Category Archives: Craft & Skills

My generation was raised to believe in the power of goals. I was taught that goals set at the beginning of an endeavor would allow me to achieve success. In promising myself that I would do a thing, it would happen. Even though I always had the best of intentions, I would often fail to meet my goals anyways.

Eventually, I realized that the problem was that I was only setting goals, not making plans. Goals are objectives, indicators of intent. Plans are action, a path for execution. Without having both, nothing will ever be accomplished. Over the years, I realized that my goals need to be SMART to be effective.

Goals are Specific. Any goal you set has to be specific enough that you can intelligently plan for success. A popular New Year’s resolution is to lose weight and get in shape. But how much weight do you want to lose? How do you define “in shape?” Establish exactly how many pounds you want to lose, or by how many inches you want your waist to shrink. Give yourself a specific BMI number you want to drop below. Establish some task you cannot accomplish now that will be your landmark for “being in shape.”

Goals are Measurable. Though specificity defines the endpoint, measurability ensures that you can accurately and regularly track your progress and take corrective action. The entire thought behind behavioral-based management is that by measuring and changing people’s actions, we can reach objectives. It is important to avoid goals that are succeed/fail in nature. If such objectives must be set, it is important that we can accurately measure progress in time to make a difference in the success of the goal.

Goals are Actionable. As a part of behavioral-based management, SMART goals must be under the influence of the person trying to achieve the goal. For instance, I have absolutely no control over my company’s stock price, so trying to set that goal would be unreasonable for me. However, the CEO of my company might very well have that goal. The difference is that his actions could have a direct effect on the stock price for the company, where mine do not. When considering actionable goals, I ask myself, “Are there steps that I can take that will directly influence the results?”

Goals are Realistic. The whole point of the goal is to make some improvement in your life, so a goal that cannot be attained is functionally useless. This is often the most difficult aspect of a SMART goal, as it requires not only introspection and self-awareness, but knowledge of one’s environment and competition. Honesty is truly important in setting realistic goals. Goals should always be challenging, but they should be attainable or else you have failed before you even started.

Goals are Time bound. Like everything else, goals have an end. Even if you accomplish your goal, if that accomplishment is not well timed, it’ll be either less effective or entirely ineffective. When setting your goal, it is essential to look at what timing you will need to be effective, and build that timing into your goal.

Because I believe in SMART goals, I will go ahead and take a risk. I am going to broadcast my writer’s goals for 2014. I am also going to ask y’all to help me keep accountable. My email address is Nathan[at]NathanBarra[dot]com. Feel free to email me at any time, ask about how my goals are going, tell me about your own goals, or even just chat.

OBJECTIVE: Make progress towards becoming a professional writer.

Though this goal is not SMART, it isn’t really a goal either. It is the overarching objective each of my goals will be designed to support.

GOAL #1 (blogging): Write and publish 52 Monday posts for In Brief, at least 10 Fictorians posts, and have a Thursday’s Thoughts online every Thursday in 2014.

I have found that though blogging takes a lot of my time, it also has many benefits. Writing and editing so frequently has had a positive effect on my prose. I have met many wonderful people through my blogging. I spend more time now thinking about my craft and seeking out resources to improve my skills than I have ever had before. Most importantly, it keeps me writing even when I am so busy that I barely sleep.

My plan for this goal is to try to establish a queue at least one month out, but still treat every week as if my queue is empty.

GOAL #2 (novels): Polish my manuscript to be ready to be shopped to editors and agents by 30-Aug-14.

This goal suffers most and specificity. What is a polished manuscript? Unfortunately, after much thought, I have not found a way to quantify this goal. The most important thing, however, is its timeliness. There are two major industry focused conventions in the fall at which I want to start shopping the book. To do this, the book needs to be finished and ready to be sent out into the world by the above-mentioned date.

