Failure

by Trish on December 6, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution

Source: weheartit.com via Trish on Pinterest

 

Loving Subvert magazine‘s posts these days, especially this one by Seth Godin (my hero above heroes!), because he tells us how he failed.

He sold his first adult book packaging deal for 5,000 dollars to Warner and then over the course of the next year, received 900 rejection letters.

As a new agent and veteran author, this still blows my mind. These are not numbers that are taken lightly. These are not numbers that anyone can shake off and say, “ah well, try again tomorrow.” These are damning numbers. This is when the inner self begins to doubt they are in the right industry.

My respect for Seth just went sky high (well, it already was sky high; now it’s even higher).

I know rejection is the name of this game of entrepreneurship/marketing/business/life. I just can’t let it lick me.

Even if I get 901.

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Willpower

by realbrilliant on November 29, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution

(via Flickr; Ruby Beach at sunset)

I’ve been ruminating a lot lately on my willpower. How to get myself to do what I should and not what I shouldn’t (I am NOT talking about this in a spiritual sense; I’m talking daily todo lists, telling myself no when I want the second handful of chocolate cookies, going to the gym, replying to emails, etc.)

I found a book (I always find a book) that was reviewed nicely in Elle magazine by journalist Rachael Combe. Two books—Willpower, by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and NYT reporter John Tierney and The Willpower Instinct, by Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal. I am reading Baumeister and Tierney’s book first and finding some helpful insights.

Tests prove that a rush of decision making early in the day renders us less able to make similar decisions later in the day. This is true for women especially—we make 80% of the buying, scheduling, lifestyle decisions in our households. We are where the buck stops, usually. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think it means that women (ME) need to be more careful with how they mete out their decision-making skills (their willpower).

I tend to batch like tasks, which according to male-based thinking, helps me to power through quickly. Emails, reading, writing, chores, errands.

But lately, I’ve been realizing that my brain doesn’t stay focused for a long period of time to batch as many tasks as I’d like. And Baumeister and Tierney reason that it is because a women’s todo list often reads “grocery shopping” but our unwritten list includes “menu planning” and “compiling a grocery list,” thus, when we put “grocery shopping” down, our willpower is accessed more than it looks like (it should be easy to just grocery shop, right?) and our brains are wiped out before we even get to the grocery store.

Baumeister and Tierney recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done for this phenomenon, because Allen recommends breaking a task apart into pieces. So “grocery shopping” wouldn’t be on our “next actions” list; “menu planning” would be, or for me, writing down on a piece of paper the meals I need to buy for and planning out what I want to eat at those meals. That should be on my todo list and then when that is done, I would write a grocery list (and ask hubby what else I should get, because he sometimes doesn’t put what he needs on the grocery list; guys are busy too!), and then schedule a time to get to the grocery store.

In a perfect world. Usually, we’re out of eggs, so I just do all of this super fast and dash to the store and then forget half the things we were out of. ;) Ha!

I highly recommend Baumeister and Tierney’s Willpower. I have enough new ideas just from that one that I may not need McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct.

Anyone else got notes on that one?

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Truth-Telling In Fiction

by Trish on November 1, 2011

in Learning the Craft,Write Now

(via Flickr)

I’m going to wax poetic on the use of idea and morality in a novel’s theme.

Janet Burroway is one of the most esteemed teachers of fiction (and a published author) and her book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is well-thumbed in this writer’s house. I recently reread it and was struck by several sections, including the section on theme.

Burroway writes:

Literature is stuck with ideas in a way other arts are not. Music, paradoxically the most abstract of the arts, creates a logical structure that need make no reference to the world outside itself. It may express a mood, but it need not draw any conclusions. Shapes in painting and sculpture may suggest forms in the physical world, but they need not represent the world, and they need not contain a message. But words mean, and the grammatical structure of even the simplest sentence contains a concept.

Flannery O’Connor writes:

Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

John Ciardi writes:

Literature is never only about ideas, but about the experience of ideas.

T. S. Eliot writes:

We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express precise thought.

Burroway again:

There is a curious prejudice built into our language that makes us speak of telling the truth but telling a lie. No one supposes that all conceivable falsehood can be wrapped up in a single statement called “the lie”; lies are manifold, varied, and specific. But truth is supposed to be absolute: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is, of course, impossible nonsense, and telling a lie is a truer phrase than telling the truth. Fiction does not have to tell the truth, but a truth.

Anton Chekov writes:

. . . the writer of fiction should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, and so forth. What is obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly.

