On this last post of the year and the last post in this series of posts about setting goals, I wanted to go over some of the basics one more time and give you a few more tricks that not only work for a beginning year goal, but when you are starting back up after life gets in the way.

Actually, last year I did about three other posts on this goal and motivation topic, and this next week I will link in one post all of these together. But for now, this rounds out the topic. And thanks for the great comments on fear, both privately and on the site. Fear is a huge issue for us all. Keep fighting that one every day.

So, basics first. Let me review a little.

Find Your Dream. That’s first. Look way out and ask yourself what you would love to be doing in ten or fifteen years. Don’t be afraid to dream big.

Figure a Smaller Five Year Dream. This can still be out of your control, but should be a step toward making the larger Dream. For example, sell five novels in five years. Out of your control, which makes it a dream, but still something to work toward.

Set Your Yearly Goal. This goal should be structured to get you to your Dream in five years and be in your control completely. For example, if you want to sell five novels, you should write and mail about three a year. You might sell more with that number, but at least you are giving yourself a fair shot and not putting all the eggs in one basket. This yearly goal will still seem like a huge elephant to you. So go to the next step.

Set Your Weekly Writing, Mailing, and Learning Goals. This is where your focus needs to be all the time. Just one week, and better yet just one day. Once you do the math and set these goals, working with the time you have available, working with time you will miss, working with family and jobs and everything else. Plan to miss at times and always have a plan to start fresh on the beginning of the next week. Every week is a fresh start. Be realistic, but don’t be afraid to push a little.

In the example above, three books a year is three pages per day. If you can’t write every day, figure 6 pages per writing day and miss half the year. Remember to work in time to mail (not in your writing time) and structure in ways to learn storytelling craft as you go along. Always keep learning, all the time, and the writing as you go along will just get better and better.

Remember, don’t let yourself think too much about the big dream. Stay focused on the week, on the day. That’s the key.

So, now to a few tricks that might help with tomorrow. Or any start-up day.

Trick one. Plan out ahead what you are going to work on. And Write it Down! I don’t mean outline, I just mean know what story or novel you plan to work on. And have two or three out ahead of you. Example: Tomorrow I plan to work on X-Novel. Chapter 10. Friday I plan to work on X-Novel, finish Chapter 10 and start Chapter 11. And so on. If you have three or four writing sessions out ahead planned, it will cut down on the panic of “What am I going to Write About?”

Trick two. Have a back-up project to work on. And have it written down on a back-up list. Example: I plan to work on Chapter Ten of X-Novel, but for some reason, that’s just not coming, so my back up is to work on Y-Short Story about (blank). There is no such thing as writer’s block, but there is “project block” so be ready to move to a new project and fire at a moment’s notice. The moment you do that, the pressure on the other project will ease, your subconscious mind will figure out what was stopping you, and you can go back to it later. But always have two or three projects ready to switch to.

The legend was that Asimov used to have a number of typewriters where he could move from typewriter to typewriter when one project got stuck. I never saw it, but what I knew about him and after being around him a number of times, I wouldn’t doubt that legend.

Trick three. Set an emergency back-up time each day for writing. For example, you plan on a writing session between 7 and 9 in the evening, but alas, family gets in the way and you’re going to miss. Nope. Your back up for the day is after the family goes to bed, you’ll stay up and get the minimum pages cranked out. That way when you wake up the next day, you’ll feel amazingly good about overcoming a life issue and still getting your pages done. Again, this time is emergency time only. But it will really help you keep up a great attitude along the way.

Trick four. Set up a “report into” person. Or persons or group or something. Ideally this is every day or every other day or at worst every week. Set up another writer friend, a family member, someone, to report in to. Knowing that you have to do this will drive you even more. We all hate making excuses and missing, so knowing we’re going to have to do that is a key element in the early years of this craft. It will drive you to write in your emergency time more than not.

After a time, as you become a professional, you will have trained yourself enough to drop this, but early on, it helps a great deal. And when anyone is really pushing on a project, it helps as well. I often set this up with other writer friends, and have one going now with the last master class. A bunch of us are writing and mailing out short stories every week and reporting into the entire class e-mail list. We started November 1st and I’m eight for eight so far. It works, it really does.

Reporting in is one of the most powerful tools in structuring new habits, which is what many of you are doing with your writing.

So, here we go into a fresh new year. It has lots of promise and fun as well as tough times and life issues. The country is bouncing along the bottom in a lot of areas, jobs are tough, money is tight. But we have a new year full of promise, a new President still trying to get clean up messes. Eventually the snow will melt, the weather will clear, and the economy will turn around. Now is the time to start fresh on the writing as well, no matter where you are at in your career.

Look out ahead, find your real dream, find the goals that can get you to the dream, break it down into a week and then only a day. And focus on that day. Only that day. Build something, write something fresh and new that one day.

And then the next day build something fresh and new that day. One day at a time.

And have fun.

Writing fiction is a great job. It really isn’t work at all, and anyone who claims it is has lost a screw. I get paid money to sit alone in a room and make stuff up. I have no boss, no dress code, no commute. I have a cat sitting on the back of my chair and another beside me as I type. I live in a huge home overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

I have my issues, yes, and I’ve worked hard and long to get here. And so can you. If you start tomorrow. And focus on only one day at a time.

And have fun.

A good writing New Year to everyone.

Cheers, Dean

One day before the new year fires up a fresh start. Actually, if you have read all the previous posts about goals, you should be thinking that the beginning of every week fires up a fresh start. Keep everything always starting over, remember, that way when you miss, you just start over and all is fresh, with a short term goal for that week.

And then those goals add right up by the end of the year. Got all that figured, right? Read all the previous posts on goals? Do so before going any farther on this one, otherwise this will sound very confusing at times. Much more confusing than I normally sound.

So, right to the big elephant sitting in the room:

Fear.

Yup, fear is a huge monster sitting in your office, between your ears, and will make you do really, really stupid things unless you can clear it out every so often and think clearly.

So where does fear come into writing and publishing and aiming at your long term dreams? Simply everywhere.

Fear has the focused goal to stop you. And it will, all the time, in many, many ways.

No real logical place to start talking about fear in writing, since it is in all aspects of writing and the business, so I’m just going to toss out examples using Heinlein’s Rules as a guide and see where this all leads.

Example: You are excited about your book or story idea, have spent a few weeks being successful at your goals of getting to your writing, and then one day you wake up and the book seems like crap, you are convinced you are wasting your time, and that you should start something fresh.

Fear got you.

Fear of trusting your writing, fear of finishing something, fear of failure, fear of ridicule when someone reads it, and so on.

Fear comes out like this: “You’re not good enough. What makes you think you could ever write at a national level? Or even finish something as big as a novel?”

Bam, you’re going to find reasons to miss a session, miss your weekly goal, and at that point months will go by because you let the fear voice win.

You can’t even get past Heinlein’s Rule #1. You must write. But this fear has stopped you and at the end of 2010 you will be very disappointed with yourself.

On to another example.

Example: You stop on a project because it’s garbage and start another one, and then again and again. You’re hitting all your weekly page goals, but never finishing anything and mailing it. Why? Fear.

On this one, Heinlein’s Rule #2 plays big. You have this deep fear of being laughed at, that your writing isn’t good enough, that people will stop you and your writing, so it’s just easier to stop yourself.

Want another example? There are thousands.

