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A Short Note to My Fellow Writers: Be Careful

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Can we have a heart-to-heart, writers?

First let me tell you about yourself. I know I’m being presumptuous, so if this isn’t you, feel free to quietly walk away. You’re a creative soul, eager for validation, eager to be original. You’d like everyone in the world to love what you write but you don’t want to sell out, whatever that means. You want to be published, and if you’ve already been published, you want to be published again.

Did I mention you want people to read what you write?

Here’s the point: There are a lot of people out there who KNOW that this is what you want. They also know what to say to make you feel validated, make you feel important, make you feel like the writer you are. And because they know the right things to say, too many of you are following blindly. You’ve swallowed their message hook, line, and sinker, and now you’ve got your wallets out and have your credit card ready.

Wait.

These folks, they’ll use this desire you have to be known, to be published, to be heard…and they’ll fleece you. They’ll charge you money to do something you can do on your own, or learn on your own, for free. There’s so much great stuff out there you can get for FREE. There are so many tools you can use to improve your craft…for FREE. Try Googling “authors talking on Youtube” or “how to self-publish Youtube video“.

But these folks won’t point you to free resources – they’ll charge you for writing classes or for consulting or for a path to publication, and you’ll pay because of this need you have to be heard. It’s a basic, instinctual need. Especially for you. A writer. And they’re playing you.

I’m not saying all writing classes are bad or online courses are unnecessary. I’ve run a few classes myself, and I’ve paid for that kind of stuff. There are good courses, and there are good teachers. I’m not saying everyone who offers you something in exchange for your hard-earned money is a fraud. I’m saying be careful. Do your research. These days, there’s usually a valid, inexpensive (free?) option that will help you find out the things you need to find out.

Want to hear an example of someone who cares about the writer and not about the writer’s money? I once contacted Jane Friedman. I had decided I was willing to pay her rather hefty hourly fee to talk about better ways to market my recent book. You know what she told me? When she found out I was trying to promote a book for kids, she said she didn’t have a lot of expertise in that area and that I’d be better off looking around. “I’m happy for you to sign up for the hour,” she emailed me back, “but I don’t know if it will be worth your time.”

Now there’s someone you want to work with. Someone who doesn’t jump at every opportunity to make a buck.

* * * * *

Don’t let your desire to be read or published or heard line the pockets of people who know your innermost desires and are willing to use that information to increase their own platform or bank account.

Here are some questions to consider BEFORE paying to become a “better writer”:

– Do they have any credentials? Have they wrestled through the writing process, not just on their own, but with other writers and teachers in something akin to an MFA program? I don’t have an MFA, and I’m not saying they’re necessary, but degrees can be an indicator of how much work the person has put in to get where they are.

– Have they edited or published anywhere professionally or for someone besides their friends? If you’re going to pay someone to edit your material, pay someone who deserves to be paid, and not just someone who calls themselves an editor.

– Are they offering you any sort of interaction or is it simply recorded or written material that you’ll be consuming? I personally feel that canned material created for the masses cannot get you beyond the most elementary of concepts. If you really want to improve, you need individual feedback, not only a PDF that makes you feel good about yourself all the time.

– Have they written anything of substance besides books or blogs on writing? I’m leery of listening to people talk about writing if they’ve only ever written about writing. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Would you take advice from someone who had only ever written about flying a kite but never actually flew one? Would you take your car to someone who had only ever written about an engine but never actually worked on one?

– If it’s a course to help you self-publish your book…do you realize how easy this is to do yourself? Are they insinuating that you will sell a lot of books if you buy their course? If so, run away. Far away.

– Do you find yourself on a track where you are continually going back to them and paying for more stuff without making progress as a writer? If you’ve been reading someone’s blog for years and buying their books and paying for their courses but your writing hasn’t progressed…why? Why? Why???

Those who talk the loudest about teaching you to write often have the least to offer because most people who actually know something about writing are too busy. You know why they’re busy? They’re writing. One of the best things you can do is buy books and materials on writing from writers who rarely write about writing – people like Stephen King (On Writing) or Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird).

Be careful, friends. That’s all I’m trying to say. There are good teachers out there. There are good courses. Just be careful.

Help your fellow writers out. What are the best free resources out there right now that help with writing, finding agents, self-publication, or promotion?

