A path through the wilderness of literary publication

Blake Kimzey felt a strange sense of homecoming when he addressed this month’s meeting of the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America on “Writing Out of the Wilderness: Surviving Rejection & Forging a Path to Publication.” Yes, he was a writer speaking to other writers, but the feeling also stemmed from the meeting’s location – an Olive Garden restaurant – a Texas twin of the one in Iowa where he honed his writing skills while working as a waiter.

“I would write stories in the wait station,” he told his audience, while observing his customers.

He came to know the regulars, in many cases, “well, there’s not really a nice way to say this – meth heads –” while dishing out their favorite order, minestrone soup, “because it was all they could afford and all many of them could eat,” given the toll their drug habits had taken on their teeth.

Some of them would inspire his stories.

Sure, Kimzey would go on to take creative writing classes, earn an MFA, see scores of his short stories published, and founded Writing Workshops Dallas  – among other literary accomplishments. But he was standing in front of a group of writers and would-be writers to tell us that if he could practice writing as a chain-restaurant worker, we too could find our way through the writing wilderness. 

 “I think there’s far too much pessimism when it comes to writing and publication,” he said, attempting to demystify the process of publication with “practical steps you can take in the face of insurmountable rejection.” 

image: pixabay

Yes, rejections will come, but the good news is there’s a way through them, and “you can start this journey sitting in the chairs you’re in right now!”

How? Just as when we write, our characters must have both an overall goal and lower-order goals, so must we as writers. 

“It’s a mystifying process to go from dreaming about being in Barnes & Noble to actually getting there, but that was my goal when I realized I wanted to be a writer,” Kimzey said. (And admitted, “I’m still trying to get there.”)

So, the overall goal is being published in a major brick and mortar bookstore, but the lower-order goals are simpler:

·       Read diversely

“Reading out of your genre shows you so many ways to do it.” (Although Kimzey recommends “more novels and less how-to books, for examples of craft he teaches Benjamin Percy's volume Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction.)

·       Write regularly

His daily goal is a modest 250 words – approximately one page. “By the time I get there, I can blow past that!”

·       Study the process

“Who is your favorite author? What publisher would be best for your work? Check your favorite authors websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages What replicable steps have you identified? Apply them before you’re ready for publication.” Make yourself “findable” via your own website and social media accounts. “Twitter is a living resume. If you’re not using it that way, you doing it wrong.”

·       Reach out to other people trying to do the same thing

And, oh yeah:

·       Welcome rejection

“Rejection slips are your receipts,” proof that you’re trying. “Everybody’s goal should be to get 100 rejections over a year.”

And how to collect those rejection receipts (as well as some acceptance receipts)? 

Check out the possibilities, he advised. Publications such as New Pages and The Review Review, which can review stories you do manage to publish, as well as Duotrope  and agent listings in Publishers Marketplace and Poets & Writers. 

***

As always when I post about wonderful writing seminars and workshops, this is only the barest dip into Kimzey’s discussion. For more, consider signing up for some of the many workshops he directs at Writing Workshops Dallas. Or ask your writing group’s program leader to bring him onboard for smaller group presentations.

Writers find our community – now what to do with it?

Last Friday’s post at this site reprised the discussion about the need for community among writers from a panel of North Texas authors. But panel members didn’t stop at convincing their audience at Interabang Books in Dallas that they needed a community. They offered suggestions on where to find those communities – and what to do after saying “I do” to them.

Internet searches will turn up possibilities such as the DFW Writers Workshop, whose alumni include panelists Melissa Lenhardt and Arianne “Tex” Thompson. And creative writing classes such as those that launched panelist Blake Kimzey’s career in short fiction. 

Lenhardt used community to hone her Stillwater mystery series and award-winning historical fiction series. Panelist Kathleen Kent, author of historical fiction and more recently, the Edgar-nominated crime novel, The Dime, has lent her aura to a number of literary venues. Kimzey even went from taking classes in creative writing to founding his own group of writing classes, Writing Workshops Dallas. 

But leave it to fantasy writer Tex Thompson to bring North Texas’ abundance of literary communities into a single tent. Well, nearly a single tent. At last count, WORD (Writers Organizations ‘Round Dallas) included at least 30 groups, many immortalized on the tray of cupcakes provided for the audience gathered at Interabang.

Lenhardt (l) and Kent

Like Lenhardt, Thompson initially discovered the DFW Writers Workshop, and through it discovered introductions to still more writing groups. 

“People would stand up and make announcements about other groups, and I started to wonder, how many (writing) groups are there?. . . People want that community, it’s scary to drive somewhere in the dark to an unknown organization,” Thompson said.

