Retro Advice

 

Terry here, answering our question of the week: State how long you’ve been writing, and what advice would you give to your younger self before you turned professional? 

Believe it or not, at one time I was trying to decide whether to become a professional singer or a writer. I’d always considered myself a writer, but I also loved to sing. What made the decision for me was that I realized that singing required a lot more ambition than I had. I honestly don’t know how singers manage to become well-known. Of course all these years later, I realize the same can be said of writing. But somehow, opening your mouth and having a less-than perfect sound seemed much more frightening than putting words on paper that need editing. There’s no editing when you sing. You open your mouth, and no matter how much you’ve practiced, you can muff it. With writing, you can go over until you’re satisfied (notice I didn’t say “get it right.”) 

 I was an early reader and like so many young girls who read Nancy Drew books, I thought being a writer would be swell! (in the language of Nancy). And being a mystery writer would be wonderful. So I wrote. A lot. Some of it was probably promising, but mostly it was just word salad. Which led to years of frustration before I finally wised up. 

 Advice I would give myself if I could turn back time: Take yourself seriously. In other words, do the hard work of becoming a good writer. Don’t settle for “good enough.” Write a book that is the best you can write. I wrote several books before I finally wrote one that was good enough to publish. Oh, the others were okay (in the words of one agent—great plot, didn’t care for the characters; and from another agent—loved the characters, crappy plot). But what I know now is that I was just dabbling. 

 After National Novel Writing Month in November, I understand there is always a spate of badly written books that get self-published—books like the ones I thought were “good enough” when I was starting out. Thank goodness at the time, self-publishing was much harder than it is now, so I didn’t embarrass myself by flinging my golden words out into the world and having them land with a thud. 

 Doing the “hard work” means taking a good, hard look at what you’ve written and asking yourself if it’s as good as it can be. There are many, many books and articles on how to do that. But for the longest time, I didn’t pay any attention to them. I just wrote until I thought I was done and then sent the manuscript off to an agent. The crazy thing is that I got several reputable agents who thought there was enough good stuff in the books to submit them to publishers. In other words, “good enough” wasn’t good enough. 

 It took a weekend workshop with a couple of writers who really wanted to help struggling writers to set me straight. It’s one of the best workshops I ever attended—and it was a one-off. The two-person faculty made passionate pitches for struggling writers to take themselves seriously. To do the hard work. I went home and for once really thought about what I should write instead of just slamming words onto the page. And Samuel Craddock was conceived. The eleventh in the series comes out October 2!