Writing Excuses 20.47: Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets

Nov. 28th, 2025 06:41 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 20.47: Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets 


From https://writingexcuses.com/20-47-now-go-write-all-the-eggs-in-all-the-baskets


Key points: A tale of hubris. Branch out, diversify your income stream. Try new markets and genres. RPGs, video games, TV, tie-ins, what are the options? Turn down gigs you don't want to do. Don't let a single revenue stream dominate your income. Redefine yourself as a writer in general, not just an author or novelist. Be flexible, roll with the hits! Don't forget why you wanted to be a writer in the first place.


[Season 20, Episode  47]


[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.


[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.


[Season 20, Episode 47]


[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.


[Dan] And this is my episode for our book, Now Go Write. All the Eggs in All the Baskets is a presentation that I do, and now it's a chapter in a book, and now it's an episode. And what this is basically about is the tale of my own hubris. So in 2014, I was on top of the world. I was very successful. I had two successful series, I had a New York Times bestseller. One of my books was being made into a movie. I foolishly assumed that I had made it, and that I would never have to struggle again.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And it turns out that that's not how it works. So, my next series was a flop, my next standalone was a flop. One of my publishers stopped promoting me entirely. The movie was made and it was very good, but nobody saw it because it got released in like four theaters nationwide. And so the career that I thought was secure had kind of fallen apart overnight. And yet my kids still wanted to eat three times a day, and I still had a mortgage to pay. So I realized that I had kind of foolishly assumed that the level of success I had attained was permanent and that everything would be easy from here on out. And to go back to the episode title, I had put all of my eggs in that one basket of novel writing, and then novel writing kind of dried up for me very quickly. And I had to branch out, and I had to do other things. And so this is the... uh... This is the episode where we tell you about all the other ways to get paid for writing words.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] This is... I'm glad that we're doing this, and that it's in the book, because that's one of the things that I've found as a freelancer that I expect. I'm always diversifying my income stream. But I see people who have a day job who think that they will be able to leave the day job and go write as the only thing that they do, but it's not... It's... It's... They're unprepared, even the ones who are having success are unprepared for the dips and valleys of income streams. And so, yeah, all of the eggs in all of the baskets.

[Dan] Yeah. So my first step in this was to try to figure out what else I could do in the novel writing space. And more or less what that came down to is I had a couple manuscripts, my regular publishers didn't want them, and I decided if I couldn't sell to the markets I was already in that I was going to branch out and try some new markets. And so I took two genres that I'd always wanted to write in before, which were historical and middle grade, and... I guess middle grade isn't a genre so much as a market, but... I figured I would try those. And I wrote one of each. And I said whichever one takes off, we'll take off. The middle grade was a huge, like top three best seller on Audible, and the historical has been read by maybe 15 people.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was one of the 15 and I really love it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. I love it too. But it was clear that I was not finding much success there, so I started writing a lot more middle grade. And that was the first step in kind of clawing my way back up the ladder again. out of that valley of success. And then other than that, a lot of it was just about figuring out, like you said, diversifying income streams. What are some of the ways that I could get paid for words? I started writing for RPG companies, I started writing for video games, I started writing for a TV company... Writing for a TV show. All these different things. Started taking on tie-in work which I had never really done before. So there's a lot of other options. And so rather than just me talk the whole time, what are some other spaces, what are some non-novel places that you all sell words to?

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes sell... I have been fortunate enough... This is not an option that's available to everyone. but, I have been... Sold, like, essays. New York Times, Washington Post. I've been lucky in that regard.

[Dan] That's one I hadn't considered.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that I do is my Patreon, which again, I'm at a point in my career where I can do that. But even when I was starting out and the Patreon was very small, the... When your income stream is, like, measured in a lot of money coming randomly from different places, if you're getting 50 bucks, $200, 250... That's money you can use.

[Howard] If you can get pizza money three times a month, you've now paid the grocery bill.

[Mary Robinette] But the trick that I have found is to... My thing has always been that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. And so when I'm setting myself up for something like a Patreon, making sure that it is geared so that it is stuff that I want to do that does not get in... Or does not get in the way of things that I want to do. So, like, my... I have... I enjoy teaching. So teaching one class a month that's... A lot of it is stuff we've talked about on Writing Excuses. But it's something I enjoy doing, it's not a big time commitment. And it's very scalable. And one of the things  I made a mistake early on was doing things that just weren't scalable. Or they got in the way of the creative work I wanted to be doing.


