Natalia M. Sylvester

Meeting publishing pros at writers conferences is something that can’t be duplicated no matter how many agent blogs and tweets you follow, so imagine my excitement when agent Colleen Lindsay posted a contest on her blog, The Swivet, for a scholarship to the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar in NYC! It’s a chance to have your query letter and first two pages of your manuscript read and critiqued by agents and editors! Sign me up! Right now!

Right?

Maybe not so fast. All excitement put aside, I know my manuscript just isn’t ready yet. I’m still in the revision stages, and you know rule number one about querying: Don’t do it too early. This also happens to be one of the rules in the contest (only finished novels!), which confirms my suspicions that these contests are plagued with premature works constantly.

Putting your work in front of an agent before it’s as close to perfect as it’ll ever be is kind of like an actor stepping onto the red carpet without their best outfit on. You can’t risk making a bad impression, unless you want to be the literary equivalent of Bjork’s swan dress:

Source: Marie Claire's The Oscars Best and Worst Dressed List

That was 2001, by the way, and we STILL haven’t forgotten it, because poor choices in how you present yourself and your work leave an impression ten times more easily than good ones will. Most literary agents agree that if they’ve turned a work down once they won’t reconsider re-reading even if you’ve revised. Even if you’ve taken off that swan dress and slipped into Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace.

Of course, if you’ve got your query letter and manuscript ready to go then by all means you should enter the contest, and any other contests that pop up occasionally on the publishing blogs that I’m always tempted to enter before I slap myself on the wrist and say: “One day, oh impatient one, one day.”

If not, be a sponge in the meantime. Learn everything you can about the writing and querying process so that once you start it, you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. There will be plenty of other contests in the future, and the best time to enter isn’t now, but when your work is at its best.

The key to giving a great writing critique isn’t pointing out the problems in the work–it’s trying to figure out why they’re happening. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done when you’re dealing with something as fluid as writing.

It’s not like a math problem where you can trace a person’s steps and see where they put in the wrong number. If a character has no character, there’s usually no easy fix. And if the story is just coming off as boring, there’s no easy way to tell a writer that. So can there really be a formula for giving constructive criticism? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to vent about your work anxieties when there’s no watercooler in your home office, or when the only semblance of a co-worker at your job has four legs and doesn’t really talk much.

But recently I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several work-from-home freelancers and was so happy to hear I wasn’t alone in my pet peeves.  It’s true that we don’t deal with some of the more typical office problems like having a tough boss, clashing with co-workers, dealing with bad parking spots or disappearing red staplers (I love Office Space, can you tell?). But our unique working situations can lead to dilemmas that only other freelancers could understand. Here are just a few of mine:

People assume I’m not working since I work from home: It took some time and conditioning before family and friends got the hint that I can’t take personal calls at all hours of the day or hang out at their house to wait for a UPS delivery while they went to work. Just because we don’t have a typical 9-to-5 schedule doesn’t mean we don’t need time to work. A flexible schedule is not the same as an open schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

I often hear writers compare their book-in-progress to a baby, to a child they’ve conceived, carried and birthed after months (or years) of labor. They’ve suffered the sleepless nights of typing away at their computer or lying awake wondering what their character will do next, and by the time the first draft is complete they feel an attachment only a parent could for his child, full of unconditional love and pride.

This is where the book/baby metaphor can either go really wrong or really right. Because any parent knows that after you’ve given birth to a child comes the really hard part: raising it right. And after you’ve written that first draft of your novel you need to do the same: revise it right. Read the rest of this entry »

Circa 1995, I used to type stories and poems into Word Perfect and print them out on a ridiculously loud dot matrix printer. Every time I wanted to change fonts, there was the quick brown fox, jumping over the lazy dog:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was used to demonstrate different fonts because it’s a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters in the alphabet. It originated as a practice sentence for stenography books in the late 1800s.

