And to offer one final bit of advice.

Choose your priorities. Don’t let them choose you. Even at the risk of letting others down (sometimes maybe a lot of others), you have to balance the very minor let-down of others with the major let-down of your self.

If you want to follow progress of my writing or other blog or my love advice column, my latest news will always be at BunnyApe.

I myself have had it, found it a challenge to my confidence and motivation to persist, but overcame the doubts and wrote the book.

Q: Susan, help!  I was reading the latest Locus magazine. The editor was decrying the increasing number of self-published books. She said it resulted in a lot more books for editors and reviewers to go through, and a lot of these books are bad. Then she said that the biggest growth was in YA future dystopian books, and there are way too many and way too many bad ones.  As you know, that subject ‘s a lot like what I had in mind. Gulp.

A: Okay, before we panic, let’s take this apart. I just skimmed the online version of Locus and didn’t notice the comment you’re referring to. But I’ve read such remarks about other topics at various times.

1. It sounds to me as though this editor was mainly talking about self-published books, which, with no professional feedback and editing, are often mediocre at best. Every wannabe can now publish just about anything, and while that has its positives, it can also result in some very bad books.  Even the blurbs about such books are unpolished and sometimes make me want to scream. Which is why some reviewers won’t look at self-published books.  So if you go that route, be prepared to find your own support systems and don’t count on the usual review outlets.
2. When someone says that the “biggest growth” in something is whatever, that could mean that there were barely any or none before this. It’s not a familiar form to me, and I read a lot (but not much YA).
3. Important:  No one general comment has any necessary validity to any one particular writer (i.e., you).

My advice: Try not to let this comment bother you, keep writing, and finish a full draft of something so it can then be revised and polished to a high gloss.  Then worry about publishing. Whatever happens, you will learn a lot. I don’t think you’re going to be one of the “bad ones.”

Lex (names and other minor details have been changed to protect my clients’ privacy) is writing a book about a way to increase high performance in any field.  Now that’s a popular self-help topic.  He’s got a pretty solid platform already. At least it looks good on paper. 

Lex and I have been going back and forth on his book since our initial phone consult 16 months ago.  He’s done his writing and rewriting between his regular work and time spent with his family. (He called me one morning and then accidentally left his phone on.  The family chaos I overheard made me wonder how he got any writing done.)

Marcy came to me with an idea I knew would excite agents, publishers, and readers alike.  How did I know?  Because it’s related to sex.  She’s not a doctor, but perhaps with a doctor writing an introduction or an enthusiastic endorsement, her book will come across as highly credible. It’s a perennial topic, much in the news, and endlessly fascinating, and her approach is fresh.  I’ve been working with her for more than four years now, as she’s been busy with growing her practice and dealing with family life.

The two things these two book writers share is that (1) at times they chose not to listen to my advice (which is fine), and (2) they’ve each approached their projects the way they seem to approach the rest of their lives.  That is, one is a bit too impatient to get things done, and one might be a bit too perfectionist.

Lex has sent drafts of his proposal out to various colleagues at the same time he sent them to me, which means those people are commenting on a version that I’m about to suggest drastic changes to.  That costs him more of my time, duplicates everyone’s efforts, and runs through his list of potential friendly first readers too soon.  He sent a nowhere-near-finished draft of a proposal to a potentially good agent, who wrote back with, guess what?  “This isn’t ready yet.”

Marcy had her heart set on a top agent, because other advisers had told her she should.  But the agent at the top of her list basically said, after seeing the proposal, “Come back to me when you’re more famous.  This is a small book now, but it could be big.”  That’s the usual platform-spouting advice of many agents these days, that bigger everything is always better.

So Marcy spent the next few months, rather than working on the book, setting up speaking engagements, a professionally designed website, and a couple of blogs (which have been a strain to keep up with).  And after all that, the big agent still wasn’t responsive.  Keep in mind that a lesser known (but by no means inferior) agent had long ago expressed great enthusiasm for the project based on the same proposal.

