September 21, 2017

The All-Blog (Writing and Blog Updates)

WRITING

I've got some exciting--to me--news about the Murder-by-Month Mysteries! This time next year, the first ten books in the series should be reissued with new covers, extended humor, and deepened romance (=hot making out with Mira and Johnny). If you're signed up for my newsletter, you'll be informed when those start dropping. Otherwise, check back here. Also, look for Mercy's Chase, the second in the Witch Hunt series, to be released September 2017. I'm working on it now! I see a 7-book arc for this series.

BLOGGING

Shannon Baker and I are halfway through our second Double-booked Blog tour! Existing stops below; each comment left at any one of them through October 12 gets you one chance to win a free book mailed to you.

September 2: How Long Before the Next Novel?
September 5: Choose Your Genre, Change Your World
September 7: Revolutionize Your Writing with These Four Editing Hacks
September 12: Cozies v Thrillers
September 19: Writers Talk Money
September 20: Best Writing Books

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June 9, 2017

Find Your Theme, Free Yourself

My 15th book released a few weeks ago. It's called Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction, and it walks readers through the lucrative and life-changing process of transforming life experiences into powerful fiction. I stumbled across this fact-to-fiction process by accident. The year was 2001. I had a three-year-old daughter and another on the way. I was teaching full-time and loving life.

Unexpectedly, inexplicably, I lost my husband.

I go into more detail in my TEDx Talk, but in general, here's what happened after his death: I had to write to survive. I needed to transform my fear and pain into something coherent. I wrote one book, then another. I'd written three whole novels and received 423 rejections before I landed my first agent.

Fifteen books later, I'd give up wine, bread, cheese, and my left foot before I'd quit writing.

But even after all that passion and practice, if I'm honest with myself (and you), it's not exactly ancient history that the idea of drafting a novel felt like being dropped into central Africa's Congo Basin with a compass and a paperclip.

Naked.

Rolled in honey.

With everyone whom I've ever wanted to impress watching via a live feed, gathered together in a room, eating popcorn and laughing so hard that they spewed schadenfreude all over the television. In fact, after I began my first novel I spent much of my writing time feeling overwhelmed at the scope of what I'd taken on and like a ridiculous fraud for even pretending I could write a book. I grew up in rural Minnesota, for crying in the night. Not only did I not know any writers, I hardly knew anyone who liked to read.

But there was personal treasure to be mined in the writing of a novel, I sensed it even then, rubies of resilience and emeralds of hope, and so I read what I could on the art of writing, sought out mentors, and read fiction like a chef trying to puzzle out the recipe by tasting the meal. After five years of trial and error, I finally arrived at a method to reduce the time and stress of writing an experience-based novel while increasing the joy in the writing and the quality of the story. More importantly, I discovered that writing fiction allows me to process much of my personal garbage so I can live healthier and happier.

You'll find that most if not all your best novel ideas are already growing, ready to be plucked, in the compost pile of your mind. (Your compost pile is that fertile, loamy, shit-filled place where you tossed your baggage in the hopes that it would decompose on its own. It doesn't. You have to stir it up and spread it out. It's just the way it works.)

All writers end up with a unifying theme across the books that they write, and that theme is the most indigestible nugget in their mental compost pile, the personal challenge they were put on this earth to overcome. For example, I write about the poison and power of secrets. In every. Single. Book. (It took me eight novels to realize my recurring theme.)

I come by this meta theme honestly. I grew up in a house built on fear and secrets, liberally sprinkled with alcoholism, psychedelic drugs, swingers, and naked volleyball parties. I packed my first bong before I was ten and mixed a mean whiskey water by age twelve. To this day, I think my parents' worst fear was that I'd rebel and grow up to be a right-winger. (My parents would be mortified if they knew I was writing about them or my childhood. This, along with an instilled allegiance to secrets, has kept me from writing nonfiction up until this moment. How am I finally breaking free of this, you ask? The advice to write as if your parents are dead seems too harsh. I'm instead writing as if they're illiterate.)