Maybe it’s time for some updated material. Here’s my shot at coming up with an original pangram:

A fuzzy pig weeps quietly whenever men joke of bacon and taxes.

Care to give it a try?

This is a post mainly about freelancing but also a lot about my Boston Terrier, Maggie, who is just so cute that it was only a matter of time before I tried incorporating her into this blog. It’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but it’d make a great spin-off: Marley and Me for Freelancers. No? Not so much?

Anyways, Maggie seems to think she’s a person, like all dogs do, but I suspect that person could be a freelancer. In that case, here are a few lessons we could learn from her:

Don’t pounce too quickly: If the wind blows a leaf across her path Maggie will pounce on it, thinking it’s a lizard. Sometimes she’ll chase her own shadows. If she’d only take a second or two to take in the situation I’m sure she’d waste a lot less of her energy. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all heard of the must-have office supplies for a work-from-home freelancer: computer (I prefer a laptop), dedicated phone line, printer, fax machine, etc. These are the essentials, but today I thought I’d share a bit about the tools that have simply made my work easier. I figure if they’ve saved me some time and sanity, why not pass the info along to another freelancer?

One thing I notice writers always asking about is writer software. They want to know if there’s an alternative to MS Word, and if there is, is it actually helpful?

I’d say yes, depending on what you’re writing. For longer forms (like my novel, currently at about 150 pages) I’ve found Scrivener to be quite the organizational life-saver. It basically works like a digital binder, where you can flip between the text, which is separated into different chapters, and an outline and notes section. This is really helpful when you’re revising a hundred page document, cutting and pasting text from page 3 to page 57, for example. It also has a trash bin for text that you want to delete but might want to go back to later in case it turns out to be not so bad. In case I’m doing a terrible job describing all this, here’s a screenshot of a Scrivener project: Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been having a tough time separating my work life from my personal life. I can’t say I’m too surprised–when your office is just a few steps from your kitchen and your writing is sometimes shaped by experience, it’s not easy to put up that invisible wall. Problem is, if I can’t balance work with enjoying the times that I’m not working, I’m defeating one of the main reasons I started freelancing: I wanted my time to be my own, and I wanted to be responsible for the outcomes of my hard work.

What’s worse than a boss who never acknowledges your efforts? Probably one who never lets you quit, who’s never satisfied that enough is enough, even when you’ve checked off all your to-dos for the day.

So in other words: me (does that sound like you, too?). What’s an overworked freelancer who can’t catch a break from herself to do? Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I posted about the difficulties in making a writers group work. Getting a group of like-minded writers to commit to meeting periodically and coordinate their schedules can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort if you can get it to work. And if you can’t, it’s really not the end of the world.

In one of my writing groups, after several attempts at meeting, we decided to embrace our aversion to scheduled meetings. Now every first Thursday of the month (used to be the last, but we switched it) we get together for “non-meetings.” Not everyone shows every time, and there are no hard feelings. We don’t turn in work to critique because not everyone has something ready to hand in, and that’s okay, too. The point is to get together with other writers and do writing exercises on the spot, so even if we came in with no new work we may walk out with the first paragraph of something great.

So basically, we took all the rules for forming a writers’ group and did the exact opposite. It’s now the longest-running group I’ve ever been in. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk to enough writers and read enough books about writing and you’ll get a lot of advice about how to get organized before the first word is on the page. After all, as my high school journalism teacher used to say, do you get in the car without knowing where you’re going?

What I learned real quick is that what works for one writer might not work for the next. Some people are outliners. I find this method helpful only when I’m working on shorter pieces of work. I’ve heard many novelists say they use color-coded index cards to plot their books, but when I tried this with my novel I just ended up with more stacks of messy papers on my desk that just happened to be colorful. Finally I tried a word map (you know, central idea in the center of the page, then it branches out like a family tree?), but an 8.5 x 11 inch paper ended up being too small, and instead of organizing my ideas I felt they were getting entangled in each other. Read the rest of this entry »