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What I Did After My First One-Star Rating (or, Creating With the Right People in Mind)

coverroughWhen I first released my book, The Day the Angels Fell, I cringed whenever I visited the Amazon or Goodreads page, as if peeking my head out of the window and waiting for gunfire. I was scared. Had someone written a review that excoriated my book, my writing ability, my humanity? Had someone absolutely despised my storytelling? Had I screwed up the plot, the characterization?

Was I a terrible human being?

But as the first three months passed, and more copies sold, the good reviews began to pile up. Mostly four- and five-star reviews with a few three-stars thrown in for good measure. It was nice. It was comforting. I started to see the review section of these pages as a friendly place.

On March 23rd, 2015, everything changed.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that dramatic.

But that was when The Day the Angels Fell got its first one-star rating on Goodreads. I stared at the rating with some surprise, and a little shock, the way villains always look in the movies when they’ve been stabbed in the gut and they realize it was the fatal blow.

But I never thought I would die in this movie, their face seems to say. I thought I was the protagonist.

For a moment, just a moment, all those little voices started to amplify. You suck. Your writing sucks. You should really have been an economist. Or a taxidermist. Or something with regular pay, because, you know, your writing is terrible.

After you’ve created your art, whatever it is – a service, an idea, an interaction, a performance, a meeting – it’s done. What the audience does with it is out of your control.

If you focus your angst and emotion on the people who don’t get it, you’ve destroyed part of your soul and haven’t done a thing to improve your art. Your art, if you made it properly, wasn’t for them in the first place. Worse, the next time you make art, those nonbelievers will be the ones at the front of your mind.

– Seth Godin

My friend Jason shared that quote with me the other day, and it helped me to verbalize what I experienced after that one-star rating. Because moments after seeing it, I realized.

Who cares?

I gave that book everything I had at the moment, every ounce of writing skill, every precious idea and thought I had to offer. That was the best that I could do. And you know what?

A lot of people loved it. I get messages and texts and emails from folks who loved the book! Their kids loved it. I’ve had people ask me in depth questions about the book, questions about details so minor I didn’t have answers for them. People obviously cared, and I take immense pleasure and relief in that. The next book, the sequel to The Day the Angels Fell, will be for those people, and while I’m revising it, they will be the ones at the forefront of my mind.

Not the one-star reviewer.

But that is what the one-star rating did for me. It ushered me one more small step along the road to not caring what other people think, to writing the story that needs to be written, and to enjoying my work. One-star ratings help me to build really important artistic callouses, the kind that make my work easier over time, the kind that allow me to put in the hard work without feeling the sting of rejection after every sub-par review. Worry, anxiety, and self-doubt are terrible co-creators.

What are you creating?

Who are you listening to?

(If you’d like to leave a rating or review of the book, you can do that at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads…or all three. Thank you!)

* * * * *

This coming Sunday evening Caleb Wilde and I will be at the Corner Coffee Shop to  talk about the death-positive message behind The Day the Angels Fell, as well as how we talk about death with our own children. Kids are welcome! Check out the details HERE.

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What I Learned From the Note My Daughter Left On Her Own Door

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When you’re used to children always being up in your business, always talking or tugging on your clothes or leaving crumbs behind them as they live their lives, you get used to a certain level of constant noise. It becomes the soundtrack to your life. So when silence sets in, I go through a predictable sequence of thoughts:

Wow, it’s quiet. This is really nice.

Why is it so quiet? Where is everyone?

Who cares where they are or what they are doing. I’m going to sit here and enjoy it.

But remember the last time you sat there and enjoyed it? It didn’t end well.

Round and round it goes.

This happened on Sunday afternoon. Eventually I came around to that point where I thought I should probably go check and see why everyone was so quiet. I walked all the way up to the third floor of the house, and I could hear Sam and Abra inside their room. Loud music reverberated through the door, and their little voices were singing away. Nothing to fear.

That’s when I saw the sign on Abra’s door (this is the translated version):

Closed
Only my friends can come in this room
If you do want to come inthen you will have to listen to me

* * * * *

I have a good friend named Seth. We’ve never met in person. It’s a strange world we live in now, that I can become good friends with someone in Arkansas whose face I’ve never seen in real life.

