The “Ten Thousand Hour” Rule — Does It Actually Mean Anything?

CLOCK’S TICKING BRAH. Photo credit: wwarby on Flickr.

While chatting with my partner-in-crime Tracy McCusker of Dusty Journal this afternoon, we started talking about the hoary old guideline of 10,000 hours to master your writing (or whatever skill you’re attempting to master). At which point she dropped this delightful bomb of bitterness into the conversation:

If I see that 10,000 hours, I CAN MAKE YOU DO IT QUICKER tidbit on another blog, I am going to hate-spew a geyser.

First of all, 10,000 hours? That’s a handy approximation that may or may not be supported by scientific testing. Instead it is provided as *whatever kind of metric* everyone can use! But bam! with my SHAM-WOW WRITING COURSE I can cut that down to 8,000. What a bargain?!

Disclaimer: I haven’t read Outliers, the Malcolm Gladwell book in which the “Ten Thousand Hour Rule” is first mentioned, and I don’t really have a problem with the rule by itself. I believe the myth of “overnight success” is one of the most poisonous lies in our profession. I do, however, think that obsessing over the raw numbers themselves is a mistake. If you’re truly seeking mastery of your craft, there are better places to put your focus than how many hours you’ve clocked.

1) Make mistakes.

There’s a reason all the books on writing tell you to write every day, or at least as much as you can. It’s because all the theory in the world won’t teach you anything until you dive in and start getting dirty. The 10,000 Hour Rule is less about the hours themselves than about cultivating passion, routine, and a wish to learn from your mistakes. Of course, you can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t start making some. So strap on your helmet, get in there, and start screwing up.

2) Fail outright.

One of the shaggiest adages from life’s Barrel-O-Advice is that “you learn more from failures than from successes.” There’s a terrific Ira Glass quote about this that sums it up more beautifully than I ever could, so I’ll just post it here.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Note that Glass doesn’t mention “hours” at all, but rather a body of work. Of course, building a body of work takes time, but the work matters most. Time is the means. Work is the end.

3) It’s not the hours, honey, it’s the mileage.

Say you were to write twelve books, all featuring the same plot, the same characters, and the same basic story arc. Maybe you change a few details here and there, but essentially you write the same book twelve times. Have you really gotten any better? Have you learned anything? If you have, it was probably by accident. The hours you spend should not be comfortable hours, breezily covering the ground you know well. Push yourself. Write something scary and exhilarating. Make some mistakes. See how it all fits together?

4) It’s not a numbers game.

Seriously, no Hours Police are going to show up at your door in overcoats and porkpie hats and chastise you for not putting in enough time. If you have indeed turned out a book before it was sufficiently polished, or sent out a query before you really have it nailed, your time deficit is likely to be reflected in unhappy readers, poor reviews, and rejection slips. Again, the real point of all those hours is to fire up your passion and your drive, not check off ten thousand tiny boxes with a #2 pencil.

5) Find what works for you.

Of course, all writing advice is ultimately disposable, including the advice you’re reading now. Maybe you’re a prodigy with enormous talent and you’ll make the squishy, uncertain status of “mastery” in 5,000 hours. Maybe you’re busy and unfocused and it will take 20,000. Either way, you’ll get there when you get there.

Which is not to say you should just relax and assume it’ll all work out — quite the opposite. One of the biggest lessons you learn as a writer is what a cruel and cunning enemy time is. His arsenal of weapons (deadlines, fatigue, scheduling conflicts) is enormous and daunting, and you’ll have to fight him every step of the way.

Don’t focus on how long you’ve been fighting. Learn to fight smarter and fight better. And above all, keep fighting.

Three Storytelling Lessons from John Carter

Today I want to talk about John Carter. Not the Disney movie and how it’s apparently taking a bath at the box office (which, as a Burroughs fan, I find depressing), but the original Barsoom pulp stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first John Carter story, A Princess of Mars, was published as a serial in 1912, then re-published as a novel in 1917. The follow-up novel, The Gods of Mars, was published in 1918, followed by The Warlord of Mars in 1919.

While the first book is decent enough in its own right, the story takes off with Gods of Mars, and it’s that book I want to discuss. Like A Princess of Mars, Gods was serialized in The All-Story in 1915, released in five parts over a period of months.

There’s plenty about the John Carter stories that’s a little dated now — the Martian environment, the series of helpless princesses in need of rescue (I kid you not, Gods of Mars has three different damsels, all of them scantily clad, all in distress at one point or another). Like many products of the early 20th century, it has a couple uncomfortable race issues, and, like most pulp stories of the period, more than a few story-saving coincidences that an author could never get away with now. But a modern writer can still learn a lot from Burroughs.

The protagonist has strong, clear goals.

At the beginning of Gods of Mars, John Carter is fighting for his life. He’s dropped into a deadly situation and must fight his way through a hostile environment — escaping first from deadly creatures and then from captivity. About halfway through the story, Carter finally gets home — only to find his wife, Dejah Thoris, has gotten herself captured again. (Cue sad trombone.) Carter spends the rest of the book chasing after Dejah Thoris and mowing over everyone who stands in his way. Sure, along the way he meets a son he didn’t know he had, topples a religion, starts a war with three different factions, and sends a would-be goddess to her doom, but that’s all incidental.

Every chapter features a setback.

Carter never gets a break. At the end of every chapter, he’s tossed down a pit, clapped in irons, outnumbered by bad guys, facing down a dozen monsters. No sooner does he rescue some princess or another than she’s snatched away again. Granted, the Barsoom stories are straightforward pulp adventure, and thus focused on non-stop action, but there’s something to be said for the way Burroughs structures his stories. Even when Carter has some downtime, it’s simply a breather before he starts pursuing his goals again.

