Epiphanies

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Back in December 2009, my wife drew the proverbial line in the sand: I needed to get serious about writing and write, or I needed to quit and not go back. Taking this ultimatum to heart, I decided I wanted to write. Badly.

So I made 2010 the “Year I Got Serious,” and I promised myself that if I quit during this year, I’d put writing behind me — for good.

Problem was, I hadn’t changed my approach. I still believed in the myths — the need to outline in detail, the need to have character sheets, the need to write slowly, the need to rewrite extensively. So by April, I was floundering. I was afraid this was the end. I was going to quit, which meant I’d never go back to writing again.

Meanwhile, I was reading Dean Wesley Smith’s blog. At the time, he was writing a few posts a month on the “myths” of writing. He called the series Killing the Sacred Cows of Writing. I was reading the series on a regular basis. I disagreed with everything he said because, well, he was a media writer, not a real author like so-and-so.

But by mid-May of 2010, I was desperate. I hadn’t written for two weeks, and I wondered if I was ever going to write again. The thought made me very sad. Then I remembered an old saying I first heard from the self-help guru Anthony Robbins: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting different results.

With writing, I’d been doing the same thing over and over for close to 10 years, and the results were always the same. I was following the myths, and therefore I was producing very, very little.

So one Friday in May, I sat down with a large mug of hot coffee, a fresh yellow legal pad, and a blue pen. With my MacBook open, I went to Dean’s sight, found the first post, and started reading. I read every post he’d written, and skimmed through the comments. I made notes. I saw ideas repeated in different ways and in different contexts. Several hours later, with an empty coffee mug and pages of notes, I finished.

What I came away with was a deeper understanding of Robert A. Heinlein’s Rules of Writing:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put your work on the market.

5. You must keep your work on the market until it’s sold.

I also came to understand that the absolute best way to practice Heinlein’s Rules and become a better writer in the process is by writing short fiction. So at the end of that Friday in mid-May 2010, I made the decision to write a story a week and to follow Heinlein’s Rules. I wrote. I finished. I did a spell/grammar check. I sent it out. I’ve been writing ever since, with no thoughts of quitting.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been problem free. Over the years, I’ve come to see that I have a problem with novels. I can’t even begin to count how many I’ve started, but I know how many I’ve finished — three.

By way of comparison, consider that last fall alone, between August and December 2012, I started and stopped five novels.

After thinking about it, I came to see one common element with the novels I finished: I had some kind of outline, nothing too much more than my plot in bullet-point. “Plot” is the linked events of the story, and that’s what I had. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, etc.

So a few months ago, I decided to start a brand new project. I spent about two weeks gathering ideas, developing them, and creating an outline. After a month of writing, I’m 30,000 words into the novel, and things are going well.

But that’s only part of the story. The last 15,000 words have been written over the last 7 to 10 days. What caused the change? A series of posts by Dean Wesley Smith in which he details writing a ghost novel. Following this series opened my eyes to a couple of myths I still cling to:

1. The writing of a novel should be slow — no quicker than 1,000 words a day. Where did this myth come from? Beats me. But think about it: If an average-sized novel is about 90,000 words, 1,000 words a day means you’d write four novels a year. Is four novels a year a lot? For some people … and apparently for me, too … on some level. But if takes me about an hour to write 1,000 words — and it does — that means I’m only putting an hour of writing into my day. That would be very good if I had a 50-hour-a-week job. But I don’t. I’m an at-home dad, and I have at least four to five hours a day to give to writing. But I only have that much time if I think about my writing schedule in a different way. This leads me to my second myth.

2. All writing must be done in a large chunk of time. Read Dean’s post, and you see that he writes in what I call “sessions.” Thirty minutes here, sixty minutes there. How have I thought about writing? Not like that. If I didn’t have at leas 90 minutes in a row free, I didn’t write. This is one reason why I don’t write on weekends. A house full of people means I generally don’t have 90 minutes in a row free. But if I think about writing in short sessions, I bet I could get in at least 250 words on Saturdays and Sundays. Probably more.

