• Your significant other refuses to take you to the movies anymore because you mutter editing advice on how to tighten the dialogue and strengthen the plot.
• You read books with a red pen in hand.
• You pass judgment before hitting the period of the first sentence in any novel on whether or not you could have done it better
• You get jealous when you come across brilliant books that you wish you would have written
• All major relationship decisions are based on whether the other person knows the difference between lay and lie.
• You cry in bookstores when you see a new book published by the imprint that recently rejected you.
• You get caught eavesdropping on conversations, but insist you’re not being nosy, just doing research.
• Anyone who ever wronged you back in high school is now either a victim or an incompetent villain in one of your novels.
• You know what a rejection letter sounds like as it swirls around in the garbage disposal.
• You know what a rejection letter sounds like as it swirls around in the toilet.
• You’ve ever said, “Well they just didn’t read it!” after getting a rejection letter.
• Your children eat corn dogs and kids’ meals when you’re on a deadline.
• Your children eat a lot of corn dogs and kids’ meals.
• You named your dog Victor, your fish Hugo, and your two parakeets Jane and Austen.
• You hear voices in your head conversing, arguing, falling in love . . . and somehow you’re sure this doesn’t mean you’re crazy,

merely a writer . . .

1. You can work in your pajamas
2. When your significant other comes home and discovers you’ve been lounging around reading all day, you can say you were working because it’s “research”
3. When someone wrongs you in real life you can write them dead in your next book
4. You can work from anywhere you want: beach, mountain cabin, bathtub . . .
5. Writing research is a great excuse to travel
6. The voices in your head mean that it’s either this or a padded room and a strait jacket
7. If you don’t like your co-workers (characters) You can delete them and get new ones
8. You get to still play with your imaginary friends and no one will judge you
9. If you want to be immortal, being a writer is easier than being a vampire and much less messy
10. Your story has the potential to change someone’s life for good

Let’s start this with a joke:

A writer died and was given the option of going to heaven or hell. Being a good writer, she decided to do her research first and check out each place first.
As the writer descended into the fiery pits, she saw row upon row of writers chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes.
“Oh my, this is awful,” said the writer. “Let me see heaven now.”
A few moments later, as she ascended into heaven, she saw rows of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes.
“Wait a minute,” said the writer. “This is just as bad as hell!”
“Oh no, it’s not,” replied an angel. “Here, your work gets published.”

Even in heaven the work is the same. There is no magical formula that makes a writer exempt from parking their backside in a chair and doing the work.
The two biggest excuses for not writing are Time and Fear.

Time
I’ve said it at more writing conferences than I can count because I mean it: Time is Made not Found. Sometimes Time can be stolen, knocked out, and dragged off to do your bidding for a few minutes, but it is never found. You are never going to be doing laundry where you pull out a previously unclaimed hour or two from the back pocket of your favorite jeans before tossing them into the washer.

A few ideas on how to make time:

• Cut out a half hour of TV (streaming services are the greatest time killers known to modern humanity).
• Prepare several meals at the beginning of the week so you aren’t doing last minute meal scrambling.
• Teach your children to do for themselves (trust me; it won’t kill them). Kids are capable of vacuuming, laundering, preparing meals and many, many other tasks. And they will thank you when they get to college and have crummy roommates who didn’t get those same lessons from their parents (trust me on that one, too. All three of my kids called me to thank me for teaching them how to be capable).
• On your break at work, go out to your car and write instead of hanging out in the break room chatting with coworkers.

Fear
Fear is the mind killer. So says Frank Herbert in the book Dune (great read) I believe him. Fear strangles your mind and all the fabulous ability you have to create and become.

Some people might call this writers block. I honestly think writer’s block stems from fear. Deep down, we writers are an odd lot. We’re egotistical enough to believe we can write something and have someone actually PAY to read what we wrote, yet we are overflowing with crippling self-doubt.
We worry that our writing attempts will be so pathetic that publishers, critics, and our own mothers will laugh at us. Worse, I have heard many would-be writers say,
“What if what I write isn’t worth my time?”
Which is the saddest worry of all. Why would your writing not be worth your time? Everything you write will have some merit, even if it’s nothing more than practice. And practice is something we all need. Besides if you have lots of practice fodder, those ideas might spark into a full firestorm to use in later works.

