Like the nerd I am, today I read through my latest issue of The Costco Connection. On page 11, I found this quote from Brian Tracy, the chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a training and personal development company: “All successful people do four things. They set clear goals, take risks beyond their comfort zones and accept feedback and self-correct. Above all, successful people never give up.”

How about if I unpack this a bit for all you writerly types?

Set clear goals. What are your goals this year? What would you like to see happen in your writing career in the next five years? Ten? Over a lifetime? If you haven’t yet written them down, stop reading this post and do it. Of course, that means going to Jesus and asking Him to enlighten you to the best goals. Of course it means that He will supply the strength to accomplish those goals. I’ll share one of my five-year goals. Learn to write a screenplay. Someday I want to see Watching the Tree Limbs on the silver screen.

Take risks beyond your comfort zones. I think all writers intrinsically know this. We reach beyond our comfort zones every time we query or send a proposal or write in a genre we’re not familiar with. I certainly felt out of my element writing a memoir in the present tense, but I’m so glad I did it. I’m a better writer because of the risk. But let’s take it further to marketing. For some of you it means you’ll need to get past timidity to do a radio interview or book signing. It may mean you have to practice speaking in case you land on TV someday.

Accept feedback and self-correct. Oh how true this is! All along the writing, marketing, and publicity journey, we receive tons of feedback. It’s not easy on our egos to take it all, but it’s necessary. Self-correcting means we heed the well-seasoned advice of professionals and make alterations to our writing, speaking, and marketing campaigns. Every day we have the potential to get helpful feedback. And every day we have a choice to become bitter about it or better. Which will you choose?

Never give up. I truly believe that the difference between those who get published and those who don’t is the never-giving-up factor. Keep at it. Slam into those brick walls if you must; then bandage your head, wait until your vision stops blurring, and keep writing. Write the next word, then the next. Write, write, write. Trust, trust, trust.

And through it all, write for God’s fame, not yours.

 

Mary E. DeMuth helps people to turn their trials into triumphs. She mentors new authors through the publishing process and has written two tutorials on book proposals (one for fiction and another for nonfiction). An expert in Pioneer Parenting, Mary enables Christian parents to navigate our changing culture when their families were not good faith examples to follow. Her parenting books include Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture (Harvest House, 2007), Building the Christian Family You Never Had (WaterBrook, 2006), and Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God (Harvest House, 2005). Mary also inspires people to face their trials through her real-to-life novels, including Watching the Tree Limbs (nominated for a Christy Award) and Wishing on Dandelions (NavPress, 2006). A pioneer parent herself, Mary and her husband, Patrick, reside in Texas with their three children. They recently returned from breaking new spiritual ground in Southern France, where they planted a church.

Seasoned and nubile writers scribble notes while the lecturer shares her publishing expertise. Both a magazine editor and a creative writing professor, Sandra Glahn teaches the workshop “The View from the Editor’s Desk” where she extols the benefits of beefy verbs and pines for the demise of adverb overuse. She finishes her time with the writer’s group by asking, “Any questions?”

A woman in the back raises her hand. “You mean I need to go through all my past manuscripts and make the changes you suggested in your lecture?”

Sandra nods. “Yes, if you want to be published.”

“That’s too much work,” she says. She never returns to the group.

Writing isn’t for wimps. It’s an arduous adventure where writers scale an ever-increasing learning curve. For beginning to advanced writers, the question remains: What do you do with the new knowledge you’ve gained from that writing seminar, book, or lecture? Stop learning? Embrace your inner wimp? Push through and improve the craft? The following are four ways writers can react to learning new techniques and skills. Two ways coddle the inner wimp; two others kill him.

1. Embrace your inner wimp by giving up. Those editors and educators don’t know a thing about your genius! They can’t recognize stellar, winsome prose, or seize upon your raw talent. What do they know?

