When you decide to make the real decision to be a writer, you have to decide what are your goals in this life?  To be published?  To be rich and famous?  To get better with every story and eventually write the great American novel?  Well, those are all perfectly respectable goals, but, as with any goal in any area, there’s one very important trait you’re going to need in order to meet it: persistence.

When I started writing—this was early 1991, I think, in the second semester of my last year of high school (better late than never)—I had only one goal: get published.  I knew whatever else the writing life might hold, it was all going to start there.  Fame never appealed to me, but I wouldn’t mind enough money that I didn’t have to work a day job.  In the beginning, though, I just wanted to be published.  I wanted to open a magazine or a book and see a title to something I wrote with my name in black print at the top.

But that wasn’t going to happen unless I did the work.  So I wrote.  I wrote sometimes in the morning before school.  At the time, I was taking a computer programming class at a vo-tech school the first half of every day, so when I got done with my work there, I’d use the computer, word processing program and printer, and write.  I’d write when I got home from school in the short time I had before my fast-food shift started.  And if I got home early enough at night, I’d write before bed.

After graduation, my best friend and I would leave our fast-food jobs at night and spend a few hours almost every night at the local Perkins, reading and writing longhand.

When I switched jobs and started working days, I’d write for an hour or two when I got home.  Around this time I started submitting my work.  I didn’t expect it to get accepted, but I wouldn’t have complained if it did.  But rejected or not, I knew I wasn’t going to be published—and this was still my goal a year in—if I didn’t start submitting.  This was in the early 1990s before self-publishing was as prevalent as it is today.  Back then, submitting to small press magazines was pretty much the only way to break in.

Eventually the hours on that new job got crazy and I started having to get up at 3:30 in the morning to write for an hour before work.   Eventually I settled into a pattern there; summer hours were 5-1 and I’d write for two hours after work, winter hours were 7-3 and I’d write for two hours before work.

It took four years of writing every day, of submitting everything I wrote—and resubmitting it when the eventual rejection letter came—before I saw my first acceptance letter.  Finally, all of that work had paid off.  Someone out there in the wide world, someone I had never met, read something I made up in my head and decided it was good enough to share with the world.  And really, that’s all I was asking.

And then it didn’t happen.  The publisher of that magazine had to close down before my story saw publication, and I was right back where I started.

I suppose I could have sunk into a depression, given up, stopped writing, stopped taking time away every single day from my son who was only two by then, and just gotten on with my life.

But it wasn’t just about being published; ask any writer and they’ll tell you the same thing: this is when we feel the most like our true selves.  When words are pouring out of us and stories are forming that didn’t exist before, that’s when all’s … well, not RIGHT with the world, but more right than it was before because we’re doing the thing we honestly, truly believe we were put on earth to do.

But by this point, like I said, I had a two-year-old son and I really loved spending time with him.  So if I look back on all those hours I didn’t spend with him, I had to think that counted for something.  And what did it count for?  Being published.  I spent that time writing, because I wanted to be published, and when I thought about it, that goal hadn’t gone away just because one magazine closed.

I still wanted to be published.  So I had to keep going.  Every single day, weekends and holidays, I never took a day off, two hours a day when time and job allowed, writing, editing, revising, submitting, WAITING—the worst part of submitting is the waiting, and thank God for the advent of the internet and email and email submissions (I once submitted a story and got an acceptance in my email thirty minutes later … to an anthology that never materialized, but by then I was getting used to it).

It wasn’t until 1999, EIGHT YEARS after I wrote my first “professional” story, before I saw my name in print.  It was the summer 1999 issue of Sepulchre Magazine (vol.2, issue 4) where my short story “Preparations” appeared.  More appearances followed, “Inside” in an issue of Prose Ax was next, followed by a few ezine appearances.  There are no words to describe that feeling, which is unfortunate since I’ve been writing for over 30 years and should be able to describe anything I can imagine, but the elation and the satisfaction that comes with seeing that in real life, holding it in your hand, it’s a joy unlike any other.  And it never would have happened if I hadn’t persisted.

