How many licks SHOULD it take?
Jan. 17th, 2006 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaPerhaps the question is, rather, how many licks can *I* take.
Disturbing news about how long it "should" take one to publish comes from Diana Peterfreund's budding FAQ:
*sigh*
I'm not sure we're using the same definition of "average." Three years from first-ever finished novel to selling one? I think that is a very quick success, one to be much lauded.
I could be wrong. But who is telling you how long it took from first manuscript finished to sale, and are they counting the million pages that went into the trash before that? (grin) Couldn't some of them be fibbing a little? I mean, I suppose the "overnight success" story is sometimes a cover for the "worked at it ten years before I stumbled on something salable" story. Then again, J. K. Rowling said she had never tried to write a novel before HP, didn't she? I seem to remember that.
Seriously, though, is that an arithmetic mean (average = sum / number of items)? They must be averaging in those of us who have waited more than twenty years with the ones who have parents named Talese*. If that's the median (which is another kind of average--the number in the middle), I would be a little surprised, but even more depressed. What do they have that is magical?
[* That's a joke, son. Gay Talese is a Famous Writer and his wife is the one who plucked _A Million Little Pieces_ out of the slush pile. I'm insinuating that if they had a kiddo and he/she wrote a book, it would get published because "it's got a built-in readership," even if it stank.]
This quickness is a new development in the past few years, because I distinctly remember reading dozens of interviews in the 1970s and early 1980s that revealed most novelists had been at it for years before selling. So things have changed drastically to favor the just-started-at-this people, probably the younger set.
That's probably what's wrong with me. I write the way I learned to write when I started writing, back when the market may have been quite different. I started writing when I could first hold a crayon, but I mean *seriously*, which means about a year out of college. I tried to write a quest fantasy epic because that's what my fiance (soon to become the now-famous Hubby) and my friends read. That book had all my beginner's errors in it. (Among them were having every new character who popped onto the scene get a scene or two from his or her POV. I think this can become confusing for the reader, not to mention for the writer. And I didn't know how to do good transitions then. And so forth.) Then I started writing variations on the Southern gothic, about people I had known in childhood and using various anecdotes passed down in the family. When that didn't work, I decided I should do a category romance, because many of the published authors I knew on GEnie and CompuServe told me that's where they had done their apprenticeships. I wasn't any good at the category paradigm, but I did learn the stuff I needed to learn: how to make characters distinct, how to make their dialogue distinct so you knew who was speaking and everyone didn't sound the same, how to avoid doing Sgt. Exposition talking to Lt. Backstory, how to telescope time, how to do LOTS of different things that I consider the skills of the working writer. I developed my voice (very strong, probably more of a drawback than a bonus.) I figured out the kinds of books I wanted to write.
Over the years, though, I didn't just write-submit-write-submit. I had a regular job and had a life going on with responsibilities. I had a couple of serious illnesses during which I couldn't make progress except back up from the abyss into life (the gift of returning to life, progress for which I am still very thankful.) I sometimes allowed the job or the life to overwhelm the ambition to write. I'd go to a convention and get fired up by an agent conference or editor consultation, send stuff off to everyone I'd met, then wait. Often after a couple of disappointments or particularly rough rejections I'd be told by the family and friends that I would NOT submit for a while, because it was too rough on them when I cried and moped around the house for several days or flew into rages over a lost penny. It got so that my family HID the SASEs that would come back. I'd haunt the mailbox until I finally realized that it wasn't coming, and then write to the editor only to hear that I'd been rejected some time ago. This was finally cleared up when I explained to the family how ridiculous that made me look. But anyhow, there were long periods that went by without my submitting work, and also long periods between my actually picking up a serious project to work on again. So don't get the notion that I worked daily at this for twenty years without any progress, because that would be REALLY depressing.
Maybe if I had gone at it steadily when I first started, I'd have been on target. Could be that I still think the way that selling authors wrote BACK THEN, which is how my style developed? Hypothesis: People now read new fic, then start doing it themselves, so their styles are more like the stuff that sells. I am thus at a great disadvantage.
