When I am teaching (as I am all the time now), I tend to think more conversationally than when I am abiding inside my head, spinning tales. Lately, it seems there’s been a lot I’ve wanted to share that’s excited  and inspired me. Here are three of those items:

1) Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

At first, I was almost disappointed in the fit-of-my-shoes and tracking-of-miles-run-in-a-month mundanity of the book. But after I finished it, the full impact of his practice as a runner, his inevitable decline in the face of the body’s mortality, but his perseverance nonetheless, gave me the triumvirate of the writer’s being: the brain (lover of plot and planning, of revision, perfection and an impossible certainty), the storyteller (crazy, intuition-driven, passionate troubadour, who can do everything you hope and more if the brain will shut up), and now, the athlete. This is the writer who knows that how it feels to get the words down is irrelevant. The key is to put in the miles, to go the distance, to establish and maintain daily routines.

2) Robert A. Heinlein’s Five “Rules for Writing.”

1) You must write.

2) You must finish what you write.

3) You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4) You must put the work on the market.

5) You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

In a remarkable little essay, Robert J. Sawyer then takes us through each rule, showing us how fully half of all people who want to be writers fail to follow each rule. He adds a sixth, too.

(I’ll spend more time on this at another point, but let me say here that knowing what it means for a particular work to be finished—Rule #2—will make it possible, I think, to follow Rule #3 with success and a sense of integrity.)

3) A writer friend forwarded a “weekly reflection” from Mark Nepo about the long and material apprenticeship various cultures expect of their various artists and craftspeople. A perfect counterpoint to Heinlein’s light-a-fire-under-your-derriere Rules, Nepo’s gentle reminder pointed to a love of the process, of making progress rather than arriving. It’s not on his web site, but a bunch of his writing and information about him is there.

And any Chloe Jo fans from the GirlieGirl Army who’ve made your way over here, welcome. Want to find out more about my upcoming and ongoing classes? Go HERE.

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Everything is changing. This much we know. People lament or exalt the Kindle, perhaps via Facebook or a Tweet. Yes, it’s a different world than the one where your morning newspaper (what’s that?) landed with a thump on your doorstep and you put a thumb between the pages of your book to call out to your kid to bring it in the house. These days you might be reading a book at Google while your “newspaper” is scrolling across the bottom of your screen. Your kid probably can’t hear you with all the electronic media plugged into him. Okay, that’s a grim view.

The key, though, is that with all this change it’s hard to get a grasp of what the heck is actually going on. Here are some recent articles and blogs that help us make sense of the new publishing landscape.

“Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business, Part 1″ is the clearest view I’ve seen. Definitely worth a look.  Part one of a long series, this really lays out what is going on as digital everything hits the publishing world.

If you are wondering how the brave new world might effectively promote reading–and not just spell its demise–check out, “Spotlight on: Social Media: Twitterpated: Religion Authors Dive into Social Media.” With all the examples of how Twitter and Facebook are being used to promote books, you’ll want to jump right in with your own giveaway, guessing game or wild new idea.

And seriously, if you are out there trying to make your name in 140 characters or less, here’s a fast and easy lesson on how to create content that’s worthwhile for your followers. “Fourteen Types of Tweets” will be helpful for newer Tweeters trying to figure out what will give the people what they want . . . and might offer a shot of inspiration even for old hands. (How old a hand can you be?)

Finally, a bit of news from the real world, but the big, bad, corporate real world, one that is touting good books! “Target Can Make Sleepy Titles Into Best Sellers” talks about how many folks are buying books alongside their detergent, diapers and plastics whatevers. Target is picking unknown authors to sell to their shoppers, and it can really turn sales around for these books. Good books, too. The article mentions my friends the wonderful writers Meg Waite Clayton and Michelle Richmond.

Shop at your local bookstore, if you have one anymore, and read your old fashioned actual-paper paperback, sure. Fight the good fight. But if you need a quick introduction to the ways technology and marketing and literature are co-existing and cooperating, take a look at these articles and let me know what you think.

