Aspiring Author – Be your own competition

It’s taken me a while to come up with my 2019 writing goals. What do I want to achieve this year? Should I fine tune and push further with my first novel? Begin a second? Or continue writing short stories for a while longer.

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One of my New Year resolutions was to write more. And I’m therefore going to keep my 2019 writing goal very simple: to do better than I did last year. To be my own competition.

Last year was a slow year in terms of number of words written. In 2017, I was actively writing my expat blog and I completed my first novel. I had a real sense of achievement by the end of the year and was excited to continue writing in 2018.

However, in 2018 ‘other life’ took over a little. We returned to the UK after living in Canada for two years. I started a new full-time job which took most of my energy and attention. It was difficult to motivate myself to continue looking at a computer screen in the evenings after work. Consequently, my writing time substantially decreased.

Despite this, I was delighted to have my first success. I attended Swanwick Summer Writing School, began interacting with agents (which unfortunately didn’t work out but was still a major compliment to have an agent interested in my novel), and had my first short story published.

In 2019 I want to do even better. Whether that means get two short stories published, write a lot of content or come up with an excellent plot outline, I’m still not sure. But I would like to be able to draw a gradually inclining line on a graph that maps out my writing achievements.

So far this year I’ve almost finished a 5000-word short story (just some final edits to go) and then I will be searching for its home.

It’s easy to compare ourselves to others. This is especially true in this age of social media and can sometimes result in feelings of ‘not being good enough’. Using ourselves as our own competition is a much healthier way to measure our growth.

What are you hoping to achieve in 2019? Do you set yourself writing goals or do you prefer to go with the flow?

 

 

Diary of An Aspiring Author: My First Review

And it was positive!

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Happy New Year! January is always a bit of a gloomy month, isn’t it? Christmas is over, payday is still a distant speck on the horizon and funds are running low. I have certainly been feeling the January blues this weekend.

I’ve also been stuck in a rut with my writing. Various ideas are floating around my head, but I’m struggling to know what to focus on and commit to. I’m unsure what to do next and this has led to me not doing much writing at all!

However, something happened today which has given me a fresh burst of positivity. Firstly, I finally finished the second draft of a short story I’ve been battling with on and off since August. And secondly, I received my first ever review! It was for my short story published in December’s issue of Writers’ Forum magazine, ‘A Different Tuesday’.

The review was published in the letters section of January’s issue of the magazine, and was hugely positive and encouraging:

“…I found it original, engaging, descriptive and very well written!”

I still find it bizarre yet incredibly exciting that people are picking up my writing, reading it and enjoying it. And not just friends and family who may feel they have to read it, but real members of the public who are free to pick it up and put it down at please.

It’s still one of my favourite feelings – that warm fuzzy feeling that you get when you’ve written something and get positive feedback. I don’t think that will ever get old.

Writing has never been easy. There are constant highs and lows, but we must treasure these high moments and allow them to spur us on.

I’m now feeling encouraged to finish the final edits of my latest short story, and to submit to more competitions and magazines this year.

What are your New Year’s writing resolutions?

Literary Agencies: Form vs. Personalised Rejection

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Rejection is a huge part of any writer’s life; that’s true for both aspiring writers, and those who are more established.

I’ve had to learn to listen to criticism positively rather than viewing it as a personal attack. It’s something I’m still learning to do, and something that isn’t easy.

Especially, when as an aspiring writer, the rejections come readily, and acceptance still feels like a distant dream.

One thing I’ve been reading a lot about since submitting my novel is the difference between personalised rejections and form rejections from literary agencies.

The first rejection I ever received was a personalised one (I think)– something along the lines of ‘I had an interesting plot and good character development, but it just wasn’t for them.’

I took it well. After all, my research told me to take personalised rejections as a compliment. However, every rejection I’ve received since then has been a form rejection.

What is a form rejection? How can you tell if your letter/ email is a personalised rejection or form rejection?

From my experience, form rejections seem to all follow a similar format.

• A thank you for considering them
• The rejection – it’s not for them
• An explanation – the agent must feel enough passion for a project to be able to represent it
• A positive statement – keep trying, just because it wasn’t for them, it’s an incredibly personal business and other agents may feel differently.