Burroway finishes:

A story, then, speculates on a possible truth. It is not an answer or a law but a supposition, an exploration. Every story reaches in its climax and resolution an interim solution to a specifically realized dilemma. But it offers no ultimate solution.

And this:

Fine writing expands our scope by continually presenting a new way of seeing, a further possibility of emotional identification; it flatly refuses to become a law. I am not a Roman Catholic like Gerard Manley Hopkins and cannot be persuaded by his poetry to become one; but in a moment near despair I can drive along an Illinois street in a Chevrolet station wagon and take strength from the lines of a Jesuit in the Welsh wasteland. I am not a communist as Bertolt Brecht was and cannot be convinced by his plays to become one; but I can see the hauteur of wealth displayed on the Gulf of Mexico and recognize, from a parable of the German Marxist, the difference between a possession and a belonging.

Excellent words. I am pondering them as I begin this month of Nanowrimo.

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Born This Way

by Trish on October 25, 2011

in Learning the Craft

Source: None via Trish on Pinterest

As I send off my synopsis and five pages to Arthur Levine (of Arthur Levine Books at Scholastic) tonight, I’m reminded about just how codependent I am. I need this editor to like my pages or I think I will just die.

Honestly, I conform to peer pressure in publishing as a kids book writer like I’m an amateur, as if I’m a baby duck learning to stay afloat. It’s the only thing I really conform to in my professional work. I’m completely differentiated in so many other ways: I don’t care at all if my editorial clients like or hate my work or like or hate me, I’ve run out of patience with authors who revise so fast they don’t really revise at all, and as an author of blog posts all over the web these days (at some prestigious blogs, mind you), I can go toe-to-toe with any commenting readers: they are mad, insane, bat shit crazy, venomous, you name it, I’ve seen it.

Truthfully, this codependent slice of my psyche bothers me.

Perhaps it’s because it really IS me. This manuscript I’m working on represents the purest sense of self that I own. I can shield myself behind a mask as an editor or critique partner or agent and I can hide underneath a thick skin of marketing terminology when I write for the top marketing blogs, but when I write a book for kids, I take all those masks off, peel back my protective scabs, and am just skin, open to any hits that are still to come. I am preparing to be wounded.

It hurts too. Those wounds. It is really hard to hear that you’ve once again started your book in the wrong place, your voice tells more than it shows, and your world-building skills are lacking in that generic, can’t-tell-much-of-a-difference-between-this-world-and-any-other way.

But there are four stages of learning: from amateur to professional:

  1. Unconscious Incompetence
  2. Conscious Incompetence
  3. Conscious Competence
  4. Unconscious Competence

At least I am consciously incompetent, which is better than the first step. And I always feel this way when I am learning something new that I’ve never done before. Don’t you?

It’s really hard to feel like you’ve got any talent, natural or otherwise, when the only thing you can see is what you’re doing wrong.

But I’m not going to give up. This is just the beginning.

 

 

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Still Musing About New York

by Trish on October 19, 2011

in brilliant,Travel Tales

Source: life-love-laughter.tumblr.com via Trish on Pinterest

 

 

I can’t stop thinking about my trip last week. It was pretty awesome. Yes, I used that word way too much while I was there (sorry, J!) and I’m still using it to describe everything I experienced.I arrived on Saturday from rainy and dreary Seattle (complete with a Venti Starbucks soy hot chocolate and PEOPLE magazine) into 80 degrees in Manhattan. Shedding my layers, I caught a taxi and called my fellow agent, J, to find out where to meet. She was wandering with her family around Madison Avenue, so I sweet-talked the cab driver into pulling up to a very busy corner (Madison and 59th Street to be precise) so that J could hand over keys to our walk-up apartment. For some reason the super couldn’t meet us in the afternoon, so J took the job of getting to the city early and grabbing our keys. And then my taxi dropped me off at our place just off Central Park West, within view of Central Park North. Fabulous! The soaring brownstone was built in 1881 and was three floors, five bedrooms, 12-foot ceilings, walk-in closets, and a gigantic eat-in kitchen with marble counters and stainless steel appliances and a private back garden and private roof terrace. This place was bigger than my suburban house!

I hauled my luggage up one flight of stairs and then gave up and collapsed into a chair to wait for my mentor and boss, E, to arrive from another airport. She and I walked through and oohed and aahed, claimed bedrooms, dumped stuff and then headed out to find dinner and wine.