Anyway, I was expressing some of my self-doubt to Seth (in the form of a Voxer message), and I was explaining to him how these voices just kept coming back to torment me, even when the book was selling well, even when the reviews have been great, even when so many kids are enjoying it. He replied by giving me some thoughts about “the cave of the soul”:

The cave of the soul is the sacred space where you go to be alone with God and to listen and to hear and to experience his voice and his calling. The voices we find in the cave of the soul that are distractions, those voices are intruders. But so often we keep them captive. They crush us with doubt and anxiety and fear and pain. But instead of releasing them, we hold them captive.

I think that what God sometimes asks us to do is to allow the intruders the freedom to be let go. To say “I am enough, the spirit work in my life is enough” – no matter how small it might seem – “and the cave is my sacred space.” So, intruders, you are given permission to leave.

All of this to say, I think I need to take a page from my daughter’s book about who she lets into her room.

If you want to come in, Intruders, then you will have to listen to me.

What do your intruders say to you? What intruders do you have that you need to give permission to leave?

* * * * *

This Saturday night I’ll be doing a reading of The Day the Angels Fell at a friend and fellow writer’s house. Kelly Chripczuk is hosting the event in Boiling Springs, PA. For more details, check out the Facebook event page HERE or email me for details. Children are welcome to attend, but we do ask that you RSVP.

* * * * *

I’m giving away five signed, paperback copies of The Day the Angels Fell over at Goodreads this week. You can enter the giveaway HERE.

* * * * *

This is one of my favorite notes I recently received from a parent who is reading through The Day the Angels Fell with their children:

“Here is a picture of my daughter playing Tree of Life with her Playmobil, complete with water, stone, and (artificial) sunlight. Just read chapter 24 to the kids and they are loving it!”

If you’ve read the book, please consider heading over to Goodreads and/or Amazon and leaving a review (every review helps give the book more exposure and introduces it to potential readers).

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What If It Takes 1,000 Days? (or, A Path Worth Walking)

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Seems you turn around and there’s a new month, a new season, staring at you, like opening your eyes in the middle of the night to find one of your (now terrifying) children standing quietly beside the bed, waiting for you to wake up. Cade used to do that when he was three or four years old. Just about sent me through the ceiling.

These years will do that to you, the way they just keep showing up.

* * * * *

I remember writing 10,000 words for the sequel to The Day the Angels Fell. Characters and scenes and settings. Then, soon after that, I finally discovered the whole point of the book, the questions that I had about life and death that the story will explore, and I realized all 10,000 words were wrong. They won’t be in the book.

Let’s assume I can write 250 first draft words per hour. This means I put in forty hours of work that were deleted. Thirty pages, gone. But this doesn’t alarm me anymore, not the way it used to when I first started writing, because I’ve learned that to get to the final story there are many, many deleted words that must be written first.

There is no path worth walking that starts at the finish. There will be steps that take us backwards. We will stumble, take a winding path when a straight one is available.

We all have so many miles left to walk.

* * * * *

“Once you find (the problem with the work), and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

* * * * *

There are things we will do in this life that will seem impossible. We will start books we do not think we have the strength to write. We will start businesses that require every ounce of us just to begin. We will love people who will not love us back or, even worse, will deliberately hurt us, seek to destroy us. There will be deleted days, months that seem useless, years that pass under a shadow of rejection and pain and disorder.

I hope that if you have resolved to do anything, it is to try and be brave again, which is not the same thing as being fearless. The only people I know who say they are fearless also happen to be very good liars. They walk around with their heads held high, claiming not to know fear, but when they turn around you can see their fear clinging to their backs like an imp.

I hope you’ve also resolved to persevere, to be willing to wait. Sometimes it takes 1,000 days, and sometimes it takes 10 years, and I suspect that sometimes we will get to the end of our lives, still waiting, and realize the waiting was what was required, not that thing we were waiting for. Whatever you dream of doing, it’s worth walking the long road. It’s worth the winding and the seemingly wasted steps. When you get there, the path will make sense.

Today, take the next step. Be brave. Be willing to wait.

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On Waking Up, a New Year, and Why She Can’t Read My Novel Yet

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope…who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art…

Ursula K. Le Guin

Seven months after my book released, I am coming to terms with my status as an ordinary author. My writing life is simple, and good. There is a book on my shelf with my name on it. There are the lovely reminders from readers that my book meant something to them. And I am learning to receive this as a gift: I’m not as big a deal as I always hoped I’d be.

