Working The Long Game

I’ve always wanted to write books. At some point in the last few years I came across a scrap paper that I must have filled out when I was about 6 years old. Under the category asking what job I wanted to do, I put something like, “firefighter or author.” I honestly have no idea where I came up with the idea that I wanted to be a firefighter (is that just a universal little kid thing?), but I definitely knew all along that I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, my nose was always buried in a book. Some of them were literary books passed down from my university-educated parents, but a lot of them weren’t. They were Scholastic books, adventurous stories about kids like The Boxcar Children, The Hardy Boys, and later the Animorphs. Basically, it was all serialized fiction which eschewed the literary bent for adventure and simplicity. Later, in university, when I found myself trying to be super-literary, I had to remind myself that my formative years were spent reading a lot of pulp fantasy and mystery, and not the (capital-C) Classics.

My first attempt to write a book came when I was about 10. I wrote about 30 pages of a crime thriller about a little kid and his friend who were somehow tasked with investigating a mysterious accident. It didn’t get very far – at some point I think I realized that I didn’t really have any idea what the kids were going to find, and the story was quickly abandoned. That pattern followed through much of high school, as time and time again I would start a story only to leave it abandoned after a chapter or two. Usually there was some sense that I’d run out of ideas and didn’t know how to drive the story to a sweeping conclusion, but I also had a tendency to agonize over the sections that were already written and either compulsively edit them or just give up, feeling like they exemplified my failure as a writer. I felt incapable of finishing anything. In the end, I would get stuck and move onto a new idea that seemed more tantalizing.

Follow-through is really important in being successful in any aspect of life. One of the first things one of my teachers preached in writing school was to work on finishing things, because history is littered with writers swimming in half-finished manuscripts who never went anywhere. I’ve gotten a bit better at completing projects since university, but not much – I’m still very much a work in progress, and stories without deadlines tend to hang in eternal limbo. It‘s with this history firmly in my mind that in the past few months I’ve been forced to set this project – at least the nitty-gritty work of writing and editing – a little bit to the side. This time, it wasn’t simply out of a loss of interest or feeling stuck. I felt like I was absolutely capable of continuing to work on the book and between Sarah’s original manuscript and my detailed notes, I have a very strong notion on how to complete the book. But I also knew that if we were going to sell this story to editors and publishers, they needed to know that we were capable writers. They needed to know that putting a book in our hands was the responsible thing to do. So I put the manuscript aside and set out to, in so many words, make a name for myself. While I knew that I had to keep my expectations in check and not expect to get big-time gigs immediately, I also knew my portfolio lacked the punch to get noticed in a slush pile and that any decent credentials would be better than what I had. If getting a book published is the end goal, getting a shorter article published in a mid-level magazine is a means to that end. It’s been a moderate success so far. While nothing I’ve written has made me an overnight success, my name is significantly more Googleable than it used to be and I’ve had a few articles that have seen widespread circulation or received some outside praise.

The other day, for the first time in my life, I pitched two major magazines with a story I’ve been independently researching. In response, I received two generally complimentary rejection emails. The first email was from an editor I have worked with before who suggested that the story was interesting, but not newsworthy enough for his publication. The other editor thanked me for the pitch but stated that the story was “not quite right at this time.” In my reading up on how to get published in the magazine industry, I have come under the impression that “not quite right at this time” often means that the story pitched was too big for the writer’s credentials – that it may have been a workable story but not one that an editor was willing to trust in the hands of an unknown. I have no idea if that was the true underpinning of my response note – perhaps there was another reason, or several, why it didn’t fit into their criteria for publication – but it seems like an entirely reasonable read on the situation. The article I was (and still am) hoping to write is a long-form piece, but it’s a long-form piece that might top out at a couple thousand words. Sleeping With The Material World is a long-form piece that will be running 100,000 words – and as such, an editor is going to need that much more faith in the writer handling the project.