Now, the story that did it, “Preparations”, I wrote in one sitting after work one night, a few hundred words that pretty much just spilled out of me, got a very minimal edit and revision, but it NEVER would have happened if I hadn’t been putting in the work, daily, all those years.  Could I have taken a holiday or a weekend off here and there?  Sure, probably.  But writing is a skill like any other, and like any other you get better with practice.  And I’ve never been all that great at too many things.  In high school I was ok at art, but never intuitive with it.  Same with learning the guitar.  I can memorize some chords and eventually fumble my way through a song, but I’ll never improvise and create something beautiful.  But I’m not too bad a writer.  Of all the things I kind of know how to do, that’s the one I’m the most confident in, and so I still wake up every morning—3:00 now; my work hours are different than they were—and write before work.  Why, when self-publishing is right there, when I haven’t submitted to a magazine in over a decade, do I still do it every single day?  Why, when my goal was to be published, and I met that goal over 25 years ago?

Because I’m a writer.  And writers WRITE.  It’s really the only way you can call yourself a writer: by writing.  And because I never forgot that goal.  To be published.

I have a new goal now: to get out all these stories in my head before I die.  And at 51, that day is way closer than it was when I was 20.  I don’t have time to waste.  But the only way to get it done is to write, every day.  This blog post is part of that goal, as is what I plan to do with it at some point.  I would have much rather spent this morning reading comics or watching YouTube videos or better yet, in bed, curled up with my wife and getting more of the sleep I know I so badly need, but I have a plan and a goal, and the only way those get done is with persistence.

There’s a quote from George Bernard Shaw I’ve always liked:

“Go on with writing plays, my boy.  One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, ‘Is there a play from Shaw this morning?’ and when she says, ‘No,’ he will say, ‘Well then, we have to start on the rubbish,’ and that’s your chance, my boy.”

“The most original modern authors are not so because they advance what is new, but simply because they know how to put what they have to say, as if it had never been said before.”

–Goethe

It’s been said there are only 7 basic plots, and it’s up to the writer to tell them in new and original ways.  So how do you do that?

By being yourself.

No one else has your life experience in quite the same way you do.  Even if you’re best friends with someone you’ve known since you were in diapers, they’re not going to have the same experience you did.  The differences may be subtle—your dad worked first shift while theirs worked third shift—but even the smallest differences can have huge impact on the outcome.

My short stories and novels may not be the most original ideas in the world—I write mostly about ghosts and haunted houses, for God’s sake.  Try telling THAT story in new and interesting ways—so I have to rely on my own personal life experiences to add flavor to what have the potential to be some really tired stories.  I mean, how many chain-rattling, sheet-wearing ghosts, how many doors opening and closing by themselves, how many footsteps down an empty hall can we take?

When I wrote my novel THE THIRD FLOOR, about a family moving into a haunted house in a new town … man, that story could have gone so many different kinds of wrong, could have been the stalest, most uninteresting story ever told.  And don’t think I didn’t worry about that the entire time I was writing it.

But I was able to use my personal experience to add flavor to that plot.  The house in the story was based on a house I had lived in.  Some of the events that occurred were things that I had experienced in that house.  And there wasn’t another single person on the planet who had THOSE experiences and could use them in a novel.

The prologue to my novel THE FLIP is the story of how two people met and fell in love.  Blah blah blah, we’ve seen it all before, so who cares?  But it’s more than just that.  The prologue to my novel THE FLIP is a retelling of the story of how my wife and I met and fell in love.  I changed the setting and the names, but my own personal life experience provided the backbone to that story.  Only one other person in the world could have written that opening, my wife, and even her own personal life experiences would have changed the way the story was told.

I took an old idea—the meet cute, the falling in love—and made it original by making it mine, by making it new.

Ezra Pound said, about originality, “Make it new,” and that’s all we’re doing.  We’re taking old stories and telling them in NEW ways.  How?  By making it your own.

My friend Dave and I have had this discussion, about how sometimes we look at our older stories and realize that our life experiences since writing them would result in a totally different version of that story if we wrote them “now”.  And as much as the structure may be the same, the result would be original.

So when you’re working on yet another retread of one of only seven basic plots, remember to add your own personal flavor.  This is also the best way to let readers know the writer behind the words.  Stephen King doesn’t have to tell people his father walked out on the family when he was a kid, he’s been writing about substitute father figures ever since.  That’s his experience and it adds a distinct flavor to his novels.