The plan is to let the books settle until the end of the month, giving time for my last beta readers to get back to me. Then, I will finish my structural edits by 26-Mar-14, and my line edits by 25-May-14. With that timeframe, I can find a proofreader or line editor, and finish the manuscript reasonably by 09-Aug-14. This might seem like a long stretch of time, but I work on-call. That means, I might work more than 120 hours a calendar week, for 10 days, and then have 5 days off to rest and recuperate. For me, with the blogging, this schedule will be challenging. But, where’s the fun in easy?

GOAL #3 (submitting): Submit at least 4 independent works to publication markets by 31-Dec-14.

The only way for me to become a professional author is to get over my fear of rejection and learn to let go of a completed work. Blogging has helped a great deal with that. Now, I need to start asking for people to pay me for my efforts. Note, that because of how this goal is worded, submitting my novel to any number of sources only counts once.

My plan is to submit twice (Q3 2014 & Q1 2015) to Writers of the Future, shop my book and submit a piece of flash fiction or a short story to a magazine or anthology.

GOAL #4 (professional networking): Attend at least 3 conferences with some sort of writing/writing business aspect by 31-Dec-14.

This goal wasn’t one that I would’ve considered in 2013. Back then, I didn’t realize how important it was both professionally, and personally, for me to get out and meet people in the industry. Not only are they business contacts, but they are my friends and support structure.

The plan is to attend Superstars Writing Seminar in February, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer’s conference in September, and World Fantasy Con in November.

My goals have been stated and written down, and so I am accountable for their success. But, I also have a plan, a SMART plan. The only thing to do now is follow my plan and succeed.

Milestones

January 6, 2014

Quincy J. Allen

Business Character Motivation Publishing Quincy Allen The Writing Life 1 Comment

I’ve crossed a number of milestones over the past few years: first short story published, first convention panelist, first novel in print, first teaching gig at a writing conference. I’ve managed to predictably repeat those achievements virtually at will, and as nothing more or less than an act thereof. Each and every one of those milestones felt like the success it was, but they were all, at best, minor-league achievements.

Make no mistake, though. To achieve them I’ve had to climb the highest, steepest mountain in my experience. And I have a long way to go.

My career-change from “IT guy” to “writer” back in 2009 set me as my own task master, and I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder. However, every milestone I’ve passed thus far has been small—insignificant when compared to the summit I intend to reach. Added up, however, the sum of those milestones made possible my most current opportunity… and crisis… from which I should be able to derive my greatest achievement to date.

I’m under contract to write a novel.

There is something both thrilling and daunting about committing to a novel under contract rather than selling a completed manuscript.

Daunting.

That word doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Frankly, I’m nervous as hell, hoping I can get Last Stand at the Gates of Heaven written within a somewhat aggressive timeline… and on top of everything else I’m committed to for the first half of 2014. As I type this, the publisher has nothing more in her hands than a title and the pitch I gave her back in November. I, on the other hand, have a deadline and a deliverable of roughly 100k words by the end of May.

What this represents is a first step into the major leagues. Granted, it’s a smaller publisher asking for a stand-alone novel, but the fact is that a publisher asked me to produce a novel. I’m on the hook for delivery. My reputation is at stake. My future is at stake. If I can deliver on this, I’ll know that I can cut it when a large publisher asks me to produce a body of work.

There’s a reason I’m telling you this, and it’s not to sing my own accolades. Quite the contrary. I’m humbled by these circumstances. I’m telling you all this because the path I’m on is one of the primary methods by which part-time writers become self-supporting authors.

The pyramids were not built in a day; each one of them started with a single block. Everest wasn’t climbed over a weekend, and every man or woman who reached that summit started with a single step at its base.

That’s what you have to understand in the writing business. Skill is a factor. So is practice and talent and luck and a lot of things. But if you’re not prepared to build upon your small successes and turn them into larger ones, you should hang it up right now. You have to be in this business for the long haul and grind away as much as you can without losing your mind. You have to invest in yourself each and every day in some fashion, gambling with your own future and the harsh reality that you might not make it.

If you can do all of that, your odds of success increase exponentially. And in the absence of it all, you are virtually guaranteed to fail.

So get to work!

