Today’s article is written by regular contributor Lydia Sharp.

Any story with a romance plot–either as the main plot or a strong secondary plot–has an especially unique challenge. The two love interests must overcome obstacles that threaten to tear them apart, while at the same time drawing them closer together. This enables relationship growth, and it’s a delicious juxtaposition that makes romance novels so popular with readers. How will these two people, against all odds, reach their happily ever after?

Applying an adhesive element to the two main characters at the outset of the story forces them together, and then adding regular doses of conflict that pull them apart, creates a sense of “one step forward, two steps back” that keeps readers turning pages. Just when it seems their love has made progress in some area, something tugs it apart again. This push/pull increases in intensity until the characters reach the momentous climax where they must go above and beyond anything they’ve done up to that point, determined to be with each other no matter what.

Conflict is a familiar term among writers, but what exactly is an adhesive?

What Is Adhesive?

An adhesive story element is something that forces things, or characters, to stick to each other. It is often external in nature. In romance, it is what keeps the two love interests in close proximity, forcing them to face the challenges of the plot’s conflicts together, before their romantic feelings even come into play. This can be any number of situations, and much of it depends on the story’s genre and mood.

In a contemporary romance, for example, a business owner may be in need of a personal assistant with a specific skill set. He hires a woman in dire need of the salary he’s offering. They both need this arrangement (and both have hidden agendas that come to light later) so it keeps them stuck together even when conflicts arise. One of those conflicts could very well be that they start developing feelings for each other–having a romantic and/or sexual relationship with your employer is usually a pretty big no-no. Neither one of them will back out of this easily, though. The adhesive is too strong.

A good adhesive involves the characters’ needs. If it doesn’t, the reader will wonder why one or both of the characters don’t just walk away when difficulties arise.

Effective Conflicts

Effective story conflicts are a combination of internal and external obstacles. The antagonist in a romance is whatever repeatedly keeps the two characters apart, either physically or emotionally or both. It can be a physical person or thing, or a situation, or a mindset, or a scarred character’s sour past, etc. This is the main thing they each need to overcome to reach their happily ever after.

But to keep a reader turning pages, the conflict must constantly shift, heighten, and intensify. This is done by adding new obstacles to the main conflict at regular intervals throughout the story that ping-pong between internal and external problems. All of these minor, supporting conflicts must somehow relate to the main conflict and the adhesive.

A conflict cannot be stagnant from beginning to end. It cannot be the same conflict “on repeat”, rehashed over and over again through different scenarios. Repetition of the same conflict does not convey an ever-worsening situation. It is that feeling of ever-intensifying dread and “how can they possibly overcome this?” that keeps a reader reading. The stakes must continually be raised, and the pressure from the antagonist continually increased, until the story reaches its peak at the climax.

The basics of why conflict and adhesive work so well in romance can be applied to any other genre or story type, although each requires a slightly different approach.

How would you apply the above points to your own work-in-progress?

Each May, my home town welcomes visiting Australian and international authors to the Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF). It’s held Walsh Bay precinct, my favorite part of the city, where old maritime wharves have been converted into theaters, restaurants and waterside apartments. It’s also, blissfully, only a 10-minute drive from my home (at least on a good day).

Today, as I write, the sun is shining and Sydney Harbour sparkling, but on Thursday it was gray skies, rain and umbrellas-at-twenty-paces at for the first event I attended, called Fabulous Female Fiction.

For this session, best selling Australian author, Caroline Overington, interviewed three female publishers, whom I shall simply refer to as Annette, Danielle and Frederique. These women hail from leading publishing houses in Australia, the USA and France, respectively.

So what exactly is women’s fiction anyway? The answer, it seems, depends on which country you live in.

What Is Women’s Fiction, Anyway?

Danielle, from New York, described women’s fiction as a “wide ranging term,” spanning commercial fiction—romance and chick lit—right up to literary or “book club” novels. What these books have in common, according to Danielle, are strong relationships, high emotional stakes, relatable (but not necessarily likeable) heroines, and a family focus.

