Baby Steps Lead to Everything

This week’s post theme is ‘Working with Others’, and in keeping with that I wanted to write today about how baby steps lead to everything, and that once you take that first, hardest, scariest step, the rest of what you want just falls right into line.

I was pretty scared out of my mind when I started my Editing business, thinking that nobody would know I existed and nobody would even care. But I did it anyways. I made a website and started a blog, created a Facebook page and a LinkedIn profile, Twitter and Google+. I went to the bank and created a business account, just to be prepared. Those things, honestly, may have been the hardest part – preparing for something that you’re not sure is going to happen is a pretty big leap. I think that this is the easiest part for a lot of people. They buckle down, create the physical (or online) space for themselves, and ta-da! They’re established!

But I think what most people don’t realize is that the preparation is actually the hardest part. So many people don’t reach out, don’t get in contact with others, because there’s a common mode of thinking going around that you have to know people, important people, in order to get anything of real value in this world. And that’s just not true. How do you think those few you hear about who “know all the right people” got to know them in the first place? I’ll tell you right now that they weren’t born with those contacts.

Okay, some lucky few are actually born into circles where they have access to whomever and almost whatever they want. But for the majority of us, those meetings take place as the result of one baby step in the right direction – toward your goals. And that step, in my opinion, is just saying ‘hi’ and letting people know you exist.

It’s really just that easy. I’m still flattered when I see someone reaching out, saying they heard about me or saw something I posted, that they wanted to talk about their own books or working with me as their Editor. We never really know who’s out there until we pick up the phone, or open up the computer, or even walk down the street and give someone a smile and a how-do-you-do.

I remember when I found Laura Callender’s ad out calling for writers for CWC. I immediately contacted her and said I was really intrigued by the concept of CWC and wanted to know more. She responded that unfortunately there were not any openings for writers, but that a new project would be starting soon and she was looking for another Story Coordinator. So I just said yes. And our friendship grew rapidly into a super team of “administrators” for CWC, and I’m proud to say that working with her has been one of my favorite things in the last few years. Working with CWC is also one of the most exciting things I have to share with the other people I randomly meet to share skills and experiences.

Baby steps don’t just hold value for starting businesses, creating new relationships, or gaining more exposure. It works with your passions, too. I had a conversation the other day with another writer who was scared out of her mind to keep writing. She had an entire list written down of all her fears, about what continuing to write would mean to her, and whether or not her passion and her talent had any true value. Questions like: What if I’m not actually good? What if nobody likes my work? What if I never get published and I’ve wasted so much of my life on something that just ends up worthless?

I knew exactly what these fears felt like – had asked them of myself several times and several years ago. Sometimes fear is a great motivator (though I would never advise anyone to ‘be afraid’), but in instances like this it’s a crutch, a debilitation, and sometimes even a dependency. And that’s when taking baby steps is the most important thing you can do, both for your projects and your own sanity.

So I told this woman that if she let these questions hold her back from continuing to write and pursue her passion, she would never have the chance to prove these fears wrong. There were important questions here that were not being asked.

Do I still want this?

What can I do today that will bring me closer to my goal?

What have I done already that has made me proud?

So often we get caught up in the what-ifs, the large obligations of the future that scare us senseless yet are so far away that they will never even happen if we don’t do what needs to be done today to get there. Miraculously, it turns out that if you do the work, take the baby steps one day at a time, when the day comes that you reach that overwhelmingly intimidating finish line you’re already prepared for it. You’ve done the work, built your project, business, relationship, novel from the ground up, and on the way have amassed a wealth of experience and understanding that only makes sense after the fact.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not good enough, that the beginning lasts forever and that the end is an impossible, terrifying ghost. I look back on the things I’ve done, the relationships and progress that I’ve made in doing what I love, and the hurdles that seemed the most difficult when I looked into the future actually turned out to be the easiest accomplishments.