Example: You get past the fear in the last two examples all right, and finish a novel. Great. It’s an event, right, it’s important because it took you a lot of time to write it, right? Nope, it’s just a story, but you need, you MUST rewrite it, polish it, make it PERFECT. Right?

Why? Because of fear, that’s why. The rewriting myth is just fear based and that’s why it’s so deep.

Heinlein’s Rule #3 is that you should only rewrite to editorial demand. So, you have to have the courage, the trust in your own ability to mail it to an editor. You spell check it, give it to a first reader, only fix what they say needs fixing, and then mail it to editors.

Fear comes smashing in for many of you with me just saying those words. But let me look at what you are afraid of.

— Fear: Death of some sort. Nope. No editor will come to your house and shoot you if you don’t give them a perfect book that is perfect for their line and has every word perfect. Nope, never happens, no matter what beginning writers think.

—Fear: Blacklisting for bad writing. An editor will see your horrid writing and remember you and blacklist you forever. The ugly truth is that editors can barely remember all the writers’ names they buy from, let alone the thousands of books they glance at and don’t take. No one remembers out there unless you do something stupid like insult them. You act like a professional, send them a book, and if it doesn’t fit what they are looking for, they will reject it and that’s it. They won’t remember you or even think about you. Nothing all to be afraid of because you have it on many other editor’s desks, remember? One of them will show good taste and buy it eventually.

The fear that everything you write must be perfect is a killer. No story is perfect, no book is perfect. Doesn’t happen. And who would be the person to say it was perfect anyway? A book I love by an author I love to read is hated by my friends who think it’s the worst thing written. Nothing is ever perfect, folks. Sorry to break that bubble.

So Heinlein’s Rule #3 shouts directly at this fear. I dare you, spend a year not rewriting to death everything you do and just mail the stories after fixing details a first reader finds. You might be stunned at the results. You are a ton better writer than you are a rewriter and I can say that without even knowing most of you out there. It’s just the way it works.

Oh, oh, another example.

Example: Book is done, sitting on your desk, you’re pounding along on a new one, meeting your page goals just fine and dandy, and months go by and the first book sits there. I personally know of writers who have up to a dozen books just sitting, not in the mail to anyone. Why? Yup, you guessed it. Fear.

This breaking of Heinlein’s Rule #4 comes about like this: I don’t have the time right now to mail it, I need to do “market research” before I can mail it, I don’t feel that good about that book, and so on and so on. I’ve heard them all and said a bunch of them myself.

This is the place that I fall down at times. I tend to write stories and novels and then not mail them. Now, granted, every novel I have finished is now in the mail to editors in one form or another. But not every short story. In fact, I would guess I have a good dozen new stories that have never been mailed, or only mailed once or twice. That’s getting fixed with my new challenge to myself. In fact, in the last week I have mailed eight stories, a number brand new, a couple never out before. But why do I do that? Why do other writers do that? Fear, plain and simple. I have no issue with Heinlein’s first three rules, but rule #4 and #5 are where my focus sometimes fails.

How does it come about in my head, this fear? It has a simple phrase: “What’s the point. It’s too weird, no one is going to buy it.”

Of course, I don’t know that unless I mail it.

The other night, sitting around a wonderful dinner with four other professional writers, I made a comment about how hard Heinlein’s Rules are to follow and my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, turned to me and said simply, “I have always followed them and still do.”

And, of course, she was the most successful writer sitting at the table. Damn, how many times do I have to shove back this fear issue for myself and climb back into the game? It seems, all the time.

So watch for the fear in these goals. It will stop you at one stage or another, or maybe at a bunch of places along the way through the year. It comes in sideways, it’s triggered sometimes by friends and family, but most of the time it is just a simple twisting in the stomach that makes you stop doing what you know is right and do something else, often without thinking about it.

And I have a hunch that just reading this post twisted a lot of stomachs out there, not because the writing sucked, but because I said something that hit home and that you don’t agree with it. Fine to not agree with these rantings, fine to do something else with your writing. No problem by me. But make sure you are acting from a clear reason that works for you, not from simple fear.

Fear. It really is the elephant in the room that you have to eat one bite at a time.

Cheers, Dean

Keeping on with motivation posts for the new year.

Now to the hard part. It’s fairly simple to take your dream and break it down into bite-sized pieces, to make the huge elephant something that can be swallowed, to extend that awful metaphor a little too far. But (extending it even farther) how do you keep biting and chewing in March, or May, or August?

The problem with year-end motivation and goal setting is that it often doesn’t last past the first month or two. Life just gets in the way and things change and the sun comes out and the snow melts and suddenly there are other things just a little more important at the moment. Rejections make it worse. Months go by and suddenly you realize you have fallen off your goals, so you get down on yourself and then just swear you’ll get back to it, but of course, you never do. Not really, not with any real energy until December rolls around again.

This last year I did the streak page here on this web site, and it was stunning to me how many people signed up to start streaks, or already had one going in December. By the time I got the reports December 1st, only about six people were still going. All normal, and the six people who were still going are the ones either starting to sell or already selling regularly. No other way to look at it, folks. Producing and keeping going over a long period is the only way to do this career.

Does what happened to most people last year sound familiar? Yup, to me too. Been there, done that, bought that tee-shirt so many times I have closets full of them.

So, now, here before the year starts, what can you do to make sure to keep climbing back onto the goals when you have a miss, when life just comes up and stops you cold for a week or two? Doing that is what makes a professional writer out of you, and doing that will make you very happy when you get to December 2010 and look back and realize you have hit most of your goals and are that much closer to your dream.

Back to the point that every writer is different, so with this problem, every writer seems to function differently.

First, I’ll try to outline reasons that just keep writers writing day after day, month after month, year after year, then try to give you all a few tricks.

ADDICTION.

Frighteningly enough, that’s a major reason many writers just keep pounding along. It’s their addiction, or they have used it in replacement for other not-so-healthy addictions. If you have an addictive personality, start working writing into an addiction, one that just makes you cranky if you miss it for even a single day. Man, at times I wish I had this addiction. It makes life so much easier for those who have it to get lots of work done. But it makes it much harder for those around them, however, just as any addiction does.

MONEY.

Stunningly enough and hard to believe for those of you who have bought into the myth that there is no money in fiction writing, fiction writers make a lot of money, and many of us write for money as well as love. So if you have a really crappy job that you hate, pound the keys harder with the idea that for every hour you work on your writing is one hour closer to getting out of the crappy job.

This was my motivation for years and still is in part. Now understand, I have a five year degree in Architecture and went to three years of law school, but I stayed working as a bartender after all that higher education (much to the disgust of my family and many friends). Why did I tend bar instead of going and becoming a professional? Because cleaning up someone’s puke at 2 in the morning made me go home that night and pound the keys. I often would get home at 3 in the morning and write until 5, then get back up and write all afternoon until I had to go back to the bar. I lived in a crappy small apartment so that I had very few bills and I spent every free moment thinking about writing and working on my writing, and every spare penny to go to conferences to listen to professional writers.

Also understand at this point I was well into my late-thirties and already had two marriages behind me. I looked like a loser to just about anyone in the real world, which was a ton of pressure as well.

Yet somehow, through all the pressure, I had the belief that if I wrote hard enough, long enough, and fast enough, I could make my living writing fiction and get out of that bar. My last day of tending bar was over twenty years ago now.

