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How to Write 10,000 Words a Day, Part II (Luc Reid)

Writing

Yesterday, I posted novelist James Maxey’s response to the question “How do you write 10,000 words in a day?” Here are my own thoughts on the matter, from my experience writing that much and more. This was written before I read James’s take, but not surprisingly, it turns out that our responses have a lot of comment elements.

  1. Don’t expect the result to be publishable unless you have a lot of experience writing. That’s not to say that you won’t produce something that can eventually become publishable, or even that you’ll necessarily miss the mark even if this is your first attempt at long fiction, but if you are going to be miserable if your work isn’t terrific, you may want to think twice before trying to write at this speed.
  2. Be a fast typist. If you can’t type quickly already, you’ll want to do some typing tutorials to improve your speed before attempting 10,000 words in a day. In theory you can write over 1,000 words an hour if you only type 20 words per minute, but in practice you’ll need to do things like make quick fixes and notes, use the bathroom, and especially think. If you know you won’t be able to type at least 40 wpm, set your sites lower than 10,000 words per day. 5,000 words a day is still an amazing accomplishment, for example–and any personal record or completed piece is worth celebrating.
  3. Clear your schedule; remove all distractions. Don’t check e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter; turn off your phone; make sure you’re alone (or at least will be left alone); prepare food ahead if possible; take care of anything pressing that might otherwise interrupt you before you start.
  4. Have all the ingredients you personally need to drive the story forward. If you’re an off-the-cuff writer, that’s fine, but make sure you understand what you’ll need in terms of research, premise, setting, character ideas, plot ideas, or whatever else you use for starting stories. For instance, although I sometimes like to use outlines, if I come up with two interesting characters having an argument, I’m off and running: setting and plot can emerge for me out of those. Other people will need a few key scenes to shoot for, or will need to know the beginning and the ending. Yet others will need a full-blown outline. Know what you need. If you don’t have enough writing experience to know what you need yet, be willing to experiment, be comfortable with the idea that you may run out of steam, and keep a copy of The Writing Engine handy in order to use the troubleshooting section as needed.
  5. Don’t revise yet. If your story gets off track, you can go back as far as you need and restart from there (while still counting the discarded words in your daily count if you like), or you can go back and insert notes as to what future revisions you’ll need, but don’t try to go back and fix things: you’re likely to lose all of your momentum and begin getting bogged down in editing rather than creation.
  6. Have a vision. If you have a vision of what will make writing so much in such a short period of time wonderful for you (for instance, the excitement of having a finished novel draft, however rough, or exploring a story idea that you’ve been wanting to explore for a long time), you’ll have something to sustain you when you almost inevitably hit those moments of “This thing I’m writing is junk!” or “What am I doing this for, anyway?”
  7. Immerse yourself in the story. The more involved you are in the story and the more you care about spending time with the characters and “seeing” what happens to them, the more likely you’ll be able to keep up the pace, and the more likely you’ll be to create something your readers can be excited about, too. Just as importantly, immersion in your story is another way of saying that you’ve achieved flow, which means maximum productivity and high quality (see “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated“).

Photo by lscan

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How to Write 10,000 Words a Day, Part I (James Maxey)

Writing

One reader of my interview with James Maxey, “Writing a Novel in One Week,” had this question:

This is an interesting article, but fails to answer the question that every writer must be asking: HOW? He’s writing 10,000 words a day! That’s great! Can it be done? Well, one writer was successful at it. Presumably, others can as well. How? What steps made this goal actionable?

It’s  a pretty practical question, and I passed it on to James to see what his thoughts were. Also, I have some answers to that question myself, because while I’ve never written a novel in a week, I’ve written more than 10,000 words in a day from time to time, including when I wrote the the majority of my novelette “Bottomless,” which won the Writers of the Future contest and appears in Writers of the Future, volume XX.

How do you write 10,000 words in a day? Here’s what James had to say.

Right now, I’m slogging away on a novel called Witchbreaker, wistfully dreaming of those 10k days of Burn Baby Burn. I’m once again back in my 10k words a week territory. Every novel is different, so I’m not overly concerned about my slower speed. Still, while I’m struggling, it’s easy to look back and see what my advantages were at the time.

The things that made Burn Baby Burn a fast novel are actually pretty simple:

1. I’d been thinking about the story for a long time. I had a big list of events and themes I wanted to include. I had enough material to fill a novel ready to go, and a minimalist outline gave me a structure to fit everything into.

2. The unique circumstances that kept me away from work, at home, with no other commitments will be difficult to duplicate again. One thing that’s causing me grief on Witchbreaker is that I bought a house in March that needed a lot of renovations and repairs. Those took time, moving took time, and now we’ve been working on our old house to improve its chances of selling. I have a lot of distractions, and it takes me a long time to ramp back up when I do sit down to write. That said, I’ve carved out some additional time in June to have several sequential days with butt in chair and hope to beat 20k words a week at least a few weeks this month. The more I write in a short amount of time, the better my ability to keep the narrative thread.

3. Burn Baby Burn is a fully developed novel, but it’s also a fairly simple novel. Witchbreaker is the third book in my dragon apocalypse series, and I have dozens of characters I have to keep track of, and at least seven or eight characters with story arcs that have to weave together. Burn Baby Burn really only followed the character arc for Pit Geek and Sunday. The other major characters, the superheroes, remained more or less static. They were fleshed out with backstories and conflicts, but pretty much exited the novel unchanged by the events. This simplicity also provides intensity. By the end of the book you will really be emotionally invested in Pit and Sunday. With Witchbreaker, you have a whole buffet of characters to sample. Some you may fall in love with, some may leave you cold, but all weave together in a grand soap opera. Writing an epic fantasy like this is really kind of like writing a half dozen smaller stories and fitting them all together seamlessly, which is more time consuming.

4. This is probably the biggest factor of all: I’ve been practicing. A long, long time. If Burn Baby Burn were my first or second novel, I would have almost definitely gotten bogged down. Instead, it was maybe the eight novel I wrote? The ninth? On top of what, a hundred short stories? I’ve easily written a million words of fiction by this point. If I count multiple drafts of the same works, I’ve probably got several million words under my belt. I’ve measured my output enough to know that I’ve had several peak days in the past when I did get out over 10k words in a day, usually when I was really swept up in the heat of a story. So, while 10k words in a day is still ambitious, I know it’s possible, so when I have a day where that’s my goal, I can approach it with confidence. Fifteen years ago, 10k words would have felt like a lot of writing. Now, meh. It’s about ten hours of my life. Finding 10 unclaimed hours is an increasingly difficult trick, but, when I do have an hour, I know I can trade it for a thousand words, at least. Last summer, life handed me a week of unclaimed time. I swapped them for a book.

If  you’re just starting out as a writer, your art is just like learning to play a musical instrument or learning to master an athletic skill. Talent only takes you so far. You have to dedicate the practice time if you want to get good. There really are no shortcuts.

I’ll follow up based on my own experience in tomorrow’s post.