Writing is hard. The more research I do, the more articles I come up with that are just disgruntled writers writing about writing, or preachy articles about how to get stuff rejected. More and more, it seems there are more people writing stuff than reading it, which is kind of a sad reality of our modern world. Between writing, working at my full-time job, and having Netflix readily available, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how many books I read these days – and that’s as a writer! I certainly make the effort to always be working on a novel, but there are certainly weeks where I barely read anything offline. But that's not the point. Really, being a productive writer is about pitching and getting work done. Reading is intellectually stimulating and important on various levels, but ultimately unproductive.

Of course, while I’m over here trying to get some smaller work published, the Sleeping With The Material World manuscript sits idly by, not getting nearly as much work or love as it should. Between Sarah’s pregnancy and my writing work elsewhere, along with both of us having full-time jobs to pay the bills, it’s become a little like an older brother who feels neglected because the new baby has everyone’s attention. And honestly, we haven’t had as much time to work on the manuscript in the last few months as we would like. But it’s not abandonment, at least not in the way I used to abandon my stories. It’s about working the long game.

-Simon

What Editors Want

As we continue to push towards getting Sleeping With The Material World published, it’s worth exploring what publishers are looking for. I recently stumbled across this interesting piece from Room editor Rachel Thompson about what an editor is looking for when she’s sifting through a slush pile of submissions. While the article specifically pertains to Room and short story submissions as opposed to long-form, I think it’s worth exploring some of her points, because, ultimately, writing is writing, and catching an editor’s eye is the name of the game.

“Writing that doesn’t begin at a critical moment upon which everything else hinges, or with an opening line that raises more questions than answers, is unlikely to hold my attention for long. You never quite appreciate in media res until you’ve read hundreds of submissions that languish in the beginning. If you’re writing narrative work, and you don’t open with an action or decision point, you’re going to lose me.”

This is an interesting point that I think I inherently understood – I love nothing more than a story that smacks me in the face. Old, dusty books that open with three paragraphs describing a tree in the front yard and the general weather patterns of the region tend to lose my interest pretty quick. Part of this is due to the shift in our culture toward instant gratification as we become an internet-driven culture and shift away from books altogether, but part of it is just that that stuff is…boring. I think that no matter what era I’d been raised in, I wouldn’t have had all that much time for that type of navel-gazing. We read stories to find out what happens. If nothing’s happening, it’s boring.

But while I inherently tend to gravitate towards action, that doesn’t mean that I always succeed in grabbing the reader. Specifically, Thompson highlights the five Ws (who/what/when/where/why). Reading that was like a light bulb going off in my head – because, duh. If the reader starts out by asking those questions, they’re going to keep reading until you’ve got them good and hooked. Once I read that point, I found myself going back over my short fiction pieces that are struggling through that gruelling submission process right now. Did my opening lines do enough to grab the reader and get them asking fundamental questions? Just for fun, here are the openers for four of those short stories:

1. The young boy pulls in fifty bucks during the first week of harvest but there’s more to life than money.
2. I always judge by how they hold their coffees.
3. A couple of days after the party, I spotted Jinay buying smokes at the gas station beside Long and McQuade.
4. The drugstore had a sign out front that bragged it had been open for 57 years but the windows were dusted over and no one had been in the store portion since forever.

Looking back, whether intentionally or not, I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of raising questions off the bat here. My favourite is probably the first one, because it raises a couple of big ones: just how young is this boy, where is he harvesting and exactly what more is there to life than money? The middle two hint at something and make you ask “who” or “what,” but they don’t necessarily raise multiple world-building questions the way that first one does. And the last one is probably the weakest of the lot because it essentially just does the boring description thing that I bashed a couple of paragraphs ago. (Note: I’m trying to analyze my own writing here, so it’s entirely possible that I’m way off base. This is more a moment of self-reflection than real analysis.)

Sleeping With The Material World isn’t a short story, so the parameters are a little bit different – we might have a few pages or a chapter to pull in an editor who has prepared him/herself to read a full-length book. But a grabby opening line certainly wouldn’t hurt. Our current opening line (which is not at all finalized) is as follows:

5. “6000 yen,” the lady behind the counter said. I thought the shirt cost six bucks.