We jumped on the subway and I got to eat at the Shake Shack, which is famous because Erika eats there every time she’s in NYC, and it is as good as it looks. Yum. And then we found a wine shop and grabbed a couple of bottles of sweet red and then got a text from J and her family that THEY had also grabbed wine and were at the apartment waiting for us to come back.

So we jumped back on the subway, walked a couple of blocks, and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and laughing and having a very good sweet red (Luigi is the brand; delish!). We crashed into bed the next day with no plans until late morning.

Sunday, I woke up with blisters. My feet swelled on the plane (I wore tall boots! Shoot!) and so I knew that I needed different shoes when I met up with my friend J (not my fellow agent J) for a tour of Central Park and the Met. I found a nearby shoe store that sold Birkenstocks and after a leisurely morning unpacking and relaxing, I took the subway to this store and walked out the door with a nice pair of sandal-looking Birks. My feet were so relieved. And then I grabbed lunch at a luncheonette chain right next door. Tuna fish sandwiches taste so good on Sunday mornings, I swear.

J met me at Columbus Circle (the southernwest corner of Central Park) and we walked all the way north to the northeast corner where I got to experience for the first time in my life—The Met. Awesome! The Egyptian exhibit brought me to tears. I have dreamed about seeing that temple for so long. I couldn’t believe it was real. I kept reaching out my hand to touch it and then the nice museum man would shake his head at me and I would draw my hand back. Ha! I saw Monets, Van Goghs, Matisse, and on and on and on. My refrain for that day: Awesome. Yep, J is so patient.

And after several hours wandering thru that gigantic museum, they were closing and I was late for a dinner. J put me on a cross-town bus (yikes!) and I caught the subway and came home to find J (my fellow agent) resting and reading. We put on our walking shoes and hoofed it up to V&T Pizzeria and Restaurant and met up with EMLA clients. E joined us from later after her meetings ended and we all took pictures and laughed and had a great time. I love my agency! Fantastic people!

And then we all collapsed into bed because the first of five days of meetings loomed on the morrow. I lucked out, however. I didn’t have to be at the breakfast meetings for three of the five days. And so I got a later start than my colleagues and thus, had to figure out where I was going to meet them the night before. I only had a bad morning on Thursday, when nothing went right, but I wasn’t late, even after getting on the wrong subway line!

So I got to wander through Union Square, buy fresh applies, drink more Starbucks soy hot chocolate, and then join in on the first of the day meetings. We met dozens of editors—from Disney, to Little Brown, to Scholastic, to Sourcebooks, to Simon & Schuster, to Random House, to Sterling, to Egmont, to Penguin, to HarperCollins—from imprint to imprint to imprint. It was awesome. Yep, there I go again.

After 16 years in this business, this was my first trip to New York City to an actual publishing house. I’ve been in publishing houses before, but this was New York City—publishing central! It was like walking into a house I’ve always lived in, walking into a group of friends that I’ve always known (when really I didn’t), walking into a world that I’m so used to, there wasn’t even a flicker of anything unusual. Of course I was nervous! Who wouldn’t be? I ate lunch with the Harry Potter editor, for pete’s sake! But it was so familiar and like a favorite pair of shoes to slip into every time. It was awesome! ;)

And after five days, it was done. I called for a town car, got up in the middle of the night to catch my early flight, bought the new PEOPLE magazine and another Starbucks soy hot chocolate and headed for home. And then freaked myself out by reading a PEOPLE magazine recommended book that was about a plane crash and a spooky door in someone’s basement. Not a great plane read!

And I’m home and still thinking about it all, still savoring it, still excited, ready to go. I’m looking to sign my first clients in the next few weeks as an agent-in-training. It’s an exciting time.

Yeah, it’s awesome!

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Creativity for Entrepreneurs

by Trish on October 18, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution,overcoming resistance

(via Flickr)

I just spent a week in the artistic creativity mecca of New York City. It is also a mecca for entrepreneurs.

I don’t think you have to only have artistic creativity to be creative; if you’re an entrepreneur, you have another kind of creativity that sometimes pulses your heart to higher levels of high-level production. Ever had to juggle cash flow and projects at the same time? That is another kind of creativity that’s more practical.

Although people forget that exercising those creative muscles is key to keeping up with both artistic and practical creativity in our daily lives.

How do I mean?

When beginning a painting, artists often have the edges of that painting within which to create. When beginning a novel, an author must remember key pieces of a story’s structure and know them so well that he/she can bend them to his/her use.

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about slow cash flow and lack of sales in several small businesses in this area. And I’ve pondered greatly how to jumpstart that creative force that always leads to breakthroughs.

