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The glory and magic of the ten-hour writing day

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 15, 2013

About two weeks ago, I accidentally spent ten hours revising a novel. I don’t quite know how it happened. I certainly didn’t intend to do it. I just got really zoned in and, before I knew it, five hours had passed. Then the same thing happened again in the evening!

What made this interesting for me is that it happened on a Monday, which is the same day that I was teaching my class and taking Spanish. For the whole year, I’d pretty much assumed that three hours was about as much as I could manage on a Monday (and I often didn’t manage even those three). And now here I was with proof that if I wanted to, I could allocate ten hours!

Of course, it did come with some costs. I wasn’t able to do any of my other work on that day. Nor was I able to undertake the 2-4 hours of reading that I like to do every day. But still, ten hours of writing! That’s really productive. That’s almost as much as what I average in an entire week.

For years, I’ve assumed that I was writing about as much as it was possible to write. It’s no secret that writers–even professional ones–are often fairly unproductive. There are tons of famous writers who only wrote for three hours in the morning and then just puttered about for the rest of the day. There are plenty of countervailing examples, of course, but three hours of writing per day remains a very respectable sum and that is generally what I aimed for.

I have to say, though, that I am suspicious of anyone who says that they write three hours a day. To me, that sounds like on some days they write three hours and on some days they write nothing (or very little), which means that their average is probably more like 1.5 hours. And that’s pretty much where mine is. Ever since I started taking statistics on my writing, I’ve averaged about 90-100 minutes of writing a day.

I generally cap out at around 4 hours. In the last year and a half, I’ve only had 7 days where I wrote for between 4-8 hours and 2 days where I wrote for more than 8 hours. That’s what keeps my average writing time low. In order to have an average of three hours a day, every 5 minute day would need to be balanced by a six hour day and I simply don’t have very many of the latter

But the ten hour day unlocks whole new potentialities. If I can just clear one day a week and make it an eight or more hour writing day, then my overall productivity will double.

So…that’s what I’m going to do. Today I put the plan into motion and had my very first pre-planned eight-hour writing day. It was excellent and extremely productive. I did eight hours of writing and still had enough time for a nap and a walk.

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Giving out a little bit more information about _Enter Title Here_ (err, and also participating in that Next Big Thing meme)

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 6, 2013

When I searched for 'Study Machines' this is what Googe Image Search gave me.

When I searched for ‘Study Machines’ this is what Googe Image Search gave me.

Three months ago, Brooke Wonders tagged me in that “Next Big Thing” meme that was going around. I intended to write a post about it (since it was the first time I’d ever been tagged in a meme, woooo). But then I didn’t, because I was in too early a stage w/ the book (I’d just completed the first draft) and I didn’t want to commit myself to it if I wasn’t going to go further with it. But now I feel like the book has a little more get-up-and-go to it, so I think I’ll stop being coy.

 

What is the working title of this book?

It used to be Study Machines, but I developed that title back when I thought it was going to be an SF book. It also has a fairly specific context that no longer makes sense. So now it’s called Enter Title Here. I am completely in love with this title. When I view the output from Scrivener, it really does look like I’ve forgotten to give the book a title.

Where did the idea for the book come from?*

            I can answer this question! Twas July 17th, and I was reading Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, a book of financial reportage that was edited by Michael Lewis. In retrospect, this was a poor decision, since the book was not very good. I only read it because I was in my Michael Lewis phase. However, as part of a bit of color commentary on the economy of Korea, there’s a whole section on student suicide that contains this passage:

In 2005, in the first rally of its kind, hundreds of high school students demonstrated in central Seoul, shouting, “We aren’t study machines!” They gathered to mourn 15 students fro around the country who had killed themselves, apparently because of intense pressure to succeed. (p. 154)

For some reason, I really loved this passage. After reading it, I thought, “There’s a novel in this! What if I was to write about a dystopian future where kids have to, like, study really hard or something…”

I walked around my neighborhood a bit and thought about it. And I slowly realized, “Wait, this doesn’t need to be a dystopian future. This is now. This is real life. In the present day, many high school kids work really, really, really, really hard.”

So I decided to write about one of them.

What genre does your book fall under?

            It’s pretty squarely a contemporary young adult novel. My first book with no guns! Not even one! It was, surprisingly, not very hard to write a realist novel. I always wondered how people did it. How did they decide that this prosaic situation was more worth writing about than that prosaic situation? Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about prosaic situations. In fact, I think it’s better than writing about really weird situations. I prefer to read about ordinary life. But still, it does seem to pose conceptual problems. In SF, you know something is worth writing about if people think it’s super cool when you describe it to them. In realist novels, something can sound utterly boring when described but actually work really well on the page. Anyway, now I know the answer: when you find the right prosaic situation, it doesn’t seem prosaic at all (at least, not to you).

