I’m running it close to the wire here. Four days to go and I’ve still got 10,000 words to hit my target of 50,000 in one month.

Even to reach this I’ve had to count everything I;ve written this month, including the words I’ve deleted.

It still counts.

Quick Tip:

Stuck for story idas? Look through the Google search terms people used to find your blog. My favorite so far is “freaky mace games.” If that was you, why?

You also inspired a short story, thanks.

But really, mace games?

I just finished an essay that was due last week.

I’m not proud.

I packed so much into an already overloaded schedule that my synapses just plain cooked themselves into a nutritious (for zombies anyway) grey goo. It felt a lot like porridge sloshing around inside my skull. I knew the particular essay was due, and it wasn’t like it was a tough one to finish. I just didn’t do it.

The problem was that I’d gotten so good at both finding and making time to write I was ignoring the other things that my body and my brain needed to keep me from keeling over sideways. In case you were wondering, if you’re going to keel over, sideways is the worst way to go.

This was going to be a blog about how to find more time in your already super busy life to write, but instead I’m going to give you something a little different. Go get a piece of paper/open word/open a vein.

Write down the top five things in your life right now, the things you do that you simply can’t do without. You get two freebies in eating and sleeping, you don’t have to write them down. My list looks like this:

1.  Family

2. Work

3. Physical health/training

4. Writing

5. University (yes I’m 28 and at university. I was a late starter at this).

Notice anything missing there? I’m willing to bet your list doesn’t have it on there either. These five things sucked up my entire waking life. The thing that’s missing is relaxation time. You need recovery folks. I do a lot of physical training, and for every hour of hard core exercise I do, my body demands some down time before I can punish it again. I have often ignored these demands and paid heavily for it. Last year I nearly died because my beleaguered body just caved in and I woke up in hospital.

Writing puts the same stress on your mind (and sometimes body) that physical training does. Instead of just making time to write, which you can do, I also want you to book yourself in for some downtime. I don’t care if these means going for a walk or playing some Playstation. If you don’t book in that downtime you’re going to keel over, mentally if not physically. Burnout for writers is particularly ugly, as we will keep writing, chasing our dreams until we simply can’t do anything else.

Even though my essay was late I made time to keep going on my novel. I forwent sleep to do this. I don’t learn quickly. So, get that list back and expand it to seven things. You get to keep your top five things that dominate your life, but you’re going to add in another two things that you are going to make time for. One of those things is you time. This doesn’t mean more time looking after the kids, doing laundry or working. This means time that’s just your to do…nothing. You’re not allowed to be productive, or even useful.

You only get away with cooking as down time if cooking really makes you happy. Cooking for your family because you have to counts as work.

The other thing you’re going to add to your list is research time. Time you spend looking at websites or books about writing. I do a lot of this and it’s half work, half downtime. Actively plan it into your day and don’t confuse it with writing time, working time or down time. Make time for research and then leave it alone. Once you’ve done the research you need for your week you should either be writing or relaxing. Spending four hours staring at writing blogs won’t get your book written but it can and will still consume your poor brains precious resources.

My new list looks like this:

1. Family

2. Work

3. Writing

4. Downtime

5. Research/reading time (reading novels counts if you’re researching them)

6. University

7. Physical health/training

Now that you’ve read all that, switch of the computer and go do something just for yourself. Not for the kids, your partner, your boss or even your novel. Go for a walk, eat a cookie, take a bath.

Your brain will thank you.

I’m a little behind.

Right now I’m sitting right on 22,000 words for the month. I’m planning a fairly epic writing day tomorrow to catch up to my target and then keep on going. In that 22,000 I’m counting almost 16,000 words that I wrote…. and then deleted because they were in fact, very bad. I do still have them on my hard drive, but they sit in the darkness alone and unloved.

The write is actually going very well though. I’m doing horrible, terrible things to my main character and that’s the way it should be. If your main character isn’t suffering in some way then you may need to make them suffer more. A great writing quote from screenwriter Martin Roth: “Chase your characters up a tree and throw rocks at him, to see how he responds.”

It’s a great quote and god advice, but personally I recommend also setting the tree on fire.

