“Oh noes! My muse is not here! I cannot write! Instead I will play Left 4 Dead 2 until muse shows up.”

This method will leave you with kickarse zombie killing skills but will not be much chop when it comes to, you know, writing.

Now, I’m not a very spiritual or mystical person, so feel free to ignore me. But I can tell you that even my most mystical woo-woo writer friends do not sit around waiting for their muse to show up. They write when they’re feeling inspired. They write when they’re not. Depending on deadlines, they write when it’s a gorgeous day and they’d much rather be cycling, they write when they’re supposed to be at a movie with friends, they write when they haven’t had enough sleep, they write when they’re ill. They write because it is their job to do so.

One of the cool things about NaNoWriMo is that it gives you a taste of what it’s like to a professional writer. Of what it’s like to write day after day after day even when you don’t want to. What some of you may discover is that it’s not for you. That you truly cannot write without inspiration. That deadlines don’t galvanise you, they freeze you. In which case the life of a full-time pro writer is not for you.

That does not mean you can’t still write. At all. There are many published writers, who write in their spare time, for whom it is not their main source of income. The majority of published writers are like that. And there are even more unpublished writers for whom the writing is the thing and getting published is not a goal. Many writers of fanfic have zero desire to turn pro.

Which leads me to revise my position: it’s perfectly fine to wait for your muse to show up if writing is not your job. But if you depend upon writing then you have to learn to make it a habit, a way of life, and not depend on totally unreliable muses and inspiration and the like.

Don’t forget to check out Scott’s NaNo writing tips.

One of the biggest flaws in beginner writing is a reliance on stereotypes and cliches which produces characters who never come to life because they lack verisimilitude. The female protag faints and is afraid of spiders. The male one is brave and strong. Or vice versa. And that’s all there is to them. They’re thinner than paper.

What do I mean by a stereotype? Let’s look at one that frequently shows up in US teen movies and books: the dumb jock.

Now am I saying that you can’t write about a dumb jock? No, absolutely not. I’m saying that if you’re writing a character who has been written a million times before and been in a million movies you have to work hard to make them transcend being merely “the dumb jock.” You have to turn them into a fully realised character.

My favourite dumb jock is D.J. Schwenk, the protag of Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen trilogy. D.J. breaks the stereotype in several ways. For starters she’s a girl and she’s playing American football on a boy’s team. But there’s more to it than that. She’s dumb in that she’s not very good at school work. She doesn’t get why people read books for pleasure. And she’s not particularly smart about her own feelings. Or rather she’s slow at figuring them out. She’s slow at things that aren’t physical. But she gets there eventually. All too often we equate fast thinking with smart thinking and D.J. helps get you to rethink that. Maybe she’s considered “dumb” because our definition of smart isn’t very flexible?

When a character is making you rethink what it means to be “dumb” or “smart” you know you’re in the hands of a wonderful writer.

How does Murdock do it?

It’s all in the details. The tell-tale observations that are so particular to her character. The syntax and rhythm of D.J.’s speech (the books are in first person) sounds like no one but D.J. Schwenk. Here’s the opening of the third book in the trilogy, Front and Center:

Here are ten words I never thought I’d be saying . . . Well, okay, sure. I say these words all the time. It’s not like school and good and to are the kind of words you can avoid even if you wanted to. It’s just that I’ve never said them in this particular order. Not that I can remember, anyway. But what do you know, there they were inside my head, like a little thing you’d say to get yourself psyched: It sure feels good to be going back to school.

It feels like D.J. is talking directly to us. We get to see her thought patterns, which are halting, even clumsy, she’s not comfortable with words, which is something we usually associate with being smart.

It’s very intimate to be allowed such close access to someone else’s thoughts. It’s a great way to get your audience on side with your character. We get to know them better than anyone else in the book does. And when we know a character that well it’s impossible for them to remain a stereotype.

So there you have it: if you get inside your character’s head, really get to understand them, then they cease to be a cliche. It doesn’t matter if they started as the perky cheerleader, or the loner goth kid who reads too much, or the bully with problems at home they will become themselves: real and believable.

Good luck with it!

Sadly, that doesn’t work for every writer. Nor does it work for every book. Although I bashed out a crappy zero draft for the majority of my books, I wrote Liar editing as I went. I don’t think it would have worked to have written it any other way.

I wrote Liar scene by scene. Working on each one until it was polished and gleaming and then, and only then, moving on to the next one. The scenes in Liar are pretty short so it was easier to write that way than if they were longer regular chapters. (You can see an extract here. I talk a bit more about the writing of Liar here.)

The other approach to editing as you go is to start each new session by going over the last bit of the book you wrote. This is an especially good technique for those people who struggle to get going with their writing. Instead of beginning each new session with the scary blankness of what is not yet written, you begin with the comfort of words already on the page. Go over the last couple of chapters, fix what needs fixing from typos on up, reacquaint yourself with your characters and story, and write from there. By the time the draft is finished you’ll have gone over the majority of the novel two or three times and your novel will be in much better shape than if you’d just banged the whole thing out with nary a glance backwards.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach. Like I said I’ve written many novels that way.

You’re now more than half way through NaNoWriMo. Congratulations! And good luck for the next 14 days!

Sometimes my procrastination feeds my writing.

That’s right, sometimes procrastination is your friend.

Yes, I know I just told you to turn the internet off. Well, now I’m telling you to turn it back on again. Or to go clean the bathroom. Or crochet or knit. Shoot some hoops. Take a shower. Or do some other urgent-ish thing that is calling to you rather than writing. Yes, even if it involves hacking off zombie heads.