– Micha Boyett

I stood in the lobby of our hotel in New York City at noon on the day after Christmas, packed in a line of thirty mostly unhappy people. I still had my coat on, and I was warm, getting warmer. The bar stools were all taken, the sofas were full, and piles of luggage lounged on carts waited to be delivered to new rooms. Me and my tribe? We were just trying to check out. We had been in the city for 24 hours, had our fun, and were ready to return to small-city life.

The wait was long. I pulled out my phone and continued reading one of the best books I’d read in a long time, All the Light We Cannot See. It was the climax, the peak of the story, and in that moment I was no longer in a city of 8.4 million people. I was no longer waiting in a lobby surrounded by baggage, holding my phone. I was in France, in 1944, surrounded by the detritus of war. Smoke rose from the rubble and restless refugees wandered through a broken land. A young, blind, French girl asked a young, starving, German soldier a question.

She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

I looked up at the television screens showing images of Times Square. I watched the bellmen and the receptionists and the bartenders scurry from here to there. I watched the people around me, complaining or reuniting or checking their phones, consumed by stimuli, seemingly oblivious to the startling, beautiful world around them.

Am I awake? Am I living my life?

* * * * *

I find myself feeling a little untethered at the end of another year. And what a year. We moved from forty acres of woods to a small sliver of city. My sister got married on a beach in Florida. My wife had a baby, number five, Leo Henri, our gentle giant. Soon after he was born, I was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, my colon blocked, my world shaking. A kind young father, a guy I knew from high school, passed away, leaving a wife and three children behind on this side of that dark passage. My parents sold their place, the basement of which has housed my family and I for two small chunks of very transformational time. I published a novel.

These years, they come and go, and some of them seem to pass like one breath leading seamless to the next. Other years are long sighs, or rattling coughs. Or gasps. Or the breath that comes through a smile. I’m still not sure exactly what kind of breath this year was, but it refuses to pass unnoticed, unrecognized.

As I stood in line in that hotel in New York City and read that passage from that heart-breaking, beautiful novel, I considered 2014 and I thought to myself, “Wake up and live your life.” Because if I’m honest I have to say that I slept through much of it, numbing myself with Netflix binges and an ever more encompassing cell phone addiction. I recognize in myself an inability to stop consuming the very things that are breaking me down.

I think we all feel that message at different times in our lives, to varying degrees: Wake Up. Live your life. I felt it strongly in 2001 when Maile and I moved to England and then again in 2009 when it was time to leave Virginia and come home. It came in 2011 when Maile and I started talking about traveling across the country. I felt it this summer when I realized, no, when I knew, that I needed to publish The Day the Angels Fell.

We all feel this message from time to time, this calling from comfort into discomfort, from predictable to not, when this hand reaches down and offers to draw us out of the rut we’re spinning in. For each of us, that call seeks to bring us closer to the center of ourselves, but it almost always arrives in the form of a question beginning with the words, “Are you willing…?”

For me? This year? I can sum it up for you in two questions that came to me through the mist of two powerful things I recently read, one shared by my friend Emily Freeman, and the other written by my friend Micha Boyett.

“Are you willing to see through our…obsessive technologies to other ways of being?”

“Are you willing to believe you are not as big a deal as you always hoped you’d be?”

* * * * *

I am beginning to remember the freedom that comes when I answer that call to Wake Up, no matter how nonsensical or counter-intuitive the ensuing steps may seem at the time. I’m beating around the bush, I know. The long and the short of it is this: the answers to these questions, in 2015, wait for me on the other side of something difficult, namely spending much less time on social media, less time blogging, less time building a platform for myself. It’s time, once again, to step back. Breathe.

I’ve come to enjoy Facebook and Twitter and the kind responses you offer to my blog posts. I’ve made real friends online, people I will stay in touch with through other means. But I also realize that my addiction to the short spurts of approval that come through Likes or Retweets nearly kept me from the long, concentrated time I required to write a novel that I’m very glad I wrote. I don’t want to watch the next five years pass and suddenly realize I have little more to show for it than a few hundred forgotten blog posts, a few thousand Facebook fans, or 1500 pithy Facebook updates.

