I write my novels with a partner – three with my husband and now two with a friend I have known for over 20 years. So it’s not surprising that the question most asked at my book signings is “how do you manage to write with someone else?”

First, let me say why I like to collaborate. The process of writing is intrinsically a lonely one. You have to sit down in front of a completely blank page (or computer screen) and conjure up characters who will, if you do your job right, come alive as if you’d literally given birth to them. The plot lines you create for these characters must be both imaginative and believable. That’s really hard. Being able to bounce ideas off a writing buddy is, for me, a way to expand my creativity – especially when I hit a blank wall on a plot point or some issue related to a character’s personality. It’s also a wonderful motivator. There is something about knowing you have to get words down on the page because your partner is waiting that’s a great kick in the pants. And best of all, when you are lucky enough to have your novel published and your publicist books you for speaking engagements on TV or radio appearances, there is someone to lean on should you find yourself tied up with butterflies just before going on.

Okay, so once you decide to develop a partnership, how does it work?

I have heard a few writers who collaborate liken a writing partnership to a marriage. And now that I have written with both my husband and a woman friend, I can say that that’s not a bad analogy, except for one thing – since my real life marriage of 38 years is, I believe. uniquely compatible, there were far fewer preliminary matters to deal with as there were with someone I didn’t know nearly as well. Joel (my husband) and I have practiced medicine together, written nonfiction medical articles and books together, gone to business school together and run a consulting business together. We’ve had plenty of experience working out division of labor issues, so we very naturally fell into what have become our specific roles as novelists (for example, he’s a better editor, I’m better at writing the first draft, he’s good at the story’s overview, I enjoy managing all the little details as the plot unfolds). I will admit that the first book was the hardest – we had only been married 12 years! There was some push and pull as to whose version of a scene was best. However, once we had that first book sold, we learned that the publisher’s editor takes her red pen to your prose anyway and often scenes we’d agreed on between ourselves required yet another rewrite anyway. Now the process is much smoother.

Because it’s been so easy with my husband, I assumed it would be equally easy with any writing partner. Not true. Although Linda and I had been colleagues and friends, it really isn’t the same as living with someone on a day-to-day basis for many years. Not only that, we were trying to write together long distance- Linda lives in LA, I live in Florida. The time difference as well as the miles between us added additional stress. Friendship is a good way to begin a writing partnership. but if you’re not careful, it can end it too. So here are a few things we wish we had discussed before we started our first book and which, I think in hindsight, would have avoided the various difficulties we encountered along the way.

It’s probably a good idea to have a written document with agreed upon items stipulated formally.  Think of it as the equivalent of a prenup – hopefully the relationship won’t break up, but if it does, you’ve clarified “who gets what” so that it doesn’t have to be acrimonious.

1. How will you share the money you make from the book? I recommend 50/50 unless it’s clear from the start that this isn’t an equal partnership. I am assuming that your novel’s copyright will be in both names.
2. How will you share any expenses that arise while you are writing (for example: new software for writing, web making, video, etc)?
3. How will you share marketing expenses above and beyond what your publisher may pay once the book is sold? These days except perhaps for the very top sellers, publishers expect authors to take on more of the marketing costs themselves
4. Who will have the final word on contract negotiations? This can be very tricky because you both want to sell your novel, but one of you may be more willing than the other to hold out for a better offer or want to negotiate better terms such as keeping certain ancillary rights. If you don’t agree to present a united front, it puts you both in a weaker bargaining position.
5. Agree that you will meet deadlines. That means finishing your assigned chapter or completing rewrites or edits when you say you will. This is a place where lots of partnerships go awry. And that’s why #6 and #7 are so critical
6. Agree that you will let your partner know if personal life issues are keeping you from meeting your obligations.
7. Agree to talk about problems. Here’s where the marriage analogy comes in. My husband and I agreed from day one that we would talk through our disagreements and that we would never go to bed angry. A writing partnership should have a similar agreement, That way you don’t let upsets simmer, so that you start resenting each other.