I’ve been recommending this link to a number of my clients who are getting ready to go in search of an agent, and I thought I’d post it for the rest of you who might be heading that direction.

Jamie Ford, in case you haven’t heard of him (and apparently there are folks who haven’t heard of Kafka, so Jamie doesn’t need to feel bad and I’m sure he doesn’t) is a best-selling author. His first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, has met with all kinds of success. Check it out.

Jamie is also a generous blogger, and one of the things he blogged about was his process of finding an agent. He even quotes his rejection letters (and no, he is neither spiteful or sassy, as he might be under the current circumstances; he’s just humble and professional). He approached the process very well, and he gives some good tips about it. Plus it makes for a good read–suspense and a happy ending.

You can probably troll his archives and find lots of great material. I’d recommend starting with his entry on the Query-Go-Round, and follow through, being sure to stop at I’ve Made Up My Mind, until you see his final announcement. Then of course, you can follow him as he becomes a best-selling novelist. All good fun.

Don’t forget to get back to your own writing, though. Because the number one way to get a great agent is to write an irresistible manuscript, oui?

http://www.jamieford.com/bittersweet-blog/2007/4/30/riding-the-query-go-round.html

http://www.jamieford.com/bittersweet-blog/2007/5/17/ive-made-up-my-mind.html

I’m a person with three novel manuscripts waiting perfection. I’m not impulsive about getting my work out before the public eye because I’ve been wounded by the public eye, been overly-sensitive to what others wrote about my work or thought about it. The blog format, therefore, is good for me. In many ways.

But it is still dangerous, and right now I’m aflame, in a quiet and deep way.

I just crawled out of bed after a long “nursey-nappy” with my family, a nap I spent finishing Po Bronson‘s excellent What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. He’s got quite a target market there: anyone who’s ever wondered, Is That All There Is?

But what made me LOVE this book was first, the excellent writing. It’s just so well-written. If you want to know what good writing is, read this book. It’s not flowery, pretentious, or even poetic. It’s honest, articulate, driven by a voice of intelligence and integrity.

If I knew Po Bronson better, which is to say if I’d ever met him or met his cousin or seen him do a live reading, say, I’d call him up right now instead of blogging, and I’d run my ideas past him. But you, dear reader, are being asked to stand in. Here’s what I’ll do to help you out. I’ll quote a few lines, and you see if you can take up the spirit of the voice of this book and answer me back, okay?

He writes:

So finding your calling is not “the answer.” Callings are vehicles that help us let our real selves out; callings speed up the process. You can find your calling, or you can find your people, or you can find an environment that nurtures you–they all lead to the same place. Many people get there without ever finding their calling. Head in that direction. (p.390)

And then he writes:

A calling is not something you know, it’s something you grow into, through trials and mistakes. Work shouldn’t just be fun. Work should be like life–sometimes fun, sometimes moving, and defined by meaningful events. Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are. (p.391)

And just one more:

You can get good at what you need to to serve what you believe in. . . . Nothing helps like knowing you are not alone. (p. 391)

Okay, go buy this book! And then come back here and listen to me confess.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been studying marketing with Michael Port, and that I appreciate that he emphasizes love and integrity. In fact, our last class, in which he made good use of a book called Love is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders was mind-bogglingly wonderful. It focused on the idea that networking is the process of taking care of other people by sharing your intangibles.

What are your intangibles? Your network, your knowledge and your passion.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Po Bronson at night, surrounded by babies, with my little clip-on reading light fading mightily. I got to the end of Ch. 46 last night and it was late for someone with two little guys who wake up before the birds around here, and so I switched off my sputtering little clip-on light, but I couldn’t sleep for two more hours. I was thinking about what he wrote at the end of Ch. 46.

And I’m working out who and how I want to teach, who and how I want to edit. I love teaching and editing; I love being good at making connections, pushing people toward their strengths, teaching what doesn’t seem to be taught much–craft, for example, close attention to words; how to write the books you write best, better. And how to finish things . . . write a whole book and then rewrite it, and write another one. What if people left an M.F.A. program with two complete, book-length manuscripts?

