Switching things up a bit and adding a little variety to our Wawa Wednesday series, here’s a list of things I learned while attending the Nebulas this past weekend.

1. Do your research on naming conventions.
   If you plan on writing a character with a non-Western name, it’s often not as simple as picking a given name and a surname. Some cultures have different naming structures (e.g. Thailand, India, Russia) that require more research. If you plan on basing a fantasy culture or nation after a real-world one, study how people and places are named. You can make up names that sound close to the inspiration culture but aren’t quite real, or you can google names (movie credits are great for this) from those cultures.
2. It’s never too early to get ready for taxes.
   It’s probably not going to save you any money on taxes if you incorporate as an author before you’re earning ballpark $100k/year on average, but when you do you’ll probably want to do it either as an S-Corp or an LLC (ask your accountant). When you start publishing your taxes are going to get harder, so getting an accountant if you don’t already have one may save you some trouble down the line. It’s also never a bad idea to start saving receipts for writerly business expenses like conference fees, travel, office supplies, books, etc. Even if you can’t deduct them or choose not to early in your career, it’s good practice for when you have to separate your writer expenses from your personal expenses.
3. At the heart of almost every conflict, people want to feel respected.
   I went to a panel on conflict resolution and it was insanely helpful, both for managing character conflicts as well as real-life ones. Respect permeates a lot of our interactions: you can tell a lot about characters’ relationships with each other, who respects whom, on the small ways they either show they respect each other or not.
4. 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron
   I just downloaded this a few days ago on the suggestion of one of my excellent new friends from the con (thanks, Karen!), and I’m already in love. Highly recommend, especially if you’re like me and struggle most with the drafting process. I’ll definitely be using this on my next project.
5. More trans guys in fiction, please. Also, more incidental transness. 
   We’re not seeing a lot of trans men in stories. Granted, we’re still not seeing a lot of trans characters, period, and often when those stories are told the gender of the character is still used as the twist or the central issue of the piece. What about all those trans princes or trans wizards having adventures?
6. It can almost certainly be shorter.
   Flash fiction is a great way to practice writing concisely. In all forms, from flash to short stories to novels, you can probably cut your word count by 10% without losing much. Some people have done a flash piece a day for years (this is awesome, it also sounds really hard). Flash also makes for nice bonus #content for newsletters, rewards, or your blog.
7. Any big project can be broken into smaller parts.
   This may seem kind of obvious, but this was a huge revelation for me. Clearly, drafting a book can be broken down into the smaller tasks of writing 2k a day, but revising a book is harder to quantify. Still, you can break it into tasks that you can accomplish in a few hours or over the course of a day, like fixing a scene, changing a character’s name, etc. The smaller you can break down your to-do’s, the more you’re going to feel in control of your project. Give yourself tasks that you can complete in a day and you will feel so much better about how revisions are coming along versus just nebulously attacking the whole project for hours.
8. Just talk to people. It will be fine.
   General con advice: probably the person you’re standing next to at the elevator is just as nervous as you are, and you might make a really cool connection. Be polite about it, obviously– if they look busy, it’s clearly not a great time to approach. But if they’re just chilling, introduce yourself. You never know.
9. Sometimes you need a distraction and this is okay.
   You will actually work better if you take a break and recharge after a job well done instead of running yourself into the ground.
10. Noise is a thing.
    I tend to do a lot of my writing in cafes listening to music. Some also people really like ambient noise, and this was a mixer people recommended. Apparently it works extra well if you listen to it with this playlist at the same time.
11.  Ask, “what will I cry about not doing by the end of this week?” and prioritize your tasks based on that.
    One of my favorite organizational tips from the con, because directly combats the problems I usually have in prioritization: ask what’s going to make you feel awful in the future if you don’t get it done. What is going to be something you’re going to have to scramble to pull together if you don’t do it early? What’s something that you’re going to be upset at yourself for not making progress on? Make yourself consider the possibility of not doing it and how much that would suck, and then do it.
12. A lot of markets really like flash fiction.
    It’s short, easy to tell if it’s working or not, and editors can often afford to buy more flash stories than short stories. Check out the Submissions Grinder for markets that accept flash (also this is a great resource for short story markets too!).
13. Study what you love.
    Last but not least. Look at the stories, games, films, any media that you are incredibly invested in and ask yourself why. How does the story work with the form? Are there tropes or aspects that you keep coming back to? Do you like particular types of characters or plots? The stuff you’re passionate about is going to be the stuff you tell the best stories about– research it and know how it works. Engage with it as an author and not just a reader.

