Some days are harder than others. The words don't flow, the page looks at you in a funny way, your story's two-children-short of a gingerbread house and the last thing you want to be doing is sitting down to berate yourself over the next sentence. So, some simple tricks:

WrittenKitten - you write in the text box. Every hundred words (or whatever interval you set) the image box beside it presents you with a new kitten. The work isn't saved, so make sure you copy-paste anything you want to keep into a file on your computer, and your distraction-to-motivation ratio may vary (I personally found myself adding random words just to get the next kitten, instead of writing) but hey - it's adorable.

WriteOrDie - a tool that prompts you to keep writing with anything from gentle reminders to deleting the words you just wrote as incentive. Since I last mentioned them, they've developed desktop and iPad versions of their original web-app. $10 for the desktop app which, when you consider it's a couple of coffees, could be worth it if that kind of thing works for you.

A more low-tech version is to consider paying yourself to write. But - and here's the important part - you don't get the money until the work is finished - when it's being sent out. Not when it's published - that's not in your control unless you self-pub. But if you're using traditional markets, then you can consider something 'finished' when you've sent it out.

Work out a method that makes sense to you - pay yourself by the hour, if you tend to do a lot of 'behind the scenes' work that doesn't involve actual words going on a page (but 'waffling' does not count as work. And deep down, you know the difference.) Or you could pay yourself by words, or by page, or by scene or chapter. You'll need to estimate how much you'll end up paying yourself in total, and how much you can afford. And remember to actually put the money aside as you earn it - otherwise it's too tempting to reduce your reward later when you feel you can't afford all that in one hit.

Record how much you've "earned" each session and put it aside somewhere. A sock or drawer if you're using actual money, or earmark a certain amount in your bank account. Watch it slowly grow as you keep working on the story. When you've sent out the story, you can have the money - spend it on something that will make you feel rewarded, not something that you'd spend money on anyway. You earned that money, your reward is the ability to do whatever you want with it, guilt-free.

You can use other things than money, too - time, for instance. Maybe over the course of a novel, you earn a nice weekend vacation somewhere. Or time doing an activity that you enjoy, but normally gets left out because you have "more important things" to do. Whatever works for you as a reward; break it down into small increments somehow, and slowly 'earn' them by working.

 

I can’t for the life of me keep to a schedule. Oh, I can get to work on time and keep appointments and for the most part go to bed at a sensible hour, because Evening-Sofie has finally figured out that if she makes Morning-Sofie sleepy, that sleepiness is passed on though Afternoon-Sofie, and nobody has any fun. But as for internal schedules - schedules for stuff that nobody else cares about (except of course if it doesn’t get done at all) - I’ll happily make them, but they’re a guilt-edged (hah) invitation to Do Something Else. 

Write? I need to do some programming, now. Finish editing that draft? I haven’t finished putting the washing on. It came to my attention mostly when I realised it was well past time that I was cooking dinner, and yet I was emailing my mother (I call these queries ‘Moogling’) to ask her advice on how to better keep to a schedule.

 I thought I was good at scheduling. I managed my Honours degree while working part time and with almost a month spare for polishing the thesis. I completed two masters degrees at the same time while working three jobs. But those were all based on external deadlines. They had a logical order, and due dates carved in stone, and the left side of my brain has learned how to manage those effortlessly. 

The left side of my brain is a scheduling-nazi. It likes everything to be planned out so it knows what I’ll be doing and when, how much time I can expect to spend on a project, when a project will be finished or ready for the next stage, what else I can fit in. It gets very upset when other people ride roughshod over that with invitations to go be social somewhere. It gets stressed when things on today’s To Do list aren’t done. 

The right side of my brain hates those schedules. Especially if they have times attached to them - write from 6pm to 8pm - but I don’t feel like it right now. I’d rather work on this. Get this list of 5 things done - okay, we’ll do some of those, but surely some of them can wait until tomorrow, or next week even. 

It's usually my left brain that thinks about scheduling and organising. And it can't understand what the problem is - why is it so hard? Surely I'm just being lazy, just put the butt in the chair and do the work. It sees it as a discipline problem, but I'm not so sure of that.

I still get things done. And anything with an external deadline - go to work, go to sleep, get these critiques done - will be completed on time. But my right brain is resisting any attempts to plan or schedule when my creative projects will be worked on, and which one gets worked on when 

I’m still looking for a solution, here. Some way to convince my right brain to work with some kind of predictability. But as they say, the first step is always recognising there’s a problem, and my problem is the part of my brain that does all the creative stuff has no interest in doing so on demand. I’ll keep you posted if I find some solutions.