Finally:

1. Don’t forsake your friendship for your work relationship. Because Linda and I both had full time job and family responsibilities, we tended to communicate in work mode only, trying to get tasks related to our writing done in between the rest of our lives. Frankly it took my husband’s pointing this out to make me realize that we’d stopped talking about anything else. Now we try to make time to catch up on mutual friends and other non-writing related topics. It’s really helped to strengthen our friendship and our writing partnership. We ‘re now ready to start working on novel #3 in our new Sammy Greene thriller series.

BIO: Deborah Shlian is a physician, healthcare consultant and recruiter, as well as author of nonfiction and fiction (medical mystery thrillers). Novels co-written with her husband are: Double Illusion, Wednesday’s Child and Rabbit in the Moon. Rabbit in the Moon won this year’s Gold Medal for the Florida Book Award, the Silver Medal for ForeWord Magazine’s Mystery Book of the Year, an Indie Excellence Award and was named a National Best Books Award Finalist by USA Book News. Check all the Shlians’ writing on their website at hpttp://www.shlian.com

Novels co-written with Deborah’s friend and colleague, Linda Reid are: Dead Air which is the first in the new Sammy Greene thriller series to be released in December in hardback and eBook format and Devil Wind which is the second in the Sammy Greene series and will be released in early 2011. Check out their writing on the new website: http://www.sammygreene.com

Bookmark This

When looking for an agent, how many rejections does it take to make you shelf a novel? To call it quits? Well, hopefully this will help you remember that its a number game and encourage you to press on.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of this story when he started his own business, and thought it held true to everything we do in life. I am taking a few liberties at the end, replacing the word “people” with “AGENTS”. I hope this helps anyone who is struggling. The author is UNKNOWN.

GO THROUGH THE NUMBERS

Let me tell you a story. Mark Yarnell, minister in a small town in Texas, was headed for bankruptcy and just about to lose his car and home. He looked for a way out and discovered Network Marketing. Luckily, he had a wise sponsor.

The sponsor gave Mark “THE PROMISE”:

THIS BUSINESS CAN SET YOU FREE FINANCIALLY IN ONE TO THREE YEARS.

But he also gave him “THE PRICE”: TO SUCCEED, YOU WILL HAVE TO FACE AND CONQUER 4 MAJOR ENEMIES.

Mark said, “It’s a deal.”

Mark then invited 200 friends over to his house to watch a video. 80 said, “No, not interested.” Mark had encountered:

ENEMY #1: REJECTION. My sponsor warned me about that. But I’ve still got 120 people coming over.”

Guess what? 50 didn’t show up. He had just met

ENEMY #2: DECEPTION. Mark thought, “No problem, my sponsor warned me about that. I’ve got 70 people who watched the tape.”

57 said, “Not interested.” He had just encountered

ENEMY #3: APATHY. Undaunted, Mark thought, “No problem. 13 people signed up.”

Guess what? 12 of them dropped out of the business shortly thereafter.

ENEMY #4: ATTRITION had left Mark with just one serious associate. To this day, that single distributor earns Mark over $50,000 per month.

You may have heard of Bill Britt, one of the most successful distributors in Amway. Some years ago, 20/20 did a feature story on Amway. They spent 19 minutes interviewing whiners and complainers—several distributors who had failed and showed the garages full of products they couldn’t sell. During the last minute of the show, Mr. Britt was interviewed in front of his palatial home. He was asked, “Mr. Britt, this business has obviously worked for you. What’s your secret?”

He replied, “There is no secret. I simply showed the plan to 1200 people. 900 said ‘No.’ and only 300 signed up. Out of those 300, only 85 did anything at all. Out of those 85, only 35 were serious, and out of those 35, 11 made me a millionaire.” Like Mark Yarnell, Bill worked through the numbers.

Jason Boreyko, now president of New Vision, told this story. When he was a distributor in Matol, he signed up 50 people. He heard a lot of “Nos” on the way to those 50. Jason took one man, who he knew would be terrific in the business, to lunch, told him about the business and the man said “No.” Jason took the man to lunch again the next month and told him the updates. Once again the man said, “No.” That went on for six months. The seventh month, something had changed for the man, and he said, “Yes.” That man made Jason over one million dollars. Jason also worked through his numbers.

