Throughout the four years I’ve been a parent (to two children now), I’ve asked myself many times: When I look back later, what will I wish I had done differently? What will I regret? Until last week, I couldn’t think of anything. Because I ask myself this question frequently, I tend to feel that I am on the right parenting track—spending a lot of time with my kids while at same time maintaining a healthy balance of time to work on my career, getting their pictures taken at regular intervals, reading to them every night, taking lots of photos and videos of them, writing down cute things they say, etc.

Then, last week, it struck me that my two-year-old daughter’s two years of life are a blur. I can hardly remember her at 6 mos, at 12 mos, at 18 mos. I can picture her bald head, but I have trouble picturing her in the stroller as a baby, or my carrying her around in the Bjorn, or her first words. We’ve been so busy—rushing from play dates to swim class to preschool—that the details have already faded. During my son’s first year of preschool last year, I taped every art project he did on his bedroom wall. This year, my daughter’s first year, her artwork comes home and sits in a pile on the dining room table until I move it to a pile on my desk in the basement. I haven’t kept up her baby book (yet, but I plan to update it next month), and I’ve missed all three preschool parent events for her class.

Looking back at this blur that is my daughter’s life, I ask myself what my favorite memories are. The answer: The mornings and afternoons I sat on the floor with the kids and played: built train tracks, played musical instruments, did puzzles, played Bingo, put shapes into the shape sorter, etc. And the mornings and afternoons we’ve spent at the park—playing in the sand, playing soccer on the grass, and riding scooters/bikes. I’m proud that my kids understand French and Spanish. I love that they are good swimmers. I’m happy that they are social and well adjusted. But my favorite memories aren’t the ones of us driving in the car from this class to that event. They aren’t the ones of me cleaning the house while the kids play alone. They are the ones of me sitting on the floor doing a dinosaur floor puzzle, building Lego castles, and trying to make a train track around the living room that uses every tunnel, bridge, and piece of track we own. And I plan to do more of that starting now.

What about you? Looking back at your children’s younger years, is there anything you would do differently? What?

As someone who just finished the last revision of my manuscript Monday night (Hurray! I’m taking the day off to go to the hot springs tomorrow, my favorite reward), this rang true for me. I sent an earlier draft of my memoir, Paris On Less Than $10,000 A Day, out two years ago to five agents. All five requested fulls, and all five had positive feedback but ultimately turned the book down (No wait, there was a sixth, the fabulous Nathan Bransford, from whom I received a form rejection, but who hasn’t received a form rejection from Nathan?) Rather than send it to more agents, I spent the next two years rewriting the book. I don’t regret that decision because I think the book has greatly improved, but now, as I prepare to send it out again, I have one goal: No matter how many rejections I get (assuming I get some) I’m not allowed to revise my book again, unless an agent specifically requests that I do so.

I’m confident that my book is well-written and marketable. I’ve read enough publishing blogs to know not to take rejection personally. It’s an impossibly tough market, the business is incredibly subjective (It’s all about finding the right agent, the who will fall in love with my story), etc. etc. I know all that. And yet …

I also know myself. A month from now, after having received three or four rejections, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll doubt my book and my writing in general. I’ll analyze rejection e-mails for clues as to what could be improved. I’ll kick myself for not having gotten my book out there sooner. I’ll wonder if having a bigger author platform would make a difference. I’ll tell myself that memoirs are a thing of the past (unless you’re a celebrity from the 80s), that modeling books are out, that the only chance I have of getting published is to sleep with Oprah’s hairdresser. I’ll wonder if my book is too serious. I’ll tell myself that if only chapters 1, 6, 9, and 18 were as funny as 2, 7, and 41, it would have sold by now. In other words, I’ll be plagued by self-doubt.

