Thirty minutes on my experience as a novelist

for a presentation at Lake Michigan College, 10/31/14

Props: One of the moleskines (probably Mulligan's Daughters), and all 5 of the print editions.

• My name is Tommie Lee, and I write novels. I have put out five of them, am working on a sixth, and have two others that I’ve played around with on and off for the last year, as well. I also have a small collection of short stories, and I write a weekly column about the Chicago Blackhawks for Federated Media’s sports website The Fan Indiana.

• My novels are mostly adventure stories, but I’ve also dabbled in horror and futuristic medical fiction, of all things. All of my books need a good polish and have far too many commas in them because I’ve never hired a professional editor.

• I was invited to come and talk to you today about my experiences as a novelist. I wish I had stories of big sales and professional publishing houses to share with you. I do not, but I’ve also never attempted to get that, either. I’m one of those guys with a small audience who pretty much writes to entertain himself, his wife, and the same 40 or 50 people who buy each of my books. I gain a few people with each book, so I figure I must be getting a little better.

• I’ll give you the short version of how I got to here. I’ve been typing out stories for over 30 years now.

• Someone far more talented than I am once said writers do two things, and they do them as often as they possibly can. They read, and they write. Both are equally important.

• I read almost constantly in my spare time, but only one out of every four books or so is fiction. I like to treat the real world as research, so I want to absorb as much nonfiction as I can whether I’m working on a story or not.

• Someone else…Hemmingway, I believe…once said “the first million words don’t count.”

• I got the writing of those first million words out of the way pretty early. I started working on my earliest novels at the age of 12. All of them sucked. I played with the books on and off for the next nine years. They continued to suck.

• When I was 21…I finally finished one. It was called The Christmas Project, and it was about the breakup of the Soviet Union. One month after I finished it, Yeltsin led the revolution. At the end of the year…Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union broke up. My novel was instantly dated. I tried to rework it, but gave up. The most important thing that came from that book was that I learned the style I wanted to write in, and the style I didn’t want to write in.

• In my 20s I became very serious about two ideas and pursued each of them for a few years. When I finally chose one over the other, I spent eight frustrating years trying to make the story work. That book, which I never finished, taught me humility. It taught me not to take myself so seriously, and that just because I loved an idea didn’t mean that an audience would…or that the idea itself was one that could work.

• A few ideas came and went in my 30s, two of which I would finally write years later, some of which worked better as the short stories they eventually morphed into. This taught me how to recognize an idea and find the ways to expand them. Some ideas are meant to wrap themselves up in 9,000 words. Others need 90,000. I began to notice that the strength of an idea and my own particular style of writing will dictate which is which. Trying to force a story that just doesn’t have the legs to carry itself is only going to lead to frustration, discouragement, and self-loathing.

• It wasn’t until I hit my 40s that I finally started putting out finished products that I felt comfortable sharing with the rest of the world. I’ll get to those in a minute. Relax: I’m not here to sell them.

• Where do the ideas come from? That’s the question I get asked the most by both readers and people who want to write. Most of the writers I see interviewed say they don’t know. I disagree. I think ideas come from everywhere.

• I work in radio and the news in my day job. To me, every minute of every day is show prep time. Everything that happens, everything I see, or read, or hear about…it all gets run through a filter to see if I can make it relate to my audience.

• By the same token, everything also gets scrutinized in the fiction part of my head. This is where I take a new piece of information and twist it. If something perfectly mundane happened that somehow struck a spark with me, there is a piece of my mind that wonders what slight change would have made that event more interesting. If something happened in the news that could have been much worse, that part of my mind wonders how much worse, what would have caused the change…and who would have had to deal with the consequences. Then I wonder about that person or group of people, and I start to develop characters.

• If the idea seems to have merit and I want to pursue it, I start the note process.

• I am addicted to these tiny little Moleskine notebooks. Every book I’ve written and several I haven’t are born in my horrible little handwriting in these books. This one is for my 4th novel, Mulligan’s Daughters, which was a sequel to my first novel.

• A lot of authors talk about “character bibles” as an important part of their process. They break down every single noteworthy characteristic about each person in the story. What color are her eyes? Which arm is he missing a hand on? Does he speak with an accent? Does she wear cheap perfume or does she smell like the wind coming off the ocean? You get the idea. Anything that I might want to reference again later on needs to be mapped out. Otherwise, I’ll be buried in continuity problems that my usual beta readers…my only real editors…will have to catch.

