I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” ~Terry Pratchett
As I begin to add more layers to the skeleton of my second novel, I keep coming back to this quote by the iconic novelist, Terry Pratchett. Every time I get stuck and I don’t know what happens next, I close my eyes and I say these words out loud. It works for every part of the writing, editing, and revising process. I’m just telling myself the story, the richest, most inspiring, and truest story that I can create.
Good news for those of us who read before I bed: it’s one of the most relaxing activities we can put into our bedtime ritual. Research shows that reading, even for as little as 6 minutes!, can reduce stress by as much as 68%. However, before bed, keep it light—no horror, excessive violence, or grief, and no self-help that requires intense introspection. The emotions stirred up by those genres can disrupt sleep and increase stress.
Happy bedtime reading, friends! Say yes to a good book.
“I think I’m going to take a class,” someone said to me. “That will help me finally write my book. That will inspire me, and then I can get the book written and published.”
Inspiration can give you the spark of a book. Discipline, especially when uninspired, is what gets it written. Not classes or books or even encouragement from others. Don’t write for recognition, ever, because that’s a road to nowhere. I have never written for the purpose of being published. Ever. Certainly I had and have dreams. I wanted and want people to read my work, and I want my work to help people. But mostly I write to exercise the thoughts and emotions and events of my life. I write the books I need and want to read.
Talking about writing doesn’t getting writing done.You have to always be writing. You have to write if you’re tired, calm, restless, happy, sad, angry, disappointed. You have to write your way out, up, over, and through. That’s the only way to get the thoughts out of your head and onto the page. There are no shortcuts.
I haven’t written poetry in a very long time, and as I was walking to work this one popped into my mind. I don’t know where it came from, but I felt empowered as I wrote it down. I hope you feel empowered reading it.
Underestimation
Do not mistake my kindness for weakness,
or my desire to collaborate as an inability to lead.
I have been through the intense pressures of life and emerged bright, shiny, and polished.
Like clay in a kiln.
Like a buried diamond, now free.
Believe me when I say I stare into the fire and smile.
Do not underestimate me.
I’m so honored to be featured on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) blog. With their support and encouragement, I took an outline and turned it into a published novel, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters. You can check out the full post at http://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/170689401897/what-nanowrimo-gave-me-as-an-authorand-a-person. Here is the text as well:
The road from plotless to polished to published can be long and filled with potholes (and plot holes). But, as NaNo participants continue to prove, it can be traversed. Today, author Christa Avampato shares her story of how she turned an outline into a published book:
In the five years after I survived an apartment building fire on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I sketched the outline of my novel, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters. That fire was a turning point for me, as a person and as a writer. It also plays a prominent role in Emerson’s story.
On November 1, 2014, I set a goal to transform my outline into a 50,000-word first draft in thirty days as part of NaNoWriMo. It seemed impossible, but I was constantly encouraged by the supports that NaNoWriMo offers: webinars, blog posts by authors I admired, writing prompts, social messages, and special offers for books and tools.
My first draft was terrible, but I’ve never been prouder of something so awful.
Over the next two years, I completed a dozen more drafts of Emerson’s story. New characters, plot lines, and settings emerged. Save for Emerson, the story was almost unrecognizable two years later. I got feedback from several close and brutally honest friends. I agonized over every word. It is the toughest job I ever loved.
Still, Emerson continued her incessant tap, tap, tapping on my shoulder because it was time to get her story published. I queried agents, and received fourteen rejections—and those were just the ones who bothered to respond at all! One of them, my dream agent, responded with the loveliest rejection. Twelve were form letters. One particularly prickly agent responded in less than five minutes with a one word email: No.
I’m not kidding. That actually happened.
I finally found a happy medium when I began to explore independent publishers. Six months after querying my first independent publisher, one of them accepted the book.
When you launch a book, you launch a brand and a business. I completed several full edits in 2017 with the assistance of two editors. Then I hired the artists and art directed the cover art myself. With my MBA and business experience, I put together a marketing plan, and began to work that plan every day.
On November 1, 2017, I became a published author. Emerson left the safety of my care and ventured out into the world wrapped in paperback and eBook formats on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in independent bookstores across the globe. It’s no coincidence that Emerson’s birthday was exactly three years after I started writing the draft of her story during NaNoWriMo 2014.
And on her birthday, I began writing the draft of her second book as part of NaNoWriMo 2017. That supportive tribe of fearless writers with impossible goals was there for me again, just as they were in 2014.
