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Research: Beyond the Internet

The plot of my next novel hinges on a fight between the hero and heroine on a complicated battleground. Not as complicated as brain surgery or rocket science, but complicated enough that I was pretty sure I couldn’t learn everything I needed to know from the Interwebz.

The realization struck fear in my heart, which is pretty silly, because in my pre-romance life, I was a freelance journalist. I did research. Once, I spent two days shadowing a nurse midwife who does home births. I got up at 2 a.m., flew cross-country to Vancouver (not a non-stop—agonizing) and was on the ground by 12:30 p.m. Pacific time. I was so exhausted and wound up that my first act upon arriving at the midwife’s house was trip over my own flowy pants and sprawl on the floor of her living room. I picked myself up and somehow managed to string together semi-coherent questions for the rest of the afternoon. The next day, I sat with her while she saw patients (none of them, for better or for worse, in the process of giving birth—although shortly after that, my neighbor gave birth on her kitchen floor, unintentionally, and I was the first one on the scene, and the only other person there besides mom and baby for more than half an hour, which more than makes up for not seeing a home birth with the midwife).

I’ve also shadowed a U.S. Senator and a high-up health-care advisor to President Obama, so you’d think nothing would intimidate me, but I think there’s just something inherently intimidating about having to ask someone you don’t know for help. Any kind of help. So I spent a long time stuck on the first step of Doing Research: Procrastinate.

There are some good reasons to procrastinate, actually. When you do research, it’s important to know everything you can possibly learn on your own before you start asking experts questions. It’s important to have well-formed, well-thought-through questions. And it’s good to be far enough along in your own book-plotting process that you’ve gone absolutely as far as you can go before the questions overwhelm your ability to continue.

But you will reach a point where you know you need to ask questions and you are still procrastinating, and then it is time to tap your network. It’s startling how many people you can reach this way. Suppose you are trying to find a motorcycle mechanic to talk to. Make your Facebook status: Anyone know a motorcycle mechanic?

And—as I discovered yesterday to my great joy, for God’s sake DO NOT FORGET LINKEDIN! I went on my LinkedIn account and typed a two-word search string (the equivalent of “motorcycle mechanic”), and up popped a list of people. Not all of them were my own contacts, but most of them knew someone I knew. When I looked more closely, the best contact turned out to know someone I knew because we had all graduated from the same college, which meant all I had to do was look up her contact info on my alumni directory.

Which brings me to another important networking note: Your alumni office or career counseling office may be a goldmine of contact information. Depending on how the alumni database or directory is organized and how easy it is to get access to it, you may be able to search on people by career. And depending on how close-knit your alma mater is, people are generally pretty good about helping out fellow graduates.

If you strike out on all your networking options, you can also try out a service called Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com). You sign up at the site and can post queries that are answered, usually, by PR people trolling for ways to get stories out to the media. Non-PR people also check the list and offer to help. Be up front about the fact that you’re writing fiction, not non-fiction. It might reduce your hits, but if what you’re writing about strikes a chord with someone, you’ll get a response.

The next step, if you’ve exhausted all those paths (and emailed everyone you know just on the off-chance they might happen to know someone), is to search directly for a total stranger who’s an expert in the field. You’ll probably have more luck with local sources—people living and working in your town or city—but there are many other ways to make connections, and Google is your friend. It’s more difficult to make connections with people you don’t know, but you’d be surprised by how many people will help.

I was surprised yesterday. I emailed a guy who does media relations for a company—a big, busy company that might be a lot like the one my hero works for. I truly wasn’t expecting to hear anything back from him. Less than an hour later, he wrote to say he had no time to help me, but he supplied me with another name and two projects to read about online. Assume you’ll get about a one-in-ten hit rate on cold contacts, just as in sales or manuscript subbing, and spread your net wide. People like the idea of helping a writer, and they like the idea of being in on the brainstorming part of a book. Tell them your story and get them excited about it.

Sometimes associations are a great way to get information, depending on how big they are and whether they have full time staff. This definitely applies to historical research—I have a friend who plans to tap the Newport Historical Society for her book set in turn-of-the-century Newport, R.I.—but it also applies to other kinds of research. Trade organizations want to promote their members, so if you reach the right person—often a PR or marketing person—you can sometimes get them to answer questions for you.

