writers Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

This is why I write

I stepped into my office today with dawn like a knife slash in the east, the light seeped through like pale orange and yellow blood. The crescent moon hung shining silver in the black branches of the tallest tree, as if night and day hung poised, so that it was both at the same time. It was both beautiful and terrible, somehow. I’ve thought that the last few mornings that I’ve seen my office this early. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write this blog. Initially, it was to grow my audience, my brand, to sell more books; but I think most of what I gained in those areas has happened already. The blog probably did most of its original purpose years ago when I was trying to do one daily for a year. So, why do I write this blog? What’s it for? Honestly, I’m no longer certain, but I know one thing that hurts me as a writer in every area, and that is not writing about things. The more secrets I have to keep, the more editing of my life I do, the harder it is to write the blog (which makes a certain sense) but also makes it more difficult to write anything.

My personal life is very separate from my fiction and yet there is some mystical connection that, even after all this time, I don’t understand but I know that it is there, and I know when I do not honor that connection my ability to write suffers. So what haven’t I been saying publicly that’s clogging up the creative pipeline?

Jonathon’s mother, Mary, had cancer this year. She’s gotten a clean bill of health now, but it took chemo to get her there. If you’ve ever seen anyone go through chemo, you know it will take time to heal the effects of the cure. I got her permission to talk about her illness a while back, but it somehow seemed too personal to her to put it here, but if she’s okay with me talking about it, then why has it been something I didn’t want to talk about?

Jonathon buried his Aunt Sweetie just before Thanksgiving, so about two weeks ago. She helped raise him, and when he talks about her it’s more like a second mother than an aunt. She lost her battle with cancer after over twenty years and several remissions. The family is devastated and still reeling as they deal with it. I will miss her, but I don’t have the decades of connection to her that they do. She was not my sister, or my childhood hero, so my loss is seen through the patina of theirs, and my major worry is for those left behind and how they are dealing with it. Aunt Sweetie was ready to go, and her faith gave her peace, so there should be no tears, and yet there are.

Today we will be going to another funeral for a friend’s father, who died suddenly, but his health had been poor for most of the time I’d known the family, so it seems both sudden and inevitable. Our friend is forty, which seems young for burying your father.

The attacks in Paris, the attacks in California, people killed, and for what? To terrify people? To terrify the world? Because that’s what terrorism is, it is literally an attempt to frighten us all, to make us insecure and unsure of our safety. It is a war that kills a few people at a time in the hopes of demoralizing the rest of us. Don’t let them win. Live your lives, be happy, and keep moving, because to do anything else gives them a victory. They haven’t won anything, don’t act as if they have. I’ll admit it’s unnerving, but be hopeful, keep faith that good triumphs in the end. Dark times come, but they do not stay, history teaches us that.

There have been a lot of tragedies this year, both personally and in the larger world. There’s more, there’s always more, but somehow the theme of death and loss seems a thread this year that I can’t shake. But Jonathon’s mother is going to be alright, and that is a miracle of modern medicine. There is good among the bad, wins and not just losses, but sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on the positive when so much negative keeps happening. I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.

Why do I write this blog? Why do I write at all? In part, it’s to reach out to other people and say, “It’s going to be all right.” It’s a way of saying, none of us are alone. We’re in this together. I write fiction to help me make sense of the world and to share a good story, so that as you read my books you can forget the news headlines for a few hours. You can get lost in a good book, where the heroes usually triumph, the villains are punished, and the world is saved. Yes, fiction should make you think, but it should be first and foremost an escape from the mundane world. It should let you slip into a world more fantastic, and more openly magical than our own. That’s why I write my stories and novels. The blog is part explaining how I make that magic happen, and a glimpse into my own reality, so that the magic and the reality of my world brushes up against your own.

I am a storyteller. It is an ancient art. We used to sit in caves, huddled around the fire, listening to noises in the dark, afraid of what they might be, and someone would say, “Let me tell you a story,” and everyone would gather closer to the fire where they felt warm and safe, and they would forget the noises in the dark, listening to adventures. Now, I sit in my office and write words on a screen, that I’ll share with you soon. I’ll finish writing the blog, and continue to work on the latest novel, because you need a good story, and I need to be able to say, “Come, sit by the fire where you’ll be safe and warm, and let me share an adventure with you.”