[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, non-fiction can be a great place to start with that. Right? And so whether that's a Patreon, whether that's a newsletter, and then trying to get things placed... I mean, one thing that's generally true, although this has changed a little bit as the Internet continues to evolve, unfortunately. But outside of genre spaces, the pay per word is usually much higher than what we're used to seeing in terms of, like, what people pay for short fiction in the science fiction/fantasy space. So short fiction writing, essays, long form nonfiction, all those can be really useful. Podcasts is a great option, depending on the kind of thing that you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] My friend Richard had a... Gosh, $300,000 a year job with a Fortune whatever hundred company, and lost it through mergers and acquisitions and whatever else. And found himself at loose ends, and... But he knew somebody at Forbes. And he started writing basically blog posts for  Forbes, and the amount of money they were willing to pay for someone who knows how to write and knows a couple of things about these businesses and happens to have friends all over that he can call... He was suddenly making a living writing five or 600 words a day.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I forgot about that, that I was... There was a point where we were living in New York. We had moved there thinking that Rob would... My husband was an audio engineer and wine maker because those two jobs make sense together. But we thought he would go into doing film and television when we got to New York. And that was when there was a writer's strike, so there was no production work happening at all. So I was supporting us on my puppetry and writing income in Manhattan.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which was a thing that I forgot that one of my income streams was essentially blog posts, I was writing for AMC and they were paying me moneys... Money to do, like, top five fantasy films with dragons. Like, the most granular lists you could possibly develop.

[DongWon] One thing I do want to flag as we're having this conversation is we are also in a moment... Pulling back the curtain a little bit in a necessary way, that we are recording this in summer 2025...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right now. The Internet over the last year and media business in general have been in a period of enormous flux and change. Right? Over the past few years, we've really seen the collapse of the online ad model, which has impacted most every content website across the internet, and we're seeing major websites going down, being acquired, losing audience, and having trouble making ends meet. So we're seeing opportunities to publish those kind of blog posts, those kind of news articles going away. At the same time, what we've seen is an incredible growth in sort of indie options in terms of journalist-led newsletters, subscriber-led podcasts. Right? We're moving away from the big, like, here's io9 where you get all of your science fiction/fantasy news to follow this creator or this small collective of creators, what are that Defector or Chloroform Media or something like that. People that you subscribe to and support directly, and that's where you're getting your content. Right? So we've seen a little bit of the shift away from you can use these big media platforms to build your audience and get paid for that to starting to need to build your own brands online and getting direct access that way. Right? So we're seeing this shift in that marketplace happening right now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a question I want to ask you, Dan, but I'm going to ask it after our break.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So before the...


[Mary Robinette] Besides recording Writing Excuses, I am kind of always trying to level up my game. So I went on Master Class, and I took this class by David Sedaris about storytelling and humor. It was really thought provoking. Like, Howard and I talk about humor all the time on the podcast, but the way David approaches it is so different and also has so many overlaps. He talks about finding your way into the story, how to end with a weight, which was a really interesting thing to think about. Anyway, at Master Class, they have thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules. So if you're a Writing Excuses listener, and you like the 15 minutes long situation, Master Class has that. They have plans starting at $10 a month billed annually, and you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers... hello, friends... chefs, and like a ton of other things. So with Master Class, you can learn from the best to become your best. That sounds hokey, but honestly, I really enjoy taking classes through there. It is one of those places where you get access, and it has this very intimate quality to it. With the David Sedaris class, in particular, I was trying to figure out  how to work some humor into a short story that was...  around some stuff with my mom, honestly. And listening to him talk about that through that class was just very helpful at getting some new angles to think about it. New ways to be a little more honest with my writing. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. I'm going to say it one more time. Masterclass.com/excuses.


[Howard] The holidays are almost here, and if you still have names on your list, don't panic. Uncommon Goods makes holiday shopping stress-free and joyful, with thousands of exclusive, one of a kind gifts that tell the recipient you really were thinking of them. Uncommon Goods looks for high-quality products that are unique and often handmade or made in the United States. Many are crafted by independent artists and small businesses. I love the shop by feature. I tried shop by interests, selected gardening, and immediately found dozens of perfect gifts, including a cute, slightly spooky, self-watering system that looks like a little IV bag for your potted plant. So don't wait. Make this holiday the year you give something truly unforgettable. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/writingexcuses. That's uncommongoods.com/writingexcuses for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer. Uncommon Goods, we're all out of the ordinary.


