GENREALITY

Happy Saturday, Folks!

As a whole, I don’t think our performance-driven culture celebrates nearly enough.  And road into professional writing can be a rather bleak, long stretch of learning.  I think learning how to celebrate our milestones is every bit as important as learning how to pay it forward. 

And there are a lot of milestones.  Finishing that first story.  Submitting that first story.  Hanging that first rejection slip on the wall.  Making that first sale.  Cashing that first check.

I wasn’t very good at celebrating in the earlier years of my life but with writing, I managed to hold onto it as a value.   I’m particularly a big fan of giving myself presents. 

For a lot of milestones, we hit a local steak and pasta place here in St Helens called The Dockside…less now that our toddlers are joining us.   This last week, we went there to celebrate Lamentation’s win of France’s Prix Imaginales and our first royalty check on the series.  Two huge milestones that I’m pretty excited about.

We celebrated the book deal (and my fortieth birthday) with a trip to Mexico a few years ago.  I’m giving myself a binge-month of Xbox 360 time and the boxed set of Star Blazers to celebrate finishing Requiem.   We’ll do something Big and Fun as a family when I finish the entire series.  It’s just factored into my budget now that my writing is bringing in some revenue.

But celebrating doesn’t have to be big or spendy at all.  Nor do the milestones you’re celebrating.  Sometimes, I celebrate finishing my daily word count goal with an hour or two of video games or a movie.   As a matter of fact, I told myself I could celebrate with an hour of Xbox if I finished both my Genreality blogpost and my Darkcargo interview.    

Now that was a fine bit of self-bribery! 

So what do you do to celebrate the milestones in your writing life?  And how often?

Welcome back, everyone, and Happy Saturday!

Today, I’m wrapping up my re-visitation of Heinlein’s Rules for Writing.  We’ve talked about writers needing to write and finish what they write, we’ve talked about refraining from re-writing unless requested by an editor who might pay you for the story.

For this final bit, I’m combining the last two rules:

4. You must put the work on the market.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

I can’t begin to tell you how many writers I’ve met who’ve written, finished, revised and are still sitting on those stories.  Many of them usually launch into a long monologue about how they know their work isn’t good enough yet, that they’re still practicing their craft, that it’s just not ready to submit to market.

The short answer to that is:  ”Stop it.  Go submit your work.”

One of the more influential essays I read during my Writers of the Future workshop was “The Manuscript Factory” by L. Ron Hubbard.  You can find it reprinted in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 12.  In it, Hubbard talks about approaching the work from the standpoint of imagining that you are the factory producing stories and I had a lot of resonance with much of what he said there.  You see, a writer who doesn’t submit her or his work is like a shoe factory that doesn’t ship its shoes out to the shoe distributor so they can land in the shoe stores for all those waiting feet.

One of the most constant truths I’ve run across in this business is that writers are terrible judges of their own work.  I’ve heard it over and over again from other pros.  I’ve seen it over and over again in the writers I’ve met along the way who are utterly convinced that their words suck, that they’re not ready, to the point of leaving stories on the hard drive instead of shipping them out to find a home.

Here’s the deal:  If you want to be a writer and want to see your work in print, you need to put it out there and let the editors do their job.

Afraid of rejection?  Look, it’s likely not as bad as your dating life in high school.  And rejection isn’t fatal.  It’s just a part of the game and if you’re like most new writers, you’ll need about a hundred rejections before you get that first sale.  (By the way, the secret to dealing with rejection is to get on with the next story and forget about the ones that are in the mail.)

Back when I started doing this I was a puppy of about fourteen years old, fresh from Mr. Lozier’s typing class at White River High School.  Yep.  Typing.  My first stories were typed painstakingly on a little portable Royal manual typewriter that I carted around with me like I do my laptop today.  And in those pre-internet days, markets were dug just as painstakingly out of the Writer’s Market for that year — or the year before if it was all my library had.

It’s far easier today.