 

This is a post on, more or less, What Not To Do.

I am an impatient person. It has been forty-five minutes since I kvetched internally that one of my projects was taking too long. I'm also a perfectionist, an achievement junkie, addicted to new ideas and by Blaire Palmer's definition, hypercreative.

Those traits do not play together nicely. 

I love to master new skills. I've added so many strings to my bow over the years I could probably use it as a hammock. And it's not a problem when my learning is externally structured, like a degree. But when I get to set the pace of my learning, difficulties arise. Not difficulties, per se. More like insanity. It goes something like this:

I discover <new concept> and think "hey! that's really neat! I want to do something with that!" I look into <new concept> a little learn some basics. An idea forms - a fantastic thing that I could do with <new concept>. It's ambitious, it's out-there, it's probably pushing the edges of what <new concept> can or should do, and no one else is doing it that I can see. It's a great, massive magnum-opus of a project but it'll be awesome if I get it together. (Side note: it's always like this, because to me there's no attraction in creating something that's already there. It feels too much like copying.) I start to teach myself <new concept> by creating <magnum opus> with what I'm learning. Impatience competes with perfectionism and I get irritated that it's taking so long to learn what I need to know to do <magnum opus> properly. I hit some kind of snag or stall, or <newer concept> comes along and I repeat from step 1. Or both.

This is not a productive way to learn, or to create projects. And I still do this, even though I can see and recognise it. The novel that will (in theory) be my debut is not a standalone novel, or even part of a trilogy, but the first in a probably-nine-maybe-twelve-could-be-twenty-book interwoven multi-world, multi-generation multi-main-character series. To paraphrase George R. R. Martin, that's like learning to mountain-climb by scaling Mount Everest. It's frankly idiotic. In my defence, I decided upon this years ago, before I'd recognised this issue, and the sunk-cost fallacy is tying me to the novel as I don't want to "waste" all the hours I've already put into it. (Yes, yes, I know. I know. Let's move on.)

But I am learning, here and there. I started teaching myself interactive fiction programming by creating a small story that didn't matter. (I still shudder at those words.) Having entirely revised my design plans for SubTracker into not only a new programming language but a whole new paradigm, I decided to teach myself what I'd need to know by creating a much smaller piece of software first. This flies in the face of my impatience to have the project done already, and my perfectionism hating to create things that 'don't matter'. It's such an antithesis to my personality that the notion in itself feels like a brilliant new idea.

Hence, probably, my posting about it here.

But it's important to have things to practise on. Projects where you don't have to be worried that a mistake means a missed deadline or hours or work redone - because a mistake can just stay there, a reminder of what you learned. Contrary to what impatient-perfectionism may tell you, it is not a waste of time - it's far more efficient to learn in small controlled stages. Otherwise university degrees would be one giant research project.

Small projects, low pressure. For preference, tailor your project to what you're trying to learn or improve. Don't learn to mountain climb on Everest - it takes much, much longer to see if things aren't working because it's a hard climb, or because you're doing something wrong.

This is not a new idea. But it's one I forget every time a shiny new concept or project comes along that I could create if only I understood more about X...

 

Based on last week’s post about workspaces - now is the time to imagine your truly perfect workspace. What would be your ideal place to work? Describe as generally or specifically as you want. Think about:

Visuals - what can you see (or equally important, what can’t you see?) Sounds - what can you hear (and, again, what can’t you hear? What are you shielded from?) Smells - do any particular smells make you feel secure and safe, or inspired, or invigorated? Objects - what ‘things’ do you need - and what do you not want there? A desk? a couch? a pile of cushions? Reference books? A giant whiteboard? Internet, no internet? Laptop? Notepad? Touch - what should those objects be made of - is your desk made of glass, or wood, or a door supported by four brick towers? Do you have carpet? floorboards? Surroundings - what’s outside your work area (or is your work area outside?) and how much of it can you see or hear?

Make sure you don’t just create somewhere that you’d want to be in, but somewhere that you’d want to work in. For example, I’d love to have an office with spectacular views of rainforest or mountains or rolling hills - but I know that, if I had them, I’d spend all my day “thinking” by looking out the window. (Now, an office that didn’t face those views that had an adjoining room that did - that’s different.)

