So who do you ask to read it?

Let me start with who not to ask: anyone whose opinion you don’t value.

Because what’s the point?  I mean, seriously–what’s the point?  

Believe me, it happens: you think, “Oh, so-and-so should read my book,” because so-and-so is a close relative or a good friend or the person sharing your bed or something, and then so-and-so reads it and hands it back saying, “This is great,” or “I have some notes,” and your immediate internal reaction to the former is, “Yeah, but what do you know?” or, to the latter, “Why would I take notes from you? You don’t know anything about writing.”

See what I mean?  Pointless.  Don’t waste their time or yours.

Here’s who you should give it to: someone you’re comfortable being naked in front of.  Not literally.  Well, maybe literally (my husband’s my favorite reader), but mostly I mean it figuratively: it’s pretty agonizing showing someone something you’ve written that may or may not be good.  Seek out the same qualities in your reader that you’d look for in a sex partner–look for someone who’ll be kind, supportive, and very much on your side.  (Good-looking is a nice bonus in both cases, too.)

Being “on your side” doesn’t mean “will always tell you it’s good,” by the way.  Someone who’s on you side will be honest with you–IF THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT.

See how I capitalized and italicized that last phrase?  That’s because it’s very important.  Sometimes you want the truth.  And sometimes you just want praise.  You need to know going into this stage of things which you want and then be clear about it.

When someone asks me to read his manuscript, the first question I ask is, “What would you like from me? Do you want notes?  Are you actually planning to rewrite it?”  (Because if he’s not planning to rewrite the manuscript, I’m not going to waste my time notating it.)  ”Do you want me to tell you it’s great?”  (Yes, I’ve asked that question and I really want people to answer it honestly, because sometimes that’s all you DO want from a reader.  Which is fine: I can gush like a proud mama if that’s what you want.)  Also: “Do you want me to pass it on to my agent?” Because if that’s really what you’re going for, and you’re a good enough friend, I don’t even have to bother reading it.

In other words, know what you want from your reader and then TELL your reader what that is.

Better yet, choose your reader wisely: if you want unconditional praise, pick the sweetest, most supportive friend you’ve got.  If you want painstakingly detailed notes, ask someone who’s a smart, knowledgeable reader.  If you’re looking for a referral to an agent or editor, ask someone with connections.  And if what you really want is harsh, unrelenting criticism, then go see a therapist because you’re clearly a masochist.

But above all else, remember these words of wisdom:

Don’t ever show a work in progress to your parents.  People who once changed your diaper are incapable of objectively reviewing anything you do as a grown-up.  They’re incapable of seeing you as a grown-up, come to think of it.  Show it to them when it’s published.  They’ll like it then.

And, hey, congratulations–you finished your novel!  Go have a glass of champagne.  It’s on me.  Figuratively.

You guys remember the comic strip Goofus and Gallant from Highlights Magazine?

For those who never had to go to the dentist (which is where most kids discover Highlights), Goofus and Gallant were two young men who had been named by their parents with frighteningly accurate prescience.  Gallant was a model of good behavior; Goofus showed you how not to behave.  Gallant held doors for people; Goofus let them swing shut in people’s faces.  Gallant helped his mother set the table.  Goofus mumbled an excuse and ran away.  Gallant carried groceries.  Goofus threw balls at people carrying groceries.   Here’s a prime example of a brilliant plotted Goofus and Gallant strip: 

I think it’s safe to say that Gallant would succinctly and helpfully stick to the point in a blog post, while Goofus would go off on an irrelevant tangent.

Which brings me to my point: I am Goofus.  Goofus is me. I frequently find myself inadvertently illustrating what NOT to do.  So here’s my writing tip: Don’t be a Goofus like me and make the following mistake:

In the very first pages of my novel If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now, the protagonist, Rickie, is about to take the family dog out for a walk.  Just as she’s clipping on the leash, she gets a phone call from a guy she hasn’t seen in ages, saying he’s in town and would love to see her right away.  She unclips the leash, telling the dog the walk is canceled, and the disappointed pup follows her sadly to the door.

