The Positively Productive Writer: The Practical Writer, #3

1

INTERNAL STORYTELLING

I want to tell you a story. Because that’s what writers do, right? Actually, everybody tells stories. We tell them all the time. The most important stories are the ones we tell ourselves. For these are the ones that affect our mindset.

We’re unique. The way we experience life differs from the way everyone else does. It’s why eyewitness accounts of events often vary, despite people witnessing the same thing.

When I began work at a High Street bank, I spent the first few days on an induction programme. That included some training on what to do if ever we found ourselves in the horrendous situation of a bank raid.

One exercise I found interesting was where we had to watch a video of a fictional bank raid. Afterwards, we were asked to write down exactly what we had witnessed, giving as much detail as possible, as if we were giving a police statement.

Once our time was up, the trainers asked us some questions. In which hand was the armed robber holding the firearm? We couldn’t agree. Some were convinced it was the right, others the left. What kind of bag was the armed robber holding? We couldn’t agree. Some were certain it was a sports holdall, others thought it was a rucksack. One person was convinced there was no bag at all.

But, even though we’d all witnessed exactly the same video, the stories our minds were telling us were slightly different. This is why autobiographies are so fascinating. They’re not recounting the truth, but the writer’s truth. We all see and experience things differently.

Whenever we experience an event, our brain turns it into a story. This helps us to process it and put it into context. It can also help with forming a memory, as we recount it (either to ourselves, or to others). It doesn’t have to be a shocking event. Our brains attach a story to everything in our lives.

The other day, I went to my car and found it wouldn’t start. The battery was flat. Then I noticed the switch for the air blowers was on. I’m usually fastidious about switching off everything when I get out of my car. Clearly, this was my own stupid fault. I’d left the air blower on and it had drained the battery.

Thankfully, the local garage sorted it later that day, and by 5:30 that evening I had a brand new battery in my car and a dent in my wallet. That’ll teach me to leave the air blower on, I said to the mechanic.

He frowned.

When I got in the car this morning to start it, I explained, I noticed the switch for the air blowers was on. That probably drained the battery, didn’t it?

The mechanic shook his head. The power is cut to all those things as soon as you switch off the ignition. Only things like lights, which you might need on in an emergency, keep their power supply when the ignition is off. Your battery was flat because it’s nearly seven years old and incapable of holding a charge for very long.

Oh. Not the air blower switch, then. I hadn’t used the car for nearly a week, and this was long enough for the old battery to drain completely. That was the real story.

See what I mean? Leaving the air blower on is the story I told myself. That’s how I explained what must have happened. And notice how, by telling myself that story, I didn’t bother looking for any other interpretations. Once I told myself a story, that’s the story I went with.

The problem with being a writer is that we have fantastic imaginations. That’s good when it comes to writing, but for our mindset it can also cause us problems.

Many years ago, when I tutored writers on a distance learning course, one of my students emailed to say that the article they’d submitted had been rejected. This was obviously a disappointment, and she was now wondering whether she should continue with the course. She explained how she’d hoped this piece would be accepted because she’d got another idea she wanted to try with the same publication.

But in her mind now, there was little point in developing the second idea, because the editor clearly didn’t think she could write. I bet the editor either collapsed in fits of laughter at my sheer incompetence, or shook their head in despair as they read my article, she wrote.

Er, hello? How did my student know what the editor had done? She wasn’t there in the room with him when he opened her email, was she? But that’s the story she’d told herself.

In fact, there are two stories here. First, there is the story the student told herself about what would happen. Her first article would be accepted, and that’s when she planned on submitting the second article.

In some ways, this visualisation of future events can be a useful tool when it comes to mindset. That’s a positive story to tell yourself, especially if it helps you complete your writing project and get to the stage where you can send it off.

But, on this occasion, the reality didn’t mirror my student’s imagined story. Cue the second story, which she embellished with some other facts she perceived must also have played a role in his decision. The editor had rejected her work. Therefore, the editor was probably exasperated at having to deal with her poor writing skills, and had rejected her out of hand.

That internal story of I was rejected because I am a poor writer is common.