My biggest form of procrastination is IMing with friends. I have been known to spend 8 hours straight doing so. (Hello, Alaya!) I find five convos¹ at the same time no problem.² I can’t tell you how many times those conversations have given me ideas, solved plot problems, made me realise something about my writing I never realised before.

To be clear we mostly don’t talk about each other’s writing directly. What we do is talk about many other things including shows, books, movies we love (or hate) and what did (or didn’t) work about them. Ever since Diana Peterfreund first nudged me towards watching Avatar we’ve been talking about it. I think writing a convincing and likable Chosen One is incredibly hard. I tend to dislike fiction that centres around one. Yet Aang in Avatar is just about pitch perfect. Our Avatar conversations have sparked off a million and one ideas that have gone into various projects of mine.

So, yes, it’s procrastinating. But it’s also feeding into my work in awesomely productive ways. I think everything I experience feeds into my writing. Which is why I believe procrastination is necessary.

Sometimes you need to be alone with your work. But no one can create without stimulus from the outside world. The key is balancing the two.

1. More than five, though, and I’m lost. What can I tell you? I’m old.
2. While also reading blogs etc.

Perhaps now is the time to rip the DSL from the wall, switch your cable off, hide your modem. Maybe you need to make your internet go away entirely until you’ve gotten as much writing done as you’re capable of.

I am a creature of little self control so sometimes I have Scott take the internet from me so I do not start chatting with everyone I know for hours and hours about writing rather than, you know, actually writing. The most and most consistent writing I’ve ever done was when staying in an internet-less house.

I worry that some of you are as bad as me.

How about for the next few days you experiment with not having the internet on while you NaNoWriMo?

Let me know how it goes.

Note: Today’s tip was brought to you by a swearing John Scalzi.

Don’t forget to check out Scott’s tips. Yesterday’s one was about the passage of disbelief.

Here’s my bad fuzzy photo of the many:

It was pretty overwhelming to be on the bill with such popular writers, especially Suzanne Collins. For those who don’t know, her two most recent novels, Hunger Games and Catching Fire are currently, and have been for some time, numbers one and two on The New York Times bestsellers list, selling bajillions of copies a week. The Books of Wonder appearance was organised around Suzanne because it was her only signing for Catching Fire. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Peter Glassman (the owner of BoW) thought to ask me to take part. Here’s Suzanne in action (with Libba Bray listening carefully):

I’d never met Suzanne before. She’s lovely, smart and gently funny. She, me and Libba had a fun conversation about the joys (meeting wonderful teens, booksellers, librarians) and travails (food poisoning) of touring. She’s also extraordinarily generous, giving up a big chunk of her presentation to talk in detail about how much she’d loved Liar, Fire,¹ Leviathan and Going Bovine. Thank you, Suzanne.

I’d never met Kristin either and she also turned out to be lovely. I don’t know what it is about the YA world but almost all the authors I’ve met have been fabulous.² It’s such a wonderful community to be part of.

It was only overwhelming at first then it quickly became relaxing. For most of my tour, I’ve done solo events with all the attention on me, but last night I could sit back and watch how other YA authors answer questions about how they come up with names, where they get their ideas, and which characters they like best.

Suzanne and Kristin were both so thoughtful and smart, providing little glimpses into how they work. They both have detailed maps of the imaginary worlds they’ve created. It sounds like Kristin’s world encompasses gazillions of countries and large swathes of time. Very Tolkienesque. Libba Bray remains one of the funniest people on the planet and I don’t just say that because she’s a dear friend of mine. As does Scott.³ Last night’s event made me want to stick to doing events with other people. Not just because it’s more fun for me, but also because it felt like the audience gets more out of it too.

What do you think?

One event I’m dying to do is me and Libba talking about unreliable narrators. For those of you who haven’t read Going Bovine you really should. We wrote Liar and Going Bovine at the same time and commented on each other’s early drafts. I can’t tell you how deeply eerie it was to discover we were both writing unreliable narrators and how many resemblances there were between our books even while they were also extremely different. Going Bovine is hysterically funny; Liar not so much. I think our two books work amazingly well side by side. Turns out I am not the only one to notice this.

Maybe some time next year we’ll be able to talk about our books, their unreliability, and how hard they were to write side by side. Fingers crossed!

1. As Kristin said, “Look! Our books rhyme!”
2. Another contributing factor to why I never want to write for the grown ups: I’d have to hang out with the cranky adult literature authors. Ewww.
3. Yes, I know he’s my husband but he truly is hilarious.

But I digress: on to today’s tip which has nothing to do with meta-documents and also kind of contradicts my previous tip about using square brackets. It emerges from a conversation I had with the marvellous Sarah Rees Brennan. It turns out that she does not skip the boring or tricky bits but instead bribes herself into writing them. Her reward is to write the fun scene on the other side of the tricky bit. So if she doesn’t write the scene she’s been avoiding then she’s not allowed to write the scene she really wants to write.

There are many reasons for doing this but the most frequently cited one is that if you skip all the hard bits—as I advised you to do in the square bracket post—you may never finish the book. As Zeborah puts it:

It means I write all the easy parts of the book first, meaning I have to write all the hard parts later in a single chunk, meaning I probably won’t finish the book. Whereas if I force myself to write entirely in order, I can use a future easy-and-fun scene as a reward for getting through a hard scene.