It will not say anything specific about your novel.

I’ve found it incredibly helpful to spot the difference between form and personalised rejections, because:

• Receiving a personalised rejection can be incredibly encouraging and should be taken positively
• If you are only receiving form rejections, it might be worth going back and redrafting your submission again.

After a stream of form rejections, I’ve made the decision to stop sending my manuscript out to agents until I have the time to look over my submission and make sure it really is 100% as good as it can be. I realise this might not happen for a while (what with a new day job, general life and other writing projects taking up my time), but I want to make sure my submission at the very least gets a personalised response – and you never know, maybe one day an acceptance!

Are you an author seeking a literary agent? How many times do you submit your manuscript before taking a step back and deciding it might need more work before trying again? How many submissions are too many?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

 

 

Diary of an Aspiring Author

How to stay motivated when faced with rejection

 

Being an aspiring author can be a bit of a rollercoaster. Some days, I wake up, full of positivity about my book (what a great idea it is), optimistic that one day I will achieve my ambition of getting a novel published. Sometimes the words just flow.

But it’s the other days I want to talk about. The days where I wonder whether I’ve wasted a million hours writing; where the self-doubt kicks in and a snarly voice in my head mutters ‘maybe, I should just throw it all in’.

Rule number one: you haven’t wasted a million hours writing if you’ve enjoyed those hours. Admittedly, I didn’t enjoy every second of the process of writing my first book. There were some hours where I’d stare at the same page of squiggled handwriting for hours trying to make a dreary paragraph work; and others where I discovered holes in my plot which made me want to scream. But overall, I’m happy with the fact I have finished a whole novel. And that in itself, means those hours weren’t wasted.

It can be hard to see what progress you are making as a writer. This is especially true when you’re doing it by yourself (i.e. not as part of a course/ degree where you’re working towards an end grade), and more so when it feels like you’re not getting anywhere… Not winning competitions, not receiving positive replies from literary agents… It can be really easy to feel like you’re not moving forward at all.

At the beginning of this year, after I finished my first novel, I decided to make a list of ‘ways to move my writing forward in 2018’. This wasn’t an overly ambitious list, but realistic steps I could take to help me recognise the progress I was making with my writing.

For example, some of my steps were to:

• subscribe to a writing magazine
• enter a few short story competitions
• join a writing group
• create a writing blog
• start submitting my novel to literary agents/ publishers
• begin planning out my second novel

These are all things that are 100% in my control and are certainly achievable.

I feel that if I am able to complete these steps, even without winning any of the competitions, or gaining representation, I will have made progress as a writer and feel more like I’m part of the writing community than I did last year.

So, I’m intrigued; if you’re just starting out on your writing career, or if you’ve been successfully writing for some time, what are your steps? What were the things you did first, before the joy of publication found you, to help you feel like you were making progress?

 

 

Am I Allowed to Call Myself an Author?

Or should I put an ‘aspiring’ before the A word?

 

 

When is the right time to start calling yourself an author?

Your first publication? The first time you creatively put pen to paper? The first time you finish a story or someone else reads your work?

I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud when I set up this website. It may be looking bare now, but I hope one day to have it filled with news of publications and updates about my writing. I debated for quite some time over what I should call this blog – can I really use the tagline ‘author’?

Other websites I’ve browsed that offer advice over becoming an author all state you should have an online presence. So, in the end I decided I should go for it. What’s the worst that could happen?

I’ve recently finished my first novel. It’s a tween time-travel story, and I’m currently in the rather painful and undeniably demotivating process of sending it out to literary agencies. I’ve had two rejections so far. Strangely one brought a smile to my face because it was a personalised response with positive feedback – the other a generic rejection email.

I’ve set myself targets for this year… things I can do to help me on my way to becoming a successful fiction writer – or at least, things I can do to help me feel a little bit less like a fraud. Sending my novel out into the world was first on the list, but also subscribing to monthly writing magazines, entering shorter fiction competitions and joining writing groups in the UK to be part of a writing community. I’m hoping that applying these small steps, they could grow into huge leaps and gradually I can gain more confidence when referring to myself as a writer.

Are you a writer? When did you first start referring to yourself as an author and what were your first steps along the author career path?