Ep. 246: Why It’s Essential to Be Okay with Writing CRAP!

In this bonus miniepisode, Rachael talks about how to get better about being okay writing truly crappy first drafts. Also, she talks about marketing from a trad perspective, as well as marketing memoir when your platform might be a little wobbly! 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How Do You Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Hello writers! Welcome to episode #246 of “How Do You Write? And this is a bonus mini episode brought to you by the patrons who support me at $5 a month or up. I get to ask, act as your coach and you get to send me questions. And then I get to feel a little bit guilty when it takes me a long time to do the mini episodes, but I do answer every question eventually. So, here we are, let’s jump into some of these awesome questions and I have to tell you that answering these, just makes me really happy. It makes me really happy to have this honest to God back and forth conversation with you, about the things that really matter to you. So, thank you to every patron at every level, including the ones who are at this level. 

[00:01:04] So, let’s start. Darren first asks. Let’s see, preamble, when I signed up for your newsletter of encouragement, which I love to pieces, you asked the question that I replied and answered. To paraphrase, what is the thing keeping you from the page? To which I replied, that I am not very good, and I know it. You graciously sent a response, which I did not expect that said, and again, I paraphrase, then write badly on purpose. I’ve tried and failed. My question for the mini coach: How do I put aside my ego that wants to write good words, even if my ability sticks out its tongue at the notion and just write crap on purpose? It feels counterintuitive. I mean, how are you supposed to improve if you’re intentionally writing crap? I heart your podcasts. I heart your spirit. I hope things continue to progress for you in your trek to New Zealand. Stay awesome, because that’s exactly who you are. Thank you for your time. 

[00:02:05] I think you’re awesome, Darren. Thank you for your patience and me getting back to this. I love this question because I lived in this question for at least 10 years, maybe more. I knew that everybody was telling me to write crap badly on purpose and move forward so that then later I could fix it. But in my heart, head and soul, my true deepest part of my soul, and this is hard to confess, but I’ve confessed it before on the podcast. I’m going to do it again. I really believed, that at some point, I would be a good enough writer that I wouldn’t have to that. I really, truly believed that the great writers that I admired, even their first drafts, were pretty damn good. I truly thought that on a cellular level. I even thought that, okay, well, if everybody else’s first drafts are crap, then I need to be the exception. And I will someday, if I try hard enough and I read all the books and I, and I keep trying to up my craft, even though I wasn’t writing very much. 

[00:03:21] Someday I’ll be good enough that I won’t have to deal with the pain, the essential pain and agony of putting words on the page that just are not up to standard. And I really believe that I held this belief on a cellular level until about two years ago, maybe. It was when I realized that that’s actually what I was saying to myself deep inside my soul. I was expecting myself someday to get good enough that I wouldn’t have to deal with that. Let’s just, Rachael. Rachael, that was bullshit. Oh my God. Nobody, nobody, nobody sits down and writes well, what they want to write. What happens is we sit down, we write badly, but we think we want to write, and then that changes too. When what we are actually meant to write is something else that we only get to by writing crap and leaving it behind. And so, I really, really understand what you’re saying, Darren. I have 100% been there. Your question is how do I put aside my ego that wants to write good words? For me, let’s talk about this in practical, usable ways. For me, the best thing that ever happened to me was doing NaNoWriMo. Because you write 1,667 words a day, every day for 30 days, or you write more and then less or whatever you need to do. But if you’re writing 16, almost 1700 words a day, sure, the next day you can sit down and try to make them better. You know, try to edit, revise a little bit or edit and revise after you write those words on the first day. But the next day you still have to get those 1700 words. And the third day you got to get those 17 words and the fourth day, and after a while, you’re so tired. You cannot, you don’t have time to write the words and then make them as good as you want them to be. At some point, you have to wave the white flag of surrender and just keep moving forward every day, making those 1700 words and you have to leave them behind because you just don’t have time to fix them.