• By the way…find at least two Beta Readers. These need to be people you respect who will be brutally honest with you. One of mine is my wife, who reads more than I do. She’s the person who can very honestly point at a section of the book and say “Why should I care about this?” and make me really think about it. Just because I get it in my own head doesn’t mean I explained it properly or set it up. Just because I think a section is really cool doesn’t mean it belongs in the book at that point, or at all. She helps me see that. My second editor is a librarian who also reads constantly. She’s my grammar boss. She’s the one who gets on me about my use of commas. I have a serious Oxford Comma addiction. They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. Between the two of them, the clay I come up with starts to turn into something that might be worth selling to people. I won’t put out a book that they haven’t put their own stamp on.

• It’s usually best that you don’t give your Beta Readers anything to read until you have a finished draft. Otherwise, they won’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish. I break this rule all the time with my wife and it probably irritates her more than she admits.

• Make sure you’re ready to share the story with your Beta Readers. I don’t want my Beta Readers getting caught up in glaring mistakes. I want them focused on the story. As a writer I feel that I have a responsibility to make sure everything makes sense, so I have to pay close attention to the process. In this case, I also added photos of clipped from magazines of what I thought the characters looked like.

• This is where it starts to sound ridiculous to most people. I have to treat all of the main characters as friends of mine. Friends that I want to get invested in. I need to know everything about them, and I need to care about them. If you don’t care enough about your characters to really get to know them, you have no hope of ever getting a reader to care about them, either. That’s another thing that took me a while to figure out.

• Most important of all is the process itself. The flow of words is the thing in the beginning. To start with, I’m of the opinion that quantity is more important than quality when you’re first starting out. The key to writing is simple: It’s WRITING. Keep putting words on the paper. If you repeat yourself, that’s okay. You’re exploring a new way to tell the same information. My first draft of my first novel was 130,000 words. I hacked 21 thousand words and three characters out of it before I was happy enough with it to finally leave it alone. The first draft took me 10 months. The second draft took me three years to finally let go of.

• The novel you write is like a child. After a while you have to let it go out into the world and do its own thing.

• Don’t expect to be good. And don’t expect to be a success. I have six titles for sale and only one of them…the most recent one…is anywhere close to what I’d consider good enough to submit to a publishing house. Whether or not it’s a lack of initiative on my part, or even a lack of courage, is open for debate. I have family members who swear I should be submitting all of my books. Again…these are family members. They’re supposed to think that way.

• When you finish your first draft, you do not have a novel yet. A house doesn’t just appear: It requires sheet rock and lumber and glass for windows and so on. Your first draft is the raw materials that you will build your novel out of. Once I have the framework of my story figured out…the first draft…that’s when I start going through it paragraph by paragraph, figuring out how to make it flow. Always remember that you are your own worst critic. Assume that if it doesn’t look right to you, it won’t look right to an audience. To me, that’s how I always put out something that represents who I am.

• And who I am is a tiny fish in a very big pond.

• I self-publish because it suits me. It’s easy and if you go through places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble it’s also free. I’m a firm believer that I should never pay anyone to publish my book. There are companies out there like Xlibris that will sell you publishing packages with professional cover design and websites and so on. Some of these packages run into thousands of dollars. The first novelist I ever met who spent that money ended up with 300 copies of his own novel that he sells any way he can.

• Amazon…the Dark Lord of Marketing…offers an alternative to that scenario. Amazon however, like everything in the world, has good and bad to it and you need to do your homework when you’re getting ready to put your book out.

• Amazon will offer you an amazing deal called Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP. It has a number of bells and whistles including more of your royalties, some of their promotional effort, and more. However, one of the stipulations is that Kindle becomes the only platform you can sell your ebooks on. Do you have a NOOK? So do a lot of people…and they can’t read your book anymore. This has become less important in the last couple of years, now that free apps for Kindle can fit in your pocket. However, something about putting all of my eggs in one basket never appealed to me. I self-publish ebooks at three places: Smashwords (who have the most cost-effective way to go), Barnes & Nobles’ PubIt! System, and Amazon Createspace for Kindle. I also do my print books from Amazon, because it’s cheaper.

