Pep talk: Why writing and writers matter

Photo by Kevin Maillefer.

In my previous post, I wrote about how creating the worlds, characters, and stories that resonate with you is the first step towards developing novels that feel believable to, and engaging for, your prospective readers. During this season of good cheer, I want to shift that focus to the importance of writing, full stop. After all, nearly every writer, whether aspiring or published, must grapple with the doubts that plague creatives: Why am I doing this? Does what I make matter? Does the world really need more novels (or art or music)? Should I have become a doctor like my parents wanted?

Photo by Kevin Goodrich.

Putting that last question aside, here are a few things to keep in mind when doubt (or existential dread) hits, especially during the long nights of winter.

Literary fiction improves emotional intelligence and may promote empathy

As reported in Scientific American, a 2013 study by social psychologist Emanuele Castano and then-PhD candidate David Kidd at New York’s New School found that subjects were more capable of interpreting and understanding other people’s emotions after reading excerpts of literary fiction than those participants who read genre fiction, non-fiction, or nothing.

According to the researchers, this is probably because literary fiction, which uses ambiguously written characters and focuses on the complexities of psychology and relationships, often forces readers “to fill in the gaps to understand [characters’] intentions and motivations.” In contrast, popular fiction is typically populated by clear, consistent characters that lead those stories through exciting journeys to predictable ends. As a result, genre fiction rarely forces the reader to work to understand characters’ minds and tends to confirm, rather than challenge, our assumptions about behavior.

Because the abilities to identify and understand emotions in others are key components of empathy, Castano and Kidd’s study may also be interpreted as showing how literary fiction does, in fact, promote empathy along with success in navigating complex social relationships.

Of course, these conclusions are a little hard on genre fiction, which contains a wider range of psychological subtlety than this study reflects. For writers, it might be more helpful to think of the results this way: forcing readers to think deeply and critically about complex characters’ motivations and states of mind fosters greater interpersonal understanding in the world at large. And our world could definitely use more empathy.

See the researchers’ in-depth article on the relationship between literary fiction and Theory of Mind, originally published in Science (October 2013), here.

We all need a little escape sometimes

Alright, so literary fiction improves the world by making its readers better people. Cool. But where does that leave popular fiction?

Well, first off, fiction of all kinds offers readers something everyone needs: an opportunity to de-stress. According to a 2009 study summarized in the Telegraph, reading is actually the best way to relax, even beating out walking and listening to music. And the result is physiological as well as psychological. Reading for as little as six minutes relieved tensions in the muscles and heart.

According to cognitive neuropsychologist Dr. David Lewis, "It really doesn't matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author's imagination.

"This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness."

At this point, we all know how seriously chronic stress can affect our health, leading to disease and even premature death. So consider this: your novel could help people cope with their stresses and thereby help extend their lives.

Empathy, the sequel (or, Genre fiction strikes back)

A 2014 study with elementary, high school, and college students reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology under the title, “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” successfully demonstrated how reading Harry Potter “improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups,” specifically immigrants, homosexuals, and refugees. Essentially, by portraying otherwise marginalized peoples in sympathetic ways and making prejudice a major characteristic of the series’s villain, the books fostered empathy in their readers towards these marginalized groups. As such, Harry Potter not only illustrates a way in which genre stories can contribute to fostering more inclusive societies, but also exemplifies the importance of incorporating thoughtfully-written diversity—and the consequences of prejudice—in our books.

Fiction makes us smarter

It should be a no-brainer that reading improves vocabulary and our understanding of language. Like other forms of cognitive activity, it also improves memory, and helps to reduce memory loss and other forms of cognitive decline later in life.

But more impressive is the way reading fiction (again, even more than non-fiction) can improve other cognitive functions. According to the authors of a 2013 study from the University of Toronto entitled “Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure,” the “need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality.” By assessing the participants’ need for cognitive closure after having them read either short stories or short non-fiction essays, the researchers found that those who read fiction “experienced a significant decrease in self-reported need for cognitive closure.” These results were most significant for those subjects who were already habitual readers. The researchers therefore concluded that reading fiction “could lead to better procedures of processing information generally, including those of creativity.”

Photo by Jakob Owens.

So, in summary, fiction—YOUR fiction—has the ability to make those who read it healthier, smarter, kinder, more rational, and more creative. In so doing, our books can help form a better, more inclusive and empathetic society. If those aren’t good enough reasons to keep writing, well, your standards might be too high.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Christmas is almost upon us, and I have work to finish, gifts to wrap, and New Year’s resolutions to make.

Happy Holidays!

Write your best novel by writing YOUR best novel

Photo by Trevor Cole

There are many reasons to write. Maybe you have a specific story or idea wriggling away inside of you that just needs to get out. Maybe you want to put hard-earned writing skills to use. Maybe you simply need to write, the way others need to run or draw or play. But wherever your motivation originates, chances are you ultimately aspire to some kind of social recognition and economic reward for all your work.

In the hope of achieving these goals, most people will at least consider writing to suit their imagined audience. Some aspects of this impulse—when it comes to articulating clearly, building a well-rounded world, creating complex characters, finding an original concept, and understanding how their work fits into their chosen genre—are necessary concerns that truly can determine a novel’s success.

