Why Rejection = Strength-Training

Are you scared to let your friends read your writing? Do you live in fear of being told, ‘You’re no good?’

You’re not alone.

My first novel came out last year, but before that, I was constantly getting told that I sucked:

That rejection letter came in response to a very stinky novel I wrote in the early 1990’s. Nowadays it’s clear to me why it got rejected. It was more boring than following a bunch of rug-hookers on Pinterest.

All the same, I was DEVASTATED by that note. How could the Arsenal Pulp Press people be so cruel?

That one sentence: “Unfortunately we aren’t interested in seeing the rest.” Ouch!

I could have stopped writing right then. I sure wanted to. I wanted to lie down on the couch and inhale a bag of barbecue chips and never, ever pick up my laptop again.

But I didn’t. Instead, I kept writing. And when I finished my next short story or novel, I sent it out too, and got another rejection back.

Rejection letter 2

I started to keep a collection of my rejections. The stack of letters grew until it was thicker than a phone book.

But here’s the thing. Rejection letters don’t make you a failure. They make you TOUGH. They make you stronger!

Rejection letters are like a dare. They’re daring you to work harder and become a kick-ass author.

Don’t let the rejections get you down. Yes, they sting, but they’re making you stronger. Hold them closely to your chest. Don’t give up. The finish line is out there – somewhere.

The Perks of Being an Author

Being an author’s cool. You get to make up stories, you can wear a beret and no one complains, and from time to time people send you fan mail and tweets.

Just finished reading Ultra by @Writerunrepeat to a grade 5 class. They loved it! They even asked for me to read while they ate lunch!

— Shonna (@macfsh) March 8, 2014

Best of all – you get invited into schools. Sometimes the students even give you stuff.

That’s part of a huge banner featuring scenes and quotes from my novel, Ultra. It was drawn by a cast of thousands (okay, maybe hundreds) of students at Oakville’s New Central School. Those same kids also gave me a pair of awesome running “sleevies” – inscribed with the name of their school:

How awesome is that?! I’ve always wanted a pair of sleevies. They’re perfect for those brisk spring runs.

Here’s something else I was given – by the amazing students at St. Hillary Catholic school in Mississauga:

A school letter! This was particularly meaningful, since, when I was growing up, school letters only went to the football players and the track stars. Since I was completely un-athletic back then, I never had a shot at one of these…

Until now! 😉

It’s quite a thrill, going into schools. Some days I’ll speak to 500 kids. I tell stories about running into bears and having hallucinations on the trail. I talk about writing and being creative and never giving up! Sometimes I even get my nephew Quinn on the line via Skype, and ask him how it feels to have inspired a literary character.

Most of all, I try to have meaningful moments with as many students as I can. I keep my eye out for the arty kids – the ones who have something special inside them that needs to be expressed. Maybe it’s a graphic novel, or perhaps it’s a new computer language, or maybe it’s a cure for cancer. With luck, those kids will find the strength to pursue those dreams. If they have someone who believes in them, I believe their odds are improved.

I like to think that I’m inspiring these kids, but the truth is, they inspire me more. Almost every single one of them asks me: “When’s your next book coming out?” It’s the greatest gift. Almost better than those running sleevies.

Pain in = Victory Out

A fellow blogger called me out on my last blog post; in which I mentioned that my recent book award was the first thing I’d won since a public speaking contest in grade 7. She kindly pointed out one of my earlier blog posts, in which I mentioned that I’d won a 10k race.

Fair point. But here’s what I was thinking.

That 10k victory and the book award feel completely different to me. One feels deserved and the other does not.

Let’s start with the deserved win – that 10k race. I have this belief that anyone can win a running race. Just put in enough training, and you’ll win. Run endless hills and intervals and ‘suicides,’ hammer your abs at the gym, go for long runs every Sunday, and I guarantee you will get faster. If you add some good nutrition and lots of sleep to the mix, you’ll start to win races. Again, this is a guarantee.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to running. If you put yourself through enough pain in training, you’ll be the first to break the tape. It’s a simple formula: pain in = victory out.

So when I won that 10k race, I felt like, yeah, of course I won. It wasn’t a surprise. I’d earned it.

The book award felt completely different. When I heard the news, my first thought was: somebody made a mistake.