My Three Best Pieces of Writing Advice

My best advice about writing is – write. Writers write. The more you write the better you’ll get at it. Writing is a skill and like any other skill from basketball to knitting, the more you practice the actual skill the better you get at the game, at making sweaters, or at writing stories. People treat writing as if it doesn’t require as much practice and dedication to craft as other things; why? I believe it’s because anyone can write. Anyone can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write. Anyone can sit down at a computer and type. The physicality of it is available to everyone who is literate and can read. If you know how to read, you can write something. It may not be a great piece of literature, but it’s words on paper and they’re right there in front of you. See – anyone can write, but not everyone can write well. That takes practice, dedication, and a lot of perseverance.

The above is the primary piece of how to be a writer, without it nothing else matters. But I’m about to give a second piece of advice that I’ve never put in a writing blog before because I didn’t realize how big a problem it was until recently. What is this new piece of advice? Stay off the internet. Yes, you read that right, stay off the internet. It’s a great tool for building a social network and promoting your work, and can be a good jumping off point for research. Never use other people’s websites as your only source for research, because most sites have no one policing them for veracity. Start on websites if you must, but don’t end there. That’s lazy research, which leads to lazy writing. It’s obvious that too much social media is like talking to your friends on the phone or having too many “business” lunches. It may all be helpful, even talking to friends can refresh you so you go back to writing with renewed vision, but if you do too much social anything it can hurt your productivity. Most writers can avoid picking up the phone and making a call, or going out the door to see people in person, but online socialization is harder to resist. It’s so easy to tell yourself, well I’ll just get on line for a few minutes; half an hour later and you’re still on line. I’ve done it myself. I’ve found that Pinterest and YouTube are especially time consuming for me. Twitter is easier, because there is a limit of 140 characters and then I’m done, or that’s how I felt at first. Now, I’m not so sure, because it’s also easy for me to think Twitter isn’t that big a time use, because of the individual messages being so short, but if I do too many short messages in a row, then it can add up to a lot of time. But what about promoting yourself and using social media as a business tool? It can be a very effective business tool, but not if you’re so busy trying to promote yourself and gain a larger online presence that you don’t get time to actually write. FaceBook was such a problem for me that I hired a media minion to post there, because I felt FB was too important to ignore, but it was also a huge time use that took away from my actual writing. I still do my own Twitter, but I’m trying to police myself better, because if I think its also taking too much time and attention, I may have to stop posting personally, which would be a shame since I enjoy Twitter.

I said time and attention above, and that second part is the other danger of the internet. I have found myself thinking, this, or that, would make a great tweet, or that would be a good blog. Now that’s all well and good, but if I find myself thinking about how to tweet, or Facebook, or blog, etc . . . and not about writing my novels, then something has gone wrong. The online media is supposed to support and promote my writing, not be more important than the writing, and if my first thought is what I’m going to tweet, Facebook, or blog, and not the novel I’m writing, then the social promotion is taking too much of my subconscious, and that part of my brain needs to be concentrated on writing my book. One of the most important tools for any writer is their subconscious. I know I’m in the zone for a novel when the book wakes me up early loud in my head with notes and the first few lines of the day. If I wake up thinking about any of my social media instead, then it hurts my ability to immerse myself in my novel, and immersion is what I need to be productive and make my deadlines. This leads me to the third piece of writing advice: Protect your prime writing time.

It will take some trial and error to figure out what your prime writing time is, and bear in mind it may change as you get older, or even with different books. Most writers have a time of day, or night, that they work best, once you find it, treat it like gold, because it is the time when your muse is talking the loudest to you. I work best first thing in the morning, let me add I wasn’t a morning person when I started writing like this, but over the years I’ve become one. I need to wake up and just go straight to my desk, if at all possible. I’m one of those writers that needs to not have anyone talk to me, or distract me in any way before I sit down at my desk in the morning. Anything more than tea before the first pages hurts my page count for the morning. The smallest interruption can disrupt me, and hurt, or even ruin, my morning writing session. I knew to avoid actual, in person people. I even wait to feed the dogs until after I’ve got a few pages for the day because if I take the time to take the dogs out, feed them, and then wait to take them out again, then I’m derailed. It’s the difference between sitting down at my desk ready to set the keyboard on fire, and sitting down at my desk with some of my energy spent, wasted on mundane things that could have waited for a few minutes. The dogs get a treat in my office while they wait for actual breakfast, and the dogs think that the office treat drawer is awesome. I’ve found that most of the mundane things that distract me from my desk first thing in the morning are all happy to wait until later; after I get my morning pages done.