Cannot Publish in Ignorance

December 27, 2013

Frank Morin

Craft & Skills Frank Morin Motivation The Writing Life No Comments

I love the theme this month and the stories that have been shared. It reminds me that we all struggle in life and in our chosen profession. I do wonder if any non-writers reading these posts might assume we’re all lunatics sharing our stories in an online Writers Anonymous meeting. We’ve proven it’s a tough, crazy journey on the road toward publication, but we keep plugging away, pursuing the dream, chanting, “Keep at it, and we’ll get there.”

Well, we’ll get there as long as we’re open to learning and growing. As they say, “Continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.”

So we’re either on our way, or we’re nuts.

Growing up I always dreamed of being a writer and I hand-wrote hundreds of pages of drafts as a teen-ager. But life got in the way and I pretended to be normal and pursued other interests through college and the first years of family and career. Then through a series of events in 2004 the desire – the need – to write reignited, and I embraced all those imaginary friends I’d been pretending not to listen to for so long.

I remembered some cool ideas I had worked on all those years ago and thought, “Yeah, I’ll just write that. I read a lot, so how hard could it be?”

Now almost ten years and millions of words later, I laugh every time I think of that naïve wannabe writer sitting down and typing out those first words, “It was a dark and stormy night. . .”

Actually, those weren’t the first words, but they might as well have been for how terrible they were. But I didn’t know better so I wrote, and then I re-wrote. For almost four years I worked on that monstrous first novel that stood at about 300,000 words despite multiple re-drafts. I confidently sent out query letter after query letter to agents, and accumulated scores of rejection letters.

A wiser man might have quit at that point.

Actually, a wise man would have quit after his wife read the first frantically written 80 pages the very first weekend. With love in her eyes, she said as kindly as she could manage, “This stinks.”

But real writers are slaves to the Muse, or we are tired of people looking at us funny when we talk to ourselves. Or maybe we’re just a lot more stubborn than most people, so I kept writing. The problem was I had no idea why the book wasn’t selling. I had no clue what was wrong with it. I mean, my mom loved it, so it had to be ready.

I didn’t even understand enough about writing to work on other projects on the side. I was blind, stuck in a place I could not get out of, but didn’t realize it. Think Maxwell Smart, but without Agent 99 to bail him out.

Thankfully I found a way out of that rut of insanity. I took the Professional Writers Workshop from David Farland.

Amazing. What a revelation. They actually train people to write! I’d been doing it all by pure gut instinct for years, and proving why there was a better way. In that writing workshop, Dave took the time to meet with me over dinner and discuss my project. Using small words, he explained some of the reasons why the book would never work – like it was waaaay too long. I learned many things in that class and some of my blind spots were revealed.

What a milestone! I finally understood some of the reasons why I was not yet successful.

If I were really humble, I would have appreciated that much honest insight into my many writing flaws. What really slapped me in the face though was the magnitude of the challenge I faced: Either walk away from the entire writing gig, angry that the industry didn’t understand a brilliant talent like mine – walk away offended and console my wounded pride by thinking “they’re just not ready for so much pure awesomeness.”

Or I could admit that first attempt amounted to the scribblings of an uneducated beginner not even smart enough to take a class for four years, and all the hard work I’d poured into that novel counted as practice. I’d written enough to qualify a couple times over for ‘the half million words of crap’ we’re told new writers need to complete prior to writing anything good. Over-achiever all the way.

So I had that going for me, which I took to mean everything I write now will be awesome.

Bottom line, the goal remained: I will be a professional writer. So I had to choke down my pride and, after surviving that, I took my first major step wearing big boy writer pants. I acknowledged that first epic fantasy story could be treated as an Epic Fail.

Then I threw it away. All 1000+ pages of blood, sweat and tears.

And I started again from scratch.

Out of pure stubbornness, I didn’t even start an entirely different story. There was a little more blood to squeeze out of that first stone. I loved the core of that original idea, so I salvaged some of the world building, some of the characters, and the nucleus of the conflict. Then I redesigned the plot from the ground up.

Like building modern-day Rome on top of the ancient catacombs.