I think so many more people would own their own business, or start a project, or write a book, if they really understood just how easy it is to keep going. Everybody knows these fears, and the best way to overcome them is to talk to those people, to put yourself out there and just be a human being. People like that. And when you start having fun it all makes sense why you’re doing it in the first place.

You Don’t Have To Be A Hermit to Be A Writer

Last week I read a large handful of comments from various people on social networking groups, on a few different blogs, and from a journalist, referring to the “independent nature” of writing as an activity. The phrase I saw repeated, more than once, was that “writing is an ego-driven activity”. Honestly, I was pretty shocked to see this theme so prevalent in the communication and updates I saw. And it struck something in me that I had to let sit over the weekend.

I’m sure these various people did not mean anything negative by what they shared, and I very easily see where they’re coming from in drawing these conclusions. But I wanted to make my own clarifications here, just to stop the domino effect of this outlook on writers.

It’s true that any type of writing, from fiction to memoirs, short stories to novels, is a vastly independent way to showcase one’s skills with the written word. It’s awfully hard to really work on your writing when you’re surrounded by lots of people or lots of noise, when you don’t have the “right conditions” that allow both creativity and focus. There are people out there who co-author novels and projects, but most novels are written by only one person. It’s also true that a good number of writers naturally isolate themselves to hone their craft, and may be a bit more introverted than the next guy. These are only observations of the majority, mind you – not blanket statements about writers.

However, “ego” and “writing” are not synonymous. Personally, I have never met a writer who thought more of themselves, was more “egocentric” and “ego-driven”, the more they wrote. And I have never met an author, published or unpublished, who did not jump at the opportunity to talk about writing (not just their own, but others’ works too), or share tips and experiences, or offer advice. I’ve even met those who will write free reviews of others’ books, who will recommend writers to agents, publishers, editors, and other writing service professionals, who will lift up and encourage budding writers for nothing other than the reward of helping another person who understands the all-consuming passion of creating new worlds through words.

And I’ve never met a writer who didn’t at least sound phenomenally grateful and excited to receive valid, constructive, positive feedback from anyone – fellow writer, avid reader, or their own editor.

The drive to write, for myself and for every other author with whom I’ve spoken, is not about our “egos”. It is not, at least initially, with the intent to make lots of money and become famous. It is not to “wow” our friends and families with tales of our wordy achievements, of how many pages we’ve written and how many stories we’ve finished. That, to me, is what makes an “ego-driven” activity. And I don’t see any of that in my writing, nor in the writing of the hundreds of other authors with whom I interact, for work and for play.

Both as a freelance editor and in working with CWC as Story Coordinator and Chief Editor, I have never had a writer’s “ego” get in the way of edits to a chapter or novel, or in submissions to a collaboration project. Every single person I’ve worked with has been generous, humble, willing and eager to participate, and grateful for feedback and hard work that other writers put into the same project, or their own.

If writing were so truly “ego-driven”, Laura Callender would not have founded CWC as it is today – a miraculous gathering of over 170 international writers who come together to write a full-length novel, one chapter at a time. That is one of the hardest things I can imagine, to write only a chapter, one unfinished section, and not have any control over the story that came before it, or where the following chapters will take it.

If writing were so truly ego-driven, there wouldn’t be such amazing social media groups like An Author’s Tale, established, organized, and moderated by Cayce Berryman. Yes, this is a closed group, but all it takes to join is a love of the written word and an eagerness to network and join forces with other phenomenally talented writers. This is not a group for pure promotion – in fact self-promotion is pushed to the background. Here, writers can talk about their issues with writing, their inspirations and fears, what brought them to where they are now, and where to go in the future. Relationships bloom, people work together, and I’ve seen people edit works, give detailed critiques of query letters and excerpts, and design artwork for one another, all completely free of charge. And Cayce has stayed at the “top of my list” with the way she constantly engages the group’s members, encourages them to interact with each other and to test the boundaries of their own creative powers, as well as their comfort zones.