Another reason not to skip tricky scenes is that sometimes you don’t know whether a scene is going to be hard until you’ve written it. I can’t tell you how many times a scene I was dreading has turned out to be easy and vice versa. A slightly spoilery Liar example after the cut:

In the third part of Liar there’s the climactic scene in Yayeko Shoji’s apartment between Micah and Yayeko and her mother and daughter. This scene was not in the first few drafts of the book and was suggested by Karen Joy Fowler and my wonderful Australian editor, Jodie Webster. As soon as they said it I knew they were right. It was exactly what the book was missing. However, I wasn’t sure I could write it. I thought it would be ridiculously hard. I whinged to Scott, who told me not to be a wuss and write the damn scene, as I have told him many times.¹ Which I did in about half an hour with no difficulty at all. It’s probably my favourite scene in the whole book.

What if the “hard” scene you’re skipping is just as easy to write as that one was? What happens when the “easy” scene you write first turns out to be really hard? Will it put you off ever writing the “hard” scenes?

Obviously all of this depends on what kind of writer you are. It will also depend on the book. Sometimes scene skipping is just the ticket. Other times not so much. Sometimes it will turn out that the reason you’re skipping the scene is because it doesn’t belong in your book. Rule number ten of Elmore Leonard’s writing advice is to skip the boring bits.

There you have it: don’t skip the tricky bits! (Unless you need to.)

1. We get to trade off on who is bad cop and who is good. Oops! TMI.

I recently learned that in certain fandoms OTP stands for One True Pairing. That is, the two characters who are meant to be together. This has made me look at everything with entirely different eyes. Do any of you watch Community? Me and Scott have decided that Abed¹ and Troy are that show’s OTP. Our favourite part of Community is their bit after the credits at the end of every show. Fills my heart with joy:

I’m off to spot all the other OTPs in the universe.

1. Abed as Batman is the best thing in the entire universe.

But, wait, you’ve stopped? Why?

Is it because the bit you have to write next is a tad too complicated (how does a nuclear reactor work?) and/or requires research (when a car explodes do the windows go flying out? how far? what does it sound like exactly?) or is too squishy (you got to the love scene, didn’t you?) or you’re not in the mood (writing journeys is boring).

Rather than come to a grinding halt why not square bracket it?

By which I mean do this:

Janice Lardano got out of the car and stared pensively at the nuclear reactor. It made her nervous to go in there but go in there she must.

[scene in nuclear reactor]

As Janice left the nuclear reactor she saw a strange man sprinting away from the parking lot.

[car explodes]

As Janice picked the bits of car from her hair she became aware of a beautiful man looking at her. His teeth gleamed.

[love scene]

Janice finished buttoning her blouse, picked up her purse, and looked back at the gleaming beauty. It would be hard to leave him, but she must. The continued survival of the world was at stake!

[journey in which Janice meets wise woman and saves world]

Janice smiled, reaching out to hold his gleaming hand. Sometimes life really was perfect.

Added bonus: when you get stuck you can go back and fill them in. I also use them for research [how much does mercury weigh?] or for really generic stuff [something else needed here] [they talk and discover they like each other] [denouement] or for instructions or notes to self [make this bit better] [she's supposed to be angry here she just sounds annoyed].¹

There you have it: the glory of square brackets. [Ending could be punchier.]

1. Though now I use Scrivener I use square brackets a lot less.

As it happens I have already written a post on how to get unstuck. It is rather lengthy, however, so here’s a quick and dirty version of what you should do when you get stuck:

• Dance. That’s right, get up from the computer, turn whatever music you like up loud, and shake it! Dance! Dance! Dance! Do it till you’re sweating. Then dance some more.
• Run around the block. For some of us dancing is just not our thing. But we can run. Or shoots some hoops. Or some other physical activity away from the computer.
• Read newspapers. This is where Karen Healey gets many of her ideas. Whenever she gets stuck she goes to her fave newspapers and starts reading. Obscure and weird articles are best.
• Send someone in with a gun. Raymond Chandler’s favourite I’m-stuck solution. He was also fond of knocking his characters unconscious. Many writers like to blow stuff up. Cassandra Clare likes to have characters who fancy each other discover that THEY’RE ACTUALLY BROTHER AND SISTER. The point being: throw complications at your characters. Make ‘em suffer! See how they react.

To sum up: to get unstuck you need to either take a break and do something that uses your whole body, or you need to throw something new at your characters. Or both.

I’m sure my gentle readers will have been more suggestions to unstuckify you.

Good luck!

In other news Cristina Hernadez posted her midterm project for her painting class on her blog and I was so impressed I asked if I could share it with you here. Remember, Cristina? She’s the one who photoshopped a very disturbing version of Maureen Johnson’s Suite Scarlett.

Here’s her midterm painting:

Wow, huh? Cristina also had to write an essay about the painting and I couldn’t help laughing when she wrote this:

Honestly, the hardest part of the project was the ESSAY. I mean, I think I finally understand** why authors moan so much about the “where do you get your ideas” “how did you came up with X idea” kind of question. Because it IS hard to answer!

That’s exactly it. So much easier to write a novel then to explain where it came from. I’ve spent the last few weeks explaining where Liar came from. And honestly? It was mostly bunkum. I don’t really know where it came from. It just is. I can talk to you all day long about the process of writing with lots of singing the praises of Scrivener but ideas? Ideas are magic. No one knows where they come from.

Don’t forget to check out Scott’s NaNo tip!

I’m seeing too many people stressing out about word counts and beating up on themselves when they fall short of them. Cut yourself some slack!

