How Writers Fail: Analysis and Solutions: WMG Writer's Guides

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Everyone fails at times. Writers fail in predictable ways—ways both foreseeable and preventable.

In this WMG Writer's Guide, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch addresses the pitfalls writers face and offers solutions to help them overcome those obstacles.

Because the best writers push through their challenges to ultimately find success, as Rusch brilliantly illustrates in these real-world examples.

"Not many people understand the publishing business as well as the author business—Kris Rusch is one of them. Her Freelancer's Survival Guide is balanced, ambitious, and packed with information that all writers, editors, and publishers should read."

—Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jul 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223985037

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I started this project because I got mad. Now, to be fair, much of my nonfiction comes out of anger. Something happens, I respond, and often, nothing happens. Then I get frustrated or, more likely, I get angry.

I’m not sure if one incident triggered this entire project. I’d been having a series of discussions with a writer I’d known for a long time. That writer had a glaring, obvious problem with their writing. It was a problem they verbally acknowledged over and over again, continually beating their head against the same wall unceasingly.

The conversations, stretched out over years, went from me offering patient advice, to me listening, to me trying to change the subject because this writer wasn’t changing. I tried not to let my frustration show, but of course it did one day, and I blurted something along the lines of, If you know this is a problem, how come you’re not trying to solve it?

The writer didn’t miss a beat. They responded, Oh, I doubt solutions will work. I’m just built this way.

Stupid me, I asked, Well, have you tried to fix the problem?

The writer looked at me incredulously. Why? I just told you. I’m built this way.

That’s when I realized I had been beating my head against a wall for years. I had tried to offer good-faith help, thinking it was being asked for, when, instead, all the writer wanted to do was whine.

I have no patience for whiners. I really don’t. Problems are for fixing, in my opinion. If they can’t be fixed, then they are something to accept.

If the problems are severe, fixing can take years. If the problems are insurmountable, the acceptance can take years.

Believe me, I know. I have a chronic illness, one that flares up more often than I would like. (Okay, that’s a weird sentence. After all, who wants an illness to flare up?) I manage the illness, better now that I live in Nevada than I did when I lived in Oregon. There, my environment exacerbated my illness. Here, my environment helps me remain healthy.

But I still trip up. I still make mistakes. Sometimes the mistake is something I can change; sometimes it’s not. For an impatient, solutions-based person like me, being unable to change something is often quite frustrating. The problem exists, but it has no solution…except to accept that there is no solution.

So I understand what that writer mentioned above. My chronic illness is part of me. That doesn’t mean I get to whine about it constantly (in my opinion), nor does it mean that I shouldn’t work diligently to mitigate the issues the illness causes.

I only mention that because at times this book will sound harsh. Fix it, I’ll say, and I’ll mean it.

But realize that fixing something or not fixing it is a choice. The writer above? They are actively choosing not to solve something that is clearly destroying their writing. They continue to say that writing is the most important thing in their life, but they do nothing active to make writing the most important thing.

If that writer accepted that they weren’t going to change, and then called writing a hobby or something they simply enjoyed, I’d have a lot more patience with them. I have a lot of writer friends who have other careers. Some are professors first. Others work in various scientific and technical jobs. All of those writers admit that writing is something they do on the side when they’re free of their real work.

I love that. They know who they are.

Writers who expect me to empathize with them because they would rather whine about how unfair the writing and publishing business is will hook me for a while, and then I realize that I am not the person they should talk to. Some of them need a writer’s workshop with people who will sooth their bruised egos. Others need a friend who will commiserate continually. Others need someone with patience.

None of those people are me.

Writers like that gave me the idea for this book. I wrote it as a series of blog posts, mostly to get past the frustration of dealing with people who had issues in this art form.

It turned out that my frustrations spoke to people, partly, I think, because the posts also offered tough-love solutions, which ranged from get therapy to accept that this is how your life will go.

I decided to turn these blogs into a book, and got to work, writing more entries.

And then I got discouraged.

You see, I understand how writers fail, because I’ve failed. A lot. Failure is part of the learning experience. Failure is how we improve.