Emerson and I stand before you as an unfailing reminder that if you are willing to do the hard work of recognizing your wounds, if you write your truth through programs like NaNoWriMo, even if your voice shakes and sputters, if you will honor the cracks in you rather than trying to spackle them shut, there is so much light that awaits you.
That’s the greatest lesson that NaNoWriMo and Emerson taught me: that light will flood your mind, heart, and hands in a way that you never imagined possible. That light, however small, lives in you now. Your only job is to fan it into a flame that the whole world can see through the masterpiece that is your life and your writing. You matter. Your story matters. It matters so damn much.
I can’t wait to read your book.
“How did you know what to write about that would sell?” someone asked me this week.
“I didn’t write a book that would sell,” I said. “I wrote the book I wanted to read.”
“But didn’t you look at trends?” he asked me.
“I started writing my book eight years ago,” I said. “Trends from eight years ago wouldn’t have helped me today.”
He was frustrated. He wanted a silver bullet, and there just isn’t one when it comes to any kind of creative work. All you can do is follow your curiosity, do your research, listen, and then get it all down as well and as honestly as you can.
You absolutely cannot make everyone happy. Some people will want the book to go faster, and others will want it to go slower. Some people will want more detail, and others will want less. Some people will say the book is too long while others will stay it’s too short. It’s all incredibly subjective.
Just know this—over the course of writing, rewriting, editing, and publishing your work, you will read / view / listen to it dozens of times. Maybe hundreds of time. You have to nurture it, love it, and then give it all away for someone else to interpret. That is the rub of creative work—you pour everything you have into it, and then it belongs to the world. It is all a labor of love.
Last week, I put out a call for help to plan my first international trip of the year—to Ireland. I’m doing research for my next Emerson book and I’ve long been thinking about Dublin because of the stunning Trinity Library and the many treasures it holds. Once I got into researching the city and surrounding area, there were so many reasons why this is the perfect destination for Emerson to travel to in book two. It is, after all, a land of magic, history, and literature. It is, and has been for centuries, a hotbed of science and discovery. From its museums to its castles to its natural phenomenon, Ireland has everything that Emerson needs to make her next daring leaps into her future. And they will be daring.
Here are some of the places I’m planning to visit:
Trinity College & Library
Marsh’s Library
Newgrange
The Little Museum
Birr Castle Gardens
National Museum of Ireland, including the Natural History Museum
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
…and a short stop over in Wistman Woods in England because I really need to see that with my own eyes to believe it’s real.
A huge thank you to Museum Hack and several of its staff members and tour guides who provided great tips and encouragement, tour company Hennessey & Furlong, Jennifer O’Neill, and all the staff of the sites tagged above. All of your advice and the ideas you shared have made me more excited than ever to visit this inspiring country. I can’t wait for spring!
Have you been to Ireland? Are there place you’d recommend I see that inspire wonder? I’d love to hear about them.
A wonderful way to close the last week of 2017: a live on-screen interview on Cheddar about my book, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters. Thanks so much for to the team there, especially hosts Baker Machado and Jill Wagner, and to expert publicist, Dan Fortune. Happy to give thanks and shout-outs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my inspiring home city of New York, and National Novel Writing Month. Watch the interview here: https://cheddar.com/videos/what-it-takes-to-get-a-novel-published
A great big day today: my book, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, had nearly 2500 downloads on Kindle this weekend, hit #1 in its Kindle categories, broke into the top 100 Kindle books across all categories on Amazon, and the incredible Dan Fortune landed me a huge interview for the end of this month. I am literally floating. Thank you to everyone for being a part of this wild literary ride. I love you. Keep dreaming.
To be a writer is to first be a listener and observer. I often go somewhere—a coffeeshop, a museum, a store—and just tune into the conversations of others. I don’t take out my phone or notebook. I don’t have any purpose other than to listen to what people say, how they say it, and then how people respond to them.
I tried this experiment recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went to their Astor Chinese Garden Court and sat there for a while as people wandered in and out. It’s a bright and peaceful place in the museum. Good for clearing the mind and opening up the ears.
It was fascinating to see such a diverse set of people come into the space and have a similar experience, of peace and contentment and happiness. It reminded me how hurried and cluttered our lives can become. And it made me more conscious of the power of places that give us time to just be. The expression of “wow” on everyone’s face when they entered the garden made me smile.
As we edge toward 2018 and the cold weather takes us indoors for a few months, I’m looking forward to more of these listening and observing activities. We have so much to learn from each other.
Christa Avampato 