Lost in the Ivy

Three keys to finding success as a writer:

One: Believe in your writing.

Two: Take chances.

Three: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

If you've written something and you think it's good enough to be published some place, find that place. It's out there, you just have to look.

Once you find that place, submit it.

If it comes back, don't give up. Rejection is inevitable. Maybe it wasn't the right place. Maybe it was the right place but it wasn't the right time. Don't get discouraged, start over and find another place.

If they ask you to change it, change it. If they want more, give 'em more. If they want it cut, cut it. Sometimes a few changes or additions or cuts can make the difference between getting published and not getting published. A little extra work can pay dividends.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece on this blog titled "Putting a Cork in the Whine." I let it sit for awhile, but at the back of my mind there was the thought that it could be published some place. One day I stumbled upon a place that I thought it might fit. I took a chance and submitted. A couple weeks later I got a response. They liked it but wanted a little more. So I beefed it up a bit and resubmitted it.

The pay-off for putting in a little extra work? See for yourself in the current issue of Absolute Write.

We all see things in others that they can't see themselves.

So begins the novel that I am writing. That may not be how it begins when it is finished. But that's how it reads now.

That opening sentence relates to the story's narrator, who is fresh out of high school, unclear of the world and his place in it. He has a muted self-image of himself and, as a result, attaches himself to someone who is everything that he is not - bold, self-assured, confident. He is comfortable being the follower and lacks the ambition to be more than that. His best friend is cognizant of this but also sees that there is more in him than he can see himself.

I thought about that story arc when my good friends at the Chicago Writers Association recently put me at the helm of their newly formed 16-member Steering Committee, basically entrusting me with guiding them in the right direction.

I am one who has never been all that confident in my own inner-compass, so asking me to steer a group of nearly 200 on a path to greater success makes me more than a bit uneasy. I am also one who has always shied away from taking on any kind of leadership role. I just have never seen myself as a leader. But, apparently, there are some in the Chicago Writers group that see in me more than I see in myself.

We all see things in others that they can't see themselves.

My own words. Life and fiction - sometimes they blend in the most unexpected and mysterious ways.

In a writer's world, there are two kinds of readers: pre-publication and post-publication.

To a writer, each of them is vitally important. Without the pre-publication reader, there would be no book to read. And without the post-publication reader, a writer cannot make a living.

As a writer, you hope that you have a lot more post-publication readers than you do pre-publication readers. If you don't, then you probably need to find some new pre-publication readers.

The vast majority of people are post-publication readers. They see a book only in its final form. After it has been polished to perfection and wrapped up in a nice package.

A select few are pre-publication readers. They see a book in its rawest form. Word or .pdf documents of fledgling chapters come to them in their e-mail inbox, sent by insecure writers fishing for guidance or reassurance.

You might think that it would be better to be a post-publication reader than a pre-publication reader. They get only the best that the writer has to offer.

Or do they?

I started wondering about that after receiving an e-mail from one of my pre-production readers commenting on one of the chapters from the book I am currently working on.

Over the past couple of months, I have sent to this particular reader a total of eight chapters. Sometimes, a chapter at a time. Other times, a couple chapters. Or, as I did most recently, all eight chapters as one.

The difficulty for him, as a reader, is that each time I send him new material, it almost always means that I've changed something that he's previously read. In most cases, the changes are subtle. But in others, they are more obvious.

You see, the story is always developing, changing, evolving. That's what the post-publication readers never see. They don't see what went into a book. The pre-production reader, in contrast, gets a glimpse into the writer's mind as he is writing.

This past Sunday was a perfect autumn day in Chicago, clear and crisp, blustery winds blowing fallen leaves. The football Bears, clad in bright orange jerseys, turned Soldier Field into a pre-Halloween Monsters of the Midway party. It was the stuff of fiction.

And in a backyard in a southwest suburb of Chicago, the pages of the first eight chapters of my novel-in-progress took to the wind. Fluttering around with the leaves, as a father and his son laughingly chased after them. The pages were all recovered, only to discover that they were unnumbered and could not be pieced back together.

That's the story the reader told me, before he went on to tell me that he'd been disappointed with the initial version of chapter four that I had sent him. He found it to be clunky, overwrought, difficult to read – "cumbersome" was the word he used. Then he goes on to tell the writer how the latest revision of the chapter is, in his words, a "wonderful improvement." The potholes had been paved. The ride was a whole lot smoother. And the writer smiles.

The reader's story of my story being carried away in a gust of wind could serve as a metaphor for my writing. I struggle to maintain control of it. Oftentimes, it seems to get away from me and I find myself chasing after it. When I retrieve it, I try to piece it back together in a way that better reflects what had been in my mind all along. Sometimes, I succeed. Other times, I don't. When I don't, well that's what revisions and pre-production readers are for.

The way to better writing? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

The 1998 movie "Sliding Doors" opens with a young Londoner, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), running to catch the Tube. The doors are closing.