3. A novel is an event. This is a myth Dean touched on in his Killing the Sacred Cows series, but I never understood it until this past week. On of my biggest problems with novels is that I see them as events — something that needs to be planned, organized, structured, written slowly, rewritten extensively. Never realized this myth was still with me, but it is.

4. Novel need to be rewritten. This falls into the “novel is an event” category. The novel is so important, I need to work on it and work on it until it’s perfect. Umm … no, I don’t. Fact: A novel is just a long story. Fact: I’m a horrible judge of my stories, long or short. Fact: There’s no such thing as a perfect story or novel. Other than needing to have a plan, I don’t need to do anything more with a novel than what I need to do with a short story: write it, layer in any plot elements that come up in the writing, then give it to my wife. I don’t need to reread it to see if it makes sense. My wife can do that, and I can address those issues.

5. A novel must be outlined. Yes, this is a myth I’ve held on to for a while … but what I’m finding is that I need some kind of outline. The difference? The myth says that, unless you’re as good as Stephen King, all novels must be outlined. That’s not true at all. However, I might need to outline my novels. I have a stack of unfinished novels and a stack of finished novels. What separates them? All the finished novels began with a very basic outline. And what I’m learning writing my current novel, for which I have an outline, is this: I don’t need much more than a bullet-point list of events.

So, what are my epiphanies … my revelations about my own work.

1. I need stop seeing writing as something that needs a chunk of time, but, rather, see it as something I can dip into whenever I have the time.  With a little more focus on this and practice, I bet I could get my daily word count up to around 4000 words by the end of the month.

2. I need to apply Heinlein’s Rules to novel writing, not just short stories. This means: I need to write, finish, spell/grammar check, then give it to my wife. There’s no reason to go over it, time and again.

3. I must stop seeing a novel as an event. I’ve got to stop writing “slowly.” I’ve got to stop thinking about taking a “break” between novels to write short fiction. I’ve got to stop thinking a novel should take a long time to write. Summer is coming up, which means I’ll have a house full of kids and summer activities to contend with. But if I can get in 2,000 words a day — should be no problem if I remember to write in bite size sessions — there’s no reason why I can’t write at least one novel beween the beginning of June and mid August. Really, there isn’t.

4. Planning novels need to be kept to a minimum. With my current work in progress, I planned far more than I’m using. I’ll need to assess what I used over the next few weeks so I don’t make the mistake of wasting time and energy on throwaway stuff. And while planning/outlining isn’t necessary, I do seem to work better on a novel, and have more success with them, if I have the basics in mind.

Trying Something New

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One thing I really hate about computers and the internet is just how many possibilities there are. Take writing, for example, and the number of programs one can use to write. Scrivener. Write Room. iA Writer. Story Mill. Storyist. A simple text editor. Ulysses III. And then there are the countless word-processing programs: Word, Pages, Bean, Mariner Write, and so on. (And I haven’t included all the Window-based apps). If you possess a little curiosity, you can waste a lot of time trying each of these.

For me, it boils down to two apps: Scrivener and Word. Scrivener is the ultimate writing tool, but it has one big problem for me: there are so many bells and whistles, I can easily waste time playing around, trying different things. Word is a pain, but I grew up using it, and I’m comfortable in it. And yet, Word 2011 for Mac is buggy as hell.

Yesterday, Dean Wesley Smith started blogging about writing a ghost novel (that is, writing a novel for an established author; see his blog for more details). Somewhere — either in a post or in the comments — he mentioned that he uses Word, that he creates a new document for each chapter, and that he puts all the chapters together at the end.

That got me thinking. I’ve never tried that approach. When writing a novel in Word, I always made it one long document. Around the 300-page mark, it really starts slowing down.

But in Scrivener, every chapter — and every scene, if you want — is a separate file. It’s very nice, but again, I find the program too damn distracting when writing. It’s just too easy to start fiddling around with things.