It’s been said that the good is the enemy of the better, but I would also suggest that the better is often the enemy of the good enough.  And sometimes, when it comes to getting a book published, good enough is all you can realistically expect.

So rather than racing around frantically in several directions at once, sometimes it’s smart to take what you can get, learn from it, and build on it.

The first piece of his I read was an essay called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Reading that long piece just prior to taking a cruise with my in-laws, I realized this was a writer I wouldn’t be able to get enough of.  Which turned out to be far too true.  (That essay, in its original Harper’s Magazine incarnation, can be found online here. If it’s your kind of writing and thinking, you’ll be hooked.)

A new book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, is basically the raw transcript of a several-day long conversation between Wallace (who was then 34 and newly famous for his massive novel, Infinite Jest) and 30-year-old Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky. It’s fascinating.  (The article never ran in the magazine.)

Wallace suffered a suicidal breakdown several years before this, and then went on an anti-depressant.  While he told the interviewer he didn’t believe he was biochemically depressed, he continued to take the pills until many years later when he tried to go off them due to side-effects.  By the time he knew he needed medicinal help again, nothing seemed to work for him anymore.

What follows are a few quotes from the book, perhaps enough for you to decide if you want to know more.  If you’re already a devotee, fine, but if you’re not familiar with Wallace’s work, go directly there first.

I really enjoy a sense of play when I’m doing it.

The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that’s all about how other people react.

There’s a set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. … One of them has to do with the sense of capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell “Another sensibility like mine exists.” Something else feels this way to someone else.  So that the reader feels less lonely.

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, …  just because they were valuable as human beings.  The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend.  Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that.  I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.

I do six to eight drafts of everything that I do.  I am probably not the smartest writing going… But I work really really hard. … When I’m in a room by myself alone and have enough time, I can be really really smart. I don’t think I’m quite as smart, one-on-one, with people, when I’m self-conscious, and I’m really really confused.  And it’s why like, My dream would be for you to write this up, and then to send it to me, and I get to rewrite all my quotes to you.

Finally, I, too, wish Wallace had had a chance to edit all this. The book is really a transcript of the interview, with some of Lipsky’s thoughts added. Every “um” and hesitation of Wallace were left in by Lipsky.  Every pat of his dog, every “if you use that, I’ll sound stupid.” It could have been a better book.  As it is, we are voyeurs to this raw interview of two young writers.  Still, for those who wish they knew Wallace better, it’s a kind of pseudo-intimacy, a peek into a young writer’s struggling psyche.

And this is how novelist Phyllis Gebauer describes her thought processes before and after sitting down to write: “Yippee! Now I can work on my book, get out of here, ‘play’ with my people.”

In a review of the book The Evolution of Childhood by Melvin Konner, Benjamin Schwarz writes, “The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together.”  According to Konner, “Combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, [play] is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.”

Play, concludes the reviewer:

seems to have multiple functions — exercise, learning, sharpening skills — and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM PLAYING

What I’ve noticed in my own writing is this:  Once I’ve thought actively about a problem at my desk, and I’m feeling overwhelmed and without a solution, I take a break and lie down, or I do something else.  Then I think about the problem in a looser way than before.  I let my mind play with the ideas, without trying to force anything.  But very often a usable idea comes to me, often an anecdote or some way to proceed with my project.  This looseness, I’ve discovered, is not necessarily low cortical arousal, but arousal allowed to run sideways.  Then, once I’ve gotten a handle on how to start or re-start, flow can begin.

It’s funny, but the way you play can tell you a lot about your own ability to let go and be creative.  I’ll use myself as an example, quoting from my book Writing in Flow:

My husband Stephen and I like to play computer adventure games, not the kind where hand-eye coordination is required (blast the alien before it conquers your planet), but the kind where you’re trying to figure something out and achieve some goal.  When we began to play many years ago, elaborate graphic adventures had not yet taken over from simple text-only games.  With those older games, you can type in anything you can think of, and the machine is programmed to respond, even if only to type back, “I don’t understand this command.”

