This is a shock!  My book is now listed #2 on my publisher’s website for the most sales!!!  I’m not sure how this happened, but I won’t complain. 

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/CategoryCenter/IUBEST/Best-Seller

http://davidsonnews.net/blog/2012/01/10/visiting-t

Poetic, but not very realistic. What if you never feel inspired? Or ready? It’s foolish, not to mention unproductive, to write only when you are inspired or ready. It’s not OK to wait for the flame to appear. It is OK to use some of the motivational strategies below.

1.    Set a daily writing goal. Make it something you can accomplish in your scheduled writing time, which by now should be a minimum one-to-two hour block of time for at least five days a week. Two pages every day. One thousand words a day. Outline second chapter and write one brief summary paragraph for each heading and sub-heading in the outline. Complete a first draft of two sections in chapter three. When your writing time is focused by having a specific goal, and you work on one goal at a time, you will be more productive. Remember, you can’t write a dissertation or a book today. But you can write three paragraphs or three pages…and move your project to completion.

2.    Schedule your writing as early as possible in the day. If you fear or dislike writing, then once it’s done, you experience a tremendous sense of relief that you have the rest of the day to do everything else you must do…without having to think about your writing. If you find there is little available time in the day to write, schedule your writing time for an hour or two before you typically start your day, and you will not have to worry that you won’t find time….again…to write.  Even if you are a “night person,” you increase the probability that you will write each day…and write enough each day… if you write the first thing in the day. (Hey, if you discover you have more time to write later in the day you will be even more productive.)

3.    Think ahead and plan backwards. This advice comes from Michael Zygmond and Beth Fischer, neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh and directors of the university’s Survival Skills and Ethics program for graduate students and post-docs. If you have a deadline for a paper or presentation, or an anticipated defense date, then plan your writing schedule backwards from that date. For example, if you plan to have your PhD conferred on May 18, 2011 (at Columbia University), you know that your dissertation must be deposited with GSAS by May 13. If you give yourself two weeks to make changes to your dissertation after a successful defense, then you must defend by April 29. You must give your dissertation to your defense committee by April 15. So what do you need to do the week of April 8? And the week before that? And the week before that…planning backwards all the way to this week.  This thinking ahead and planning backwards helps you to know what you must do this week, and what you must accomplish today, if you hope to meet your long-term goal of dissertation completion.

4.    Work with deadlines. (See posting #10, January 11). If you find yourself repeatedly missing deadlines, even when there are good reasons for doing so, then you know that you must schedule more days to write, you must write more hours in a day, or you must produce more writing in each session. If not, you will miss your deadline and must bail out on your conference presentation or job interview or postpone your graduation. (I find these consequences very motivating but also very painful. So perhaps another motivation strategy is to write now and avoid pain later.)

5.    There is no writing, only re-writing, Steve Mintz, director of the Columbia GSAS Teaching Center, told our Dissertation Boot Camp participants. Lamott (1994) says, “Get it down, so you can clean it up.” Shaw (1993) says, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” If it helps to motivate you, you do not need to write a final draft, or even a good draft. You must write today so that you can produce good writing when you edit.

6.    Reward progress. Some of us are adequately rewarded by the satisfaction of completing good writing. (We have an internal locus of control) Some of us need something more – tangible, tasty, real rewards. So reward yourself at points throughout your writing but only after you have completed something substantial. (No candy bar after each completed sentence.) Silvia reminds us to “never reward writing with not writing. Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette….Don’t lose your good writing habits” (p. 45).

7.    Motivate (and comfort) yourself with stories of other good writers (and how they suffer, too). Ralph Keyes in The Writer’s Book of Hope explains that he keeps a file with such stories: ‘A San Francisco Examiner editor returned an article to Rudyard Kipling with a note saying, “This isn’t a kindergarten for amateur writers. I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language” (p. 142).

