Writing Goals

 

Have you made out your list of goals for the year?

I'm not talking about resolutions. I'm talking about the concrete steps you've taken to achieve a particular goal.

Say you want to write a novel, and you've never written one before. Break it down into realistic bite-sized pieces. 100 words a day during your lunch break. Or wake up fifteen minutes early to write. Cut out a TV program to write. Whatever works for your schedule.

This picture is the Treasury House in  Petra, Jordan. The people of Petra literally carved their city into the cliffs. They sure as heck didn't do it in one day, much less a year. So why do you think you can write a novel in a matter of days when you have no experience?

Eons ago when I still practicing law, I wrote my first novel 500 words at a time in the local IHOP during my lunch hour. Think about it. 500 words X 5 days a week X 50 weeks in a year. That's 125,000 words a year. Roughly one and a half novels.

Write a novel one bite at a time. The same way you eat an elephant.

Experiments Are Good...

...but sometimes, they prove you were doing things the optimum way for you already.

Two weeks ago, I talked about trying writing sprints. Some authors use them to great success, getting in a few thousand words per day. They write for twenty-five to fifty minutes, take a short five to ten minute break where they hit the head or do jumping jacks, before setting a timer and write for another twenty-five to fifty minutes.

So, I tried sprints for a few days in the mornings, and SQUIRREL!

Yeah, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't do the five minute break. I was constantly distracted by SQUIRREL!

For the last twelve days, my daily word count was SQUIRREL!

So I'm better off sitting for a solid two hours in a comfortable position for neck, legs and back, getting into the flow of the novel to the point that I exist only in that time and space. In between the longer sessions, I can take a nice long walk, do the chores that are bugging me, refill my beverages, and then start writing again.

I don't know if any of you readers keep track of your daily word count. I do in order to try to beat last year's goal. (It's one of those weird personal things. And I was a thousand words short in 2017 of 2016's total words.)

But looking at my daily from December 29 through January 8? They're sad. Like only mid-three figures sad. Going back to my old way, I did my usual 1500 words, plus watched two episodes of Airplane Repo on the Discovery Channel (thanks for getting me hooked, DH!), and had a date night to see Jumanji (not to speak ill of the dead, but this was way better than the Robin Williams version). The full review will be up on Monday.

So, all-in-all, the morning sprint experiment was a nice try, but it didn't work for me. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it.

Of course, it may have more to do with me just not being a morning person, too.

Trying Something New

New writers constantly want the magic bullet, the secret handshake, whatever you want to call it.

What they're really afraid to do is experiment. There's so many ways to write. So many different methodologies. All of them have pluses and minuses. What works for one writer may not work for another, and vice-versa.

There's an old saying BICFOK. It stands for "Butt In Chair Fingers On Keyboard."

It's that simple. And that difficult.

I'm one of those writers who likes to carve out a straight hour or two to write. Preferably in the afternoon or night. Because I am SO not a morning person.

But with a husband and a kid, that's not always realistic, either from the amount of time standpoint or the time of day standpoint. It's also not healthy sitting in one position for so long as I age.

This morning I tried a couple of different things. One, I started writing a half hour after I crawled out of bed. Two, I tried writing is short bursts, aka sprints.

Sprints have been advocated by several writers I've known over the years. I've only ever tried them with other people, and the experience wasn't the best because there's always that one person who needs to talk.

(Yeah, sometimes I was the guilty party.)

This morning though, I tried three solitary 25-minute sprints. On the plus side, I came in on my normal speed of 600 words per minute hour. (Dang! Talk about a Freudian slip! I WISH I could type 600 words per minute.) On the negative side, I had a problem getting back into the story after my breaks. Though in all fairness, I took more than the 5-minute bathroom/drink break that I was supposed to do.

The reason I'm doing this? We're looking for a house, and I need to make the most of my writing time if I'm going to maintain my business schedule in the middle of a move.

So, I'm going to try sprints again, and see if I can't refine my technique.

Anything y'all are trying new to improve your writing for 2018?

Clarification on the November Status Post

I regularly hang out at The Passive Voice. During a discussion on Kris Rusch's recent post on "churning out" books, I mentioned I'd got some grief from other writers on my November Status Report. Someone e-mailed me privately, concerned about my experience.

Here's the deal. I've learned not to let this kind of crap bother me. Yes, it used to, but I also thought my normal bullshit meter didn't apply to the writing world. I was stupid. I was naïve.

I got over it.