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

            I will not play this game. This game does not interest me at all.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The novel you’re reading is the novel that is being written by an Indian American high school senior who plans to use it as her ‘hook’ for college admissions; however, her carefully-managed self-transformation into a ‘typical’ American teen is interrupted when one of her teachers accuses her of plagiarism.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I actually thought about writing this book last summer, when I first thought of it, but I held off because I wanted to revise that other (terrible) novel first. In the end, holding off was probably a good idea, since it let me do some additional brainstorming. I didn’t go into winter break intending to write this novel, but then I just went ahead and did it, because it seemed silly to spend day after day groping around for another short story when I already had this idea that really excited me. I wrote it in thirty-one days (Dec. 18, 2012 through Jan. 17, 2013). I didn’t set out to write it in exactly one month. It just turned out that way.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A lot of the book is inspired by my own anxieties over getting published and whether I really knew how to write stories (it’s primarily told as a monologue to the literary agent who’ll be reading it, which I thought was cute, since I expected to be querying agents about it).

Since I didn’t go to a large public coeducational high school (the graduating class at my all-boy’s catholic HS was 36 people), I also read all these ethnographic studies of high school to see if I could fake the social dynamics a little bit (yep, that’s how I roll).

Will your book be self-published or presented by an agency?

Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, I guess it’ll be represented by my agent at Greenhouse Literary. However, that seems like it’s a ways in the future, since we haven’t even started to do anything with the last book.

My tagged writers

I will not tag anyone, since I am not sure: a) which writers read this blog; and b) whether those writers have already done this or not.

*Note, in this question is normally listed (in most posts that use this meme) as “Where did the idea come from for the book?” That is a dreadfully awkward wording and it’s an example of the trouble that you can get into when you try to contort a sentence to avoid ending it on a preposition.

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The difference between a sequence and a scene

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 2, 2013

I’ve been reading a lot of screen-writing manuals (as research for a novel, not because I want to write screenplays). And it’s been pretty fascinating. The nice thing about screenplay books is that they’re incredibly prescriptive. One of the most popular ones–Save The Cat–says that your second act turning point MUST occur on page 25. Not on page 23, or on page 27…page 25 is where it’s got to be.

If I was actually trying to write screenplays, I imagine I’d find it infuriating. But since I’m a novelist, I think it’s actually a bit nice to have a book that’s unafraid to give real advice. Most writing manuals are a bit froofy and guarded. There are too many examples of famous and beloved novels that contain some really bizarre decisions. For instance, what is up with Wuthering Heights? Why is it told as a weird story-within-a-story? And why does it leap forward, halfway through, and begin talking about the children of the protagonists’ in the first half?

So novel manuals are afraid to say anything definite. But that means they just don’t say anything at all. You come away from them thinking that the way to write a novel is to just read a lot of novels and then write a novel. Which is fine. It’s even true. But you don’t need a book to tell you that.

Turndown_Sequence_by_maxduff           One interesting thing that I learned (from Save The Cat) was this distinction between scenes and sequences. The author, Blake Snyder, describes a sequence as a part of the movie where the dialogue is intercut with a lot of action (an action sequence, a sex scene, a negotiation, the operation of equipment, driving a car, etc.)

I thought about this when revising my novel Enter Title Here. In This Beautiful Fever, there are maybe two parts that I think of as being really locked-in: places where everything falls away and I feel really gripped by the narrative. And they both have what I’d call a sequencey feeling to them: there’s an interplay of action and dialogue and internal monologue that works really well. When writing them, I thought of them as setpieces and I used them to anchor what I thought of as the “acts” of the novel.

In Enter Title Here, I feel as if these sequences are more common, but still limited in number. There are maybe six or seven of them.

It’s tempting to say that novels need to have both scene and sequence, but I’m not sure that’s true. There are definitely novels that are all sequence. For instance, Emile Zola’s Nana has roughly eighteen chapters and each of them is basically this fantastic ten thousand word setpiece. In one of them, she’s performing a play. In another, she’s spending all of some dude’s money. Etc. Etc.

Grapes of Wrath* is also much more sequence than scene. Not only is it intercut with these fast-moving impressionistic chapters that are a bit orthogonal to the main plot, even the main plot often has a lot going on (I’m thinking of, for instance, the strike, or the Joads’ midnight drive across the desert).

I would say that Mrs. Dalloway is also mostly sequence. There’s never a moment at which people aren’t somehow in motion.

It’s also tempting to say that sequence is better than scene. I think there is something to that. Sequence certainly engages the interest in a certain kind of way. But plenty of novels work very well without it. Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels don’t really contain any sections that aren’t just two people conversing. I’d also that Jane Austen is much, much more dialogue than action. Even when people are strolling and talking, the environment never really impinges on their perception.

