Tag Archives: perseverance

I have found in my writing and in my life, that if I make a list, take notes, outline, plan – I will get whatever it is needs done just that much easier and quicker.

I’m talking about making a six month, one year, five year plan for your writing and for your life. They aren’t the same, although sometimes it may feel that way. As a sidebar – life is what feeds our writing, so don’t ignore it or you may find your writing drying up and getting stale from lack of fresh inspiration.

Family, friends, classes, the bowling league, hobbies, reading and the latest movie are not only food for your soul but food for your writing. Do you know how high a priority they are? Will you have that on your list in a year or five? Think about it…

My friends know my schedule is hectic, so if they want to have time with me, it has to be scheduled. I make time for my friends because they are important to me, but I also have to literally make time for them or they get lost in the craziness of my schedule. They are a high priority and on my master plan, so that is covered.

I recently had to turn down helping on an event in 2012 I really wanted to do because I didn’t have the time to commit to it. Is it now on my plan for 2013? You bet it is. I have a plan for it and other things will have to get sacrificed so I can participate, but that’s ok. I’m planning ahead so I know what’s coming up, what needs done, and when.

What about your writing? Will you have one book done a year, two a year, one epic and one novella? What’s your goal? What’s the plan to get there? How are you going to accomplish it? Do you write intently one weekend a month, a page a day, an hour a day? All this planning helps you accomplish your goals. It really does.

If you spend a little time planning ahead, you don’t have to think about it, you can just get on with what needs done. An hour of planning on Monday for the week can save you several hours wasted while you figure out what you needed to do each day.

In my writing, I’m a plotter not a pantser, but I recently tried pantsing a novel. I got a good start on it, about 30K and then I had no idea where I was going. I knew how it ended but I had no idea the route to get there. I was completely lost. Now, I’m having to map my course so I can finish my story’s journey.

I may be a little over-zealous on this planning issue, as I am the person who had a 47-page itinerary for a ten-day road trip from coast to coast, but maybe that’s just how I need to operate in order to get to my destination. Some of you may be able to jump in the car and drive with no plan, but I suspect most will fall in between the two extremes.

I’m just suggesting that you consider planning. See if it doesn’t make things run smoother. If you aren’t already a planner, try it as an experiment. Figure out the goal for the week, day by day, and follow it. Let me know if it helps.

My goals for the next year?

Writing – Do my regularly schedule blog posts on all three of my sites, write at least 4 hours a day/4 times a week with a goal of finishing two books during the year, and actively submitting.

Life – Do not take on any more commitments, schedule time at least once a month with my “best-y”, schedule my days so they are more productive, and ensure my writing time is held sacred.

Go forth and plan…Be ‘Fictorious!’

Managed Expectations

December 19, 2011

Dylan Blacquiere

Craft & Skills Dylan Blacquiere The Writing Life 6 Comments

One of the things that the contributors to this blog do, as part of a larger community of writers, is to set goals for the coming week that we broadcast to each other. The things that we need to do, or aspire to do, written there and stated plainly to the others in our writing group. The following week, we not only make new goals, but we account for our progress on the old ones. It’s been a way that we can keep in touch with the goals of others, and act as encouragement for those who need it, or to celebrate in each other’s accomplishments. Sometimes we’ve cheered as someone gets a publication, and sometimes it’s been something as simple as praising someone meeting their quota of words for the week. It’s been a great way to keep in touch with what people are doing, and what people are hoping to achieve.

In another sense, it’s a way to keep each other accountable to our goals, even if the only sanction is a sense of shame at not having lived up to the standard you’ve set for yourself. There have been times where I have cheerfully and earnestly placed a goal – say something modest, like writing a few thousand words – only to fail at it, and then have to face up to writing that accounting the following week.

