I personally believe that setting word or page quotas is much more effective than time quotas. This is mostly because if you tell yourself you’re going to sit in the chair until you’ve written a thousand words, you’ll find your fingers leaping into action much faster than if your fingers know that all you have to do is sit in the chair for an hour to call it a success.   (I realize we’re attributing a lot of independent brain power to those fingers, but bear with me.)   But I know that word quotas just don’t work for everyone. Some people find themselves freezing up if they know they have to write a certain number of pages.

I still can’t quite recommend just saying “write for an hour,” because that goes against some of the basic writing principles that I believe — that writing faster is generally better, that anything you can do to encourage yourself to write faster is helpful in keeping ahead of your critical voice.

So here’s a variation that works for me: Write as many words as you possibly can in one hour, and then track your progress.

Or thirty minutes. Or fifteen minutes. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to start with less time and work your way up.  Maybe you start by writing 250 words in an hour. Then it goes up to 500. Soon it’s 750. Rather than focusing on something you can’t control — why a particular story or novel hasn’t sold, etc. — you’ll have a measurable way to evaluate your success in an area you can control.  And that’s definitely a good thing.

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I’m about to run out to the Oregon coast for a three-day writing workshop — a fun opportunity to talk shop with lots of other writers, something I don’t get to do nearly often enough — but I wanted to share this link before I go.

On Monday, Fantasy Magazine, published my collaboration with Ray Vukcevich, “A Stray.” You can read it for free online.

Well, today they’ve published an interview with Ray and I about the collaborative process.  We even included a couple of our email exchanges at the end, which you might find interesting.  I also agree with Ray’s comment that when two people collaborate, then a third person emerges, which was certainly true in this case.  A lot more planning and pre-writing went into this story than is usually the case for me — usually this sort of thing happens more in my head, and even then more on a gut level.  I believe Ray was saying the same was true for him.

But going back and forth about the story via email, shaping it and molding it a bit before setting a word on the page — that was a very valuable experience.  You might find some of our notes interesting too, especially if you read the story, because it shows where we made decisions about the direction the story was going.

Whether those decisions worked or not, well, that’s up to each reader to decide.

If you’ve followed my blog, you know I’ve written about the Pages Before Play principle before, but it’s so effective that it deserves a mention here.

The basic idea is this: You withhold all activities you enjoy until you’ve met your page quota for the day.

It’s simple, isn’t it? Surfing the Internet, reading books, watching television or movies, playing video games — whatever you do for fun in your free time, you don’t allow yourself to do those things until you’ve met your quota. The idea is to use those activities as extra motivation to get your pages done — and not only done, but done sooner and faster.

More than any other principle, this is one I’ve tried to live by. I’ve found it to be one of the most effective ways to keep myself focused. My big Achilles heel is the Internet. It’s easy to tell myself I’m just going to check my email, five minutes tops, and the next thing I know I’m off ogling a gadget on Gizmodo or arguing with some pinheaded pundit (in my head of course) on Politico. Before I know it, an hour is gone — and the time I would have devoted to writing some new pages is gone with it.

But I also have to say: Although it’s a deceptively simple game, and tremendously effective, I’ve also found it to be incredibly difficult in actual practice. I’m always falling off the wagon. Temptations abound, after all.

That’s okay. You’re going to fall off the wagon. Just get back on again. It’s also a great game to whip out now and then as a corrective measure, when you find your productivity dropping. You want to watch Lost? All right, buddy, then get those pages done.

(A lot of people use a variation of this game, but here’s a hat tip to two of them who emailed me something along these lines:: Michael Jasper and Cyn Balog)

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So far, I’ve been focusing mostly on ways to boost your productivity.  Well, all that productivity begs the question:  How do you keep coming up with ideas?  Most serious writers learn very quickly that story ideas are a dime a dozen — they can literally come from anywhere.  It’s what you do with those ideas that matters.

