We were lucky to catch up with Jennifer M. Lane recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jennifer M., appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience, for me, is the equal and opposite reaction to rejection. You can’t have one without the other. Authors face a great deal of rejection, so resiliency is the natural result, but it rarely arrives smoothly. It’s a tsunami of emotions that can be hard to pin down. One of the early antidotes that helped me develop a thick skin was the realization that rejection wasn’t the pain point. It was the feeling of shame that came with it.
We are mammals, after all, with an innate need to form a tribe for security and protection. The feeling of shame is designed to help us follow the rules, avoid criticism, and keep us safe from being exiled. It’s a completely unnecessary reaction to receiving a form rejection from a literary agent. That realization was the start of a more intentional trajectory for my writing career.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
There’s a lot less writing to being an author than people might think. There’s a lot of marketing, reading, and in the case of historical fiction—a lot of studying and research. And there’s also a day job which modern life requires. But unlike being a banker or a nurse, being a writer isn’t contingent upon employment or certification. What’s special about being a writer, is that it’s less a series of tasks than it is a thinking process.
Writers are meaning junkies, collecting significance from the world around us an expressing it in ways that are fulfilling to us and, hopefully, to a reader. It’s essential to the craft as well as elemental to our nature that we chew as much meaning from the world around us as we can. And that tendency is often devastating once we reach the stage where we’re aiming to share our work with others. There are some exceptions, of course, such as those who write a non-fiction book or two in support of their career or an author who puts forth a passion project, but most authors struggle to build a platform, acquire a following, generate ongoing sales. And all of that is counter-intuitive to the creative spirit. What we’re actually striving for, whether we know it or not, is human connection. By sharing our work with others, we close that creative loop.
In my writing career, I chose to peel off some of my more niche works and publish them under my own imprint. I get to have much more control and have fun with marketing and cover design, giving as much or little energy to different aspects as I’d like. I’m currently working on the second book in a duology about a teenage girl who takes on a coal boss whose pollution of the waters caused the deaths of her parents. While I’m still querying my more mainstream manuscripts, I get to enjoy the full experience of storytelling in this way.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Storytelling has always been a big part of my life. I was an early reader, enjoyed community theater, studied history, and worked in museums. My favorite job was working as a docent, tailoring tours of a historic house museum to visitors’ interests and bringing history into context. I would encourage new writers to identify ways to exercise storytelling in their lives that don’t come with high boundaries. It’s a healthy source of validation and keeps the creative spirit going.
Curiosity about the past has informed nearly every step of my journey. Riding in the car as a child, I’d often wondered what the roads looked like two hundred years before. Curiosity led me to anthropology, to studying aspects of human conflict and our need for connection. When my partner, Matt, rebuilt an old car, my curiosity led me to dive in and it became part of the inspiration for my first independently published book Of Metal and Earth. The writing journey can be energy consuming, so I urge new writers to carve out time to play.
Productivity is one of my biggest strengths, but it’s also the opposite of curiosity in some ways. It’s gratifying to be productive and check things off a to-do list. Though the drive to accomplish as much as I can has made excel at time management and to be an organized thinker, it’s easy for me to move too fast sometimes. The key to juggling outlining, editing, and publishing books, marketing, a day job, and family life, is finding a way to manage a to-do list. I keep one in the cloud, so I can update it from anywhere.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think it’s important to align our strengths with our values before focusing on our weaknesses. Someone can be extraordinarily good at sales but value connection with the natural world far more than banking or capitalism, leading to activism over managing a sales team. In terms of writing, striving to understand how storytelling provides us with healthy validation and connects us with our values can help us choose the right publishing path to pursue. One writer may be fulfilled with a self-publishing journey whereas another may feel more at home with a small press or large publisher.
I found my weaknesses naturally began to strengthen when I sank my teeth into a satisfying path. Digging into weaknesses like boxes that must be checked can lead to burn out and dissatisfaction. Instead, when I encountered a marketing skill I lacked or an area of writing where I could improve, I enjoyed learning and honing my craft. My best advice to anyone overwhelmed by the vastness of what they don’t yet know is to look at the work of writers they admire. Study the books you can’t put down. Sign up for newsletters, and look at social media feeds and websites to see how others market their work. And above all, don’t forget that writing doesn’t have to be so insular. Build a community and boost your resiliency by connecting with others. That, after all, is the heartbeat of storytelling.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jennifermlanewrites.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferlanewrites/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferMLaneAuthor/
Image Credits
[The credit for each image is in its properties under Details>Title.] The author name is in the file name and here are their relative credits: Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash Photo by Rain Bennett on Unsplash Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash
