Help! They’ll hate my story. I can hear them now. ‘It’s lovely and so… you!’ Yes, they hate it.  Even if they say they don’t, can we believe them? At least, the verdict we get from an agent or competition judge will be honest. But honesty is cruel. No wonder new writers shudder when entering a major contest. Since 2009, many of the 3500+ contestants in the Writers’ Village * fiction award have asked me ‘Please be kind!’ Their terror is real. Why? If readers reject our story, they stomp on our soul. Here are seven defences against the terror of rejection. 1. Join the club! Virtually all authors who have left an enduring legacy were scorned in their debut years. It took Agatha Christie 23 attempts to get her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles into print. Every publisher in London laughed at William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. Even J K Rowling had her new novel The Cuckoo’s Calling turned down by ten publishers before they discovered who had written i...

Well, of course, we know it’s both. Anyone who has undertaken the daunting task to actually write and complete a book knows that no choice really exists.  I wrote in January about Inspiration, but this one is more about her evil twin: Work.  Yes, you need the initial inspiration to even talk yourself into starting. And, often, that beginning breath of the gods will take you a long way—through the opening, into the major conflicts, your oh-so-well-drawn characters jumping to life and racing around the first turn and even (hopefully) into the backstretch. Image Courtesy of http://www.horse-races.net/clip/  Ah, we love that muse, and prime her in every way we can think of! We feed her with all the sweet nothings whispered into her ear, with the promise of carrots at the end of our writing day. And she always responds. At least initially.  And then, often, we run smack dab into a soft spot on the rail. Sometimes writers hit a wall but, usually, it’s more of a...

Anybody can write a book, no? Sure, anybody can type enough words to fill up a standard-sized bound set of pages.    But as anyone who has stuck it out can second, the initial inspiration is just the place from which you start.   The psychological aspects of writing are such that most people who continue on in the process are probably garden-variety crazy.   I mean, here’s a job description for you. Wanted, worker who will: 1). Set grandiose goals, with some insane notion of actually realizing them 2). Work all hours, especially those in the dark of night when some idiosyncratic character quirk wakes one from a peaceful and much-needed sleep, demanding to be immediately jotted down or risk the horror of being forgotten 3). Remains willing to work in complete obscurity for long periods (months into years) before anyone sees the first word 4). Can tolerate an even much-longer time frame before said product is introduced to the public ...

Please welcome Terry Odell for another interesting and informative guest piece. I started writing a new book last week. I'd been between projects with other writing-related activities taking up my time. What I didn't realize until I immersed myself in Chapter 1 was that I need to write. It's a stress-release for me. If you're a writer, you write because writing is like breathing. You simply have to do it. But will it make you rich? If you're looking at the success stories of the few rich and famous authors, you're going to feel like a failure from Day One. There are no overnight success stories. No shortcuts. A writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. And nowadays, when the odds of a new author breaking into the Big Six are getting slimmer and slimmer, and the mid-list authors are going the way of the dodo, I decided to investigate alternate publishing methods. Yes, I'd heard Joe Konrath preach that e-books were the get-rich-quick scheme of publishin...