[unknown] kimi no game system... [Japanese ad for Lenovo]


[Mary Robinette] Break, DongWon was talking about how the market has shifted a lot. I am curious. Do you think, if you had to make those decisions now about trying Ghost... It was Ghost Station?

[Dan] Ghost Station.

[Mary Robinette] Ghost Station...

[Dan] And Zero G.

[Mary Robinette] Or Zero G. When you were trying to do that, do you think that you would do the same strategy or do you think that you would do some indie publishing?

[Dan] Were I to do it today... Honestly, I would probably not do either one. Because the next thing I was going to talk about that we... Is I became a professional game master. Which is not writing, but it is still storytelling. And I supported my family pretty much solely on that for 2 years. And I gave that up basically when I started working with Brandon's company. But were I back in the situation where I was looking for work again, I would absolutely go back to doing that.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Dan] I have become more amenable to publishing my own stuff over the years. I self-pubbed Ghost Station in print, and Zero G in print. So, I don't think I'm very good at marketing myself as an indie author, is what I have discovered.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And when you are indie, that's like 60% of your job is self-promotion. And that's not a skill I have developed yet. Although, clearly one I would work on developing if I didn't have a real job now.

[Chuckles]


[Howard] Clear back in... Clear back in 2006, I was at Emerald City Comic Con and there was a panel of webcartoonists including the penny arcade guy and Robert Khoo, who two years previously had basically come up to them and said, "You're not monetizing yourselves well. I can do it. I'm worth $90,000 a year, but I'll work for you for free for a year, and at the end of that year, if you can't pay my salary, it's because I've failed and you won't need to and I'll quit." Penny Arcade went on to launch the Penny Arcade Expo. Which is one of the biggest entertainment Expos...

[Dan] Right now, I think it's two or three of the biggest entertainment Expos.

[Howard] In the world. Exactly. Yeah. It's huge. And this was all Robert Khoo. And even just two years into his run with them, we were hanging on his every word in that panel. And one of the things that he said was never let  any single revenue channel account for more than 40% of what you make. And I hate advice that begins with never, and so turning it on its head, what I would offer is, strive to ensure that you have enough revenue streams that if you lose one of them, you're not losing half of your money.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I thought in the early days... Early days. Through 2012, 2014, with Schlock Mercenary, I thought I had accomplished that, because we had ad revenue and we had another kind of ad revenue and another kind of ad revenue, and we had books, and we had merchandise. And all of it was pinned to Schlock Mercenary.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, Schlock Mercenary has now finished its 20-year run, and we're still making money on it. In fact, making most of our money on it. But I'm in a situation very similar to yours, in which, gee,  I thought I had my eggs in a bunch of different baskets. But all of the baskets were in the back of the same truck.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.


[Mary Robinette] But what are the other things that... The other lessons that you're kind of wanting us to know that you put into the...

[Dan] Yes. So, the first main lesson is what Howard just articulated. Make sure that you have lots of different revenue streams, that you don't have a majority of it all tied up in one thing. The other one is, I think, more psychological. You have to change the way you think about yourself and the way you think about your career. And this was difficult for me, because I had always, since second grade when I told my parents I was going to write books, I had always thought of myself as an author, I'd always thought of myself as a novelist. And it felt like selling out in a way to start doing other things that were not that. And I really had to redefine myself not as an author exclusively, but as a writer in general. Someone who can write these essays or these nonfiction things or go to RPG companies and video game companies and write for them. Writing tie-in fiction was a very selfish hurdle to get over, because I wanted to write my ideas, I don't want to write your ideas. But if you are going to make a living in this industry, that's a lot of what most professional authors, I think, need to do, to branch out and write words for other people in addition to writing for themselves.