Now, as I tried various writing apps, I found one I really, really like: iA Writer. It’s clean. It has a great font. And what’s more, you can’t modify a damn thing on it. All you an do is write. Period. No screwing around with margins, with fonts, with font sizes. Nothing. You can only write. And what’s more, I find writing on it very, very enjoyable. The only problem with iA Writer is that, for a long document like a novel, trying to reference something would be nearly impossible.

One of Scrivener’s features I love most is full-screen mode. But even full-screen mode can be fiddled with, poked and prodded, constantly manipulated. I find it distracting as hell.

So here’s my plan for the next week or so. I’m going to try out Dean’s method of writing a chapter in a new file, but instead of using Word, I’m going to use iA Writer and Scrivener. I’ll write in iA Writer. When I finish the chapter, I’ll upload it into Scrivener where it can grow slowly into a finished book. Scrivener has a lot of cool organization features that I really like, and so I can use those to help keep track of where I am and where I’m going.

All this sounds like I’m creating unnecessary work for me. And maybe I am. But … I find when I write in iA Writer, it’s akin to a mystical experience. In iA Writer, it’s so easy to forget about everything except the words and the story, I find I write faster, I write more, and the process is more enjoyable. It’s weird, I know, but that’s been my experience.

At any rate, that’s my plan for the next week. We’ll see how it goes.

39

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Last week, I turned 39. My little sister texted me: “Happy Birthday. Enjoy your last year of going uphill.” It made me laugh.

At the same time, I’ve been a bit … pensive. Not in a negative way. It’s just … well, it’s time for a change.  People say that all the time, right. But I’d like to start my 40′s in the best way possible. I want to have certain habits in place. I want my life to be … well, not on a different road; I just want to be walking down this road in a better way. I have a year to get on the right track.

One of the things that have struck me over the past few months is how unnecessarily busy I am. The fact is, I’m not that busy. I’m an at-home Dad. Other than getting the kids to their after school activities (and since we limit those activities to one per child each year, I don’t have that many activities to contend with), I have no real outside pressure on me.  So why am I so damn busy? Simple: I lack the ability to focus.

Coinciding with this feeling is a deep sense that it’s time to pay attention to my health. I read somewhere that one’s health in one’s 40s dictates one’s health in one’s 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. It occurred to me that health and life form a one piece. I’m not too much in mind-body-soul type of stuff, but we are a psychosomatic unity — a unity of body and soul. As the ancient Greek philosopher Thales said, “A sound mind in a sound body.”

Could my feelings of being busy and my lack of  health be related? I think so.

Thus: over the next year, I’m going to make a series of changes to help me get back to a more peaceful and focused life. Here are some of the things I’m thinking about and experimenting with right now.

1. Food. Basically, I’m very intrigued by the paleo/caveman diet … especially as Mark Sisson outlines it. The idea of eating natural or real food as opposed to what comes in a box or out of a bag makes a whole lot of sense to me. I’m more-or-less addicted to bread, pasta, tortillas, and pizza. My goal here is to treat each day as an end unto itself. I’m not going to worry about weight or thinking long-term thoughts such as, Can this be sustained. At the end of the day, the goal is to have eaten a whole lot of real and natural food. Day after day will eventually, over time, form a habitual way of eating. Which is the point.

2. Exercise. Again, I’m going to focus on what Mark Sisson outlines on his blog and in his book. It’s pretty simple: walk a lot, and lift weights a 2-3 times a week. As far as walking, I have a 9-month old Golden Retriever, so if I just make a concerted effort to take her for a 45-minute morning walk, I have that covered. For lifting weights, we have a few dumbbells around the house, so it’s a matter of finding some time to do it. But walking comes first.

3. Writing. What’s occurred to me over the past three months of 2013 is that I’m approaching my writing all wrong. I’m too goal oriented, focusing on how many words I’m going to write, or focused on how many projects I’m going to finish. While having goals like that can be good and helpful, the downside is that one’s sense of enjoyment can be hindered. How so? Because happiness become attached to finishing, not doing. As Ray Bradbury said, If you’re not having fun writing, stop doing it. What I’ve found is that my love of writing has been compromised by an excessive focus on goals. This change didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual shift over the past year or so. But it must change. So, I’m no longer going to track my daily word count. Instead, each day I’m going to look at what kind of time I have available to me and set a clock goal. Instead of writing 2,000 words, it’ll be to write for three hours. I did this today, and I not only ended up writing more, I had a whole lot more fun doing so.

4. Reading. Like writing, I’ve slowly have become more focused on how much I read than on enjoying what I read. How did this happen? When I got serious about writing, to make sure I was spending my time wisely, I started tracking what I was reading, and I started pushing myself to read more. For a while, it worked, but somehow the goal became more important than the doing, and the upshot was, I stopped reading as much. Strange how that happens. So like writing, I going to stop tracking how much I read, and instead of trying to read 50 pages a day, or 1 short story a day, I’m instead going to try to read for one hour a day. I have to admit, I feel a bit silly about even scheduling reading time, but it must be done.

5. Email, Twitter, and the Internet. As an at-home dad, I tend to check email quite a bit. Same goes for Twitter. And the same goes for spending time on the Internet. This has to end. One of the reason I feel so damn busy is because I waste so much time. So I need to set up some arbitrary rules.  Because I don’t have a job with a boss and a hord of coworkers, I don’t get too much email, and the email I get isn’t all that pressing. Taking time to check email is therefore a distraction. I think twice a day is enough — once at noontime, which I can check while I eat lunch, and once in the afternoon or evening. No more. Twitter is another matter. The problem I have with Twitter aren’t the tweets, which are easy enough to skim, but the links inside the tweets. The links take me to the Internet, which in turn sucks me into a vortex of time wasting. The Internet it my Achilles’ heel; it’s the source of many of my woes.

So the question is: What am I going to do about the Internet?

There are a couple of solutions to this. Perhaps the most obvious — and the easiest — is to use Freedom to lock me off the Internet for 8-hour periods. Like I said, I don’t have any pressing emails to take care of. If I need to check email (and “need” is a dubious way to describe it), I always have my iPhone, iPad, or the family computer upstairs — none of which I ever use.

Also, by using Freedom in such an extreme way, I will (hopefully) develop the habit of not being on the Internet so damn much. Blog posts like this one can be written on Scrivener, Ulysses III, iA Writer, Word, or MacJournal. I don’t write time-sensitive posts, so they can be posted in-between these 8-hour periods. And eight hours isn’t so long, either. There’s absolutely nothing so pressing in my life that it can’t wait.

I’m reluctant to use such an extreme measure … but, as I read somewhere, dire straights calls for bold measures.

At any rate, the purpose is to free myself from some of these shackles.

Writing Update, 4/5

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1) 5,000 words. That’s how many words I’m at in my new project. So far, so good. I transferred all my plot notes into a bullet-point list of the things that need to happen, and that’s my outline. It’s loose enough that I don’t feel trapped by it, and yet it’s enough of a map that I don’t think I’ll write myself into some kind of corner.

One thing I’ve noticed about having an outline is that when it comes to the writing itself, I’m free to focus on things other than what is going to happen. I can think about how to open chapters, how to end them with a cliffhanger, how to present setting, ways to increase conflict, and so forth. And since all I have are bullet-points that say things like “David goes to Bobby’s house to get money,” “David delivers the money to Sofia,”  there’s all sorts of places to “discover” my story.

2) Genre Structure Workshop. Today, I started a new online writing workshop called “Genre Structure.” This has been a workshop I’ve wanted to take for sometime, and finally have the opportunity. I’m excited about it because, as a writer who likes to write in multiple genres, it’s a quick approach to mastering the essentials of each genre without having to spend years reading in that genre.