The stakes get raised.

As Gods of Mars progresses, the protagonist goes from being lost in hostile territory, to uncovering the secrets of a fraudulent religion on a planetary scale, to toppling a goddess and becoming a fugitive from his former allies, the Red Martians. Burroughs keeps raising the stakes, and each minor goal Carter achieves just puts him in a worse position. If you want to examine the principle of “move the protagonist further from the goal until he finally reaches it,” Gods of Mars is a good example of how to do it right.

Some elements of the Barsoom stories may seem a bit dated to modern sensibilities, but some storytelling principles are timeless, and there’s a reason Burroughs’ work is still being retold a century later.

Advice From Every Side

Photo by marrycunningham on Flickr.

A short one today.

Even the most well-meaning friend can unwittingly undermine you with a destructive or demoralizing piece of advice — even when it’s technically sound.

By way of example: I recently started passing around a fantasy novella I’ve been working on to some beta readers, with the intent of releasing it for free as a promotional piece for my book. Here is the full range of the advice I got:

1) Don’t release it for free, people will devalue your work.
2) Don’t sell it, people love free.
3) Release it now, it’s totally ready!
4) Don’t release it now, it’s totally not ready.
5) Don’t release it at all, it will sabotage your later efforts.
6) Your novella has to be BETTER than your next book because of [some sales principle I don’t really understand]
7) Your novella can’t be better than your next book because people don’t expect an author’s quality to go down over time.

In terms of the narrative, advice was equally split. Everyone had a favorite character. None of them picked the same one. Too much romance. Not enough romance. Tone down the action. Crank up the action. And so on.

Now, all my friends are fine people. And clearly, they all want to be supportive. But if I tried to implement their suggestions equally, I’d quickly lose my mind, because it can’t be done.

This sort of contradictory advice is all over the blogosphere, too. I’ve read more vehement debates about the free / 99 cent Kindle issue than I care to think about. Some of it is market-driven. Some is just cynical. Most is utterly subjective.

All any of us can do is stick to our convictions, move forward, and always keep learning. And that’s no real revelation, but sometimes it’s easy to forget.

Outlining for Fun and Word Count

Photo by landschaft on Flickr.

Until recently, I was not big on outlining. I believed that making things up as I went along was vital to the creative process, that it kept things fresh and unpredictable, that it prevented boredom. I believed that outlining somehow sterilized the process and rendered it artistically inert.

Wrong.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that you need to start outlining right this minute to be a professional (or, god forbid, “real”) writer. As always, you do what you want. But I’m going to tell you why outlining works for me, and about the significant positive results I’ve had.

The Why

I started my first serious outline while working on a very un-serious project for a friend. It was a casual piece of fiction that got out of hand (like so many casual projects do). Originally intended as a small-scale piece, the cast of characters swelled to gargantuan proportions, and the plot with it. (This happens to me all the time. I seem incapable of sticking to a small, concentrated cast of characters. But that’s a story for another day.)

To keep track of these characters and the emerging and labyrinthine plot, I started making a rough outline. The rough outline became a spreadsheet, which eventually became several spreadsheets. One handled scene order and timing. Another tracked characters through chapters. A third listed personality traits, goals, and ambitions at a glance. For the record, I recommend starting with the first of these and seeing how that goes.

I hadn’t yet considered outlining my more serious work, which is why I think this knock-off story became such a breakthrough for me. I had no hangups about this piece. It was intended for a tiny and personal audience, and I’d never have to worry about salability. That unstrung a lot of my issues and let me start outlining, rather than fretting over some abstract and ill-defined notion of artistic purity.

The other big “why” came out of that great pantsing Mecca, National Novel Writing Month 2010. That year, I wrote the second book of a series I’d been working on for a while. Midway through, I created a whole bunch of new characters, a new secondary plot, and took the story in a whole new direction.

That was a mistake. I later realized that I’d only gone in that direction because I had no idea where the main story was headed. I’d written thousands of words on some new story that didn’t have those problems, hoping that when I got back around to the main plot, I’d somehow have an answer to its nagging issues.

As you can guess, that didn’t work. I ended up throwing away a lot of work and wasting a lot of time — all of which could have been prevented with an outline.

The How

When outlining, I tend to start simple and work toward complex. Since story for me is always centered on the characters, I start with them. I begin with something like this:

That tells me their most basic arc. I do the same for the other major characters. Then I start defining their relationships with one another. Once I figure out the character’s ambitions, story goals, and motivations, it’s time to start blocking out scenes. My scene spreadsheet looks something like this:

I generally include:

  • The scene number
  • The POV character (color-coded for easy reference)
  • The details of the scene
  • Word count
  • Date written
  • Notes on what purpose the scene serves
  • A field for whether or not the scene’s been written (so I can skip over something and come back to it without Ruining Everything Forever)
  • Optional: day of the week (for watching timing issues)

Sharp-eyed readers will recognize this as a variant on the Snowflake Method scene sheet. I use it because it’s served me well in the past.

The important thing to remember when writing an outline like this is that things will change. All the time. The whole point of the outline is not to create a rigid, inflexible flowchart. It’s more like a roadmap showing where all the turnoffs, construction work, and washed-out bridges are. Looking at the notes in my scenes, I can instantly tell which ones are weak and need revising or cutting.

As you write and develop the story, you’ll find problems. You’ll see things that don’t work. You’ll move scenes around. This is good. It means the outline is working. Don’t get hung up on following the outline no matter what. The outline is not the story. At best, it’s a Frommer’s guide. It’s Cliff notes. So don’t sweat it too much.

