There are things we can’t control, and things we can. For example, we as individuals can’t control the price of gas, the degree to which our water pipes rust or the behavior of elected officials. We can, however, change our commuting patterns & schedule to consume less gas, adjust our behaviors to use less water per day and vote for different people in the next election. Things that we can’t control may frustrate us now, but when we consider what we can control instead of what we can’t, things become more clear and less stressful. Normally.

Case in point: you can’t control the expectations and tastes of an agent, but you can control your writing and its presentation.

It’s not up to the whims of a muse or the machinations of fate or the trends of the industry. You control your writing. If you don’t write something, nobody else is going to write it. Period. Schedules are going to change and even get thrown into upheaval, writers get distracted by issues large and small, and when the day is winding down and you finally make it home, sometimes you just want to vegetate in front of some rapidly-moving brightly-colored images. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s part of life, but you must keep in mind that the only person who can write what you want to write is you.

For example, I can see the next few months of writing laid out in front of me but I know I won’t get there if I do nothing.

By the end of July I want to be finished with Cold Iron. The outline tells me I have about six chapters to go. I’m getting started on Act 3, so to speak. I should be able to maintain the momentum of the narrative if I can carve out more time for it around everything else that’s being held together with chicken wire and duct tape.

August is when I begin the rewrite of Citizen in the Wilds. There are at least three major changes I need to make, and there will be more than that as things take shape. I may adjust the ending to reflect a different or more coherent line of thought from our hero, even if it ends up making him less heroic. The goal is to make him more human. If that means he does something that pushes him away from the shining ideal of heroism, so be it.

I may drop the current working title for something else. Not just for marketing purposes. The title of the book should tell you more about its contents, and I don’t know if Citizen in the Wilds works when our heroes are only in the Wilds for a portion of its action. There’s also the fact that when I’m done with the rewrite, the book will be different. I want it to be more unique in its content, more driven in its narrative and more immediate in its appeal. Like a prime cut of meat, it’s at a decent starting point but needs a better marinade and proper cooking time.

After that I begin editing Cold Iron. The pruning shears will stay out. I’ll reload the darling-slaying shotgun. I’ll vivisect the thing and ensure the characters dance on their strings exactly how I want them and look human and three-dimensional while doing so.

That’s the kind of thing you need to do as a writer, I feel, from time to time. You must assume control of your work and push yourself to improve it. Otherwise, you might as well not bother, or at most try to sell yourself as a novelist for a collectible card game or a scriptwriter for Michael Bay.

“Peace, however comforting, is stagnation. Conflict, however messy, is life.” – Bob Chipman.

Sooner or later, you’re going to run into difficulty. It’s a fact of life. Everything isn’t always hunky-dory. A tire goes flat, a check bounces, a bone gets broken, a job market tanks, a lover cheats, a bill gets skipped, a chore gets neglected, a payment gets forgotten. It happens. There’s no way around it.

Even when you do everything right, even if you put yourself onto the rails of a carefully-laid plan for moving forward, someone or something is going to put a penny on those rails and you’ll have to respond accordingly to the subsequent disaster. That’s life. It’s a mess. It’s conflict.

Why should the lives of our characters be any different?

It’s fantasy, you might say. It’s fiction. We can have our characters exist in a consequence-free world if we want. It’s our world so it’s our rules, right?

This will work in a video game like Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause. But can you imagine the world of Harry Potter as one without conflict? Or A Song of Ice and Fire? Or hell, Jersey Shore? Yeah, I said Jersey Shore’s fictional. Those might be people in a reality show, but I challenge them to be ‘real’ in any sense of the word in person. I mean if they look fake, sound fake, act fake and give out fake expectations…

Yeah. Conflict. Let’s have some of that.

We want to live vicariously through our fiction. But fiction without conflict and without consequence is ultimately boring. The stories we truly enjoy, the ones that stick with us and pull is back in just by glancing at a title or cover, are the ones with deep conflict, long-lasting consequences for the characters, the sorts of things we dive into fiction to escape from. Why?

Because we empathize. We understand. And in the end, we root for the characters who are just as under the gun and behind the 8-ball as we are.

In writing one draft and preparing to revise another, with a tip of my hat to the brutally honest people of Book Country, I’ve realized that with this conflict comes passion, even if it’s dark and often misdirected passion, and that passion is an emotion onto which readers can also grab hold. Or, in other words, it’s something that will grab the reader and pull them bodily into the narrative.

I was wondering where my hooks were. I think I answered my own question.

Without conflict, there’s no passion. Without passion, there’s no hook.

Therefore we must begin with conflict. And we can’t let up on it until the end.

The conflicts may change. One may end as another begins. Or multiple conflicts may intersect or even collide with one another. Good. The more conflicts and chaos, the more deep and nuanced the story becomes. The challenge for the writer is to keep all of this chaos straight, at least in their mind, to keep it from becoming a jumbled mess of angst and post-modern darkness.

I’m not saying to open with something exploding or a big gunfight or a little spaceship being chased by a bigger one. You can, but it’s kid’s stuff, really. Open with a deeper, inner conflict. One set up by society rather than bullets. Find the deep things that bother your character, their fears and what pisses them off. Tap one of those veins right at the start, and you’re more likely to suck in a reader within your first page.

