Author Archive: jsomers

Once you make the dubious life decision to pursue writing as a vocation or avocation, there are a couple of things that are absolutely, 100% certain to happen:

1. Someone will start calling you “Shakespeare”;
2. Someone will ask you if you’d be interested in writing their genius idea for a novel in exchange for, say, 20% of the profits;
3. You’ll have to deal with criticism of your work.

From the author’s point of view there are two kinds of criticism: The kind you agree with and see value in, and everything else. The first kind is easy because it usually indicates that you yourself thought there was a similar problem with the book, and you’re just getting objective confirmation. It doesn’t feel too awful because there’s a good chance on some level you’ve already dealt with it.

The latter though can be difficult, because when people make criticisms of your work that you think are ludicrous, it’s easy to just shrug it off and assume they’re just not very good readers. But not only should you always be appreciative of anyone who is willing to give you feedback on your work, you should probably also not ignore criticisms that seem off the wall. In fact, if you’re first reaction is to frown in puzzlement at a piece of feedback, chances are this is exactly the feedback you should be paying extra attention to.

The Zone of Discomfort

It’s easy to accept negative feedback when it lines up with what you’re already thinking. The hard part—and thus the necessary part—is to listen to feedback that seems completely off-target and objectively evaluate it.

Why? Because you will never control how people react to your work, and if you’re not regularly confused and outraged by the feedback you get, you may be in a bubble where only people who see things the same way you do get to read and comment on your work. You’ve got to seek feedback that scares you a little bit, that confuses you. You might ultimately reject it just as your initial instinct told you to, but you have to at least consider it. It’s the only way you’ll ever see your writing from a point of view outside your own experience.

Also: Don’t challenge critics to duels. It never ends well.

Most stories have what literary scientists call characters; fictional people who the reader chooses to believe are real. Or the reader chooses to believe this if you manage to make those characters at least halfway believable as people and at least 56% interesting.

A lot of writers think the first part (believability) is hard and the second part (interesting) is easy. After all, making characters pop off the page can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from a distinctive accent or catch-phrase-laden dialog to costuming, physical appearance, and perhaps really crazy hair. You can almost tell you’re reading a pretty awful story simply by stepping back to observe the characters, because there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of the story and what the characters are wearing.

It boils down to: The crazier you make a character’s defining characteristics, the less believable they are. Because if a man walks into a room wearing a cape, with a parrot on his shoulder, no one thinks look at this fascinating man! They think, who in the world wears a cape? and they pop out of your story as if shot out of a cannon.

Unless, of course, you’re writing a story set in a place where capes are common, in which case: Carry on, but you get my point.

People Be Crazy

In real life, people who dress outrageously aren’t the cool characters of your story, they’re the people you don’t want to sit next to on the subway. Defining your characters by a verbal tic, accent, or strange appearance is easy—guy in a cape, got it—but the cape doesn’t make them a distinct character on the page, it just means your reader can’t think of anything else when they’re doing something.

You’ve got to make your characters distinct the same way people around you make themselves distinct. We all (or most of us) play along with certain conventions of society. We dress within a fairly narrow range of acceptable fashions. We speak certain ways to strangers, slightly differently to friends. Within a spectrum, everyone basically behaves the same way because as George Costanza once said, we’re living in a society here and that’s part of it.

So how do you tell your friends apart if we’re all within this range of normalcy? Their opinions. Their backgrounds. Their way of speaking (which may actually include an accent or catch-phrase, to be fair, though that’s rarely the only thing that distinguishes them). Not using the easy physical markers to define your characters will force you to dig a little deeper and make them into people with motivations, back stories, and subtle traits that make them stand out.

Unless your character is a magician-pirate, in which case go with the cape and the parrot.

The first thing I ever wrote that was recognizable as a short story (as opposed to “nonreactive pile of words that failed to start a chain reaction of genius) was called “Bricks”, and was written in 1986, when I was fifteen. I’d recently been told that in order to get into college and stop the clear downward slide my life was already engaged in, I needed to have activities on my transcript.

(Anyone high school age reading this: You don’t. It’s an adult conspiracy to get you involved in school activities. Walk away.)

I showed up for one meeting of the wrestling team, and left after twenty minutes, because holy shit that’s a lot of work. So I figured I’d get involved in something a little closer to my comfort zone: Writing. So I joined the literary magazine. In order to join the literary magazine, you kind of had to have literary output, so I shifted from 100% novels to writing some short stories.