The Results

After trying the outline on for size, I made a point of tracking how much faster I wrote with an outline in hand.

When simply improvising my work, I averaged anywhere between 500-1500 words a day before I’d burn out. At most, I’d write two or three scenes.

My record when working with an outline was over 6,000. My actual average was somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000, usually an average of four or five scenes.

A dramatic difference. In terms of numbers, there’s no question that outlining works better for me.

But what about enjoyment and spontanaeity? Actually, that’s measurably better as well. Knowing what purpose the scene is there to serve, and its place in the greater story, leaves me free to play around more with the prose without worrying that I’ll get off-track. It’s like being in a theme park where all the entrances and exits are clearly marked. You can still ride all the rides, but you don’t have to wander around looking for a way out afterward.

So, pretty demonstrably, outlining works for me. Does it work for you? Does it not work for you? Tell me your story.

Scene and Structure: Make Something Happen!

Imagine if Star Wars began like this:

EXT. OUTER SPACE
A Corellian blockade runner sails peacefully across the stars.

C-3PO
Oh dear! Princess Leia, if Darth Vader attacks us, what will happen to the Death Star plans?

LEIA
I don’t know, Threepio. I guess we’ll just have to try to safeguard them somehow. Captain, are there any signs of a Star Destroyer on our tail?

PILOT
Negative.

LEIA
Oh, good. It would certainly be bad if he attacked. Darth Vader is a monster.

C-3PO
Princess, you might be interested in knowing we’re now orbiting above Tattooine, a desert planet of the Outer Rim. Tatooine has two stars, as it is in a binary star system. Tatooine’s G-type and K-type twin stars (Tatoo I and Tatoo II) heat its surface, making water and shade hard to come by. The planet’s indigenous lifeforms—such as the Womp rat, bantha, Sarlacc, and Krayt Dragon—are well-adapted to its arid climate, but human settlers often become moisture farmers and live in subterranean dwellings in order to survive. The planet’s lack of resources, brutal heat, and decentralized population have made governing the planet nearly impossible…

Exciting, huh? No. No, it isn’t.

Seattle Ain't Bullshittin'

I’ve seen a lot of beginning writers trot out scenes like this. Hell, I’ve done it myself. Scenes where the action is waiting to get started. Scenes where, as David Mamet says in his infamous master-class memo, “two characters are talking about a third [and] the scene is a crock of shit.” Nothing’s happening, but people are talking about how something might happen at some point. And that builds tension, right?

Not necessarily.

Scenes like this are ripe for the proverbial cutting-room floor. Why? Because they’re unnecessary. For example, look at how Star Wars actually begins, as compared to the dull hypothetical above.

The attack’s already taking place. Leia’s already in trouble. The fifteen-second prologue crawl has already filled us in on the situation. We don’t need Leia to explain that Darth Vader is a badass. We learn it easily enough when he shows up and snaps a guy’s neck like a candy cane. Badassery established!

Similarly, the reader isn’t going to give a good goddamn about the details of Tatooine. It’s hot, it’s dry, it’s empty. We learn this when the droids are wandering around lost. The only setting details we learn are those that impact the story right now. The exposition and the action develop at the same time. That’s the essence of a good scene.

Another vital principle of scene structure is that no character leaves the scene unchanged. If your characters learn some information, say “huh, that’s interesting” and then go on with their lives as if nothing happened, then the story probably isn’t moving forward.

Two characters talking about what a third character might potentially do isn’t action. There’s the possibility for something to happen, but nothing actually happens. You want to be very sparing with this kind of scene, because essentially, you’re asking your reader to wait while you get the story moving.

Unless your scene somehow ramps up the tension or raises the stakes somehow, you’re just marking time, and your reader may start losing interest. Raymond Chandler used to solve this problem by having men burst into the room with guns whenever things started getting stale. That may not always be an option for you, but it’s in your best interest to push your characters and story forward.

To further strip-mine the opening sequence of Star Wars: Leia begins the scene as a princess fleeing with the Death Star plans. She ends as a prisoner, the fate of the plans now out of her control. R2 and Threepio begin the sequence as two droids on a starship, minding their own business. They end as fugitives in possession of a galaxy-changing secret only one of them knows they have. Nobody just goes on with business as usual… except maybe Vader, who, for the moment, is the least interesting character in the room. The next time he shows up, it’s torture time. And he’s interesting again.

So the next time you’re peering at your prose and wondering why it seems flaccid or dull, ask yourself: what’s happening in this scene? And furthermore, what can I make happen right now?

A Jedi Like Your Father: What Luke Skywalker Taught Me about Writing Characters

For the longest time, I struggled with strong character motivation. Still do, actually. Unless I make a conscious effort to do otherwise, I tend to write reactive characters to whom shit happens — who just sort of blunder from one encounter to another, maybe having an emotion or two about it, but with no all-consuming wants of their own. It’s an instinct I still have to actively fight, even though I know how weak it is writing-wise.

It didn’t click with me until I started examining the stories I loved from the inside, and realized all the best characters have a driving need that moves them forward — and then story circumstances that move them further and further from those goals.

Since I’m a sci-fi / fantasy buff and I love to cite movie examples, let’s go with one of the nerd classics: Star Wars. (I thought about aiming for some literary credibility by busting out, I don’t know, Silas Marner or The Brothers Karamazov or something, but come on, we both know I’d be faking it.)