Back when I was rock climbing, I wanted to get my lead card at my local rock climbing gym. I’d heard from several people that no one passes the first time they take the lead test. Climbers often have to take it two or three times to get their cards because their lead has to be PERFECT—perfect clips, smooth, strong climbing on an overhanging 5.10B or 5.10C, and no stepping on or behind the rope. I passed on my first try. Not because I’m a great climber, but because I was so afraid to fail that I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced long after any sane person would have taken the test. I would not take the test until I was confident that I could do it flawlessly. Why? Because I’m plagued by perfectionism, the cousin of self-doubt.

Perfectionism can be a good thing. It can lead to great accomplishments. But it can be damaging, too. It can slow us down, it can prevent us from putting ourselves out there, from taking risks. And in order to get published, we need to be willing to put ourselves out there. We need to take risks—in our writing and in our lives.

What about you? Are you plagued by perfectionism and/or self-doubt? Do you find that men are more confident than women when submitting their writing for publication? How do you remain positive in the face of rejection?

1. New York Times Modern Love—Start by reading a lot of Modern Love columns to get an idea of what they’re looking for. You may even want to buy this Modern Love collection. And don’t miss this article on Media Bistro on how to turn your Modern Love column into a book.

2. New York Times Lives—TheNew York Times Magazine Lives column is another great place to get published. The best way to submit to any large publication is to have someone put you in touch with the editor of the column. The rest of us can e-mail our essays to the Lives section at lives (at) nytimes (dot) com.

3. Newsweek My Turn—Start by reading “How To Get a My Turn Essay Published in Newsweek Magazine.” Then read some of the past essays that have been published to get a good idea of what they are looking for and what’s already been done.

4. Christian Science Monitor Home Forum—The Christian Science Monitor is a highly respected international newspaper and is not religious-based. It’s Home Forum page includes a personal essay that can run from 400 to 800 words. After you read the Monitor’s contributor guidelines, check out this article for advice on how to beat the odds of getting your essay published.

5. The Sun—A monthly magazine, The Sun pays from $300 to $2,000 for essays and interviews. They receive a thousand submissions (including fiction and poetry) for every issue, so don’t be surprised if you have to wait six months for a response.

6. The Smithsonian Magazine—The Last Page of The Smithsonian is a humor column running 500 to 650 words and pays $1000. For more information, read the submission guidelines.

7. Salon—From what I’ve read, the pay is low for Salon essays ($150?), but it’s better than nothing and a great way to get exposure. Check out this list, and then click around the different departments (Life, Sex, Poetry, etc.) to see what they’re publishing. Finally, see their submission guidelines, which aren’t all that helpful.

8. Slate—Slate publishes some essays, but I was so distracted by their targeted banner ads (Camping gear! Children’s outdoor play equipment!) that I gave up on my search before I got very far.

9. The Rumpus—An online culture magazine, The Rumpus “[tries] to maintain high standards even though we don’t have any money and can’t pay for writing.” For details on submitting essays or book reviews, see their writer’s guidelines.

10. 7×7—Another West Coast publication, 7×7 has an Urban Ledger column for which readers can pitch their personal essays. They pay $1 a word, and their essays run about 1000 words. For more information, contact the editorial department.

11. Skirt—An online women’s magazine, Skirt accepts submissions up to 1500 words, but—like most online publications—does not pay. For more info, read their contributor guidelines.

12. Granta—A British literary magazine, Granta publishes original memoir pieces between 3000 and 6000 words. They do not accept e-mail submissions. Read a few copies of the journal (you can find most journals at a library) and then read their guidelines.

13. Tin House—A literary journal, Tin House accepts essays as well as poetry and fiction from Sept. 1 to May 31. The suggested deadline for their Spring 2012 issue, themed Weird Science, is Oct. 1. The real deadline is Nov. 1. Click here for submission guidelines.

14. Zyzzyva—You have to live on the West Coast to publish in Zyzzyva, but it’s another literary journal that accepts personal essays. The best way to learn what any publication is looking for is to read several issues of that publication, and Zyzzyva is no exception. Start by buying a copy. Then read the submission guidelines.

