Karinwritesdangerously

We’ve all been there—struggled with flat characters, thorny plot issues, pacing—along with tough self-publishing and marketing decisions.

Help is at hand!

Hank Quense, my good friend, is offering us all some amazing support through his website. As an author and marketing expert, Hank’s site is bursting with practical how-to advice through: Real Problems, Real Solutions: (https://hankquenseauthor.org/real-problems–real-solutions)

Below, Hank describes the range of support this free offering provides:

Let’s be honest. Writing a book isn’t the only hard part. After you write it, then you have to publish the thing and, worst of all, get somebody to buy it. Somewhere along that road, every writer hits a pothole. Usually several. Sometimes the whole road caves in.

I know this because I’ve been in several cave ins since I started writing stories back in the last century (that sounds better than “a long time ago”). I’ve published plenty of short stories plus a pile of fiction and nonfiction books, all self-published. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to.

That’s why I added a new feature to my website: Real Problems, Real Solutions. It’s a collection of the problems writers and authors actually wrestle with, along with practical answers. These answers are based on my own experience, not on advice from some guru who’s never uploaded a manuscript.

The feature has three sections.

Fiction Problems

This covers the story stuff, from “I have an idea, now what?” to “I’m stuck in the middle” and everything in between.

Is your plot flat?

Do readers say your characters are dull?

Do all your characters sound the same? (Hint: they may be too much alike.)

Confused about Point of View?

Wondering if you really need a character arc? (You do.)

Each problem gets a straight answer, plus a pointer to more in-depth content.

Self-Publishing Problems

Self-publishing a book, especially your first one, means lots of research. That’s where the trouble starts: who can you trust on the web? Some of the information out there is accurate, some is outdated, and some is just plain wrong. Then there are the scam artists and vanity presses waiting to separate you from your money. This section covers:

alternatives to self-publishing

KDP vs. Draft2Digital vs. IngramSpark

whether you need an ISBN

what you need before you upload

a ten-step process for getting from manuscript to published book

Book Marketing Problems

The amazing thing about book marketing is the huge number of ways to spend — and waste — money. This section tackles :

keywords

blurbs,

book descriptions

targeting

Author Central

It also covers the most important piece of marketing you have: your book’s landing page. There’s even advice on what to do first when your marketing budget is about the size of a cup of coffee. And if you’ve wondered why your social media campaigns don’t sell books, I explain that too. (Short version: social media sells clicks, not books.)

Don’t See Your Problem?

Send me an email and I’ll answer it. If you need more hands-on help, hankquense (at) icloud (dot) com. I also offer coaching for self-publishing and book marketing.

So the next time you’re staring at a stalled manuscript, a publishing decision that has you baffled, or a marketing plan that’s going nowhere, stop by Real Problems, Real Solutions. Odds are your problem used to be my problem, and I’ve done the hard work of figuring out the fix.

Bravo, Hank! What an amazing resource he’s created for us all! Check it out at: (https://hankquenseauthor.org/real-problems–real-solutions)

And now, supported and savvy, let’s all write on!

Everything I do all day, I do in preparation for my reading time. Give me a great novel or memoir, some tea and a cozy spot to curl up in, and I’m in heaven…
Insight, information, knowledge, inspiration, power: All that and more can come through a good book.”
Oprah Winfrey

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Oprah’s a gifted reader whose love of books has made her a beacon of light in the publishing industry. And Annie Lamott is a gifted writer whose books and essays are beloved and eagerly awaited. 

But whether writers or readers, or both, like Oprah and Annie, we all share a common bond: We belong to what I call the Joyous Bookaholics Club. This club is open to anyone and it’s free: the only price of admission is a boundless love for the written word. 

Joyous Bookaholics are easy to spot: As kids, they’ll read anything and everything, from the labels on their T-shirts to the backs of cereal boxes. When they get their own library card, they act like they’ve been given the keys to the kingdom. Their rooms are full of books, but they have their special favorites — the ones they read again and again. When it’s lights out, they don’t give a hoot, because they can fish out their flashlights from under the covers and keep reading until they drop. That was me, anyway — I hope and pray that some kids still feel like this.