I don't think this is the case, because I can write in more than one style, but writers do have to keep reading new fiction just to see what they're buying and how styles change. If you don't believe that ways of doing a novel go in and out of style, go back and read some of the books written before realism and filmic sensibilities became popular. Changes have been going on forever and will keep happening. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Anyway, hearing that it only takes an average of three years from kit to ship is seriously daunting for those of us who have been at this quite a while longer. Perhaps, as I've said, I will not be able to write a book that appeals to the current generation, although the books get accolades for having good prose. To write a completely different kind of story would require living with that story for the entire time it takes to write the book, and even I can't change myself on the inside THAT much. I have to love the story I'm writing. It has to come out of an organic artistic process. I write the books that I would like to read. This may mean I won't ever sell. So it goes.
Let's try to analyze why people who never wrote anything before could learn everything you need to learn in order to sell in three years. Because I see that as a pretty good trick. Let's further assume that they were born with the spelling gene, have a natural way with a phrase, and loved the study of grammar and punctuation all through school. They've still got to learn how to create characters, make them three-dimensional, control the narrative, understand point of view, understand psychic distance, write believable dialogue, give each character a unique voice so that it is instantly recognizable who is speaking in the story, understand story structure . . . and a lot more. Well, maybe it came naturally out of their reading. Maybe they're just better people. It took me some time to gain command of each of these aspects of craft. In fact, until I read Dwight Swain and Jack Bickham (after winning contests at the Golden Triangle Writers' Conference and meeting several pros), I didn't really grasp scene and sequel. (That's how you keep thinkin' out of the middle of an action scene, for the most part.) I had a quantum leap forward after I dumped "said" for action tags. This all took time. And it took time for me to develop each new story idea out of the characters who came to me.
So how in the world do others do it this quickly? Are they that much better than "the rest of us" who have been at it longer (admittedly on and off)?
Perhaps it's not that so much as some other factor. (And here I begin the tongue-in-cheek guesses.) They haven't been at it this long, and they got lucky? They wrote using the most emotional events from their lives, and therefore the work had more power naturally than one that is fiction done from research? They went to more critique groups? They slept with editors? (Tell me which ones. I can dig it.) What?
Because it isn't a matter of writing well. My rejections out-and-out say that. (The variation in writing ability among popular authors becomes apparent if you actually read a lot of novels.) It isn't talent. *I* have talent. All right, you can argue all night about what talent is and what it means, if anything.
My friend Dennis has written several books that I believe are ready for prime time. A mutual acquaintance of ours, Rachel (nee Richard) Veraa, wrote a good book about his/her life that didn't sell during her lifetime. I'm sure you have a critique partner whose work is good, but hasn't yet sold. Part of this is about being lucky enough in the crapshoot to find the editor who hears your voice and likes your singing. Luck is a factor.
I know many people who are circulating manuscripts that seem to ME to be of more lasting merit than some of the books I pick up when we're browsing bookstores. This tells me that by my lights, it's very much a crapshoot. You write something and accidentally hit a burgeoning trend (probably without meaning to), and there's an open slot in a publisher's list created by someone's having not delivered a work on time, and your book appeals to Editor Emma when she picks it up because you don't have any of her betes noires in it and the character's name is the same as her high school boyfriend's. Offer ensues. Success!
But that seems to trivialize it. And that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm simply trying to get a handle on how long this "should" take, if there is any such measure to be made.
Perhaps I subconsciously want to be spectacularly unsuccessful. Well, it can't be that simple, but something's wrong here. I'm battling uphill against the odds again. (Why is that not a surprise?) There has to be some button I'm not pushing in readers. Or that I'm pushing by accident.
It could be that no one "gets it" about my brand names. It could be that they like more sex scenes than I have. Maybe they're politically correct and they don't like some of my characters' accents or dialects, although they're afraid to point this out. But it's probably the kinds of plots and the things that I choose to write about. That is going to be a tougher egg to crack--it's hard-boiled.