At first, Stephen would come up with outlandish ideas to try in order to get past some obstacle in the game, and I would routinely squawk, “You can’t do that!”  I have no idea what I was afraid of, other than the new, the untried, the unexpected.  We both still joke about the time when we (us on the screen, in the game) needed to get past a stubborn guard to go up some stairs to get a key to continue to the next scene of the game.  We tried everything logical, while a little frog jumped nearby and made inane comments.  For two or three evenings of game play we remained stuck and frustrated.  Finally, Stephen typed in, “Throw the frog at the wall.” I, of course, was horrified (remembering childhood pals who had done hurtful things to frogs).  But it worked.  When we “threw” the frog, it grabbed the needed key for us, and so we bypassed the recalcitrant guard and got unstuck.

I’ve since thought a lot about my habitual risk-aversion and finally realized that there was actually no risk involved in games.  Then I was able to loosen up.  My real test came when I made a move in a game that resulted in the blowing up of a horse into grisly bits.  It didn’t solve the puzzle, but I didn’t let the pretend consequence upset me.   Since then, I have often considered whether some experimental action I wanted to take was as risky as it first seemed.  That’s why I know it’s possible to become more open.  Even if your usual tendency is to holler, “But you can’t…!”, or “I mustn’t!”,  you can learn to pull a switch in your thinking and allow yourself to do whatever it is anyway.

It’s only play.

For some people, especially women, it can be incredibly difficult to imagine breaking the normal boundaries of niceness.  In Getting Unstuck, a guide to unblocking your creativity, it’s suggested that you talk to your shadow side to learn what’s holding you back.

Susan O’Doherty, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in Brooklyn Heights, NY, authored Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity. She has also had essays, stories, and poems published, and helps those who are struggling with creative blocks.

What O’Doherty wrote about acknowledging our shadows was an eye-opener for me.  I know I hold onto plenty of “shoulds” in my life, but I think I’ve chosen most of them mindfully. Yet I envy people who say “no” to distractions and “yes” to the priorities of their own essential selves.

TRY THIS

O’Doherty offers the following suggestion:

Imagine a day without consequences. … No one will remember any of this [what you do or don't do] tomorrow. In fact, it won’t have happened. You can eat whatever you want without gaining an ounce, you can conduct an affair free of guilt or complications, you can even commit murder–and your victim will spring back to life tomorrow. What would you choose to do?

Record your imaginary day, and then think about how you would characterize a person who did those things. Begin a dialogue with this person, your shadow.

Would I spend the day pigging out on chocolate licorice or M&Ms?  I don’t know if I want to hurt anyone, even if it’s only imaginary.  Could I be kidding myself about that? As for accessing my shadow, if that’s a freeing thing to be able to do, maybe that’s where my interest in writing fiction has come from: it’s a safe way to explore the darker stuff I can’t or don’t want to access otherwise.

I asked O’Doherty about that, and she responded

That exercise, and the book, are intended for those who are unable to produce at either the rate or depth they feel capable of. If you are writing well, and making use of fiction writing to explore issues it would be dangerous to act out in real life, skip the exercise.

TOO NICE?

But what if a client of hers said she didn’t want to hurt anyone, but then added that there are some people she regularly wants to throttle?  O’Doherty said that in such a case she would probe for an internal struggle between the desire to be a moral person and some anger that doesn’t fit into this positive self-image. “Many of us are raised to discount our anger, because it challenges the image of niceness and kindness that we want to embrace, or are taught that we should embody.” She continued

Anger is a signal, like pain. Anger isn’t fun or pretty, but it often serves to tell us that we’re in an emotionally dangerous or untenable situation. Exploring such feelings can give us insight into the real nature of the problem. For example, the person we feel an impulse to strike out at may not be the one we’re really angry at–a coworker may remind us of a family member about whom we have unresolved feelings; or our resentment of a more successful peer who seems to be showing off may actually spring from anger at ourselves for not taking more risks or pushing ourselves to produce more. And it’s hard to find a solution to a problem unless we’ve identified the real, rather than the surface, cause.