That said, having a bag of tricks you can use to come up with story ideas on demand is immensely helpful.  The Title Mash-Up is a good one.

Here’s how it works in essence:  Take parts of two titles of two stories and combine them into a new title, then write a new story about it.

That’s it.  Take a couple anthologies from your bookshelf and type up a list of all the titles.  Or, better yet, go to Amazon.com and do the same with anthologies you haven’t read — easier not to be tethered to the author’s original ideas when you do so.  Then start copying and pasting a list of new titles.  This works best with longer titles, ones that have conjunctions (”and,” “or,” etc.).  Pick one and start writing.

I’ve used this one a number of times.  I published a story in Asimov’s a couple years ago called “The Tiger in the Garden.” I’ve since forgotten the original titles I used, but I know that I used this game to get it, combining “The Tiger” and “in the Garden.”

The great thing?  No two writers will write the same story.  You might look at that title and think fantasy or a children’s story; I turned it into a science fiction tale about a terrorist computer hacker in hiding on a small backwater world, a man whose handle was “The Tiger.”  Now he’s suffering a debilitating mental illness that’s crumbled his once brilliant mind so that he’s only a shadow of his former self.  His only joy now?  Working in his garden.

See how it works?  The title is just a touchstone to get you thinking; to get you to ask questions.  It’s a starting point, nothing more.  Try it out.

(Hat tip to Dean Wesley Smith)

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Everybody knows that old Nike slogan, right?  Just do it.  For the sake of writing, I’ve taken the liberty of modifying it slightly to “Just Finish It.”

In practice, it translates this way:  No matter how you feel about the project at hand, you must finish it.

A lot of writers, especially in the beginning, suffer from what I’d term APS — Abandoned Project Syndrome.  Novels, stories, articles, poems are all started with great passion, but somewhere along the way that passion dissipates.  Maybe you don’t think that original idea was so good after all.  Maybe it seems like more work than you anticipated.  Whatever the reason, this is very common, and that’s when you have to push through those roadblocks and finish it anyway.

Most writers are the worst judges of their own work.  It’s true.  So whether you think that story or novel sucks or not is irrelvant.  What is relevant is that it’s not a story or novel or essay or haiku unless it’s finished. If it’s not finished, it’s nothing.  It can’t be sold.

If you’re starting out, here’s the real problem with abandoning projects halfway through:  You never learn how to finish.  I mean this in two ways.  One, you never learn how to write the conclusion to your story — it’s like trying to learn how to play the piano while skipping half the keys.  And two, you’re not learning the mental skills of seeing a project to its completion.

There’s also another benefit to finishing what you started:  Most people receive a great boost from finishing a project, a boost that can propel them right into the next project.  If you don’t finish, you don’t get the boost.

So finish what you start, whether you like it or not.  In the long run, it’s doubtful you’ll be able to look back and know which projects you loved writing and which ones you hated –and even if you do it won’t matter because few writers can judge their work accurately.

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I learned early on that if I didn’t mark down, in black and white, how much I was actually writing, then it was very easy to lie to myself about my productivity.  Oh, sure, I’d tell myself, I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall I’ve been pretty good at cranking out the copy.  The reality, however, was that it was easy to overestimate my word counts and underestimate how many days I was missing.

So what I do is use what I call a “Writing Productivity” spreadsheet.  I use Microsoft Excel, but you could even do it by hand if you prefer.  At a minimum, you’ll want columns for your daily word count, a monthly running total, an annual running total, and an area to jot a few notes about what you were writing.  (Those notes can come in handy later, believe me, when you want some idea on what you were working on when, or how long it took you to finish a particular project.)  I use Excel to calculate the results automatically, but you could use a trusty calculator as you go along too.

Tracking your word counts will help you in a number of ways:

1. It helps you see that you’re treating your craft seriously.
2. It’s another way to build momentum.
3. It encourages you to focus on something you can control (your productivity) rather than on factors outside your control (publication)

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet I’ve been using for the last couple years (minus my own word counts, of course).  It’s pretty much good to go, though having a working understanding of Microsoft Excel is probably helpful.