Photo by sundaune

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Things I Love: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000

Resources

Even though it’s not usual fare for this site, I’ve been thinking that it might be helpful for me to from time to time talk about something I have or use that I can strongly recommend. I’ve done this for Scrivener in “How Tools and Environment Make Work into Play, Part I: The Example of Scrivener” and “Would Scrivener Make You a Happier Writer.” Here’s a brief discussion of something you may find useful if you do a lot of typing (I do a lot of typing): the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

What I like about this keyboard:

  • It has an ergonomic rather than flat or simply curved layout, which helps me stave off hand and wrist injuries.
  • The two main sections of the keyboard are split, which makes my hands stay on their sides and forces me to type properly. I learned to type through multi-finger hunt-and-peck, so a little rigor really helps me stay in the groove of typing the “right” way–and thus more quickly and accurately. My typing speed is about 80 wpm on this keyboard, which is a little faster than without it. (After all, it’s important to be able to type quickly if you’re going to write prolifically.)
  • It has a number of useful buttons and gizmos, like a zoom slider, multimedia buttons, calculator button, Internet button, e-mail button, and a bank of programmable buttons.
  • Both the wrist rest and the keys feel really nice to me. I’m always a little disappointed when I go back to my older ergonomic keyboard, which I have set up on another computer.
  • It looks cool as long as you’re into black. I know that’s not important, but it’s nice to have. Who in the name of all that’s holy ever decided that “putty” would be a great color for computer devices?
  • It’s the only keyboard I’ve ever seen (though I’m sure not the only one existing) that comes with a piece that elevates the front of the keyboard for a reverse angle–instead of angling the keys up in the back like so many keyboards with feet do. My understanding is that lifting up the back of the keyboard is asking for repetitive motion injuries, while a reverse angle is ergonomically ideal.
  • It’s pretty cheap for a terrific keyboard–less than $40.

I understand and sympathize if you’re one of the many people who’s used to propping a keyboard up in back and/or who is very uncomfortable with an ergonomic layout. About these things, I can just say that my experience was that I got used to the new setup within about a week when I changed over years ago, and I’m very much willing to go through that kind of temporary inconvenience to permanently guard against injuries.

Complaints:

  • Honestly, none so far. Maybe it would be nice to have an easy way to label the 5 programmable function keys, but that’s just getting picky. It’s a pretty nice piece of equipment for the typing-conscious.
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Critique, Mentors, Practice, and a Million Words of Garbage

Writing

This post originally appeared as part of my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” on the now-dormant online magazine Futurismic.

Do writers who use critique groups do better than writers who don’t? Do writers need mentors? What differentiates a bad writer from a good writer, and a good writer from a great writer? Does it always take time to develop writing skills, or do some people just have them right off?

All complicated questions. Here are some answers.

Born with it?
The first thing I have to tell you may not go down easily if you haven’t come across it already. This is it: you were born with pretty much no talent for writing. The same with me. Also Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and the screenwriter forDude, Where’s My Car? … well, let’s not look too closely at that last example. The point is, virtually all writing skill islearned.

I can understand if this isn’t easily believable. The myth of talent is rampant in our culture: the standard idea is that any time we see someone who can do something really well, it’s because that person is just naturally gifted in that area. It’s an understandable mistake to assume that, but other than in very limited ways, like physical build for some kinds of athletes and range of intelligence for many fields, genetics does not determine what a person will be good at.

What does? Practice: lots and lots of focused practice, with lots and lots of feedback. Toddler Mozart practicing music for hours and hours every day under the watchful eye of one of the most celebrated music teachers in Europe at the time–his father. Tiger Woods got long, intensive golf lessons at a very young age from a highly accomplished golf teacher–hisfather. And so on.

Practice and feedback
I won’t work too hard to convince you of the importance of quality practice here, but if you’re interested (or absolutely disbelieving), try my post Do You Have Enough Talent to Be Great at It?, or read Geoff Colvin’s extensively-researched book Talent Is Overrated or the first part of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Skill and artistry come from deliberate practice, which is to say practice that is undertaken in a smart way, that presents challenges, and that gets constant feedback.

Getting deliberate practice means pushing ourselves. Just showing up and putting in minimal effort doesn’t get us anywhere, which is why a mediocre accountant can keep books for 40 years and retire not much less mediocre than he started, if he doesn’t actively try to get better with challenges and feedback.

The feedback part is especially crucial. The process of improving our skills in a particular area is essentially one of try-get feedback-incorporate feedback-try again. If we don’t get feedback, then we have no useful information to apply to our next try, and we’re not likely to get any better.

Ways to get feedback
Fortunately, sources of feedback for writers abound. First of all, our own reactions to our writing are feedback, and while that feedback isn’t unbiased, it can be useful. For instance, if I write a story and am excited by what I’m writing–whether it’s coming out easily or has to be dragged word by word from the gaping pit of Hell–then that bodes much better for the work than if I have no strong reaction to it, or only have vague hopes that it might be good enough.

But feedback from others is even more valuable, because other people will react more to the story on paper than to the story the writer is imagining. Every story critique we receive, every family member who sits through reading something we’ve written or starts to read it and then makes an excuse to put it aside, every rejection letter, every personal note scrawled in the margin of a rejection letter, every acceptance and rewrite request, every review, every letter from a reader who loves or hates the story helps tell us how we’ve affected one particular reader–and in the case of editors and agents, that reader’s professional opinion of the impact of our writing will likely have on other readers.

The problems are that every reader is different and that some of the feedback we get isn’t even a faithful representation of what the reader really thinks. A writer I know, for instance, went through a critique group where she was energetically encouraged to submit a book–a book that it later turned out most of the encouraging parties hadn’t even read. Then she switched into a critique group where one particular member seemed to be certain that she had no idea how to tell a decent story, on the theory that his opinion alone was valid to tell what was and wasn’t decent writing. (More on these particular incidents can be found in my article Telling Bad Advice from Good Advice.)

Still, it’s essential to get some kind of outside feedback on writing, even if that feedback is only rejection slips, acceptances, or sales figures–with more feedback being better as long as the writer can keep up with it. But it’s also essential to realize that no single person can give complete feedback on any piece of writing. A person can only pass along an individual reaction and, if that person is an experienced professional in writing or publishing, conclusions based on professional experience–which can also easily be off. For instance, J.K. Rowling’s agent had to spend a full year finding a publisher for the first Harry Potter book because publisher after publisher kept rejecting it: their experience told them it was too long to sell. They were right, in a way: the recent successes for that age group were much shorter books (although it’s hard to say if that was in part self-fulfilling, that no one would publish longer books due to the conventional wisdom that longer books wouldn’t sell). Like everyone, these publishers have individual tastes and limits to their knowledge. No one opinion can be comprehensive.

Yoda, Gandalf, Donald Trump
Which brings us to mentors, who can be incredibly helpful or the worst possible influence. After all, if a mentor has very high credibility then we tend to put a lot of weight on whatever they say, whether they’re saying that your story is great and should sell to a major market (Orson Scott Card, speaking to a writing student whose story sold immediately on being sent out) or San Francisco Examiner editor who reputedly rejected Rudyard Kipling with the words “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” If the mentor has low credibility, then we tend to disregard what they’re saying unless it completely agrees with our own already-formed opinions, but a high-credibility mentor can create beliefs about our work that may or may not be any help to us going forward. One writer I knew wrote a piece of flash fiction that was praised highly by a seasoned pro. The writer, preoccupied with the high praise, rewrote the piece over and over for years as it grew into first a short story, then a novelette, and then a novella. To the best of my knowledge, he never did sell the final version.

