Hectic schedules and tiny egos

It’s been a hectic fall with lots going on, so I’ve backed off on my Type M commitment, dropping down to one post per month for the time being.

I have a new day job. I’m leading the upper school at Detroit Country Day School now, having left boarding school for civilian life. Michigan, I’m learning, is a great place to live (and write). And aside from a fondness of bourbon, I now have one other thing in common with Ernest Hemingway: Michigan has given us both the freedom to write. While Hemingway went to Paris and wrote about Michigan; I moved to Michigan and am writing about boarding school life.

In late August, I finished a draft of what I’m hoping will be a new series featuring a husband and wife team at a New England boarding school, and I did something I haven’t done before: I brought in a hired gun to read it and offer a critique, hiring a longtime editor Marcia Markland (St. Martin’s and Avalon) to read the manuscript and offer her thoughts. Those thoughts were instrumental in me developing the draft.

I’ve long used a “home team” of readers –– close friends who are book lovers and who know me and the boarding school environment well. They offer excellent insights. But Marcia, who acquired and published crime and genre fiction, read the work as an acquisitions editor does. Her feedback allowed me to trust my instincts and have made the book much better.

It’s a question of ego, I think. I have published nine novels. Why pay for a reader? someone asked. My answer is simple: When trying to launch a new series, the goal is to go to houses with the best possible product, and I write only from 4 to 6 a.m. The rest of my day is spent with my head in another world, so I’m willing to pay Marcia for her time, excellent insights, and her ability to examine my book for plot unity.

I’m hoping to have the updated manuscript on my agent’s desk by Thanksgiving.

*

In an unexpected plot twist in the story of my writing life, an agent at CAA reached out to my agent, Julia Lord, last summer with unexpected news: two screenwriters wanted to option my Peyton Cote US Border Patrol agent/single mother series and pitch it as a TV series. In late September, we sold the option, and I’m thrilled that Bruce Norris and Caroline Wood will try to develop it with me as “consulting producer.” Caroline, who will take the lead, gets my vision for the series, which is set in the unique and isolated region of Maine known as Aroostook County.

A New Time for an Old Read

 As a writer, I advise newbies to read, read, read, and I find myself laboring to abide by what I'm telling others to do. My excuse is that I sit at the laptop all day, writing and editing, and in spare moments, it's too easy to zone out watching YouTube or Netflix. Reading for the sake of losing myself in a good story has become a challenge. I fondly remember my years in high school when I could spend the better part of evenings and weekends devouring the works of Leon Uris, James Clavell, John D MacDonald, Harold Robbins, and Arthur C Clarke. Feeling the need for such literary stimulation (okay, Harold Robbins would've chafed at being labeled "literary" but he did make bank with his writing), I decided to return to an old favorite, West With The Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham. In her day she was a renowned horse trainer and an accomplished pilot, being the first aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic, east to west. Interestingly, I found out that two friends were also reading this same title.

Markham starts by describing her experience as an African bush pilot, then shifts into her backstory as a young girl living on a farm hacked out of the Kenyan bush, chronicling a life that seems more fantastic than any CGI adventure offered by Hollywood. In one episode, she skips school, and accompanied by her dog, joins a hunt with the local Masai. When they fell a reed-buck, it's up to Markham and one of the boys to skin and butcher the animal, which they feed to the hunting dogs. Later, the hunting party confronts a lion, and thankfully, after the lion and the Masai leader, Arab Maini, signal that they won't back down from a fight, the two sides retreat and go about their business. Markham fantasizes about saving the day with her trusty spear. She then sets her dog loose to chase warthogs, an exceptionally dangerous and cunning adversary. Not wanting to lose her faithful dog, she searches and discovers him, gravely wounded and next to a warthog vanquished after a ferocious battle. She won't abandon her dog and decides to spend the night alone with him in the jungle. She wears shorts and describes how her legs bleed from cuts inflicted by thorns and elephant grass. Arab Maini finds Markham. He is naked, having wrapped his simple robe about his arm to free his movements. The images overwhelmed me. Markham, an adolescent white girl in the African wilderness, with no water and no food, tending to her dog, so badly injured that his ribs are showing, spending the night with an unclothed man and and yet there's an innocent Eden-esque naturalism about it. 

