Have you ever been seized with a plot idea? Jotted down a few scenes? Chapters? Actually finished the book? If not, have you ever thought about what it would be like to try? Two of us on the TN team have been crazy enough to finish a book, and we got talking about it.
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Lorena Gay (more affectionately know as Team Seth around here) and I (formerly The Plane Friend on LTT, but I go by my real name [Carrie Jo] here on TN), are both writers.
Lorena published her first book, On the Cusp of the Earth, through the independent company Eat Your Serial (isn’t that an awesome name?). Her book, about a Bipolar engineer who develops a new weapon of mass destruction and teams up with a hot co-worker as they travel through Russia, is available now.
I (Carrie Jo) have been writing a YA novel about a girl whose older sister disappears without a trace on her wedding day, and has to fall in love herself before she discovers what went wrong in her sister’s relationship. I’ve recently signed with a literary agent, and am hoping to be published via the traditional route.
We had a lovely email chat/interview, and thought we would fill you in on a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes for a writer:
Q: When did you start writing?
Lorena: I started writing a chapter book at age 8. It was about a boy on a little league baseball team. The book is now in my storage closet in a box. The writing isn’t very good, but the title was! I called it Baseballs Don’t Bounce.
Carrie Jo: Lucky 8-year-old you with a non-embarrassing book title! My first book was titled The Cry of a Heart (gag!). I started writing it in middle school, and I’d pass the book around to my friends at lunch time. It’s now gathering dust in a filing cabinet in my parents’ attic.
Q: Is your book (for Lorena)/current manuscript (for Carrie Jo) the first completed book with real potential? Or do you have others languishing in a virtual drawer, waiting for you to edit them?
Lorena: Yes. I actually started it in 2008 and chose to publish it as a serial to force myself to finish it. I’d been tinkering with some chapters in writing groups for years and I saw this as an opportunity to carry out the story. I can’t not make good on a commitment; it’s against my DNA, I think.
Carrie Jo: That sounds like a great motivator to finish–having a due date for your next chapter. I’ve had to be entirely self-motivated. The manuscript that landed me my agent was my 13th (!) “book”. Of all the rest that are sitting in files on my computer, there are probably only three that I could reasonably edit into something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show someone, though. It took me a long time to hone my writing/story-telling skills.
Q: Lorena, How far into writing your book when you started posting it on Eat Your Serial?
Lorena: Not far enough. I think I was through chapter 10 when they started going up live to the site. It took me ages to write 11 and 12 and then I was writing a chapter per week from then on out because of time constraints. Definitely don’t recommend this to anyone!
Q: Carrie Jo, when did you start looking for an agent?
Carrie Jo: I started sending queries (the business letter you send an agent, telling them about your book and asking if they’re interested in seeing it), after I’d finished my ninth book. I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t ready, the book wasn’t ready, and I hadn’t done enough research about the publishing process yet. I had no idea what I was doing, and I got a lot of (well-deserved) rejections. When I queried my 10th and 12th manuscripts, I got requests for partials (part of the book)/fulls (the whole thing). I knew I was getting close. It wasn’t until lucky 13 that I got The Call.
Q: Lorena, you chose to go the indie (i.e. with a small, independent press) with your first book. Was it a good experience? Would you do it again?
Lorena: Publishing indie is good and bad. With them there was no marketing or publicity basically, so it was almost like self publishing in that way. Luckily I got an editor for free, which you’d pay for self publish route, and I got my stuff out there without having to hassle with Amazon myself. There were probably more negatives from a long term financial perspective, but I have rights ownership now. I could self publish it if I wanted to, but I’m more interested in pushing through other projects.
I will say though that I love being able to say I’m published by a publisher, not self published. Obviously whatever route you take you’re doing a lot of self promotional work, which is fine. I just think with a more established indie publisher or a mainstream one you’d have slightly more engaged publicity team. My publisher had a start-up mentality.
