a Christian publisher interested in publishing a massive fantasy tome? I never did, but I received enough positive feedback from editors who loved my writing that I didn’t give up. I set the fantasy tome aside and moved on to the next story. After two years of serious work on that first novel I joined a local critique group and began to get feedback from those ahead of me in the process, and mega doses of encouragement. In 1994 I joined Oregon Christian Writers and began attending their summer conferences. I gained a much broader sense of the world of Christian publishing.”

“Turning 30 is a milestone for most women, but my 30th year was a bit more of a milestone than I bargained for. I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma in March of 1999. I decided to take those treatment months off from writing and focus on getting well. After the “all clear” in November of 1999, I intended to jump back into working on the novel I had set aside in March. An editor was interested in it and wanted to see it when I was finished. The chances of the cancer coming back were slim. I had every reason to press on and immerse myself again in the joy of writing. But that’s not what happened.”

“I’m sure everyone reading this knows chemotherapy has side effects. I experienced a number of them, but in the end I felt I’d gotten off easy… until the months started passing, and very little writing got done. And what did get done was joyless, frustrating. Concentration proved elusive. Plot threads frayed out of my grasp. I’d spend hours and hours researching and promptly forget everything I’d learned and have to do it over again. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was suffering from chemo fog.”

“When I experienced a lifting of the chemo fog nearly five years after my treatment, I found my writing process was both rusty and radically changed from how I approached writing a novel before cancer. I used to write in a linear fashion, Chapter One thru to The End. When I began Kindred, I knew next to nothing about the time period I had chosen to set it in, the late 18th century south, and I couldn’t see where the story should start. Having gained a healthy aversion to spinning my wheels in a mess of words that won’t behave, and knowing the importance of maintaining the joy of writing—joy in the process of sitting here and putting words on the screen—I decided to simply write what I could see. This turned out to be a chunk of scenes near the middle of the novel. I kept on that way, writing whatever scenes were speaking to me the loudest, the most beguiling, even if I wasn’t sure where they would fit, or if they would fit, doing whatever it took to keep me eager to come to the computer each day. I was reconditioning myself to daily work, and knew it was, for me, most important to find and maintain joy, not worry so much about what the end result might look like. I had to prove to myself that I could still finish a novel.”

“I did finish Kindred, four years later. But that was only the beginning.”

When Lori’s debut novel is published it will look to some as if this writer just burst on the scene. Nothing could be further from the truth. Count the years. Even with her hiatus from cancer, Lori achieved her 10,000 hours many times over. And the challenges she personally faced give depth and richness to her fiction.

Mastery. This has got to be goal, not publication. You don’t want to forever be making excuses about your “early books.” You want to be one of those writers who burst on the scene to critical acclaim.

So what do you think? How do you measure up to Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule? Or do you believe true genius does exist– a talent that doesn’t require an apprenticeship?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

As I was saying in my blog post yesterday, you can communicate not only inappropriate items to your publisher but, in addition, you can communicate too often. I’m in the middle of straightening out a publisher-author fracas because the publisher is just plain weary of hearing from the author. Every day, apparently, the author had new questions to ask about marketing/publicity, when the next contract might be offered, how the last manuscript turned in was received, etc.

The publisher, weary of being barraged with emails, came to me and said, “We give up. We’ve tried to be responsive, but really, we can’t devote this amount of time to answering one author’s questions.”One of the great aspects of having an agent is that the publisher depends on the agent at such relationally-defining moments  to step in and sort through the mess. Because, trust me, the publisher and the author have very different views of how the communication misfired.

The sad truth is that some agents won’t try to sort through the tangle. He or she believes the agent’s job ends when the contract is signed. At our agency, we believe the agent’s job is never done, even when no more money is coming from a project. We want to oversee the author’s career, and that includes taking care of relationship snafus.

What can we learn from my client’s mistake? That the publisher does not appreciate hearing from authors too often. If an author sends a nonstop stream of e-mails, even if they’re to different people at the publishing house, that author soon becomes thought of as a problem.

The author is seen either as way too insecure (and needing too many assurances) or way too pushy (and hoping that being pushy will result in more marketing/publicity or editorial feedback). But the publisher will hold an author at arm’s length in such instances, and the publisher will always win because the author needs the publisher more than the publisher needs the author.

If you think you’re over-communicating, consult with your agent, or ask your editor if the in-house folks think they’re hearing too often from you. Let it be known that you want to be sensitive to how much communication should take place.