• With Amazon you also retain the rights to your book. Do a little homework and find the difference between publisher and author and distributor. You can act as all three if you wish, but having Amazon distribute your stuff means they make your book more accessible to an audience. Yes, it also means they get a cut of your royalties. How much of a cut is up to you based on how many of their services you want to make use of. To Amazon’s credit, they lay it all out and explain it. As much as I don’t care for the idea of their KDP program, I can tell you that I’ve been very happy with the way Amazon puts out my product without it. And you have the option to not use KDP. With my second novel, I was also able to partner up with a local book store on the campus of Notre Dame and sell it there (some of the book takes place there). I bought the copies at my discount and split the sales with the bookstore. A couple of copies are still on the racks there, two years later, next to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. That kind of blows my mind. When you own the rights, you are free to do that no matter who distributes your books.

• I design my own covers using Amazon’s CreateSpace program at their website. It costs me nothing and it gives me something I can be happy with. The cover of your book is very important to its chances of getting noticed, and it’s one area where I can see making an investment if you’re going to make a serious run at getting published (the other being a real editor). Again, for my purposes, I like what I can make myself at Amazon with my limited design abilities. My wife shoots most of my cover photos after I stage them. The cover for my first novel involved spilling spoiled red wine in the snow behind our house to look like a blood trail. It was fun. The sequel to that book had a beach cover, which we shot with our daughter and two of her friends over at Silver Beach one afternoon. Sadly, I didn’t bring a copy of my most recent book with me, which has the best cover we’ve done so far, in my opinion. If you do a search on The Rift by Tommie Lee at Amazon, you can see it…but you have to remember to spell my name with an “ie” instead of “y”.

• (Questions?)

• Going back to the creative process for a moment…tomorrow begins something called National Novel Writing Month, which happens every November via NaNoWriMo dot org. Different people will give you different opinions about NaNoWriMo. For starters, for those who don’t know, NaNo challenges you to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 16 hundred 66 words a day.

• Keep in mind that you’re not writing a novel in 30 days, and you’ll be okay. What you’re doing is tacking up 50,000 words of a rough draft. Too many people write 50,000 words and then self-publish what they assume is a finished product because they were winners in this crazy November word-sprint. This results in a ton of really, really bad self-published books flooding the market every year, which makes it more difficult for self-pubs who actually put a lot of time and effort into their books to ever be taken seriously, because they find themselves lumped in with the lower-quality stuff. My greatest fear as a writer is that I’m one of the former group, rather than the latter.

• I recommend that everyone try NaNo once. It’s an excellent way to push yourself and see how creative you can be under a deadline. The pressure of putting the words on the page every single day for a month can inspire amazing creativity. There were days I contributed very little to my project. There were other days where I would add 5000 words in a day because I got into a zone. That happened twice when I worked on The Mayor of Seventeenth Avenue two Novembers ago. That was my second NaNo project, and I broke 50,000 words with it. My first attempt was the year before, Chair de ma Chair, and I “won” the NaNoWriMo that year as well by hitting 50,000 words in 30 days or less.

• What do you win if you finish NaNo? There are a handful of small prizes, but one of the best parts is that you will get six free printed copies of your finished book at Amazon Createspace, which you can do with as you wish. That doesn’t sound like much…but depending on how long your book is, author copies can really add up when you order them. And everyone has at least a few people they want to drop a free book on. To a cheap person like me, it’s worth doing NaNo every year just to get the free books. I skipped it last year because I had just finished a very long book, The Rift, and needed a break.

• After taking last year off I do plan on starting a book tomorrow, a sequel to The Rift. I have a lot of the book mapped out, but none of it written. I’ve been plotting and researching for a couple of months now in anticipation. It’s a head-start without starting early.

• Another way to do it is take a book you’ve already started, and try to add 50,000 words to it. I know a few people who do this.

• I also know that if I do manage to write the 50,000 words, I’ll still have a long way to go before I have a novel. However, I still recommend joining NaNo if you’re just getting started for a couple of reasons. The community is filled with some crazy, attention-starved people, sure…like any other website has. But it also has some successful novelists in it, most of them in management positions. They talk on the forums and give encouragement, suggestions on improving your chances to win the month, and so on. There are even genre-specific forums and local forums where you can talk to people who are going through the same thing you are. On Twitter, there are accounts like NaNoWordSprints that have exercises all the time that will help you boost your creative process. In Northern Indiana we also have a very active NaNo community who meet at the University Park Mall and other places every week to write and discuss ideas and encourage each other.

