One of my favorite pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony, late in their lives.It’s Women’s History Month, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of thing, it’s a topic that’s certainly worthy. I didn’t know a lot about the women’s suffrage movement in America until I was hired to teach an Intro to Women’s Studies class at Towson State University one year, having seen a flyer up at JHU where I was in grad school at the time. I frantically crammed a whole lot of reading in that summer, prepping to teach a class that covered what seemed to be everything: linguistics, biology, anthropology, literature, and more than anything else, history, history, history.
And in it I met one of the great loves of my life: a movement whose history continues to fascinate and inspire me, the American suffrage movement and the fascinating characters that moved it forward: Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull…and more, a cast of hundreds in a period that was turbulent and changeable and crammed full of social movements, including abolition, free love, spiritualism, temperance, women’s suffrage and a myriad others.
If you’re interested in it, a great place to start is Stanton’s own memoir, EIGHTY YEARS AND MORE: REMINISCENCES 1815-1897, which is free on the Kindle as well as on Project Gutenberg (as is everything I mention for free on the Kindle). Or the books she, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage authored, also available free on the Kindle, Volumes I, II, and III of HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE as well as the three later volumes penned by Ida Husted Harper, Volumes IV, V, and VI. Harper also wrote THE LIFE AND WORK OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Volumes I and II. (Note: I don’t see Volume II in a free version on the Kindle; if you don’t want to pay, I suggest going to look on Project Gutenberg and maybe kicking them a buck or two as a thank you.)
Skip ahead one generation to what Wollstonecraft’s daughter writes (and the wonder of e-books is that all of this is out there for free, which frankly to me makes the Internet the marvel that it is) and you’ll find FRANKENSTEIN, THE LAST MAN, MATILDA, and PROSERPINE AND MIDAS.
I’ll try to post some more of these throughout the month – there’s a TON of free reading out there in this area and the only problem is its discoverability. I welcome recommendations!
Hi–this is a very informative post. Right now, I’m reading sci-fi, but I’m going to send this link to a writer friend who penned a children’s historical fiction that deals with this precise time frame.
Thanks for this, Cat. I agree with you about the “discovery” and the wonder part of learning about the suffrage woman. It inspires awe.
I’d recommend, too, delving into the work of the early 19th century American women writers: Kate, Chopin (who breaks my heart), Edith Wharton, especially “House of Mirth.” There are others and they were writing from their pulse-beat.
My book “Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life of Leadership” is also available free as an e-book though not for the Kindle). It can be found and downloaded by looking up the title on Google Books. The original intended audience was middle school students, but I believe quite a few adults have read it.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Self Promotion and Career Building: What I Told the Clarion West 2013 Class
Yesterday I spent a pleasant chunk of time talking to the Clarion West 2013 students, along with Django Wexler. Django and I were the “mystery muses,” a Friday feature for the CW students where people come in to chat about a specific aspect of the writerly life. Django spoke well to the experience of having one’s first major book come out, since his book (which I have read and heartily recommend) The Thousand Names just came out. He let us all know (to mass disappointment) that it doesn’t lead to being booked on the Leno or Daily Show or lavish book tours, though he did get to go to ComicCon.
I decided to talk about self-promotion and career building, since that’s advice I didn’t get a lot of while at Clarion West myself. And I came up with nine maxims, but lost that index card so I have an incomplete list. Maybe the students can chime in to tell me what I’ve forgotten.
Writing always comes first. Self-promotion can become a form of procrastination, particularly if you’re playing on Facebook or Twitter while pretending it’s all in the name of self-promotion. Having the biggest Twitter following in the world won’t help you unless you’ve actually got something to promote.