As a teenage horse trainer, Markham relates treading barefoot through stables that need mucking and shares her trials of being bitten and thrown, even knocked unconscious against a tree, and having to convalesce for several days before returning to work. Throughout the memoir, she describes the environment with keen reverence and others with a profound understanding, always with empathy and without rancor. What a difference to today's verbal barf-fest on social media. However, Markham's no pollyanna about life's difficulties, showing her father worrying and toiling to save his farm as drought ravaged about them, only to lose everything. As marvelous as her anecdotes are, what makes her narrative sparkle is her extraordinary prose. Of the effect of World War One upon her community, she writes: 

"The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time."

To say that she was a superb writer would be too flimsy of an accolade. Ernest Hemingway, who seldom expressed praise of any writer, wrote this about Markham:

"I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and some times making an okay pig pen...(she) can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers."

Blood on the Page

 By Thomas Kies

Our local college has contracted me to teach another Creative Writing course in January—if our state is still allowing in-person classes by then. I’ve taught three of these in 2020, remarkable because of everything that’s going on. We all have masks on and we’re safely distanced apart in a large classroom. 

It was heartwarming when the college asked if I’d teach an Advanced Creative Writing class in addition after I finish teaching Creative Writing 101 in February. They tell me that they’ve been getting requests by former students asking that I teach an advanced course. 

I’ve noticed that the students, most of them adults, find the class to be kind of therapeutic as well as instructive. I’ve had as many as twelve in my classes (before the pandemic) and as few as four. All of the students start out as strangers, but at the end of six weeks, they’ve bonded and know a lot about each other.  

This is how I teach the class. Initially, I ask them all what they want to get out of the course. Once I have an idea what their goals are, I craft the classes accordingly. So, each Creative Writing course is slightly different, but we still cover the basics.

While the courses may vary, the structure remains the same. After each class, I give the students an assignment. It may be to write a deeply emotional scene. One assignment may be to create a scene with a kick-ass protagonist meeting a villain. The final assignment for all the courses has been to write the first few pages of your book and the last few pages of your book. Whatever that means to you.

In many cases, the beginning of their story and the ending are both deeply personal, even though it’s fictionalized.

We start the two-hour class period with the students reading their work out loud. Now, I know how scary that can be. I remember what it was like for me. It’s freaking terrifying. You’re showing everyone your baby. What if they call your baby ugly?

So, after each reading, we all applaud. Then we go around the room and we talk about the piece’s strengths and then we talk about ways that could potentially make the work stronger. When the course is over, I want the students to walk away feeling good about the craft and with a desire to keep writing. 

I love how the students have bonded at the end of six weeks. They start out as complete strangers, but when the course is finished, they feel close to each other. I think that’s because we put some much of ourselves on the page when we write.  

What was it Hemingway said? “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

When the fledgling writers do one of my assignments, in many cases, they fictionalize an event from their real lives. Some of those events are heartwarming, some of eye opening, and some are tragic. 

But much of what we write comes from our own lives and our own observations. Sure, we make stuff up. We write novels. But it’s all culled from a lifetime of experiences, emotions, feelings, observations, and influence by the people around us. 

I find these courses fulfilling and I’m gratified that the students and the college wants me to take it to the next step, Creative Writing 2.0…an advanced course. Now I’ve just got to figure out what that entails.  

Stay safe and stay healthy.

So much to digest

There has been so much to digest this week. The news cycle nearly forgot COVID-19, as the death toll topped 100,000 Americans, and swung to nationwide protests in the wake of the horrific killing of George Floyd.

On Monday evening, I, along with the rest of the nation, watched the president use military force to clear a path through protesters so he could have his picture taken in front of a church. He was holding a Bible as the armed military members stood at the ready.

As a privileged white man, I don’t pretend to understand the emotions my Black friends and colleagues feel this week. I am not teaching right now, so I’m not working to help students process images seen on TV or the words they hear coming from home. My work at present is primarily as a father: in conversations about systemic racism, about the anger spilling into the streets in nonviolent and violent protests borne in the deep and dark waters of slavery, about the ways we, as a white family in this particular nation, have benefitted from a financial system built on oppression and designed to allow us, above others, to own property, and about how owning property alone creates opportunities for things like college loans. Admittedly, this effort on the homefront is not much, certainly not enough.

If you are looking for a compelling read about race and its relationship to the American police forces, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me.

*

When scenes like the one I saw on CNN Monday evening elevate my blood pressure and these next five months loom large, I, like probably many who turn to this blog do, turn to the blank screen –– and write.

