My Five-Year Writing Challenge
By: Mary Adelaide Scipioni
Tags: Writing Life, Confidence, Storytelling, Authors, Writing

My Five-Year Writing Challenge

Author’s copy over image by fotografierende (Unspalsh).

The promise

Five years ago I made a promise to myself to write five books in five years. I created a habit, put in the time, combed through my work by chapter by chapter, shared my stories with my trusted readers, and edited again and again for each book.

I did it!

I want to share my experience so that you can reflect on your own approach to writing and building a catalogue. And since this has been a year of learning to see with “2020” vision, it’s an appropriate time to stand back and gain perspective.

Many times along my path my foot slipped into a hole called the business of writing. I struggled with ebook formatting, designed covers, self-published, learned about keywords and ad copy and CPC and the rest. I may not always do these things myself in the future, but I needed to understand how they were done.

I’ve always come back to the joy of writing as my primary motivation.

First things first: a Pseudonym

Before I began my challenge, I decided to go incognito. I wanted to invent my name, just as I would invent my stories. And it made me feel a little less on the line. I proceeded as Mariuccia Milla.

How I started my first story

When I was twenty-five, I made a decision to go to Italy so I could learn about design. I used the beginning of my personal story as the germ of the first novel. A young woman splits up with her boyfriend in New York to seek adventure in Milan. And the fictional story developed from there organically.

I was so excited about returning to Italy in my mind that used many Italian expressions in the book. I created a glossary at the end. I wanted to describe the beautiful landscapes: the mountains huddled around Lake Como, the view of Rome over the rooftops, even the smokey chill of Milan’s stone-paved streets. And then there was the food! It kept creeping into the story through trysts with bread and cheese and dinner parties with asparagus risotto.

The principal theme of the book was what you might call social ecology. My characters were diverse in age, nationality, wealth, and desire. And yet, so many tiny threads wove them together into a dynamic community of friends and lovers. A system of relationships.

Maybe I tried to do too much, but I considered it a great accomplishment.

Linking to the next story

I live and work in the Finger Lakes region of New York, so I decided to set my next novel there. It’s a moody, beautiful landscape that I know well. How to begin? I stole a character from my first story, one who’s life was not resolved at the end of it, and sent her to visit her younger friend who was teaching at Cornell University.

Without the backdrop of a big city, I decided to bring in a handful of small communities as supporting actors: Ithaca, Trumansburg, Watkins Glen, and Penn Yan. Characters included a snooty professor, a barista, a couple of Mennonite teenagers in love, an older townie addicted to pain killers, and more. In the center stood our protagonist and her friend, two Italian women upsetting the apple carts and becoming upset themselves.

The diversity of the characters and their interrelationships were again glued together by the reflective, influential character of the landscape and the sharing of food. I’m an Italian mother: I have to feed my characters. Eat before reading.

This second work allowed me to see how I could weave the books together thematically. There was a relationship between my two novels, Meet Me in Milano and Blue Sky with Clouds. They seemed to naturally piggyback one another. I didn’t want to create a series, but I liked the idea of stealing characters from one story and putting them in another. They were becoming part of a larger ecological system in my writing life.

What next?

Since I couldn’t quell my obsession with food, I decided to write a book of short stories dedicated to the ritual of Italian food preparation. I came up with a dish for each chapter–not a gourmet dish, but something pure based on fresh ingredients and simple technique. Around each dish I wove a story based on memories of my life in Italy, love stories of family and friends. I decided to call it Stories of Food and Life.

Disappointment

I was finally beginning to feel like a writer. This was good, but some negative stressors were entering my life as well. You know, marketing, advertising and all the stuff for which creative writers are not necessary suited. I read about it, watched videos, arm wrestled with different platforms. I was worried about competing with all those marketing-first authors.

Some of you may not remember this, but when self-publishing started, Amazon’s KDP was a gold mine for indie writers. It was an alternative to traditional publishing: there was a space where authors could be seen and heard. We had our own piazza!

Sadly, that was before I jumped on the bandwagon. By then, publishing houses had come to the table with Bezos and signed the Agency Agreement. Now it was a horse race to publish, as Mick Rooney of The Independent Publishing Magazine puts it, “competent and prescribed book products to fit existing trends and markets.”

Traditional publishing had abandoned its elitist stewardship of content. The system was broken but thought itself saved, and eBook prices soared to the price of a paperback. Indie authors had broken ground like artists moving into a low income neighborhood, opening the way to gentrification. Now we were getting pushed out just as our numbers increased.

Much chagrined by the whole “write to market” trend, I decided to base my next novel, Bestseller, on the world of independent publishing. The anti-hero, Felix, decides a bestseller will save his career and his marriage. Incapable of writing, he learns all the marketing hacks and like so many of those people we despise, those who manage to come out on top while relying on the efforts of others, he…well, I can’t tell you what happens.

Bestseller again featured a motley, improvised community. To experiment further, I threw in some fantasy elements that seemed to reflect the gap between the characters’ desires and reality and instead of landscape, I used weather as a background character. Felix’s novel is of the “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, genre. This book was my commentary on the inadequacy of genre categories and the whole concept of “writing to genre.”

There is a whole industry built on self-publishing. Once your book is completed, there are editors, formatting services, graphic designers, publicists, marketers, and ad managers, many of which may have themselves fallen out of the system and who see independent authors as their market. You buy your own books to gift to your reviewers and friends, hoping to create a buzz. The money seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Then you ask yourself, why am I doing this?

And it all gets back to the writing. So, I went back to my studio to craft book number five. Armed with characters from my first novel, who by now were seasoned with experience, The Garden Underground was set in one of my favorite places in Italy, over the mountain from Portofino, facing the sunset on the Italian riviera. The landscape is more restricted, though rich. It is also in danger and the protagonist tries to save one small piece of it. She herself doesn’t come to the conclusion she expected. And neither have I.

Happy Endings

The is a certain skill to writing a happy ending: everything has to come to gether. I started out with that goal, but as I wrote one story after the next, the endings became more ambiguous, and the threads came loose. I am incapable of living without hope and of writing a story without it, but my idea of a HEA may not be the same as the next person’s, and it’s evolving.

Where to go from here

What better time than a pandemic to envelope yourself in storytelling. The more I write, the more I want to read. Reading is to learning how to write as listening to native speakers is to learning a language. It is absorbed without the middleman. You have to keep writing as you read.

I have learned more about marketing along the way, but I no longer cower when someone who is trying to make money from me tells me what’s wrong with my work. I can proudly stand on the strength of knowing why I write and draw confidence from that. And with every book I write, I sell a few more. The drops have turned into a trickle, and that is progress.

Mariuccia Milla is the author of four novels, one collection of short stories and one nonfiction book. You can learn more about her books here.