Not only should your main character be the person with the most to lose, he should also be suffering to keep it. That’s what grabs my interest as a reader, I want to know just how much your protagonist is prepared to give to keep what he loves. Grim anti hero’s with nothing to lose are fine, but they;re only interesting when they are threatened with pain and loss. No one cares about the emotionless killing machine, they can make a good villain (although they’re even better when the villain too has something to lose) but in the end your audience must root for your character to win, you first have to have something to lose.

This turned into a much bigger post than I was intending. Perhaps I need more beer….

Serial Agent Pimp Nathan Bransford (I love coming up with titles for people, it’s going to get me in trouble sooner or later) has finished the mammoth task of reading 2,500 plus entries and come up with a short list of ten finalists.

I’m not one of them.

I’m not bitter about this at all, for starters the ten finalists have some up with some excellent first paragraphs, I want to know what happens next in their stories. The other reason I’m not bitter is that if I couldn’t handle losing out in an online blog contest, I’d have no business at all being a writer.

Rejection and failure are all part of this writing business. You will be rejected, your masterpiece will go unappreciated and often unread, you will lose contests, you will be hunted down by pitchfork wielding peasants.

Actually that last one’s just me.

My propensity for attracting lynch mobs aside, every writer goes through both internal and external rejection. Luck plays a huge role in any creative endeavour, especially publishing. Even if you get an agent or a publishing deal, there is no guarantee your book will sell.

There are a few things that can get you through the down times:

Persistence:

Don’t quit. If you stop writing your chance of being published instantly drops to zero. The more you write, the better your writing will get and the better chance you will have of being the person who’s in the right place at the right time. We all know that J K Rowling got rejections before Harry Potter made her one of the richest women in the world.

Flexibility:

You might have to make some changes. None of us really like changing our stuff, after all we’ve written it, edited it (you did edit it didn’t you?*) and loved it, surely it’s golden?

No. Not even a maybe.

It could well be that your book just hasn’t found the right agent yet, but if you’ve hit up every agent that handles your genre and there are still no bites, there could be something that needs changing. You need to be open to the idea that you can change your book, even if it means a re write or even starting a whole new story. be stubborn about keeping writing, not about making changes.

That leads us to…

Objectivity:

Take a week off from your story, take two. The go back and read it like you just paid twenty dollars for it at Borders. You’ll see mistakes there that you never thought you could make. The key at this point is not to ignore those mistakes. You read books, lots of books**, so you know how a good book should feel. If your story doesn’t feel that way, you will need to be honest about that with yourself and make the changes.

Equally valuable is bringing in some outside objectivity. Recently Julie Butcher*** of Wordathon fame took some time out of her ridiculously busy schedule to give me some feedback on my writing. I took the notes she gave me and decided that my second chapter needed a complete re write. If Julie hadn’t been kind enough to give me that feedback I probably wouldn’t have changed it.

Enjoy Yourself Damn It

It’s really easy to get caught up in how hard writing is. It’s really hard, some days are a horrible mockery of a happy existence. It doesn’t matter. I love writing, I’m happiest when I’m tinkering with my stories, and like cold pizza and sex, even when it’s pretty bad, it’s still pretty good.

If writing does nothing but fill you with pain, why are you still doing it? There is no guarantee that you will get published, and even then no guarantee that you will sell enough books to make a decent living, or even a living at all. Obviously we all want to be published and have so much money that Dan brown turns green with envy, but we have to be able to enjoy the process of getting there as much as we dream of fame and fortune.

Fame and fortune may never arrive. I honestly believe that with enough work and a little talent, anyone can get published if they keep at it, but real success is often down to luck. If that fame and fortune never arrives I want you to be able to look back on every minute you spent writing and say “It was worth it anyway.”

* Didn’t you?!

** Your writing will be better for doing more reading.

*** Julie is the busiest person in the world and still cranks out excellent writing, helps with charity events, organises wordathons, raises six kids and plots daring cupcake escapades. If she can find the time to write so can you.

Does your story need violence to make it interesting?

Maybe.

I wish the answer was no, I’ve experienced enough real violence to tell you for sure that it isn’t fun in the least*, but when it comes to stories one of the things readers really respond to is violence.

It doesn’t need to be physical violence though, crippling harm can be dished out verbally by a character who knows how to manipulate someone’s emotions, or ruin their reputations. An emotionally violent character can quickly and easily make their victims wish they’d been punched.