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Since starting with 500 words may seem like too much for some writers, here’s a different approach.  I can’t remember where I heard this particular game, though I know I’ve heard it used by a number of successful authors.  It’s really quite simple:

You just have to write 25 words a day.

That’s it.  That’s your quota.  If you hit 25 words, then you give yourself permission to quit.  I reached that in the first paragraph, so you can see how ridiculously easy it is.  And that’s the point.

See, most of the battle of overcoming our natural resistance as human beings to doing anything that requires discipline is just getting our butts in the chair. Once your butt is in the chair, the word processor is fired up, and the first couple words are typed, you’re already well on your way.  Most of the time, you’ll actually find it hard to stop at just 25 words.

But not always.  Maybe you’re down with the flu, maybe you’re out late partying with Jay-Z, or maybe the creativity center of your brain is just coming up empty, and if that’s the case, give yourself permission to stop at 25 words.

The key is keeping a streak alive.  Creating momentum is one of the most powerful ways to boost your productivity.  Once you’ve got a streak of even a few weeks going, you’ll find you don’t want to miss.  Try it out.  You might be amazed after a couple weeks how the pages have added up.  It’s also a great game when you find yourself suffering from a long dry spell.  Because no matter how bad your writer’s block is, you can always write a couple sentences, right?

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Games Writers Play #1: The 30/500 Rule

I’m starting with this one because it meant a lot to me.  When I finally got fed up with my low productivity not many years ago, when I was so self-critical of my own writing that it was nearly impossible to squeeze out any words at all, I decided that I needed to do something to get out of my own way.

1.  Get yourself a countdown timer.  An electronic egg timer works well, but most digital watches have them.

2.  Set the timer for 30 minutes.

3.  The goal is to write 500 words or for 30 minutes, whatever comes last.

The emphasis is important.  If the timer goes off and you still haven’t reached 500 words, keep writing until you have.  If you reach 500 words and the timer’s still going, keep writing at least until the timer goes off.

4.  Do this every day.  You can always find thirty minutes.  If you do, you’ll have written at least the equivalent of two novels over the course of a year.  All with thirty minutes a day.

You’ll find out very quickly that one of the reoccurring themes of improving one’s productivity is to do so by creating limitations. It’s paradoxical, really.  You’d think that have no boundaries would make you more creative and more productive, but it’s often exactly the opposite.  Too much freedom and writers often just freeze up.  There are too many possibilities.  If you limit the time or the subject matter, you’ll often find your creativity unleashed and the words flowing.

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Most writers play games.  They might use other words for it — challenges, mental tricks, techniques — but the purpose is always the same.  The point is to find ways to put the butt in the chair and get the words flowing; to trick the mind so that the critical voice, the one that tells you that you’re no good, that you can’t possibly write even a decent sentence much less a whole story or novel, gets out of the way.

I’m a game player myself.  Like a lot of writers, I’ve got more than a few personal demons that would like nothing better than for my keyboard to fall silent.  Over the years, I’ve collected a number of these games, some from other writers, some from books, and many simply from my own experience, and I finally decided that other writers might benefit from them too.

So here’s the deal.  Every Tuesday, I plan to post a new game — some Jedi mind trick that’s meant to help writers produce more words.  Why write more?  Well, I’m assuming you’re a serious writer, somebody who’s either already writing for publication or hoping to get there someday.  And if you are, then I’m also assuming you accept the principle that the rate of your success is directly dependent on the level of your productivity.

Sure, you have to try to get better.  Sure, you need to watch your said bookisms, your use of adverbs, your tendency to tell rather than show.  That’s a given.  But that’s not the focus of these posts, although you might get a little bit of that along the way too.  No, the focus of these posts is to give you games you can play to unlock your creativity, destroy writer’s block, and get yourself to produce more words.

More words = more success.

If you don’t believe that, you’ve come to the wrong place.

There’s no particular order to these games.  Some will be general principles, others will be specific challenges or techniques.  Not all of them will work for any particular writer.  Like me, you might have to try a few on for size before you find some that work for you.  Remember, the whole point is to get you to write more. If it’s not working, try something else.

How long will I keep it going?  As long as I can.  I’m obviously working on lots of other projects and this is just something I want to squeeze in now and then — something that helps me, too, because I’m always looking for ways to boost my own productivity.  When the project’s done, I’ll most likely put out a print on demand edition, so those of you who want a hard copy will be able to buy it.  I’m hoping it’ll end up as a nice resource when you find your well running a little dry; just open the book (or go back to the Internet) and look for a game to help you get going again.

I’ll be maintaining a table of contents, and I’ve taken out a domain that will take you straight to it (http://www.gameswritersplay.com) so you can bookmark it for easy reference.

You’ll also notice something at the bottom of the posts that I haven’t done on this site before:  a donate button.  If you find these posts useful, if one of them really clicks and helps gets the words flowing, I’d really appreciate it if you “tipped your waiter” a few bucks.  One of the things I decided at the start of this year was to be more active with my own website, but it’s hard to justify the time unless there’s some monetary compensation involved.  I do write for money, after all.  Even a few dollars really does help.

If you can’t donate — and hey, I understand, we’re in a recession here — then please help spread the word.  Write a blog post pointing people here.  Retweet my Twitter posts.  That helps too.

And if you have a game you’d like to share, drop me an email by using the Contact Page.  Type “Games Writers Play” in the subject line, and make sure you give me your website.  I can’t promise you I’ll use your particular game — and I won’t copy it verbatim, because that would obviously be copyright violation — but if I do, I’ll make sure to give you a “hat tip,” which will mention your name and a link to your website.

With that, let the games begin.

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As I sit here on New Year’s Day, the kids playing with their cousin on the floor beneath me, my wife baking in the other room, a hot cup of coffee on the end table, a computer on my lap, and the sound of the rain outside as I sit here comfy with my feet up on the recliner — I have to think, you know, this is a pretty darn good life.  Of course, all that baking will mean a pile of dishes to do later, but hey, I really can’t complain.  Well, I could, but I don’t imagine I’d get a lot of sympathy points. 

 As far as writing productivity goes, 2009 was a decent year.  Not a great year, but at least back to where I was when I decided to get serious about being a writer about eight years ago — with two new novels finished, another novel started, and five stories out to editors.  As far as publications go, it was pretty quiet, with just one short story seeing print (”The Bear Who Sang Opera” in Analog), but you know, for the most part the publication process isn’t something I can control. 

 Still, 2010 should be an even bigger year when it comes to productivity, far exceeding any year before it.  I made some changes to my work habits the last third of 2009 — mostly just being much more strict about adhering to regular daily word counts — and it paid off in a big way.  So I’ll be sticking with the daily regimen.  Plus I’m doing a short story a month while I’m doing the novels and that’s helped my productivity too, allowing me to switch from one project to another when I find myself stalling a bit.  More than anything else, I measure my success in terms of productivity, so just plain writing more has been intensley gratifying.

And that’s just the beginning.  I’ve got big plans for the website too.  I’ve done a lot of thinking the last few months about what it means to be a writer in the twenty-first century — especially a fiction writer — and you’ll see a lot of that thinking turned into action around these parts in the near future.  No need to say more for now, but it’s going to be fun.  Work, but fun. 

This year will also see the publication of my first novel, as well as two story collections, so it’s already set to be a banner year. 

I’m not big on posting all of my goals and plans publicly (though I’m actually very big on the whole goal thing pesonally), but I will say that my main focus this year is being smarter with my time.  As productive as I am, I’m often aghast at how much time I fritter away.  Since I want to crank things up a notch this year — in all aspects of my writing — it’s not something I can let myself get away with any more.