[Erin] Yeah. I think this is something that I struggle with a lot, as somebody who also writes a lot for a lot of different types of people, is that there's  sometimes, I think, a perspective in the industry that, like, certain types of writing don't count as writing. Like, somehow that's not really writing. I remember being on a panel with some folks talking about, like, making money as a writer, and they were all novelists. And so it was basically, like, making money as a novelist was the true... So I was like I'm... All I do is write or teach writing. Like, that is my entire career is writing. But I felt like people were like, well, yeah, but like none of that's from novel writing. And I'm like, that is true. I don't write any novels. But in some ways, I'm like, that's cool. It means I've managed to, while avoiding novel... If I wrote a novel, too, I'd just be rich. No.

[laughter]

[Erin] Not true. But, like, I think it is... There's so much like what is the self... Like, what is the image of what it means to be a writer? And I think, like, divorcing yourself from that is always helpful. Because there are a lot of things that we think of that are being a writer that are not great. That are... That can be harmful. I remember a friend once saying... This is a very weird pivot... That she drank more because she thought that, like, writers would, like, end every day with, like... I don't know, like a cup of whiskey and writing. And then she was like, why am I drinking so much? It's because I came up with this idea...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When I was 10, and now I have to, like, bury that idea because, like, my liver would appreciate it. And so I think that kind of thing, like, stepping away from that, because at the end of the day, like, you're the only one you have to live with. You know what I mean? Like, you have to pay your bills and the people who may or may not think X about your career are not going to be there with your landlord, like, or your mortgage company.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. And the big kind of click over for me was when I stopped thinking of all of these other  writing projects and all of this freelance work as slumming...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] As something I was forced to do and started thinking of it as something that was great, something that was expanding my horizons and my abilities. Today I work as the vice president of Dragon Steel with Brandon Sanderson, who's one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world. People all the time ask how you can get that job. And it's because of this. It's because he came to me, not because I've known him for a long time, but because I had a ton of experience in a ton of different areas that he doesn't have. And he's like, well, we eventually want to do TV shows of the Cosmere stuff. Well, I've worked in TV. We want to make role playing games. I've worked in role-playing games. Every aspect of writing and the writing industry, I have dipped my toe into, which made me a really appealing candidate for this huge entertainment company.

[Howard] You've written ad copy.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When I did the collaboration with him, he came to me because I had audiobook experience and he did not. There's a thing that Jim Henson says, or said, which is the secret to his success was to hire people who are better than him and let them do their job.


[DongWon] I think one thing that's... I think as we're talking through all of this, when I think about a  writer's career, I think one thing that's really, really important is the writers who make it long-term have a certain kind of flexibility, a certain willingness to roll with the hits. I don't care who you are, your career's not going to go as smoothly as you thought it was going to be. Right? And I don't care how much success you've achieved, you're still going to be hitting roadblocks, you're still going to be running into things that are challenges or frustrating. One book's not going to work as well, or TV deals are going to fall through or whatever it is. Right? Nice problems to have, but those are still problems. Right? So whatever it is, I think a writer's ability to succeed as a published author in the publishing industry, as a professional writer in the world, often comes from your ability to roll with the hits. Right? And then to keep going. The good news is no one gets to take writing away from you as a job. That is a thing that you can always be doing. What that comes down to. though, is how flexible can you be about how you see that job and what opportunities are you willing to pursue to keep furthering that? Right? And so, all of that said, though, I do want to put one note in here about don't forget also why you wanted to be a writer in the first place. Right? And even as you're pursuing these other projects, defend the time that you need to work on the projects that are near and dear to your heart, that are important to how you see yourself as a writer. Right? And so, yes, don't be drinking whiskey every night...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Let go of, like... Shed the parts of, like, this dream of being a writer that don't serve you, but also don't forget the core of it, of, like, why you're pursuing this art in the first place. And then figure out, okay, I need this amount of time to do that, I can spend this other time writing, pursuing these other things. Doing comics, doing games, writing for TV, whatever it is.

[Erin] I just want to say one quick thing, which is that I think part of what that does is open you up to Kismet. Because I think that...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Sometimes you forget some of the things that you used to write or some of the things you used to do. Like, I've taken work doing script writing, and when I was in college, I wanted to write for soap operas. Like, because I love them as an art form. And so, like, I wanted to be a script writer, but I forgot. Like, sometimes you get really focused on one particular type of writing because it's the type you're doing. And you forget that, like, each project to me is. like, what can I learn from this? If I don't think I can take something interesting away from it... And sometimes it's like I'm interested in still feeding myself. But a lot of times, it's what can I take that's inter... Like, that's interesting that I can learn, and I will sometimes be surprised like you were saying, Dan, that, like, later somebody will look at you having done something, like this is really valuable experience in a way that you could never have anticipated when you did it. But the thing that you learned still stays with you and then you can end up using it in the world once you're out there doing other projects.

