“I feel scattered,” I told my closest friend today when we were out walking on Church Street in Burlington, Vermont. I talked about my ongoing work on The Willpower Engine, my recently-released book of flash fiction, my wish that I had time to work on novels again, and other writing interests and aspirations.

photo by redjar

For well over two and a half years, I’ve blogged three to five times a week at the Willpower Engine about the psychology of motivation and habits. Since April of 2007, I’ve been blogging about writing sporadically at http://reidwrite.livejournal.com, although the ridiculously intrusive advertising LiveJournal has introduced over the last year or so has made me eager to move that blog somewhere else. These two blogs and the way they separate my blogging attention reflect a similar split in my writing focus: I’ve been doing fiction and non-fiction at the same time, and although I’ve prioritized my writing about the psychology of habits, my powerful interest in writing fiction has meant that it’s never been possible to really focus on only my Willpower Engine writing.

Another problem I’ve faced in going forward with my Willpower Engine writing is that I have no professional background I can point to that makes me an authority on the psychology of motivation. Yes, I’ve studied and written about the topic intensively for years (well before I ever started this blog), and I’ve kept up with a lot of the current psychological research. However, I don’t have a degree in psychology, I’m not a therapist, and I don’t have professional non-fiction writing credits in the area of psychology. I also don’t have experience running seminars or workshops on the subject. What all of this means is that I’m not enough of a recognized authority to have interested a publisher in the nonfiction book I’ve been working on, so even while the readership for the Willpower Engine site climbs week after week and as my understanding of the topic becomes deeper and wider, the aspiration I’ve had of placing the non-fiction book with a major publisher hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’ve also had trouble finding a proper voice for The Willpower Engine. I’m not a therapist and don’t want to sound like one, but I am trying to convey useful information in a way that is easy to understand and make use of without being too dry or abstract about it.

And with my attention tied up for years with the Willpower Engine project, I haven’t been putting any serious work into novels. I’ve seen many of my talented peers in the Codex writers group sell novels and land multi-book deals while my own fiction career has been limited almost entirely to flash fiction written for The Daily Cabal–although admittedly, I love writing flash fiction, and all of that writing has led to a new eBook release, my flash fiction collection called Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories (available at $2.99 from Amazon for the Kindle and from Smashwords for all eReaders).

So I’ve been doing a lot of work that I’m proud of, and I’ve been immensely grateful for everything I’ve learned so far about my own motivation and habits– but at the same time, I’ve been ignoring my own advice to take on only one major goal at a time. From my point of view, I felt as though I had no choice: I’m far too interested in the psychology of motivation to give up my Willpower Engine work, and writing fiction is far too important to me to give up either. What’s more, I’ve had major accomplishments in both areas, like the thousands of readers who come to this site and my Writers of the Future win with my fiction. How could I possibly stop doing either one? I can’t, that’s how. And yet splitting my attention is preventing me from moving forward.

But what emerged in my conversation with my friend (to finally get back to that) was the possibility of merging my interests, focusing my efforts on all of the things that are most important to me and none of the ones that aren’t central. Specifically, while not giving up the idea of writing nonfiction books sooner or later, I can focus on a novel–and my challenge with that novel can be to use what I’ve learned about the psychology of motivation so well that readers of the novel, while not being lectured or taught in any usual sense, come away knowing a lot more than they used to about the subject in ways that they can actually use in their lives. In other words, instead of explicitly offering information in the form of non-fiction, I can weave that knowledge into my fiction, in service to storytelling, and make a hell of a story that also carries some real-world knowledge. I have a real advantage here: very few fiction writers have spent years studying the scientific research on human motivation.

This idea made immediate and powerful sense to me, but I had reservations, especially about the Willpower Engine blog. I don’t by any means want to abandon it, and yet the amount of time and attention that goes into posting three articles a week on the psychology of motivation is too much of a drain to allow me to really focus on a novel. Even one post a week, a bare minimum in my mind for anything I would call “posting regularly,” would take too much attention away.