If you have lots of issues to clarify, collect them over several days, put them in categories (marketing, publicity, editorial issues) and then send emails targeted to the best person for each category.

Can you think of a time someone has over-communicated with you? (Like maybe your toddler…) How did you respond? What would have made the relationship work better at that point? How might that apply to an author’s relationship with her or his publisher?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Since most of us will be out grilling, watching parades, and oohing and ahhing over fireworks on our grand Independence Day, this blog post will remain up  through Tuesday. Just so no one misses out, you know.

I’ve been thinking about an author’s relationship with his or her publisher recently, and it occurred to me that some of my clients have learned how to successfully maintain that relationship the hard way. So, to save some of you from those faux paus, lean in and listen (er, read) carefully.

Once a writer signs a publishing contract, everyone involved is dizzy with happiness. The editor, the marketing people, the sales reps, the author, and the agent are all like teenagers who have just met the dreamiest person–who is going on a date with them! The future looks positively, giddily full of  promise.

Because the writer feels (rightly so) affirmed in his or her writing ability and in the marketability of the project, everyone at the publishing house is like a new best friend to dream about the future with.

That perception is right…almost.

The folks at the publishing house are not your new best friends…they’re your new best colleagues.

So what does that mean? Here are six ways authors can show themselves presumptuous in the relationship:

• Do not assume that what you say to one person stays with that person. (This is not Las Vegas.) Everyone at the publisher’s works daily with everyone else. Okay, that seems obvious, but think about the repercussions of, say, complaining to your editor that the person who wrote your back cover copy is lame-brained. Why, that  might be the individual the editor has lunch with almost every day. Hmm, your comment might not go over well.
• Do not deride any other books your publisher has chosen to produce. Okay, so you think some very-famous-but-can’t-write-his-way-out-of-a-paper-bag author shouldn’t have been given the chance to show off his lack of skills–let alone have a mega marketing budget. Here’s the thing: That author might well be providing just the infusion of cash the publisher needs to be able to produce your book, and to pay for employee’s salaries.
• Do not confess that you don’t read any books in the genre you’re writing in. You have just proclaimed that you’re writing with blinders on. That you don’t even particularly like your genre. Especially if you admit this to your editor, red flags will start snapping in the wind for her. Oh, oh, you don’t know the “rules” for your genre; how can you produce the best manuscript? Just how much work will she have to do to pull you from the brink of disaster?
• Do not assume your publishing house will understand that you missed your deadline because you received a bigger advance for another project after signing a contract with this house. This is not a “family affair”; you have acted unprofessionally.
• Do not divulge that your wild weekend left you debilitated on Monday and unable to work. Sure, you think the person you’re talking to on the phone or writing an email to might have experienced a similar weekend. But you don’t know. And just because they did doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to have gone and done likewise. That individual might be offended–and that surely can’t do your image any good. Unless, of course, your book is about what a bad boy or girl you are. (Now, that’s an unlikely scenario.)

By the way, my clients haven’t fallen off of all of these cliffs, but I have seen other authors do so. Even if some of these scenarios seem far-fetched, I assure you they are not.

Ultimately, remember this: You have entered into a professional relationship. And while writing is a highly personal experience and many people at the publishing house will learn lots about you as they work with you, every one of them will always protect the publishing house over you. Always.

What errors have you seen other writers commit in relationships with publishing staff?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

This week I’ve touched briefly on significant impediments to writers being able to produce quality work. Physical ailments, such as hand problems and blindness, can be frustrating for writers with the urge to create. Emotional impediments and addictions tossed into the mix of ailments can be nearly impossible to overcome. Yet for writers with an impelling voice or story to tell, such hurdles made a challenging life just a little more difficult; their stories still got told.

For those of us with less vexing circumstances, healthier lives, and fewer demons, writing still can be full of obstacles.

How do you encourage yourself on days of discouragement?

How do you keep the spark of creativity flowing?

What steps do you take to enable your body to physically handle the stress of sitting in a computer chair hour upon hour, day after day, possibly forever?

How do you get past barriers to the pure joy of telling a story in your unique voice?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

I grew up in a community of folks who knew how to party well on Saturday nights. Charming, funny, clever and lovely, they nearly all enjoyed a drink or two. And then they thought themselves  funnier, more clever and devastatingly attractive. I learned early to distrust alcohol and the words of people even “slightly under the weather.”

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter Thompson and Lillian Hellman all were famous for their “alternate reality” ingestion while creating literature. I’m sure we all know more authors who had a problem with drink and drugs. Did it help their creativity?