Here’s why:

NaNoWriMo is meant to be a fun, companionable way to try your hand at novel writing. That means that over the month you’re going to start to learn what kind of writer you are.¹ One of the things you might learn is that you are not a fast writer. There is no shame in that. Lots of very fine writers are slow. Nalo Hopkinson rarely writes more than 500 words a day. Doesn’t get in the way of her producing many wonderful books.

You may also discover that you’re a very fast writer. No shame in that either. I swear I’ve seen Maureen Johnson bang out 20,000 words in a single sitting. That would kill me. She continues to live and breathe and write more wickedly funny words.

Give yourself permission to enjoy NaNoWriMo. So if at the end of the day you’ve only written 150 words, celebrate those words. Do a 150-word dance! Same if it was a one-word day or a six-thousand word day.

Some of you won’t get anywhere near 50,000 words in the month. Perhaps you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about your novel. That’s writing too. There are many writers who need to nut the whole novel out first in their heads before they can start writing. Could be you’re one of those.

Like I said, use the month of November to explore. Whatever you wind up with—on paper or in your head—you’ll know more about yourself as a writer.

Have fun!

1. I’m still not entirely sure what kind of writer I am. Sometimes two thousand words a day is easy, sometimes it kills me.

You know what that means? You can relax. A first draft can be bad. In fact, it will be bad. Don’t worry about it. Plow on. Don’t even think of it as a first draft. That’s too much pressure, not to mention insulting to first drafts, think of it as your zero draft.

That’s what I do.

I get a lot of people asking for tips for dealing with writer’s block. I don’t get writer’s block. But only because I’ve learned not to be bothered by writing utter, utter rubbish.¹ I expect my zero draft to be the worst writing in the history of writing thus when it turns out shockingly badly, I am unconcerned. “Why, yes, it is rubbish. No matter, that’s what I was going for.”

I write myself out of trouble,² but that also mean I write myself into trouble: my zero drafts are full of insanely repetitive passages, and thus full of redundancies. Here is a short example:

Even though he’d now taken it away I could still feel the warmth of where his thumb had briefly brushed against my shoulder.

In the final version it became this:

I felt warmth where his thumb had been.

I have no idea how many drafts the novel went through before that slim sentence emerged from the bloated one. Lots.

I also usually wind up writing something like this at least once in the course of a zero draft:

She wasn’t sure what she was doing there. What was the point? Maybe he wouldn’t meet her after all. She should have stayed in class. She should never have answered the phone. Or talked to him. Or agreed to meet him. Or been born. Why was she here? Why wasn’t she doing something more productive? Somewhere else?

In the final version it looks like this:

. . .

Yup, that’s right, deleted, gone, wiped out, obliterated, not in the book. And if I were writing the preceding sentence in a novel I’d probably pare it down and all. Unless I was going for the laughs. Sometimes repetition can be funny. But only if used sparingly.

So, there you have it my tip is to have fun with your first draft and don’t worry about writing rubbish. Expect it! You can fix it later.

Disclaimer: If this advice doesn’t work for you and you keep getting stuck it could be that you’re an outliner. Down tools and start outlining. But don’t ask me for advice on how to do that cause I have no idea. However, I suspect that once you’ve outlined and start writing your first draft then the above advice may well apply.

Good luck!

1. Also I don’t get paid if I don’t write.
2. As opposed to stopping working and thinking my way out or outlining the next few chapters.

Scott and me decided that we’ll spend the month offering tips. Scott’s tips will be over on his blog and will appear on the odd numbered days of November, mine will be here on the even days. Though as I’m still deep in Liar promotion, I can’t guarantee my tips will be 100% true. Who knows? Maybe Micah will take over for a few of them?

If you have anything specific you’d like a tip on, let me know in the comments.

Happy Halloween! Don’t scare your younger siblings too much or steal all their sugariffic treats.

1. November is almost always a travelling month for me.

The finished Liar turned out somewhat differently. Less with the funny.

This happens to me a lot. I suspect it’s because I don’t plan or outline my novels. Writing the first (or zero) draft is where I do the planning and figuring out and where I discover what kind of book I’m writing. Though maybe that’s what those planners are doing as they outline?¹

Just before I start writing a new book I have the shiny wobbly spherical-ish ur idea of it floating at the front of my brain. I can see the colours and I know what it smells like. It is gorgeous and wonderful. But something happens the moment I start writing it: the-texure-colours-shape-and-smell-novel I thought I was writing begins to fall apart. Every new word on the screen speeds up the process. Within a few thousand words all that’s left is this very faint residue. By the time I finish the first draft I can barely remember the floating sphere of wonder. The book has become its own self.

When I first started trying to write novels that process really bothered me. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t capture what I’d been imagining on the page. I thought it meant I was a terrible writer. But now I know it’s just part of the process and I enjoy it. I’ve decied that exactly capturing those early imaginings would be boring. There’d be no discovery, which is part of why I can’t outline. I really enjoy finding out what kind of novel I’m writing as I write it. I like that my novels surprise me.

But of course as I’ve said here many times before: every novelist writes differently. I’m sure many of them will not recognise what I’m talking about and write exactly the books they imagined. I wonder what that’s like?

1. Who knows? Their ways are a mystery to me.

Today I prepare for my appearance in Larchmont tonight and the many appearances I’m doing next week in Seattle and Portland. Then I’ll be at the Teen Lit Festival in Austin next Saturday. That’s quite a temperature range. Packing’s going to be fun!

