From the Editor's Desk

Comparison and Contrast
by Celina Summers

Over the last week, I've been glued to the television watching swimming. Once, every four years, Americans have enough interest in swimming to actually televise it. It's funny—so many people speak so knowledgeably about the sport when you know full and darn well they don't have a clue about what it takes to be an Olympic medal swimmer. I was a mediocre swimmer at best, and I spent 3-4 hours a day every day working out in the pool, running, or lifting weights. So I find it a little funny to hear people say, "Well, Michael Phelps looked really tight in the semi of the 100 fly last night."

Looked really tight? The man is six foot four inches, one hundred and ninety-four pounds, and has an arm span of over six and a half feet with abs you could slice ham on and legs taller than anyone who competed in gymnastics. I think it's anatomically impossible for a guy who put the lank in lanky to ever look tight.

That being said—

Right now, across the world tens of thousands of people like myself who swam competitively in their youth but gave it up are shaking their heads. Michael Phelps has been to—and won gold at—three Olympics. That's twelve years of international caliber swimming. It doesn't even count the years before that and how hard he worked to even get to that level. Hours upon hours of work seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, since the twentieth century. He didn't just wake up one day as the greatest swimmer who's ever lived. Nope, he worked for years to gain that status and earned every ounce of the eighteen gold and four silver Olympic medals that now hang around his neck.

So I always find it baffling that people think writing is easy.

You don't just wake up one day and write a bestseller. Writers spend a lot of long, lonely hours—sitting at their desks getting words down on paper, editing and revising, cutting and rewriting. We have to. I wish that the very first time I sat down and started to lay a story out on paper that it had been a perfect manuscript, that I landed the first agent I sent it to, sold it to the first publisher she sent it to, and sold out of the first printing before the book was released.

But that's not quite the way it worked out—for any writer that I'm aware of.

Just as an Olympic champion swimmer spends years upon years of his life in the water, swimming lap after lap, working on his stroke and kick, stretching his endurance to the longest possible moment, and gaining his top speed one thousandth of a second at a time—the writer must also work out intellectually, spending years upon years within their stories, consigning those stories to paper and reworking them until they are the best possible representation of their writing. You can't expect someone to jump into the pool for the first time at twenty-four and swim a world record time. Why, then, would you expect someone to write the next great American novel right out of the gate? Heck, for that matter, why would you expect your first draft to be the final draft?

Why expect gold right off the bat?

Writers' expectations should be more realistic. And just like a top athlete, achievement comes after you've established the daily repetition of exercise—word counts or scene goals, a set amount of work completed day in and day out with gradually increasing goal expectations. Sometimes, life conspires so you can just jump right in. In my writing life, for example, I started off as a full time writer because of an accident that kept me from working. Those long days after that accident, I sat alone in our apartment for eighteen hours a day while my husband worked two jobs to keep our heads above water—no internet, no cable television, not even a telephone to break up the monotony. Every morning, I woke and climbed into my recliner, powered up the computer, and wrote. I rarely went out, even more rarely found some other way to engage my mind. All I had was my story, and I steeped myself in that world. I cranked out six 150,000 word first drafts in three months.

And I look back at those first drafts and cringe.

Writing is a tough business. Whether you write epic or flash, you must be trained for success by constantly working to refine and improve your craft. And just like Michael Phelps has his coach, Bob Bowman, the author has her coach—her editor. Bob Bowman helped Phelps to trim seconds off his time; an editor helps a writer to trim the unnecessary and tighten up her manuscript. You may hate working with your editor at the time—God knows I've yelled at the computer screen a lot during edits—but the end result of that work makes you glad you did it.

See, the whole purpose of training, whether you're an athlete or a writer, is to make the very difficult look very easy. As writers, we're surrounded by tons of people in real life who confide, "I plan to write a book some day"—like it's an easy thing to do…like just anyone can do it. (Unfortunately, we editors rarely escape that person at the party, who then proceeds to pitch their story to us and talk confidently about how much money they intend to make. It's a conversation that never ends well.) But writing isn't easy. Writing is hard. Writing takes training and patience, meticulous attention to detail and the dedication to sit down at the computer every single day. Athletes like Michael Phelps have a big advantage, too. Phelps started swimming competitively at age seven. Writers, on the other hand, write competitively much later in life. Sure—I have trunk novels from when I was in my late teens, but I'll burn them before I let someone read them now.

So while we all sit back in admiration as the greatest Olympian and swimmer of all time finally hangs up his goggles, stop and think for a minute of writing as a sport. Sit down and set your goals, then determine the training you'll need to meet those goals. Take the guidance of your coach/editor, and use that knowledge to improve your work. And while you'll never get that national anthem moment on the podium, with the dedication and drive every successful writer needs you might get that quiet moment in the middle of the night when a new review comes out of one of your stories and you feel the triumph of a job well done.

And until Bravo comes up with a writing reality show (and I would so audition for it, by the way), that's the medal ceremony for people like us. Unless, of course, you play the Star Spangled banner every time you finish a story.

Kind of cheesy, but hey—if it works, it works. I'm not going to judge you for it.

