Episode 151 - Setting Your Creative Horizons with Patricia McLinn
September 13, 2022
Patricia McLinn talks about SETTING YOUR CREATIVE HORIZONS. She discusses how those horizons differ between traditional and indy publishing; the importance of keeping your eye on the goal and of listening to the voice in your head; protecting the writing; the danger of searching out the secret; and going with your gut.
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Patricia McLinn is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of nearly 60 novels cited by readers and reviewers for wit and vivid characterization. Her books include mysteries, romantic suspense, contemporary romance, historical romance, and women’s fiction. She has spoken about writing from London to Melbourne, Australia, to Washington, D.C., including being a guest speaker at the Smithsonian. McLinn spent more than 20 years as an editor at The Washington Post after stints as a sports writer and assistant sports editor. She received BA and MSJ degrees from Northwestern University. She lives in Kentucky.
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"Each person needs to know how they operate. Does something new really rejuvenate you? Do you need to be learning new things? Or are you better off with a routine and keeping to that perfect schedule? Pay attention to when you're more productive, how you're happier creatively, and find your ways." —Patricia McLinn
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Links
Patricia's Links:
Website: patriciamclinn.com
Facebook: facebook.com/PatriciaMcLinn
Twitter: @PatriciaMcLinn
Pinterest: pinterest.com/patriciamclinn
Instagram: instagram.com/patriciamclinnauthor
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Website: patriciamclinn.com
Facebook: facebook.com/PatriciaMcLinn
Twitter: @PatriciaMcLinn
Pinterest: pinterest.com/patriciamclinn
Instagram: instagram.com/patriciamclinnauthor
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Patricia McLinn. Hey Pat, how are you doing?
[00:00:04] Pat: Hi, Matty. I'm doing good. I hope you are too.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am, thank you. So normally at this point, I would read a bio of the guest and oftentimes I can get that by going online to the author's website. And when I did that for Pat, the bio started out with, "Starting the story at the start. I am born."
[00:00:20] Pat: I'm born. Do you know what book that's from?
[00:00:24] Matty: I do not.
[00:00:26] Pat: Ah, I'm pretty sure it's David Copperfield. I know it's Dickens for sure.
[00:00:29] Matty: Yeah, it sounded like Dickens. I wouldn't have been able to say which. But I thought that rather than spending the entire time giving a bio of Pat, I would just ask Pat to give a paragraph of information about yourself, to give some context for our listeners and viewers.
A Little About Pat
And I think that the important thing to your listeners and viewers would be, why the heck should we listen to her? And it's because I've been around publishing for a long time. My first book came out in 1990. Pretty clearly, that was traditional. So I did, I think it was 27 books in 24 years, traditional. And then I had a period where I was overlapping and officially, I just finished being a hybrid author. I got the final rights to the final book back from a traditional publisher. Yep. But I started indy actually in 2008, before there really was indy, but then the retailers in 2010. So I've kind of spanned the spectrum here.
[00:01:25] Pat: I also have a background in journalism. I'm going backwards in my history. So I spent a lot of years as a sports journalist, reporter, columnist for a small paper, then editor, then went to the Washington Post. I was an editor there. When I started publishing books, I went part-time at The Post. And then I was in other departments beyond sports. I have an undergraduate degree in English Composition, which let me tell you, is incredibly impractical.
[00:01:55] Matty: English Composition specifically?
[00:01:58] Pat: Yes. There has never been an employer looking for somebody with an English Composition degree. And then I got a master's in journalism also from Northwestern. And the reason for the English composition is, junior year, I realized that I had enough credits, because I had advanced placement credits, that I could either switch to journalism and get an undergraduate degree in four years, or I could look and see what my courses qualified me for an undergraduate degree, and then I got the master's in the fourth year. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. I petitioned to graduate the same day I declared my major.
[00:02:37] Matty: How funny.
[00:02:38] Pat: They were not happy with me, but it worked.
Well, that obviously was successful.
[00:02:42] Pat: Yeah, so that is actually the publishing background is interesting, but also that sneakiness with getting two degrees in four years is also why people should listen to me.
[00:02:57] Matty: Yeah, well, I think that story is a great entree to our conversation, which is setting your creative horizons. And I heard you speak on lots of topics, but you had referenced in an interview on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast about setting your creative horizon. And oftentimes I'll hear somebody on a podcast and they're covering many topics, but there's one thing I hear that I'm super interested in, which is why I invited you on the podcast.
Why Are You Writing?
[00:03:22] Matty: And I specifically wanted to talk about this idea of horizons, especially because I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage, so.
[00:03:30] Pat: That caught you Matty.
[00:03:32] Matty: Yeah, so the horizons was great and it was especially great because craft and voyage, that's what I'm all about. But horizons is a different and more strategic view. And so I wanted to ask, do you distinguish between thinking about your horizons and thinking about your voyage as an author?
[00:03:51] Pat: I don't think I do. I think one of the things that I think about with the horizon, is you look out at the horizon, you look all the way, but you're also looking at segments closer, and you need to do all of that. And the voyage to me, I guess you should be looking at, to think about what's your final endpoint with the voyage. My final endpoint is to fall face down on the keyboard. That's my goal. I want to keep writing. And how do you navigate to that, is then the question and that determines your horizons.
So the first thing every writer should know, and it's really hard, is why you are writing. What is your number one reason? And I do an exercise sometimes at workshops and stuff that makes you come down to that number one reason. And there's a video online, I think it's called, Three Words on Writing. I did a short keynote at the Romance Writers of Australia several years ago, and this was a take from that. And that helps you narrow down, because then if you're writing, if you're writing to fall face down on the keyboard at the end, that's a different structure from what you're going to have in your career if your goal is to make a million dollars and quit. Or have one huge book and never write again. Or write until you're 75 and then go to The Bahamas forevermore. Or maybe your goal is to be at your local bookstore and do an event there. I hope that's a medium goal, you need longer goals than that. But the reason, your personal reason for writing is the most important thing. And that's what you then check everything else against.
