The Recipe for Success by Jannine Gallant

Those of us in the book writing business are constantly looking for success, searching for ways to sell more books and earn a little recognition for what we do. It occurred to me this past weekend that the elements to achieve success are the same, no matter what it is you want to do. Many of you know my older daughter has always been a runner. I'm going to use Tara as an example of what it takes to succeed, and how we can apply the same strategy to our writing (or any other) pursuits.

Element #1: Talent
I don't care what people say, if you don't have a certain natural talent for whatever it is you're doing, you aren't going to succeed at it. You can always fix problem areas and improve your craft, but if you're a writer, you'd better be able to string together words in a coherent manner and tell an interesting story. For Tara, she was always naturally good at running and biking. She inherited her talent from my husband who is extremely athletic and good at every sport he's ever done. She blames me for passing along inferior athletic genes, but I tell her she got her brains from me, so she shouldn't complain. LOL

Element #2: Hard Work
This is what you have to do to improve on the natural talent you were given. You have to work your butt off. I don't care how good you are, if you don't put in the time, you aren't going to reach your goal. If you're a writer, that means actually writing. Book after book after book. Chances are you aren't going to produce the Great American Novel on your first try. With every book I write, I get better. I learn what works and what doesn't to improve my craft. You aren't going to produce a better book if you don't work hard at honing your skills, and that takes practice. Butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboards, people! For Tara, it meant running and biking and swimming ALL THE TIME. Training is a lifestyle for her. Her cross country coach in high school gave her the "Hardest Working Athlete of All Time" award. Now in college on the Cal Triathlon team, she never lets up. She works to improve all the time.

Element #3: Persistence
Sometimes it's hard to keep trying when we face failures. In writing it can be rejections, no sales, no notice. We ask ourselves why we bother. Well, the simple truth is you won't succeed if you give up. Tara went from being a powerhouse at a small school to not being good enough to make a varsity running team at a top school. She put education over sports when she chose to go to Berkeley because she knew she wasn't good enough to run for them. After a miserable freshman year, she discovered the Triathlon team. But just being on the team wasn't enough, and the Cal team was large and strong. She wanted to be one of their top girls. She had to learn to swim properly since she had zero experience, and she honed her biking skills and went back to her passion for running. She persisted, and she worked her way up to getting noticed by the coach and kept at it until she was included in the elite group training. That's what we have to do if we want to succeed--persist until we get noticed.

Element #4: Luck
Yes, luck. I swear no matter how talented and hard working and persistent we are, we can all benefit from an element of luck. That publisher who finally notices you. The Bookbub ad that bumps up your sales. BUT, if you haven't put in the other 3 elements when luck finally happens, you won't be ready to take advantage of it. Make luck work for you instead of having it pass you by with little or no benefit. For Tara, luck had a hand in her recent success at the Collegiate Club National Championships in Tuscaloosa, Alabama over the weekend. She'd worked her butt off to hone her talent and be ready to go, and she expected to do well. Then rain happened, lots of rain that required opening flood gates on the river the kids were to swim in for the first leg of the triathlon. For safety, they had to change the format to run/bike/run. Tara took full advantage and finished 10th out of 482 girls. By the way, 4 of the Cal girls finished in the top 10, and they won the National championship, so I wasn't kidding when I said their team was strong. I'd call that a success story for both my daughter and the team!

So, for those of you who lack motivation to sit down and write, keep the faith. Use your talent and boost your skill with a lot of hard work. Persist, and maybe luck will happen to you. It certainly won't do you any good if you quit trying and don't have that book ready to go! That's my pep talk for the day. If you haven't read BURIED TRUTH yet, now's the time. LOST INNOCENCE will be out before you know it!

Writing and the Inevitable Rough and Bumpy Road by Margo Hoornstra

The way to know life is to love many things ~ Van Gogh

If I may paraphrase ~ The way to know a work in progress is to write many things.

Composing, revising, polishing, proofing. The road from initial story idea to completed manuscript is not only lengthy, but fraught with false starts, detours and any number of  potholes to jar body and soul combined.

Those chapters constructed with such care and strict adherence to the concepts of goal, motivation and conflict that have to be ditched because they just don’t move the story forward. That complicated, epic length manuscript, that was supposed to have been a simple short story. Or vice versa.

I know a little something about the latter. Not too long ago, I whittled a 70 thousand word novel that didn’t sell down to a 40 thousand word that did. Humbling? You bet. But, surprisingly, not all that difficult to accomplish.