*Speaking of Grapes of Wrath, the other day I was thinking about Ma Joad lying on the floor of the truck during their ride across the desert and I got chills. Oh man, I’m getting chills right now, just writing about it! That book is really, really awesome. I was also thinking that there is some alternate reality where Grapes of Wrath is indisputably the greatest American novel: the alternate reality in which the Steinbeck’s socialist revolution actually came to pass. There’s such an element of prophecy to the book. When it closes, you can feel that something has to change: that there’s no way this rotting system can totter on for even another five years. But, unfortunately, it did. It tottered on right into the modern day. So Grapes of Wrath has to content itself with just being a wonderful novel, rather than a piece of our history.

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Five software programs that’ve improved my productivity and given me peace of mind

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 29, 2013

This is what your scrivener screen can look like, if you are a power user (which I am not).

This is what your scrivener screen can look like, if you are a power user (which I am not).

I’ve always scoffed at writers who blogged about the software tools they use. Mostly because that stuff doesn’t really matter at all. And I continue to stand by that. None of these tools makes you into a better writer.

In fact, most technological advances haven’t improved the writing. Jane Austen wrote her manuscripts in pen and they’re still unsurpassed.

But…technology does make your life easier. It makes writing more pleasant and less aggravating. And that’s worthwhile too. Not everything has to be so grimly focused on “But does it improve the writing?” If it improves your happiness and productivity, then that’s a good enough reason to use something.

Freedom – I can’t overstate how useful I find this program to be. Almost 90% of my writing is done while it’s enabled. It’s a program that disables the internet for the amount of time you specify. Really, all it does is put thirty seconds of work between you and the internet. If you want to use the internet (before the time is elapsed), you can just restart your computer. But those thirty seconds are enough! I won’t say that I don’t spend some of my writing time staring at the wall or checking my twitter feed on my iPad. But, by and large, it’s really cut down on the amount of time-wasting I used to do. It’s also trained me in the correct habits. Sometimes I forget to set it and I’ll have written for an hour and a half before I realize that I actually do have access to the internet.

Microsoft Excel – It would be a misnomer to say that I have a “submissions spreadsheet.” Really, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track everything in my life that’s important to me (including my submissions). It started out as a simple submissions tracker and over the last nine years I’ve added more and more functionality to it. The core of the sheet has become my Daily Log: a place where I record my writing output (both in terms of minutes and words), the number of hours I’ve spent reading, my TV-watching time, the number of calories that I ate, and my social media activity, and also includes short notes on what I worked on and what other things I did on that day (in addition to a few other fields). But there are other important sheets to. I have a log of every book I’ve read for the last three years (which includes capsule reviews of each book). And there are ancillary sheets: one on which I tabulate various statistics re: my life, one for my finances, one to track novel and nonfiction queries, one for MFA applications, etc. I am sure that there are dedicated software packages for life-tracking, but I really don’t think that any of them have the flexibility of Excel and portability of Excel.

Dropbox - In March of 2009, I suffered a hard disk failure that wiped out three months of work. Since then, I’ve used Dropbox. There’s really only one way to use it. Just move everything in your My Documents folder to your Dropbox folder. And from then on, just treat your Dropbox folder like your My Documents. I’ve actually gone even further and put my entire iTunes library in there, because I am tired of having to reconstruct it from CDs and backup discs, but that might be going a bit too year. Yes, I do spend $99 a year to get an extra 100gb of Dropbox space. It’s totally worth it. If you have multiple computers, Dropbox also keeps the files in sync (which is really the only way that a person can use more than one computer). This has the added benefit of turning your computers into de facto backup drives for each other. It is still worth making a physical backup (on a backup drive) every once in awhile, since it is possible for Dropbox to spaz out and delete the files on your computers (happened to me once, because I did something stupid–was able to pretty easily restore the files using the Dropbox web interface, but still…)

Scrivener - Yes, I’ve become one of them. I’m not saying that Scrivener is the greatest thing ever, but it is useful. For those who aren’t in the know, Scrivener is a word-processor that is specifically designed for writing long documents–screenplays, novels, reports, etc. I’ve used it to write two projects now, and I have to say that it is really useful to be able to see the structure of your whole work at a glance and to be able to move things around as needed. Furthermore, I can tell you that doing all the reformatting that was necessary to put This Beautiful Fever into the approved form for submission to contests, publishers, and agents was a nightmare, and I think that Scrivener does all that work for you in a much more efficient way. Scrivener also has a number of outlining tools that I haven’t made as much use of, since I don’t do much outlining, but I think that they’re probably pretty useful to some people, maybe.

The thing about transitioning from one software package (Word) to another (Scrivener) is that it’s never perfect. There’s always that one feature that’s missing. Scrivener is missing a lot of features that I use in Word. The formatting and page layout options aren’t as detailed. The interface isn’t as clean. Doing stuff like alphabetizing data or inserting charts is harder. It’s not easy to make stuff pretty in Scrivener.