Horizons Are Always Moving
There are a couple of things in there that I wanted to loop back on. One is that one of the things I like about the horizon, which could be good or frustrating, depending on your perspective, is that it's always moving. You never reach the horizon, right?
[00:05:55] Pat: Yeah.
[00:05:55] Matty: Which I think is in line with that idea of, I think a lot of writers' goal would be to end everything falling face down on the keyboard. I don't know a lot of people who talk about the writing career that they want for themselves, and they say, I want to be doing this until I'm 65 and then I want to retire.
[00:06:10] Pat: But there have been authors who have done that. They shocked me.
[00:06:14] Matty: Yeah, I'm guessing it's the ones that are currently more successful and are probably wanting to retire from the pressures that that success is brought to them, would be my guess.
[00:06:21] Pat: Or at least those are the ones we know about. Yeah.
[00:06:24] Matty: But I do like that idea that on your voyage, you're always looking to the horizon and you're adjusting your course accordingly, but it's not like you get there and then you say, whew, thank heaven, so I finally arrived at the horizon.
You're just, you're always out on the water.
Which could be good or scary. All of this is either good or scary.
[00:06:41] Pat: Yeah, if you like writing, if you find something in the writing process. And when I say like writing, I can bitch and ground with the best of them, for sure. Actually, sometimes it is just miserable. And when I get into deadline mode, and I tend to be deadline-motivated, so I'm doing a lot coming up to deadline. At the end of deadline, I'm thinking, oh, I can't wait until I get to clean the garage. It's something different, just let me go. So saying that I like it is, maybe I need it. I need to get these characters out of my head. I need to create that, and that keeps you going. And if that need stops or for any writer, whatever is driving them, if that goes away, there are a lot of easier ways to make a living. There are other ways to express your creativity. But this is the way for me. I'm stuck.
[00:07:37] Matty: So, was there a point at your career when you started thinking in terms of creative horizons or is that just something that evolved over time, you can't put a finger on when that became a meaningful phrase to you?
Horizons and Traditional Publishing
[00:07:47] Pat: Well, I think initially you want one book sold and then you want two books sold and then you want three books sold. And when I went part-time at The Post, that was a commitment to the writing. And I think I did start thinking about it at that point. But it was actually hard to think about horizons during my traditional part of my career, because you have so little control. You don't control scheduling or covers or deadlines or titles. So you couldn't, you couldn't steer to that horizon. You could have a horizon, but you know, somebody else ran the boat.
[00:08:24] Matty: Yeah.
[00:08:24] Pat: What are you going to do?
And I think I started to think about it more in a couple periods. One was, I took a hiatus from writing. It was about two years, and it followed the death of a very dear friend who is a writer. And you would think one of the things that made me grieve deepest about her loss was I knew all the stories that she still had to tell and that she was excited about telling, and they didn't get told. And you would think that would make me then write more. No, no. So I went through this period where I thought, maybe I'm not going to be writing anymore. And then gradually came back to the actual writing and I thought, maybe I won't be publishing anymore.
[00:09:09] Pat: And then the second period that really started me thinking more long term was the shift into indy. And in 2007, I was president of Novelist, Inc. We had an annual conference and I got Chris Anderson to come and speak to us as a keynote speaker. He was then the editor of Wired magazine, now he runs TED Talks. And he had written a book called what am I trying to think of? The Long Tail. Yeah, the Long Tail. He came to this conference in '07. It's all traditionally published authors because there really wasn't an alternative. And he said, publishing as you know it is dead. And this sort of sucking in of air in the room, and I said, what's next? If it's dead, what's going to take its place? He said he didn't know, but to look at music and the music industry. And I thought, we are in deep trouble.
Because music industry was flipping from the performance supporting the physical object to the physical object supporting performance.
Authors don't perform. Who wants to come and sit in an audience with 700 of your closest friends and listen to an author read their book? I wouldn't, you know, not many people.
So I was like, bleh, this could be really nasty. This could be a mess. But with that in my head, when ebooks started taking off, giving us the technology to go indy, because you couldn't practically before that, because of the costs and the infrastructure needed to get physical books out to people. I was one of the early ones who jumped on that. And so were several other people who were at that conference. It laid the groundwork.
So that to me was the beginning of, the really strong beginning of looking at the future, not solely focused way out there, but always having your eye on what is looming out there? Is it a storm? Is it land? Is it another ship? What is out there and how can I best react to it? Do I go toward it? Do I go around it? If I go around it, are there other things over there? So I'd like the idea of having all that kind of percolating in the back of your head.
And I'm not saying people have to jump right on things. I think we have talked about, Matty, I've talked about it on other podcasts. I think Joanna Penn's futurism episodes are fantastic because she does all the work. She does all the research and all we have to do is listen, and you don't even have to act on it, as I said. You just let it percolate back there. It primes you so you are not caught flatfooted when things really take off, and you can pick and choose. If something she talks about really does appeal, ooh, okay, let's go explore that. See what's going on with that.
Episode 54 was, "Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now."
[00:12:17] Pat: Oh, that's great.
[00:12:18] Matty: Joanna talked about exactly that thing, but yeah, and I think I've heard both of you say, it's not that you need to jump on them, it's that you should just be aware that that they're out there.
Keeping Your Eye on Your Goal
I do like this idea that you're kind of scanning the waters ahead of you. I'm really going to belabor this nautical thing to switching your focus from what's right in front of you. Am I about to run over another boat? To far out, am I still heading in the right direction? And that you always have to be shifting your focus so that you don't get so deep in the details of understanding like, what's the new feature that this particular author tool offers, and overlook the longer-term perspective and vice versa, that you don't get so enmeshed in the longer-term perspective that you're missing, the important details of running your business, for example.
