Meet Lynette M. Burrows

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lynette M. Burrows a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lynette M., we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
How a person becomes confident and has self-esteem is complex and intermeshed. The definition of self-esteem includes the word confidence. There are a lot of factors that go into building one’s confidence and self-esteem. You can’t have one without the other. My journey wasn’t smooth or straightforward. My family moved seventeen times before I graduated from high school. That many moves to different neighborhoods, cities, and states meant a lot of change. I had to learn to adapt or fold under the uncertainty of those changes.
When you move so often, you quickly learn not to become too attached to people or places. So I often played by myself. And by play, I mean I read. My mother complained I always had my nose in a book.
Moving also meant going to a new school at least once a year. Each new school had different rules and taught different things at different grade levels. Several times I had to ‘catch up’ on things the new class knew and I didn’t.
My family couldn’t afford a tutor and the teacher only had so much time to give me special classes, so I had to learn on my own. I had to discover what I needed to know, where to find the information I needed, and how I could learn that skill. Learning to take criticism of that new knowledge or unpolished skill to strengthen that knowledge or skill was a critical piece of building confidence.
Each time I learned something new, I gained a little more confidence.
While every English teacher I had encouraged me to become a writer, my family warned me against choosing that as a career because it was so unpredictable.
So I chose a different path and got on with life.
Along the way, I learned the power of self-talk. Discovering how to turn my negative self-talk around helped build my self-esteem. Finding the courage to make small changes gave me the confidence to make larger changes.
My love for reading, especially reading science fiction, ultimately led to attending science fiction conventions. There I listened to authors talk about their ideas, their books, and their craft. Their passion for their craft rekindled my desire to write.
My childhood skills of researching and learning new things helped me build my writing skills.
My willingness to research and learn helped me find peers and mentors through critique groups and classes. And when that critique group or mentor wasn’t helpful, I found another, more helpful one.
Learning story structure, writing skills and techniques helped me build enough confidence to share my work with peers and mentors. Sharing with them and receiving feedback helped me learn my strengths and weaknesses.
Positive feedback from peers and mentors goes a long way to building self-esteem, however learning to take in critical feedback and how to use it to strengthen your work and your voice is another tool in building confidence.
If you haven’t figured out by now, a hard shell of stubbornness is part of how I built my confidence and self-esteem. I believed I could learn how to do this thing and, by golly, no one could tell me to quit. No matter what.

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?
I am the author of the Fellowship Dystopia series, a blogger, and a creativity advocate.

I’m passionate about crafting stories centered on unforeseen heroes who transform themselves and their world. My stories are about complex people who find the courage to chart a different course. People who are willing to transform themselves, whether it’s by wielding an automatic pistol or a ray gun, tinkering with a spaceship or a computer, or sparking a revolution.
My stories are set in our world, our past, or in other worlds. No matter what story I’m telling, hard science supports the fictional universe, but it’s the people and their emotional responses to the science and technology that drive the story.
This is true in my Fellowship Dystopia series, the story of Miranda, a young woman who dares to break the rules. It’s 1961 Fellowship America and the Angels of Death Take unbelievers. Miranda discovers a cruelty and danger in her world, in her family, beyond imagination. She vows to destroy the Angels of Death and the tyranical Fellowship. Even if it means destroying her family.

Book one, My Soul to Keep, and book two, If I Should Die, are available for sale now on Amazon and most online bookstores.

Book three, And When I Wake, is in progress and will be available at the end of this year. I’m also developing a new space opera series.

You can find out more about me on my website: lynettemburrows.com, get the latest updates from my newsletter, or follow me on Amazon, Goodreads, Bookbub, or Facebook.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Perseverance (or stubbornness) is probably the number one quality that has been and continues to be the most impactful in my journey, develop the split personality of a creative business person, and be willing to pivot.

Writing a novel, figuring out what you want and need to write about, and finding an audience is a long game. It takes perseverance, the self-discipline to do all the things, each in its time. Unless you are one of the rare and lucky few, you won’t get rich—quick or otherwise. So you’ll need lots of perseverance.

Assuming you want to write books and stories that people will buy and read and love, you’ll need to become both a creative and a businessperson.

Learn everything you can about the craft and the business. Try all the techniques and structures and skills you learn about and figure out which ones suit your voice and stories.

Write a first draft with your heart. By that I mean be vulnerable. Dig deep into your hopes and fears, your good and bad experiences, and your dreams and your nightmares. Write what excites you, what brings you joy.

Edit and market as a businessperson. Learn about the book publishing and marketing business, even if you’re going to submit to traditional publishers. Know your market by reading what’s out there. It may feel foreign and unnatural because your strengths are in your creativity, but unless you’re rich enough to hire help, you will need both a creative and a business side.

Be willing to write some stories that will fail. Learn from them and write more stories. You may need to change which genre you write in, change marketing strategies because publishing trends and markets change. Pivoting with the changes you experience as you grow more skillful and pivoting with changes in the marketplace is crucial to your long-term success.

It’s not a simple path, but the old saying is true. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

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?
To me, this is not an either or question. Brain research has shown that you can make a much greater improvement by working on your strengths. So by all means, invest in making those improvements. Play to your strengths.

It’s probably not wise to spend tons of time trying to make your weaknesses into strengths, but don’t ignore them.

Even if you plan to hire someone to do the things that aren’t your strengths, you need a strong understanding of your weaknesses and how to improve or perform that part of your job. If you don’t have that understanding, then you can’t know if the person you hire does it well.

For example, say I write a fantastic book. A traditional publisher pays me an advance and publishes my book. I tell all my friends and sit back and wait for the fame and the money to roll in.

At the end of the year, my book has sold fewer than a hundred copies. My publisher won’t publish the second book in the series because the first book didn’t sell. I get mad and bad mouth my publisher because they didn’t advertise my book.

What happened? I didn’t understand the business. I didn’t need to know enough that I could be a big name publisher. All I needed was a little research to know that unless I am a well-known public figure or am telling a very on-trend story, the chances are that the publisher won’t spend any money to advertise my book. Instead, the publisher markets the heck out of Stephen King’s book because he knows he’ll make double or triple his money on King’s book.

Had I done my research, I would have known I could ask the publishers to help me advertise my books (what they can or will do varies). I could have marketed my books in venues that were free or at very low cost. And I could have built a mailing list prior to publishing. Those things may or may not have helped me become a best seller, but I would have sold more books. I also would have proven to the publisher that I will work toward my book’s success and that may have tipped the scales in favor of him buying my next book.

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Image Credits
Lynette M. Burrows,. Carlos Barajas

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