Rickie’s mother ends up taking the dog on a walk, so–please note–the dog IS FINE.  She would have been fine even if she hadn’t gotten a walk.  I mean, my dogs frequently don’t get taken on long walks, and they’re fine.  A little neurotic, admittedly, but that has nothing to do with the number of walks they get.

After the book was published, I was shocked to discover that some readers disliked Rickie.  I mean, sure, she was sharp-tongued and a little self-centered, but she proves over the course of the novel that she’s devoted to her son and loves her family. She was good folk, deep down–at least as far as I was concerned.  Why wasn’t that coming through?  Then I realized that a lot of the reviewers were saying they disliked her at FIRST but later came to care about her, and that’s when I realized it:

They hated her because the first thing she did in the entire novel was disappoint a sweet dog.

It was such a throw-away moment for me (and wasn’t the original beginning to the book–originally she started off picking up her kid at school which would have made her much more sympathetic) and it set more of a tone for the book than I realized (as first pages are likely to do). If she’d rescued a dog from being caught by its leash in a bush or something, readers would have instantly liked her. But instead she said no to the dog and it took readers a while to get past that.

The goal is to get your readers to like, respect, and feel invested in your main character.  That doesn’t mean that he/she has to be the most noble, perfect, and beautiful human to ever walk the planet–flawed heroes are the most interesting. But it does mean that our first view of them matters.  Would we love Katniss as much if she didn’t instantly sacrifice herself for her sister’s sake?  Or Harry Potter if his first act were to tease Dudley for being fat?

So find a nice little moment at the beginning of your novel to create a reason why it should matter to the reader whether your protagonist succeeds or not.

And, most importantly, don’t ever let him or her disappoint a dog. A cat, MAYBE.  But never a dog.

viruses are so pretty

Other people’s kids are the problem.  They foster these nasty, debilitating viruses and then create situations where they’re in the same room as your child and pass them on.  Evil, right?   Some of them even cough and blow their noses.  They might as well be pointing a virus-filled ray-gun at your child.

Your own kid is the innocent victim, the one who happily skipped off to a playdate healthy and whole, and who casually mentions when she comes back that her friend said her throat hurt.  When your precious darling comes down with a bad cold twenty-four hours later, you know who to blame: that reckless shrew of a friend.

(Of course, when Precious Darling has her own playdate that second day–because she doesn’t want to cancel it and why should she?  It’s just a little sore throat–and then gets really sick a few hours later, you don’t feel guilty.   I mean, it wasn’t her virus that she passed on to her friend–it was playdate number one’s virus.)

I was recently on vacation at a hotel where several members of my extended family got felled by a particularly nasty stomach virus.  My sister started talking to another mother on our floor, who told her that her son had also gotten the stomach flu, but then made it clear he wasn’t to blame for bringing it there. That honor belonged to another little boy who had the stomach flu a couple of days before everyone else got it and whose mother let him wander around the lounge area when he was clearly still contagious.  When we discussed it later, the decision was unanimous: we could all blame that original, unknown family for making us all sick.

A couple of months ago, my husband and I watched the movie Contagion and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was total wish-fulfillment.  Not because–spoiler alert–there’s a brilliant, unselfish scientist who figures out a way to eradicate this new pandemic.  No. The great satisfaction of the movie is that they ultimately–another spoiler alert but it doesn’t really spoil anything for you but still if you don’t like to know any details about movies before seeing them you should probably skip the rest of this paragraph and actually if you are like that I hope you stopped reading a sentence ago because that earlier thing was really more of a spoiler–trace the disease to a single Patient Zero and figure out exactly when and how she was the first human to be exposed to this particular virus.

How satisfying is that?  We know exactly who to blame for getting the virus and spreading it.  There’s no “she must have gotten it from someone else herself.”  Nope.  First human to get it.  And then she ate from a bowl of peanuts at a bar.  She is so totally to blame.

It’s all we moms really want out of life: a scapegoat to blame for every illness our kids get.

This is a joke.  Not a ha-ha lol kind of joke.  More of a wry, sophisticated, “Oh, Noel, you’re such a cad” kind of joke.

That was a joke too.

The point is (I usually have a point, but I’ll be the first to admit I don’t get there in a straight line) that the perfect writing conditions DON’T EXIST and WILL NEVER EXIST.