But we don’t know what actually happened on the editor’s desk. We don’t know what the editor was thinking. We don’t know what the editor did between opening the submission and then rejecting it.

The easiest solution is to make something up. To create a story that fits those facts. So what we end up doing is creating an internal story that has the potential to damage our mindset.

It makes sense then, not to create these internal stories in the first place. Or, rather, we should avoid creating these negative stories. And if you find that’s what you’re doing, stop. Acknowledge what is happening. Then try rewriting your internal story into a positive one.

Whenever you tell yourself a story, ask yourself two questions: What are the facts, and what have I made up?

That step can help bring you back to reality. But you can only take it once you’ve recognised that you’ve created and told yourself an internal story. Over time, as you spot yourself doing it, you can then take steps to change the stories you tell yourself.

My agent has been busy submitting my novel to publishers. Many have rejected it. It would be easy for me to tell myself the story that my fiction writing skills are diabolical. Over two dozen publishers have rejected it. Why wouldn’t they? I’m a rubbish fiction writer.

But that’s not the right story. I know this because that novel secured me my agent. Agents don’t take on rubbish novels. And the story I tell myself now is that the novel can’t be rubbish, because although two dozen publishers have rejected it, two separate editors at two different publishers took my novel to their acquisitions meeting. Yes, that’s right. Two different editors loved my novel so much, they took it to their acquisitions meeting where they tried to persuade the other departments that my novel is a book worth publishing.

Because of that, I know the internal story of me being a rubbish writer of fiction is inaccurate. Yes, I’m still deeply disappointed and hurt when it gets that far in the publishing process and still isn’t taken on, but I remind myself of the facts that two different editors loved it enough to take it to acquisitions.

Once you become more aware of the internal stories you tell yourself, you can then question the facts you’ve based them on. The chances are, those facts are not facts at all, but the result of a fertile imagination.

The danger of not spotting this is that, over time, these false stories mount up and become the foundation for future decision-making. If the last dozen stories you’ve written have been rejected because, as your own internal storyteller has decided, you’re no good at writing, then why bother writing another one? It’s not worth the effort, is it? If you can’t get a short story accepted for publication, then why even bother starting a novel?

These inaccurate internal stories do a lot of damage. That’s why it’s important to question why you think what you think. Ask yourself, where’s the evidence? Okay, a rejection is evidence, but it is evidence of an unsuccessful attempt at publication. That’s all. It doesn’t always evidence why your piece was rejected.

Don’t beat yourself up over this. After all, talented writers need fertile imaginations. But question the stories you tell yourself, because they could do you more harm than good.

2

TWISTING NEGATIVES INTO POSITIVES

Is your toner or ink jet cartridge half-full or half-empty? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Our outlook on life influences what we achieve.

We are not born as optimists or pessimists. It’s a character trait that we learn. Therefore, pessimists should rejoice because it means they can learn to be more optimistic.

Every negative has a positive. Don’t believe me? Check the battery in your television remote: negative one end, but positive the other.

There’s a reason we have the clichéd saying, Every cloud has a silver lining. It’s because it’s true. The difficulty can be finding it when our mind is captivated by the negative side. The trick is to learn to look for the positive angle. Sometimes it’s there to see if you simply look for it. At other times, it may not become obvious until some point in the future.

As a freelance writer, I am a failure every day and often several times a day. If I send out ten query emails to editors, pitching article ideas for their magazines, Murphy’s Law says I’ll get eleven rejections. Ten will be from today’s mail out and one left over from yesterday. Yet I accept it isn’t me personally being rejected. It is just that idea at that particular time.

It’s easy to look at the eleven emails in my inbox all saying no and draw the obvious conclusion: I am such a failure. I failed eleven times today. But if I were to look for the positives, I could tell myself that I sent out ten pitches today. Not only did I have ten ideas, but I’d also had the courage to send them off to ten different editors. And that’s ten different editors who’ve seen my name today.

The reason it feels like a failure is that the expected result has not happened. The internal story I told myself has not come true. I wanted a commission. Just one commission from those ten pitches would have been enough to make me feel I’d had a successful day. That one success would have made my brain ignore the other ten failures.