My experience of working through and spreading my mental compost pile via novel writing is not unique. At a recent writing conference, a successful noir author confessed to me that all her books are about that pivotal, cathartic moment when a person tests his/her limits. John Irving's recurring theme seems to be younger men who are seduced or abused by older women. Parental abandonment appears in every one of Charles Dickens' books. Amy Tan tackles mother/daughter relationships in her writing.

You will find some version of your own experience-based theme in all the novels you write. Don't worry if you don't know your life theme right now; discovering it is one of the many gifts of novel writing. Just know that wherever you are at in the writing process, you are doing the right thing. The good work.

Write on, with love,
Jessie

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March 20, 2017

The Shame of Writing

I woke up to an email from a woman I have not met. I’d submitted a guest post for her blog. She responded with a pile of mean wrapped in hair.

She said she’d read the article I’d submitted, didn’t know who I'd stolen it from (surely I couldn’t have written it because she’d tracked down the one salvageable sentence to my blog so knew I could write and wanted more of that), said the rest had clearly been written by a “failed academic,” and declared that the last paragraph of the piece (which was my bio) read like an “infomercial,” so I needed to delete that but also, could I send her a bio?

She left me with two options, either to 1) write the article myself, or 2) have someone else write an article about me, because, “Mixing those two modes won't work. After all, I want your work and book to shine, Jess!”

I'm chuckling as I type this. The levels of absurdity (for the record, she had a point about the stuffy tone; the rest was crazy cakes—of course I'd written the article). But if you think I was anything but locked in Rage Tower, shooting death rays at my dog and children (price of admission, folks) after I read her email, well, thank you for thinking so highly of me.

The Firestarter fury burned itself out within the hour, but it left behind a worm of doubt. Maybe this isn't the right time to write that book I've been dancing around for months…Now here is where it gets interesting for me. I’m 15 books into my career. I know the games I play, how I’ll scuttle into the nearest excuse and hide there, a hermit crab of a human being, comforting myself with the fact that of course I’d work on that book if not for this lovely, formfitting excuse.

But Unspeakable Things? The book I’m “working on” now? I’ve never gotten so personal in my fiction, and not coincidentally, desperate in my reasons not to write it. The book is Lovely Bones meets Stranger Things, a time travel to Paynesville, Minnesota, 1983, when boys were being abducted and returned but the adults never told us why. It’s an examination of the monsters we all grow up with. It’s mystery and magical realism, nostalgia and freedom. I’ve outlined it every which way but Wednesday, and now, I circle it. Looking for reasons not to write it.

• Maybe I should self-publish a Murder-by-the-Month novella and make some quick cash so I can pay for the trip I want to take with my family, and then I’ll write this next book. And I’m going out of country in a couple days. I should wait until I return to dig in. And I have articles to write for my book that’s coming out May 1. That’s time sensitive. I should do that first. And I work too much. I need more time for fun, less time writing. I already have a full-time teaching job, I shouldn’t make writing another job. And maybe I’m not good enough of a writer to…*

SNAP

It’s that last weasel worry that finally woke me up to what I'd been doing, and I have this morning’s email to thank for it (you might want to take a gift-wrapping class, blog lady, but gratitude for the present just the same): Maybe I’m not a good enough writer to…

I recognize that old friend. His name is Shame. He masquerades as a fear of failure, or a fear of success, a need to get this one page just right before I can even think about going on to the next one, a million reasons not to begin or not to continue, worry that I’ll waste hundreds of precious hours writing, that people won’t like the book, that they’ll see my imperfection laid bare in my words, or the order of my words, or that they just won't want to see my words.

I imagine that I'll wrestle with Shame at the beginning of every new book I write (he loses his seat at the table around page 100, dunno why), and I'll have to fight myself back to this place each time. Steven Pressfield does a great job naming this crisis of confidence in The War of Art. Anne Lamott offers an antidote in “Shitty First Drafts”—that whole book is a must-read. But here’s what I know, and what I forget with each book: there is only one cure for the shame, and it is this: word count.

The writing is the reward. The writing is the reward. The writing is the reward.

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