15. Traveler’s Tales—Traveler’s Tales is currently accepting submissions in the women’s travel humor and travel humor categories. Visit their website for submission details. The deadline is TODAY (Sept. 21) for their Fifth Annual Solas Awards, so get it in fast if you have something ready. Otherwise, you can submit year-round and your submission will be held for the following competition.

16. Literary Mama—An online literary magazine “for the maternally inclined,” Literary Mama is looking for “revelation so stark that it hurts. Pathos can reveal, but so can humor and joy; superior craft (clarity, concrete details, strong narrative development); and ambiguity, complexity, depth, thoughtfulness, delicacy, humor, irreverence, lyricism, sincerity; the elegant and the raw.” View their submission guidelines for more info.

17. Brain, Child—The magazine for thinking mothers (as opposed to literary mamas), publishes essays between 800 and 4500 words, which are “the signature pieces of the magazine.” They pay “as much as we can, although our fees are still modest for now.” View their writers’ guidelines.

18. Chicken Soup for the Soul—It doesn’t seem like there’s anything left to publish in this series, but there is! There is! And here are the submission guidelines.

19. Seal Press Anthologies—Seal Press publishes books “By Women. For Women.” They aren’t currently accepting submissions, but check back periodically for upcoming books.

20. Adams Media books—Adams publishes nonfiction books, including some anthologies. Right now they’re taking parodies of Jane Austen writing for an anthology titled Bad Austen.

In addition to those listed above, there is a plethora of other literary journals that publish personal essays. NewPages.com provides an extensive list with descriptions. Writer’s Digest also has a great article called Tips to Help You Publish Your Personal Essays. They also publish the trusted Writer’s Market directory, which you can access online.

Do you have any publications to add to the list, or details/tips about any of those listed above?

So where does that leave us? We writers who share our short stories and book chapters in critique groups, at writers’ conferences, and in MFA programs—is our work safe? Since the copyright of unpublished work can be difficult to prove, and substantial portions have to be copied verbatim in order to claim copyright infringement, is there anything to prevent a fellow writer/student/colleague from stealing our ideas? The answer is no. Here’s an example:

This past February, I read the New York Times Book Review of a novel written by a former classmate of mine from my MFA program at Mills College. I was surprised when I came upon this quote: “[Elena] Shapiro has given her fictionalized Louise an extraordinarily sensual nature. She straddles a motorcycle with “thrilled and shivering limbs,” commits adultery (and possibly incest) to the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and, like every Frenchwoman I have ever observed, approaches food like a lyric courtesan.”

Strange, I thought. I also wrote about a character who had sex to the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer in an Advanced Fiction Workshop I took at Mills, in which Shapiro was working on the novel quoted above. After reading the review, I bought Shapiro’s book, 13 rue Thérèse, and read it. When I arrived at the scene mentioned above, I was stunned at how closely it resembled my own scene, which is in the memoir I’m currently working on (I had submitted my memoir as fiction at Mills because I wanted to take Yiyun Li’s class). To be sure, I thumbed through my archive of MFA critiques, and there it was, the passage I had written and submitted in Li’s workshop with Shapiro’s critique and signature attached, dated October 5, 2005. In the scene (below), I have just had unprotected sex with a Frenchman and am now praying to God that I don’t get AIDS. The scene takes place in Paris in 1988. (I’ve added the bold to emphasize the similarities between the two passages):

“I swear I’ll pray every day for the rest of my life. I’ll start right now. Our father, who art in heaven … wait, I thought Pierre was asleep … hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come … oh, God, not again. Doesn’t he ever get tired? … thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day … what is he doing? I’m not a dog! … Our daily bread … oh, that actually feels pretty good … and forgive us our trespasses, as we … I’ve never tried this side scissor position before … forgive those who … oh, oh God, I think he’s coming again … trespass against us. Hail Mary, full of grace … oh don’t even bother, you’ll be there all night … the Lord is with thee. … Believe me, there’s no point … Blessed art thou amongst women and … oh God, oh God …
blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God … oh, oh,
oh shit! Shit! Shit! … pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,
Amen.”