Every time we do something, we do it for a reason. I pitched an idea because I wanted a commission. I wanted an editor to turn round and say, Yes, that’s a brilliant idea. Write it up and I’ll pay you for it. That’s why I’m doing it. In my mind, I’ve told myself a story. If I do this, then that will happen. However, even though I have done this, it turns out that that hasn’t happened. I got it wrong. Therefore, I failed.

There are varying strengths of perceived failure, too. Being rejected hurts, and rightly so. As writers, we may have spent time finishing a complete piece of work, or we’ve had to develop several ideas hoping that an editor will be interested in one of them. Being told, No, not for us, I’m afraid, is demoralising, particularly when you’re reliant on selling words in order to put food on the table. It can also be disheartening if your writing time is extremely limited each week. Spending your precious 30 minutes a day for two weeks working on a short story only to have it rejected by a magazine will hurt. That’s when you wonder if that time would have been better spent working on something else.

I don’t believe so. Everything you write helps you to develop further as a writer. What’s so wonderful about writing as a hobby, or a profession, is that nothing is wasted. Today’s rejection can become tomorrow’s acceptance.

So learn to twist it around. Turn that battery upside down and look at the positive end.

When you first receive a rejection, ignore it. It’s difficult, but you must. Why? Because you’re emotionally hurt. Whenever we write something, we’re turning a dream into a reality. The submitting of a piece of work is part of a dream that includes an acceptance, publication and being rewarded financially, too. It may even be part of a bigger dream to change your life, to give up the job and earn a living from your writing. A rejection means that dream isn’t becoming a reality. Yet.

But there’s another reason for ignoring the rejection. Rejection temporarily lowers our IQ (Intelligence Quotient) level. This means we don’t have the brainpower to make a rational decision about what next to do with our manuscript. (Although I’m sure many writers know what they’d love to do with the rejection letter, in the heat of the moment!)

The best thing is to forget about it. Instead, carry on and do what you planned to do today, anyway. Even if you had a Plan B should this scenario happen, I still recommend putting the rejected work to one side for at least twenty-four hours. (Having a Plan B is a great idea, because it means you’ve already considered the possibility of rejection and, therefore, the rejection will not be as shocking to you. It also means you have hope, because you’ve already identified a new opportunity for this work.)

You need time to lick your emotional wounds and learn how to believe in yourself again. Getting eleven rejections on the same day is tough. However, as many freelance article writers will know, getting any response from every editor I’ve pitched to is an amazing achievement in itself. Many don’t even bother replying at all if the idea doesn’t excite them.

I’ve learned how to put a positive spin on things. Because of my ten pitches, ten editors have seen my name today. Just because they didn’t like today’s idea, that doesn't mean to say that they will reject tomorrow’s (assuming I will come up with one). But I will try to come up with one. Because when my name pops up in their inbox tomorrow, they may even remember it (hopefully not as the idiot that keeps sending those awful ideas!).

A writer who continues to submit relevant ideas to an editor, despite regular rejection, shows determination. Editors note this. One day, one of your ideas will be the perfect pitch. It will intrigue the editor. That you’ve continued to bombard him or her with your appropriate ideas (and they must be appropriate for that specific publication) and not been put off by their rejections demonstrates a level of professionalism.

It can be enough to give them the confidence to trust you with an assignment. I’ve had an editor reject an idea I sent them one day, only for them to contact me the next with a commission on an entirely different topic. Would that positive outcome have happened if I hadn’t gone to the trouble of approaching the editor the previous day with an idea? Ultimately, that rejection led to a positive outcome.

I’ve had publishers reject my book proposals but ask to see more ideas. I don’t turn down those invitations, and so I submitted new ideas which were commissioned. Those commissions wouldn’t have happened if I’d not sent in that first rejected idea.

Rejections often lead to new opportunities:

A new opportunity to review and improve your text. Because some time will have elapsed between submitting the work and getting the rejection, when we next look at our work we’re doing so with fresh eyes. Suddenly, we’ll see ways and areas that we can improve, that weren’t obvious when we originally submitted the piece.