It's easier if you're committed to a genre that has certain expectations. If I could DO a category romance, I would. I just can't make the leads concentrate on nothing but the other person/the romance. It becomes a matter of two obsessives, and then it goes downhill from there. And you already know I can't do sex scenes. Mysteries are a challenge because you have to have a clever plot with a few twists, and it takes time to think those up. Fantasy is a market that is somewhat glutted now, I am told. You have to love the genre you write in, so if what you love to read isn't "in" right now, you're stuck.
I suppose there's no answer as to "how soon one SHOULD sell." Still, it's a bit daunting to see others leaping over the hurdles after only three years or so of practice, when you've been in training (and leaping hurdles that only you yourself may deem "good") for a lot longer than that.
I think my luck, like Daphne's, is shot as far as publishing goes. It's dead, but it just won't lie down. (That's a literary allusion--three points.)
# # #
Used while filling out a form:
Political Stance:
Everyone should stand on a politician at least once
Sexual Orientation:
Yes, I would like to sign up for Orientation 101!!
SLOGAN: That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable
Choose one logical fallacy to use in promoting your next venture:
Overgeneralization • Vague Definition • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc • False Analogy • Partial Selection of the Evidence • Groupthink • Begging the Question
They left out my favorite!
[EDIT: It wasn't so much a literary allusion, I guess, as a pop culture allusion. "He's Dead But He Won't Lie Down" is a song published on 12/20/1954 with Famous Music Corp., lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Hoagy Carmichael. The phrase is part of the common vernacular. Probably was out there before the song.]
Disturbing news about how long it "should" take one to publish comes from Diana Peterfreund's budding FAQ:
How long did you write before you sold?
I finished my first book for publication in the summer of 2002. I sold in April of 2005. I hear that's about average.
*sigh*
I'm not sure we're using the same definition of "average." Three years from first-ever finished novel to selling one? I think that is a very quick success, one to be much lauded.
I could be wrong. But who is telling you how long it took from first manuscript finished to sale, and are they counting the million pages that went into the trash before that? (grin) Couldn't some of them be fibbing a little? I mean, I suppose the "overnight success" story is sometimes a cover for the "worked at it ten years before I stumbled on something salable" story. Then again, J. K. Rowling said she had never tried to write a novel before HP, didn't she? I seem to remember that.
Seriously, though, is that an arithmetic mean (average = sum / number of items)? They must be averaging in those of us who have waited more than twenty years with the ones who have parents named Talese*. If that's the median (which is another kind of average--the number in the middle), I would be a little surprised, but even more depressed. What do they have that is magical?
[* That's a joke, son. Gay Talese is a Famous Writer and his wife is the one who plucked _A Million Little Pieces_ out of the slush pile. I'm insinuating that if they had a kiddo and he/she wrote a book, it would get published because "it's got a built-in readership," even if it stank.]
This quickness is a new development in the past few years, because I distinctly remember reading dozens of interviews in the 1970s and early 1980s that revealed most novelists had been at it for years before selling. So things have changed drastically to favor the just-started-at-this people, probably the younger set.
That's probably what's wrong with me. I write the way I learned to write when I started writing, back when the market may have been quite different. I started writing when I could first hold a crayon, but I mean *seriously*, which means about a year out of college. I tried to write a quest fantasy epic because that's what my fiance (soon to become the now-famous Hubby) and my friends read. That book had all my beginner's errors in it. (Among them were having every new character who popped onto the scene get a scene or two from his or her POV. I think this can become confusing for the reader, not to mention for the writer. And I didn't know how to do good transitions then. And so forth.) Then I started writing variations on the Southern gothic, about people I had known in childhood and using various anecdotes passed down in the family. When that didn't work, I decided I should do a category romance, because many of the published authors I knew on GEnie and CompuServe told me that's where they had done their apprenticeships. I wasn't any good at the category paradigm, but I did learn the stuff I needed to learn: how to make characters distinct, how to make their dialogue distinct so you knew who was speaking and everyone didn't sound the same, how to avoid doing Sgt. Exposition talking to Lt. Backstory, how to telescope time, how to do LOTS of different things that I consider the skills of the working writer. I developed my voice (very strong, probably more of a drawback than a bonus.) I figured out the kinds of books I wanted to write.