Now for the hard part - look at your list of requirements and try to find the common themes. Is it ‘something to inspire me’, or ‘peace and quiet’, or the colour teal (guilty), or somewhere that feels secure? This is important, because unless you’re the next J. K, you’re not going to be able to have your wonderful perfect workspace that you just described. It's tough. Life happens. But if you work out why you want those things - what underlying problem or need they solve - maybe you can adapt your current space to something that works better for you.

The last step should be obvious - you’ve found what’s important to you - inspiration, peace, teal, security, whatever. Now, what steps can you take to make your current workspace fulfill more of that need? What objects, colours or things could you put near to inspire you? How can you make your area more peaceful? What can you get away with painting teal? What would make you feel more secure?

Repeat until you have a workspace that you’re comfortable actually working in. You’ll know this is the case when you’re actually working in it. And remember that your needs will change as you do. If you find yourself feeling frustrated in your physical space, or that where you're trying to write just isn't working, do this exercise again, and see what you can fix.

 

For most of my life, writing has played second-fiddle to my education. I'll admit that most of that was due to me going around getting more education than was probably good for me,  but my workspace was never writer-centric. 

It was essentially my life in desk-format. I'd plonk my university books at one end with the tutes I was going to be teaching, pile my assignments in descending order of duedates (topped with whatever bill had to be paid in the next few days) near my mouse, and create horizontal 'files' of any interesting article, note, book, doodles, picture, letter, page of notebook, stickynote, sandwich* or gadget that I was pretty sure I'd want later**. Drafts of stories (and their edits, redrafts, feedback from my writing groups and notes for improvement) had their own special pile under the really urgent notes from <health and car care profesisonals> assuring me I was overdue for my <whatever>, which kept the stories safe from accidental exposure to editing, sunlight or cogitation. You get the notion that my writing really blossomed under this regime.

 

Something to think about - especially with the current self-pub/traditional question. Originally posted by Kristan Hoffman, who adapted it from Charles Schultz. However, her site seems to be reading her bandwidth cap pretty regularly, so I'll repost here (but hers has pretty pictures, and other interesting posts you should check out):

There are two “quizzes”. Scroll slowly and read carefully to get the full effect. It’s okay if you don’t know all the answers, just keep going.

Who are the 3 wealthiest writers in the world? Who are the last 3 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Who are the last 3 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? What are 5 of the “Top 10 Best Books” of last year? What’s the latest book on shelves that was signed for a 7-figure deal?

 The rest, for maximum effect, is hidden behind the Read More function...

I was all geared up to do Nano this year - of sorts. I was going to write a novel, but it probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 words. I didn’t know how many words it was going to be, and I wasn’t going to track it. Because that number, when you come down to it, is a nonsense way of judging whether you’re “done” yet.

I read this post by Jason Black on Plot to Punctuation who gave a great argument against using word count as a daily goal. The little number at the bottom of the screen (or wherever) takes far more of your focus than the words you’re churning out to increase it, and tempts you to stop when you’re on a roll, just because you’ve reached today’s number, or keep pushing when all you’re doing is padding or waffling because you still have another 200 words to go.

I find when I give myself wordcount goals, that rapidly becomes the case. And because my first drafts of anything tend to be absolute-bare-bones, super-condensed story, I fight the urge to pad out my story when the wordcount’s a little low despite my being halfway through already.

When you consider that, especially for self-publishing, story-length really doesn’t even matter anymore, it seems fairly idiotic for me to focus so much on wordcount when it hinders me in so many ways. 

Black has a great solution that I really wish I’d thought of earlier. He’s ignoring wordcount, and focussing instead on scenes.

It makes so much sense. Instead of having some fairly arbitrary counter distracting you, you judge your progress by how much of the story you’ve completed. You know instinctively how far through the scene you are. Scenes invite you to finish them, it’s a much more natural, unobtrusive goal. You’re not tracking a number while you write, you’re just writing this scene.

Scenes in my novels range from 2000 to 5000 words. I can write a scene - or most of one, if it’s a long one - in a day’s writing, before and after work. And serendipitously enough, my novel broke down into exactly thirty scenes. So my great plan was: one scene a day (accepting that they’d be bare-bones scenes. I go back on a second pass and fill in the description and detail and everything else before I consider the draft ‘finished’).

