Did you miss me?

It always takes me awhile to get back into the swing of things once I get home from a trip.  But now I’m back at my desk and thinking about what a great time I had at the San Francisco Writers Conference — and what a terrific town San Francisco is.  Ages ago I went to medical school there, and every time I go back, I’m reminded that there’s no place like it in the country.  How many towns can boast a female chief of police AND a female fire chief?  Then I opened up the local newspaper and on the front page was an article about a local official’s boyfriend, who’d set fire to their residence.  It wasn’t until a few paragraphs into the article that I realized the “local official” was a man.  Oops!  In San Francisco, you can’t assume anything.  The town is full of surprises — and delights.

The Writers Conference was another delight.  Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen have built it into a classy event that covers a wide range of topics.  One of the sessions I was anxious to attend was the talk “writing the breakout novel” by literary agent Donald Maass.  I’d been hearing about Donald Maass for some years, from people who’d raved about his how-to course on writing bestselling novels.  Even though I do happen to write bestselling novels, I’ve always wondered if I really know the “secret”.  Most of the time I think I’m just operating on my storyteller instincts, with a lot of luck thrown in.  Could Maass help me pin down exactly what makes a bestseller?  Or is it all just fairy dust?

When I finally did catch my first glimpse of Maass, I was surprised he was so young.  I’d been hearing about him for so many years, I’d expected a gray-haired gentleman.  He read off the titles on the current New York Times fiction bestsellers list and challenged the audience to list what those bestsellers had in common.  The result?  Not a lot.  There were thrillers and literary novels, books with heroes and books with heroines, a book set in Afghanistan and a book set in Jersey, books with high stakes and books with quietly personal stakes.  As he pointed out, you can’t predict which topic or which plot will hit the list.

But you can find certain things that bestsellers have in common: characters you care about, stakes that matter to them, and what he referred to as continuous “microtension” – a story with a high level of conflict, an underlying sense that something important is always about to happen, or could happen.  He also said something that I myself have concluded (and in fact blogged about sometime ago): action, in and of itself, is not tension.  In fact, it can be downright boring.

I found myself nodding in agreement with everything he said.  He managed to verbalize what I’ve tended to do by instinct.  Wow, I thought; there really is an algorithm for writing a bestselling novel! 

 

The publishing business is already enough to drive a writer crazy, so why should we make things even worse for ourselves?  Here are some sanity-sparing suggestions that I myself am trying to stick to:

STOP CHECKING YOUR AMAZON INDEX

Yep, that means you.  Unless you’re checking the effectiveness of a particular promotional tool (in which case you may want to see how the index responds) you really shouldn’t be looking at yourself on Amazon at all.  In particular, avoid looking at the reader reviews of your books.  Some of those readers are nasty, vicious people, and why do you want to torture yourself by reading a lousy review of your latest book?   Sure, you may find a really great review, and that’ll make you feel good … for about an hour.  But a lousy review will leave you feeling miserable for a week.  You wouldn’t volunteer to get your fingernails wrenched off with pliers, would you?  So why let anonymous readers torture you on Amazon?

STOP GOOGLING YOURSELF

For the same reason I told you not to look up your own books on Amazon.  Sure, maybe you’ll find a website that says nice things about you.  But you might also find a site that calls you the spawn of Satan.  So don’t even look.  Because ignorance truly is bliss.

LEARN TO SAY NO

Writers are often told to jump at every chance to promote ourselves.  So we accept every invitation to speak at libraries, schools and writers’ conferences.  We’ll travel a thousand a miles, take three days off from our writing, to smile at a gathering and sell only thirty books.  When you’re starting off and still trying to establish your name, these are probably good investments of your time.  But you have to learn when enough is enough.  Don’t let the gigs take over your calendar.  Don’t let them eat too deeply into your writing time.  As Sue Grafton once said to me, “Don’t be a literary slut.” 

EXERCISE

Last autumn, I sprained my knee while hiking down a mountain.  For two months I could barely walk, much less hike.  Stuck at home, I got grumpy and flabby.  Then winter set in, and the roads got icy, prolonging my inactivity.  Finally I got fed up with how listless I felt and made one of the best investments of my life: I bought a treadmill.  It sits right here in my office and it’s my new best friend.  First thing in the morning, I turn on National Public Radio, climb onto the treadmill, and take a brisk uphill walk for half an hour.  When I’m done, I feel pumped and ready to dive into my writing.  And I can stop feeling guilty about my sedentary job.

