Carrots are not the opposite of Sticks

Some days I feel so much like a cynic, a hardened soul. But when I was asked, "Does your son work better with sticks or carrots?" recently, my idealism aborts its vow to stay hidden and comes back roaring.

"Carrots and sticks are the same," I retort, trying not to sound too snooty, and stopped the words "bribery" and "manipulation" just before they escaped my mouth. "They come after something has been done and typically from an outside source and have very little to do with the task/lesson itself."

In all my years of teaching, motivation has always been the area that has fascinated (and frustrated) me the most. As a teacher, I want a key to the place where motivation resides in my students, to see what's there. As a parent, that desire is intensified a thousand times.

But this is getting away from what I want to write about today.Today, I want to write about writing and motivation, and about now my heart soared when I read the comments on my last post.

In my post, I lamented the unfortunate situation in which writers are told to polish their opening or nobody would notice their manuscripts. Most of us write because we love to or we need to but publishing is a goal as well. And when we read the same advice everywhere, it's hard not to pay heed. Some days, the heed-paying takes its toll. Like many others, I have to continually peek at my motivation and my direction, to make sure I haven't forgotten my primary responsibility is not to get published but to write what I must write.

So, when I saw in my fellow writers' comments that their concern is all about their stories, and not about how to fit into a mold that conventional wisdom insists is, if not the only one, then the best, I felt like weeping.

Listen to how they talk about their work. Scott Bailey said this about beginnings:

My idea is to take the reader by the hand and say, "Hey, let's go have fun" and establish the reader's trust that I have the technique and the imagination to make good on that promise of fun.

Domey Malasarn's explanation about why he couldn't skim on his middles is simple but speaks to the real reason we write: because we care.

The middle is my favorite parts of a book, so I care about it a lot!

And I'm going to think about my endings the way Tanita Davis does from now on:

...leaving a book is so hard. I want the reader to feel the same reluctance to read the last paragraph.

Not a single comment by anyone about doing something to get published. Instead, the focus was on character and relationships and setting. Nobody mentioned anything about carrots or sticks, only the stories. So there, B. F. Skinner et al!

Go, Take heart. Write.

Scholastic Asian Book Award

The Kumquat Code, my middle grade novel, has been shortlisted for the Scholastic Asian Book Award!

It's a good habit not to let the inevitable road bumps and obstacles prevent me from writing, but I am most certainly going to let good news buoy my spirits!



Squee!

Black Belts and Food Trucks

So I got my black belt.

The next morning, Saturday, I competed as a black belt for the first time--in a ring with 2nd- and 3rd-degrees who were mostly teenagers with a few state champions thrown in. Nothing quite like jumping into new challenges with both feet!

On Sunday, all adrenalin and energy deserted me all at once, it seemed, at 2:08 p.m., and I collapsed on the couch. Yes, you may watch TV, I told the kids. They chose the Food Network, which was running a marathon of the Great Food Truck Race as a lead up to their grand finale. And wouldn't you know it, several episodes later, I came away with some lessons learned that apply to writing and publishing.

A bit about the show. 7 teams set up their trucks for two days in different cities across the country. The team with the least sales amount in each city is eliminated. As with other reality shows, the producers throw in twists and turns in the forms of different challenges.

One team, the Nom-Nom truck, won in every single city. The reason was clear: they played smart. For example, before arriving at their first city, they called ahead to place an ad and had lines waiting for them before their competitors could even set up shop. In another city, every team was given a frozen quarter of beef as a challenge and many of those teams knew nothing about butchering. Some of them simply did the best they could, wasting precious time and not doing a good job. But the Nom-Nom team knew their limitations, and asked/hired a butcher to cut it all to specs.

After a few cities, a number of the other teams started to figure out their strategies and stepped their own game up. One team, Grill 'Em All, in particular tried to beat the Nom-Nom team at their own game. In one challenge, Grill 'Em All and Nom-Nom had to prepare each other's food: Vietnamese Bahn mi sandwich and hamburgers. The GEL guys hunted down a Bahn mi shop and bought all the ingredients: marinated beef, sauces, veggies, already cut up. Unfortunately, they still lost that challenge.

