“When readers tell me they’ve cried or laughed or thought about my words long after they’ve put down the book, that makes my heart sing.” —Samantha M Clark
On Wednesday, September 23, Samantha M Clark will teach “The Long Haul: How to Begin (& Finish) Your Book.” In this class, students will learn how to get started, how to not lose steam in the middle, and how to revise effectively after you’ve finished the first draft.
Samantha M Clark is the award-winning author of The Boy, the Boat, and the Beast and Arrow (both published by Paula Wiseman Books/Simon & Schuster) and American Horse Tales: Hollywood (Penguin Workshop/Penguin Random House), as well as the Gemstone Dragons chapter book series (Bloomsbury). She lives with her husband and two funny dogs in Austin, Texas, and helps other writers through her Your Writing Mentor newsletter. Sign up for news and giveaways at www.SamanthaMClark.com. Follow her on BlueSky @samanthamclark.
Here’s what Samantha had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
When I was a kid, I believed Narnia was real. I wanted to go to a place filled with magic, and that desire fed my ambition to become an author, tell my own stories, and make up my own magical worlds. Today, I’m influenced every time I read a new book. Right now I’m reading Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s THE MERMAID, THE WITCH, AND THE SEA, and her story-telling techniques and beautiful prose are pushing me back to the pages of my own books filled with new energy.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
The biggest challenges to my writing have been time and my own confidence. When I started writing novels, I was working a full-time job and quickly recognized that writing when I had the time wasn’t moving my author career forward. I learned I had to carve out time to work on my books, so I woke up at 4am every weekday and wrote for an hour before work. Spending this time writing every day helped me keep the story in my head better, so I could write faster.
Confidence and imposter syndrome have always been an issue for me—they’re literally what I wrote about in my debut novel, THE BOY, THE BOAT, AND THE BEAST. So carving out time to write had the added benefit of reinforcing that my dream was important. I was treating my dream as a second job rather than a hobby, which gave it the importance it needed to feed my drive to persevere.
I needed that, because I had more than 100 rejections before I signed with my agent, and have dealt with many rejections since. The most important lessons I’ve learned from these are:
- Write consistently
- Write every day or as close to it as possible, even if I’m just keeping my story at the front of my mind
- Write from my heart, because that’s where my best work is.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
The most rewarding part about being a writer is hearing from readers who have connected with my stories. As an author, I’m creating the story, characters, and world, but my readers have to add in the final ingredient: their imagination. My writing needs to guide their imagination so they can fully experience the story. So, when readers tell me they’ve cried or laughed or thought about my words long after they’ve put down the book, that makes my heart sing.
Who do you write for?
I write for myself first. If I try to write for others, I second-guess my choices too much. I’m currently co-authoring a novel, and every time I question a decision because I wonder if my co-author will like it, it slows me down. It’s the same if I write for readers, because I can’t know what every reader wants. All I know is what I want in a story, and if I love my story, I know others will too.
When I’m writing for children, I do consider their age in the voice and appropriateness of the action. But I also focus on that more in revision than in my first draft.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
It took me 5 years to finish the first draft of my first novel, and I knew that if I wanted to be an author for a career, I wanted to do more. Over the years, I’ve developed skills and techniques to not only help me write more efficiently, but also to quell my insecurities so I can make it all the way to The End without giving up. I hope the writers in my course will find these useful, so they can more easily work toward their own The End and find their joy in the process of writing.
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Thanks, Samantha!
Click here to learn more about Samantha’s upcoming class.