The worst mentors, though, are those with high credibility but little real experience. For instance, while some college writing professors are excellent mentors, others may have no successful experience of their own in the kinds of writing that interest you. For instance, if you want to write historical romance novels, what’s the value of feedback from a professor who doesn’t read romance and whose own publications are limited to intensely experimental fiction published in tiny literary magazines? We won’t even talk about a writing teacher whose work hasn’t been published anywhere significant at all.

But if we imagine for a minute a mentor who has good credibility and whose comments tend to offer a lot of insight that the student doesn’t already have, it quickly becomes apparent how useful one can be. Someone who really knows what they’re talking about can set the record straight very quickly and accelerate the process of becoming a better writer. At “Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp” in 2001, Orson Scott Card talked to me and the 19 other participants about actively coming up with ideas instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, and then had us use different strategies to come up with those ideas until we saw that we could conjure them on demand. At the Writers of the Future Workshop in 2003, Tim Powers talked about the importance of using the senses in writing (for example, he recommended knowing where the light was coming from in every scene), and that good advice has stuck with me, too.

Fortunately, mentors also come in convenient book and blog form. Books like Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel, Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint, or Stephen King’s On Writing (other suggestions in comments are welcome) deliver an enormous amount of useful information that can prevent having to learn their lessons through years of trial and error, or worse, never learning those lessons at all. But this isn’t feedback per se, just ideas that we can incorporate into our own attempts. Feedback from ourselves and others will eventually tell us how successful those ideas were.

The real magic starts happening once we write and send our work out into the world–to a friend, to a critique group, to a magazine, to an agent, to a mentor, or anywhere where it can be praised, scoffed at, devoured, or ignored. Card theorized that writers have a million words of garbage to write before their writing gets consistently good, and this might be a pretty good rule of thumb–something along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion (which he does a good job of backing up with evidence) that regardless of the skill, it takes about 10,000 hours to become really world class (not just professionally competent) at something. In both cases, the pages and hours are practice, and practice is more effective when it’s more challenging and when it includes more and better feedback–so that the length of time and the amount of work between where we are now and where we want to be as writers becomes shorter the better the quality of our practice and feedback.

Photo by /Sizemore/

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Communicating Emotions: Useful Words

Resources

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life offers an invaluable method for helping to resolve conflicts constructively, whether you’re directly involved or not, and even if you’re the only person there who knows anything about it.

Among the resources offered on the Nonviolent Communication Web site at http://www.cnvc.org/learn/resources is a list of words used to describe emotions. These are valuable in any kind of communication about feelings partly because of how tricky it sometimes is to convey exactly how we feel to another person and partly to help us differentiate between emotions and judgments (see the article preceding this, “The Difference Between an Emotion and a Judgment“). Here is that list, also available at http://www.cnvc.org/Training/feelings-inventory .

Feelings when your needs are satisfied

AFFECTIONATE
compassionate
friendly
loving
open hearted
sympathetic
tender
warm

ENGAGED
absorbed
alert
curious
engrossed
enchanted
entranced
fascinated
interested
intrigued
involved
spellbound
stimulated

HOPEFUL
expectant
encouraged
optimistic

CONFIDENT
empowered
open
proud
safe
secure

EXCITED
amazed
animated
ardent
aroused
astonished
dazzled
eager
energetic
enthusiastic
giddy
invigorated
lively
passionate
surprised
vibrant

GRATEFUL
appreciative
moved
thankful
touched

INSPIRED
amazed
awed
wonder

JOYFUL
amused
delighted
glad
happy
jubilant
pleased
tickled

EXHILARATED
blissful
ecstatic
elated
enthralled
exuberant
radiant
rapturous
thrilled

PEACEFUL
calm
clear headed
comfortable
centered
content
equanimous
fulfilled
mellow
quiet
relaxed
relieved
satisfied
serene
still
tranquil
trusting

REFRESHED
enlivened
rejuvenated
renewed
rested
restored
revived

Feelings when your needs are not satisfied

AFRAID
apprehensive
dread
foreboding
frightened
mistrustful
panicked
petrified
scared
suspicious
terrified
wary
worried

ANNOYED
aggravated
dismayed
disgruntled
displeased
exasperated
frustrated
impatient
irritated
irked

ANGRY
enraged
furious
incensed
indignant
irate
livid
outraged
resentful

AVERSION
animosity
appalled
contempt
disgusted
dislike
hate
horrified
hostile
repulsed

CONFUSED
ambivalent
baffled
bewildered
dazed
hesitant
lost
mystified
perplexed
puzzled
torn

DISCONNECTED
alienated
aloof
apathetic
bored
cold
detached
distant
distracted
indifferent
numb
removed
uninterested
withdrawn

DISQUIET
agitated
alarmed
discombobulated
disconcerted
disturbed
perturbed
rattled
restless
shocked
startled
surprised
troubled
turbulent
turmoil
uncomfortable
uneasy
unnerved
unsettled
upset

EMBARRASSED
ashamed
chagrined
flustered
guilty
mortified
self-conscious

FATIGUE
beat
burnt out
depleted
exhausted
lethargic
listless
sleepy
tired
weary
worn out

PAIN
agony
anguished
bereaved
devastated
grief
heartbroken
hurt
lonely
miserable
regretful
remorseful

SAD
depressed
dejected
despair
despondent
disappointed
discouraged
disheartened
forlorn
gloomy
heavy hearted
hopeless
melancholy
unhappy
wretched

(c) 2005 by Center for Nonviolent Communication
Website: www.cnvc.org Email: cnvc@cnvc.org
Phone: +1.505.244.4041

Note: If you read my previous article, you may have noticed that the list and I disagree on the word “hurt,” but regardless it seems to me that thinking about words that carefully can be a great help, whichever side of that question you would choose.

Photo by Saad Kadhi of a sculpture by Bruce Krebs

Feelings when your needs are satisfied

AFFECTIONATE
compassionate
friendly
loving
open hearted
sympathetic
tender
warm

ENGAGED
absorbed
alert
curious
engrossed
enchanted
entranced
fascinated
interested
intrigued
involved
spellbound
stimulated

HOPEFUL
expectant
encouraged
optimistic

CONFIDENT
empowered
open
proud
safe
secure

EXCITED
amazed
animated
ardent
aroused
astonished
dazzled
eager
energetic
enthusiastic
giddy
invigorated
lively
passionate
surprised
vibrant

GRATEFUL
appreciative
moved
thankful
touched

INSPIRED
amazed
awed
wonder

JOYFUL
amused
delighted
glad
happy
jubilant
pleased
tickled

EXHILARATED
blissful
ecstatic
elated
enthralled
exuberant
radiant
rapturous
thrilled

PEACEFUL
calm
clear headed
comfortable
centered
content
equanimous
fulfilled
mellow
quiet
relaxed
relieved
satisfied
serene
still
tranquil
trusting

REFRESHED
enlivened
rejuvenated
renewed
rested
restored
revived

Feelings when your needs are not satisfied

AFRAID
apprehensive
dread
foreboding
frightened
mistrustful
panicked
petrified
scared
suspicious
terrified
wary
worried

ANNOYED
aggravated
dismayed
disgruntled
displeased
exasperated
frustrated
impatient
irritated
irked

