Cracking the Whip: Hard Enough, But Not Too Hard

Balancing Acts Guest Posts Living Deliberately Motivation The Writing Life Work-Life Balance 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Travis Heermann

Discipline.

A professional writing career lives and dies by discipline—or the lack thereof.

Maybe you have talent, but talent is only the beginning.

There’s honing one’s craft (got to practice and study until professional-level prose is automatic). There’s learning how to deal with rejection (growing a callus on one’s heart). There’s learning how to market one’s work effectively (most writers revile, loathe, and despise self-promotion). There’s connecting with a community of other writers, finding your tribe (who will sustain you through the long, dark nights of the soul).

And then there’s the simple fact that one has to insert one’s backside (Tab A) into the chair (Slot B), apply one’s hands to scribing tools (Assembly C), and wiggle them around until beauty and pathos are released into existence.

It all sounds so simple. But if it were, the world would harbor more professional writers.

It’s easy to pour something onto the page when the flush of inspiration is hot and new, when the Muse is sitting in one’s lap with a martini in one hand, stroking your hair with the other, and whispering thrills into your ear. Call it what you will—The Muse, inspiration, your subconscious, whatever—I’m talking about those moments when you realize two hours have passed and there are many more words on the page now than there were before, artful words poured forth from the chalice of your amazing subconscious.

However, the Muse is a fickle tart and simply doesn’t show up every day.

But you’re the professional. You have to show up to work even when the Muse doesn’t. You have to slog it out, even when the Muse is out there draping her(him)self over the lap of some other writer. The bottom line is this: the Muse most often visits writers who are working.

It is working that’s the hard part. Carving out a writing schedule when other demands on your time swarm like rabid termites out of the woodwork, and then guarding that time like a snarling, viciously aroused mama tiger, is where the discipline to finish books comes from.

One of the best ways to develop writing discipline is to set daily goals.

  • A paragraph.
  • A page.
  • A thousand words.
  • A chapter.

These are all good starts. A thousand words a day is a great round number, because it means in 60-90 days you will have a completed novel draft. If you write 250 words a day, a single page, you’ll have a novel draft in a year.

Regularly meeting a simple, achievable goal helps develop good, steady production habits. After a while, you may find that it becomes easier and easier to meet your production goals. In that case, try ramping up a little. Challenge yourself. Instead of a thousand words a day, try 1,500.

You will find, once you establish reasonably regular butt-in-chair discipline, that the Muse finds you increasingly sexy and comes over for trysts more frequently.

Nevertheless, there are limits. You should push those limits, yes, but you must make sure your goals are achievable. If there is no way you can write 3,000 words in a day, making that your goal, only to fail every single day unless you skip showering and sleep and feeding the kids, is a fabulous way to dive headfirst into the crazy pool. It will destroy your confidence like those dreams where you’re walking around naked at work. The Muse likes you best if you’re properly groomed and smelling nice.

For the last two years, I have successfully completed NaNoWriMo. This year was a real struggle, because I lost more than a week of writing time to travel and household emergencies. But I succeeded—51,000 words in about three weeks. It was a struggle. I had to make sacrifices. Friends and family saw me less often, because I had a goal. And I made it. That success alone was a tremendous confidence boost.

Fortunately I have learned to surround myself with people who understand and support my goals. They miss me, but they’ll get over it when the book is done.

In the coming months, I have a number of goals.

  • Finish the third volume of my Ronin Trilogy, Spirit of the Ronin.
  • Write seven short stories for various anthologies.
  • Launch, promote, and oversee the Spirit of the Ronin Kickstarter campaign.

Creating and running a Kickstarter campaign relates squarely to goal setting, but that’s a topic for another time, except to say I would really appreciate your support. The campaign will launch in mid-January, 2015. Please follow this link to view the Kickstarter campaign, and consider supporting this project.

Then go put your butt in the chair and invite the Muse over for a booty call.

Goal Setting: Another Perspective

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“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!”

—     Rudyard Kipling, winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, first native English-speaker to attain that prize.

The above is taken from a poem entitled ‘In the Neolithic Age’, which is a piece of comic poetry.  Kipling was good at comic poetry.  For that matter, he was good at a number of styles of writing.  Look up the Nobel committee’s motivation for giving him the prize to see what they thought.

