Category Archives: Dave Heyman

A Guest Post by David Heyman

“Honey, where are you?”

Physically I’m in the store with my wife, where she is asking my opinion of an item she’s seen. In my mind though – I’m on a far-off snowy plain, trying to get my heroine out of the scrape I’ve written her into. This is the world of the writer and their family, and it’s one I’m betting most of you are familiar with. Managing the scales between the time and energy we give to our writing and the time we give to other demands can be one of the more difficult challenges an aspiring writer can face.

It’s commonly called the work/life balance, but for us it is a more complex beast – one more properly named a work/work/life balance. We all have lives that include family, friends, pets and the many activities that make life worth living. These are all wonderful, but they rightfully expect an investment of your time. Then most of us have the job that pays the bills, taking care of that rewarding life and keeping the road ahead of us clear. That job also makes demands on your time, demands that can be harder to negotiate with than Fido.

Now you want to add writing, but for most of us writing no mere hobby. It doesn’t fall into the ‘pursuits’ section of that life category. No, writing for us is our second job – the one that might not be paying bills yet, but someday….

Something’s gotta give – somewhere a sacrifice must be made.

I always view my time as cake. I cut a piece of cake for my family, one for work and one for myself. If I want to write and that’s going to use some of that available time, then someone’s piece of cake is going to get smaller.

My advice: make sure you are the one making the sacrifice. Cut into your cake, not someone else’s.

Want to write on your lunch break? Sure. You can bang out that scene while you have your sandwich. Write during that boring dial-in meeting where they never call on you anyway? No, that time is committed to the job that pays the bills. Writing after play time with the kids and TV time with your spouse? Sure, but discuss it with them first.

You are the one who wants to be a writer, the big time sacrifice must come from you. Video game time, Game of Thrones watching time, Facebooking time.

Your time.

I would caution not to take all of your time, though. Don’t take away the sleep you need, or the time you exercise to stay healthy. Reserve some time for yourself to de-stress, to recharge and get the creative juices going again. Moderation is the key.

Each day is a cake that you choose where to make the cuts and choose the sizes. Your job, your friends and families all have their plates out, waiting to be serves a slice of your time.

How you distribute those slices will have a big impact on your support system going forward – and you will need that support to succeed.

David Heyman:

Dave writes both novels and short stories in the various genres of speculative fiction. His other passions include his family, gaming and reading about mountaineering. Sleep is added to the mix when needed. You can visit him at daveheyman.com

Writing While You Condition and Rinse

December 28, 2015

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Dave Heyman The Writing Life No Comments

As I am still in the early phases of my writing career, I approached this year with goals that were as much about education as production. I did have specific writing milestones I wanted to achieve, but I also wanted to devote a decent percentage of my time and resources on learning as much as I could about the craft. I attended classes, took workshops (both online and off) and made as many contacts in the industry as I could. Like most new writers, I was looking for advice from every corner I could find.

The most valuable thing I learned this year though was how to tailor all the advice and counsel into a form that worked inside my own life and methods. Different strokes, as they say. For me, the most important lesson was how to integrate the most common advice of all: write every day.

“Write every day” or some version of this is by far the most frequent recommendation I’ve seen, the one piece of counsel most writers seem to agree on. This was something I was aware of in 2014, and by the start of this year I was in already in the habit of sitting down at the keyboard at the same time every night and working through my two hours of blocked out time. Some nights I wrote little, sometimes I wrote a lot. For a while I became very focused on word counts, during the Spring I decided this was less useful than I had hoped.

As the year progressed, I started to look at this time differently – it stopped being writing time and started being typing time. When I entered my two-hour block with a solid idea of what I was there to do, the words would flow quickly and freely. When I tried to use the same time to work out my story’s problems and issues, all the while with hands on the keys and eyes on the screen, I could feel the momentum grind to a halt.

To work on the mechanics of my stories I needed not only a different environment but a different time. That time might come in smaller, harder to predict chunks, but it was there. In the car, at the grocery store or in the shower. I could spend that time thinking about my stories, and that was writing too.I discovered that, for me, writing was not only something I could do at other times of the day, often times it worked better.

To give a specific example, I’d like to dive briefly into a more detailed lesson I learned this year. This came courtesy of an online workshop taught by Dean Wesley Smith. (I found these workshops to be excellent – here’s a link. The relevant item to my story was the lesson that your character needs to have an opinion about the setting; omitting this will deny both the ability to resonate with the reader. As Dean often says in his lessons, I filed that “in the back of my writer brain” and moved on with my writing.

Fast forward to several months later. I was working on a new short story that I was quite passionate about. I had an interesting setting, a solid premise and what I felt was a really compelling main character. Unfortunately, when I ran the story by my writing group I got very consistent feedback: the readers could not connect with my main character. She was coming off as cold and distant, removed from the story somehow. I racked my brain trying to reason out why that was and eventually that voice from the back of my writer brain reminded me of Dean’s lesson. Taking a second pass at the story, I added her opinions about the setting and got the feedback I was looking for.

The important piece I want to stress here is not really how I solved this particular problem, but where. I didn’t solve that in front of my monitor, hands on the keys. I solved it in the shower, because when I take a shower, I always take it as a writer.

As I said above, I realized earlier this year that I have all my best ideas and breakthroughs when I am isolated. Taking a long walk by myself, driving to the store, or taking a shower. Thus I decided that when I am in those isolated situations, I will always think about my writing. This has allowed me to be mentally present when I am with my family or working my day job, while still getting maximum usage out of my typing time.