Sometimes I write my rationalizations – oh, what the hell, excuses. I was busy. I did this instead. I did that instead. Et cetera. Sometimes – the times when I really didn’t have an excuse – I just didn’t say anything. A flat, inflectionless statement of the coming week’s goals, as though last week’s mark had been completely forgotten.

Inevitably that leads to a sense of frustration and failure. Wracking up week after week of missed bars is not a good feeling, and there have been times when I have felt that keen frustration that comes achingly close to just calling the whole thing off, taking a hiatus, not bothering to keep up with the accounting.

This is the wrong way to go about it. If you’re at all like me – someone who has a desire to write, but has a whole lot of life in the way of it – it’s important to keep those goals, and those reckonings. But maybe they have to be shifted. Maybe this won’t be the year that the blockbuster gets written or the screenplay gets done. But maybe, if you can block off some time, hit your small achievable goals, well, that well keep the whole thing from turning into an inescapable morass of shame and failure.

For me, I have my final licensing exam for my medical boards in May. I will not have time to do much writing in these last five months – I just wont. Afterward, we’ll see. In the meantime, what goals can I achieve? How can I do enough to justify to myself that I am a writer, as opposed to some hobbyist with an unused laptop in the corner? Maybe for the next five months it will be blog posts, and small submissions to journals that carry prose and poetry in the medical humanities field. Maybe token goals – a scene a week, or a couple of hundred words. Something that won’t detract from the very real need to study for this exam, but will make me feel as though I’m still actively engaged in this equally important passion. A managed expectation, if realistic and still aimed toward the future, can still be an important one, and one that keeps you on the path forward until you can raise the bar higher once again.

Stocking the Shelves

November 30, 2011

Jason Michelsen

Craft & Skills Jason Michelsen The Fictorians The Writing Life 4 Comments

A while back, I started the second draft of a novel I’ve been working on for some time . . . close to a year by the time I opened version 2.o in Word.

I’d made it through the beginning, trudged through the sticky middle, and was well on my way to the climax when I realized some of the characters weren’t where they were supposed to be, both geographically and emotionally.

I’d strayed from my original outline–I’m more Gardener than Architect, though I do try to outline key events in my stories–and realized some changes were in order. It wasn’t until around the 160k word mark of my first draft that I finally understood some of my characters and realized there were things I needed to change in the beginning in order to get them where they needed to be by the end.

So I started over. I got about 20k words in and was really digging the revisions. My villain was more clearly defined in a shorter amount of time. The conflicts seemed more urgent. The setting was even coming to life in ways it hadn’t until much further on in my first pass.

Then, because writers aren’t immune to outside forces, Life reared its ugly head and gave me a smack in the face, bashing my inspiration into the mud and stomping it into an unrecognizable pulp. Pulling words from my head became about as difficult as pulling an entrenched boot from quicksand.

It’s no surprise we talk so often on this blog about what keeps us writing. Sometimes, nothing seems to work. There is no magical can of Inspiration we can use to grease the creative wheels, no verbal laxative to unplug our plugged minds. If there were, I’d put it in a can and stock an entire pantry. I wouldn’t sell it, I’d want it all for myself! Well, I might sell it for an exorbitant price so I could quit my day job and write full time like when I was unemployed. Oh those were the days!

So what do you do when the words won’t come? Last time I posted, I wrote about my return to reading. Indeed, it worked in the short term, coaxing a few thousand more words of my own onto the screen when I wasn’t working or reading. But the effect didn’t last long.

So I ask again, what do we do when an unfinished project turns stale? Many authors will push on, throwing down words they know they’ll delete at a later date until the levee breaks and good words start flowing again. Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of writer that can do that. I’d rather write 50 great words than 1000 bad ones. I’m a little too much of a perfectionist for my own good at times.

The answer, at least in my case, is simple: Write something else.

