We’ve left it open for you, so you don’t even need one of those little keys. Because writing is life, and keeping it real means forgoing the line between the personal and the professional.
Over the course of the last 25 years, we have done work with a variety of companies and organizations to help their employees become better writers. We teach the basics of structure (scene, series, and theme, you know the drill); the primacy of voice; killing your darlings; how to begin a little bit further on because that is where the good stuff actually gets going; and how to earn your end—through the somewhat torturous process of sorting out the middle.
With that said, at InkHouse Public Relations, we were not only invited to help people become better writers — but become the people they were intending to be all along. Over the course of a decade, we were privileged to teach people how (and why) to leave your reader wanting more, but also to help writers describe what their grandfathers meant to them, how to come clean about their addictions and still be able to manage people (in fact, to be able to manage them better), and how to reach back into the past and connect some of the dots of their experiences to discern where things might be heading in the future.
At InkHouse we put together yearly books of essays, or hosted Moth-style readings, bravely sending the work out into the world so that clients would really know who they were working with—fusing the personal with the professional, in a way that benefitted both lenses. Under the auspices of co-founder and CEO, Beth Monaghan, an excellent writer in her own right, we operated with the understanding that creative non-fiction was neither “unprofessional” nor was it “too personal” — if it was good. Then it could benefit all kinds of relationships, including the one you have with yourself.
We would never want to put words into Beth’s mouth, but it seemed like she realized that some of her employees wouldn’t work for her forever. Hey, it happens. And that means that you have a responsibility to develop not only their resumes and their experience, but their hearts and souls — and to help give credence to a human being’s natural creative gifts. And that is why our work at InkHouse is this month’s chosen highlight from the last quarter century.
Ipuna Estavillo Black, PhD, MSN, RN, MFA recently signed with her first literary agent—after more than a decade of pursuing creative writing. Earlier this month, Madison Utley spoke with Ipuna about what drew her to writing in her thirties, how she kept at it amid competing demands and through bouts of discouragement, and the one piece of advice she has for writers struggling to stay motivated.
MU:To start, can you tell us when you began pursuing creative writing in earnest?
IB: I was always a reader, but I was never one to declare “I’m going to be a writer” when I was three years old. My mom was an immigrant from Korea. I saw her sacrifice and how hard she worked to make a living, so my focus was on creating a career for myself. I didn’t give any time to thinking about my dreams.
I love the direction I chose in nursing. But the extreme research-based learning I did in my PhD program could be quite dry, and made me aware of the lack of creativity in my life at that stage. I was in the final trimester of my fourth (and last) pregnancy at the time and it was getting difficult to do my daily run, so I decided I’d rededicate that time in the morning to writing a book–and I did so in three months. That was 2012.
MU:How’d you land on a full-length book as the ideal vehicle?
IB:When I was younger, I was an avid reader but I had lost that sense of wonder; I wanted to get it back. A few years earlier, after my Masters but before my PhD, I had taken a creative writing class at the local community college. I thought that would be enough to push the urge to be creative down again. I was wrong, and so I decided writing a book might do the job. I had no idea how to write a book, or even what a scene was, or how to tell a compelling story. Like at that point, I thought editing meant checking for grammar.
At the end of the three months of writing, I Googled how to get an agent and Stephenie Meyers’ story popped up. She had written Twilight over three months and then queried 15 agents, and the one she signed with was from Writers House. I assumed that was normal. I had no writer friends so I was like, “Great!” and I also queried 15 agents. I heard nothing back; not even rejections. That’s when I realized I didn’t know what I was doing.
MU:Is that the point where you pursued more formal assistance?
IB:That’s when I decided to attend my first writing conference where I met Stuart. He led a session on editing which made me realize how little I knew about the writing world. At the end of his session he said, “Does anybody have questions?” I didn’t have a question. I had no idea what to even ask.
Stuart ended up being the first person to help me with editing. My manuscript was terrible and needed a lot of work, but he did the best he could with big picture items. He found the perfect balance of giving constructive feedback that was very specific and useful, while keeping things feeling positive. I remember how much he loved the word “awkward” whenever things were off. I always knew if I was on the right track with what I was doing when I’d get the least amount of awkwards in the margins. He was careful to never crush my spirit though, and I felt like I could really learn from him.