[00:05:29] That is the way I learned how to do it technically is I gave myself a big enough challenge, and for me it was 1700 words a day. Yours may look different, but I gave myself a big enough challenge that the only way I could keep up with this challenge was to write words and then stop writing for the day because my brain was empty. My brain was done and tired by that point. And what that necessarily produced was a whole whack of words that I had to leave behind me on the page to fix later. Your real existential base of your question though is, how the hell am I supposed to get better if I’m just writing badly? How do I get better? 2 answers to that. Number one, it just happens. The more we write, the better we get, the more we write, the better we get, even when we’re writing crap. And number two, you actually get better measurably and you can feel it when you go back to revise that mountain. That trash mountain of a first draft, because you have learned, you have, number one, you’ve learned from the words that you wrote. You’ve learned a little bit about what the book wants to be, what these characters want to be. They’re not what you thought they would be, and they are not as good as you thought you could do on a first draft. They disappoint you, they let you down. And that is part of writing. Our writing will always disappoint us.

[00:06:55] Our writing will always let us down. That is part of writing and we just keep showing up every day and we get used to the feeling of being let down by our writing. However, when we go back to revise, we have learned from doing the writing and we learn, literally, we literally learn from reading the words we left behind and we think, well, that just sounds awful. What a stupid sentence. I must be an imbecile to even think I could try this. And then somehow we stay at the page and we fixed that one sentence. We make it a little bit better or we get rid of it entirely. And then we go to the next sentence and it’s just as bad. And we fixed that. And in fixing it, we learned a little something. And then by the time we get to the third sentence and I’m breaking this down very simply, but the building blocks are true and reliable. By the time we get to that third sentence, you are a little bit smarter than you were when you sat down that morning to work on your work. And that third sentence, you’re gonna revise in a different way, in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to. Had you not started revising this and had you not written all this first draft.

[00:08:03] So you are constantly learning as you write and as you revise. Susan Sontag said, my writing is smarter than I am because I can revise it. It blows my mind every time I think of that quote; my writing is smarter than I am because I can revise it. Your writing is one level of smart on that first draft, but every time you go back to it, it gets better and you get smarter as a human being, as you learn to be a better writer. And it just feels terrible to leave those words behind. So again, let’s go back to that idea, sorry, creaky chair, of giving yourself a challenge that’s big enough that you just have to leave crappy words behind, and maybe you don’t want to write 50,000 words in a month, like NaNoWriMo has you do. Maybe you just want to write 10,000 words this week. And you know that that is enough to exhaust you. You won’t be able to really get too tied up in thinking about how bad you did yesterday because today you’ve got to write your 2000 words or whatever it is. Then do that, and then go back and play with revising. But what you are feeling, Darren, is 100% normal and, it gets easier. It gets easier and easier. You’ll always write badly. You’ll always let yourself down. But you get a, you learn to have a deep, deep faith that yeah, you know what, that sucks. I’m a terrible writer when it comes to first draft, but boy, do I know how to make things better in a second or third or fourth draft. And that becomes super, super, super exciting, and not only exciting, it becomes, what’s the word, satisfying. You know, that you’re going to have a satisfying experience when you get into revision. And, knowing that that’s coming, is enough of a reward to draw us forward. So, thank you for asking a question that will help everybody. Thanks for that.

[00:10:04] Okay. Mariah says, hello, Mariah, now that your new book, Hush Little Baby is out, hooray! I’ve been wondering how promotion is set up for this one. How does the publisher work with you on that one? How far ahead do you and the publisher and the publicist get in touch and plan things? Is your agent involved at all? What moving parts are in the plan? How much do they ask you to do? Are there Facebook ads for this sort of thing or other promotions? Tell me everything. Okay, so fantastic question. So, promotion for Hush Little Baby was set up a little bit later than normal because during this pandemic, we have not been doing, and by we, I’m talking about all the traditional publishing, almost no one has been doing physical advanced reader copies. It used to be that people over in the office at Penguin or Harper Collins or wherever. The publicists would be physically touching the advanced reader copies, putting them in an envelope, sending them to the long lead magazine, sending them out to the bloggers, sending them out to the bookstagrammers. They’re just not doing that now. They’re doing NetGalley advanced reader copies, which is digital. They didn’t even print advanced reader copies of Hush Little Baby at all. There wasn’t one printed, which is the first time in 20 plus books that that’s ever, I’ve ever seen that happen was this pandemic. So, it’s a little bit less lead time. 