George starts writing, believing his second grade teacher to be a prophet. “You’re a terrific writer,” she penned across his summer vacation story in happy red ink. He’s coddled that affirmation all these years — something that’s hardened him to actual feedback. After several attempts to convince fellow writers of his abilities, he gives up. George stores his spy thrillers in a box in the garage and spends his days looking up his second grade teacher on Facebook. He’s embraced the wimp, lazing around the Internet, murmuring about what could have been.

 

2. Feed your inner wimp by submitting subpar writing. I call this the delusional, yet hopeful writer — one who believes she’ll break through by submitting, submitting, submitting.

Edna comes to the writer’s group month after month, bringing the same story in increments of five pages. Although the group has kindly reminded her to flee passive voice and curtail her purple prose, she continues to stubbornly adhere to her ways. She submits faithfully to contests and the occasional publisher who takes unsolicited manuscripts, and she garners rejections aplenty. She never learns; it seems beneath her. She will never be published, but she is sure she will be. She feeds the wimp, preferring lazy writing with a kick of tenacity to genuine improvement.

 

3. Kill the wimp inside by grunting through your old drafts. If you’re wondering what the publishing process is like, take an old piece of yours and rip it to shreds in light of what you know now. When you sell your first book, you’ll experience the same kind of work — agonizing over run-on sentences, discovering, then slaying, your pet words and phrases, killing clichés, cutting paragraphs and chapters that don’t propel the reader forward. It’s never too late to go back and fix things, but be warned: sometimes it’s better to let those stories and articles go. You could mire yourself in your inadequate past.

I’ve taken unsold articles, revamped them, and sold them. I’ve tried to resurrect my first (yet unpublished) novel several times, resuscitating my flabby descriptions and plot flaws, only to tangle myself inside the story, weary and unmotivated. I’ve killed the wimp by grunting through, sometimes with success, sometimes without.

 

4. Kill the wimp inside by forging ahead. When you’ve discovered your penchant for adjectives, instead of slaying them in the cobwebs of past documents, move boldly forward, writing clean, powerful sentences chock full of strong nouns and verbs. Sometimes it’s right to turn the page of your past body of work in order to construct better pages today. Give yourself permission to say goodbye, so you can say hello to great writing in the present.

Mayla wrote four good novels. During the process, she read writing books, attended conferences, and welcomed hard critique. She views her books as stepping-stones to publication, but she won’t resurrect them. Instead, she pens a new novel, armed with new expertise. The result? She’s a finalist in a prestigious first-novel contest, and an agent has requested the full manuscript. She has successfully killed the wimp by moving forward.

 

Place yourself in a writer’s group. Hear a lecture about strengthening your prose and take notes. Raise your hand. Instead of lamenting all the changes you’ll have to make now that you know better, simply tell the lecturer thank you, and vow to kill the wimp lurking inside.

 

Mary E. DeMuth helps people to turn their trials into triumphs. She mentors new authors through the publishing process and has written two tutorials on book proposals (one for fiction and another for nonfiction). An expert in Pioneer Parenting, Mary enables Christian parents to navigate our changing culture when their families were not good faith examples to follow. Her parenting books include Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture (Harvest House, 2007), Building the Christian Family You Never Had (WaterBrook, 2006), and Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God (Harvest House, 2005). Mary also inspires people to face their trials through her real-to-life novels, including Watching the Tree Limbs (nominated for a Christy Award) and Wishing on Dandelions (NavPress, 2006). A pioneer parent herself, Mary and her husband, Patrick, reside in Texas with their three children. They recently returned from breaking new spiritual ground in Southern France, where they planted a church.

May this piece be a blessing to those of you who want to deepen your stories.

While I prefer to have a life like a maple tree in spring — full of promise, growth, and branches that reach for the sky in greening prayer — I realize I’m a better writer when I’m an autumn oak, bereft of leaves, dried out, and my arms brittle from the reach. On my run today, I see why. When trees begin their shedding, and when the promise of life floats away on a crisp breeze, you see more of the sky. More sun, more blue, and more clouds peek-a-boo through barren branches. What is hidden is revealed. I’d never see the curiosity of bird nests had the camouflaging leaves not fallen.