The scene from Shapiro’s book also takes place in Paris (1928). And, like in my scene, the chapter culminates with an orgasm followed by the word “Amen.”

I hesitate to quote the entire passage because I’m not familiar enough with fair use laws to know how much is “fair,” but here are a few lines from 13 rue Thérèse. Again, the bold is mine:

“Our Father who are in heaven, his beautiful mouth!—is on hers.”

“She can feel he is hard for her oh—forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—the pure unrestrained joy of it.”

“He begins to nibble the side of her neck: she starts to squirm, letting out something that sounds like a little hiccup when she feels teeth— hallowed be Thy name Thy kingdom come Thy will be done—”

“When he finally penetrates her, she says thank you. Amen.”

The love scenes are different, but the trope (interspersing lines of the Lord’s prayer into a sex scene) is clearly the same. But, like Fowler states, “When caught in the act, almost all plagiarists, including Helen Keller, plead cryptomnesia” (unconscious plagiarism).

Shapiro’s response to my e-mail about the matter states: “[W]hen I wrote the scene for my book I had absolutely no recollection of that scene in your story. That prayer is a very familiar rhythm that everybody knows; I went to Catholic school so its French version was in the background of my entire childhood. I am sure it has flitted through many a head throughout history while making love, and my guess it that it has been used in sex scenes in other published works before because of its ubiquity and significance.”

Okay, first let’s take a poll. How many of you recite The Lord’s Prayer while having sex? Can I see a show of hands?

And here’s a little advice: One) Copyright your unpublished manuscripts. All original work is automatically copyrighted when it’s written, but you need written proof that you wrote it on a particular date to make, or fight, a copyright infringement case in court. One way to do this is through the United States Copyright Office. Another way, according to a professor at Mills with whom I spoke about this incident, is to send it to yourself via Certified Mail and DO NOT OPEN it. Just store it away in a safe place. Two) Think twice before sharing your work with others. Don’t be paranoid about it, and do participate in critique groups with people you trust, but if you have a novel idea or a turn of phrase of which you feel particularly proud, protect it—because, from what I understand after reading Fowler’s post, only the direct copying of substantial passages of text is actionable. Copying ideas is not. Writing similar passages is not. But it leaves you feeling like your best friend just slept with your boyfriend, and no one needs that.

What about you? Has anyone ever copied your work, inadvertently or intentionally? Have you ever plagiarized someone else without realizing it? How did you handle those situations?

I toyed with this dilemma the entire time I worked on this book. During my MFA program I faced mental blocks to writing scenes about my family because I was afraid of what they might think or say. My teacher told me not to worry about it, to just write the stuff now and worry about it later. But I did worry. How could I not? I knew that one day the time would come when my book was finished and ready to send off for publication, when someone in my family would say, “I don’t want you to publish your book.” I was SO relieved when my dad gave it the thumbs up. The other person I would have worried about was my mom, but she’s been dead for fourteen years. I toned those sentences down after my sister saw them, and I’ve written very little about my family despite advice from some readers that I should include more of them, not less. I’m happy with the result, and I think my sister will be, too, once she reads the whole book. But these aren’t easy decisions for a memoirist to make, and they can stifle a writer’s ability to write openly and honestly about her experiences. I admire memoirists who bare all, especially about themselves, like Bill Clegg in Portait of an Addict As a Young Man and so many other great memoirs I’ve read lately (All Over The Map by Laura Fraser, The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott). But it’s always easier if you’re estranged from the people you are writing about, if you don’t care about their feelings or how they will react. That’s not the case with me.

What about you? Have you written memoir or personal essays? Have you written about other people in your life? How did you strike the balance between telling the whole story and managing their feelings? Did you show them your work before you published it? And if you haven’t written memoir, what do you think you would do if one of your family members told you he didn’t want you to publish your book?