If writing were so truly ego-driven, there wouldn’t be places like Writing Fiction, where readers can get a free copy of an author’s published book in exchange for only an honest review posted to Amazon. There wouldn’t be complete sites like Writers Helping Writers, who encourage guest bloggers to share their knowledge on certain writing topics, who publish Encyclopedias dedicated to teaching writers how to focus on certain psychological aspects of their characters to make internal conflict more believable.

If all writers were truly “ego-driven”, no one would ask for an editor. No one would ask for a review, or an opinion, or a critique. Nobody would share their work until the finished product was published and everyone had to pay for a copy.

It makes sense that the writers who share more of their work with more people, who ask for feedback and who want constructive criticism, will be “better” writers than those who don’t. They get advice and tips from so many different writers and readers, and they take that feedback as they will and use it (or not) to improve their writing. The writers in my own community, people I work with every day, are some of the most gracious, humble, and talented individuals I’ve yet to meet – and most of them in the online sphere, where one doesn’t necessarily have to be genuine to create a presence.

Most of you already know this. Most of you reading this are writers, or know writers, or love and support writers. These people define themselves by what they create, by the act of writing itself and, more importantly, by their need to share fantastic stories with the rest of the world. Writing itself is not an “ego-driven” activity. Like any pastime, career, or form of entertainment, the “ego” comes from “ego-driven people“. Fortunately, in my experience those people are few and far between.

Writing does not have to be solitary, nor hermetic, nor solely for one’s own personal gain. And all it takes is a little bit of reaching out, of offering something of yourself and your own work, to find that out for yourself.

And for those of you who don’t write, just remember that we do this for you, to share our characters and our stories in the only way we know how. More often than not, we even forget ourselves in the process.

Self-Editing Tip #4: Aggressively Passive Voice

I described some wordy writing once as being like “taking a train all the way around the world just to get to the next town over.” Not only does writing in the passive voice add unnecessary extra words, but it sometimes can make a sentence seem tiresome and confusing. If this happens for an entire paragraph, or an entire page even, the reader may find themselves distracted and missing some essential details of the story. Or they might put down a book altogether.

So these are some ways to stay away from using the passive voice (and other nastily tricky styles) to keep your writing succinct and to the point.

• was
  • This is the most obvious sign of the passive voice. He was sitting by the window. She was crying in the corner. He was walking down the street. These are simple examples, but they should be changed to: He sat by the window. She cried in the corner. He walked down the street.
  •  Sometimes this is acceptable to use when relating what your character sees, feels, or notices about another person. She turned around to see that the man was watching her. If the passive voice is not used regularly throughout the piece, this is one effective way to show that someone had been doing something and continues to do so.

• continued to, started to, began to
  • These can be a burden on any writing. The man continued to punch him, over and over. My mother continued to look for her favorite shirt. ‘Continued to’ is a phrase that basically means nothing. When you’re telling a story and describing an action, “continued to” repeats what the reader has already read. Even when you’re trying to say that the character just won’t stop doing what they’re doing, it can be done in a much better way with a new image. The man hit my brother on the street corner. I ran over to them and tried to stop him, but the man continued to punch him, over and over. Get rid of “continued to” and try another angle. The man hit my brother on the street corner, but when I ran over to stop him, he wouldn’t let up. It’s shorter, more succinct, and does not repeat an image we’ve already seen.
  • ‘Started to’ and ‘began to’ are even more useless, in my opinion. My boss began to scream at me from behind his chair. If you’re telling us what a character is doing, it’s implied that they haven’t already been doing it. My boss screamed at me from behind his chair. That is the start of a new action for this character, so we don’t need to be told that the character ‘began to’ anything.
  • Basically, if you can take out any of these three phrases from a sentence and it still works, don’t use any of them. Redundancy can kill any story, no matter how fantastic the plot or the characters.