NATURAL BORN STORY TELLER MEETS THE MUSE.

Most long term professionals I know have made themselves into natural story tellers. The key is we all LOVE story. We love telling stories, we eat up just about any story put in front of us, and if we had to write a laundry list, it would come out with a plot and a character in trouble. Often that nasty thing that beginning writers call “The Muse” snaps us and makes us write something we didn’t have planned to write. Those are fun stories or books. Romance writers call them Books of the Heart. Often these books will drive a writer harder and longer than any other.

The problem is, they don’t often last, and you can’t bring that feeling of fun and desire up with every project, so it isn’t something to be counted on. When it hits, run with it, but don’t plan on it hitting you or you’ll be spending a lot of time in coffee shops talking with other want-to-be writers. Real professional writers sit down and write even when they feel they have nothing to write and no desire to sit there.

IT’S A JOB.

This is sort of like the money part, but not really. Some writers I know can just treat writing like a job and go to it every day with a real job structure, even when the job might not make them any money in the near future. This job attitude is a good one and works well for those of us who were brought up middle class with a work ethic. But there are no easy tricks I can give you to make this switch turn on in your head.

The key with this one is having a good, fair, but hard boss. Yup, the boss is you, and you have to be hard on yourself. The attitude is this: If I would call in sick at a real job and talk to my boss, then I can have the day off of writing. But if I would go to my real world corporate job, then I can’t take the day off of writing. The boss would get angry. And since you are the boss of your own writing job, you need to be firm, yet fair.

For example, today to end this decade I lost a tooth in a pretty good dental operation. I am in pain, drinking only fluids, and feel like crap, yet here I sit. If you can’t do that, stay away from this job.

Of course,this works for me at times like now, but then other times I just say “Screw it” and don’t show up for work for months at a time. But, of course, I had that attitude about real world jobs as well, so my writing is no different.

Now notice, none of these mention writing because it’s your dream. Every writer has that and it just isn’t enough, sadly, to maintain long term commitment to this business.

So, to some tricks. These are basic tricks to keep you going for a time. If you are lucky, your writing will turn into an addiction, or a drive to make a living, or a job attitude. But to get it there, you have to set down the patterns and these tricks help set that up and get you back on track when life gets in the way.

Trick #1. Challenge.

The challenge has to be for something that matters, that has feedback loops, and is short in duration.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I challenged each other to write, finish, and mail one new story per week and we made missing hurt with having to buy the other a dinner and lots of grief. For us, this challenge lasted for years and helped us both set some patterns in our writing and get a lot of stories in the mail and sold.

Notice that the challenge with Nina hit all three of the goals I talked about in the last post. That’s the best kind of challenge. So if you do set up a challenge with someone, or with your family, make it hurt if you miss. Make it so that you wake up worrying about missing. Then you got yourself something that will drive you to the computer on the really hard days and help set up the patterns.

Trick #2. Keeping track of how much you have in the mail on editor’s desks.

Now I came up with a system to do this back in the early 1980’s and it ended up being called “The Race.” It’s an easy number system that gives instant feedback, hits all three goals mentioned last post and is sort of fun as well.

The Race is against yourself, of course.

— You give yourself one point for every different short story you have in the mail.

— You give yourself 3 points for every chapter and outline you have in the mail on an editor’s desk. (Just three points per book, no matter how many editors you send it to at once.)

— You give yourself eight points for every full manuscript you have on an editor’s desk. (Again, max of 8 points per book no matter how many editors are reading it at once.)

When the story or book sells and you get the check, you drop the points. Note I said “Get the Check.” A sale, a contract can often fall through, but once paid, it counts and you lose the points.

I have 52 points in the mail at the moment and climbing.

Stunning how much fun this silly score-keeping system is. I keep track of mine every week and on one of the writer’s boards of writers who have attended the workshops here, there is even a web site that keeps track for people. It is also always stunning how the writers with the most points make the most sales. Always happens for some reason. (Right now my wife has over 120 points in the race, and she sells stuff all the time for some reason.)

So building your “Race Points” can work as a nifty way to keep track, and also, when a story comes back with a rejection, to keep the point you must put it back in the mail. This “Race” helps with most of Heinlein’s Rules.

Trick #3. Getting a streak going.

Now, this works for those writers who have the ability to be very consistent in life. Pati Nagle, who was on the streak list last year, has kept it going for over six years, writing at least 500 words per day, no days off. Of course, Pati also mailed everything she wrote and she is well published now. I personally find this stunning and amazing and I admire those who can do it. Loren Coleman challenged me to try this last May, at least one page per day, and I made it one month without an issue, then just sort of went “Yup, I can do that.” And I stopped.

So if you can get a streak going of some sort, it makes a lot of natural pressure to not break the streak. This is like a person trying to stop drinking. You have to take it one day at a time and count the days since you last fell off. This works. Fred Pohl, of course, is known that for decades and decades he did four pages per day, 365 days a year, without a miss. I admire that man a great deal, both for his writing, his long career, and his ability to do that every day. He’s in his 90’s now and still going at it. Stunning.

So, as you set up your goals for 2009, take a look at a few of these tricks, or write me with one of your own, and get that as a firm goal as you start. It will help you keep focused on making it through the hard months and to a place in December 2010 when you look back and are happy with your year.

Cheers, Dean

Onward with thinking about the coming new year and new decade. I’m still sort of stunned that this is my 5th decade in publishing coming up. I honestly don’t feel that old and felt very old and behind when I started. I have no idea how that works. Just one of the head-shaking things about fiction writing.

Remember, read the first 6 posts in this series if you really want any of this to make sense.

A good title for this post might be “More than One Goal.”

So now, if you are getting serious about this writing thing for the coming year, you’ve figured out your writing speed. You have figured out how much time you can carve out of a day or a week regularly. You know about how many words/pages you can write in a normal writing hour. Then you have gone and looked at your long term dream and worked backwards from there to a weekly writing goal. A realistic goal, one that will not only allow you to make it happen, but will advance your movement by the end of the year toward your dream.

That far, right?

“Getting serious.” I guess I have to talk about that for a few paragraphs and then move on. “Getting Serious” is a term used in writing when a professional writer looks back at years and says, “It was at that point that I got serious.” That means that they made the time to write, set goals, and switched from a writer who always wanted to write but could never find the time to a writer who made the time, set targets, and followed Heinlein’s Rules in one fashion or another on the path to making the dream come true.

My big turning point, as I have talked about before, was January 1st, 1982, where I went from writing two stories a year and sometimes mailing them to writing and finishing and mailing one short story a week. I got serious. Granted, I had published a couple stories and a whole lot of poetry in the 1970’s, but that date was the day I “Got Serious.”

I can’t help you much on the decision to get serious, and all these “goal” blogs are aimed at are writers who are going to make the “Get Serious” jump, or writers who already have made the jump and are just looking for tricks to keep going into the new year.

Let me put it this way. You look back from December 31st, 2010 and you finished only a few short stories and didn’t mail much of anything and couldn’t get that novel done, you’re not serious about attaining any writing dream. But you set some goals now toward making your dream down the road, and come close to those goals, you are serious and have made the jump.

And for those of you who read this post last year, look back at how you did. Was 2009 your get serious year, or do you still need to make the jump.

So now to marketing goals.

I’ve gotten a bunch of questions from people about marketing. It seems the dream that almost everyone has is to get published, to sell books or stories, and that means you have to mail them. But yet writer after writer will finish a book, then just not mail it, or mail it to three agents and give up.