According to Richard Poe in “Wave Three”, while starting Amway, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel, America’s eleventh richest people, recruited 500 people. 495 dropped out. The five that didn’t quit built Amway. All $7 BILLION of Amway’s business was built under those 5 people. Jay and Rich had to work through their numbers.

HERE’S THE LESSON: You success is directly related to the degree to which you are willing to work to find an AGENT.

Mark Yarnell’s odds were 1 out of 200.

Bill Britt’s were 11 out of 1200.

Jason Boreyko’s were 1 in 50. (After many Nos.)

Would you be willing to go through 200 AGENTS to find the 1 who will get you published?

Here’s the catch: YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SET OF ODDS AND YOU WON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE SUCCEEDED. So if you’ve gone through 50 or 100 AGENTS and you haven’t found THE ONE, either you can give up and assume they don’t exist, or you can recognize that you are working through your own numbers.

THE TRUTH ABOUT REACHING GOALS:

Be faithful to your dreams!

Get really CLEAR on what YOU want!

Hang around successful and motivational people! Forget about the one’s who put you down!

Identify YOUR dreams.

Let no one or any challenge stand in the way of accomplishing your dreams!

Learn from others who are successful.

Set priorities. Do not let anything or anyone permit you to become sidetracked.

Your goals must be pursued EVERY DAY! This can be full-time or part-time, but never sometimes.

WRITE down your goals, and READ them every day.

Review your goals regularly and update them if needed.

HOW TO SET HIGHER GOALS

Answer this question for yourself: “WHY NOT ME, AND WHY NOT NOW?”

Become TEACHABLE! Become a sincere student of those who HAVE DONE IT. Be willing to pay the price.

Know that big goals come with bigger price tags.

Make a clear decision that you are going to do it. Be splecific!

Make your plan, plan your work, and them work, work, work your plan!

YOUR SUCCESS IS UP TO YOU!

We really can do this! All of us. I believe it.

Bookmark This

Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

---

There have been times when I’ve felt a need, a hunger to write, just to get something down on the page. It didn’t matter what, and so I would pick up a pen, open the notebook, and start writing.

Three months ago I was having one of those days. You know the kind, when frustrations number more than the breaths you take. Well, sitting there in the coffeeshop, I started writing and a story emerged. I didn’t expect it, didn’t know where it would take me, but I kept writing.

First there was lightning. Okay, that’s cool. So what happened then? There was a girl, running, trying to get rid of something. She wanted to bury it. Interesting. What did she have? A necklace. But it wasn’t an ordinary necklace. I wasn’t sure why yet, but I went with it, eventually getting to the point where the girl is struck by lightning and the necklace was fused to her skin, becoming part of her.

Wow. I’d never even thought of it before, and yet an entire story opened before me. Three weeks later, I had written a 50,000-word book with plans for two more.

And it started one night when I was so frustrated I would have screamed had I not had a pen and some paper handy.

———

Now, I want you to grab a pen and some paper or a notebook. (If you can write on a computer without going back to edit, that’s fine too.) Then start writing. Don’t think first. Just write.

Then, once you’ve got it all out of your system and the story ends or you have to stop to take a breath, I want you to come back here and tell us what happened.

Bookmark This

Oh, I know this looks like I am about to give you some tutorial… but nope.

I’m asking you, dear reader… how?

Here I sit starting at a query, and I know the story is a good one. I know it has a good hook, a great conflict, and frakkin awesome characters. So how do I summarize it and get an agent to read it?

A month or so ago Nathan Bransford did an agent for a day experiment on his blog.

Basically, there were 50 queries, and your task was to go through and decide which ones were actually published books. I got about three into the list and realized something. Queries are kind of boring, and they shouldn’t be!

Now, I’m frustrated because I don’t want to bore with my query. How can I hook them reader?

How can I get the voice of my smackin story into these two teeny tiny paragraphs?