See that?  I’m shouting at you.  That’s what those capitals are there for.  I am shouting at you to make sure you’re listening.  Are you listening?

Would-be writers say stuff like this: “My parents have a little cottage near a lake in Vermont, and at some point, I’m going to take a leave of absence from work and go stay there, all by myself, and write like a fiend.”

Published writers say this: “I got up at five in the morning for two years so I could squeeze in a couple of hours of writing before I had to go to work.”

Would-be writers say this: “I have a great idea, but I need to know I’m going to have a lot of time to really focus on it before I can get started.”

Published writers say stuff like this: “I wrote when the older kids were at school and my youngest kid was taking a nap.”

Would-be writers say this: “I need a quiet office all to myself, with a clean desk to work on.”

Published writers say this: “I have a laptop and I’ll work wherever there’s space and whenever I get a free minute.”  Or sometimes simply: “Where’s the closest Starbucks?”

I’m generalizing here, of course.  (It’s what I do best.)  There are probably tons of published authors who did clear a lot of time and space to work and a bunch of never published writers who frantically worked whenever they could.  But still . . .

Published author #2 in the above scraps of dialogue was me, by the way.  I wrote my first published novel, Same As It Never Was, when I had no daytime babysitting help, my two oldest kids were in elementary school, my daughter was in preschool, and my youngest son was six months old.  I wrote most of it when he took his mid-morning nap because the others were all out of the house then.  And I’ve never enjoyed writing more.  I’d think about what I wanted to write when I was driving or rocking a kid to sleep or doing the dishes or whatever task allowed my brain to roam freely, and then as soon as I had an hour to myself, I dashed over to the computer and wrote it down.  It was so much fun.

Best of all, there was no emotional burden on me to be productive.  I mean, if you take three weeks off from work to go stay in some desolate country estate somewhere, you’re going to be paralyzed with the need to churn out a bestseller.  Ever seen The Shining?  That’s what happens to authors who try to create the perfect writing conditions.  It’s too much pressure.

So don’t wait for the stars to align.  If you have an idea and a free minute or two, try to dash something off.  If you get interrupted, don’t sweat it: the words will still be there when you come back (so long as you hit save of course).  And don’t forget that Jane Austen supposedly wrote at a tiny little high desk in the corner of the living room of a very busy household.  And I’ve been told her books aren’t half bad.

Open up any magazine and you’ll see diet advice.  And I don’t just mean dieting-to-lose-weight advice.  I’m talking about article after article telling you that eating the right foods will pretty much make you into the person you want to be.  Things like, “This diet will make you stronger!”  ”Eat right for more energy!”  ”Here’s what you should be snacking on to sleep better at night!” “These foods can improve your sex life!” and so on.

So it stands to reason that eating the right foods can also make you a better, more focused, more productive, more publishable, more bestselling author.  (And by “reason,” I mean the exact opposite.)  Since my goal on this blog is to help fledgling writers earn their wings (while maybe slipping a tiny bit of self-promotion in along the way), I’m going to share with you my new invention:

The Bestselling Writer’s Diet.

If you observe the following dietary guidelines, I personally guarantee that you will have a NY Times bestselling novel by next year.  (Note: results not guaranteed.)

Here is the easy to follow diet that will have you writing like Stephen King, Jennifer Weiner, and John Grisham all rolled up in one bouncy rubber ball:

1. Ingest coffee whenever, wherever, however you can.  I myself have an electric coffee maker, two french presses, a cup-top filter system, a percolator, a huge samovar, several packets of Starbucks Via and a container of Trader Joe’s instant coffee all taking up valuable kitchen real estate at this very moment, and I’m not afraid to use any one of them at a moment’s notice.

Why is coffee so crucial to an author’s success?  If you’ve ever sat in front of a computer and stared at an MS-Word doc for more than a minute, you know why.  The brain reverts to doze-mode the second it sees the words “document elements” at the top of the screen.  You need a quick high.