That’s the secret of great writing.

Naked lives letting the sun poke through, revealing snatches of life not otherwise seen.

That all sounds breathtakingly ethereal, but really, it’s pragmatism. Because I’m at my best, literarily speaking, when I embrace my frailty. And I think you are, too. The best novels out there are populated with characters who fail, struggle, and reach for heights but miss the mark, lose loved ones and rail at the heavens and at the unfairness of it all. How can we possibly give our characters such beautiful angst if we’re not willing to experience life ourselves?

The best novel chapter I wrote came after an excruciating conversation with a loved one. Such hollowness poured over me as I asked the question, “What if my character had these same feelings? But toward another person?” With all the raw energy of my fragile emotions, I scratched out that scene, let it sit, then sent it to my good friend who’s an excellent novelist. She deemed it my best writing. I wept. I thanked God for the scarred circumstance that brought it about, how He made beauty from the ashes of a painful conversation.

In life we long to have things tied up neatly with a velvet bow; but life, in all its wild tumbles, wrestles the bow away, flinging the box wide open. It should be that way with our stories too. I’m guilty of writing first drafts full of black and white characters and plots that tie up neatly and happily. I’m thankful for editors who point this out and make me go back, adding wayward flesh to my characters and twists of reality to my plot.

In that exercise, I only have to look at my own life to see that the most beautiful parts of my life were birthed in the cauldron of bitterness and unmet expectations — in the autumns and winters of my life. Why would I deprive my characters of that same experience by making everything springtime and summer? And why would I deprive my reader? They’ve experienced their own share of worry and heartache. They’re looking for storytellers who understand, who dare to tell their stories because that is what readers relate to.

It’s not easy to go there. It’s never easy. But how can you expect to mine the depths of human depravity and grace in your stories if you’re unwilling to mine them in yourself? Someday, if God opens the door, I’m going to teach novel writing. It will be unlike any other workshop I’ve attended. Of course I will delve into story structure and passivity and point of view, but before I begin any of that, I want to inspire writers to understand how we deepen our stories beyond mechanical constructs. I want writers to see that great stories grab you by the throat because of their terrible humanity, because readers feel the story is theirs somehow. And that can only happen when we’re willing to live in the pain and joy of our own stories. It’s my firm belief that great writing flows from the pen of self-aware writers.

Here’s your assignment. I give you permission right now to write something from a place of emptiness or angst or bitterness or bewilderment or nakedness. You know what I’m referring to. Take those emotions, feel them, pray about them, go to Jesus with them. Then, write like the wind. See your story not as a tree in cacophonic bloom, but as a shrub awaiting winter, leaves gone, glory faded. Let the sun glory through the spindly branches.

Sometimes I’m asked how I write deep, relate-able stories. It’s because I do what I assigned above. I recognize those autumn places, walk through them (not always graciously either), and translate those emotions into the landscape of my stories. This is something you can do. It’s something you must do. Embrace your frailty today, and venture forth. The world needs to hear your story.

 

Mary E. DeMuth helps people to turn their trials into triumphs. She mentors new authors through the publishing process and has written two tutorials on book proposals (one for fiction and another for nonfiction). An expert in Pioneer Parenting, Mary enables Christian parents to navigate our changing culture when their families were not good faith examples to follow. Her parenting books include Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture (Harvest House, 2007), Building the Christian Family You Never Had (WaterBrook, 2006), and Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God (Harvest House, 2005). Mary also inspires people to face their trials through her real-to-life novels, including Watching the Tree Limbs (nominated for a Christy Award) and Wishing on Dandelions (NavPress, 2006). A pioneer parent herself, Mary and her husband, Patrick, reside in Texas with their three children. They recently returned from breaking new spiritual ground in Southern France, where they planted a church.