“Don’t tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what is intolerable to bear alone that we must hide it in a story.” – Libba Bray

In all her guts, glory, humor, and wisdom the fabulous and charismatic Libba Bray spoke at the 2011 LA SCBWI Conference. During her keynote speech she shared the devastating story of writing a 560 page novel and having to throw it out and start over. If she wasn’t your hero before, she might be now. The following are her tips on how to write it all wrong and survive.

A little Backstory:

• Libba wrote a 560 page novel all wrong…
• It’s okay! Embrace the suck!
• When she discovered the 560 page novel she wrote was all wrong she began to freak out and feared it wasn’t good enough.
• She got a 12 page single spaced letter from her editor confirming that everything about it was wrong.
• She did a 900 page revision of the book and only 100 pages of the original 560 were kept in that revision.
• Find the real imbued with honesty, emotion, and truth. Her novel needed to be true to itself and it wasn’t.

 Libba Bray’s Five Tools to Survive as a Writer:

1) Gather Your Tools for Survival

• “The voice is in there, we just had to find the right tools to find it.”
• Your book is in there!
• Use playlists to help you find it.
• Go to your local café to find a comfort zone.
• Do you have a reward system? Find yours.

2) Avoid the Quicksand

• Beware of your irrational fear telling you “no one wants to read this book.” Or “what if my ex-boyfriend read this and realizes he’s the base for the asshole in my story?”
• Breathe deeply!
• That thing you are writing is AWESOME! (That message was on a postcard that Holly Black sent out to her writing friends).
• Be your own thing and not a trend.
• You are safe in the writing cave. No voices are allowed in the cave (the negative voices telling you you’re not good enough).
• Readers are not trends, they want a well written story told from your soul.

3) Perfect Wants to Vote You Off the Island

• Perfect wants to vote you off the island, but better wants to make an alliance.
• Lower your standards!
• Realize that you can’t make a book that is perfect. Perfect = Failure.
• You just have to make it better.
• Do it in small steps. Make that little bit of dialog better, or change that metaphor.

4) Explore the Whole Island

• Sometimes you need a change of format.
• Change the POV, format, tense, etc.
• Form is function – this is what the architects tell us.

5) In Case of Emergency – Break Glass!

• Writing is freakin’ scary!
• Writing is vulnerable. It’s intimacy with a reader, and the possibility of failure and rejection.
• We often write it wrong, because we think that’s what others want and we are afraid to show who we really are.
• All writing holds our DNA, our bones and blood – a part of ourselves.
• We are evasive and inarticulate when talking about projects that are emotionally autobiographical.
• “Don’t tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what is intolerable to bear alone that we must hide it in a story.”
• Find the part that hurts. The story you needed to tell.
• Like us, stories have an adolescence that is awkward and gawky and pimply. It needs time to grow.

Other Great Advice from Libba Bray:

• I’ve seen Libba speak multiple times and the following are notes from her other talks.
• Libba Bray’s Ten Insights for Writing
• Write With Reckless Abandon

Libba Bray is the author books for Young Adults, including Going Bovine and the Gemma Doyle Series: A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing. In 2010 she was awarded the Michael L. Printz award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Tags: Revision, Survival, Writing