And that’s a sampling of my thoughts from the con! Hope this helps, and as always, if you like these weekly tips, definitely leave me a comment and let me know!

Hello and welcome back to Wawa Wednesday, more properly known as Writing Advice with Alex, week two edition!

Anyway, this week I thought I’d tackle the dangerous dramatic darling of writing world: purple prose. *mood lighting comes on, there is a bongo in agony somewhere, you cannot find it, trust me I’ve looked*

A few years ago, I was working as an intern for a literary agent. This was really cool and I learned a lot before I queried (if you get the chance, definitely apply for these remote internships when they come up). The agent I was interning for also set up a private forum for us to discuss craft and therefore help us identify promising queries faster, and one of the very first topics we discussed was purple prose. So, in keeping with that fine tradition, it will also be one of my inaugural topics.

Purple prose is, most generally, an overblown or overdramatic description of something. It can be a little easy to get trigger-happy here and say that any long description is purple, when this isn’t necessarily accurate– purple prose is more like, you’re trying so hard for an effect you don’t realize when you’ve achieved it and when you’re running the poor metaphor or whatever into the ground.

(Aside: sometimes it’s tempting to say that writers from previous centuries have purple prose when they’re describing scenery for pages or farming techniques or hats, etc. It’s more like, the audience’s tolerance for description has just shifted to preferring smaller, pithier details than a full-blown dissertation on Russian farm culture or cetalogy, interesting though both of those things are.

That’s more to do with knowing your audience though, which we’ll cover sometime in the near future here. Back to actual purple prose. *bongos out* )

My goal when writing descriptions is to always either talk about a new thing or some new feature of an old thing.

If I’m just saying the same thing as the last sentence over and over, chances are that I’m just searching for the best way to say a single thing versus actually describing multiple parts of a thing and adding depth. (Sorry this is so vague, I’m trying to make this apply to as many situations as possible.)

Let’s have an example.

Meillin’s gaze drifted to the clocktower. His eyes were twin lavender orbs, lilac spheres glinting like daggers in darkness. This was a killing gaze, the same he trained on assailants, almost as though he wished to murder time itself. He smirked.

What doesn’t work here ?

• The orbs. Okay, this is a personal bias, mostly because I read and wrote fanfic as a Youth™️, and back then one did not suffer the word “orbs” to be used for eyes. Same deal with purple eyes and heterochromia. Unless you had a cool and new take on it, it just made you look like an amateur. Maybe it’s different now; maybe you have a cool use for it, fine, go for it. I’m never using it, ever, because it makes me feel dumb and I think when you write you need to feel awesome. Anyway and more importantly,
• The repetition. Right? Like, man, do I super have to tell you about both the lavender orbs and the lilac spheres? No. This is you as a write subconsciously trying to find the best way of saying this. Pick your fave, or find another way to do it. Same with “killing gaze” and “the same he trained on assailants”– it’s saying the same thing about his eyes, aka that he can look like a Real Bad Dude when he’s being attacked.
• The not-so-subtle metaphor. Murdering time! Well, gosh, I wonder what this guy’s personal conflict is going to be about.
• The lack of action. Okay, granted, sometimes you’re going to have to slow stuff down to get some good details in, but if you’re just having our guy pause and look sadly at this clocktower so you can describe his eyeballs, rethink. Your prose should be pulling at least twice its weight almost all the time. That is: you should always be looking to accomplish multiple things at once with any sentence/paragraph/chapter.

Okay, so what’s the root cause of purple prose? If we can see what some exemplars of it are, can we go for the jugular and identify the root cause? *koolaid man voice* Oh yeah.

You’re not trusting the reader.

The reason why people repeat stuff over and over is because they don’t think you’re listening. Same deal here: the writer is repeating the eyeball nonsense because they’re secretly worried that the audience is going to miss the fact that this guy has purple eyes. Same deal with the time thing. The writer risks being heavy-handed in order to assure that that metaphor is signed, sealed, and delivered.

