An answer to the question I’m asked the most.

How did you get started?

I’d love to tell you that I woke up one day—a perfect manuscript on my hard drive. An Agent begging to represent me in my inbox. A Publisher with a contract already in hand.

Actually—I’m not sure I’d really love to tell you that. It would have been easier. But it would erase everything I learned along the way. Everything I’m about to share with you.

Step 1—Write down your daydreams.

This was twofold for me.

I refused to be embarrassed here. Assumedly, you are here, on my webiste, for one of two reasons. Either you have read my work and liked it enough to boot up your internet, listen to the connecting sound of dial up, and type my name into Ask Jeeves. In which case, you already know how delightfully strange I am. Or. Or, you are here because you do the exact same thing I’m about to admit to doing. In which case, welcome. Pull up a seat. Dissociate productively with me.

Daydreaming came in two parts for me. One, I daydreamed stories. All the time. My mind has never been and will never be off. This is often a problem. So much so that it is has impeded my life negatively. I have had so much noise in my mind that I’ve forgotten burners on the stove, have locked my keys in a running car on multiple occasions, and have misplaced more pairs of headphones than I care to number. More often, it is a blessing. In that I can create entire, very vivid stories, in my mind. I can see them, like a movie. If you’ve read my books, you may have noticed. It’s easy for me to create a setting. I’m just writing down what I see. The first step, then, was to start writing those stories down. Some short. Some long. some disjointed. But they existed somewhere other than my brain.

The second part of daydreaming was the part that I’m tempted to be embarrassed about. But we’re resisting that temptation today. So I’ll tell you—I used to daydream about telling people I was an author. And one day, I realized. I would never be able to tell anyone that if my daydreams stayed locked away with the rest of the noise in my brain. I’d have to be content with imagining what it would feel like to say it out loud, to say it and it be true.

So, here we have an echo of the above advice. To be an author, you must write.

Step 2— Become very comfortable with rejection. Very, very quickly.

I read a lot about becoming an author once I decided I was actually going to try.

Most of the stats say that the first book you write will not be the first book you publish. I thought I would defy the odds. I was quite wrong.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first thing you need to do, before you think of agents or editors or seeing your book on shelves, is find someone to write with.

This means connecting with other writers at your level. There are so many ways to do that. Google local writing clubs, talk to your local indie bookstore, talk to your local librarian. Search Reddit where you’ll find so many wonderful opportunities to connect with people exactly where you are. You can pay an editor, you can hire someone. You can send your work out to agents and cross your fingers and hope. But nothing will give you more experience and foster more growth than connecting with someone exactly where you are who can point to things in your manuscript that are off. And nothing will teach you how to analyze a story better than reading someone’s work as a writer. It’s a win-win for both of you.

But you have to become very comfortable with someone reading your work and telling you every single thing that’s wrong with it. It hurts. It’s hard. But you cannot grow without growing pains.

The second thing you need to do is read. Read as often as you can. Read for fun, but pause when you’re invested. Pause when you want to cry. Pause when your heartstrings are pulled and ask yourself why and how and what magic the author used to make you feel that way. Then replicate it in your own work. Read books on craft. I love Story Genius by Lisa Cron and Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland. Learning to let your work be bad is hard. Learning to take helpful criticism is difficult. But it will make you a better writer.

Step 3- Kick your bird out of the nest.

I am too far removed from querying to be any practical help here. But I can give you the basics. For the rest, I’d recommend scouring the PubTips subreddit—it is a gold mine.

You need an agent.

To get an agent, you have to send queries.

You will send a lot of them. Probably.

You will hopefully get representation.

Once you do, you will get an edit letter from your agent, and you’ll work on polishing your book for submission.

On submission, your agent sends your manuscripts to editors at publishing houses. They read it, and they decide if they want to publish your work.

This is a very bare bones explanation. But there are a lot of great sources out there if you’d like to learn more about the submission process.

Step 4- Write some more.

It all comes back to this. Even when you’re published, there is always another book. There is always another story. So write. Do it now when no one is reading your work. Do it and learn and grow and let yourself love it because, hopefully, you’ll be doing it for a long time to come.

Persist. If you do, you’ll be the one writing this blog post in a few years.