by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1
Are You Ready to be Published?
A few days ago I thought about the first few writing conferences I attended, and how I hung out at the appointment desk, trying to get as many appointments with editors and agents as I could. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty, and I’m sure I was probably annoying. Which is bad since my manuscript wasn’t even ready.
Oh, I had a great first chapter, and it should have been—I’d worked on it for ages. What I didn’t have was a great middle and only a fair-to-middling ending, not to mention there was a lot of telling rather than showing. Some of the comments I received when my manuscript was returned (in those days you sent an SASE with the manuscript so they could mail it back to you): clichéd, nothing new here, learn how to show, don’t open with a dream…
*Sigh* I don’t know why I expected my novel to be accepted when I hadn’t learned the craft of writing. But I’m not alone. In the years since I’ve heard many people say: I could write if I wanted to. You just sit down and tell a story.
Yeah, something like that. Now, I’m sure there may be someone out there with natural talent and the words just flow from their brain to the page perfectly. But for everyone else, expect to invest time and money in your writing. Just like a second year college student shouldn’t expect to perform heart surgery, writers shouldn’t think they could crank out a book without paying their dues.
What are those dues? Literary author and screenwriter Hal Phillips once told me that it took a million words to make a writer. I tend to agree, but not just any words. That was my mistake. I wrote that million words, but I never got feedback. Therefore I had no idea that I couldn’t jump from one person’s thought to another in the same scene; or that the first descriptive word that came to my mind was probably a cliché; or not to start a story with the weather…it was a dark and stormy night…I was making the same mistakes over and over.
It wasn’t until I sent my work for a critique and attended a few good teaching conferences that I began to learn the craft of writing. I say began, because ten years and ten books later (all since 2014), I’m still learning. Learning the craft of writing is hard work. But we must do it so that when God opens a door to the publishing world, we’re ready to walk through it.
I’m not sure where you are in the writing journey, but if you’re a newbie and you can’t afford to attend a conference, get a few good craft writing books. I hate to mention any, because I’m sure to forget some, but here goes anyway: Any book by Susan May Warren or James Scott Bell I particularly like Susie’s How to Write a Brilliant Novel and James’s Super Structure), Randy Ingermanson’s How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Diane Dixon’s GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict…
There are more out there, but this is enough to get you started, and if you’ve been writing a while, these are good ones to brush up on. Writers out there – what craft books do you use?
It’s Elvis Week in Memphis, and homicide Detective Rachel Sloan isn’t sure her day could get any stranger when aging Elvis impersonator Vic Vegas asks to see her. But when he produces a photo of her murdered mother with four Elvis impersonators–one of whom had also been murdered soon after the photo was taken–she’s forced to reevaluate. Is there some connection between the two unsolved cases? And could the recent break-in at Vic’s home be tied to his obsession with finding his friend’s killer?
When yet another person in the photo is murdered, Rachel suddenly has her hands full investigating three cases. Lieutenant Boone Callahan offers his help, but their checkered romantic past threatens to get in the way. Can they solve the cases before the murderer makes Rachel victim number four?
Patricia Bradley lives in North Mississippi with her rescue kitty Suzy and loves to write suspense with a twist of romance. Her books include the Logan Point series and two Harlequin Heartwarming romances. Justice Delayed, a Memphis Cold Case Novel, is the first book in her next series and it releases January 31, 2017. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.