And the thing is that your reader is usually going to be paying enough attention that this stuff isn’t going to just slide right by them. When in doubt, my professional opinion is to err on the side of “my reader is smart.”

So, let’s try to rescue this thing.

The clocktower struck midnight and Meillin’s purple eyes glinted like daggers in the darkness. His gloved hand found purchase on the slate tiles of the tower and he hoisted himself up gracefully until he reached the massive clock face. Threading his body through the wrought iron numerals, he waited until it was 12:15 and then pulled himself up on the minute hand. He smirked. This would be the greatest heist in history.

Obviously this isn’t the only way to do it–maybe you thought the part about the killing gaze was better than the daggers in darkness, that’s also fine! The idea is you choose your favorite of the ways you’ve come up to describe a thing, and you go with that. You have extra space to add more stuff: look at all the junk I added about what he’s doing. Instead of just getting a picture of his eyes and whatever, we see him interacting with the environment and sort of have to augur his goals more from there.

Exercise:

• Choose a character or a setting of yours. Write a paragraph (let’s say 4-5 sentences, more if the spirit moves you) describing one of their features. Think about describing different aspects of that feature with each sentence. For example, here’s mine:

The flat was really just the attic of a coffeeshop, and countless roasts from the store below always made you feel awake when you entered it. The only way up was a trapdoor that always got stuck in the up position that needed to be yanked, firmly but not roughly, for it to open. On the back wall, a modest bed was pushed up by the room’s one window, and along the sides were various discarded shop ephemera: old houseplant, bags of beans, tools for fixing the faulty wiring, and several dead siphons. An ancient cathode ray tube television took up most of the space on the single table, and the threadbare sofa was covered in dust.

(Yes, I’m obsessing about Persona 5’s protagonist’s awesome room, but that’s beside the point.)

As always, feel free to post your attempts in the comments– I love reading them.

One thing I’ve really wanted to do for a while is a weekly post about writing. So, without further ado, here’s the first installment in Writing Advice With Alex (affectionately abbreviated as Wawa Wednesdays, because I live too far away from the sandwich empire not to miss it).

A good question one of my freelance clients had for me a while back was about tense and POV, that is, who’s doing the narration and how in a story. There are three main choices you have here:

1. Tense: Past or Present?
2. POV: First or Third? (Okay, yes, you could also go with second, but as that’s a tricky kettle of fish I have not attempted yet I feel less qualified to speak on that.)
3. Scope: Omniscient or Limited? aka the bounds of perception: how much information do(es) your narrator(s) have access to? all of it or selected bits?

Tense, for me, is most useful for immediacy of action. I really love present tense for action scenes, especially for stories where I have some really slick lines planned (I guess I usually think in present tense? I have all these post-its with phrases or one-liners that I know belong in a certain story, and usually they’re in present tense). When I was writing fanfic hard-core in high school, I would always write all the battle scenes in present tense (even if I was writing the rest of the fic in past, this was a really annoying habit to break) just because it felt that much snappier and dramatic to me to have the battle happening in real-time. There’s a desperation that comes from writing in the now.

On the flip, past is really helpful for descriptions and setting up stages. NB: just like you can still do action scenes without a problem in past tense, you can still describe things perfectly well in present. Sometimes past tense will make a story sound grander and lend the 20/20 of hindsight, and sometimes the uncertain present can keep the pacing tight. It just depends on your goals for a project.

For example, if I know I have to build a lot of world in a project, say like a fantasy, I might look at past tense and see if that would make my life easier than trying to do it all in present. If I’m working in the real world– like, contemporary YA or modern day fantasy– I might go with present, because my reader’s already going to know a lot about the world and while I’ll obviously still describe junk I also don’t have to tell you about Houses and foreign dynasties.