Frederique, on the other hand, said there was no such thing as women’s fiction in France, only “literature.” To the French a novel was a novel; that way there was no hierarchy, no “judgement”.

Perhaps that’s a good thing, because in Annette’s opinion there is a prejudice against commercial women’s fiction in Australia, with these novels and their authors largely ignored by reviewers and the organizers of literary events (a quick scan of the SWF program seems to confirm this). Yet to Annette these books frequently offer their readers “intelligence, warmth and heart”.

Each of these women stressed that prejudice against commercial fiction was in no way felt by the publishers themselves. With commercial fiction outselling its literary counterpart by a wide margin they’d be fools if they did.

The Bread and Butter of Fiction Publishing

If you write, or aspire to write, books that fit under the broad umbrella of women’s fiction you’re in luck.  Each of these women estimated that women’s fiction, covering romance to literary, represented about 70-80% of their company’s fiction sales. So while thriller authors like Lee Child might dominate the best seller list, novels written for women (and largely by women) remain the bread and butter of the fiction publishing business. At the end of the day there are far more women readers (and book buyers) than men.

So, for the aspiring authors among us, how do these publishers decide what makes fabulous female fiction?

What Makes for Fabulous Female Fiction?

Annette gives a book 50 pages and it if hasn’t grabbed her by then, compelled her to “keep turning the pages,” it ends up in the reject pile.  She also needs at least one likeable character, although she concedes this is a personal bias.

Danielle is less forgiving than Annette. While she might read to page 20 before abandoning a work you really need capture her on the first page—and with dozens of manuscripts thumping down on her desk every day, who can blame her?  She admitted to a special fondness for books that made her cry.

A large part of Frederique’s job is reviewing foreign releases with a view to having them republished in France. For Frederique the ultimate test of a book is whether it causes her to cancel engagements and stay up all night reading; she singled out the works of two Australian writers, Kate Morton and Hannah Kent, for this honour.

For the self-published or those considering it, Danielle confirmed that the big US publishers do scour the Amazon best seller lists, searching for hidden gems. Unfortunately they too often find that the best sellers are there by virtue of price rather than literary merit!

Finally, in this era of steadily shrinking review space in newspapers, all women agreed that having an online presence can help an author. If you already have a large following through blogging and/or social media, you have, in a publisher’s eyes, a built-in market for your book. This may tip the balance in your favour if you’re hoping to secure a traditional publishing deal.

Ultimately, however, it’s all about the book. And when it comes to fabulous female fiction, all these publishers all agreed that character is king—although in this case we probably should say queen!

Do you read and/or write women’s fiction? What’s your personal definition of the genre? What are some of your favourite works of women’s fiction, and what makes them outstanding in your opinion?

Today’s article is written by regular contributor Sarah Baughman.

Leading a discussion at a writing workshop a few summers ago, I fielded a question that struck me first as funny, then as thought-provoking: one participant wanted to know how often I drafted stories and poems by hand.

I stumbled over the answer at first; I hadn’t really thought about it before. I’m in my early thirties, part of a generation that generally can’t imagine giving up computers now, despite clearly remembering life before them. I have boxes full of lengthy handwritten stories I penned as a child, so I know I must have done it at one point, but these days I can barely write a page without my hand cramping.

“Not really,” I answered at first, then paused, realizing notebooks filled with scrawled half-pages still filled my desk at home. “Well, wait. Sometimes.” Considering the question again, I realized that despite my reliance on the computer for writing, I still, reflexively, write by hand too. But only in certain situations. Why, I wondered, did I sometimes ditch my laptop for a pen? And did it ultimately matter?

Does handwriting affect your writing process?

A recent BBC article asked: “Is handwriting still important?” The article mentioned a bill drafted by a North Carolina congresswoman demanding that elementary schools teach penmanship; a linguistics professor meanwhile deemed such instruction “not crucial to their education” as technology displaced handwriting as a communication tool.

