Writers Are Word Dancers

My wife and I love competition. Because there aren’t many sports that a couple can engage in fully clothed, we chose competition sport dancing. Sport dancing, or DanceSport, is an international sport much like soccer is international.

Like any sport, DanceSport requires coaching, training, dedication, and practice to compete successfully. There many levels of competition in divisional categories based on whether a couple is amateur or professional, just like there are many levels of writing based on whether you are an amateur or a professional.

In addition to dancing, I also write novels, and sometimes I can’t help but compare potential success in writing to potential success on the dance floor. After all, each has its share of winners and losers. As mentioned above, as a dancer I must be coached and trained to be successful.  Is this true in writing?  Of course it is.  Having worked in nearly all facets of the publishing industry, I’ve always found this to be the case. However, I find that many writers feel they can compete with no training at all. Yes, almost everyone can write just like almost everyone can dance. However, everything changes when you go from just writing to wanting to be a published author, just like everything changes when you step off the social dance floor and onto the competitive dance floor.

For example, presentation becomes not only important, but vital. Step on the competition dance floor in jeans, and you’re not going to get a lot of the judges’ positive attention and that will distract them from getting the full impact of your dancing. The same goes for a manuscript. A sloppy manuscript is fine for your personal read-throughs, but when you decide to ask a reader to buy your work, your book needs to be polished so that it doesn’t distract from the story or readers will never buy another one of your books.

Also, even at the lowest levels of dance competition, the interpretation of the music is key. Just going through the patterns is not enough, even if they are technically perfect. If there’s not emotion, no connection with the music, there’s nothing for the audience to connect with. The same goes for your book–story is everything. If you have no real story, nothing your readers can connect to and enjoy, then you don’t have a book.

In dance, we practice and practice and practice to compete for anywhere from 5-20 minutes, depending on the competition. In publishing, books that take months to write and revise often only get about the same amount of time to wow the reader. Each requires a great deal of effort with little time to impress the intended audience, so the stakes become incredibly high.

Writers for years complained about gatekeepers who they felt were standing in their way and preventing them from being successful authors.  But as with dancers, writers also have those who judge their performance and it’s not just agents and editors anymore.  Even now that most gates are wide open, the indie author is still being held accountable by the same gatekeeper who has always judged them—the reader.

When you decide to go to the next level, whether in dancing or writing or something similar, you have to be prepared to understand, first of all, that competition is fierce, that there different levels and requirements, and ultimately, success of performance is directly proportional to how much time and effort is spent in preparation of the final product and its presentation.  And, as it is with competitive dancing, performance is everything.

A Plan–Man!

Has anyone ever told you to get beyond being a hobbyist you must begin thinking like a professional? Many writers don’t think beyond hobbyists until they try to be published and many don’t move beyond this point even then.

When you are writing do you think also about writing a business plan? I doubt that the business part of writing even entered your mind. Just getting words on paper is what occupies most who start out writing a novel.

Your writing will never move beyond being a hobby until you begin thinking like a business person and to do that you’ll need a business plan. Too much trouble you say; too involved. I just want to be published. I don’t want to go that far. I just want to see my book in print, just hold it in my hand.

Fine. There’s an easy way to do that. Contact a printer in your local area and have a copy printed up. In fact, they can probably do that for you at Staples.

Who Knew?

Part IV

About this time, because we had been long-term subscribers to both The Writer’s Digest and The Writer magazines, we decided to craft some articles that might interest authors and submit them, never imagining one would be published. But who knew?

And so there we were, the proud authors of a magazine article published by our favorite magazine. Wow! Then there came another contract, an offer to publish that same article in The Writer’s Guide. About this same time, we were also invited to our first writers’ conference.

The Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon, is a huge conference and that year there were over 800 writers in attendance. We not only attended, but we also taught classes there.

This invitation was followed shortly by another to attend The Surrey Writers Conference in Surrey, Vancouver, BC, Canada. The Surrey Conference is an international conference and considered to be the premier writers’ conference of all conferences. The list of well-known authors attending this conference still blows my mind. Most are out of vogue now, but they were hot at the time.

In the spring, we were invited to the Pikes Peak Writers conference near Denver. We were riding high and nothing could touch us now. Queries came pouring in. Everyone, it seemed, wanted us to represent them. I was now a full-time agent and had my own list of clients. Sharene wasn’t invited to Pike’s Peak because, according to their rules and regulations, they only invited one agent from each agency. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this would be the only conference out of over 50 we attended in a 12 year period that had this policy. Sharene did attend, however, at her own expense because one of our clients was going to be there.

The first day, I was slated to site on a panel but at the last moment, they wanted to switch me to do blue-pencil edits instead.

I’d never done a blue-pencil. What in the world was that? Whatever it was, I felt exposure to answer questions from writers would be more productive, so I graciously declined for a seat on this panel—a panel containing two other agents, one of which I found out later had her agency in Denver.

When I attended my first conference, I feared getting too chummy with my competitors because I’d heard agents were very territorial. But along the way I’d made some agent friends, as I did at this conference. What they should have told me is guy agents are okay, it’s the women agents you have to look out for. They can get very nasty. Honestly, I’ve never met one that wouldn’t cut your heart out, hand it to you on a plate, and dare you to touch it.