Likewise, POV or point of view tells me who’s narrating: is this a third person perspective or a first? Some people advocate for writing YA in first person because of the close psychic distance (you as the reader are right there with the character as they experience their greatest triumphs and deepest humiliations, art imitating teenage life), but this isn’t the only way to write it, by any means. There’s a big difference in how SIMON VS THE HOMO SAPIENS AGENDA handles first person YA and how Leigh Bardugo’s SHADOW AND BONE or Megan Whalen Turner’s THE THIEF does. It’s definitely not like third person YA doesn’t sell, though: tell that to SIX OF CROWS and THRONE OF GLASS. There really isn’t a category or even a genre standard here– it’s just whatever’s right for the story you’re telling.

Another example if YA fantasy’s not your jam: you usually see regency-era historical (or alt-historical) in third person, since part of that genre is this idea of polite distance– dry humor also requires some room for its sleight of hand. Right now I’m reading Zen Cho’s SORCERER TO THE CROWN and loving how much gets communicated in these quiet turns of phrase as well as how easy it is to miss something scandalous because someone’s maneuvered the conversation to avoid it extremely politely. It’s not like you couldn’t write this in first (see the hilarious KAT, INCORRIGIBLE middle-grade books by Stephanie Burgis), but you might have to come up with another way to channel that style (Kat, for example, is a wit but certain things do sail over her head as she’s younger), since it’s something that we look forward to in this type of story. Also, the word reticule is fantastic.

Scope is all about perception and what boundaries you impose on it, if any: in short, how much does your narrator know? If they’re a regular person, probably it’s limited. Limited means the narrator don’t know everything that’s going on, i.e. they’re limited to being in a single place at a single time, only seeing events from a single perspective (their own). You can have multiple limited third person narrators (e.g. SIX OF CROWS) or a single one. You could also have omniscient narrators who can see all the players’ hands.

You can pull some truly epic shenanigans that subvert your readers’ expectations by playing around with narration.

Like, first omniscient. We are lucky enough to be living in a time where Ann Leckie is one of our contemporaries and her masterful Imperial Radch books exist. If you convince the reader that the narrator has certain skills and limitations (in this case, Breq’s perspective, as she is/was/is still occasionally a ship) we’ll follow you through these wild set-ups and believe you when you say that our narrator friend knows what’s going on effectively everywhere.

So much of writing is just getting the reader to be willing to suspend their disbelief. Sometimes you do this through detail and sometimes you do this through crafty world-building.

So, Aesop-style, what’s the moral of the story?

There is no tense that is “right” for all stories in a particular genre. I’ll be blunt: anyone who says you have to write YA in first past or whatever’s in vogue these days to sell or get agented is silly. The type of narration you should use for your work is the one you think you can write your project best in. The more comfortable you are with different tenses, POVs, and scopes, the more tools you have in your writer toolbox to do some damage with. If you only really prefer writing in one narrative style, that’s fine too! You’re probably really good at it!

The other moral (this is our inaugural post in the series and therefore is a two-for-one moral occasion) is that you can do any damn thing you want, as long as you can pull it off. At the end of the day, your reader has to be able to follow you and be on board with your fanciness. I’m not talking about every single reader ever, since that’s impossible, but you should have some type of ideal audience in mind and write to them. More on that later.

And now, because I always loved these:

Exercise:

• Write a short story or a scene in a narration style you’re less familiar with. Maybe that’s second person limited in present, maybe it’s third omniscient past, etc. See what’s easier and more difficult for you. For added zest, take a scene from your WIP and write it in a different POV and tense. To get the best effect on this, open a separate Word doc or Scrivener dude or what-have-you and type that sucker up afresh. What changes for you when you’re writing, besides the obvious flipping verbs and pronouns?

Feel free to ask questions or comment with your exercises! Shocking as I know it will be to you all, I love talking about craft and analyzing stuff and am totally down for chatting in the comments. Obligatory self-promo outro: if you’d like to hire me to read over your manuscript or query, I also offer freelance editing services here.

No one said finding a good CP was easy– in fact, it’s probably one of the harder things you’ll do as a writer. So why invest the time and energy into finding one or several who really click with you?

A CP gets you experience having your work read by someone else who’s well-read in your field. You also get to read and write editorial letters, or use Word’s Track Changes (depending on which, or both, methods you two decide to use). Both of these are tools that editors in the industry use when they give feedback to their authors, so getting familiar with them early on is a definite plus.

