Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Many of us think the toughest part of developing a writing career is finding a publisher. Nope. In actuality, most careers have a slump or two built into them. These often occur just when you think you’ve built up some momentum, such as when you’ve written and had published about six books.
Overcoming your writer slump.
Everyone’s situation is unique, of course, but take a peek at some of the advice I’ve given.
Break the chain
If you’ve had a string of mediocre sales for your books, you might need to spring free from the type of writing you’ve done and try something different. Give yourself a chance to break out of your writer slump with a fresh start.
One of my clients, Jane Orcutt (who died a number of years ago at a young age of cancer), was one of the finest writers I could hope to represent. She had created a number of historicals that took place in the western United States, each of which received strong reviews but puny sales.
Then Jane hit upon a masterful idea. She wrote a sassy Regency. Full of cheeky wit and a spunky but deliciously impractical heroine, All the Tea in China was a delightful reading experience. And it sold at a lively clip. It would have broken Jane out of the doldrums. Unfortunately, before it released, Jane died, and she never saw the wonderful response readers had to her novel.
Rather than writing another novel, maybe you need to try your hand at a memoir. Memoirs require a strong sense of story and use novel techniques; so in that sense they’re a great fit for a fiction writer. You do, of course, need a topic worthy of being a memoir.
Rather than writing another nonfiction book that lines up beautifully on the bookshelf with all the other nonfiction books you’ve written, you need to dip into a different topic you feel passionate about.
Or find someone with a strong platform, great message, but no writing ability. A collaboration on a topic you care about might suit the needs of both you and the wannabe author.
Find a new publishing venue.
I’m all for an author finding a publishing home and staying put for as long as possible. But I’ve observed over the years that sometimes a ho-hum attitude develops in the publisher-author relationship. Shaking things up might be called for at this point. A new publisher, with a fresh take on how to position you in the market, might be just what the doctor ordered. (I am compelled to add that you must have a zinger of an idea to make this transition because, after all, you are trying to get out of a slump, which means you have low sales you’re dragging around behind you.)
Know when to stay the course.
Sometimes an author needs to patiently work at producing fine projects that are a perfect match for what he’s passionate about. It takes a much larger volume of work to develop momentum than the casual observer realizes. New York Times best-selling author Debbie Macomber says she was an overnight success after 20 years.
Use a pen name.
Your name becomes equated to your sales history after you’ve written a handful (or more) of books. If your sales record isn’t stellar, retailers, librarians, publishing personnel, and others in the industry develop an attitude that your next work will perform just as poorly as your previous work.
Sometimes the way to slip past this midcourse writer’s slump is to use a pen name. It’s a way of beginning again. While abandoning all the work you’ve put into your career is a painful choice, at times it’s the right choice. You get a do-over. Making sure your next manuscript is five-star helps–or writing in a new category.
Strategize with your agent.
In car advertisements that depict trained drivers whipping cars in and out of traffic or over cliffs, the viewer is advised not to try the driving maneuvers at home. Writers, don’t try these tactics without the aid of an agent. Each has inherent risks, and you need to understand what those are and how to attempt each with as much finesse as can be mustered.
What slumps have you faced in your writing? How did you overcome them?
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Great post, Janet. I suspect many people reading this will be looking at a slump not from sales, but from the perspective of their own productivity. I’m certainly in that camp.
* If I may I’d like to add the following suggestions –
1) Carefully examine your social media presence, and see if you’ve fallen into a rut, both in original material you post and engagement with your followers. This can be an excellent diagnostic tool for what might be ailing your writing. (And it may well be worth investing in a professional assessment.)
2) Do you have the same narrator, ad nauseum? Voice (to my thinking) has to be the same from book to book…yet different. Look at Beethoven; his voice in the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies was quite different, yet unmistakably Ludwig van. One good reason to stay active in a crit group!
3) Are you keeping pace? Buy the DVD releases of current films that may appeal to you audience, and watch the film with the director’s commentary. You’ll learn a lot about pacing, and since the reading paradigm for the modern audience is partly (or largely) formed by visual media, you’ll be able to ride that wave. Cowabunga, dude.
4) Perhaps most important, have you let Your Inner Martha control your writing? Are you writing from a sense of duty to existing characters or setting or values, or are you open to the prodding of the Holy Ghost?
Forgot to add these, more practically oriented to getting around writer’s block –
1) Exercise regularly. Working your muscles forces toxins from your body, and these toxins DO impede the creative functioning of your brain.