Plus, drinking cup after cup of coffee gives you an excuse to eat:

2.  Pastries.  The most important food group.  You need coffee and coffee needs pastry.  It’s as simple as that.  Of course, within the pastry genre, you have a lot of choice.  I am at this moment debating between chocolate chip yeast cakes (think fluffier, less sweet cinnamon rolls), which I make in large amounts and freeze so I can defrost them one at a time, a pan full of chocolate chip cookie cake that’s on top of my oven, and a bag of  breakfast cookies (oats, dried fruit and, yes, chocolate chips) with my name on them.

I also–out of curiosity–just counted the number of brownies mixes currently on my pantry shelves and–this is true–there are over FIFTEEN of them.  I clearly live in terror that I might one day run out and NOT be able to whip together a batch of brownies at the drop of a hat.  Fortunately, that will never happen.

But don’t be reckless. Brownies can only be eaten after noon.  Before that, you must get your sugar and chocolate in something that sounds vaguely breakfast like.  Anything with the words, “bun,” “biscuit,” or “roll” qualifies.

Lunch.

3. Protein, protein, protein.  By now, you’re thinking, “Come on, Claire, I know my basic science.  You need protein in your diet or you get all wimpy and tired.”  You know what?  You’re right.  You DO need protein.  Which is why you should either a) spread peanut butter on one of your pastries or b) throw some nuts into your brownies.  Nuts and legumes are excellent sources of protein.

Now we’re cooking with gas.  You feeling the energy?

4.  Getting over that mid-afternoon hump.  Morning gives you an excuse to drink lots of coffee.  Evening is cocktail hour.  (More on that later.)  What’s good about the afternoon?  Nothing.  That’s why you should forget about eating or writing and take a nice long nap.  When you wake up, it’s a good time to have another cup of coffee and a pastry.  Nice, right?  Like you’ve just bought yourself a brand new day.

5. Your evening meal.  So you’ve gotten through the day buzzed on caffeine and nourished by sugar and the occasional nut.  You’re craving a little something more.  And I know what that something is: salt.  Yes, it’s time for crunchy, salty things.  Potato chips are good.  Potato chips with hummus are even better.  Guacamole and tortilla chips are mind-blowingly wonderful.  Manchego cheese with a little rice cracker?  Oh, man, you’ve just died and gone to heaven.  But with all the salt you’re throwing down, you need something to combat that mighty powerful thirst . . .

6. (MUST BE OVER 21 TO READ THIS SECTION): Now it’s time for the vino.  Pour yourself a glass.  You deserve it.  You’ve sat at home in a comfortable desk chair and actually typed words on a keyboard.  You’re exhausted.  You’re wrung out.  You need to decompress.

Treat yourself right.  Use the good crystal.  Or a jelly jar.  Who cares, really, so long as it’s full?

7.  And to finish . . .  All that salty stuff has added up to one mighty fine meal.  Between that and your jelly jar, you’re feeling good right around now.  There’s only one thing missing: that one last bit of sweetness I like to call “dessert.”

Make it count.  Let it be decadent.  Then sit down and relish every bite–you’ve earned a little treat, you author you!  After the productive day you’ve had, you’re halfway to Stieg Larsson-sized success. (Now there was a man who appreciated a good cup of coffee . . .)  Bon appetit and bon . . . whatever the word for “writing” is in French.

Stayed tuned for my next diet article: how to eat well to read well.  You won’t want to miss it!

Speaking of questions, a fan of Epic Fail wrote to me recently asking me for recommendations of similar YA novels she might enjoy.  Can anyone help me out with this?  I’d love to get back to her with some titles but I’m not as well-read in that area as I should be.  Let me know if you can think of any, either in the comment thread here, or on my FB page.  And don’t forget to check out the book giveaway contest while you’re there–it ends Friday morning.

Bon appetit!

I don’t know why I said that.

Come over to my page to check it out!  Tell me what your favorite item of clothing is and what made it your favorite, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now, or Growing Up on the Spectrum (that last one is non-fiction).  But you have to respond on the Facebook comment thread, not here.  The winner will be picked using a computer randomizer and will get to choose which book he/she wants.

P.S. If you’re under 18 and enter and win and would prefer a copy of Epic Fail, that’s fine too.

Come join us!