Before you reach out, think about what you want. Do you want to ask questions? Do you need help brainstorming scenarios? Or would you like to visit something or shadow someone? Sometimes it’s a good idea to smart small, build a relationship, and then ask for bigger favors. Sometimes it’s best to lay everything on the table up front. You have to let your gut lead you in this, and—I can safely say as a journalist who has had stories slip away—there’s a little bit of trial and error involved.

But when you get it right, when you make a connection with someone and succeed, in the process, in connecting with your subject matter and your characters, it’s one of the most satisfying experiences you can have.

 

 

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Wake Up, Writer Girl!

A fabulous writer friend of mine has been trying to wake up early so she can get more writing done. Talking to her about her difficulties made me realize that I’ve learned a lot about early-morning writing since I first began doing it nearly a year ago. Here are some reasons to wake up early and write, and some tips that can make the process more bearable.

Reasons to wake up early and write:

  • You’re most creative early in the day.
  • Your kids sleep ’til 7, so 6-7 belongs to you. Or, your kids get up early and you might as well get going, too.
  • When you write first thing in the morning, it jump-starts your brain on writing tasks. Even if you don’t write again until much later in the day, your subconscious solves story problems all day long.
  • Repetitive stress injuries are least troublesome early in the day.
  • You hate exercising before breakfast and writing gives you an excuse not to.
  • It’s the only time you can carve out for yourself.
  • You’re useless after 3 p.m. (my most compelling reason)

Tips to help you wake up early and write:

  • Get a coffee maker with a timer. We used to have one that actually ground the beans for us—the new one just brews coffee. Set it the night before to produce your coffee five minutes before you wake. The scent of freshly brewed coffee helps with wakeup, too.
  • Set the clock next to your bed forward ten or fifteen minutes so it seems later than it is when your alarm goes off. I know I’m incapable of getting up before 6, but if I wake up at 5:50 and stretch for a few minutes, I can convince myself I’m sleeping ‘til six. Then, to buy myself extra time, I set the clock forward, so I actually wake up at 5:40. Weird, but it works.
  • Shower, stretch, eat breakfast or do whatever helps wake you up first, before you write. On the other hand, if eating makes you dopey, don’t eat first.
  • A cold house is a major disincentive for getting up early. If your house thermostat is on a timer, make the heat come on at least twenty minutes before you wake up. Put a super-warm robe & slippers RIGHT next to bed so you can grab them easily.
  • Have lots of light wherever you are working. I use a full-spectrum light all winter—it’s like sunlight and wakes me up while I work. Bonus: No seasonal affective disorder, if you’re prone.
  • Have Twitter friends who also get up early to hold you accountable (I feel guilty if I don’t show up for my early morning friends). But make sure you only check Twitter/email briefly before buckling down. Being productive is so rewarding that it will help you get up more easily the next day.
  • Have a word count goal you have to reach in the time allotted. Figure out how many words you can write in your early morning window, then hold yourself to it.
  • Don’t give up if you don’t get up on time (or have trouble concentrating) the first couple of days. Your brain will adjust to waking earlier.
  • If you aren’t having any luck waking up an hour (or more) earlier, try waking up ten minutes earlier and writing for just ten minutes. It’s something! And then once you can do that easily, shift it back another ten minutes, until you have the window you were looking for.
  • Know thyself. If you do your best writing in the afternoon or evening, you probably won’t do great writing if you wake up early. Instead, apply your willpower to becoming more disciplined about writing during the hours you are most productive. If you’re having trouble getting motivated in the evenings, could you write before you clean up the kitchen after dinner? Or what about lunchtime?

Do you wake up early to write? Do you have any tricks that make it easier? How do you discipline yourself to write at the time you’ve chosen for yourself?

 

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Rich Stories, Poor Stories, and Secret Love Child Stories

An old friend used to say, “You can fall in love with a rich girl as easily as you can fall in love with a poor one.”

