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How to Become a Published Author in Just 5 Easy Decades (Part 3: The Third Decade)

2/19/2015

You're Never Too Old (Or Too Young) to Be a Writer. Lessons Learned During 49 Years of "Honing My Craft"

Once I moved out on my own and had to start supporting myself, managing my life became an important priority. Making sure I had I job I could stand, enough money for rent and groceries, and a car that (more-or-less) functioned had to take precedence over writing, at least for a while.

But I still couldn't let go of the dream. As if trying to force creativity through my pores by osmosis, I dated a published author, a professional storyteller, a photographer, a musician. I surrounded myself with creative people as much as I could.

In between jobs, friends, and travel, I still wrote, and I tried to follow the suggestions I read so avidly in Writer’s Digest. I wrote poetry and short stories. I entered them in contests and submitted them to small literary magazines. I had a modest amount of success with my poetry, including some first place wins in contests (even one that paid me a whopping $100 which for an 84-word poem seemed like a great deal of money at the time).

I wasn’t anywhere near my dream of being a full time writer, but I was still working at it. I was living, working, exploring, traveling. I fell in love so enormously and got my heart shattered so badly that it inspired the initial idea for my first novel, The Seventh Magpie (although I wouldn’t have the emotional or literary maturity to actually finish this book until this year).

I read books and magazines about writing. I joined an excellent local writer’s group where we read and critiqued each other’s work every week. I kept writing, and I started getting used to that horribly uncomfortable feeling of sharing my work with other people on a regular basis: asking for, receiving, and giving constructive criticism.

Unexpectedly, I found that my lifelong habit of voracious reading had given me a skill I didn’t know I had. I was unusually good at critiquing other writers’ works and giving them helpful suggestions. Even though I felt as if I didn’t have any real qualifications, my writer friends encouraged me to start offering critiques professionally. I did a few freebies to get some testimonials, and then started freelancing for money. It still wasn’t enough to really support myself full time, but it was a way to at least make some money in the publishing field.

But one’s twenties are an unsettled time. Between changing jobs, changing cities, changing relationships, life was a constant deluge of new experiences. I wrote more poetry, I started a few different books, but my progress toward actually submitting my work dwindled to nothing. I knew that none of the stuff I was writing was finished enough to meet my own standards. I simply wasn’t mature enough yet mentally, emotionally, or in my literary skills to perfect my work, so I refrained from trying to publish. If it had been the age of easy electronic self-publishing, as it is now, I might have succumbed to the temptation to put my work out there anyway, but the reality of it is (as with many self-publishers nowadays), my work simply wasn’t good enough to go public yet. So, thanks to being born a long time before the age of Createspace and KDP, I managed to keep slowly experimenting and honing my skills while also avoiding publishing any majorly embarrassing works.

I dabbled in learning commercial copywriting for a while. I lived with a professional storyteller and frequently helped him develop his stories. We collaborated on a story that he performed on the local radio one Christmas. Collaborating was interesting and our particular efforts went relatively well, but over all I decided that it was more satisfying to write solo.

In my late twenties I moved to a new city, joined a new writers’ group based on the free-writing exercises in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. My poetry took on a much less constructed, metaphorical, and lyrical tone, and were more personal and conversational. Although I occasionally tried to get some of the poems published--and occasionally succeeded--I made little progress toward completing any of my novels. However, the free-writing techniques I learned were tremendously valuable tools that had a lasting impact on my productivity and creativity.

I fell in love, got married, and moved to yet another city, this one far from anyone I knew except for my husband. The job market was favorable at that time, and before long I found myself with an actual job as a low-level writer/editor on a real live magazine. Yes, it was an industrial trade magazine whose subject matter held no personal interest to me at all, but for the first time I was fully supporting myself by my writing and editing skills.

Lessons Learned from Decade 3:

Sometimes life takes over. That's okay. You're gathering material for later writing projects.
Even if your writing can't be top priority right now, you can still make it a priority.
Feed your creativity by interacting with other writers.
If your work isn't ready to publish, don't publish it.
Keep writing, even when you don't see progress.
Try new fields, new formats, new methods. You never know when you might find one you love. Or one that will pay the bills!

Stay tuned for Part 4!

Image credit: By 관인생략 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Lost Composure

2/17/2015

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As most of you already know, my first novel--a dark, illustrated fairytale entitled The Seventh Magpie-- was just published this week.