[00:13:01] Pat: And I think medium distance too, and all sides, but I think looking close is one of the things that we all get into. And when you're looking really close, I think there's a sense of, I've got to do all these different things. But if you're combining that with a more distant view, a lot of those things fall away, because they are not going to get you to that longer range goal or that farther out goal. They're noise. Yes, somebody did great with that, but maybe that somebody who did great with that, they had a different goal. They were going this way. So I find that having the long distance one is a good check against what I need to do.
So I will tell you in this exercise that I do with figuring out what your number one reason for writing is, mine, to my astonishment, was to get these people out of my head. Because they back up and they get cranky and it's uncomfortable. And I've done it a couple times and it keeps coming back to that. That is a very different goal from making the New York Times. And you're going to do different things short-term based on what that long term goal is. So I need to do the things that are going to give me more writing time to get more of these people out of my head, to empty the waiting room a little bit, because it gets really crowded and boy, they are nasty when they're sitting there waiting for their story to be told. So it helps me determine my short term and let some of those other things slide away.
[00:14:47] Matty: Are there specific examples on the publishing side of things that you started and then jettison when you realized that they weren't serving the longer-term goal you had?
[00:14:56] Pat: I think the better example I have, because I have a bad habit of starting a lot of different things, because I'm curious. And then I have to periodically go back, and periodically sounds like it's organized, it's not, I get to a point where it's just “ack!” and I go back and start thinking, okay. Recently, I just decided to teach myself how to edit video. Not a good use of my time. But then I started into it, and I couldn't quit it. Still not a good use of my time, how much time I spent.
Listen to the Voice in Your Head
[00:15:28] Pat: But what I have found is that there are things that have not appealed to me, and I have procrastinated. Like one year at NINC, everybody was talking about their street teams and what swag did you get for your street teams? And I was like, eechh. I love to talk to the readers, I love to have the contact, but the idea of organizing a street team and then the real idea of ordering swag just did not appeal to me.
So I do a list when I come from NINC of all the possibilities and I had it on there, but I didn't have it real high up. And the next year, it's like that's sort of passé. And I'm thinking, hot damn. I procrastinated my way out of having to even think about doing that, much less do it.
So I think, listen to that voice in your head about things like that, which of the things are just not going to, I’ve gotten, maybe it's the stage of my life, but I've gotten to the point of saying, don't want to, not going to.
[00:16:32] Matty: Yeah, I recently did that. I think I've mentioned this on another podcast episode, so I'll just reference it briefly, but I just decided for my fiction side, not to worry about sending out an email newsletter unless I had a book launch or an author event, because I was killing myself. The weekly reminder would come up, or monthly or biweekly or whatever I was trying to do at the time, that it was time to send out a fiction platform newsletter with interesting factoids about myself and my life. And I just dreaded it so much, and I finally just said, just from a point of view of angst, it's not worth it. And I still do things to collect emails for my list because I appreciate that an email list is a very important resource for indy author to have, but I'm only notifying people when I have a book or an author event. And I think, if I were following me, that's what I would want myself. If I follow authors, even the ones I love, I really only want to know when they have a new book or an author event. I don't really need to know like, where they went on vacation or what they had for breakfast.
So I felt that same relief that I think you did when you realized that you weren't going to have to worry about swag for your street team.
Protect the Writing
[00:17:37] Pat: My non-existent street team. I will say, I think you need to be careful because one of the things that, I didn't have any background in marketing, but getting into indy, you really start to pick it up. And one of the best things that somebody ever said to me, or had the most impact was, you are not your audience. And I thought, Ooh, Ooh, okay. I need to pay attention to that. So that would argue against them saying you, yeah, you still need to do newsletters. But the flip side of that to me is the first thing you have to do is protect the writing. And if doing those newsletters was draining your writing joy, enthusiasm, energy, time, then that's it.
[00:18:30] Matty: Yeah, that's absolutely true. The thing I try to protect most is specifically, my fiction writing.
And the other thing I was thinking when you were talking about the video editing, is that I think it depends on what bucket you put it in. So if you're thinking of the video editing as like a hobby, and you're not thinking of it as a P&L of your writing business, then edit away. If you're thinking of it as a rejuvenating creative activity, then that's fine. But if you're thinking of it as a profit center and it's not a profit center, you have to decide what approach you're bringing to it, interesting hobby or part of your business.
[00:19:08] Pat: That's true, although I don't really have too many other hobbies. Everything feeds into the writing. And I tend to be binge and purge, and so I threw myself into it and was doing it for days and days and days, and then I start getting cranky. Why am I doing this?
[00:19:25] Matty: Yeah, the danger is you have a commitment now, so now you have to deliver the video you edited and now you're stuck.
[00:19:30] Pat: Yeah. And it's a mental commitment. I started this project, I'm going to finish it, by gum, I'm going to figure this out. This software will not defeat me. But this is also very individual. And each person needs to know how they operate. Does something new really rejuvenate you? Do you need to be learning new things? Or are you better off with a routine and keeping to that perfect schedule? So pay attention when you're more productive, how you're happier, how you're happier creatively, and find your ways.
The Danger of Searching Out the Secret
[00:20:07] Pat: Because I think it's a tendency for all of us to search out the secret and scrunch ourselves up and get stiff and think, got to do it just right. If I follow these steps on this path, sorry, this goes off of your water metaphors.
[00:20:27] Matty: I'm flexible.
[00:20:28] Pat: Okay, because we're on land now. If you follow these steps on this path, I'm going to get to this place and it's going to be exactly the place that this other person got to by following those steps. And that never happens. I shouldn't say never, because somebody will come up with an example. It very rarely happens.
And something else somebody said to me a gazillion years ago in the traditional world, a fellow author. I was griping about not being very good at the parties where other people were schmoozing with editors and agents and making great headway. And she said, if you did that, you could do it, you could schmooze. But if you did that and you succeed, then you're stuck. Then you have to continue to be that person. And I thought, wow, is that success, if you're stuck being somebody you aren't and don't want to be?
[00:21:28] Matty: Yeah.
[00:21:29] Pat: My answer was no.