Next, I want to share a discussion I had with Roni Loren last week on her blog. Roni’s post “How Fast Do You Have To Write To Build a Successful Literary Career” struck a nerve with me. She stated that although the standard expectation of writers for decades has been to write one book a year, today writers are expected to write faster. In order to create her backlist and quit her day job, she said, “I KNOW I have got to be able to write more than 1-2 books a year.” She mentioned that romance author Maya Banks writes 8-10 books a year and that proof that her quality hasn’t suffered is that she hit the New York Times bestseller list last year.

In May, I wrote a post about social media books in which I quoted a story told by Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a personal finance book I’m sure you’ve heard of. Kiyosaki told a reporter who had had trouble getting her novel published that she should take a marketing class. When the reporter appeared taken aback, Kiyosaki pointed out that the cover of his book read “bestselling author,” not “bestwriting author.” I used that anecdote to illustrate the importance of social media marketing. What I didn’t mention is that the best-writing part is equally as important. ONCE you’ve written your book as best you can, THEN you should worry about selling it and marketing it, but not at the expense of the quality of the writing. And just because a book hits a bestseller list, does not mean it is well written. It means that it has sold a lot of copies, for whatever reason. (Think of all the blockbuster movies that make gazillions of dollars but get terrible reviews.)

IF you are lucky enough to be one of those authors who can truly crank out two great books a year without letting the quality of your writing suffer, go for it. I am not one of those people. The first draft of my memoir was 520 pages, and I’ve spent the past four years revising it and editing it down. I’ve never heard that there is any expectation for writers to write more than a book a year. Most published authors I know spend 3-4 years on a book. (Samuel Park spent 3 years 9 mos on his). Roni’s rationale behind writing 2+ books per year is that she needs to create a backlist in order to make enough money from her writing to quit her day job.

The argument for a backlist is a good one. (The point being that if someone reads and likes one of your books, he can go out and buy the others.) It’s an argument to stop being so anal about your first book being a super-mega-bestseller and just GET IT OUT THERE because if people like your second book, they’ll go back and buy your first. That happened to Alice Siebold. After the runaway success of The Lovely Bones, people went out and bought her earlier memoir, Lucky, which hadn’t met great success when it was first published.

But why does a backlist have to be developed in six months? What’s wrong with publishing a book every two or three years? You’ll still create a backlist, just a little slower. Like slow blogging. If you blog once a week, you’ll still build a following, just a little slower. My argument that I’d rather see authors take time to write a really good book than to rush them to publication was countered with many comments by people arguing that more time writing does not necessarily equal a better book. Of course it doesn’t in all cases. But I bet if you piled all the books that took less than one year to write on the left side of a table and all the books that took more than one year to write on the right side, well, first the table would tip over. But I bet you’d see a greater number of high quality books—regardless of genre—on the right side. Now, there will be some great books on the left side. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days. There will be YA books and novellas that took little time because they are short. There will be books by experienced writers who have so much practice writing that they truly can crank out a good book in less than a year.

But I hope everyone doesn’t get into a two+ books a year frenzy. There are many ways to make a living as a writer. You can publish your books and earn money from your backlist, but you can also teach, edit, consult, speak, and publish shorter pieces like book reviews and magazine articles.

I think it’s wonderful that Roni is so motivated and that she has a clear goal for herself in mind. I think it’s wonderful that writers are mastering social media and how to market their work. But I think it’s even more wonderful when someone spends four years—or three years and nine months—on a book to create a truly wonderful book that will enlighten and entertain his or her readers.

Rachel Howard is the author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, described as “enthralling” by the New York Times. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and now teaches memoir and creative nonfiction at the San Francisco Writers Grotto and Stanford Continuing Studies.

Shaping Truth with Point of View

In memoir, the default—and some might assume, only—point of view to call on is first-person: I did this, I thought that. After all, you’re the one telling this true story. But artfully shaped memoir and creative nonfiction can take surprising imaginative license with point of view without violating any of the facts or honesty of the story.