But it’s exactly those features which make Word such a disaster. The formatting system that underlies Word is fine for short documents, but in a longer document (even one as simple as a novel), it eventually gets completely snarled up and starts causing weird problems.

I still use Word for most word-processing (including writing short stories). But for novels and longer stories, Scrivener is pretty darn good.

Evernote – Been using it for ages. It’s just a good way to jot stuff down. The main benefit is the easy synchronization between computers and mobile devices (my iPod / iPad). It’s where I put all my random ideas, story notes, lists, etc.

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I’ve now achieved every one of the eleven productivity goals that I set for myself in the summer of 2009

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 26, 2013

goal_setting

In the summer of 2009, I made a list of five productivity milestones I wanted to hit in the next five years. With the recent acquisition of my thousandth short story rejection, I now have ALL of them.

  1. Words
    1. 400,000 Words[1]
    2. 500,000 Words[2]
    3. 750,000 Words[3]
    4. 1,000,000 Words[4]
  2. Completed Short Stories
    1. 100 Stories[5]
    2. 120 Stories[6]
  3. Rejections
    1. 500 Rejections[7]
    2. 750 Rejections[8]
    3. 1000 Rejections[9]
  4. Novel Draft Completion[10]
  5. Novel Submission[11]

Some of these goals were obviously harder to achieve than others. I hit my 120th story and millionth word like two years ago. But still, at the time I wrote this list, I was nowhere close to any of these goals. I’d written about 300,000 words and 70ish stories and only had maybe 350ish rejections. So these goals were only achievable if I put in an order of magnitude more effort than I was currently doing.

That summer was also maybe six months before I quit drinking, I was nowhere close to getting my life in order. In fact, at that point, I was about to apply to eleven MFA programs that’d all reject me in the coming year. But, nonetheless, I went ahead and made these goals. And, in the coming years, I took them seriously. I feel like there’s a lesson here, of some sort, even though that lesson is totally counter to the advice I usually give (which is to set low-ball goals that you are sure of being able to achieve).

[1] Achieved on 9/9/9

[2] Achieved on 4/25/10

[3] Achieved on 5/13/10

[4] Achieved on 8/26/11 (nineteenth month sobriety anniversary too)

[5] Achieved on 9/9/10

[6] Achieve on 4/21/11

[7] Achieved with rejection by…somewhere, I dunno…around 6/30/10

[8] Achieved with a rejection by…I dunno…Asimov’s? Around 12/19/11

[9] Achieved on 4/24 with a rejection by Asimov’s

[10] Achieved on, I believe, 10/27/10

[11] Achieved w/ submission of This Beautiful Fever to an agent on 12/19/11

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Some thoughts (and additional statistics) re: my thousandth short story rejections

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 25, 2013

If I had a nickel for every rejection I've gotten, I'd have...$50 (and fifteen cents)

If I had a nickel for every rejection I’ve gotten, I’d have…$50 (and fifteen cents)

Well, it finally happened. I got my one thousandth rejection! And then I got three more. And now I have 1,003. And I’m too lazy to temporarily delete the last three, so all of the below will be the numbers for 1,003 rejections.

I started submitting on Dec. 20th, 2003 (meaning I’ve gotten approximately 2 rejections a week for nine years). These rejections arise from submitting 142 stories to 255 publications (and contests).  However, the vast majority of those publications only saw 1-4 submissions from me. Actually, over half my rejections are accounted for by just 20 publications (as shown by the table below).

#

 Name of Magazine

# of Rejections It Gave Me

Cumulative Rejections by Magazines 1 to #

1

 Lightspeed

73

73

2

 Clarkesworld

46

119

3

 Shimmer

43

162

4

 Asimov’s

36

198

5

 F&SF

35

233

6

 Strange Horizons

35

268

7

 Daily SF

32

300

8

 Apex Magazine

31

331

9

 Medicine Show

26

357

10

 Analog

25

382

11

 Ideomancer

24

406

12

 ASIM

21

427

13

 Abyss and Apex

18

445

14

 Fictitious Force

17

462

15

 WotF

14

476

16

 Ceaseless Skies

13

489

17

 Flash Online

13

502

18

 Baen’s Universe

12

514

19

 Aeon Specfic

11

525

20

 Pedestal

10

535

As you can see, just four publications have given me a fifth of my total rejections. Eleven publications are responsible for 40% of my rejections.  Out of these top twenty publications, I’ve only sold stories to five of them. For many of these publications, I’m probably amongst their top 20 or 30 most prolific submitters.

Although I submit to both literary and SF publications, only 87 of these rejections are from literary journals. The rest are all from SF magazines.