The brief article touched on the question of whether or not handwriting is a purely nostalgic skill. My choice to write by hand, or not, went far beyond penmanship and struck at the core of my creative process.

I realized I wrote poem drafts exclusively by hand, typing them only after several revisions, when they felt “done.” Essays and articles happened primarily only on the computer, yet if I wasn’t completely sure how I planned to start and wanted to sketch out an organizational plan for a longer piece prior to writing, I usually started with a pen in my hand rather than with a blank Word document. I felt I’d reached a point where no matter how much of an essay or story I wrote by hand, though, I’d only be able to truly finish writing it on my computer.

The easy quickness of the clacking keys, the way my typing speed matches the pace of thoughts as they come, the “delete” key keeping me from getting mired in unwanted sentences, the cut-and-paste tool helping me easily rearrange and reorganize– I just couldn’t imagine giving up these conveniences.

Not only was typing easier than writing by hand, it had become, for me, necessary to my actual writing process. I couldn’t imagine the patience that, say, Charles Dickens must have had, writing Great Expectations line by line, without even white-out. I realized, logically, that people wrote that way once because they had no other way to write. But what intrigued me was the idea that I honestly didn’t know anymore if I could. Had I evolved—or devolved—into someone who needed the computer for expression, like some kind of extra limb?

I doubted I had the discipline of Wendell Berry, a writer and poet I admired who insisted he would never buy a computer to write. “I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil,” Berry stated, going on to say that he might give computers more respect as soon as anybody writes “work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s” on one.

I admired his point, but despite having written by hand for a couple of decades before growing accustomed to effortless typing, I felt that perhaps my brain had changed, grown dependent on the keyboard and screen. Without my computer, would I even be a writer anymore?

Faced with the question at the workshop, I finally answered that I used the computer to actually write and edit, but that if I needed to think first, I went for the pen and paper. I knew my tendencies wouldn’t apply for everyone, but I still wondered if there was anything to learn from them.

Can handwriting be helpful?

After leaving the workshop and doing a little research (on my computer, of course!) about the effects of handwriting, I learned about some connections between handwriting and cognition.

Citing a study on handwriting and children’s cognitive development, The Huffington Post called writing a “more complicated” task than typing on a keyboard, noting that since it integrates three brain processes—visual, motor, and cognitive—it actually builds brain power.

The Wall Street Journal discussed several studies indicating the importance of handwriting, including one that “highlights the hand’s unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas.” The physical act of handwriting, the study suggested, “activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.”

So perhaps there’s something to my inclination towards brainstorming and organizing by hand. And it follows that poetry, which for me personally requires condensed focus on shaping the right words first rather than free-writing and cutting back or editing later, would also benefit from handwriting.

I’ll never give up writing on my computer, but I did learn fairly recently that I didn’t need to entirely depend on one either. Hospitalized and on bed rest during my second pregnancy, I felt urged to write but didn’t have a computer nearby and moreover, felt strangely tired at the thought of trying to maneuver one into the bed. I was comforted, however, by a small notebook and pen I’d brought, and spent the long hours doing what I used to do before computers came on the scene—writing, scratching out, stopping and thinking, and writing again. It was slower going, but it felt just fine.

The essay I wrote by hand in the hospital will be published in a literary magazine this summer, so I suppose I haven’t completely lost my ability to express my thoughts on actual paper—even if I did edit them later on a computer!

Do you write by hand anymore? If so, when? Does it help or hinder your writing process? Do you believe handwriting is a valuable exercise, or a near-obsolete nostalgic venture?

Today’s post is written by regular contributor Dr John Yeoman.

To get a novel published today you need an agent. Of course. But why? It wasn’t always thus. When I began writing books 40 years ago I sent my ms directly to publishers. Provided I’d observed the proper rituals – double spacing, one side only, return postage enclosed, etc – I could be sure of getting back a signed personal reply within three weeks.

Few agents existed then and authors were advised to ignore them. Why pay 15% of your earnings to a middle man, who’d do little more than check your contract, when you could go direct? Happy days!

