Character emotion is a tricky thing. Not enough and readers won’t invest; too much and you lose realism. I gave a tendency toward the former – emotionally distant characters that create emotionally distant readers (especially in long works). It’s something I’ve been looking at – been looking at for a few years now, actually.

My first angle was to look at whether or not I feel anything when I write. There was a period when I didn’t. It took time and practice, but I started to feel more. I began to connect to my characters and my stories. I laughed, I cried, and, yeah, they became a part of me.

But strangely, the more I felt about my characters and stories, the less emotion I actually put on the page, as if the distance kept me safe. I was creating a distance between me, the writer, and the reader. That created a distance between the reader and the story. In short, I was having a hard time making readers care.

Sometimes I could even see it for myself. So I would go back through and add more of what makes me feel. I would add sensory details, atmosphere, setting with carefully constructed details to evoke my own emotions in hopes of doing the same to the reader.

But it didn’t always gel with readers. They could see the emotion I was trying to evoke in them, but it wasn’t real. It was more of a series of cardboard signs like the kind held up at the airport. One character would hold up “Happy” in hopes it would come along. Another had “Angst” scrawled on a piece of cardboard. Each just a sign to connect the reader with the emotion. But the distance was too big to be bridged by a cardboard sign.

I started working on collapsing that distance more. I took some workshops. One workshop leader said the emotion was there. She could see it. She found it effective. But she wasn’t casually reading. She was reading every word, thinking, analyzing. She was reading to find out what I needed to be working on. She wasn’t reading for story but for teaching.

I don’t think most readers read every word of a story. Especially in emotionally heated moments where the action is moving quickly. They’re rushing ahead to see what’s happening. If I’m sort of hiding the emotion in the scenery it might not be noticed. Subtlety probably isn’t my best tack

And yet, I couldn’t figure out how to come at it head-on. What, do I just write, “She was sad. Really really, really sad, the kind of sad that can only be expressed in banal repetition.” That seemed vulgar to me. And it cheated readers like my workshop leader.

But somewhere over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a tendency I have in my own life that might be the key to this problem. I’ve been told that I seem to have it all together. I kind of hear that a lot. Whatever ‘it’ is, I’ve got it rounded up and singing cowboy odes to the lonesome prairie. But this is, of course, ridiculous. I know that I leak insecurity and near-panic all over the place. But I hide it in the details. I say the together things but I throw in details I hope someone sees. But when people are concerned and ask you straight out, they’re listening to your words, not analyzing and dissecting for contradiction. They just want an answer.

I think it’s that way in fiction. In a highly emotional scene, the reader is asking questions. With those questions asked, the reader is listening for the answer and believing the words in the quote marks or coming from the character’s mind, not trying to weigh those words against sensory detail or scenery description. Yes, there is room for contradiction and nuance and complexity, but not for hiding. Big difference.

I don’t need to hide emotion from readers; they can take it. More than that, they want it. Now to figure out how to give it to them – one revelation at a time. Just like life.

I want to be one of those people who can look back and smile at rejection letters.

Rob Sabo commented on my last post: “Perspective: The first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times. I think I read somewhere that Jo Rowling is the first billionaire author.”

This got me to thinking. I love stories of failure before success. Especially ones where hindsight makes that success seem inevitable. I like to fantasize about the day when I will speak proudly of my rejections as an audience gasps and titters in shock that anyone could have overlooked my obvious brilliance. I will be the example writers give to each other for reassurance when they are feeling down about their own rejections. One writer will say, “I might as well just quit. Another rejection. That’s nine! I should just take the hint and quit.”

And the supportive writer friend will smile wryly and say, “Oh no. Did you know that Cindie Geddes was rejected 500 times before she sold her first novel? And even then, you know The Bad Parts (at which point the friend will roll her eyes and snort, because everyone knows that book) was rejected nineteen times and she just gave up! It only got published because her friend Wolf made her send it out again on a bet.”

The dejected writer will shake her head and laugh, and she will feel better. And she will send out her story – again and again and again, determined to not give up until she at least sends out as many times as Cindie Geddes did.

Yeah, these are the kinds of fantasies have. I am a very exciting woman.

But since it’s going to be at least a few months until I reach the kind of success that will make this fantasy a reality, I figured I could list a few real-world examples* we can offer one another during those inevitable dark times.