Only, as my sister Donna has just reminded me, it wasn't my first illustrated fairytale book at all. It wasn't even my first illustrated fairytale book featuring troublesome, trickster birds. The other fairytale in question had a very limited print run of one, and was a birthday present to Donna, somewhere around twenty years ago.

Now Donna has kindly scanned her personal copy and sent it to me so I can share it here. So, without further ado, I present to you, The Lost Composure, written and illustrated by Nancy Chase. (You'll quickly understand why I hired the talented Katrina Sesum to illustrate The Seventh Magpie, rather than doing it myself!)

And in case you're wondering, yes, the heroine of the story really does live on a little farm with ponies, cats, and chickens, in a place called Siberia, Maine. This is what it really looks like.

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How to Become a Published Author in Just 5 Easy Decades (Part 2: The Second Decade)

2/17/2015

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You're Never Too Old (Or Too Young) to Be a Writer. A Tongue-In-Cheek Look at the Lessons I've Learned During 49 Years of "Honing My Craft"

Continued from Part 1

By fifth grade, I was on a roll. I alarmed my Gifted and Talented Program teacher by writing a short story about a man and his German Shepherd who are the only survivors of a small plane that crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. After days of struggling across the tundra without any supplies, trying to reach civilization, the dog finally attacks and eats the man, then sets off to find the nearby village alone.

My teacher liked the story, but seemed a little concerned that I might be some kind of young sociopath. She was relieved when I explained airily, "Oh, I read a lot of Jack London."

Around that time, inspired in part by my grandmother, Otta Louise Chase, who was an award-winning poet, I started writing poetry. In sixth grade, I wrote, directed, and starred in my one-and-only venture into playwriting: a dark tale of two girls spending Halloween night in a cemetery, who are confronted by Hades and Persephone, god and goddess of the Underworld. I still remember staying after school to paint cardboard gravestones for our set.

The writing kept pouring out, but in seventh grade the quality took a dip. I had reached that painful stage where, for the first time, you're aware that you're writing crap, even as you're writing it. I remember my teacher loved one story I wrote about a Native American teenager who is ostracized because he is "different" and won't do stupid things like drink and drive with the other boys. Even at age 13, I recognized my plot for heavy-handed preachy drivel, but kept my mouth shut because that drivel got me an A grade.

Another story I wrote at the time featured a rich teenage girl whose attempted kidnapping is thwarted by her loyal horse and dog. It was obvious wish-fulfillment fantasy, and I had the good sense not to show it to anybody. Even so, I was not (very) embarrassed to have written it. I just acknowledged its flaws and moved on.

All this writing was fueled by constant, voracious reading. My seventh grade English teacher, astonished to see that I had done my book report on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, asked me why I had chosen that book. Embarrassed, I admitted that I had done it out of laziness, because it was a book I'd already read once before.

In eighth grade English, we learned to diagram sentences and write five-paragraph essays. I liked the logic of sentence diagrams, but resented the tedium of the essays ("Every paragraph must have one topic sentence and three example sentences."). When I was later a finalist in the Voice of Democracy "Youth: America's Strength" essay contest, I knew my essay was plodding, dutifully patriotic pap. I was actually pleased when I lost to an essay that was actually good, and didn't mindlessly follow the rigid structure I'd been taught.

Also in eighth grade, my Reading teacher gave us the best assignment ever: We were to write a story, make a cover, and present it to her as if it were a real book. Finally, someone was asking me to do what I'd been trying to do since I was four years old!

I wrote a science fiction story entitled, "Exiled to Earth," about a scientist in a utopian world who gets sick from handling a contraband cat, and ends up exiled to earth, which is now uninhabited by humans and has reverted entirely back to nature. He learns primitive survival skills and adapts to his environment so well that when later human explorers arrive, he doesn't go to them and ask for rescue, but slips silently back into the forest to continue his solitary life.

My book had an elaborate cover of blue construction paper with illustrations of the iridescent glass domes the utopian people lived in, a rocket shooting across the sky, and lots of little silver dots of glitter for stars. My teacher gave me an A++ and took me aside to ask me a question that blew my mind: "Do you want to be a writer when you grow up?"

Everything stood still. I could not believe that for all the thousands of books I'd read and all the dozens of stories I'd written, it had never once occurred to me that writing was something you could do for a living. It was like being informed that you could get a job breathing or eating. All my other potential dream jobs (jockey, veterinarian, ballerina) dissolved into dust in the face of this wondrous revelation. "Yes. Yes, I think I do."