So, in a nutshell: Writers write. Stay off the internet. Don’t let mundane things interfere with your prime writing time. Now, stop reading this blog and go write stories that only you can write.

New Blog – Jason, the novel, is here!

Today is the official on sale date for my latest book, Jason! It’s the newest Anita Blake novel, and the first original paperback since Micah, thus the title being the name of one of the leading characters in the book. My publisher and I are very into naming conventions. Before you ask, yes, I do have ideas for other short novels featuring other major, or even minor-major characters in Anita’s universe, but currently I’m finishing up the next hardback original for Anita and the gang, Dead Ice.

In fact, Dead Ice woke me at 5:20 this morning according to Spike, who is as light a sleeper as I am, so he was very aware when I tried to creep out of bed and not wake anyone else. Genevieve and Jon usually sleep very soundly, but I learned at lunch that even they knew when I got out of bed. One of the unforeseen downsides of being polyamorous is that when ideas wake you up at odd hours you disturb more people. Or maybe that’s a downside of sleeping with a writer, regardless of your relationship style.

The book was very loud in my head, I knew exactly what came next and exactly how to write the scene. I’d gone to bed knowing what came next, but not how to get from A to B, and suddenly I woke in the dark and I knew. I also knew I couldn’t wait to get to the computer and start typing it. I’ve learned that when inspiration knocks that loudly you need to answer it quickly, because otherwise you end up knowing you had this great idea, or the perfect way to work this scene, but now you can’t remember most of it, just a vague sense you lost the wave that would have carried you further in the book. I hate that feeling, so I was typing before dawn, trying to keep up with my muse. We’d done 12 pages yesterday, so to be this pumped again today was a very good sign that the book is gaining momentum.

I’m happiest as a writer when I’m writing fast. I joke that I write as if the monsters really are chasing me and if I hesitate too long they’ll catch me. For all of you reading this that are wondering why I didn’t give myself a day off to enjoy Jason coming out, well first, I spent many years on tour for every book. It sort of conditioned me that I didn’t get the on sale date off, and in fact traveling across the country to promote a book can be pretty grueling. My record for grueling is still 26 cities in 28 days, that book tour still lives in infamy for Jon and myself, because he traveled with me on every last day of it. We hadn’t met Genevieve and her husband, Spike, at that point.

It is a wonderful thing for a publisher to spend money to send a writer on a book tour, it really is. But I’ve done my time and it’s a blessing to stay home, too. Thanks to the internet there are so many ways to promote your book now that don’t make you get on a plane to travel the country. Because if we were on tour for Jason, I wouldn’t be writing on Dead Ice. I can write on planes, while I try to pretend that I’m not flying (Yes, I shared my fear of flying with Anita), but I lose the thread of a book when I tour. I know some writers can continue to write a new book through a tour, but I’ve never been one of them.

Being home I could take the day off and just enjoy that Jason is on the shelves, but I didn’t. Instead I did what writers do, I wrote. Writers write; that may sound simple, but a lot of beginning writers don’t seem to truly grasp the concept. Writers write when we’re happy. We write when we’re sad. We write when we’re inspired. We write in order to get inspired. We write when the outside world has moved us to spill some reality onto the page. We write when the inside of our head is so loud that it seems almost more real than reality. We write to understand ourselves, to understand others, or to just admit on paper we don’t understand either. We write to make sense of the world and to share fiction that is often tidier and more logical than real life. Some of us write to escape logic and put the fantastic on the page so that everyone can hunt dragons from the safety of their homes. Writers can help you hunt down a killer, solve a mystery so baffling and dangerous that the death toll is frightening, all from the safety of your armchair. Writers write about what moves them, outrages them, intrigues them, makes them laugh out loud, or weep. Writers write; and if they’re very lucky, what they write moves the rest of the world as much as it moves them. I celebrated the release of my newest book, Jason, by working on the next book, because I’m a writer, and writers write.