***Quick note before I jump into today’s topic. A main character in the book I’m working on is Japanese American, and I’m looking for sensitivity readers. People who can point out nuances of Japanese culture that I don’t know about and/or tell me what I got wrong about the experience of being Japanese American. If you can help, please send me an email: Stephanie(at)StephanieMorrillBooks.com***
My nine-year-old daughter said to me a few days ago, “I never fail.”
I said, “That would also mean you never learn.”
She said, “Let me rephrase that. I never fail because I always learn from my mistakes, and since I learn from it, it’s not really a failure.”
Mistakes can’t be avoided, but they aren’t nearly as painful if we learn from them, especially if we can share our knowledge with others. Lucky for you, I’ve made lots!
In the last few weeks, I talked about how I was an obsessive rewriter, and how I thought that I would become a “real” writer once I discovered my perfect novel writing system. Today I’m sharing three more:
Writing a Series
Don’t freak out!
I know lots of you are writing series or want to write a series. I’m not trying to dissuade you from that. Series are lovely things. As a reader, I adore them. And for some writers, they’re a great way to build readership.
There are lots of good things about series, but because I don’t often hear the bad stuff talked about, I want to share why I wish I hadn’t started my career with writing two series.
I originally intended Me, Just Different to be a stand-alone YA novel. But series were huge (Twilight was the rage when I signed my contract) and my agent suggested I brainstorm a couple ideas for potential books two and three. I did that, and my publisher bought The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series as a three-book deal.
But sales for Me, Just Different were slow from the beginning, and the book never took off the way my publisher and I had hoped. And who buys books two, three, four, etc. in a series? People who read and loved book one! So even though I had new books coming out every six months, I had a very narrow window of people who I was able to market them to because so few people had read the first book.
A similar thing happened with the Ellie Sweet books, though there are only two of them. Shortly after the second Ellie Sweet book came out, my life was derailed when my three-year-old son started having seizures. The stress and extra constraints on my time led to me giving my writing a critical look and saying, “What, exactly, am I doing here?”
At that time I had five published novels, and three of them were follow-ups to a book one that didn’t sell very well. I decided it made no sense to keep signing multi-book contracts. I wanted contracts for one book at a time, and I was only going to write additional books if sales merited it.
But here’s a quick side note on why these two series may not actually be a mistake: I still get emails from readers who loved the Skylar Hoyt and Ellie Sweet books. Emails that say things about how Skylar’s story helped them through a hard time with their parents’ divorce, or how Ellie finding her own confidence helped them to find theirs. I would not trade these emails for anything, including better sales numbers.
So even though I’m still committed to only writing stand-alone books for now, I’m not as regretful about my two series as I once was.
Not Understanding Why Character Age Matters
When I wrote Me, Just Different, I put my main character in eighth grade. I liked this because it seemed like so many Young Adult stories were about juniors or seniors in high school, and I thought this would make mine stand out.
The first editor I pitched the book to told me she liked the book and wanted to recommend it at her publishing house, but that I needed to rewrite it with Skylar being older. I pushed back a bit, and she explained that Skylar was twelve, the age of many main characters in the Middle Grade genre, but that the maturity level of the story was Young Adult. She told me, “Most sixteen-year-olds don’t want to read books about twelve-year-olds.”
That made sense. I totally get the temptation to push back on this because it’s what we like to do as creatives. Plus it’s easy to look at a series like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson and think that’s justification for writing a younger character in a more mature story. But those series have both been exceptionally successful (more on that in a bit) and it’s unreasonable to expect the same result.
If you’re wanting to be traditionally published, you want to minimize as many stumbling blocks as you can. There will already be plenty of others you can’t do anything about, so for a first novel, this isn’t a battle I would choose to fight.
Planning On Being An Exception
One of the first craft books I ever read was On Writing by Stephen King, which is a great one if you don’t mind some language, and it’s a classic for a reason. I hardly ever teach a class where I don’t mention it.
BUT I’M NOT STEPHEN KING. Do you know how long it took me to realize that? I don’t write what he writes, and—I think this is the most important part—I’m not pursuing a writing career in the 1970s. I’m pursuing it now. So there are things that get to be true for Stephen King that are never going to be true for me.
The same is true for whatever literary hero you hold up. I discovered contemporary YA author Sarah Dessen in 2004 and loved her voice and stories. She was doing something very similar to what I wanted to do, so when I made decisions I often patterned my career choices off what I thought worked for Sarah Dessen, including how she blogged and wrote. But in publishing just a few years can make a huge difference. She started her blog five years before I started mine, and was already a NYT bestselling author at that point. I couldn’t just do whatever Sarah did and expect similar results.
That’s especially true if you’re talking about an anomaly of an author like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or James Patterson. They are lightning strikes, and it’s unrealistic to pattern ourselves after them, thinking lightning will strike us too. We can, of course, learn from literary greats, but we don’t want to ignore truths about us and our stories.
Have you struggled with any of these mistakes? If so, share in the comments so I don’t feel quite so alone!