After that, there were years and years of editors and agents, conferences and learning, pitching and reworking manuscripts, writing whole new manuscripts. I’ve never been afraid to put myself out there. I always thought: how am I going to learn if I don’t get feedback? I’m not scared of failure and I’m not scared of rejection. When you’re in academia, like in my PhD program, you get a lot of feedback. You’re always sharing your work, your research writing. You’re always critiqued. So I was used to that, and I used every opportunity to connect with somebody who could make me better.
MU:Education seems to have played a large part in your life, both with your nursing career but, eventually, also with your writing. Can you tell me more about that?
IB:I learned so much about the industry through all of my experiences, but eventually I did end up getting my MFA from University of Nevada, Reno in Creative Writing, Writing for Children and Young Adults through a low-residency, mentorship-based program. I finished my YA manuscript–a story of a high school hurdler in 1995 Las Vegas navigating her mother’s Korean War trauma–that secured my agent with the assistance of my four mentors. Together, they helped me hone my voice and identify the heart of my story, while also preparing me for the marketing component of pitching.
When I did start querying, I felt like I was at a high self-esteem point. I knew my story, I knew my voice, and I felt good about it. I got 12 full requests, slowly, over time. From there, I got two really detailed feedbacks on the manuscript. And then, one offer fromSandra Proudman at Gallt & Zacker. I’m very happy with Sandra. She gets my writing and she gets my story. So it was a very long road, but I do feel like I learned from every person who I was connected with along the way.
MU:Did you consider stopping at any point over that time?
IB:For a lot of those years I was working full time, getting degrees, having and raising kids. But in the beginning, it was fun, even though I had to work to carve out the time to write. I was like, “Writing is calling me! This creative energy is calling me! I must listen!” But doubts did start to creep in. I wondered if it was a waste of time, and if I should be focusing my energy on more practical things. But I didn’t stop. Every positive piece of feedback or promising connection that would happen would give me just enough hope to take the next step. Eventually though, it was pure grit keeping me going and I was exhausted. I was a decade in at that point, asking myself, “What am I doing?” But the MFA tipped me over; if I hadn’t done that, I don’t know where I’d be.
MU:What would you say to your fellow writer who has been toiling at this for years and years, and is still waiting for their breakthrough moment?
IB:You have to find a way to make it fun. That’s what made all the difference for me. I’m a very goal-oriented person. A checklist kind of person. I even cut back at work and went part time for a period to meet my rigid page goals. I thought if I just kept investing more time and more energy, then I’m going to make it. But I eventually realized the more negative pressure I put on myself, the worse my writing got. It made my words stiff and forced and I hated it. I took a step back for a spell, but I never considered quitting.
The thing is if you truly want to write, the writing will never quit on you. You will be composing stories in your head, a character will come to you, you’ll dream about something you need to write about. At least for me, it didn’t feel like this desire was going to let me go. I also realized it’s the same thing I tell my kids with their sports; you can see when they’re trying too hard and they’re in their head, they play worse. So I stopped giving myself these crazy daily goals. I built writing into my schedule where it made sense, like longer chunks on the weekends, and that also gave me a chance to anticipate it. Rather than seeing it as a chore, it was something to look forward to. That shift helped the outcome matter less to me; because it was a source of fun and good in and of itself, rather than a means to an end, it brought me to a better mental space and made my life–and, ultimately, my writing–better.
Why do we recommend learning how to meditate to all writers? In part, it is so you will have greater access to your flow state when meditation becomes part of your creative ritual. Sure.
But it is at least as much so that a writer will learn how to wait. Lose the sense of rush, is one of our favorite mantras that applies here. And not just the rush over the course of an entire project, with its side tracks and dead ends, where every draft takes longer than you think, and there are more drafts required than you would ever initially have considered necessary.
Meditation can also help you lose the sense of rush at the outset of every writing session, so that you come equipped with the all-important skill of presence. When you don’t know how to wait, you hurry into words that aren’t quite the words, hastily choose subjects and scenes that might be important eventually but are not where your heart is right now. Because, after all, time’s-a-wasting!
Actually, if you want to become a good writer, you have to be able to wait for so long that the waiting itself becomes interesting. During that time, you naturally shuffle through what you thought you had to do at the desk so you can get to what you want to do. The longer you wait, in fact, the more you are able to pay attention. And the less it seems like waiting at all, in the sense of waiting for something to happen.
Because things are happening all the time. And then, among the presumably infinite stream of happenings, you can tune your ears and your eyes to what you have been looking for all along, beneath the surface or just outside the frame of the picture.