For those of you who only read the posts and not the comments, you really need to check out the comments on the White Writer Advantages thread and the Hating Female Characters one. People are being astonishingly smart.

Here’s my response:

Firstly, those who’ve heard me talk about writing may remember that I, too, use that high diving metaphor. Yup, stole that one from Scott. Hey, he steals heaps of my stories and metaphors too. We’re an equal opportunity story-stealing household.

It’s also true that we are each other’s first readers, or in this case, listeners, and that we make many suggestions for changes to each other’s work. Many of which wind up happening. I’ve been asked if that means we collaborate on everything we write. No, only in a really broad sense could you say that. And it would be so broad it would make the word “collaborate” meaningless.

One thing I find really interesting is that despite how closely we work together, and how involved we are in each other’s work, our writing voices are very different. I could not write like Scott no matter how hard I tried. And he could not write like me. I don’t have the simile bug for one.² But I do think we understand each other’s work better than anyone else and thus are really good at suggesting ways to make it better. Admittedly my jobs a little easier than Scott’s. All I have to do to improve his current series is point out that it’s time to blow something else up.

All right, that’s enough self-indulgence from me this morning, let’s take this outwards: How many of you work very closely with another writer? Do you read you work aloud to someone else? Is there anyone who reads and critiques every word you write from the very first draft?

Do anyone of you never show your work to anyone?

Tell me about your critiquing process!

1. What? I wanted to check out some more Liar reviews. That’s not a crime, is it?
2. I defy you to find a page of Scott’s work without a simile on it. I have whole novels with nary a simile.

I know that the title of this post is going to lead to some comments insisting that it’s not true that white writers have any advantages and that many white people are just as oppressed as people of colour. I don’t want to have that conversation. So I’m going to oppress the white people who make those comments by deleting them. I don’t do it with any malice. I do it because I want to have a conversation about white privilege in publishing. We can have the discussion about class privilege and regional privilege and other kinds of privilege some other time. Those other privileges are very real. But I don’t want this discussion to turn into some kind of oppression Olympics.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t, Redux

There were some wonderful responses to my post attempting to debunk the “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” canard. But I got the impression that some people understood me as saying that it’s fine for white people to write about non-white people and that any criticism for doing so is no big deal. Writers get criticised for all sorts of different things. Whatcha gunna do?

I did not mean that at all. I’m very sorry that my sloppy writing led to such a misunderstanding. I think the criticism a white writer receives for writing characters who are a different race or ethnicity, especially by people of that race or ethnicity, is a very big deal. We white writers have to listen extremely carefully. Neesha Meminger wrote a whole post about why in which she talks about how hard it is for many non-white writers to get published:

I know how tiring it is to hear over and over from editors or agents (who are, in almost all cases, white) that they “just didn’t connect with,” or “just didn’t fall in love with” the characters of a mostly-multicultural book. And, while I know these can be standard industry responses to manuscripts, the fact of the matter is that white authors are getting published. White authors writing about PoC are getting published—sometimes to great acclaim—while authors of colour are still not (in any significant numbers).

Mayra Lazara Dole makes a similar point:

Many POC feel you are stealing their souls. We’ve never, ever had your same opportunities. As an africanam friend would say, “the times of white people painting their faces black in hollywood are over.” Why don’t you sit back and allow us to get our work published while you keep writing what you know until we catch up? Shouldn’t it be about equal opportunity? If so, please consider giving us a chance to make our mark (about 90 percent of all books are written by white authors).

Now before you get your back up and start spouting about how you have a right to write whatever you want. Neesha agrees:

So, to my white brothers and sisters: certainly, write your story. Populate it with a true reflection of the world you live in. Bring to life strong and powerful characters of all colours. Do so with the ferocity of an ally and the tenderness of family. But please don’t be so cavalier as to shrug and say, “I did my best, and frock you if you don’t like it—plenty of your people thought I did a great job.” Take the criticism in as well. After the urge to defend yourself has passed, pick through the feedback and see if there’s some learning there. Because the reality is that masses upon masses of “our people” have absorbed toxic levels of self-hatred from the images and messages (and *inaccurate representations*) that surround us. Many of us have learned to believe that we are less than, not worthy, undeserving—and are simply grateful to be allowed to exist among you without fear.

So does Mayra Lazara Dole:

On the other hand, having been born in a communist country with censorship, please, write what you want, but just know that even though you have every right to write whatever you wish, you’ll hurt some of us. Many POC’s won’t be as forgiving, but some will. To some POC’s it will feel as if you are stealing from them . . . Don’t you want POC to write our own books?

So do I. Hey, all my books so far have had non-white protags (follow the link for my reasons why). Neither Neesha nor Mayra want to censor white writers, they want us to be very careful of what we do, and they want us to own it.

That’s what I’ve tried to do, but I haven’t always succeeded. Writing, thinking beyond my privilege, these are things I struggle with every single day of my life. I was not standing here from on high saying, “Here’s how to do it.”¹ I was saying, “Here’s what I’m wrestling with.”

What are the advantages that white writers writing about people of colour have that PoC writers don’t have?

