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These are a few of the everyday, predictable set-backs that each and every writer is guaranteed to face:

Unfortunately, it’s part of the job. Comes with the territory. Better get used to it and better figure out How To Snap Back.

That’s where mental toughness comes in. Not tough like Clint Eastwood packing heat and snarling, “You feeling lucky, punk?”

But tough like the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera, the best reliever in baseball.

The New York Timesexplained:

“If a thick skin is the most important attribute a baseball closer can have, then Rivera is made out of leather. He holds the record for most career saves, has won five World Series titles and is thought by many to be among the most mentally tough athletes in baseball history. Nothing sticks to Rivera. Poor pitches are forgotten immediately, crushing losses go out with that day’s sweaty jersey. Rivera, long the Yankees’ safety net, is a master — the master — at moving on.”

The mental toughness that makes Rivera “the best” is a necessary quality for relievers—and for writers. If you get blocked or stymied at rejection, if you melt into a tearful/incoherent puddle at every bump and bruise, you need to develop a much tougher attitude.

The qualities I’m talking about include:

1)  THE ABILITY TO “SHRUG IT OFF” whatever the it is: your editor leaves & your book is stranded/orphaned, your agent fires you, your publisher goes bankrupt and everything you looked forward to—the ads, the TV appearances, the reviews, the copies in stores—ain’t gonna happen. No way Jose.

Solution: Think like Mariano. You blew the save? You gave up the game-winning home run? You walked in the winning run? In Game Seven of the World Series?

Remember the old Bud ad: Let it go, Louie.

One way or another, you need to regain your focus and move on: write the next book, think of a new ending for the old book, revise, rewrite, redouble your efforts.

2)  TENACITY & FLEXIBILITY.Call it stubbornness or stick-to-itiveness but, if you think you’ve got a good idea, don’t give up. If your book doesn’t work as a mystery, maybe it will if you write it as a comedy. If your screen play doesn’t find a home in the movies or tv, maybe you should turn it into a novel—which is exactly what Lee Goldbergdid. (He's the creator of the great TV series Monk--A)

In his essay about the writing of KING CITY, recently published by Thomas & Mercer, Lee, details the long, obstacle-strewn path that led—finally—to success:

“KING CITY began as a TV series pitch that I took all over Hollywood four or five years ago. It generated some interest but ultimately didn't lead to anything.  So I put it in a drawer and moved on.”

But the idea nagged at him and Lee didn’t give up. He rewrote, revised, cut, expanded, outlined—and then he did it all over again. You can read his detailed account of the process here.

3)  FOCUS.  Mental toughness also means the ability to concentrate and to lay down rules.  Mariano Rivera did not allow himself to be distracted by crowd noise, an umpire’s bad call, shouted advice from leather-lunged fans or all the woulda’s-coulda’s-shoulda’s. Laser-like, he concentrated on the next pitch, the third strike and the last out.

Nora Roberts takes a similar approach: She was quoted as saying that her family knows that when she’s working, there are only two reasons to interrupt her: “blood or fire.” She’s one of the world’s best-selling writers, the author of 200 books and someone who obviously has a few good ideas about productive working conditions!

4)  MISTAKES, BAD DECISIONS & TUITION. Not someone else’s screw-up but your own. 

If the cost of your own poor judgment is financial, think of the price as tuition.

You’ve certainly learned something, most of all about yourself and also about the sharks and incompetents to beware of. The cost of that expensive knowledge is financial loss. It’s the tuition you paid to learn a valuable lesson.

5)  HUMOR. Sometimes all you can do is laugh it off. Definitely a sign of mental strength. As a friend of mine—she’s a bestselling writer—once said when a guy she wasn’t even that crazy about dumped her: “Sometimes you can’t even get what you don’t even want.”

Black humor works wonders so don’t forget that looking through a noir lens can be a jolting brace of reality-adjustment (aka mental toughness).

6)  THE LEFT/RIGHT BRAIN STRATEGY. Analyze the problem rationally and figure out coping strategies. You’ll feel much better.

Cozy mystery author Elizabeth S. Craig explains: “I’ve gone a step farther, too. Besides looking for data from reader emails, I’ve sought out and read my stinky reviews online…and analyzed them for a common thread. When I saw something mentioned repeatedly, I made a note of it. It’s not too hard to get past any hurt feelings when you’re being analytical—easier than it might seem, actually.”

Bottom line: Don’t wallow. Analyze!

Winston Churchill, who led England to victory in World War II, knew something about mental toughness: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Also from the Brits: Keep calm and carry on.

You’re tougher, more resilient and flexible, more able to laugh at yourself and the world around you than you might think. After all, as Carlos Castaneda said,

 “We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

I’m often approached by parents or grandparents of children who’ve shown a talent for writing. They ask how a child can learn to be a writer. Or sometimes a person going through a mid-life job change will ask my advice about going back to college to pursue a long-deferred writing dream.