Trust me, you won’t attain any dream by doing that. So combined with the page production goals (the most important part) is Heinlein’s Rule #4 and #5. You have to mail your work to someone who will buy it and publish it. (Agents do not write checks or publish anything, as a point I wanted to make and then drop.)

How to mail a book to someone who will buy it? Well, to be honest, it’s tough. Kris and I spend an entire week teaching writers how to market their work and we have two of those marketing workshops left before we wind down this round of teaching. One in March, one in October, and if you can make one of those, write me for information. Basic information is under workshops here on this site. (Don’t expect us to do another one. May not happen. Sorry.)

So, it’s not going to be possible to tackle a weeks’ worth of work here, to teach anyone how to write a good query letter here, or a good cover letter, or a good proposal. All that takes that evil word: Practice. And some hands-on training, which is why Kris and I do those marketing workshops.

For a short story per week challenge, the marketing is easy. Mail the story to an editor and keep it in the mail until it sells. But for novels, this part tends to freeze up writers.

Let me back up first for a moment and talk about why writers freeze up at this marketing point.

Book as Event.

Writers can produce a short story in a few hours, a few days, maybe a week. It isn’t an event getting it done and it’s easy to just fire into the mail to an editor. Not much of a big deal for most writers. And short stories appear in a magazine and then are gone, replaced quickly by the next issue of the magazine. No event, no one treats them like events, including the writer.

But books seem to take on a life of their own. To a writer, the myths built up around writing a novel are hundreds of years old, have deep roots in all of us, and in many ways affect how we approach the writing of a book.

English professors, bless their hearts, dig into the “meaning” of a book, how “important” the book was by the author, how layers of this or that were put into the book. Oh, my, any young writer after that will think “I can’t write a novel, I don’t know how to do any of that.” But what the professor never says is that’s not how the writer wrote it, and chances are didn’t see 90% of what the professors are pointing out and would be surprised that it was even in the book. (Not kidding.)

All this builds up to “book as event” on the writing side, which freezes anyone. It is the biggest elephant of them all to try to eat.

I had a couple people stunned that I could type in a title and then just fire on a novel, with no idea at all where I was going. If you feel the same way, you may have this “event” issue even deeper than you realize. I did an entire long post in the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing on Book as Event. Go back and find it and read it.

A novel is just a story. Sure, it’s longer, sure it has more characters, sure in Western Literature, it has a certain structure, just like humans all have bones that give us a certain structure. But we all know the structure, we all have read thousands of books, watched thousands of movies. We all know story structure deep down inside.

We are story tellers, not “book as event” writers.

How else does this “Book as Event” kill writers? You finish a book, it’s taken three months, six months, most of a year, whatever. That’s a vast amount of time spent so, of course, it’s MORE IMPORTANT because you spent more time on it. Uhhh, no, it’s just longer. Nothing more.

But because you think it’s IMPORTANT, you have to rewrite it, of course, right? Ignoring Heinlein’s Rules because he’s dead and what did he know anyway. My novel is IMPORTANT and I had better make it good before I mail it.

Yup, and there you go, down that rat hole. Writers don’t know their own work, wouldn’t know if something was working if it slapped them. Give the book to a trusted first reader, only fix what they suggest that you agree with, then mail it and start the next one. Let the editors decide if it is worth their time or not. Trust your work.

This business is a numbers game, remember? I said Editors above. Note the “s” on the end of that word?

So what happens on the other end, on the editor’s end. Well, to them, these books are events as well, as they should be on their side of the contract. Books take a vast amount of time, energy, numbers of people, and money to take from manuscript and get to the shelves. The publisher risks upwards of a hundred thousand bucks on your small paperback original, so of course they look at the book as event. They have to.

And you, the young writer, goes out and listens to editors talk about books, as you should. And this book as event feeling comes back with you into your office. And the thinking goes like this: “If they are going to spend so much time and energy on my book, my baby, my masterpiece, then maybe I had better spend more time on it also, rewrite it a couple of times because I wrote it fast.”

And thus “book as event” death right at that moment to a real creative person. Creation comes from deep within each of us. Our voice, that thing editors say they look for, can only come out when you are pounding away in a creative state. Voice, in rewriting, gets toned down because you, the writer, can’t see your own voice. “Polishing” takes off the rough edges and makes your book dull and just like every other “polished” novel out there.

So when setting marketing goals, the first thing you have to do, and the hardest, is trust your skill, trust your writing, and just write it and mail it. Let the editors decide if what you have done is an event or not, worth their time.

In other words, you have to somehow, in some way, take “Book as Event” thinking out of your mind. You tell stories. Short ones, long ones, doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.

So to nuts and bolts on setting marketing goals, as much as I can in this place.

Short story: Finish and mail to one editor, keep it in the mail when it comes back. Write the next story and repeat.

Novel: Finish and mail to five or ten editors. Keep it in the mail when one rejects it. Write the next novel and repeat.

Warning again: The process of writing a book has nothing to do with the final product of a book. So never tell them you cranked it off in six weeks and didn’t rewrite it, just like you should never tell a short story editor it took you one evening to write the story they are using for their cover. Novel editors are going to be spending a year with your book, working and fighting to get it into print. Let them believe you spent the same amount of time on the other side of the process, even though every good editor out there knows better.

Back to a reminder from a previous post when it comes to setting marketing goals. Marketing is not writing. Research is not writing. Researching editors is not writing.

Keep your production goals outside of your marketing goals. You must have duel goals.

But let me say this clearly right now. If your goal is to write a novel this next year, your goal should also be to market the novel this next year. Two goals.

And get used to rejection. There is nothing you can do to keep it from happening. It means nothing. Keep your rejection slips and letters for tax proof you are making a consistent effort at making money. Count your rejections. Rejoice at the personal ones because a busy editor took time with your manuscript to give you a personal one. When you get a form letter back, just shrug and say, “Guess it didn’t work for them. Their loss.” And then mail the thing back out again.

Short story only one editor at a time.

Novels, keep the novel on a number of editor’s desks at once.

Your marketing goal will be tied to your dream and your production goal. Securely tied. You can’t make the dream of selling and publishing without marketing.

And somehow, go learn how to write a good query letter, a good proposal. Make that a goal too. GOAL #3 for those of you counting. <g>

For years I watched really good writers get books rejected and couldn’t figure out why. Then we started the novel workshops and had the authors attending, all selling short fiction writers, send in proposals with their novels and query letters.

Kris and I were stunned. The novels were great but all the query letters and proposals sucked. The novels were damned good, but no editor was ever going to see the book, no agent look at the book, because the author was hiding their good work behind a crappy presentation.

That would be like going into a job interview half dressed and smelling like dead fish. No one would hire you. Bad proposals, bad query letters are exactly the same issue. They are your job interview, your books job interview to become an event in some publishing house.

Make it a goal to learn how to write good ones. But learning that is not writing, so keep it away from your writing time.

You are a story teller. Learn how to write stories by sitting down regularly. That’s goal #1.

Learn how to present your stories in a good way. That’s goal #2.

Submit your stories to people who will buy them. That’s goal #3.