[00:11:29] So we did a little bit more of that coming together and talking about marketing a little bit later than usual. Usually, we started about four months out. I think I met with them two or three months ahead of time. What happens is you and your agent, if you are traditionally published, generally what happens is you and your agent get together with your editor? And whoever’s working with you on publicity and whoever is, and that includes your promo person and your marketing person. Your marketing person is in charge of the stuff that they put money into and your promotion person is in charge of the stuff that’s basically free, social media. If you write essays to get interest in your books and you have this meeting online, and you brainstorm about what you could do to get attraction for this book. 

[00:12:16] So I will just say that when we were brainstorming this, I realized that in this book, Jillian is a recovering alcoholic. It is not what the book is about and that was my whole point is to show recovering alcoholics just doing their jobs, living their lives, much like I, as a recovering alcoholic. I just do my job and live my life. But it hadn’t occurred to me until after I talked to them or while we were talking that, oh, I really like recovery podcasts.  Let’s reach out to the recovery podcasts that I like best and talk to those hosts and send them digital advanced reader copies or finished copies after the finished copies are printed, so that maybe then they will want to have me on their show to talk about this book. And so that was a brand-new idea that occurred to us then. Something that generally happens nowadays. 

[00:13:06] It used to be that you would be put on a blog tour. Blog tours for books are a little bit dead. Now it’s all about the bookstagrammers. People on Instagram who read and review books have a lot of power, a lot of clout, and they have a lot of followers. And your publicist at the traditional publishing house has a list of all those people. So, she’s going to reach out to them, offer to send them the book they’re going to say yes or no. Hopefully if they get it, they’re going to feature it. And a little, they’re going to put up a photo of it and they’re going to say to their followers, do you want to read this? Does this book look good? Best case scenario is if the bookstagrammer reads it and then talks about it and recommends it, hopefully they like it. So that is a big part of publicity and promotion right now. Let’s see, your agent is involved in that. She’s just there making sure that stuff gets done. As regards, things that cost money like Facebook ads or Amazon ads, generally in traditionally publishing, from where I have been, which is just a solid mid-list author, they will put a little bit of money into that, not a lot, and it’s usually for the first week or two. In Facebook ads, they’ll generally target other authors like you, their readers, they’ll target them. But money doesn’t go far. Publishers don’t have very much of it. So, they’re not gonna be able to send you on any kind of book tour or pay for your plane flights to go do something, back in the days when we could still do that. There’s less money spent, unless you are a very big name. If you’re getting a seven-figure deal in a, if you’re getting a seven-figure advance, they’re going to put some real money into Facebook ads, into Amazon ads. But if you’re not, then you need to do it on your own. 

[00:14:53] So anything that I didn’t say on this podcast, about that, is what I’m doing on my own. Basically, the author is in charge of doing the vast majority of all publicity and promotion for their books, which is very hard and is a perennial source of angst and wringing of hands. Do I know how to do it well? I absolutely do not. Could I do a better? Oh, yes! If you look at my Instagram, I should have a lot more pictures of Hush Little Baby instead of the seven or eight that I do. I’m not very good at it. And it is something that we’re all always trying to figure out better ways of doing, searching for the magic bullet, there isn’t one. Books take off and hit the New York Times bestseller list and nobody knows how. They didn’t have any publicity promotion behind them. And perhaps you as a reader, didn’t think they were as good as this other book, which completely tanked. Sales for a book, like I’ve said on the show before, don’t have anything to do with how good a book is. It’s this weird thing. If publishers could make best sellers, they would. If publishers could make best sellers of every one of their books, they would. They don’t know how to do it either. None of us know how to do it. So, it all, I always would like to bring it back to what is inside my control. The only thing that is truly inside my control is my writing, is doing the work, is sitting down, protecting the time, writing the crappy first draft, and then knowing that revision will happen and I will make something out of it. That’s what I control. I control the fact that every book that I write, I want to be better than the one that came before it. Hush Little Baby, as my most recent book, is my best book. It’s the best book I’ve ever written. Is it selling as well as some others? It is absolutely not. It’s a, that’s a strange time in publishing for many different reasons. But I can rest. I can close my eyes at night knowing that that’s the best book I’ve ever written, subjectively, as I rate it on my particular sale. And that’s all I can control. So, I’m just going to write the next book. But, fabulous question. Thank you for asking that. I think I answered all of those questions.