I’d say that line is okay, but not great. We’re definitely wondering why she’s buying a shirt. We have a sense of the what, the where and who (shirt, Tokyo and Sarah). The when is unclear but doesn’t seem vitally important. So on the whole, I think this opening could be improved - if we could really get the reader invested in what’s happening and who Sarah is from the jump, that would be ideal.

While discussing why stories get rejected, Rachel later touches on something that got hammered into us in writing school, but that I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around:

New writers just don’t have the experience to know how many drafts professional writers go through before publishing. (It’s more than most think, likely by a factor of ten.)

Ten drafts? That’s crazy! I still feel that way – but maybe that offers some insight into why I’ve struggled to get much fiction published. As I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve certainly begun to learn the value of extensive editing and revision, but I can definitively say that I’ve never rewritten the same story ten times from scratch. But when I scratch the surface, I realize there is truth to the notion that a story improves the more you rewrite it. If we take Sarah’s original manuscript as draft 1 and my long-form outline and rewrite as draft 2 and 3, then the revisions quickly begin to pile up. I don’t think there’s any doubt that there will be another full rewrite before the final polished copy reaches the public at large. But whatever the expected final revision number, the most important point to take from this is that there will be a revision number.

Thompson also makes one last point I think is worth considering:

I’m totally over the idea that if my writing doesn’t make it into an issue of a magazine, it means they think my work is no good.

This is both good and bad – good because it means that all oft-rejected writers like me shouldn’t hang their heads too much, but bad because it drives home how hard it can be to really get some great work published. Even if we think Sleeping With the Material World is eminently publishable, finding a publisher that has the exact need for this type of book and the time to work on it is certain to present a major challenge. Fighting through the submission process is half the battle, it seems.

-Simon

So What Is SWTMW Anyway?

Some people who click onto this blog might be confused about what exactly Sleeping With The Material World is. Especially if you don’t know us and you’re simply clicking over from the Facebook or Twitter page, you may not be familiar with the story of the book or what we’re trying to do with it. I mean, it’s pretty clear from the introduction up top that it is a book, but since there’s no widget on the website offering you a copy for sale or linking to it on Amazon, some might find themselves asking how they could obtain said book. And it’s an understandable question.

To be clear: Sleeping With the Material World is an unpublished book. Technically speaking, the final draft is not even completed yet. This page exists to raise awareness about our book project in anticipation of selling it to a publisher. Because as Sarah found out the hard way when she submitted her first draft to several publishers, turning your raw manuscript into a published masterpiece that can be found on Indigo’s shelves is actually pretty damn hard.

I know in the past while exploring the internet I’ve come across certain author webpages that refer to a book that doesn’t appear to actually exist, and it’s frustrating. You feel like if the book was published and all you had to do was click on a link, you would be more than willing to support the artist. But how are you supposed to go about supporting an unpublished author?

Sarah has been working on this book for multiple years and in its first iteration it was mostly just a jumble of stories. Since I came in, I’ve radically restructured the narrative. We now see SWTMW as a creative non-fiction "bildingroman," which is a fancy word for a coming-of-age story. It’s a story about growing up, and while the characters may be zany and all over the place, it’s really about a girl who travelled the world to find herself. SWTMW is laid out into 15 chapters, with each chapter taking place in a different city than the previous one. Many locations pop up multiple times, but some don’t – this is just a tour of Sarah’s world in her years in the modelling industry.

As such, on some level it’s a combination of a travel book and a modelling book, which is a little bit unique. There are a few first-person modelling narratives out there – notably Model: A Memoir by Cheryl Diamond, which I read and quite enjoyed, although I didn’t find that it had much of a narrative resolution – but few have really explored the experience of being a model, being flown in and out of different countries and immersing yourself in a new culture for a few months before being plopped down somewhere else. Our whole book is an adventure, as new opportunities pop up and disappear before Sarah’s eyes.

Sarah brought me in because I went to school for creative writing and I have a much better understanding of the process of writing an engaging, readable book with a story arc, but that doesn’t mean I have an in to the industry itself. The key right now is finding a baseline for our pitch that will make what we think can be an excellent book into something that is worth investing in for a significant publisher. So in a way, our goal right now is to brand the book as something that is worth reading. Part of that is demonstrating what’s enticing about this particular story, part of it is showing that we have the ability to write for a large audience, and part of it is finding that audience ahead of time.