One point of view you can use without moving too far from the qualities of first-person is second-person: You do this, You think that. In this kind of second-person, you becomes something of a stand-in for I, and yet the effect of second-person is quite different from first. Second-person can convey the effect of the narrator separating from him or herself. It can also have the effect of implicating the reader or making the reader imagine him or herself as the protagonist because of the use of you. Laura Fraser wrote a complete memoir in second-person, An Italian Affair. Marilyn Abildskov uses the second person more intermittently in her memoir The Men in My Country, moving fluidly between the first-person and the second-person:

There’s the boy who hands me something after lunch, Presento, he says, then races off, waving good naturedly, Have a NICE day!, a phrase made popular on Japanese TV. I thank him twice, once in English and once in Japanese. Then I look at what he has handed me: two packets of mayonnaise.
There are the boys in seventh grade, some so small they they float in bunched-up paper bag pants, the boys that make you put your hand to your grown-up teacherly heart. There are the boys who hold hands walking down the hall, who sit in each other’s laps, and after a time, you don’t see anything strange about that touching at all. By eight grade, the acne begins and so does the acting out and you wonder how anyone survives eighth grade anywhere [. . .]
At school they write messages on the bottom of composition books, little lost boats you have the urge to keep and save. KEEP OO JAMMIN in all caps. Or questions that sail in on paper scraps, tiny letters in bottles that sail across the sea. Do Marilyn-sensei like Guns and Roses?
A little, you lie. You believe in kindness over honesty.

But memoir and creative nonfiction can also call upon the third-person point of view—he did this, he thought that—in unexpected ways. In Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn writes many chapters—about a third of his book, actually—in the third person of his father’s point of view, rendering what his father did and thought in scenes that Flynn didn’t witness, and doing it with so much detail and conveyance of his father’s inner life that his father is almost a fictional character. It works, I think, because Flynn sets up an implicit reader understanding that he’s extrapolating from the facts of his father’s existence. He’s taking the surface facts and reshaping them to get at a deeper portrait of his dad—and at the same time, a deeper portrait of Flynn’s understanding of his dad.

Then there’s the way Abildskov uses third-person point of view. Consider the shift from first-person to third-person here:

I remember a couple standing in a small kitchen, making dinner one night. The air is thick. The man is Nozaki. The woman is me. What happens next I can see in a series of snapshots, click, click, click.
After the lull, the fall begins, Not all at once but gradually.
He cuts tomatoes. She watches the past cook. She has gone to a great deal of trouble to hunt down a jar of artichoke hearts and hopes he will like them, this delicacy he has never tried.
But after one bite, he makes a face.
Too sour, he says, and she eats the hearts alone that night.

Abildskov goes on this way for two more pages, writing in the third-person about herself, stepping back to look at herself as a character. Is this merely a surface flourish to jazz up her story? I don’t think so. I think it works to shape the deeper truth of what was happening between her and Nozaki, to put the reader inside the truth of that experience instead of reporting the surface fact of it (and also putting us inside the deeper truth of how she remembers it).

Experimenting with point of view might help you get beneath the surface facts of your story to bring the deeper truth to the fore.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled post. I was doing some research a few weeks ago and stumbled across this post on Joe Konrath’s blog. It’s a very touching and very sad post, and you should read it. But the title, “Depression and Writers,” is what really struck a chord with me. I have suffered from depression and know many other writers who have as well, which got me to thinking, which came first, the writing or the depression? Do writers get depressed because they are writers, or do people with depression tend to flock toward writing, painting, and music as a means to express their suffering? I think both. I think people who suffer from depression benefit from expressing themselves creatively (I know that when I was modeling in Paris and depressed more often than not, I wrote furiously in my journals nearly every day, and that constant practice led me to want to take my writing to the next level.) I also think, like in the case of Kiana Davenport (whose collection of short stories I bought but have not yet read), depression may be exacerbated by the ups and downs (mostly downs these days) of the writing life.

