Our GirlieGirl Army readers are not only glamorous and compassionate, they also wildly intelligent. In fact, we know many of our readers are not only voracious readers – but exceptional writers! We often get asked “How does one go about publishing a book?” and our answer is usually to buy Writer’s Market. For 88 years, Writer’s Market has given writers the info they need to sell their work- it’s a complete “How To Get Published”. But when published, well-respected writer and noted writing coach (not to mention longtime GirlieGirl Army reader!) Elizabeth Stark offered to share her personal five best tips to get your dream tome published, we jumped on the chance to revel in her experience! Enjoy.. oh, and is this a good time to tell you we are writing a GIRLIEGIRL ARMY book?
Five Steps to Getting Your Book Published
1) Learn in public. Perfectionists (like me) loathe this, but you can never succeed absolutely at any creative act, and so you must either learn in public and keep getting better or fail quietly alone as you wait to be perfect. Read at open mikes. Join or start a writing group. Take a class. Go on tour. Make a film and submit it to festivals. Collect rejection slips (on a big spike in your wall like Stephen King or for papering your bathroom wall like James Joyce). Consider your creative work an ongoing dialog with a real audience and an important part of the world.
2) Make your book a page-turner. Introduce funny or moving characters that people find fascinating, and put them in unforgettable and gripping situations. Who do you love? What terrible things could happen to them? Call it sadism, or call it the human need to learn from stories how to survive suffering. Ask yourself questions whose answers you don’t know, and then write books to answer them, as Barbara Kingsolver does. Put your characters in impossible situations and then watch them struggle. Stay close to the action and close to what’s true and human. (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has talked about how true his stories seem to him, stories such as those his grandmother told about her life . . .)
3) Write deathless prose. No cliches. Janet Fitch said that for a writer, a cliche is anything you’ve ever heard before. Wow. (Don’t worry about this in drafting-fix those cliches when you revise. See #5.) Lean heavily on imagery-anything that can be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, touched. Human action is more complex than any philosophy or theorizing. Bring your readers to your world and let us watch what’s going on.
4) Finish your book. Don’t give away all its energy at cocktail parties or trying to prove yourself to handsome strangers. Hoard it for the writing. Write 1000 words a day (as Carolyn See and Stephen King recommend). Every day, or at least every weekday. Practice. Keep going. Get better.
5) Revise. Revise as many times as you can stand, Donna Levin teaches, and then revise once more time. In my experience and that of my published friends and clients, books often require a few revisions more than you can stand. Hemingway famously revised the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. What was the problem? a reporter asked him. I couldn’t get the words right, Hemingway said. When do you stop revising? See #1. And then start over again.
Elizabeth Stark is an author (Shy Girl), a filmmaker (FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies), and an editor and coach for storytellers. Want to write your book this year? Check out Elizabeth’s classes: http://elizabethstark.com