I was due back from Paris the morning of the 1st (oh, yeah, I went to Paris. Again. Did I mention that? Pics in later posts. Luxembourg is beautiful.). That gave me, somewhat optimistically, a full day to write a scene. Allowing for jetlag, I still had several full free days before I had to go back to work. If I missed the first day, I could make up for it later.

I didn’t account for Qantas. I didn’t account for a three-hour delay on the euro-star. I didn’t account for jetlag to be coupled with illness, sunburn and my fridge breaking down, so that my brain was too scattered to even think about story until possibly last night. Well, Friday night. Because I write these in advance. Sorry.

So, a week late, I could still start and make the ‘spirit’ of Nano. I looked at my story-plot, all neat and organised in Scrivener. Then I realised that, while I’d plotted out my story, I’d skimped on the worldbuilding. Again.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that spending time ‘worldbuilding’ outside of actually writing the novel or just daydreaming was a form of procrastination. Actually writing down the story bible was procrastination, and should be avoided.

Now, this is nonsense - I’ve even written about how important your story bible is, especially for series. But there was a little opinion in my head telling me I should just be writing the novel, not wasting time faffing about the edges making decisions on what plant to include near the desert. I’m a very impatient person, and I wanted the book done now now now. I wanted to be selling it already, and moving onto the next ones. I have way too many ideas, and not enough brains to channel them.

But there are no shortcuts, here. So - no Nano for me this year, not even to try out my snazzy new notion (though I will be trying it, once my planning’s done. Just not in Nano.). But for anyone else who tends to write their first drafts in ‘story shorthand’ - try aiming for scenes instead of numbers, and see how well those goals work for you.

 

 

Find a long piece of music or an album, preferably instrumentalist. Ideally, it has highs and lows - parts where the music is upbeat, parts where it's dark, sections of tension, melancholia, light relief. Classical music works well as do movie soundtracks (if you skip out any pop songs), or (my personal favourites) albums by Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre or Enigma.

Sit down, put the album on, and start writing whatever scene the music makes you think of. A tense, underworld exploration? A happy couple? A chaotic storm of dreams? Go with the music, shifting the tone and pace of the story to match as you listen.

If you're someone who types slowly, you may find you have only time for a sentence or two before the tone changes - that's okay. Treat it as an outline exercise, in that case - you can flesh out the sentence into a paragraph or so later.

 

Music often makes stories in my head. Pop music less so; the lyrics are too distracting, and the melody often too repetitive and (dare we say it) not particularly evocative. Which isn't to say I don't like pop, just that I rarely find it inspirational.

Instrumental works, however often inspire a world of stories in my head based on whatever I happened to be thinking about before they came on. I'm particularly partial to the works of Vangelis, Enigma, Jean Michel Jarre and the instrumental works of the Alan Parsons Project for these purposes. Not all that surprising, I guess: those were the artist my father used to blast through the house from his massive stereo system when I was growing up. I have to be careful what I listen to at my techwriting job, lest I get lost imagining some story with the music instead of getting my work done.

I find this can be useful when faced with a scene that I'm either finding difficult, or not really in the mood for -  writing a frantic escape scene when I'm absolutely knackered, or aloving reunion scene when I'm feeling curmudgeonly. They're also great defence against distractions - external or internal - that want to tear me from my precious writing time. Just put the music on, set my fingers on the keyboard, and forget about the world outside my little bubble.

 I'm in the process of setting up "writing mood playlists" for different types of scenes, filtering through the Gigs of music to find the songs that inspire this or that particular emotion. If you haven't tried writing to a soundtrack, I suggest you give it a go - though it takes some prep work to get it right. Make sure the songs you choose are ones that won't distract you from the writing or push you towards an emotion that doesn't work in the scene. Make sure the music goes for longer than you're planning to write - the sudden silence is very disconcerting if you run out of music partway.

 

On Friday I went to the opening of an interesting gallery exhibition. Titled 'Off the Wall', it's a showcase of prose and poems from writers at the Waverley Community Learning Centre, and corresponding artworks created by artists inspired by the pieces.

There were some fantastic pieces on display, both written and visual - a perfect demonstration of the myriad results you'll gain from asking disparate people to create art from a central idea. Some artists created a representation of the imagery already present within a story or poem, others went for metaphor or even further abstractions. Some were realist, surrealist, post-modern or aesthetic, some in paint, some glass, textile or thre-dimensional.