My pace of submission has increased significantly over time. My first 500 rejections took me 6.5 years to accumulate. Receiving the last 500 took only 3 years. And that’s not even counting rejections from novel agents, publishers, and nonfiction publications (all of which are types of submissions that I only began sending out in the last two years). And, as you can see, my pace of rejection is still only increasing (I attribute this to my increasing numbers of submissions to lit-mags, which allows me to have an extra 20-30 submissions out at a time).

I have to say, I am proud of the record of determination and tenacity that this represents. But…I have to say, I once polled authors on how many rejections they’d gotten in their lives and I learned that it doesn’t usually take 1,003 rejections to get to where I am today. I’m not quite sure why it’s taken me so many more stories and so many more submissions to get my double-handful of publications. Furthermore, it’s not like it’s smooth sailing for me. I don’t see any slowdown in the pace of rejection. In 5-6 months, I fully expect to be posting about my 1,100th rejection. And I’m not sure how happy I am about that. I kind of feel like, at this point in my writing life, I should be past getting 25 rejections for every acceptance, but that’s where I’ve been for roughly the last 2.5 years.

The obvious answer is that I should be writing less and putting more time and care into my work. But I’m honestly not really sure whether I do put less time into each story than other writers. Earlier in my career, I didn’t do much revising, but nowadays I spend quite a lot of time on my stories. My short stories are usually the result of 12-25 hours of labor and a number of redrafts. I’m not sure how much harder I could be working on them. I think that my increased prolificity is just because I work longer hours than most writers. For instance, many writers say that they work two hours a day, but I know that their estimates are soft. They’re not counting the days when they did nothing. Or the days when they intended to work two hours but only worked an hour. They’re not counting the month of vacation they took. I count all those things. Even inclusive of everything, I work about 100 minutes a day. Which is not where I want to be, but it’s pretty good.

But, at the same time, I feel like I’m not getting quite the results that I want. I don’t know. In everything, there’s always a tension between refining your method and trying something new. And right now, I really don’t see any obvious improvements to make in my method other than engaging in more and more redrafts. I really think at this point, the answer is to just keep writing stories. I am still learning things, and I do think that the stories I’m writing nowadays are better than the ones I wrote at this time last year. Oh well, we’ll see.

I’ve stopped expecting to be that person who gets suddenly discovered and has this meteoric rise. Maybe I didn’t work my cards right for that. Maybe if I’d held off on submitting for ten years…maybe if I’d relentlessly honed one story until it was perfect…maybe if I’d gone about things a bit differently…I don’t know.

I all the time hear people say that they’re not willing to do something because it somehow doesn’t fit into their psychology. For instance, people say they’re not willing to network or to use social media because they’re too shy / anxious / awkward / introverted. And, I always think, “Well, yeah, that’s definitely a choice that you can make…but it’s going to hurt you. It’d be way better to just gather your courage and do what you know you have to do.”

So I am suspicious of myself when I say that I don’t feel psychologically equipped to take that laid-back, aristocratic way of doing things–submitting only one story every three months and trusting that it’ll get picked up, because people won’t have acclimatized themselves to the essence of you-ness. But that’s just not what comes naturally to me. I think it’s hard to find a method that allows you to produce work that you’re happy with. And mine has brought me a lot of success and has allowed me to springboard past a lot of rough patches that would’ve brought down other people.

The main argument against my method is that it seems to involve a lot more work per unit of success than many other methods do. But if that’s how it is, then that’s how it is.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: | 6 Comments »

I still find it really weird to think of myself as a novelist

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 17, 2013

confusionI vividly recall the decision to write my first novel. It was about this time, four years ago, in the spring of my 23rd year. I’d made my first professional sale (to Nature) about a year before. Since then, it’d been nothing but rejection (I’d have another year to go until I made another one). Furthermore, in their rejection letters, editors kept telling me that my characters were unsympathetic. I was getting pretty tired of hearing about that. What did they want? Some wide-eyed orphan who was getting kicked around by an evil stepfather? Some square-jawed hero whose only problem was that he loved justice too much? Some good-hearted heroine who single-handedly supports her parents and keeps getting dumped in favor of the blonde tramp? What was the fun in that?

So I threw myself on my bed and cursed those magazine editors for their conservative tastes and decided that I was going to bypass them! I’d write a novel! At novel-length, people would finally be able to see my characters (the amoral wretches) for the beautiful, complex, and utterly sympathetic made-up caricatures that they were. And I’d put them in front of the eyes of an entirely new set of people: book editors—people who actually cared about the bottom line and who were, thus, willing to take a chance on a new and provocative and bold voice.

This actually wasn’t the first time I’d attempted a novel. Like most aspiring fiction-writers, I started one during my freshman year. I had the whole plot mapped out and everything. I wrote 8500 words the first day, 5000 on the second day, 2000 on the third day, 1000 on the fourth day, and nothing on the fifth, sixth, seventh, and all subsequent days.