With all that said, the term violence doesn’t really cover what your story needs, perhaps a better question would be “does my story need conflict to be interesting?”

If that’s the question then the answer is definitely yes.

I used to make a distinction between literary and genre fiction, loathing the introspective go nowhere aspect of a lot of literary stories. To be fair this isn’t fair to a lot of literary writers, who have written some really fantastic books, however the books that very nearly put me off literary writing forever were the ones without conflict.

I definitely prefer my fiction with a splash of physical violence, but I’ll read anything that has an intriguing conflict in it. A good example of this type of conflict = interest equation is in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books. The protagonist, professional wizard Harry Dresden** is constantly in the middle of multiple conflicts. Not only is he beset on all sides by any number of ghost, goblins, demons and vampires, Harry is also drawn into conflict within his own organisation (The White council of Wizards), and while occasionally violence is threatened, the conflict there is mostly political.

You’d think that’s be enough, but Jim Butcher writes in even more woe for Harry. Dresden is constantly experiencing conflicted feelings for his sometime partner Officer Karin Murphy**. On top of that he’s also dealing with the side effects of being raised by the Dresden File’s equivalent of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, emotional attachments to various supernaturally maligned women and a half brother who’s also a life draining succubus.

Dang that’s a lot of conflict, and that’s just one character.

However with all of this multi-level conflict, I have never even once been bored reading one of Jim Butcher’s books. I always want to know what happens next and I’m always hanging out for the next one to be released. Part of that is down to the excellent writing, but a serious part of my interest in the books is down to the total lack of navel gazing.

Bottom Line: You don’t necessarily need violence, you definitely don’t have to have graphic violence, but you must have conflict in your story. No conflict means, for me at least, no sale.

* Violence in the context of sports is fun. I do MMA and it’s a blast. I’m talking about honest to goodness no prior agreement to be gentlemen fight for your life violence.

** To be fair, from Butcher’s description Karin Murphy is smoking hot, and a total badass to boot. I’d be conflicted too.

I get asked this a lot. 

I think any writer, published or unpublished, gets asked this at least once a week. To people who don’t write it’s the irresistible question…well, that and “why do you do this to yourself?”

Maybe that’s just me.

The truth for most of us is that we don’t know where we get our ideas, and we scramble for a answer that sounds good enough to make the asker go away. We then spend the rest of the day wondering “where do I get my ideas?”

Just a few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me a slightly different question, she didn’t care where I got my ideas from, she wanted to know what it felt like when an idea popped into my head. I gave her the only answer I had:

It’s like being mugged.

I can be walking around minding my own business and an idea will creep up on me and smack me over the head. I usually have about a minute to write it down before something else grabs my attention and its lost forever, but during that minute the idea holds my full attention. So far I’ve been lucky and haven’t had a book idea while defusing a bomb, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.

It’s actually a far better question than “where do you get your ideas?” because no matter where my ideas come from, its not going to be the same for anyone else, because my life experiences are different. Finding out how an idea feels means that you can imagine that feeling in your own mind and see if that helps you find your own ideas for a book*.

What does it feel like when you get an idea? Do it creep up on you with a cosh, or does it knock politely?

* This is a technique called modeling that I picked up from NLP

We need heroes. Real and imagined the heroes around help make the world, which can be pretty awful at times, seem like a better place. In yur writing, no one character will have as much impact on your work as your protagonist.

Villains can be more fun to write, especially those that can find time in their day for an evil laugh, but more on those later.

Your protagonist says a lot about your story. Got a wise cracking, yet dark and powerful wizard as your main character (ala Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden) then chances are the tone of your book will be dark, intense with moments of levity spun into the work like hidden candy (can you tell I like the Dresden files?).

Is your protagonist more like Rincewind? Terry Pratchett’s bumbling wizard sets the tone for his books as being funnier and less introspective than Pratchett’s other protagonists, especially the aging Commander of the City Watch, Sam Vimes. The Vimes books are still funny, I don;t want to give you the wrong idea, but they;re not as light and breezy as the books where Rincewind stumbles from one disaster to the next.