The resulting story is infinitely better than the original, and I’m now working with an agent to try to find it a home. And instead of waiting forever for that sale to happen, I’ve actually moved on and since written three other novels and e-published one of them. Four others are in various stages of outlining, all of which I plan to complete next year.

Still plenty of blind spots, but I try to identify them one at a time. It’s more satisfying that way and a lot less painful – like lancing a single blister instead of performing open heart surgery on yourself.

Still, it was that first major awakening that salvaged my writing career. I’ll always be grateful to David Farland for beating me down so thoroughly (in a nice way). Now that I can walk again, I’m a better writer for the experience.

And now I’m looking forward to paying forward the favor. You may find me roaming the halls at conventions and workshops, looking for blind spots to destroy.

It’s for your own good. Some day you’ll thank me.

The Gift of Scorched Earth

December 16, 2013

Gregory D. Little

Character Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Gregory D. Little Motivation Rewriting Storyline The Writing Life 4 Comments

Today’s post is going to cover two gifts for the price of one, both intangible and tangible.

I began my first novel manuscript in January of 1999. There were three of us then, and during our winter break from college, we set out to write the greatest epic fantasy novel known to man. I probably don’t have to tell you our plans didn’t quite pan out. But flash forward four or five years, and that book, the first thing I ever tried to write with a serious intention of publishing it, was nearly the reason I quit writing for good.

My co-authors dropped out early in the process. We enjoyed talking about our story’s awesomeness more than actually working on it together. But I’d continued plugging slowly along on the book throughout college. And by the time I was graduated and then married, I had a couple of hundred draft pages. That seems like a tiny amount to Present Day Greg, but at the time it was by far the longest thing I’d ever written. The trouble was, I’d basically stopped working on it.

I told myself I was just busy. Working at a full-time job and commuting three hours daily left me very tired by the end of each week. But that wasn’t it. In truth I no longer believed in the story I was writing. I was no longer excited by it, because there was a dissonance between the plot and the protagonist. I didn’t believe that this protagonist would be responsible for the acts of his recent past that formed the foundation of the plot.

I’d be willing to bet a lot of writers don’t consciously decide to give up writing. It just sort of happens bit by bit, day by day until they look back and realize it’s been months or years since they’ve written. The point of no return is when this thought no longer bothers them. I came pretty close to that point. A more experienced writer would have just tossed the idea and started on a new one, but that wasn’t how I looked at it. The germ for this story had been in my head for a decade. If I couldn’t even see it through, what hope did I ever have of being a writer? But the Sunk Cost Fallacy had me in its claws. For those unfamiliar, the Sunk Cost Fallacy is the human tendency to “throw good money after bad” and continue investing in something that isn’t working just because you’ve invested so much into it already.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but I gradually gave myself permission to scrap what needed scrapping in order to the save the story. It started with rewriting the protagonist into the antagonist, but by the end I trashed every single word of text and started over. Some of the characters’ relationships to one another and some of my original world-building concepts would survive, but every bit of the prose was fed into the furnace of reigniting my excitement for the project. It was total scorched earth, and as much as I’d dreaded the concept, it was surprisingly liberating once I’d committed myself to it.

Eventually I finished my monster of a first manuscript, An End to Gods. The final product is infinitely better than the project was originally shaping up to be. I’ve gotten much faster and trimmer as a writer since then, and the book is still too big and too Byzantine to publish as a novice writer, but I love it for all its messy complexity. My cousins even collaborated to get it printed and bound in leather for me several Christmases ago, complete with custom chapter icon artwork (Ben and Duncan, you guys still rock!) and it is still the coolest gift I’ve ever been given. It’s sitting on my shelf behind me as I type this (and in the picture at the top of this post). I don’t mind telling you I got teary-eyed when I first laid eyes on it, and I still plan on publishing it one day, however many rewrites that takes. I’ve already done it once, after all.

So there you have it. Two greatest gifts for the price of one. Kevin J. Anderson likes to use the phrase “dare to be bad (at first)” and that’s excellent advice. But if that first draft is so bad it’s discouraging you from continuing to write, it may be time to tear it down and start again.