I am an unapologetic nerd and I love my fandoms.

124 of my original, 1980s vintage My Little Ponies that I owned from childhood on, an encyclopedic knowledge of Transformers, an appearance on the Gargoyles Season One DVD and a dedication in a Halo novel all indicate just how much I love my fandoms.

In undergraduate university I discovered the Internet was filled with creative fans just like me. Fans who took part in fandom and made it their own through fan fiction, fan art, fan comics, roleplaying, handicrafts, cosplay, conventions…the list goes on.

So, having an affinity for writing, I tried my hand at some fan fiction. I’d mostly quit doing creative writing in the last few years of high school (spending most of my free time on getting my glider and private pilot licenses) and fan fiction brought back to me just how much I loved storytelling. I met people online who read my stuff and gave me feedback: what worked, what didn’t, what they’d like to see next. I had a critique group, an audience, and a fan club all in one.

In my first year at Royal Military College I realized I wanted to be a professional writer. Somewhere down the line, I wanted to tell stories for a career. I wanted to write at a pro level, to create worlds and share my vision and earn at least part of my living doing it–to be able to focus on creating and support myself while doing so.

…but I was still writing fan fiction.

I was getting better, I told myself, and I was. Every writer has to write their million words of crap before they learn to shine, I said, and I did. I’m honing my skills at character development, outlining, foreshadowing, strong beginnings, rewarding endings, I argued, and it was true.

But I couldn’t sell any of it.

I had nothing to submit to paying markets. I had nothing to bring to a writer’s group of people polishing their work for publication. I wasn’t getting any experience at creating worlds from scratch, or working out internal logic for those worlds. I wasn’t learning how to write cover letters, network with industry professionals, or sort out good opportunities from mediocre opportunities from outright predators.

I spent hours roleplaying, convincing myself I was “improving my character building skills.” I was hooked on the kudos I received for the next posted chapter of my fanfic saga, thrilled to hear that people loved my writing. I drew my characters over and over to have models when it came time to describe them in words. I told myself I’d be hot out of the gate when my professional writing career began. But at this point, I was marking time.

Superstars Writing Seminar was a watershed for me. Investing in the seminar meant it was time to start looking at my writing as a career, not a hobby; as a job, not a celebration of my fandom. I quit fanfic writing and roleplaying and fan art and relegated myself to the occasional TV show, comic book and hour of video games.

…I went too far the other way, and was dissatisfied. I missed the social aspect of fandom, I missed playing with my beloved characters, and I felt like a huge component of my life had been cut away.

So I’ve returned to role-playing and fan fiction, but strictly as entertainment. It comes after, not before, my professional writing goals for the day have been met. It comes instead of, not in addition to, other things I might choose to do for fun, like play video games or make crafts. It might support my professional writing by introducing me to more people, picking up my mood when I feel frustrated and battered, and encouraging me to play with words, but it does not take the place of writing original stories, editing them, submitting them, and beginning research on the next.

I don’t do cosplay or make fan comics or draw art challenges any more. With limited time for relaxation, I chose fan fic and roleplaying as my favourite parts of fandom, and let the others go.

If I had it to do over, I’m tempted to say that I’d push myself to start submitting my work sooner. I’m not sure, though, how to pinpoint the time in my life where I was mature enough to not interpret a rejection as a portent of doom, personal insult, or sign of my complete and incurable ineptitude. I’m also grateful for the epic saga I wrote that taught me yes, I do have the ability to write a book’s worth of material.

So instead, I’d tell myself to keep in mind that fandom is not a career.

If you love to write fan fiction, roleplay, cosplay, draw, do voiceovers, whatever…do it! But don’t fool yourself into thinking that your marathon roleplay sessions or your fanfiction epic or your costume of your character are critical building blocks to professionally publishing your first story. Writing that story is a critical building block to publishing that story. So is editing, submitting, learning lessons, networking, and starting a second story in case the first one doesn’t pan out. By all means keep doing what you love, but know that if you want to make writing your career, you need to focus on writing sellable stories, and save your fan activities for your relaxation time.

(And if you’d like to write for licensed IPs – intellectual properties, like Halo and Transformers and My Little Pony – those writers aren’t chosen from the best fanfiction on the internet. Invitations to write for licensed IPs go to people who’ve already proven they have the professionalism to write, edit and sell original fiction. Publishing your original novel will get you there a lot faster than writing your 100th fanfic–or your 1000th.)

Even if you’re not a fan – I’ve seen aspiring writers do a similar thing with writing “prep”. They attend tons of seminars, go to cons, faithfully update their social media, and spend hours on story research and how-to-improve-your-writing books….but rarely write anything. All those things are great, but they don’t replace the fundamental act of writing. You can’t supplement what you’re not actually doing.

If you want to be a writer….write!