ANGRY
enraged
furious
incensed
indignant
irate
livid
outraged
resentful

AVERSION
animosity
appalled
contempt
disgusted
dislike
hate
horrified
hostile
repulsed

CONFUSED
ambivalent
baffled
bewildered
dazed
hesitant
lost
mystified
perplexed
puzzled
torn

DISCONNECTED
alienated
aloof
apathetic
bored
cold
detached
distant
distracted
indifferent
numb
removed
uninterested
withdrawn

DISQUIET
agitated
alarmed
discombobulated
disconcerted
disturbed
perturbed
rattled
restless
shocked
startled
surprised
troubled
turbulent
turmoil
uncomfortable
uneasy
unnerved
unsettled
upset

EMBARRASSED
ashamed
chagrined
flustered
guilty
mortified
self-conscious

FATIGUE
beat
burnt out
depleted
exhausted
lethargic
listless
sleepy
tired
weary
worn out

PAIN
agony
anguished
bereaved
devastated
grief
heartbroken
hurt
lonely
miserable
regretful
remorseful

SAD
depressed
dejected
despair
despondent
disappointed
discouraged
disheartened
forlorn
gloomy
heavy hearted
hopeless
melancholy
unhappy
wretched

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Writing a Novel in One Week

Writing

How fast can you write well? Don’t mistake slowness for quality: what speedy writing lacks in deliberation, under the right circumstances and with enough writing practice behind it, it can more than make up for in involvement, awareness, and momentum.

James Maxey, author of numerous successful short stories and of the Dragon Age trilogy of novels, has been used to a goal of 10,000 words written per week. This is pretty ambitious by almost anyone’s standards, and he doesn’t always hit the mark. Recently, though, he found he suddenly and unexpectedly had a full week without obligations, and he asked himself if for that time he might be capable of writing 10,000 words a day. Working like that for a week, he reasoned, it should be possible to write an entire novel.

Maxey planned a roughly 60,000-word sequel to his superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl (Phobos Books, 2003; available in paperback and for Kindle), wrote an outline based on ideas he’d been having for years, and psyched himself up. At about 4:00 am on August 8th, he started writing. Stopping for little more than food and sleep, he pushed hard and completed the book in a 58,829-word first draft on August 14th at about quarter to three in the afternoon, with more than 13 hours to spare. His novel, appropriately enough, is called Burn Baby Burn.

And not only did he complete and survive the project, but he also kindly agreed to let me interview him about it a few days later.

Let me jump in with an obvious question: what in the world made you think you could write a novel in a week?

I knew that crime and adventure novelists from the pulp era often cranked out multiple short novels per month. Michael Moorcock claims to have written some of his Elric novels in a week, and I’d heard that Jim Thompson wrote The Grifters in a weekend (though I tried to Google that factoid this morning and couldn’t find it, so I may have been working under a false premise!).

Like most writers, I have a day job. I’ve pretty much been continuously employed since I left college. The vast majority of my writing takes place in stolen moments. When I’m in the zone, I can produce roughly 1000 words in an hour. But, it’s so hard to get in the zone. After I get home from work, I’m too burned out to sit down and write immediately. After I start feeling like myself again and get to work in an evening, right about the time I’m feeling warmed up, it’s bed-time, since I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning to punch the clock again.

And I’ve always wondered: What if I was punching the clock to write? Could I put my butt in a chair and leave it there for eight hours a day? Every now in then on a day off, I managed to do this. My record for a single day was 13,000 words. But, it’s rare I have a day off when I have a free eight hours. On weekends, I like to go biking and canoeing with my fiancée. My vacations are normally spent with family at the beach. I don’t want to be a recluse and cut myself off from all human contact. So, most weeks, I only get about 10 hours of writing time.

Then, in a surprising plot twist, my employer announced they were shutting down my workplace for a week to rewire the building for new equipment. I had only a month’s notice. Suddenly, I found myself with a week of time where I’d be home all day while my fiancée and all my friends would be at work. I had no plans to travel, no obligations at all. After fantasizing for the last twenty years about how much writing I could do if I wasn’t employed, it was suddenly time to discover if I had what it takes to write a book in one week, or if I’d been kidding myself all along.

I know this is already a long answer, but there are two more elements that play into this: 1. I discovered this year that I had a severe thyroid deficiency. One way I discovered this was that the records I keep of how many words I produce a week showed a declining trend. I’ve now been taking medication for several months to compensate, and just in the last few months have felt my brain wind back up to full speed. I wrote the bulk of my last novel, Hush, when my thyroid deficiency was at its worst, I felt like I’d been running a marathon wearing lead boots. Now, the boots were off, and I felt faster than ever. 2. The novel I had in mind was a novel I’d wanted to write for years, but hadn’t because I didn’t think I could sell it. But, the publishing world has been upended by e-books, and now I can write whatever I want to write secure in the knowledge that I can bring it to readers via Kindle and Nook. Knowing that what I’m writing is definitely going to see print (or pixels, at least) is a tremendous motivator.

What obstacle threatened to hold you back the most, and how did you get past it?

I would say that my biggest obstacle was that I can type a heck of a lot faster than I can imagine story details. So, after a big rush of words on the first day, each subsequent day got a little tougher as my imagination buffer kept running dry. By Wednesday, I really wondered if I should pull the plug on the project. I wrote a very clunky chapter that was also pretty short, but which still took hours to produce. I worried I’d reached a point of diminishing returns, and continuing might actually ruin the book if I kept cranking out bad chapters.

Fortunately, I was posting chapters to my blog at dragonprophet.blogspot.com as I wrote them. I’d announced I was going to finish a novel in a week there, and on Facebook, and on Codex. Failing to keep posting chapters would have been a pretty public failure. So, mostly to avoid embarrassment, I kept writing on Thursday morning. And, yay! I liked the chapter I wrote. I didn’t spend as much time at the keyboard Thursday – Sunday as I did Monday – Wednesday, when I was pretty much glued to the computer. I would walk away and think about what happened next, then what happened next, and not come back until I had three events to flesh out. Three events didn’t require a huge effort to think up, and proved sufficient to let me keep typing without feeling like my brain was running dry.

I do think that, if I hadn’t been so public with my goal, the temptation to quit after I’d gotten 30k words written for the week would have been difficult to overcome. I’d never written that much in a week before. It would have been very easy to call it a win and finish the rest of the book before the end of the month at my old 10k words a week pace.

How do you feel the book came out compared to books you’ve written at a more usual speed?

The plot was definitely more stream-lined. It’s still a fully developed main plot, but it only has two or three sub-plots. Through the book, there are only three point-of-view characters. Sunday and Pit’s POVs drive the main story, while the superhero known as Ap has a few POV chapters where the primary subplot is developed.

In comparison, my Bitterwood novels all have at least a dozen point of view characters, and more interweaving subplots than I can count.

But, I wasn’t aiming for epic fantasy. I was shooting for a page-turning pulp adventure featuring atomic supermen and space aliens drifting along dark desert highways. This is the sort of novel I used to devour on a single summer afternoon when I was a teenager. On the other hand, this novel isn’t mental junk food filled with empty calories. I think I manage to get to moments in the book that will prove thought provoking, and other moments that will provide genuine emotional catharsis. It’s a book I’m proud of, and can’t wait to get into the hands of readers.

