Category Archives: The Fictorians

Goals Part 3: Evaluating

I’ve always been big on goals. But evaluating them can get discouraging, especially as I rarely accomplish my goals. One of my kids asked me once, “Why set goals if you’re not going to accomplish them anyway?” I responded, “So I accomplish something.” There is more to life than destinations. There’s the journey.   Setting goals gives us direction.

Each year, as I evaluate my goals, it’s more than a checklist. It’s a compass reading. How much of my plan did I implement? What can I change so I can do the things required to reach my goal? Why and when did I lose sight of the plan? How can I approach the goal in a better way? How can I enlist support from friends/family? How should I change the goal so I can be more successful next year? If I achieved my goal, what else would I like to work on? This kind of self-evaluation corresponds with our writing goals as well as our personal ones.

We should never set goals for things outside of our control, like landing an agent or publisher, but there is so much within our grasp. When we evaluate our productivity goals– how much time was spent writing, the number of pages, chapters, or stories finished–we have an opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t. We can look at our habits and writing patterns and decide how best to get our BICFOK (Butt in Chair, Fingers on Keyboard) at our optimum writing times. We can evaluate what got in the way, why, and how to change it.

As for that agent/publisher, we can set goals to meet people, to submit our work, and to do anything and everything we are capable of making happen in order to encourage their acceptance of our work. In the end, though, it’s their decision.

Now, I’m coming to the end of the most unproductive month I’ve ever had. There are a few reasons for that: started planning for the holidays later than I should have, overextended myself to family and friends, didn’t take the time to write during the days like I usually would, and spent too much time in the evenings watching TV because I was too tired. In evaluating the way my goal progress tanked, I can make some decisions. I’ll set a date to start the holiday shopping, I’ll set time parameters for holiday projects instead of committing myself to unreasonable time-consuming activities, I’ll reduce the shows I follow and schedule when I’ll watch them instead of staying up late or letting it eat into my writing time.

Will I slip-up or forget some of these goals through the course of the year? Sure. Looking over them on a regular basis will help, but I’ve never yet achieved even half the goals I set for myself. But I usually get a few. There’s no reason to give up on goal-setting just because we fall short. The purpose is to give direction, not perfection.

So, good luck on setting your goals. Remember to keep them specific, attainable, and limit your focus to a few of the things most important to you. And if you don’t reach them all, that’s what assessment is all about; we always have the opportunity to keep trying.  As writers, that should be a concept with which we’re painfully familiar. Happy Writing in 2012!

 

Goals – Part 2: Setting Measurable Goals, and Plans to Reach Them

This is the second of three blogs related to setting goals.  Clancy kicked off the series with her excellent post Road Maps Help You Get There.

I will be building on what she started, talking specifically about how to set more effective goals.  We’re starting a new year, and as usual, this is a time for renewal, a time for fresh starts.  It is very common to set goals in personal and professional lives.  Why is it that so many of these new year’s resolutions remain unfulfilled at the end of the year?

First, they aren’t written down.

“People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.”

This quote, from an unknown source, drives to the heart of this post.  Life is busy and unless we focus our energy, we will fail to best utilize the limited time we have for writing.

A goal not written down is a daydream, whereas a written goal is a dream with a deadline.  If you like the idea of being a writer but aren’t interested in actually finishing anything, then don’t bother reading on.  Otherwise, roll up your sleeves and get your pencil ready.

Second, they aren’t meaningful.

Writing a goal isn’t enough.  If it’s ambiguous or you don’t really understand your goal, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

For example, a writer may decide to set the goal, “I’m going to write a book this year.”

Wonderful, but not very effective.

I’ve set this very goal in the past, and I’ve proven to myself that I need to be far more specific.

What kind of book?  How long?  Is it a 10 page children’s picture book or a 150,000 word epic fantasy novel?

If you say you’re going to write a 100,000 word novel (pick your genre), then you have a starting point for setting a meaningful goal.  There are a few other things you need to understand first.

How are you going to approach writing this book?