• James Joyce’s Dubliners: rejected 22 times. The publisher only printed 1250 copies. 379 sold the first year. Joyce had bought 120 of them. And, yeah, he did OK.
• To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Theodor Geisel writing as Dr. Seuss: rejected by 29 publishers.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig: rejected 121 times.
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach: 140 times
• William Saroyan built a pile of rejections 30 inches high (equaling around 7000 rejections) before he sold his first story.
• M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker collected 21 rejections.
• Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries: rejected 17 times.
• Carrie (by Stephen King) was rejected 30 times.
• Watership Down by Richard Adams: 26 rejections.
• Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis: 15 no-thank-yous.
• Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen: 140 NOs.
• Frank Herbert’s Dune: nearly 20 rejections.
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: 26 maybe-next-times.
• Alex Haley once told me (yes, in person, and I didn’t even faint, though I did stutter when I asked him about rejection) he had been rejected 800 times before selling anything. 800. Even I haven’t hit that many. But C.S. Lewis has. He was also a member of the 800 club.
• James Patterson saw 26 rejections for his first novel.
• William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: 20 not-right-for-us(es).
• Kathryn Stockett stopped counting rejections after she received 45 on her best seller The Help.
• Gone with the Wind brought Margaret Mitchell the sting of 38 rejections.
• Ray Bradbury has been rejected more than 1000 times and STILL gets rejected.
• Judy Blume submitted for 2 years straight with nothing but rejections.
• Stephenie Meyer gathered 7 or 8 rejections for Twilight, including one that came in after she’d gotten a three-book deal from Little, Brown.
• The Dairy of Anne Frank was passed over by 16 publishers.

And if you’re like me and feel better knowing that current rejection does not negate future success, check out this site of quotes from actual rejections of some of the best writing ever. http://schulerbooks.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/recent-article-30-famous-authors-whose-works-were-rejected-repeatedly-and-sometimes-rudely-by-publishers/

*Disclaimer: I didn’t fact check any of these. Some I saw in magazines, some I read on the Web, some I heard … somewhere.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about rejection, considering I have so very little in my life. I don’t date (which works well with the whole being-married thing), I’m not out of work and looking for a job (I’m self-employed), I don’t compete in sports, politics or even the lottery. And yet, surveying a bunch of long e-mail threads I’ve had with people in 2009, I see a few subjects popping up again and again. The top 9 are:

9. God

8. Marriage

7. Beauty

6. Age

5. Parenting

4. Money

3. Politics

2. Time

1. Rejections

Yes, the greatest of these was Rejection.

Why?

Well, because I’m a writer. Now, I know there are lots of writers who never ever get rejections –they never submit anything. And I’m sure there have even been some blessed souls who submitted their work and sold it with nary a rejection (before their fellow writers lashed them naked to trees and peeled the skin from their bodies with clam shells, all the while telling each other how very happy we are for their success).

But most of us get our stories rejected. WE get rejected. If you think it doesn’t feel like the same thing, then you’ve never experienced the maddening schizophrenia that comes with the creative brain. Part of our brains always expects Stephenie Meyer-level success. The other part girds its loins (brain loins!) against the onslaught of criticism, belittling, and possible violence sure to come from anyone who sees us attempting to do something so obviously above the level of our meager abilities.

For someone like me, someone who is not naturally imbued with grace and aplomb, rejection is a bitch. She whispers the worst insults in my ear while raising a 2×4 behind my head. And as soon as she’s run out of heart-deadening half-truths to release into my ear like those awful creatures in Star Trek, she raises that board to bludgeon the rest of my ego free of my body. It’d be easier to split me open like an overripe cantaloupe and watch the seeds of inspiration fly chaotically to the dirt.

But I am determined to be a writer. The kind of determined that has stripped most of my ego off in slick strips I can make into shoes to keep me walking onward. My determination is fed by continuous hunger to try to fill all those gaps I can see between the stories in my mind and my ability to bring a story to the page. My determination is massive and undying.

So the only way I’ve been able to keep myself going through hundreds of rejections for my handful of sales is to change how I see rejection. Sure, there’s some delusion in here. A dash of denial. Some whimsy and naiveté dance above the scales that weight my rejections and acceptances. There’s tricks of work and tricks of the mind and tricks of the industry that I juggle when I can. And when I can’t juggle, I drop everything and break out into a scuffy little dance to draw the eyes away from my failures.

All this brings me to 9 ways I’ve come to think about rejection.