The solution to that problem is to allow the Willpower Engine to change. It already has hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics relating to goals, habits, emotions, self-confidence, and willpower. But instead of adding more such articles, I’m changing the focus of the blog to write about motivation and writing, motivation in my own life pertaining to my writing, and especially weaving psychological findings into my fiction. This new version of the blog will still have a lot to say about the psychology of habits and related subjects, and some posts may well be similar to ones I’ve posted on the Willpower Engine in the past. There will also, however, be posts on writing fiction, as I’ve posted periodically on my ReidWrite blog, as well as posts about trying to integrate what I’ve learned into my own life and my fiction.

The blog name will need to change: for one thing, it will incorporate both of the previous blogs, ReidWrite and The Willpower Engine. For another, it will have a different focus than either. But I’m not greatly worried about a new name for the blog just yet, or other technical concerns, like how I’ll arrange the content on the page. Instead, I’ll begin to prioritize questions like how I can sharpen my focus in life so that my non-writing endeavors are less scattered, on whether I should focus my career at present on young adult or adult novels, and on which of the many, many, many novel ideas I’ve developed over the past ten years I’ll choose for my new project–if indeed I don’t come up with something entirely new.

I think readers of ReidWrite will find much more of interest here for the foreseeable future. For regular readers of The Willpower Engine, I hope this announcement will not be discouraging. Of course I’m hoping that much of the new content of this blog will continue to be meaningful in those readers lives and to serve some of the same purposes my posts have in the past, but with the change in focus, I can’t imagine this will be the case for all Willpower Engine readers. For readers interested only in articles of the kind I’ve written on The Willpower Engine so far, I hope you’ll find much of use by delving into the 328 posts I’ve already put up on this site and more in some of the similar posts I’ll be doing from time to time in the future.

The new blog will not keep to a regular schedule, but for the immediate future I’ll certainly have a lot to post about, including using what I’ve learned about the psychology of motivation, choosing a novel project, developments in the electronic publishing world, findings from my eBook flash fiction experiment, and more.

To all readers, thank you very much for your support so far. I welcome your comments and ideas and hope you’ll find much to entertain, enlighten, and involve you on the new site.

Luc Reid
January 2, 2011

I love movies and novels where a character finally makes a change that we’ve been dying to see since the story began. I love seeing Lester in American Beauty finally understanding the importance of other people, when he sheds the worst of his self-deceptions. It’s a huge relief to see Miss Havisham in Great Expectations break down and finally see what she’s done to herself, Pip, and Estella. Yet to some extent, these transformations are a lie.

The bad news
Let’s face it, our problems, hangups, bad habits, and limitations aren’t hats or shoes, ready to be taken off and replaced at any moment. They’re more like our bodies, which can’t be replaced but can be gradually transformed. The trick of it isn’t to get to that one sudden moment of transformation, because there is no moment of transformation in which a body suddenly becomes healthy after being unhealthy, or in which decades-long thinking patterns spontaneously unwind themselves from our brains. The neural connections we’ve established through repeating problem behaviors or choices over and over can go away, but they only go away gradually.

To put it another way, making one choice one time will not transform us, although it can start us on that road. But making one choice dozens or hundreds or (sometimes) thousands of times will change us. Instead of receiving goals like prizes, we build them up bit by bit, so that a goal is less often something accomplished than a state we reach from some kind of thought or action that we’ve woven into our daily lives.

The good news
Is sudden change useless or imaginary, then? No! We really can and do experience sudden changes of perspective, insights or experiences that completely alter the way we look at some part of our life. And when we start something radical and good, like doing a task that’s been dreaded and avoided for months or going out and offering forgiveness to the person we have most reason to despise, that action can release a lot of energy to propel us forward into thinking similar thoughts and making similar choices going forward. Except in the most extreme cases, we’ll need more than that initial charge to get us all the way to a new habit, but the initial charge can still count for a lot.

Ultimately I think these dramatic fictional transformations do have a value to us, and that value is in their illuminating what it feels like to become a different person. Often the hardest thing about motivating ourselves to follow the difficult path that leads to an altered self is believing that change is even possible. But both in fiction and in life, if we look for them, examples of transformation are all around us.