(I used to say, “You’re a jerk,” but that’s another whole story. And to be fair, at the time, he was a 17-year-old boy quoting his father. He’s still a good friend.)

I had a conversation on Twitter yesterday that started as an exploration of whether there was any market for f/f/m erotica and turned into a discussion with the Bree half of Moira Rogers about whether you could fall in love just as easily with a marketable story as with an unmarketable story.

Writers, especially writers willing to admit that they care about “the market,” worry a lot about whether they should write for the market or write what they’re passionate about. The conclusion of my conversation with Bree? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Bree says that she and Donna (the other half of Moira Rogers) “know we can’t write to the market, but we CAN write the most marketable of our ideas.”

In other words, you can fall in love with a lot of different ideas, but you can choose to devote the lion’s share of your energies towards writing the ones that you believe will be successful in the market. (In my case, I’m probably going to eliminate the f/f/m scene I was contemplating in favor of the far more marketable m/m/f or m/f/m that can serve the same purpose plotwise. I’d rather write the f/f/m, but it won’t be a hardship either way. ;-))

If you’re thinking “I don’t have enough ideas to throw any of them away”—which is how I used to feel before I started writing romance—I sympathize. But in that case, the solution is to stop believing that about yourself and start looking for ideas everywhere. Instead of viewing yourself as someone with a scarcity of ideas—and the world as stingy with its offerings—imagine that everything’s an idea. Every story that comes out of your best friend’s mouth. Every piece of gossip that falls from the lips of your neighbor. Every stupid “what if” or fearful worried fantasy you have about what could go wrong—or what could go way more right than you think you could handle. Every thing you’ve never allowed yourself to wish for because it’s “not practical” or “not likely.” Reacquaint yourself with possibility, because even though I have been there, in the place where it feels like there aren’t enough ideas, it is not a place you want to accept as a long-term dwelling.

Sometimes, though, you can’t help falling for an idea that’s just not market-friendly (just like those poor romance heroines can’t help falling for the wrong guy—if human nature worked any differently, we’d be out of a job). In Bree-Moira’s case, it’s her “sick love of genre mashups and trope subversion. Sometimes it works out okay. Sometimes… LOL… Ahhh, well.” In my case, it’s ideas that are dark-dark-dark. Something terrible happened and my heroine just can’t get past it. And now more terrible things are going to happen! I also tend to have ideas that are overtly political—characters who are message-bearers for a certain cause. They’re good characters, they’re just not marketable characters.

If you’re flat-out writing with no downtime, you might have to set those true loves aside for another day, but some of the speedier writers I know have times when they’re waiting on a contract or to hear back about a proposal, and those downtimes are ready made for secret love children. You can write that secret love story during your downtimes or on the side when you’re struggling with a revision that makes you feel like you left your writing talent by the side of the road. Since the secret love child can’t survive in today’s market, there’s no hurry to get it done, and if you have to suddenly pick up something with a deadline, you can set it aside. You’re passionate about it, so you’ll always come back to it. And meanwhile, it will reinforce your self-esteem and refuel your passion for writing. (Except when it breaks your heart.)

Also, there’s always the faintest chance that the market for your secret love child will break WIDE open while you’re working on it, and if so, you’ll be poised for breakout success. But don’t hold your breath on that one. Secret love children are for secret loving. The mean, cold world wants your hardiest ideas.

Do you have a lot of ideas? Do you have a secret love child? Do you write “for the market” or “for yourself?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lucky Seven (Blame Del)

Del Dryden tagged me in a Lucky 7, which means I have to open up a WIP, go to page 77, 7th line, and post the subsequent 7 sentences/lines. Since my WIP is a 20,000-word story (sixty-five pages), I went with the equivalent sentences from page 7, instead.

The sky was nearly light now, a gleaming pale-blue tribute to morning over the increasingly urban suburbs.

He shifted, and the train seat creaked. “Are you asking why it took so long for me to come out here?”

She nodded.

“If I answer that, will you tell me why you left without trying to work things out?”

She pressed her nose to the window. “I didn’t think there was anything to work out.”

These seven sentences are part of Ticket Home, one story in an anthology-to-be tentatively titled Strangers on a Train.