And to alleviate the “driving in the dark” fear, WORD last spring brought together more than 300 group members to sample what each has to offer. WORDfest – the 2.0 version – repeats this year, Saturday, March 24, on the Tarrant County College Northeast Campus in Hurst, Texas. 

In the meantime, all the discussion of “writing communities” at the Interabang meeting no doubt left some audience members uncertain exactly what those communities have to offer. And what might be expected of them if they join one. 

Will they get to – or have to – read their own writing out loud? (No small concern considering that writing is one of the most introspective of human activities.) Will they be expected to judge other people’s writings? (See above concern again.) And what are the rules, if any, for either of these?

The good news is, as Lenhardt said, the DFW Writers Workshop group she picked, “‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.” 

Still, how does a newcomer, a writer in a group of writers, “know when to show your work to someone else?” discussion moderator Jordan Smith of the Writer's League of Texas asked.

“I don’t think anyone should show anybody your first draft,” Lenhardt said, “because it’s terrible! Send it as polished as you can. That’s basic courtesy.”

Except, of course, when that writing rule, like many others, needs to be broken. Which she confessed once to doing when hard-pressed by a deadline. Still, it’s an exception she tries to keep as exceptional as possible.

On the other hand, Kimzey noted that he had been forced to show first drafts when he first started attending creative writing classes. With no more than a set of story vignettes in hand, the pressure of completing complete narratives before showing them to readers would have felt overwhelming. “If I hadn’t been sharing my first drafts, I’d never have finished anything.”

Whether first draft or third – or later – panelists still emphasized the value of having more than one set of eyes on their work before attempting publication, or approaching literary agents.

“You’re so close to your work that you don’t even know your own soft spots,” Kimzey said. 

And speaking about feedback, “Do you have any tips for it?” Smith asked.

“When I accept another writer’s manuscript, I owe a responsibility for honesty, offering my advice and being open about it,” said Kent. “(But) more than anything else, I try to be kind. As you become comfortable in your writing, the dime will drop. . .” (pause for laughter) “. . . and something will resonate. I take everything seriously, but you are the final arbiter of your work.”

Thompson also came in on the side of kindness from one writer to another. When talking to another writer one on one, her first rule is to say, “Thank you for much for entrusting me with this.”

A statement soon followed by, “What are you excited about? (Because) if you can’t get excited about their work, you probably shouldn’t be critiquing.”

“How important is genre when showing someone your work?” Smith asked.

“DFWWW is all-genre, so anything goes,” Lenhardt said. “I have found that having a real breadth of experience is a help. Personally, I think the best thing about a feedback partner is that they’re a good writer.”

Once writers have found a community, and received their own help, what can they do to pay that support forward? Smith asked.

“Buy their books,” Kimzey said. “Send them a kind note. Tell them how much a book meant to you. If it’s a peer, read their work and give them honest feedback.”

And don’t underestimate the power of little things, Thompson said. “If you’re (socially) awkward, volunteer to put the chairs up after a meeting. People will love you!” 

What is a writing community and why be part of one?

There was a full house at Interabang Books this week as Dallas’s newest independent bookstore and the Writer’s League of Texas hosted a panel discussion about community building for writers. And we hadn’t even known there would be cupcakes! (Those arrived courtesy of irrepressible panel member, author and community organizer, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, decorated with the names and logos of local writers’ communities.)

No, we were there because, despite the Hemingwayesque stereotype of writers as antisocial loners – possibly hard drinking ones at that – the local authors on the panel –

l-r, Lenhardt, Kent, Kimzey

Thompson, Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Blake Kimzey – extolled the necessity of connections.

“It is so important for every industry to own its issues,” Thompson said. “For football, it’s brain injury. For ballet dancers, it’s eating disorders. For us it’s –”

“Hemorrhoids,” an audience member shouted.

Well, at least anxiety, Thompson acknowledged, when the laughter had died down. “You writers, there’s something seriously wrong with you!” (More laughter, some slightly self-conscious.) “It’s important that we need a counterbalance to the word hamsters running around in our heads. You need a writing community if you’re going to stay healthy and stay in the game.”

And that, if in more chaste language, was the tone of the discussion, was the tone of the discussion moderated by the League’s member services manager, Jordan Smith. 

“Why is it important for writers to be in a community?” Smith asked. “And how do you find a community?”

Kimzey agreed. Now a prolific short story author and founder/director of Writing Workshops Dallas, he confessed to starting his writing career as an alternative to his day job.