Every team had a good product. Each was given the same information and seed money. Why did the teams fare so differently?

Many unpublished writers have the message and the craft, why do some succeed, and others not? Some of the reasons are out of our control. The leader of the Nom-Nom team had probably the most photogenic face. And much as we like to pretend beauty makes no difference, it does. But no one on the other teams begrudged (out loud, at least) her good genes. They did their thing as best as they knew how, work hard, tried to be open to new ideas.

Then there was the Ragin' Cajun incident. This team parked at a horrible spot in one of the cities and had no customers. The leader freaked out and tried to drum up sales by using his megaphone and calling out to passers-by, but to no avail. The next morning, he started at it again, but he was much more successful, primarily because he quit being the crazy guy on the street yelling at you to go eat his food. He became the charmingly wacky guy doing his best to persuade you.

I could so relate to that poor, desperate man going red in the face on that first evening, Please, gentle readers, if you sense a whiff of my going insane in public, please stop me.


What this show reaffirms to me is that, to be successful, I have to:

• have an excellent product
• not bury my head in only creating this product
  
• get the message out there
  
• learn about my customers
• realize that strategies and careful planning can have a lot of impact
  
• be willing to adapt

But this is not the end of the story.

The Nom-Nom truck had been the clear favorite. But in the end, they lost the final challenge to Grill 'Em All, a team that makes hamburgers.

This team was almost always at the bottom in every city, yet they scrounged up new enthusiasm after every setback. Nobody on their team would make it to the cover of GQ magazine, and the one time they felt super confident about winning a challenge--by getting the ingredients for making Bahn Mi ready made--they didn't. They were definitely the underdogs. And I love it when underdogs win.

To all my fellow pursuers of a seemingly unattainable goal, to all my fellow underdogs, to all my fellow dreamers: here's to a rich journey and a satisfying end.

30 years for a manuscript to get published

I read recently about an author, Selden Edwards, who worked on his novel, The Little Book, for thirty years before it was finally published by Dutton.

To be fair, he wasn't working on it non-stop during that time. He did what many of us have done: write it, shove it, revisit and revise, submit, rinse, repeat.

But really, how many of us have something that's been on our minds that we've doggedly worked on for thirty years?

I started my my first novel seven years ago. It began its life as an assignment for a writing course. Completing the book was the beginning of my journey to learn and hone my craft: I read books on writing fiction, experimented with different types of work, submitted my work regularly to critique groups, entered contests for feedback, and paid attention to the books I read as a writer as well as a reader.

And rewrote and rewrote and rewrote based on what I've learned.

So, while I've occasionally wondered about how slowly this first book came together, I also know that writing the novel wasn't the only thing I was doing during the time.

I don't know the fate of my book, whether it will be published, and when. But Edward's story of persistence gave me a boost. Sometimes it's good to file away early works as exercises, but sometimes it's good to hang on to the hope that willingness to improve and perseverance can win.

Not quite what I expected

Say you're someone who's always preferred reading and writing and drawing and playing the piano to running cross country. Say part of the reason is that you always run out of breath within two minutes and you hate feeling like a wimp. Say now you're older and wiser and realize that while reading and writing and drawing and playing the piano are still so much more enjoyable than running cross country, physical stamina is a very good thing that is worth pursuing.

What would you do.?

Well, you may put on your sneakers and start a very gentle program to build your endurance from, oh maybe walking 30 minutes in a session to eventually running 30 minutes? Sounds very doable, right?

What if, after a month of it, you still feel as wimpy and winded as you were? What would you think?

Just give it time. The stamina will come. It's common sense, right? Everybody knows that if you start training, you'll eventually get there.

But then a newest study shows that exercise won't boost endurance levels for 1 in 5 people.

