Category Archives: Your Writing Career

When I picked my topic for this month (titled above) I didn’t realize the title of my first Fictorian post this year, “Keeping the Day Job.” The two titles definitely describe where I was and am in my writing and I’m happy to see the progress made this past year due in part to my keeping goals.

I wrote everyday. There might have been a month or two that I didn’t hit 20,000 words, but there were others that I surpassed that. I did not submit something each month, but I submitted 12 pieces for publishing during the year. I finished a novel, my first, The Broken Amulet, and am in the stage of cleaning it up and editing. I went to Phoenix and Salt Lake City Comicons. And I attended David Farland’s writing workshop.

It was there that writing changed for me from a hobby to a career. In that workshop I was able to see how I could actually make money at doing what I enjoy. I’ve started working on a new book. David Farland helped me see how to craft, research, and frame the story and I’m confident that I will have it in the hands of an excited publisher by the end of 2015.

There was a moment in the workshop that I realized that I could be a successful author if I continued to learn and grow and develop as a writer. There wasn’t a month last year that I wasn’t a better writer than the month before.

So I’ve set some new goals and have developed a bit of work ethic. Here are some things that I am doing different now.

I set up an author email, jacebkillan@gmail.com that I use to keep all my writing stuff in one place. As I have ideas for short stories or plot twists in my novels I email those to myself with a descriptive subject line so that I can find them later, but I don’t spend too much time thinking on new things and forsaking my current work in progress.

I set up an author profile at Wattpad. At some point I will share a short story or two. It seems to be a great tool for aspiring and published writers.

I write at least a couple blog posts each month. This gives me a break from my work in progress and allows me to process things on my mind. It also helps in developing a readership.

I started outlining my novels. This was a hard thing for me as I’m a prancer or discovery writer, but Farland’s workshop helped me get some direction without losing interest in a story once it’s laid out. Another great tool is Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines.

With a good outline, I’m able to research with direction. I’ve spent the last month scouring old books, the internet, and museums for research on my work in progress. The picture above is of my readings this past weekend. In my hobby days of writing I would have taken the lazy, less expensive, less timely road of just making it up. Actually, I wrote a chapter of my current work in progress before Farland’s class.

The scene takes place in Milan, Italy in 1774, where the protagonist is enjoying chicken parmesan after having travelled a great distance from Nice, France. After Farland’s class I learned through research that Milan, Italy didn’t exist in 1774 but belonged to the House of Savoy in a country known as Sardinia. And tomato sauce wasn’t really used in Italian cuisine until later. And Nice wasn’t yet a part of France either, but also belonged to Sardinia and it wasn’t until a few years later during the Napoleonic era that Nice was annexed. So I rewrote the chapter and it no longer reeks of novice.

I started using Scrivener to keep track of my research and keep my thoughts and outline organized.

Every movie, television show, book that I experience is now analyzed for its story telling features.

To wrap up, my goals for this next year are as follows

Finish my work in progress
Find an agent
Submit at least once to Writers of the Future
Finish editing The Broken Amulet
Outline another novel
Attend two cons
Attend two writing workshops
Register for Superstars in 2016

I’m confident that I will become a published writer and professional author because I continue to improve, I continue to learn, and I continue to write.

Goal Setting and the Metrics of Success and Failure

December 1, 2014

Quincy J. Allen

Goals Motivation Quincy Allen Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

This month on the Fictorians, many of us are following up on posts we made back in January and July. We’ve given a great deal of thought over the past twelve months to setting goals, meeting them, and coping with the inevitable shortcomings and failures that are common with people managing their own destinies.

Like most careers, becoming a self-sustaining writer is not unlike climbing a mountain—but one that has no summit. It’s more a matter of reaching one plateau after another in a line of them that extends to the end of our days.

I use that analogy deliberately because of something I noticed recently on Amazon.com. Amazon—that mega, web-enabled shopping cart of doom—has become a mainstay for traditional, hybrid, and indie-pub authors alike. We ply our wares there, and many of us track the status of our success or lack thereof in a little place called Author Central. If you have books or stories of any kind, regardless of publisher, that are available on Amazon, then I would recommend you go through the exercise of setting up your Author Central Account and tying in all your available works back to that account.

Once you have this mechanism in place, you can track where you sit in the Amazon author rankings. I must add here that it may be a bit daunting at first. To give you an example, my data goes all the way back to September 28^th, 2012. My rank started at 386,929. Between then and November 2^nd of this year, I saw a low of 629,888 and a high of 35,451. It’s a jagged graph that seems to plot, at least partially, when the novel came out or was revamped in a new edition. It also seems to reflect when the anthologies I was in came out.

Then something happened. On the 2^nd of November there was a sharp spike in my ranking. It jumped to 4,500 and then slid back down slightly to hover for the past month around 20k. That is the plateau I was talking about. The beauty of it is that I can track that spike to three separate releases that all occurred at roughly the same time. Essentially, One Horn to Rule Them All, Fantastic Holidays: The Gift of Stories, and The Best of Penny Dread Tales all hit the streets or had media spikes almost simultaneously, and this gave me a bit more “street cred” in Amazon’s ranking algorithms.