[Dan] Yeah. I know we're going kind of long. I want to make one final point before the homework. As Howard mentioned, I've written a lot of ad copy. Before I broke in as an author, I spent 8 years in advertising and marketing. And so I freelanced as a website writer. It can still take a long time to break in. Like, some of what we're talking about sounds very pie in the sky, like, I didn't have a career, so I started writing for TV. Like, that's... It's not that easy. You have to put in the work, and a lot of your early writing might be really boring stuff that you don't love. But stick with it. If this is what you really want to do, doing these kinds of add jobs and marketing jobs and website jobs can be a good way to get your foot in the door.


[Dan] Anyway. Here's our homework. I want you to try writing in a genre or a format that you've never tried before. If you have always been writing novels or short stories, kind of classic prose fiction, branch out and try something else. Write something in a script format. Write an episode of a TV show that you love. Write a role-playing game adventure. pick a... Try doing tie-in work. Pick a book series or a video game series that you love and write a short story using those characters and set in that universe. Do something that you've never done before, and see how it feels.


[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. 

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Writing Excuses 19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps

Jan. 3rd, 2025 05:26 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps 
 
 
Key Points: Life's speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances... Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and... disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don't go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren't working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace "you can't have it all" with "you don't actually want it all!" Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don't want to do, because sometimes you'll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.
 
[Season 19, Episode 52]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 52]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we've been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven't really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we're all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we've been encountering and some of the strategies that we've used to navigate around them.
[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I'll just plow through it. I'll just muscle through this. I will just… I'll put in the extra hours. I'll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we're actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.
[Laughter]
[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it's a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody's backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.
 
[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it's a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It's like, come on. But we couldn't wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I'm going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it's like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It's been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] It's funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we're talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it's been a really wonderful decision for me. It's been the right choice, and I'm really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There's a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn't mean it wasn't a speedbump. It doesn't mean that I didn't need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I'm not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it's been an interesting moment of reflection as I'm looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.
 
[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We'll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That's… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that's the reason you haven't really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that's the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] [garbled]
[Howard] And it's not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Dan] No. Not at all.
 
[Erin] It's interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…
[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?
[Erin] Self-inflicted.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn't get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?
[Laughter]
[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you're like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what's… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it's a very small obstacle, but you're holding a lot of things, and it's a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you're trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.
[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I don't think you even… [Garbled]
[Howard] It's not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.
[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I'm like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I've ever met.
[Erin] Yay?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?
[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let's take a quick break.
 
[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren't enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn't get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it's an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa's childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that's really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it's a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It's some of the best performances I've ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn't Fury Road, it's its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you've found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year's resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I'm still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?
 
[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I've looked at, this last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn't get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I'm reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I'm going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don't have to turn my head much, I don't have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don't make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you're going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It's sort of like ergonomics, and I don't counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.
 
[Mary Robinette] That's been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we're talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you're off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you've got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn't… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I'm… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I'm like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn't serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.
 
[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I'm thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…
[Dan] That happens to me a lot.
[Laughter] [Yeah]
[Erin] And it's always…
[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?
[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I'm thinking…
[Howard] Now I'm sad.
[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie's delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I'd had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.
[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.
[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It's, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I'm only going to have room for one or two other things. When I'm teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It'll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That's big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that's a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I'm going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So it's a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.
 
[DongWon] I'm completely in agreement with everything you've just said, and I've been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I'm thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That's why I've been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what's on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you're talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren't just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren't just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I'm doing this. That's probably not true, there's probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that's going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I'm working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.
 
[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can't have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don't actually want it all.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I've been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn't really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don't know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I'm going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I'm going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I'm going to let myself ignore if I need to.
[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.
[Howard] Yeah.
 