But the summer of 2009 was different. That summer, I had purpose. That summer, I started writing a novel. It was a bold, high concept science-fictional premise featuring a bunch of awesomely epic setpieces and a whole mess of gunfights. That summer, I abandoned the novel and then restarted it. That summer I got a third of the way into the second draft of the novel before losing steam and petering out.  I didn’t really write a word of fiction between September 2009 to January 2010 (during this period, I also applied to eleven MFA programs). However, the following summer, I picked up the novel again and barreled through, completing it in November of 2010. Time from beginning to completion of a draft? Eighteen months.

Six months after that, I sat down to revise it and realized that I didn’t really want to put in the work to make it publishable. A week or so later, I got the idea for another novel, but I didn’t want to waste another two years of my life. I swore to myself that I’d only do it if I could write a complete draft in less than a month. And I did. And that novel became This Beautiful Fever.

Since completing the revisions on TBF and sending it out (about sixteen months ago), I’ve started three novels and completed drafts of two. But I still find it very difficult to think of myself as a person who writes novels. It all feels very strange and foreign and unreal to me. Short stories still come much more naturally to me. Every novel I’ve written has felt like some kind of interlude—a break from “real” writing.

But I’m glad that I’ve taken those breaks. It’s really weird how we reap the rewards of past impatience and foolishness. If, as a 23 year old, I hadn’t been so anxious for success to come right now, then I’d be in a much worse place right now. But my 23 year old self would probably be disgusted in the sheer waste involved in these last four years: the hundreds of thousands of words that’ve been discarded—the months that’ve gone by without any appreciable progress. Actually, now that I think about it if I hadn’t been so impatient, two years ago, to produce a sellable novel right now, I’d probably still be revising that first novel. Who knows, though? Maybe that novel would’ve ended up being spectacular.

I just don’t understand how life works. Sometimes you make all these impulsive, crazy decisions and you end up broke and homeless and friendless…and sometimes you make all these impulsive, crazy decisions and you end up with novel drafts and a growing confidence in your own abilities. But…to some extent…both kinds of craziness feel the same. My decision to start a novel was ridden with anger and resentment and laziness and every other bad reason for doing something. But it still worked out great!

That’s the thing about optimism and pessimism. We pretend that things can either have a good outcome or a bad outcome. But that’s not accurate. Things can have infinite outcomes. And it’s very difficult to predict which of those outcomes will actually come to pass. Both optimism and pessimism break down when we confront the fundamental unknowability of the future.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: | 9 Comments »

“I am now represented by John Cusick of the Greenhouse Literary Agency” is what I _should_ title this post, but its real title is OMG, I HAVE AN AGENT!!!

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 16, 2013

Roger-Federer-Reached-Quarterfinals

Placing in the Tu Books contest started a chain of circumstances that entailed a lot of fairly quick movement and a lot of sleepless nights. For once, the publishing world moved at a rapid pace. I think that the last two weeks have been the only time in my life when my writing life has moved faster than my real life.

My agenting story starts in January of 2012, when I started querying agents about this novel. I got a few manuscript requests, but my submissions process was interrupted by several long breaks during which I tried to hone my query.

Then, in January of 2013, a query that I’d sent out in October resulted in an offer of representation from a literary agent (A1). I was excited about the offer and was leaning towards accepting it, but there were two problems: a) I still had manuscripts and queries out with other agents who I wanted to hear back from; and b) I was a finalist in this Tu Books contest, which required that its winner be unagented.

A1 rather graciously agreed to hold the offer until the award was announced. If I lost, then I’d be free to sign with her.

A week later, the public announcement of the slate of finalists for the Award generated a manuscript request from another agent (A2), which I also had to put on a shelf until the results were announced.

About two months later (and roughly two weeks ago), I was notified that I’d won the Honor Award. Since I hadn’t taken the top prize, I was now free to sign with A1, who was still waiting for me to respond to her offer. However, I asked her for two weeks in order to follow up with A2. I then emailed A2 and asked if she could possibly get back to me within two weeks, which she agreed to (try) to do.

I also emailed all the other agents who were sitting on partial manuscripts* or my query, and said that if they wanted to consider the manuscript, they should get back to me within two weeks, because I was considering another offer. This generated a lot of very nice notes of the “Good luck with your new agent!” variety, as well as another (partial) manuscript request! (Oh, and a lot of the agents never responded at all, of course)

At this point, I was still relatively sane, since I was really only  waiting on one person to get back to me.

But then the winner of the contest, Valynne Nagamatsu, emailed me (and all the other finalists)  out of the blue and offered to refer my manuscript to an agent (A3) with whom she had a personal connection.

A day later, an old high school friend who I hadn’t spoken to in quite awhile Facebook-messaged me and asked me if I had an agent yet, because one of her college friends was an agent (A4). My high school friend knew from Facebook that I was an author, but I don’t think she knew that I was actively looking for representation, which, to me, makes this the weirdest bit of serendipity in the whole process.

