And the winner.....

We have a winner  to last post's competition!!! A copy of Fuzzy Doodle will be going to the first commenter, Girl For All Seasons. Congratulations! Email me your details and I will sign it forthwith and pop it in the post :)

And as a cool bonus in addition to the competition announcement ... one of my favourite-of-all-time writers, Maggie Stiefvater (The Scorpio Races, The Raven Cycle and many more...), recently responded to a question on twitter about 'Imposter Syndrome' with a somewhat unexpected but totally genius answer. I've often felt the sting of this syndrome. I've picked myself up from the fraudsters' floor and reminded myself that I have a few clues about how stories work. But I love how Ms Stiefvater embraces the idea as a mechanism of keeping ourselves grounded, and a reminder that many things contribute to any success we might enjoy. You can read it for yourself below and I also recommend you pick up one of her books and give them a go too. She is equally smart (and linguistically lyrical) with fiction.  And as always, writing itself, word by word, is what we need to keep doing.

On Twitter, Connor Allen asked: "do you ever deal with imposter syndrome as a writer? If so, how do you get past it and just make yourself write?"

My answer:

Dear connorallen94,

I think everyone does to some degree or another.

Career success and artistic skill are only poorly correlated. What do I mean by this? I mean that you have to get a certain level of skill in order to get published/ put in a gallery/ get musical gigs, but after you get to a certain level of competency, greater or less skill doesn’t seem to have any relationship to how commercially successful you are. Other factors begin to take over in exposing your work to buyers, and moreover, the more rarified your skill becomes, the fewer the punters are who can appreciate it. You can turn a beautiful turn of the phrase while juggling 47 themes and delicately drawing an allegory for the pain of man’s condition? Great. Most people won’t notice. And while that additional skill will get you noticed among peers who are also writing beautiful novels with 47 themes and delicately drawn allegories, it is a bad predictor for commercial success. If you use that skill to delicately render specific lizards, for instance, you still run the risk of only appealing to lizard people.* But mostly it’s just excess — the average person doesn’t care if Coldplay’s Chris Martin can play Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in D on his guitar. (I don’t know if he can. But I hope so.)

This is because in the commercial art world, most consumers are not also artists. Other factors are nearly always more important to the non-artist consumer: a strong story, a topical subject matter, a celebrity name, a catchy tune, a wicked hook, a pretty cover, the creator’s funniness on Twitter, the creator’s ability to speak in public, the creator’s actual and literal hotness because wow, relatability of the themes, a movie tie-in, an omnipresent advertising campaign, availability of the work in places that rhyme with BallMart.

It’s why you can be an international bestseller without being the best in your field. It’s why you can be an international bestseller without being remotely the best in your field.

Whenever I say this online, people like to shout “what kind of a self-drag!” I suppose because as an international bestseller, I am supposed to think I am 100% fantastic and have definitely earned my title at the top of the heap by some objective measure of wonderfulness. Also because people are weird and possibly don’t understand how self-awareness, confidence, and humility really ought to play well together if you want to be a happy professional artist. It’s crucial to understand just how big of a role you play in your own success. This is so that you can focus on only the things you can control (you can’t make your subject more topical, you can’t suddenly become a famous rock star with a memoir, you can’t guarantee you have a beautiful, eye-catching cover; you can only work on writing faster, writing more accessibly, writing well), so that you don’t take it too hard when all of your career dreams fail to come true overnight. But it’s also to keep you from being a self-aggrandizing asshole about success. You’ve sold millions of books? Great. Remember, Stiefvater, that your skill is only poorly correlated to that number. You wrote a competent-or-better book at a good time for that genre/ subject/ cover/ something, and it took off. Good job, that was nice. Get back to work.

I don’t generally mind this push-pull, actually. Imposter syndrome whispers that I might be a fraud, a just-okay writer wrapped in accolades I don’t deserve. But mostly I think that’s all right: let the voices whisper. The opposite of the imposter syndrome would be letting myself believe that I am entirely to credit for my success, and that’s just as false. The truth is a middle ground, and this truth is also why imposter syndrome doesn’t get in the way of my work.