Today, only a handful of mainstream publishers will accept an unsolicited ms directly from an author. Agents guard the doors. And they’re overwhelmed by newbies. In fact, a whole new industry is about to emerge – the agent’s agent. First, you’ll have to impress a literary ‘scout’ who knows an agent, who might recommend you to their friend.

Is the traditional publishing route worth it?

Needless to say, you could walk away from all that nonsense, self-publish your novel like everyone else and work 18 hours a day to promote it. Your life will become a round of blog tours and social networking. You will become an habitué of Goodreads and AuthorsDen. You’ll discover, painfully, that paid-for advertising does not work for fiction. (Nor does spamming your book at Google+ and Facebook.)

But unless you have the sales skills of John Locke or the manic energy of J A Konrath – authors who each sold more than a million ebooks by their own efforts – you’ll be lucky to shift more than a few hundred copies.

What’s the remedy?

The publishing industry is in meltdown. However, for an author who just wants to write not hustle, the traditional route still has its attractions. Your books appear in bookshops (what few remain). Your name is sacralized by a respected publisher. (There’s more clout in having Transworld behind you than an unknown indie house.) Reviews appear in trusted journals. Even bad reviews are better than none. At least, you’re being noticed.

You’ll have ‘arrived’ as an author. And your local writing group will offer you $200 plus a free lunch to tell their members how you did it. Success!

So how do you find an agent?

The textbooks are right, up to a point, when they suggest:

1. Study those authors in your genre whom you admire.

2. Locate their agent. A Google search “[author]” + agent often works.

3. Check the agent’s website for their terms of submission. Not all agents accept new authors and many have quirky requirements.

4. Note the agents that accept email submissions. Emails are likely to be acknowledged faster. Hard copy is for masochists.

And email them your cover letter, terse synopsis (1500 words max) and first chapter(s) (say, 6000 words max).

All six agents at once? Yes. Multiple submissions are the norm today, although agents hate them. But it can be argued that agents have only themselves to blame for being dilatory in the past. Who can afford to wait six months to receive a rejection slip from agent #1 before approaching agent #2?

Is that all there is to it? No! Your submission will still be binned, unread, unless the first paragraph of your cover letter is exquisitely right. How do you do that? Start with a very personalised introduction.

Here’s a secret that few new authors knew.

Attend a literary event, it doesn’t matter what. Check that it will be attended by agents who handle fiction, it doesn’t matter who. Ask to be directed to the most famous agent in the room. Ask that grand person “who are the best agents in [New York] for [historical fiction] right now, would you say?” Relieved that you’re not going to pitch them, the agent might trot out three good names. Find another agent, and another, and repeat the question.

You can now truthfully write to a select list of agents along these lines: “The agent [Ann Brown] personally suggested that I approach you because…” You’ll have overcome the first, and most important hurdle. Your cover letter will get read.

What happens then depends on the quality of your work and the professionalism of your presentation. But you have a chance.

Is this obvious wisdom?

No. Agents will tell you that 99% of new authors spam them with “Dear Sir or Madame”-type submissions. They’ve taken no trouble to choose an agent or justify, thoughtfully, their choice. Those submissions move to the Delete folder at the speed of light. Any personal introduction is better than a cold call.

Does it work?

I used that strategy several years ago and had three agents vying to represent me. Which did I choose? None. Instead of finishing my novel, I went off to get a PhD in creative writing. Maybe that was not the best career choice but at least I’d found a way to get an agent. Three of them! That might have posed a problem. Which do I choose? But it’s the sort of problem all new authors should have…

Today’s article is written by regular contributor Christi Craig.

Every once in a while, I read about a weekend retreat or a month-long writing residency, and I dream.

If only I had a month to squirrel away on just writing. If only I had money to pay for just two days to slip away and write.

Lament long enough to a good friend and fellow writer with a creative and determined spirit, and you discover that dreams are not impossible; they just need to be tweaked a bit to become reality.