You can also read James Maxey’s post “Five tricks for writing a novel in a week” here. The full text of the first draft of Burn Baby Burn is available permanently for free on Maxey’s Web site, though Maxey says “it may be a bit of a slog to read since I didn’t bother fixing the formatting for the web,” while you can get the finished and polished book for Kindle here. The result was entertaining and fairly engrossing, I thought. You can read my review on the book’s Amazon page.

By the way, James has a habit of coming up with pithy things to say about writing. You can see some of his writing quotes here.

This piece is adapted from my Futurismic column “Brain Hacks for Writers”

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Lon Prater reviews the Marshall Plan Novel Writing Software

Writing

Lon Prater kindly agreed to guest post about Marshall Plan novel writing software. Lon is a friend through the online writers’ group Codex. You can find out a bit more about him and jump to his Web site at the bottom of this post.

marshallsoftware

Near the end of October 2013, I was given a free copy of the Marshall Plan Novel Writing Software (Mac version) to review. After tinkering with it about 10 weeks, I’m ready to share my thoughts on it.

Some Background
I was first exposed to The Marshall Plan as a set of extremely helpful books by agent and author Evan Marshall. One book focuses on writing your novel, the second on selling it. There are also some workbooks, but I have no background with them. The two main books have a lot of meaty, useful stuff packed inside. Though geared for planners over “pantsers” there’s still a lot of valuable technique to be learned in these books, as well as crunchy good info on the business and career side of selling what you write. There are sections of these books I have gone back to reread no less than eight or nine times over the years.

One of the most specifically structured aspects of the Marshall Plan is a breakdown of how many scenes a book of a given length should have, with some additional consideration for genre, and how the viewpoints should be distributed across those scenes. As you can imagine, this can get incredibly fidgety.

As an example: a 70K Suspense/Crime novel would be broken up into 56 sections, with so many from the point of view of the Lead, the Opposition, and the Romantic Involvement—each happening in a specific (but not confiningly rigid) order. Pivotal turning points and other standout scenes have specific requirements, and there are certain elements that every Action or Reaction Section should have.

Laying out a plot using these strictures will probably suffocate the dedicated discovery writer (much the way Randy Ingermanson’s fractal-based and mostly helpful Snowflake Method has been known to do to unsuspecting pantsers) but don’t let this sway you from the value of the Marshall Plan when it is telescoped out from the scene by scene structuring. There is just as much valuable information in the Plan when it comes to the overall arc of your story, subplot, etc.

The Software
For those who enjoy the level of detail employed in the Marshall Plan, the software is probably going to be very appealing. I know that I personally jumped at the chance to review the program based simply on how much I adore the main book. I had expectations that this software would be on par with Scrivener or WriteWay Pro (both of which I have used over the years).

When I say “on par” let me spell out my expectation: a program that would help me organize key information, plan and outline my novel, and provide a native word processing function that would allow me to write the novel in sections tied to my outline. I get all of those and more with WriteWay Pro and Scrivener. (Much more in some cases) Those programs generally cost about $50.00, less when you catch a sale.

Now here’s the part where this review gets painfully honest.

The Marshall Plan Novel Writing Software fulfills all my novel planning and outlining needs, but lacks a function for writing and saving sections within the program itself, and also lacks a dedicated place to stow your research and scratch pad ideas. For so much less functionality than similar writing-based programs, you’d think this would cost a lot less than Scrivener or WriteWay Pro.

You’d be wrong. I checked for sales during NaNoWriMo and Christmas and again in mid-January. The current and constant price for this software has been $149.00.

Most aspiring writers just made their buying decision at the end of the last paragraph. But some of you are no doubt wondering “Is the part that’s there so awesome it makes it worth paying triple the money for 1/3 the functionality?”

What You Get For The Money
Again with the expectation/reality game. I thought, surely for that much money this will be one hell of a polished machine, a sleek German-engineered novel planning joyride. I mean, the sales literature even says, “It practically writes your novel for you!” and who wouldn’t want that kind of efficiency? No one, that’s who.

I searched for signs of that luxury app feel, some clue as to what would make this program worth that kind of scratch, and the only thing I can muster up as a reason is, as the cool kids say today: “because proprietary”. True to its promises, the software automates the difficult sectioning and outlining functions, in the specific proportions of The Marshall Plan. This would have otherwise been a laborious project, even if you had purchased the Workbook to help you. It also repeats key concepts from the books in scrollable windows of advice. Though the entire book is not included, just summary passages on structure, character building, editing, and careers. (To me they left the best part of the book out of the program, the parts covering techniques for clarity and how to handle exposition, dialogue, etc.) There is also an extensive list of Character Names and meanings.

Minor Complaints
The software feels unfinished to me for several small reasons, and one large one.  The small ones first:

  • There are numerous typos and artifacts of earlier builds hiding in the sparse help text and directions. For $150 this thing better be as typo-free as a query letter. Examples: 1) The text says click the Genre List above, but actually it’s a drop down menu on the left side of the screen. 2) “Or use a Reaction Section, as explained above” but the explanation is below. 3) There are an awful lot of doubled quotation marks “” scattered throughout the documentation.
  • Arrowheads used to open and close parts of the program felt stingy and smallish; they required concentration to click them reliably.
  • Minor Character support is not robust at all. You get to put in a Name and a Role, but if you want to keep any other info straight about them, you better go buy a notebook. Also, there does not appear to be a way to export Minor Character data.
  • The List of Names is very long. Which would be just ducky if there was a search function, or you were allowed to jump to a certain letter. Nope. Start scrolling at A on either the Male list or the Female list. 7,000 names between them…

The Worst Offender
One of the earliest, and most important steps of planning your novel with this software is when you pick the overall length you are going to aim for. The program gives a lot of valuable information about averages for genres and so on, in perhaps a bit more granularity than that handy 2010 post from Colleen Lindsay’s The Swivet everyone likes to go by.

But where it gets dicey is when you decide on that length and then enter it into the form field directly under this, in red: (Warning: Reducing your novel’s word length removes and/or resets sections, so data may be lost.)

To be fair, the software does provide a warning. What does this mean in practice?  It means that once you set a word length, the program will create a list of Action and Reaction Scenes and tell you which ones need to be from a certain viewpoint character and which you can choose the point of view. It will also dedicate space for you to write notes about what will happen in each of those sections.

But if in the course of writing—or even outlining—you discover that this is really panning out to be more of a 70K novel than the 90K novel you thought your idea would support, you have two choices:

  • You can start a brand new outline file (because remember, this program doesn’t actually have a word processor built in) in the software and laboriously cut and paste all your notes for each section into the new outline file.
  • You can change the existing file, knowing that you will lose what you have saved as notes for several sections. Print a copy before you change the length and then retype your notes back in.

To me, either option seems like a lot of wasted time that would be better spent writing that first draft. To me, this would be a dealkiller even if the program cost less than a Happy Meal.

Wrapup
I started evaluating this program from a very positive and hopeful place. I like The Marshall Plan books and I was excited about getting a copy of the software to try.

In the end, I wanted to give a better review than I was able to.

Until the software has more features, more polish, allows changing novel’s length without losing data, and doesn’t bite so deep into the wallet, I cannot recommend it for anyone without money to burn (a rare descriptor for novelists) and extraordinary confidence that they can make any story idea take X amount of words to tell it. There are just too many better values currently available in the marketplace, at a fraction of the cost.