1. Face the reality. Whenever I am avoiding looking at something, I should probably look at it. Lack of cash flow, lack of organization with too many projects, lack of time management, whatever.

2. Brainstorm several things you could do immediately to help the situation. Then brainstorm the most unconventional approaches that you’ve always considered, but never entirely wanted to do. To clarify: if you’re facing a time management problem, you could keep track of your time for a week and see if there’s anything that could be improved, if you’re facing a cash flow crisis, can you remove any outgoing payments or delay them?

3. Remember that you’ll be clumsy with this at first. A lot of practical creativity is common sense. But it requires the ability to see reality; you have to face the truth. In artistic creativity, this means an author must face the truth that he/she may not be the best at characterization when writing her newest novel, and he/she has to face that realization that he/she will need multiple revisions in that one area of the story.

It’s hard work, facing reality. It’s hard work to get past the denial and do the work. I know. I live it every day. Next time, we’ll talk about some great resources for doing the work and facing that reality.

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First Big Trip to New York

by Trish on October 12, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution,Reframe Your Possibilities,Travel Tales

(via Flickr)

I’m in New York City now, taking my first editor meetings as a brand new agent just building her list. Very exciting! We’re staying in an 1881 brownstone walk-up just off Central Park West, which means we have floors 2-4. This place is huge. Not a typical New York apartment. More like what I’ve always seen in the movies! We have a marble counter kitchen and a backyard! Plus a rooftop terrace, so we’re feeling kinda spoiled.

Truth is, after our days full of meetings, we’re very tired and mostly want to put our feet up and unwind.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with creativity, well, I’m in creativity heaven. I sit in small conference rooms stacked to the ceilings with bookshelves loaded with books/series like Magic Treehouse, If You Give . . ., Clementine, Toot & Puddle, Ivy & Bean, and authors like Shel Silverstein, Mo Willems, Terry Pratchett, Deborah Underwood, Sarah Beth Pfeffer, Sarah Dessen, and on and on and on.

Today, though is a big day. We’re headed to the land of Harry Potter! Scholastic.

I have been roaming the streets on my lunch breaks and just grinning from ear to ear. This is what I was born to do. And I feel so lucky to be here. My notebook is filled with my notes on this imprint and that editor who likes this. It’s awesome!

But there’s something else very apparent this week. I am so comfortable, not even nervous. I’m so ME. There’s no pressure to be 100% percent on or talking a mile a minute. I’m just listening and I’m just doing my thing.

I am beginning to think this is when MY creativity begins to spike up really high. When I can relax and just let it flow. Just something I’ve been thinking about.

Gotta run!

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Learning About Uncertainty

by Trish on October 4, 2011

in brilliant,Create Now! Revolution,real

Source: 3lostkids.tumblr.com via Trish on Pinterest

This past week, a friend of mine, Jonathan Field’s, new book launched, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I saw an advanced reading copy weeks ago and yet this past week, with all the blog tour appearances and all the great review coverage about uncertainty, was when I most needed to think about the difficult fact of being uncertain.

I’m very uncertain about the immediate future. I’m in a place I’ve never been before. It both scares me and exhilarates me. I despise stress and crave it. I know in the past I’ve used my work stress as a way to stay in denial about things in my life, and yet, for the first time in a long time, I’m stressing about something that is NOT being used as a way to stay in denial. I’m facing the truth and feeling the pressure. I’m very uncertain.

I face new adventures (I’m no longer just an intern, but an agent-in-training, on the cusp of finding my first author clients) and I’m traveling next week in that role, with editor lunch meetings on my own (eek!) and with my agency bosses. This is so new, and yet, I was so born for this.

But it is still very uncertain. I don’t know how to walk this road. I think everything that I’ve been taught about “how” to do things right goes out the window. Most of this job is up to me and how I “feel” about things. If I love a book, that’s the point. It’s a return to my right brain, to the younger version of myself, to that instant emotion that springs up no matter how “left brain” I get about my life. (And as an editor, I’m very left brained.)

My right brain has always been neutral about uncertainty. My right brain looked uncertainty in the face and helped me launch my small business. My right brain stares down uncertainty and helps me accomplish my biggest goals. I think my right brain habit bodes well for me.

I will not give up on something that I truly believe in. No matter how much pressure comes to bear, I will not let go. Call it tenacity, stubbornness, hard-headed, I don’t care. In the face of uncertainty, you’ve got to just keep at it. Uncertainty is not going away anytime soon for me, but by golly, my right brain is helping me this week. It’s shaking its fist at the unknown this week. It’s not mad, it’s just all feist and feeling.

