Dec 23 2009
Motivation #2
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
That sounds great, it really does. What about goal-setting when you’re doing this full-time already? I suppose we could just multiply all that by six or ten or whatever, LOL.
First, thank you for reposting these motivations.
Just for clarity on Heinlein’s rule 3, since it keeps coming up:
I think he meant: once you finish the story (rule 2), don’t rewrite it unless an editor tells you to do it.
I’ve seen other places saying “well, of course you have to write more than one draft” (and I know your opinion on that, which is “don’t”) but I think they’re confusing rule 2 (they don’t think it’s finished until it’s rewritten) with rule 3 (stop tinkering with it once it’s ready to be mailed).
Is that your take on it?
Looks like you’ve covered some ground here that I’ve already trod in my own thinking, but I see hints of things to come that I can’t wait to read.
Heinlein meant and explained a number of times over the years, that a writer does his best work when in the white heat of writing first draft. When you get to the end of that draft, leave it alone except for fixing spelling mistakes and mistakes at the level of spelling mistakes.
The rewriting myth is very, very deep in this culture and pushed by everyone from your writing workshop to university programs. But the realty is that creative writing is creative writing, and the moment you switch to critical writing, your voice, the freshness, the slight turns of sentences that makes it original are taken out to make it sound like your third grade teacher or some manual of style. Boring is the enemy of creative writing, and yet in the effort to make “perfect” writer after writer turns creative into boring.
I have, except for an occasional post and the pros who come to the workshops here, given up fighting this myth. Long term, meaning more than twenty books and a decades of a career, do no rewriting other than fixing typos. Almost no exceptions, but alas, remember, none of them fight this myth either. We do what we do, but out in public, we tell you we write three or four drafts. I tell people three drafts in public. This myth of rewriting is needed as a crutch for many, many people. They need it because they have no self confidence, no courage to just write and mail, and a massive fear of looking bad in front of someone. And they do it because they have no understanding of how the human brain works or how the publishing industry works. The myth is based on ignorance and impossible to fight against the masses. But if you want to be a professional writer, if you want to write your best stuff, wage the battle against this privately.
Cheers
Dean
So, I have a question about rewriting vs research. You’ve often said that you sometimes just sit down and start writing with no idea where the story’s going to go. My question is, what happens when you need to write a scene and you don’t know the details? Where does research fit into this?
If you don’t know you’re going to need to know the ins and outs of, say, airport security or crime scene investigations or what Los Angeles was like in the 1930s before you find your story going in that direction, what do you do? If you’re _planning_ a story about those things, you can always research ahead of time, but what happens when you’re in that white hot creative mode and you don’t know what you’re talking about? Fake it and fix it later? Leave yourself a note to research it and move on?
Mark, no right answer, every writer does it differently. Fixing details in a story is something we all do. You are confusing that and spell-checking with rewriting. Fixing a detail doesn’t change a story, messing with every word, rewriting the sentences, changing the grammar is what screws up stories.
I usually just run and research a detail I don’t have, since I can’t seem to move forward without having the information. Other writers just make notes to fix later.
No correct way, no rule. Just write the story, leave it alone, mail it.
Cheers
Dean
I was wondering if you could list some of the writing books we should be reading. I have a list from years ago but it’s mixed in with all of my other writing files. And I do have some already but it sounds like this is something you can’t have too many of. I get an offer every so often from Writer’s Digest for writing books but I’m not sure which ones are worth getting.
And I add my thanks for this series.