Anyway, both A3 and A4 wanted to look at the manuscript and were willing to get back to me within the deadline I’d set for responding to A1.

During the whole querying process, my full manuscript had never been on more than two desks at the same time. Now, within the space of a few days, it was on four.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think. Well, actually, that’s not true. I wrote 20,000 words over the course of one weekend. But there was a frenetic quality to everything in my life. I was flitting from euphoria to despair every few hours.

When all of this began, I was reading a story collection by Miranda July that’s only maybe 60,000 words long. Now, two weeks later, I’m not even close to finished. I still have a third of it left!

While I waited, I developed some unsettling behaviors. There were days when I literally spent seven or eight straight hours staring at the GMail client, waiting for emails to come. I developed a cardiac arrhythmia that only appears when I hear the little beep that my iPad uses to signal new emails. I turned down social engagements so I could spend time in my room, alone, worrying. I exhausted every possible way of obsessing about this process.

Then, last Tuesday, I got an offer of representation from one of the agents. I had a very pleasant talk with the agent (one that made me late for my fiction workshop). And after hanging up, I dropped into an even deeper abyss of insanity while I waited to hear from the rest. Before that, I’d been somewhat convinced that A2, A3, and A4 were all going to turn me down. But now I knew that anything could happen.

The agent search has literally been all that I’ve thought about for the last week. Thank God that I had a class to teach, or I think I’d have skipped all my seminars and literally just have holed myself up in my room with my computer for days on end. I owe a very special thank-you to all the friends who were willing to listen to GChat with me about this agent stuff, ad nauseum, for hours.

Anyway, I’m not going to describe the details of my deliberations over the various agents (or, for that matter, their deliberations over me). All were amazing options, and I think they’d all have represented me very effectively. But I finally decided on A3 (John). I think he’s awesome: he seems enthusiastic about my book and my career, and he belongs to a great agency. I am extremely satisfied with this outcome, and I’m really looking forward to working with him.

In all of this, special thanks go to Valynne. She’s amazing. During this whole query process, I never even thought to ask anyone to refer me to an agent: my only referrals came totally unsolicited, and I really want to thank everyone who thought to lend me a hand. But I think it’s a special kind of awesome to win a contest and immediately turn around and offer to help the same people you’d been competing against. Also, during the last two weeks, she answered a lot of my questions and gave me plenty of useful advice on how to conduct myself. Before talking to her, I hadn’t realized how much I didn’t know about the publishing world.

And thanks are also due to my old friend, Valerie! Hearing from her would’ve been wonderful under any circumstances, but few rekindled connections are as wonderful as those which come attached to amazing career opportunities =)

*Agents will often respond to an author’s emailed query by requesting a partial manuscript (usually the first three chapters of the novel), so they can better judge if they want to see the whole manuscript.

 

Posted in Background Checks, Writing | Tagged: , , , | 9 Comments »

Trying to enjoy second place

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 12, 2013

silver-medal-hiSo, first of all, yay, I won the honor award in the Tu Books contest. It’s always good to win things. Also, I’d like to congratulate Valynne. We’ve corresponded a bunch and she is wonderful in a number of different ways: a truly rare person and one who is very deserving of this award. Despite her modesty, I have no doubt that her novel is excellent. Also, I’d like to congratulate the other finalists: Ibi, Ailynn, and Akwaeke. I’m glad of the chance to (virtually) meet them, and I’m sure that they’ll be successful in their writing endeavors as well. And I’d like to thank Stacy, the editor of Tu Books, for, you know, making me a finalist and reading the book and doing all that other good stuff.

However, I think I will have to break from the normal triumphalism of these sorts of posts and say that I was a bit disappointed at not winning. Being runner up is good, but if I’d won, my book would be getting published. It’d be in stores (well, like two years from now). That’s a concrete accomplishment. A runner-up prize really isn’t. It’s definitely a sort of triumph, but it’s also a sort of loss.

So for a few days after this happened, I was feeling a bit disappointed about it and I was finding it hard to concentrate. I can’t say that I felt poorly done by. People have to publish who they want to publish. But still, I was just really wishing that I’d won.

However, eventually, during one of our classes, I had a sudden realization. I thought, “You know, I better enjoy this, because this is not going to come again.” And I immediately felt much better.

Now, this realization makes perfect sense to me, but no one else seems to understand it. Here’s how my conversations about this tend to go.

Me: So I decided that I better enjoy this, because it’s not going to come again.

Other Person: What? No! Of course this will happen again! You’ll publish a book someday!

Me: No, no, I just mean this…this thing…placing second in a contest…being so close but quite there…that is never going to come again.

OP: Err…well…I guess that’s true. But every moment is kind of like that, right? I mean we’re never going to have this conversation again, are we?

And then I just throw up and my hands and say, “Sigh! I am so misunderstood!”

