Christina Katz's Path to Joyful Writing

In the last 18 months, three-time Writer's Digest book author Christina Katzhas helped twelve writers self-publish thirteen e-books. In only six years, this talented writing coach has enabled many other wordsmiths to write their way to a traditional book deal. Fortunately, for us, Christina, who recently published The Writer's Workout, remains committed to helping others on their writing path.

"Bringing new voices to the masses is not something I am likely to tire of any time soon. I see my job as inspiring and empowering mom writers and that’s exactly what I do on a daily basis," says Christina, who graciously agreed to share her unique brand of inspiration today on The Writing Well.  

If you're looking for ways to discover or rediscover the joy of writing, be sure to take part in her "21 Moments Writing Challenge," which begins Friday. 

 

Q. What got you into writing, and what made you decide to use your experiences to help others succeed as writers?

I’ve written since I was young as a way to process my feelings and express myself. I have not always had an easy time expressing myself and it is still something I have to work hard at to do well. Maybe this is why I became a writer, so I could get rewards for expressing myself clearly. For me, there is nothing more satisfying than getting exposure and money for striving to say something so clearly that it reaches and impacts others.

Q. What's the biggest hurdle writers face, based on your own experience as a writing coach?

The biggest hurdle writers face is the desire to have written rather than simply wanting to write. In other words wanting all the glory without doing any of the really hard growth work will get your career nowhere. I think this is human nature to a certain extent, but at the end of the day, the reality trumps the fantasy. So I recommend letting go of myths and fantasies about success and getting to work.

Q. Tell us more about The Writer's Workout -- who did you target, and how does it differ from other writing how-to books out there?

The Writer’s Workoutoffers 366 practical tips, tasks and techniques for writers who are eager to succeed but can’t always find a clear path stretching out ahead of them. Once a writer realizes that she is creating the path as she goes, the journey becomes a lot more fun, and a lot more of a professional adventure. When it comes to doing the real work that creates writing career success, The Writer’s Workout lays it all out for the reader without apologizing. I don’t think you can read The Writer’s Workout without feeling inspired to get on with it, already.

Q. Given that you have written three books for Writer’s Digest Books in the past five years on how to have a more satisfying and successful writing career, what are three fun exercises that can get writers who may be struggling back into a can-do frame of mind? 

1. Stop making your goals so big and set out to accomplish one small goal that you can achieve this week. If you lower the jumps, you will succeed, and one success will buoy you up to try something a little harder next time. Real results repeated and built up over time create lasting success and genuine self-regard.

2. If you are stumped for something to write about consider a how-to. The quickest way to find out what you might write about it to fill in this blank ten times:

I know how to __________________________________.

Be specific rather than general in your response. Sometimes it’s not just what you know, it’s your signature way of doing it that makes the how-to appealing and fresh for editors and readers.

3. Keep a list of the next twenty-five steps you need to take in your writing career, so that when you have an idle moment you can tackle one. I have been offering this tip to writer’s conference attendees for years, because it’s so common to walk out of conference completely mentally overloaded. And this method of breaking things down into just one proactive step at a time really works for writers. So pace it out. I offer a grid-method of keeping this list in The Writer’s Workout (on page 179).

Q. What was your inspiration for your 21 Moments Writing Challenge?  What do participants get out of this experience?

If a writer can’t write well short, she can’t write well long. If she can’t enjoy writing short, she can’t enjoy writing long. If she can’t learn to let the writing lead and get out of the way, then everything she writes will be unappealing to readers. My inspiration for the 21 Moments Monthly Writing Challenge was to get the whole world writing for the sheer pleasure of it.

Everyone has to start somewhere. I’m teaching anyone who wants to write how to enjoy writing and how to do it every day because that’s what successful authors do. The 21 Moments Monthly Writing Challenge gives a writer of any level somewhere to start today, excellent writing to learn from, and a simple goal: to enjoy writing today. Your readers can learn more about it here.

Q. Who inspires you?

My students inspire me the most. When a writer is ready to make the leap from hired pen to publisher, the shift can be challenging and thrilling at the same time. The future of publishing is that everyone is a publisher. I am very proud to be a leader in the micro-publishing movement. It doesn’t make publishing easy, like some claim, but micro-publishing helps publishing evolve by lowering the jumps and allowing more room for worthy writers at the table.

The Inspirational Force of Chris Baty

Adam Mansbach and Chris Baty (right) at the Crossroads Writers Conference Saturday.

Coming off this weekend’s Crossroads Writers Conference in Macon, Georgia, I feel a renewed commitment to finish my historical novel.

That’s what a weekend like this does – mingling with established and aspiring writers alike, and connecting with a community of people who share my same passion for storytelling.

Crossroads organizers asked headliner Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), to inspire and motivate. By all accounts he delivered. I can see how his energy and enthusiasm have ignited people around the world every November to tackle the impossible – writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch.

