words

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.

The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, book 15 in #15in2015

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The Lord of the Rings The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book 15 in #15in2015

In an era when so much fantasy–especially the really popular sellers–read like novelizations of movies that have never been made, this book (I read it in a single volume edition) was wonderful.

This isn’t my first time through. I read Lord of the Rings in high school and then again in the nineties when a pre-production interview with Peter Jackson got me all excited for the stories again. This time, though, for my third read, I promised myself that I wouldn’t skim.

Because, frankly, LOTR is pretty skimmable. Especially at the start, where Tolkien was obviously feeling his way through the story, trying to get a handle on what was happening.

But by the end of the story, the cumulative weight of what had gone before has a powerful effect. I’m not even sure when the change happened, but somewhere in The Two Towers I was hooked.

I’m not going to talk about these books too much, since so many others have done it before and better. However, I was really touched by the scenes in The Scouring of The Shire, in which Frodo, who’s been touched so deeply by evil, pleads with the others not to do violence of any kind.

Anyway, flawed, but its flaws are part of what makes it so wonderful.

Buy this book.

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.

I helped another writer make a sale (in a very small way)

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Ideas are cheap.

Everyone knows that. They’re optional, since you can have a great story without an unoriginal idea behind it. They’re common as dirt–so common, in fact, that most writers have more than they could ever find time to write–and they’re only one very small component of a finished piece of fiction. Without solid execution, even the greatest ideas are useless.

But a cool story idea is valuable in one way: it can make people excited about a story.

That’s why I give my story ideas away right here on the blog. Sometimes I have an idea that’ll tickle my brain, but I don’t have the time (or, frankly, the inclination) to write it. Sometimes it’s just a title or an interesting mashup. Maybe it’s in a medium I don’t write in. Maybe it’s a genre that’s wrong for me. Maybe there’s something else about that, while it sounds interesting, makes me want to put it aside.

The best way I’ve found to put them out of my mind is to add them to my Story Seeds posts, then give them away to the world.

Last night, for the first time ever, I received an email from a writer who’d taken one of those seeds, written a story, and sold it. Obviously, my role in that sale was incredibly small–it was the writer who did the bulk of the work. Still, it feels good.

It only gets harder once you’re published (mostly)

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Some days ago, Chuck Wendig wrote a blog post about how writing books gets harder after you get published, not easier as some people seem to think. Yesterday, Clarke Award winner Tricia Sullivan wrote about breaking in and then fighting to stay in.

I used to say all the time that it’s easier to break in than to stay in, and Wendig and Sullivan have different paths. Wendig has been growing his readership and having success. Sullivan’s experience is closer to mine: struggling to find a substantial readership and to get her work out there, although she’s been doing it longer and has that award on her mantel.

I have ten books out, and on Tuesday I passed 30K words on book 11. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a NY publishing contract for this one, so the backlist bump will hit my self-published work.

And Chuck’s right: I still have all the same insecurities and doubts about the work I’m doing. Worse, actually, is that I sometimes feel that I’ve lost a certain attitude I had when I wrote Child of Fire. I was pretty frustrated when I wrote that book, and I attacked it with an attitude of Fuck it. I’m going to do what I want.

I’m still doing what I want, but the fuck it doesn’t have the same bite. Why? Because that publishing contract was a tremendous relief. I didn’t celebrate it by jumping around and cheering; I flopped into a chair and sighed. I haven’t wasted my life after all.

It’s easy to forget that feeling as the years go by. Even if I never make the midlist and die in obscurity, at least one professional in the field thought my work was worthwhile. Before I was published, I really wanted that. Afterwards, I learned that it’s not enough. It’s something–something good–but it’s just the start.

Okay, voice. How do you do that?

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Someone asked me a followup question about last Friday’s post called What I learned reading debut novels, in which I talked about an exercise Miss Snark gave us: spend a year (or a few months, I guess) reading recent debut novels.

I did that, and the only thing they had in common (as far as I could tell) was a strong voice.

There’s more about it at the far end of that link above.

Anyway, someone asked me the question in the subject header, and I surprised myself by having a ready answer. This has been on my mind a lot lately, but I only just then realized what I’d learned. And it’s pretty simple:

Ask yourself how the point of view character and/or the narrator feels about the events of the book, and reflect that in the text in an interesting way.

That’s how I do it, anyway.

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.

What I learned reading debut novels

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Not that any particular voice is going to have universal appeal. I’m a big fan of Richard Stark’s novels, although I can understand why many people wouldn’t be, and A Clockwork Orange is an amazing exercise in voice, probably one of the most outre examples. Then again, I stopped reading Kushiel’s Dart at the word “fustian” because I wanted to read a certain voice and that so wasn’t it.

Voice. It matters.

The Kid Curates His Own Homeschool Reading List (thx to reddit)

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A couple of days ago, I tweeted this:

Here’s the list of reddit’s 100 favorite books. There’s some good mixed in with a lot of not so good, just like reddit, but he wanted to know which of those books we had in our apartment. That, naturally, led me to search through my bookshelves, which lead to this:

My wife is an enthusiast. When she sees something exciting, she commits, and the idea that our son would return to reading in a big way had her tearing through our shelves looking for books on the list to give him. And if there we didn’t have a particular book but did have something else by the author, that got tossed into the mix, too.

It’s dangerous. As much as I love her passion, I know it can over run someone else’s tentative interest in a thing in the same way a hurricane will blow out a camp fire. So we don’t have The Unbearable Lightness of Being but that doesn’t mean you can toss The Last Temptation of Christ on the pile. And you don’t just add some Marshall McLuhan because you think it’s worthy and he ought to be interested. And I’m sorry, but you can’t substitute Dhalgren for Dune.

Anyway, while she’s at work, I’ve gone through the stacks she’s put together and set aside the books that aren’t on the list. Books not on the list by authors who are have been placed nearby, but except when they aren’t. And LOTR… well, I’m not going to bother.

For a few years, he’s hated the idea of reading anything, and did so only for homeschool assignment. Resentfully. Recently, he’s been reading ebooks of Japanese “light novels.” Then he found the list, realized we had the #1 book on the shelf, and grabbed it.

When I gave that book to him a couple years ago, he rolled his eyes, read a few pages, then pushed it away. When reddit recommends it, he’s in love.

And that’s fine. I knew he would turn around at some point. Now we just have to nurture this interest instead of vomiting a reading list on him.

Guest post for Jim C. Hines, re: replacing willpower and discipline with apps

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Just a quick note that I wrote up a blog post for Jim C. Hines’s space, about apps people use to block the internet while they work.

Jim is leaving his day job soon, and a few of us are writing about living the life without other employment. Like a lot of writers, I produced less when I first went “full time” (not that I was ever full time) until I worked out a new system that replaced my rigidly structured days. Check it out.