Why You Should Write What You Love

Reno Bobcat

"Write what you love" is not only a writerly-advice cliche but it's also one of those no-brainer ideas that makes immediate sense to most people.  After all, why would I want to spend my time writing something I didn't love?

Well, money was my reason.

Here's what happened:  Back when I started writing seriously I read a lot of books about how you should pitch your book to an agent.  Most of these books included sections on both fiction and non-fiction.  Even though I'm a MG fiction writer I was interested in reading  how the other half pitched as well.  And, as I read those sections on non-fiction book proposals, the seeds of an idea started taking hold in my head.

The one thing I read over and over again was (as the Postkeepers detail) the need for a pre-existing platform, or your current way of reaching your audience of potential, future book-buyers.

For 16+ years my wife and I had been doing Arts and Craft Shows, spending many a weekend driving to shows, setting ups, dealing with displays, customers, the weather, credit card machines, wonderfully pleasant/horribly obnoxious neighbors, then breaking down and driving home again.  I had noticed there were no books on getting into the Arts and Craft Show business and with all of my experience, I figured I could be the person to write just such a book to fill that need.

I sat down during a lull in a three-day weekend show and started writing a list of potential topics to write about.  If I could come up with 100 topics, I figured I had something.  I would start writing a blog about doing Arts and Craft Shows to (a) develop my platform and (b) serve as first drafts for the content of the book.

I came up with 120 without working too hard.  So I bought a catchy domain name ("The Art of the Craft Show"), installed WordPress, and started writing blog entries.

At the time,  however, I was completely burned out on doing craft shows.  I was tired of the weekends spent making jewelry, the weekends spent doing shows, the constant worry about the weather, the national economy, the local economy, the dwindling sales, and a host of other factors that were completely out of our control.

In short, I hated craft shows.

I suppose I was the only one who was surprised to find that I also hated writing about craft shows.

Or, that after four months of trying to write even short sections of a book that I had a good chance of actually selling, I gave up on it.  Writing those blog entries became worse than work, worse than even doing craft shows.  They required an enthusiasm and energy that I could not fake.  Despite getting a few regular commenters, within weeks I found I was starting to resent the whole project and actively dreaded the day of the week I had chosen to write/post new articles.

Eventually, any time I sat down to try and write the black cloud that had become The Art of the Craft Show settled over me, all-but dooming my MG fiction work.  Didn't I have an TAotCS blog entry that needed to be written?  Why not try to crank out a couple of them so I'd have a weekly posting backlog to carry me through a month or two?  (Even trying that didn't work.)

As much work as your writing takes, it deserves your full attention, your love and your devotion.  Doing otherwise won't fool anyone, especially yourself and your writing.


-- Tom

Completing a First Draft

Finishing one of these bangles only means
there are more waiting to be made

There was a blog entry today over at The Alchemy of Writing that asked about our reactions to being finished with a first draft.  The author of the entry described his elation at the moment he completed his draft, being overcome with a rush of nervous, active energy.

Me, I'm a bit different.

I'm about a day or two away from completing Draft One of the first of several MG Steampunkish stories.  My Draft Zero has been printed out and those pages have been marked up with my trusty red pen and I'm in the process of keying in those changes.

So how do I feel? Elated?  Nah.  Filled with energy?  Nope.  One step closer to being done?  Yes--but with qualifications.

As I've mentioned before, my wonderful wife is a jeweler.  She makes beautiful gold and silver jewelry using precious and semi-precious gemstones.  Shortly after we were married she convinced me to try wire-wrapping.  I did and eventually started making bangles like the one you see above.

My wife and I had very different approaches to completing a piece.  To my wife, each piece was an individual work of art, and as such, was never completed.  Her favorite line about this is, "An artist never finishes a piece, they merely surrender it."  To me, the bangles were not individual artworks, they were something I made in a one-mass assembly line process.  Completing one bangle simply meant there were more bangles to make.

(Yes, they're pretty.  Yes, they were reasonably priced.  Yes, we sold a lot of them.  Yes, I'm appreciative of every bangle I made and sold.  And, yes, I'm very glad I haven't had to make any of them this year)  (knocks wood)

My response to finishing my Draft One of the Steampunkish story isn't quite as bleak as my reaction to finishing a(nother) bangle.  I do see the story as something much closer to a work of art than something cranked out on the assembly line.  However, it is still something I'm referring to as a Draft, not as a finished manuscript.  There's the problem I have with the first five to ten pages, there are my questions about the end, there's a serious uncertainty about the two chapters that lead up to the climax...

In other words, it's one step closer, but I recognize that it's just that: a step.

I'll send it off to my beta readers early this week.  As responses start trickling in, I'll send out my list of follow-up questions.  When those come back, I'll review each of them, make some decisions and do some further editing.  Then it goes back out to a few of the beta readers for their take on the changes.

One step in an entire march of steps towards getting to a point where I can "merely surrender it" with a reasonably clear conscious.


How do you respond to completing a First Draft?  Any sense of elation?  Pride?  Do you have any celebrations?  I'm curious to know what you do.


-- Tom

Playing With Your Characters

When In Doubt, Post Another
Picture of a Cute Cat

This week is being taken up by line edits of the current WIP.  My goal is to have them marked up by the end of the weekend and completed in my laptop by sometime next week.  Then, I send copies off to my beta readers to review while I studiously work on a good query to have ready for WriteOnCon (August 10 - 12.  You DO know about WriteOnCon, don't you?)

Meanwhile, let's talk about gemstones and jewelry for a moment, shall we?

My wife is a goldsmith and a jeweler.  One day each year, in the late winter months, she takes out all of her gemstones and spends a day with them.  She will arrange them in various combinations, moving them around and staring at them for long periods of time.

We refer to this as her "playing with her stones."  

I've come to appreciate the time she spends like this, designing her pieces.  By the end of the day she has a dozen or new designs sketched out, some on paper, others just in her head.  She saves the separate sets of stones in their own plastic cases and then can't wait to get started making each piece.


When it comes to writing, I'm a character-driven writer.  I start with a character who sparks my interest and explore what makes that character so interesting.  I'll spend time with that character, talking to them and letting them talk through me. (allowing them to become some of The Voices In My Head)

Sometimes, when I'm talking with a character I'll find out what they do that's so interesting (or trying not to do) or their particular circumstances.  If not, I start dropping them in absurd, difficult situations and seeing what they do.  This not only shows me how they might react to different events, but also gives me some ideas on what problems would make for an engaging plot to feature them in.

When it comes down to it, I'm doing much the same thing with my characters that my wife does when she plays with her stones.  My characters may sparkle in the sunlight* but they are being taken out and examined, put into different settings and contrasted with other characters to discover how they might best be put on display.

So play with your characters!  They should be fun to work with--and they're certainly cheaper per karat than gemstones.


 -- Tom

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*No, this is not a Twilight reference.  This is a faceted gemstone reference.  Who ever heard of a sparkling vampire?  They're blood-sucking demons, not Champagne.  Geez...