So you have a story idea–maybe even an outline–and you want to start writing. But just as your hands are descending on your keyboard, you stop, uncertain.  Do you want your protagonist to tell the story, in the first person?  Or do you want an omniscient third-person narrator?  Or maybe you want to switch between narrators, sometimes one character, sometimes another?  You could even try writing in the second person (“you walk up the stairs where you see someone you know” etc) but . . . nah, you’re probably not going to do that.  You’re creative but you’re not crazy.

Still, it’s tough choosing between that first person and third person voice.  How do you decide?

Ultimately it’s a personal, creative decision and there’s no right or wrong answer.  But I can tell you that I tend to lean toward the first-person narrator when I have a very strong protagonist, someone who’s going to be in every scene (that’s important) and who’s interesting and original enough to add zest to the narrative.  I happen to love telling the story from the main character’s point of view (as you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read more than a couple of my books), but it does limit you.  You can’t describe events that take place away from that character (unless she recounts it from hearsay) and you can’t give her knowledge she wouldn’t have.

A third-person narrator simplifies all that kind of stuff.  You can go anywhere, describe anything, fill in any information.  But you do lose some personality: an incorporeal narrator isn’t going to help flesh out a character.  And you still have decisions to make: can your narrator see into anyone’s mind?  Or still lean toward one character’s thoughts?  (Think Scarlett O’Hara in GWTH–third person narrative, but you only know what Scarlett’s thinking.) Or do you want to keep it simple, just describe what’s going on and let the characters’ dialogue and actions speak for themselves?  That limits you because you can’t describe what someone’s thinking, but there’s a creative purity to it that’s appealing.

One thing that really bumps me in a book is when a narrator switches points of view within one scene, so that just when you’re seeing the action through one character’s eyes, suddenly you know what another character’s thinking.  You need some rules about this.  I suppose you could just dip in and out of everyone’s mind, but then you lose a lot of mystery–you’re cheating if you can sometimes see everyone’s motives but then try to spring a surprise because it serves you better in another scene.

I got around that one in two of my novels by having a third-person narrator but switching which point of view you could see, depending on the scene.  So, for example, in Knitting Under the Influence, you could see into Sari’s mind when the story was about her, and Lucy’s when it was about her.  The confusion could have come when they were together, which they frequently were, but then I made a very deliberate choice whose point of view that scene would still be told from–it could vary between sections but never within a section.  If I started a section in Sari’s voice, then I wouldn’t suddenly switch over and say, “Lucy thought Sari was being annoying.”  That would have felt inconsistent to me.

In both Knitting Under the Influence and The Smart One and the Pretty One, I needed to serve more than one main character.  I could have switched the first person (i.e. had one character narrate a chapter then switch to another character’s voice for a different character, something plenty of authors do, to interesting effect), but I decided to use that third person voice to avoid confusion.  For all my other novels, I’ve used the first person–I just love slipping into someone else’s mind and telling the story the way she would.  It lets you think like your character for a while and that’s just fun.

Tomorrow (Thursday) night is my last Book Candy TV interview.  And this is going to be the best.  I know this because the smart, savvy, and beautiful Marla Miller is going to be interviewing me AND we’ve already agreed to go long if good questions keep coming in. So come, settle down, bring some snacks (you don’t have to share), and join in on a nice long discussion about writing.

Here’s the info:

Join prolific author Claire LaZebnik when she appears on Book Candy TV to
talk about her writing life with host Marla Miller.  Fans of Claire’s will
have the chance to ask her detailed questions about her writing process.

Do her characters come to her first?
Does a theme drive the narrative of each story?
How influential is setting to the novels she writes?
What’s her favorite point of view and why?

We will also discuss Claire’s books about autism, and find out how her
experience writing non-fiction has influenced her fiction.

If you’ve yet to join a chat room during an interview with a notable author,
don’t miss this opportunity to join Book Candy Studios TV on January 12,
2012 @9PM Eastern / 6PM Pacific.

All you have to do is sign in – it’s free! It’s the next best thing to being
in a workshop.  Claire and Marla look forward to answering your questions
and discussing her craft, creative process, and the caffeine that fuels it
all.

DATE: JANUARY 12th, 2011
TIME: 6:00PM Pacific / 9:00PM Eastern

How to join:
- click widget below
- use the guest tab (not registered users tab)
- enter your name in the guest field
- click enter button to join

http://t.wbx.me/gcknl

Kate Casey, who writes a very funny and smart blog of her own, asked me to talk a little bit about getting an agent.