I know you might ask, “Why are the two mutually exclusive? Why can’t you write and do social media?” I’m not sure. I can’t explain it. But for me, that’s just how it is. I have not been able to dive deeply into writing the novels I want to write…except during the year I took a break from blogging. Also, I must emphasize that this is not a value judgment on social media and it’s impact on society. Or on you. It’s a value judgment of myself, a realistic assessment of my capabilities, of how much I can handle, of what’s important to me, right now, and what it will take for me to Wake Up.

* * * * *

When I released The Day the Angels Fell just over a week ago, I was mostly nervous about one thing, and that one thing came up in a comment left by a reader of this blog. She wrote:

Looking forward to reading this once my head is clear. Finding ‘death as a gift’ a difficult concept at the moment.

How can death be a gift? How can the thing that separates us from those we love be a gift? How can other, less literal deaths (the loss of jobs, the giving up of things, the turning away from things we want) be considered something worth having? The last thing I’m trying to do with this book is diminish the pain we feel when we experience some kind of death.

I had a long talk with Caleb Wilde about this last week, and I’m still not sure exactly how it plays out, this idea of death being a gift. Yet I know this: stepping back from social media and blogging feels like a kind of death to me. But it also feels like an amazing gift. That, I think, is where the tension lies: the loss we feel when we encounter death does not always coalesce with the knowledge that death can be a passageway to somewhere or something better.

So what lies on the other side of this passage?

I will focus on the projects I’m being paid to write. I will begin writing a sequel to The Day the Angels Fell. Maile and I will take a trip to New Orleans, because that seems to be where the sequel will take place, and I want to look around, feel the place, walk the streets. In April and May we’ll tour the country, talk about the book and meet new friends and hear what you have to say about death being a gift, or not. Once the trip dates and locations are set in stone, I’ll post them here and send out an email to those subscribed to the list.

If you’re currently asleep, I hope you’ll consider what it might take for you to Wake Up.

If you’re currently experiencing some kind of death, I hope you’ll hold out hope for something better on the other side.

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Why I Write (or, Let Me Tell You a Secret About Writing a Book)

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For those of you who’ve never had the chance to write a book, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. For most of us writers, there doesn’t come a time when crowds of people start following us through the street for our autograph (that’s not the secret). For most of us, a royalty check has not yet arrived in the mail that we look at and say, “That’s cool – now I can pay off the house” (that’s not the secret either).

Here’s the secret.

In my experience, for every book I’ve written, there’s come a moment in time when a light has fallen down from the heavens and a voice has whispered in my ear, “This is why you wrote this book.”

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Sometimes that moment happens before the book is ever published. When I wrote Think No Evil, a book about forgiveness in the midst of the Amish schoolhouse shooting, that moment came as I sat across from first responders who had the chance to talk about what they experienced on that horrendous day. As they wept and talked and processed, that little voice said, “This is why you’re writing this book.”

During work on a recent family memoir, a daughter of the lady the book was about looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “I never knew my mom went through all of this stuff. Thank you.”

At a book signing I attended with Tim Kreider for the book Refuse to Drown, more than one person leaned in close to Tim and I and said, “My relative did something horrible, and it had a huge impact on our family. Thank you for writing this book.”

This is why you wrote this book.

* * * * *

If you look inside my recent novel, The Day the Angels Fell, you’ll see that it’s dedicated to the following people:

To Maile,
Cade, Lucy, Abra,
Sam, and Leo,
for being the main characters
in my favorite story.

And to the families of
Peter Perella
and
Jason Darity.

Peter and Jason are two high school friends of mine who passed away in the last sixteen months. They were both in their 30s. Jason was an incredible man, raising his daughter, determined to live a good life.

Peter’s family, the Perellas, played a huge role throughout my childhood. His cousin Johnny is one of my very best friends, and his uncle was my little league baseball coach when I was six years old (as well as my 4th grade teacher). His aunt was also a teacher at my elementary school. His father was my music teacher in middle school, and his two brothers played soccer with me and my cousins. His mother is a librarian at our local library. The name Perella has provided a wonderful backdrop to my childhood.

Peter died of cancer earlier this year.

* * * * *

On Wednesday night, I got a message from Peter’s brother Tom asking if I’d sign and write notes in three books for Peter’s three children. I don’t know Peter’s wife or his kids, but I feel like I do. I signed those three books, thinking quite a lot about my own children as I wrote to each of Peter’s children. If I was gone, what would I want someone to write to my own kids?

And as I signed each of those books, I thought to myself,

This is why I wrote this book.