What would you do then?

Cry? Curse your genes? Eat ice cream? Rant?

But what do you do with those sneakers?

Writers know the meaning of toil. We do it every day. For most of us, we do it with no real, tangible reward in sight. We do it for a variety of reasons: we love it, we can't not do it, we know it's the good thing to do, we know it's the right thing to do.

Then we are reminded that talent and luck do play a role. What if we are one of those people who don't really have the talent (the right genes that allow training to build our stamina) or the luck. What is the point then?

Those of us who have been slogging for a while at writing will have our own answers to this question. And we've kept our sneakers on. I would love to hear some of yours.

(Incidentally, here is an article that tries to balance the hype.)

Thoughts, mostly obvious, occasionally profound, and sometimes disconcerting

As I promised in an earlier post, I will jot down some of the thoughts and questions that have been swirling around in my mind, and the conclusions i have chosen to arrive at. Many of them are so obvious that it embarrasses me to have to put them down, but knowing they are available to anyone who has any interest to read, keeps me a little bit more accountable than if they existed only in my mind.

Conclusion #1
Some things in life can be controlled, others cannot

"Well, duh!?"

I hear ya.

But the complication comes with not knowing which things are in which category. Eat healthy you say? All right then, let's buy us lots of fresh veggies and fruits. But then do I know if pesticides have been sprayed on those beautiful green leaves, and whether the brightly colored oranges have been picked when they were light green and kept so long that there is hardly any vitamin C left?

Exercise to lose weight, you say? Sure thing. Pull on the sneakers and strap on the willpower. But as you decrease food intake and increase energy output, your metabolic rate starts to do through a complicated series of events to compensate.

Write well and learn the publishing process and maximize your chances of getting published? You fill in the blanks.

So the only way to live based on this conclusion is: approach every task as if I have full control but think about outcome with the understanding that I actually have none.

And try to convince my emotions that it is just fine.

A heartening sign

Amidst the continued hand-wringing by many on the state of publishing today, I see a sign that says things are looking up. What is this sign? A number of agents are publicizing their needs:

Several agents from the Dystel and Goderich Agency are putting their wish lists on their blog, joining agents Sarah Davies and Julia Churchill from the Greenhouse Literary Agency, Jill Corcoran, and Elana Roth, who have done the same. You may have come across some others.

I find this trend (I am going to call this a trend, indulge me) heartening. For a long time, rightly or wrongly, I had the impression that agents were getting so many queries they were this close *index finger and thumb almost touching each other, eye squinting* to changing their status on AgentQuery to "This agent is no longer accepting unsolicited queries" and before we knew it, there would be no more agents left to query, and we, the unagented, would have to rely on our hairdresser's boyfriend's dry-cleaner who knew the doorman to the building where an editor lived.

When agents, independently from one another, put their wishes out there where they know hungry authors are sure to pounce on, I mean pay heed, and risking their in-boxes--or maybe just the in-boxes of their assistants--overflowing with queries, it tells me they think the market is viable, editors are acquiring, and publishers are, well, publishing. That calls for a jubilant woo-hoo. Care to join me?

Woo-hoo from Flikr Creative Commons by Jeremy 白杰瑞

One other reason this trend brings such warmth to my heart is that it presupposes that this manner of dispensing information works. It speaks to a certain trust between the agents and the authors; it says that we're all in it together. That makes me glad.

It is a business about communications after all.

A slightly more coherent and objective look at last week's stream of consciousness

Or what made me pick the books I did.

The Chinese Handcuff: After a friend loaned me Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, I was so taken by Chris Crutcher's writing and his compassion and honesty, I looked for more.

Shift: and since I now trust Crutcher, I was willing to read a book he recommends.

Gregor the Overlander: recommended by a fellow writer friend.

Ranger's Apprentice: Nathan Bransford says he was going to read it, so I thought I should check it out as well.