I’m running up character history for my protagonist at the moment, and I’ve taken a hint from my old role playing days to do it. Every character that has more than a passing affect on the book gets their own character sheet. It details not only what they look like and what they’re good at, but little things. The main protagonist’s name is Michael Ginlink, and despite being a hardened former Army medic, he’s got a soft spot for animals of all kinds. His apartment contains three cats, a turtle, and iguana and a document chewing bird named Lizzie.

The animals may not have a great bearing on the novel, but no matter how bad things get for Michael (and they go south for him in a big way), that he will always look out for his pets, even over and above people, tells us more about his character than straight description can.

If you’re struggling to flesh out your protagonist, give this a try: put together a character sheet for them. Don’t just list their stats, get detailed. You should have at least two pages of history for your main two or three characters. You might never use this stuff, but the fact the the history is there will create tiny changes tot he way you write that will help the characters feel “real” to the reader. I’ll let you choose the big things, but try to answer these three things about your main character:

“What’s their favorite snack?”

“Favorite movie?”

“If they’re in trouble, and they can’t reach the person that they call in your book, who will they call?” (Chostbusters?)

“How much sleep do they get each night?”

“Favorite hot beverage?”

These small things can get left out while you’re doing the big things, so take a few minutes and answer these and another five little questions you make up yourself, you’ll end up with a more rounded character to show for it.

When do you let go of a pet project?

It’s a hard thing to be objecive about. When do you move on from one of your babies?

There’s really only two times I think a writer should put a project aside. I don’t mean abandon forever, because you never know when you can go back to something. I’m coming to this post from the point of view that the third draft of The Shadow Library just isn’t working for me.

That hurt to type.

It does bring me to the first time of two when you can set a project aside:

Your Project Takes More Than It Gives:

This is where I’m at with The Shadow Library. The writing of my pet project isn’t getting me anywhere at the moment, but it is taking me away from another book that I know for a fact is a better project. I know this is a total contradiction to my previous advice about finishing projects, but like any piece of advice I give, there are exceptions. Since I got to draft three I feel like I’ve given The Shadow Library a proper shot, but y’know what?

Right now, it’s not very good.

Objectively speaking of course. In my heart it’s still the greatest thing ever written.

So, to clear my head, and hopefully to help The Shadow Library become something better, I’m going on to my next project.

The only other reason to put aside a project is that:

It’s Finished, Let It Go Already:

I wish I was here. Several writers I know are still stuck on their first projects, but they can’t let their babies go. They want to do one more draft. Then one more. Maybe one more after that. Then finally after a quick polish maybe they’ll send their manuscript out to a publisher. They’re terrified that if this particular project doesn’t work, that’s all they’ve got.

I have news for you. All of you who are here. You’ll never run out of ideas. Go get a sheet of paper and write down ten ideas for books. You’ve got ten minutes. I’m willing to bet if you’re honest about writing down whatever comes to you without self editing you’ll hit at least one good idea, maybe more. If you’ve gotten one idea onto paper then I guarantee you there are more floating around in your head.

Go do it now. You’ll feel better.

I’m working on my first podcast for you now, so here’s hoping it’ll be done by tonight and up tomorrow.

It’s been awhile.

Actually it’s only been a week, but I’m sorry I’ve left you hanging. My excuse (and it is just an excuse) is that my brain space has been invaded by other projects, work,martial arts training and the plethora of other things that everyone else has to deal with in their lives.

The reason I mention brain space is recently a friend of mine mentioned how much brain space looking after children takes. After a moments thought I decided I have no real frame of reference for looking after children, since I don’t have any.

I have an incontinent, adventurous kitten, but I’m sure that doesn’t count.

It hit me that as busy as I am, I’m fortunate to have some free time, a computer and some available brain space to throw at creative projects. I also have two arms, two legs and no major injuries or disabilities (unless you count a horrible cauliflower ear). This puts me (and I’m guessing, you) ahead of a huge chunk of the rest of the world.

If you have both the desire, and the ability to write, you don’t only owe it to yourself to be working towards your dream, you owe it to everyone who wants to write, but can’t.

Whether it’s due to circumstances beyond their control, disability or even a simple lack of resources, there are people who dream your dream who don’t even get the glimmer of hope we have.

You owe them.

Time to go back to writing.