  • Luke Skywalker wants to get away from his dead-end life on Tattooine. He finds out about Princess Leia, and wants to find out who she is and help her (goals).
  • Hoping to join the Imperial academy (goal), Luke gets frustrated by his uncle, who refuses to let him off the farm (setback). He seeks out Obi-Wan to find out more about Leia (goal) but gets waylaid by Sand People (setback).
  • Later, he manages to get off Tattoine, although it costs him the only family he has left (setback, which then leads to another goal).
  • Now Luke also wants to become a Jedi, and rescue the princess. (goal)
  • He makes a little progress on the whole Jedi thing, but then loses his master when Obi-Wan gets killed by Vader (setback). The Jedi goal won’t get picked up again until the second movie, and won’t be fulfilled until the third.
  • Luke rescues the princess, presumably with romance in mind (goal), but Han breezily cockblocks him (setback). Which turns out to be fortunate for everyone involved, as it prevents Darth Vader from having flipper grandchildren.
  • Having rescued Leia, Luke gets caught up in the Rebellion and the attack on the Death Star… (goal)
  • ….but his new best buddy Han wants nothing to do with it (setback).

The final battle is then one setback after another, as Luke watches his buddies botch their attack runs and get picked off like flies. But, finally, he gets the job done. The Death Star is destroyed (only there’s a second one), Han gets his reward (but no longer seems to care that much), Luke gets the girl (only not really), and everyone is happy but Grand Moff Tarkin and those dead contractors.

This is a pretty basic rundown of Luke’s character arc, which I’m sure has been combed over in painstaking detail by more devoted nerds than myself. The point is, Luke, even though he’s frequently thought of as a whiny kid who just sort of bumbles around, he actually has very clear goals.

You can graph Han Solo much the same way. His basic objective is “get paid,” a goal so beleaguered by setbacks that he begins to question it (“no reward is worth this”). Obi-Wan has more elusive and far-reaching goals, some of which transcend his own death — which, from a story perspective, is pretty cool.

On the other hand, Star Wars does have a character who blunders through the story being batted around by life, who just reacts to things as they come along: C-3PO. Does he make good comic relief? Sure. Would he make a good protagonist? Hell no.

The same goes for Chewie. Okay, calm down, I love Chewie as much as the next Star Wars dweeb, but what’s Chewie’s motivation? It’s kinda Han’s motivation. Follow Han around, collect a paycheck. He’s a good supporting character, but on his own, he doesn’t have much going for him.

Good characters want things. They want things badly — and they frequently don’t get them, until the end of the story. Or, when they do get them, they become gateways to greater, more troublesome motivations. If you want a strong protagonist, you should be able to break down their goal in one succinct sentence. Harry Potter wants to survive (and later defeat) the machinations of Voldemort. Frodo wants to get the Ring to Mount Doom. Roland wants to get to the Dark Tower. Indiana Jones wants to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. And so on. (Raiders of the Lost Ark is actually a really interesting example, because the hero basically never gets what he wants, which is the Ark in a museum. He loses out at every turn, right through the ending, but the story is compelling anyway because he wants it so damn bad.)

So if you have a story that seems to be flailing around, take a good look at your main character. Much of the time, a directionless story points straight back to a directionless protagonist. Do they have an all-consuming goal that’s constantly moving them forward? If not, you’d better give them one, because an indecisive, noodly protagonist will erode reader sympathy like sulfuric acid. If your characters don’t invest in something emotionally, how do you expect your readers to invested emotionally in your story? It’s simple: they won’t.

Make them want it.

[Guest Post] Your Workshop Story Is Probably Shit

Today’s incendiary guest post comes from Tracy McCusker, former editor, published poet, and avowed pottymouth.

There’s a certain kind of story that can be found hanging around self-published short story collections and small-press slush piles. This kind of story has a certain whiff about it. It’s verbose. It’s stylized. It’s littered with impossibly academic sentences. It steps you through a scene without understanding how to frame it–noodly verbs and weak adjectives strewn across the page like chewed-up toys.

Oh yes. I know them well. I’ve read hundreds of these per year for four years.

It’s a workshop story.

When I was working as an editorial intern at Faultline, I read hundreds of short story first-pages. We churned 3,000 submissions. We published 30. It was easy to pick out the stories that wouldn’t make it into the second round of consideration.

There were the usual assortment that never made it in. The prison stories with no self-addressed stamped envelop to return a note to San Quentin. A paranoid city-dwelling protag ranting against the machine. Manuscripts typed out on yellowed paper (the same submission we received the year before). Novel-length stories jammed into fifty pages of tiny print.

But there was a second class of story that caught my eye as I perused the accompanying query letters: the workshop story. These were from the undergrad who’d been told by their adviser that their writing was super-ready for publication, despite numerous red flags that cried “amateur author!” Workshop stories were never rejected out of hand. They were sent dutifully on for consideration. None ever made it to round two. With thousands of submissions for an (unpaid) reading staff of five, workshop stories from aspiring writers didn’t get more than a form rejection slip.

This is not a case of gatekeeping, that’s such a drag. Many of the stories that did get published weren’t the most scintillating pieces of fiction. A certain roughness in quality is par for course for small press stories. A normalizing aesthetic can make a lot of these stories predictable and dull. And we’re talking about the published work. But many of these published stories had their charms: a good head for prose; an interesting character; an interesting voice. The small press was usually the first step on the ladder of the MFA/BFA to build up an reputation. To get in with the lowest rung on the publishing world.

I never grudged the submitters their aspirations.

But the workshop stories, man. They were usually shit.

True Tales of Horror: I was a undergrad workshopper

When I say these workshop stories were shit, I wasn’t sneering at these writers from an ivory tower of publication. I was in my second year of workshop, plugging away at my keyboard by night. Usually I was writing critiques. Once in a while, I pounded out a story. A couple nights before deadline. Or the night of. Day of? You bet.