So where do you go?  Well, there are two that I can recommend though lately I’ve not spent much time at either.  The one I used the most was www.ralan.com.  I liked it because it was easy to navigate, updated regularly and it broke out the markets in a way that I could start with the professional markets and work my way down the ladder through semi-pro and paying markets.  I never went to the non-paying markets unless it was a favor for a friend.  I built my short story career on Ralan’s labor of love.   The other one was www.duotrope.com.  I liked that it was searchable.

Beyond those two sites, there are other ways to find markets.  Word of mouth is one and meeting editors at conventions is another.

How do you decide which market to submit to?  Well, I always started with the highest paying market that seemed a good fit for the story and then I worked my way down.  I paid attention to their word limits and guidelines, picked up sample copies, and lobbed my stories into the mail, electronic or snail depending on what they accepted.  And then I worked my way down the list of markets.

My buddy John Pitts showed me the value of a submission log and I set up an Excel spreadsheet that listed out all of my stories along with how long it was and where it was submitted, the date mailed, the date rejected (or accepted), the amount of payment, the date of payment and the date of publication.

Then, whenever a story came wandering back home, I sat down with my pal Ralan and found a new market for it.  Sometimes, I even took part of a Saturday morning if there were several that needed some research and submitting…and checked to see which markets were due for a query.

I made it as critical a part of my Manuscript Factory as writing and finishing what I wrote.  Because just like writing a story is practicing your craft, submitting it is practicing your business.

So go out and buy your envelopes and stamps.  Prep your log if you don’t already have one.  And sit down with the market list of your choice and get your work out there.  Let the editor decide if it’s good enough or not and get on with your next story.

Fishermen rarely catch fish if their line’s not in the water.

What’s getting in your way when it comes submitting your work?  What could you do differently that would help you make putting your work to market a sacred habit?

Thanks for hanging out with me through this re-visiting of Heinlein’s Rules.  I’m not sure what’s coming next week but I’m open to your ideas.  Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to see me tackle and I’ll consider it.

Meanwhile, you have some stories to write, finish, and send forth into the world!

Best luck to you!

Trailer Boy out!

“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” ~ RICHARD RHODES

“Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.”
~William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”

Happy Saturday!  As you read this, I’m in Hollywood, California, to speak to the Writers of the Future winners at their workshop and then attend the awards ceremony on Sunday evening.  It brings back great memories of my own workshop and ceremony back in 2005.

Last week, I started us down the path of revisiting Robert Heinlein’s Rules for Writing.   We covered the first two rules — writers must write and finish what they write.

Today, I’m going to spend some time talking about his third rule: 

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

This is a rule that’s been tricky for some folks.  I’ve seen writers on panels and in blogs or workshops expound a great deal on what Heinlein meant by the words “refrain from rewriting.”  Some have seen it as a ban on any and all revision and others have argued that it wasn’t what Heinlein intended at all.  But because that bit is a bit more open to interpretation in its exact meaning, I’m going to jump first to the second bit.  The exception:  When someone is potentially offering you money for the story and asks you do rewrite or revise it.

You may have experienced this.  You put your story in the mail.  You wait for the rejection or check you’re certain to get and then…voila!  You get an email from the editor:

Dear Ms Writer,

I  greatly enjoyed your short story, “Romance in the Dawn of Zombie Love,” however I struggled with your protagonist’s motivation.  If it were more clear, I think this could be a fine story for Undead Tales of the Rich and Famous.  If you are willing to do a bit of revision please let me know and I will gladly provide more detail as to what I’m looking for.

When that happens, you have three choices…make the changes (and probably a sale), attempt to explain why the motivation is exactly as it should be, or submit your story to the next market on the list.  I tend to lean towards the first option.  Sometimes, if I really feel strongly that the story is fine as it is, I may go with the third option.  Option two — well, I don’t recommend it under most circumstances (though, yes, there are sometimes exceptions.)  Why do I dodge trying to explain the story to the editor? 