Joyous Bookaholics of the adult variety pursue their obsessions more openly: They have piles of books stacked here and there because their shelves are all full. Despite warnings by other, more rational people, they are constantly adding to their piles. And despite digital seduction, they still love the smell and creamy, nubbly feel of the real deal: a book that comes with two covers and has honest-to-goodness pages. 

Cancel that: You can be digitally seduced and still join the Joyous Bookaholics Club. I have friends who absolutely love to read and adore their Nooks and Kindles, which sort of look like skinny books (especially when they have leather covers). So, take your magic carpet ride on the covers of a book or in cyberspace — whatever sets you flying. 

Joyous Bookaholics, unite! I think I’m going to have a membership card made up and carry it with me. Then, when I meet a fellow traveler, I can flash it and without even speaking, the two of us will know that we’re on the same page. Write on! 

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From the pithy, wonderful guide, Steering the Craft, by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“Again I am inclined to fault journalists and schoolteachers, however well meaning, for declaring it a sin to say the same word twice, driving people to the thesaurus in desperate searches for farfetched substitutes.

“Repetition can indeed be awkward when a word is emphasized for no reason: ‘He was studying in his study. The book he was studying was Plato.’ This kind of thing comes of not listening to one’s writing (and from the long thinking-pauses that occur while writing, so that you’ve forgotten the last sentence when you start a new one.) Everybody does it. It’s easy to fix in revision by finding a synonym or different phrasing: ‘He was in his study, reading Plato and making notes,’ or whatever.

“But to make a rule ‘never use the same word twice in one paragraph,’ or to state flatly that repetition is to be avoided, is to throw away one of the most valuable tools or narrative prose. Repetition of words. of phrases, of images; repetition of things said; near-repetition of events; echoes, reflections, variations: from the grandmother telling a folktale to the most sophisticated novelist, all narrators use these devices, and the skillful use of them is a very great part of the power of prose.

“Prose can’t rhyme and chime and repeat a beat as poetry can, or if it does it had better be subtler about it than this sentence. The rhythms of prose — and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm — are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large they’re hard to see, like the shape of the mountains when you’re driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there.”

What a wonderful description of rhythm in writing and the power of repetition! Something to ponder and apply as we all write on!

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He Wishes for the Cloths Of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

Wanting to be a writer and having F. Scott Fitzgerald as your dad must have been a tough row to hoe. But that’s exactly what happened to Scottie Fitzgerald. When she felt a bit discouraged about a story she’d penned in high school, her dad responded with a letter that gently reminded her of the challenging life of the writer:

Grove Park Inn
    Asheville, N.C.
    October 20, 1936

Dearest Scottina:

…Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn….

Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.

Scott

“Nothing any good isn’t hard” — words to ponder as we all write on!

“In our rush-rush world, if we allow ourselves to slow down our lives and
our writing process, we’ll discover that we’ll connect — or reconnect — with our most profound work.” Louise DeSalvo, The Art of Slow Writing

Slow cooking and slow writing: While the ingredients are different, the idea behind them is the same: to create something savory and soul-satisfying by taking the time, making the time, to let flavors or words ripen and reveal themselves. As Louise DeSalvo says so well in The Art of Slow Writing, the real goal is to “become our truest, deepest, most authentic writing selves.” This takes time, intention, invention, revision.

In her search for the wellsprings of creativity, Louise DeSalvo studied the early and later drafts of well-known authors, and read their journals, interviews, and letters. I find it inspiring to learn that Hemingway rewrote The Old Man and the Sea 19 times or that John Steinbeck spent many years gathering material and reflecting on it before he sat down and penned The Grape of Wrath. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in crafting my novel, it’s this: building a world takes time. With every revision, my characters have deepened and my story arc has strengthened. The gift of time is a gift I’m giving myself — and my story. We’ve earned it — together.