Are you a free-writer who will sit down at the computer and just start typing in hopes of triggering the Muse to start whispering in your ear?  That’s fine.  Just recognize that the early effort, and maybe the entire early draft, is just an exploration, a search for your novel.  Once you find it, you’ll probably need to throw away most of what you’ve done to that point because only then are you ready to actually start writing the real story.  Actually completing a viable first draft of a 100,000 word novel this way may require 250,000 words or more.

If you are more of a story planner, have you discovered your story yet?  If not, you will need to allow for perhaps months of work before beginning the actual draft of the story.  You need to explore concept, theme, characters, setting, and plot.  You need to develop conflicts and figure out your ending and weave in sub plots through the outline.  You may write 50,000 words or more in your outlining process before you’re ready to begin a viable draft.

Whichever way you approach the work, writing a 100,000 word novel in a year is far more than just banging out 100,000 words into a text file.

Once you understand what you wish to accomplish, you are ready to set a goal.

Third.  They aren’t measurable.

Isn’t the goal of writing a 100,000 word novel measurable?

The answer:  partially

If you reach the end of the year with a 100,000 word completed draft of your novel in hand then you can say you reached that goal.  However, how do you know in June that you’re on track to make it?  Have you set any measurements to help you plan the effort each month?

Break the goal down into smaller blocks that will serve as sub-goals you can work each month, week, or even day.  If you can do this, you’ll know at any given time if you are on track or how far behind you’ve fallen.

Another benefit of breaking goals down into smaller blocks is the goal suddenly feels far more achievable.  Sitting at the computer, staring at blank page number one, and knowing you’ve got 100,000 words still to go can be extremely daunting and discouraging.  It’s not so bad to think, “I’ve only got to write 1000 words today.”  You can do that, no problem.

Take these three components of successful goals and apply them to any goals you wish to set.  You’ll find they immediately help you define, clarify, and organize your goals.

For example, last year I set the goal to write two complete novels.  I didn’t quite make it.  Part of the reason was that I did not follow this process as closely as I knew I should.  I did complete two drafts of one novel, make significant edits in a previously completed novel, write a new novella, and complete about 70% of the planning process of another full novel.  I am pleased with all the work I did complete, but I could have done better.

This year I am approaching the setting of goals more carefully.  I am still finalizing the plan, but right now it looks like this:

Goal 1:  Complete edits to The Sentinel’s Call, my 150,000 word epic fantasy novel.

The detailed monthly plan is not complete, but at a high level, I need to:

  • Re-read the novel and identify needed edits to improve book pacing.
  • Compare planned edits with feedback from my agent, and finalize plan
  • Make the edits.

I expect to complete this effort by April or May.

Goal 2:  Write the sequel to The Sentinel’s Call.  This will be a 125,000 word epic fantasy novel.

Plan will include:

  • Complete high level outline (Current state: 70% complete at 3,500 words).
  • Tie plot to planned edits to The Sentinel’s Call.
  • Complete detailed outline of up to 30,000 words.
  • Write first draft in 3 months.
  • Gather feedback from beta readers, plan second draft, and write it prior to the end of the year.

As you can see, I still have work to do, but I’m getting close.  As I finalize the goals, measurements, and the plan to achieve them, you can see how the resulting tasks will easily become sub-goals and milestones I can use to benchmark progress and keep myself on track.  I’ll plan to schedule at least a couple of burst-writing sessions in the months with the heaviest chapter writing to increase productivity.

If I can identify clearly and realistically what I’ll need to do every month to reach these goals, then I just need to work the plan.

We’ll see how well I do.

What are your plans for next year?

 

Should You Read How-To-Write Books?

Recently I’ve been sampling some commercially-focused writing education. While high school and college classes presented what I consider a sort of forensic, after-the-fact approach to literary analysis, how-to-write books tend to focus on how to generate a prizewinning or commercially successful novel or screenplay.

After reading dozens of how-to books and listening to many hours of lecture and seminars since I started writing my current novel, I thought I’d share some of my take-aways.

1) Some books teach an overtly formulaic approach, and are focused on simply getting something written.