You may also discover cool new tools. One of my CPs raves to me about how awesome Scrivener is and fields my weirdo questions with it. Another one suggests great YA reads to me so we can both keep on top of where the category is going. A CP’s usefulness doesn’t end when she finishes your manuscript: this is a person who is with you for the whole ride, from querying to agented to published (or any other paths that end in published, really).

CPs and beta readers are often mentioned together, but the terms tend not to be interchangeable. Usually, a beta reader reads manuscripts on more of a book-by-book basis. Maybe you want a second opinion on the setting since you’re not from the area your book is set in and you want to make sure that it’s done right. There’s less of the inner circle aspect that you and your CPs develop, but also less of a time investment. If you’re still figuring out who you want to CP with or if you don’t have the time to commit to a CP relationship, finding a beta can be a good option.

So, how do you find CPs?

My biggest advice here is to just put yourself out there in as many ways as possible. I found one of my CPs through How About We CP, a super useful tumblr maintained by a literary agent. Other people use Maggie Stiefvater’s CP Love Connection to great success. My CP and I started emailing and we discovered that we were just awesome wow much write and it’s been shibes and manuscripts ever since.

Another CP and I met over twitter when she asked for publishing intern bloggers and I offered to help. Not only did she get me a running start with blogging, but we also stumbled into being each other’s CPs along the way.

Most other people whom I exchange work with I’ve met through twitter (if you’re not on that platform, or less active over there, step it up!).

Okay, so let’s assume you’ve discovered a few people who sound cool/interesting, they like you as well, and you’ve decided to swap first chapters. Here are some questions to determining who might be a good match for you long-term:

Do you write in/have familiarity with the genres and categories the other writes in? This is kind of the big one, so I put it first. Familiarity with the genre and category your manuscript is in is indispensable.

Do you have similar goals? Like how we asked this in the agent blog, do you and you potential CP also want to get traditionally published and agented, or are you exploring different paths? Obviously there’s no embargo law saying NOPE IF YOU WANT XYZ PUBLISHING PATH YOU CANNOT CP WITH THIS ABC PERSON, but it’s sometimes helpful to have a CP with same goals as you.

You can ask each other about querying (and omg exchange chat hugs, party, etc depending on how that goes), whether the agent who’s offering rep is a good choice, should you accept this publisher’s contract, etc. Likewise, if you decide to go indie, having a CP who’s been down that path can be a huge help both with setting deadlines for yourself, locating formatters, editors, and cover artists, and budgeting time and costs.

How long do you plan to be in this game? Similar to career goals, how committed is your potential CP to staying in publishing? It’s not like you guys need to make a blood pact to be PUB BUDDIEZ 5EVA but it sucks when someone whose work you really liked and who you jived with as a friend decides that they’ve had enough after the first book (or gives up during querying). One thing you should discuss with people is contingency plans– will you continue to write and attempt to get published even if this manuscript doesn’t sell or does poorly?

How slow or fast a writer are you? Sometimes it’s hard to read and crit two of your partner’s manuscripts while you haven’t even finished your own. Do you need someone who writes more at your pace, or are you okay with helping out a faster/slower person revise? Most CPs tend to work this out on their own if they’re not evenly matched– like, for example, the faster CP may promise to give the slower CP’s work priority over her other manuscripts for a quicker turnaround time.

How brutally honest do you want critique? Chances are, if you’re seriously looking for publication you want as honest feedback as possible. Make sure that this is something you and your potential CP agree on– no one has to be mean about things they find that need work (mean/deprecating honesty is nowhere on the scale), but you do have to agree that you’re ready for whatever the other finds.

Are you writing things that your potential CP is okay reading? Let’s face it: really no one can predict everything they want to write/will write ever. Writers and their tastes change. But, if you know off the bat that you want to write edgier YA, perhaps with more explicit sex scenes, maybe consider checking in and making sure they’re still up for reading that.

In general, if you and your CP like the same type of books you’ll probably find that you have similar tastes for how edgy or dark you prefer to write.

Is their critique actually useful to you? Is your potential CP about at your level of writing or are they providing you comments that you value? Your time is important– once you start writing professionally and getting on deadlines it will become even more important.  If someone is just not getting your manuscript or gives you feedback that doesn’t jive with your vision, they may not be the best match.