And now, for the next lucky seven (including a couple of Strangers on a Train co-conspirators):

  • Donna Cummings
  • Samantha Hunter
  • Karla Doyle
  • Isabelle Flynn
  • Karen B. Booth
  • Edie Harris
  • Theresa Romain

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How Heroines Are Like Cheerios. Really.

A journalist friend of mine recently interviewed a professional matchmaker. The matchmaker told my friend that everyone should have a personal brand. Your personal brand, just like your professional brand, helps you convey to the rest of the world who you are. It’s a few words or phrases that explain why you’d be the perfect person to invite to that upcoming dinner party. Ideally, you drop these words and phrases into casual conversation, as in, “Oh, yes! People often tell me I’m vivacious!”

Since my friend told me about personal branding, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my personal brand, though I’ve drawn no irreversible conclusions. I like the word “expansive,” which I chose after I discarded “prone to saying inappropriately sexual things in conversation with the well-groomed mommies at the third-grade French luncheon.” I’m pretty sure “recovering from a lifelong desire to be the valedictorian of everything, including physical therapy and house staging” is not going to cause the invitations to fly my way. And I just don’t know how to capture in a word or two the fact that I successfully keep my bossy streak at bay most of the time.

I’ve also been thinking about whether the idea of personal branding could be useful in developing characters, and I think it can. Characters, unlike real people, are supposed to be larger than life—they are, more or less, their brands. Sure, a really good single-title heroine has to be multi-dimensional, but there are still going to be certain aspects of her character that define who she is and make her memorable. More so, even, than the real people we know. So I think it’s worth taking a few extra minutes during the planning stages of any story to ask ourselves whether we’ve created a character with a memorable brand (Sally in When Harry Met Sally comes to mind here, and I don’t just mean the famous diner scene. Her high-maintenance personality is as unforgettable as the golden arches, brand-wise).

I’ve been realizing lately that even though my characters are multi-dimensional, they’re not as memorable as I want them to be. In the grocery store, wall-of-cereal world of romance characters, you want your heroine to be the Cheerios.

Lest you think I’m just slinging it now (“capable of turning a passing thought into a week’s worth of rumination, blog entries and DM conversations”), I believe the Cheerios brand is actually a good example of what it takes to make a good romance heroine. Cheerios is a physical standout—both the distinctive shape of the cereal and the bright yellow box. Cheerios is a feeling—childhood and toddlers and safety and nurture. And Cheerios is a solid experience—a reasonably healthy and pretty decent-tasting breakfast cereal. Those are the three levels on which romance heroines (and heroes) need to emerge strongly, too. They need to stand out physically among a whole throng of generic hotties (there’s a GREAT hero description at the beginning of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Match Me If You Can, which I’m reading now—he’s hot and manly, but not perfect, and his imperfections make him real). They need to engage our emotions by being the kind of people we want to be—brave, passionate, ambitious, caring, devoted, loyal. And they need to deliver on what they promise by being real, too—stubborn, stupid, prone to leaping to conclusions, fearful of commitment, desperate for connection, or easily riled. And quirky. Prone to outbursts of too-rapid talking. Devotees of vintage clothing. Insomniacs, (low-level) hoarders, extreme sports enthusiasts.

Most of all, we need to convey all that about our heroes and heroines without ever using any of those words. By showing them in action. By spreading their quirks over the pages, by letting them act hot-headed or tyrannical and then thoughtful and democratic. You know, because you wouldn’t buy Cheerios if it came in a brown paper bag that said, “Nurturing, healthy, safe food for toddlers.”

Or invite someone to your dinner party after she casually dropped in conversation, “Oh, yes! People often tell me I’m vivacious!”

What do you think about the idea of personal branding? Any thoughts on what your brand would be?

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To Become a Novelist, Be a Novelist

Everything I know about success, I learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which argues that “talent” is more a matter of luck than we’d like to think. It has to do with when and where you’re born and how early and often you’re exposed to the skill you’re striving to master.