O’Doherty reminded me that in Getting Unstuck another writer balked at this exercise. “Elizabeth” was shocked to uncover a fantasy of stabbing her ex-mother-in-law with a kitchen knife. The writer wasn’t a violent person in her life, her writing, or her conscious fantasies. And she didn’t really want to hurt her mother-in-law (who was already dead in any case). Both this client and O’Doherty came to believe that

what her shadow wanted to accomplish was to “kill off” the emotional power this woman still had over Elizabeth. Our unconscious minds sometimes make use of violent imagery to make a dramatic point, but as artists, we know that symbols aren’t meant to be taken literally. So if you do try the exercise and find yourself throttling someone, this could provide valuable clues to a quality your shadow wants you to confront, rather than an indication of murderous tendencies!

In my own workshops and classes, I’ve found that being a “bad” person, or dread of being thought one by others, is indeed a major hindrance to many who would like to open their creative selves more fully. O’Doherty’s practical advice and strategies get to the heart of what many of us have to struggle against in order to find and be ourselves, and to enter flow.

• For more of O’Doherty, see her advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In,” on MJ Rose’s blog, “Buzz, Balls, & Hype.” Or her Career Coach column at the Mama Ph.D. blog. She’s also a monthly panelist on the podcast Litopia After Dark.

Richard M. Berlin, M.D., is a psychiatrist whose book of poems, How JFK Killed My Father, won the Pearl Poetry Prize in 2002, and whose poetry appears monthly in Psychiatric Times. 

An Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Berlin is the editor of Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process. In our interview, he reiterated that treatment won’t make a person creative, but it will at least open the door to that possibility.

ARE PILLS “CHEATING”?

Q: It seems so many emotionally troubled people think of taking pills as “cheating,” including one or two in your book. Yet no one ever worries that drinking alcohol is cheating, and many of those same people drink or drank heavily. Why do you think that is?

RB: While alcohol is a commonly used psychoactive substance, the antidepressant and antianxiety medications account for billions of dollars in market share and are among the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States.

When I was writing the introduction for Poets on Prozac, I was fascinated by the higher rates of antidepressant and antianxiety medication being prescribed in the U.S. as compared to Japan. The Japanese place a much higher cultural value on suffering as a stimulus for growth and change than Americans. Of course, the Japanese also pay a price with a higher suicide rate.

Cultural values and stigmatization erode trust, and the disturbing overlap between the medical profession and Big Pharma also makes people uncertain about who to trust.  Which brings us back to alcohol, which is legal, cheap, “natural,” easily accessible, does not require a prescription, and provides short-term relief, even if its long-term effects are potentially devastating. Patients can use a drug like alcohol and also maintain a certain level of control over their care. However, “natural” remedies, including alcohol, are part of a billion dollar industry, are promoted heavily, and have a complicated pharmacology. What I tell my patients is that we have medications that have been studied for safety and effectiveness, and other medications that have yet to be tested.

Q: Why is individual response to particular medications so various? Seems like many of your poet/essayists have tried or are on quite a number of different meds.

RB: Unfortunately, that’s a common problem. We still don’t have a single psychiatric disorder which can be diagnosed with a biological test, and we still don’t understand the fundamental biology at play. For example, people know that Prozac increases a neurotransmitter called serotonin. But serotonin is one of hundreds of neurotransmitters, and an increase in brain serotonin usually takes a few weeks to work. For roughly half the people who take this type of antidepressant, there is no beneficial response. And everyone’s body handles medications differently: I see patients who have immediate effects from very low doses of medication and others whose dosing has to go way beyond the usually recommended limits in order for them to benefit.

This brings us to the doctor-patient relationship. Most of the time, we can find a medication or combination of medications that can be helpful, but alas, the process is one of educated guess-work and trial and error. The doctor needs to create a context of hope and trust, and be an active guide through the entire process.