It was college. Everything was due yesterday, and the pressure was on.

I wrote shit stories. This odoriferous patina clung to everything I did. I thought I wrote pretty sentences, and would preen over my clever turns of phrase. Poet-by-training, prose monkeys couldn’t compete with my 150+ word  sentences that drilled down into the very essence of societal manners merely from a protagonist entering a room.

But those sentences, too, were shit. No one could follow along. The beasts were eating their own tails. Communication was confused with obfuscation. I was making the strokes of art. But they were wild marks. I wasn’t in control of my craft. Not enough to make a unified work that conveyed what was in my brain.

And that was a good thing. Workshop gave me the room to experiment; my peers would pick apart these experiments and give me feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I look back fondly on my workshop stories. They were important stepping-stones in my creative development. But just as life-drawing studies aren’t meant to be published (unless you are that damn famous already), workshop stories are meant to be crammed in a tiny little desk drawer.

Here’s why.

1. Workshop stories are written in the haze of actual workshop.

You bang out a story. Maybe you have one stored up for just such an occasion. You’re writing down to the deadline. Or you smile as you pass around an object that you’ve been coaxing for weeks. If you’re a novice at craft when you make this object under duress or at your leisure, the object will always retain a hue of those novice brush-strokes.

Just like you don’t put your first still life up for sale, your first stories will always retain that youthful hue of partly-successful, partly-unsuccessful experimentation. The worst that can happen is a reader discovers you, reads your work, and forms a prematurely negative opinion about your work. Eventually, you may have an audience for these kinds of stories. The best you can do with this story is release it into the wild for free (or as a bundled freebie). But just as I keep my first drawings from art workshop under lock & key, you might not want readers to see just how bad you were when you started to get serious about craft until you’ve established a name for yourself as a writer.

2. Workshop stories are written for a specific audience.

Workshop stories are written and the around the embryotic fluid of their context: a group that meets weekly to read published authors and stories written for the workshop. This specific audience is at first foreign to you. You all speak different prose languages. If you’re new enough to writing, the stories have the tendency to read the same. Pop culture influence and pop literary influence is palpable.

Over the course of the workshop, this audience is primed by reading the same material, sharing a discussion on craft, reaching a consensus (or at least greater understanding) of the basic rules of writing. By the end of a good workshop, you know who your peers are. You’ve heard them critique you, you’ve heard them praise you. You know in a sense what this audience wants.

Good! You can now write for that audience. The problem is that audience is both super-literate (from having read a bunch of classic authors back-to-back) and familiar with each other (and understanding of particular readers’ wants/dislikes). This audience in no way reflects the reading public. That clever pun on The Death of Ivan Ilyich you made on page 5 that turned the key to the entire plot? Not such a big hit to someone who hasn’t read Tolstoy. Drag.

This can be a good thing. Workshops can be super-critical, influenced by stylistic concerns that your reading public won’t be. Did you eschew writing a first-person narrative about a young woman’s difficulty in a turbid relationship because that’s just so Sylvia Plath? Was your workshop genre-hostile, or even selectively genre hostile (science-fiction is the literary equivalent of gold, noir is hackneyed and artless)? Were the workshoppers just out of sync with your style/concerns/interests? All of these concerns can warp a starting writer’s sense of what they should be writing.  Writing workshops can be insular; the bubble of a 12 to 15 person setting doesn’t always carry through to the outside world.

The reading public isn’t privy to workshop concerns, much in the same way that arguments about counters and stem-height will make a non-typographer’s eyes glaze over. Your actual, non-workshop audience will get ticked off when it senses that you aren’t writing for them.

3. Even worse, some workshop stories are written for no audience.

One of the essential skills that workshop attempts to instill in its writers is how to write stories for an audience. It does this two ways: by showing a writer how their expectations match up to audience reactions; and introducing writers to the audience-community of other writers.

A writer can be led to an audience, but you can’t etc etc. Sometimes a writer will present a first story culled from their life, diary-style, replete with self-referential quirks that make no sense outside of the author’s head. Impenetrable stories are unpleasant reads. (Heaven help us if the author decides to help us out by footnoting it.) Workshop stories–especially early ones–tend to be wrapped up in what the author thinks is meaningful. Workshop authors are novices to prose that bridge the gap between what’s in their head and what’s in the audience’s head. This kind of meaning-making can take years of craft to hone, steady readers, and steady feedback.

Sometimes a writer will self-justify any criticism of their work as being “it’s not for you, it’s for me.” I am never sure how much of this statement covers a bruised ego, and how much of it is an actual writer’s belief that their writing is for themselves. Writing is meant to say something to someone who isn’t yourself.  If a writer is adamant on this point–wonderful! Start a journal.

This phenomenon is not limited to writing workshops. Look for this excuse to crop up approximately everywhere. The impetus to make art that is for oneself is fantastic; but then why insist on exhibiting work meant solely for yourself?

4. Workshop stories lack awareness of style’s function.

The function of style is not to do something stylistic. Style ain’t like clothes, worn and discarded at whim. Style communicates to your readers something essential. If you choose to write in a style that’s outside the norms, you need to make sure it is introduced early, often, and the reader is taught how to “read” the style you’ve chosen. Then you do something awesome with that style to justify its choice.