That said, if you haven’t read The Marshall Plan for Writing Your Novel, I can’t recommend the book highly enough.

####

About the Reviewer: Lon Prater has worked in the Reactor Compartments of USS Enterprise, edited the military’s textbook on arms deals, and kept things safe in the produce and laundry industries. His fiction has appeared in the Stoker-winning anthology Borderlands 5, Origins Award finalist Frontier Cthulhu, and dozens of other publications. Visit www.LonPrater.com to find out more.

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Inclusivity and Exclusivity in Fiction: Anatoly Belilovsky on Atrocities and Menschkeit

Interviews

This is the eighth interview and the tenth post in my series on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction. You can find a full list of other posts so far in the series at the end of this piece.

In today’s post, I talk with Russian-American writer and physician Anatoly Belilovsky.

LUC: Your background and origins are very different from most English-speaking writers and readers. How does that affect how you read and write fiction?

ANATOLY: That used to be an easy question, until I found at least three other Anglophone writers with backgrounds somewhat similar to mine, whose writing and criticism of science fiction and fantasy (and much of everything else) is either different from mine, to varying degrees, or, in one case (and, no, I won’t drop names here) diametrically opposite. So, in a broad sense, I am not sure how my origins feed into my weltanschauung. I think the best I can do is tell my story and let readers make their own conclusions.

I grew up in a culture whose dominant language has no words for privacy and appointment, with an entire set rules of etiquette for behaving while on a queue, with another set of traditions for communal apartments with shared kitchens and bathrooms; a society in which, for most of its history, its own government, while pretending to look out for the good of the common people, committed unparalleled atrocities against them.

It was also a culture that took art and literature seriously – as serious tools for social engineering. “Inclusion” and “marginalization” had very different meanings there and then: “Inclusion” meant membership in Writer’s Union, which opened doors to publication, and “marginalization” meant being relegated to Samizdat (“Self-publishing,” a tricky proposition in a country in which typewriters were registered with samples of output to permit matching pages to their sources) or Tamizdat (“There-publishing,” by Russian emigre markets – the route that led to highly embarrassing Nobel Prizes in literature for Joseph Brodsky and Boris Pasternak, for works never published in their native country.) The Writer’s Union also took seriously the question of publishing underrepresented populations: having praises of Worker’s Paradise sung by a variety of voices in a variety of languages was a major priority. This led to a highly amusing episode: two banned writers encountered an unknown aspiring poet who was bilingual in Russian and another, obscure, language. Forming a mini-conspiracy, the trio wrote ideologically impeccable poetry that brought in money and prizes by the bucketful, and continued to circulate what they wanted in Samizdat.

Outside of the never-never land of inter-ethnic harmony in Social Realist literature, things weren’t all that rosy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Koreans_in_the_Soviet_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets

To make a long story short, coming to America was a culture shock of which I’ll talk in another installment. Suffice it to say that, right from the start, much of what would be considered a dark dystopia by a Western reader, felt like a lighthearted satire of the real world (A Clockwork Orange, 1984.)

As for “literary” fiction, I never could bring myself to care for most of its characters and conflicts. Catcher in the Rye is emblematic of that: I’m afraid I never could see Holden Caulfield as anything other than a spoiled brat in search of excuses for his upper-class ennui.

LUC: What kinds of issues about inclusivity or disregard do you see in other people’s fiction that the authors themselves often miss?

ANATOLY:

I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.

–James Watt

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

–William Shakespeare

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.

–Walter Miller Jr

I chose these quotes to illustrate a few points.

The second is to illustrate what inclusivity is, all too often, exclusively defined as: writing about characters whose “differentness,” and society’s callousness in dealing with that “differentness,” is the sole, or the major, driving force behind the plot and the character’s actions. That’s a perfectly valid way of looking at inclusivity, but it really isn’t mine. I look for common ground, for the universal experience.The first one is to illustrate what inclusivity isn’t. Hogwarts inclusion of the Patel twins and Cho Chang cannot be called inclusive: the twins’ roles rise barely above those of furniture, and Cho gets to break under pressure and then feel terrible about it. If plot is a river, Cho gets swept away by the current while the twins get to sit on the banks and stare at the water. Whatever roles were given to individuals who shared the panel with Mr Watt, they were clearly not the ones who rowed that boat.

Which brings me to the third quote. It bears repeating:

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.

Miller is writing about a Jew – never mind what happened to that Jew later, he’s certainly a Jew writing these words – who is thinking what anyone would be thinking, with apocalypse looming beyond the horizon: he is thinking of his family.. And instead of drawing a huge red arrow that says, “LOOK AT ME – A JEWISH MENSCH WHO LOVES HIS FAMILY!” he is keeping that feeling in the subconscious, the tip of the iceberg of genuine powerful love showing up as a note to self to bring home some food. Leibowitz’s Yiddishkheit quite literally shows up in the grammatic construction (of is superfluous in languages that have a genitive case) and in the food choices, the limbs and outward flourishes, while his universal, transcendent Menschkheit (which I choose to translate as “humanity,” not “masculinity”) is responsible for the caring that drove it.

Now I get to talk about my kind of inclusivity.

Ken Liu’s Nebula and Hugo-winning Paper Menagerie [note from Luc: between when we conducted this interview and now, the story also won the World Fantasy Award] is about a kid who’s ashamed of how uncool his mother is. OK, the kid is half-Chinese and his mother barely speaks English, and the descriptions are good enough that you find yourself totally immersed in the story, you can see the scenes and the characters as vividly as if they were on film, and yet it brought up memories of my late, decidedly non-Asian mother, and the catharsis of the story’s protagonist triggered one of my own. I had a conversation with Ken about that story at Readercon, and I think it surprised him, at least a little, how broad an appeal this story had.

On the same Hugo ballot was Mike Resnick’s Homecoming. It’s a universal “fathers and sons” story, relevant to anyone, and here is the funny part: I first heard it as a podcast, narrated by an African-American voice talent. I could see the characters of this story as well, in my mind’s eye, and the father came across as a very definitely African-American elderly man. Didn’t change the universality of the story, only grounded it in a very specific mental image. And I really don’t know if I would have had the same image if I had read the story in print, first.

On the subject of “exclusion,” I have a bone to pick.

There seems to be an approved list of oppressions and atrocities as subjects for fiction. The deportations by the Soviet government of a number of ethnic groups dwarf in size, in casualties, and in sheer nastiness, the Japanese internment of WWII. Seen any Anglophone stories set in the Holodomor? Me neither. No one seems to be protesting the exclusion of such oppressed minorities as Koryo-saram, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Russian kulaks, Don cossacks, geneticists, students of Esperanto and abstract painters, all dealt with rather harshly back in the old country.

Amusing anecdote: I have my mother’s old 1950’s Soviet psychiatry textbook, somewhere. On page 100 there is a pearl the equal of which I have never seen – here in my translation:

Homosexuality is not necessarily a form of psychopathology. In reactionary societies where payment of bride price is customary, it may be the only possibility available to men of the poorer classes who cannot afford to marry.

I always wondered how drunk the editors had to be to come up with that.

