Moms Who Write: Step Three–Learning the Craft

Congratulations, you’ve been writing your heart out and you’ve been dipping your feet in the vast whirlpool that is the publishing industry.

Here’s what you’ll do next. I know, because I’ve been there.  You’ll get bogged down in your first chapter/first blog/first sentence. You’ll get stuck. You’ll start writing about the trees, and you’ll lose sight of the forest.

It’s okay. It’s what newbie writers do. But it’s a stage you need to get past if you’re ever going to get your writing into the hands of readers.

You need to learn craft.  Craft is beyond sentences and words. It’s also structure and theory. In my experience, would-be writers are often naturally good at the sentences and words, but not so much on the structure and theory.

There are a million craft books out there. Which is the best one? That’s easy—whichever one works best for you. Every writer has her own specific weakness. Maybe it’s plotting. Maybe it’s grammar. Maybe it’s character. You won’t know what it is until you start reading craft books and seeing which ones help you and which ones just seem silly.

My biggest weakness is plotting. For a long time, I swore by Deb Dixon’s Goal, Motivation Conflict. Excellent book to start with. It changed everything for me.

But my plotting was so bad, it wasn’t enough. My next big find was Christopher Vogler’s, The Writer’s Journey. I have this book memorized I’ve read it so many times.

Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat was another excellent plotting book. This is a screenwriting book, but it works for other kinds of story-building as well.

But the book that changed my writing life was Stanley D. William’s The Moral Premise. Again, a screenwriting book. But Williams has so many amazing things to say about story structure, I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re really stuck in a book, I promise that Williams can set you free.

But these are just my books. You might find that these books don’t speak to your issues at all.  I know writers who swear by books that did nothing for me. I think you have to try everything you can get your hands on.  You never know where the nugget is that will open your eyes to whatever it is that’s holding you back.

While you’re learning from books, be sure you also learn from other people.  You need a critique group. If you want to learn to write a romance novel, boy are you in luck. There are 10,000 amazing women ready and willing to teach you everything you need to know from the Romance Writers of America. (http://rwanational.org)  There’s nothing like it in the writing world. Find your local chapter, and get started. You won’t be sorry.

If romance isn’t your thing, look for any local writing group. It takes time and experimentation to find the right people for you, but it’s worth the effort. No one can judge her own writing. You need help.

Tomorrow: But can I make any money at this?

An Open Letter to Dara-Lynn Weiss, the New “Mean Mommy” Who Put Her Seven-Year-Old on a Diet, Described Every Gory Detail in April’s Vogue Magazine, and Now Has a Book Deal (Working Title: The Heavy):

Dear Dara-Lynn,

In your article for Vogue, you wrote about how you put your “obese” daughter Bea on a draconian diet that included public shaming and carefully-controlled-by-mommy meals. She was seven years old, four-foot-four, and 93 pounds.

I won’t pile on to the criticism of your diet and its methods. Slate.com pretty much sums up my thoughts in their article, Is concern with childhood obesity about health or beauty? Bea herself also summed up my feelings quite nicely in Vogue when she tried to tell you, “I’m not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds.” You argue with her until tears “run down her beautiful cheek.”

It’s all been said on the Internets. I have nothing to add.

But what I’d like to weigh in on (so to speak) is that book you’re planning to write about your daughter’s struggle with her weight, The Heavy.

Please think twice before you write a book about your child while your child is still a child. No seven-year-old (or eight or nine or etc…) can give you permission to make their private life public. They’re too young.

A few facts about writing a non-fiction book about a child:  All their friends WILL read it. All the parents of their friends WILL read it. All their teachers WILL read it. All their enemies WILL read it. Let’s not even get started on the college admission committees and the hiring committees.

When the last “mean mommy,” Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her children were teens. She let them read and edit it. They discussed it. They revised it. They were old enough and educated enough to understand.

When I wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Daughter, my fifteen-year-old wrote half the chapters. The chapters I wrote, she read with a red pencil in her hand and she was not afraid to use it. The rule was, she had veto power over every word.

Can an eight-year-old exercise such power? Can she understand the consequences of what goes out into the world about her?

There’s more than age at issue here. How tough is your daughter? How confident is she at dealing with difficult social situations? When friends and relatives (my first readers) expressed concerns about certain parts in  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Daughter, I would remind them that this was Hana we were talking about. Her hair is blue (well, at the moment, purple). She wore homemade unicorn hoodies to middle school. She went fearlessly by herself to school dances and other social events. She even confronted bullies who were attacking other children. This was a child who marched to the beat of her own drummer. She didn’t give a %#$# what anyone thought of her.

How’s Bea at all that?