If you want your work to be ORIGINAL—and what writer doesn’t?—you have to make it YOURS.  And the ONLY way to do that is to use YOUR personal experience.  There’s only one you, and when you rely on the strength of that, you’re going to be writing stories that leave readers saying “No one else could have written that.”  And they’ll be absolutely right.

“The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself.  It is also his most difficult task.”

–Robertson Davies

Have you ever written something and sent it out into the world for others to read and, hopefully, enjoy, only for people to leave a review saying how much it sucked?

I have.

But then, every writer has.  Just like every writer has a stack of rejection slips.  It’s part of the business and we have to learn very quickly to not take it personally; some stories just don’t connect with some readers.

And some negative reviews can be a learning experience.

I met this writer once years ago, Jeff Something, I can’t remember his last name and he’s not around anymore, who my friend Dave and I got into a debate with him on his blog about learning from bad reviews.  He insisted he NEVER reads his reviews, which I thought was just ridiculous because, as I told him, if every review comes back and says how the plot was good but the dialogue was terrible, that’s a good indicator that maybe you need to work on your dialogue.

Jeff said there’s nothing to learn from reviews, good or bad.

Like I said, Jeff’s not around anymore.

And I’m not saying EVERY negative review is a learning experience—one of the one-star reviews my novel THE THIRD FLOOR received had this to say: “This book was awful. Can’t figure out why or how I managed to finish it. It’s full of listening…I will not be reading ANYTHING else by this author….”  Full of listening, you say?  I have no idea what to do with that.

Another said: “You know what’s scary? Subtlety. This book is anything but subtle. From the first chapter the house wants you to know it’s haunted. It’s desperate to establish right from the beginning that scary things are going to happen, and that makes it even more unscary. I want to be intrigued enough to read on and wonder what’s going to happen next, but when you bash the reader over the head right from the beginning there’s really no reason to read to the end (which I did anyway and regretted it).”

Yes, I very purposely wrote a haunted house book from the first chapter.  Hell, the manuscript had a ghost on page ONE, that was my intention, so unfortunately I couldn’t learn anything from this one-star review.

However, another had this to say: “With their poor decision making (like Liz heard voices and immediately called the police, but when her stepson and herself began violently throwing up blood and he started Ebola-like eye, nose and ear bleeding she easily wrote off the possibility of going to the hospital), it was hard to feel any sympathy for any of them. This also impacted the “fear factor” of the whole book, as without that sympathy, their plight never felt remotely scary.”

That is an excellent point, one I don’t remember if I addressed in the book.  Because in a real world scenario, yes, it makes perfect sense that if your son’s nose if bleeding that heavily (in the book it was only the son, not both of them, and if I recall correctly, it was a nosebleed, not throwing up blood leading to “Ebola-like eye, nose and ear bleeding”, but then I wrote this book over 20 years ago, so I could be wrong) you take him to the hospital.

The reviewer then went on to say: “Some other details were downright confusing – there was scene with smoking inside the hospital! The Indoor Clean Air Act went up in the early 1990s, so it would have been nice to have other indicators if that was the year this story was set.”  That was my mistake.  Having a mother who spent my entire childhood from first grade all through high school working in hospitals, I should have known that.

I’m not saying you take EVERY negative review to heart.  Some people just hate everything.  But there are times when criticism is helpful.  We all want to be the best writers we can, so we have to listen to criticism and judge for ourselves if there’s anything worth taking away from it.  In most cases, it’s just people being shitty, but sometimes you find a lesson.

And like Dave and I tried to convey to Jeff Something those long years ago, if every review says your plot has holes or your characters don’t ring true, that’s a lesson you should definitely take and try to learn from. 

We’re writers, we have no idea where our weaknesses lie.  But if you listen to the reviews, both good and bad, and find the lessons buried there, that’s just as good an education as anything.  In my own work, I learned to either do a lot more research, or write around the areas I don’t know about.  And I never ever ever have a character smoking in a hospital anymore.

And, to be clear, THE THIRD FLOOR has 17 one-star reviews, but 203 five-star reviews.

The hardest part of any short story or novel, any piece of writing, is the first line.  No matter what roadblocks you may run into later on, no matter how complicated the plot or how involved the characters, it’s that first sentence where you meet the most resistance.  From there, it’s just a matter of momentum.

Have you ever had to push a stalled car out of the way?  Once you get it rolling, it’s a lot easier to move.  But that initial start is where you expend the most energy.  Writing is the same way.