Photo by Stuck in Customs

A year or two ago on Codex, I put out some ideas for a kind of writing checklist, things to keep in mind that tend to be good questions to ask about a successful story. Some good additions and improvements were made, resulting in a very pithy list of questions that I post on my wall, “The Virtuoso Writer’s Cheat Sheet.” The idea is that anyone who can keep all of these things in their head at once and act effectively on them is pretty much a fiction virtuoso. For the rest of us, there are walls and scotch tape.

You may not agree with the implications of every one of these questions, and I hope you won’t think that every question is supposed to apply to every story. For instance, Sauron doesn’t have sympathetic traits, but he makes a pretty decent villain for a fairly popular story.

Regardless, asking myself these questions about my stories in progress or about stories that I’m about to edit is awfully useful to me, and maybe it will be to you, too. If you have a story that’s been rejected a number of times but that you particularly love, you might want to run it through this to see if it turns up any possible flaws or limitations you might not have noticed.

Much of this material is stolen (thank you Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, Codex members, Tim Powers, etc.) Comments are welcome.

Dialog
* Always some kind of conflict or tension?
* Stage directions subtle, but enough to prevent reader confusion?
* Distinctive character voices (diction, topics, vocabulary, personality, etc.)?
* Would a real person talk like this?
* Length of speech logical for the situation?
* Can reader tell who is speaking when?
* Everything said because of what the characters want, nothing strictly for the reader’s benefit?

Description
* Where’s the light coming from?
* Are several senses engaged on each page?
* Is the scene clear from the description alone, without your extra knowledge as the writer?

* Are descriptions specific, sensory, and fresh?

Opening
* Conveys character(s); at least a hint of conflict; and setting?
* Originality in first few paragraphs?
* Opening problem, hook, or other draw?

Title
* Not easily confused with the title of another book or story?
* Suggests the kind of story?
* Offers something intriguing or attractive?
* Sets the right tone?
* Easy for one person to pass on to another?

Ending
* Satisfying, yet unexpected?
* Resonates with beginning and/or theme of story?

Antagonist
* Has sympathetic traits?
* Actively trying to achieve a goal?
* Realistic motivation?
* Offstage time accounted for?

Language
* Leaving out unnecessary words or phrases?
* Mood and/or foreshadowing conveyed through word choice?
* Tension level conveyed through word size, flow, harsh/soft sounds?
* Active construction wherever possible?
* Use of strong verbs and nouns?
* Minimal use of adverbs and adjectives?
* Avoiding distracting repetitions (rare words only once in a book, non-structure words once in a paragraph or page)?
* Avoiding weak modifiers very, slightly, just, quite?
* Avoiding sensory crutch words like looked, appeared, seemed, heard, sounded?
* Avoiding self-contradictory language (impossibly tall, slightly unique)?

Protagonist
* Struggling with some important flaw?
* Sympathetic, likely to attract the reader?
* Actively trying to achieve a goal?
* If more than one, are they about equally engaging and sympathetic?
* Protagonist the person with the most to lose?
* Acts unusually, and shown in situations that demonstrate it?
Story concept
* Something significant that the reader might care about at stake?
* Both internal and external conflicts present?
* Taking into account reader expecations for genre/subgenre/story model?
* Decent capsule description of story automatically sounds compelling and attractive?
* Something about the story that’s attractive and enticing to readers?
* Character’s goals feel important to the reader?
* Has inherent conflict, or is the conflict just incidental?
* If a standard story type, doing something unique that justifies the story?
* Some elements of this story blow the cool meter?
* Powerful moments that create compelling, unusual images?

Plot
* Do mysteries naturally arise in the storyline without artificially withholding information?
* Inciting incident, character response, disaster?
* Driven by character, not author?
* Enough tension at any given moment?

Scenes
* Taking into account time of day in each scene?
* Describing an actual event rather than summarizing when possible?
* Each scene contributing to the story in at least two ways? (e.g. characterization + tension, immersiveness + stakes, etc.)
* Each scene essential to the story or strengthens/propels it?

Characters
* Readers care what happens to them?
* Names easily distinguished from one another?
* Based on an understanding of real people instead of on movies, other books, or stereotypes?
* Any characters who would be more effective if combined into one?
* Each important character has an implied past, friends, family, a job, something they would be doing if the story weren’t happening?