One of the most common statements I hear from folks in my position is “It’s hard to find time to write” and I almost agree. Balancing a job, a family, healthy living; all the demands of real life can be quite challenging. Sometimes you can only find a few minutes a day to type, but it can be easier to find time to write if you remove the requirement of a keyboard from the definition.

Just make sure you have a good hot water heater for those long showers.

About the Author: David Heyman

Dave writes both novels and short stories in the various genres of speculative fiction. His other passions include his family, his job, gaming and reading about mountaineering. Sleep is added to the mix when needed. You can visit him at daveheyman.com

Petting the Dog in Space

January 4, 2015

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Character Dave Heyman Guest Posts Narrative Voice 2 Comments

A guest post by DAVID HEYMAN.

2014 for me was a year of education. As I made the decision to move my writing out of the realm of hobby and move towards publication, I immersed myself in every book, course and workshop I could find.

An immediate focus for me was on my characters, as I felt that my initial takes on characters tended to be a bit drab, especially on the protagonists. I wanted my readers to like my characters, to care about them and root for them. One lesson I heard articulated often was something David Farland referred to in his workshop as “petting the dog.” In effect, show your character being nice to someone and people will naturally start to invest in their trials and goals themselves. People like nice people.

I began to look for examples of this in media, and once I knew to look for it I found it pretty easy to spot. While it was often fairly obvious in television shows, movies and novels, my favorite example of it was not in the realm of fiction at all. It was, instead, in the Twitter feeds of the two ESA probes investigating the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

The investigation of the comet was fairly well captured by the standard media. If you followed the approach and landing on the television news or via news websites, you were given an accounting that was factual, if a bit dry. If you followed the ESA Twitter feed however, you were given an emotional epic. Through the use of nothing more than 140 characters at a time, the ESA wove a story that made its readers care.

The ESA started by anthromorphizing the probes, allowing them to speak on their feeds in the first person. I felt this was a good first step, and one that plays on human nature. As people we seem to be drawn to this model easily, as we go about our lives ascribing emotions and whole personalities to our cars, our favorite shoes and so on. By making the probes speak for themselves, they started to become characters.

Making something a character is not that hard in the perfunctory sense. The trick I have been studying is how to make them likable, and in this I feel the ESA engineers gave a clinic, as these two probes quickly became characters I was invested in. The trick was not in simply letting them speak, but rather what made me care about Philae and Rosetta is that they clearly cared about each other.

Consider the following message orbiter Rosetta sent lander Philae, just after the small probe had separated from the larger lander:

@ESA_Rosetta: Also now back in contact with @philae2014! Good to hear you again buddy 🙂

The probe responds back:

@Philae2014: Nice to talk to you again, @ESA_Rosetta!

The two went back and forth like this, with Philae sending Rosetta pictures of itself and promising postcards from the comet’s surface. They would comment and compliment each other as they went about the work of the landing. When Philae finally completed its historic landing, it was with Rosetta cheering it on by re-tweeting the probe’s landing announcement:

@ESA_Rosetta: Well done my friend! RT @Philae2014: Touchdown! My new address: 67P!

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned for the mission. For a time, the ESA scientists could not locate Philae’s position on the comet. During this period the two probes exchanged humorous messages about the situation, like actual humans would, both trying to keep each other calm in the crisis:

@Philae2014: I’m in the shadow of a cliff on #67P. Where exactly? That’s what my team is in the process of finding out!

@ESA_Rosetta: @Philae2014 you’re in a shadow? How am I supposed to spot you there?! Our teams working hard to find you 🙂

In time it was determined that Philae had bounced on landing, and was now located in an area with much more shadow than expected. Due to this, the solar batteries would not receive the expected charge and soon communications with the probe would be lost.

By this time, my wife and I were fully invested readers. Philae and Rosetta were no longer pieces of machinery, they were now characters we had grown to care about. Through the skillful use of 140 characters at a time, the ESA engineers had made these two matter to us on an emotional level. The writer in me was curious to see how they would handle this new dire situation Philae was in.

I was proud to see they recognized the path the story needed to take. If Philae was going to die, he was going to die a hero. His last tweets were brave, talking about the work he would do until the end:

@Philae2014: I will use all my remaining energy to “communicate” between @ESA_Rosetta and myself with @ConsertRosetta

@Philae2014: @ESA_Rosetta I’m feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap…

This culminated with a final exchange, where you can almost see Rosetta kneeling by Philae’s bed, telling his young charge that it will be all right:

@ESA_Rosetta: S’ok Philae, I’ve got it from here for now. Rest well…

@Philae_2014: My #lifeonacomet has just begun @ESA_Rosetta. I’ll tell you more about my new home, comet #67P soon… zzzzz

My wife and I held back a few tears while reading this. I kept checking Philae’s Twitter feed for several days, but no new updates were forthcoming. Its batteries drained and its mission complete, Philae was at rest.

Long after the comet mission faded from the news, I continued to think about how emotionally invested I had become. I knew very little about the mission before the landing grew close, and I while I had followed similar missions like the Mars landing with great interest, that is all it had been. Interest.

Philae and Rosetta made me feel. That is a powerful reaction, the very goal of my writing, and I suspect a lot of the investment I grew to have in the mission was from how these two characters cared about each other. As I move forward in my own writing, the lessons I learned here will be ones I hope to emulate.

Guest Writer Bio:

David Heyman writes short sci-fi and fantasy and is working on a novel. He works as a director for a networking company.