I have a manuscript with my agent, so I’m playing the waiting game. Meanwhile, I’m writing a short story with the idea of using it as the frame for the sequel to the novel my agent has. I got the idea by reading Ed McBain’s story “Sadie When She Died” and then the novel by the same title. The story is wonderful. McBain liked it so much he turned it into a novel. I did this with the first Peyton Cote novel, Bitter Crossing.

Using the short story form allows one to take a plot and try it out. To see where it falls flat, see where, if you had another 90,000 words, you could expand it with additional storylines, characters, suspects, and complications.

Writing a story is good practice. I’m keeping a careful eye on my word count. There are no extraneous scenes. No fluff. Hemingway said fiction writing was architecture, not interior design. Nowhere in fiction writing is that more true.

It hasn’t been a good week, but I am hopeful that change is coming.

Be well, be safe.

Nervous About Teaching Creative Writing.

Tonight I’m teaching my first Creative Writing class at our local community college. It’s a continuing education program so I won’t be grading papers or scoring tests. It’s purely for people who are interesting in learning about being better writers.

I’m a bit nervous because, while I’ve taught a couple of college courses in the past and given writing workshops, I’ve never taught a course on Creative Writing.

To be sure, I can offer advice on the mechanics of writing. How you can go about developing characters that are interesting and memorable. I can show ways to create a protagonist who is relatable. I can talk about how you should “show” rather than “tell”. I can offer my thoughts on plot structure and even a few tricks about plot twists.

We can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of narrative viewpoint and how to write believable dialogue.

I’ll suggest that they read aloud what they write. It’s a great way to “hear” what’s been rattling around in their heads and then hammered out onto their laptops.

I’ll let them know that often it’s a good idea to leave your manuscript in a drawer and walk away from it for a few days or even a week or two. Then when you’re ready to write a revision, open the drawer and you’ll have a fresh set of eyes critiquing it.

But what I’d like them to do, more than anything, is to bring in some of their works in progress and read selected passages from them aloud to the class. I’m hoping the feedback they get will help them become stronger writers.

I’ve taken creative writing classes and was scared out of my wits to read what I’d written to a room full of people. Even to this day, I can speak to an audience about my books and my thoughts on writing, but reading from my novels still makes me nervous.

But the great thing is, in a creative writing class, you’re in a room full of people who share your passion. Everyone there has a joy for writing.

So, I think I can do a good job helping them with the mechanics of writing. But can someone teach creativity?

I’ve read articles that say that it can be taught and some that say that it can’t. There are exercises that can help strengthen someone’s creativity. But as an adult (and all my students at adults), unless you are already endowed with it, is it really possible to suddenly grow creativity if you don’t already have it?

Tonight, I’m going to ask each student what they hope to get out of the class, who their favorite writers are, and tell us about their ‘work in progress’? And if they tell me they don’t have a WIP, I’m going to have to ask them, “Why the hell not?”

Now, I’ll end this blog with three quotes:

“It aint’ whatcha’ write, it’s the way atcha’ write it.”—Jack Kerouac

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”—Ernest Hemingway

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do for them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”—Dorothy Parker

Speaking of Words...

I, Donis, have found it very interesting to read my blogmates recent thoughts on inspiration, the reality of murder and crime solving, outlining (or not), technique, and conveying sense of place.

All of these deep thoughts have made me consider the psychology of my own writing. So much of my technique is unconscious. How do I convey a sense of place, the personalities and motivations of my characters? How does one describe a smell, a color, an emotion? It helps to have a spectacular vocabulary, I’m sure, but it doesn’t seem to be the number of words a writer uses, but which words. Genius is the ability to choose the right words and arrange them in just the right order to convey the perfect nuance of feeling and senses.

What, you may ask, is she babbling about now? I’m actually talking about Ernest Hemingway.I was never a big fan of Hemingway’s manly themes, but I have a great appreciation for the genius of his style. He is terse in the extreme, but somehow he is able to create real honest-to-God people coping with situations that most of us will never face.His characters are so human that in the end, the reader feels she might really know what it’s like to be an anti-Fascist freedom fighter or an elderly Cuban fisherman.How does he do it when he is so sparing with words?

Whether or not we authors convey crime-solving techniques with absolute accuracy or not, mystery is a fabulous form for exploring character. In fact, mystery is all about motivation. Why do people do what they do? What is going on in a character’s head when he is driven to kill someone? Why is the sleuth trying to figure out who did the deed? What is driving him? Do I think about these things when I write a mystery? Yes, I do, especially when I’m creating the character of the murderer. But then after I have written about her for a while, she separates from me, in a way, and begins to react unconsciously to the situations I put her in, like a real person would do.

