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Another Rare Post From The Not-A-Blogger

Proving once again that I’m not much of a blogger, I’ve gone too long without an update. Part of this is due to the state of my life right now — when you have a day job, two young children, all the fun stuff that makes life interesting, and the writing on top of it, it makes finding time for anything not considered Top Priority pretty tough — but it’s also because there really hasn’t been much to report. This isn’t to say I haven’t been busy. But as I’ve shifted more of my time from short stories to novels (and if you want to eventually make a living as a writer, you pretty much have no choice), there’s obviously going to be less newsworthy activity. The novels are longer, so you write fewer of them a year, hence marketing fewer of them, which means there’s less news. Of course, I hope that once I start sellling them, the news is correspondingly bigger, but we’ll have to forge that particular river when we get to it.

That said, I happily note that I’ve finished a new novel. I also finished a novella in the last few months, and that’s now out on an editor’s desk. And my story, “The World in Primary Colors,” just hit the stands in the September issue of Ellery Queen. I don’t want to give anything away, but this is one of those rare stories where the whole thing came to me all at once, as I was helping my (at the time) two-year-old daughter navigate one of those tunnel-like play structures you sometimes find at fast food joints. Often ideas need molding and shaping, coming to me like a slab of potter’s clay, but this one hit me like a punch to the gut, so much so that I actually remember sitting down for a moment, reeling from its impact.

That’s a nice feeling. I wish I could have it more often. Of course, that doesn’t always mean the story’s any good, but I think it often does. I guess you’ll have to go read the story to find out. Why, you don’t even have to subscribe. You can get an electronic copy from Fictionwise.

Now see how sly I was, working in that plug?

Production and Process

Following up on my last post, “Pages Before Play,” I thought I’d share another two P’s that are a big part of the way I see my writing: Production and Process.

I lump everything related to writing into these two categories to help me stay focused on the right things. Production is really just one thing: writing. However, it’s not just any writing, but specifically fiction. Blog entries, nonfiction, emails — those all might be an integral part of my life as a writer, but none of that falls under the Production side of things. Only fiction. It’s where the vast amount of my effort, energy, and mental focus must go.

Process is everything else that’s necessary in being a professional fiction writer. Market research. Story research. Mailing manuscripts. Reading. Studying other writers. Going to conferences or workshops to further my learning and career. I lump it all together as Process, because they are part of the process you must follow if you hope to take your writing career as far as it will go. Calling it Process also helps me remember not to worry or stress about things I have no or limited control over; I just follow the process, knowing that if I do, things will work out for me in the long run. It’s too easy to obsess about minutiae that don’t matter, to pin your hopes on details that don’t pan out. Marketing short stories is a perfect example. I print a story. I come up with a market list. I mail it to the best market, in my opinion, for that story. If it comes back, I mail it to the next one on the list. In between, I try not to think about it at all. Hard to do sometimes? Sure, but I’ve gotten better at it over the years.

The fact of the matter is that nothing in the Process category matters all that much if you aren’t producing. And if you want to do one thing that helps you find success more quickly, then you should produce more. Write another page a day. Or five. Or ten. Most aspiring professional writers don’t write nearly enough, a lot of them falling prey to the thinking that landing a great agent or making that contact at a conference is the key to success. If you go to a conference, sure, try to make contacts. And when you’re actually mailing your work, put some time in to thinking about the best places to send it. But most of the time, you shouldn’t be thinking or worrying about those things at all.

Whenever I find myself worrying about things outside my control, I tell myself to just produce and let everything else be part of the process I follow. Not only has this helped me become more efficient with my energy and time, it’s made me happier, too.

Recommended Reads

  • The Undercover Economist by Tom Harford. Great book on applying economics to every life and the bigger world picture.
  • Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. Stirring, multi-viewpoint book about a number of women all dealing with different aspects of pregnancy and being new mothers. Her writing was highly accessible, and she brought all of her characters to life. I loved the structure of the book, too.
  • The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald. I’ve read five or six of the Travis McGee series, and I’ve loved them all. This was the twenty-first book, the last one published before MacDonald died, and though I don’t think it was written as the capstone of the series, it was a fitting end to it. He’s the kind of writer that makes me want to be a better writer, too.