Take Canadian hockey players, for example (as Gladwell does). A quick glance at player stats reveals that a disproportionate number of elite hockey players from Canada are born in January, February, and March. That’s because the age cutoff for youth hockey in Canada is January 1. If you’re born on January 2, you have to wait a year longer to join a team. So when you do start to play, you could be as much as 364 days older than the other players on your team. When you’re a kid, that’s a big difference. Older players are also often bigger, tougher, and faster. Bigger, tougher, and faster players earn more playing time and are more likely to be noticed by coaches and scouts recruiting kids for camps and off-season play. The longer this goes on, the wider the gap grows between you and your younger teammates, until you’re practically a shoe-in for league all-star teams and other opportunities that will move you up the ladder towards a pro hockey career.

It’s not that hockey players born on January 2 are better than hockey players born on January 1, Gladwell argues. It’s just that the system favors them.

The same applies to talent and success in other arenas. The earlier and faster you’re able to get exposure to a certain skill, the more likely you are to pull ahead of your peers. Bill Gates may be a supergenius, Gladwell argues, but more to the point, he was one of the first kids in the country to have non-stop access to a fully outfitted computer lab. Because of when and where he was born, because of wealth and access, he logged ten thousand hours—the amount of time Gladwell and other experts claim is necessary to achieve mastery of just about any skill—before most kids ever laid fingertips on a keyboard.

Ten thousand hours. I often wonder if I’ve written ten thousand hours yet. I suspect I probably have, or at least I’m getting close. Someday (I tell myself daily), my ten thousand hours will pay off, and I’ll be published. But lately I’ve been thinking that hours-of-practice isn’t the relevant unit for measuring mastery in writing.

Maybe this is self-evident, but it’s not only how much you write but also what, exactly, you write that matters. When people say, “Writers write,” or “butt in seat,” or “words on the page,” they’re missing a key piece of the mastery puzzle. Writers of novels write novels. And more to the point, writers of published novels write, revise, revise again, and market novels.

When I first got to know Ruthie Knox, author of the acclaimed* Ride with Me and forthcoming About Last Night, she and I had both been writing for just about a year. I’d written one novel—by which I mean one revised and polished novel—and a draft of a second. She’d written six. She was still in the processing of revising and polishing some of the six, but more or less, she’d written the beginning, middle, and end of six books, revised them, polished them, and convinced an agent to represent them. (Also, I might add, they’re all good. But that’s a whole other story.)

Writing a book teaches you a lot of lessons. It teaches persistence—the mere act of putting down five hundred or a thousand words a day, day after day, is an enormous lesson in how small acts of faith translate to much bigger accomplishments. It teaches self-trust: When it doesn’t feel good, when you suspect something has gone awry, when you secretly know you’ve gone off track, you’re right.

Writing a book teaches other lessons, too—how to put together a story, beginning middle and end, setup, turning points, black moment, downtime, resolution. How to take a character from inadequacy to self-actualization. How to plot, how to scheme, how to stick it to your heroine, literally and figuratively.

You learn the vast majority of these lessons too late. You learn them when you revise the book, or when you plot the next book, or when you sit down with your friend’s book and help her take it down to the studs. You learn it just in time to get it more, or even mostly, right the next time. And you only learn it by sticking with each book as long as the book still has something to teach you, which often means long after the effort you’re putting into it is justified by the likelihood of market returns.

This is why people tell you to put your first manuscript in a drawer. Not so much because no first manuscripts are good, but because mastery, for a writer, is about moving on. It’s about collecting successes, where successes are finished—finished!—books. This is also why there is value to working on shorter pieces—novellas and long short stories—because you can learn all the lessons a book has to teach in a shorter time frame. You’re trying to find the optimal combination of books finished and hours logged, like a math word problem you couldn’t do in high school.

Ten thousand hours of starts and stops, ten thousand hours of rough drafts, ten thousand hours of a good book that you never try to sell (and thus never have to blurb or synopsize or get rejected)—those are good hours, but they will not get you there nearly as fast as ten thousand hours of written, revised, polished, marketed, agonized-over books. Six finished books in a year? That’s a year with six times the learning potential of mine. So yes, writing fast pays (as long as you write fast and thoughtfully, with enough time to plan and enough time to revise). And yes, follow-through pays. And also non-neurosis pays because the less time you squander in self-loathing, self-doubt, and Tweeting, the more books you will finish and the faster you will achieve mastery.