• of
  • This is one of the most frequently used words in the English language, along with ‘the’ and ‘and’. But using this instead of possessive nouns (Harry’s) or possessive pronouns (his) is something that really drags a reader around in circles. He was then introduced to Heather, the daughter of his boss at the record store. This is a great example of using both the passive “was” and extra wording around a possessive noun. Then his friend introduced him to Heather, his boss’s daughter. In addition to cutting out the extra words and more thoroughly getting to the point, staying away from the passive voice and using “of” brings your readers closer to the characters, closer to seeing through their eyes. That will keep them from losing interest in characters or plots with which they have a difficult time identifying.

A lot of these can be pretty difficult to catch sometimes. But if you know how to look for the identifying characteristics, like the word “was” in your sentences, you can start to train yourself to stay away from them. Play with the sentences, see what you can change around to say the same thing with less words and more vivid imagery.

Go Ahead. Take A Second Look.

CreateWorks Chronicle, the Blog, took a small, week-long hiatus for some much needed beauty rest and a surprise makeover. I didn’t want tell anyone because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off in a week, but I did. So take a look around.

KLH CreateWorks as a business site has now joined forces with the Blog, and they’re unpacking their bags to settle in together. And CreateWorks Chronicle has changed its name to You Are What You Write (can be accessed directly at  KLHCreateWorks.com/YouAreWhatYouWrite). I thought it was a good time for the “system to reboot”, as it were, and both site and blog are stronger than ever.

Don’t worry, all of the content is still here, plus the information regarding my Professional Editing Services, pricing, testimonials, and experience. All the good stuff now conveniently together on one site.

I urge you to look around, see if there is anything here that interests you, catches your attention, sparks some questions. And please feel free to get in touch! I hope that the new layout is as fun to navigate as it was to create.

It took a lot of willpower not to keep posting throughout the week, but I wanted to make sure that when the Blog came back full-force, it would be a pleasantly surprising change. Nobody wanted to see that awkward phase. And I definitely used the last week to stock up on some topics to share in the coming days, so keep checking back for those 3 posts a week.

I didn’t go anywhere, I promise.

What Made You Decide To Be A Writer?

One of my clients, who has now become someone I like to think of as a friend, asked me this question when we were chatting online.

“What made you become a writer?” 

This, I’ve found, is a topic that comes up a lot in writing groups across the social media board. So I thought it warranted a blog post.

I can remember the exact day that I started actually writing. It was the morning of my tenth birthday, and after repeated dreams of changing the ending to my favorite movie, I decided that it would almost be like changing the movie if I were in fact to rewrite the ending.

Of course, I never actually rewrote anything about the movie. But I started writing a short story that a year or two later I realized very closely resembled Harry Potter, and I couldn’t keep going with it. Instead, I ended up working on a supremely high-fantasy “book”, I called it, that revolved around fairies.

I don’t write about fairies now, and haven’t since I was eleven, but the point is that I realized I could create my own realities simply by putting it down on paper. That realization brought me over 200 words of Word document pages before I turned twelve. And I finished my first novel in high school five years later.

So I shared this “aha moment” of becoming a writer with my friend, and he sent me an amazing description of what he considered to be the turning point in his life that led him to calling himself a writer. And he agreed to let me share that story here.

 

‘I would say that it was a fear of death, or rather the fear of leading a life of no consequence or significance. From a very young age as early as six I was terrified of the idea of dying. I spent far longer than any child should spend contemplating ways to cheat death and live forever. Eventually I came to the acceptance that I would one day die so I wanted to leave something behind that was not subject to the laws of flesh and blood. For most I think that the concept of a legacy is a family, and while not opposed to such a notion I wanted to accomplish more with my limited time than simply perpetuating the circle of life. I chased fame for a while, a long while. I fixated on pursuing acting and movie stardom. That seemed like a good way to cement something that would last past my own mortality. From age thirteen and for a full decade after that I trained in film, theater and stage. Sadly it never went anywhere while I had natural talents for drama I did not have the drive to push myself to past the point where things became difficult.