Over the years, though, I didn't just write-submit-write-submit. I had a regular job and had a life going on with responsibilities. I had a couple of serious illnesses during which I couldn't make progress except back up from the abyss into life (the gift of returning to life, progress for which I am still very thankful.) I sometimes allowed the job or the life to overwhelm the ambition to write. I'd go to a convention and get fired up by an agent conference or editor consultation, send stuff off to everyone I'd met, then wait. Often after a couple of disappointments or particularly rough rejections I'd be told by the family and friends that I would NOT submit for a while, because it was too rough on them when I cried and moped around the house for several days or flew into rages over a lost penny. It got so that my family HID the SASEs that would come back. I'd haunt the mailbox until I finally realized that it wasn't coming, and then write to the editor only to hear that I'd been rejected some time ago. This was finally cleared up when I explained to the family how ridiculous that made me look. But anyhow, there were long periods that went by without my submitting work, and also long periods between my actually picking up a serious project to work on again. So don't get the notion that I worked daily at this for twenty years without any progress, because that would be REALLY depressing.
Maybe if I had gone at it steadily when I first started, I'd have been on target. Could be that I still think the way that selling authors wrote BACK THEN, which is how my style developed? Hypothesis: People now read new fic, then start doing it themselves, so their styles are more like the stuff that sells. I am thus at a great disadvantage.
I don't think this is the case, because I can write in more than one style, but writers do have to keep reading new fiction just to see what they're buying and how styles change. If you don't believe that ways of doing a novel go in and out of style, go back and read some of the books written before realism and filmic sensibilities became popular. Changes have been going on forever and will keep happening. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Anyway, hearing that it only takes an average of three years from kit to ship is seriously daunting for those of us who have been at this quite a while longer. Perhaps, as I've said, I will not be able to write a book that appeals to the current generation, although the books get accolades for having good prose. To write a completely different kind of story would require living with that story for the entire time it takes to write the book, and even I can't change myself on the inside THAT much. I have to love the story I'm writing. It has to come out of an organic artistic process. I write the books that I would like to read. This may mean I won't ever sell. So it goes.
Let's try to analyze why people who never wrote anything before could learn everything you need to learn in order to sell in three years. Because I see that as a pretty good trick. Let's further assume that they were born with the spelling gene, have a natural way with a phrase, and loved the study of grammar and punctuation all through school. They've still got to learn how to create characters, make them three-dimensional, control the narrative, understand point of view, understand psychic distance, write believable dialogue, give each character a unique voice so that it is instantly recognizable who is speaking in the story, understand story structure . . . and a lot more. Well, maybe it came naturally out of their reading. Maybe they're just better people. It took me some time to gain command of each of these aspects of craft. In fact, until I read Dwight Swain and Jack Bickham (after winning contests at the Golden Triangle Writers' Conference and meeting several pros), I didn't really grasp scene and sequel. (That's how you keep thinkin' out of the middle of an action scene, for the most part.) I had a quantum leap forward after I dumped "said" for action tags. This all took time. And it took time for me to develop each new story idea out of the characters who came to me.
So how in the world do others do it this quickly? Are they that much better than "the rest of us" who have been at it longer (admittedly on and off)?
Perhaps it's not that so much as some other factor. (And here I begin the tongue-in-cheek guesses.) They haven't been at it this long, and they got lucky? They wrote using the most emotional events from their lives, and therefore the work had more power naturally than one that is fiction done from research? They went to more critique groups? They slept with editors? (Tell me which ones. I can dig it.) What?
Because it isn't a matter of writing well. My rejections out-and-out say that. (The variation in writing ability among popular authors becomes apparent if you actually read a lot of novels.) It isn't talent. *I* have talent. All right, you can argue all night about what talent is and what it means, if anything.
My friend Dennis has written several books that I believe are ready for prime time. A mutual acquaintance of ours, Rachel (nee Richard) Veraa, wrote a good book about his/her life that didn't sell during her lifetime. I'm sure you have a critique partner whose work is good, but hasn't yet sold. Part of this is about being lucky enough in the crapshoot to find the editor who hears your voice and likes your singing. Luck is a factor.