 
I tell my kids all the time, “Courage is being afraid, but doing it anyway.” This has enabled them to get on rides at Disneyland, go rock rappelling, and learn to snorkel in the ocean. I’m telling it to all of you in the hopes that it will enable you to take the chance on yourself and finish that manuscript so you can submit it to agents and editors and the people who can turn your dreams into reality.

Time and fear . . . not anymore

You are in charge of your life. Make your time. Conquer your fear. Do what you feel in your soul you were meant to do.

In Stephen King’s book, On Writing, he says that the first draft of a novel should be written with the door closed. This means that no one is watching. You can put in whatever cheesy line you want. You can make it be a bit absurd. You can riddle your manuscript with adverbs and metaphors that make no sense. You can go on at great length about why donuts are better when they’re jelly-filled. You can have lengthy bouts of exposition while you explore your own world and come up with back history.

There is great joy to be found in writing with the door closed.

Then the second draft happens. Mr. King says the second draft needs to be written with the door open. This is the draft we know our family, friends, and enemies will be reading. This is the draft for public review. Leaving the door open can be painful.

While I don’t mind it so much once the door is open, I despise the process of opening the door. I’ve lost many great lines to the open-door policy. Knowing my target audience, those lines couldn’t stay, and it broke my heart to hit the delete button. I also despise opening the door because I’m afraid I didn’t edit all the absurdities out. Did I get rid of all those lengthy bouts of exposition? Did I really delete all the cheesy things my characters did and said?

If I didn’t, someone will be sure to let me know about it. Reviews are so much fun that way. (Or not)

Open doors mean that you, the author, are open to criticism. And some writers have a hard time dealing with that (I’m raising my hand here. Guys, it’s hard).

I endorse writing the first draft with a closed door. You need to be allowed to write bad pages so you can push forward through writer’s blocks that can come when writing a manuscript.

But that doesn’t mean you should hide behind the door. You can fiddle forever with a manuscript and never really be done, but a point has to come where you just let go.

If you’ve been working on it for several years, it’s probably past time. Send it out and start working on your next manuscript.

The longest it has taken me to finish a manuscript was with my first one. I kept the door closed for a whole lot of years. I started it when I was fifteen and finished when I was 24. Nine years of hiding behind the door. Then I hid a few years longer by not submitting the manuscript. I finally submitted and had the book published when I was 29 years old.

Oddly enough, I finished my second manuscript in just under six months after getting the first one published. What was the difference?

I realized I could. By getting one out there, I *knew* I could do it again. Confidence is an amazing cure for writer’s block. There is no such thing as second manuscript infertility. So if you’re writing with the door closed and it’s been a while, you might want to try opening that door up to all the possibilities out there.

I can’t cook. It’s just not something I’m any good at. I’m guessing it has something to do with my lack of recipe literacy. My life is busy enough that I skim directions. I do a lot of guesswork and substitutions because I don’t prepare enough in advance to know what ingredients I needed before actually cooking the meal. This is why my food ends up overcooked, undercooked, soggy, dried out, not exactly like the picture, and not exactly edible.

I have found that when I take the time to thoroughly read the instructions and actually follow them step for step, my husband smiles at mealtime and my kids don’t complain and comment on how they wished Daddy had done the cooking (which is something he normally does so they don’t have to complain too often). All of this means that I actually *can* cook if I’m willing to take the time and follow the directions on the recipe.

I was at a writing conference where, on one of the panels, someone asked about the query letter. Another person asked what, exactly, do editors/agents want to see when you submit to them. Do you submit one chapter? Five chapters? The whole thing?

I responded, “Submit whatever they ask for.”  Jessica Day George then added, “But not more than they ask for.”

In short: follow the directions. It takes a little more time to research each agency and publishing house to find out their individual submission guidelines, but the result is much preferred over what you will get by taking a guess at what might need to go into that submission. All agencies and publishers post their individual guidelines. Submission guidelines are important because they prove you are flexible, easy to deal with on a personal level, and they prove that you can take direction. Being an independent thinker with your submissions might make you feel empowered, as you include full manuscripts that weren’t requested or pictures of your cat in a Halloween costume, but it won’t make you look like you’d be easy to work with.

It’s a first impression thing. Make your first impression count, have a polished product, and follow the submission guidelines when you submit.

I got a great question from one of my up-and-coming author friends about professional editing. She made this comment to me:

“I’m assuming you don’t send your own work off to a professional editor since you are one.”