In high school, the momentum continued. As a freshman, I was invited to audit the senior creative writing class with the wonderful Myra McLarey, who was the first teacher to actually show me ways to improve my writing. I was editor (and chief contributor) to the school literary magazine Halcyon for all four years of high school. I hounded my friends to contribute, I submitted my own stuff, I got swoony feelings for the boys who submitted good poems and stories, and secretly looked down on those who submitted drivel. I even turned in my best friend for plagarism when her English teacher gave me a poem she had turned in for his class which I recognized as actually being the lyrics to a John Denver song. I was thrilled to be chosen for the region's Gifted and Talented Young Writer's Program, where we traveled to different places around the state and got to meet and have workshops with real famous authors and poets. The one I remember best is Morgan Llywelyn, who gave me good advice on writing a supernatural goddess character I was working on (to avoid making her seem unread, give her vulnerabilities or little human habits like nail-biting). Morgan also generously corresponded with me for a while after that, giving me encouragement and advice. I started writing a sword and sorcery novel, The War of the Wizards, and even was interviewed by the local paper about it. I never finished it, but although I now recognize the plot was full of clichés, I do still like the three main characters, so who knows, maybe I'll go back and rework it someday.

At age 18 I got my first paid publication--$5 for some poems and a story, "The Fool" about a court jester who overthrows his king--published in a local magazine, Bittersweet. I asked for a fancy typewriter for my graduation present, and started feeling my way in the big world of real-life publishing, writing stories and poems, and figuring out where to send them out, not even minding the rejection slips that came back.

Lessons Learned from Decade 2

Experiment with different genres and styles to find the ones you like best.
Read. Read everything.
Learn the rules of grammar and structure. You need to know them, even if you later decide to challenge them.
It's okay to write stuff that isn't that good. It's inevitable. Don't make a big deal about it, just let it go and move on. Don't be surprised when some people like it anyway. This is the Universe's way of trying to make up for the fact that later, when you write something brilliant, some people will still hate it. Nice try, Universe!
Keep writing. Write all the time.
Learn from experts whose work you admire--and from those whose work you hate. Just learn!
Don't be afraid to submit your work for publication. Even if you are afraid, submit it anyway. The thrill of one paid acceptance is worth the disappointment of a hundred rejection slips.

Stay tuned for Part 3!

Image credit: By 관인생략 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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How to Become a Published Author in Just 5 Easy Decades (Part 1: The First Decade)

2/16/2015

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You're Never Too Old (Or Too Young) to Be a Writer. Lessons Learned During 49 Years of "Honing My Craft"

I wrote my first book before I could, well, write. It's true. Back in my toddler days, when I was still trying to master that pesky task of combining bits of the alphabet together to form words, I'd already deduced that books were the Best Thing Ever, and the world should have more of them.

Confident that I was the girl for the job, I immediately formed my own publishing company. I folded and cut a stack of drawing paper into pages and stapled them together to form a book. Undeterred by the fact that I was still illiterate, I scribbled line after line of gibberish across all the pages and declared myself done (a process I would replicate several times in later decades while participating in NaNoWriMo).

Eager for my first 5-star review, I presented this charming first edition to my father. "Daddy, I wrote a book!" Unfortunately, my father is not a man of refined literary sensibilities. After a bemused glance at the scribble-covered pages, he not only declined my proposal that he fund a series of sequels by giving me more drawing paper, he also neglected to even finish "reading" all the pages.

Once I recovered from the shock of having my masterpiece panned by my own father, I intuited that perhaps for less avid book-lovers than myself it was important for books to contain actual words. So I set about learning some words and soon returned to my publishing ventures. To supplement my limited vocabulary, I also provided crude pencil drawings depicting the subject matter, which ranged from reporting current events (my sister got bitten by her horse, which made her late for school) to more encyclopedic works illustrating all the different kinds of animals at a zoo or circus (despite the fact that I'd never been to a zoo or circus).

Buoyed by the positive reviews these picture books generated among my family members (except the sister who got bitten by the horse), I eventually turned to writing fiction. My love for speculative fiction emerged immediately. In second grade, I wrote a series of illustrated ghost stories. Soon afterwards, I began the multi-part saga of an orphaned horse named Safari who lived in the jungle and battled tigers and elephants. Realism took a back seat to adventure, but I didn't care as long as the stories were exciting.

