If you’re like me, there’s times when you sit down at the keyboard and every idea that comes to you seems hackneyed.  The well has run dry.  You can’t seem to think of an original idea.

Well, therein lies the problem, this tendency that writers have that everything must be original, and that everything they write should be autographed and framed on the wall. Sometimes you have to plow through thousands of words of practice before the original idea — the one that really gets you excited — emerges.

Here’s a technique I’ve used all the time just to get the fingers moving:  Set your countdown timer to five minutes and write as many words as you can in that time.  Don’t stop.  Don’t judge.  Just keep typing until the timer goes off.  Then add up the words.  If you like this technique, keep a running total of how many words you’ve written at each session. *

Now, you might be thinking, well, I could just type random words, but I dare you to try it.  Our minds actually want to create order out of chaos.  You might be surprised at where your typing takes you.  If you’re pushing yourself to write fast — remember, don’t judge, just keeping pushing, the focus is on the number of words and not on the quality — you’re out-racing the critical side of your brain, the side that censors things for being “too weird.”  But when I’ve used this technique, often those “too weird” ideas are the ones I’ve been able to turn into something I had a blast writing — and usually sold too.

The worst that can happen?  Even if you don’t find anything in your free write you want to use, you spent five minutes — a whopping five minutes — warming up your fingers and shaking the cobwebs out of your brain.  That’s valuable all by itself.

* Note:  If you use Microsoft Word, you can click on File, then Properties to get the word count of your document.

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As far as publications go, this Spring is the biggest one yet:  Last month, I published two story collections – The Dinosaur Diaries, as well as A Web of Black Widows — and here in a little over a week my first novel is coming out from Simon and Schuster.  For the most part, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is garnering great reviews (Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching and impressive debut novel”), so I’m hoping sales are good as well.  Early next month, I’m having my official book launch event in my hometown.  Lots happening.  And if you plan to buy the book, please preorder and buy in the first few weeks.  Those early sales numbers encourage bookstores to stock more copies, which helps an author’s career.

There’s some things percolating on the writing front, some things that could be potentially very good, but I can’t talk about them yet.  Regardless, I have this sense that my writing career is shifting into its next phase.  What that phase ultimately looks like remains to be seen, but the shift is happening, I think.

It’s also caused me to do a lot of thinking about exactly what my career goals are as a writer.  Up until now, I’ve pretty much just gone by the seat of my pants, my philosophy that I would just keep trying different types of books to see what sticks.  And because my writing is just like my reading — eclectic — this plays to my strengths.  I just write what I want to write and let the chips fall where they may.

And while I may always be a little that way (it’s just who I am), I also want to give myself the best chance at reaching the widest audience possible.  This might mean being a little more careful about what I write and why.  It might mean thinking about the potential audience a little more, as well as how commercial and marketable a particular concept is.  Up until this point, I’ve pretty much refrained from letting the marketing and business side into my creative space, but lately I’ve been challenging that assumption.  And that’s okay.  I think I’m finally at a point where I can do this in a way that augments my creativity rather than hinders it.

It’s a very subtle shift in the way I’m approaching the craft, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a significant one.  I’m also more willing to allow people into the early stages of the creative process to help me gage these factors.  This is the biggest gamble for me, but there’s some things that have happened lately — and we should see in the near future how these things pan out — that give me hope I’m finally at a point that I can do this without jeopardizing my confidence.  I never would have attempted some of these things ten years ago, and I would seldom if ever recommend that beginning writers do anything but just write what they feel passionate about and finish it before showing it to anybody.

But becoming successful at anything involves some amount of risk, and it’s not just in the product.  It can also involve your methods.  I’m starting to take more risks with my methods right now.  We’ll see how it pans out.

“You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

If you’re sitting around waiting for the perfect idea to pop into your head before you put a word on the page, you’re going to be waiting a long time.  Usually you never know when an idea is great anyway — it just happens along the way.  And even when you’re finished, you may think the end product is terrible, but your own opinion is often distorted because you’re comparing your work to some impossible ideal and not really seeing the true merits of what’s on the page.

Anyway, ideas are easy.  It’s what you do with those ideas that makes great writing.

Still, there are times when the ideas just won’t flow.  Here’s a neat game that can give you a jolt: Use a dice and a grid with story possibilities to create the bones of a new story.

This is geared toward fiction, but you could certainly adapt it to nonfiction.  For fiction, the bones of every story can generally be boiled down to a character in a setting with a problem.

A hobbit named Frodo [C] journeys across the ancient land of Middle Earth [S] to destroy the One Ring before the evil Sauron finds him [P].

In fact, you can boil almost every scene down to those essentials too.

Indiana Jones [C] races through a deadly cave [S] to avoid from getting crushed by a giant boulder [P].

To play this game, create a 3 x 6 grid.  The three columns along the top should be labeled “Character,” “Setting,” and “Problem.”  Number the six rows on the left.  Now it’s time to do some brainstorming.  You need to come up with six characters, six settings, and six problems.  Be creative!  Here’s an example:

The next step is to roll the dice three times.  The first number chooses the character.  The second number chooses the setting.  The third chooses the problem.  Once you’ve got those, start your story and see where it goes.  Here’s a tip:  Don’t be too constrained.  If the story takes you in a different direction, go with it.

So let’s say I rolled a “3,” a “1″ and a “6.”  That would give me a lead singer in a hit band who’s in an elevator and must pay off a bet to a mafia man.  My mind is already rolling . . .

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Although I get a much stronger charge out of reading great writing, I have to admit that I get a little boost out of reading bad writing too — that is, bad writing that’s made its way into print by a major publisher.

Now, I’m not going to name any names, because again, this is subjective, but just about every writer has had the experience of reading something and at some point along the way (because often you don’t even manage to finish it) you say to yourself, “How did that get published?”

And you think to yourself, “Hey, if someone was willing to publish that, then I can certainly do it too.”

If you’re always comparing yourself to the masters, and you become aware of how big the gulf is between your level of craft and theirs, it’s easy to get discouraged.  But when you realize that the bar to getting published — and even getting widely read — is not that high, it can help sustain you during those discouraging moments.  It doesn’t even have to be bad.  Mediocre is probably a better word.

So don’t throw that bad novel in the garbage.  Keep it.  And when you’re feeling discouraged, pull it out and remind yourself that your writing doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.

The caveat, of course, is to make sure you’re still reaching for greatness.

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It never fails.  Whenever I find my creative well running  dry, I get a charge out of reading great writing.

Of course, great writing is subjective, so what I find great will be different than what you find great.  But almost all writers can name a couple of influential books that inspired them along the way, books that made them want to write something equally as good.  I’m not talking works by Shakespeare or Joyce or Chaucer either, although it certainly could be.  I’m talking about books that made you fall in love with reading — Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice . . .

It’s even better when it’s a modern book, one written in a style that’s still popular.  Maybe it’s an author you really admire.  For me, Stephen King is one of the first writers I grab, because he writes with the kind of engaging voice and clear style that I’m reaching for in my own writing.

So here’s the game in a nutshell:   If you need a creative boost, grab one of your favorite books and turn to one of your favorite passages.  Read it aloud.  It won’t be long before you feel that creative impulse return, the impulse that says, “I want to write something as good as that.”

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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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