With book awards, there are so many external variables. You have to pray that the jurors won’t come down with stomach flu while reading your book (thus colouring her or his reading experience). You have to hope that they won’t have been bullied by a kid with the same name as your protagonist. You have to hope that last year’s winning book wasn’t ALSO about running, and that you’re not up against Suzanne Collins’ latest bestseller.

And then of course, it’s all so subjective. I mean, how can you quantify the reading process? You can’t. Something as small as a Luna moth flapping its wings in the opposite direction might be enough to put someone else’s book on the podium instead of yours.

Authors have control over their writing. But they have no control over how it will be received. They can suffer all they want, they can put their bodies and minds through years of abuse, they can write an absolutely beautiful 70,000 word thing, and there’s still no guarantee that it will resonate with people.

So as thrilled as I am about this ‘win,’ I can’t lose sight of how idiosyncratic it all is. I don’t believe for a moment that the other shortlisted books are any less deserving of victory than mine (I’ve actually ordered them all, so I’m going to find out!).

Of course I’m very grateful that awards like the Cybils exist. Not just because they give much-needed exposure to authors, but also because they get people talking about books!

I know this must be true because I am writing it in the middle of the night.

This is What Keeps Me Awake At Night

Want to know the hardest thing about writing for kids? Coming up with fake curse words.

Let’s face it, most kids swear from time to time. You did it, I did it. It’s totally natural. It would be weird to write a kids’ story that didn’t have some kind of cursing. But to use an actual four letter word? Nah, I could never do that!

Instead, I come up with “fake” obscenities. Words that possess all the power and energy of real swear words, but that aren’t remotely offensive.

Coming up with a good fake curse is like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk. You snatch it up and stuff it in your pocket, hoping no one else noticed your discovery.

My neice Kara (above) is the master of the fake curse word. She gave me a couple of good ones last summer. BUTT KNUCKLE is my favourite. Don’t you just love the way that rolls off your tongue? Butt knuckle! There’s just something about those 3 syllables tied together. All those hard consonants: the B, T and K. Say it with me: Butt Knuckle!

(Question: what is a butt knuckle? Do we actually have such a thing, somewhere in our derrieres? I’ll ask Kara.)

Kara also gave me the classic phrase, POOP NUGGET.

What, you don’t like Poop Nugget? Blame Kara, not me!

I kinda like Poop Nugget, though it’s maybe a bit goofy. There’s nothing worse than a goofy fake swear word. Kids’ll throw your book at the wall if the fake swear words are too goofy. Hmmm. I’ll admit I’m on the fence with this whole Poop Nugget thing. It skews a bit younger; toward kids with a more scatalogical sense of humour. Maybe I’ll let one of my younger characters use it. Minnow. Yeah, Minnow would say Poop Nugget for sure.

Speaking of characters, I’ve almost finalized the names of the characters in my next book. There’s Finn, Minnow, Brody, Skyler, Deena, Grac and Gwen. The villian, who’s plotting to cut down an old-growth forest, is the Tree Weasel.

I’m having trouble with one character though. She’s a fifteen year old girl with blue-green hair and scuffed-up knees and she likes to wear a Fidel Castro army cap and reflective aviator sunglasses. She started out as Sal, but that got problematic. Names starting with the letter ‘”s” are awkward in novels. In dialogue scenes, every other sentence ends with “Sal said.”

So I changed her name to Dia. But that didn’t feel right either. So I changed it to Will, short for Willa. Then to Dal. And now Mel.

It’s getting frustrating. Butt Knuckle! Poop Nugget! There, I feel much better now.

Quinn and the 100-Mile Map

When I was a kid, I loved books that had maps. For instance: A. A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” (above). And Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons:”

I loved being able to follow along with the characters; to know exactly where they were as they went about their adventures.

Those books inspired me to draw maps of my own. I spent a lot of time designing imaginary worlds; countries jam-packed with hidden tunnels and valleys. Mountains and caves were essential too. Secret getaway places. Strongholds. Forts.

I never lost my love of maps. So when I wrote my novel Ultra, of course I needed a map!