I get the sense of Western civilization being singled out for criticism in both Western and non-Western literature, and I see this being accepted as the right and proper course, and I am not willing to leave this assumption unexamined in a comparative analysis. Suffice it to say that back in the old country at least, being “disregarded” was, for an individual or a minority population, the best of all possible states, and any kind of attention would have been immeasurably worse.

LUC: Now you’re bringing up a point that I don’t think I’ve really heard discussed before: prejudice and persecution of other cultures by other cultures. For instance, I suspect the reason we hear so little of Soviet oppression of the Koryo-saram (ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Union) in English-language literature is that English-speakers often have little familiarity with either Russians (and other Soviet cultures) or Koreans, to say nothing of Korean-Russians. It seems to be much simpler and more obvious for people who are trying to fight bigotry to focus on the bigotry of the people they know, yet the death by deportation and neglect of 40,000 Koryo-saram–not to mention some of the other atrocities you mention–dwarfs much of what happens in our own culture. What’s the case for learning about and writing fiction about persecution in other cultures?

ANATOLY:

It seems to be much simpler and more obvious for people who are trying to fight bigotry to focus on the bigotry of the people they know

There was an old Russian joke: a Russian and an American soldier are facing each other across Checkpoint Charlie. The American says, “It’s really better in the West. I can stand here all day yelling, “Down with Reagan!” and no one will bother me.” The Russian says, “So what? I can stand here and shout “Down with Reagan!” all day, too, and they might even give me a medal!”

I think the problem is better stated as, It seems more rewarding to focus on bigotry that affects them and the people they know. Which is a perfectly valid approach; my own activism, such as it is, is aimed at thwarting social – psychohistorical, if you will – forces that have a chance of leading us down the same terrible path as the one that had led to the 70-year Soviet nightmare, and to the crushing bigotry to which the resulting society subjected myself and my own family. And the first and most insidious of those forces is the demonization of success.

Before I get lumped in with Ayn Rand, I find demonization of lack of success equally repugnant. In fact, the only things worth demonizing are hypocrisy, in advocating changes sure to produce results opposite to those promised, and stupidity, in believing such promises.

What’s the case for learning about and writing fiction about persecution in other cultures?

Well, what’s the case against learning and writing about persecution in other cultures? Is it that it has no relevance to our world? Is it something that can’t happen here?

Or is it that, by pursuing one of these lines of thought, we…

ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita?

[find ourselves lost in a strange and darkened forest, where the direct path is lost — Dante’s Inferno]

as we realize that, in limiting ourselves to axes of oppression that intersect upon the standard model of privilege, we have been writing exclusively about spherical cows.

Let’s start with Internationale, which I remember by heart (in Russian, of course) having had to sing it countless times:

Весь мир насилья мы разрушим
До основанья, а затем
Мы наш, мы новый мир построим, —
Кто был ничем, тот станет всем.

We will destroy this world of violence
Down to the foundations, and then
We will build our new world.
He who was nothing will become everything!

Koryo-saram, Volga Germans, and others were not oppressed because they were poor, powerless minorities. They were oppressed because they were perceived to have power and privilege (in the form of land, a sufficiency of food, and a few non-spherical cows,) for not succumbing along with everyone else to revolutionary mismanagement. They were oppressed in order to make them into poor, powerless minorities that the Soviet state could then manipulate at will.

And to those who don’t think this has any relevance to the world we live in, I say: “Blessed are they who share the Universe with spherical cows.”


Anatoly Belilovsky came to the US from the USSR in 1976, learned English from watching Star Trek reruns, worked his way through Princeton as a teaching assistant in Russian, and ended up a pediatrician in an area of New York where English is the 4th most commonly spoken language. It is perhaps unwise to expect from him anything resembling conventional fiction. His fiction appears in NatureIdeomancerAndromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine the Immersion Book of Steampunk, and elsewhere. He can be found online at  http://apogrypha.blogspot.com/.


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Wait, You’re Not a Real Writer at All!

Writing

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

Writing professionally, or even just aspiring to write professionally, requires a weird combination of hubris and humility. You have to be willing to believe, at least for the 15 minutes it takes to put together and send out your submission, that the stuff you make up and write down is so fascinating that thousands or tens of thousands of people would pay good money to read it. The Hollywood Bowl has a seating capacity of about 18,000, but even a modestly successful midlist novelist or someone who sells a story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reaches more people than that. Who the hell do we think we are?

At the same time, we have to embrace humility if we’re not going to drive ourselves nuts. Actors and salespeople are among the few who compete with writers in the “getting rejected” department–and even those professions don’t spend two years on a project, send it out, wait eighteen months, and receive in return a form letter saying “No thank you; good luck elsewhere.”

Impostor syndrome
So is it any wonder that writers are often susceptible to Impostor Syndrome? If you’re not familiar with Impostor Syndrome, you might be interested in the article “Impostor Syndrome” on this site, but short version is that it’s when you see your successes and you think they must be due to someone making a mistake. Any time you sell a story, get a bite from an agent, or receive a positive review, it seems like a fluke. Obviously these people don’t understand that I’m really a big faker, you might think, or if I wrote something good, it was just blind luck and will never happen again.

Many many writers I know struggle with impostor syndrome. From a certain perspective, it makes sense: if you spend years and years looking up to people who are getting regularly published in certain magazines or whose novels are making it into the hands of thousands of satisfied readers, and if during this time you get a constant barrage of polite but generally impersonal messages that say “No, this thing that you poured your heart and every ounce of skill you have into really isn’t any good,” then you’d have a pretty inflated view of yourself to not ask yourself if the sale you finally get isn’t some kind of anomaly. (No disrespect intended to those who, like me, lean more to the hubris side than the humility one.) Maybe the editor who bought your story was drunk when she read it. Maybe your new agent is confusing you with another writer who’s actually good.

Misdirected expectations
It can get even worse when you have a little success: maybe you sell a story or get an honorable mention in a major contest. What happens if the next story you send out fails miserably? It just reinforces the idea that the first success was a fluke–even though any decent statistician with access to writers’ track records would predict a few failures with a high degree of confidence, even for writers who overall became very successful.

It doesn’t help that we writers are not particularly good judges of our own work. (See “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing”). We may think a particular piece we’ve done is the best thing ever written, or may think it’s utter trash, and in either case we can be right on the nose, tragically wrong, or even both.

Thinking your way out
So how do you stop feeling like a faker? Well, there’s thought and there’s action.

In the thought department, we’re better off when we avoid telling ourselves things that are either false or questionable and instead stick to things we know are true. For instance, instead of thinking “I know this story is going to be rejected,” we can substitute the thought “This story might sell or it might not. If it doesn’t, I’ll send it somewhere else.” That process, called “cognitive restructuring” (or my preferred term, “idea repair”), may seem elementary, but it’s surprisingly effective, as research and clinical results have shown. If you’re interested in idea repair, which is useful for far more than just addressing Impostor Syndrome, you can find articles, books, and other resources on the topic here.

Where does confidence come from?
On the action side of things, one of the most productive things to do is more. Write more, send more out, and get more used to the rejections–and the acceptances. I was at my son’s high school yesterday for a parent presentation, and I was powerfully impressed to see what complete confidence and self-possession every one of his teachers showed when presenting to groups of parents. How can they be so confident? I asked myself.