[Erin] Because I think we're taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that's really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can't do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they'll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don't need in your life anyway.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.
[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I've been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson's slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We're so trained in conversation that there shouldn't be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn't fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I've been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I'm getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin's talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it's very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I'm like, you're going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I'm not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.
[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can't do it.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…
[Mary Robinette] So true.
[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they're like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I'm like, actually, I think I've got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that's fine. We'll find somebody else...
[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.
[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they'll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it's 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don't want to do because at some point, you'll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don't think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don't like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.25: Breaking Into Game Writing

Jun. 23rd, 2021 06:49 pm
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Writing Excuses 16.25: Breaking Into Game Writing
 
 
Key points: You'll probably start at the bottom. Work-for-hire means follow the marching orders, and someone else owns what you make. Put yourself out there. Cold calls, a portfolio, networking. Game jams! Snowball your career, start small and roll up into bigger gigs. Give the boss what they want. Be careful of trying to impress and ending up setting expectations that aren't sustainable. Competent, on time, and pleasant to work with is enough. To break in, you need to be obstinent, and keep throwing yourself at the door. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[James] Breaking into Game Writing.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[James] I'm James.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are finally arriving at the topic that I bet a lot of our listeners have been waiting for. For seven weeks…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] We've been talking about how to write for games. But today, we're going to talk about how to break into it as an industry. How to try to get paid for it. So, Cass, if someone wants to become a game writer, what do we do? Where do we start?
[Cassandra] I think setting expectations, unfortunately, is definitely where you want to start. It is a highly competitive business, regardless of the field you're talking about, whether it's tabletop role-playing games or video games or anything in between. So, like any other job, unless you benefit from nepotism, but that is a topic for something else, you start at the bottom. No one is going to hire you to run a new game right off the bat. Nobody wants to publish your homebrew setting. Not because they don't necessarily believe in your abilities, but because they have an entire stable of people who have already proved themselves and have contacts to reach out to. Most of your work is, unless you end up opening your own studio, going to be work for hire. Meaning somebody else owns your creation. As such, you have to be prepared to follow those marching orders, within reason. You're a mercenary. [Garbled plot games?] Prior to the show, we were discussing artists versus artisans. I'm curious about the analogy you're using there.
[James] Yeah. So, this is one I often use, along with mercenary, like you said. Where I think an artist is all about sort of expressing yourself and creating the thing that is you, embodied on the page. An artisan I think of as somebody who does a job for somebody else. So when I say… I always say for game writing or any sort of tie-in work for hire, you're building a house with words for somebody else. They tell you what they want. You build it. Then they control what happens to it afterwards. So if you build a beautiful word house and then they decide to paint it with purple polkadots and you hate that, sorry. Like, that's not your house. Like, your fundamentally building something for someone else. I think that's really important for people to know going in. Because it can be easy to get your heart broken if you go in thinking you own something when you really don't. But, so, getting in again is the important part for this show. So, how do you get in, Cass?
[Cassandra] You have to put yourself out there. I know it is possibly a difficult thing to do if you're an introvert, which I think a lot of writers are, but this is definitely one of those things that is just necessary. You have to cold call companies you love, maybe noting a few specific things that you enjoyed about their games. You have to present a portfolio. You have to have a portfolio. You should network, at least as much as you can within the boundaries of what you feel comfortable with. Cons, social media, talking to people at social media, internships, meeting devs… Dan, you have any other thoughts on this?
 