The reason I led off with this quote, though, is because, comic or not, it is a solid truth about writing.  You’ve probably gathered that already if you’re a regular reader here at Fictorians:  there are many different ways of practicing our craft and art.

What does this have to do with this month’s theme of goal setting and attainment?  Only this—I don’t do the whole goal setting thing.  So I’m writing today from the position of heretic, or at least Devil’s Advocate.

Do I have no goals at all about my writing?  Of course I do.  That’s not what I mean when I say I don’t set goals.  I agree that everything living has at least some goals in their lives, even if it is nothing more than to survive until sundown.  But I follow goals in a personal manner.

I do not set out at the beginning of a year (or any other regular time period) and establish a defined set of goals to keep in the forefront of my mind.  I do not try to shape my productivity and my behavior to attain those goals.  I don’t have a list of bullet points pinned to the wall above my desk, nor do I have them serving as wallpaper on my laptop or tablet or phone.  I don’t have yellow sticky notes with hand scrawled encouragements stuck up in my workspace.  I don’t review my performance daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly to determine how well I am performing in attaining the ‘current’ goals.

Why not?  Well, I’m not really sure.  I haven’t really thought about it much.  One possible explanation is that I am by nature an introvert, and the establishment of a rigid structure of goals feels to me like something imposed from outside.  Artificial, you might say.

Another explanation might be that I am a seat-of-the-pants (or organic, if you prefer) writer, given to much flexibility in my compositional styles and processes, so that I would find a lack of flexibility in other areas of my writing career somewhat distasteful.

A third explanation could be that I feel that all the brainstorming and monitoring sucks up energy that I would much prefer to pour into the creative processes.

And last, let’s not ignore the fact that I am a champion procrastinator, as well as just a smidge on the lazy side.

So if I have goals, but I don’t do the detailed specific kinds of goals that are very measurable, what are the goals I do have?

 

  1. Write. This, more than anything.  Just plant my posterior in my chair, put my fingers on the keys, and start flowing words.  If this doesn’t happen, nothing else is of import.

 

  1. Tell good stories. Tell stories that make people feel the emotions of my characters.  Tell stories that make people laugh; tell stories that make people cry; tell stories that make people say, “Damn, I wish I could have seen/heard/felt/experienced that!”

 

  1. Keep my promises. If I tell someone I’m going to write something for them, then do it.

 

  1. Have some fun along the way, even if it’s just imagining the look on the face of my alpha reader when he gets to this scene.

 

  1. Finish what I start. I can’t sell incomplete stories.  I can’t present my craft and art to readers if it hasn’t been brought to fruitful culmination.  And, not-so-incidentally, I won’t get paid for unfinished work.

 

Those are my goals.  I may come up with more as I mature in my craft, my art, and my career, but that’s what they are today.

 

How well am I doing in following them?

 

—     Since 2004, I have written and sold over 400,000 words of short fiction, all but one story of which have been published.

 

—     Last year Baen Books published a story collection and a novel.  Let’s just say that sales are good.

 

—     My co-author and I just turned in to Baen a novel in an established series which should be published next year.  (Approximately 175,000 words.)

 

—     The one short work which hasn’t been published?  A 33,000 + word novella sold to a hardcover anthology.

 

I currently have four projects in progress:  one on the front burner, one simmering on a back burner, and two have been started but are waiting for my limited mental creative space to open up for them to be further developed.

 

My approach seems to work for me.

Remember Mr. Kipling’s words above, “. . . every single one of them is right!”  If the rigid detailed goal setting doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, just like it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you if you write organically rather than by outline.  It just means you need to explore other approaches until you find one that will work for you.

 

But goal #1 always has to be “Write.”  Otherwise, the whole exercise is worthless.

 

Have fun.

Love it. Do it.

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Do What you loveMerry Christmas!

This is my favorite time of year.  I love Christmas and everything it stands for.  It is a time of good cheer, family, and giving, regardless of religious belief.  I am religious, so I celebrate that part too.