Be discoverable. One of the questions that always comes up in my Building an Online Presence for Writers class is whether it’s mandatory for a writer to have a social media presence and blog and all that. The answer is no, (though it’s helpful in these days, when the burden of promotion falls increasingly on the writer him or herself.) But you do need a way for someone to find you if they liked a story and want to contact you. That may be a simple static webpage where you maintain a list of your publications. It may be a full blown blog. Or it might be a social media presence (although I think this approach is not the best, because people may not be on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or whatever network you’ve chosen).
Don’t oversell. We’ve all unfriended or stopped following people because of the unrelenting way they push their books. Out of five Tweets (or blog posts, or FB posts, or whatever), only one should be about selling stuff. The others can be kitten pictures, advice, funny sayings, whatever (one easy way to fill this quota is to promote other people), but make it something that people are interested in.
Don’t be a jackass. It’s a small world and word gets around when you behave badly. Search on “authors behaving badly” if you want some examples. Professionality is important, although sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of in our charming, silly, opinionated genre. Don’t make arguing on the Internet another form of procrastination.
Jealousy is okay. We all experience it. Use it as motivation for writing. Don’t put it on the Internet. Find one person you can trust and use them as your sounding board when you absolutely have to say those snarky things about an award or kudos bestowed unjustly.
Say thanks. When someone does something kind like getting you invited to an anthology, blurbing your book, whatever, don’t assume it’s your due because you’re a genius. We all think we’re geniuses. SF is full of people paying it forward, but they’re more likely to do so for gracious people.
Be kind to yourself. Writers are so good at beating ourselves up, at feeling guilty for not doing X or achieving Y. Don’t do that. Set goals but rather than punishing yourself for not meeting them, reward yourself when you do hit that word count. You are the person with the most to gain from being kind to you, so do at least one nice thing for yourself each day, whether it’s taking time for some activity you enjoy or giving yourself some small present.
Don’t be a jackass. It’s a point worth repeating.
Some other things that got mentioned:
Find someone who is where you want to be a few years down the line and look to see what they’re doing, using their example to guide your actions.
Early on, you don’t need to go to conventions unless they’re something you enjoy for their own sake. If you do go, participate. If you can’t be on panels, try volunteering, which is a great way to meet people and network.
Writing process differs from person to person. Try different strategies and when you find something that works for you, do it, do it, do it.
For most of us, it’s easier to write if you get at least a few words in each day.
It is often skill in rewriting that differentiates the professional-level writer from the almost-but-not-quite-there.
And here’s something I didn’t mention, but which has come up a lot recently, as to what to blog about, both in terms of finding something interesting and not spending too much time on it: excerpts of what you’re working on both fulfills those terms and encourages you to get some words out.
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Technology
This is a really cool project based here in Seattle, Health Month. It’s making a game out of achieving your goals, getting so many points for each one met. It connects with the Fitbit, which I have and love, which also uses geeky addiction to numbers as motivation to get fit.
A tool that I’m still exploring, ifttt. Basically use if/then statements to create actions triggered by web events that come from channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, e-mail, the weather, etc. Mark Zuckerberg appeared at the Facebook developers conference to discuss Timeline, which supplies a new appearance for Facebook. Samuel L. Ipsum is a lively alternative to the traditional filler text, Lorem Ipsum.
4 Responses
Hi–this is a very informative post. Right now, I’m reading sci-fi, but I’m going to send this link to a writer friend who penned a children’s historical fiction that deals with this precise time frame.
I’m glad it’s helpful!
Thanks for this, Cat. I agree with you about the “discovery” and the wonder part of learning about the suffrage woman. It inspires awe.
I’d recommend, too, delving into the work of the early 19th century American women writers: Kate, Chopin (who breaks my heart), Edith Wharton, especially “House of Mirth.” There are others and they were writing from their pulse-beat.
Cheers.
Hi Cat,
My book “Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life of Leadership” is also available free as an e-book though not for the Kindle). It can be found and downloaded by looking up the title on Google Books. The original intended audience was middle school students, but I believe quite a few adults have read it.
Thanks for this excellent post.
~~Nate Levin