In my fantasy world, this might be true, but in reality, I’d dash out my own eyes before trusting them, and only them, to catch all my flaws. You know that old saying? Something about not seeing the forest because of all those trees? Writing is a lot like that. We get too close to our projects and lose all form of objectivity. Or sometimes, even when we know something’s wrong with our manuscripts, we don’t see how to fix it exactly.

No matter how published, or smart, or HUGE an author is–everyone needs an editor.

And just for kicks, here is how my writing, editing, submitting process works:

• Write the book
• Edit the book myself
• Go over the book a few more times (just in case)
• Send it to trusted beta readers
• Write something new while waiting for the results
• Get results
• Cry a little over the fact that I’m not all that brilliant
• Watch a Hallmark movie, eat chocolate, and get over myself
• Do final edit
• Submit to my publisher
• Get edits back from my publisher
• Cry over the fact that I’m not all that brilliant
• Watch a Marvel movie, eat chocolate, and get over myself
• Do final final-edit
• Almost hit submit, but hesitate
• Do final final, I-mean-it-this-time edit
• Submit the book to my publisher
• Get galleys
• Curse myself for not being more thorough in final edit
• Turn in galleys
• Get author copies of my book and still think of ways I could have been better, while also thinking how cool I am for getting a new book published.
• Watch a Dr. Who episode, eat chocolate, and get over myself.
• Finish writing new book
• Start the process again

If you’re being honest with yourself, you know you can always do better. This is not to say you should never let a manuscript go. Every writer reaches a point where they must finally shout, “Enough!” and move on to a new project. Sometimes more fiddling is just more fiddling.

Eventually, your book has to stand on its own, but dragging it through a few other sets of eyes (editors), makes it stand a little taller.

I’ve done a lot of school assemblies. And I’ve learned some seriously important things. I won’t give you the wretched details of how I came to know all these things, but take my word for it.
The top ten most important things I’ve learned are as follows:

1. Use the restroom first. It’s a wee bit embarrassing (pun intended) to be doing the potty dance in the middle of your own presentation.
2. Wash your hands (I know you would, but I figured a reminder is always nice). And dry them THOROUGHLY. You will want to shake the hands of the principal and the librarian. Nothing worse than soggy palms because you have an aversion to those hand dryers or because you were too hasty in your use of the paper towels.
3. Make sure you do up all zippers, buttons, etc. Make sure things that are supposed to be tucked in are tucked and those that aren’t stay out.
4. Keep a tissue in your pocket in case you need to sneeze. A thousand kids saying, “ewwwwww!” in your presentation when you weren’t purposely trying to be gross . . . well, that’s bad.
5. Keep a water bottle handy in case your throat gets dry. A hacking cough really throws off a rhythm.
6. Do a powerpoint. Kids are trained to look at the big screen in front of them
7. Don’t put lame stuff in your powerpoint. Snoring children isn’t your goal.
8. Be funny where possible, but don’t try too hard. Funny should be natural. If you don’t do funny, then know it can’t be forced.
9. Do not make your presentation nothing but an hour-long infomercial of “buy-my-book”
10. Make the presentation about THE KIDS NOT YOU!

The last one is the most important thing I can advise.
There is very little in my presentation about my books. Seriously. I spend only a few minutes on my books. My presentations are about literacy, believing in our own potential, believing that each individual human being has something magical and amazing to offer the world. Because if I’ve got an hour, and only that hour, there are way more important messages to give than, “Hey, kid, buy a Julie Wright book.” My presentation is about living without limits on your own awesomeness. Why should it be anything else? What if my presentation is the only place some of those kids ever hear that they can achieve great things? Wouldn’t it be tragic if, instead of selling those kids on themselves, I was instead trying to sell them on my books?
After one of my school visits, we did a book signing at the library where I ran into one of my friends who happened to work there. She was blinking in shock at the two-hour-long parade of kids tramping through her library. She asked me one simple question, “What did you do to make them all come out tonight?”
My answer?
I told them the truth.
I told them they were amazing. That they were brilliant. That they had the right to shine on the world in the same way that the star Antares shines from over a thousand light-years away. I told them they had no limits to the great things they could accomplish.
The truth is powerful.
Youth are powerful if they only dare let themselves believe it.
And as writers, we have the power to tell them.
So I guess this post is really a bit of an admonition. I’ve heard many principals sigh and tell me of how disappointed they were in other authors because they felt like they’d yanked the kids out of useful class time just to hear a commercial. They were relieved my presentation was different. It makes me sad that I hear this comment over and over again. Truly consider, authors. You have an hour with several hundred kids.
What message do you want to give them?