That was my first real short story. The first good short story came about three years later. And the first story I actually sold was written four years after that.

The Chapter Stops

I can divide my entire literary life that way, between eras marked by Firsts. Some of those chapter stops shift over time as my definition of good and successful change, but in general I can point to works and say, this was my first real novel, this was my first good novel, this was the first story I ever sold, this was the first story I ever got a dollar a word for.

Just as important, though, are the milestones that don’t have a fixed point in time—things like the best story or novel I wrote. It’s kind of great that that status keeps changing, because the only things worse than realizing the best thing you ever wrote was written thirty years ago is realizing the last thing you sold was thirty years ago. As long as your dates keep changing, as long as you have new milestones to mark, you’re okay. And to keep that happening, you have to keep working. You never know when your next idea is going to be the best one you’ve ever had.

Unless your idea is to spend the next few years observing your cats as research for a Watership Down-esque epic about them. That will never be your best idea. Trust me, I speak from experience.

I don’t hang out with other writers much, because I hate talking about writing. Discussions about craft tend to get pretentious, quick, and discussions about the business side make me squirrelly, because I was raised to never speak of money, for some reason. I think my parents were in dire financial straits for a long time—like, lose the house straits—and never once mentioned any of it to my brother and I. The only reason I even suspect this today is a few stray comments made by my mother in her later years. As a result, I prefer to pretend that I am a Gentleman Writer who publishes solely for the acclaim and the glamor, never the money.

There are some exceptions, mainly with writers who like to drink whiskey as much as I do. Whiskey is the social lubrication of the gods, after all. When I do get together with fellow writers and talk a bit about our work, there’s one thing I can count on: We all hate our old books.

Past Me is a Hack

It’s unsettling when you pull out a manuscript you wrote a few years ago and thought fondly of, a novel you thought might be revised and massaged into something great, and discover that Present You now hates it, and wonders what drugs Past You was on when he wrote it. I used to assume this had something to do with my growing vision and talent as a writer—older books were terrible because I had gotten so much better at it, just like I no longer think The Dukes of Hazzard is a good TV show because my taste in television has gotten more sophisticated.

Now, though, I realize that’s not quite it. Past Jeff is not the same person as Present Jeff, just as I will not be the same as Future Jeff. That stranger wrote a book, and incorporated all these weird ideas, and none of it is the way I would do it. So I hate it. I will always hate my older books, no matter how old they are, precisely, and no matter how well they are received or how well they continue to sell. They were written by a weirdo with my name, a man I don’t know any more.

This is probably why time travel never seems to happen. People invent it, travel back to see themselves, and end up murdering themselves and the universe reboots.

I don’t know how other writers do it, or have done it—sell novels, get agents, all that jazz. All I know is how I did it, so that’s the limit of my knowledge. It’s very possible (very possible) that other writers are smarter than me, more charming and connected, and that they’ve got some secret I don’t. That’s a pretty common fear/assumption, isn’t it, that other people have it easier because they know something you don’t. So, stipulated: Other writers may know something I don’t.

For me, it was all just doing the work. Writing the query letters, mailing out the sample chapters, emailing folks, all that jazz. There was literally no secret to it, no special networking. I never left the house, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t go to conferences, and I didn’t read any books or blogs of advice. I just routinely sent out submissions to publishers and queries to agents, for years.

The Secret: There’s No Secret

That’s anti-climatic, isn’t it? And a bit dull. I wish I could say I had some amazing secret, believe me. But I just sat at my desk every day and wrote, and then sat a little longer and wrote funny, disastrously sloppy letters and then made photocopies of my typo-ridden manuscripts and mailed them out. Later, of course, the ridiculous cover letters became Word documents and the photocopies also Word documents and everything was via email, but it was essentially the same process. And somehow in 1999 this translated into a novel sold to a small publisher and in 2002 it translated into signing with an agent. All it took was a few hundred mailings and a lot of letters.

So, when people ask me for the secret to selling a book or landing an agent, I don’t mention conferences, pitch slams, or publishing events where I bought everyone cocktails, because for me those things didn’t exist. I just did my thing, for years, rinsing and repeating over and over again, until I found My People. My People get my jokes, forgive my typos, and generally think I’m a charming genius instead of a shambling mess. So the sum of my advice to folks who want to traditionally publish is: Find Your People.

Of course, when someone approaches me for advice of this sort I at first act all mysterious and imply heavily that there is a secret that I’ll tell them if they buy me, say, five whiskies. Because I’m an idiot, but I’m not a fool.