POV
* Chosen POV the most effective for this story?
* If first person, justified by the character having a distinctive voice or special way of seeing things?
* If not omniscient, is POV clear and consistent?
* Are changes in time, place, or POV character clearly tagged as such from the start?
* If multiple POV characters, are the transitions smooth?
* Do POV changes propel the reader on rather than making them start again cold?

Facts
* For scientific/tech details, math checked?
* Factual subjects handled accurately from knowledge or research?

1. We fire e-mails back and forth, brainstorming ideas for the story
2. One of the ideas catches our interest and we start brainstorming other elements. Maybe the first idea we came up with was a character in a situation, so then we might brainstorm other characters, other events, etc.
3. Sooner or later we get to a point where one of us is itching to start the story. This might be very early on, when we barely have the basic idea for the story in our sights, or it might be much further on: we might even work out a complete outline for the story when we start writing.
4. Whoever is the one who got inspired to start writing first writes to a certain point–anything from a paragraph or two to half the story or even a bit more–and then passes it back to the other person to continue. We continue to discuss the story through e-mail or even by phone as we go.
5. We continue writing chunks of the story, not necessarily of the same size each time, alternating until it’s finished. (The chunks don’t even have to be written in order, although it’s easier to do it that way.)
6. When we have a completed first draft, one of us does the first round of editing. If one person did more of the original writing, the other should be the one to do the first round of editing. During editing, we discuss any major changes before making them, but other than that we’re ruthless and edit the stories almost as though they were our own. We don’t hesitate to strike out a beautiful phrase or change a character or what have you even if the other person has done the original work. However, we do this using Word’s “track changes” feature, which is very easy to use, so that if something needs to be restored it can be.
7. The person who didn’t edit the first round edits it the second round, using the same approach.
8. If necessary, we continue alternating, editing the story all the way through and passing it back to the other person, until both people are happy with the story.
9. When it’s time to market the story, one person is elected to be the marketer and keeps track of markets. Both people must agree for the story to go to a specific market. If the story is sold, the money is split 50/50 regardless of word count contributed. Any further direct use of the story (expansion into a novel, reprint sales, etc.) is done only with the agreement of both writers. Both writers are free to write derivative works from the piece (e.g., stories in the same world).

A few days ago a zebra came up to me and bit me. Just bit me. I live in Northern Vermont. We didn’t happen to get a picture.

Now, you probably don’t believe that, so let me shift gears for a moment and explain what this post is about.

Orson Scott Card, who is that rare combination of a person who can both write exceptionally well and teach writing exceptionally well, describes three key questions that are good to look out for in a reader’s response to a story. I won’t attempt to summarize or paraphrase the great information he gives on the subject, but do highly recommend his books Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy to you. The short version is that these three key issues are understanding what’s going on, believing it, and caring about it. (“Huh?”, “Oh yeah?”, and “So what?”, respectively.)

This post is about believing. Just because something really happened doesn’t make it believable, and just because it’s believable to readers who don’t know better doesn’t make it realistic.

Back to the zebra: I really did get bit by a zebra this past Sunday. My son and I drove up from our home in Burlington, Vermont to Parc Safari, just across the border in Quebec. They have a drive-through safari where animals come up to you to be fed the food they sell at the entrance. They tell you not to feed the zebras, because they bite. Prudently heeding their advice, when a zebra came up to my window, I refused to feed it. I think that’s why it bit me.

My son points out that I was trying to pet the zebra, but I hardly see how that has anything to do with anything.

Now do you believe that I was bit by a zebra? Because I actually was. I don’t know if you believed it after that additional information or not, or if perhaps you have so much faith in me that you believed me at the beginning without any details (in which case bless you, kind soul!), but the fact of the matter is that the more detailed version was more believable than the less detailed version. Four of the main underpinnings of believability in fiction are confidence, inherent plausibility, willingness, and detail.