I have to tell them the truth: learning to write is hard--and earning money from writing is way harder.

I’m not saying certain types of writing can’t be lucrative—“content providers” can find careers in advertising and various tech fields—but that’s usually not what the doting grand/parents or career-changers are thinking. They might be imagining plays or screenplays, or even journalism—fast-fading professions too—but mostly they’re thinking memoir and novels.  

But writing book-length narrative is one of the toughest ways to earn a living—and it’s getting tougher all the time. The average book advance is less than half of what it was ten years ago. Almost all writers need day jobs.

So the question arises: how much money should people put into educating themselves to be writers? 

Anybody who visits a lot of writing sites has probably been followed around the ’Webz by ads for college creative writing degrees. Do those give students a jumpstart or prepare them for a writing career? 

Unfortunately, they usually don’t. They’re often based on very old ideas of what the publishing industry is like. 

If you have the privilege of attending college, by all means take courses in creative writing. Also take courses in business management, advanced string theory or Athenian red-figure vase painting—whatever interests you. None of your time learning will be wasted, and a college education is massively helpful to any career.

But don’t go to college expecting to be taught how to be a professional writer who can enter the workforce and earn back the cost of college like somebody studying accounting or medicine. It won’t happen.

I’m not saying degrees in creative writing will hurt, but they’re not necessary for a writing career. And they’re usually expensive.

Thing is: the number one thing that’s NOT necessary to any creative career is…DEBT. Debt is a prison that can keep you locked into a job you hate, living in noisy, crowded circumstances, and plagued with anxieties that are the enemy of creativity

“But, wait!” says Aspiring Young Writer, “What about an MFA? That gives you a leg up into the publishing business doesn’t it?”

Um, not really.

Not with most agents and publishers (although a prestigious school can provide valuable contacts.) What an MFA will do is steer you in the direction of literary writing, which tends to be less lucrative for a publisher (and you.)

An MFA DOES qualify you to teach creative writing at the college level, and as a day job, college teaching is a pretty good one. But be aware of the implied trade-off.

Think of getting an MFA like studying ballet or learning to play classical music—you’re entering a fiercely competitive field with a niche audience and not much remuneration…but a lot of prestige. For those who love it, there’s also a fulfillment that can come no other way. If writing and teaching literary fiction is your bliss—follow it! The world needs you to carry on that tradition.

But if your goal is writing popular fiction, treat your education more like preparing for musical theater, playing roots music, or ballroom dancing—and take a more eclectic route in your training. (And prepare to work a day job.)

Of course you first need to learn the basics just like a literary writer: grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and word usage. If you didn’t get that in high school or college, you need to take some brush-up classes. Language is your instrument, and you need to learn to play before you can get in a band.

NOTE: Don’t count on some hired editor to clean up your stuff after you write it. Editors cost a bundle and they can’t do it all. Good language skills are essential. You wouldn’t try to be a carpenter if you couldn’t pound a nail.

But once you have that down, what do you do?

There’s still a whole lot to learn. Straight-A grammar skills don’t help you with learning how to tell a story. You need to educate yourself on story structure, how to create compelling characters, pacing and all the rest.

For that, the best approach is to study widely. Get as much education as you can from many sources as you can find. There is no one right way. You can enroll in inexpensive classes at your local adult ed. or community college extension programs. Short online courses can be really helpful, too, especially ones that concentrate on structure and story-telling techniques. Read the classic books on writing. Go to writers’ conferences, especially local ones where you don’t have to pay for room and board.

Sometimes professional writers will offer workshops in person or online. A short course from a well-known author is usually worth the price, because their name will hold weight in a query and you may be lucky enough to have them mentor you.

If you live in a place where there’s a local writer’s club or chapter of organizations like RWA, SCBWI, or Sisters in Crime, join. Clubs like those can be amazingly valuable resources. And a good critique group can sometimes teach you as much as a college class about how to write. (But beware group-think. Critique groups are only as good as their members, and ignorant people can spread bad habits. See my post on Bad Advice to Ignore from your Critique Group ) 

And these days, a whole lot of what you need to learn is available on the Internet for free. I know people who have learned a huge amount by working with other writers in various writers’ forums.

To become a professional, you need to learn the business side of publishing as well as grammar and story structure. They are equally important these days. Agent blogs are a valuable resource here. Agents like Rachelle Gardner , Kristen Nelson and Janet Reid offer mini-courses in publishing in their archives.

And you’ll need to learn to use social media. It’s as important to a writer today as it is to know how to use an apostrophe. I recommend Kristen Lamb’s valuable blog and her book We Are Not Alone: The Author’s Guide to Social Media. 

If you ask most professional writers what’s the best way to learn to write, they’re going to tell you two things:

1) Read

2) Write

And some will add:

3) Live

Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum that you need to do something 10,000 hours in order to learn to do it well is a valuable one to keep in mind. The corny old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall applies: practice, practice, practice.