[00:21:30] Matty: Yeah, I love that. I've never heard it framed up quite that way, but I think that's a great consideration. If I had really hit it out of the park with my newsletters but I hated writing them, then I'd be stuck.
[00:21:41] Pat: You're stuck. You're stuck. Yeah.
Balance Between Stagnation and New Things
[00:21:44] Matty: I think the other thing that's helpful is to balance trying new things with sticking with what's working for you. So I think there are analogies to this in both publishing business related things, different kind of ad or something like that, and creatively, like trying out a new genre, which I know you're very familiar with. And that idea of don't let yourself get stagnant by sticking with the same thing all the time. But similarly, don't always be just going after the shiny object. And I have a general business philosophy that I have as few tools as I can get away with, and I use each of those tools to the maximum of my ability.
And so when something comes up like, oh, you should be able to automate this part of your business, I think a lot of people jump to whatever their thing can automate it for them, whereas my tendency is to go look at what I have and see if I can do something similar with that, but then still reserving a little bit of time to look at new things, so I don't find that the technology or a creative impulse has passed me by when it shouldn't have.
[00:22:41] Pat: Yeah, I think that the tools in particular, that's really smart because there's such a learning curve with them. And you go from one email provider to another email provider, it's going to take a chunk of time. It's not just transferring the names; it is learning your way around it. And they never seem very intuitive to me.
Creatively, I think it's a balance. I think you need to push yourself sometimes to try new ways and or new genres or new techniques, without losing a story. You have to hold onto what was your germ? What's the seed, what's the core of that story for you? Yeah, for me, anyhow, it's going back and forth. I tend binge and purge. I tend to write a whole lot, want to clean the garage, then I clean the garage for a little while and I think, Ooh, I'd really like to go back and write.
[00:23:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that can be very therapeutic. When you can get yourself back to saying, I really want to sit down and write some stuff.
[00:23:42] Pat: Yep. Yep. It feels good.
What Made Her Shift Her Horizon?
[00:23:44] Matty: So you write in a lot of different genres. Was your first venture into a genre different than where you started spurred by that, like you had an idea that didn't fit in your genre or you were intrigued by it, or what made you shift your horizon, your creative horizon in that way?
I was always very interested in mysteries because those were really the first genre fiction that I read coming out of college. I hadn't really read much genre fiction. And I don't know why I didn't start writing them. What I started writing at the very, very beginning, and never finished, were Regency romances. So I liked those, I started reading those at some point. And then I wrote something and sent it off and I made every mistake. I just, I didn't know what I was doing.
[00:24:28] Pat: And I sent it off and several editors wrote back. Most people ignored me, which was understandable. But one wrote back, and it was from a publisher that was not appropriate at all. And she wrote back and said, it's clear you know, nothing about publishing. And the said, you did this wrong, you did that wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she recommended that I look at the romance genre, because her point about what I'd written, which was a mishmash of many, many, many genres. I don't think I had horror in there. Maybe skipped space opera but had just about everything else in there. And she said, I'd over plotted for the characters. And her point was, which is very valid, in romance, you have to have really strong characters, because the reader has to connect with them. That is the core of being interested and then what happens.
And so then I explored romance and went, yeah, okay, now I know why I was really interested in the peace part of War and Peace. The battles were like, who cares? You know, just, just go away. And it just felt, it felt really like home. I was interested in people and how people connect and how people heal, and romance really filled that. And to some extent, I see the same thing in mystery. But eventually, I did come back to the mystery.
[00:25:57] Matty: The fact that the editor or the agent or whoever it was that read that piece that you had sent them and said, you didn't know anything about publishing, that's actually quite flattering that that person saw a lot that needed to be fixed, but they were willing to spend what sounds like a lot of time reading your work and offering that advice.
Shift Your Horizon or Keep Going?
[00:26:14] Matty: And so I think my last question is, at what point do you assess the input you're getting from other people and understand whether it's advice on which you should shift your horizon, and in what cases should you say, no, that's not in support of the goal I have and ignore it?
I'm going to divide this into two. One is smaller and one is bigger. And the smaller is in editing. I feel very strongly that if you're having other people look at your material and they say, this is a problem. Put that aside, have other people look at it. Then if multiple people are pointing to the same area, then you probably do have a problem there. But they don't always have the right solution. I recommend that you look at that area, look at it within what you are trying to create for the character, for the story, and then address it yourself, kind of slide away their recommendations.
I think there's a lot of tendency for, especially beginning authors, to treat it like school and like the people who are reading your material are the teachers and they know the answers. And there are no answers, so they don't know answers. They know what they like and how they react to it. So take the benefit of that, how they reacted to it, but assess that against what you're trying to do and how it feels.
Go with Your Gut
[00:27:42] Pat: And in the bigger picture, still it comes back to what you are trying to accomplish, whether you take what other people say or not. I would try the gut reaction first, like my street team things, where people were, oh, you have to do this, and you do this, and you do that. And then you can do it this way and you can do that way. And just, my gut was going, blah, don't want to do that. No. Life is too short. Why do these things that you really don't want to do? There are other ways to get around it, to do other things. So yeah, you got to edit now, you know, a lot of people don't like editing, but there are ways to deal with that. So I would say, go with your gut.
But also try to step back from it a little bit and think about, if your immediate reaction is, no, I don't want to. Don't want to, not going to. But sit with that for a little bit and come back to it and reassess it. Is it because you're scared of doing something? Because one of the things I felt about with the street team was, that was not my strength. And I had a lot of other things to do that I could do that were my strengths and that I thought would be more beneficial. So it wasn't just having a snit. Listen to your gut reaction, that first reaction. There's usually a reason for it.
[00:29:10] Pat: And then assess and be more practical and look at it a little bit from outside too, of how it fits into what you're trying to accomplish or whether it doesn't fit into what you're accomplishing.
[00:29:23] Matty: Pat, that was so interesting. Lots of food for thought there, and I appreciate you so much taking the time to chat with us. Please let the listeners and the viewers know, what's a central location where they can go and find out all that you do online.