Well, for one Big Reason that I will expound upon even further in my own interpretation of the first bit of Heinlein’s rule.  It’s not your job to be the editor.  You are the writer.  Writers write.  Editors edit and buy stories.  Chances are good that the editor knows just what they’re looking to buy, understood your story as written perfectly well,  and felt strongly enough about its promise to make that request.  In my experience, most of the seasoned editors I’ve worked with have a good eye for story and their distance from my manuscript gives them an objectivity that I lack.  I believe in letting the editor do their job and focusing instead on doing mine.

Which brings me to my exposition on why refraining from rewriting, in my opinion, is a good plan unless someone wants to give you money for the revised story.  Often times, we can over-work a story and cut the life right out of it by trying to second guess the editor who hasn’t even seen it yet.  We can fall into that trap (I know you know these people, too) of constantly reworking the same novel, the same short story, always telling yourself that you can make it better.  If you fall into that trap, you may never get more than that one novel or short story finished in your lifetime.  So I say let the editor tell you herself what it needs.  Because if the story grabs her and carries her — if it resonates with her and fits the market she’s purchasing for — she’ll ask you for the changes she wants to see.

Now, this rule of course is interpreted and re-interpreted by a lot of writers smarter and more successful than I am.  But this is how I apply it to my writing.

In the early days, when I first started writing and finishing my short stories, I would take multiple passes.  I have some short stories in my file that are labeled FIRST, SECOND, even FIFTH draft.  Yikes.  I suppose I didn’t know this rule back then and more importantly, I didn’t have the experience to get it right in fewer passes.  I was still growing into my voice and still lacking confidence.  I would run a story past my beta readers three, four times sometimes and they were particularly patient.

But as I started figuring out how it all seems to work for me, I learned a valuable truth:  I can always write a better story tomorrow than the one I wrote yesterday.  Which means that I can also always find ways to improve any of my past stories if I look at them with a critical eye today.  Because practice improves performance.   I can either apply that learning from practice to old material that hasn’t sold yet…or, I can go write another story.  I choose the latter.  Unless an editor says “Hey, Ken…..”

 So this is what I do.  I write the story.  I let some readers look at it (often, one of those readers is the editor who requested the story) and I give it one good pass to make sure it synchs up and is polished.  I incorporate the feedback I’m given where it makes sense to me.  And then, I call it finished and I put it in the mail.  I re-save the file as “Long-Ass Ken Scholes Short Story Title, FINAL” and tuck it away into an e-folder with the first draft and then…I move on to the next project.  If it’s a novel, I also have the copy edits and the galley proofs to check and those let me also make corrections — an extra couple of opportunities to make sure it says what I intended it to say — but ultimately, I aim for as few passes of revision as possible.  And then…next please!  I go write something else.

Rinse.  Repeat.

Okay.  Next week, we’ll talk about the last two rules.  For now, I’m in Hollywood and the sun is out.  There’s bound to be some lunch and good writerly discourse right around the corner from where I sit in the lounge at the Author Services Inc building.   So this is Trailer Boy signing out until next Saturday.

Cheers!  Oh, and join me on Sunday if you like:  The Writers and Illustrators of the Future Awards Ceremony will be streaming live from their website.  Come see what it’s about…and hey, send in a story if you’re a SF/F writer.  Next year, it could be you up there getting your award!

Howdy Folks!  Happy Saturday!

I was just sitting down to work on my blog post when an email came across my Blackberry from a writer who heard me on David Farland’s Authors’ Advisory Conference Call talking about self awareness as the writer’s first best tool.  He had a question that collided with my brain in just the right way and voila, a blog post was born!

Here’s his question:

I just heard your interview on the Author’s Advisory blog, and I found it very educational. The part that caught my interest the most was your writing speed of 1000 words an hour.

I’m a pretty slow writer myself (average of 500/hr), but I’m not happy with this speed at all. Writing time is in short supply for me, and I need to be more productive. Do you have any suggestions that can improve my writing speed?