So I’m thinking about how to build my teaching and coaching and editing business, how to serve the people I’m meant to serve. But at the same time, of course, there’s something else: I want to be a writer.

I’ve known this for a really long time and it keeps not changing. I don’t like growing in public or marketing my wares-cum-deepest creative efforts. But I keep pulling past those blocks, changing my mind, being willing to figure out a new way to be willing to grow in public and to see selling my wares in a different light.

Add to the mix that I’m raising two kids, and that I want to raise them. I want to be there for the rolling out of the new words, for the jokes they make and the dance moves they invent and the art they create that, frankly, blows my mind.

So that’s business, writing, kids, in no particular order, and not to mention my relationship, my friends, and my voracious appetite for reading . . .

And each of these items has a few sides to it.

Because besides the amazing sentences my boys utter and the laughs they earn and the hugs they give, there are also endless meals to cook, surfaces to wipe down (counters and bottoms and floors) and dishes to clean and toys to pick up off the floor–again–and laundry to do and baths to be given and hair to be washed and no one likes to brush teeth, it turns out . . .

And writing comes with building a platform and collecting rejection slips, which means addressing and stamping and mailing envelopes (or is anybody even doing that anymore?) and researching markets and proposing articles and books and then convincing other people to buy them . . .

And building a business comes with letting other people know about it and developing products and courses and trying methods of outreach that fail, and doing taxes, and keeping books and records and mailing lists and returning phone calls and emails . . .

Everybody else just woke up, and I was planning to drive the point home if I could, but then people needed dinner and a lot of attention.

So . . . where was I? Oh yes, all the pieces of a whole and the many wholes that compete for attention.

Here’s my immediate, not-yet-digested idea after finishing Po Bronson’s book: I am going to structure my courses and coaching to support my–and hence my clients’–writing life. Perhaps a first-thing-in-the-morning group check-in to rev us up and get us going? Followed by a three-hour writing block. A lunch hour course rotating between planning your book (Mondays?), writing your book (Wednesdays?), revising your book (Thursdays?).(Clients can move among them as needed.) The craft course to keep all of us in the best shape possible for writing great prose . . . And then afternoon coaching sessions for people who are ready to soar.

This is a work-in-progress, but at its heart is my belief that serving others can be done best when I am serving myself. And as I learn about building a platform using all of the exciting media options available, as I create tours and promote books, I will share this information. I want to help apprentice writers become professionals, and professional writers become stars. Myself included.

What do you want? What is your driving passion? What should you do with your life?

I certainly didn’t see the writer as a business person. Why should the writer, who must daily summon the courage to dredge her soul–and that of her neighbors–also worry about marketability, profitability, and spreading the word about a product so worthy as the book?

All this has changed, and more.

Think of Michelangelo. He didn’t wake up one day with a vision to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was no quirky artistic impulse, some sort of installation project. No–it was a commercial job, an assignment. Nonetheless, he created immortal art on the job, prone on scaffolding, painting the hand of God. People have lain on their backs for money and done worse.

Raymond Carver produced many a short story because he had a wife and kids and had to pay his rent in Chico, California. Do we wish he’d had the leisure to forgo that writing?

I’ve mentioned that I’m taking a marketing course, one that has integrity and even love writ into its principles. I’ve been studying how you think about what you do, how you talk about what you do, whom you serve, how what you do addresses the urgent needs and compelling desires of your clients. Then I’ve been thinking about how all of this business sense applies to fiction.

Are writers service professionals?

I pose this question and all my old objections surface: the originality and honesty of the writer must not be compromised by some sort of base grappling with supply and demand.

But Charles Dickens rewrote the ending to Great Expectations to please his editors and the audience of this serialized tale. Shakespeare stooped to greatness to garner a laugh from the rowdy crowd.

The parenting angle of this rant is this: I am solidly out of the self-centered musing and exploration of my solitary youth. Everything I do is in relationship. Demand and supply. Demand and supply. It’s humanizing. The expression “navel-gazing” itself might remind us that we were, each of us, nurtured into being from somebody else’s body. That very belly-button of solitude is the site of our first and most dependent inter-relationship.

