The 2024 edition of Colorado Gold was excellent. I’m back home today (Monday, Sept. 30) feeling exhausted and inspired. There was so much energy at the conference this year. For those who could not make the conference, I thought I would publish my comments from the “Welcome” event on Friday, Sept. 27:
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I was recently traveling overseas with my wife and we got off a ferry and into a cab in Oslo, Norway. The cab driver asked us where we from and when I said “United States” he said—instantly:
“Oh, United States. You know everything.”
I assured him that at least this one citizen of the United States did not know everything.
The same goes for this particular “Keynote Speaker.” If any of you think this particular longtime citizen of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers knows everything, I want to assure you that I do not.
Let me pose a simple question: why are we here?
There is no shortage of writing advice, suggestions, books, tips, inspiration, prompts, local classes, local talks, online classes, online talks. On and on.
There’s Writers Digest University. Heck, Oxford University offers online courses in creative writing. There are Ted Talks like “The Clues to A Great Story” or “Your Elusive Creative Genius.”
Hey, there’s the RMFW blog and don’t forget all the things you can learn on RMFW’s own podcast. And if you’d like to be a guest and share your insights and journey, send an email to podcast@rmfw.org – it’s never too early to book your spot.
Books? How about the Creative Writing Coursebook or Creative Writing for Dummies or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. There are hundreds of books about writing from famous writers—Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, Francine Prose, Anne Dillard. Who hasn’t read Stephen King’s book about writing?
Online is full of writing advice, anywhere you look in the writing and book ecosystem. Writer’s Digest just published Best Writing Advice Websites for Writers 2024.
Need tips? Writers are often publishing their tips.
“If you’re using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.” – John Steinbeck.
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” – Elmore Leonard
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London
You could soak up advice about writing and read books about the process of writing for a few years and never run out of material.
In short, coaches abound. Instruction is everywhere. Some of it is junk. Some of it sold with great promises of how rich and famous you’ll soon become.
But yet we have a great desire to learn. Writing is a very strange, dark art. What is wrong with us? Why do we feel so compelled to stick our warped, strange stories in the heads of perfectly innocent strangers, people we don’t know?
So let’s break it down.
First, there are the words.
Second is what you are going to do with those words.
That’s it. Pretty simple right?
But, really, are there any shortcuts?
Well, as we prepare for 48 hours of inspiration and learning, here are a few things I believe:
I believe the best part of all this craziness is the writing, the storytelling, and seeing what comes out on the page when we tap our imaginations and let it flow.
I believe nobody can tell you what to write.
I believe the indie versus traditional publishing days are over. There is no more versus.
I believe these are both viable, honorable, legitimate ways to get your stories in the hands of readers.
A good friend – I’m looking at you, Cynthia Swanson – had her first novel optioned by none other than Julia Roberts. That novel was also a New York Times best-seller. This month, for many reasons, she self-published her latest, Anyone But Her. With her next novel, she plans to return to seek a traditional publisher.
My friend Maria Kelson waited years and years and years with her book, Not The Killing Kind, until she found an agent and later a traditional publisher. She could have gone indie. She wanted a traditional publisher. She worked at it and worked it. Not The Killing Kind came out this month.
I wrote for 23 years before I found a small publisher for my first novel, in 2007. A second slightly larger publisher published my second novel and a third even larger publishing firm, this one with about 80 authors in its stable, gave me a contract for novels three and four.
But all three publishers went belly-up and by the time I had written novel number five, I got the rights back to the others and I self-published all five under my own imprint. I was very glad the tools existed to make that happen.
I believe there should be no gatekeepers. Writing is expression—no different than an indie rock band running down to the studio and putting a few tracks together and posting them on Spotify later in the day.
I believe there’s no better time to be a writer because you don’t have to declare yourself “trad” or “indie.”
I believe you can go back and forth. Go indie for a few books, test out how your stories go over with readers. Test out your marketing ideas. Test out how getting one book out in the world influences your writing. What was the reader reaction? What would you do differently? How does it feel to see your words in a book?
I believe you can go indie for a few books and get to know the bookstore folks, the librarians, anyone who will help you put on an event or help showcase your writing. Putting out a book and building those relationships within the book and reader ecosystem is invaluable.
I believe if you go indie for a book or five that doesn’t mean you can’t, someday, submit another piece of writing that you think is something that belongs with a traditional publisher.
I believe there are many agents and editors who would shake their heads at this advice. In fact, some discourage it with vigor. There may be some truth behind their scowls.
But I believe if you have a successful indie platform, including thousands of rabid followers, and if the quality is there, they’ll listen.