I hope she on board. I hope she’s thrilled that you’ll be telling her story to the world. I hope that you and your husband have discussed thoroughly the moral and ethical issues around this book and decided that the world needs this book despite the pain and shame it may cause your family, especially your young daughter. I even truly hope that we’ve entered an age of so much public disclosure on Facebook and reality television, that I’m totally off base, and Bea is thrilled at all the attention. Your book will be for her just be a drop in the great big sea of over-exposure that is modern life.

But I doubt it. So, Ms. Weiss, please put your daughter’s feelings and issues before your career and your pocketbook. The silent star of the book is your child. Your very, very young child who has a very, very public weight problem.

She’s already got a lot on her plate (sorry). I hope you know what you’re doing when you pile on even more.

Yours warmly and with compassion,

Diana

How to Make a Killer Book Cover: Or, How I was Humbled by a Fourteen-year-old

Readers always judge a book by its cover.  As a former advertising professional with an understanding of brand and the unconscious motivators of humans, I knew this. And yet, when it came time to design my own book cover I made every single mistake in the book.

Then, with great humility and pain, one by one I fixed them.

Mistake Number One

“I can totally do this myself.”

Sure, I don’t have a ‘real’ art background. But fifteen years in advertising agencies working with some of the best designers in the business meant I knew how to work the software (sort of) and understood all the buzzwords like pixels and dpi (more or less).

Plus, I had exquisite taste. What could possibly go wrong?

How about this:

My daughter took one look at this cover and said, “It looks like something from the 80’s that you’d see in the twenty-five cent bin at a garage sale and you wouldn’t buy it because it’s hideous.”

My God. She was right. I had produced a totally adequate, absolutely sucky book cover. How had I let myself do that? And how did I not even notice?

“It’s all over the place,” she went on. “It’s like you don’t know where to look. Everything is glimmering and askew and the colors….”

Right.

Plus, I had committed the number one sin of sucky book covers: it had no concept. I had been in advertising for cripes sake. I knew the number one rule of picture + text: they must create a story. So besides the fact that this book cover was hideously ugly, there was no story on this cover. The words and picture didn’t interact to create tension.

So I began to think concept.  What was the concept of Tiger Daughter? That the daughter is wiser than the mother. That successful parenting happens only when the mother steps out of the way to let the daughter discover her own passions and desires.

Thus, mistake #2

Mistake Number Two

Tone is everything.

The next cover was much better. I had a concept  I searched for stock.  I got a little better at InDesign and Photoshop. And I came up with this:

Whoa. Now we were getting somewhere.

Luckily, before I bought the stock, my daughter looked at it and said, ” Are you trying to sell a book to get kids to be criminals? It doesn’t really make any sense. I look like a hoodlum. I’d never spray paint over something. I hate graffiti.”

After being mad at my persnickety daughter for a day or so because this was one heck of an excellent concept with a pretty decent execution if I do say so myself, I realized she was right.

Which leads me to mistake number two: don’t ignore tone. The concept of this cover was spot-on, but the tone was off. Tone is everything.

I knew exactly how to fix this. But I couldn’t find the stock. And if I couldn’t find the stock, I’d have to shoot the photo, which would be expensive.

Ah, mistake number three…

Mistake Number Three

“I really don’t want to spend a fortune on this cover.”

I thought about this for a long time before I decided that I had to hire a professional photographer if we were going to get the cover we wanted.

Luckily, I go a few times a week to our local college library to get some writing done. By chance, I picked up the college student-produced magazine. Hey, this stuff wasn’t bad. So I emailed the student whose work I really admired, and we had our picture fast, inexpensively, and with no hassle.

Thus, we didn’t fall for mistake number three–spending too much or too little for your cover.

And we ended up with this:

Perfect.

A cover with a concept. A cover with the exact right tone. A cover that’s been selling beautifully.

I couldn’t be more thrilled.

When you write a parenting book…

Buy it now at Amazon.com

 

Writing a parenting book has been an exciting adventure. And a surprising one.

One of the biggest surprises has been who our competition is. I thought I’d be up against psychologists. I thought I’d be up against PhDs.

No.

It’s much, much worse than that.

We’re up against Tori Spelling.

Yep, that’s right, Tori Spelling. She of 90210 fame (if you’re of an *ahem* certain age).  It seems that Tori Spelling has written not one but TWO parenting books.

 

The first of Tori’s books is called uncharted terriTORI.  I have no idea what this means, but it’s currently #12 on Amazon.com’s top mothering books. Her second book is called MOMMYWOOD.  You have to see this one to believe it:

 

Still don’t believe it?

Me neither.

In any case, BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER DAUGHTER has gone as high as #9 on the Amazon.com Motherhood list, but Tori–damn her and her green bubble dress!–keeps beating us back.

Am I going to have to read her book(s)?

Please, say it ain’t so!