Baty recalls how the idea started small in 1999 when he invited a group of friends to write a novel in a month.

Seeing NaNoWriMo Grow from 20 to 250,000

Twenty people joined his challenge. Some of them came together each night after work to write. By week three “something interesting started happening” -- these books “started to come alive.” That moment when energy really starts to flow into a writing project for the first time, “is really electrifying,” Baty says.

At the end of the month six of them had crossed the 50,000-word threshold.

“It changed the way I saw my potential and it changed the way I saw the potential of everyone around me because I knew if we could do it, anybody could do it,” Baty says. “I saw in fact that novels aren’t written by novelists; they’re written by every day people who give themselves permission to write novels. Nothing was the same.”

The following year 21 people grew to 140, then 5,000 and then 40,000. In 2011, 250,000 adults in one month wrote three billion words of fiction. Baty says I50 NaNoWriMo writers have sold their manuscripts to traditional publishers, and four became New York Times’ bestsellers, including Canadian Sara Gruen, whose debut novel, Water for Elephants, was made into a film in 2011 (Read my film review).

Baty turned NaNoWriMo into a non-profit six years ago. The organization employs a staff of seven and offers summer programs and a Young Writers Program that offers classrooms free creative writing curriculum workbooks, stickers, and buttons.

“Last year we had 2,000 classrooms take these free resources,” he says.

In January, Baty, decided to leave the organization he has nurtured for the last 15 years to set off to be a full-time writer.

“It feels great to feel unchained. No more getting up at 5 a.m. to sneak in that writing time – no more of those steady paychecks to hold us back,” he said, inspiring laughter from the audience. “It has been a really adventure-filled, educational, fantastic nine months.”

Baty admits he’s had moments where he’s felt on top of the world and moments when he’s wondered, “What the hell have I done?”

Embarking for the Open Sea

He takes comfort from an old quote by John Shedd (Salt from My Attic, 1928):  “A ship in the harbor is safe. That is not what ships are built for.”

“I spend the last 15 years of National Novel Writing month watching thousands of people get inspired by their books and decide to make writing a more central part of their life, which means they are guiding their ships out of the harbor – into the open ocean, and I’ve been monitoring their progress from shore. One thing they all shared – they heard this clear, mysterious, sometimes maddening call to sail out and meet that adventure on the horizon. The fact that we are all here today means we also have heard that call.”

  

Packing Four Indispensable Items

From watching all these ships set sail over the years, Baty says the most successful have remembered to pack four important things: 

1. A deadline.  “To me, having a great deadline for your book project is more important than having a good idea for your book.  It’s true because the human imagination is one of the most formidable imaginations on earth. Given the right amount of prodding it will take this half-assed concept and turn it into something dazzling. But sadly, the human imagination, left to its devices, will happily spend its entire life eating Cheetos® and watching TV…Ultimately, we have to be as creative with our deadlines as we are with our books.”
2. Momentum.  “In 1687 Isaac Newton wrote this amazing book for writers. The book was called, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. This book contains these two natural laws you remember from middle school – the first one, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. So, from watching so many of my novel revisions remain so peacefully at rest the last decade, I can attest that Isaac Newton was really onto something. Sometimes projects stall out. Once your book does achieve a state of rest, it’s hard to get it moving again. The great thing about writing is that small steps, taken several days in a row, have a way of turning into very big strides. It’s really not speed; it’s about momentum.”
3.  An appreciation of messes.  “I think our job as writers – especially at this point in our careers – is to make as many messes as possible. Messes we make on first drafts – unholy nightmares, grammatical car crashes, flat dialogue, one-dimensional characters, clichéd plots. Then there are messes on the business level where we are experimenting sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully on doing things like building our platforms, leveraging social media, trying to stay on top of all these changing technologies in the publishing industry.  In the pursuit of making writing a more central part of our lives, we will make mistakes and we have to forgive ourselves. Because, if we are making mistakes, we are learning. And by trying and failing we are growing by leaps and bounds as writers.”   
4. Faith. “We need a big truck full of faith. We need faith that our books don’t suck on some monstrous level. We need faith that we are getting better over time and we need faith that our projects will eventually matter to someone. As writers, we are observers. And we’ve observed that it’s hard to make a living writing. We realize that this dream of being a writer is impractical -- maybe an impossible one. But I will tell you as someone who has watched hundreds and thousands of kids, teens and adults write a book they never dreamed they could write… that success is often a lot closer than you know. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from my time running National Novel Writing Month is that everyone has so much more in them than they realize and that when we make the time and when we give ourselves permission to follow our inspirations and our impractical dreams, we have power to do unimaginably great things.”

Baty concluded his remarks by saying that when times get tough, he relies on the faith of his friends and family to pull him through. “I hope for today you will let me carry your faith for you and you will believe what I tell you that your story is important; that your voice matters. And that there is someone out there who has waited their entire life to read the book you are writing right now...Those readers are ready. Let’s go give them something amazing.”