There was one nasty comment. It popped up while I was online, so I caught and deleted right away. If you subscribe to comments, you may have gotten the notice. If so, delete the e-mail. I'm pretty sure it's the buddy of a former friend, who likes to troll me every once in a while. This person's crap has tapered off since I no longer associate with the former friend. Since I'm a non-Christian, I'm the equivalent of Al-Quaeda in their Tea Party minds. As GK would say, "What evs."

I received three e-mails from "friends" who are oh-so-worried about my incredibly bad decision to indie publish. But then, they've been worried for four years now. To a person, they said the same crap Kris mention on her original blog--no one will take me seriously if I write too fast. *cue eye roll*

The only person whose comment concerned me was my new writing partner, Laura Kirwan. We had a nice talk about expectations and writing speed, and I like to think we both walked away feeling a lot better about completing our joint project.

The funny thing about the November post? I didn't even mention the Alter Ego projects for 2015.

Can you imagine the eye-popping apoplexy some of these people would have if they knew? LOL

Speed and First Drafts Are Not Your Enemy. Fear Is.

The reason this post is late today is I'm reticent to stir the controversy pot.

I can hear what thinking. Since when, Suzan?

It's the issue of speed when it comes to drafting a story.

Please understand that I'm not talking about physical limitations. And before anyone goes off on me in comments, yes, I do understand certain impediments. I'm in the early stages of arthritis thanks to the self-destructing chemical soup that is my body, and I'm losing my eyesight, even though my doctor has been running an a battery of tests since March, he can't figure out what the problem is, and he's more frustrated about the situation than I am.

Maybe it's my own impending problems that spurs my need for speed. I've got so many ideas in my head that demand to be told. I started watching how many books were put out per year by my favorite authors. The only one who really talks about his process is Dean Wesley Smith.

When I started writing with the intent to publish back in 2004, I was doing great to get down 250 per hour. At the beginning of the year, I could do 500 words per hour. Dean's 7500 words per day seemed an impossible thing to achieve unless I went without sleep, food or potty breaks.

So instead of the impossible, I went for the possible. I'd done NaNoWriMo before. 50K words in 30 days comes out to 1,667 words per day. What if I bumped that up to 2K per day?

And it worked! Despite the craziness of homeschooling and packing, it worked. I finished five novellas, three short stories and the infamous novel Blood Sacrifice since January 1, 2013.

Which brings me to the other problem--rewriting. Maybe it's the flippant answer I gave in a recent interview. Maybe it's something Dean said in his blog, but I've given up on rewriting pieces ad nauseum.

Why? Because when I do, the book doesn't sound like me anymore. It reads like every piece of pablum coming out of New York these days. Oh, there's definitely times when I, my editor or beta readers say, "Hey! This piece here doesn't match the rest!"

But to me, that's content editing, not a complete rewrite. And I'm not saying a rewrite is never necessary.

Blood Sacrifice is a prime example. I started it in 2009, and I had to scrap it after seeing Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull because Steven Spielberg and I had the same frickin' plot. In 2010, I tried again, but I realized I had a problem with who the Big Bad was. It needed to be someone worthy of Alex and Phil.

I sat down for a brainstorming session over pumpkin lattes with my friend Jody in 2011. "The Aztecs and Mayans are overdone right now," she said. "Go farther south."

She had lived in Peru during the 1968 military coup. (I really think she needs to write about her life, but she thinks she's boring. Goddess, she so is not!)  She had a ton of books (most of which I couldn't read because they were in Spanish) and native music recordings she let me borrow, but it was her photos and recounting of the the Day of the Dead festivals that caught my warped attention.

Again, I started Blood Sacrifice. Again, I ran into a problem. I set it aside and concentrated on Alter Ego's career. This year, as I was wrapping breakables for packing, the solution popped into my head.

The only other time I rewrote a novel was to satisfy the bizarre whims of agents. (Zombie Love if you're curious. The published version is very close to the original version once I gave up trying to please a bunch of strangers who didn't give a shit about my story.) It's one thing when my perfectionistic streak comes into play. It's another when someone arbitrarily dictates changes.

Anything else I've written and published is the first draft. Including the short story "Justice" which I sold to Elisabeth Waters, the editor of Sword and Sorceress 28.

I can go into all the psychology of why writers think slow drafting and multiple drafts are a good thing, but I won't since Dean covers it pretty well in his Killing the Sacred Cows series on his blog.

It all comes down to one word--fear.

It's amazing how good writing feels once you let go of that fear.

So I challenge all of you to write FAST, write FEARLESSLY and have FUN!