And that’s fine! It doesn’t mean you can’t be friends if you don’t click as CPs– it just means that you’re both mature enough to know what you need in a critique partner, and that you respect each other’s time enough to move on.

Are you willing to commit to a CP relationship? This seems kind of silly– obviously you wouldn’t be reading this page on finding CPs if you weren’t somewhat willing to put in effort–but it’s important to recognize that you are making a commitment to another person by agreeing to be their CP. It varies person to person– I have some CPs I speak with almost daily (and whom I am 100% there for any time of day) and others who I have a more relaxed relationship with, either over twitter DMs, occasional chats, or email.

No matter what kind of CP relationship you have, if it’s high-involvement, medium, or low, make sure you’re willing to put the time in. If it’s going to take you a while to get to a new manuscript from a CP, let them know. Put in your best quality work on notes, and be available to celebrate or mourn when something goes awesomely or catastrophically.

While you can’t share everything with the writing community at large, you can with your CP. I know they’ve helped me improve my writing and made my work the best it could be. Good luck!

1. Write, a lot.

The first rule, the one true precept. You get better by doing, so therefore make sure that you’re out there making things happen. Maybe this is the year you finally attempt the sticker method (do it, it is so useful for keeping track of things and giving you a visual representation of how much you’re putting out each day). More than anything, the sticker method has helped me learn to…

2. Set reasonable writing goals for yourself.

If you know that you’re consistently able to produce 1k words that you don’t hate a day, then good! If you feel like you can get a better handle on your draft by writing more words, then write more words a day. If you feel, like I do, that you need to go slow and make sure that the words you do write each day are words that you’re mostly proud of, then cool, do that.

A resolution to write more is never going to stick if you make it exhausting to accomplish each day. Break down your goals: so you want to write one book, or two, or three. Figure out a basic word count (lit agent Jennifer Laughran’s post here is a good resource) and then determine how you can meet that writing your optimal– whether it’s big or small– number of words each day.

3. Read, a lot.

One of my favorite pieces of advice was that you should always be reading more than you’re writing. This sounds so haughty when you first come across it, like how dare you random internet blog I read what I want. But if the mind is a storehouse of furniture for you to use in your stories, then books are the shops and wholesalers you get the cool chairs and hip rugs from. That way, you have the luxury of choice when you want furniture for your own stories.

4. In fact, learn from many masters.

The way you get stuff in your stories that is new or different is to read a lot of different things. Diverse books, non-fiction books, poetry, even things that aren’t books. Watch anime, TV shows, play video games and analyze the stories, re-write newspaper articles to be more interesting, write an epic fanfic for that crack pairing that may or may not be your OTP. The exercises you can make for yourself are endless.

The thing is that you are constantly, actively or passively, thinking about story.

5. Realize it’s going to take a while.

Sometimes it won’t, but it’s always nice to be surprised pleasantly than unpleasantly. Sometimes you are going to feel like your writing life is either a comedy of errors or an epic tragedy. Your friends or people you consider your peers may already have agents or contracts, and you will look at your empty hands and wonder what god you left unappeased for this to happen to you.

But, hey, one: publishing is slow. Two: the people you’re comparing yourself to probably put in a lot of unseen work/time– it only seems like things are moving faster for them. Three: your hands aren’t empty– you have a lot more experience and manuscripts than you did before.

6. And find a way to relax.

Everyone tells you to go on social media and read up on the industry– which is great! don’t stop doing that!– but an equally important thing is to know when you’re being driven too insane and need a break. Find an activity that you can do that calms you down, whether it’s reading not on your laptop, walking the dog, crafts, welding, etc. For me, it’s drawing.

7. Commit to fixing one thing you don’t like about your writing at a time.

Do you know how long it took me to wean myself off of using telling verbs and onto showing verbs? (Hint: a long time.) Your writing is never going to get better unless you are actively trying to change it, unless you can identify a thing you don’t like or feel is clunky and then get to work fixing that. Don’t like your beginning? Read a lot of book’s beginnings– more specifically, read the beginnings of stories you love and study how those authors draw you in.