My friend Victoria and I are both working on novels, and we both have young children at home. Getting away isn’t easy for either of us. So, when she sent me an email and suggested we plan our own weekend writing retreat—one that was low in cost and rich in hours—I said, Yes!

I can’t speak for Victoria, but I can share my experience in the plans and how I made it work for me and my novel.

Time.

In my life, weekends fill up way in advance, I’m talking six months to a year in advance. So, if I want to secure time away for writing, I have to X-out those days in red on the calendar—his, hers, theirs—as soon as possible. Make sure that everyone knows, come rain, shine, or baby’s got a cold, I will not be on the home premises for those few days.

Partnering with another writer for a weekend like this sealed my commitment to the date, as well. Neither of us were about to let the other peter out on the plans, especially because we were in the same boat when it came to finding time for intensive writing.

Space.

Location and lodgings both played important roles in our plan. Victoria and I live a hundred miles apart, so we needed a place located somewhere in between, one within short driving distance. We didn’t want to waste precious time racking up mileage. With accommodations, we considered renting separate rooms in a Bed and Breakfast, thinking that kind of environment might be more comfortable than a hotel. But, I knew I would need more room to spread out, pace the floors (most likely). And, I didn’t want to worry about odd looks from strangers at the breakfast table, after a night of wandering the halls and mumbling my way through story structure and plot. We opted, then, to search for a house or cottage to rent.

Googling “cottage for rent” brought up two websites right away, PerfectPlaces and FLIPKEY, both of which offer international rentals. We went with FLIPKEY, and, believe it or not, we found a beautiful, three-bedroom Victorian house, complete with kitchen furnishings and a lovely sitting room, in a quaint town oozing with history, art, and creativity. The cost of the entire house was the same price we would have paid for a room at a Bed & Breakfast.

Strategy.

When I am gifted a chunk of time, free from all responsibility, I dilly-dally. I drink too much coffee. I catch up on emails. I check Facebook, drink more coffee, check Facebook again. I take a nap. For this weekend to be a success, I needed a plan.

I hoped to gain some strong footing with the novel-in-progress, but the temptation to bring that short story I’d been fiddling with or that really great book I’d been itching to crack open–for a break here and there, you know–was strong. Just like Facebook, though, small writing projects and interesting reads distract me from bigger endeavors. Since this weekend was about tackling the novel, I left everything else behind. Everything.

Then, I set some reasonable, SMART goals. I knew I wouldn’t bomb through a second draft rewrite in two days, but I figured I could set my story structure in solid order, so that my rewrite wouldn’t be as daunting. Friday night, I typed an outline of my entire first draft. Saturday, I wrote the outline headings on half-sheets of paper and shuffled those papers around the sitting room floor like a giant sliding box puzzle. By Sunday, I had a strong story line and a renewed hope that this novel would see The End.

Revelry.

Thanks to cold and rainy weather that weekend, it was easy to sequester myself inside with my story for two days. But after spending much of Saturday hunched over paper and drowning in my own heavy sighs, I needed respite. Victoria (the great writing friend that she is) could see that. She poured the wine, we stepped away from our work, and we talked all things writing and life.

Don’t underestimate the power of downtime. During those discussions, we not only celebrated all our hard work, but we shared strategies, asked each other questions, reasoned out parts of our novels. We proved that walking away from the work can be just as productive as being immersed in it.

And, immersing ourselves in the work, and only the work—over an entire weekend—wasn’t as impossible as it had seemed.

If you could plan your perfect writing retreat, where would you start and how would you strategize?

Last year, I shared with you my vision of creating a biannual, digital literary journal which would be connected to Write It Sideways but would also stand on its own.

I wanted to give readers of Write It Sideways a regular opportunity to see good writing in practice, and provide another venue for emerging writers to see their work published alongside established writers.

Over the past four months, an amazing team of editors has helped me shape that vision into Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing.

It’s beautiful, useful, completely free, and available to everyone.