When we, as writers, concentrate so much on ensuring a reader an visualise our worlds and stories, it's a fascinating glimpse into the alternate possibilities presented by a more "direct" medium for such a thing.

I wonder what we'd create if we cycled the process once again - if writers took inspiration from the artist's creations, created new stories and poems?

THe exhibit's on until October 6th at the Highway Gallery - highly recommended.

 

This is going to be a bit of a link-fest, because so many people wrote posts in various places that made me go "ooh, awesome, must share with people who actually care about publishing writing and stories!" (and sadly, the venn diagram between that group and the group of people who follow me in Google Reader or Google+ has a microscopic overlap).

So, the on-topic links first: publisher Simon & Shuster has signed a deal with John Locke to publish his incredibly popular Donovan Creed books. But this is the important part: the deal is only for print distribution. Locke retains rights to his ebooks to sell how he wants, S&S are only doing the print distribution. Michael Shatzkin, in his usual style, has some interesting thoughts on where this might lead. It's what a lot of the peanut gallery have been pointing at and cheering towards, and I'm hopeful it's the next step toward a new publishing paradigm.

At the risk of sounding paint-dryingly dull, this is economic logic. If two entities can both produce the same materials, but vary in their efficiency of each, then the most efficient form of production is for each entity to produce the material that it can produce most efficiently and then trade with the other. Authors can produce and publish e-books far faster and more efficiently than publishers can - without the overhead of running a publishing company, their costs are much lower. However, print distribution is much, much harder for an individual author. A publishing house is equipped exactly for print distribution; their overheads (which make them poorer ebook producers) make them better qualified for print production. So logically, the most efficient solution is for the author to produce the ebook on their own bat, and for the publisher to select successful ebooks to turn into print editions.

Now, the extension of that logic is the publisher also taking a smaller chunk of the pie. Why? They're no longer taking huge risks on unproven works. Instead, they follow demand and produce print editions of what's already popular. (Though there's nothing stopping them then developing those authors as they used to, or keeping their existing authors in deals.) They use the only real "gatekeeper" - the readers themselves - to determine what should be published. 

Bad news for agents there, I guess. And it remains to be seen how feasible this is - after all, the more bookstores that disappear, and the less shelf space there is available, the less relevant print distribution becomes. While traditional publishing certainly isn't going to go away, it's going to have to make some pretty radical changes to survive. But the Locke deal is a sign of hope that they're starting to adapt and try new approaches in order to do just that.

In unrelated news:

Joe Konrath  and Blake Crouch have a conversation about ebooks and publishing. Interesting, insightful and informative as always.

Steve Saus posts some good links on the discussion of publishers having to justify their existence.

Eric, over at Pimp My Novel, has a list I'm tempted to print and stick to my wall - in keeping your butt in the chair.

And on a similar vein, Elana Johnson has a great post on balancing writing with other aspects of your life.

 

So the unpacking has all but finished - we're down to the "find homes for box of miscellanious things", and (and I suspect I'm going to wind up just putting said box of miscellaneous things in a cupboard somewhere...). Which means real life has to come back some time soon. 

Real life like writing, exercise, and not buying chocolate from the supermarket every lunch break to scoff in the afternoons. Real life like I haven't seen in about two months, now.

I find routines are the issue, here - either making them or breaking them. The chocolate-buying, for example, is a routine I have to break, and the writing and exercise are routines to be made. And they can both be made the same way:

1. Come up with a reasonable plan for a routine. For example, "I get up half an hour earlier and write every morning". Make sure it's realistic - if you already get up at 5am for other tasks, then getting up half an hour earlier might not be the greatest idea. Cutting your kilojoule intake from 9000 to 6000 is probably not a good idea. Ask yourself honestly - is this something you're really committed to do? If it's not, then revise it until you have something more reasonable.

2. Come up with a carrot. Something you will enjoy as a treat, and - this is important - not something you were planning to buy/get/do/have anyway.

This was where I always used to run afoul with my routine-instigation - I'd come up with a reward that I really wanted, but I wanted it so much that I knew I was going to do/buy it for myself anyway, regardless of whether I kept the routine. In short, I took something I'd already decided to do/buy and made that my reward. That doesn't work, because it no longer matters if you break the routine. So - pick something that would be fun, but is in no way important or needed - something that you could deny yourself. The point of the reward is just to be a little celebration of a milestone, not for you to be 'working for' something you really want - because that just pulls your self discipline in two directions - you're too tempted to just buy the thing anyway.