That’s a map of Hither Lake; the body of water Quinn circumnavigates in his 100-mile race. You might notice that the shape of the lake bears an uncanny resemblance to the lake where I spent a lot of summers as a kid:

Why Do I Write? Reason #231

Five months have passed since my little book was published, but I still haven’t gotten used to being an author. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, see the glowing orange letters on my bedside table, and pat the novel like it’s a dog.

I really did it. I actually wrote a book!

I barely remember writing the thing. Most of those 45,000 words got scribbled down in a fevered dream. That first draft was followed by two years of re-writing, endless rejections and fits of depression that I countered with 30 mile training runs through the forest. I kept asking myself: WHY DO I BOTHER!?

Now I know why. Because of mornings like this, when I wake up and learn that it’s been shortlisted for an award. An award that’s been won by Neil Gaiman and Suzanne Collins. An award that’s largely decided by my favourite type of people – book bloggers!

You can click the image below to read about all 5 books that made the shortlist. Buy them all! Support the arts!

Ultra-Running on the Radio

It’s always fun to share the weird world of ultra-running with a national audience. So just before Christmas, it was my pleasure to be interviewed by the brilliant Shelagh Rogers on her CBC Radio program, “The Next Chapter.”

In case you missed it, you can catch it here:

Friends tell me I spent too much time talking about the bears and hallucinations other trail demons, and not enough time promoting the book. Oh well. At least I got to repeat my mantra: “Once you’ve run 100 miles in a day, everything else you do seems a lot easier.”

The Weirdest Miles I Ever Ran…

Kids often ask me, what’s the weirdest thing you ever saw while running a 100-mile race?

Easy one! The 75 mile turnaround at the Haliburton Forest Trail Race.

I got there around midnight, after 18 hours of running. 2 women volunteers were there. They were cooking lasagna and chicken noodle soup over a Coleman stove. They’d hung a disco ball from a tree branch, and a lantern was burning right above it, and the fractured lights from the disco ball swirled across the backdrop of trees. It was freaky and beautiful.

I was about to sit down in a camp chair, but one of the women said “DON’T DO THAT! BEWARE THE CHAIR!”

Beware the chair?

‘If you sit down after running 75 miles you’ll never get up again.”

So I kept standing. One of the women asked to see my feet. I took off my shoes and it was a horror show down there. Seriously, it was like I had trenchfoot or something. Trenchfoot times ten. The woman was totally cool about it though. She cut my blisters open and drained them, then squirted krazy glue into the skin flaps to seal them up. After that she wrapped duct tape around and around my feet, and put my shoes back on.

“Good as new!” she said.

I started running again. I only had 25 miles left to go. That’s nothing, right? Just the distance from Toronto to Hamilton. It was a hard grind. I was tired, freaked out, my feet were killing me, and I was having trouble keeping food down. It felt like that race was NEVER going to end!

And then, at 2 am, my phone rang. It was my neice Caelan, calling from Edmonton.

There she is. She knew I was running the race, and she’d asked her dad (my brother) to wake her up, so she could call me to cheer me on. I don’t remember much of what she said. But I do know that she told me a knock knock joke. A knock-knock joke that she’d made up herself. It went like this:

Knock knock / Who’s there?

Banana / Banana who?

Banana had to go to the hospital…

I knew where this was going. I’d say “Why did banana have to go to the hospital?” And Caelan would say “Because he wasn’t peeling well!”

So I did my bit. I said, “Why did banana have to go to the hospital? And Caelan surprised me. She said: “Because he had puke in his lung.”

Yeah, I didn’t really get the joke either. But it was such a weird punchline, it made me laugh. Believe me, when you’ve run 84 miles in 20 hours, and you’ve had your feet sliced open and krazy-glued back together, you’ll laugh at anything. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard as I did in that moment. Caelan’s crazy joke got me to the finish line.

So as a thank-you present, I put Caelan in my novel. Except I changed the spelling of her name to “Kaylin.”

Here’s another character in my book:

Any guesses who she is?

Believe it or not, it’s Kara (the 40 year-old cop)!

The real-life Kara (above) is tough and fearless and deadly with a bubble gun. That’s how she came to inspire that tough-as-nails character.

I should mention that Kara is also my neice. And she’s not too shabby with the knock-knock jokes either.

Polishing the Turd

Which is harder: running a 100-mile race, or writing a novel about it?

A lof of people have asked me this question. I wasn’t sure how to answer it at first. “Both nearly killed me!” I blurted out.