I know this phenomenon occurs with all authors, but it does make you feel a bit like you’re possessed. I wonder what Dr. Freud would have to say about it?

When the Writer becomes the Teacher

How many of you teach writing? For a while, to pad my income, I actively sought writing gigs but backed off that because it was A) a lot of work finding gigs, and B) I didn't get a lot of interest. It was embarrassing touting myself as a "National Bestselling Author" and have zilch in terms of students signing up. I did have some success, don't get me wrong. I taught Writing the Graphic Novel at Front Range Community College and for the last TEN years, I've taught craft seminars at Lighthouse Writers summer LitFest. Just last week I taught a craft workshop at the Westminster Public Library. And like many of you, I've presented my fair share of panels, gratis, at various cons.

In my classes, one of my guiding principles is that I have specific take-aways for my students. I want them to feel that their money and time was well spent. I also like to include quotes to illustrate that this writing game can be a challenging biz, even for big-name writers like Hemingway, for example. Although I personally don't like writing exercises, or "prompts" to use MFA jargon, I rely on them because that way I don't have to talk for the entire session. I listen to myself enough as it is. For the most part, I seem to cycle though the same topics though the classes have different titles each time: story structure, characters, premise, and the big one--motivation. Something else I've noticed is that students, especially older ones, seem to be seeking the one secret trick that will get them published. One time I mentioned that I listen to ambient soundscapes as I write--cafes are my favorite (I'm at Starbucks without paying $$$ for a latte)--and when I shared a specific Youtube address, my students feverishly wrote it down. Older students also don't seem too interested in speculative fiction or mystery and instead prefer memoir. Understandable, I guess, though I don't teach it.

Every once in a while I'll have a student challenge me, which I find annoying. I certainly welcome different opinions because that's how I learn, but when some pompous nitwit wants to make a point at my expense I don't like being in the position of defending myself. When it happens, my ego kicks in, but I tend to downplay their response and move on.

Lately I've been a mentor in the Regis University Mile High MFA program. My personal take-away from that is how motivated and well-read these students are. They definitely keep me on my toes. One objective of the program has the graduating students identify how they'll use their MFA degree after leaving school. Not surprising, teaching is one avenue.

Follow Your Heroes

Once in a while, I get asked to speak to young people about writing as a profession. When the time comes to offer career advice, I ask them, Who are your heroes? Why are they your heroes and why can't you be a hero like them?

I ask those questions because when I look back on my life and see the direction it's taken, I realize that my way forward is along the path illuminated by other writers. Reading about inventors and moguls was hit or miss, so I was never destined to be a business tycoon. However, the biographies of literary greats like Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and F Scott Fitzgerald spoke to me. I understood their struggles. A favorite source of inspiration was The Red Hot Typewriter, a biography of John D MacDonald, and my takeaway was his blue-collar approach to his craft. He wrote every working day from 8-Noon, 1-4, and during his career he published over forty novels. In 1964, he published five! Using a typewriter! No whining about writer's block from him.

Another hero, though he's excoriated by the literary world, is Harold Robbins because of his steadfast application at putting words on paper and spinning bestselling yarns. And there's Anita Loos, a screenwriter who defied conventions to become a pivotal force in the movie business and invented that Hollywood staple, the romantic comedy.

Not all worked out for my heroes. It's no spoiler if I tell you that the lives of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Robbins went off the rails during their later years. On the other hand, while literary critics like to talk about the burdens of artistic genius and its toll on the writer's psyche, Burroughs, MacDonald, and Loos kept pecking away at the keys well into their sunset years.

What brought these thoughts to mind is that I'm close to finishing one project, the next and long overdue installment of my Felix Gomez series. Now I have to decide what next to dig into. Those of you who've written a book know what it's like to stand on the ready line for another long march. No matter my approach, it takes a year to eighteen months to write the first draft. I've tried schemes, like Chris Fox's 5,000 words-per-hour method, to shorten my turn around time, but when I do that my result is a pile of mush that needs serious editing so I gain little. I wish I had the focus of Cindi Myers who can crank out four-to-six novels a year. People who've attended a writing retreat with her say she easily produces 15 thousand words in a weekend. And it's quality work since since she's won numerous awards to include a Colorado Book Award. Another slayer of the word count is Kevin J Anderson who's hammered out more than fifty bestselling novels. I've been at WordFire parties and when the rest of us are about to start yet another late-night cocktail, Kevin says he's got to go write. That's dedication.

My heroes.

