You Can Be a Winning Writer. Joan Gelfand
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen self-published Chicken Soup for the Soul. Other best sellers that were self-published include Fifty Shades of Grey, What Color is Your Parachute?, and a long list of iconic books.
With a healthy dose of the Four C’s, all became bestsellers.
Part of the sea change is that writers can no longer afford the luxury of living the life of an introvert. The writer’s life has become a cruel paradox; the work that requires a person to possess high thresholds of tolerance for solitude now requires high thresholds for public speaking, promotion, and public appearances!
Talk about anxiety-producing! So how does a private person become a winning writer? With patience, a custom menu plan and determination, most writers can follow the Four C’s of successful authors.
And here’s the good news. Mastering the Four C’s becomes easier over time. Once the four pots are simmering away, readers catch a whiff of your excellent cooking! Now there’s a crowd congregating around the stove. Murmurs of “Mmm…” and, “How did she do that?” start to hum. A buzz is going around about this “chef” who appears to be everywhere! Readers are curious!
Now, you can turn down the flame on one burner and turn up another. But not one step can be overlooked or ignored when you are getting started. All your skills will be tested. All your perseverance will be tried. Your confidence will be challenged.
You will want to quit. There’s a reason the saying goes, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
In the chapters that follow, you will learn how to refine your craft. You will learn how to manage the first dozen—or hundred!—rejections. You’ll learn how to build your reputation as you are writing your book. You’ll learn how to build your fan base even before your book hits the stands. And when that book comes out, you’ll learn how to speak to your fans, making each one feel important and loved.
The long and winding road:
A few years out of graduate school, I received what every writer dreams about: a love letter from a top agent: “You are clearly very talented. Your book is compelling, but the second half falls down. Please let us know what you decide to do.”
I had hired a writer’s assistant to send my first novel to agents. I didn’t realize that this agent who had praised my work and was asking me to take a closer look at the second half was the agent of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
This is what we writers call “the backstory.” Established authors can’t help but chuckle when an author is touted as an overnight success; we know the years it took to hone the craft and get the project out into the world. Even Steph Curry didn’t make the cut for the NBA in his early years.
Each author has a unique backstory. While mine is particularly circuitous, you’ll see from the anecdotes peppered throughout this book, I have lots of company.
When the dream letter arrived, I was working full-time and raising a child on my own. I owned a home and was caring for an aging mother. I was writing from 5:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. before I dropped my sleepy, pajama-clad toddler to daycare and got myself to work.
I had just met the man who was to become my husband. His response to the encouraging missive from the New York agent was that the letter was an open door, a chance, and a golden opportunity: “Quit your job and write!” The edict came with an offer to help me financially. He didn’t have to ask twice. “I’ll have this book published in a year,” I promised. He already knew what a hard worker I was. He saw how focused and determined I could be. As Adam Gopnik, a columnist for the New Yorker, writes: “No one is hungrier than a writer staking out his reputation.” At the time, I was in corporate sales and had been a top producer in my field for over ten years.
Unschooled in the Four C’s at the time and naïve about the pitfalls of the literary world, innocent about the vicissitudes and the complex maze of getting books published, I took my book to an editor I had read about in the professional press.
I didn’t take the time to vet her or research her reputation with writers. Her advertisement proclaimed that she was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and editor. From where I sat, I would be lucky to get her attention.
“Your female characters are male, and your male characters are female.” Ouch. And, in not so many words, she proclaimed the book was no good. She even pulled a book off her shelf to compare a passage I had written about loss to a published novel. Cowed, I was sure my book was a loser. The letter from the New York agent must not have meant anything. The agent must just have been feeling generous and decided to be kind to an aspiring novelist.
How easy it is to diminish praise.
“Many writers learn to write by writing their first book,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor. “What else do you want to write about?”
At that time, I actually was anxious to start a book about the characters I had come to know in the tech world. I agreed to put the novel that I’d spent the previous five years writing on the shelf.
Starting a new book meant that I wouldn’t have to confront these terrible flaws that this charming editor had brought to my attention. Starting a new book meant I could start fresh.
I had a BA and an MFA in Creative Writing. I had been encouraged to write the book I was about to shelve by my first writing teacher, a novelist herself, who believed the story, the characters, and the writing to be strong and compelling.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author billed me a whopping $3,500 and washed her hands of me. I never even got a write-up of comments. Her work was a wholesale smash job.
How quickly I put five years of writing, revising, and editing on the shelf, not to mention the years of getting up at 5:00 a.m. to write for two hours before work. Unbeknownst to me, the “editor” had a terrible reputation for tearing writers down.
What happens next is that I blew it. Big time.
Crafting a Great Piece of Writing
“Anyone who is an inspired storyteller…knows that the essence of good storytelling is not assembling a heap of facts but having the imagination to leap through an arc of bright truths to create a great arc of invention. A story is a constellation of stars, a recognizable shape made from shining bits of fact that may exist empirically at different levels and different spatial depth.”
—Adam Gopnik, on the author Romain Gary, The New Yorker, January 2018
While Gopnik describes writing, he himself crafts an impressive piece of journalistic prose. By using imagery (an arc of bright truths), analogy (a story is a constellation of stars), and metaphor (the story exists empirically at different levels and different spatial depths), Gopnik crafts a sentence that you want to read over and over. You might like to contemplate “a constellation of stars” or how a story exists at different levels and different spatial depths.
By using basic tools of craft, he creates a memorable paragraph, as well as an excellent argument.
When I taught poetry to school-aged children, we broke down teaching into five basic elements:
•Imagery—draw a picture with words.
•Sound—use words to clash, rhyme and accentuate each other.
•Repetition—use the same words to make your piece memorable and incantational.
•Analogy and metaphor.
•By using