Anyone who commutes by train is familiar with this scene and knows the drill. You either catch it or just miss it – and dejectedly wait for the next train.

In "Sliding Doors," however, it's not an either/or event. Helen splits into two people, one of whom makes the train and catches her boyfriend in bed with the other woman. The other misses the train and returns home just after the mistress has left.

The scene serves as a device to illustrate how situations – even everyday ones, like catching a train – can alter one's reality. Helen's life could follow completely different tracks, depending on whether or not she catches that train.

As a fiction writer, I see those sliding doors, in a metaphorical sense, all the time.

There are scenes in my life that play in my head over and over again, like a broken record. They are the ones that have had a profound and lasting impact on me. Oftentimes, I wonder how these scenes might have turned out differently – how I might have turned out differently – if only I had kissed the girl, caught the baseball, or taken a right turn instead of a left.

Personal experiences inspired me to write my debut novel, "Lost in the Ivy," and the novel that I am currently working on. In "Lost in the Ivy," the inspiration was the death of a neighbor. A thought occurred: What if the shy, unassuming neighbor became a suspect in his murder. The inspiration for my current work was a teen car accident. Again, a thought occurred: What if that accident provoked an act of revenge or retaliation.

The seeds are planted, and from those real-life experiences, a fiction grows. The reality that I'd known is turned upside down. Sometimes it gets twisted. Other times it gets stomped on and beaten to a bloody pulp. And when it's finally cleared from my head, I have a novel.

In "It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey receives the gift of seeing how the world would be without him in it. Fiction writing has similarly given me the gift of being able to see how my own life might be different, if altered ever so slightly.

The original title to this blog entry was, How I Learned to Find Peace, Contentment and even Happiness in Failing to Achieve My Writing Goals. But that got a bit unwieldy, as my blogging program politely edified me on.

But I digress. This all starts on Saturday, when I hosted D-Day, an event sponsored by my friends at the Chicago Writers Association. Two months ago, I wrote about this event on this blog. I explained that the "D" is for deadline, and the concept behind the event is that you, as a writer, set a goal to complete a writing project that you've either been thinking about doing or have already started but have stalled out on and need a jump start.

Close to thirty writers signed up to participate in D-Day. Less than one-third showed up for the D-Day celebration.

There are a lot of ways that you could look at that and you could come up with any number of explanations for the winnowing of writers. Here are just a sampling of hypothetical reasons:

• The writer never intended on coming.
• The writer intended to come but something else came up.
• The writer lost enthusiasm somewhere along the way.
• The writer was drunk and doesn't remember signing up.
• The writer didn't meet the goal. 

The last one is the one that's probably most plausible. Truth be told, I didn't meet my stated goal, which was to write 20,000 words. But I was hosting the party, so I couldn't beg out.

Even though I didn't reach my goal, in many ways I feel like I did. How could that be, you ask?

Well, for far too long I'd been telling people that I was working on my next novel when, in fact, I wasn't. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of would-be novelists that do this all the time. What it means is that they're thinking about writing but not really writing. They call this "conceptualizing" but it really just means they they're stuck in a mud bog, spinning their wheels. As a writer, this is an awfully easy trap to fall into.  

Sometimes, as a writer, you just need a good kick in the ass. That's what D-Day turned out to be for me. Over the course of two months, my manuscript grew from 3,000 words to 15,000 words. The average length of a novel is 60,000 to 100,000 words. Obviously, I've still got a long way to go. But I'm a lot closer to getting there than I was two months ago. If I keep at the pace of 6,000 words per month, I'll be able to write "The End" before this time next year. And that's a goal worth striving for.

During the D-Day event, I read the first chapter of my novel-in-progress. I note this primarily because that first chapter didn't exist two weeks ago. Back in April I offered readers of this blog an insiders peek at my current project. To my surprise, a few even took me up on the offer and I sent them a sample of it. I feel a bit guilty about that now, since the story now has a completely different opening to it. So I'm renewing the offer. If you'd like to read the new Chapter 1, contact me by email and I'll get it out to you by special e-delivery. Of course I make no promises that a year from now, when I've finished writing this darned thing, Chapter 1 won't look completely different than it does now. That, of course, is the nature of writing. It's an evolutionary process that, hopefully, becomes better over time.

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As a reminder, this Wednesday, August 16, I'll be on a panel at the Schaumburg Township District Library, 2nd Floor, Adult Classroom, 130 South Roselle Road, Schaumburg, Ill., from 7-9 P.M. Joining me on the panel discussion, Is It REALLY Happiliy Ever After, will be other local first-time authors Simone Elkeles, Jimmy Jack, Gail Lukasik, Ann Macela, Morgan Mandel, Joseph Rizio, and Marcus Sakey. We'll be discussing what it's like to sell and market that first book.

So, is it REALLY happily ever after? Oh, I can't ruin the ending for you. You'll have to come by the Schaumburg Library and find out for yourself. Oh, if you can't stop by, please tell your friends.