jessiemac.com

Therapy for Writers in 140 Characters or Less Written by Patty Blount ~

I’m a writer.

There.

I said it.

No, I’m not yet published, nor do I have an agent. But I write. Every day, I sew words into sentences, sentences into scenes, and breathe life into my stories, doing all the same things ‘real writers’ do with their stories. Yet I argue with myself that I’m still not a real writer. I thought that when I completed a novel, I’d be a real writer. I’ve since written four and still frequently feel like a fraud for daring to call myself a writer.

For a long time, I believed I was alone with such defeatist thoughts.

And then I found Twitter. My involvement with social networks was born from my day job as a software technical writer. A new executive who’d taken over my team encouraged us to “think outside the book” and find ways to engage and converse with our customers. I went from a puzzled frown, “What’s a twitter?” to having two Twitter IDs, two blogs, a Facebook page and a LinkedIn account in the span of a year. What began as mere research has since evolved into an always-available writers’ conference. I first began by searching popular celebrity hashtags. (Okay. Yes! I admit I avidly searched for news on Robert Pattinson’s whereabouts. But I’ve since stopped that. No, really, I have.) When I learned more about hashtags, I started following those related to my interests, such as #techcomm or #stc (Society for Technical Communication). Later, I branched out to #fiction, #amwriting and #writechat.

But it was by searching on #query that I found literary agent Janet Reid, also known as the Query Shark. Janet’s Query Shark website is devoted entirely to queries, using real submissions from people willing to brave the waters and subject their ideas to her professional and frequently brutal feedback. By following Janet, I soon learned of her clients and began following them. Jeff Somers and Bill Cameron each have multiple titles published, Sean Ferrell was eagerly awaiting the release of his debut novel and Dan Krokos was just beginning the process. Following these folks on Twitter led me to still more authors, each in a different point along the road to publication. I now follow over a hundred writers and agents who have taught me that the very last thing I am in this odyssey is alone.

Writing is such a solitary endeavor, isolating and lonely. We sit at the keyboard or the notepad and talk to ourselves. If that doesn’t end a party early, surely asking people their opinions about the drawbacks of first person versus third person point of view does. (Take my word on this. I cleared a room by asking this question once.) No, you are far better off posing such questions to other writers, of course. Whenever I have questions, someone typically tweets a link to a blog post that helps answer it. How to query, understanding the distinction between a synopsis and a summary, characterization, dialogue, plotting versus writing by the seat of your pants, I’ve read blogs on just about everything fiction-related.

Twitter preserved my sanity last month. After a particularly bad day, I settled in for an evening of writing and was struck senseless by how BAD my writing was. That single thought spiraled, out of control, until my twitchy finger hovered above the Delete key, ready to erase 60,000 words out of existence, thus saving the world from my drivel. Luckily, I tweeted about my despair and one of my Twitter pals rescued me with an offer to beta read. Kelly, you didn’t just save a manuscript that night. You saved me, because I was ready to quit completely. I’m so glad I didn’t delete anything because last week, I won a contest run by the generous Candace Ganger, who tweets as @candylandgang. The prize was thirty minutes of phone time with agent Michelle Wolfson. Without Twitter, when would I, a full time technical writer, have been able to speak with a professional agent?

I’ve read tweets and blog posts from a number of the folks I follow and realized that no matter where in the process they are – agented or not, published or not, book deals signed or not, we all feel like frauds at some point, all believe our writing sucks, all believe we’ll never be as good a writer as INSERT BEST-SELLING AUTHOR HERE. In other words, every writer has doubts.

Am I alone with my doubts? Not anymore, thanks to Twitter.

~ Thanks Patty ~

Patty Blount is a technical writer by day and a novelist by night. Her first novel, Penalty Killer – a whodunit about a star hockey player whose father is arrested for the murder of a dad on the opposing team. Her second Postpartum Deception is about a grieving mother whose emerging psychic ability helps her locate the baby presumed dead in a fire. Border Lines and Send are her most recent.  Border Lines is about a doctor whose free clinic teeters on the brink of bankruptcy unless she can convince a hot reporter to give it some positive press coverage. Send is a story about a boy whose failure to respect these technologies ends a life and ruins another. (taken from Patty’s website)