I read a Dummies guide to novel writing. It laid out a formula, break your story into 1/4 1st act, 1/2 2nd act, 1/4 3rd act. It seemed to be mostly focused on solving the problems of writers block, and offered a ‘fractal’ approach, where you write summary sentences for each act, expand those to paragraphs, expand each sentence in the paragraphs into a paragraph, and so on until you have a story. It was very focused on if you just keep turning the crank you’ll get a novel out.

The Dummies book also made reference to another book that detailed minute mechanics of each scene and each line in the scene. I then read that book and was practically scared off of writing. This book (Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer), a classic, out of print but lauded title, told me that I have to have to painstakingly compose every sentence of either a motivation or a reaction. I felt like the only way to have a great book was to take a tiny brush and hand polish every word of every scene. I’m sure I do need to do that at some point, but I tried a hand at thinking that way, and I couldn’t move through my book. I decided that was an editing task and that I’d have to develop that skill in time, and I moved on to reading other how-to books.

2) Some books try to psych you up to deal with the relative impossibility of getting published.

The majority of the books I read, on novel writing at least, offered a cautiously optimistic take on the industry, and essentially gave out the same advice: Keep trying. This becomes a tautology of sorts, because if you never stop submitting you technically still have a chance of making it, whereas if you give up you will have of course failed.

This whole theory of publishing – “maybe I’ll get an agent or maybe I’ll get signed” – is outdated, because today there’s absolutely no barriers to getting your book in ePublishing. But having numerous friends and relatives in the music industry, this is an old, well known problem. Sure, there’s no barriers to cutting an album either, and in fact having a perfect, shining album produced entirely on your own money is practically prerequisite to trying to get signed as a musical act. In the same way, it’s expected that you write a pretty finished product these days in your attempts to submit and get agented or published, since your competition is doing just that.

But now you have the issue of, well, why are you waiting to get signed? Why not just put your stuff out there and see what happens? And since the record label (or publisher) wasn’t likely to sink their marketing budget on you anyway, they were going to see if you struck a chord with the public and only then cautiously support you, why not take it on yourself to promote?

Ironically, (I think it’s irony), since books take years to get published, not one of the writing books I read, even recent ones, really addressed the “maybe you should just e-publish” issue with more than a passing thought of the traditional variety, that self-publishing is sort of dirty and might tarnish you. I suppose it’s like trying to write “‘The History of the Revolution” in the middle; there’s just nothing that can be really said until the dust clears and we know who’s in charge. (Hint: Amazon and Apple).

3) Some books, seminars, and lectures offer detailed plot beats.

A good number of the lectures I listened to, which admittedly were more geared towards screenwriting but included numerous writing craft classes as well, focused on story beats. The 51 good beats for a thriller. The 189 beats of a RomCom. The 5000 beats of a master tearjerker.I exaggerate, but seriously there seems to be a very well tread path in commercial fiction and stories to hitting the key beats, and this category of advice resonated the best with my own style.

As any experienced artist knows, form is indeed liberating, and the emphasis is that while it may seem “formulaic” to include the various beats, it is also formulaic to have 4 beats in a song, formulaic to use well known instruments, formulaic to use a language that people speak, and formulaic to use Do-Re-Mi as the notes in a scale. Really, the audience (except for art seekers purposely looking for experiences out of the mainstream) is expecting to be entertained, and may not be investing more than a casual amount of attention on your artistic work. Thus making a work accessible in the standard ways but doing a fine job of it, will be rewarded. Similarly, taking a well known story form and just adding a unique twist on aspects of it, subverting expectations in an interesting and novel way, can pay off because it is built upon, again, a well known story.

4) Discovery vs. Outline writing

This is an area where it appears that the writing universe agrees to disagree.

I sort of think of it this way. There are people who are great live storytellers. Great ad-libbers. Great comedians. They can tell a joke, they can thrill you with anecdotes at a party. I have a dry sense of humor and I can occasionally be funny, but often my humor can fall flatter than I had wanted. I have a brother who can tell excellent if occasionally long winded stories, but you would see him being more effective than I around a campfire.