Now, go back and look at your schedule and figure out where, each week, you can learn one more detail on the second two goals. Just one detail on goal #2 and #3 per week along with the production of new pages. Yes, the other two goals take time, but you can work the time in. Yes, it takes time to write a query letter, but once a good one is done for a book, you pretty much got it for that book. Research of editors takes time, but there might be five minutes here, or a quick stop in a book store to research a book line.

All three goals need to move forward at the same time. And honestly, all three are fun. Writing is the most fun, but sending out your work and getting paid for it has its rewards as well.

Cheers, Dean

A quick side trip for a moment. Another Motivation post coming later tonight.

But Joe Konrath had a blog post today that says a lot of what I’ve been trying to say, only right to the point. He’s doing a summary of the information from all his old posts trying to help new writers.

Read this one, folks, then come back.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-i-know.html

Cheers, Dean

5 days until the new year, and five posts ahead of this one that you need to read for this post to make any sense. I’ve been putting up one per day and will do so until the end of the year. After that I’ll go back to other topics and Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.

Thanks, everyone for the comments on these, both with the posts and privately. Glad they are helping a little.

So onward.

The last post got into a lot of detail with examples, with luck trying to show you how to set the goal that fits what you are aiming at with your writing. The key is to really know what you want from your writing. Let me say this simply:

No writer is like any other writer.

Thus, when you hear some writer giving you some hard, fast rule about writing, some firm statement about how to write, about craft, you should run away. No rules, just what’s right for you and the story you are writing. I can’t tell you how many questions I answer about silly rules like “You can’t use first person.” or “Editors hate such-and-such.”

Now granted, there are some pretty solid business rules that fit almost everyone, but when it comes to producing pages, there are only patterns and how the brain works and that’s where you have to be honest with yourself. Every writer is different. Every writer looks at story and the production of story differently. So take my examples, take my suggestions, and warp them to fit who you are. They are just examples and suggestions. Not rules. Okay, we clear on that?

For example: One of the biggest myths in all of writing is that writing fast equals writing poorly and writing slowly equals writing better. Maybe for some, chances are no. The brain and your voice comes out when you clear the critical voice out. But some writers write slow. Not many long-term professional writers, granted, but some writers who sell do write very, very slowly. I honestly think they just take a lot of naps and do house chores. <g> But there are no fast rules. Try fast, try slow, and see which sells for you.

Try everything once or twice. Someone says “You shouldn’t write first person” write your next few stories or novels in first person. Why not? Works for Meg Cabot and James Patterson and many others. <g>

And then if something you try doesn’t work, try something different, try a new way, try a new math with a new set of goals. I shake my head at writers who say, “Oh, I can’t do it that way?” 99.99% of the time they have never tired it, but since they have been doing it another way, they just think they can’t do something different. What I find interesting is that when beginning writers say that to me. What I always want to ask (but never do) “Are you selling stories the way you are doing it now?” Of course, the answer is no, but no chance they will change, try something new, and I know for a fact those writers will likely not make it.

A title for this post could be “Avoiding Goal Failure” simply to get your attention. The simple truth is you can’t avoid it. You will fail, that’s a fact.

All of us fail all the time. Get used to it and get over it.

Writing is a series of linked failures and no story is perfect. Rejections are constant, the feeling of writing crap is pretty constant for most of us. Failure, at least in our heads, is always there. Always, no matter how many books we sell or awards we get.

Being around a lot of very successful authors over the years, I’ve always been amazed at how all of us are not happy with where we are at. We almost always think that in one way or another we’re failing. We’re not getting enough money or readers or that book of the heart didn’t sell or I got bad reviews or… or… or… The list is endless, trust me.

So what makes us, the long term pros, different from the beginning writer or the writer who has sold three books and then gives up when the selling of the 4th book gets tough?

Long term pros just keep going.

Something inside of all of us know, in one way or another, that failure is normal, that down-turns in careers are normal, that rejections are normal, and we just keep going. We have somehow trained that into our thinking when it comes to writing and it’s very deep.

Besides, we love telling stories, sitting alone playing in made-up worlds, living lives of characters we are creating. Oh, trust me, even with the failure, it’s a great job.

So, when you set these goals, prepare for failure at the same time. That’s why I worked hard to show that you have to build in the time for missing writing days, the time for just having a bad day, the time for being sick. And so on.

Now, let me make a suggestion to you, one that Kris and I follow.

Taking in story is important (movies and other books), research is important, plotting the next book is important, dealing with business and editors and contracts and page proofs is all important. But it’s not writing.

Sorry, let me say that again. It’s not writing.

Writing is sitting down and putting new words on the page. My suggestion to you is keep the line right there and things will get very simple for you in your goal setting.

So, let’s use my example from the previous post.

Dream: To sell five novels in five years. (You have four years to do this, since publishing and submissions works so slowly. And yes, I am ignoring two book contracts which means you only have to write one book to sell two.)

Figure to sell five, you had better write at least ten or twelve to start off with. So you need to try to produce three books per year.

Math works to 1,250 words per page each writing session (about 1 1/2 to 2 hours) 216 days of the year. Lots of days to miss and have off.

I got two different questions about “How do I make time to outline and get ready to write the next book?”

My suggestion. “Not in any of your writing time.”

Writing is putting new words on the page. If you feel you must outline every book, then try this: Type in a title, type the first sentence, and then the next and the next and just see where it goes. Why not? Afraid of failing? Have you ever tried it that way?

I have often written entire novels that way, and I have written entire novels from extremely detailed and long proposals and outlines as well. Both methods work fine for me, although I have to admit that when I don’t have a clue where the book and the characters are going, it gets exciting at times. And scary. And I always find myself on those books waking up in the middle of the night with ideas, or standing in the shower while the water gets cold while I work out a plot point. Those are fun books, but they are not the only way I write books. I have learned that each book is different and thus I never try to force a book into a certain method of writing.

So, if you are looking for excuses to not write, research and outlining are great ones. They feel like they are important, they feel like they need to be done, but the dishes need to be done as well. Just excuses.

Set your WRITING goals. All else works around the production of new pages.

You can’t avoid failure on these goals, so build it into the goal schedule.

Here is one final detail to think about.

Your goal for this next year is to write X-Number of pages, words, books, whatever you figure out. Think of yourself sitting down for a few minutes on New Year’s Eve, one year from now, and looking back at the year.

How will you feel if you hit your goal or went past it? Great, right? And full of energy to keep going.

How will you feel if you fell way short, spent all the time plotting and researching and didn’t get the pages done? Like crap, right? Discouraged.

So now, as you set your goal for 2009, be real, plan for failure, plan for missed time, and plan that if you do hit your goal, it will take you a large step toward your dream.

When you find that you have missed a week or so, remember how you will feel on December 31st if you give up. Then do as long term professional writers have trained themselves to do. Get back to work.

Plan for failure, but plan more for success. You won’t remember all the small failures and misses on December 31st next year if you hit your goal. Trust me on that.

Cheers, Dean

I sure hope everyone had a good holiday. Now only six days until the new year and the new decade.

Thanks for all the comments on the previous posts. Very much appreciated. So, where were we? Oh, yeah, numbers.

Please read the previous four Motivation posts before trying to wade through this one. I’m going to be doing math and writers, for the most part, hate math. And they hate reality as well, but that’s a topic for a post a little later on in this series.

Done reading or rereading them? Good, time to get to some solid goals and how to set them. I’m going to do some posts on how to maintain a goal you have set, but for the moment, these posts are still in the basics of trying to set a goal that fits for you. You have questions to answer. Try not to talk too loudly when you do.