8. Don’t be afraid to imitate.

Obviously this goes with the slight caveat of DO NOT PLAGIARIZE but one of the ways you get better at telling the stories you want to tell is by doing it with training wheels on. Sometimes writing fanfiction helps a lot– you can write through a scene a different way than the author/creator and see why they chose to present it the way they did. You can do character studies, or you can practice description or thematic arcs.

Even if you don’t write fic, you’ve probably reaped the benefits of imitation. One of my earliest stories was this half-drawn, half-written thing that I am more or less sure was a rip-off of Akira, but it also taught me a lot about character archetypes and worldbuilding. Two years after I stopped working on it, I’d more or less realized it was terrible but it also provided me a more solid foundation to work on my next story, and the one after that.

9. Experiment.

Especially if you write YA, you’re in a great place to try something new. Push your boundaries as well as your readers’– I guarantee you that you’re going to feel like you’re jumping off a cliff writing a POC or LGBT protagonist for the first time if you’re a cishet white person, but ultimately you’re doing both yourself and your readers a service. You’re learning how to be a better writer by telling more stories (and also learning how to research culture and lifestyles like a bamf) and you’re learning to be fearless.

Will you mess up? Yeah. But you’ll also learn to…

10.  Ask for help.

Whether it’s having someone beta read for your character with a mental illness or you finding a critique partner long-term, one of the greater truths in publishing is that this whole thing is very rarely done alone. Traditional publishing usually means you and your agent (and your editor) will all be on your team helping to make your work the best it can be. There are tons of critique partners and beta readers out there who want to help you depict their culture/illness/faith/lifestyle, etc accurately.

Realize that writing is a big job. You do not have to go it alone, and no one’s going to shame you for having CPs or hiring a freelancer or checking your work. They’re probably going to think more highly of you for it.

11. Always be learning.

Maybe this falls into a few of the categories above, but it’s important enough to also stand by itself, too. Always be bettering your craft. Read, challenge yourself to improve your writing, notice what your CPs are doing that helps give their scenes extra sparkle, make a list of things you want to change about your writing this year and cross them out one by one. No one is ever done learning– ars longa, vita brevis, yo.

12. But also realize your contemporaries are not your competition.

Hemingway had this great thing; when people asked him who among his contemporaries were his greatest competition, he said he didn’t think about them that way. Instead, he thought being a writer was more fighting the people who came before you, the established classics, and trying to be better than them.

I dig. It forces you to concentrate more on bettering your work so it can stand against some of the greatest storytellers of all time versus trying to take down your fellow ~students of the craft~

13. Make lists of ten.

One of my other favorite things from Kate Brauning, CP and good friend, is the list of ten technique.

You ask yourself a question: why doesn’t this adult C– like crowds? And then write up ten different answers to it. Your first three will probably be pretty run of the mill (his mother lost him once in a crowd and he felt helpless, he hates people, the city is suffocating) but as you go on to #5-7, your ideas will get more original (maybe he saw a crowd stone someone to death and has no faith in humanity). #7-10 will likely be the trickiest but also your most creative.

14. Be the consummate professional.

Publishing is both a slow business and a small one: relationships are forged gradually and can be destroyed quickly. It is almost never in your best interests to act on the spur of a moment (if it’s a good or a bad thing). Read your contracts carefully, return your critiques in a timely manner, and always always thank people for their time.

Neil Gaiman said in one of his keynote speeches that there were three things that you needed to make people want to work with you again:

People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today’s world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They’ll forgive the lateness of the work if it’s good, and if they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as the others if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

15. Last, always be writing.

Always have something in your backpocket, another trick up your sleeve. Publishing is in many ways a long game. You’re in this because you love it, and that means loving it beyond the lifespan of a single project. If you’re serious about writing, then you’re not just in this because you have one single book you want to publish. You have hundreds.

The key is to develop a system, whether it’s draft-> revise -> query -> repeat, or draft -> revise -> send to agent -> sub -> repeat, and just keep going. More and more what I’m seeing of publishing is that its problems are stones that you have to wear away over time. Steady work will wear the stone down, but you have to be putting in that work even when you’re not seeing a visible reward.

Happy 2015, and happy writing!