I believe, and this might also be controversial, that if you want to go traditional, for whatever reason you may have, I believe you can. Will this put you on a longer, slower path than going indie? Maybe? Maybe not. A lot of it will come down to the quality of the words on the page.
I believe if you work on the words and keep working on the words, the rest will fall into place.
I believe you need a process for getting better at the words. I believe you need to get really freaking good at taking feedback.
I believe if you get really freaking good at taking feedback, the words will get better. And you’ll be happier.
I also believe you need to be open to surprises in your career and not cling too hard to anyone thing.
So allow me one self-indulgent story.
In 2001, when I used to live here in Denver, I was driving down I-25 near Broadway when a novel idea fell into my head. The idea was complete. The whole thing appeared fully realized in about three seconds flat. Antagonists, protagonists, general idea of tone and darkness.
I already had three novels under my belt. None published. I wrote this new novel and tried to find an agent. I got a couple of odd offers but really nothing solid. I stopped trying to find an agent—this was back in the day of self-addressed stamped envelopes—but I kept working on that book. I liked it. If you don’t know what a self-addressed stamped envelope is, stop me later.
Soon I found the first of my many small and medium-size publishers and got busy writing my mystery series. In 2015, after the last of my three publishers went south, I went to a pre-conference Colorado Gold party. At the suggestion of my good friend Linda Hull, I chatted with an agent about this 14-year-old novel.
The agent offered to read it, did so, and signed me up. After six months of working on it, still working on the story itself and not yet shopping it around, she announced she was no longer repping crime fiction and that she was moving to YA.
She said her boss would read the book but was under no obligation, of course, to keep me on. Well, her boss also liked the book and we started working together on his ideas for improvements.
About six months later, I came up with the idea for The Fireballer. I called my agent and told him the concept. He loved it. He said this other novel would wait. Write that baseball novel, he said, and we’ll go from there. We took The Fireballer out to market in February of 2020 just as the global pandemic settled in. Twenty agonizing months later, it sold. Twelve months later, it was published, on January 1, 2023.
Long before The Fireballer was published, the editor who bought it said she didn’t want to see any of my crime fiction. She wanted to see another mainstream novel. Something else about “the human condition.” So long before The Fireballer came out, I started writing one. By the time I was finished, a couple of years later, she’d been promoted.
Her replacement didn’t care for this new mainstream novel but my agent knew this editor liked crime fiction and quickly sent her this book that first sprouted as a seed way back in 2001. This was April, of this year. Twenty-three years after that moment on the highway, it was going to an editor for the first time.
The editor read it in one sitting on a flight from Seattle to New York. She immediately emailed my agent. Five words. “I fucking love this book.”
Those are words you like to hear.
And for the first time in about, I don’t know, six years I opened that novel up to look at what I’d wrote. I was horrified. How had this editor even made it through the opening chapter? It was written in a dull, numbing, third-person and some of the writing was, well, ugh. As my agent and the editor worked up a contract, I quickly dove in and started rewriting. I switched the whole thing to present tense and cleaned up more junk than a dredge working the bottom of a mucky river. My standards had changed. My style had changed. I shook my head in amazement that the editor could see the story through all the cluttered-up sentences.
Unless the publisher wants the title changed, because I’ll have no say over the final choice, the book will be called No Lie Lasts Forever. It will be out next spring, the first of a three-book series. Yes, the book I thought was a neat little standalone—I had to go back into it and set up a sequel.
My mind is, quite frankly, blown.
I could have gone indie with it somewhere along the way. I think it would have come out pretty well, but not the same as it will with the thorough editing process I’m being put through and with the support I’ll be getting around the launch.
But that’s me. I’m a big believer in the long road. That’s not you.
No matter indie or traditional, we all need our tribe. And, of course, that’s why you’re here this weekend—to build and strengthen your network.
I know the wallflower feeling. I’m never the first guy on the dance floor. But don’t miss a moment this weekend to dance. Engage, engage, engage. You’re a writer and say it with pride.
No matter your path, I believe it’s all right here for you at Colorado Gold. This is the most secular, welcoming writing group I’ve ever known. Half of the conference is in the workshops and events, the other half is bumping into people and learning from each other, building your network and all of that good stuff. And where else can you go from a workshop about the words, about craft, and then to the next about the publishing options at your disposal?
Here’s another thing I believe—whatever your particular needs, it’s all right here at Colorado Gold.
A final thought – and my good friend from Lisa Taylor will be shocked that I’m going to read a poem – is from Billy Collins:
It’s called Advice to Writers:
Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.
Clean the place as if the pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.
When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.