I’m not giving up on the novel I’ve worked on for over a year–far from it–I’m simply taking a break to write something else. Something I can finish, because nothing is as therapeutic to an author as writing “The End”. I started working on a short story, and, lo and behold, the words began moving again. It just so happens it’s a short story I’d actually like to turn into a short, animated film . . . or perhaps an illustrated, not-quite-for-children, children’s book a la Pat Rothfuss’s The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed.

What we write isn’t always as important as actually writing. And the more we write, the better we get. Guaranteed. So, when your darling of a story isn’t behaving like a darling, write the ugly step-child of a story instead. Get the words flowing again, and soon you’ll have your inspiration back. Do that enough times, and you’ll have a virtual shelf–or perhaps a folder on your computer hard drive–filled with ever improving stories.

It can’t be said often enough, the only way to grow as a writer is to write.

Starting Over: A Most Exquisite Agony

November 28, 2011

Evan Braun

Craft & Skills Evan Braun Rewriting The Writing Life 6 Comments

Just about everyone who has ever used a computer knows the gut-wrenching pain of having to cope with lost data. Ever had your computer crash in the final stretch of writing an essay, and then discover that the file is unrecoverable? Ever spend hours on a piece of work and forget to save it before disaster strikes?

Of course you have.

But this post isn’t about data recovery, a subject on which I know very little (frankly, I would be well-advised to learn more). No, today’s post is about the exquisite agony of starting over.

Over the course of the last few years, fantasy wunderkind Brandon Sanderson has released chapters on his blog from his early unpublished manuscripts. On the one hand, this is an encouraging development, since it demonstrates so well the gradual accumulation of skill as time wears on. I find myself able to identify with Sanderson’s early writings. Hopefully, given more time, I, too, can become a writer of his caliber.

But the most interesting thing to me is the way that Sanderson openly talks about rewriting, and even re-rewriting, some of his manuscripts. In other words, he wrote it once-it wasn’t good enough. So he waited a while, then wrote it again-it still wasn’t good enough. He waited some more… then wrote it again! Finally, it was ready to see the light of day.

This kind of persistence is remarkable. As far as I can tell, it’s a necessary quality if one is to become a best-selling author.

In my editing career, I frequently come into contact with books that just aren’t good enough. It’s not that they’re outright bad (well, sometimes they are), but rather that editing alone isn’t enough to elevate them to “ready” status. The unfortunate reality is that the writer probably just doesn’t have chops to pull off the story-yet. My suggestion might be to give it some time, work on other projects, then come back a few years down the road and attempt the unthinkable: a page-one rewrite.

In other words, write the entire novel over again. From scratch.

If you’ve ever spent months-honestly, probably years-on your pet project, then the notion of starting over is truly daunting. Exhausting.

In my case, I have a 175,000-word novel sitting on my shelf. I wrote it the first time back when I was in high school-well, I wrote the first half before giving up. At the tender age of sixteen, I knew I wasn’t up to the challenge.

A few years later, I resurrected the project and tried turning it into a series of teleplays (television scripts). I wrote more than ten of them! But this format was impractical in the long run, so the project fizzled out. And almost stayed fizzled.

Then, after a long break, I jumped back into the fray last year and wrote the complete novel, which took nine months. In the spring, I trimmed it down some, bringing me to that polished 175,000-word version.

Except it’s not polished. Not really.

I’ve grown tremendously over the last few years. I was able to accomplish things in my most recent draft that my high school self would never have believed possible. But after receiving a lot of honest and well-intentioned feedback, I was forced to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: it’s still not ready. And in fact, like those editing clients I mentioned, editing still isn’t enough to get it where it needs to be to really come alive.

Indeed, I’ll have to start over. One more time.

But there’s no point in attempting another rewrite so quickly. Brandon Sanderson turned some of his flawed early works into best-selling gems, but they had to percolate for years.

So, just how long will I need to wait? Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast rule, but I do know one thing: I will accumulate more skills and grow faster as a writer if I keep producing new work.

And there’s the rub. It’s not about waiting at all… it’s about pressing on.