Blue Fingers: soft spot for all things martial arts. Although I have to say "Oooh Ninja" alone wasn't enough to keep me engaged.

Archer's Quest: Loved Linda Sue Park's Kite Fighter and A Single Shard. Plus connection to another writer friend.

Jumping the Scratch: Again, liked the author's first book. Willing to read another.

Sisters Grimm: Daughter liked the first in series, so finishing all the books is inevitable. (True for my own reading as well: enjoyed the first few of Five Ancestors so much, I was willing to go on two detours unexpectedly thrown in by the author.)

Series of Unfortunate Events: ditto.

The reason for this exercise? To find out how one book lover chooses books. And for me, it boils down to the matter of:

Trust.

Trust in a friend's recommendation. Trust in other book lovers' tastes. Trust in an author whose other works I've enjoyed.

How does that translates to my goal in getting people to buy my book? (Okay, okay, finish that thing and submit it and get it published first. I hear ya! I'm trying, I really am!)

• Get people to like it enough so they'd recommend to their friends.
• Get someone with clout (like Christ Crutcher) to like it so they'd recommend it.
• Get enough people to like it so subsequent books, whether in a series or other wise, would get a chance based on earlier works
  

Or

• Write a book about ninjas.

So that was an easy problem to solve.

Queries, queries, and yet more queires II

First there was QueryFail, then came AgentFail, events that touched tender spots in many people and stunned many others with their fury. If you wade through them (I only managed to read snippets) you may agree that we can learn from them if we can find a way to manage the negativity.

In comes Nathan Bransford, ever helpful and positive, with Agent for a Day. He invited readers to submit queries, 50 of which were randomly chosen and posted on his blog on Monday, April 13. His readers chimed in to comment on these queries and to choose the five queries that interested them.

There is still some negativity in the comments but if we ever wonder how our queries compare to the others, this is a fabulous opportunity to find out. I discovered that I couldn't read more than seven to ten queries at a time, and even then I skim, a lot. A few of them piqued my interest: voice, plot, possibilities. I plan to re read those to see if I can pinpoint just what attracted me to them.

You want more real-life examples, you say? Well, another uber-agent, Kristen Nelson, posts examples of the queries that caught her eye, with comments by her, as well as letters she sends to editors. Check them out.

Good is not good enough

Talk to someone pursuing a big goal:getting accepted into an Ivy league school, landing a contract with a record label, being hired as first horn by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and you'll hear how crazy difficult and competitive it is.

Getting my novels published feels as crazy difficult. I realize there are lots that are outside my control: the state of publishing industry, trends, the economy, so I concentrate on what writers are suppose to do, write: revise my first novel, draft scenes of my second, and jot down thoughts about my third. I am also doing what writers who want to be published do: send off queries and submissions. (Can we say roller-coaster emotional rides?)

A sensible sentence caught my attention this morning. It is from Tami Brown at the Through The Tollbooth blog. She says:

But your writing ... must be as good, and in most cases, better than writing you see in published books. Why? The authors of books in print already have relationships. You are new. It takes something extra to break through.

Not a thought that most people who consider encouraging, but strangely, it's encouraging me to keep plowing and polishing so my work will be better, hopefully better than good.

(It's pretty obvious that I was procrastinating. I should be writing, not reading blogs? But hey, every once in a while, those tactics do bring us back to what we're supposed to be doing.)

Pep Talk Week: Things May Not Be As Bad

I don't know if anyone is still reeling over the stock market dive yesterday, but I wanted to share an article that outlines several reasons for optimism in the juvenile book market.

Excerpt:

Children’s Books are Still Selling Strongly. According to Publishers Weekly, children’s books “proved to be one of the most recession resistant segments of the book business” throughout the 2008 holiday season. Sales were strong across age groups. Many stores reported increased sales numbers over 2007.

Children’s Books are Outselling Adult Books. As we write this, the top five overall best-sellers in America, according to USA Today, are children’s/YA books. The Last Straw, the latest installment of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, is number one. The Twilight series claims slots two through five.