For those of you who are writers, which facet of writing do you find harder to do? To write an original draft, tell the story you want to tell – no holds barred. Or to go back through and rewrite that draft until it’s, well, polished to perfection?

As far as I’m concerned, the rewrites are far more daunting than the actual writing. In the rewrite phase there are rules to be followed, guidelines to adhere to. Being in the throes of a minor overhaul of a once completed (or so I thought) novel may have something to do with my current choice.

The, what I have come to refer to as my WIP Repeat, was originally rejected by an editor who, before this, had accepted everything I offered her. Among the reasons for her no thanks: Not enough conflict, bad guy who wasn’t bad enough, and the ever present—in my writing at least—too much flowery language.

After recovering from any author’s reaction to rejection unbelievable shock followed by near crippling disappointment, I got to work on the suggested rewrites.

In my opinion, there’s a lot of good material in the original I’m trying to preserve and weave into revised story arcs. Except, I’m haunted by some rewrite advice from a workshop I took long ago.  "If you have a line you simply love and can’t do without, cut it, get it out of there. You’ll be better off in the long run."

I think I’m learning the hard way how true that statement is. Yet I’m confident, eventually this manuscript will all come together. Much of it already has. I will get there with a submission worthy work. Until then . . . let’s just say I sure am ready to have this WIP Repeat behind me.

Then, as I begin that inevitable next one, I am so looking forward to having that good old blank page in front of me once again. Because we all know that next one is really the best. The one that isn’t even started yet. The one still happily floating out there somewhere with the rest of our still to be fulfilled dreams.

The one of many things—writing wise—we truly, dearly love.

My days to blog here are the 11^th and 23^rd. For more about me and my writing, please check out my website

 

My Motivation To Write by Margo Hoornstra

Ask any writer why they write and you’ll get a variation of; Because I can’t not write. My reason for writing is much the same and I also write romance because of the happily ever after.

Everyone has a list of life’s challenges, experiences and adversities they’ve faced and, hopefully, overcome. In addition to being slightly older for The Last Rose of Summer line of The Wild Rose Press, the characters in my stories are no different. Not only do they tend to have been around the block a time or two, they are definitely mature and, in some cases, entering the second phase of successful careers and moderately happy lives. They’re everyday people slowing down, pausing to smell the roses, if you will. Who understand, at long last, what’s important in life. Many have been dealt challenges and granted second chances.

In many of my short stories, the heroines especially face, and manage to triumph over, their own adversities. In Forgotten Alliance, Sarah Novak was forced to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity. Greg Novak's journey is to admit to this failure and do whatever it takes to save his marriage.

My first full length book, Honorable Intentions, has single father Chase Canfield trying to rebuild a life for himself and his teenaged daughter. The heroine, Samantha Wells is a retired police officer embarking on the second phase of her law enforcement career.




The three Class of '85 high school reunion books I did, Glad Tidings and To Be Or Not are true second chance reunion stories. Next Tuesday at Two has a going home again theme with a twist. 

My current work in progress, Circumstances Beyond Her Control, has hero Brad Collins, a bounty hunter about to embark on a quest that will affect his life like none other. In this case, he thinks he knows it all and has no idea what’s in store for him. (I'll be totally honest here, neither do I. Yet!)

As is a sign of today’s times, many of my characters end up forming non-traditional families. And, it almost goes without saying the heroines are strong, intelligent and self-sufficient. The heroes are individuals who can eventually acknowledge they may not be perfect or have all the answers.

While, in my opinion, there’s a special beauty in the happily ever after guarantee of romance fiction, also in my opinion, there’s another bonus, the payoff, if you will as we all experience the ups and downs in real life.

In a romance, the hero and heroine find love and acceptance on their own terms and to fit their own lifestyles. Something readers can identify with, maybe even find inspiration in.

They can do it. I can do it. We’re all going to be okay. Which in large part, is motivation in itself.

Links to my books and stories, some for free, can be found on my Blog

Motivation - The M in GMC by Jannine Gallant

There's a lot of talk about GMC - Goals, Motivation & Conflict - in writing circles. Editors tell us we can't have a story without it. Authors agonize over it, using the following formula: Your POV character wants (goal), because (motivation), but (conflict) keeps him/her from attaining that goal. I'll admit, about the third or fourth time I saw this posted, I wrote it on the inside cover of my catch-all notebook, feeling more than a little nervous for having ignored GMC up to that point. Now, even though it's there, staring me in the face, I still tend to ignore it when jumping on a new project. Occasionally, when I'm in the mood to torture myself, I'll contemplate one of my completed novels and try to fill in those blanks. Sometimes it works. Other times, not so much.