What happens to a book when its author is concerned with attracting readers?

First, it means the characters must be fascinating, the plot enticing, the language compelling, the world drawn so that the reader is drawn in. None of this is bad for art. If we are modern-day Scheherazades, tale-telling to save our lives, our lives dependent on the continued interest of our listeners and their insatiable curiosity–fed by our craft–to know what will happen next, does this repel the intimate muse? Is she the sort who will not let you take her out in public? Who will not kiss you on the dance floor? Beware the finicky muse. She will not supply your bread and butter.

David Mamet said, “If you have something to fall back on, you will.” And yet by setting the writing to one side and the money-earning, world-facing self to another, we force ourselves to fall back on something else. The most prolific writers I know have a working-class work ethic. Work doesn’t surprise or offend them, and they understand that writing is work–making it and selling it.

A cousin of my great-grandfather invented the heating and cooling system for the Ford. My great-grandparents moved into a small apartment with this man and his wife, so that they could live inexpensively, and they all worked–my great-grandmother made hats and sold them door-to-door–so they could invest in the company that would make these heating and cooling systems. They became very rich, and it’s taken three or four generations to turn that fortune into the exhaust fumes of family bickering.

But what if the inventor of the heating and cooling system had felt that the effort of thinking of the thing was enough, was all that he could be expected to do? What if my great-grandmother made hats but did not want to sell them, wanted them to sell themselves by dint of their beauty and worth?

My communist, trust-funder grandmother may be rolling over in her newly minted grave as I extol the virtue of market forces on art, but if she’d been forced to complete her decades-long project, a screenplay about the Haymarket martyrs, the world would be a better and a richer place, both. If she’d been hungry not only in her soul but in her stomach, she’d have accomplished more.

It is a false luxury and a disservice to imagine that you do not have to peddle your wares if what you make is art. If you were making a better spark plug, you’d have a business plan. It’s time for writers to do the same.

One final note: perfectionism is the bane of really good writers, and market forces do a funny thing. They force you to get your best work out in front of people. They support greatness and push against perfectionism. This is a gift no writer can afford to turn down.

The New York Times published an article about how sales of books are up in France and Europe in general.

Two favorite quotes:

“It’s a happy message,” said André Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales. “People have been reading and they will keep reading, no matter what happens.”

“Books are a very cheap treat,” said Helen Fraser, managing director of Penguin Books in London. “When you are reading all this dreadful news in the paper, a lovely 500-page novel by Marian Keyes or a classic by Charles Dickens takes you right away from all that.”

What are you reading?

When FSG published my first novel, this seemed a validation of my focus on craft over career. Because my novel contained lesbian content, and FSG had not published a book with lesbian content before (except, funnily enough, in their YA division, where they’d published Nancy Garden), people at my readings often asked me, over and over, how I’d gotten my book published. I had no answer for them beyond the hard work I’d put into making it strong.

Pretty quickly, though, my naïveté about publishing and marketing caught up with me. I didn’t know that there was a three-month window after a book is published for it to “succeed” or “fail.” I had no idea what I might do to promote the book. In fact, in the months after my book was published, I was packing and moving across the country, leaving behind all the connections I had to local writers and bookstores.

The head agent at my agent’s office met me and told me that the only advice she could give me was to have fun. I understand why she said that–it was Zen good advice. But seriously, folks, if you are a novelist–and this is more true now than it was then–you are a small business owner or you have a hobby. Those are your choices. You might get published once or twice if you have a hobby of writing books, but you cannot sustain a viable career unless you make it your business not only to write books but also to sell them.

(As an aside, I would like to mention that if you are a writer or anyone who cares about textual storytelling, you’d do well to make it your business to buy books, too, and to promote other people’s books and the world of books in general. If you never buy a new, hard cover book, you are going to have a heck of a time believing other people should buy yours.)

It is still a pet peeve of mine when people who have not written one polished, lovely book are hyper focused on selling it. The truth is that while “bad” books are published all the time, the one best marketing tool you can have is an excellent book. That’s why my motto is: If your readers can’t put your book down, they’ll have to buy it. This implies that you’ve written an irresistible story.  You’ve worked on it until it’s powerfully strong.