So. Write. And finish. And revise and revise and polish. And market. (Also, help your friends do all these things, because I swear, I learn twice as much when I help someone else with their book, because I have acres more perspective—I can see the problems clearly and don’t get into lying to myself about them, the way I do when I revise my own stuff. When you help someone else with their book, when you think hard about someone else’s plot or character arcs or story goals or marketing blurbs and synopses, that’s when your suspicions about how to do things solidify into useful conclusions. It does not take away from your work—it is your work.)

When you are finished, rest, briefly, and do it again and again and again. And did I mention again?

*Ever since I met Ruthie, I’ve been waiting to use the word “acclaimed” in reference to her.

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Out of the Rut

This weekend, I took a twenty-four hour vacation. My husband and I dropped our two children at their cousins’ house and checked into a nearby hotel. We sat for hours by the inn’s fireplace, haunted a local café where we drank coffee and paged through real-estate listings for our cross-country destination this summer, and browsed nearby stores (it is possible that my activities stepped outside the bounds of “browsing” when I accidentally purchased a lime-green racer-back braided-silk itty-bitty little slip of a dress for an upcoming Mardi Gras evening event).

In the scheme of things, my little departure from the grind was nothing. Twenty-four stolen hours, a few activities I do all the time—only the slightest respite from real life.

It was huge.

Monday morning, I reported for jury duty. Instead of getting up, eating, writing, swimming, writing, and greeting the are-you-serious-you-can’t-be-home-already kindergarten bus in the late morning, I drove twenty minutes to the courthouse and installed myself in an overheated room with twenty-five other citizens who were either elated to be sprung from their lives or grumbling about the inconvenience. I watched a movie about the importance of serving on a jury, spent ten minutes in a courtroom but never occupied a jury box seat, and was returned to the jury pool room to await empanelment on the next case. Meanwhile, that defendant fled the courthouse—oops!—and we all got sent home.

You couldn’t even call it a departure from routine, not really. It lasted only long enough to keep me from writing, but not long enough to keep me from meeting the kindergarten bus. All I did was read my book and witness the slimmest slice of the judicial system in action. Meet the defendant—he’s accused of assault and battery of a police officer. Do you think you’d be more likely or less likely to believe a police officer was telling the truth than any other person? No?

It was huge.

My moments out of real life, my departures from routine, they woke me up. I had to watch where I put my feet on the marble steps of the courthouse. I had to read signs and listen to instructions. I had to check in and check out, I had to read a menu I’d never seen before. I saw a new set of faces, considered an uncontemplated set of trespasses from the beaten path. I touched silky fabrics and people watched college students with unusual hair styles and disturbing piercings.

I had loads and loads of story ideas.

Breaking routine makes you pay attention, and if there’s one thing a writer can’t afford, it’s not paying attention. It’s way too easy to get into a rut when you’re writing day in and day out, especially when you’re devoted and dedicated and full of willpower and you’re determined to wrestle every last drop of writing time out of every day. Do you have time to go someplace new or try something unusual? I don’t. I’ve got to get those thousand or fifteen hundred words today.

My twenty-four hour furlough and my trip through justice’s maw made me remember that breaking the routine isn’t just a nice luxury for a writer, it’s a necessity. I have to make myself do it, and I have to make myself do it often. It almost doesn’t matter what it is, but it has to be different enough to shake me up and make me alive. Otherwise, I really am just writing about what’s inside my head, while what’s inside my head is a world that gets smaller and smaller instead of bigger and bigger.

What about you? Do you get in ruts? Do you have a way you make yourself break out? When was the last time you did something totally new, even if it wasn’t very big?

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Monday Girl, Thursday Girl

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve the proper perspective on a writing career. The problem is that you can’t judge success or failure from any given moment, because of the roller coaster nature of the experience. It’s so easy to get frustrated when things aren’t going well—when you’re not producing, when you’re not selling, when you’re not getting the acclaim you’d hoped for or deserved. It’s equally easy to get disproportionately elated when things do go well.