[Dan] Yeah. But before we leave this concept of the portfolio, how does someone build a portfolio before they get hired?
[James] I'm glad that you asked, Dan. We were definitely going to hit that.
[Giggles]
[James] So, making your own portfolios, you kind of have to start a lot of the time by making your own stuff. So that can be writing a little one page role-playing game, it could be writing interactive fiction like a choose-your-own adventure, writing fan material for an existing game, new adventures, new rules, etc. Modding a videogame. Even just writing a short story. Anything you've done that's somewhere related to the job you're trying to do can be experience. Then you take that to companies, usually smaller companies while you're first starting, and say, "Hey, I've done some stuff that's related to this. Here's what I can do. Do you need my skills?"
[Mary Robinette] One of the things also to keep in mind when you're building a portfolio, regardless of the medium in which you are building it, is that portfolios are judged by the weakest piece in it. Because your best peace might be a fluke as far as they're concerned. So whatever your weakest piece is, if you're like, "Well, I'm including this. It's not really good but there's this one piece about it," take that piece out. Take that piece out. A portfolio is only as good as your weakest piece.
[Cassandra] It all ties into something I also wanted to say. Joining game jams, at least for video games, is a really good way of building your portfolio. It gives you an understanding of working within time constraints, working within the constraints set by somebody else, and also, you'll have people judging and commenting on your work. So if you don't necessarily find yourself a good judge of your own abilities, game jams are a good way of outsourcing it, right? Very slightly?
[Dan] I'm not sure that I'm familiar with game jams. Can you…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I don't know either.
[Dan] Talk to us about that?
[Cassandra] I keep forgetting everybody hasn't been in the games industry… Video games industry for far too long at this point. I need a new job.
[Laughter]
[Cassandra] So, game jams are things organized by the videogame community. I think nowadays by some of the people out of the RPG community. It's basically people will say, "Okay, over the course of this particular weekend, we need you to make the thing that uses these two ideas." Very often these ideas are voted upon by a community. So it could be stuff like make this a romance game. But it must in some way involve sentient cacti. Then everyone just goes to town creating them. Depending on the game jams, there are pre-events, where you can partner up with artists and programmers, other writers, and kind of fuse together into this temporary team to pull things off. It's definitely very stressful, I will not lie. It's something people need to watch out for, because I've seen folks burn out on it. But it's very much an interesting way of approaching stuff like this.
[James] So I wanted to throw out a couple more examples of, Cass had talked about, various ways you can network and get your portfolio in front of people. We mentioned cons and social media and internships. But there are some others. There are… You can meet with the devs, by, say, interviewing them as a fan or for podcast, fan sites, the press, whatever. That can be a good way to make contacts in the industry and just get some face time and learn about how things work. I love press because you get to ask people how they do their job and learn from them and get paid for it. You can also take non-writing jobs at game companies just to be sort of around it and learn by osmosis. You need to be careful with that, because if I hire an accountant at my game company, I want an accountant, not a game designer. So you need to make sure that first and foremost, you do the job you were hired for. If you do it well, then the people in the quote unquote creative departments are going to be a lot more likely to give you a shot when they're looking for freelancers. There's also mentorships. Cass, you had talked about one called the Pixels?
[Cassandra] Yes. It is just, I think, a yearly thing where a number of people offer to be mentors. They organize classes and workshops. They have little talks that are hosted across the year. You can apply with the knowledge that there is a group of people embedded in the video games industry who are invested in getting you to the next stage. This is a little bit of a sidebar, but one thing I definitely want to note. If you're breaking into game writing and you're from a marginalized community, it is incredibly easy to see a list of requirements in a job opening and go, "No, this is not for me." Especially in the video games industry, you will see people going, "Okay. You must have shipped at least one AAA game." Something that is very difficult, because positions in narrative are very limited. What I've learned from recruiters and managers over the years is people don't actually care about that. There are very many, many recruiters who will hire people with a good portfolio, who do not meet those credentials. As you're breaking into it, like, keep that in mind. Like, do not be dissuaded.
[Howard] One of the things that I found in the few occasions when I've done work for hire for game companies for other folks is that the skill set that I built writing Schlock Mercenary and writing other things had some holes in it. I had to learn new things. I had to learn them pretty quickly. Fortunately, I'd learned that I can learn things very quickly and I know how to build a craftsmanship skill for myself. But it's a challenge. It's a… The learning curve is steep. While I know we already have homework for this episode, one of the things that I think will build confidence for you and going out there… Putting your name out there, somebody says, "Well, can you write multi-branched dialogue?" Well, the question… The answer you always want to be able to say, "Yes, I can." Because I know I can learn how to do it. But you don't say that part out loud. Over the last several months, we've given lots of different kinds of homework assignments in Writing Excuses. I've looked at a lot of them and I've said, "Oh, that looks tedious. I don't want to do that." Okay? If you want to break into writing for hire in any business, I challenge you, take the homework assignments that look tedious and you don't want to do them, and do them anyway. So that when somebody says, "Can you do this?" Not only can you say, "Yes," because I know I can learn how to, you might even be able to say, "Yes. That was a homework assignment on Writing Excuses and I did it three days ago."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yes, but you don't actually need to say that part out loud.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Please don't.
 