I’ve had three agents in my writing career.  The first two represented my first two novels, neither of which got published.  I left one and one left me (well, not so much left me as refused to take my calls and pretended she’d never even heard of me in the first place).  I don’t think about them much though, because I’ve had such a long and successful relationship with my current agent, who so far has sold nine books of mine–and counting. (I hope.  I hope we’re still counting.)

Full disclosure: I got my agent through connections.  My husband has a TV agent who passed my manuscript onto a literary agent who got it to a book agent, who took something like five months to read it–and then took me on as a client.  But since I did get two previous agents other ways, I still figure I’m somewhat qualified to give advice.

Actually, having connections is the best advice I can give, come to think of it–do that!  Have connections!  Or at least spend a minute or two thinking about whether you do.  Do you know someone who has a book agent?  If so, ask that person if you could use his name in a query email to that agent–people respond much more quickly if there’s a familiar name in the subject line.  This also works if you know someone who’s just friends with a book agent.  And obviously if it’s someone who’s read and liked your book and can actually recommend it–that’s even more powerful.

Remember to always be gracious and grateful when asking people to help you make connections.  Most authors have been where you are and if they’re your friends, they’ll want to give you a helping hand–but they are using up some favors to get you a read, so do make it clear you appreciate it.

But say you don’t know a soul connected to the publishing world in any way.  What do you do then?

My advice is to figure out which published authors are doing work that’s vaguely similar to yours.  Obviously, no one’s writing the exact same thing (or at least I hope not, because if someone is, you just lost originality points) but usually you have some sense of what books would be paired with yours on a bookshelf.  So figure out who those authors might be and then do a little research to find out who their agents are.  Used to be you’d have to go to the bookstore or library to get that information, but guess what?  These new Interwebs thingies take the hard work out of larning.  Within just a few minutes, you can find out who’s representing whom.  And then you’re ready to write a query email.

Here’s what you should include in a query email:

1. A brief description of your book.

2. Your name and contact info.

3. An attachment with the first thirty pages of the book or so.

4. A thank you for the time you’ve already taken up.

5. An offer to send the rest of the manuscript if they find the first few pages appealing.

Here’s what you should NOT include in your query email:

1.  A sob story about how hard it is to get published and how you really really need this because all you’ve ever wanted to be is a writer.

2. A sob story about your recent illness.

3. A sob story about how mean a previous agent was to you.

4. Any sob story whatsoever or any rant about the publishing industry.

5. A hilarious anecdote. (PS: Hilarious anecdotes are rarely hilarious.)

6. Any attempt at whimsy, adorableness, cleverness, or coyness.

7. An entire manuscript.

In other words, be professional.  Don’t waste anyone’s time.  This person is being gracious enough to read your email in the first place.  Keep it brief and informative so he can make a quick decision about whether the subject matter is up his alley or not.  And make it easy for him to read the first few pages by attaching them.  He may not bother, but if he’s the slightest bit intrigued, they’re there for the sampling.

And be prepared for rejection.  A lot of rejection.  When that rejection comes, don’t immediately leap to the assumption that everything that particular agent said is right and you should rewrite the whole thing according to his or her notes.  I’ve known people who’ve done a major rewrite after every rejection and lost sight of what they wanted their books to be in the first place.

If, however, you’ve had several reads and they’ve all come back with similar criticisms, then you should really stop and think about whether those might be valid.  Usually if there’s a majority agreement, there’s something there that needs to be changed.  (I’ll be writing more on processing readers’ notes in the future.)

Anyway, don’t lose hope or heart but, as I mentioned in a previous post, if you’ve sent the manuscript out and are now stuck playing the waiting game, turn your attention to your next project.  It’ll keep your spirits up and remind you why you’re doing this is the first place: because writing books is fun.

And don’t forget to join me on Book Candy TV, live at 6 pm PST and 9 pm EST on Thursday night with the lovely Marla Miller whose website I’ve been getting wrong in my last few posts: this is the right one.

Hope to hear from you then!

If only he could help with descriptions.