Rachel Hauck

How To Manage Manuscript Feedback

Well, it’s contest time and with that, unpublished writers often get some sort of feedback.

Feedback we want. But often it’s harder to digest than we think.

So, what are you to do with input from readers, judges or critique partners?

Digest it.

Consider it.

Pray over it.

Reread it.

Chew up the meat and spit out the bones.

Not all feedback is good. You have to know that, right?

But how many of you immediately dismiss the good things said and focus on the negative things?

Yeah, I see those hands waving in cyberspace.

Writing For Him. No, Not Him As In The Hero But Him As In Jesus

… I mean writing for Him as in the Lord.

A month or so ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and felt the Lord saying, “Write for me.”

“Of course, always,” I said. “There’s never been a question.”

Then I kind of faced a crisis with writing a book that was hard, and finding myself under the gun.

The pressure mounted.

And when stress and pressure mount on me, I tend to get low and humble before the Lord.

I went back to the drawing board, why do I write? Why am I doing this?

Because to be honest, I wasn’t sure there would be a “next” book for me.

I mean, who needs stress and pressure that keeps you awake at night?

I determined one thing. No way out. No way around. I had to walk through it.

Psalm 23 “When I walk through a dark valley, I fear no evil. You are with me!”

Rachel Hauck

What To Do When A Book IS HARD To Write

I hear you. “Rachel, what do you mean? Every book is hard to write.”

True.

But some books are harder than others.

I ran into a paralyzing premise book in “Dining with Joy” when I kept asking, “What IS that book about?”

What is “Dining with Joy.”

I ran into this same road block with “How To Catch A Prince.”

Just how does one catch a prince?

I’ve never had a book elude me so much. Never have doubts been higher.

But at the end of the day, books are not rewritten, they are rewritten.

What doesn’t work initially can be tweaked and fixed.

So, don’t get in too much of a wad — like I have — over a book that is hard to write.

My husband says when he doesn’t understand things or people he puts an “X” over it.

“Treasure buried here.”

Rachel Hauck

Backstory, Flashback, Memory Moment: The Difference

In order to give our characters depth and widen our stories, we layer in backstory, flashback and memory moments.

Flashbacks and Backstory are familiar terms to most novelists.

Memory moments is my term to break out from backstory and flashback as ways to bring in “the past” of a character.

I also use the term Character History. But I’ve blogged about that already and it’s not exactly where I’m going with this post.

This post is the difference between backstory, flashback, and memory moment.

Backstory is back story. Another story. Something from the character’s “past.”

The rule in novel writing is no back story for the first 30 – 50 pages. Meaning, no wandering backwards in the character’s story line while we’re meeting them and discovering the initial conflict.

But we never really need a break from the current action to go backwards in the story.

Rachel Hauck

Writing For The Long Haul

No one wants to be a one hit wonder.

You know, write that first book, or first series, and then struggle to find more success.

I was in this boat after the Nashvegas books.

Not that they were a break out… in fact, they weren’t at all.

So I had to decide what to write next that caught my publisher’s eye.

I was blessed to be at a house that believed in giving an author more than a one-contract chance.

But if I didn’t find some success soon, there was no reason for my publisher to continue with me.

I was writing chick lit but it was dying a quick death as a sub romance genre.

At an ACFW conference, I braved a conversation with my publisher. “What can I do to turn things around?”

“Well,” he said, “we’re not quite sure how to brand you.”

This really confused me. I wrote chick lit. Romance. How was it hard to brand me?