1. It’s the same as having an envelope stamped Return to Sender: Address Unknown. I just sent the wrong piece to the wrong person at the wrong time.
2. It’s a timing thing. Maybe they just got the same sort of story submitted by someone whose name alone sells copies. It’s not that my story is bad, just that my name is not well known. Yet.
3. Maybe the editor had a very bad day and can’t see brilliance of any sort. I know I’ve had days when even a sunset pissed me off.
4. The story is destined for better. If I’d sold some of my stories to the first place I sent them I would’ve missed out on greater sales later.
5. Maybe I’m not ready for success yet. I’ll just keep sending stories out while I continue to work on making myself a better person, the kind of person who can at least fake grace and aplomb in the face of good reviews and awards.
6. My karma’s getting dingy. Time to try to help and support other writers.
7. I need rejections to keep balancing the scales I see in my head. Only when there are enough rejections to tip the scales will I achieve a sale.
8. The editor is biased against … (insert ridiculous reason here: women, Nevadans, freelancers, bloggers).
9. The editor is obviously just irretrievably stupid.

Keep in mind I’ve been an editor (nonfiction, though), so I can safely say almost any of these reasons could be true (except 9. I’ve never met a truly stupid editor). And I do actually know that even given these comforting stories I tell myself, it’s still possible that my story simply sucked. But I can’t really know why a story is rejected. And I’m not capable of judging the suckage of my own work any more than I can see anything but brilliance and charm in my son.

So regardless of the reason for rejection, all I can do is keep sending the work out.

Everything else is just me telling myself stories.

Regardless of what the rest of the world is thinking about as 2009 slips into 2010, writer goals never seem to change. Your neighbor wants to lose weight, your cousin is determined to get out of debt, your friend will get married if it kills her. But writers? While there are many variations, most of our resolutions come down to one thing: selling. Selling a short story, selling a novel, selling an essay, an article, a memoir, a poem. I have had selling a novel on my New Year’s list for decades, even before I had written anything (hey, someone could just hear about my wonderfulness and back a truck of cash up to my house, right? Any day now.) But I’ve learned a lot in the last 14 months, some of which I’ve managed to put into use. Some I’m still working on.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned (Thanks, Kris and Dean!) is the difference between what I want and what I can control. I still want to sell a novel. But that’s not my goal, because I can’t entirely control that. What I can control is 1) how much I write, 2) the quality of that writing, and 3) how much and how often I submit for publication. The actual selling? That’s up to the folks with the checks. In the final analysis, only editors control whether or not I sell a piece.

1)      How much I write: 16 months ago, I swore I couldn’t write more than 500 words a day because I hadn’t. I even had doubts I could do that, considering how long it had been since I had. But a two-week workshop blew that belief out of the water. At the beginning of 2009 I wrote a novel – Beach Bitches. I wrote at least 1,000 words a day every day until it was done (around three months). So now I know I can do that. And it wasn’t even hard. It usually took only around an hour each day (night, in my case). I never missed a day, no matter how complicated or dramatic life got. No matter if I was sick or my son was home or my husband was out of town or I had a tight deadline with the paying work. Sometimes I didn’t start my 1,000 words until midnight or 1 a.m. Most days I had no idea what I was going to write, where my story was going to go. As soon as I decided there would be no acceptable excuses for not doing my 1,000 words, the writing came easily.

2)      The quality of my writing: I’ve learned that I can’t judge the quality of my own work. Sometimes, what I think sucks sells. Sometimes, what I think is wonderful doesn’t. But I still work on the quality – not on the level of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting one story, but on the level of constantly trying to learn more as a writer. I read more carefully, I research and take workshops about things I know give me trouble, and I practice those elements. For example, I knew plot was a weak point for me, so I wrote a mystery novel. Now I will try to sell that practice.

3)      How much and how often I submit: This is my weakness. I know no one can buy my work if they don’t see it. I know I can’t judge my own work, but I still find myself hesitant to send out certain stories. I have a great, well-organized submission routine. But I don’t do it. I’m not sure why yet, but I suspect it’s a fear of success sort of thing combined with the fear that once I commit something to the mail I’ve lost any hope of bridging that awful space between the story in my mind and the story on the page.

So, in light of these three realities, these are my goals for 2010. They are modest, I know.

1. Fix all the holes in Beach Bitches. Things like making that one secondary character a girl all the way through (right now, she’s a boy in the first half of the book), giving characters names that don’t all rhyme or start with the same letter, taking out one of the two nearly identical characters, and having the clues come from the characters rather than out of the blue or through newspapers or police.
2. Practice information flow by writing a book with a complicated flow. I started this book, but it fell apart down under the weight of my inability. So now I will start over in a new way with what I’ve learned from that version. This “practice” means writing at least 1,000 words per day. Then I have an oldish draft of a book whose scenes I like very much like but which never gelled into a book. With what I’ve learned in the last year, I’m ready to take a new run at it –primarily just cutting about 2/3 or it. Both these books will be finished and submitted by this time next year. I will also continue to learn about the industry and stay abreast of its changes, challenges and opportunities.
3. How much and how often I submit: I will focus on the why of my not submitting and then submit anyway. I’m thinking three stories (or proposals) a week is good for now, as I run the learning curve of compiling a list of where to submit. Once the finding of markets becomes less complicated and the submission of three stories becomes a habit, my psyche is out of the game. At that point, I can increase the amount I submit each week. I’d like to be up to 10 a week by the end of 2010.