However, there are those people who think of the great retort later that day. “Ooh, I know what I should have said to him!”. Well, the good thing about those people is that they can be great writers. They can write that down, and the next great retort and the next,  and now they’ve got some punchy, incisive dialog.

I can sit down, my mind swimming with thoughts, and write them down, and keep writing, and after some days and months I have more goodies than I know what to do with. I cull the best, separate the rest into a future bucket, and have goodies for later chapters or other books.

The same issue occurs impacts the approach to writing. There are discovery writers, who sit down, write the book, and then edit it. Period. Stephen King is a good example of this style and explains some of it in his book on writing. Some of the more genre writers, such as SciFi and fantasy, create vast universes and need to painstakingly document the magic systems or physics as well as the geography of the worlds they build. Naturally, they are sometimes just as painstaking in their plotting.

I myself found that, coming from a tech writing background, I outlined a lot. But I also found that when I go to write a chapter, no matter how outlined, the characters lead me wherever they do for the scene. I think I’m a hybrid outliner/discovery writer, but I’m probably way more outline than discovery.

5) Plotting vs. Character

The discussion of outline vs. discovery also impacts this theme, which I encountered in a lot of books. There’s this tension between hitting the plot points and keeping them from being forced. Would the character naturally do this to achieve their burning goals and desires? Or are they just stopping by the bank so they can get tangled in the bank robbery because it moves the plot along?

I saw a lot of discussion of this without a lot of good advice on how to solve this dilemma. The best I got was that plot should flow from character, and what the characters would do. But if you sit and ask what those characters should do, they might do the darndest things – and depending on how burning a desire you give them, and how sharp and defined their flaws, they might give you a great plot.

It seems to come down to some oft-repeated basics: Give them a burning desire; give them understandable flaws; put the characters in conflict.

But will this get them to the bank to be a victim of the bank heist that is critical to the unfolding of the plot? I just don’t know. And again, I will probably have to study more books to see if any of them give me some better tools than “don’t” to achieve this effect.

6) Don’t be derivative

Another oft-given piece of advice, easier said than done, is that you shouldn’t repeat others’ stories. Advice in this area ranged from what should be obvious: “don’t plagiarize”, to entreaty, “please don’t make me read your obviously derivative story”. The common areas of offense, which presumably came from the how-to authors’ personal experience in reading slush, were in characterization and plotting. Several times I was told not to write about a whore with a heart of gold or a hard-bitten cop. So I’m going to write about a cop with a heart of gold and a hard-bitten whore and see where it gets me.

Plotting, while not being outright plagiarism or theft, can be a serious issue. If you’re not familiar with the stories and literature of your genre, you could use the exact same twist – either subliminally transmitted to you by the culture, or thought of completely independently. Either way, you come across clumsy and unprofessional if you unknowingly lift someone else’s solution. Especially, especially if they don’t know about it.

Was it Picasso who said good artists borrow, great artists steal? Well poor artists unwittingly copy.

Should you even read how-to-write books?

That’s the question. When I started writing my current novel, I started perusing (in the thorough sense) various books on writing, but I took them with a grain of salt. I had been given the advice – probably from a how to book – that reading them was a fruitless exercise. That the techniques they taught were often different than the way I worked, and they were mostly applicable to that specific author’s personal work style. Also, a lot of advice was simply an attempt to help aspiring authors finish something. In a similar vein, many of the books simply said “you should read a lot” and in many ways implied that style and judgement would arise from reading sufficiently. Other books gave the simple answer “write a lot” and the books were divided as to whether people should have their works critiqued.

Here’s my thoughts on the matter:

1) If you’re having trouble finishing your book, some of the books with a motivational slant may get you past the finish line.

2) If the drivel you write feels like total crap compared to the lofty prose you read, some of the books might help you find out what’s wrong with your sentences.

3) If you haven’t read enough at all, or read enough in your genre, or if like me all your in-genre “reading” was actually going to the movies which are universally regarded as not as good as the book, then you shouldn’t read a how-to book. You should read novels in your genre.

4) If you’ve barely written but you’ve read enough, then you should likewise skip the how-to books. Like language, you probably have the vocabulary – not just words but the scenes, transitions, motivations, and plot – and you should just start writing. Chances are, if you are quite well read, and you have some story ideas, that you will be able to write well.