Because the truth is this: I’m a writer who works hard, puts down a quarter million words of fiction each year, shows up for work even when life throws health or family or world crises at me, and doesn’t make excuses. Those things aren’t subjective. Those things I can control.

So get to work.

urs,

Stiefvater

*http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/163714808581/x

How the word cumquat could help you win a book...

Sometimes I like books that are just a gob-smackingly good read - with luscious language, pace and a plot so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. The ones that make you feel like 'I didn't really know reading satisfaction, until I read this book.' Sometimes I like books that make me think, challenge my preconceptions and tie my brain in useful kinds of knots, like some metaphorical, metaphysical macrame pot plant holder. But my most favourite books are the ones that are the former, with the latter secretly hidden inside. The entertainy, learny kind all rolled into one 'oh-my-goodness-I am-so-devastated-it-is-over-how-will-I-live-without-it-but-look-how-much-smarter-I-am-about-the-world-now' package. These are the books that you want to un-remember so you can read them for the first time again ... and again.

I like to try and write books that make people think. That aren't just superficial and glossy but have some kind of greater meaning or examination of universal themes or revelation of some useful truths, or helpful ideas that people can take away and use in their own lives. Sometimes I think I get there, sometimes I almost get there: but it is always the goal. Words are a powerful medium. And with power comes great responsibility. A book is one of the safest ways to venture outside your comfort zone. To gain an insight in to the lives of others. And it is my job to put it in an entertainy, learny package that makes you put it back on your book pile to read again.

Authors work very hard to draw the reader in. To help them see what the author sees. The brilliant Maggie Stiefvater explains it well here. And shows exactly why some books need more than one reading to get the most out of them.

And because I now have a total of 40 followers I am going to have a competition. You can win any one of my books (except the first one, Clever Moo) in print, or where available, in a digital format if you prefer. Enter by commenting on this post with the title of the book you would like to win and with your favourite word (no swears please). I will pick my favourite of your favourite words as the winner. For example 'phalanges' is quite an amazing word, or 'cumquat'. The competition will close on Friday.

Your mind is a temple too...

An old unpublished junior mystery manuscript (oujmm) I wrote a while back has been whispering sweet nothings in my ear and I confess I have been cheating on my university studies with it. Just a few little trysts on my laptop, sneaking around behind research project's back for an hour or two in the evenings. Oh, the guilt. I know I will pay for this. But oujmm looks better than I remember him. He's kept in shape. He wants to change. I can't resist him. Please don't tell on us...

Over the past eighteen months or so I have discovered an interesting fact about publishing, hitherto unknown to me by virtue of the fact that up until that point I had effectively only had one publisher (that's not entirely true as I had multiple publishers for different short stories over the years but they kind of have a separate set of rules to begin with so I expected differences). Anyways, what I discovered is that one publisher is not the same as another publisher. Its not just that the people involved are different, with different tastes and interests. Its also that different publishers can operate in completely different ways. Their contracts are not the same, their advances and requirements and expectations of you are not the same, their sales, marketing and publicity are not the same. Their submissions processes are not the same and how they interact with you is not the same. Justine Larbalestier says it very well here. Sometimes the only common factor across the different publishers you might get to work with is you. This doesn't make them better or worse, it just means you shouldn't expect the same experience.

I also liked this link this morning. I have talked about feeding your creative mind before. Its extremely important to put new stuff in when you are busily taking so much stuff out as you write. Running on empty isn't pretty. But Maggie Stiefvater has taken a different approach. Its not just the experiences your mind requires. Be careful about the food and drink you consume. Its not just the reactions to some substances you personally have that can dull your mind. Its not just your body that's a temple.

And this too at Stroppy Author's Blog - nothing like a call to sanity, eh? She's right - we can't go back so there's no point in whining about how things used to be. They weren't always wonderful anyway. Be smart and embrace the future. It might be better, it might be worse, but either way, with or without you, it'll be happening.

And if you haven't been over to Maureen Crisp's blog recently, you should. She's had some excellent and most useful links in recent weeks.