And since I absolutely need someone to report to in order to keep myself from cheating, I will continue to use the gracious support of the infamous Des. We make goals every week and she checks in to see if we met our goals or not. If we do, we cheer. If we don’t we discuss what happened and then reboot for the next week.

The more I learn about writing, the harder it is. Back when I knew nothing, I would just leap to the page in joy. I created with unabashed passion. I had no critical brain, only creative.

Now, I can still tap into that creativity but it’s hard for me to stay there. My critical brain is always looking over my shoulder, asking questions:

“Does that advance your story?”

“Could you be less expository?”

“Is that the character or are you on your soapbox?”

“Is that the right word?”

“Could this passage serve more than one purpose?”

“Who talks like that?”

These are all good questions, and they need to be asked. Critical brain has improved my final product greatly. The problem is that critical brain keeps jumping in the middle of my playtime and kicking sand in the face of my creative brain. Critical brain is a bully. Creative brain has an inferiority complex. Not a good combo.

The result is my seeming inability to get my stories out the door.

It’s taken me a very long time to start to be able to see how critical brain can improve my writing. I rejected her for so long she learned to be awfully passive aggressive. But she does have her purpose. She’s got my back in a foxhole. She makes sure I don’t leave the proverbial house with proverbial toilet paper stuck to my proverbial shoe. But when I just want to hang out and create, she’s kind of a pushy bitch.

I’ve tried distracting her, kicking her out of my office, bullying her, even giving her free reign. But she is singular in purpose, digging in her heels while creative brain goes off flitting after lightning bugs. So I’ve found bigger guns.

My writing life now is filled with a complicated set of sticks and carrots. Critical brain loves rewards, but even more, she hates to be punished. And I’ve found some great ways to keep her in line. Actually, my friend Désirée has found some great ways of keeping critical brain in line. Désirée kicks my critical brain’s ass.

I met Des at a workshop in Squaw Valley years ago. She’s from Southern California and loves Lake Tahoe. I live near it and never go there. We both wanted to get away and just be writers once in awhile. So we cooked up a plan to rent a cabin at Tahoe for a weekend and work out plots of the books we were stalled on. We did, and it was wonderful. We went again the next year but without real goals. It was still wonderful, but not as constructive. So we made a bet.

I needed to rewrite a book. I didn’t need to fiddle; I needed to cut out large chunks and rearrange what remained. But every time I opened the file I started tweaking language instead. And I was making the language worse. In this book, creative brain had done her job on a first draft with verve and style. Critical brain wanted to rein her in. Bad brain.

Des suggested that we have our works-in-progress rewritten by the time we met again in May. Plenty of time. If I didn’t? I had to write a painfully large check to a politician I deeply despised. Not only would it suck to fork over the money, but the check register would permanently remind me that I helped that person.

In typical Cindie fashion I waited until the last minute. Then I got sick. Had there not been that stick hanging over me I would’ve blown it off. But there was no way I was writing that check. And there was no way I was going to Tahoe as a welcher. The only way to bring an end to the tweaking and avoidance was to just finish the book, critical brain be damned. Come May, I showed up at the airport to pick up Des and drive to Tahoe with a complete book.

The following year we challenged each other to start and finish books before our return to Tahoe. The reward for this productivity was an extra day at the Lake. We met our goals and spent the weekend critiquing and brainstorming and writing (and eating and drinking and marveling at the beauty of the Lake right outside our window. Seriously, there is much marveling with us). That extra day was heavenly. We plan to do it again this coming year because we will have new manuscripts done by then.

Now we have smaller goals as well, goals designed to help us write more than one book a year and, more importantly for me, finally send them somewhere. We set weekly goals. We check in on our progress. And need be, Des will find another big-ass stick with which to threaten critical brain.

(One of my weekly goals is to write and post a new blog entry every Wednesday. I have a cold. I feel … not well. But I know Des is going to check in with me come Monday. So I’m sitting here writing while hopped up on cold pills. Critical brain is quiet. Maybe drugging her into oblivion is another stick. Or carrot.)