Hemingway notoriously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Is it possible these talented writers needed the alcohol to get them past the personal horrors from which their writing came?

And is it only alcohol and drug abuse that’s the problem?

Kay Redfield Jamison detailed her life with manic-depression in her well-known book, An Unquiet Mind. I’ve never forgotten, however, how she described her reluctance to take lithium because while it moderated her “lows” it also took the edge off her manic “highs,” thus leaving her feeling less creative. (Nowadays she knows to take her medicine and feels she leads a more productive life.)

Hemingway and Fitzgerald succeeded in writing fine works of literature because they had an uncommonly devoted editor: Maxwell Perkins. Famous for his uncanny ability to find the glorious writing among the rough, Perkins nursed a generation of writers through their demons to produce quality work. Among other heroic activities, Perkins induced Thomas Wolfe to cut 90,000 words out of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

Where does creativity come from? Does it need a chemical “start?” What types of non-addictive behavior  have you observed or used to encourage your own creativity or writing life?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Pity F. Scott Fitzgerald, a talented Ivy Leaguer who fell in love with a beautiful Southern belle of exceptional creativity and beauty with a terrific name: Zelda.

Their flamboyant life during the Jazz Age–a term Fitzgerald coined himself–served as backdrop to some of the finest writing done during that period. But the toll of trying to pay the bills and keep up with a wife diagnosed with schizophrenia drove Fitzgerald to the brink of emotional breakdown himself.

Depression, in particular, seems to be a frequent problem for writers. Someone told me once “depression is anger turned inwards,” and with a career based in rejection and on the hope of acceptance, writers would seem particularly vulnerable. Among noted writers who struggled with depression were L. M. Montgomery, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.

Some of the problem may stem from the nature of the job–irregular hours, isolation, lack of exposure to sunlight, little money.

How can writers cope with emotional impediments, days in which just turning on the computer seems like too much?  Does the creative gift go hand in hand with emotional imbalance?

For many, like me, the act of writing helps pull us out of the “downer” times. Being able to put into words on paper the feelings coursing through me helps. Often I only figure out what I really feel once it’s written down. Indeed, journaling is a common tool psychologists use to help people to process the good and bad experiences in their lives.

Moderation and balance, along with professional help, can help to stabilize those susceptible to depression or other mental illness. Prayer, a healthy spiritual life and the encouragement of others can go a long way, too. What have you seen work in the lives of creative people to keep them balanced and emotionally healthy?

And before you write anything down, think of five things you’re grateful for.

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Yesterday I wrote about my own challenges with writing; today we’re going to talk about what others have dealt with.

Prior to fifty years ago, blindness was a common problem in many parts of the world. You may not be surprised to know, therefore, that one of the greatest works of English literature  never actually was read by its author.

John Milton wrote his definitive Paradise Lost over a ten-year period in the mid-seventeenth century by dictating to  whomever was available to transcribe–most notably his daughters. They read back his work, and he edited by voice.

Other notable blind writers include Homer, Jorge Luis Borges and Helen Keller. To write blind in the past, you needed someone with a pen in hand or supreme confidence in your touch typing ability.

These days, however, better tools are available, and we can experience Scotty’s attempt to dictate to a computer in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. How many of us snickered when the engineer spoke to a screen and expected it to start typing? Today, such behavior is possible. My physician urged me to purchase voice-activated-software when I first visited with hand problems. “I use it all the time for dictation,” he explained. “It’s a life saver.”

I bought it, I read aloud into the microphone for several hours to acquaint the program with my voice and syntax, and then I went to work.

Forty-five minutes of slow, carefully enunciated syllables produced…three paragraphs. When I read through the work, tapping my toes in my urgency to get moving, nearly every other word was a homonym of misspelling. Obviously my dragon needs further training.

My personal engineer (i.e., husband) assures me technology should be harnessed to serve our needs. I can e-mail my own manuscripts to my Kindle and then listen to the machine read it back with expression commonly found in the most stultifying GPS voice.  Still, it enables me to hear when things don’t sound right and then return to the scene of the verbal crime. I need my eyes to do the work, but being able to listen can ease the strain.

The eye doctor also has weighed in on the use of computers. “Make sure you blink often. Stare into the distance frequently. Get special glasses if need be. And make sure your screen is at the proper height.” Both my Kindle and the computer will allow me to make the letters larger and thus easier to read. If it helps, who cares if the kids laugh.

What else do you do to enable your eyes to work well with your writing life? And hey, make sure you blink once or twice before you comment!