Now I have a more thoughtful answer. Both the race, and the book, caused me a TON of pain. But the race only lasted 24 hours. The book, on the other hand, took years to write.

Let me put it another way. A week after I ran the race, my body had recovered and I was bounding around like a gazelle. A week after I wrote the book, I was weeping inconsolably while I plowed through the first of thirteen rewrites.

Funny thing about pain though. Once it’s gone, you forget how much it hurt.

I’m working on my second novel now, and ERMAGHERD – why am I doing this to myself?

Writing a first draft is more painful than sitting through an Optimist Club luncheon. You have to create worlds, map out settings, shape plotlines, and stuff your characters full of strengths and flaws and anxieties and senses of humour. HARD!

Worst of all, when you finish the first draft, you’ll read it over and discover that it’s an 80,000 word turd.

Okay, maybe that’s a bad choice of words. Let’s call it a hunk of marble instead. Either way, it’s massive chunk of verbiage that you’ll be chipping away at for the next two years, or roughly 1/50th OF YOUR LIFE.

Relax, Dave. Breathe deep. With luck, that ~~turd~~ block of marble will one day look like this:

I finished the second draft of this novel in July. It was 64,000 words back then. Now, 4 months later, I’ve whittled it down to 54,000 words, and I’m hoping to cut 9,000 more before I’m done. With every sentence I delete, the manuscript gets leaner and better. Nothing makes me happier than a page that looks like this.

How “Sydney” and “Ollie” Came to Life

“Ultra – the novel”

There it is. It’s 192 pages long. Weighs 396 grams. And it costs less than a fancy Starbucks coffee.

Talk about a bargain! You might enjoy your Starbucks coffee for 20 minutes. This book, on the other hand, will warm your heart forever.

Why? Because it’s fortified with ten essential characters. Including one who was inspired by this young woman:

Sydney, aka “Sydney Watson Walters”

Say hello my niece Sydney. She was five years old when this picture was taken (she’s grown since then, and is now in grade nine). She plays basketball and volleyball, and sings and plays guitar. She’s also, believe it or not, one of the world’s coolest aunts.

How did someone so young inspire a literary character? A character who bears a strong resemblance to Oprah Winfrey?

A couple of years ago, when I was still struggling with the book, I called Syd and asked her for some advice. “I’m going to read you a couple of pages,” I warned her. “Tell me if the dialogue sounds okay.”

I started reading. I got halfway though one page when Syd said: “Kids don’t talk like that.”

“Really?” I said. “How do they talk?”

“Like kids,” she said.

Syd offered all sorts of good suggestions. She also asked me a LOT of questions. She said: “What are you trying to do with this scene?” And, “Am I supposed to like Quinn now? Because I don’t. He’s being a dink. Kneecap needs to tell him to smarten up.”

Re-writing a book is kind of like running on the same stretch of trail over and over. If you’re not careful, you’ll wear the trail down so much that you’re running in a deep trench, and you can’t see over the sides anymore. Syd reached into the trench and pulled me out. Then she sent me down a more interesting path.

Those conversations I had with Syd helped the book A LOT. And I’ll never forget the tough questions Syd posed. She reminded me a bit of a TV journalist. Which is why I borrowed her name for the Sydney Watson Walters character.

Here’s another family member who inspired a character:

In the book, Quinn has a little brother named Ollie. Ollie acts as Quinn’s “pacer” during the race. He calls Quinn at all hours of the day and night, and recites crazy jokes to cheer him up. Most importantly, on page 171, Ollie utters a six-word sentence that literally saves Quinn’s race.

I based this funny and wise character on my real-life nephew, Oliver. That’s him above, doing his best Usain Bolt.

Years ago, when I was running the Sulphur Springs 100-mile race, Oliver called me on the phone to wish me luck. It was close to midnight, and I’d run 84 miles. The moon was out, and I was feeling shockwaves of pain, which isn’t unusual when you’re that far into a race. Still, it was a tough spell, and I felt like I was going to throw up.

I can still remember exactly what Oliver said. He said: “Seriously, Uncle Dave? You’ve run 84 miles already? But it’s not even midnight! You’re doing great!”

Be careful when you use words of kindness like that. You might just find yourself in a book.