First of all (assuming that you can actually write) your odds of getting published are better than theirs.² No, I don’t have statistics to back me up, but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence. Of friends and acquaintances who were rejected by editors and agents who already had their one African or Asian author. If you’re the only brown writer on a list than you have to be a lot better than all the other brown writers competing for that one slot. The hurdles that many non-white writers have to jump to get published in the USA are higher than they are for white writers.³

Here’s another big advantage: If you, as a white writer, produce an excellent book about people who aren’t like you odds are high that your ability to do so will be seen as a sign of your virtuosity and writerly chops, which it is. However, non-white writers rarely get the same response, even though it’s just as hard for them. I say that not just because I think all good writing is hard to achieve, but because every time you write a nuanced character who isn’t white you’re writing against a long, long tradition of stereotyped characters in Western literature. That’s hard to do no matter what your skin colour. And if you’re a writer working within in a different writing tradition and trying to make it succeed within the English-language novel tradition you’re doing something even harder.

I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that we white writers should feel guilty about any of this. Guilt is a pointless emotion. White writers who’ve written about people of colour and won acclaim and awards don’t have to hand their prizes back. That would change nothing.

What I am saying is that we need to be aware of our privilege and listen to criticism and act upon it. We need to do what we can to change things. The more novels with a diversity of characters that are published and succeed in the marketplace the more space there will be. The more people who can find themselves in books, the more readers we’ll all have, and the more opportunities there’ll be for writers from every background. Of course, it’s not just the writers who need to be more diverse, but everyone in publishing, from the interns to agents to the folks in sales, marketing, publicity, and editorial, to the distributors and booksellers.

There are many wonderful books by writers of colour. Read them, talk about them, buy them for your friends. Point them out to your editors and agents. Be part of changing the culture and making space for lots of different voices. The problem is not so much what white people write; it’s that so few other voices are heard. If the publishing industry were representative of the population at large we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.

1. And I’m very sorry if it came across that way.
2. Yes, it’s hard for all people to get published. I know. It took me twenty years to do so. But add to that the prevailing notion in the publishing industry that books about people of colour don’t sell and it becomes even harder.
3. The hurdles they have to jump to have the time and resources to write in the first place are typically also higher, but that’s a whole other story. Don’t get me started on the differences I’ve seen on tour in the USA between predominately black schools versus predominately white ones.

Damned if you do, they say, damned if you don’t.

To which I can only say, and I mean this nicely, “Please!”

What exactly are you risking? Who exactly is damning you? Which of your previously published novels have attracted no criticisms and no damnation? Cause that’s amazing. You wrote a book no one critcised? Awesome. Please teach me that trick!

Every single book I’ve published has displeased someone. I’ve been accused of promoting teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, and underage drinking. Every single one of my books has caused at least a few people to tell me that I stuffed various things up: my descriptions of Sydney, of NYC, of mathematics (absolutely true), my Oz characters don’t speak like proper Aussies, and my USians don’t talk like proper Yanquis. My teenagers sound too young or too old and are too smart or too stupid. I did my best, but some think that was not good enough.

That’s the risk you take when you write a book.

If you do not have the knowledge, resources, research, or writing skills to write people who are different from you, then don’t. People may well criticise you for that. They’ll also criticise you for having some of your characters speak their notion of ungrammatical English¹. And for not having enough vampires. Whatever.² Write what you’re good at. Lots and lots of writers pretty much only write about themselves and their friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a famous example. There are many many others. That’s fine. Own it. And do it as well as you can.

If you, as a white writer, decide to write people of a different hue to yourself then you should do your damnedest to get it right. But know that no matter how well researched your book, no matter how well vetted by multiple knowledgeable readers it is, there will always be people who think you buggered it up and misrepresented them. All you can do is write the best, most thoroughly researched book you possibly can. After all, don’t you do that with every book you write? You don’t write your historicals with Wikipedia as your only source, do you? Right then.

What should you do when you are criticised?

Listen. Learn. Even if you think they’re insane and completely wrong.

Figure out how to avoid the same egregious mistakes in your next book. But remember that your next book will also be criticised. That’s how it goes.

Do not have a hissy fit and say you’ll never write about anyone who isn’t white again. Do not insult those criticising you.

Say you, as a white American, write a novel with many Thai-American characters and a Thai-American reader criticises you for getting something wrong yet another Thai-American reader praises you for getting the exact same thing right. Who do you believe?

What do you do when two white readers disagree about stuff in your books? Do you assume that all white people are the same? Perhaps it’s time to stop assuming that all Thai-Americans are the same and have the same opinions and experiences. Thailand’s a big country with a wide range of ethnicities, religions, cuisines and everything else. The experiences of the Thai diaspora in the USA is going to be just as varied. Some Thai Americans will think you got it right, some will think you got it wrong. That’s how it goes.

Keep in mind that Thai-Americans writing about Thai-Americans are also criticised and told they get it wrong. No one is immune from criticism. No one is immune from getting it wrong for at least some of their readers. We all do it.

Writing is hard. No matter what you write about. You will be damned no matter what you do. But that has nothing to do with you being white, that has to do with you having the arrogance to be a writer, and publish what you write for other people to read. Your readers get to judge you. That’s just how it goes. Your job is to be a grown up about what you do and how people respond to you. That’s really hard too. Trust me, I know.

Thus endeth the rant.

1. Trust me, I get that one all the time
2. I am SO over vampires. Except for the good ones.

For instance, after yesterday’s event an adult came up to me and explained that they are an aspiring writer working on their first novel. They said they wanted my advice but the questions they asked really confused me:

What’s the best way to get started writing fan fiction?

How do you build up a following?

Should I be using wordpress, livejournal or blogger?

It took me awhile to realise what was going on. They wanted to know what to do to get a publisher’s attention. And they had decided the best way to do that was to reverse engineer other writers’ successes. Two of their favourite writers had started out as fan fiction writers and developed big followings. Another of their favourites was a blogger who had sold a novel they had first posted on their website.