I mention this all because while goals are an important aspect of being a writer, tracking metrics on your successes and failures is the first step in truly managing your writing career. We all need to have an understanding of what a success is—beyond just finishing a story or getting it accepted somewhere. There is a bigger end-game that many of us work towards: namely, making our writing career a viable means of self-employment. You can’t steer your course unless you know where you are succeeding and failing. Author Central is just one mechanism to do this. Maybe what you are looking for are positive book reviews, or sales data, or invitations to conventions. The metric you use isn’t nearly as important as having the knowledge of where you are in your career path.

Be aware of these things. Set your goals, implement the tools to track your success, and consider each “failure” as a stepping-stone to the next success. I quote Thomas A. Edison who said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” While it wouldn’t surprise me that Edison stole that quote from Tesla, the import of what he said is paramount to us. Failures are inevitable. We need to know each one intimately, so continue to have them, and use them as a foothold to the next success. And have a means of knowing when you’ve reached your goals. It’s always more than just finishing a story. In fact, finishing the story is just where the work begins.

Keep writing.

Looking for Progress in a Mirror

November 25, 2014

Nathan Barra

Author's Perspective Balancing Acts Craft & Skills Motivation Nathan Barra Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life 1 Comment

It is human nature to compare oneself to others, no matter how unfair that comparison is. I know that I have neither the productivity of Kevin J. Anderson, nor the skill to write the poetic prose of Guy Gavriel Kay, nor the ability to manage massive story lines and milieu like Brandon Sanderson. However, they are all professional writers with many years more experience than I have. Their skills represent goals, markers of achievement that I aspire to. Even looking to my friends who are closer in experience to myself isn’t an apt comparison. We are all different people and very different writers. Ultimately, their skills and successes have no direct impact on my own abilities. They are simply further down the road than I am. I have found that self-comparison is the only reliable and reasonable metric of progress.

As a writer advances through his/her career, growth occurs with every word and work written. I have often heard writers bemoan their old stories, talking about how they would do things differently given the chance. Though, I have written plenty of prose that has made me cringe later, I am more pleased than disgusted by the discovery. My ability to recognize flaws in my old work shows me better than any other metric my own growth as a storyteller.

The original introduction of my first completed novel is a perfect example. Because I largely discovery wrote that book, it took me two full years to complete. Now, I prefer to work in a more focused and deliberate manner, but that initial experience taught me a lot about my own style and craft. Naturally, my skill and tastes grew in that time. My more experienced eyes were able to see that a passage I had thought was filled with compelling characterization and evocative metaphors was little better than navel gazing. I redrafted that particular introduction half a dozen times, and each version was able to leverage my new skills and perspective. By comparing the initial and final drafts, I am able to clearly plot my own growth.

Though there have been times where I have made notes in a manuscript to rewrite or rework a passage during editing, I would not release a story into the wider world until it represented my best work. I have found that it is generally a good assumption that other writers have the same philosophy. What most non-writers have a hard time understanding is that it is almost impossible to track down and eliminate every error in a manuscript, especially since it passes through so many hands during the publishing process.

The way I see it, if I can recognize that some aspect of my old work is garbage, I must have come a long way from the time that I wrote it. Bonus points if I now understand why it is bad and how to fix it. Therefore, my own terrible prose is a marker of my progress as a writer. For me, that’s very motivating. Being a professional writer isn’t a game for those looking for short term benefit. Rather, writers must be continuously growing and learning. After a while, the trajectory of your skill matters more than the absolute value at any particular moment in your career.

The Light at the End of the Publishing Tunnel

October 31, 2014

Leigh Galbreath

Goals Leigh Galbreath Motivation Publishing Reflection Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life No Comments

Happy Halloween, everyone!

You know, in some circles, it’s considered advantageous to end endeavors before and begin new endeavors after the sun rises on November 1st (the official end of All Hallow’s Eve). In a sense, Halloween is a kind of spiritual New Years.

Thus it seems appropriate that over this last month, we Fictorians have shared the not-so-enjoyable aspects of our writing careers, from health issues to saboteur computers to fears of Bisquick, we’ve hit a lot of the big issues we writers face in our attempts to finish projects, build an audience, and further our careers.

And so we finish our journey into the darkness of the writing life today, Halloween, when it’s best to bring dark things to an end.

After reading the posts this month, I’ve been struck by how varied our fears and dislikes are, yet how uniform our reactions to them. It comes down to one word: perseverance.

With every setback, each of us has pressed on like the protagonists we write about. We try, we falter, we get back up (sometimes bloody), and we try again, repeating the sequence until we get it right. While few of us get the tidy denouement of our imaginary heroes, it’s important to remember that we get something they never will. We get a story that doesn’t end. Not really. There’s always another chapter, and we can either help drive the plot of our lives forward or let the twists and turns defeat us.

Not everyone can do it. Many don’t get back up after being knocked down. They don’t finish the book, don’t submit to their dream agents, don’t put themselves out there for possible ridicule, humiliation, and scorn. These are not the people who achieve the goals we all share — a thriving career as a published author. Whether out of fear of the unknown, or dealing with a failed attempt, the only way of getting past these rough spots is to persevere.

My dad used to always counter the phrase “There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel” with “Yeah, it’s the headlight of an oncoming train.”

To be fair, yeah, sometimes it is. But oftentimes it isn’t, and the only way to find out the difference is to walk the track.