You have to GET going, but once you do, you’ve got momentum, and momentum will help you KEEP going.  But once you HAVE momentum, you have to MAINTAIN momentum.  Once you’ve started, write every day.  Much like the example of the stalled car, it’s so much easier to keep going on a story once you’ve started.  But if you start, then stop the car when you encounter a speedbump, getting started again is going to be so much harder.  And now you’ve got this speedbump in front of you.  You’ve already got momentum, use that to roll over the speedbump, ignore it and keep going.

William Faulkner said, “When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.”

Many writers, when they hit a part of the story that’s going to require research, will put a notation in there, something they’ll remember and can easily find again (I will usually mark a passage with *** on either side of it, then do a search for *** later on so I can find it again; this is called the bracket method, except I personally don’t use brackets), and they keep going, only coming back to this part much later, after they’ve completed the current scene or chapter.  They’re following through on the momentum they’ve established, riding over the speedbump.

This is a case where an outline would be most beneficial.  If you know where the story is going already, all you have to do is transfer that to prose and put it on the page.  The outline is your momentum kickstarter.  You’ve already done the hard part, figuring out the course of the story.  But, again, once you’ve started, you have to keep going.

Another way to maintain momentum is to set a word count.  But not a word count where you tell yourself, “I have to write 500 words in the next hour.”  Instead look at your current word count, and go from there.  For example, say your current story is at 4234 words.  Say, “I have to get to 4300 words.”  That’s 66 words.  You can do 66 words.  And chances are, once you’ve started, you won’t stop at 66.  You may stop at 350 words.  Then you’re at 4584 words.  Okay, you have to write 16 words to get to 4600.   But you won’t write 16 words, you’ll write another 158.  Now you’re at 4742.  Only 58 words away from 4800.

I’ve used this method to reach my 1000 words a day goal several times and it’s never failed me.  But that’s to maintain momentum THAT DAY.

If you need something to help maintain momentum from one day to the next, a great trick is to stop in the middle.  My writing time every morning is limited to whenever I get out of bed to whenever I have to start getting ready for work, so I don’t always have a lot of time (I overslept an hour this morning.  Thank God I already had the day off), so sometimes what I’ll do is, if it’s getting close to time to stop, but the story is really chugging along—because I’ve established excellent momentum—I’ll look at the clock, decide how much further I think I can go, set a nice round cut-off point (“I’m at 4376 words … I can stop at 4500.”), and once I reach that point, I stop.  Just stop.  Even if I’m in the middle of a sentence.  Even if that sentence only has one more word to go.  I’ll finish it TOMORROW.  But naturally I’m not going to sit down tomorrow and just write one word.  I was right in the middle of a thought, I’m going to finish that thought.  And since I’ve already got started for the day, I’m going to keep going until I hit the end of that scene, or until it’s time to stop and get ready for work.  With any luck, when that day’s time is up, I’m right smack in the middle of a sentence again.

Maybe setting a 1000 word daily goal is a reach; not everyone has that kind of time every day.  You can still maintain a DAILY momentum with, say, 200 words.  The above paragraph, from “If you need something” to “middle of a sentence again” is 246 words.  If you can do THAT on a regular, consistent basis for a year, you’ve got an 89,790-word novel.  The key to momentum is not quantity, it’s all about consistency.  Remember, the hardest part is starting.  But once you’ve started, it’s so much easier to keep going.  An object in motion tends to stay in motion, right?

You just need to START.

I have a day job, and I’ve been in that job for ten years at this point.  I like to think I’m pretty good at it.  Do I know everything there is to know about that job?  No, but I’m always trying to learn more, not so I can know it all, but just so I can be better at it, and in turn hopefully not get fired for incompetence.  The same rule applies to writing.  Or any creative art, really.

I’ve heard of seasoned, road-weary guitarists learning new licks from fellow musicians, and visual artists who study the work of others in hopes of learning new techniques.  As a writer, you’re never done learning.

“But, CDM,” you say, “I’ve been published.  I’ve written five novels, and some of them sold.  I know how to write.”

Hey, I know how to write, too; I’ve been doing it for over 30 years as of this writing.  But I still read every book with an eye toward figuring out how the author did or did not succeed in creative believable characters, an intriguing plot, or in writing prose that carries me along and makes me forget I’m reading fiction.