The problem with that plan¹ is that there only a handful of writers in the entire world who got published that way. You’d be better off buying lottery tickets.

Besides which, none of those writers did it on purpose. They wrote fanfic because they loved it. They blogged for the same reason.² Because they loved it and were good at it they developed a following. None of them blogged and wrote fanfic in order to develop a following.³

I stood there, mouth agape, trying to figure out how to respond to these wrong questions. Should I tell this aspiring writer that they had the cart so far in front of the horse that the two were never going to meet?

Instead I asked AW a question:

Justine: “How many novels have you written?”

Aspiring Writer: Silence.

Justine: “Have you written one novel?”

AW: “Well, um, I’m halfway into my first one.”

Justine: “You don’t have a finished draft?”

AW: “No.”

I told the AW about how I started at least twenty novels before I finally finished one. I did not sell the first novel I completed. Or my second. I sold my third novel. I know many, many writers who sold their fifth, eight, or twentieth novel first. The majority of published writers did not sell the first novels they wrote.

I explained how bad it is for you to start thinking about marketing and promotion before you’ve even learned whether you can finish a novel. It will do your head in. It’s bad enough angsting about all that stuff when you do have published novels.

I think I got through to AW. I think I finally know how to get other wrong question asking aspiring writers back on to right questions. From now on I am going to ask them how many novels they’ve written.

1. Okay, there are MANY problems with that plan. Starting with it being insane.
2. Many of them still do both.
3. How do I know? The writers in question are friends of mine. Yes, I know everyone.

I’m back! So yesterday I gave you a list of books about poc that I think you should read, although I’m sure I left off some great books by accident. If you want some more lists check out Susan’s at Color Online for specifically sci-fi check this out the Happy Nappy Bookseller’s list and for bi-racial, multi-racial poc go here.

Also I want to share some information with you on the Diversity Roll Call meme. Diversity Roll Call is hosted by Ali at worducopia and Susan at Color Online. Anyone can participate. It’s for two weeks and is basically like a challenge. The meme asks you to really evaluate your reading habits, how diverse are they (gender wise, religion wise, race-wise, economics-wise, sexual orientation).

The current assignment asks you to blog about a book that appeals to both genders, talk about gender in your writing (if you’re an author), or take a book that you love and change the gender of the protag. You can do all or either of these. I highly recommend everyone join in! More details when you follow the above link. If you don’t have a blog, just leave a comment answering the question. Have fun!

You may be wondering: why should I read books about people who aren’t like me? They’re not the same gender as me, the same sexual orientation, race, or religion. I’m uncomfortable reading about what I don’t know. I would never be able to understand them.

My response: No, no, no! Don’t think like that. First of, let me explain. I don’t only read books about poc. I’ve read (and loved) many books featuring white characters (I currently really want to read Eyes Like Stars, Deadline, Angry Management, Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, and Perfect Chemistry). But I don’t just want to read books about people who don’t look like me, so I can understand where the ‘I don’t wanna read about people I can’t relate to’ crowd is coming from.

Sometimes I don’t pick up a book because there’s a white person on the cover and I think ‘I can’t relate.’ But then I stop and think ‘I would hate to know someone else is doing this same thing to a book with a Latina on the cover’ (or any other race/religion/gender/sexual orientation), so I at least read the synopsis. Often I end up getting the book and enjoying it (like You Are So Undead to Me, the Mortal Instruments Trilogy, the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Heat, Private series).

I think it’s important to expand your horizons. Reading books can really put you in someone else’s shoes. For example, Whale Talk is one of my favorite books in the world. I could totally relate to the male main character even though I’m not a guy. Or reading about a lesbian teen (Down to the Bone—on my tbr list!) even if you’re straight can help you experience and sympathize with the hate, ignorance and discrimination LGBT teens and adults often face. They can also make you see that the way LGBT teens feel about their loves and lives are pretty similar to those of a straight person, the only difference is liking their same gender (or both genders).

Also, often when you’re reading a book you may not even notice their ethnicity a whole lot (like in the Make Lemonade Trilogy), they just are what they are. You get so wrapped up in thinking ‘Yeah I’ve been through that’, or ‘I definitely would have said that too’, that you don’t notice a character’s race, religion, or gender or anything else, except that you can relate. That’s awesome. One of the most powerful things books can do is help tear down stereotypes (especially the negative ones). They educate, uplift and make us laugh. Read more books about poc, the opposite gender or sexual orientation, and/or religion and I bet you’ll not only learn something new, but you’ll really enjoy it (maybe not all, but I’m sure you won’t hate all books about guys, if you’re a girl, for example.)

In writing this blog post, I’ve stepped back and really looked at my diverse reading habits. I definitely need to read more books about LGBT teens, Native American teens, Asian teens, and teen guys. So if you have any suggestions do share!

I hope I haven’t bored or insulted anyone. I would love to hear your thoughts on my posts so leave a comment on Justine’s blog, my blog, or email me willbprez at aol dot com.

Thanks Justine for letting me guest blog! I hope you don’t regret it.

1. These two guest posts are timed to post while I’m travelling. If your comments get stuck in moderation you’ll have to be patient. Sorry.

I don’t remember deciding that Reason, the protagonist of the Magic or Madness trilogy, would have a white Australian mother and an Indigenous Australian father. I don’t remember deciding that Tom would be white Australian or Jay-Tee Hispanic USian. But I made a conscious decision that none of the characters in How To Ditch Your Fairy would be white and that Liar would have a mixed race cast. Why?