But I’m not a success on Monday just because an agent found my blog and asked for my full, nor a failure on Thursday because a different agent rejected my partial.

I think a lot about the speech that Sherrilyn Kenyon gave at the 2011 RWA National conference. She was down to her last postage stamp when the big break came in her career. She’d been told that her writing was so bad, she shouldn’t even bother. Now she is a New York Times best-selling author, tens of times over. At any point during the dark times, she could have concluded that the whole venture was pointless, that she was a failure.

And she could feel that way again. Maybe it will get harder to sell after a while, or maybe she will just get mired in self-doubt, worry that popularity doesn’t equal success. She probably won’t, because she doesn’t seem like that kind of person, but she could.

That’s what happened to my mother. My mother sold two novels then wrote a breakout. ABC made that breakout novel into a Sunday Night Movie that was initially viewed by more than one million people (it re-ran, several times, too—who knows how many people have seen it by now?).

By just about any measure, having an audience of a million is a success. She felt terrific. But then her breakout novel was orphaned when her editor left the publishing house, and the publisher ultimately declined to publish the third book in her three-book contract. And since then? My mother hasn’t published anything in decades. She feels awful. She feels like a failure. She feels like giving up.

Last week I interviewed Theresa Weir for the Wonkomance blog. In the interview, Theresa says she was a failure as a romance writer, so much so that she stopped writing romance and wrote thrillers instead. Only now, she’s re-releasing her books digitally, and they’re selling, and people are getting interested in them again.

She’s not the only one with a story like this. I heard two stories at my last local chapter meeting about people who are suddenly making comfortable salaries selling their books digitally. Things turn around fast. The industry changes.

Or, reader expectations change. Theresa says in her interview that people were outraged that she used male point of view in her romances. She was one of the first writers to do that. When you do something new, or unusual, something cutting edge, or a little wonky, you sometimes have to wait for the world to catch up. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. You don’t know. I’ll say it again: You don’t know.

Maybe Sherrilyn Kenyon’s success is transient. Maybe my mom will become a digital publishing success story. Maybe I am more like my Monday self, and maybe I’m more like my Thursday self. We don’t know. And the crazy thing is? We’ll never know. The story is not over, not on Monday, not on Thursday, not when you make it big, not when your big success fades away, not when you rise from the ashes. Not even when you die, because we all know about posthumously.

So all we can do is take the joy we’re given on Thursday and the chance we’re given on Monday—to rally and drag ourselves out of the morass. That’s what we’ve got. That’s what we know. So it’s gotta be enough.

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My Version of the Story

A wise woman (Actually, it was my novelist mother, but I’ve recently started to think that adults shouldn’t start sentences with “My mom said…”) once told me that there was only one plot in the world. This is not an original assertion, but her way of putting it is my favorite. She said, “There is only one plot. Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.”

I said, of course—as you will—“But that’s two plots!” And then she said, “No, it’s the same journey seen from two different perspectives.”

Whether you think there’s only one plot, or two, or seven (a common claim), there is not an infinite number, only infinite variation in the possible ways to tell them. That infinite variation is what makes me believe what I believe about story sharing, namely that writers don’t need to compete over ideas. The same idea in two different hands is not the same story (which is also why you can’t copyright ideas, only the execution of them).

When I was a kid, the wise woman told me that she and I didn’t need to worry about laying claim to our ideas. We could both write about anything we wanted to, and there would never be any danger that we would write the same book. We didn’t, however, actually try it until quite recently, when she submitted a list of ideas to an agent who was interested in working with her from the genesis to the completion of a novel. I helped her make the list. She came up with the ideas, and I helped her flesh them out.

One idea on the list stuck with me: There’s a hit-and-run, and the driver of the car leaves the scene but can’t get the victim out of his thoughts. My mom has a dark mind, and in her version, the driver is consumed by guilt and drawn increasingly into the lives of the victim’s family members, eventually losing perspective and neglecting his own family.

In my version, it’s a romance novel (of course). It’s not a hit-and-run, it’s a meet-cute! Nobody dies, the hit-and-run victim is injured, not killed, and nobody goes off the deep end—the driver just dabbles in legal trouble.