Conflict should suck for our characters, and be as prevalent and relentless, as it is for us. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Let’s say you’re a writer. You like, love, need to write. Ideas, characters, plots and events chase each other around in your noodle while you’re collating TPS reports, shoveling coal or telling morons the bleedingly obvious. You want to bring them to life, invite other people into the worlds and lives you create, provide a small measure of escape and solace to your fellow man through the art of the written word.

Or maybe you just want to make a quick buck. You’re tired of the commute, the daily officer routine, the dirty or suspicious looks from your boss and you believe you can write your way out of it.

Well, I commend your ambition and can sympathize with whatever sentiment that’s motivating you, but you need to be aware of a harsh truth that might be difficult to swallow. You might be aware of it, peripherally, or because writers much better than me have already issued similar warnings. But here it is: Getting published sucks.

If it were easy, everybody would do it. A thousand gamers and a million housewives and a billion Harry Potter fans would be getting their work published and making money if the process weren’t soul-grindingly difficult. And it’s not difficult in the way algebra or biochemistry can be, it’s difficult in that it curts right past the idealism and imagination that got you writing in the first place and dumps you without preamble into the ice-cold shower of reality.

Let me hand you the soap. You don’t want to bend over.

Finding an Agent Sucks

I hope you like rejection.

Who am I kidding? Nobody likes that. I can’t think of a single person who breaks into a smile when they’re told something they’ve worked hard on sucks. Even when the creative person can admit it to themselves, it’s a tough thing to face and harder to overcome. And just when you think you have overcome it, refined that lump of coal into a diamond, polished that work until it shines?

“Sorry, this isn’t good enough.”

Not good enough for the market. Not good enough for the agency. Not good enough for the individual agent’s taste. Just. Not. Good. Enough.

It’s what every form rejection letter boils down to. And let’s face, agents are busy as hell. They get flooded with queries, full-out manuscripts, love letters and blatant bribes every day. They can’t respond in person to every single one. So they use the form letter. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t personal. They don’t mean to come off like they don’t care. It’s not their intent to act like your hard work will never amount to anything.

But boy, the write can certainly feel that way.

The payoff, though, is that when you do get the attention of the right agent at the right time, you have a voice in the publishing community. Somebody with established credentials is now on your side. They have the pulse of the market. They know who to talk to, where to go, what to say to get your work into the hands of someone willing to put it in front of readers everywhere.

They will go to the mat for you and you will love them for it.

You just have to find them first. If you can.

Publishing Yourself Sucks

Fuck that! I have sent queries all over the place and gotten nowhere. I’m even more miserable and broke now than I was a year ago when I finally finished my seventeenth draft! I’m hip! I’m with it! I’m a digital native! I’m gonna publish myself, dammit!

Not so fast there, Sparky.

First and foremost, let me point you in the direction of someone who’s been out there, who’s seen what it’s like to face the demons on Amazon and those Barnes & Noble guys, who wrestled with what to do and what not to do with his bare gorram hands while bringing a child into this world.

BAM.

Get it? I hope so. You take a walk down the road of self-publication, you are in for just as much work and heartache as finding the right agent, if not moreso. There are a thousand things an agent will do for you in the course of a day if you’re fortunate enough to retain their services. There’s networking, marketing, promotion, pricing and contracts, a heaping handful of moving parts that keep the machine of your dreams humming along towards actually getting paid for your work.

Without an agent, take a guess who needs to do all of that.

If you guessed yourself, give yourself a No-Prize.

Let’s compare the two tracks. If you pursue an agent, after months (if not longer) of rejection you finally get one’s attention and they like your work enough to represent it. You might need to do a couple more edits before the work is ready for prime time, but once it is you and your agent can work together to get it out there.

Go your own way, and you’ll need to bother a lot of people on your own. Relative strangers to give you honest test readings. Maybe an editor if you’re pressed for time. Definitely a professional cover artist (you do want people to check out your book, right?). You’ll need to set the type yourself to make sure the finished product looks good on mobile devices. Then you need to get it onto the marketplaces people use and promote the hell out of it. Offer incentives. Get reviews and post them everywhere. Shill until your voice hurts and your fingers are sore.

Neither of those seems like very much fun, do they?

Doing Nothing Sucks

There’s a third option, of course.

You could just do nothing with your work. Write for your own enjoyment. Maybe post your work on a blog or a forum, if you have time. After all, who needs that aggravation? It’s a huge expenditure of time and energy and it’s going to frustrate you, depress you, enrage you and wear you out. You need that energy and time for things. Chores. Trips. Games. Chatting up attractive members of the opposite sex.

Of course, if you do nothing with your work, nothing will come of it.

You get what you give. Just give it to a forum or a blog with a couple viewers and you’ll get a couple encouraging responses and little else. Take a chance on finding an agent or put in the work to put it out yourself, you’ll get a lot more. Possibly some extra income. And that can’t do anything but help the aforementioned activities.

Those are the paths open to the writer. The path you choose is entirely up to you.