The answer to where the confidence came from was quickly obvious to me: these are teachers who enjoy their jobs, and they stand up and talk like this for most of every workday. They have get in more public speaking in the typical week than many people will do in their lifetimes. Effective practice makes you better and better at what you’re doing, and it also quells concerns about whether you have any right to do it. I’ve written about 15,000 words of fiction in the past week. I know from critique responses (we sometimes get very rapid turnaround on critique in my writer’s group) that at least some of those words worked well for a good sampling of readers, but I have no way of knowing if the stories I’ve put together will sell or just become more rejection magnets. However, having written all that, and especially doing that and then sending the work out, I know that I’m a writer. Whether or not editors buy what I write is up to them and out of my direct control. All I can do is keep plugging away, always working on something new, concerning myself not with whether people accept what I’ve written but with how well I’m doing the job of churning out words worth reading.

The thing is, regardless of how successful your writing is now or ever, if you bust your hump putting out new works, and if you push the envelope to try to make yourself better at what you do, then you’re a writer–and you might as well be proud of it.

Photo by V’ron

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K. Bird Lincoln on Plot Turns and the Short Attention Span Writer

Writing

I stop reading a lot of novels before I get anywhere near the end. My thinking is that these days, there’s far too much available to read in the world for me to stick with a novel that doesn’t have me hooked or pay off in some big way. Books by authors I’m trying for the first time often suffer this fate, but so do classics and bestsellers. It doesn’t necessarily say anything bad about the story, just that a particular novel isn’t for me.

However, if I stick with a novel to the end and continue to be deeply engaged in the story, that does say something good about the story and the author. Not everyone will share my taste in stories, but it’s an important feat to keep even one reader on seat’s edge for hundreds of pages.

As I started reading K. Bird Lincoln’s new Kindle novel Tiger Lily, I half-expected never to finish it. The main character, Lily, is plagued by self-doubt and pessimism, and that’s just not the kind of character that tends to draw me in. It wasn’t far into the book, though, that the story took an unexpected and intriguing twist, and I decided to keep reading until that problem was resolved–except that before that issue came to a complete close, the story took another twist, and then another, and then another. Halfway through, the story walloped me with a twist that made perfect sense but that I would never have imagined, and I knew the book was a keeper. Straight through to the climax, these reversals and surprises never let up. I was impressed enough with Lincoln’s mastery of these attention-trapping skills that I asked if I could interview her on the subject. She kindly agreed.

Luc: In your novel Tiger Lily, it seems that as soon as we begin to get relief from one suspenseful situation, a new one comes up as a natural part of the story. The result, for me, is continuous suspense and engagement. Is this something you consciously set out to do, or does it just happen automatically because of how you write? 

K. Bird Lincoln: Yes to both?

I’ve got a fairly limited attention span. Also, I’ve read quite widely and deeply in Science Fiction, Fantasy (urban, historical, epic, paranormal) over the years and so have come across quite the range of tropes for these genres. I kind of know what’s going to happen and who it’s going to happen to most of the time when reading. So for a story to keep my interest, there have to be continuous issues for my main character to overcome.

In short, get me attached to someone, and then give them big and small problems. Think about X-Files when it was blazing new trails in TV-Land for having an overarching question that we got hints about (are there aliens? who is the cigarette smoking man?) at the same time as smaller, more bite-sized monster-of-the-week issues were resolved in each episode.

Books that keep my interest do this. So when I’m writing, I keep in mind the overall issue that’s going to need to build up and be resolved by the end of the book. In the case of Tiger Lily, it’s the confrontation with the Pretender Emperor on the plot level and Lily’s feelings for Ashikaga on the inner-character level. When I come to the end of a chapter, I try to give the reader a dramatic pause, as well a reason to go on to the next chapter that involves smaller obstacles. Those are the monsters-of-the-week.

But here’s my confession. This sounds all very purposeful and consciously planned out. The truth is, I’m a “by-the-seat-of-my-pants” writer, not an outliner. So my short attention span kind of naturally guides my writing towards the dramatic pauses (such as Tiger Lily encountering a kami for the first time) every 3,000 words or so….because if I don’t, I get bored. Then writing is work and not fun any more. If writing isn’t interesting/fun, then I’ll go watch an episode of Vampire Diaries or do the laundry or bake cookies.

So it happens naturally when I write, but I tend to rework chapter breaks during editing to make sure they hit a dramatic pause. Or else I end up eating too many cookies 🙂

Luc: So let’s say you’re getting to a point where something new needs to happen: 3,000 words have passed, or you find yourself starting to think about cookie recipes. How do you decide what that “something new” is going to be? Has it been brewing already over the past 3,000 words, or do you sit and think “What can I do to shake this up?”

K. Bird Lincoln: Oh, I don’t have anything planned. I totally just make it up as I go along.

K. Bird Lincoln’s Unconscious (KU): You’re kidding, right? You’re so full of it. I’ve been working like a dog thinking about the character, and the overall arc, and where the character is, and the other characters’ motivations while you’ve been sitting poolside drinking a latte and watching the kids’ swim lessons. “Totally just makes it up” MY PANTS!

K. Bird Lincoln: I get into that writing zone after the first 200 words or so and the next line jumps magically on to the page. I don’t have to consciously “shake things up.” The crisis just happens naturally.

KU: *palm to face* As if you never read that Scott Westerfelt interview where he said he always started off a writing session by going back and editing the last few pages he wrote. It’s not magic, doofus. When you’re editing, I’m getting bored, so I am figuring out how to make things more interesting before you crack open the 101 best chocolate chip cookies book.

K. Bird Lincoln: Okay, okay, I do go back and edit the prior day’s pages before writing. And so, of course, whatever happens there usually plants the seeds of the next impending crisis. But you can’t take credit for planning that crisis while I’m daydreaming or editing. I’m a seat-pantser writer, not an outliner!

KU: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Luc: I’m not sure whom to ask this final question, so I’ll throw it open to both of you: how much of the suspense emerges in the first draft versus what comes out in editing? 

K. Bird Lincoln: I guess I’ll take over for my Unconscious. She needs to get back to work figuring out how my plucky boy adventurer, Eli, is going to escape from a cave full of giant centipedes in my work-in-progress.

When I first crack open a blank Word Document, I have a vague plan how the big, ending battle is going to go down. In Tiger Lily’s case, I pictured her using forbidden Jindo songs to fight evil. I started writing- and life intervened.

One month passed, my children started school, my job required overtime, and I’d completely lost touch with my original excitement about how she was going to fight evil. That’s such a MARVELOUS feeling. And it happens to me all the time.

So I sat down to write anyway, and my husband interrupted with some news about an active volcano in Southern Japan, and I remembered climbing Yamadera (awesome, shrine-laden mountain stairs in Yamagata Prefecture) ten years ago. Suddenly Lily’s climbing Hell Mountain to save Ashikaga.

The official answer is that suspense emerges in the first draft, but by the time I’ve finished the “First Draft”, I’ve probably gone through three or four different tension-building scenarios.  Then when I’ve written the end, I go back and erase aborted ideas and false starts, and layer in little bits of tension that (hopefully) foreshadow the big, ending battle.

That’s how to to be a constantly interrupted, short-attention span writer: be willing to change ideas mid-scene (no matter how painful) if the romance suddenly dies, and also put your butt in the chair and write even if you’re not sure where your characters are going. You can always fix it later.

After you’ve made cookies.

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