Also, it means I can better organize subplots, which are often in a genre other than the main genre of the book (a fantasy, for example, might have a romantic subplot).

Slowly, over the years, I’ve become convinced that what separates professional writers from wannabe writers is dedication to the craft. The writers who have a deep understanding of character, setting, conflict, structure, point of view, pacing, and so forth, are the writers who will sell. It’s not so much the ideas that make a professional writer, but the writer’s ability to pull a reader deep down into his/her story. Readers want a ride, and it’s up to us writers to give them the ride they want. Harry Potter in the hands of a less skilled writer would’ve been an complete disaster, and look at how many mystery writers earn their bread and butter telling tales of a detective hunting down a murderer.

I’ve taken workshops on ideas, plotting, character, setting, openings, and cliffhangers. This workshop is on genre and structure. I have a feeling this might be my last real craft workshop for a while. Maybe a workshop on world-building. But, really, what’s left is reading and analyzing the work of bestselling professional writers.

And writing my butt off.

3) Knockout Novel. Yesterday, I signed up to use the Knockout Novel online program. This isn’t really a workshop, though there are teaching portions within the program. Rather, it’s a series of steps to take an idea and mold it into a solid novel foundation.

Normally, I wouldn’t have signed up for something like this, but two things grabbed my attention about it: first, it’s modeled off James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure book, which I like very much, and second, there’s a 30-day money back guarantee. And it’s only $50, which isn’t that much. From the little time I spent with the program, I think it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

My experience developing my current project has showed me that I like working out the basic plan of a novel before beginning. Of the last six novels I started (not including this one), I finished none of them. All I had going in was a general idea of what I wanted, nothing more. Using Bell’s book, I was able to take some basic ideas and develop them into something I’m excited about writing. More importantly, I’m not worried if I’ll run out of steam. I have the story. All that is needed now is getting it down to the best of my ability.

With the Knockout Novel program, you have a series of steps (several dozen, I think) that systematically lead you from your basic idea to having the skeleton of your story in place.  More than that, you can work on as many projects as you want, and you can move around through the program. You’re not stuck following the plan they laid out for you.

For me, a program like this might prove very valuable. I find the idea of having multiple projects in different stages intriguing. Writers such as Jack London, Louis L’Amour, and Isaac Asimov, all moved around in various projects; they’d get stuck in the middle of one, then move on to another. I know that James Patterson, Brandon Sanderson, and Kevin J. Anderson also work on a few projects at once. Not necessarily writing two or three, but having a primary project on the table as well as several in the fire.

But how does one organize such a thing?

The Knockout Novel program does it for you. Besides providing you with the steps to take your idea to a solid story structure, each project has its own database for characters, settings, plot lines, and scenes. If you want, you can have a dozen or more projects warming in the proverbial fire, and you’re able to move around in each as you see fit.

This means — I hope, I hope — that never again will I have to stop everything and start building a story from scratch like I just did. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but I want to be the kind of writer that produces X-amount of words every week. I don’t want to have three weeks off to organize a project. I believe writing is putting new words on the page, and time away from writing for planning, research, and editing, is just that — time away from writing.

Ideally, I’d like to finish a book one week and start the next book the following week. To do this, I need to have several projects going on at once, and my hope is that the Knockout Novel program will allow me to do just that.

Oh, yeah, one last thing. Knockout Novel allows you to export everything you’ve done as a .rtf file. This means, when it comes time to write, you’re not stuck with all your notes online.

It’s obvious, I’m excited about this program. I suppose I have 30 days to see how well it works for me, writing on one project and planning others. I really don’t think I have an option here. Balancing project is a skill I need to master … if I want to achieve my writing goals and dreams.

Getting Ready to Write

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For the past few weeks, I’ve tried outlining a novel.

Outlining means different things to different people. In Plot & Structure, James Scott Bell covers nearly every form of outlining: from using 3X5 cards to treatments, from outlining as you go to having a full chapter-by-chapter outline.