Pages Before Play

It’s said that most writers like to have written more than they like to actually write. I wouldn’t say this is totally true for me, because I love writing — you know, the actual process of putting words on the page and molding them into something that resembles a story — but I can relate to the challenges of actually getting the butt in the chair. I don’t know why this is. You’d think that when you love something, you’d look for every opportunity to do it, but I suspect it has something to do with writing being hard. It may be fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

For years, I tried everything in the book to get myself to write more. Nothing worked well until I realized that any rule had to be tied not to time or place, but to a specific number of words or pages. In other words, I couldn’t say to myself, “I will write for an hour each night from 6:30 to 7:30,” but instead, “I will write 1000 words every day.” Or 500. Or 100. It didn’t matter how small, so long as it was specific and achievable. Because if you tell yourself you will write for an hour, well, you may write, but you may write only a few sentences. If your goals are time-based, rather than production-based, then you’re creating the wrong mindset. You want to condition yourself that when you sit, you write, and not that sitting for any set amount of time satisfies your goal.

If I know I’m not letting myself up out of that chair until I’ve written my five pages, you better believe I’ll get cranking fairly quickly. I don’t want to be sitting there until one in the morning when I know my kids will have me up shortly after the crack of dawn.

Ah, but that brings me to the other critical adjustment I made that helped me go from being a dilettante to a doer: withholding rewards until the work is done.

Or, when it comes to writing specifically, what I call pages before play.

There has to be either punishment or reward tied directly to your goal. Since I’m not really into the whips and chains and the fifty pushups with the face in the mud, I prefer to go with the rewards. What type of rewards are best? Well, that’s for each person to decide, but usually they’re what you’re doing when you know you should be writing. For me, that’s a couple things: 1) reading, of course, which is the big one, 2) movies and television, and 3) Internet and email.

So what I did is lump all of those into the “play category,” and I don’t let myself do any of them until the daily quota is met. No checking email to see if I heard back from so-and-so editor at such-and-such magazine. No reading that John D. MacDonald I find so addictive. No watching that documentary that was getting all the buzz lately. All of that waits until the pages are done.

And this works. It works very, very well, in fact. You have to have the self-discipline not to cheat, but usually the guilt will prevent you from doing that. Because not only do you create incentives to get your butt in the chair (gosh, you really would like to see that romantic comedy you brought home from Blockbuster the other night), you also eliminate most of the easiest distractions.

Pages before play. The trick, of course, is really doing it. But then that’s what separates the wannabes from the achievers — not just in writing, but any pursuit in life that takes discipline and dedication.

May Update

It seemed time to do a quick update on the writing. My wife’s broken leg back in early March threw us all for a loop, and with two young children in the house on top of things, it certainly made for a hectic and exhausting time. The writing took a backseat for a while, but I seem to be back up to nearly full speed now. I’m still not quite at the all-cylinders-firing level of productivity I’d like to be at, but that’s something I’m continuing to work on, and I’m getting there. There’s just no doubt in my mind any more that my own productivity will determine the speed at which I achieve the goals I’ve laid out for myself (goals that are so ambitious and lofty that I refrain in mentioning them, for fear of sounding arrogant to the extreme). This may seem pretty obvious (write more = do better), but it takes a while to develop confidence in your abilities and your potential so that you can fully embrace the idea that there’s really nothing holding you back but your own dedication and discipline. This isn’t to sound egotistical. I’ve got bucket loads still to learn, and always will; it’s just that I’ve come far enough, and achieved enough modest success, to know that any real obstacles to success are within me. It’s refreshing, and sometimes frustrating, when you realize this. It’s refreshing because you’re not shadowboxing with invisible villains any more. It can be frustrating when you’re not doing what you know you need to do.

Simply put, it means this: I know what I have to do to get where I want to go. Now it’s just a matter of doing it. As far as actual writing goes, I’m making good progress on the novel, but it’s a long road. If a short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon, and I’m still getting used to the difference.

Publishing News:

  • “Father Hagerman’s Dog” appeared in the June 2007 issue of Analog. A college student’s attempt to sell a robotic dog to a defrocked priest. A bit light-hearted, this one, and fun to write. (If you can’t locate an actual copy of the magazine, you can buy it electronically through Fictionwise at http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook45191.htm?cached)
  • “Road Game,” a suspense story involving road rage and the power of addiction, appeared in the June 2007 issue of Ellery Queen. (If you can’t locate an actual copy of the magazine, you can buy it electronically through Fictionwise at http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook45192.htm?cached)
  • “The Dinosaur Diaries,” a coming-of-age novelette that begins when a young man finds Tyrannosaurus rex tracks on his family farm in modern Iowa, will soon appear in Realms of Fantasy. It’s one of the longest and most ambitious stories I’ve sold so far. I was told the August 2007 issue, but who knows if this is true. More news when I have it.