The Patience of Writing an Onion

August 6, 2014

Ace Jordyn

Writing a good onion, I mean story, takes time and I don’t just mean the time to think and type the first draft. Becoming and being a writer is an evolution, a process, and we need to be patient with ourselves as we learn the craft and apply it. But what does being patient mean and how can we apply it in a meaningful way? Here are three areas where I’ve learned to apply patience:

Creating the story
One day, I heard one writer critique a story. “Sheila is a patient writer,” he said. I was dumbfounded. What did he mean? I read Sheila’s piece and then looked more carefully at the author’s I liked. Slowly, I figure it out and my writing improved immensely.

Patience in your writing means taking your time to explain things where and when they need to be explained. For example, a story which starts with a lot of back story tells of an impatient writer. Knowing when to sprinkle in the details and saving some of them for later takes patience. It also means taking the time to explain things clearly when the opportunity presents. That can be with setting, character description, with action or dialogue. If you are clearly grounded, then the reader will be as well. Take time developing that scene. Show the situation, the feelings, and focus on the important points and explain them as clearly as needed. Don’t rush it unless there’s a good reason for doing so. If you over-write, you can edit it down later. If you are patient with characters you will make them memorable. If you are patient with your story, you will ground your readers and hold their interest.

Learning new skills
You can’t learn everything from a book, a workshop, a conference or a course. The secret, I’ve learned, is to take one thing that stuck with you and apply it to your story, scene or character. That one thing is usually an aha! moment and because of that it means you’ve become aware of something you never realized before. It’s another layer in writing the perfect onion. Apply that new understanding to your work and suddenly it’s transformed in ways you couldn’t have imagined. The truth is that how-to books are long and cumbersome and workshops are intensive because they try to cover enough points so that everyone will get something from it. So, take one thing and apply it.

Deciding which hat not to wear
The first draft can never be perfect – you’ve heard this before but what does it really mean? If you strive for a perfect first draft, your story will never be written and it’s an impossible feat. It’s impossible to wear both the creative hat and the editor’s hats. Yes, plural hat for the editors.

There are three editorial hats: conceptual where the larger elements of the story such as plot and structure are examined; line by line where every sentence and word are examined for clarity, word choice and content; and copy editing for grammar, spelling and punctuation. Then there’s the creative hat. Wearing four hats? Suddenly that sounds silly, doesn’t it?

Your first draft can be augmented by some planning (outlining) and your current writing skills. As you’ll write, you’ll learn more up skills along the way which makes new works cleaner and more cohesive. But that first draft will never be a perfect finished work. Every successful writer knows that. Don’t believe me? Check out their acknowledgements pages. First readers, proof readers, editors – they’re all thanked because they’re all there for a reason. Creativity needs its own hat to weave unexpected twists and unfetter your imagination. The weight of four hats will give you a headache and ultimately, writer’s block. So be patient. Wear your creative hat and come up with an exciting, moving story. The wear each editorial hat in turn. As you wear each one, that’s a good time to apply new skills or insights about the craft. A trick is to have cheat sheets with points or questions for each of the editors.

Patience can best be described as creating an onion rather than peeling it back. Layer upon layer must be built before the story is completed to our satisfaction. So perhaps the hat analogy doesn’t really work. The creative and editing processes are about layering the story to add density to the concept, the plot, to character, to our voice and mastery of the craft. An onion grows from a small seed and layer by layer with watering and patience, it forms a solid bulb and so too grows a story.

Own Your Choices

August 5, 2014

fictorians

Author's Perspective Balancing Acts Craft & Skills Guest Posts Motivation Reflection The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Peter J. Wacks

I’m taking a break from working on a Veronica Mars Media Tie In story to sit down and contemplate the following request: ‘If you could go back in time and speak with yourself as a new writer just starting out, what’s the most important piece of advice you would give yourself?’ The makes me think a lot of things.

First thing it makes me think, though, is that it’s a trick question.

I have accomplished a lot of what I have set out to do, and I have done it because of the failures I have embraced.

I manage Wordfire Press because I had the temerity to have a company fail in the game industry, over-hiring from a group of friends until it crashed itself under the weight of payroll. Without that failure… I never would have learned to abandon caution in your dreams—while laying groundwork—plans within plans—to protect your creative child in reality.

Without the frustrating failure of my first book The Divine Prank, which ended up in the trash as a 100,000 word partial manuscript under the first printing of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, I wouldn’t have learned the hard edge of fight that lets me never back down, and always find a way through… that same edge that pushed me to sell tens of thousands of copies of my first book, Second Paradigm, by hand. It’s also what gave me the edge and strength to say no to a 2,000 book print run with a $2,500 advance from the big six and say, I’m not going to change the plot structure, I’m going to self-publish it instead.

There are a dozen other examples I won’t cite, because you get the point. What else does the question make me think of? What about successes? What about learning curve?

The second thing it makes me think is, what successes have I had that I could have amplified?

That is another slippery slope. The largest frustration I have dealt with when it comes to success is that I was a better writer in 2008 than I was in in 2012. I spent so much time on marketing and promotion that my writing style regressed.

I got worse.

Talk about frustrating! I couldn’t sling my stories as well! …Which forced me to study my style and start coauthoring with others to regain my skills and find new techniques.

Was

Awesome!