We all need courage and faith in ourselves to survive the stages our work goes through as we shape it and reshape it. And we all need the strength to find a new path when our original vision seems to melt away and we’re left with something altogether different. 

Slow writing. Sl-o-o-w writing. I like the way this sounds. It reminds me that anything worth doing is worth doing well. And most of the time, this takes time. I remember reading about John Legend’s response when a studio executive worried that his album was taking too long to finish. Legend simply said, “You can’t rush creativity.” Write on!

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Writers are word lovers and when we love them hard and long enough, they love us back. Writerly thoughts on word wooing to inspire us all:

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it….Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” Ursula Le Guin

“Words set things in motion….Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing.” Toni Cade Bambara

“A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory…thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.” Rumer Godden

“Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose that the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.“ Barbara Tuchman

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” Hart Crane

“When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter.” Ray Bradbury

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” William Wordsworth

Word lovers unite — and write on!

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Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the plot for the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde during a dream.

Paul McCartney discovered his hit song “Yesterday” in a dream. 

Mary Shelley’s dream at Lord Byron’s villa inspired Frankenstein.

Dreams have always been a powerful creative tool in artist’s arsenal. And studies confirming the importance of sleep show that our neurons fire almost as often when we’re sleeping as they do when we’re awake. A few findings about sleep and creativity:

There’s growing evidence that our minds tend to be most creative just as we are emerging from sleep: During the half-waking, half-dreaming state known as “sleep inertia,” our creativity seems to surge. This is why coming up with ideas and writing them down as soon as we wake is a proven technique for enhancing creativity that’s been used by everyone from writers and poets to Ben Franklin.

The theory behind this: When we’re in a post-sleep, dream-like mental state, we can bridge the gap between sleep and wakefulness, and bring insights and inspiration from our sleep state into our consciousness. Once we’re fully alert, our waking consciousness assumes total control, making plans and doing things — and we pass out of the more fluid, expansive state we enjoy when we’re just emerging from our rest.

Sleep can also be a powerful creativity booster because the mind, in an unconscious resting state, can forge surprising and innovative new connections that it might not make in a conscious, waking state. Studies show that sleep can foster “remote associates” or unusual connections in the brain. And these can lead to exciting “a-Ha” moments.

Why not test this all out and give your creativity a boost by having a paper and pen by your bedside, so you can jot down any hot ideas before they slip away? Write on! 

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“Freedom lies in being bold.”
Robert Frost

Writing dangerously is all about becoming bolder. Here’s how my handy Oxford Compact English Dictionary defines the word “bold:” 1) confident and courageous; 2) audacious, impudent; and 3) (of a colour or design) strong and vivid. 

Confidence, courage, audacity, impudence, strength and vividness — can we bring these to our writing? Of course, we can! What practices can help engender these qualities? Some ideas from a fellow creative:

Put the work first: Make fueling and fulfilling your creativity a top priority. Whatever the demands on your time or challenges that life throws at you, figure out a way to keep you writing center stage — carve out the time and space to let the magic happen. 

Spark creativity with play: Creating a playful writing mindset might mean using Julia Cameron’s idea of “Morning Pages,” to loosen up our brains, or reading poetry, or taking three words from the dictionary and weaving a story around them for 10 or 15 minutes. Or even using a coloring book to relax and stoke ourselves. Whatever works!

Focus solely on this one thing, no distractions: Once you are in work mode, stay in the zone. Save emails and social media for later.

Welcome accidents and discovery: Messy, unruly drafts can take us to exciting, unpredictable places. So go all out—don’t hold back! You can always fine-tune and revise.

Revise=re-envision: Let’s zealously push our writing to the next level, polishing and repolishing it until it shines.

Find models of excellence: Constantly look for inspiration from other creative souls.

Practices to ponder and apply as we all write on. 

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Peace

Peace flows into me
As the tide to the pool by the shore;
It is mine forevermore,
It will not ebb like the sea.

I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky;
My hopes were heaven high,
They are all fulfilled in you.

I am the pol of gold
When sunset burns and dies —
You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold.

— Sara Teasdale