Writing is communication. Your style of communication is unique to you. Experiencing and relating stories is inherent in the human psyche. We all live stories. So if you’ve experienced, if you’ve listened, then you can similarly tell a story. And if you can put sentences together that make grammatical sense, you can write a book.

5) Probably the worst thing that can happen to an artist is criticism. Criticism stops art. Invalidation and unskilled or inapplicable “constructive criticism” can kill or worse, subvert one’s creativity.

One huge risk is that external criticism gets internalized.

“Oh we don’t need any more vampire stories.” “You can’t use -ly words”.  Perhaps these words of advice are relatively true for today, but there are countless other opinions and advice that have no bearing but when conveyed as rules create a cage that can stifle creativity.

My advice on reading how-to books is either:

1) Stay away from them!

or

2) Read all of them!

That way, you’ll be able to see which advice is consistent across books, which advice is the oddball opinion of one writer, and which jealous “advice” shouldn’t be foisted upon writers at all.

In conclusion, here’s a summary of the most consistent advice I gleaned from the myriad of how-to books:

  1. Read a lot
  2. Write a lot

If you’ve read enough, you don’t need to study how to write.

Road Maps Help Get You There

I have found in my writing and in my life, that if I make a list, take notes, outline, plan – I will get whatever it is needs done just that much easier and quicker.

I’m talking about making a six month, one year, five year plan for your writing and for your life.  They aren’t the same, although sometimes it may feel that way.  As a sidebar – life is what feeds our writing, so don’t ignore it or you may find your writing drying up and getting stale from lack of fresh inspiration.

Family, friends, classes, the bowling league, hobbies, reading and the latest movie are not only food for your soul but food for your writing.  Do you know how high a priority they are?  Will you have that on your list in a year or five?  Think about it…

My friends know my schedule is hectic, so if they want to have time with me, it has to be scheduled.  I make time for my friends because they are important to me, but I also have to literally make time for them or they get lost in the craziness of my schedule.  They are a high priority and on my master plan, so that is covered. 

I recently had to turn down helping on an event in 2012 I really wanted to do because I didn’t have the time to commit to it.  Is it now on my plan for 2013? You bet it is.  I have a plan for it and other things will have to get sacrificed so I can participate, but that’s ok.  I’m planning ahead so I know what’s coming up, what needs done, and when.

What about your writing?  Will you have one book done a year, two a year, one epic and one novella?  What’s your goal?  What’s the plan to get there?  How are you going to accomplish it?  Do you write intently one weekend a month, a page a day, an hour a day?  All this planning helps you accomplish your goals. It really does. 

This is Clancy Lost

If you spend a little time planning ahead, you don’t have to think about it, you can just get on with what needs done.  An hour of planning on Monday for the week can save you several hours wasted while you figure out what you needed to do each day.

In my writing, I’m a plotter not a pantser, but I recently tried pantsing a novel.  I got a good start on it, about 30K and then I had no idea where I was going.  I knew how it ended but I had no idea the route to get there.  I was completely lost.  Now, I’m having to map my course so I can finish my story’s journey. 

I may be a little over-zealous on this planning issue, as I am the person who had a 47-page itinerary for a ten-day road trip from coast to coast, but maybe that’s just how I need to operate in order to get to my destination.  Some of you may be able to jump in the car and drive with no plan, but I suspect most will fall in between the two extremes. 

I’m just suggesting that you consider planning.  See if it doesn’t make things run smoother.  If you aren’t already a planner, try it as an experiment.  Figure out the goal for the week, day by day, and follow it.  Let me know if it helps. 

My goals for the next year?

Writing – Do my regularly schedule blog posts on all three of my sites, write at least 4 hours a day/4 times a week with a goal of finishing two books during the year, and actively submitting.

Life – Do not take on any more commitments, schedule time at least once a month with my “best-y”, schedule my days so they are more productive, and ensure my writing time is held sacred.

 Go forth and plan…Be ‘Fictorious!’