PatriciaMcLinn.Com is the primary one. I also have the podcast AuthorsLoveReaders.com, which is less for the writers, and more for readers. But I also think aspiring writers can get a lot out of it by listening to established authors talking about how they do what they do and the stories behind it.
I also have a book if there's anybody out there who is a real discovery writer, I have a book called "Survival Kit for Writers Who Don't Write Right." And it is on the retailers, but on my bookstore, on my PatriciaMcLinn.Com website, it's 99 cents. Anybody who needs to hear this, who feels like they're not doing it right for whatever reason, get the book. Feel that you have permission. You have not only permission, I'm ordering you to do it your way.
[00:30:32] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:30:36] Pat: Thank you, Matty. It's wonderful to talk to you again.
[00:00:04] Pat: Hi, Matty. I'm doing good. I hope you are too.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am, thank you. So normally at this point, I would read a bio of the guest and oftentimes I can get that by going online to the author's website. And when I did that for Pat, the bio started out with, "Starting the story at the start. I am born."
[00:00:20] Pat: I'm born. Do you know what book that's from?
[00:00:24] Matty: I do not.
[00:00:26] Pat: Ah, I'm pretty sure it's David Copperfield. I know it's Dickens for sure.
[00:00:29] Matty: Yeah, it sounded like Dickens. I wouldn't have been able to say which. But I thought that rather than spending the entire time giving a bio of Pat, I would just ask Pat to give a paragraph of information about yourself, to give some context for our listeners and viewers.
A Little About Pat
And I think that the important thing to your listeners and viewers would be, why the heck should we listen to her? And it's because I've been around publishing for a long time. My first book came out in 1990. Pretty clearly, that was traditional. So I did, I think it was 27 books in 24 years, traditional. And then I had a period where I was overlapping and officially, I just finished being a hybrid author. I got the final rights to the final book back from a traditional publisher. Yep. But I started indy actually in 2008, before there really was indy, but then the retailers in 2010. So I've kind of spanned the spectrum here.
[00:01:25] Pat: I also have a background in journalism. I'm going backwards in my history. So I spent a lot of years as a sports journalist, reporter, columnist for a small paper, then editor, then went to the Washington Post. I was an editor there. When I started publishing books, I went part-time at The Post. And then I was in other departments beyond sports. I have an undergraduate degree in English Composition, which let me tell you, is incredibly impractical.
[00:01:55] Matty: English Composition specifically?
[00:01:58] Pat: Yes. There has never been an employer looking for somebody with an English Composition degree. And then I got a master's in journalism also from Northwestern. And the reason for the English composition is, junior year, I realized that I had enough credits, because I had advanced placement credits, that I could either switch to journalism and get an undergraduate degree in four years, or I could look and see what my courses qualified me for an undergraduate degree, and then I got the master's in the fourth year. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. I petitioned to graduate the same day I declared my major.
[00:02:37] Matty: How funny.
[00:02:38] Pat: They were not happy with me, but it worked.
Well, that obviously was successful.
[00:02:42] Pat: Yeah, so that is actually the publishing background is interesting, but also that sneakiness with getting two degrees in four years is also why people should listen to me.
[00:02:57] Matty: Yeah, well, I think that story is a great entree to our conversation, which is setting your creative horizons. And I heard you speak on lots of topics, but you had referenced in an interview on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast about setting your creative horizon. And oftentimes I'll hear somebody on a podcast and they're covering many topics, but there's one thing I hear that I'm super interested in, which is why I invited you on the podcast.
Why Are You Writing?
[00:03:22] Matty: And I specifically wanted to talk about this idea of horizons, especially because I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage, so.
[00:03:30] Pat: That caught you Matty.
[00:03:32] Matty: Yeah, so the horizons was great and it was especially great because craft and voyage, that's what I'm all about. But horizons is a different and more strategic view. And so I wanted to ask, do you distinguish between thinking about your horizons and thinking about your voyage as an author?
[00:03:51] Pat: I don't think I do. I think one of the things that I think about with the horizon, is you look out at the horizon, you look all the way, but you're also looking at segments closer, and you need to do all of that. And the voyage to me, I guess you should be looking at, to think about what's your final endpoint with the voyage. My final endpoint is to fall face down on the keyboard. That's my goal. I want to keep writing. And how do you navigate to that, is then the question and that determines your horizons.
So the first thing every writer should know, and it's really hard, is why you are writing. What is your number one reason? And I do an exercise sometimes at workshops and stuff that makes you come down to that number one reason. And there's a video online, I think it's called, Three Words on Writing. I did a short keynote at the Romance Writers of Australia several years ago, and this was a take from that. And that helps you narrow down, because then if you're writing, if you're writing to fall face down on the keyboard at the end, that's a different structure from what you're going to have in your career if your goal is to make a million dollars and quit. Or have one huge book and never write again. Or write until you're 75 and then go to The Bahamas forevermore. Or maybe your goal is to be at your local bookstore and do an event there. I hope that's a medium goal, you need longer goals than that. But the reason, your personal reason for writing is the most important thing. And that's what you then check everything else against.
Horizons Are Always Moving
There are a couple of things in there that I wanted to loop back on. One is that one of the things I like about the horizon, which could be good or frustrating, depending on your perspective, is that it's always moving. You never reach the horizon, right?
[00:05:55] Pat: Yeah.
[00:05:55] Matty: Which I think is in line with that idea of, I think a lot of writers' goal would be to end everything falling face down on the keyboard. I don't know a lot of people who talk about the writing career that they want for themselves, and they say, I want to be doing this until I'm 65 and then I want to retire.
[00:06:10] Pat: But there have been authors who have done that. They shocked me.
[00:06:14] Matty: Yeah, I'm guessing it's the ones that are currently more successful and are probably wanting to retire from the pressures that that success is brought to them, would be my guess.
[00:06:21] Pat: Or at least those are the ones we know about. Yeah.