A new opportunity to offer your work elsewhere. New markets and new competitions are launched all the time. Perhaps your best market didn’t exist when you first submitted your piece. But following that rejection, you’re now free to submit it to this new potential outlet.

An opportunity to send your work to a higher paying market. This has happened to me several times. I’ve initially targeted a magazine where I knew their rates of pay, only to have it rejected. I rewrote and resubmitted the piece to a second market, not only to find that they accepted it, but paid more money than my first target market.

I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was when my agent told me an editor was taking my novel to an acquisitions meeting. Although you’re told not to get your hopes up, you do! So when the decision at that meeting was not to publish, it was gut-wrenching. All those dreams I believed were about to come true were dashed.

Because of that, the editor offered to chat with me directly, to pass on some feedback. This was an amazing opportunity. Editors are busy people. They don’t have time to waste. Yet this editor not only loved my book enough to take it into an acquisitions meeting, he was still prepared to spend some time offering feedback.

We spent 30 minutes on the phone, chatting about what I could do to improve my novel. He suggested some useful ideas, and some painful ones. To bring it to a more publishable length, he recommended cutting it by twenty-five per cent. That hurt. It was hard work, but I did it. And he was right. The novel is a much better book because of it.

And there was also advice that I could apply to the next novel I was writing. That meant I didn’t make the same mistake twice.

It would have been so easy to have focussed on that book’s rejection and its failure at the acquisitions meeting. But, looking back, I now see that rejection as a success, because not only did it give me the opportunity to chat directly with an editor at a major publishing imprint, but it was also an opportunity to learn how to improve my novel. And I had to remind myself that this was a novel that an editor loved enough to take to an acquisitions meeting.

Turning rejection into a positive means learning how to be more optimistic. A pessimist often looks upon failures as their fault. My article wasn’t accepted because I’m a terrible writer. An optimist understands there could be external factors at play. My article wasn’t accepted because the editor already has an article scheduled to appear in the next issue of the magazine, of which I wasn’t aware.

Pessimists are less hopeful. They rejected my novel. What’s the point of writing another? If they didn’t like this idea, they probably won’t like the next idea. Whereas an optimist sees a setback as temporary. It didn’t work out. Now let’s try again.

Pessimists wrongly assume that they cannot change the situation. They rejected my novel. I’m clearly not a writer. I should give up and find something else I can do. Optimists understand things happen in life that are outside their control. Instead, it’s best to focus on what we can control. They rejected my novel. I can either look for another publisher, or I could go on a novel-writing course to see if there’s anything new I can learn about writing novels, or I could develop a new idea for a new novel.

Our mindset and mental health varies daily, and sometimes it isn’t easy to pinpoint why we feel the way we do from one day to the next. But the next time you receive a rejection (because you will be rejected: it’s part and parcel of being a writer), put it aside for at least twenty-four hours (if not longer). Then, when you come to look at it again, make a list of the opportunities you now have with this piece of work.

To begin with, it won’t be easy. But the more you do this, the more you’ll train your mind to be more optimistic. It will help twist rejection from that negative, end-of-the-road, hopeless situation into a more optimistic, hopeful perspective. This is just a minor blip on the journey towards your writing dreams.

3

SUCCESS

Hands up if you want to be successful? Just as I thought.

But what is success? Or rather, what does success mean to you as a writer?

I ask because it’s an important consideration to make, not only so you have a way of measuring how close you are to reaching your success, but also to help you stay in a positive frame of mind with your writing. If you browse social media timelines, one thing you’ll soon spot is writers (and I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past) declaring joyfully about the latest contract they’ve just signed with a major publisher, their most recent book sales, or revealing the cover of their brand new book that’s now available in Swahili.

We should congratulate these writers for their success because, as we all know, this writing malarky is hard work. But while the social media timeline shows a happy author declaring their contractual success with a major publisher, it doesn’t show the twenty-year journey they’ve endured in order to get there. (And we don’t seem as enthusiastic about sharing our disappointments and rejections on social media, which only reinforces the