Don Henley and Voice

Tuesday night, I drove two hours across Massachusetts on Route 2 and into Boston to see Don Henley play at an outdoor venue on the waterfront in 40-degrees and rain. He played all the songs I remember from the 80s, and (along with 5,000 other gray-haired aficionados) I stood and sang along with him. At one point, I turned to my friend Greg Leeds and said, “The guy’s voice never changes.”

Which got me thinking: the songs (the lyrics about memories and about loves lost; the blend of guitars and horns; and the long, sweeping choruses) sound the same. And so too does Don Henley –– that whiskey voice we all recognize instantly.

Voice, we talk about when discussing authors, is a writer’s DNA. I can take a paragraph from Annie Dillard, set it next to one from Alice Walker, and a reader will immediately be able to name the author of each paragraph.

So what is voice?

Technically, it’s the nuances of diction and syntax that roll into a sound/personality/persona on the page. I read somewhere that a writer finds his or her voice when they’ve written a stack of pages that exceeds their own height. I’ve also read that you know you’ve found your voice when you know it. I had that experience: seated in the damp basement of our first home early one morning, writing my third novel, I sat back and re-read the sentence I’d just written, realizing it sounded precisely as I’d hoped. To a guy who loves writing because you always feel like the dog chasing its own tail, this was a startling moment: I had produced one sentence that offered the absolute clarity I hoped for. (Hopefully, there have been a few more and others along the way.)

It was Hemingway, who, after all, also wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Does truth equate to voice? Maybe not entirely. Consider James Crumley’s opening line to The Last Good Kiss (1978): “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” We can examine the line for its rolling syntax, subordinate and main clauses, look at the clever adjectives, and as Billy Collins would say, “beat it with a hose.” But what’s the use? We know everything we need to know about the speaker, C.W. Sughrue, an alcoholic former military man now a private investigator. And we know a thing or two about his creator: Crumley’s voice –– cynical, observant, and lyrical –– appears in his opening line. You meet the writer, the speaker, and want to spend more time with both of them.

Which brings me back to Don Henley and Voice. We can all try new sounds. I’ve written from the perspective of men, women, children; tough guys and mothers; people who hold my political convictions, and those who do not. Yet in the end, I’m certain there are aspects of my syntax that does not vary. I wish I was as fluid as Crumley but admittedly am not. For, as Hemingway said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master,” which keeps us all writing –– and searching for our own voices.

Rabbit Holes

Destiny's Pawn hits shelves this week, and I hit the road, signing and doing author talks. All this while I'm writing the fourth Peyton Cote book (2017), which is due to my publisher Sept. 1.

The new book deals with human trafficking, and to write it I did all the right things: I outlined it (took me a week), I created character sketches (so I could use multiple characters' third-person, limited points of view), and I researched, reading ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (highly recommended) and various online articles, even e-mailing professors and experts on the Syrian situation.

The research took weeks. When I finally sat down to write, I finished 30 pages pretty quickly. As often happens, I hit a plot snag, so I slowed, researched more, and continued on, albeit at a slower pace. Around page 50, I needed to do additional research. I ended up on the phone for an hour with Kevin Stevens, former deputy chief of the US Border patrol. Then I plotted some more. The result was a 60-page Google doc that had my marginal notes ("comments") that ran the entire length of some of the draft's pages.

And I walked around the house like a zombie, the storyline, the characters, the information forming a kaleidoscope in my head.

When my wife asked what the book was about – and it took ten minutes to describe it to her – I knew I was in serious trouble.

"Isn't there a way to simplify it?" she said.

"Oh, there is," I said.

It's not the death penalty, but it's close: I stopped and started again, writing the story from only the third-person, limited point of view of Peyton Cote. It wasn't an easy decision, especially since Destiny's Pawn is told, successfully, from the point of view of several characters. However, the narrative structure of Destiny's Pawn – using multiple points of view – was dictated by the story itself: Simply put, Peyton cannot realistically have access to information the reader needs for the book to hold up. But book four is a different story, one that can be told from Peyton's perspective. So I've climbed out of the wrong rabbit hole, and the book is going well. (It's due, after all, Sept. 1, so it has to go well.)

Writers face many choices when we begin a book (or even get 50 pages in). Some choices are predictable. Others come at you sideways. But any choice a writer makes must benefit the work itself. As Hemingway said, novel writing "is architecture, not interior decoration."