An example: switching “person” is one of the hardest things to pull off in fiction. If you write a story in third person, we expect it to stay there. James Clavell, however, gave that advice the finger. In Shogun, he would drill down from his omniscient third-person narrator into a close third, where the character’s thoughts, fears, and perceptions would bleed into our consciousness… until in a moment of supreme vulnerability, a character would begin to speak with an I-voice. Then he’d reign in the voice and pull us away from that intimacy. The breech would feel tragic. The tale of the rise of the Tokagawa Shogunate was full of such tragic breeches. Theme and style came together to create an atmosphere of vulnerability and loss that one or the other wouldn’t have  achieved.

And that is awesome.

Workshop stories generally operate on the level of experimentation. There’s the workshop story that plays around with second person (a perennial feature), but doesn’t quite know how to pull along the reader like Maile Meloy does in “Ranch Girl”. Or the workshop story that’s trying out an unreliable narrator, but by withholding too much information, the reader is simply frustrated by the multiplicity of readings rather than reveling in the possibilities Emily Carroll presents us in her supernatural fiction.

Within workshop, dabbling is important; outside of it, you need a more developed sense of just what the hell it is you are doing, and if it’s actually doing it.

5. Workshop stories generally know jack about the camera lens effect.

The camera lens guides what we seen on screen when we’re watching a film or TV show. We’re so inundated with visual culture now that there’s nary a word that can describe the effect that I notice in novice fiction. This is a failure of knowing how to pan, zoom, cut, and focus on information that’s important to the story.

Take a gander at this as an opening paragraph:

Daniel swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was groggy from the night of bad coffee, worse sleep. He got up and moved around his bedroom. He picked up his socks that he’d cast off onto the lamp in a fit of supreme nonchalance. Banging his head into the open drawer that he’d forgotten to close last night, he grumbled. He put the socks in the drawer. He closed it, walked across the room, and trudged out into the living room to make himself some coffee.

Aside from the fact that nothing remotely interesting happened in this paragraph (we learned nothing about the narrator, nothing about his state now aside from some cliched groggy-morning blues), the paragraph shows an extreme failure of the camera lens of the narrative. What about this scene is important? The coffee? The socks? Banging his head? Something that hasn’t even happened in the narrative yet? No matter your genre, every word counts and every second you need to be selling your story to your reader.

I’ll save an extended discussion about the camera lens effect for another post. Suffice to say, the camera lens effect is not a failure of editing (editing would likely clean the sentences up, or remove some of them without addressing the underlying problem). It’s a failure of the writer to choose important details with their camera lens. Instead they’ve focused on what they see the character doing in their head with their internal camera lens. They see it spool past their mind’s eye, so they write it.

Fiction is not about the details, it’s about the story. When a story is overwhelmed with finicky details (and our narrator is not a borderline autistic who needs to put those socks away or his world will be shattered), the scene becomes a waste of time.

It’s a pity (and a pain) that some workshop pieces are montages of scenes just like this one, strung together into a “story” that tells us nothing about its characters.

6. Workshop stories are pretentious, bland, cliched, or some toxic combination of the three.

It’s true. I’ve even written a story that was all three. It was about a young girl being smuggled up to Canada by her father and step-mother with the help of an ex-Vietnam vet. The short story read like a turn-of-the-century novel of manners.

The only cure for this ill is to read more, to read extensively, and to get some damn life experience that can break you out of regurgitating pop culture.

7. Workshop stories are not revised, or barely revised.

Writers everywhere say a story needs to be “edited.” What they actually mean is “revised.” Workshop stories are often not revised before they hit the workshop. The drafts that cause published writers to vomit in their mouth a little when they think back on their first novels? We read those.

Sometimes exclusively.

If you revise it once, or even twice after workshop, most likely you are still revising without a strong idea about how to fix all of the problems with your work because workshop critique was based on a first draft, maybe even an “ideas draft”. Not a finished product. What you need to do is workshop the story again (maybe even again) to receive feedback on a story that’s finally ready to be published. Most of us don’t get the chance to have a workshop story read more than once.

8. The best thing you can do with a workshop story is to forget about it until you can cannibalize it for later work.

I had seven advisers give me feedback on my workshop story! It’s totally my thesis!  I’m a special snowflake!

Here’s the Low-down Diddly Flump about writing programs. Feedback from your advisers is always aimed at the level of writer that you currently are. Feedback will attempt to push you to the next level. But if you’re at the bottom of the rope, you can only claw your way up so fast.

I have received amazing instruction from my writing teachers. Had dozens of them (been one of them), and most of them have been amazing. Yet I have a dim view of writing advice at the university level. I know how many students an adviser/instructor has to wrangle with. There is only so much you can do or say for each student before they’re pushed along to the next juncture. Even feedback on multiple drafts can only do/say so much.

I like to receive feedback from several different sources. A writing group outside the pay bubble. A writing partner who I exchange work with. Dan. A particular reader who I know likes the genre. Another reader who knows diddly-squat about the genre, but is game to give their feedback.

9. How do you know when a work is ready to be published?

If you don’t have reliable feedback of how good a work is (by producing work, sending it out, getting responses/sales), then you can only rely on a host of beta readers. Would they buy your work? Or at least read it without begrudging you the time they spent with it?

If you cannot judge how good your work is, then you need to put it away in a drawer until you have the clarity to evaluate it.

The best technique you can have in your toolkit is this: set aside three short stories, poems, whatever. One a classic from a respected author.  Another a piece by a favorite author written in the past ten years. One a piece you can’t believe was published (preferably also recent). After you have set aside your short story / novella / novel / epic poem for a few months (or years), take it out from that drawer. Read your piece side-by-side with these writers. Maybe your piece isn’t going to be world literature, but are you at least as good as your favorite author? Are you maybe half as good? One-tenth as good?

How about the piece you can’t believe was published? If you’re better than that–go ahead and throw your story into the great blue.