So some of the failures I describe in these posts are things I went through. Others are rabbit holes I watched friends go down. Some of those rabbit holes became actual sinkholes that swallowed my friends whole.

It’s heartbreaking to watch, which is why I offer solutions. I couldn’t help those friends, but maybe I can touch someone I don’t know, by making them realize that the problem that has them swirling actually has a solution—should they choose to take it.

It took me a long time to write these blog posts. Months, in fact, because I found them so sad to write. I should have had this project done a year before I actually did. But sometimes I couldn’t face the sadness.

When I decided to put these posts into the book you’re now reading, I left the conversational tone and the air of immediacy. I don’t think you can separate the initial beginnings as a blog post from the chapter before you. I have made a few changes, mostly to answer questions that readers made in the comments or to update something. But generally, the chapters are the posts that appeared on my blog.

There is no particular order to these chapters, which is why the titles are so specific. There’s no progression here. Some writers have several of these problems. Some have only one or two. Every writer has faced something that I mention in these posts.

The successful writers are the ones who figure out a way around the problem. Not necessarily through the problem. Some don’t solve the problem, in a concrete way, anyway. Often the only solution is to accept that, yes, indeed, I’m built that way, and then figure out how to use that essential part of you, rather than let it become an excuse.

Clearly, I don’t know everything about writing. I’m not a trained therapist either. I have simply been in this business a long time. I’ve seen a lot of patterns.

What you will find in this little volume might speak to you or it might anger you. Anger, by the way, is a great fuel. Often, anger is the first step toward understanding.

If something in your life brought you to this book, I hope the book gives you a start on the road to clarity.

I wish you only the best…in writing, and in life.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Las Vegas, Nevada

February 10, 2023

1

ATTITUDE

I keep forgetting that working in the arts requires a very specific sort of attitude. It’s an attitude that can be trained, but to do that, an artist must want to change. This is a complex and sometimes difficult thing to do.

First, the attitude itself.

It’s a combination of optimism and pragmatism, with a bit of cynicism mixed in. Yeah, I know, confusing. So let me give you the example that initially sparked this small series of blog posts.

Moving to Las Vegas enabled me to get in touch with dozens of artists in very different fields. I haven’t had that experience on a daily basis since I left Wisconsin mumble-mumble years ago. When I lived in small-town Oregon, going to conferences and conventions provided some of the contact, and the openness of the internet both helps and hurts, but nothing replaces an in-person experience, particularly with other art besides writing.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been taking a series of classes. Some of them are in disciplines that I wasn’t able to practice due to that West Coast move, although I kept my hand in through online study. Some I simply needed to do in person for me, to get the feedback that comes from an audience and/or from an on-site instructor.

Sometimes I learn that something absolutely is not for me. For example, I always wanted to take fencing, and I signed up for three classes in 2019. We had to share face coverings, which, given my health at the time, made me so uncomfortable (even with promised cleaning) that I never came back to the class. God knows how they do their study now that everyone knows sharing face coverings is a terrible idea.

But, about a week ago as I write this, I sat in the first class of a discipline that has changed a lot in the past forty years, due to the internet and the connectivity of the world. I’m being deliberately vague about the discipline for a variety of reasons, not the least is that I don’t want a bunch of people (on Facebook or here on the blog) asking me why I’m abandoning writing.

I’m not. I’m just reviving some other parts of myself.

There. That’s the sentence that I would have been typing over and over again had I actually told you what I’m doing.

What type of class we’re dealing with isn’t exactly relevant to the story. I was sitting next to another person who desperately wants a career in the arts. That person had confessed as much to me.

We sat through the same presentation. We learned a whole bunch of really cool stuff. By the end of it, my internal optimist saw so many opportunities that had I not already chosen a writing career, I’d have been jumping on all of those opportunities. As it is, I’m looking at how to use what I learned just in the first class in my own writing career.

I was so excited. I’m still excited. The entire class made me realize I had felt this way when the indie publishing movement started—the whole popcorn kittens feeling. ¹ That feeling is essentially so many cool ideas that it’s almost impossible to corral all of them.

Time, illness, life, moving, a damn pandemic managed to mute that feeling for me when