Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield

I read this book last week while watching the Academy Awards. Since I was very young, I have watched the Oscars. It's something that I remember really enjoying with my mother and my sister. It felt very special then, and it still feels very important to me even though a) I rarely see all of the movies any more, b) the stars don't seem nearly as glamorous to me now, and c) I often find the show boring and tedious. (I miss the big production numbers they used to do. I used to really like Billy Crystal's medleys. I wish Hugh Jackman had hosted the show more than once.)

My solution this year was to read during moments that did not hold my interest. For this year's Academy Awards, I chose Steven Pressfield's Turning Pro, which felt like the perfect antidote to an awards ceremony. To me, Turning Pro is about making an internal commitment to your art and not caring so much about external validation. Perhaps you end up with a glittering trophy at the end, but what's most important is putting in your time and taking your creative life seriously. It's not about one moment of glory; it's about living a life where you produce whatever you call art.

I ended up quite happy with this way of watching the Oscars. Turning Pro is made up of short pieces, ideal for a commercial break. (That was another issue this year. It was my first Academy Awards since we cut the cord on cable. This show has been so much a tradition in my life, that it took me until the day before the show to realize that I would not automatically be able to watch it. Luckily, we figured out a streaming option but it came with ads. I didn't mind. I had a book. When I was young and the Oscars meant so much to me, the ceremony came with commercials.) Anyway, the book seemed to me to be the perfect answer to evening gowns, thank you speeches to agents, and Jet ski jokes. It lingered on in my head long after the orchestra played its final song.

On Perfectionism

This week I've been thinking about efficiency, productivity, and straight lines.

When I was a teen, I was a perfectionist. I was a Straight A, National Honor Society, anorexic girl who had all sorts of rules in her head about how to succeed, and on one level it worked, although it could have killed me.

Thinking back on it now, it's no surprise that it took me so long to write novels, although it is a dream that I've had since childhood. I believe writing novels requires bags of grit. You have to listen to all parts of yourself. You have to often not know. You have to be willing to be humbled, again and again.

Right now, I'm in the beta reader process of my book, and I have heard some suggestions. I have to say, first off, that I am really fortunate to have my beta readers in my life. They are thoughtful and smart. They get me. So I've begun this process, not fully completed, where I'm hearing feedback on my latest draft. And here is my process: “I can't believe I didn't see that! But I read those craft books! How could I have made that mistake?” The perfectionist wails.

But I've come to this answer: I'm not a machine. I will do my analytical best to figure out what to write, but at some points, I may trick myself for the greater good. I may get a little lost to go deeper, to say a truth that may take me several rounds to realize and fully tell.

Maybe some people would have this experience, and the takeaway would be, “Get thee to a feedback group and have continual thoughts on your work as you move through your draft,” and, for some people, that is the answer. That would stop me in my tracks.

So, here I am, a work in progress in more ways than one, taking one step at a time each day, listening, adjusting, and trusting my work. I hope this is helpful in some way. I wish you the best in your creative endeavors.

Practice

I was a shy kid. I mumbled. It was hard to speak. I would often have to repeat my words because nobody could understand what I said. If I had to speak in public, my hands shook. To make matters worse, my hands tended to dance around when I spoke. Shaking dancing hands will tend to distract people from your message

Fast forward to years later in adulthood. Mike and I took a trip back East to attend my ceremony in honor of my father. At the start of the event, my dad walked up to the podium and delivered a speech that was funny and wise. It looked as if he was speaking off the cuff. We even asked him later if that was the case.

He told us he practiced. He  wrote out his speeches, and then he would recite them in the car when he was alone, off on errands. He told us he would go over a speech until it felt natural, until he knew it backwards, forwards, and inside out.

When we returned home, I went to my local women entrepreneur group and signed up to speak. Every meeting, one of the attendees would make a presentation about their business. I had put it off, but now I thought I could do it. I followed my dad's advice and discovered that I loved speaking in front of people. I just had to practice until I would write it in my heart, and then it was really fun. After that, I spoke at this women's group whenever I could. I presented at the Rotary Club. I've given talks to students. I turns out I love to speak about writing. I want to share what I know with people who want to write books. As with speaking, I believe the key is practice.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

My partner, Mike, has been trying to get me to read this novel for years. He knows my love of animals. I have already written one novel where animals talk. I'm currently working on another. It seemed a natural fit for me to read this highly-praised novel set in the rabbit world.

