What is staring you in the face?

Bright sunshine beckoned the other day and I tied on my runners and trotted outside. With my headset plugged into my iPhone, I hit the music button, ready for a brisk walk. Instead of Emeli Sandé, I got thundering silence. The bounce went out of my step and I stared at my phone dumfounded.

Word count: 334    Reading time: 1-2 minutes

I punched buttons as if simple determination would make the songs magically reappear. When I pulled out the ear buds and stood there, I heard nothing more than the autumn leaves that rasped along the pavement. I resigned myself to a technology-free hour and moved on.

Without the cocoon of music to separate me from ambient buzz, I walked. Although it would be glorious to report that I heard something so significant that it inspired a brilliant short story or chapter, that didn’t happen. But I caught conversations from people’s yards. Jays scolded in a cedar tree. When a car drove past, the doughy sounds of its tires on the warm road reached me. A normal Sunday morning on the edge of Mt. Fromme.

My sharpened hearing changed to more focused looking and I saw, for the first time, the way the Steller jays’ wings appeared translucent against the sun. I breathed deep the rich humus smell rising from the earth. I touched the springy young needles on a hemlock tree.

Susan Sontag said, “A writer is someone who pays attention to the world.” When I plug into my tunes, I deny myself a chance to do just that.

When the latest iPhone 4 upgrade deleted my entire iTunes library it may have given me an inadvertent gift: I discovered that music piped directly to my brain doesn’t turn off only my ability to hear, it also dulls my senses of sight, touch, and smell. Maybe it sweeps me into what Jason Perlow calls the Sea of Stupid.

Do you have a habit, particularly one that is technology-dependent, one that diminishes your powers of observation? How do you overcome it?

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Leaves in autumn, Tapis de feuilles en automne by hamon jp

Did you slip a stitch?

Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. Sophia Loren.  

Word count: 501       Reading time: 1-2 mins.

On April 20^th I’ll be part of a panel at the North Shore Writers’ Festival discussing the road to publication and beyond. Apparently the most frequently asked question at last year's festival was, “How can I get published?”

To be honest, in an effort to get published, it’s easy to make mistakes. If I were to admit every error of mine in this process, I’d have to break my 600-word limit for this blog. So I’ll start with the things I’ve done right so far, the shorter list by far: 

• I started writing for the simple love of writing. I really didn’t care where the stories went or who liked them. I wrote for fun.
• Eventually I wanted outside validation so I submitted to local writing competitions and gradually gathered some publication credits and prizes.
• After six or seven years as an autodidact, I took a writing course and discovered how little I actually knew about what I was doing. Formal study was a turning point; it helped me understand what does and doesn’t work. It also underscored how important meaningful feedback is.
• I learned to be a ruthless self-editor, silence my ego, and accept that my novels need multiple revisions.  

Everything I’ve learned has made me want to learn more so I’ve also listened to, read the blogs and followed the tweets of publishing professionals. I want to learn not just from my own mistakes – everyone does that – but from other people’s as well.

So here are some of the missteps emerging writers make:

• Submitting work too soon. 
• Submitting work that is poorly edited.
• Using the shotgun approach – sending work to the wrong agent or publisher.
• Sending a poorly constructed query letter
• Not knowing your market. (i.e. What are the comparable books in this genre? What is a standard word count? - see Chuck Sambuchino's blog on the latter point.)

As to the actual work: at the Agent Idol session at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in 2008 and again in 2010, agents were asked what they didn’t like to find in their slush piles. The top answers were:

• Books that begin with prologues (I didn’t understand this well until I read Writing Irresistible Kidlit by Mary Kole, pp 43-45. Her book isn’t just about kidlit!)
• Books that begin with someone looking out the window
• Books that begin with dream sequences

If you’ve made any of these mistakes, it only proves you’re trying. Only those who are asleep make no mistakes (Ingvar Kamprad). If you really want to avoid common errors and you have a free half hour or so, read JM Tohline’s blog The Biggest Mistakes Writers Make When Querying Agents. You could save yourself some embarrassment.

What mistakes have you made in your efforts to get published so far? Have you failed to immerse yourself in practice and study so that your writing continually improves? Have you rushed to query a manuscript before it was ready?  

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons by rmkoske