Confidence: If you are reading a new work by a writer whose previous works you know and love, you are much more likely to give that writer any kind of slack necessary to tell the story. If Stephen King opens a story with beetles crawling out someone’s ears, most readers will accept that there are beetles crawling out of that person’s ears without concern and read on. If an amateur writer whose writing is full of grammatical mistakes starts a story with beetles coming out of someone’s ears, we’re much more likely to say “Wait, how can beetles come out of somebody’s ears? That just doesn’t make any sense!” If you build up a good body of well-appreciated work, you may have to work less hard to get your readers to swallow the stories you’re telling them.

Inherent plausibility: If someone writes about an accountant standing on a sidewalk, that’s fairly easy to accept. If that same person writes about a living blob of intelligent pond scum standing on a sidewalk, that’s a little harder to get past.

Willingness: Of course, if the reader just wants a good story and isn’t in a critical mood, you can get a lot more by that reader with less work. Unfortunately, this is in the individual reader’s hands rather than the writer’s, so it’s best to write for the skeptical and unwilling reader, since the willing reader won’t be overly bothered by the detail.

However, there is one element of willingness over which you have control, which is how compelling your story is. If you introduce your pond scum creature in the midst of a tense scene in which it immediately becomes clear that the pond scum creature may be able to give your main character the name of his birth mother, the reader may care so much about the story that they will accept whatever they need to in order to continue seeing it unfold.

Detail: Detail is the thing over which you arguably have the most immediate control. If you really want to write a story about that pond scum, you can describe it as moving sluggishly, stretching and contracting like a cautious leech, a smell rising from it like dead fish and mowed grass, a thin layer of translucent bluish membrane holding all of it together. As it passes over a discarded cigarette, the cigarette hisses out. It makes a sound like a soaking wet towel being dragged over rock.

Those details aren’t going to make everyone believe in the pond scum creature, but they’ll up your numbers.

Remember that just because something really happened in your experience, unless it has also happened in the reader’s experience, it’s not necessarily believable to them. If I write a story about a man being bitten by a zebra and don’t give some details to shore up plausibility and add detail, readers who have actually been bitten by zebras may have no trouble with that part of things, but readers who haven’t have a good chance of objecting to it.

And there’s the flip side: just because something’s believable to many readers doesn’t mean that it’s actually plausible. Take for example making someone go unconscious by hitting them over the head. According to friends of mine with medical backgrounds, you cannot hit someone over the head hard enough to make them pass out without the possibility of doing significant permanent damage. We’ve all seen people knocked out hundreds of times, but for the great majority of us, only in fiction, TV, and movies.

“So?” you may say. “If the reader believes it, who cares?”

But of course we’re not writing for just one reader, and any reader who knows that people can’t be casually knocked out without the risk of serious damage are going to either think your character is a psychopath who doesn’t care who dies just so long as he gets his caper finished, or think you the writer are kind of ignorant.

Therefore I strongly recommend never using fiction as a source of research about how things work in the world if you can help it. If you want to know about knocking people out, talk to a doctor or someone with a lot of training in personal combat. You’ll win more readers and gain more confidence from the readers you already have … believe me.

Recently I was e-mailed this question:

My daughter is looking into [a particular college writing program] because she would like to become a fiction writer, and their school, in her opinion, is where she needs to attend to accomplish her goal. I, on the other hand, feel that she doesn’t need to go into loads of debt to a major college to learn how to be a writer…. am I wrong? What would your advice to her be?

Here’s the answer I gave:

Well, it certainly depends on the situation. It’s very difficult to make a living writing fiction. In our writing group, out of about 80 active members only a handful have yet been able to go full-time, and generally this was after at least a few years of writing seriously and constantly. Many more of us have made professional fiction sales but are nowhere near being able to live off the proceeds. Short stories typically pay so little that the income can’t possibly add up to a full-time living; $350 for a story, for instance, is a good pro rate, and there are a limited number of markets that pay even that (although there are a very few that pay much more). So writing fiction for a living basically means writing novels. First novel sales generally net well under $10,000 for the advance–$5,500 would be typical, and the writer’s agent gets 15% of that–so even selling a novel is only a baby step on the road to a full-time fiction writing career–although if that novel is exceptionally good it might get a higher advance and/or earn royalties above the advance. This is, however, the exception rather than the rule. Later novels begin to net more money if earlier ones do fairly well. And first novels are extremely hard to sell, even for talented writers. And those first novels sold aren’t necessarily the first novel written; it’s very common for a good writer to take two or three or more novels before they’ve written one that will sell. It takes both talent and a lot of practice to get it right for the vast majority of people.