Because a young Hispanic girl I met at a signing thanked me for writing an Hispanic character. Because when I did an appearance in Queens the entirely black and Hispanic teenage audience responded so warmly to my book with two non-white main characters. Because teens, both here and in Australia, have written thanking me for writing characters they could relate to. “Most books are so white,” one girl wrote me.

Because no white teen has ever complained about their lack of representation in those books. Or asked me why Reason and Jay-Tee aren’t white. They read and enjoyed the trilogy anyway. Despite the acres and acres of white books available to them.

Because I don’t live in an all-white world. Why on earth would I write books that are?

I’m not saying my books are perfect. They’re not. If I could go back and rewrite them I would be much more specific about Tom and Jay-Tee’s backgrounds. Tom is just white. I’m specific about his bit of Sydney and about his parents’ occupations, but not about their or his ethnicity. White is not just one flavour. Nor do I go into any kind of detail about what kind of Hispanic Jay-tee is. Is her family from Puerto Rico? Mexico? Venezuela? Dominican Republic? All/none of the above? I say she’s from the Bronx but not where in the Bronx. It’s a big place. (Please forgive me, all my Bronx friends! Especially you, Coe.) As a result I was much more specific about Micah’s background in Liar. All mistakes and oversights in that book will be worked out in the books I’m writing now. The things I get wrong in those books will be fixed in the books I write after them. And so it goes . . . (I hope.)

Questions of representation were not foremost in my mind when I was writing the Magic or Madness trilogy. I’m a white girl who grew up in a predominately white country. Thinking about race and representation is something I have to make myself do because my life is not governed negatively by it as others’ lives are, like, say Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It was the response of my readers that got me thinking hard about representation. Now those questions are foremost when I write.

Thus when I sat down to write How To Ditch Your Fairy I already knew none of the characters would be white. I also knew that I was writing a somewhat utopian world¹ in which race and gender were not the axes of oppression that they are in our world. Female athletes having as strong a prospect of making a living at their sport as a boy is clearly not true in our world, but it is in the world of HTDYF. Nor is there any discrimination on the basis of race. But there is on the basis of class and geography. (I was not writing a perfect world.)

Not many people noticed, or if they did, they didn’t mention it to me, but I was dead chuffed by those who did. Thank you.

1. In some ways it’s very dystopian.

I get to a point when I’m writing a lot when I just can’t. My brain mushes. Sentences turn murky. Gibberish dribbles out of my mouth. My typing slows and the level of typoes skyrockets. Always means I’ve written too much and I have to stop.

I wonder what’s going on. Almost all my writer friends get the same thing. Is it just fatigue? Or is there something specific to writing?

Anyone got any theories? Seen any research on it?

In the meantime tell me what your favourite/most appalling stalker song is in the comments below. I will send a signed (by me and Scott) copy of the anthology Love is Hell to the commenter whose stalker song selections most amuses me. Or at random if the busy-ness makes my brain not function enough to decide. You can find the first part of my story in the anthology here.

In the meantime here’s Stalker Song by Charlotte Martin (via Stephanie Leary):

Many people in that thread talked about how writing fanfic was a learning experience that prepared them for becoming a professional writer. And there’s no doubt that that’s how fanfic has worked for many pros. However, the vast majority of writers of fanfic not only don’t become pros, they have no desire to do so. They write fanfic for a variety of reasons: fun, community, because writing is something they can’t not do and so on—they don’t do it as some kind of apprenticeship for becoming a “real” writer.

I know professional writers who also write fanfiction. So clearly it’s fulfilling a need that their paid writing isn’t. I also do a lot of unpaid writing. You’re reading some of it right now. Often I enjoy writing posts here more than writing novels.

Or, rather, I have a much less stressful relationship to this writing than I do to my novel writing because there’s not much riding on this blog, whereas my ability to pay my rent, buy food, stay in the profession that I love is tied up in the novels I write. Sometimes it takes awhile to push that stuff aside and just write. For me blogging is a relaxation; writing novels is an economic necessity.

Which is not to say that it can’t be fun. It can. I wouldn’t swap my job for any other job in the world. I love it. But it’s still my job and comes with all the stresses that any job has, including anxiety about losing said job.

Not everyone who spends a lot of time writing wants to be a professional writer. Frankly, I think that’s sensible. It’s very hard to make a living as a professional writer. Even if you do manage it’s just as hard to make it a sustainable career. I know lots of writers who’ve been able to support themselves for a year or two or four or ten but then demand for their work dwindle, fashion in the publishing world changes. In the 80s horror was huge, now not so much. YA’s big right now but who knows were it will be in ten years. Romance is pretty much always the biggest selling genre and yet it has the lowest advances. I know of romance writers with multiple bestselling books who only get around 20k per book.

The majority of pro novelists, who are making a living, write a book a year. Many write two or three or four a year. For many writers that’s an impossible pace to sustain and it can suck the fun right out of the writing. There are lots of reasons for not making writing your main profession. Most of the published writers I know are not full-time. Many of them claim to be happier that way.

When writing becomes your full time job it completely changes your relationship to writing. It becomes a business. You can’t wait for your muse to show up. You have to force it when you’re not in the mood. You have to meet deadlines. You have to think about whether there’s a market for what you want to write. You can’t just write whatever you feel like unless you happen to be lucky enough to have a market for what you feel like writing.

In which case you’re probably Nora Roberts. Lucky duck!