THE TALKING CURE

Q: On the subject of regaining or retaining or accessing one’s creativity, how vital is the talking part of the “cure,” compared to the medicinal part?

RB:  Recent studies demonstrate that the combination of psychotherapy and medication tends to have a better outcome than either treatment alone. And perhaps most interesting of all, actual scans of the brain show changes in the same areas when patients respond to either medication or psychotherapy.

Q: I got the impression from some of the essays in your book, that as creative linguistically as these poets are, they aren’t above-average when it comes to psychological issues, in that they “think they’ve tried everything,” or “feel they have no other choice,” that sort of thing.

RB: Being ill and suffering really narrow a person’s viewpoint and resilience. In people with psychiatric disorders, an additional component is the distortion in world-view: people who are depressed tend to see things as hopeless, including the possibility of recovery, and people who experience delusions and hallucinations often don’t even see themselves as “sick.” So yes, people become less resilient, but that may be due to the state of being ill rather than an enduring trait.

Q: Is there really such a thing as “creative gestation” that happens during deeply depressed episodes? Does the brain need that sort of “rest”?

RB: Two of the poet/essayists write about their “creative gestation.” Gwyneth Lewis discusses her severe, recurrent episodes of immobilizing depression this way, and David Budbill compares his periods of depression to the cycles of growth and rest we see in the natural world.

The hero of this debut thriller is an engineer, much like the author himself, Boyd Morrison.

Morrison, with a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, has worked for NASA, Microsoft’s Xbox Games Group, and Thomson-RCA.  He was also a Jeopardy! Champion, as well as a professional actor. He was able to get a good agent, but The Ark was rejected by 25 publishers.  Morrison self-published it for Kindle, and then, after early online sales showed promise, secured a four-book deal from a major publisher (Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster).

Intrigued by the idea of an engineer hero, I read The Ark and tried to figure out why it works, and where it doesn’t.

The Positives:

1. I wanted to keep reading to see what happens.
2. It’s as visual as a TV movie.
3. It’s simple enough (with everything explained and no frustrating puzzles) so that even a non-typical-thriller reader (like me) can “get it.”
4. It’s a bit quirky (engineer protagonist), and it’s timely (some major scenes take place on a threatened oil rig).
5. The writing is competent, without the sort of OMG moments where I want to throw a book across the room.

The Negatives:

1. It’s extremely visual, so that at times I felt almost as though I were reading a screenplay. I didn’t care how much each of the characters weighed or how tall they were.
2. It’s not very sophisticated in its plotting and characterization.  Would “the best and brightest scientists, engineers, and thinkers” not catch on that their supposed “visions” were actually holographic?
3. Everything is explained (it tells rather than shows, when at times that feels too expository). Experienced thriller aficionados may find that a problem.
4. The love interest piece of the plot is formulaic, with no depth of character in the female.
5. A better copyediting job might have avoided sentences such as, “The survival suit hung from him like a coat hangar,” or “She shared a kindred spirit with Ulric’s vision for a better world.” (And referring to the southern California city of Palos Verdes as “Palos Verde.”)
6. In dialogues, there are too many slightly off, slightly stiff, complete sentences (a beginner’s error).

BUT I kept reading the novel to the end, so thriller readers may enjoy it.  Meanwhile, writers can see what it takes, plot-wise, to interest a major publisher (sooner or later).

• Read an online interview: Q&A: Boyd Morrison – 5/1/2010 – Library Journal.

Always think of such rules as mere suggestions, knowing that the opposite of each one may be even more worthy.

When I interviewed 76 successful novelists and poets, I discovered how silly some of the usual instructions can be.  My advice, then, is that you seriously consider avoiding the following 8 types of advice:

1. Advice that demoralizes you. One young poet despaired when a teacher told her to put her poems in a drawer for ten years before sending them out. That advice plays into a paralyzing perfectionism. You can usually manage to see your words through fresh eyes in only a few days or weeks.

