Posts Tagged ‘goal setting’

17
Oct

The Down Times

   Posted by: Andrew    in Links, Pimping, advice

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.

Tags: , , ,

2 Comments
17
Jul

Micro Writing and You

   Posted by: Andrew    in advice

Micro Writing is the art of writing in small, sometimes tiny, chunks throughout the day. This is the polar opposite of the 10,000 word marathon session. If you have lot of spare time, then of course sitting down and cranking out anywhere from 1000 words up is great.

But what if you don’t have that kind of time?

Enter Micro Writing. You simply write small amounts of words whenever you get half a chance. Instead of setting a daily goal, you set a session goal. I suggest something like 100 words. You can tap out 100 words in less than five minutes. Got a break between calls? Awesome, write 100 words. Baby stopped crying for a moment? Awesome, write 100 words*

You do this with higher numbers as well, although you’ll need longer stretches of time. If you want to hit four thousand words in a day (which is a lot if you aren’t a full time writer) then sitting down and trying to do it all in one hit will leave you chewing your own foot in frustration.

It won’t taste good.

Write 1000 words before breakfast. Two lots of 1000 during the day and 1000 after dinner. It’s still going to be a big day, but four lots of 1000 words is not the behemoth of a task that 4000 words is.

There is a downside to this style of writing though, and that’s the break you get in the flow of words. If you’ve ever re read something you’ve written over several sessions and found it stilted and jerky then you know what I mean. To combat this I suggest taking a run up. Re read your last sentence and you hit the end of it simply write what you would have like to read next. It isn’t a complete solution to the problem, and you may need to even things out  in a later edit, but it helps.

Give Micro Writing a try the next time you have a full day. You’ll be surprised how much you can get done.

* NB: make sure baby is okay first.

Tags: , ,

3 Comments
13
Jul

Failure: Do it Right

   Posted by: Andrew    in Uncategorized

I set myself a big goal for the weekend: Write 20,000 words by hook or by crook. I utterly failed. At 8,000 words my brain turned to jello and I crashed out on the sofa with a box set of DVD’s.

 

You heard me.

 

As a writer, you’re going to fail at your goals sometime. I’m not trying to be depressive about it, it’s just that sometimes life gets in the way. If you catch fire I would expect you to put it out before getting on with chapter three.

 

It could happen.

 

The point of all of this is not that I failed to write 20,000 words, or even that I cooked my brain like a Christmas turkey. It’s that I got out 8,000 words, which is significantly more than I normally write (I usually go for 3 to 4 thousand words over a weekend). If I hadn’t gone for the big score, I wouldn’t have gotten 8,000 words out as a kind of failure by-product.

 

So lesson one in failing right is: Dream Big.

 

 If you don’t set a big goal, you have no chance of achieving it. Even if you don’t hit that big goal straight off, if it’s big enough, there’s always the chance you’ll get something worthwhile out of it anyway.

 

Like 8,000 words.

 

Of course, if I’d set myself a goal that was too big, like finish my first draft by the end of the weekend, I wouldn’t have done anything at all. You need to dream big, but it needs to be theoretically possible to hit your goal. As much as I joke about setting myself the impossible goal of finishing a first draft by the end of the month, it’s more than possible.

 

That make lesson two: Think difficult, not impossible.

 

I blog about these thing sin the hope that other people can learn from my mistakes, but I try not to give myself too much grief about the mistakes themselves. Of course I’m disappointed if I don’t get a goal, but being angry at yourself is a waste of energy you could be putting into your writing.

 

If being angry helps you write; by all means go nuts, but as soon as your writing is done with, put the anger away too. I’ve really made myself suffer in the past by being overly hard on myself for making mistakes. This is your writing, your novel. A mistake is not a tragedy because tomorrow, you can do some more writing.

 

Lesson Three is the big one: Learn from your mistakes, and then LET IT GO.

 

I’m on track to finish my first draft by the end of the month, and in part that’s because I haven’t let my innate ability to fail get in my way. If you check on all of your favourite authors, they’ve screwed up more than once on their way to becoming great writers.

 

Failure is temporary; it can’t stop you unless you let it. Now get writing.

Tags: , , , ,

2 Comments
Back to top

Andrew Jack Writing is using WP-Gravatar