If you don't know Jon and Laura from the Children's Book Insider, you should check them out. At a recent writing retreat, the Big Sur at the Rockies, run by Andrea Brown, I had the privilege of being in a critique group led by Laura, and found her to be a superhero.

So, writers, especially of children's and YA lit, keep those words coming.

Snap! Snap!

What's that obnoxious snapping sound?

My desperate attempts to snap out of a writing-funk I've been in for the last couple of weeks. It's either February or the cumulative effect of reading all the Publishing-Is-Dead articles and blog posts (including this one Publishers Weekly) that have rendered me unable to garner the necessary energy to keep writing.

What's the point of writing, publishers won't take chances on new authors. Write because you have to; if you have anything else you'd rather do, go do that. Publishing was hard to begin with, now with the economy heading south, it's just gotten a hundred times harder. Write what you love. I can't be blind to market forces. You can only write what speaks to you, anything else will come off inauthentic and publishers and readers alike will smell it a mile away.

And of course, not writing brings with it the low-level but constant restlessness and something-isn't-quite-right-ness.

Vicious cycle.

What do I have to come back to? What can I control? Not the state of the economy or the publishing industry, the taste of readers and health of bookstores, decisions of agents and editors. The only thing I can do is

Write the best book I can.

As advice goes, this is glib, flippant, and cliche, but unfortunately true.

I have to ignore the loaded word "best", ignore the bad news, and just go back to writing. Where do I find the motivation that brings energy and hope?

Write. Read. Live.

Bailout for Writers

I'm (obviously) not the only one who calls for a bailout of the publishing industry and writers. Two other writers, Paul Greenberg in the New York Times and Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker both presented their bailout plans.

Andy Borowitz presents a compelling case of how far reaching the consequences of him not given a handout: the whole economy can collapse! All these affected families!

Paul sees that:

the workspace for writers seems to get more crowded by the day as refugees from other professions take cover behind what they hope will be the respectability of the writing life.

From his perch on the writing stool, he contemplates what Graham Greene asked:

“Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled."

Save the writers!

On a more upbeat note

To counter the negative vibes of my last post, I'd like to get back to the conclusion I had arrived at before getting sidetracked, and that is:

despite all the bad news and the mounting difficulties in getting published, as a writer, I will continue to write. And improve and learn and grow and live.

One of the things that helps me hone my writing is to read a lot; to compare and figure out what works and what doesn't. There is subjectivity involved, obviously, but great writing, in the end, will stand out.

The super-generous agent, Nathan Bransford, ran a contest recently, in which he invites writers to submit their first paragraphs. From the 1000+ entries, he selected 6 finalists and readers voted their favorites.

These posts offer an immense resource. First, we get to read the first paragraphs of so many writers. Second, we get to hear different people's opinions (ignore the snarks) of the chosen paragraphs. Third, we get to see the ones who stand out and why.

I haven't yet read through all the entries. But having read just the ones I have, I can understand a little better what agents and editors mean when they discuss the queries and submission they receive.

So there you go, a bit of a silver lining.

Here's one way

To get published in this age of shrinking publishing houses and disappearing advances: take up a trade--you only need to be as good as this guy


--and get yourself 15 minutes of fame. Or become a famous pooch, or a career celebrity by continually doing outrageous things in public.

Most of you have read the op-ed piece in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, Typing Without a Clue. If not, here it is.

The long and winding road to publishing

is getting longer and more winding.



By now, everyone interested in the publishing industry has heard the bad news. Even the big publishing houses, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Thomas Nelson, and Random House are not immune.

What are we, unpublished writers, to do? If you're inclined to see the sky falling, you may find some comfort in one editor's take on the situation. Mark Tavani, a senior editor at Random House, talked about it at Notes from the Handbasket, a blog by author Laura Benedict.