8.    Read others’ acknowledgments is one more motivational tip from Keyes:  They “can be a treasure chest of useful and reassuring information” (p. 143). Writers demonstrate in their long list of acknowledgements that, through times of AFD (anxiety, frustration, and despair), there were those “who encouraged them, who supported them, and who kept their spirits up” (p. 143). When my graduate students were having a rough time with their momentum and motivation (or even were fearful of starting to put words on paper), I encouraged them to write their acknowledgements. It’s fun and easy to write, it makes the dissertation begin to look like an actual book, and advisors and committee member won’t suggest edits to your acknowledgements. Writing a page of acknowledgements can provide motivation and encouragement. (I read James C. Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity many years ago. When I read the author’s acknowledgement of his wife, I was moved to tears reading about the academic author and his wife, neither of whom I had ever met. Since then, the acknowledgements are the first thing I read when I pick up a book. Like Keyes, I’m always amazed at how many people have helped, encouraged, and sustained the authors through the writing of their books. For me, writing a book’s acknowledgements means that I get to thank the people who have mentored and encouraged me, so they can see their name, and my appreciation, in print. That’s a real motivation for me to finish the manuscript.)

9.    And here’s another good motivational strategy: Donate $5 to your favorite U.S. presidential candidate’s opponent for each day you do not write (Boice, 1990).*   (I like this one the best)

Boice, R. (1990). Professors as writers: A self-help guide to productive writing. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.
Keyes, R. (2003). The writer’s book of hope: Getting from frustration to publication. New York: Owl Books.
Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. New York: Anchor Books.
Shaw, H. (1993). Errors in English and ways to correct them. New York: Collins.
Silvia, P. (2007). How to write a lot. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

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New Sci-Fi Novel Presents Lesson in Living

Author Gretchen Hummel releases debut novel to acclaim of fellow writers

DAVIDSON, N.C. – From Octavia E. Butler to Ursula K. Le Guin, the landscape of science fiction has erected a number of grande dames. While relative newcomer Gretchen Hummel has yet to claim a crown of her own, there is every indication that her own royal marriage to sci-fi infamy may not be far away.

In her first published novel Dreamer’s Island, Hummel leads readers through the streets and alleys of a future, post-plague San Francisco, which has been made an island by a massive earthquake. At the center of Dreamer’s Island is a mother’s unrelenting search for her daughter; at the bottom, an engaging look at fear, the resiliency of life and the intersection of the two.

The book’s heroine is Blair, a mother searching for her kidnapped daughter. She works as a tour guide on what mainlanders call Devil’s Island – all that’s left of San Francisco. The island is infamous for its high rate of plague survivors, its lively, thriving arts community and its suspect spirituality.

The island is quarantined, yet mainlanders Dr. Lourdes and his daughters insist on a visit. Their stated agenda is to shop the arts district and to adopt a child. But Dr. Lourdes’s curiosity about rumored plague virus experiments has Blair worried about the true purpose of their visit.

When the doctor’s youngest daughter contracts the plague, Blair must call on all her plague-gifts to help her survive. The girl’s fight for her life and Blair’s search for her own daughter dovetail in a startling conclusion.

Dreamer’s Island has already garnered attention among readers and writers:

“In Dreamer’s Island Gretchen Hummel has created a rich, complex world that’s both beautiful and scary. Reading it, I found myself caught up in a lively and humorous community of artists, craftspeople, and dreamers-who are all too aware of the dangers that menace them from outside. I couldn’t put it down.”

– Alison Baker, winner of three O. Henry Awards and author of Loving Wanda Beaver

Hummel is pleased with the attention and hopes readers walk away from the book with a stronger resolve. “We have to go through the shadow of fear to learn what it has to teach us,” says Hummel, “and it has a lot to teach if we don’t run away.”

About the Author

Gretchen Hummel has an MFA degree in Creative Writing and an MS degree in Psychiatric Nursing earned from the University of Utah in SLC and the University of NC at Chapel Hill. Her publishing credits include short stories in The Potomac Review, Confrontation, and Shades. She lives in N.C. with her spouse and two furry, four-legged editorial assistants.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is back-story, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

This has been floating around Facebook and the web the last few weeks and I thought it worth posting here. Writing is hard work. Don't ever think otherwise.

I've heard so much about this book, I'm finally getting around to reading it.  The hype isn't without its due.  I wasn't sure I was going to like it reading the first, say, fifty pages.  But now, well, I can hardly put it down.  I'll write more after I've finished it.