The Yin and Yang of Writing: a guest post by Jenny Milchman

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The day after Christmas, thoughts tend to turn toward - well, yes, toward returns and post-Christmas sales, but also toward the New Year. A time to start fresh: a new calendar, new prospects, new resolutions. For many of us who write, the New Year will be marked with one important resolution: get that novel started. Or finished. Or both.

Jenny Milchman knows this resolution well. It took her eleven years, twenty-two drafts and a one hundred and eighty thousand word manuscript to get to the place she is now: awaiting the January 15th publication of Cover of Snow, a stunning thriller that's gotten rave pre-pub reviews from Lee Child, Laura Lippman, Louise Penny and Yours Truly. Obviously, the years spent honing her craft were well worth it. But how does a writer keep going? How does he or she handle the crazy ups and downs of the literary life? Jenny is going to tell us how to stay motivated and make that resolution a reality:

Writing is a craft that wears two faces. You know the ones I mean. There is the part where the writer finishes his or her day’s work, sits back, and smiles like the Cheshire Cat bathed in cream.

“Man, am I a good writer. Not a good writer. A great writer. In fact, a word has not been invented yet to describe what a fantastic writer I am. Maybe I should coin a word to describe what a great writer I am, like Lewis Carroll coined the word chortle. Lucky I’m such a great writer.”

A few days pass. Maybe the writer gives those pages out to some trusty readers. Maybe he or she submits them somewhere, or begins querying on the project. The feedback and rejections start trickling in.

“Man, do I suck. What made me think I should let anyone even read this dreck that just came spilling out of my incompetent fingertips? I am such a bad writer, not writing isn’t sufficient consequence for me. I shouldn’t stop writing, I should stop living.”

Right now you’re either nodding in recognition, or looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am crazy. I’m a writer. This passion of ours could drive a person nuts.

I started writing my first novel in 1998 (I’m not including that Victorian-esque thing I wrote when I was studying English Lit in college, or the ones with magic marker illustrations from when I was six.) I was an intern pursuing a graduate degree in psych, and I had this very intense case. I think the reason I’d never finished a real novel before was because I thought I had to write something like the classics I’d studied, and hadn’t come to the fairly obvious realization that you should write what you like to read (even if you’re not going to write what you know).

What I read was suspense. Thrillers. Mysteries. And now I had a case that was right out of a suspense novel, and don’t we all start with something autobiographical? So I created a sleuth who was, what else, a psychologist-in-training. And got her into all sorts of fixes. 180,000 words later, I was done. My novel wasn’t, but you couldn’t tell that to me. I was firmly embedded in the every-word-I-wrote-is-a-freaking-miracle phase, and refused to revise until a handful of kindly agents showed me the error of my ways.

There’s another aspect of writing that wears two faces, like one of those tragedy/comedy masks from theater, and that’s publishing.

Cruelest business in the world. It could make you long to be a coal miner. (I fully understand that coal mining is harder than any day ever spent at a computer. Just sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.)

A hasty auto-sent rejection might be the only response you see to your carefully crafted query and the pages you suffered through the aforementioned yin and yang of writing to create. And that’s if you’re lucky. You might get no rejection, no response at all, and just be left hoping day after day after day that this could be the morning when your pages are finally read. And that the agent will call to say she or he didn’t even bother signing you before getting you a major book deal and selling the film rights to boot.

But every yin has its yang, and one day that tragic scowl just might flip.

I wrote eight novels, signed with three agents, and stayed on more or less continuous submission for eleven years before the magic happened, and so I know just why people keep at this for so long.

When the publishing game is going well, there is no greater high. Publishing is like gambling, writing is, too, and we risk it all every time we sit down at our machines, or take out a pad and a pen, or slide a slice of paper into a typewriter (which I hear is gaining in popularity again).

Of course, typewriters are gaining in popularity again! At least a rejection won’t ever come in on one.

But this could be the day that your agent calls on the honest-to-goodness telephone, instead of emailing, to say that an editor wants to buy your book.

And when you get that call, you’re not going to remember the fifty or eighty or hundred form rejections, all the months (years) spent on submission, getting close but smoking no cigars, or anything else from the tails side of this particular coin. You’re rolling heads now, baby, and there is no better business than this.

Which is only reasonable, you chortle.

After all, the pages you just submitted were the very best ones ever penned in the entire history of the world.

Until you look at them again the next day.

How about you, dear reader? Is this the year you're going to write that novel? Or are you just looking forward to reading some great new ones? Let us know!

 

Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Adirondack Mysteries II, and in an e-published volume called Lunch Reads. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Her first novel, Coverof Snow, will be published by Ballantine in January.