(In case you’re not familiar with the world of literary journals, they are publications that feature a variety of fiction, poetry, essays and interviews. Some well-known ones are Tin House, Glimmer Train and Ploughshares.)

Compose’s Blog Is Now Live

Today we launch the blog portion of Compose. Our blog will feature a combination of:

Please welcome today’s anonymous aspiring author, ready for a peer critique.

Take a moment to read the excerpt and leave some thoughtful feedback in the comment section below.

If you are a writer whose excerpt has appeared anonymously on Write It Sideways, and now you’d like your name to appear on your piece, contact us.

If you’d like to submit your own writing for critique, keep an eye out for future calls posted on the blog.

Coffee In a Paper Cup

Short Story

*Please note: This excerpt is taken from the beginning of the work.

You’ve had worse in seatmates.

Four-thirty AM in what has got to be the smallest international airport in this country, and you’re curled sleepy around your thermos of coffee, one foot tucked up underneath you, watching other tired people, electric signs, TV screens all reflected in the windows against a still-dark sky. Dawn’s threading along the edges of the hills; you can just decipher the outlines of planes creeping along the runways.

You catch yourself humming along with the music from your iPod, stop. Take a nonchalant sip of your drink (craving the scent more than the caffeine) pretending it wasn’t you humming a (probably off-tune) accompaniment to Sigh No More.

‘Don’t stop on my account.’

You look up, raise an eyebrow at the guy who just spoke. Tallish, he wears battered work boots, jeans threadbare in patches, a grey T-shirt under a leather jacket that, like the rest of his clothes, has a lot of character. (Really. Nicer to say that than ‘seen better days’.) Military-short light brown hair, stunning green eyes, a smile he doesn’t mean.

He looks so tired, and don’t you know exactly how that feels?

Gestures with his own cup of coffee. (Paper cup, you notice mournfully. At least it’s biodegradable.) ‘This seat taken, sweetheart?’

You shake your head, move your coat to make room for him, and just to let him know he’s coming on a bit strong, deliberately place your left hand on your knee.

The engagement ring’s just a white lie, useful for fending off anyone sketchy…

Potential Feedback Prompts

When you respond, you might consider:

• your immediate reactions
• likes and dislikes
• anything that seems unclear
• language issues
• point of view
• voice
• inconsistencies
• general encouragement

Thanks!

Today’s article is written by regular contributor Debra Eve.  

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail inspired Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 last year. But Cheryl took her famous hike in 1995.

Wild was a bestseller fifteen years in the making.

David Guterson wrote Snow Falling on Cedars over a ten-year period. Michel Faber worked on The Crimson Petal and the White for almost twenty. Helen Hooven Santmyer famously took almost six decades to complete …And Ladies of the Club.

Why does the process sometimes take so long?

I’m exploring my time with maverick archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who lost her eight-year battle with lymphoma in 1994. In comparing my years digging to my years writing, I’ve realized that some projects take longer because they come from “the deep heart’s core,” to borrow a line from Yeats.

We must excavate them over several seasons like archaeologists.

Cheryl Strayed believes this time lapse was critical to her success, gifting her with a deeper perspective. Author and writing coach Cynthia Morris agrees. Her novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach (2012), took twelve years from idea to book launch.

Chasing Sylvia Beach is set in 1930s Paris. The plot resembles Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but it focuses on daring and unconventional women, specifically bookseller Sylvia Beach.

I asked Cynthia about Chasing Sylvia Beach and why she thinks some books take longer.

Cynthia, how did you know that Chasing Sylvia Beach was a “heart’s core” project? Did you ever consider abandoning it?

When we’re working on a major project like a book, we always come to what I call ‘commitment points’. Faced with rejection, not knowing where to go with the story, distracted by other projects, we are tempted to abandon it.

Frustrated, lost, or discouraged, we have to decide what makes this project one we must complete. This is a very personal process. Everyone will have to find their own motivation when they arrive at these commitment points.