It struck me this week that Santa represents one of the best examples of someone making a crazy career choice and turning it into a successful, long-term enterprise.  Many people regard writers in the same not-quite-connected-to-reality category as Santa Clause.  And when we first start out, it can be hard to see past the detractors and the naysayers and keep pursuing a passion that has absolutely no promise of producing any financial return.

I’m a perfect case in point.  I’ve been writing for almost ten years, and my expense-to-income ratio so far is so lopsided, it’s laughable.  And yet here I am, still writing.

I love it.

I love stories.  I love consuming them in every form, and I love creating them.  Not only do I love to write, but I’ve set ever-challenging goals to drive myself along this writing path.  It may be a long road, but it’s a road I’m happy to travel.

I’m not the only one who believes that working at what we love is the best possible work choice.

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Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

~Ray Bradbury

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There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.

~Wayne Dyer

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If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time.

~Billy Joel

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2014 was a banner year for me.  I set extremely high goals, and succeeded at many of them.  But what really made the year was that I managed to work more hours writing than I did at my consulting job.  I’ve been working toward this milestone for years, but I reached it almost without noticing.  I was so busy writing and doing, that I didn’t pause to reflect until I had already made the shift in my schedule.

The purely pragmatic side of me admits to nervousness as I allow my consulting business to trend downward to make more room in my life for writing.  My computer work is still how I pay the bills and support my family, and it’s a job I really enjoy.  However, I LOVE storytelling.  Despite long success in computer-related fields, I made the choice to move toward writing as a full-time career.  It’s taken a very long time to get to this point, but to me it’s worth the effort.

Loving this work means I Work at it.  This year, I completed three new novels (I set the goal to complete four), along with a lot of other work, including a frantic juggling act preparing novels for a fast-approaching publishing blitz.

2015 will be even bigger.  Eight novels published in eight months is the goal, and I’m doing everything in my power to reach it.

I love writing.

So I’ll work harder at this job than any other.

Do what you love.  Commit to it and let nothing stop you or convince you that you can’t.

It may take a while, but the time’s going to pass anyway.  Why not use it working toward a goal that means something to you?

Goals vs. Objectives – Who is Really In Control?

Balancing Acts Goals Living Deliberately Motivation Nathan Barra Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life Work-Life Balance No Comments

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” ~Helmuth von Moltke

I am highly motivated by progress and will often get frustrated when I feel like I am spinning my wheels in a task. This probably explains my penchant for lists. I know that I’m not the only one who gets a sense of satisfaction by drawing a bold stroke through a particularly challenging line item. However, I have found that it is all too easy to focus on the list itself and forget that it exists to serve my objectives. Recently, I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into living a purposeful life, driving towards and realizing my objectives to the best of my abilities. Through trial and error, I have found that the key to effective progress is self-aware honesty, maintaining a life balance, and having the courage to change course when results do not line up with what was intended when I set my goals.

The first step to living deliberately is to determine what you truly want out of life. There are countless voices in the world, some benevolent and others selfish, that seek to guide our desires. Many people never look past what society, advertising agencies and our loved ones tell us we want. If they are happy that way, all the better for them. It takes work to quiet all the voices and achieve the self-awareness necessary to decide what you really want free from the influence of others.

Once your objectives are set, it takes practice to be able to manage all the distractions and necessities that the world demands of us. Though there are a thousand obligations competing for our time and attention, many things that we view as “essential” can actually be minimized or eliminated entirely. It is a matter of understanding one’s priorities. Once you achieve the self-awareness to determine your life’s objectives, sorting the essential from the non-essential becomes much easier.

Finally, I have found it necessary to be proactive in evaluating and adjusting my goals. Though it is easy to simply stay the course until things start to fall apart, it is a much less effective strategy than taking time periodically to honestly evaluate the results of my efforts. If a course of action isn’t working, isn’t supporting my objectives, there is nothing holding me to them. Try to make a change and see what effects come. I look at it like sailing by the stars. Having a heading does no good if you don’t look up every so often.

I started out my blogging year with the Fictorians by describing the system we use to set annual goals at work. Though I stand by the idea that goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound), I have come to realize that they need to be adaptable as well. Action is not progress unless my objectives are being achieved. Therefore, goals should be designed and maintained to support objectives, not the other way around.