[00:17:16] All right. We have two more questions. All right. This one is for Brian, from Brian. Thanks again for your patience, everybody. Brian says, thanks and hello again. I have a question regarding my first revision. First of all, I imagined myself being your least qualified patron. No, that’s not true, Brian. I am a high school dropout and my only qualification for writing is that I lived in a cabin alone in the woods of Sweden for nine months during COVID. I passed my ninth-grade writing competency test and I’ve completed a 100,000 word first draft memoir. So, this might seem like a very simple question, how much passive voice is okay? My normal speaking voice is very passive, slangy and sing-songy. This is my voice however, and I understand that to engage the reader, I must write actively. Do I limit my slangy sing-song passiveness to quotes, or can I slip 5-10% into the overall narration? Thanks for any help. And thanks for being my coach, coach.

[00:18:12] I love this question. So, I personally am very, very, very drawn to writers who use their own voice, who could not be anyone else, I’m thinking particularly right now of Samantha Irby. If you have not read her, her last name is IRBY. She writes incredibly funny essays where she is passive voices, sing songs, slang, all of her own words. You can tell that she is writing in the voice she uses to speak in the world and it is hilarious and nobody else could do it. And I would say for her, you’re asking 5-10%. I would say that Samantha has got 30-40% in there. Of course, she has things that we need in our writing. She has action. She has dialogue. She has things happening on the page. She has things that she wants. Things that she has prevented from getting and methods of trying to get around those blocks. Right? That’s what we’re all writing about. We’re writing about wanting something and not being able to get it and how we, how we changed in the pursuit of that goal. That’s really what every story is about. But you get to put in as much as you want. The passive voice in particular. So, let’s, let me try to come up with an example. Oh, it’s going to be just a simple, dumb example, but here we go. When the sun was shining and the birds were chirping on the morning, on Tuesday morning, so the sun was shining. Let’s just say the sun shone and the birds chirped. When we have that to-be verb in there, the were, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, it is, it puts us at one degree of remove. We’re one, we’re one step away from that actually happening and feeling like it’s happening. So, the sun shone is more direct. I was angry. That’s a passive voice. If we say, I slammed the cup against the wall and the coffee sprayed all over her face, that’s direct. That’s active. That is, that is happening. That is not, I was angry. That is actual action happening. So, you do want that in your book, but if you have that passive voice in there, absolutely. If that’s your voice, include what you want in it. And this will be, at some point, everybody, every single person listening to this podcast, I’d like to remind you, you will have an editor. Please, God, have an editor. You don’t have to. You could write a book, first draft and slap it up online and it will get bad reviews and you’ll be sad. But everybody else, all the rest of you will have an editor.

[00:21:12] You will either get an agent and go the traditional publishing route where your agent will sell your book. And then you will have an editor at an, at a publisher who will be assigned to you, who will buy your book and they will work with you on editing your book, or you will use someplace like Reedsy to find a great editor for you and they will be, and you’ll hire them. They will be the one saying, okay, this is too passive right here. I don’t feel close enough to you right here. Can you bring me closer in your work? And here are some suggestions of how to do that well and strongly, and your editor will be helping you with that. So in the meantime, number one, I forgot to say, the most important thing. Congratulations! You did something that most people never do. You finished a book. You completed a first draft. The statistics say that 80% of Americans say, I know you might not be American because I know you were living in Sweden. But 80% of Americans say that they want write a book, 97% of those who start. 97% of those who attempt to write a book, do not finish it. You’re already in the top 3%. Holy crap! Congratulations! And now, start working on that revision or revisions. And then, you’re going to be working with an editor at some point, and they will be able to tell you if you’re using too much slang, if it’s getting in the way. But, you’re so close to it, you will probably not be able to tell that yourself. So onward I say to you, and I’m really proud of you. Thank you for asking that.

[00:22:47] All right. Last question is from Ken. Rachael, I’ve finished my memoir letters to my son in prison, and I am in the process of hiring an editor for development and copy. Now I’m turning my attention to marketing and promotion. Up to these point 5 years, I’ve wanted to go traditional, both for credibility and marketing help, but my wife has been pushing, and I don’t think even the best traditional will bring much promotion muscle to the table. As to platform, I have a poultry Instagram presence and to be honest, I don’t see myself having much success on any social platform. What I do have a several decades of friends and business acquaintances who I can market my book to. I’m guessing I can sell a hundred books with my network and maybe get word of mouth working for me. Any thoughts? Advice? And who is the guy you use for marketing you interviewed him a few months ago? He had a book out. 