[00:06:24] Matty: But I do like that idea that on your voyage, you're always looking to the horizon and you're adjusting your course accordingly, but it's not like you get there and then you say, whew, thank heaven, so I finally arrived at the horizon.
You're just, you're always out on the water.
Which could be good or scary. All of this is either good or scary.
[00:06:41] Pat: Yeah, if you like writing, if you find something in the writing process. And when I say like writing, I can bitch and ground with the best of them, for sure. Actually, sometimes it is just miserable. And when I get into deadline mode, and I tend to be deadline-motivated, so I'm doing a lot coming up to deadline. At the end of deadline, I'm thinking, oh, I can't wait until I get to clean the garage. It's something different, just let me go. So saying that I like it is, maybe I need it. I need to get these characters out of my head. I need to create that, and that keeps you going. And if that need stops or for any writer, whatever is driving them, if that goes away, there are a lot of easier ways to make a living. There are other ways to express your creativity. But this is the way for me. I'm stuck.
[00:07:37] Matty: So, was there a point at your career when you started thinking in terms of creative horizons or is that just something that evolved over time, you can't put a finger on when that became a meaningful phrase to you?
Horizons and Traditional Publishing
[00:07:47] Pat: Well, I think initially you want one book sold and then you want two books sold and then you want three books sold. And when I went part-time at The Post, that was a commitment to the writing. And I think I did start thinking about it at that point. But it was actually hard to think about horizons during my traditional part of my career, because you have so little control. You don't control scheduling or covers or deadlines or titles. So you couldn't, you couldn't steer to that horizon. You could have a horizon, but you know, somebody else ran the boat.
[00:08:24] Matty: Yeah.
[00:08:24] Pat: What are you going to do?
And I think I started to think about it more in a couple periods. One was, I took a hiatus from writing. It was about two years, and it followed the death of a very dear friend who is a writer. And you would think one of the things that made me grieve deepest about her loss was I knew all the stories that she still had to tell and that she was excited about telling, and they didn't get told. And you would think that would make me then write more. No, no. So I went through this period where I thought, maybe I'm not going to be writing anymore. And then gradually came back to the actual writing and I thought, maybe I won't be publishing anymore.
[00:09:09] Pat: And then the second period that really started me thinking more long term was the shift into indy. And in 2007, I was president of Novelist, Inc. We had an annual conference and I got Chris Anderson to come and speak to us as a keynote speaker. He was then the editor of Wired magazine, now he runs TED Talks. And he had written a book called what am I trying to think of? The Long Tail. Yeah, the Long Tail. He came to this conference in '07. It's all traditionally published authors because there really wasn't an alternative. And he said, publishing as you know it is dead. And this sort of sucking in of air in the room, and I said, what's next? If it's dead, what's going to take its place? He said he didn't know, but to look at music and the music industry. And I thought, we are in deep trouble.
Because music industry was flipping from the performance supporting the physical object to the physical object supporting performance.
Authors don't perform. Who wants to come and sit in an audience with 700 of your closest friends and listen to an author read their book? I wouldn't, you know, not many people.
So I was like, bleh, this could be really nasty. This could be a mess. But with that in my head, when ebooks started taking off, giving us the technology to go indy, because you couldn't practically before that, because of the costs and the infrastructure needed to get physical books out to people. I was one of the early ones who jumped on that. And so were several other people who were at that conference. It laid the groundwork.
So that to me was the beginning of, the really strong beginning of looking at the future, not solely focused way out there, but always having your eye on what is looming out there? Is it a storm? Is it land? Is it another ship? What is out there and how can I best react to it? Do I go toward it? Do I go around it? If I go around it, are there other things over there? So I'd like the idea of having all that kind of percolating in the back of your head.
And I'm not saying people have to jump right on things. I think we have talked about, Matty, I've talked about it on other podcasts. I think Joanna Penn's futurism episodes are fantastic because she does all the work. She does all the research and all we have to do is listen, and you don't even have to act on it, as I said. You just let it percolate back there. It primes you so you are not caught flatfooted when things really take off, and you can pick and choose. If something she talks about really does appeal, ooh, okay, let's go explore that. See what's going on with that.
Episode 54 was, "Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now."
[00:12:17] Pat: Oh, that's great.
[00:12:18] Matty: Joanna talked about exactly that thing, but yeah, and I think I've heard both of you say, it's not that you need to jump on them, it's that you should just be aware that that they're out there.
Keeping Your Eye on Your Goal
I do like this idea that you're kind of scanning the waters ahead of you. I'm really going to belabor this nautical thing to switching your focus from what's right in front of you. Am I about to run over another boat? To far out, am I still heading in the right direction? And that you always have to be shifting your focus so that you don't get so deep in the details of understanding like, what's the new feature that this particular author tool offers, and overlook the longer-term perspective and vice versa, that you don't get so enmeshed in the longer-term perspective that you're missing, the important details of running your business, for example.
[00:13:01] Pat: And I think medium distance too, and all sides, but I think looking close is one of the things that we all get into. And when you're looking really close, I think there's a sense of, I've got to do all these different things. But if you're combining that with a more distant view, a lot of those things fall away, because they are not going to get you to that longer range goal or that farther out goal. They're noise. Yes, somebody did great with that, but maybe that somebody who did great with that, they had a different goal. They were going this way. So I find that having the long distance one is a good check against what I need to do.
So I will tell you in this exercise that I do with figuring out what your number one reason for writing is, mine, to my astonishment, was to get these people out of my head. Because they back up and they get cranky and it's uncomfortable. And I've done it a couple times and it keeps coming back to that. That is a very different goal from making the New York Times. And you're going to do different things short-term based on what that long term goal is. So I need to do the things that are going to give me more writing time to get more of these people out of my head, to empty the waiting room a little bit, because it gets really crowded and boy, they are nasty when they're sitting there waiting for their story to be told. So it helps me determine my short term and let some of those other things slide away.
[00:14:47] Matty: Are there specific examples on the publishing side of things that you started and then jettison when you realized that they weren't serving the longer-term goal you had?