Actually, writing your personal answers to some of these questions down is a good thing. Writing it down, even on a yellow legal pad, makes them a little more real in your mind. Back to the writers hating reality issue.

Step one: What’s your Big Dream? (Really big dream, like New York Times #1 Bestseller for forty books in a row. That sort of thing.) Chances are this dream is not at all in your control, but it’s a good distant target, like a walking trip from LA to New York. You know New York is way off in the distance and a long ways away, more steps than you want to think about, but at least you know which direction to head in. Otherwise you might end up in Mexico, way off the target. So write down the Big Dream first.

Step Two: Where do you want to be in five years with your writing? This question is going to take some thought. And some reality (that issue again). Aim real but high. Make the Dream seem out of reach for a short five years. Again, notice I’m still talking dreams instead of goals. Dreams are often things out of your control, like selling a novel, but they help aim you, and help you determine what you need to do.

For example, if your dream is to have sold ten novels in five years, then you know you have to write 15 to 20 novels at least in that time and you have to learn how to submit them and keep them in the mail like Heinlein’s Rules. Otherwise the dream is not possible. So Big Dreams and Five Year Dreams are ways to define the road you want to walk.

If your dream is to be recognized as a major literary writer in Five to Ten Years, then you need to get to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshops, and do other things focused in that direction and have other targets for your mailing and what you write. Again, the big dream aims the goals. For the examples below and from here on out, I will assume you want to be a commercial writer, selling novels to New York. Nothing wrong at all with other goals, and you can use my examples to set your own if you want to go other directions with your writing. But for the examples, it’s commercial writing.

Step Three. Take the Five Year Dream and figure out, as I did in the example, what you need to finish in one year to have a chance of hitting that Five Year Dream. Only on this step, keep everything you write down completely in your control.

For example, you can’t control “selling or publishing” a book, but you can control writing and mailing a book. And you can control how much you learn, how much time you spend writing, so on. (I will do future posts on how to keep learning and the goals around that.)

Example: Five Year Dream is to sell five novels. That is a very real dream and very possible. And the number does not overwhelm most writers with myth issues. So let’s use five books sold in five years as a major example now.

Take the five books and figure that to sell them in five years (and you haven’t sold a novel before), you better plan on writing and submitting 10 to 12 books. (And remember, the books you write the last year will not have time to sell, so you only have four actual years in this challenge to sell five within five years.)

So, to have any chance at all at hitting this example goal, the yearly goal needs to be to write 3 books per year. (Here comes the thundering elephant.) I can hear you say THREE BOOKS A YEAR! Crap, only Dean can do that.

Nah, that’s writing slow for me when I’m writing. Remember the math from a previous post? You did read the previous posts, didn’t you? That’s all of about 750 words a day.

Step Four: Figure out how much your yearly goal is in pages per day. Do the math for whatever goal you set.

Now back to the Major Example: Three books a year is simply 750 words (3 manuscript pages) per day for 360 days in a year. So a person needs to write 1,250 words per writing day to make up for the missed days and vacation and sickness and stuff. If you write a very slow 250 words in 1/2 hour, then to do this example, you would need to spend 2 1/2 hours on a writing day. But if you can type, as most of us can, 250 words in about 10-15 minutes, then you have to carve out about 1 1/4 hour to hit your word count.

See how that works?

Another way to look at the same number. Three novels in this Major Example are around 270,000 words. Divide that number by 1,250 words per writing session. You get 216 days of writing sessions. That leaves 149 days off, about three and a half months of misses.

Nifty how the math works, isn’t it. Sort of strips all the excuses away.

So you figured the five year dream, worked it back to how many books a year, then worked it down to a word count per day or writing session. Maybe get two writing sessions on a certain day of the week that allows you a little extra time in your schedule.

So, here comes the goals.

Step Five: (Write this down and show your family.) Figure out one week only.

That’s right, you figured out earlier what time you can carve out in a week. Your focus from now on is only one week at a time and hitting the goal that week.

Back to the Major Example: Five writing sessions carved out of a week that gets 1,250 words done each session. That’s this example’s goal. Period. One week only, with the intent to make the second week the same goal, and so on. But for the moment, the goal is only think of one week at a time.

If you get ahead of your goal on a week and write more pages, forget it and reset the goal for only one week the second week. If you miss your goal one week, don’t worry, you have lots of extra time built in. Simply focus on the week ahead. Sunday to Sunday. Monday Morning to Monday Morning. Whatever works for your schedule.

And celebrate a little when you hit your goal for a week. One week is something that all of us can focus on and keep in our minds. Just one week. Miss, start over the next week, no big deal.

So, let’s keep going and answer the logical question for the Major Example: What do you do when you finish a book since in the Major Example you must write three per year and mail them?

My suggestion is this: When you finish the first draft of the book, schedule the next week off and celebrate. (Don’t worry, extra time built in, remember?) Then the week after that the goal is to fix the problems left in the book, spell check it, and get it to your first reader. That’s the goal that week. The “fix” draft. If you cycle and fix stuff as you write every day as you go along, then skip this week and just spell check the book and give it to your first reader. Remember Heinlein’s 3rd Rule?

Third week after finishing a book, get back on writing with the next book, while the first reader reads the book. Get the next book started, get the pages done, get right back on the weekly schedule. (I’ll talk about the mailing issues later.)

That’s what I would do. But I can’t tell you how many dozens and dozens of times I finished a book one day, mailed it, and fired on the next book the next day.

A summary. Figure out the Big Dream and write it down. Figure out the Five Year Dream and write it down. Work backwards from the five year dream to figure out what needs to actually be done in one year. Then do the math and figure out how much needs to be written, your time available, and how fast you are.

Then focus on only the week ahead, starting January 1st.

Do not look at the big goal, don’t look at the yearly goal. Just stay focused on the weekly goal. And make sure you have lots and lots of time extra worked in, as I did in the Major Example. You will miss weeks. You can’t let that stop you. Just focus on making it the next week. And then the next. That’s how words add up, books get written, and writers are made. One day, one week at a time.

Keep the elephants a long way from your writing. They will stop you cold.

Have fun doing the math. Keep it real. Makes life easier.

Cheers, Dean

Christmas Day. Kris and I both worked, both watched some television, had a great dinner, and are now both back at work. Normal day around here and I love it that way. I’m just not much of a holiday person, especially year and year after year. So last night with friends was enough.

Before you read the following, make sure you have gone back and read the three before it, in order, or not a lot of this will make any sense. One week to a new year. A fresh start. A fresh decade, and glad to be in it, to be honest. I’ll talk more about this later on, in a “look back” post, but this is starting my 5th decade writing. I sold a bunch of poetry and two short stories in the 1970’s. I ramped up and sold a first novel in the 1980’s, sold another sixty books in the 1990’s, and then this last decade I just sort of chugged along. So in one week I get to start my fifth decade with writing. I have a hunch it’s going to be the best one yet.

So on to motivation and goal planning for the new year.

If you have followed the previous posts, you know how much time you can carve out of your daily life and you know how long it takes you to write a simple manuscript page of 250 words. Right? And you have the big goal in mind, the big dream. Right?

So what next?

Answer: Numbers.

Publishing is a numbers game, all the way through Heinlein’s Rules. A simple numbers game.