I’d definitely love to publish traditionally. There’s just a different set of doors opened when you achieve that and it’s a good place to be for a serious writer.
Q: Carrie Jo, you’re pursuing the traditional route. Why?
Carrie Jo: I’ve just always dreamt of walking into a bookstore and seeing a book on the shelf with my name on the cover. That’s most likely to happen if I go through the traditional channels. Plus, I’ve realized I like to conquer things. I want to look back one day and say “I did it. Against the odds, I made it happen.”
Q: What’s your writing process like? Do you try to write so many words per day/week/month? How long does it take you to finish a novel?
Lorena: My process isn’t word count driven. I aim for 5k words a chapter and then write scenes. I’m really engaged with scene writing and even storyboard based on a screenwriting book. I have to know what is going to be achieved in a scene and overall in a chapter before I can write it. Once I have that in my mind I can actually write my characters in a convincing way. Most of my edits involve questioning characters’ motive and believe-ability.
I’m going to say it takes me 9 months to finish a novel. I don’t know, though, because I have only finished one and it wasn’t achieved by normal means. I’d love to have the time to write and edit something for its language, which would take more than 9 months to get right. Publishing as a serial, with forced deadlines, was an incredible motivator for producing quickly. The longer you have, the less pressure there is. Let’s just say I was never one of those kids who did their homework right when they got home from school.
Carrie Jo: For a long time, that lack of pressure was a bad thing for me. I only wrote when the mood struck, and I never got anything done. So I made up my own deadlines and started giving myself a one thousand words (per weekday) minimum. Of course, it doesn’t always happen, but I usually manage 20,000 words a month. Now that I’ve been in that grove for a few years, it takes me about 3-4 months to finish a first draft. I’ll always take a break between drafts (which is usually when I’m prolific on TN and my personal blog), but once I’m back to editing, I’ll tackle a chapter a day. Since it’s rare that I feel like a book is “done” before I’ve gone through 5-8 drafts, it usually takes me about a year before I feel like I’m finished.
Q: How do you balance writing with your day job and personal life?
Lorena: I don’t. Writing a novel is impossibly time consuming and emotionally draining. If I’m going in, it’s full force. You can’t tame it once it’s happening for me. Luckily I don’t have kids, because I don’t know if I could write if I did. I can barely keep a marriage together when I write a novel 😉
Working full time is hard enough for finding emotional energy to write. I found writing before work was the way to go before but I’ve not gotten back in the groove. I’m in a rut at the moment. Maybe this post will kick start my writing cravings again…
For me I have to have undivided passion for my novel in order to make it happen. Otherwise life’s passions are too tempting, you know, like having a beer on a nice day or going snowboarding or reading a new book. I can’t do any of that when writing a novel. It’s all focus and energy on the novel. It’s exhausting!
Carrie Jo: When I was teaching full time, I wasn’t writing. It’s only after my daughter was born and I decided to stay home that I got serious about making this dream come true. I decided I didn’t care if I had a dirty house and started writing during nap times. Although my daughter is almost five and doesn’t nap anymore, she still has a 2-hour rest/playtime each day when I expect her to amuse herself. That’s when I write. And I’ve had to train myself to ignore my phone, stop browsing the internet, etc. and put words down on the page, whether I’m in the mood or not. So unlike you, I’ve never had a muse take over me. Stories just exist in my head, and it takes self-discipline for me to get them on paper.
I’ve laughed with friends that I have a full time job (being a mom) and a part time job (being a writer) and so far, I’m not getting paid for either. But since signing with Taylor (my agent who works at Waxman Leavell), it feels like all my self-discipline has paid off. The road to a book deal has been long and winding, but it feels like it might (finally!) be just around the bend.
So what do you think? Have we inspired you to start that novel you’ve been thinking about writing for years? Have any questions for us we haven’t answered about book publishing? Realized that writing might be more work than you imagined? Tell us your thoughts!