Because of the way the industry is today, with the rise of the internet and Kindle and the focus on bestsellers and literary fiction, it’s very important for us to find our audience before we even sell the book itself. When I came into this process over a year ago, as I mentioned, I had the know-how, but I didn’t have much in the way of actual credentials aside from a few isolated articles. Since then, I’ve had my first short fiction piece accepted for publication in a literary journal (scheduled for March of next year) and landed regular gigs writing for TheRichest.com and RaptorsRapture.com. That’s a start, but it’s certainly not going to wow any publishers. Neither of us are going to get in the door because of our resumes alone, so in order to get this book finished and produced, we need to find out who is going to read it. This blog is a part of that process.

In addition, we’d love to explore any other networking opportunities that the internet has to offer – be it guest posts, podcasts, or the like. Most of all, we would love for you to subscribe to this blog (there's a big box on the right-hand side!), and then give our Twitter and our Facebook a follow. And then, maybe even more importantly, share it with all of your closest friends! This might seem like shameless advertising, and to be honest, it totally is.

But we hope you want to see this book get made as much as we do.

-Simon

Beijing Memories

I love this photo.

This was taken less than a week after I ran out on my last international agency in China. In this shot we’re on the elevator on the way to the club to go party with the 2008 Olympians. I was chilling with the Jackass boys and two BMX riders after we had all finished up the Gumball 3000. The “Masters of Dirt” hat I’m wearing is the logo for one of the BMX companies.

It had all started the previous Saturday night, when my friend Min in Shanghai invited a bunch of the girls up to a huge party in a fancy hotel. Min told me it was a party for the Gumball but I had no idea what that even meant. He assured me that the party would be packed with celebrities and that they needed some hotties there. So I asked my 5 roommates (all beautiful models) if they wanted to come. Of course they came – I always knew where the fab parties were. When we got there, there was free booze and free food everywhere. The girls and I stayed all night, then went back to the penthouse and partied till the next morning. One of the hot guys I had met asked me if I wanted to stay with them and travel to Beijing. I told him yes. Then I called the agency and told them I was cutting my contract. I was sick of my agency and the scene in China and just needed a change, but more than anything I was just down to have a good time. Thinking back now, it just reminds me how wild and fun I used to be. It’s not that I can’t have fun now, but I’m more grown up. In my teens and twenties I did whatever I wanted, and got paid. Life was easygoing and carefree.

So I joined the Gumball. The Gumball is enormous car rally that takes place somewhere in the world every year. Thousands of cars and drivers drive thousands of miles just to have a good time and enjoy their toys. It attracts the wealthy, the famous, and anyone who is crazy about cars. The cars in the main rally itself are absolutely gorgeous. In 2008, the Gumball was lined up with the Olympics, winding up in Beijing just in time for the Games. I had really only hitched onto the last leg of the trip.

Fast-forward to this picture. The hottie who had convinced me to run out had already left Beijing, since he was a writer for GQ and had other things to do now that the Gumball had reached its destination. One of the Jackass cameraman, a guy named Teatree, invited me and Miles, the main BMX rider I was hooked up with, to come into town to eat something with him and some British girl. It was probably one of my favourite nights in Asia. We went on an Asian Gondola and rode around a river. We went and smoked sheesha at some side street make shift “restaurant”. Then we ended up in this club somewhere where all the Olympians were hanging out. It was probably best that I had no idea who anyone was because then I wasn’t going crazy about meeting any of them. I had no idea who they were. We partied all night.

Later, Miles, the British girl, Teatree and I were all drinking and Miles put his head down and went to sleep. The British girl was basically gone, her eyes looking all different ways, and me and Teatree were left to chat. He was living in LA but was from New York. He was Jewish and Russian, loved his family, and came across as so funny and sexy but not in your typical way. We stayed there chatting and drinking for a few hours with our dates ‘under the table.’ Teatree was a skateboarder who started his career off as a cameraman for skateboard videos. He moved on to shooting for ‘Jackass.’ He was charming but so not my usual type and a little older then me. We hit it off, and after this meeting we dated on and off, though it never went anywhere. Twice I told him how I felt and twice he turned me down. He only truly wanted me around when he was lonely. From time to time he would fly me out to wherever he was and we would end up stuck to each other’s hip, as they say. Then I would go home, and we would go back to being just friends again.