Writing may not be a lucrative profession, but creating worlds out of words is still one of the most exciting ways to spend your time, so I tell those parents and grandparents and mid-life career-changers that nobody should be discouraged from following their dreams.

But I also warn them not get talked into expensive college courses they can’t afford. (And people should especially beware writing degrees from for-profit colleges. Recruiters can tell a lot of half- and un-truths and provide a slick, easy path to a lifetime of debt.)

The electronic age may bring more responsibilities to writers—social media and online marketing can seem like a huge time-suck—but it also opens up hundreds of new paths to our goals, many of them inexpensive or free. So I say embrace the journey and accept the abundance of information at your fingertips.

The book I’ve been writing with Catherine Ryan Hyde, HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE—and keep your E-sanity! will be published by Mark Williams international  in June of 2012. The book will be available as an ebook that will include free six-month updates. AND it will also be available in paper in both a US and UK edition.

I have a number of rejection stories. I’ll bet it’s a larger number than the best guess in your head right now. I’ve written a sort of “best of” series of my rejection stories into Anne’s and my new book HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE—and Keep your E-Sanity

Each of the stories is meant to illuminate rejection, to show that it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

At first you think it means the work is no good, you’re not a good writer. But then how can you reconcile the fact that my short stories were rejected an average of 17 ½ times each before going on to find a good home without further revision? (You’ll read that story in our book.) Okay, so then you figure the work may be good, but you’re trying to place it with the wrong publisher. But if that were true, I wouldn’t have placed my first short story with the same magazine that issued my most vicious rejection. (You’ll also read that one.)

Now, hopefully, you’re almost where you need to be, thinking rejection really only means that this particular editor won’t publish this particular work. Hold onto your socks for what comes next: It doesn’t even mean that much.

This is the one I consider to be my ultimate rejection story.

I’d had an agent who marketed Walter’s Purple Heart to no avail (25 rejections!) and wouldn’t even take on Pay It Forward. Hated it, hated it, hated it. (Told that one in the book, too.) I told her to send both home to me, and then gave them to a newer, hungrier agent.

The new agent sold Pay It Forward to Chuck Adams at Simon & Schuster, who then immediately asked what else I might have. Out of the drawer came Walter’s Purple Heart.

He bought it in a six-figure deal right before Christmas.

Why is that my best rejection story? Because one of Walter’s Purple Heart’s 25 previous rejections was from…wait for it…Chuck Adams at Simon & Schuster.

           

And he knew it.

His statement on why: He said Simon & Schuster had changed. They didn’t used to let him take on the smaller, more literary works. Now they did.

My statement on why: My career had changed. A book he might not have successfully marketed as a debut could be much more saleable as a follow-up to Pay It Forward.

So there you go. The true story of rejection. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that any one particular editor won’t buy that work of fiction. It just means he (or she) chose not to buy it on that day. Later, things can change. Reader tastes, the book industry, or your name recognition.

Here’s a final question before I move on from the subject of rejection.

I once received a plain, printed rejection from a small literary journal on my short story Nicky Be Thy Name. But they accepted the next story I sent. In a phone conversation with the editor, he remembered “Nicky,” and referred to it, saying he’d come within “a hair’s breadth” of taking it.

Now, I hadn’t known that. He hadn’t said. I just figured he didn’t like it.

When we get a rejection back in the mail, we usually don’t know the process the work has gone through. We don’t know if one paragraph was read by an editorial assistant (translation=first reader, probably straight out of college) or if our work made the rounds of all editors and survived everything but the final cut.

Here’s the question:

Why do we always assume the editor(s) hated it, that we have been branded as hacks? Why don’t we ever assume that it came within “a hair’s breadth” of acceptance, and is being returned with deep regret?

On the first weekend in February (and possibly the second weekend as well if I get enough takers) I'm going to be doing a weekend workshop at my studio in Cambria. This will be a read-and-critique workshop with a heavy focus on self-editing. In other words, the stuff your read-and-critique group will miss if they are only listening to the work, not reading it on the page (students will be encouraged to bring enough copies for everyone). Self-editing is a must for any author considering the indie, rather than traditional, publishing model. Class size is limited to eight. Hours on Saturday and Sunday will depend on class size, so please email for more information, and to reserve a space: ryanhyde@cryanhyde.com

Traditionally I have charged $175 for workshops of this length (14 hours of instruction if maxed at 8 students). I'm doing the workshops, quite frankly, because I need the money, yet I am more than aware that most of my students are not exactly rolling in it these days, either. So I am conducting this workshop as a "recession special," which is another way of saying "pay what you can." Make me the best offer you can afford to make, and I won't turn anyone away over financial considerations. 

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This week's inspiring excerpt from the INDIE CHICKS ANTHOLOGY is here. It's a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons story from historical suspense writer Suzanne Tyrpak.