Ray Bradbury said, “Success is a continuing process.  Failure is a stoppage.  The man who keeps moving and working does not fail….  If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.  You fail only if you stop writing.  I’ve written about 2,000 short stories; I’ve only published about 300 and I feel I’m still learning.”

There was a quote from THE Harlan Ellison, one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century, hands down, no questions asked, no doubt about, no argument to be made, where he said that after decades of writing, he was “just learning how to do this.”

You have many jobs as a writer, and one of those jobs is to NEVER stop learning.

I’ve met writers over the years who had that earlier mentality where they assume that, because they found an editor willing to publish one of their short stories in a “for the love” magazine where their payment is two contributor copies, they’ve learned all they need to know as a writer.  And they never progress any further than that point, churning out the same stories with the same mediocre prose and the same stereotypical characters over and over.  Sometimes those stories got accepted, sometimes they didn’t, but those writers never ever matured, their style never changed, and NONE of them ever achieved the level of success I KNOW they hoped for.

There’s another quote, this one attributed to Albert Einstein who said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.”  That absolutely applies to writing.  When you’ve reached a point where you think you know all there is to know about writing, you are creatively dead.  You may continue to write, but everything you produce will be stunted and weak.  Only by continuously learning new methods of storytelling and world-building, new ways to structure a plot, or even just to use the language we all use, can we truly become the writers we all WANT to be.

By 1992, I’d read all the Stephen King there was available to read, but it wasn’t until I read Clive Barker that I started to understand that poetry and prose could be interchangeable, or that sometimes it’s ok to show the horror, that it doesn’t have to be vague suggestion, the monster can be there on the page.

It wasn’t until PULP FICTION that I learned how to successfully tell a story out of order.

The Prince song “Housequake” taught me that, we all use the same words, it just depends on HOW you use those words, and the really successful ones will use it every way they can.

Clive Barker, Quentin Tarantino, Prince, all voracious learners willing to push themselves to keep getting better, and the ONLY way to get better, to progress, is to NEVER STOP LEARNING.

How?  First, read everything you can.  Everything you read will teach you something, even if it’s a terrible book: you’ll learn what NOT to do.  Second, write.  Every day.  And if you can’t, do SOMETHING writing-related every day, even if it’s just thinking through a story you’re already working on, or want to start.  Churn it over, explore the plot, get to know the characters, look for those plot holes before you write them.  Third, get to know other writers, talk to them about writing.  Writers LOVE talking shop with other writers, and that’s a back and forth you want in your life, believe me.

While I do believe some things just can’t be taught, that you either have it or you don’t, why stifle yourself and your growth by not even TRYING to learn?  And writing is a marathon, not a race.  That means it’s never too late to start.  So start now.  Find a writer you love, open a book, start reading and learn all you can.

Kill Your Darlings

Some of my most favorite passages I’ve ever written were things the world will never see.  While beautiful and poetic—to my ear, anyway—they added nothing to the plot of that particular story, so they had to go.

I was once editing a story for a friend, this was back in the very early 2000s, and she had a scene in a park where a side character goes on a rant about something or other, I think it was about fast food.  I crossed it out with the notation “author intrusion”.  The author really liked the bit, though, and fought for it.  I insisted it had to go because, while it had meaning for the author, it was a point she wanted to make about society, it really had NOTHING to do with the plot or the story she was telling.

In the end, she had to kill her darling.

This is a phrase you hear a lot when you start writing, but what does it mean?

Put simply, it means that, when you reach the editing phase, that line that you think the world is going to faun over, that side plot or supporting character you think gives the story flavor, chances are very good it doesn’t.  In fact, chances are just as good it’s unnecessary fluff that is only going to distract from the main plot.  Readers don’t have time for your bullshit.  Tell the story, and tell it in the most straightforward manner you can.  Anything that isn’t THE STORY has to go, no matter how interesting you think it is, no matter how purple the prose may be, and no matter how cleverly YOU think the passage doles out some universal truth.

In fact, that last one definitely HAS to go.  That’s author intrusion and it has no place in your story.  YOU have no place in your story, even if the story is told in first person.  In the world of the story, you don’t matter.  You don’t exist.  Only the story exists, only the story matters.

Kill your darlings.