He doesn't offer a no-worries-things-will-be-back-to-the-good-old-days-you-just-wait. What he does offer is this:

But on the bright side, maybe fewer books will mean better books. Maybe, over time, books will regain an elite status that I sense they once had. Maybe, in the end, books won’t qualify precisely as mass entertainment, but entertainment for a sizable if select audience.

Not exactly unqualified confidence in the industry, but a reasonable and achievable state. In the mean time, those of us who love the written word, who love stories, who simply have to write will do just that: write. Focus on getting better in craft and more savvy in the profession. Doing the same thing we've already been doing.

Hand me the hammer, please?

If you've been thinking about getting published, you would have heard of the term "platform."



My understanding of a platform: that which gives you the authority and draws people to your book. It used to be that platform reigns supreme in non-fiction. After all, who wants to read a book about the migration patterns of miniature vampire bats if the author isn't someone who knows a thing or two about it. (Please don't google "migration patterns of miniature vampire bats" because there may not be such things. See, I don't know the first thing about bats or migration patterns or vampires, so you wouldn't want to buy a book on the subject even if I wrote one.)



Fiction these days needs platforms as well, I am told. What constitutes a platform gets slightly fuzzy in my mind. One example I can think of is the author Jeff Stone, who wrote the international best-selling series on five young monks schooled in kung-fu. Jeff Stone is a highly trained martial arts practitioner as well and can talk authoritatively on the subject. I can also imagine him performing some cool monkey-styled kung-fu moves in school visits.

What else? How do unpublished authors build their platforms? (Please don't say plank by plank, you clever and cheeky ones.)


Have no fear, there is a book out, titled Getting Known Before the Book Deal, in which one writer, a successful one, discusses platform-building. You can read an interview with the author and get the links to the book and her website at Writer Unboxed.

Know a not-yet published author? Need to get him/her a gift?

(Hint: I'm not published and I haven't read the book yet either. : D)

Grateful

I have much to be thankful for. In this blog, I want to share those things that pertain to writing, especially during these uncertain times.

I am thankful that:

• perseverance and tenacity are part of being human,
• people wired to write will write regardless,
• out of impossible situations can come good results, results which may not happen otherwise,
• when life becomes difficult, people tend to come back to what matters,
• truth and beauty will not be defeated.

Happy thanksgiving to everyone in the US, and to the others, I wish you gratitude.

Queries and Synopses

We write our novels, we get it critiqued, we polish it. And two/seventeen years later, we get to the fun part: submitting our work, a process that involves writing various shorter works to entice agents and editors so they'll ask to read our manuscripts. Many authors deal with it with fear and trepidation, creating a new area where those in the know can help. And help they do, by writing articles and books and critiquing the efforts of the many unpublished authors.

For example, Editorial Anonymous is offering an open mic night for synopses. If you like to participate, email her with synopses of well-known, published middle-grade/YA novels (synopses should be no more than 150 words). She'll post them with her comments regarding thoroughness, clarity, style, and appeal in a later post.

Many aspiring writers are rising to the challenge by educating themselves and by spending as much sweat on their query letters and the synopses as they do on their books.

And then the inevitable happens, as told by agent Stephen Barbara at Publishers Weekly. He now receives so many well-written queries that he will only skim through them to get to the writing samples. Sadly, his experiences so far have shown him that a good query letter is no longer a mark of a good writer.

It is all in the writing--of the book.

Promoting your book

Nathan Bransford's blog is one that I read frequently. Recently, guest blogger Michelle Moran, acclaimed and bestselling author of NEFERTITI, and THE HERETIC QUEEN, wrote two posts on ways to promote a book.

After reading her posts, I want to go out and do some of her suggestions: I'll produce a book trailer! I'll write music to go with the book! I'll check out AuthorBuzz! But wait, I don't have a book published yet.

Guess it's time to go back to writing and editing and pulling teeth and checking in with my imagination and shushing / pleading for help from my inner editor and rejoicing and puzzling and wondering...