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I took 4 days off writing. Here’s why that’s okay.

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A while ago, I tweeted this:

I joke a lot on Twitter, but that’s an actual thing I do to motivate me to get out of bed: I imagine the burning regret I will feel for every minute of my wasted life, because there have been a lot of them.

For me, a lot of the work I’ve done to make myself a better writer has been about increasing my productivity. When I first started out, I could barely get through a few hundred words a day. Finishing anything took forever, and everything I finished was mostly bullshit, and it was all so incredibly hard.

It took me a while to realize why I couldn’t get anything done: I’m easily distracted. Looking out the window, checking the internet, oooh that book looks interesting… all of it stole my time and attention away.

Then there’s the daydreaming, and I don’t mean about my characters or what they’re feeling. I’m talking about stupid shit like wondering if I could hit one of the rats running through the tree outside with an arrow, or what I would say to encourage JRR Tolkien if I could time travel back to the time he was struggling with Fellowship…. Really useless, stupid shit.

But I learned that working slowly was hurting me. Too many word echoes. Too many continuity errors. Poor pacing. I became a much better writer when I taught myself to speed up. I’m still not all that fast, but I’m better than I was.

The thing is, I suspect I’ve hit my personal upper limit.

Recently, I challenged myself to accomplish 10k words a week, with the added incentive that I could take days off, guilt-free, if I hit goal early. Why not? I’d certainly managed 2k or 2.5K on dedicated writing days. If I could manage five days of two thousand words each, I could take two whole days off and feel fine about it.

And it worked. For one week. Then I had to stop because I realized I was just typing out weirdly detailed extraneous bullshit about every minute detail of whatever behavior was happening in my mind’s eye. Everything was draggy and dull and bloated. So I stopped, tossed aside my dumb new plan, and took a couple of days to do nothing.

Check out Chuck Wendig’s post here about his productivity. Chuck writes quickly, finishing a few books a year. His stuff is popular (unless you love Mandalorians more than you probably should) and he gets critical raves, too. But, as he says in his post, this is what works for him. As much as I would like to be that prolific, it just ain’t gonna happen. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

(One place I would disagree with Chuck is this statement: “Fourth and finally, and I’m mighty sorry to report this, but a full-time writing career is not easily maintained by writing slowly.” I’d suggest a writing career isn’t easily maintained in general, and there are plenty of authors doing very well releasing books slowly. GRRM, Susanna Clarke, Pat Rothfuss, and Scott Lynch each have probably sold more copies of their latest than I will sell in a lifetime, but it has nothing to do with writing books quickly)

And this is why (to finally get around to the point of this post) I would warn people against gamifying your writing output. Yeah, I just spent a couple hundred words talking about increasing productivity and finding what works for you, but turning your process into a game, with points and levels, strikes me as leaning way too hard on productivity.

Because increasing productivity can be harmful to our work and our legacy, if we’re lucky enough to have one. It might be pleasant to award ourselves points for submitting stories, but if the stories don’t sell, then what good is it? Better to award points for actually selling work to a publisher, which supposedly writers can’t control, but if the work is solid and we’re putting them into the hands of buyers, we’ll eventually hit the mark.

And that’s why I cut off a productivity experiment. It was turning my fast-paced thriller into yet another bloated fantasy, and that sucks. Yeah, it would be great to write four books a year that were critical and popular darlings. It would be great to write a book every four years that readers turned into instant best-sellers. It would, in fact, be great to revive my moribund writing career so that I could maybe hit the midlist someday.

But then I read something like this and I’m reminded that I simply need to keep doing what I do, for the reasons I do it. I need to keep pushing myself toward better, more personal, more original stories, and productivity is secondary.

Randomness for 9/13

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1) Why Salad Is Overrated.

2) Actually, salad is good.

3) Ice-T will has some startling information for you in these (fake) SVU screencaps.

4) Most Heinous Stories of Role-Playing Games Gone Wrong.

5) Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Man. “Stereotype threat” and academic achievement, or how to erase any statistical difference between whites and blacks / men and women.

6) I love this book design.

7) Classic book covers turned into gifs.

oh god am i really going to write about the hugos again

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Okay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.

Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.

He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)

Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?

Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:

The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]

I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.

But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?

Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.

Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.

Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.

Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.

That’s a good thing.

It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.

[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.

[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.

[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?

[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.

Randomness for 8/26

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1) Wheel of Misfortune. Love this comic. Love. It.

2) Every JRPG ever: Video. Reader, I laughed at them.

3) Exotic polyhedra dice, made of marble, gator jawbones, carbon fiber, and more.

4) Hole Quest: Ryan North live-tweeted the thrilling 40 minutes he was stuck in an empty pool with his dog.

5) 15 Delicious Regional Sandwiches. A chow mein sandwich? I don’t think so.

6) Texts from HP Lovecraft. This made me laugh.

7) Ten tabletop games that you can play as couples. Video.

I used to work at Amazon, too

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A lot about this NYTimes article, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, seemed familiar to me. I worked at Amazon.com for a little while, in the late nineties when the Seattle fulfillment center was their only one.