I suffered from a terminal case of entitlement, thinking that I was above paying my dues as a starving artist. Life continued to happen. Life also continued to be unremarkable. I spent so much time leaning on others hoping to ride their coat tails to loftier station that I squandered a lot of potential. It was after a life-altering trauma that my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I endured that I soon decided that I would no longer pin my success on others. I refocused my efforts and took stock of what I could do to accomplish something extraordinary. As much as I loathed writing in grade school and battled for every word on an assigned paper, I settled on writing. It was a place where I could bring the full weight of my creativity and imagination to bear, and I had nobody else that I had to depend on to produce something. It was just me, a pen and a blank page. I found that notion very comforting.

I set myself the goal of being able to say “I am a published author,” and I made a plan to attain that goal. I started writing a couple poems a day and four hundred words rain or shine and then in the month of November in the Year 2012 I published “Modern Knighthood”. Ultimately that book was for me. So that I could break off a little piece of forever for myself.’

 

That book of poetry, “Diary of a Warrior Poet” by Jason Pere, can be found here.

I found myself needing to respond in kind to his very open-hearted explanation of his own experiences. And so I chose to delve a little deeper, bring myself up to speed on what my relationship with writing looked like so I could share it. This is what I came up with.

 

‘Don’t get me wrong, my relationship with writing was not, by any means, all fun and games and passion from 10 years old to now. I just recently, in the last year and a half, have returned to that consuming passion. There was a 5 year hiatus there, two of which were spent in seemingly tearing apart and destroying my own life at every opportunity, and three in picking up the pieces, putting myself back together, and guilt-tripping myself into actually believing that, because I deviated from my plans and chose destruction instead, I no longer deserved to call myself a writer. There was a point in there where I was so terrified that if I picked up the proverbial pen again I wouldn’t even be able to do it anymore, that I had abandoned and consequently lost that “zone space” that had been my fuel and my companion all through high school and the years of college for Creative Writing.

I’d really done a number on myself, and though I thought about writing constantly, wanted to more than anything in the world, that fear kept me back for way longer than I like to admit. I had to quit my job waiting tables in Charleston due to a chronic injury thing, and then I went through this whole thing of “I’m married, my husband wants to support me (and can) so I can write, this is the first time in my life that I’m not working and don’t HAVE to, and I totally don’t deserve to use this time to write.” I finally got over that, turned an odd experimental short story into what’s currently being written of my third novel, and then started my business.

I started calling myself a writer again before I even was able to type a single word after those five years, but the fact that nobody questioned the validity of my claim or my love for what I considered myself to be gave me a whole new freedom in letting myself actually pursue it again. That and a thought that occurred, almost literally, like a lightening bolt – My worth is not defined by whether or not I do the things I think I should.

That drive is the same for us all, though, those of us who say we’re writers and actually believe it really deep down. It just takes a while to be able to say it, to take ourselves seriously in a much less serious way.’

 

I’d like to hear what you think. What made you become a writer? And maybe more importantly, what’s standing in the way of you becoming a writer right now?

It Never Stops … And Then It Gets Better

My week was extraordinarily busy with getting in touch with new people, keeping in touch with old friends and acquaintances, and trying to keep my head on straight amidst the overwhelming bombardment of “social networking” going on in my computer. I had to take a break today, walk away and get some fresh air, and headed to the Briar Patch Co-Op in Grass Valley to take advantage of their hot bar and grab the dogs some more dogfood.

I had been thinking about talking to someone at Briar Patch about their bulletin board, and taking out an ad in the monthly newsletter that they send out to all member/owners. So I decided today was the day to do just that. The man that I spoke with was the same man that my husband and I had met on our first visit to the co-op, when we became owner/members, but I don’t think that he remembered me. I didn’t necessarily expect him to.