Because this is not some kind of zen thing. I don’t mean that I need to enjoy this moment because you need to people to enjoy every moment because every moment is special and beautiful and wonderful.

No. I mean that every phase of a writing career has its own joys and sorrows. When you’re starting out, the sorrow is that you’re getting rejected everywhere, but the joy is that you believe so strongly in yourself and the writing is so easy and so confident. Then you get slightly more encouragement, but you drop into the pit of self-doubt once you see how far you have to go. And eventually you get to where I am: a place where you really don’t have much in the way of concrete success or status, but you’re  finally able to successfully execute at least part of your vision for a story.

Right now, I have tremendous artistic freedom. I’m not (too) hampered by my own inability and I’m not at all hampered by external constraints: marketing, agent expectations, editor expectations, deadlines, the public’s perception of me. Right now, there are no risks. Nothing I write can hurt me. The moment you publish a book, that stops being true. Your next book needs to improve on the performance of the last one.

And I’m not terribly far from selling a book. It might not happen this year, or next year, or the year after, but it’ll happen eventually. And when that happens, I’ll be on the rollercoaster. It’ll be great, but I’ll also have so many new worries and new anxieties. There will come a time in my life when not winning an editor’s approval will be a real tragedy—something that will throw a severe wrench into my career.

So yes, I do want to enjoy the good things that come my way right now, because I’m never again going to be on the verge of selling my first book, I’m never again going to be such an unknown quantity, I’m never again going to feel the momentum gather around me in quite this way.

Also, I won $500.

(As a P.S. I believe I’ve never mentioned what my eight-day novel is about, but the press release for the New Visions award unfortunately let the cat out of the bag.)

 

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

Why I am not a pessimist and people should stop saying that I am. Because I’m not. And, also, you will never succeed at anything, ever

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 11, 2013

Now, when I write stuff like yesterday’s post, people always say, “Oh, Rahul, you’re so pessimistic. You can’t succeed if you don’t try!”

But I don’t think I am pessimistic at all. It’s just a fact. The vast, vast majority of people who want to become creative professionals are going to fail. And it’s not because of the marketplace or anything like that. It’s just the nature of the beast. The number of creatives that the world needs does not scale up linearly with population. If the population doubles, people don’t watch twice as many shows; they just have twice as many people watching the same shows (obviously, this isn’t exactly true—it’s more like 1.4 times as many people watching 1.4 times as many shows). However, the number of people who want to be actors does double. Thus, you have 2x the people competing for 1.4x the spots. Thus, as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to become a media personality (a thousand years ago, every village had its own rock star: the town skald or Homeric orator or whatever. Whereas nowadays your story-telling neighbor is just seen as a crushing bore).

So yeah, it’s a fact. Most people who want to succeed in a creative endeavor will fail. There are a hundred ways to succeed, but there are a thousand ways to fail. You can do everything right and still just not be good enough. A few days ago, an acquaintance forwarded me this article about all the non-traditional things you can do to succeed in your art. And I loved the article, but I hated the way it implied that if you’re creative and quirky and dedicated then you will succeed, because that’s just false. Articles like this never bother to find people who followed all their rules but still failed; those people are invisible, but they are legion.

And this is where people are like, “Oh, Rahul. You’re so pessimistic. Why are you so depressing about all this stuff? Why can’t you just let people follow their dreams…?”

But I’m not pessimistic. I consider myself to be an optimistic, because I believe very strongly that in the future, I will continue to find ways to: a) be happy; and b) get sufficient food, shelter, and leisure time.

These are not difficult thing to achieve, but they are at the core of what life is about. Furthermore, the fact that they’re not difficult is exactly why I think I’ll achieve them. Most Americans are fairly happy and most Americans have sufficient food, shelter and leisure time. Since I’m more fortunate and capable than most Americans, I think I ought to be able to do at least as well as the average.

That, to me, is a very joyous and optimistic worldview.

On the other hand, I find it to be profoundly pessimistic and depressing when someone (and our society, in general) acts in a way that suggests they will not be happy or satisfied with their life if they are not able to achieve something that they only have a 1 in 100 shot of achieving. That’s a recipe for disaster!

So, in order to get back to the mainpoint of this blog post, I will say that I don’t think it’s stupid to enter a humanities grad program. However, I do think that people should be cognizant of the likely scenario: in ten years, you’re probably going to be applying for the same kinds of jobs that you could get right now.

But really, what’s the problem with that? Having a higher-status job isn’t the cure to all of life’s ills. If you enjoy your studies, then that feels like it’s worthwhile in and of itself.

(For what it’s worth, I’ve heard a ton of Ph.D horror stories. It seems like they are, more often than not, quite miserable. I think comparatively more people like their MFAs. From my perspective, the MFA is great. The workload is light and the people are good. It’s been like a year-long vacation).

Posted in Advice | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

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