It’s said that when you always having to be certain about everything, you’re dead. I say let’s be certain about one thing and then let the rest of it go.

What say you?

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It’s Fall! Time for Practical Creativity

by Trish on September 27, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution

Source: andrewle.com via Trish on Pinterest

I have been trying to remember back to what my life used to look like.

This has been the summer for massive change. First of all, I am officially out of summer mode (well, what we saw of summer at least) and back from our family reunion in Hawaii (which helps me feel like I had a full summer!) and the crisp fall weather always brings me back to memories of the best this season has to offer. It’s time for bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils and books and curling up inside and the dappled sunshine and the falling leaves.

This year is different than those in the past. There’s something fresh in the air (duh, rain) and yet, it’s more than that. Something’s new. I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until yesterday as I worked on a project I’ve got cooking with my business coach. We’re thinking through creativity and how it applies in real life. Most people think that the word “creativity” means you paint or draw or build something. But creativity is also a part of everything else in life.

My creative path this year has been a lot of rearranging and shifting of major pieces: time, energy, business focus, and confidence as I shift from full-time editor and part-time marketing consultant to full-time agent and part-time writer. I’ve learned that I apply creativity whenever I do anything (without a paper and pen and without drawing anything). There’s a term for it: practical creativity.

It’s how I’ve had to shift my thinking. For example, I’ve read as an editor for my job for over 16 years. This year I’ve had to learn to read as an agent (I’m currently reading manuscripts to build my client list). It’s a bit harder than I thought, I’ll confess. An editor read is more detail-oriented and since I’m not the editor for this book, only the agent, I have to leave room for a later editor to come along and fall in love and see the potential and be able to put their editorial mark on the book. See what I mean? Very different.

That’s been an interesting path this year. Over the summer, I made the transition. (Thus, silence on this blog because I was deep in the slog of it all.)

So the above quote really resonates with me. My reading is limited to my new role and that requires practical creativity. Practical because now I can read a manuscript rapidly and walk away from it and trust that my instinct will flag it if I need to go back and take another look or if the manuscript needs a revision or if I need to pass the manuscript to another agent in my agency (this happens a lot in a lit agency; most of the manuscripts are coming my way tho).

What way as practical creativity been helping you these past few months? I’ll be highlighting some practical creativity stories over on the Facebook page, so hit the “Like” button to get those status updates on your FB feeds. And if you want to, sign up for the eZine, which will be featuring a lot more practical creativity ideas in the next few months!

Talk to you next week!

 

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A Bouquet of Freshly Sharpened Pencils

by Trish on June 18, 2011

in Create Now! Revolution,Creativity Workshop

 

I got a sign (yep, the one above)

Things are new again around here (I think you’ve probably already noticed)!

I got SUPER-DUPER supernova inspired at World Domination Summit two weeks ago. Most times there really is NOT a reason to launch a revolution. And then sometimes, there definitely IS!

Perhaps I like fresh stuff like I enjoy freshly sharpened pencils.

But the Create Now! Revolution is about more than just launching new stuff. It’s about keeping up the creativity even when we get tired or bored or jaded or burnt out.

I say we need more reasons to KEEP doing creative things, not less. I say we need more people encouraging us to be CREATIVE than telling us to get serious. I say we need more PERMISSION given. We need more comments supporting us and telling us,”You can DO it” or “YOUR call” when we’re not sure what to do next.

But that is hard to find, isn’t it?

I agree. But it’s easier when we SEE other people actually doing it. It’s easier when we KNOW that creativity is completely within reach.The Create Now! Revolution is where we all will be able to see and know a lot.

What I need from you

Read and respond. If you have thoughts or insights or are inspired, please let us know.

Sign up for the eZine. The eZine (sign up in the sidebar) will have even more creative insights and revolutionary material. We can only give out some of this extreme revolutionary stuff to folks who have given us permission to send it. So, if you want it, go get it!

Share us with your creative-minded friends. Pass us along, shout our praises on a banner, give us awards, whatever! We want this revolution to spread far and wide!

Most important, be creative! The point of this revolution is MORE creativity. So, if you’re finding that your creativity is squeezing out your ability to read the blog, then our job here is done.

We officially launch July 1, 2011. Don’t think you can wait that long? We’re stocking up on Create Now! revolutionary material over on our Facebook page. Check us out and “like” us if you want to! And we’re on Twitter, too (some revolutionary stuff may pop up there as well!). Follow along, because here we go!

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