Category Archives: Life Philosophies

Goal Setting and the Metrics of Success and Failure

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 28th, 2012. My rank started at 386,929. Between then and November 2nd 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 2nd 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.

 

Q.

Don’t Break Your Promises

Author's Perspective Craft & Skills Frank Morin Reflection Storyline The Writing Life 1 Comment

Break PromisesAs authors, we make lots of promises to our readers.  What genre is this book?  Is it going to be a fast-paced adventure or a slow, character-focused drama?  Is it funny, horrific, or simply entertaining?  We set the tone in the opening of the book and the reader picks up on those hints and sets certain expectations for what to expect.

Betraying those expectations shatters a reader’s bond with a story and leaves an angry residue, no matter how good other aspects of the story might have been.  This happens both in books and in movies.  Sometimes false expectations are set in movie trailers or book jackets as a marketing ploy to suck in a wider audience, but any short-term gains will be lost in the long run as people realize the trick.

One movie that did this to me was Cowboys vs Aliens.  The trailer made it look like an action comedy and I entered the theater with that expectation.  Some parts of the story were well done, but I kept waiting for the punchline that never came.  It wasn’t an action comedy.  It was more like an action horror movie.  Despite some quality acting and a halfway decent plotline, I left the theater feeling betrayed.

Another movie tried the same ploy.  The trailer showed a hilarious scene that made it clear, this movie was a comedy.  It wasn’t.  It was a terrible flick with no redeeming qualities.  Unlike some of those dumb comedies I remember fondly only because they made me laugh, this one was just dumb.  Another betrayal.

Books are worse though, because we invest so much more time in them.  A couple examples jump to mind.  One novel, by a well-known author, started as a very interesting fantasy adventure with high stakes and a hero in deep trouble.  I read on, drawn by the intrigue of how this hero could ever escape the predicament.  I was looking forward to being amazed by the character’s wit and cleverness in escaping certain death.

What a huge disappointment when the climactic showdown resolve itself without any of that.  The ‘magic’ saved them, the same magic that had been blocked in a thoroughly explained way that prevented it from coming to the rescue.  The lame excuse offered by the author was that the hero just figured it out and boom – the magic solved all their issues.

I’m a fan of great magic systems.  I read and write all types of fantasy, so magic is an integral part of many stories I love.  But this was a cop-out, a deception, a betrayal of the contract the author made with me as a reader.  Since then, I only ever started one other book by that author.  In that one too, I picked up on a different deception.  I put that book down unfinished, and that author lost me as a reader forever.

Is that harsh?  Maybe.  But it’s reality.

When we set expectations, we have to fulfill them.  We can’t take the easy way out.  If we set up our heroes with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we’d better have an equally awesome solution.  The hero has to figure it out, often in a split-second flash of understanding as they put all the pieces together we’ve worked into the script.  We have as long as we need to figure it out and craft that moment so that readers exclaim in wonder at the hero’s creativity and then think, “Yeah, I can see how they figured that out, but that’s clever.  I get it now.”

If we can do that, we’ve got a winner and readers will come back to us again and again.

Because they know they can trust us to entertain.

Looking for Progress in a Mirror

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.

A Tale of Two Readers; or, Everybody Wins

Kristin Luna Reading Reflection The Writing Life 2 Comments

You could say my husband Nic and I are into books. I write them, and read up to sixty a year. Nic reads anywhere from twenty to seventy a year. We love books so much, we had our engagement pictures taken in a library.

Awwwwwww.
Awwwwwww.

Nic and I agree on a lot of things, but there is one major difference between us that frequents our discussions: why we read. I read stories to feel, to experience, to learn and unravel the complexities of life. Nic reads for the story. He reads to be entertained. He can stomach atrocious writing if the story is good. For me, bad writing just flat out ruins a story.  This is why he can read Terry Goodkind and I just can’t. (Sorry, Terry!)

Every now and then, Nic allows me to suggest one of my favorite literary fiction books, and he suggests an enormous fantasy tome to me.  These suggestions have been both hit and miss for both of us. As it turns out, this is because Nic’s brain and my brain are working in two completely different ways while we are reading.

Researchers at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging found interesting results when they hooked up readers to a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner. The researchers gave two test groups a passage from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. They asked one group to read as if they were reading for pleasure, and asked the other group to read the text closely, as if they were reading it for a literary criticism class. “The subjects were using completely different parts of their brains when reading the same passages, depending on whether they were reading them for fun, or for analysis.”

Most shocking of all, and detrimental to my argument that how I read is better than how Nic reads, is that neither way of reading is superior to the other. “Reading rigorously and analyzing the ideas presented and even the structure of the language and how the ideas are presented exercises one mode of functioning in our brains, and cultivates that mode. Reading just for the fun of it exercises another mode of functioning, and cultivates it. Both are necessary to see the world around us clearly, from a balanced point of view.”

What Nic and I can celebrate is that we both win. Many studies have shown that reading, whether it’s Wizard’s First Rule or The Grapes of Wrath, promotes biological changes within the body, can change how we act, how our brains connect and function, and how we empathize in social situations. Reading slowly can even reduce stress.

So as you read this month’s blog posts about bad and good writing, just remember one important thing: no matter what you read, you win.