Notes to a Younger Writer

Things I wish I could tell my younger self about writing:

1. There are all kinds of armor. Some of them (like the attractive get up at right) protect your brain and lung cells when you're dealing with toxic chemicals. Other kinds of armor can and will protect your heart and soul when you're dealing with rejection letters, the occasional toxic person and the disappointments that are inevitable in any career. Learn these armors. Learn how to don them when needed. More importantly, learn how to take them off because you can't create from a closed up, claustrophobic heart.
2. There is no 'when things calm down.' It doesn't exist. Do the thing - the thing you keep putting off for a better time. For when you know more. You don't learn by not doing. You learn by trying, by making mistakes, by assessing, and by fixing. Make your mistakes often and early.
3. Give up caring what other people think of you. Truth is, they don't think of you. They're too busy wrapped up in the dramas and traumas of their own lives. This is both blessing and curse. Yes, you're alone. Deal with it. Because QUICK! No one's looking! You can try out those dance steps you're secretly afraid might be silly. Or that plot twist you suspect will either be brilliant or a train wreck. No one's watching. G'head. Experiment! You can always change it later.
4. Talk to people. More importantly, listen. Listen to what people say, sure, but more importantly listen to the stories people are telling themselves. Those stories are hidden beneath what they say. PS: Stay the hell out of the dime a dozen dramas that unfold in the industry. They're legion and they will devour your time and life energy if you let them. Also? The death of this genre, that genre, insert your death knell du jour here, or of publishing as a whole has been touted for decades. DECADES. People still buy books in one form or another. So shut up and write.
5. Write what YOU want. Screw what's popular right now. Your best work will be that which fascinates you, so wallow in your chosen freakiness and get on with jotting it all down.

Most everyone knows that I suffered undiagnosed major clinical depression as a teen and young adult. Until that was finally identified and treated, I wasn't capable of the kind of emotional resilience writing requires. I only say this because too many people suffer mood disorders without getting treatment. If you want to DO something, but find you just can't? Talk to your doctor. Ask to be assessed. If you are suffering from a disorder, it can be treated - which doesn't always mean meds forever. The point is that you have to stack the deck in your favor and if you feel gray all the time that's your life energy and your drive and motivation being stolen from you. You don't deserve that.

Closing the Perspective Gap

You know the bit about when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail? I was like that when it came to POV and perspective. All third person. All the time. Critique partners kept commenting on how distant my characters felt. Looking back, it's easy to see this was the price of suffering untreated, major depressive issues as a teen - everything happened at vast emotional remove, you know? And even though I'd finally been treated, the habit of emotional remove had stayed in place. Hardly conducive to a writing career. But I desperately wanted my stories to WORK. I just didn't have the emotional vocabulary to work out how to close the distance. It wasn't until a local, RWA meeting where the incomparable Stella Cameron looked me in the eye and explained that third person omniscient kept readers outside of my characters - something utterly incompatible with how romance works that the light bulb switched on in my head. I had a problem. I had to solve it come hell or high water.

Fortunately, about that same time, I went to the Rain Tree Conference in Victoria, BC. No. I didn't go just for the afternoon tea, no matter what anyone else tells you. At that conference that a pair of presenters recommended drafting in first person. It was a fast, easy exercise designed to get an author inside a character's head. Naturally, I'd previously claimed to hate first person. I may also have unwisely sworn never to write first person. But. Based on the feedback I'd been getting, I sucked it up and I attempted writing a draft in first person.

Suddenly, every last thing I'd ever spent waaaaaaay too much money learning at acting school came back. I knew how to turn myself into someone else. It said so on my degree. What I hadn't known how to do was turn myself into some distant he or she out there in the ether. Another Stella - Stella Adler once equated acting with playing what if. The great actors, she said, didn't make themselves into someone else, they asked 'what if I'd grown up with this background, were faced with this dilemma, this obstacle?' and they respond from within themselves.

Drafting in first person unlocked that for me - though I won't claim any sort of greatness - just a deeper level of understanding how to get readers into a character's emotional life. I hope.

However. I still have a first person bias. Only one piece (Emissary) ended up published in first person. All the rest were transcribed from first to third. The greatest compliment I ever had was when a critique partner complained when I brought a WIP that had been switched from first to third - she said, "Are you sure you want to make this switch? I miss the heroine." You see why I love my crit partners? Thing is, I'm still writing romance and third person gives me the most flexibility in getting the hero and the heroine some time on the page so readers can see from both points of view.

These days, I no longer have to draft in first person. If a story is particularly challenging, however, it's default. A kind of cheat I use to remind myself that it's about the feels, silly! And about a character's unique filter on whatever experience they're having. Drafting in first person seems to let me step around myself in some odd way and interact with a story with fewer hang ups. Dunno why. I'm sure there's some deep psychological and possibly disturbing reasoning there. I'm not sure I want to know. After all. The first to third seems to be working.