But if you’re not… stuff it back into the drawer.

Because polishing shit just gives you shiny shit.

 

Writers, what do you do with your workshop stories?

 

Dabbler or Disciple: How Serious Are You About Writing?

Photo by laurelville_gallery on Flickr.

Today’s guest post comes from Ruth over at Bullish Ink, who delivers some stern truths about the passion and drive the writing life requires.

Do you want to be a writer or do you just want to write?

Here’s the difference. Those who want to be a writer experience the Writing Life as an unquenchable fever in their soul and those who want to write  experience it as a casual crush.

There’s no right or wrong answer. My objective here is to simply help us figure out what we want from the Writing Life. Do we want to dabble with it like a casual date or become its devoted disciple?

Truth is, the Writing Life doesn’t want to be penciled in. It wants to screw up your schedule without any resistance on your part. It demands your slavish devotion. You want to be a writer? Cancel your gym membership. Give up your favorite tv show. Beg out of dinner dates.

Committing To The Writing Life

Think of it this way – would you only spend fifteen minutes a day with your best friend or significant other? What kind of relationship would that produce?

Imagine saying to your spouse: “Well, I’d love to pick up milk on the way home, pudding-pie, but you’ve used up your allotted time today. How about I pencil it in for tomorrow – time permitting?”

If you continually tell your Writing Life that you can only afford it fifteen minutes a day, the relationship will self-destruct. It isn’t going to wait around forever for you to get your life figured out. It’s going to pack its bags and hit the road.

Once the two of you split the sheets, reconciliation is no peach. Forget about open arms, tender reunions and mind-blowing make-up sex. It isn’t that easy  to rekindle the romance.

I’m speaking from experience here. The Writing Life and I split up a few years back. Got pretty messy. Things were said. Feelings hurt. Vows made. Just about the darkest period of my history.

And trust me, reuniting was no picnic. Took a couple years to get our mojo back. I had to put in a lot of late nights and write hundreds of thousands of words of crap before we were able to effectively communicate again.

And that’s when I realized that I didn’t just want to write, I wanted to be a writer. I was smitten with the written word. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.

Making Time For The Writing Life

The paradox is this: we are so damn intent on figuring how to fit the Writing Life into our day-planners and warping out because there just aren’t enough hours in the day, when the simple truth is that we make time for our passion without giving it a second thought.

See, if we are passionate about writing, if our hearts pump ink and the scent of paper causes us to tremble, we will make room for writing with nary a thought to logistics.

Remember what those first few weeks of ‘being in love’ feel like? You don’t need to eat. You don’t need to sleep. You have all the time in the world to bask in the presence of your lover because you make the time.

Your calendar miraculously clears itself. Duty and obligation and busy-work fall away – unmissed, rendered unnecessary and no longer important.

That’s what it’s like to be a writer. You instantaneously and unapologetically give up activities and interests that previously defined your entire existence so that you are free to pursue your passion: the Writing Life.

Just as creative talent makes room for itself, passion makes time to pursue the lover.

The Bottom Line

So, is writing something you plug into the weekday schedule like the gym and the dentist?

Or is it something that causes you to forget to buy groceries, change your socks and flounder for your child’s name?

Are you dabbling with writing or are you its devoted disciple?

Until you move the Writing Life from your To Do List to your Can’t Wait To Do List, you won’t be able to bridge the gap between wanting to be and being.

Ruth is a forty-something administrative professional who enjoys fast-paced stories, vintage cars and southern rock. A reader by birth, paper-pusher by trade and novelist by design, storytelling is her passion. You can read more of her take on the writing life at www.bullishink.com or swing by the frugal living blog she shares with her sis at www.shoestringwithstyle.com.

Writing When You’re Sick, Tired, or Just Hate the World

Photo by desiitaly on Flickr.

In a perfect universe, I’d begin every writing day with nine hours’ sleep, a perfectly brewed cup of coffee, nothing on my work schedule, and a gentle rainstorm to keep me from even thinking about going outside. I’d have a clearly formed idea, a flawless outline, and several unbroken hours to work.

While I’m at it, I would also like to write with telepathy from the seat of my private jet while I get a neck massage from a Czech supermodel.

Writing when you’d rather not is one of the most important skills you can ever cultivate as a writer. Anyone can write when they’re feeling fine and the muse has just hit them between the eyes like a thunderbolt from Valhalla. But there will be days when every syllable is like a back-alley fistfight with a rabid hobo. That’s when your mettle really gets tested.

Any book, blog or seminar on writing advice will tell you to write every day, and with good reason. To me, the most important reason is this: every day that you write hones your craft just a little more. Every day that you don’t write dulls it just a little more. For most people, it dulls a lot faster than it hones. Go a week or a month without writing anything and you can practically hear the shriek of rusty gears grinding together.

Good habits are easy to build when there aren’t any obstacles in your path, but it’s an imperfect universe, and obstacles happen. In fact, obstacles are nigh-omnipresent. So what do you do when you’re sick, tired, or just plain hate the world, but you still want to get words down on the page?

The Stimulus Package

Let’s get the easy one out of the way. Stimulants! Imbibe caffeine in various forms. Take a vitamin pill. Drink a whole tumbler of orange juice. Some artificial stimulation can sometimes get you through the job, as long as it doesn’t further compromise your health.

Embrace the Delerium

Writers love to romanticize the image of the drunken author who composes his or her masterpieces while smashed. Why not do the same for the natural incoherence brought on by fatigue, sinus congestion, or having just chugged an entire bottle of Robitussin? So you couldn’t string a proper sentence together if someone put a gun to your face — they can bill you! Let your incoherence be your guide. Write whatever comes to your poor addled brain. Freewrite like an escapee from a mental ward. Some of it might end up far more usable than you think.