This photo was the beginning of the end of the fun times. My agency was super pissed at me, and had contacted my mother agency to tell them that I’d disappeared and was on drugs (neither of which were true, though I had left with zero notice). My mother agency was calling my mom to make sure I was okay, and now every other day I was on the phone with my mother reassuring her I was fine and just with friends. By that time the modelling agency in Shanghai had taken all my belongings and brought them to the office under lock and key, including my passport and lap top. They threatened that they would keep everything and not let me leave China. But I was too busy having the time of my life with these millionaires to care.

A few days later, the parties dried up and people started to leave Beijing and I had to go back and clean up the mess I’d created. The train home from Beijing to Shanghai was one of the worst experiences of my life. There were four small beds in each cubby. This train was infested with mold and I’m deathly allergic to it. The train ride is only about five hours long but I thought I was going to die. My throat started to close up, my eyes were foggy and my ears were completely plugged. So much phlegm was coming out of my nose and mouth. I would choke on it at times and have to cough it up and spit it out in a tissue. When I got to the point where I thought I couldn’t take any more my stop was next. I ran off the train and my symptoms instantly disappeared. I was so relieved.

Now: the agency. I knew it was going to be bad. The agency had my laptop, my suitcase of clothing, and my passport all locked up in a massive vault. I still have no idea why they had a bank-sized vault in the agency. They refused to give me any of it back until I reimbursed them for the flight monies they said I owed them for flying me out to China in the first place. I told them I did not want to stay there anymore. I wanted out. But I didn’t have the money.

I sat in the waiting area for while. Finally the owner of the agency arrived and told me to come into their boardroom. He yelled at me for about an hour. He told me I was twenty-three years old and I was acting like a child. He had never had any model do such a thing. Then he told me that I was worth nothing because I was female. I was crying but told him that I was going home this week. He said no, I wasn’t going anywhere until we figured out about what I owed him.

That day I ended up leaving without any of my belongings, only getting them back much later with help from my mother agency and an assurance that I would never work in China again. Even though this was basically the end of my modelling career, I don't regret my decisions at all. It was such an amazing experience and I still talk to some of the people I met on my Gumball trip.

-Sarah

Tojo: A Short Sample from "Sleeping With the Material World"

We don't want to do this too much while we shop this book around, but we thought it would be nice for our followers to get a sense of what this book we're writing is all about. So here's a short sample section where Sarah meets a cute surfer named Tojo and hooks up with him. This is taken from near the end of Chapter 3, on Sarah's second trip to Tokyo:

Tojo:

Anne and I had a casting together. She and I had the same look – skinny, white, blonde – so we ended up at a lot of castings together. We pulled into the parking lot a bit early, and as we waited I bit into a Nutri-Grain bar. I had a thing for candy bars at home and now that I’d gotten to know Tokyo I’d found the westernized spots in town where I could go to buy North American stuff.

“What is that?” Anne asked.

“Just a granola bar,” I said.

“Gran-no-la,” she enunciated each syllable. “That word funny.”

“Hey,” I slapped her and pointed out the window. “Who’s that guy?” A Japanese guy had gotten out of a separate car in the lot with a model and was heading into the casting ahead of us. He was medium build, dressed like a skater, but he immediately looked familiar. “I swear to God, he looks exactly like Pharell Williams.”

“The rapper?” Anne said. “He does, too.”

“What’s his name?”

“Whatever, Sarah. He is another DTA," my DTA Masahiro said from the from the front seat. "Who cares?”

“Serious, though," I said. "I want to know his name. And what agency he works for."

“He's called Tojo,” Masahiro said. “I’ve seen him around. Are you girls ready to go in?”

“Ready to get his number, more like,” I joked. Anne rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I'm ready," I said, more seriously.