3. Come up with another few carrots. About four is good. Make them increasingly rewarding if you like, but that's not important, as long as they all obey the rules in step 2. They should probably be different things, (you'll see why in step four).

It's advisable to make them things that don't directly contravene your overall goal or lifestyle. For example, if you're also wanting to lose weight, food-rewards are probably not the best idea. If money is tight, buying things might be an issue - pick something that isn't going to make you feel guilty in another part of your life.

4. Come up with a timeframe for the rewards. For example, if I can go a week without buying chocolate on my lunch break, I get to buy some lolcat magnetic poetry for my fridge. If I can go two weeks in a row, I can buy the minecraft fridge magnets*. Three weeks, and I can buy something off my amazon wishlist. etc.

Note that the timeframes don't have to be consecutive. If I buy chocolate on Thursday, I just start counting over again from the next day. Assuming most people have the odd slip-up, it'll take about two to three months to reach your four-week goal. And that's long enough to have made it a habit - then it'll continue on its own. Or at least, be a lot easier.

There's no punishment for not meeting the goal, ever. That's not helpful - you're not at war with yourself.  Just a small reward for getting there, something to remind you that this is something you want to work towards, and something to celebrate when you manage it.

As a final note - don't try to make too many routines at once. One at a time, if they're a big change, maybe two if they're small, but no more. I know that sounds crazy when you're looking at six or seven things in your life you feel you need to change, but it's important. It's too hard to keep track of more than two; you pull yourself in too many directions and the number of changes you're making will scramble your nerves. Take it slow, and be patient with yourself, not antagonistic.  

After all, there's nothing stopping you from doing / not doing those other things occasionally anyway. They're just not the focus right now.

*Honestly, I don't have a fridge magnet fetish, I just made the mistake of looking on Thinkgeek the other day for other people's presents. Want!

 

Not so much a writing game as a thinking game, I'll admit. A couple of friends of mine are facing burnout in their various projects - not all of them writing, but most of them creative endeavours that have to fit in around earning a living.

They're rapidly losing interest in their respective projects, and they're seeming more like a chore than pleasure, and more effort than reward.

My first-aid for project burnout is to take a break. At least a month, sometimes up to six, depending on how long and ardently you've been working on the project. No thinking about the project during the time-out.

Usually, one of two things will happen. Either I'll recover from the burnout and start itching to get back to the project, and realise an issue with it that had probably caused the burnout in the first place, or I'll realise that the reason I was burned out was that this activity just doesn't interest me anymore.

It's okay to let stuff go if it's just not for you anymore. Nobody said you had to do this. And it's just as okay to take a break from stuff and try other things to see if, maybe, you've moved on from that interest or you just need a time out for a while.

But it can be helpful to have a reminder of why you liked it in the first place - especially if you're trying to make a decision on whether to continue or go back. So - assuming, at the moment, you're into your writing (or other activity - this works equally well for everything else) - why do you like it? What is it about it that drives you, that inspires you? What do you enjoy about it?

There' s no judgement here, that's important. No such thing as a 'good' reason or a 'bad' reason. If one of the things you love about writing is having written, rather than writing, that's okay. Or if you like an excuse to retreat from the world for an hour or two with permission to daydream. That's fine.

The point now is not to determine that you don't have any reasons 'good enough' to keep doing this, it's just to make a list for yourself as to why you like it. Later, when you're deliberating whether to give up writing for a new career in scuba-pyrotechnics, you can look back on the list and make that judgement call. But for now - why do you write?

 

When I took apart my furniture for transport last week, I was surprised by the number of things I've blu-tacked to my desk area that I no longer saw. Things that, at the time, I must have thought would inspire and motivate me, which gradually faded into the background of life as time ticked over.

Some of them still speak to me. On an index card, in bright pink letters, I have I've already written the worst novel I'm ever going to write. That's true. I pushed myself to write 87,000 words of drivel just to prove I could get to the end of a novel. It was my first attempt at using Atchity's index card approach, which failed badly when I realised one quarter in that the novel I was writing had nothing to do with the index cards I'd so carefully sorted. There were plotlines and even whole characters that disappeared halfway through because I flat-out forgot about them, and I had a tendency to resort to explosions whenever I got stuck for what happened next. It's a terrible novel, even if the odd half-chapter is an okay read. And when I feel I"m writing drivel, there's something comforting in the fact that, no matter how bad this one is, it can't possibly top that first one.

