Free Cell and Other Coping Mechanisms for Writers: Chatting with Fiction Writer Nancy Christie

I admire fiction writers. When I try writing fiction myself, I get so attached to my main character that I can’t bear to have anything bad happen to her. And if nothing bad happens to your main character, you don’t have much of a story. “Our smart, strong and beautiful heroine woke up refreshed and had another really great day. As usual, she made only wise decisions, and no one bothered her all day.” My protagonist would be gloriously happy and very nearly perfect, but no one would want to read about her.

But I happen to know a wonderful fiction writer, my friend Nancy Christie, and I was thrilled recently to sit down (virtually!) with her and have a discussion about the writing life. In lieu of my regular blog, I’m posting our talk here. Nancy’s responses are italicized. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads. She also has a great podcast, Living the Writing Life. (Full disclosure: I was one of her guests!)

While I don’t write fiction myself, writers have more in common than I realized. For one thing, writing is hard work, no matter what you’re writing. Readers may think we sit down and the words magically pour out of our brain and onto the screen. (We wish!) There are days when there’s nothing there to pour out. So what do we do when we’re suffering from what Nancy calls “creative constipation”?

As a columnist with regular deadlines, I admit grudgingly that for a writer, deadlines are a useful, but not necessarily welcome gift—like getting socks and underwear for Christmas. A deadline forces the writer to regularly engage in the most effective method there is of preventing writer’s block: writing crap. Ideally of course, I don’t stop there, but if I keep working at it, eventually it becomes, if not a piece of inspired genius, at least passable before deadline. I find that the more time I spend writing anything, even crap, the more inspired I become—most of the time. That said, sometimes it pays to walk away and come back refreshed, rejuvenated and re-caffeinated. What about you, Nancy?

On those days, Dorothy, I give it maybe a half hour or so of false starts, interspersed with rounds of Solitaire (personally I like Tri-Peaks and Free Cell) and then I just have to get away from it all. That’s when I do physical activities like run the sweeper, wash a load of laundry or clean the house. (You can tell how bad my writer’s block is by the amount of dust on the furniture. If the surfaces are clean, lots of writer’s block. If you can write your name in the dust, my creativity is going full steam!)

I love it Nancy! Clearly I’ve been too inspired to dust lately. Remember, back in the day (meaning pre-COVID), authors were expected to do a lot of in-person events. And while many times it was fun to have that in-person interaction with readers, there were times when things didn’t go according to plan. I remember when I spoke to a particular group two years in a row at an annual event. The second year, they pulled out a photo album from the past year's affair. “Well look at that,” one of the members laughed. “You're wearing the same dress you wore last year. It must be the only dress you own.”

Haha! Very funny! Also almost true. But it was a different dress that I spilled a glass of water on shortly before I was to go on stage at another event. I spent ten minutes under the air dryer in the bathroom hoping it would dry in time. Any strangely memorable events you’d like to share, Nancy?

Well, Dorothy, two events stand out in my mind. At one, I was getting my free coffee (a bonus for authors from the bookstore) at the café and told the counterperson that there was no charge since I was doing a book signing. At that, the woman behind me gushed, “Oh, you’re an author! I never met an author before!” and then proceeded to talk to me about how exciting it all was to meet one in real life. At first it was flattering, but when she followed me into the restroom and then stood outside the stall—STILL TALKING!—it got a little creepy.

The second one was when I showed up at a bookstore in San Diego, all ready to do an event, and noticed there were no signs in the window announcing my appearance. AND no floor sign inside, saying I’d be there and what date and time. AND no table set up with my books. Actually, no books in the store at all! At that point, it occurred to me that, “Houston, we have a problem”—confirmed when the store manager asked who I was and why I was there. Turns out the event coordinator had neglected to put it on the store calendar. Luckily I had some books in my car, but that taught me to confirm my appearance and the state of my book order more than once prior to showing up!

Nancy, writers know that the acceptance process can be a long and arduous one. It doesn’t matter if we’re writing books or articles, short stories or essays, the only thing we can control is the actual writing part of it. The rest—acceptance by an editor or publisher or responses from readers—is basically a crap shoot. And even though we know this intellectually, it can still be devastating emotionally when things don’t turn out the way we want. That’s when we most need the support of those nearest and dearest, but sometimes they don’t quite give us what we need.

That is so true, Dorothy. For example, I remember when I was talking to a family member about my lack of publishing success for my short stories. Every time I sent one out (this was back in snail-mail submission days), that dreaded return envelope would come back with some version of “Thanks, but no thanks.” I was terrified that this meant no one would ever publish one of my stories and I would go to my grave not as a “has-been” writer but as a “never was” writer. Her response was “Why don’t you get a different hobby?” I knew then that the only people who could really understand what it was like would be others in creative fields who struggled with the same issue.

I totally relate to that sense of “never was,” Nancy. I call it the “all washed up before I got off the beach” feeling. I confess I seldom share the tales of my many failures with family and non-writer friends lest they think even less of me than they do now. Consequently, I think they’d be quite surprised at all I’ve gone through to achieve my current level of mediocrity. I fear that when I die, my descendants will open my closet, searching for heirlooms. Instead they’ll be knocked to the ground by an avalanche of rejections and dusty, unpublished manuscripts, a testament to my wasted life. Then they’ll realize that I was quite unstable and that yes, they should go ahead and contest my will.

Our books are like our kids, and like our kids, they are often the source of humorous anecdotes. For instance, here’s one that is related to a title for one of my books. It was March 2020. I was steps away from unleashing my third book, Alexa’s a Spy and Other Things to Worry About, Humorous Essays on the Hazards of Our Time, on the world when there appeared on the scene a “hazard of our time” I hadn’t thought to include: COVID-19. In a book claiming to make light of the hazards of our time, a global pandemic seemed conspicuous by its absence. How did I not see that coming?

Before COVID, people had laughed when I told them the title. But after the pandemic was underway, several people actually said, “Ewww” when they heard it. That’s not the reaction you want when you reveal the title of your new book. At that point, no one needed anything else to worry about and they definitely didn’t want to hear about more hazards.

I pouted and debated my options for several weeks, hoping the pandemic would disappear—poof. You may have noticed, it didn’t. Finally, in an uncharacteristic effort to be reasonable, I changed the title slightly to Alexa’s a Spy and Other Things to Be Ticked off About: Humorous Essays on the Hassles of Our Time.

I have one relating to a book title issue, too, Dorothy—in my case for my first book, The Gifts of Change. We were nearing the release date when my publisher called me and said she just found out that another and much better known author in the same self-help field was publishing a book with a title almost exactly the same as mine. Hers was called The Gift of Change. —singular “Gift” not plural, like mine. Worse, from my publisher’s point of view, her book was being released at the same time as mine. She asked if I wanted to change the title. I thought about it and decided against it, reasoning since I was an unknown, there was at least a 50/50 chance someone would order my book by mistake and I might get some sales that way!

A second story involves my name, which is the same as a Canadian author. She writes research-heavy academic type books, while mine are short story collections, books for writers and the aforementioned self-help book. Unfortunately, online retail sites (Goodreads, Amazon, Bookshop, etc.) tend to lump us together, either putting my books under her bio or vice versa. Makes for an interesting body of work for one of us!

Thanks Nancy! So wonderful to talk with you. Read more about Nancy at www.nancychristie.com.