When the team shows up for its first practice, bleary-eyed, a little flabby, and the look of I’d rather be someplace else on every face, the coach blows the whistle and sends everyone out to run a few laps. Out there on the track it hits every player that he or she is back. As sweat runs down your forehead, stinging your eyes, you become conscious of your stride, your diminished wind, and where you are in the pack. Taking a few laps restores your focus. You begin to think, Oh yeah. This is what I do. Been away too long. Time to suck it up and get back to work.
We’ve all heard it a million times, and said it as much ourselves, writers write. I’m going to embellish a little and say that as a writer, I feel better when I’m writing. It’s healthier for me to write than it is to read about writing, or talk about writing. My guess is that you too are a faithful writer, disciplined to put in a few hours every day, sometimes rising from bed to get a few lines or pages down on paper, even before putting on the coffee. Then, out of nowhere comes a hiatus, a speed bump in your routine. Work can cause it, so can a bad cold, bad news, or even a vacation. When I find myself in literary doldrums I know it’s time to take a few laps, laps characterized by fingers on the keyboard rather than feet on the track.
The best place for me to start stretching and regain my stride is to pick up whatever I was working on before I went AWOL. Since I’m usually busy with two or three things at once, I can pick and choose among them as my starting exercise. I can return to querying agents about a finished book, write new copy into an existing manuscript, or extend my notes for characters, scenes and chapters of a yet-to-be-started manuscript. Whichever one I pick will have me again thinking freshly about my work. Here are some ideas for those few laps.
The first lap. I have two finished novels. Beyond the Boathouse is a suspense/thriller. Dead End File is a mystery. In the publishing industry, these are my products. I know about them and I think they’re great. The problem is that agents and publishers don’t know about them. So job number one is to make them aware of these products – my novels. I task myself to learn what they are looking for. This is learning what the customer wants. Then I deliver the information in the format of their preference. This combined activity is marketing pure and simple. I have an excel spreadsheet for agent queries. For me, a valid first lap would be to browse the sheet and take note of how many agents I’m still waiting to hear from. I’ll probably write a couple “nudge” emails and send them to agents queried 90 days earlier. Next I’ll check some resources like the Agent Query database www.agentquery.com or Bill’s list of mystery agents http://www.wrhammons.com/mystery-book-agents.htm to see who else I can go after. I also like to look at the Independent Booksellers website http://www.indiebound.org for their bestseller and books to watch lists. I seek out books that remind me a lot of my own and then try to find out who agented those books. Once I have identified a potential new agent I’ll check out everything I can find out about him or her. Many author blogs reference their own agents. This is a great place to gain useful insight with minimal time investment. Krista Van Dolzer is an author who interviews agents on her blog. The interviews are excellent for authors. She lists them in alpha order. Check out http://motherwrite.blogspot.com/p/interview-with-agent.html. Putting in a few hours searching for that next agent to query is only a first lap activity if I write a fresh query, tailored to that agent, and submit it.
The second lap in business parlance is new product development. If I’ve been away from a manuscript for a week or two I’ll have to begin by re-reading the last fifty or so pages. The longer the hiatus, the more re-reading is required. I’ll also read my notes and any character biographies I have written about the book, just to get reacquainted. After the reading I’ll look carefully at the scene and chapter I’m in, or about to begin, and I’ll set out to write as many pages as I can. I know before I even start that I will probably rewrite all of this work tomorrow because I’ll think about it in my non-writing hours. When I come to it fresh the next day that thinking will help me fly through the rough stuff improving and expanding it into something that feels right, that works.
The third lap is more R&D than anything else. This is all about the next book, the one that I think about enough that I’ve started jotting down notes about it. I mean that sincerely, jotting down as opposed to writing polished text on the laptop. For jotting I keep a dozen or so 5X8 index cards in my briefcase, in the car, and in whatever book I’m reading at the time. The cards allow me to scribble down any and all ideas that have to do with the new book, the name of a new character or the characteristics of a new character. I might write out a bulleted list of things that are going to happen in a scene, scenes that will happen within a chapter, or notes about a location I want to use as the backdrop for certain action. Ideas come at all times. I don’t want to rely on memory. The beauty of the cards is that it allows for whimsy and fearlessness that I don’t get if I’ve committed to the formal exercise of hammering out a complete outline for the book. Truth told, I don’t write, much less hammer, outlines at all. At some point I’ll shuffle my cards into the most logical order for the story. Next I transcribe the notes on the cards into titled files, that is, Word docs. Now that I have a view of the continuum of the new book, I can write better balanced chapters, and plan for necessary elements like conflict, rising action, climax and so on. Also, I can weed out superfluous stuff that might be fun to write, but might tire or confound the reader. Yes, the cards could be a wonderful way to begin a killer outline, but I’m always more eager to plunge into the real stuff than to continue tweaking the preliminaries. Fatal flaw? We’ll see.
By the time I’m into the third lap I feel much better about myself as a serious writer and am more likely to be at my desk tomorrow morning before my first chat with Mr. Coffee. For you, one of your laps might be checking your submissions spreadsheet where you log in which short stories you’ve submitted to literary magazines and contests. Chances are one of your stories was rejected a few weeks ago and is ripe for sending out again to a new magazine or contest. That new submission provides you a new possibility, a new hope. Or, this may be the day to finish the damn story and stop agonizing over it. Type THE END and send it off to three of your go-to readers. Let someone else agonize over it while you get on with your next new work.
There’s a long list of things writers do besides write. We are also readers of fiction and nonfiction, trade periodicals like The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets and Writers, book reviews and blogs. We also attend conferences, retreats and workshops, give readings, teach courses, and research facts for our new projects. We tend to our social networking through our websites, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. But for first laps, it’s about the writing. Save this other stuff for next week. Get back to what you’ve been missing.
Till later,
Ken