“I was nodding off in a cubicle 10 years ago,” the author of “a lot of vignettes,” but no completed stories until he found a creative writing workshop at Brookhaven Community College. 

“It was transforming for me. There I was, getting feedback for the first time.”

He and the other students – mostly college freshmen and sophomores years younger than he was – took a second course together because they formed such strong bonds. (Kimzie would even take the course a third time, and end with nine completed stories.) “Now I have my gang of four, all at different stages. It’s important to have a cohort.”

“I started by going to the DFW Writers Workshop,” Lenhardt said, where she was able to grow her Stillwater mystery series and award winning historical novels. “They ‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.”

The stay-at-home mom went to her first workshop meeting and thought, “Oh, my God, nobody asked about my kids.” It wasn’t that workshop members didn’t care about her kids, she said, but that her relationship with them was being built as a comrade, not on the family connections which had previously dominated her life.

Kent, on the other hand, already completed the manuscript that would become her New York Times bestseller, The Heretic’s Daughter, on her own. She has said in other contexts that she kept her writing a secret from almost everyone except her mother, fearing the eyeball rolls if she confessed to it, with another career and well into middle age. “I wish I’d had a group like that.”

Which doesn’t mean it’s ever too late to start, either with writing or finding a community.

“Unlike, for instance, downhill skiing, writing is something you can begin at 50,” she quipped.

(Next time – tune in for suggestions on where to find that community of fellow writers we dream about, and an intriguing offer from the ever-cheerful Tex Thompson.)

Wordcraft -- Embrace rejection & other writing insights

Is it weird that a writer whose stories were selected for The Best Small Fiction 2015 Anthology wanted to talk about how often his pieces have been rejected? Not at all, insisted much published Texas author Blake Kimzey, in his guest appearance at the recent meeting of the Writers' Guild of Texas. "Embrace rejection!" he proclaimed, as a sign that writers are putting their work out there as often as possible. “What I want to focus on is demystifying the process of publication and offering practical steps in the face of the (apparent) insurmountability of rejection.”

And although he insisted on the need to research the publications and editors that best suit an author’s work, his mantra is “read diversely, write regularly. The work is done by the time you start thinking about publication.”

His personal journey to publication began more than a decade ago with a 93-page novel fragment entitled (although he may have been speaking tongue in cheek) Forever Undergraduate. His endless revision of this fragment lead to his first realization: “must finish the story.” Trying to get beyond this impasse, he enrolled in a screen writing course “but I didn’t know how to end the story, so it remained incomplete.” After extensive reading of “how-to write” books and articles, he gained the second realization, “read more novels, fewer how-to’s” and found deadlines at a semester-long creative writing course a spur to learning how to finish a story. (Do it, or fail the course!)

More classes, more writing, more discovery of writing communities, and at last his first story was published. It took nine years, but he was on his way, first as a prolific writer of short fiction, then the winner of a chapbook contest (Families Among Us, published by Black Lawrence Press in September 2014) and now as he looks for an agent for his novel in progress, described as "a drug deal comedy set in the Midwest." Definitely, he's not still an undergraduate.

So back to embracing those rejections: how to start collecting them?

His suggestions, after the reading and writing parts, are the research, in places like New Pages, The Review Review, Duotrope’s Digest, PublishersMarketplace and the Poets & Writers agent database.

“As the New York Times reviews novels, New Pages reviews literary journals,” as does The Review Review, which also includes interviews with the people who run the literary journals.” Kimzey also subscribes to Duotrope’s Digest (“the Google of all things literary”). “Use these things and use them often!” 

His totals include 727 story submissions. “That’s relentlessness.” And then, OK, there were 487 rejections, which leaves a lot of room in between for what we're all looking for, acceptances. Even the rejections are targeted submissions, arrived at by researching publications looking for stories like the ones he writes. 

Along the way to publication, he add another insight: find a community. “There’s lots going on in Dallas, but you’ve got to seek it out. Be a good literary citizen (by) going to readings (like the ones at The Wild Detectives bookstore in Oak Cliff), to conferences, and by creating, developing or joining a community like this (the Writers’ Guild).”

He also recommends that authors make themselves findable: on a website, Twitter, Facebook, and the Poets and Writers Directory. "Find an author to follow and emulate. Insert yourself into the stream.”

“Be relentless, do research, be OK with rejection. It’s a part of the process.”

***

In the interest of snatching acceptances from those relentlessly courted rejections, I’ll mention that my own latest short story, “Planet, Paper, Space” is now up at Lunar Station Quarterly. Read it and works by other writers online for free. Or be a good literary citizen and buy a copy, which will get you the snazzy pink cover art.