I know many people who are circulating manuscripts that seem to ME to be of more lasting merit than some of the books I pick up when we're browsing bookstores. This tells me that by my lights, it's very much a crapshoot. You write something and accidentally hit a burgeoning trend (probably without meaning to), and there's an open slot in a publisher's list created by someone's having not delivered a work on time, and your book appeals to Editor Emma when she picks it up because you don't have any of her betes noires in it and the character's name is the same as her high school boyfriend's. Offer ensues. Success!
But that seems to trivialize it. And that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm simply trying to get a handle on how long this "should" take, if there is any such measure to be made.
Perhaps I subconsciously want to be spectacularly unsuccessful. Well, it can't be that simple, but something's wrong here. I'm battling uphill against the odds again. (Why is that not a surprise?) There has to be some button I'm not pushing in readers. Or that I'm pushing by accident.
It could be that no one "gets it" about my brand names. It could be that they like more sex scenes than I have. Maybe they're politically correct and they don't like some of my characters' accents or dialects, although they're afraid to point this out. But it's probably the kinds of plots and the things that I choose to write about. That is going to be a tougher egg to crack--it's hard-boiled.
It's easier if you're committed to a genre that has certain expectations. If I could DO a category romance, I would. I just can't make the leads concentrate on nothing but the other person/the romance. It becomes a matter of two obsessives, and then it goes downhill from there. And you already know I can't do sex scenes. Mysteries are a challenge because you have to have a clever plot with a few twists, and it takes time to think those up. Fantasy is a market that is somewhat glutted now, I am told. You have to love the genre you write in, so if what you love to read isn't "in" right now, you're stuck.
I suppose there's no answer as to "how soon one SHOULD sell." Still, it's a bit daunting to see others leaping over the hurdles after only three years or so of practice, when you've been in training (and leaping hurdles that only you yourself may deem "good") for a lot longer than that.
I think my luck, like Daphne's, is shot as far as publishing goes. It's dead, but it just won't lie down. (That's a literary allusion--three points.)
Used while filling out a form:
Political Stance:
Everyone should stand on a politician at least once
Sexual Orientation:
Yes, I would like to sign up for Orientation 101!!
SLOGAN: That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable
Choose one logical fallacy to use in promoting your next venture:
Overgeneralization • Vague Definition • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc • False Analogy • Partial Selection of the Evidence • Groupthink • Begging the Question
They left out my favorite!
[EDIT: It wasn't so much a literary allusion, I guess, as a pop culture allusion. "He's Dead But He Won't Lie Down" is a song published on 12/20/1954 with Famous Music Corp., lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Hoagy Carmichael. The phrase is part of the common vernacular. Probably was out there before the song.]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-17 01:35 pm (UTC)I mean, it still seems like fast work and good on her. But I don't think we can assume by that that she woke up on New Year's Day 2002 and decided to try her hand at writing for the very first time. I*n fact, there's this question/answer in the same spot:
Q: Is Society your first book, or do you have unpublished manuscripts.
A: I have four unpublished manuscripts. Two are category romance, one is an action adventure, and one is a single title, kinda paranormal romance. Only one is definitely unpublishable, but that does not mean I'm seeking publication for the others at this time.
Sounds like she's got her practice manuscripts as well. I wouldn't agonize over this--although the "how we got started" stuff is always interesting to write about.
And yeah, I know who Gay Talese is (although I'd never heard of his wife--or that book she picked up on, at least not before this week.) I got your insinuation just fine.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-17 03:31 pm (UTC)I just felt terribly intimidated by the idea that those who are going to get published will do it within the first three to five years. I had heard that someplace, and then I read it in Diana's FAQ, and I thought, hey, maybe there's something to that. Where are their million words of junk that everybody's supposed to have, though? Maybe they're just not mentioning that part.
*Surely* they're just not mentioning that part.
About Age
Date: 2006-01-19 09:47 am (UTC)I would ask, about that girl with the 2002-2005 publication span, "how old is she?" If she's in her twenties, it makes perfect sense. Her publisher can count on a few more books before she gets past thirty and her work becomes passé through being dated and not in touch the way she once was. Can you at XX, or I at 67, be any less vulnerable to ageism than everybody else?