Let me say right now—whether you are published or not—if you are relying on external validation from the public and the publishing industry to ward off your depression, get thee to a shrink stat. Because there is NO guarantee that your unpublished book will get published. There is NO guarantee that your published book will get good reviews. There is NO guarantee that your published book with great reviews will sell enough to pay your mortgage. SO PLEASE do not let the craziness that is going on in the publishing industry today determine how you feel about yourself, your writing, or your life. I know it’s hard. We (as writers) are smart, creative, motivated people who could have gone to law school or earned an MBA. We could be making a lot of money! Instead, we chose to follow our hearts because we love literature and we love words, and we wanted to give back to others some of the joy, fulfillment, and knowledge we have reaped from the many books we have read throughout our lifetimes. That and because we love to write. (If you are one of those overachievers who is making a ton of money as a doctor or a lawyer AND writing books on the side, you’re probably too busy and overwhelmed to know if you’re depressed or not!)

So yes, writing is hard. And it can exacerbate depression. It’s hard when you’ve taken writing classes, you’ve earned your MFA (or, rather, spent all your earnings on your MFA), written your novel, revised your novel until you have carpal tunnel and are nearly blind, hired a freelance editor to edit your book, revised again, queried agents, been rejected by agents, queried more agents, gotten some bites but no offer, revised some more, queried more agents, been offered representation by an agent, then sat around for a year while your agent couldn’t sell your manuscript, considered self-publishing, considered changing agents, considered re-revising … and on and on. It’s hard.

But there are a few things writers can do to help/prevent/alleviate depression:

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Have other interests and other sources of income besides writing. Also have more than one project you’re working on at once. Don’t bank everything on one manuscript. It may be your second or third or fourth that sells. Remember ex-literary agent and published author Nathan Bransford said he wrote a book in his 20s ” that didn’t work out.” I can promise you he’s not the only one.

2. Exercise! This is my secret sauce. When I get down, I go running, or swimming, or even just for a walk outside, and it makes me feel so much better. Yes, there are those days when I feel too crappy to go running. That’s when I …

3. Call a friend. Sometimes it helps just to talk about things. Feeling you’re not alone with your feelings, or your problems, that someone else is shouldering the burden with you, can offer tremendous relief.

4. Write. Writing isn’t always the answer. Sometimes we need to take a break from writing. But if you haven’t been writing for a while, scribble in a journal for a few pages, or start a new short story. You could get crazy and WRITE A POEM.

5. Get some fresh air. Have you been spending all your time in front of a computer? Have you been writing and blogging and Tweeting and Facebooking? Maybe it’s time for you to take a hike. I did this yesterday, and I felt strong and happy and invigorated. It’s so important to get away from the electronics and the lights and the traffic and the roads now and then. Take a walk in the woods. Or have a picnic on the beach. Or go jump in a lake. A little oxygen and some negative ions may change your outlook on life.

6. Read. When I was living alone in Paris in the late 80s/early 90s, I would head to the English bookstore (W.H. Smith) whenever I felt down. Sometimes I bought self-help books (Louisa L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life) and sometimes I bought novels, but curling up in bed with a good book always made me feel less alone.

7. Take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, and eat healthy food. If you’re like me, you get depressed when you’re sleep deprived for too long, or if you eat crappy food too many days in a row. It’s important to exercise, but it’s also important to get enough rest. Lie in bed and read a book, take a hot bath, or get a massage.

8. Get help. If all else fails, don’t hesitate to call a therapist and set up an appointment. I’ve been to five in my lifetime, and most of my friends have been to them, too. They’re awesome, and if they weren’t so expensive, I’d probably still go because I love having someone sit there and listen to me blab for an hour.

What about you? Do you occasionally (or frequently) suffer from depression? How do you deal with it? Do you think writers tend to get depressed more often than non-writers? Why?