Plus, when a real idea comes, you will be ready for it — your reflexes will be primed so that perception becomes action. The words and lines and paragraphs fall together in a way that would have seemed quick just a little while ago, but are now just part of a natural unfolding.
On the one hand, as an editor, you don’t want to repeat yourself. On the other hand, I do find myself saying some of the same things over again (so much so that, at times, I will just copy the comment from above and paste the same exact one below). That made me wonder if it might be helpful to describe some recurrent challenges I see, so that writers might get ahead of these issues before they become structural. In that spirit, here are four common editorial observations along with a brief exploration as to what they might mean on a larger scale.
1. THIS FEELS A LITTLE ABRUPT: I understand that links, those transitional passages that fuse one scene to another, often come last. At the same time, nothing benefits “the willing suspension of disbelief,” as Samuel Coleridge put it, more than a causal connection between scenes, or a temporal one, or some other reasoning (which is clear enough to the reader) why something should come next and something should come after that.
So why might this “feel a little abrupt”? It could be that the order of scenes (or subheads, if you are working in non-fiction) is actually off — a common enough challenge to navigate in the drafting process. In fact, you can actually work backwards and say: if this feels a little abrupt, might it be that things don’t go in this order at all?
If, however, you are content with the current sequence of things, then you might have to dig deeper to discover why a segue between one scene or paragraph to another isn’t satisfying. What is the tributary, the meaning, that can be harnessed, so that your river of discourse can flow?
2. DRAGGING IN HERE: As you can see in this reel, I am a big fan of something happening in a work, regardless of the genre. It’s like Robert Louis Stevenson said, “When we are in a hot corner…we want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy.”
Now, I understand that the novel as an art form was, in part, invented to give voice to interior monologue. And that people read for different reasons; some, like the British novelist Laurence Sterne, maintain that “digressions are the very soul of reading.” Nevertheless, I often find myself wondering while editing, what is the point of this speechifying, if nothing is going to happen? That is the first definition of scene, after all: A scene is where something happens. The second definition follows from that: a scene is where because something happens, something changes.
I don’t think it is just my taste for (relative) minimalism — as evidenced by the fact that the contract for my forthcoming parenting memoir, Amnesty Day, called for 70,000 words — a bar which I found almost impossible to reach. Rather, I think I am not alone when I find myself asking, “Is it so much to ask for for something to happen?”
3. QUESTION TO BE ANSWERED: This is a good one — see, they aren’t all bad! This comment means that we have identified where something is at stake. There always has to be an unanswered question that the reader keeps in mind. Otherwise, as the theater critic Louis Catron once said, “When the questions are answered, the play is over.”
If you have gone to the next level with the Book Architecture Method, you know that every series — those repetitions and variations of an object, a character, a relationship, or a phrase which create meaning — has to ask a question. The question might be basic (“whodunit?”) or it might be complex; it might be brief, or it might require most of the narrative to answer. But these questions are literally what keep the pages turning, so that we can find out whether someone ends up safe, falls in love, gets what’s coming to them, etc.
Some advanced considerations in this category include: a question being resolved in such a way that it poses a new question, not having so many open questions at one time that the reader can keep them straight, having the same question open too long without development so that the internal progression stalls, and — if at all possible — avoiding those kind of clumsy recap paragraphs when the author tells us all of the open questions at once.
But perhaps the most important aspect to keep in mind is that, following the logic that a series worth tracking has to ask a question, that question has to eventually be answered.
4. AVOID REPEATING THE SAME WORD IN THE SAME SENTENCE: This might seem obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is the challenge to not repeat the stem of the same word in the same paragraph, or even on the same page.
At last count, there are about 170,000 words in current daily use in the English language. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a word nerd, the average native English speaker knows at least 20,000 words and usually more like 35,000.
So, use them. One of our Book Architecture core values is, “We use our words.” We aren’t too afraid to raise the bar with our vocabulary, even in a social setting that doesn’t seem to call for it. Let other people puzzle the meaning of a word out from context…or even go look it up.
This comment isn’t solely designed to help you avoid repetition; it is also meant to encourage you to think about the exact shade of meaning you are trying to convey. To lift your writing out of cliche into an original expression with every word choice.
Ironically, the better your writing gets, the more challenges that will present themselves. Because some words are so dynamic that they can’t even be repeated in the entire manuscript. We learned this injunction from editor Annie Tucker, who once told us that the mark of a good editor is that they can remember you used a word like “deromanticizing” once already, and even though it is now 183 pages later, you can’t get away with it a second time without making it seem like your resources are limited.
