I write my books; I edit for other authors. I’m close to offering my first two book contracts for Entangled Publishing. After publishing 16 novels of my own and reading countless propsals others have written over the years, all I know for sure is, this is all about soul.

• Have you been rejected (like me)? Figure out if you have what it takes to get up the next morning and start over from nothing–because every published author must do that each and every time they meet a deadline.
• Do you have a day job (like me)? Buckle down and accept that your personal life off the clock belongs first to the book you need to finish, not your hobbies and social (media) life–because the majority of published authors don’t make enough off their writing to support their families, so we’re all hoofing it to make ends meet while trying to stay creative in the dark hours of early morning.
• Do you have a busy family (like me)? Love them and care for them, the tell them your entire life doesn’t revolve around them and they’re going to have to take care of themselves the 1,2,3 hours a day that you devote to your writing. Otherwise, they’ll consume you (and maybe that’s what you want, if family is the excuse you’re making daily for not creating new words).
• Have you been dealing with an illness (like me)? Deal with it, by all means, your health is everything. But for Dog’s sake, knock off saying your illness is responsible for you not moving forward in your writing. I don’t mean to be insensitive or unkind, but whatever your condition is, I assure you I can find others who’ve managed to succeed battling far worse circumstances–because they refused to quit.

Soul is the thing that lives and breathes inside us, regardless of the piles of s**t raining down on our worst days. And on our best days, it’s the piece of us that sings the loudest, reminding everyone of who and what we are at our essential core. So, what are you? How strongly do you want that dream you say you want? How hard and for how long and through what difficulties are you willing to grit out this journey?

Grit is what I call that indiscernible thing I’m looking for in my own work and the manuscript submissions I read. It’s my name for what drives us as artists to create, then to refine and revise and rework and create some more, until we’ve done absolutely everything we can do for a project. Grit is the magic we all hope to write and read one day. It’s the soul of every thing and every person who’s touched us in that indescribable way we’ll never forget.

I went for nearly 2 years before my thyroid issues stopped zapping every ounce of creativity away, not to mention the energy it requires to sit before a computer and write thousands of words a day on deadline. So, instead, I read research for 4 different projects (3 of which are being considered by publishers now). I upped my freelance editing business, because it took less concentration and allowed me to work in shorter spurts of time (and now I’m doing that as a second career). I got excited about my life again, despite the rest (and that excitement, I’m told by others, is shining through my new novels and every new endeavor I’m undertaking). It wasn’t easy. I nearly quit–every day. It took grit to keep going, but try as I did, I didn’t know how to quit. And here I am(hopefully), on the other side of it, wondering how I could have ever thought about stopping.

As I read for authors fighting I have no idea what obstacles themselves, and as I write my new books and look forward to seeing them published and hearing from their readers, it’s grit that I long to see. Mine and others. I want to feel that faith and determination and the beautiful inspiration and inventiveness that flourishes when we persevere until our dream becomes reality. I want to see that in every beautiful word. If I don’t, I instantly know something’s missing. That either you or I have only given a portion of ourselves. And it’s not enough. Time is too precious. We can’t afford to waste it on sort-of, maybe, kind-of creating or experiencing anything.

Books/stories are our dreams playing out for the world to see. The courage it takes to touch another’s heart with our own, with nothing more than words strung together on a page, stuns me. Every time I see it in others or realize that core of pure steel that’s driving my own writing journey, I’m humbled that this is what we get to do with our lives on this earth. You inspire me, and I long to inspire you. Don’t short change that. Not a single word of it. Give your writing your all, your grit, every single day.

Put your soul in every word, my writer friends. Grit out whatever obstacle stands in your way. Slay every excuse that tempts you not to revise or resubmit or start over or learn whatever lesson is holding you back. Make yourself proud, be proud of your work, be prepared to do whatever it takes.

And in the middle of that insane journey, know I’ll be writing, too, trying to make this craziness work. It’s all about soul. Leave yours on the page. I’ll meet you there!

Flip that around. If the unknown scares you, and you tend to plan for likely outcomes before you embark on a journey, drafting a new novel won’t make you warm and fuzzy (I tend to call the feeling a blank Page 1  invokes in me abject terror, but that might be a bit extreme for the rest of you.)

 But if you’re the wanderer, dreaming of a backpacking trip through Europe where you merely have a start point and a destination and you’ll figure out pesky details like lodging and food and transpo along the way, well…you’re nuts! Eh-hem. What I meant to say is that I suspect writing blind into a new story is a mighty lovely place for you. Until you hit The End, and have to go back and break things down into their parts, rework your rough draft pieces into a better whole, then knit everything back together (which anal retentive, geeky analytical girls like me tend to think of as Nirvana ;o).