2. Advice that limits your potential.  Could it be true, as a novelist once wrote, that if you’ve left a novel unfinished for a few years, you may as well forget about it?  Not if your passion for project is still there or can be resurrected.

3. Advice that cramps your imagination.  Should you only write from your own point of view or about a group to which you belong?  No, that’s too rigid.  Great fiction has been written from the point of view of the opposite gender or from another era or culture. It’s all about pretending.

4. Advice suggesting that what works for you is nonetheless wrong. One novelist worried when told it was best to “Get the story out first, then polish.” His own method was to polish each section before moving on. That worked for him because he never became paralyzed by obsessing over every minor detail to the detriment of making any progress at all.

5. Advice that’s more market-oriented than you are. You may often hear, “Anticipate what the audience wants and then give it to them.” While that has worked well for some authors, others can’t create at all if they’re not pursuing their passions. There’s a time to focus on whether your work is the best it can be for reaching the audience you have in mind. But to prematurely zero in on what you think “they” want can be inhibiting.

6. Advice that’s impossible to follow. My favorite example of this is “Don’t think.” I, for one, can’t write from my toes, elbows, or even my heart. The trick, of course, is to take this less literally, and to learn to think in more inclusive ways than the usual grocery-list-compiling way.

7. Crazy-making advice. Examples: “Read everything,” or its reverse, “Don’t read at all when you’re writing.” Obviously one can’t read everything, even in a particular genre. Focusing on junk leaves little time for the good stuff. I like to immerse myself in the kind of work I’d like to produce myself.  As I read so many books, I’m not worried about imitating someone’s voice.

8. Advice that insists there’s only one correct way to write, propose, query, or submit your work.  Should you always avoid adverbs? Never use the passive voice? Never start a sentence with “there are”? Every one of these “rules” is broken constantly by top writers. And while there are established formats for query letters, nonfiction book proposals, and novel synopses, for every successful sale based on those formats, there are numerous exceptions.

Having spent many years putting hours of effort and creativity into my own work – sending off brown envelopes filled with still-warm pages, to various editors and judges – it is rather horrifying to discover that it takes me about a minute to know that yet another manuscript is about to be ‘binned’ as they say. In a sort of apology, I feel the least I can do is to reveal a few of the instant signs that your writing genius will not be discovered by the judges this time around!

What follows is a few of Simonson’s deal-killers, from Ten ways to get your writing rejected.

• Your male character is carrying around a battered and much-loved copy of a Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein or Rimbaud – guaranteed to get you moved to the “Pretentious? Moi?” pile.
• Your female character, the ‘love interest’ of your hero, has a ‘dancer’s body” and/or ‘jutting hip bones.’ I’ll personally take those jutting hip bones, and raise you a donut, as I casually toss it into the ‘get my own back on skinny youth’ pile.
• The hand of God as plot resolution.
• Your careful depiction of suburban alienation and the empty materialism of bourgeois marriage, will be put in the ‘suburban alienation and bourgeois marriage’ pile, so that in a later round, I and some colleagues can lay out the ten or twelve similar manuscripts and pick the one least likely to make us go home and ask for a divorce.
• Personal information relating to your significant psychological issues or your desire to travel with Bertie the parrot (particular to residential writing programs).

And here are a few of my own additions to the “get rejected fast” list:

• Begin the story with long paragraphs of description, not a character or bit of action in sight.

• Include numerous cliches on the first page.

• Spend inordinate amounts of time telling readers whenever a character opens and walks through a door.

• Construct every sentence, especially in dialogues, as a complete and grammatically correct sentence.

In reality, agents and editors rarely provide specifics as to why they’ve turned something down.  The most you’ll usually get is a general brush-off, something like, “While your writing and the storyline are good, I wasn’t sufficiently drawn in to take this on.”  Entertain me better, is what they mean.

And that is a product of putting together all the positives, avoiding all the negatives, a lot of luck, much persistence, and reaching one of the publishing gatekeepers on a day they haven’t had an overdue tax notice in the mail.