• All the tools and encouragement in the world don’t mean anything, though, if you aren’t motivated to sit and write. You have to want it to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s like quitting smoking. Anyone who has done it will tell you that it doesn’t happen until you’re finally ready to do it.

• Put 50,000 words on a document in a month and you’ll be happy that you accomplished it. Whether you end up using most of them or not, that’s a hell of a start. My first NaNo book ended up being slightly longer than that when it was published…still far shorter than most publishers will consider, but I’m not interested in showing it to them anyway. I call it one of my “short novels” and I leave it at that.

• Most publishers want something between 70 and 100,000 words. That sounds daunting, but if you plan it out, you can get there. It’s all about how you prepare, and how you execute. You will find your own style. You can talk to other writers about how they do it. You can also find books about writing by several successful authors, like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre or Janet Evanovich’s How I Write. I recommend those. They’re a great way to see how the pros do it.

• Some people use outlines. Some people use software like Scrivener. I just slip on my headphones with my little notebooks and some nice loud music and disappear for a little while a few nights each week. My wife tolerates this as long as I also remember that I’m married and should, you know; interact with her once in a while, too. You will eventually find the method that works best for you. My first finished novel…the one way back in 1991…was written with a cigar and half a bottle of chardonnay every night for a few months. It’s probably why I hate chardonnay now…and why that book was never published.

• As I mentioned about eight hours of my rambling ago…writers not only write a lot, but they read a lot. You should always be reading the people you like. Borrow from how they structure thoughts. Don’t steal…but adapt. I love Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett but I know better than to try and write like them, because I can’t. But I can get weird every now and then in a story because they’ve inspired me to do so.

• Motivate yourself however you need to. Start with an idea and start monkeying around with the different directions it can go in. Always remember that this is your book, and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want with it. Make it interesting and surprising. Sometimes in the writing process you will even surprise yourself. Mulligan was supposed to be about a guy named David, and he is the main character for the most part. The more I wrote it, however, it turned out that another character named Yuri was just as vital to the storyline. When I did the sequel, Yuri was a lot more important that David was. It just worked out that way. To this day, Yuri remains my favorite character that I’ve ever written. He has more complexity than almost anyone else in my books, more conflict between right and wrong than just about anyone. I also love writing him. To me he’s a cross between Marko Ramius from Tom Clancy and the guys who created the atomic bomb. Tortured by his genius, his guilt, and his desire to leave the planet a little better than he found it.

• Work hard and you’ll be rewarded. If your first attempts fall short, shrug them off but learn from them. Some of my early failed books might still try to come back later, now that I know how to build them more efficiently. Who knows? I’ve thought about writing a novel about radio for ages, and I’ve taken a couple of stabs at it that I wasn’t happy with. Today is actually my 26th anniversary in the radio business. I have so many strange but true stories about radio that there has to be a way to knit some of them together into a book someday.

• The challenge there, as it is with all of the books I’ve written, is finding time. The real radio job keeps me from having a lot of free time to write, especially now that I wake up at 3:30 in the morning now. You will find the same problem: That pesky problem of having to eat and make money. The real world does everything it can to step on your writing time. So take your writing time seriously. Stay off Facebook. Minimize your distractions. WANT to write more than you want to do anything else at that point.

• If you stick with it, you just might have the chance to one day walk into a book store and buy a copy of your own book. And then, to be funny, you can autograph it to yourself…and cherish it forever as a symbol of what you’ve accomplished. I can tell you that after trying to create a book for many years…nothing prepared me for the feeling of holding a physical copy of my printed, bound book in my hands. When I got my first review proof in the mail…I couldn’t let go of it for a couple of hours. I carried it all over the house.

• I hope every one of you gets to experience that feeling in the near future.

• I leave you with this piece of advice. Don’t let anyone tell you that your stuff is horrible and you should quit. Keep writing anyway. Write for yourself if you want to write. Keep writing and rewriting until it starts to turn into something you can be really proud of. If you don’t like it, do something else. They’re your words. Make them do what you want. And listen to the people around you who read and write. They can help you get better at this. Don’t take any criticism personally, but take it to heart. It’s a process, and it never ends. I’m still learning how to write after 32 years. I’ll never fully figure it out.