[00:14:56] Pat: I think the better example I have, because I have a bad habit of starting a lot of different things, because I'm curious. And then I have to periodically go back, and periodically sounds like it's organized, it's not, I get to a point where it's just “ack!” and I go back and start thinking, okay. Recently, I just decided to teach myself how to edit video. Not a good use of my time. But then I started into it, and I couldn't quit it. Still not a good use of my time, how much time I spent.
Listen to the Voice in Your Head
[00:15:28] Pat: But what I have found is that there are things that have not appealed to me, and I have procrastinated. Like one year at NINC, everybody was talking about their street teams and what swag did you get for your street teams? And I was like, eechh. I love to talk to the readers, I love to have the contact, but the idea of organizing a street team and then the real idea of ordering swag just did not appeal to me.
So I do a list when I come from NINC of all the possibilities and I had it on there, but I didn't have it real high up. And the next year, it's like that's sort of passé. And I'm thinking, hot damn. I procrastinated my way out of having to even think about doing that, much less do it.
So I think, listen to that voice in your head about things like that, which of the things are just not going to, I’ve gotten, maybe it's the stage of my life, but I've gotten to the point of saying, don't want to, not going to.
[00:16:32] Matty: Yeah, I recently did that. I think I've mentioned this on another podcast episode, so I'll just reference it briefly, but I just decided for my fiction side, not to worry about sending out an email newsletter unless I had a book launch or an author event, because I was killing myself. The weekly reminder would come up, or monthly or biweekly or whatever I was trying to do at the time, that it was time to send out a fiction platform newsletter with interesting factoids about myself and my life. And I just dreaded it so much, and I finally just said, just from a point of view of angst, it's not worth it. And I still do things to collect emails for my list because I appreciate that an email list is a very important resource for indy author to have, but I'm only notifying people when I have a book or an author event. And I think, if I were following me, that's what I would want myself. If I follow authors, even the ones I love, I really only want to know when they have a new book or an author event. I don't really need to know like, where they went on vacation or what they had for breakfast.
So I felt that same relief that I think you did when you realized that you weren't going to have to worry about swag for your street team.
Protect the Writing
[00:17:37] Pat: My non-existent street team. I will say, I think you need to be careful because one of the things that, I didn't have any background in marketing, but getting into indy, you really start to pick it up. And one of the best things that somebody ever said to me, or had the most impact was, you are not your audience. And I thought, Ooh, Ooh, okay. I need to pay attention to that. So that would argue against them saying you, yeah, you still need to do newsletters. But the flip side of that to me is the first thing you have to do is protect the writing. And if doing those newsletters was draining your writing joy, enthusiasm, energy, time, then that's it.
[00:18:30] Matty: Yeah, that's absolutely true. The thing I try to protect most is specifically, my fiction writing.
And the other thing I was thinking when you were talking about the video editing, is that I think it depends on what bucket you put it in. So if you're thinking of the video editing as like a hobby, and you're not thinking of it as a P&L of your writing business, then edit away. If you're thinking of it as a rejuvenating creative activity, then that's fine. But if you're thinking of it as a profit center and it's not a profit center, you have to decide what approach you're bringing to it, interesting hobby or part of your business.
[00:19:08] Pat: That's true, although I don't really have too many other hobbies. Everything feeds into the writing. And I tend to be binge and purge, and so I threw myself into it and was doing it for days and days and days, and then I start getting cranky. Why am I doing this?
[00:19:25] Matty: Yeah, the danger is you have a commitment now, so now you have to deliver the video you edited and now you're stuck.
[00:19:30] Pat: Yeah. And it's a mental commitment. I started this project, I'm going to finish it, by gum, I'm going to figure this out. This software will not defeat me. But this is also very individual. And each person needs to know how they operate. Does something new really rejuvenate you? Do you need to be learning new things? Or are you better off with a routine and keeping to that perfect schedule? So pay attention when you're more productive, how you're happier, how you're happier creatively, and find your ways.
The Danger of Searching Out the Secret
[00:20:07] Pat: Because I think it's a tendency for all of us to search out the secret and scrunch ourselves up and get stiff and think, got to do it just right. If I follow these steps on this path, sorry, this goes off of your water metaphors.
[00:20:27] Matty: I'm flexible.
[00:20:28] Pat: Okay, because we're on land now. If you follow these steps on this path, I'm going to get to this place and it's going to be exactly the place that this other person got to by following those steps. And that never happens. I shouldn't say never, because somebody will come up with an example. It very rarely happens.
And something else somebody said to me a gazillion years ago in the traditional world, a fellow author. I was griping about not being very good at the parties where other people were schmoozing with editors and agents and making great headway. And she said, if you did that, you could do it, you could schmooze. But if you did that and you succeed, then you're stuck. Then you have to continue to be that person. And I thought, wow, is that success, if you're stuck being somebody you aren't and don't want to be?
[00:21:28] Matty: Yeah.
[00:21:29] Pat: My answer was no.
[00:21:30] Matty: Yeah, I love that. I've never heard it framed up quite that way, but I think that's a great consideration. If I had really hit it out of the park with my newsletters but I hated writing them, then I'd be stuck.
[00:21:41] Pat: You're stuck. You're stuck. Yeah.
Balance Between Stagnation and New Things
[00:21:44] Matty: I think the other thing that's helpful is to balance trying new things with sticking with what's working for you. So I think there are analogies to this in both publishing business related things, different kind of ad or something like that, and creatively, like trying out a new genre, which I know you're very familiar with. And that idea of don't let yourself get stagnant by sticking with the same thing all the time. But similarly, don't always be just going after the shiny object. And I have a general business philosophy that I have as few tools as I can get away with, and I use each of those tools to the maximum of my ability.
And so when something comes up like, oh, you should be able to automate this part of your business, I think a lot of people jump to whatever their thing can automate it for them, whereas my tendency is to go look at what I have and see if I can do something similar with that, but then still reserving a little bit of time to look at new things, so I don't find that the technology or a creative impulse has passed me by when it shouldn't have.