Lessons Learned from Decade 1

Raw enthusiasm is not enough. Content matters, so hone your skills.
Don't let bad reviews get you down. Learn from your failures and do better next time.
Write the kinds of stories you love to read.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2!

Image credit: By 관인생략 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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This Is How My Heart Was Broken: The Real-Life Fairytale Behind The Seventh Magpie

2/14/2015

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Once upon a time, more than thirty years ago, there was a fifteen-year-old girl who was very shy. She read a lot of books, walked alone in the woods a lot, and spent most of her time in the world of her imagination.

Like most girls that age, she felt lonely and misunderstood. She had already developed a passion for writing. So, that summer, to fill her loneliness, she decided to use her writing skills to make up the perfect man, the one who would be her happily ever after.

She considered herself a sensible person, so she approached it logically. What did she like? What attracted her? Straight off, she knew: She had a special weakness for English accents, so her dream man would have to be English.

But she didn’t like cold weather, so he’d be from the southernmost part of England. She got out her family’s big red atlas of the world and looked at a map. The southernmost part of England was Cornwall. The only Cornish town of significance shown on this particular map was Bodmin. Fine. He’d be from Bodmin, Cornwall, England. What else? She started making a list. Hair, eyes, interests, personality, she chose them all.

Well, now that she had created the perfect man, he needed a name, right? J---- sprang to mind instantly as a strong but simple English-sounding last name. But what was his first name? C----? No, P-----. That was it. P----- J----. Her perfect man.

In time, summer ended, and the girl started her sophomore year in high school. Caught up in her studies, she mostly stopped daydreaming about her perfect man. But one day in Spanish class, the teacher told the students about an international pen pal organization, where they could pay a dollar and be matched up with a student in another country.

The girl didn’t allow herself to think too much about it as she filled out the form to indicate her own interests and personality and to choose the attributes of her future pen pal. But still, before she paid her dollar and handed in the form, she did check “England” and “Male.”

Several weeks later, the pen pal company sent each student back the name and address of the person they had been matched with. The girl opened hers, curious, but not expecting too much. Yes, it was a boy her own age, from England. Cornwall, in fact. Bodmin!

His chart of interests matched exactly the boxes the girl had checked. She raised her eyes to the top of the page to see his name. Her heart stopped. His last name was J----, the name she had picked for her perfect man! The first name was different, though: R----.

She wrote to R---. He wrote back. She wrote again. He sent cartoons, picture postcards, flirtations. It wasn’t hard to get to know each other. They wrote to each other for three years. It got so she could feel it when his letters were waiting for her in the mailbox, before she even got home from school.

It was inevitable. When she graduated from high school, she wanted to go see him. She had vacation time from her job that January. She bought her tickets. New Year’s eve would be her first night in London. R---- promised to meet her at the airport.

She thought she would recognize him right away, but it took her a moment. He was taller than she’d realized, pale and dark-haired. And he was waiting there for her. After a few awkward moments, they got on the train to take them into London. Before long, they were side-by-side, leaning forward, talking intently. Across the aisle, a total stranger looked at them and asked, out of the blue, “Are you two brother and sister?”

“No,” they laughed. “We just met.” But secretly, the girl was thinking: Kismet. Even strangers on a train could see the connection between them.

That night they roamed the streets of London, while around them, the whole city celebrated New Year’s Eve. In a foreign country, amidst thousands of total strangers, the girl felt at home at last. Later, the boy dropped her off at her B&B and left to return to where he and his roommate were planning to sleep in the car that they had driven there from Cornwall.

But after a little while, she heard him calling outside her window. He’d missed the last train. He couldn’t get back to his car, so he had nowhere to stay. She ran down to let him in. It all felt like a movie. She gave him a pillow and a blanket. He stretched out on the floor next to the radiator. She curled up on the bed.

The plan was for her to accompany the boy and his roommate back to Cornwall, where after a week, they would have to go back to school, and the girl would continue on her month-long tour of the country. But on the way, they stopped in Bristol, where the boy and girl took a starlit walk up to the top of a bluff to view the lights on the Bristol suspension bridge. Standing there beside him in the cold night air, looking down on the lights, for the first time in her life she felt a moment of absolute, pure, perfect happiness.

“I love you.” Which of them said it first? It didn’t matter. In that moment of perfect happiness, they kissed for the first time.