Does this mean my books are weak? Probably not, since I'm not overly filled with self-doubt. I think it means I fill in the blanks on a sub-conscious level as I write. Goal is never an issue for me. My books tend to have lots of action with a plot that moves right along. A common goal in all romance novels is to find love, but most of my characters also have the goal of survival. I write suspense, so there's usually a bad guy hindering their chances of making it to the end with their skin intact. So, there you have it, my surface level conflict - outwit the villain. The internal conflict generally goes along with the finding love goal. What makes our characters tick that keeps them from skipping merrily down a smooth path toward happiness? That's where the M comes in.

Motivation. I rarely think about this. Which is why I was plenty shocked yesterday to find myself worrying about the motivation of my heroine in my current WIP. Grace was the sister of my heroine in my very first published book, Victim Of Desire. I gave no thought to a sequel when I wrote it way back when. And now I'm stuck with the traits and history I gave Grace. She's single, beautiful, sarcastic, motivated to succeed, and not afraid of much of anything. I can work with all that. BUT, she had the reputation for going through men faster than takeout pizza. Yikes, not the best quality in a heroine. So, for the first time ever, I started thinking about why she would act this way. What was her motivation for her love 'em then run for cover attitude? My CP suggested an early marriage that ended in tragedy, so she's afraid to love again. Good, but no go. She'd never been married in the first book, so I can't toss in a husband now. So after a couple of unsuccessful ideas, I finally came up with one I liked. My CP likes it, too! Now I have my motivation for Grace's behavior - but you'll all have to read the book to find out what it is. LOL

So, is it easier to sit down and plot out your GMC right from the beginning? Or are you like me, letting it develop as you delve deeper into the story and learn more and more about your characters? Motivation often comes from something that happened in our pasts, but we have to slip it into our writing gradually, keeping a bit of mystery surrounding it. No info dumps! But that's a post for another day...

Find blurbs and links for all my books on my website.

Let's Hear it for Motivation

I'm writing again. 

For most of you, that may not sound like a statement worthy of announcement, but for me it is. By now, I'm sure everyone knows about the upheaval in my life during the past several months and my recent cross-country move. I feel like I've been busy every second--busy with everything except writing. Some of my activity has been writing-business related. I've designed my first three book covers, which was a wonderful creative experience and a great start to the design aspect of my new career. But I also have 3-4 writing projects growling for attention.

For the first time in my career, I have unfinished projects in several stages of completion. I know many writers keep several WIP's going at at time, but I've always been more linear. Start a manuscript. Finish that manuscript. Get glimmer of idea for next manuscript. Develop that idea while first manuscript is in editing. Write second manuscript. Ditto, ditto, ditto. I don't know if I've become more scatterbrained as a result of stress or more freely creative, but suddenly, I find myself with a completed manuscript I'm reworking, two partials, and an urgent idea. Not my usual style at all.

Time for triage. I've decided my completed manuscript should come first. It's a fun, snappy contemporary romance entitled Unwritten Rules about the proprietor of an all-female bodyguard agency who signs on to protect a former-CIA agent-turned-author on a national book tour. I got some great suggestions from a couple of beta readers (my sisters) I want to incorporate before I self-publish it. As both my first contemporary and my first venture into indie publishing, this book will be a major departure for me. I also plan to design my own cover. I'm nervous on all counts but pretty stoked, too.

Next on the timeline will probably be If Wishes Were Fishes, an expanded version of the short story I wrote for the Roses of Prose 2012 holiday anthology. I fell completely in love with the characters and setting and would love to have a longer version ready for the holidays this year. 

Last, (and by that, I mean probably next year) I'll move on to my two partials. One is a western novella about a woman who has reluctantly inherited a saloon but would rather bake pies, and the other is the first in a contemporary series about three artist sisters living in the Carmel/Big Sur area of California.

My muse has never been so active. Now all I have to do is harness my concentration and actually GET THESE THINGS DONE. Wish me luck!

Alison
www.alisonhenderson.com
http://alisonhenderson.blogspot.com