Think about some of the old Fido WRITING regulars who made it to print. Have you seen anything new from Billie Sue Mosiman or Karen What's-Her-Name (she did a "Hawaii Five-Oh" book and was an impeccable stylist, as I recall)?
The really sad thing about ageism is that you don't have to tell anyone your age to be a victim. Publishers want YOUNG, and if your points of reference to Sixties rock bands or other ephemera of the past is in your work, they'll be able to pin you down to a 5-year age group. As the parent of two girls (women -- just gave myself away yet again!) born respectively in 1961 and 1966, I'm perhaps more comfortable discussing a time period up to the late Seventies, early Eighties than someone lacking that background. But as to identifying a band that existed between 1984 and the present -- not to mention what hits, if any, they had -- well, I'd be dead in the water. All that's left for me as a writer is nostalgia (and even that isn't as good as it used to be).
It was that way in the music business, I can assure you. It is no mystery to me that my years of earning good money coincided with the years between 25 and 38. In Las Vegas there are entertainment directors who would LOVe to hire swing/jazz/nostalgia big bands, but they'll only do it if they see a stage full of young men with full heads of hair. And, sadly, those fellows tend to be the least likely to be able to play that kind of music in an authentic, believable manner. To this day, in L.A. and New York as well as Las Vegas, you could easily assemble a big band that could put everyone away with their artistry and verve. Problem is, the average age would be 70. And two rules the people who buy band live by are, "no gray hair" and "no bald heads." I'm sure "no fat guts" is another factor. But that isn't as important as the others. Way back in the 1940s, when some incredible jazz bands hit it big, there were 300-pound trumpet players who worked all the time. But they were YOUNG. They had all their hair. It was its original color.
I really think the same thing is happening to writers. Thomas Gifford's words still resonate: "If Noel Coward were alive today, he couldn't get published." Well, Gifford was old, fat AND bald by then, and he couldn't get published either, at the end.
Alas, I have no comforting words about this problem. I think it's very real, and as I said, I'll fight it by writing nostalgia. COLOR RADIO might stand a chance of me finishing it, after all.
You need a hug, so accept a virtual one for now. Be smart and you will prevail. Fool those born-in-1982 editors with something set in the past but relevant to today. But keep writing. It's your mission.
Dennis
Re: About Age
Date: 2006-01-19 01:53 pm (UTC)I love COLOR RADIO. And it's a mainstream novel. It's aimed at the Greatest Generation of readers and makes no excuses; they're still a large segment of the reading public (even if they go to libraries and lending carts in nursing homes to get books, rather than ordering them for cash!) You'll have readers who want to learn about those days, as well. Your book will be SET in the past. Finish it, because I want to read past that last scene I read some years ago.
I do think, though, that we can at any age write a novel with wide appeal. We could write a historical (or something set in the past that isn't quite antique, such as during the Vietnam war or WWII, although I am told those time periods can limit a book's appeal). We could write mysteries from the POV of a person aged fortysomething or sixtysomething. These might be a little harder to sell, but I see them on the shelves, so it should be possible.
*My* trouble with LR is that much of its appeal/substance is that it's in the ChickLit voice, which implies (I think) that it's by and for the younger crew. It has to conform to the chick lit marketplace's expectations. That's what we're kind of feeling out when we talk about it, in addition to other structural concerns. That's where the age deal may come into play. I don't think like GenX or GenY or whatever. I'm a late Boomer, and I think like someone even older (I believe.) Crossed with a hippie. Peace, baby.
But my other books should suffer less from that problem, if it even exists.
