Tips for Writers

A. There were times I was an inattentive mother, a cook who relied on canned goods, a less-than-creative writer, a messy housekeeper, and a runner who walked more than she ran. I tried to rotate my areas of poor performance, so that no one area was crappy all the time.

Some tips on juggling life/creative process:

• Get up early
• Wait until everyone is in bed.
• Change your work hours to work late or work early
• Find 15 minutes to write. Can't swing that? Then 10, or 5. You can always find something.
• Write on your lunch hour
• Write during boring meetings (sneakily, like you're making notes)
• Write on weekends, like Phil Margolin (he wrote 7-11 just on Saturdays and Sundays for a long time)
• Give up something
• Enlist your family to help out
• Write regularly every day. Just one page a day and you'll have the first half of a book at the end of the year.
• Turn off your internal editor. Give yourself permission to write badly. You can always edit something that's bad. You can't edit nothing.
• Tenacity is as important as talent.
 

I usually have goals to write a certain number of hours a day or a certain number of words, or both.  And goals for the month.

Sometimes writing is pure joy, but sometimes it is pure job.  Usually it still take a bit of work to at least make myself sit down.  But once I sit down, I find it goes better than I was thinking.  Just getting your butt in the chair is the hard part.

A. Here are my top tips:

• Read, read, read.
• Write regularly. Write every day, or every weekend. Start by keeping a journal or doing the exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Make writing a habit. Don't wait for inspiration. Once you are published, you'll need to make deadlines.
• Go to readings at bookstores. You'll learn something from every writer you hear.
• Get some distance from your writing. Once you think you're done, try to put a piece aside for at least two weeks. Then when you do pick it up again, read it aloud while imagining that you are reading it to an editor at a publishing house. What works and what doesn't? Truman Capote was right when he said, "Good writing is rewriting."
• Buy a book of baby names. Great for naming your next character.
 
• Keep a journal. Get in the writing habit.
• Keep a file folder full of fodder. Need an interesting trait to give a character? Need your dialog to sound better? Pull out your file folder full of ideas, newspaper clippings, articles about writing, and interviews with novelists you admire. Include photos of interesting people or places.
 
• Subscribe to free weekday e-mails from Publishers Weekly at publishersweekly.com. Subscribe to free weekday e-mails from Publishers Lunch (publisherslunch.com). Has much of the same information as Publishers Weekly (although sometimes a different spin), but also has information on which literary agents have recently closed deals for which books, with a ballpark reference to the advance. For a fee, you can join Publishers Marketplace (producers of Publishers Lunch) and search their data base of agents. You can also find some of the same information for free on agentquery.com. Avoid agents who want to charge you a reading fee, or refer you an editorial service - they may be making most of their money in reading fees or kickbacks from the editorial service.

A. I spent 18 years working in corporate communications. Now I get paid to tell myself stories. That's the best. There are days it's more job than joy, but even so, I love being my own boss.

A: Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.