I was temp-to-hire, which meant I was a temporary employee packing books into boxes or whatever, and if they liked my work they would offer me a permanent position. They did like my work. They did make that offer. I turned them down.

Here’s the thing: it was October, and the supervisors running our section were all gung-ho about the company. Real cheerleaders, and I just assumed it was an act. We were all standing in front of a terribly-inefficient packing machine, and they kept talking about giving our all. For a bullshit warehouse job.

Then one day in October, one of the supervisors stands on a box or something and gives us this lecture about the upcoming holidays. I guess it was supposed to be a coach’s halftime talk or something, but she was telling us that Christmas was going to be hugely busy, and it was “going to be like a war in here,” and that we should be ready to put our personal lives on hold.

My first thought was Fuck you.

My second thought was that she was joking.

When I realized my second thought was wrong, I knew I wasn’t going to stay.

At that point, I’d been with my then-girlfriend, now-wife for a few years, and one thing I’d learned was that she had no intention of being a career widow. If I was planning to ignore her over the Christmas holidays, she would never stay.

And besides, fuck that. Amazon.com wasn’t my company. I just worked there. I had people in my life, and my writing, and was I really supposed to put all that on hold so Jeff Bezos could create his dream company?

Eventually, one of the supervisors pulled me aside to offer me a job (because let’s face it, I’m a good worker) and I told him I wasn’t going to accept because I could never be part of Amazon’s culture. I could never be yay-gung-ho over a day job.

He instantly deflated, going from upbeat to morose, and we talked for a while about not really knowing where we belong and not knowing where we could make a future for ourselves.

I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s happy.

Anyway, Amazon is one of the reasons that Seattle has such a thriving economy, but I’d never want to work there myself. Check out this quote from the article:

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon.

“Put your personal life on hold.”

“Put your personal life on hold.”

My personal life IS my life, and it’s the only one I get. I’m not wasting it to make some obnoxious super-libertarian richer than he already is.

Randomness for 8/15

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1) How One Misunderstanding in the 1870s Created an Entire Sci-Fi Subgenre

2) Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.

3) Someone is setting hipster traps in New York.

4) An “accomplished writer” takes James Patterson’s “Masterclass.”

5) What if Werner Hertzog directed Ant-Man?

6) Architects crowdfund to build £1.85 billion Minas Tirith in England.

7) I read NPR’s 100 best sff novels and they were shockingly offensive. Nothing to argue with here.

Randomness for 8/7

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1. How many of the “world’s strangest delicacies” would you eat? I consider myself an adventurous eater, but: five-ish, depending on the moment.

2. Video series compares the changes made to the Star Wars movies.

3. The Ten Best Tales of Online Drama from Ten Years of Fandom_Wank.

4) Academics unlock Agatha Christie’s “whodunnit” code.

5) Five Bizarre Board Games.

6) The amazing high technology behind the NYC subway system.

7) A skateboard sidecar for toddlers: Video.

Randomness for 7/24

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1. The Hot Tub Hammock.

2) If The Moon Were Only One Pixel: a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system.

3) Some kitchen gadgets are all about the NOPE.

4) Like selfies? Like toast? Now you can get your own selfie toast.

5) Keyboard shortcuts for novelists.

6) Sure, whites are privileged, but not me personally!

7) The Artisinal Landlord Price Hike Sale.

Randomness for 7/13

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1) Why do people go bald? Video

2) A conversation between graffiti artists and removers.

3) Fearless girl rips out own tooth with a slingbow. ::faints::

4) The names of ten fireworks effects.

5) Assigned to write an essay about a “leader” a group of teens decide to stand out from the pack and contact gangster Whitey Bulger in prison. He wrote back.

6) Ten Paintings of Guy Fieri as a Renaissance Baby.

7) The Detective As Speech. “An early letter I received after publishing my first book, Indemnity Only, came from a woman who wanted to know why V. I. Warshawski was allowed to “talk back” to men without being punished. The writer wasn’t seeking help in learning to talk back herself; she was criticizing V. I. for behaving in a way that was neither right nor natural.” h/t James Nicoll

Twelve years from hobbyist to pro

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Want to check out an excellent post for people who a) like cool artwork and b) want to be a professional in a creative field? Well, here you go:

How I Became an Artist: The 12 year journey of my art thus far.

Takeaway: At the start, he wasn’t much better than me. Maybe a little better. At the end, he’s creating art so cool that it’s downright spooky.

But there’s no mention of the word talent–except once, in quote marks. All he talks about is hard work, and education. When he was starting out, he found a useful community for mutual support and critique. As he continued, he took classes, worked on techniques to improve the places he felt weak, continued to strengthen his strong points, and he practiced like whoa.

It’s a reflection of the growth mindset discussed in (among many others) this Atlantic article: Don’t Call Kids Smart. The way to find success is to force yourself to grow and improve, and to expect it to take a long time and a lot of work.

This is important. Too many people would look at the art at the bottom of that page, think how talented! and assume his ability to create that artwork comes from some spooky inborn trait. It doesn’t. It’s just hard work and self-education.

This is something I’m trying to impart to my son. It doesn’t have to be art; it can be anything. You suck at things when you start out, and you get better over time. With extra effort, you get really good. That’ what it takes.