We both started writing—she, her dark drama, and I, my romance—and it was apparent from the get-go that the stories were unrecognizably different. She had dark roads and broken marriages and brooding protagonists. I had a misguided sister with an abusive boyfriend, a family on the brink of patching up its long-standing issues, and a heroine ready to forgive.

And here’s the punchline: She didn’t end up finishing her book because she decided it wasn’t viable, and I ended up cutting the hit-and-run incident out of my romance novel because I decided it wasn’t a functioning subplot. As a result? No hit-and-run accident books. No overlap. No problem.

With the exception of the wise woman, I don’t borrow other people’s stories. I don’t think profligate plot sharing (writerly communism?) works in all communities. But I do like that our little experiment reinforced my belief in how infinitely rich stories are, and how little need we have to feel panicky or covetous. The stories won’t run out. They won’t run away from us. And as long as we write from our hearts, we don’t need to worry about telling a story that’s already been told—only about telling it again, and better this time.

What about you? Have you ever knowingly told a story that’s already been told—a retelling for example? Have you ever asked a friend if you can “have” an idea whose ownership is dubious? Have you ever fought with someone over an idea?

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Red-Pill Moment

Just before Easter, when my son was three years old, I obediently brought a dozen eggs to his preschool for egg dyeing. I left them with the teachers, proud of being so on top of things that I had purchased white eggs, even though we usually eat the brown ones. Also, I’d sent twelve eggs, more than the required three or four, so my son would be able to share with the children whose (less organized) parents had forgotten to send eggs to school.

I made it home, sat in front of my desk, and began my work, before something that had been niggling all morning finally rose to the surface of my brain. I leapt out of my chair, ran back to the car, and drove to the school, wrenching the box of eggs out of the teacher’s grasp just as she was about to distribute the raw eggs to the preschoolers for dyeing. I apologized profusely and took the offending eggs away, but it was too late for me to hard boil them and get them back in time. I’d blown it.

I felt like a fool. I beat up on myself. And when I retold the story, which I did several times that day and week in search of a narrative I could live with, I always said, “That’s not like me at all. I’m a really organized person.” I’d found myself saying that with more and more regularity. “I’m a really organized person.” When I left their lunches home. When I accidentally dumped the dinner soup into a colander and strained all the broth out (I was thinking pasta). When I forgot to pick up a kid scheduled to have a play date at our house. “I’m a really organized person—usually.”

Then a very wise woman said something life-changing to me. She said, “You know, if you set the standards lower, you wouldn’t find yourself being so disappointed in yourself all the time. Why do you have to be the kind of mother who always remembers everything? Maybe you’re the other kind of mother. Maybe you’re the scatterbrained kind. And then, when you do something scatterbrained, it’s just the way you are.”

It was so liberating. Suddenly, my mistakes were not disasters. They were part of who I was—not that I was a screwup, but I was somebody who got things right a lot of the time and wrong some of the time. You know, just like everybody else.

There’s a line in The Matrix, just after Neo is unplugged, when he’s confused by the fact that, jacked in, he can still “see” his body. Morpheus tells him, “Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self.”

Sometimes, I think we get stuck with bits and pieces of residual self-image. I was the good daughter—prompt, obedient, organized. My brain was hardwired to see me that way through years of parental reinforcement. When it came time to let go, it wasn’t easy. I had to have my illusions stripped away.

Clinging to those little bits and pieces of residual self-identity slows us down. It makes us vulnerable to insults that no longer should have staying power. It keeps us from changing when big life events require us to be nimble, when suddenly we’re responsible for three lunches instead of one, or when we have to give up a certain career vision because it no longer fits who we are. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s a good idea to stop and take stock of who you think you are and what you believe your limits are. Or, conversely, what you believe the minimum requirements of being a good human being are. Both of those things can be enslaving. So check in with yourself from time to time. Because it’s possible that it’s time to take the red pill.

What about you? What do you think you have to do to live up to your standards? What do you believe about yourself that might not be true anymore? Have you ever had a red-pill moment?

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