[00:23:38] Okay. So, first of all, let’s start off with where I should have started with Brian, which is congratulations. I’m so glad that you have finished your memoir and I’m really proud of you that you are in the process of working with an editor for development. First, we first work with our developmental editors and they help us with the large picture, very important stuff. And then second, the copy editing. That’s the very, very last part. That’s where we get all our commas and our typos out of the way. So, it looks like you’re doing everything exactly right in the right order. I love that you’re thinking about marketing and promotion.

[00:24:13] Here’s what I like to say. Social media, it can help. Absolutely. Will any of us or all of us be able to boost our social media numbers up into the dozens of thousands of people following us that we would need to really utilize them and harness them? That’s difficult. The most important thing to be working on using is building a mailing list, if possible. And we could do a whole show on that. And perhaps we won’t right now, but having a mailing list to announce to people when you come out with books is a nice thing to have. If this is the only book you want to write and get out there, then that mailing list is going to be less important. However, for you, I’m guessing, you said you have several decades of friends and business acquaintances who I can market my book to. You might be a person who might do very well on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of those often overlooked social media places. You might already have the connections there and you can start, you know, you can basically write little blog posts on LinkedIn to get attention and eyeballs. You can release your book cover, there, when you get the book cover and have all of those business acquaintances and friends, look at it and say, Ooh, I can’t wait to buy that. You could, if you’re going to self-publish this, you can do a preorder at all the vendors and say, my book is now available for pre-order, here it is. Click that link. You can excerpt things on LinkedIn and on all the other social media, you can do this. You can excerpt like, you know, a paragraph or two to wet people’s appetite. That might be something that’s gonna work really well to drum up that interest.

[00:25:56] Another thing to think about when we’re talking about this kind of marketing is when the book is out, ask people to leave honest reviews. You cannot incentivize good reviews. It is not allowed and you will get punished for it. And it’s not very good to do morally, let’s just admit that. But you can ask for reviews. You can say to your friends and acquaintances, reviews are very, very important for books. It helps them to be visible in the algorithms. So don’t forget to ask for those, after your book comes out, after you’ve sold those, a hundred or so copies that you feel like you can move with your network. Ask for those reviews, because that’s how other people who are not related to you will be able to find the book. The social credit. That is gained by people, looking at your book and seeing that, oh, people really did like this. This is a verified purchase. They bought this book, they read it, they wrote this review and they liked it. That means I’m going to do the same thing. I’m also going to buy the book. Can be hugely useful. But can overall, I just want to say, like, it sounds like you’re doing everything in the right order. The title is awesome. I can’t wait to see it. Continue forward, onward, onward always.

[00:27:12] And thank you for your questions, all four of you. I have more than four people in the mini coaching club. So, let’s, I’m going to erase these questions from my guilt-laden list of questions to answer. And I want new ones. So, if you’re on that list, please send me new ones. Maggie, I feel like you sent me one. Did I forget it on this? But I’m usually pretty good at not forgetting that. So I will go back and check. But to all of you listening who are Patreon supporters or who are not, thank you for being here with me. This really makes my heart sing when I get to talk like this to you extemporaneously, well, I actually always do that, just heart to heart of what you are thinking about. What I am also going to do and what. 

[00:28:02] Oh, can you ask me who my marketing person was? I don’t have a marketing person, but I do have an assistant. His name is Ed, he’s in episode 200 and his contact info is in there. He doesn’t, he’s an assistant, not marketing. But you can always reach out to him and see if he’s accepting new clients. His information is in that episode, number 200. And what I was going to say is that Ed is bugging me to do another bonus episode. So, I will be putting that up soon of Hush Little Baby’s release party, which is now more than a month old. But if you were not able to attend the launch, it’s a fun conversation that I had. So I’ll be releasing that probably next week. Cause I’m starting to get around to doing things because we are out of the house and I’m just in this Airbnb doing work. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a writer. You’re the only person who can write your book. You’re the only person who can write your books. So please continue to do the crappy first draft work, which will get you closer and closer to those revised words, which will make their way into readers’ hands. And that is an awful, damn good feeling. So, happy writing, my friends.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.