From The Editor's Desk

How Literature Affects Everything…Even the Olympics
by Celina Summers

Okay, I'll admit it. After the brilliant opening and closing ceremony from China four years ago, I wasn't holding out a lot of hope for the English response for this year's Olympics. But the beginning of the ceremony made me eat my words—I thought the transition between an agrarian, idealized England to the Dickensian grime and darkness of the Industrial Revolution that then faded away, leaving the molten metal in the Olympic rings was amazing.

Then, the show made a departure from the glam and the hype to something much closer to my heart.

No, not Mr. Bean's homage to Chariots of Fire.

The great stories in children's literature written by British authors—J.M. Barrie with Peter Pan, P.L. Travers with Mary Poppins, Dodie Smith with 101 Dalmations, and Harry Potter with J.K. Rowling—were center stage during England's welcome to the world's athletes. Literature? At the Olympics? Not quite as strange as it might sound—the original Olympics in ancient Greece held competitions in athletics and the arts. The original Olympics were held every four years from 776 BC to 394 AD, when the Roman Emperor finally put an end to the festival held in honor of the king of the gods, Zeus. The winners of each category were immortalized at Olympia, the site of the games, their names and visages left for posterity in the ring of champions

In fact, literary works had to be at least twenty thousand words in length, in dramatic, epic, or lyric categories. What an opportunity we missed! When I was a kid, I dreamed of being an Olympic swimmer, just like everyone else on my swim team. I grew up less than an hour from the home pool of Tracy Caulkins, who at 14 was the best female swimmer in the world. Tracy got cheated out of her best shot at the Olympics when the Americans boycotted the Moscow games. The gold medals she earned four years later in the Soviet-boycotted Los Angeles games didn't have quite the luster that she deserved. But regardless, as a swimmer a few years younger than Tracy, the Olympics were my dream—and I could imagine myself on the starting blocks, swimming the race, looking up for the score…accepting my medal while The Star Spangled Banner plays…

So much for that. Obviously, even as a kid my imagination was running rampant.

But if the modern Olympics still had literature competitions? Music? Art? There are rumors that the 2016 games will have a ballroom dancing category added, which is a step in the right direction. And it seems only fitting that the modern games, based as they are on a ritual religious observance, should honor art as well as athletics—something I think the British organizers gave a nod to with their inclusion of the great British writers in the opening ceremonies. After all, if it weren't for writers, our knowledge of the ancient games would be significantly smaller. For example, the funerary games for Hector in the Iliad give us, the modern reader, a glimpse at what the Olympics must have been like. Even in the centuries before the birth of Christ, winning the Olympic Games was a source of pride for the competitors as well as their countries or city/states—and that was for discus and sculptors, wrestlers and singers, runners and poets.

In 1952, an art exhibition was substituted for the contests at the Helsinki games, and the art competitions never returned to the Olympics. The International Olympic committee instead voted to include a cultural program at all Olympic Games, to promote understanding of the myriad cultures represented in the countries who participate. And so we, the modern writers of speculative fiction, lost our chance to compete for the medals in our chosen field. We can only watch as athletes are crowned with the laurel wreaths of the victors, can only applaud as they lower their heads for their gold medals, and tear up when, above the stadium or pool or field, our national anthem plays high and sweet in the summer air.

But we, as writers, have other rewards. We have the joy of seeing our stories being published, the warm glow of good reviews, the innate satisfaction in the hundreds or thousands of silent readers who love the stories we gave them. We have the long nights at our desks when the rest of the house is quiet, immersed in the characters and plot lines that populate our minds. And some authors, who climb the highest pinnacles in our craft, have the ultimate honor—just like an Olympic champion in any sport—of giving back to the people who love what they've done.

I doubt that many people are aware that Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie left all the royalties from his works to Great Ormond Street's children's hospital for the duration of the copyright. As a result of the amazing popularity of the Harry Potter franchise, J.K. Rowling has made incredibly generous contributions to literary programs, programs for single mothers, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Who needs medals against a legacy like that?

Barrie's bequest to the sick children of London was a gift of such genuine love, given back to the readers who looked upon his story of the boy who could fly with magic and wonder in their eyes. But even before that, a gold medal already hung around his neck. The timelessness of his characters, the passion and delight of his stories—all this brought a measure of escape to countless children, lighting the way through the darkness and horror of the long nights when German fighters were bombing London.

When the world is literally exploding around you, sometimes imagination is the only thing that can free you.

So modern writers may not have a medal to display proudly over the mantel and when we finish a story, the national anthem might not play. But no matter what genre we write or the age of the readership for whom our stories are intended, we all reach a moment when we, too, feel like we're on the podium. Our stories are inspiring those people who, for a moment, joined with our characters on a journey through our imaginations. Our books are our legacies. And while I may never accrue a readership that would permit me to be as personally generous as J.M. Barrie or J.K. Rowling, I can still look back at some moments of my career and know that I once made a difference in someone's life. You don't need money or a gold medal to create a legacy, in much the same way that generosity isn't measured in the number of zeroes on the checks you write to charity.

A writer's generosity is measured with the stories she or he shares with the world.

The tradition of arts and the Olympics stretches back to ancient times, when the greatest poets and sculptors once competed just like the athletes under the grueling heat of the Greek skies. The opening ceremony for the thirtieth Olympic Games of the modern era harkened back to that relationship—a reminder to us all that the arts—and in our case, literature—has a place in Olympic lore. There's no better time to remember that than now, as we cheer on our athletes in the London games.