But my motto also implies that you’ve then gotten your book into the hands of some readers. These are the two parts to our business, and they can feel antithetical to one another.

In the privacy of your office/ bedroom/ café table, you reach into the depths of your mind and scale the rocks and hard places of your soul/ high school experiences/ life, and you come back with a story. The cadences, whether borrowed, stolen or invented, are yours. The sentences and the images and the characters are all yours. Yours the way a baby you birth is yours. And then you have to put the squalling, fragile creature of your heart out into the world, and what’s more, you have to promote it.

Terrifying.

Absurd.

Reprehensible.

But true.

Here’s the good news: I’ve been studying marketing, marketing with integrity and heart, and . . . (drum roll) it can be fun. You want to get your voice out into the world. You have something to offer readers, and you know this because books have been your lifeline, your pleasure and pastime. Right?

So let’s start here, with your commitment to be what Michael Port calls fully self-expressed. And here, there’s more:

I am teaching an exciting new course called Technique. Set goals, write and master the craft.

GIVEAWAY ONE: TONIGHT, I am offering a FREE CLASS BY TELEPHONE. Email me for a space and information about how to call in.

GIVEAWAY TWO: Post a comment on this blog post this week to enter a random drawing to WIN FOUR WEEKS of the Technique Course (value: $150) Winners announced Monday. Please check back and include an email so I can contact you!

FINE PRINT: Class meets by conference call on Wednesdays, 6 – 7:10 p.m. PST. The only charge will be whatever your phone company charges for the call. (You can use a cell if you have free minutes.) If you enroll now to ensure a space or are already enrolled, you will win an extra four weeks after your paid course runs out.

When a generous teacher at a two-week writing workshop gave me his agent’s address and insisted that I send her my short stories–I was twenty-one–I returned to sit on the twin bed in the small dorm room where I’d been staying, typing on a manual, non-electric Underwood someone lent me, and I thought, This is it. I’ve been discovered. Life will never be the same again. I surveyed the people I knew. These would remain my true friends, the ones who’d loved me before fame and glory descended. These would be the ones I could trust.

Much as I’d once imagined Sting appearing at my junior high and walking with me through the grounds, thus revealing my essential worth to certain cruel or oblivious people, I now imagined the transformation to come. I went to the payphone in the hallway (just to offer some carbon-dating) and called my mother and then my boyfriend. They each wanted to know if this particular teacher wanted to sleep with me.

Since we were both leaving the state that day and had just said good-bye, I assured them that his mysterious beneficence was not driven by lust but by a genuine belief in my talent. I hung up discouraged by their lack of faith and tried to drift back to my fantasies of fame.

Needless to say, I still meet people everyday who are not only able to see the real me in the face of my fame and glory but who, even squinting and peering, cannot find a trace of the glitter I’d imagined trailing behind me wherever I went. Wanting to be published and being published have a lot in common . . .

What’s surprised me is that even writers I consider much more successful struggle with a sense of languishing in obscurity. I remember about fifteen years ago, Ethan Canin pointing out that the most famous writer in America–he suggested John Updike–could have a conversation on an airplane that began with full introductions, moved on to “What do you do?” and ended with, “Anything I’ve heard of?” Answer in the negative.

I can only hope that wherever John Updike is now, there are delighted readers all around . . .

This is not, however, a lament. Writers are the most generous, wonderful people I know. (Writers being a subset of that category of glorious beings known as readers.) And I intend to make it my business to bouy them up in rough seas. Here is the focus of my coaching and editing:

Momentum. Mastery. Marketing.

When you need one great reader and then thousands . . . .

This is my direction. In the meanwhile, referring back to the article in the Guardian and the title of this blog, let me suggest–as a writer, as an editor, as a parent–that many of the greatest aspects of life are both joy and chore.

Even junior high could be heavenly with Sting at your side. And even writing and even, yes, even marketing your writing, can be a thrill with the right kind of support and a solid plan.

(More to be revealed soon . . .)