For example, to finish one book a year, you should write two pages per day and then not worry about missing a bunch of days to get to the 360 pages of a 90,000 word book. Numbers.

When submitting books or stories to editors, you can’t control what they think of your book, if they have an opening in their list, if their sales department didn’t get on board, if they just bought something like it six months earlier. But you can control the number of editors you mail the book to. You can control the number of chances your book has to sell. You can control the number of different books you mail to different editors. Numbers.

So, with numbers in mind, let’s look at Heinlein’s Business Rules again to set some goals.

Rule 1: You must Write.

If your large goal is to be a professional writer, or just sell regularly, you have to do this. If you hate writing, why are you thinking of doing this? You should love writing, telling stories, having people read your stories. Otherwise, find another job.

“But I just can’t find the time.” Those words come out of your mouth and you are doomed. That simple sentence is the excuse of the masses and what separates a real writer from a want-to-be. You have figured out where you can carve out time, you have your family ready for the carving of the time. When that carved time comes each day, each week, you sit down and type. It doesn’t have to be good. Just type. “Dare to be bad.” as my close friend Nina Kiriki Hoffman said to me once.

She was right. It takes a lot more courage to sit and type and fail (because it’s practice anyway) than it does to not type. So carve the time each day out of your life, park your butt in the chair, and type.

Numbers:

Write one page per day for 360 days to finish one book.

Write two pages per day for 360 days to finish two books in a year.

Write three pages per day for 360 days to finish three books in a year.

Write four pages per day for 360 days to finish four books in a year.

(If you can’t hit writing every day, then cut the number of days in half to give yourself half the year off and divide the book numbers in half. For example, write 4 pages for 180 days in a year to finish two books in a year.)

Rule #2: You must finish what you write.

If you keep typing and carve the time, you will finish what you write. This rule really gets hit with the Dare to Be Bad courage issue. If you don’t finish, you don’t fail, right? Nope, you fail worse. No one likes a quitter. Don’t finish story after story and you are nothing more than a fearful quitter. Blunt but true. Sorry. And this rule is really mixed up with the next rule for most quitters.

Rule #3. You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.

This rule hits right at the heart of a huge myth, a myth so large most writers never get past it, and thus fail.

Rewriting is a forced process, not in creative voice, but in critical voice, and often leads to the failure of Rule #2 and worse yet, really crappy, dull stories because all the voice and life are taken out for safety sake.

The myth is that a story must always be rewritten until it’s good, right? Snort. How the hell, as a new writer, do you have a clue if a story is good or not? I’ve written a hundred novels and far more short stories and been an editor for decades. I can tell you what’s wrong with your story, but I don’t have a clue when it comes to my own stories. Not clue one.

So remember this simple statement (which you won’t but try <g>). Writers are the worst judges of their own work.

I learned this by selling a lot of poems back in the 1970’s to some really top literary markets before I stopped mailing my poems out. I would always in a submission send one poem that I thought was my best, that I had really worked on, that I thought was “art” and one poem I thought was all right, not great but good enough, and one toss-off poem I thought was silly, had spent no time on, and didn’t care about. I always sold the toss-off poems, never the “good” ones. Those “good” ones are still in my files, I still think they are good, but hundreds of editors of major magazines didn’t. They liked my toss-off stuff. Stuff that I had not rewritten to death.

Here’s how many professional writers I know do it. We do three drafts. Very simple, we do a pounding first draft, racing through the story, making notes or going back and changing any detail that needs to be fixed as you race in a white hot heat through the story. If you make notes, go back after you finish the book and add in only the notes. Everything done in creative mode.

Spell check your manuscript as draft #2. (You should always have your spell checker and grammar checker turned off while writing. Computer people do not know how to write. Trust me.)

Third draft, give the book to your trusted first reader, fix the mistakes and problems they found, and then mail it to editors and start the next book the next day.

Or you can have real courage and do it like Harlan Ellison has done many, many, many times with many award-winning stories. Sit in a store window with just an idea someone handed you, or a simple word, and write a story on a manual typewriter, ripping the pages out of the machine and taping them to the window so the people standing outside can read them.

Rule #4. Mail the story to an editor who will buy it.

With books, you can go to many editors, with short stories only one at a time. But always mail your work to someone who can write you a check. Agents can not write you a check. You can hire one after you get a book offer and should hire one at that time to help with the terms and the contract and a thousand other things. Only editors and publishers can write you a check for your work, so focus on them. (If your first thought reading this was “But…” you are in deep trouble right here. Over this last year I’ve talked a great deal about agents, go back and read some of those posts.)

Here comes the problem with Dare to be Bad. And also the problem with not knowing the quality of your own work. When you finish a book or story, you will think it sucks. You must have the courage to mail it and then work to make the next story better. You honestly don’t know if the story sucks or not. Just mail it and let an editor decide.

In the master’s class, we had the writers attending bring three stories well disguised with pen names and different fonts and everything. One story was a story they thought was one of their best, one was all right, and one story they thought was their worst. And they could NOT tell anyone any of the pen names. Then, along with the stories they wrote at the workshop, we tossed them all into a tub and made them put an anthology together. Upwards of over 100 different stories to pick from, and they couldn’t pick any of their own. They had to do a table of contents and then give that table of contents to everyone.

The shocked look on people’s faces was wonderful. What happened was that their “best” stories seldom sold, but everyone in the room sold their “worst” story many times. And most of those writers didn’t even have those stories in the mail because they thought they were so bad. Writers just don’t have a clue what’s good or bad in their own work, thus you have to have the courage to just mail it.

Rule #5. Keep it in the mail until someone buys it.

The numbers of this are simple. The more editors you let see your work, the more your chances of selling your work. Publishing is ripe with stories of a major bestseller selling after 30 or 40 or 50 rejections or more. Not kidding. You get discouraged because one editor, or three editors said “Sorry” to your story, get over it quickly. Rejection and sales are a numbers game.

During Babe Ruth’s years of playing ball, who struck out the most? He did, of course. If he had been afraid of striking out, we wouldn’t know his name now. Same goes with publishing and rejections. I have thousands, and I do mean thousands of rejections and I still get them all the time. No big deal, part of the numbers game of mailing your work to editors. You have to keep it out there.

So, when thinking of setting these goals, also set goals regarding keeping your work in the mail. That’s a goal you can control. And I will talk about methods of setting these goals, both page count and novels in the mail goal in a new post coming up shortly.

But for now, think about what you want in your large goal and try to find just an extra thirty minutes a week above what you have already carved out in time.

And one more thing. Start working on the attitude that you don’t know if you write a good story or not. You’re just going to do your best and then release it for others to determine if it is good or not.

One last truism that applies to the rules above. “The quality of a book or story has nothing to do with the quality or the experience the writer had while writing it.”

Stick that on a sign over your computer right along with “Dare to be Bad” and you should be a good step toward starting these goals and getting your attitude in the right place to keep going after the month of January is finished.

Cheers, Dean

Hope everyone is having a good Christmas Eve. I’m headed off to spend a few hours with six other professional fiction writers, then back here for the rest of the holiday. Today, the sun is shinning, I’m sitting in my office looking out over the ocean and the calm surf with a white cat on my lap biting my wrist when I move too much or forget to pet him. Yup, life is good.

As I said before, each day as we get closer to a new year I’m updating and reposting motivation and goal posts from last December. I had intended to write new ones completely and then looked back at last year’s posts and thought that they worked just fine with just a little bit of work. So onward with number three.