CHASE OTHER INTERESTS

Indulge your hobbies.  Feed your curiosity.  Life isn’t just about meeting deadlines and seeing another one of your books on the stands; life is also about doing and learning cool stuff.  We get about eight decades on this earth.  That seems like a lot of time, but as I get older, I realize how precious little time that really is.  Although I spend most of the year racing to meet my book deadlines, I’m also learning how to read ancient Greek.  I’m trying to read through my copy of Herodotus, which sits on my nightstand.  I’m trying to memorize a Chopin Ballade on the piano.  Probably none of these hobbies will end up being used in a book, but why does everything have to be about the writing?

Among the comments about my last post, M.J. makes a very good point:

“If the writer believes this, he or she has misunderstood the situation.  Which sounds like the agent has not been doing his/her work. Or – The author is suffering from real and serious issues and needs outside psychological help to resolve her conflicts.”

M.J. brings up a very good question: are these pressures the author feels real or merely perceived?  Is she making herself crazier than she needs to by inflating her own importance to the publishing house?

I do think the term “payroll author” is a valid one.  I’ve certainly been hearing it a lot lately — from various sources referring to various authors.  The prime example of a payroll author is J.K. Rowling, who singlehandedly changed the fortunes of Scholastic.  The other name I’ve heard associated with that term is Dan Brown, whose publisher is breathlessly awaiting his next book, and no doubt counting on that book to wash away their red ink.  I’m certain that quite a few other names also qualify as payroll authors.  Although publishing houses make money on backlist sales, many of those backlist sales are driven by frontlist sales.  Every time Grisham comes out with a new book, sales of his backlist also spike.  If an author stops producing, his backlist sales will gradually wither away and die.  But payroll authors are a very select group indeed, and agents and publishers want to hold onto those writers and keep them working hard.

Sometimes, though, they work those authors way too hard.  And then they risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Authors are an insecure bunch to begin with, and when an agent or editor tells them that slowing down or taking a year off will kill their careers, they absolutely believe it.  Because there’s a certain amount of truth to that statement.  A writer doesn’t want to go unpublished for too long, because once you’ve stepped out of the yearly publishing cycle, readers forget you. Booksellers forget you.  If you stay away too long, you may never be able to jump back in.  We writers are advised to write at least a book a year, just to stay in the game.  We’re terrified of backsliding.  No matter how successful we may be, we feel entirely dispensable because there are a thousand other writers ready and willing to take our publishing slot.  So we write book after book, year after year, and some of us manage it with no problem.

But for others the stress piles up, and eventually you’re like that author who throws up every morning.  She’s lost sight of what it means to have a life.  A real life.

Some writers muster up the backbone to call a halt to the madness.  I remember when Sue Grafton, about halfway into her alphabet series, announced that she was exhausted and she planned to take a year off.  I remember the noise that generated within the publishing industry, and all the speculation that it would hurt her mystery series and permanently damage her career.  She did it anyway.  And when she came back, she was bigger and better than ever.  In a recent interview with Romantic Times, Grafton marked a milestone — the release of her 20th novel in 25 years.  (Which makes me think she must have taken off more than just that one year.)  Her latest title, T IS FOR TRESPASS, earned her some of the best reviews of her life.  And her sales don’t seem to have suffered one whit from the sabbaticals she’s taken.

In fact, I would guess that her career has been helped by taking that time off.  It gave her time to rest and recover.  It gave her time to re-charge her creativity.

Our stories have to come from somewhere.  We can’t just pull them out of barren soil.  We need to keep feeding our imaginations with fresh information, fresh experiences.  I couldn’t write the books I write if I weren’t pursuing my interests in other fields.  The book I’m writing now is inspired by my interest in Egyptology and my two trips to Egypt.  (Yes, it’s a Rizzoli story.)  My visit to the catacombs of Paris inspired BODY DOUBLE’s early chapters.  My fascination with Biblical archaeology was what inspired THE MEPHISTO CLUB.  Had I not traveled so much, had I not devoted so many hours to my rather obscure hobbies, I could not have written those books.  I might be reduced to writing variations on the same old serial killer stories again and again.   And yes, they would probably sell fine.  But how many years can you re-write the same book before the spark goes out of your writing?

I think any editor or agent who pushes an exhausted writer to keep writing is being shortsighted.  They are killing the gift that made that writer special to begin with.  And any writer who allows herself to be forced into a killer schedule is going to end up sick or completely tapped out.  That helps no one.  That ruins the books, disappoints the readers, and wrecks writers’ lives. 

We should all strive to be as sane and sensible as Sue Grafton.  We should pay attention to our own bodies, our own anxiety meters.  We should recognize when it’s time to say, “That’s enough, I need a break.”

We should.  But too often, we’re afraid to.