Good question.  Thanks for sending it in.

I started thinking about my Words Per Hour probably around 2005 when I hit a point in my writing life where I began taking it more seriously.  If you make widgets, how you go about selling those widgets and what you sell them for is largely dependent on how many widgets you can make.

Writers make stories.  And if you are a fast writer, you will have (usually) a faster learning curve and more inventory available.  A person who writes a short story every week, practicing their craft and business by writing, revising and submitting is likely going to get there faster than a person who writes a short story every six months.

But more important than that, if you know how fast your story factory cranks out its product, you can forecast the future a little better.  For instance, you have a very busy week and an editor asks you for a short story that they need Right Away (trust me…this happens.)  If you know that you write 500 reasonably clean wph and you need a 5,000 word story, you will need to budget 10 hours to get that draft done.  Factor in time to revise based on your self awareness around how quickly you do THAT piece of the job, and you can estimate how much time you need total to get that story turned around.  If you have a jam-packed week full of children, dayjob, other engagements, other assignments, you’ll know whether or not you can fit it in and how better to answer the editor when s/he asks “When do you think you have something over to me?”

It also comes in handy when planning to write a novel and scheduling that into your calendar.  For me, I write 1k wph at my best.  If I’m going slower, there’s usually something going on — flabby writer muscles, having a cold, being distracted or rundown, etc.  But I can estimate that my goal is to put in about 2k per day (or two hours) and that if my novels around 150k, I know it’ll take about  2.5 months.  Factor in your conventions, life stuff or other events that may interfere and set your goal.  I know my life well enough to pad that time and say 4 months.  It only takes a couple of head colds or a week of sick children to throw things into utter disarray.

So how do you write faster?  Well, there are some things that I think might help but ultimately, I would say that learning to write faster isn’t always what best serves you as a writer.  You have a natural rhythm, whatever that is, that lines up with your own process…and it may take you years at the keyboard to figure out exactly what it is.  And it’s something that will likely improve over time as you take the learning curves that come your way.  But in some instances, going faster isn’t the key…writing more and writing faster aren’t the same thing.  If you want 1k per day, you may land better words by setting aside two hours and letting your brain do what suits it best. 

So…going faster?  Okay.  First…practice.  I can move from a G to a D much faster now than I could when I first picked up a guitar in 1985.  Why?  Because I’ve been doing it for a long time.  I can learn songs — and write them — much faster now, too.  It was all just a matter of practicing over time.

Second, pay attention to what you’re doing as you write.  Are you stopping a lot and going back to fix typos, revising as you go?  Now, I know I could write faster than 1k wph if I didn’t do that.  But I’m so used to writing that way…and ultimately happy with my writing speed…that I leave that alone.  The trade off is that by writing the way I write, my first drafts tend to be pretty clean.  But if you think you gain more by writing faster and you’re revising as you go, try cutting that out on the next story your work on…see how that goes for you.  Trick your inner editor into letting your inner muse just slap down the words with a promise (or bribe) to let the inner editor have free rein as soon as the draft is written. 

(Alternatively, I know some writers who edit the previous day’s work before starting up for the day and this gets them re-exposed to the story, makes the inner editor happy, and lets them write faster during the actual hour or two of writing they do.)

Third, make all of this exploration and discovery into a game.  My friend Liz Coleman uses a program called Write or Die sometimes to force herself to write quickly without thinking too much.  Setting a timer or having a wordcount race with a writing friend can also help.  But by making it fun…letting it be a type of play…you can let yourself off the hook for taking it all too seriously.  And try lots of things.  Me, I work better with music and by minimizing outside distractions by wearing headphones.  I also have a time of day that I work best at — early mornings — but I only know that because I tried lots of things while exploring my personal writing process.

In closing, writing more is definitely a key to success.  Writing faster isn’t always.  But find out what works for you, then push, stretch, learn…and most importantly:  Write.

What about you?  What’s your average wph and what things speed you up or slow you down?