Crucially, however, all of these useful concerns revolve around how to best bring your ideas to life for your aspirational audience. None of them are about pandering to fads or other assumptions about what an audience may or may not want. Making that particular leap from trying to best communicate your ideas to your audience to trying to write content for your audience can be a deadly one, as it typically results in a story and characters neither the author nor the reader will care about.

So, if you are considering writing a novel with a female protagonist because someone told you that’s easier to sell, but you have no particular interest in writing a female protagonist, then don’t write a female protagonist. Same deal when it comes to race, sexuality, ability, non-binary identities, and non-European cultures.

Likewise, if you don’t enjoy reading or writing romantic or erotic subplots, don’t force one into your novel just because many readers like them.

If you want to write literary fiction but think you have a better shot at getting a YA horror novel published…well, maybe see how drafting the YA novel feels. Sometimes genre experimentation can lead to great and unexpected experiences! But if it just isn’t working for you, get back to your real passion and don’t look back.

Trying to force yourself or your characters to follow one of these “trends” will almost always come across as inauthentic, if not insulting, to your readers. But if you are writing what matters—truly, deeply, matters—to you, then your book has a real chance of resonating with an audience who cares about those things too.

Focusing on your own ideas/concerns/perspective is especially important in your first draft, where the core of your novel is formed. From there, your readers, editor, agent, and publisher may suggest you incorporate additional elements to better round-out your story, world, and characters. This is the point—when you have specific feedback available to guide your craft and the basic elements of your vision are already well-established—at which stretching beyond your initial comfort zone and pushing into the realm of the unconsidered and non-personal is most likely to benefit the final novel you will ultimately share with the world.

So just remember: When building your novel, always write for yourself and to your audience.

This is not to say you shouldn’t take specific feedback or the realities of the field to heart. But at the end of the day, good books are honest books, and that honesty has to come from you.

How to avoid annoying your editor (and get better feedback as a result)

Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw

do your due diligence before submitting

An editor is essentially a well-trained second set of eyes whose purpose is to catch the things you can’t. The manuscript you send to your editor should therefore be the version that represents how far you are capable of taking your work on your own. Ideally, this means you have

1) finished a full draft of your ms

2) revised that draft

3) sent the revised draft to beta readers

4) revised again based on the readers’ feedback

5) run spellcheck and checked formatting one last time

before sending your book to a professional.

Even after the ms has gone through all that, there will still be plenty for your editor to suggest and correct. However, doing your due diligence upfront should not only decrease the number of paid edits your book needs, but will also save your editor the concussion that comes from banging her head against a wall when faced with the easily avoidable, careless errors of a poorly self-edited ms.

Be upfront about anything that might impede your ability to write or Self-edit, as well as anything that might affect your content

Years before becoming an independent editor, I was an annoyingly thorough college-level grader. Since then, I’ve found that much of the advice I once gave to my students also applies to the writers I work with. The most widely applicable of these wisdom-nuggets is to be upfront about anything that might affect your writing and its content. If I know a writer is vision impaired, for example, I will have significantly more patience when his/her manuscript is littered with commas where there should be periods—or vice versa—than I would be otherwise. The same goes for those writing in a second language.

Similarly, it is also helpful to know whether clients are writing from their own experience. If you are writing a main character with a particular mental disorder, knowing how much first-hand knowledge you have of that disorder will help your editor know how much to question your presentation of that character. Likewise, if you are writing from the perspective of a particular culture, it helps to know if you are either from that culture or if you have spent significant time in/studying that culture. Your editor should want to respect your point of view, and if she feels you’re an expert on a subject, she probably won’t question that expertise unless it seems absolutely necessary.

Make the changes your editor asked for before sending a draft back to her

Obviously, no one wants to redo work they’ve already done, just as no one wants to do work for people who don’t take their own writing seriously enough to do what’s necessary to improve it. More than that, though, it’s important to keep in mind that editing is really a refining process, and the edits for each draft clear the way for a new set of issues to show up and be corrected. When changes that need to be made aren’t, this process is both stalled and imperiled.

Of course, your editor may suggest changes you decide are not best and/or appropriate for your work. In these cases, you should discuss your reasoning with her. Not only will this help her understand your choices in these specific instances, but it will help her better understand your perspective as a writer in a way that should improve the kind of feedback she gives you in subsequent drafts and manuscripts.

Learn from your previous edits

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then the surest way to make otherwise sane editors feel crazy is to make them correct the same mistakes over and over. If, for instance, the first ms you give to your editor is full of sentence fragments that she carefully corrects for you, make sure your subsequent manuscripts are drastically fragment-reduced, if not completely fragment free. If you instead decide not to learn from your previous mistakes and treat your editor like a garbage dump for lazy writing, be prepared for increasingly harsh feedback or for her to stop working with you altogether.

Besides, why wouldn’t you want to write the best book possible and save yourself significant time and money by avoiding what should be unnecessary revisions?

In summary

Basically, what all of this boils down to is just another version of the Golden Rule: treat your editors with the respect you want them to show you and your work. Remember that, even in the best of circumstances, editing is an extremely time-consuming, painstaking process done by fallible humans. The more problems your ms possesses, or the more additional frustrations you add to the process, the less complete—and kind—their feedback will be. On the other hand, the more effort you put into your own work and the more openly you communicate with your editor, the better her feedback can be and the more willing she will be to go the extra mile for you.