Chasing Sylvia Beach taught me that I am more tenacious than I ever knew. It just wasn’t an option for me to not finish and publish the book. I knew that if I abandoned the project I would ultimately feel awful about that choice and about myself. I knew I wouldn’t be the coach I need to be. I knew that if I didn’t finish it, that decision would alter me and my spirit in a negative way, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen.

So no matter what happened with the book, no matter how ‘successful’ it would be, I had to finish it. I’m so glad I did. I can look myself in the eye now, and if I had ditched it, I would not be in integrity.

In hindsight, would you do anything differently to compress the time it took to write Chasing Sylvia Beach?

This is a tough question. Writing just takes a long time. Most of us work full-time and have other responsibilities as well. There are times when you have to be fallow. When I think about the last five years of my novel, this is what I was doing:

I shed my life in Boulder and moved to Europe. On the eve of my departure, I got an agent who wanted me to revise. But I was heading into the world with one suitcase. I moved to Lisbon and fell in and out of love. I moved around Europe as a nomad. That year was very difficult to write, but near the end of that year I had two months of relative seclusion in the south of France. During that time I made major progress, but before that I wouldn’t have had the focus or the ability to work on the novel.

Then, when I returned to the US in 2009, my agent had the book but didn’t seem to be submitting much. Looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t as ‘on top of it’. But I was in a major process of upheaval and transformation and that took a lot of my focus. By early 2010 when my agent and I parted ways, I had another revision ahead of me.

Aside from being a better writer than I was, I really can’t see how writing the novel could have happened more quickly. I don’t think it matters that it took so long. By the end of the project, I was a different person. I was able to bring things to the final draft that I couldn’t have brought to earlier versions. Self-publishing was at a radically different place in 2011 than it was in 2006 or even 2009.

I believe in timing, and I also believe timing is a sort of trickster. We can’t control timing as much as we’d like, but when we look at our process, we can see that everything does happen at the right time.

I’ve been coaching writers since 1999, and I know that we all have our own pace and our own timing. You cannot force someone. Life happens — deaths, job upheavals, major moves — and during those times it can be very hard to write.

Writing and creating always seem to take longer than we want. The creative process is complex and humans are incredibly complex. In our minds, we’re unstoppable and we believe our creative process should operate like clockwork. In reality, we’re affected by all kinds of things — our emotional lives, the lives our loved ones, our work, our environment.

That said, I do work with myself and others to drive away unnecessary resistance and procrastination. My clients become very clear about the difference between resistance, procrastination or adding new, exciting projects, and life’s inevitable upheavals that require our attention.

Thank you, Cynthia, for this heartfelt advice.

So how do we keep a heart’s core project alive over the long haul? I have three suggestions:

1. Own it, honor it, and let it lead to kindred projects. Cheryl Strayed penned nature essays before she undertook Wild. David Guterson wrote short stories around Snow Falling on Cedars. Cynthia Morris forged a new career as a writing coach from her fascination with Sylvia Beach’s world.

2. Do short, daily timed writings around it. I recently took Cynthia’s Free Write Fling, a month of 15-minute writing prompts. I used each to delve into my archaeological memoir. At the end, I no longer felt overwhelmed and realized I could start writing it anywhere.

3. Work with a writing coach. As Cynthia mentions, if you’re extremely close to a project, unbiased support can help you distinguish between procrastination and incubation.

In this era of what Jane Friedman calls commodity publishing, where “get it out quick” often trumps art, it’s time to celebrate these slow, hard-won successes and, like archaeologists, dig deep.

Are you working on a heart’s core project? How have you kept it alive? 

Cynthia Morris is an author, coach, public speaker, and avid traveler. She has helped hundreds of writers find the motivation and structure of a writing life that fits their needs and lifestyle. Cynthia has also written Create Your Writer’s Life: A Guide to Writing With Joy and Ease. You can discover more at her site, Original Impulse. I heartily recommend Cynthia’s 31-day workshop, Free Write Fling, which starts again on May 1.