Another is an extended loan from my mother, because it spoke to her, too. (But being a mother, she said I could have it. For a while. I've taken it to my new house, so I don't know when she thinks she's getting it back, but that's mothers for you.) It's actually a cutting from the Age newspaper - and a cutting of an advertisement, of all things. We carefully folded away the bits that were the advert - I can't even remember what it was for. But the image is of some famous aussie-rules coach (or possibly soccor, forgive me, I'm not a football person) arms folded looking determined against a storm-cloud backdrop. The caption reads: Sucess is a habit, it's not a Saturday thing.

That hits home in so many ways. Real success means making sacrifices, working at it regularly, making it part of your life. You can just dabble for an hour or two on the weekends if you want to, but that's not going to lead you anywhere. If you want to really get somewhere, you have to take it seriously, make a real committment.

And one final one, again in bright pink on an index card (I don't actually like pink that much, it just stands out the most in my packet of sharpies): If you want out, write the damn book.  I look at that one two ways - I know I wrote it at a time when I was desperately hating my day job and dreaming of a time I could hang it up to go write wherever. So it was a simple reminder to spend my time actually doing the stuff that was supposed to get me out of there, and not just imagining what it would be like when I had. But it also serves as some bum-glue when I'm trying to invent an excuse for stopping writing before my timer goes or my word quota is up - if you want out (of that chair, of this room, of this half-hour), write the damn book. THe only way out of your writing session is to write yourself out of it. So get to it.

Then there's always my favourite, which I wish I could claim as my own, and isn't actually on my desk because it would worry people too much. And on the whole, probably not recommended as an philosophy for life (no matter how closely it runs to my own) but amusing nonetheless. Brute force: if it doesn't work, you're not using enough.

What sayings, pictures or posters would you put above your desk to keep you writing?

 

On Friday, I took the Emerging Writer's Festival masterclass on Business for Writers. They covered everything from tax, business legals and invoicing to time and project management to social media, marketing and promotion in six pretty grueling hours (some great key points of which have been summarised by E. Markham over here.)

It was probably the best workshop / class I've ever taken. While a lot of the business and money side was stuff I realised I already knew from Uni, (and it reinforced my conviction that nobody can "teach" you social media, other than the two rules of Don't Be An Arse, and It's Not All About You) there was some really great discussion and tips on marketing and managing things - especially time.

 

This isn't so much a writing exercise as an exercise to help you write more often, but it's in tune with the theme I've been having this week (more on that tomorrow).

We all procrastinate, writers especially. For any number of reasons, whether it's to do with feeling too tired, uninspired, worried that we can't do justice to the idea in our head, or feeling that the job is too big to start. If you're anything like me, you may watch entire days go by that you'd intended to spend making progress on your project, that instead get spent with a hundred other things that probably didn't need to be done on your day off, that could have waited for a spare moment another day.

We know that just "forcing ourselves" to sit down and work only works some of the time; for the rest of the time, you really need to understand why you're flabbering around. The point of this exercise isn't to stop procrastinating, but rather to start understanding how and why you do. It also doesn't have to be about writing - if you're procrastinating learning a language, getting a report done, even doing the dishes or the laundry, just substitute your activity for "writing" in this exercise.

It's very simple: make a mental note of the times you intend to write. When those times come around, if you're not writing, note down the time, what you should be doing, what you're doing instead, and why. For example:

11:49: writing the big fight scene from chapter 5. Tidying desk because it's too cluttered to work 11:58: writing the confrontation scene in chapter 6. Got up to get a drink, was up to hard part in scene 12:17: writing the escape in chapter 7. Checked email to see if Jim had responded because I really need to know about that cheque.

This is best done over a about a month, whatever time scale fits with your schedule. You want to record at least ten attempted (or supposed-to-be) writing sessions, preferably closer to thirty. The more you do it, the easier it will be to spot when you are procrastinating (which is also part of the exercise) and recognise the reason why.

When you've got a fair number, try to find a patterns in your procrastination:

are there common times or situations that cause you to flit away, like at the start or end of a session, whenever you finish or are about to start a particular thing, whenever it's late at night or early. are there common reasons you procrastinate, like feeling you don't know what to do next, or being unhappy with your environment, or too tired, or thinking about other things are there common things you do to procrastinate, like tidy things, check email, play with the dog are there pitfalls in your project that cause you to procrastinate, like trying to write something when you're not sure what happens?