Of course, a new writer might immediately come up with a best-selling novel that sells to the first publisher it’s sent to, and such a person can certainly make a living from the word go. However, this is comparable to winning the lottery, not only extremely rare but also more than a little arbitrary. Just being very talented alone will not achieve it. Very talented plus exceptional lucky might do it.

So a very talented writer who writes constantly and pays attention to the proper way to do things (querying, working with agents, and so forth), after three or five or ten years, may finally get to the point where she or he can live off fiction. Personally I’ve been writing seriously for seven years, after having written off and on for a number of years before that, and my first book only came out this last year. It’s possible I might be making a full-time living as a writer within a year or so, but it’s also possible that it might take me another five.

I apologize for being so discouraging, but it’s essential to understand the nature of fiction as a career for someone who’s contemplating it. Anyone who imagines submitting their first novel and shortly thereafter having a full-time income from writing is almost certainly in for disappointment. However, if a person really loves to write–if a person is driven to write and can’t stop doing so–and if that person is talented and patient and professional, then it’s sometimes possible to eventually carve out a fiction writing career.

Other areas of writing are easier to get into and more lucrative. Romance novels alone among fiction are relatively easy to break into for a talented writer and can pay the rent. Non-fiction writing is often much more lucrative than fiction, for instance including magazine articles and non-fiction books on popular subjects, although full-time journalism is still not a very lucrative field. Writing for television, while hard to break into, can be lucrative if a person finds the right niche. Writing for the movies, while very lucrative, is much harder to break into than writing novels and requires an entirely separate set of skills.

But to finally address your question: if your daughter is going for an undergraduate degree, I would suggest that college probably is pretty important. Someone who has only a high school education is much less likely to have developed all of the skills necessary for effective fiction writing, or for that matter to have experienced enough of life to have something meaningful to write about. College can provide a general educational foundation that will be crucial in good writing down the road. It can also provide the skills for a career that can provide a living wage while a person builds up a writing career, which is an essential piece of the puzzle in most cases.

As to a writing program specifically, opinions differ. Several members of Codex have gone through MFA programs; not one of those writers, despite all being good, has yet sold a novel, whereas others without an MFA have done so. Some college writing programs can even be harmful to a writing career, if they are taught by an amateur or not very accomplished writer who believes she or he knows the rules of writing a good novel but has never produced one; or if they are taught as literature courses, which are more about dissecting fiction that may or may not be of interest to the reading public than understanding how to create it. Chopping vegetables is a very different skill than growing them.

However, if a writing program includes a lot of practice writing commercial fiction (by which I mean fiction aimed at the general public instead of “academic” or experimental fiction), and if it includes on its faculty one or more people who have actually placed novels with major publishing houses that have gone on to sell well to the public, then it could be a good place to grow one’s writing skills and get some good advice. I would caution your daughter that many successful writers seem to be of the opinion that they way they write is the only effective way to write, and therefore tend to pronounce things as rules and commandments that in reality are only one possible way of doing things. The best innoculation against these kinds of problems is to read a lot of writing books and Web sites by successful novelists so as to get a wide variety of points of view, and to participate in writers’ groups.

I see I’ve gone on in some detail, probably more than you were looking for. The short answer is that an undergraduate degree, whether in writing or in some other discipline, is probably a very good idea for an aspiring novelist, whereas a graduate degree may be helpful but is unlikely to be the key element in creating a novelist’s career. Further, it’s essential to find some other way of making a living while one slowly builds one’s readership, writing skills, and writing career. And it’s probably a bad idea for that other way of making a living to be journalism, since the people I know who have tried that have tended to find it drains their writing energy and leaves little behind to use for fiction.

The key elements of a successful fiction writing career, other than talent, are writing constantly, continuing to learn how to write better, being patient and persistent, and submitting work regularly in a professional manner.

I’d be happy to answer questions from your daughter if she has them. I hope this has been useful.