My point to my students is never that either one or the other of these approahces is bad, in either life or writing. But that it’s best to know your strengths and weaknesses and to play one up, while compensating for the other. If it takes you forever to write a draft (to the point that you revise and revise and revise your first 100 pages while never writing the rest of the novel), take a look at why. If you can’t “make” yourself go back and revise a first draft because all the fun’s gone out of the story for you now that you know how it ends, and the idea of working with it anymore makes you nauseous, take a look at why.

We make excuses for the broken parts of our writing processes. Excuses that in everyday life would impact our ability to do our jobs or run or families or keep our friends. In the “real” world, we learn to correct the personality traits (and control the emotions) that get in our way, so we can live better. Why, then, aren’t most of us doing the same thing in our writing lives?

How to draft can be taught to any writer with a true gift for telling story through the written world. How to revise and deconstruct story and analyze its parts can be taught to any writer with the desire to actually publish the beautiful creation that is their rough draft.

The only real unknown is, how hard do you want to work on the internal life of your writing process? How honestly can you look at your strengths and weaknesses as a person, and the emotions that always come with challenging those weaknesses, no matter what you’re doing? How determined are you to make your writing work and sellable, not just fun.

The fun will always be there–the part of this writing journey that you love best. So will the challenges. But once you decide to combine the two into whole–a well-rounded writer who’s the entire package that a publisher, agent and reader are looking for–nothing can hold you back.

We live our books. We live our writing process. Our minds are creative, yes, and the artist’s heart within us must be protected. But the writer’s mind is also a tool that can be trained to overcome any challenge it faces–including the parts of us we don’t like to look at any more closely in our writing than we do in our other lives.

“Look,” I tell my students. “See what you are and what you’re doing. Keep what works, fix the rest.”

Life’s just that simple.

Let me repeat. Rewriting a manuscript until it’s reader-ready is hard. Brutal. Seldom pretty, at least at first. And it takes time.To analyze. Re-evaluate. Re-focus. And only then, to revise what you’ve already painstakingly completed. The process takes a creative artist out of her comfort zone and dumps her into the hell of picking apart word and character and theme and plot choices, drilling deeper until the true meaning and purpose of each piece is (effortlessly) crystal clear to a reader.

This isn’t a post on the method and technique of revision. I’ve done that already, so scroll back through How We Write, or attend one of the half-dozen workshops I’m already scheduled to give this year, the majority of which will include a discussion of rewriting. This is a blog about attitude. Fortitude. Determination to maintain your unique writer’s voice, while doing the writer’s day-to-day job of reaching others through story.

If you can’t commit to doing that, once it’s made very clear to you how hard and uncomfortable and unpleasant that part of your job can be, then that successfully published novel of your dreams won’t become a reality, no matter how wonderful your original idea might have been. I fact, it’s that very commitment to making your story everything it should be that protects that innovation bursting to live through your imagination.

By successful, I mean a story that reaches into readers hearts and souls and pulls out the best and worst of who they are, all while you’re transporting them to a fictional place that existed only in your mind before they began reading your words. You can epublsh anything you want these days, but if you’re wondering why your self-published fair isn’t hitting the top of the charts, take a look at the work you have or haven’t done rewriting/recrafting your novel and accept what might be missing in your process. Honesty. Practicality. Innovation. And, yes, time.

Good writing is good writing. But good story requires time to create and craft and recraft, until you’ve hit the mark. Readers engage with emotion and characters, and the growth of character over time, through a series of dilemmas and conflict that pushes the character and reader toward a satisfying (though not always happy) ending. Most of us can’t pluck something like that out of our imaginations, throw it on the page, and have a successful novel in first draft form. MOST of us require pass after pass through the raw beauty of what we’ve done, until we even understand what we’ve done, let alone can plan and execute a revision that gets us closer to a good story. Most of us need time.

Give yourself that time. Give yourself a good critique group or, if you’re lucky, the benefit of a good editor’s (often brutal) insight into your creation. Be practical, but innovative. Be vigilant in maintaining your unique writer’s voice, but be open to change. See your vision, while accepting what the reader sees beyond your own experience. These are the things that will make or break your success at this job.