Recognising these pattens is the first step to addressing them. You won't be able to eliminate procrastination entirely, but you'll be able to start addressing some of the reasons - whatever they are - that you're not letting yourself work.

 

I have a book that I've been working on for about three years now. Probably closer to four. I wasn't really keeping track of drafts or versions, but best I can tell, it's on about version 7 or 8. Possibly twelve, if you count the attempts that were aborted before the end of chapter 1.

None of those versions ever made it to the end of draft 1. Many were written with completely different processes, but in each I could tell there was something fundamentally wrong with the book - not the writing, which is fixable, but the story, which is not.

I was getting rather discouraged with this - I had a plan, you see, to be writing full time. I'm a touch-typist and a trained student*: I can write quickly. When in the habit of it, I can write several thousand words a day, with time for exercise, general life and my day job. Put that into a routine and you have a draft in a few months. Add another few months for editing and polishing, and you have a book in four to six months. Combine that with the fact that these processes can be overlaid - I can plan one story while writing another and editing a third (I know this because I do it now), and I can have several books a year. 

That was The Plan. Roughly: self-publish several books a year, average not-very-many sales across all of them a month, and be able to write full time in five or six years at the current salary I get from my day job.

Taking three years for one book was throwing not just spanners, but hammers, screwdrivers, allen keys and a disgruntled plumber in the works. But this week, three important things happened for me and my plan - or rather, my disappointment in my plan.

 

 

"Process" is sadly a much-abused word. Typically, by people who are more interested in seeming artistic than actually creating art, who presume that the more wacky and incomprehensible demands one makes in the name of one's "process", the more arteeeeestic one is seen to be. They insist on writing only on the top half of the left side of a leather-bound hand-stitched notepad with a MontBlanc dip-style fountain pen, the ink of which they have carefully blended with gold dust, saffron and probably the blood of a unicorn. Or something like that.

I'm not talking about that kind of Process, here. I mean the lower-case kind. How do you build a story? Where do you start, what comes to you first (usually)? How do you tease that idea out, build conflict, build an arc, some change, a premise? Do you block things out in scenes, write a whole lot of creative-plop that you then shape, work backwards, jump all over the place?

Look back at how you've created things in the past. Stories you've written. What are the common things you have done that have worked for you? What are the things that didn't work?

The point here is not to be prescriptive - ironing out a method that must be adhered to is unlikely to be helpful. Art is unpredictable, and flexibility is a must, even with the way that you work. But it's beneficial to be able to recognise things that often help you, steps you may forget you need, things that generally lead you down a goose chase or actually help procrastinate.

So - how do you write a story?

 

I've blogged about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) quite a bit before. Dan Wells, author of I Am Not A Serial Killer, has adapted it to his own challenge, which I think is ideal.

He's termed it NaShoStoMo - National Short Story Month. And it's not particularly national - as far as I know, it's just him - but it's great practise for a writer. It's very simple: every day of the month, he writes a complete short story. They're tiny - a minimum of 200 words, but they can be longer. They must be complete, with a beginning, middle and end. Like NaNoWriMo, they don't necessarily have to be any good. The point is to practise the art of storytelling, rather than writing. They're different disciplines - one is about constructing sentences, the other is about constructing emotion and story - and you need both.

Now I'll admit, this isn't something that fits into my life right now - I have several projects on the go that need to take precedence. But I'll definitely be saving this idea for the future (probably in an adulterated form - 200 is a little short for me, I'd rather have at least 500 words.). I think it would be especially good if you're feeling blocked on unsure of what to write.

It doesn't have to be one story a day - if you're interested, but not a prolific writer or have a very busy schedule, make it two a week for ten weeks or something similar. Just like Nano, it's entire what you make out of it.

 

 

For the last two months, I've been in various countries on the other side of the world. My first major trip (not counting teenage years when I had parents or teachers looking after me), I launched myself into freezing (and well below) temps, countries in terrible recessions, countries that didn't speak my language and people whose culture I (still, after two trips there) don't understand.  I had naive ideas about what I'd be capable of on that trip. Not in terms of the trip itself - I exceeded my own expectations, there - but rather more ordinary tasks.

I thought I'd be writing thousands of words.