2) Dress professionally, even at home. While sweats may be comfortable, they bespeak a lack of mental precision and discipline. Don’t slop around. Stay strapped, stay tight.
3) Don’t eat comfort foods when you’re in a funk; they tend to be high-fat and high-carb, which taste good but make any funk worse (kind of like listening to the blues when depressed). Go for protein.
4) Mind the caffeine. The Starbucks High gives a false sense of accomplishment.
5) If you don’t use a Word-Count-Goal, set one now. Professionals produce; you may think most of what you are writing when in a slump is gibberish, but what you’re doing is identifying and eliminating blind alleys of creativity. If you’re lost in Bryce Canyon’s Amphitheater (what Ebenezer Bryce called “a h*** of a place to lose a cow”) you won’t get closer to finding your way out by sitting and thinking. And do you wonder how I know this? (Moo!)
I’m a dairy farmer’s daughter. My cows walk compliantly to their stalls on their twice-a-day schedule. Except for that one rogue cow who finds every little break in the fence and escapes the ordinary. That wiley stubborn critter is named Andrew.
🙂
I love your suggestions, Andrew!! So practical!
Thanks, Jeanne!
I like the suggestion to watch the director’s commentary, Andrew. We always watch most of the other additional materials on DVDs, but I haven’t been watching the director’s voice-over commentary.
I can slice my adult life into phases, either by where we lived (midwest phase, northeast phase) or family status (before kids, during kids, after kids). More significantly, I can identify my spiritual stages (coasting, exploring, sensing, obeying). In my case, I fiddled with writing in my early northeast phase, during kids, sensing spiritually. I found my voice mid-notheast, after kids, while settling into obedience. Transition from any one phase to another has been awkward. It sucks up energy. It could leave my writing flat, or it could open the door to a new opportunity.
*Whenever I get too comfortable, God shakes it up. Spiritual slump, writer’s slump–a new door opens. Sometimes I whine, but I now know if I don’t get off my comfortable couch and walk through it, God will just upend the couch.
Such a great post, Janet. My slumps have mostly occurred due to discouragement. Which usually requires a realignment of my thinking with God’s thinking. I know this sounds simplistic, but there it is.
*One plus is that, even when I’m working to overcome discouragement in my novel writing, God has given me plenty of blogging material, which has been a great way to keep me writing.
*That said, I love your practical suggestions for published writers in that slump. I know there are applications, even for pre-pubbed writers like myself.
One thing that can help during a slump is to intentionally do something you enjoy and at which you’re good – and which will give positive feedback either in concrete results or accolades. A hobby, a sport, whatever. Success breeds success.
* Conversely, DON’T go the opposite route of “well, I’m in a slump anyway so I may as well do that unpleasant task that I’ve been putting off so long.” It’s like putting some more weight on an already overloaded mule.
* The most dangerous aspect of a slump is that it can change your work habits and make it very hard to ‘get back on the horse’. ‘Why we work’ is found, to a large degree, in the way we work, and if you let a slump change your practical paradigm you can lose the meaning of the whole thing.
Andrew, I love your suggestion to push through a slump by intentionally doing something else for positive feedback. At the very least, accomplishing something you enjoy will help get your mind off the slump.
Lara, thank you. I think it may be the most important thing in the ‘toolbox’; one ‘win’ can turn around many things, from a writer’s heart to an athletic team (GO CUBS!) to a nation.
That’s such a helpful insight, Andrew. To find success wherever we can and not to let a writing slump change our work habits keeps us moving forward, despite the adversary facing us.
Maybe if you already have six published, you have a platform built based on you and not your writing specialty, but is that true?
*I’ve read multiple warnings that changing time periods with historical or writing both contemporary and historical is a bad idea because your followers expect only a certain type from you.
*Of course, if your sales are mediocre, maybe your followers aren’t buying much of what you sell anyway. Any recommendations on the best way to handle this?
*The pen name would be a total reboot on building platform. You would still have the email lists, but many followers probably don’t subscribe. I know I often don’t. Suggestions for preserving your platform with a pen name?
A writing slump can call for triage, changing genres means some of your current readers won’t follow you in your direction. But if your last book sold dismally, how many readers are you losing? While each one was difficult to obtain, momentum has been lost. You must find a way to get going.
Regarding how transportable your platform is, you could retain at least a portion of it if you moved into writing that has an obvious link to what you’ve done in the past. If you wrote issue-oriented fiction, you could writing issue-oriented nonfiction.