Honest Writing

I read Aline's, Frankie's, and Donis's recent posts with great interest and recalled Ernest Hemingway's famous line from A Moveable Feast: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." My three Type M colleagues touched on what, to me, amounts to honest writing – telling the story inside you, the one you have to tell. This is something I've been considering a lot recently.

The opportunity to explore a new character has piqued my interest. I've published nine novels (No. 9, Destiny's Pawn, comes out in June). Eight of those required tremendous research (five were set on the PGA Tour; and the last three featuring a US Border Patrol agent). Research can be fun. I like talking to people, learning new things, and reading or watching just about anything to do with the criminal justice system. But research is also time consuming and nerve racking (you must, after all, get it right).

I've had a character in my head and an idea for a book (and series) for several years. I started a version of the book a few years ago, then sold my Peyton Cote series, and wrote that instead for the past four years. All the while, this idea for an amateur sleuth novel set in a locale I know very well, has stayed with me. Then something happened about three weeks ago that stalled the book I was working on, and this novel's opening line appeared. I wrote it. And kept going. Now, I'm thirty pages in, and the book is writing itself.

One reason for the ease with which this project is proceeding is because I've set the book at a New England boarding school. For me, having received financial aid to attended a boarding school and now living and working at one, I am surely following the adage of "write what you know." Additionally, these are places where privilege, wealth, and power can collide -- always a potent concoction for plots. Most importantly, those same elements that combine to create interesting plots also offer potential for great empathy, which every story needs if it is to have a heart.

So where does this book go? Who knows? But I'm eager to see where it leads. More importantly, I'm motivated to finish it.

The Church of the Writer

Last Sunday I was drinking beers with some buddies and one of them asked if I had read the Ernest Hemingway book on writing. I said that I had, and we talked about the letters Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald shared about writing. Our conversation turned to discuss my writing process since I was the only one at the table who has been published. Another asked where my ideas came from. I'm afraid I disappointed my fellow beer drinkers when my answers turned flip. I don't like to talk about the writing process because it's easier to talk about writing than it is to write. When asked how do I write, meaning how do I approach the daunting task of writing, I replied that I sit at the keyboard and start writing. I don't regard where I write as a sacred space; I tend to think of it as a sausage machine. There's a lot of work to be done, and unless you turn the crank relentlessly, nothing comes out. I think people who don't write--or try to write--want me to say how the Muse kisses my forehead and the words magically flow. They don't feel the Muse's kiss and therefore, they don't write.

I get a similar impression at conferences when new writers crowd around us published authors like we're the chosen anointed, holders of the secret key that will unlock the hearts of agents and editors. The truth is that if I had such a key, I'd be at the top of all the bestseller lists, winner of every freakin' literary prize, and so rich I'd hire Stephen King and E L James to entertain me with pie fights. But there is no such key. And even more irksome, the path for every writer's success is different. After Hugh Howey, author of the mega-hit Wool, punched the sweet spot with a Reddit Q&A, untold other writers have since tried to leverage that venue for similar results...and zilch. Using a different tactic, one writer used Instagram to gather an army of followers. Others have Tweeted their way to stardom. Countless others have tried to follow their examples and their efforts became exercises in futility. So what works? Who the hell knows? You have to blaze your own trail.

On social media, it's an echo chamber of advice for writers. Lots of scribes post all kinds of aphorisms and you-gotta-dos. Most of them are trite or vague. Once in a while someone twists the obvious into something that sounds profound and other writers pile on with the Hallelujahs. It's like church, and we behave like backsliding, guilt-ridden Baptists turning to the Holy Scriptures for comfort. And like church, we seek the company of fellow believers, those with the precise kind of faith. Ever notice that shopping for a critique group is much like looking for a congregation? In either case, we want a close-knit community who understands us, who welcomes us, who shares our parochial view of the world. Within the sanctuary of that group we make ourselves vulnerable to criticism in the struggle to improve our souls.

But don't think that I'm cynical about the need to gird yourself. Writing is an intense, intellectual process. It's easy to quit out of frustration. It's easy to stare at the screen and feel like your head is an empty balloon. It's easy to pour yourself onto the page only to see your writing appear like a confused mess.

What's the best writing advice? First, gain command of writer craft and understand storytelling. Read. Read. Read. If you're serious about writing, then it's got to be a priority in your life. And lastly, because writing--as much as we say we love it--the act can be a pain in the ass. With that in mind I share these powerful, illuminating words from Steven Pressfield:

"Our enemy is not lack of preparation; it's not the difficulty of the project, or the state of the marketplace, or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy is resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why he can't/shouldn't/won't do what we need to do."