(Before you read this, read the previous two posts on goals.)

About a month ago I got a phone call from a wonderful women who works at our small city water department. She had been informed by the water meter reader that we had an unusually high usage and more than likely, we had a leak somewhere.

Talk about eating an elephant. How do you find a leak in two buildings served by the water, in ninety feet of lawn covering a water pipe, under a concrete slab where one pipe ran, and then, worst of all, down a steep hill for about eighty feet through trees and brush to the street below.

Somewhere in all that was a leak. So I took a deep breath and started with just one detail at a time, like writing a big book, one page at a time.

I did the standard first steps, checking to make sure toilets weren’t leaking with dye, checking under the buildings, all the simple things, including walking the yard looking for soft spots. (Not highly likely, since our ground is all sand and water would go right down.)

Nothing. So I turned the water off at the top of the hill, made sure nothing was getting to the house, then went down the hill and looked at the meter. Still spinning.

The leak was in an eighty foot run two feet down through deep brush, some tall trees, and a thirty foot drop. I remember standing there and thinking that was impossible.

The size of the elephant just stopped me cold. So I called for help (something you really can’t do when writing). The guy I called said it would cost me a number with a comma in it for his guys to dig up that run and just lay new pipe, much simpler than trying to find the old leak. Then it would cost me a bunch more for a plumber to hook it up on both ends of the new run. Ughh. Suddenly tackling the elephant seemed like a better idea.

So, not wanting to write checks with commas just yet, I got a young friend of mine to help and we started digging down at the street by the water meter.

One shovel full of sand at a time.

I kept thinking it was like writing a novel. One shovel full, one page. I did not allow myself to look up at that impossible hill of brush and trees. (At least not very often. )

We dug out the entire meter, and about four feet of old metal pipe until it vanished under a huge tree stump. Clearly when the pipe was put in originally, the trees were very small.

So, I gave up on that end for the moment and we went to the top of the hill.

Just like writing a novel. I often do false starts on books, toss them and fire again. So we went to the top of the hill and dug out the shut-off valve there, one shovel full at a time.

Slowly the pile of sand grew (like completed pages) and the task at hand made progress. No leak at the valve, so we started following the now plastic pipe down the hill, figuring that where the plastic joined the metal was a likely place to find the leak.

As it turned out, we got lucky about six feet along the run, where the plastic black pipe went directly at a large tree. The roots of the large tree had warped the pipe into such a shape that it had finally just split. Plumber is coming tomorrow and it won’t even be a check with three digits to fix. Very simple.

What I thought was going to be a novel’s length of work turned out to be a short story’s worth. Yeah!

But I was willing, day after day, to go out there and just move a few more shovel fulls of sand, work my way down that hill, cutting roots and facing the challenges of the project, until I found that leak. Just like I write a novel, one page at a time, facing the challenges, getting it done.

Interesting how knowing how to write novels can help in a real world situation.

And the other way around. Look at your life. Figure out which tasks you do that take time over days and months. Quilting and knitting are good examples of tasks that take the same type of drive and small detail to add up to a larger product in the end.

Construction of any sort is the same way.

Cooking a good meal is also the same thing.

A simple round of golf is also the same. One shot advances you forward, then the next and the next until you have moved to a finished goal.

Life is full of examples that are exactly the same as writing a book or a story. So when I talk about these goals, setting small detail goals, doing the math, just think of all the things you do in the real world that work on the same process. It makes this writing thing seem a lot less scary.

And a lot more fun than digging up old pipe to find a water leak.

Cheers and happy holidays

Dean

The second day of posts about getting yourself ready for the new year and how to think about goals. But first, some basics about writing that will help you more than you can imagine when setting a new year’s goal for writing.

Heinlein’s BUSINESS Rules.

1) You must write.

2) You must finish what you write.

3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.

4) You must mail your story to an editor who will pay you money.

5) You must keep it in the mail until someone buys it.

Those darned rules are so simple. Right? Yeah, right.

Heinlein didn’t claim that these rules would help you with craft. These are business rules and he called them that.

Goals, by and large, are business goals. You know, the ones I called “Dreams” last post. To be a bestseller, to sell a first novel, to have five books on the rack at Safeway at the same time. All business goals.

Learning craft in fiction comes from writing, from constant study of other writers, by going and listening to professional writers talk about craft, by reading How-To… books by the hundreds. And then writing, practicing, working out the kinks in the craft and learning how to tell a story so that someone else will like it and buy it.

Yes, I said the evil word. And I’ll say it again. Practice.

Goals I’m going to be helping you set are goals to help you practice. You can’t go anywhere in the arts or music without practicing. Sorry. Same goes for writing, but I’ll try to not call it that much, since writers hate that word. We all seem to think that every word we write is golden. Nope, just practice. And sometimes we get paid for our practice, which is really nifty, trust me.

Later on I will try to set out ways to set “craft” goals. In other words, goals that help with your craft, like making sure that there are all five senses every two pages and things like that. But for the moment, let’s focus on business goals.

Besides, putting it simply, by setting business goals and getting your butt firmly planted in the chair, with pages coming from your computer, finished pages, your craft will improve if you keep learning.

So, I’m talking about business goals here, production of product goals in crass business terms.

Now, if you haven’t read the previous post on motivation, do so now. I’ll wait…

Got the time figured out, where you can carve 15 minutes here, an hour there, out of your schedule every day? You must have this and have those around you informed that when you start, those carved times are important. That will be tough, but important to try to establish. More on people around you later on in these posts.

Got how long it takes you to write a single page of fiction? Are you slow at 30 minutes or fast at 10 minutes? Chances are you will be between those two numbers. Almost all writers I have ever met are.

So, now, it’s time to do some math.

I’m going to start with a big dream first and work backwards to a real goal using simple math and following Heinlein’s Rules.

Big Dream: Write and mail one new novel per year.

Novel is 90,000 words. Divide that by 250 words on a page and you get 360 pages.

Now, say you can write a page of fiction slowly in 30 minutes. To write a novel, you have to work at it for 180 hours. Okay, here comes the stomping elephant again. That seems huge and impossible.

But look at it another way. Your dream is to write a new book every year. 360 pages at one page per day is 360 days. Less than one year.

Thirty minutes per day writing, following Heinlein’s Rules, will finish a novel in one year.

Let that sink in for a moment. That sounds very possible, doesn’t it, even with kids and family and a job? If you really want to write, you can carve out 30 minutes per day.

Now, let’s be real a little more. Not many of us, some, but not many, can be that consistent in pacing, so I suggest the following.

Two pages per writing day and miss half the days of the year. Carve out one hour on writing days, take the weekends off, takes weeks off on vacation, take time when kids are sick, and so on. At two pages per day at thirty minutes per page, one hour total per day when writing, you will write a novel in 180 days of writing scattered throughout the year and have the rest of the year off.

Not so impossible, is it? Math is a wonderful friend in this goal setting time.

Think about how you could carve out an hour a day to get two pages done and then imagine that by the end of the year, missing half the year, you will still finish a novel. It is simple and very possible.

But…but…but…. Yeah, I can hear all the excuses and reasons and myths now. Go read the myth posts I already have up, then hold on to your excuses that keep you from writing. I’m going to pound on them over the next few days.

Back tomorrow with Motivation #3.

Cheers, Dean