I’ve been through that gauntlet 16 times with published works, and countless others with the proposals and manuscripts that haven’t made it to contract. Then there are the projects I’ve helped other writers create, each of which have come to be very special to me as I see them grow (or sometimes stagnate). And what I can say for certain, as a publishing insider, is that the time you spend revising/rewriting is the MOST critical part of your writing process. Don’t skimp on it. Don’t deny your novel (and your readers) your absolute best, no matter how hard the work ahead of you might be.

And I’m not just talking about suspense plots.In addition to writing (and now editing) romantic suspense as well as crafting sci-fi/fantasies that are full-on thrillers, I also write home and family dramas (straight contemporary romance) where the same level of escalating conflict and tension must still exist, in order for the reader to care enough to turn the page.

Conflict is how readers identify with your characters. It’s how the story transports the reader through a purely fictional journey. How deeply do the dilemmas you put the protagonist through resonate? How carefully do you craft the internal motivation and goals and tension the character must resolve, and are there external factors (anchors and stumbling blocks) that drive that person to do and behave and learn and grow and fail and, ultimately, succeed?

Conflict IS NOT petty arguments and bickering between the leads.

Misunderstanding and arguing and coincidence and a character emoting her feelings to someone else until the other person, finally, understands and “gets” her at the end of the book isn’t conflict.

Conflict is active things happening on the page to thwart a protagonist from achieving an external goal (which, in turns, mirrors, and mucks up, the internal journey the character must complete, in order to get what she needs).

Here’s Bob Mayer’s excellent technique for isolating the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist of a story, so that you have escalating tension to drive your plot from beginning to end. He calls it Conflict Lock.

In this blog post, he further explains how this central conflict must exist in every scene and act of your story, from beginning to end.

This isn’t a new concept, but crafting strong, believable central, character-driven external conflict is difficult, and a lot of us delay learning the technique.

Crafting compelling, believable, active conflict is an intermediate creative novel writing skill. Whatever you’re designing in the book’s external reality must drive your protagonist (and antagonist) to behave the way he/she does. It must also drive internal struggles and growth,  so the characters arc in believable, plot-driven ways from the beginning to the end of the story. For most of us, this type of detailed attention to the mechanics of storytelling takes time and effort and analysis to achieve. Too many writers don’t make that time in their process.

Something active and external, and active and internal, needs to be at stake in every scene. These two components have to be linked and pushing the plot (and the reader’s expectation that something even more interesting is about to happen) forward. Even in the family dramas that I write, there have to be very real goals and motivation and reasons why what the lead character is doing isn’t going to achieve what he/she wants, until the very end of the story–because of the conflict/dilemma I continually, carefully, put in the way as the story and the character arcs. That journey through all those landmines is the plot that, ultimately, should appear effortlessly drawn to the reader–after a hell of a lot of work.

This week’s writing challenge is to spend some time analyzing the plot/characters’ central conflict, in your current project.

Use Bob’s techniques or anyone else’s you prefer. But nail that lock between your protagonist’s internal/external needs and goals and the conflict being created by competing internal/external needs and goals of the antagonist you’ve created.

Then report back. Let me know how it’s going ;o)

What a way to spin into a new year!

It wasn’t long ago that 2010 was, for me, about fear (health scares and such) and the publishing industry crumbling around all of us. 2011 was rebuilding and fulfilling the last of my ‘10 obligations and nervously promoting an exciting novel in a new digital media world I really didn’t understand when I first started. And now, 2012. More change. For all of us.

For me, I’ll be embracing it. I’m putting all I have into these new opportunities and finding my place in them.  New novels I will find publishers and an audience for, however that makes sense now, rather than how it worked a few years ago. Teaching six different groups (by today’s count), after having to spend most of ‘11 off the road, and I can’t wait to connect with other creatives who love to do what I do, and maybe help them on their own journeys just a little bit. And now I’m part of an exciting team of women, writers all of us, who are taking our passion for storytelling and working with authors and turning it into something really amazing at Dead Sexy Books.

How many writers will I get to help at Entangled? How many books will find excited readers, because of what we’ll do in 2012.

It makes my soul smile, in all parts of my life, to be so optimistic about what’s ahead. It’s taken me a few years to get healthy and caught up and ready for this new plunge. But it’s a very good day. No matter whatever stumbling blocks come my way, and there will be more than a few if I have my guess, it’s going to be a VERY good year!

How will 2012 change your life? How will you partner with the stream of “new” flowing through your life, and make this year everything you’ve dreamed it could be?

Make this year your home. Find your place, your soul, in the decisions you make!