None of these paths is easy to travel, but when your career is stalled, only difficult decisions can jump start it.
I usually pray, ask for prayer, sit down, and write, trying to push through. I think I saw Katie Ganshert post something like: “Magic happens in the rewrite” … beg God to make something beautiful of what seems so messy. Of course, I don’t have the stress in a slump that a contracted author would have, but I imagine my strategy in my minor world would work the same in the major world. Having someone with experience on your side–an agent and writer friends with experience–seems a huge asset and blessing. 🙂
Slumps? Yep! All the time.
At least I don’t have Jacob Marley’s chains of “low sales I am dragging around behind me.”
Great visual!! (OK, OK, I have no sales to drag around.)
And there is a kind of freedom in not having sales.
I wasn’t planning to add this, by my ‘slump story’ may help someone else, so here goes.
* I’m in a slump, it’s major, and I don’t know when of if it will end. It came about from a sort of perfect storm of Bad Stuff Rising in health, life events, relationships, and faith, and the only thing I’ve been able to do is at least slow the free-fall of confidence. Here are some specifics:
– I act as if I care about what I’m doing. When I write, I make sure to write with precision, and to make edits and corrections as needed. I’m probably a bit more careful with words now that back in the good days.
– Onerous chores are not left to pile up, because that creates an ambience of hopelessness.
– I try to avoid talking about how depressing the whole thing is. For me, that just solidifies the situation; it’s as if I’m justifying and validating depression and the slump.
– I actively avoid media that’s irritating and triggers a cynical response, because cynicism is the mother of self-contempt. For example, I like Joel Osteen, but his “God is about to bring your miracle” message is a bit hard to swallow at the moment so rather than saying “Oh, yeah?” I tune him out.
– When I find a temptation to compare my career/life arc to others, I shut that off as quickly as I can by actively doing something else. Comparison under these circumstances is a fool’s game and spiritual suicide.
– Last but perhaps most important, I stay engaged. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to stop writing the blog, stop participating in social media, and just drop out altogether; my words and thoughts seemed empty and my thoughts hollow. But one simply can’t do that, because it’s an active form of self-destruction.
* Writing that wasn’t much fun, but it’s there in the hope that maybe one person out there will feel not so very much alone in the pit.
Thanks for honestly sharing, Andrew. I know that the words you write here are avidly read and received. They are articulate and insightful. When you don’t comment on a given day, we all feel the loss of your presence.
Janet, I truly appreciate your words; being part of the Books and Such community is perhaps the best thing that’s happened in my life, and I don’t say that lightly. To be absolutely frank, I usually hit a low spot on Sunday night, and looking forward to your weekly post is the bright spot that picks me back up, keeps me going. Your wisdom, humour, and above all compassion are a gift for me, and for all who gather here.
Andrew, thank you for kindness. Each time I schedule my blog, I picture you opening it up, reading, and faithfully, thoughtfully responding.
Andrew, you are an inspiration to all of us. You may think you’re not doing much writing, but if you add up all your posts here and on other blogs you’ve written volumes in the past few years and maybe touched more lives than you could have with books. Please don’t give up.
Jan, thank you so much. I won’t quit; it is a decision I have to reaffirm every day.
Wow, Janet and Andrew, great ideas!! I had to smile when reading Janet’s first few paragraphs. My slump came when I had 6 adult books published (one middle readers), and the slump began because my genre — books set in prehistoric times — was dying, big time! I tried several other genres and didn’t seem to have the same enthusiasm or ease I had writing my previous books. I wish I would have take the advice of Rachelle Gardner, who was then my agent. She suggested I might want to write in my favored genre and just wait out the slump. Now, a new generation of readers is suddenly interested in prehistoria. If I’d taken her advice, I’d probably have 2 or 3 books ready. Agents have their fingers on the pulse of the business. My advice to other writers? Listen!
We agents aren’t always right, but we do have a larger context in which to see each of our clients’ careers. And sometimes our advice is painful to receive, but it’s always given with the thought that a solution can be found.
Great ideas, Janet and Andrew. My first response was a whip-lash type of reaction. Why? Because I was pinned by a previous post (Wendy, I believe) about how an author’s agent does not want to hear “I think I’ll try a different genre.” But I see the wisdom of these suggestions when in a slump AND in concert with your agent. Thanks, as always, for sharing your wisdom.