[00:22:41] Pat: Yeah, I think that the tools in particular, that's really smart because there's such a learning curve with them. And you go from one email provider to another email provider, it's going to take a chunk of time. It's not just transferring the names; it is learning your way around it. And they never seem very intuitive to me.
Creatively, I think it's a balance. I think you need to push yourself sometimes to try new ways and or new genres or new techniques, without losing a story. You have to hold onto what was your germ? What's the seed, what's the core of that story for you? Yeah, for me, anyhow, it's going back and forth. I tend binge and purge. I tend to write a whole lot, want to clean the garage, then I clean the garage for a little while and I think, Ooh, I'd really like to go back and write.
[00:23:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that can be very therapeutic. When you can get yourself back to saying, I really want to sit down and write some stuff.
[00:23:42] Pat: Yep. Yep. It feels good.
What Made Her Shift Her Horizon?
[00:23:44] Matty: So you write in a lot of different genres. Was your first venture into a genre different than where you started spurred by that, like you had an idea that didn't fit in your genre or you were intrigued by it, or what made you shift your horizon, your creative horizon in that way?
I was always very interested in mysteries because those were really the first genre fiction that I read coming out of college. I hadn't really read much genre fiction. And I don't know why I didn't start writing them. What I started writing at the very, very beginning, and never finished, were Regency romances. So I liked those, I started reading those at some point. And then I wrote something and sent it off and I made every mistake. I just, I didn't know what I was doing.
[00:24:28] Pat: And I sent it off and several editors wrote back. Most people ignored me, which was understandable. But one wrote back, and it was from a publisher that was not appropriate at all. And she wrote back and said, it's clear you know, nothing about publishing. And the said, you did this wrong, you did that wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she recommended that I look at the romance genre, because her point about what I'd written, which was a mishmash of many, many, many genres. I don't think I had horror in there. Maybe skipped space opera but had just about everything else in there. And she said, I'd over plotted for the characters. And her point was, which is very valid, in romance, you have to have really strong characters, because the reader has to connect with them. That is the core of being interested and then what happens.
And so then I explored romance and went, yeah, okay, now I know why I was really interested in the peace part of War and Peace. The battles were like, who cares? You know, just, just go away. And it just felt, it felt really like home. I was interested in people and how people connect and how people heal, and romance really filled that. And to some extent, I see the same thing in mystery. But eventually, I did come back to the mystery.
[00:25:57] Matty: The fact that the editor or the agent or whoever it was that read that piece that you had sent them and said, you didn't know anything about publishing, that's actually quite flattering that that person saw a lot that needed to be fixed, but they were willing to spend what sounds like a lot of time reading your work and offering that advice.
Shift Your Horizon or Keep Going?
[00:26:14] Matty: And so I think my last question is, at what point do you assess the input you're getting from other people and understand whether it's advice on which you should shift your horizon, and in what cases should you say, no, that's not in support of the goal I have and ignore it?
I'm going to divide this into two. One is smaller and one is bigger. And the smaller is in editing. I feel very strongly that if you're having other people look at your material and they say, this is a problem. Put that aside, have other people look at it. Then if multiple people are pointing to the same area, then you probably do have a problem there. But they don't always have the right solution. I recommend that you look at that area, look at it within what you are trying to create for the character, for the story, and then address it yourself, kind of slide away their recommendations.
I think there's a lot of tendency for, especially beginning authors, to treat it like school and like the people who are reading your material are the teachers and they know the answers. And there are no answers, so they don't know answers. They know what they like and how they react to it. So take the benefit of that, how they reacted to it, but assess that against what you're trying to do and how it feels.
Go with Your Gut
[00:27:42] Pat: And in the bigger picture, still it comes back to what you are trying to accomplish, whether you take what other people say or not. I would try the gut reaction first, like my street team things, where people were, oh, you have to do this, and you do this, and you do that. And then you can do it this way and you can do that way. And just, my gut was going, blah, don't want to do that. No. Life is too short. Why do these things that you really don't want to do? There are other ways to get around it, to do other things. So yeah, you got to edit now, you know, a lot of people don't like editing, but there are ways to deal with that. So I would say, go with your gut.
But also try to step back from it a little bit and think about, if your immediate reaction is, no, I don't want to. Don't want to, not going to. But sit with that for a little bit and come back to it and reassess it. Is it because you're scared of doing something? Because one of the things I felt about with the street team was, that was not my strength. And I had a lot of other things to do that I could do that were my strengths and that I thought would be more beneficial. So it wasn't just having a snit. Listen to your gut reaction, that first reaction. There's usually a reason for it.
[00:29:10] Pat: And then assess and be more practical and look at it a little bit from outside too, of how it fits into what you're trying to accomplish or whether it doesn't fit into what you're accomplishing.
[00:29:23] Matty: Pat, that was so interesting. Lots of food for thought there, and I appreciate you so much taking the time to chat with us. Please let the listeners and the viewers know, what's a central location where they can go and find out all that you do online.
PatriciaMcLinn.Com is the primary one. I also have the podcast AuthorsLoveReaders.com, which is less for the writers, and more for readers. But I also think aspiring writers can get a lot out of it by listening to established authors talking about how they do what they do and the stories behind it.
I also have a book if there's anybody out there who is a real discovery writer, I have a book called "Survival Kit for Writers Who Don't Write Right." And it is on the retailers, but on my bookstore, on my PatriciaMcLinn.Com website, it's 99 cents. Anybody who needs to hear this, who feels like they're not doing it right for whatever reason, get the book. Feel that you have permission. You have not only permission, I'm ordering you to do it your way.
[00:30:32] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:30:36] Pat: Thank you, Matty. It's wonderful to talk to you again.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Pat! What did you think about her advice to listen to the voice in your head and to go with your gut? Is this something that comes naturally to you, or do you need to remind yourself to pay attention?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!