He gave me some information on advertising, and then asked what my business was. So I told him. And of course, as has been my pattern for the last two months, there was some connection there. He, too, was a freelance author, and had self-published his own book. Intrigued, I popped back into “networking” mode, so incredibly grateful that this time I could do it in a face-to-face encounter with another like-minded person. While I’ve been working to get to know more people in Grass Valley and become a part of the community, I’m always looking for more. And it turned out that this man and I had far more in common than I ever imagined possible.

His name is Bill Drake, and his book Almost Hereditary: A White Southerner’s Journey out of Racism was something that I had not expected to see. He showed it to me briefly (the book is also available at Briar Patch), and we exchanged website information, spoke a little bit about self-publishing, and he said that he would email me a small information packet that he’d put together about self-publishing a book. He was so engaging and exciting about talking about these things with me; I may have spent more time than I should have speaking with him, seeing as another woman waited behind me in line.

When I got home, I looked up his website HealRacism.com, which was dedicated both to his published book, his own experiences, and the work Bill is now doing in the Northern California community as a result. He is a founder of an organization here, Creating Communities Beyond Bias (CCBB), whose goal is to bring awareness and tools for overcoming bias in everyday life to high school and college classes in the community. They’ve gotten a lot of wonderful, positive feedback and gratitude, and Bill has also written a number of newspaper articles about overcoming bias, most recently on the recent tragic events in Charleston, SC this past June.

I couldn’t help myself. I was so impressed and touched by the things he was doing, by his book (his grandparents were slave owners in the South, and he grew up with much the same viewpoint before finding a way to move past racism in his life), and by his willingness to extend advice and knowledge to me. I wrote him an email telling him all of this, because I just couldn’t help myself. And then I received multiple emails from him in reply (they’re still coming)…

I had shared with him how much I appreciated what he was doing, and my own experience with racism and bias after having lived in the South for three years, and marrying into a very traditionally Southern family. Before moving to South Carolina, I was not aware that these sentiments still existed in the world as they actually do. I thought it was just an unspoken fear or discomfort that people still harbored, but it didn’t take me long after calling the state my home that I realized I had been wrong. Not that I need to be another person to add to the conversation surrounding the shootings in Charleston and the national recognition and discourse that followed, but I’m very glad that the rest of the country is finally starting to be exposed to the things that happen every day in some areas of our nation, and that are very, very real. As someone born and raised in Colorado, those realities of bias and discrimination were really just facts in my head that I never got to see with my own eyes, and feel with my own heart. For people not in the South, the issue seems to be more or less swept under the rug, because of the fact that it does not seem real. I don’t think that’s possible any more, and I’m really grateful for that. It’s a silver lining, and it brings a lot of hope into the discussion for the chance to really change ourselves as individuals, and as a country.

All that being said, Bill’s reply to me was stuffed full of even more opportunities for involvement in the things I love, right here in my community. He commented on my website, asked if I was “still interested in Buddhism”, and it turns out that he’s also a founder of Sierra Friends of Tibet, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about Tibet, the domination of its culture, government, and people by the Chinese government, and the assistance needed in preserving the beautiful things they have to offer. This is something that, in my own time, I’ve spent looking into, and a cause that I’ve come to very strongly support. For more information, click here for the Sierra Friends of Tibet website and information.

Bill also shared with me information about Sierra Writers, a group of writers in the Northern California area who meet every other week to read aloud and critique one another’s writing. Again, another wonderful find, because leaving my Charleston Writing Group when we moved here was one of the things I knew I was going to miss the most. And now, just like that, I have an opportunity to join another.

Bill’s openness and generosity really hit me hard, especially after he acknowledged the experiences that he and I (and my husband) share, and then invited my husband and I to come meet him for a copy of his book and a chance to have more time to talk and get to know one another. I couldn’t be more grateful to him, a complete stranger and yet someone who I feel I can connect to very easily.

The point is that that’s just how it works. Everybody, no matter their background, age, race, or experiences, has something to offer to each person they meet in their life. We just have to be open to the idea of being open, and then everything falls into place and just keeps getting better.