How do you do it? I am dying to know!

Bookmark This

A couple of months back, we had guest blogger Beth Revis talk about the Scrivener software, but I was sad when I learned it was only for Mac users. She mentioned an alternative. The Page Four Software.

Now, I consider myself to be a bit of a technology freak, so when I read about the special writing software just for me, I had to try it out!

I contacted the software company, and they graciously offered me a copy of their software so I could write a review.

I have to say that while some of it took me quite a while to get used to, there are parts of this software that I find invaluable to my writing.

The coolest feature by far is the tabbed writing feature. Basically, each chapter of your book gets its own tab and you can move them around as you see fit.

I love the flexibility of being able to move my stuff around, reference notes and outlines easily, and to open a chapter without having to scroll around to find it. The tab feature alone makes me like this software, but another cool feature is the ability to quickly scan for over used words and phrases.

Not only can you scan for the phrases, but you can set all your own attributes, so if you don’t want it to search for something in particular, then it will just skip right over that.

I love this feature, and discovered things about my book that well… let’s just say I have a tendency to overuse certain words… okay?

It also has a really cool roll back feature that lets you look at older versions of your work, so if you decide you spent an entire day over editing the crap out of something and now you want it back–then all you have to do is roll back to a previous version.

I did find a couple of things I wasn’t so crazy about with the software though. Most of my friends write in word, which means they edit in word as well. We use the little comment bubbles out to the side and the track changes feature in order to peer edit each other’s stuff. You can’t use word bubbles in page four, and you can’t see the tracked changes, so if your friends are using that, then there’s really no way for you to check their comments other than to open up your MS Word stuff. You can upload .doc files into the software though, so that does make up for this flaw a little.

I really like the ability to comment out to the side of someone’s work, and I love the track changes feature for when I am line editing something, so this is a major thing to me. I wish that the software somehow offered the same amazing editing and change tracking that word offers while still having all the great features like the tabs and the overused phrase counter.

I am still mostly using word to write my documents, and haven’t completely fell in love with pagefour yet, but I have been using it more lately, and I promise to update you as I continue to get more familiar with it.

I would love to hear about the software you use to write your manuscripts with. Please let me know in the comments below.

I’d also like to extend a special thank you to pagefour for providing me with a free copy of their software for review. If your company makes a software designed specifically for writers, you can contact me at jamie (@) totally the bomb (.) com (remove the spaces and parentheses) or just leave a comment below, and I will be happy to review it.

Bookmark This

We have been talking on this blog about writing what you know.

Writing “who you are” is equally important, and here’s why:

Let’s face it, there aren’t many original plots left. If you analyze the books and films we have till today, the number of plots boil down to seven different types. The immortal Shakespeare stole all his plots, so what are the odds of any  ordinary mortal not doing so? But how is it then that successful writers tell us the same old story so as to pique our interest?

They tell it from their own perspective, of course. From the way they perceive reality or constructed reality. They know what pushes their own buttons, what hits a nerve, and why they want to tell a specific story in that particular way. They know themselves, and according to James Scott Bell, they create their “personality filters” in order to create an original story based on one  or more of the seven plot types.

So, how does Bell reckon you know yourself? According to him, here are a few of questions all writers should answer when they approach the plotting of their novel:

What do you most care about in the world?

If you were to write your own obituary, how would you want it to read?

What is your physical appearance? How do you feel about it? How does it affect you?

What do you fear most?

What are your major strengths of character?

What are your major flaws?

What are you good at? What do you wish you were good at?

If you could do one thing and know that you would be successful, what would you do?

What are the three events from your childhood that helped shape you into the person you are today?

What are some of your annoying habits?

What secret in your life do you hope is never revealed?

What is your philosophy of life?

————————————

I am plotting my first MS, and I sat and wrote down the answer to all these questions. All I can tell you is that it made me re-think quite a few aspects of my work, and how to change them in order to make my work more resonant.

So pick up a pen and paper, or your laptop, and take a few minutes to answer these questions. You might be intrigued by what you find, and how it can affect your next novel.

Bookmark This