That all seemed true to me, but I still didn't do it. I was afraid the book would be too dry. Conversely, I was also concerned that there would be too many battle scenes—I had heard that the book was bloody, and I thought I would be put off by that as well. But Mike kept insisting, and I finally checked it out of the library. It was a great tome of a book with beautiful illustrations that looked to be of considerable importance.

I read the foreword and related to Adams immediately. He had started the book as a story he made up in the car on long drives with his children. One evening, he was reading a story to the children and he threw the book across the room because it was so dull. They suggested that he write down the story that he read to them in the car. It was much better than that book, they said.

So Adams did after work. He wrote in the evenings and then he would read what he wrote to his children, and they would give him feedback. Then he submitted it to numerous publishers who all rejected it with the same criticism—it was too sophisticated for children, and adults would not want to read about rabbits. But Adams was not willing to make any changes. He eventually did find a publisher, and the book became a success.

I was never able to read that beautiful book. After I finished the foreword, I found the text daunting. But this is not a new phenomenon. I have a strange wiring in my head regarding reading. I can read light contemporary novels and children's books just fine. But if it is nonfiction or something out of my comfort zone, I need to listen to it in order to enjoy it.

So I bought the Audible unabridged version of Watership Down with Ralph Cosham as the narrator. (I bought it in December, and it currently seems unavailable. I don't know why. But if you also enjoy audio books, and you can get a hold of this version, I thought Cosham did a fine job as the storyteller.) It is a very quirky book. There are epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter that range from Shakespeare to Napoleon. In this book, rabbits love hearing mythological stories of their culture. I think if I was reading it, those would have been a big yawn for me. Truthfully, they were my least favorite part of the story, although I admire Adams for adding them in, as I think they do deepen the world.

If you haven't read Watership Down, I don't want to give anything away. I would tell you that I listened to the story when I drove in my car and when I took walks, and there were times that I would cry or wish that I had time to walk further or do one more errand so I could find what happened next. I think it has one of the most perfect endings in the world. I have told Mike that we will probably have cats named after Watership Down characters in our future. It is one of my favorite books.

Beta Readers

After I've written a first draft and revised and revised and revised until I can't see it any more, then I turn it over to beta readers. This is currently where I am in my process. Here are some tips that I've learned about this stage along the way:

1. Create Deadlines. At first I naively, grandiosely assumed that people would just read my manuscript right away. Well, people have lives. They put off reading. They might not, gasp, like what I wrote. So now if I ask someone to be a reader, I ask if they can finish within a certain amount of time. I usually say a month. That seems reasonable to me.

2. Less Is More. This is all a personal preference, but I generally ask two, maybe three people to read my draft. It makes life less complicated. I know that I still have the editorial process in front of me, where my developmental and copy editor will also be chiming in with their thoughts. So two or three readers works for me.

3. Choose Carefully. Do you need an expert on a subject to chime in? Who do you know? Or who do you know who knows someone who knows? I also think about compatibility here. I want someone with a kind, thoughtful manner who will take this responsibility seriously. My friend and neighbor, Larry Brown, fits this criteria. I always ask him to be a beta reader, and I look forward to our meeting, when we sit at the table, both with drafts in hands, and I take notes while he tells me what he thought. When you're choosing your beta readers, think about what you might need checked and how you like feedback expressed to you.

4. Provide Guidance. Where do you need help? What is nagging at you? Where are you unsure? Tell your beta readers a few things when you give them the draft. Sometimes I'm more cagey about this step. I don't want to unduly influence their reading. But I generally feel that if something has been bothering me and and I can't figure it out, it's better to  just share that with my beta readers rather than having them get to that point and think, "Oh, this is a mess. Poor dear. I'm going to have to tell her." If I tell them about my concerns, it then becomes a moment of "This is what she was talking about. What would be my suggestions?"

5. Reward Them. I give beta readers the book when it is published. I also often will do some sort of swap: editing or reading of their project in the future or some measure of thanks for their assistance to me. I want them to know how much I appreciate their feedback.

6. Remember You Have the Last Word. One of the reasons why I am not in a feedback group is because I have the unfortunate tendency to want to please people. If I was receiving constant opinions, I would be continually changing my story and forgetting why I wanted to write it in the first place. When I receive feedback from my beta readers, I listen and assess. Most of the time, they have a point. But sometimes I keep it the way it was or I shade it or I go in another direction that I think will work instead. In the end, the writer needs to have final say.