Shake it Up

If your condition (and your conscience) won’t allow you to work on your chosen masterpiece while half-dead, work on something else. Start something new and impractical. Try your hand at dirty haiku. You may not create anything deathless, but writing is writing. That thing I said last time about giving yourself permission to suck? That goes double for when you’re sick.

Work it In

Say, have you got a chapter where one of your characters just took a dart full of dimethyltryptamine to the face, or drank Windex till he saw a UFO? Well, would you like one? Nothing gives you perspective on being sick, tired, or full of hate than actually being those things. Now’s your chance to get those feelings down on the page. It’s not death’s door, it’s research!

Throw it Out

A lot of writers I know loathe tossing out anything they write. Their words are like their precious babies, the nectar of their very soul. Why not take a sick day from your well-manicured neurosis? Rattle off a freewrite and then shred it. Bang out a wild, incoherent blog post and then delete it. Fall deeply out of love with your words for one day. Meditate on impermanence while you listen to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume. Turn your vitriol on your own work. You can kiss and make up tomorrow.

Just Do a Half-Assed Job

Accept that what you’re writing now probably won’t be your best, and possibly in the running for your worst. Just remember that it’s still better than nothing. Earn some street cred with yourself. Make this your war story. Sure, you might look at what you wrote a few days from now and toss it out in disgust. Then again, maybe not. But either way, you put pen to paper or butt to chair and did it, even when you didn’t want to. Go you. Pound it. High five. Okay, well maybe later.

This one goes out to my good friend Tracy McCusker, who is on the mend. Feel better, Tracy.

The Lurking Fear

Not a book review, nor an amazing facsimile.

Among the many stops on what I call the Road to Getting Serious About Writing is a frank conversation I had with a close friend many years ago. He had just finished assembling materials for a book idea he’d been kicking around for years, and admitted to me that he was nervous about starting.

“Why?” I asked. “You’ve obviously got the knowledge, you’re passionate about the subject, you’re a skilled writer. What are you worried about?”

“Well,” he said, “this is my life’s work… what if I put in all that work and it isn’t any good?

I winced because I’d felt the same way, many times. This particular fear often comes to haunt me in the wolf’s hour, when it’s three in the morning and I can’t get to sleep because of the parade of morbid thoughts stomping over my ribcage. It rears its deformed head when I’m in the midst of an editing problem of Gordian proportions. It bites my ankles in the evening hours when I’m behind deadline and my inspiration has gone as limp as overcooked linguine. It peers over my shoulder and paraphrases the bitchy girlfriend from Happy Gilmore: “All you ever talk about is being a writer. But there’s a problem. You’re not any good!” This is the worst of all, because apparently my taunting psychopomp enjoys Adam Sandler movies, and therefore so do I. If that’s not an eldritch blasted heath of the soul, I don’t know what is.

This fear is not only natural, it’s fairly endemic to writers in general. I have yet to meet a writer who hasn’t white-knuckled their way through spasms of self-doubt at least once. But ultimately, it’s like any other psychological terror: you either let it stop you, or you work through it. Here are some things to keep in mind that might help you banish the lurking fear back to the unholy terror dimension from whence it came.

You’ll fail for sure if you don’t try.

This is so obvious it circles the drain of empty platitudes, but it’s true enough that it bears repeating. If you write a bad book, then you write a bad book. Or short story, or screenplay, or whatever. But if you write nothing, then you’ve got nothing. Whenever I start thinking about giving up because trying’s just too damn much work, I recall a favorite quote from Al Pacino in Glengarry Glenn Ross: “In this life, you regret the things you don’t do.” Granted, he was a crooked real estate salesman trying to hoodwink a potential mark, but… well… shut up! It’s motivational, okay?

“Not any good” isn’t an ending, it’s an obstacle.

dArKwHiSpEr420 gave our book one star on Goodreads. Our lives are over.

Life isn’t like a movie. In real life, couples who finally get together after a series of hilarious misunderstandings have to learn to get along. Likewise, giving up on your book isn’t going to end with you laying on the floor in defeat and the camera slowly zooming out while the theme from Requiem for a Dream swells in the background. You’re going to have to live with yourself for the full run, so you might as well learn from your mistakes and get back in the game.

A bad book can be fixed. You can learn craft. You can learn to edit. You can get better. You have awesome opposable thumbs and the capacity to absorb new knowledge. Expecting perfection the first time around is a rookie mistake, Millhouse. Get shut of it and embrace the joyous torment of revision.

Maybe this isn’t your life’s work.

The very words “life’s work” can carry a heavy load for a writer. Certainly you have to invest emotionally in your work to get to the finish line, but it’s easy to get overly invested and start defining yourself by the quality of your prose. All the passion in the world won’t do you any good if you spook yourself into never writing again.

Accept imperfection as inevitable and don’t raise the bar so high for yourself that you can no longer spot it in the clouds. Chances are you have many more stories in you, so don’t hang the world on this one. I used to think every writer out there just polished their first book until they sold it, but a lot of them don’t. Some have written as many as twenty books before making a successful sale. So don’t write off the rest of your creative future just yet.

Like Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, the lurking fears of writing can never truly be defeated. They await, dead but dreaming, for the moment when the stars are right. And when “the stars are right,” I mean when you’ve run out of coffee and you’ve been staring at the blank page for an hour and listening to the sussurrus of your hair falling out. But you can dispel these fears long enough to get your work done.

Fortunately, that’s all the time you really need.