Part of me wanted to go to the outlining extreme: I wanted to develop a chapter-by-chapter outline of the entire story, regardless of how long it was. But I’ve changed by mind for two reasons — one business, the other artistic.

1) The Business Reason. I don’t want this “project” to be the be all and end all of my writing career.  Even though I’d like to create some big massive epic, I don’t want to be the writer of “that series.” If I become “that series’s” writer, then so be it. But I’d much rather have a career like Dean Koontz or Stephen King  rather than Robert Jordan or J.K. Rowling. That is, I’d much rather have a career that transcends both genre and series. No one thinks of Koontz as “The Writer” of Odd Thomas (though he is), just as no one thinks of King as “The Writer” of The Dark Tower (though he is); rather, Odd Thomas and The Dark Tower are just one of many things Koontz and King have written.

There’s also the down-to-earth practical side of things: Chances are, if I’m going to make it in this business, it’s going to be as a midlist writer. For this to work, I can’t put all my eggs in one basket. There’s an indie writer I know of who has done just that: focused on one series for several years only to have the whole thing fall flat. The depression that seeps through this writer’s blog posts and tweets is palpable.

Maybe this project of mine will take off, but chances are, it won’t. I heard George Lucas say in an interview that every film-maker has to assume that his current project is going to flop. That’s true of fiction writers, too. This means I can’t spend months and months of building a massive outline. I need to write more than just one story. And that’s exactly what this project is. It isn’t a series in the way Harry Bosch and Spenser are series; these won’t be loosely connected books that can be read in any order. This project is more like Harry Potter or The Wheel of Time: it’s going to tell one massive epic story.

The thought of spending years writing one massive epic story only to have it fall flat is depressing. But that’s a real possibility, and one I can’t ignore. Better, I think, to have the thing be just one part of my writing, with a goal to bring out a book every 12 to 18 months.

2) The Artistic Reason. Thinking about one’s writing in terms of business is important, but it can be overdone. You have to join your business thoughts with who you are as a writer and an artist. John Scalzi, for example, has made it known that he started writing military SF (Old Man’s War) because a.) it sold well and b.) he liked it. See, a combination of business with pleasure.

I’ve tried to think about this project along the same lines. The fact is, I’d get terribly bored if all I did was write one thing. I have many ideas for many stories in various genres, and I don’t want to get stuck focusing on just one thing. Also, there’s the fact that my own brainstorming and outlining have reached something of a conclusion. That’s not say I finished outlining. Only to say I’m done with it — for now.

A few years ago, I attended a workshop with David Farland. He met privately with each of us. I talked to him about my frustrations with writing a novel … specifically with the outlining exercise he had us do. At the same time, trying to discovery write a novel wasn’t working too well. He encouraged me to combine the two: do a loose outline of the first part of the book, then write it. Then think about the next part of the book, create a loose outline, then write that part. And so on. If you keep the outline loose enough, there’s plenty of room for discovery. And since the middle sections of the novel aren’t in place, you’re free to develop as you go.

Oddly, I haven’t tried this approach. I’m not sure why. And yet, I realized it’s the perfect way for me to approach this project. I have the beginning firmly in my mind. I know the ending. It’s the massive middle that I don’t have. Why do I need that now? Why can I just create a loose outline and start writing?

Since I didn’t have any good answers to these questions, I created that loose outline today. And in doing so, I saw two things

First, that as I got deeper into what I did have, the less and less I knew. I realized I didn’t really want to answer those questions at the moment. Right now, I’m more excited about writing what I do have than answering questions about what might happen in 60,000 to 80,000 words.

Second, I saw that my bullet-point outline was a novel until itself. The novel will end on a serious cliffhanger, but there’s a clear arc with what I have.  So even though I don’t have the whole thing, I have enough for the first novel. Which is probably enough for now.

Besides, after writing it, I might be ready to move on to another project before going back to Book 2.

So tomorrow, I start writing.