I have always *thought* that being a writer is my mission in life. Or, if not, it's part of my purpose that will help accomplish whatever mission I'm on. My mission may be to help convince Person X out there that love is worth waiting for, or that crime doesn't pay, or that you make your own luck. (Insert cliche of your preference.) That mission may be accomplished in person or through a distance method, such as writing a book that makes Person X think and begin to research something. It may sound outlandish, but there are many people who started investigating a concept, a career, or even a religion after reading novels. (Ayn Rand's readers went loco--some of them, anyway--over her libertarian thoughts, while C. S. Lewis's readers sometimes decide to investigate Christianity. People who read detective novels might decide sleuthing is fun, or might learn enough about the B&B business to look into it for themselves after reading some B&B-set mysteries. That's what I am talking about. And I give this example not for you, Dennis, or to "overexplain" for people who "get it," but because so MANY people will try to misread me and claim that I said I was going to start a religion with one of my novels. I kid you not, someone clueless might twist what I just typed into that claim and start posting it around.)
Daphne's mission may or may not ever be accomplished. I was just musing about the shock I felt when I read that FAQ and realized that someone I admire and whose advice I listen to (and she's 27, to answer your question) could say that three years is "about average." That's what threw me. You understood that. *yay*
Give yourself a pat on the back. But don't strain a muscle! (GRIN)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-18 03:41 am (UTC)And of course Diana was just not mentioning the millions of words she's written in notebooks and hidden in her sock drawer.
And even if she hasn't--hey, we all have our own paths. Diana's has nothing at all to do with whether you and I get published someday. Why beat yourself up about it?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-18 06:29 pm (UTC)You are one Smart Cat. :-)
my ears are burning
Date: 2006-01-22 09:22 pm (UTC)When people come into the professional writing field, they aren't always starting from zero. And publishing a book isn't a steady finishing line either. You make up your own course.
Re: my ears are burning
Date: 2006-01-25 12:13 pm (UTC)I wrote the novel that took events out of my own life years ago, for my professors at SMU, and they said it was a typical angst coming-of-age thing that no one would be interested in publishing. My mother also said that if I ever published that, the family would ostracize me because it was so full of what they didn't want known. I trunked that one. Maybe someday that one can come out of the trunk and be re-worked, because it could be powerful, though depressing. (grin) I think that many young chick lit writers access their own lives easily for the genre, and that makes their work appeal to the editors. I want a do-over (starting from childhood, I mean)! *grin*
I'm glad we opened the dialogue, although I'm sure the final consensus will be "it takes you as long as it takes you."
it's not just the time...
Date: 2006-01-24 06:27 am (UTC)I think a lot of it is in the concept. You can hear many stories of people who wrote several books and sold the sixth or so, and then some of them manage to sell the older ones, too. Because, more often than not, you need a great concept to break in.
Adding to the average. I've been writing, on and off, for ten years. I have short stories in the mags, some of them award-winning and two novellas epublished, but I don't have any kind of NY-based career yet. And none of my writing credits are helping that a single bit, by the way :)
I could have been seriously published a lot sooner if I:
1) focused on genre novels, and not the semi-genre, semi-literary, zero-marketable experiments
2) wrote fewer short stories and more novels
3) bothered to study the market in my early years
4) had useful connections among crit partners or friends (the kind that will pitch your books to their own editors and agents, or the kind that have said agents and editors as friends, themselves having little to do with the industry)
5) didn't have a bad habit of dumping half-done projects for the sake of new excitements
6) was a faster and more disciplined writer in general
7) focused on one, two, or three genres instead of forays into anything and everything save for inspirational romance
8) wasn't doing screenwriting on the side (not going to give that up, though)
So, it's not the age (although I must admit I'm also in my twenties), and not the time one has spent writing. It might be also the precise, steady, streamlined, and business-minded approach some writers take.
Re: it's not just the time...
Date: 2006-01-24 08:01 am (UTC)For every author who didn't focus on one genre and didn't sell, there's someone who did.
For every author who bothered to study the market and sold, there's one who didn't and sold.
And so on.
Also, age doesn't matter a bit, either. Jenny Crusie writes chick-lit style fiction (and blogs :) and she's...older than 30. I guess I'd say it's more living in the present (assuming you're writing comtemporary fiction) that matters.
Also, circumstances matter a lot. Diana had a day job and a social life and started writing fiction in her early 20s. I started writing fiction in my early 20s (I was 22, I think) but before I finished what I consider my "internship" and first book, I added children to my full-time day job. I think that makes a BIG difference in focus, which contributes to time.