Upon arriving in Cornwall, the girl learned the proper way to make tea. She ate things she’d never heard of before: Eccles cakes, saffron buns, marmite soldiers, Cornish pasties. And, within a few days, she and the boy made love.

The week was too short. She didn’t want to leave him to finish her trip. She was torn. Then he decided to ditch school and come with her. It would be tricky, traveling for two on her budget for one, but she didn’t care. Anything to have more time with him.

They were lying in bed one morning, when she finally mustered the courage to tell him the story of her perfect man. By the time she reached the end, when she told about picking the names, the boy was looking at her very strangely. “What?” she asked him nervously.

“R---- is my middle name,” he said slowly. “My real name is P-----. C---- is my father’s name.”

The girl felt like the breath had been knocked out of her. Three years of writing to each other, and she had never known that. This was really, truly it. Fate was hitting her over the head with signs and portents. She had found her perfect man. But they were only nineteen. The weight of it all was both dizzying and terrifying.

They traveled together for the whole month. They saw Stonehenge and Cardiff Castle, Buckingham Palace, and York Minster. They fed swans in the park, browsed in used bookstores, and made a pilgrimage to the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. When the time approached for the girl to return home, they talked about what they would do next.

The boy wanted to come to the U.S., and for him to get a green card, they would have to get married. But he’d just witnessed his parents going through a messy divorce, and he was terrified of marriage. The girl didn’t care about the marriage issue one way or the other, because she knew that we were destined to be together, regardless of what it said on a piece of paper. They could get married for green card purposes only, and see where the relationship grew from there. She had no doubts that everything would work out. Together, they visited the embassy and learned about the paperwork they’d need to process.

All too soon, the time came for the girl to go home and leave her love behind. He’d follow in a few months, after they got everything arranged. That last morning, he brought her a single red rose, and, sobbing, she carried it onto the plane. She had exactly one coin left in her pocket: a single British pound.

Back home, time passed. The girl went back to work. The boy went back to school. The girl filed the paperwork to get him into the country. It got lost in the mail. The boy’s letters got further and further between.

And then one day she just knew. The same way that she used to know when his letters would be waiting in her mailbox, she knew that he had decided not to come.

Blindly trying to wrench herself back from the abyss where she teetered, she allowed an old friend of hers to come over to visit. She allowed him to make love to her. She felt sick inside, but somehow it seemed like a way to seize control of the situation before she fell apart altogether. She had done it, not the boy. She had broken the magic spell that brought them together as soul-mates, not him. She, of her own volition. But it wasn’t true. His letter breaking up with her was already in the mail.

It was worse than she could imagine. She could understand him being afraid of marriage, of emigrating to a new country sight unseen, of making a commitment to a girl he’d only known in person for a month. But this was worse. It would be “too hard,” he claimed, for them to remain friends. After three and a half years, and one magical month, he never wanted to talk to her again.

She became a whirlwind of despair. She dated a lot of men, slept with most of them, liked them all, but loved not a single one of them until seven years later. She thought the timing was interesting. Seven years, she had read, is the time it takes for all the cells in your body to die and be replaced with new ones. She could not love again while there was a single cell in her body that still remembered R----.

.............................................................................................................................................................................

Yes, the above is a true story. Yes, it happened to me. And yes, it was during the resulting tempest of emotions that I began writing the first draft of The Seventh Magpie.

Now, when I look back on that time, the memory of my own image is blurry with the emotional tumult surrounding me, and R----’s has faded away to a few indelible impressions. Mostly I feel bad for putting him into such a situation. He was only nineteen years old at the time, OF COURSE he made the right decision not to uproot his entire life. I don’t even know if we’d still have anything in common today. I know that my life would have been narrower, and I would not have learned as many of wisdom’s lessons, nor met as many beloved people if I had been allowed to wrap my life around his until the end of our days. I’m sure I would have strangled him with the force of my expectations. He was the Perfect Man, after all. How could he ever have been just a person to me?

In the years since, I’ve had a very satisfying life, and I've learned to appreciate the benefits of Free Will instead of fickle Fate. I have a very happy, 19-years-and-counting marriage with my wonderful husband Ken. I wouldn’t change a thing. All the same, it was the friendship abandoned that I mourned the longest, the fact that R---- and I would never be able to look back together on our young foolish passions and laugh fondly, while sharing a good cup of properly made English tea. In memory of that long mourning, even after all these years, I still keep a few remembrances: All the letters he ever wrote me. A single British pound coin. And the dried petals of one red rose.