I am so much better now than I could have been by myself. Each author I have worked on a project with has amplified my skills. How could I give that up? Why would I give that up? More importantly—if I hadn’t been faced with my own lesser skillset, would I have been able to learn what I have, could I have embraced the growth? I don’t think so. Which ties back to failing your way forward, and we are back to our first answer.

The third, and final thing, that the question makes me think on is what I like to call the ‘Hallmark’ factor. What platitudes are out there that seem trite until you REALLY need to learn that lesson, at which point they become incredibly poignant? And how the heck do I generalize a very personal lesson to a large audience in such a way that they gain something of value out of it?

Don’t forget your personal relationships?

Sleep is important too?

Never give up, never surrender!?

And there it is, the one thing we can ALL learn from. But it is not something that any of us need from the past. If you are here reading, or in my case writing, then you haven’t given up. You haven’t surrendered. But…

Writer, musician, artist, actor… the title of a creative almost synonymous with the phrase self-doubt. So let’s not focus on a lesson for the past, but instead focus on a lesson for the present and, more importantly, for our future selves.

Every failure isn’t a failure. None of them are. They are just weapons your future self can use to create success. Be it a month, a year, a decade, or a lifetime of fighting, you are remarkable – because you haven’t given in! Because you fight, you learn, you grow, and each step that feels like it is a step back, is, in fact, something you will look back on in the future and say “Wow, I’m glad I learned that lesson then!”

Own your choices. Only you can. And every choice, good or bad, is what will, in the end, give you the strength to succeed… and you will, because you have been strong enough to not give up.

Write on.

~Peter J. Wacks

Guest Writer Bio:

Peter J. Wacks, the managing editor of Kevin J. Anderson’s WordFire Press, is a bestselling cross genre writer. He has worked across the creative fields in gaming, television, film, comics, blogging, and most recently he spends his time writing novels.

When he isn’t working on the next book he can be found hanging out with his kiddo, practicing martial arts, playing chess, or fighting with swords. He also loves Angry Birds and drinking IPAs with friends.

You can find out more about Peter at his website, which he rarely finds time to update:www.PeterJWacks.com

It’s My Job

August 4, 2014

clancy

Balancing Acts Clancy Metzger Craft & Skills Reflection The Writing Life Writing Tools 4 Comments

If I could go back to when I started writing, I would have treated my writing time differently. I would have started off treating it like a job and not a hobby and creating good habits. How would I do that? Glad I asked!

First, whether I was writing part time or full time, I would set a schedule and stick to it. If all I had time for was fifteen minutes a day right before bed or a half hour before I went to work or if I had the luxury of writing several hours a day, I would set that time aside and hold it sacred. It matters less how much time you have available than that you use it the way in which you need. At most other jobs, we’re expected to arrive at a set time, work for a set amount of time, take lunch at set times and leave at a set time. And while we’re there, we’re expected to accomplish certain tasks. This is what we’re paid to do. And you’re writing career should be no different, if you expect to make money from it someday.

So, I need to show up when I’m expected to, keep to my schedule and do what I’m expected. I am my own boss on this and I need to keep my employee-self on task. This not only helps me treat my writing professionally, but it tells others it’s a job I take seriously. Family and friends can be terrible sources of distraction whether they mean to or not. When they try to encroach on my scheduled work time, I would say what I’d say if I were at any other job, “Sorry, I can’t. I have to work.” Schedule lunches, meetings, errands and such for other times that aren’t your work time.

Second, write. Seems obvious. It isn’t. If I could go back, I would set aside other time for writing related tasks that are not writing. Checking email, reading articles/blogs/books about writing, plotting, editing, doing research, staring at the ceiling thinking and a list too long of other related things are NOT writing. They are all things I need to do in my writing career, but they are not writing. They are things I can usually do other times or squeeze in around the edges in little bits of down time. Some I can even do on commercial breaks at night while watching my favorite shows. And if I have to schedule time to do them, then I would. But I would not let it infringe on my sacred writing time, my work time (whatever time I had set for that).

Third, I would advise my early self to keep writing if I’m stuck. Crap can be fixed. Holes can be filled. Transitions can be built. But nothing can be done with nothing. So, if I’m stuck in the current scene. I can make some notes on what I’m thinking at the time and go to a different scene and work there. At least I’m doing my job.

I would tell me to take my job seriously. If I don’t, why would anyone else? And if I take my job seriously, then I will get my work done. I will finish stories. I will produce the necessary product to get it out there no matter in what way I choose to get it out there. You can’t query, edit, revise, sell, publish or market a product you do not have.

Yes, writing is an art. It takes creativity, but as Dave Farland/Dave Wolverton once told me, I can train myself to get into that creative mode really quick through good habits. Treating it all as a job, going to your work space at the set times you are scheduled to work and getting to it are the habits needed to train your brain to put on its creative work clothes quickly and get to your job.

After years, I still struggle with some of this, but the more I practice and ingrain these job habits, the more I get done and the better writer I become. So, that’s the advice I would give me if I could go back.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this month because as a professional, I’m always looking for better ways to improve my work, my work space, my work habits, and my work mentality.