Category Archives: Lessons

Writing Around Life

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You have to write every day, if you want to be a writer.

Everyone says that.

Okay, maybe not everyone, but enough people to make it seem likjune-children-s-day-calendar-symbol-white-cube-41085882e everyone.

But what about life? You know, living? Doing the living stuff, like sleeping and eating and earning money and taking care of the kids / elderly parents / needy loved ones. What about that stuff?
I began this writing adventure exactly three years ago when I finally discovered I had a story I wanted to tell. At that time I was a senior consultant with a hard-working wife, two adult children, the greatest granddaughter ever born, a large group of friends and a serious passion for nature photography.

When does a guy write?

I’m a morning person so I moved the morning up a couple hours. The alarm started its annoying buzz at 5 a.m. Not that bad for a morning person, especially in the summer when it’s lighting up out there at 5 a.m. During the winter, it got harder.

I kept this up until last year when we experienced a family health crisis. I found I could not write at any hour, much less 5 a.m. Two years and three books in the computer, and I couldn’t write!

So I stopped and dealt with life. Sometimes you do that.

Was I less a writer than I had been the previous two years? No. I wasn’t producing stories, but I was a writer with more important things to do.

When the crisis eased, I found I still couldn’t write until my wife asked me to take it up again. I told her I just couldn’t focus enough to make things up, i.e., write fiction.

Fine, she said. Write something else. I did. Ironically, or maybe not, I turned to working on a memoir about my two years in Southeast Asia during the Viet-Nam War. That is, I went back to doing what I knew: Reporting.

The project took a year — much longer than I expected — but it’s done.

Am I back to writing fiction at 5 a.m.? Nope. Still cleaning up the memoir mess. (Doing the maps took two weeks alone. I devote at least half a day a week writing customized pitches to agents and carefully filing their rejects.)

So am I a writer or not?

Yeah, I’m a writer. Sometimes life intrudes, and you need to clean up a mess or two.

I’ll be back to writing four to six hours a day like the old days, but I’ve already decided that I won’t be doing the 5 a.m. wakeup call again. Life is too short, and I’ve found other things I can trim.

Write on.

What No One Tells You About Publishing

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I suspect I am like many aspiring authors. I overindulge in research on how to  get published, lessons learned by established authors and the like.

So when I came upon Curtis Sittenfeld‘s post on BuzzFeed entitled 24 Things No One Tells You about Book Publishing, I immediately read it and liked it.

rectangle-38507_1280She focused more on human behavior and less on nuts and bolts. Which is not to say she didn’t touch on a few nuts, like these two.

  • Blurbs achieve almost nothing, everyone in publishing knows it, and everyone in publishing hates them. [I knew it. I just knew it. None of my favorite authors seem to share my taste in books.]
  • But a really good blurb from the right person can, occasionally, make a book take off. [So, I guess she’s thinking Oprah or Stephen King.]

But what I really liked was her attitude:

  • Sometimes good books sell well; sometimes good books sell poorly; sometimes bad books sell well; sometimes bad books sell poorly. A lot about publishing is unfair and inscrutable. [Emphasis mine.] But…

  • …you don’t need anyone else’s approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing — of sitting by yourself, figuring out which words should go together [I love that.] to express whatever it is you’re trying to say.

    Brava, Curtis. Useful and comforting at the same time. Just what aspiring authors need. 

Editors & (Crushed) Egos

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A week spent reviewing my copy editor’s suggestions reminded me how painful — and valuable — editing can be for a writer.

I feel for writers who haven’t been edited hundreds and hundreds of times, as I was during my journalism career. Those 20-plus years of daily edits grew quite a rhino hide over my tender ego.

I can still recall the pain of those blue pencil marks — my perfect prose slashed by a heartless editor who may have given my story a five-minute read. ( Before the advent of red and blue underlined Track Changes in MS Word or its equivalent, we used blue pencils on buff copy paper.)
blue pencil art

Old fashioned blue-pencil editing

But, my old copy editor would say, ‘It’s about the reader, dummy.’

It was — and is.

So when I opened the copy-edited files of my forthcoming memoir*, I viewed the tracked changes with more interest than dismay.

These marks were going to make the book better, the reader’s job easier, and me look brighter.

Just for the record, the manuscript runs 77,600 words over 330 pages. The edits: Only 1,686. That’s only five edits per page. And most of those were Oxford commas, a new thing for me.

So, on behalf of my readers who are spared those five mistakes per page, I say thank you, Sylvia, for the great editing job.

* Much more about that later, but it’s called “HIDDEN WAR: A Memoir of America’s Secret Crusade in Laos.”