[Dan] Let's take a minute for our game of the week, which is coming from James.
[James] Yeah. So this week I wanted to talk about a tabletop game called Dread. The reason I wanted to bring this up for this class is because it's fairly simple. It's something that you could make without the big team. The basic mechanic of Dread is that you use a Jenga tower. Every time you have to try and do something, the GM says, "Okay. Pull one piece." Or pull two pieces. Or pull three. Depending on how hard you're trying. If the Jenga tower falls, your character dies. It's a horror game. That little mechanic is so good at creating tension, because as the game goes on, everyone's just naturally getting more and more scared of that thing falling. So, like, that's a very simple mechanic, that, like, is an idea that you could come up with and put… You could build a game of an idea that simple and put it online and really impress people. Similarly, the character creation system is the best I've seen in that it's just a series of leading questions. So the GM will give you a bunch of questions. They'll be things like, "Why didn't you talk to your father before he died? What's hidden in your sock drawer? When was the last time you cried?" So as you answer these things for your character, it's impossible to not create a back story. So, that's Dread. It's a supercool indy RPG. I encourage people to check it out.
 
[James] So, as we're coming out of that, talking about Indy RPG and talking about credits, while absolutely you should be applying at the big companies, it's also really important to be looking at the smaller companies and seeing what companies are doing good work, because you're going to have a lot easier time getting in there. Then, I always think of like Katamari Damacy or the sort of what I call the snowball theory of career, which is you get credits whatever you can, and then you roll them up into larger and larger gigs. So maybe you start putting out a little thing on your own, and then you use that to get in with a small RPG company, and then use that to get into the next larger one and so forth.
[Cassandra] But I think, universally speaking, impressing bosses, the process is pretty much exactly the same. You should give whoever hires you, whether they're from a small company or a large one, precisely what they want. You want to hit your word count, not more, not less. You absolutely want to hit your deadlines. If you can't, you should always be transparent about your inability and give people enough time to create a buffer in case something comes up.
[Mary Robinette] But, speaking of buffers, this is a piece of general life advice to people. One of the things that people will do when they want to impress bosses is that you will do 110% that first couple of months. The problem is that they assume that that is your normal.
[Hehheh]
[Mary Robinette] And you will then have to do that level of work all the time. If you… If they add more to it and you succeed at that, that is what they think is your normal. So you actually want to build a buffer in for yourself. A piece of advice that I heard very recently was to come in and plan on giving 80%. So that the times when you actually have to do extra, that reserve tank is there and that you can bring that. But the other is not sustainable. I've spent my entire life building it to create crises because I work best in a crisis. But that also means that I have big burnout periods.
[Dan] Yeah. I saw somebody on Twitter the other day… Maybe this was something you had linked to, Mary Robinette, but they said their therapist had told them that if you always do your best, it's not your best anymore, it's your average.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That can be such an easy trap to fall into. Especially for an employee or a freelancer.
[James] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when you… I'm not saying, like, to deliberately slack off. But think about how you work best, and do that. But don't… Remember that whatever expectations you set at the beginning are the expectations that you have to live up to for the rest of your time there.
[James] Yeah. I would say, as somebody who has spent a decade… Oh, to say, as somebody who's spent a decade hiring authors, one of the easiest things you can do to really stand out is just match their existing material. Do that thing we were talking about before, where, identifying their formatting, the language they use, the way the game is written. If you can copy those specific style elements for the game when you're writing for it… If what you can give them looks as close as possible to what an in-house generated document looks like, you're going to make it easier for them. You're also going to make it seem like you are already on the team. It makes it a lot easier to hire somebody if you can tell that they're going to be able to jump right in with very little on boarding.
[Mary Robinette] Cass, what were you going to say?
[Cassandra] I was going to say capitalism has definitely created a very toxic work environment in general across all the industries. What you mentioned earlier about not giving your 100%, but instead something that is comfortable with a buffer to grow into if you need to crunch. Like, that is really good advice, and that is advice that I think a lot of companies are trying to push under the carpet. Because they want to pressure everyone to go as hard as possible, churn them out and get the next new hire who is willing to work for a lot less then you might have once you've realized your importance and role in that company. Which I think is an oddly depressing point to bring up in an episode about breaking into the game industry and writing industry.
[Mary Robinette] Actually, but I will say… Yeah. I will say something from having hired people, from talking to my husband who works in winemaking, to talking to a contractor, to talking to editors. If you are competent and show up on time and are pleasant to work with, you are… That's basically all people want.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah. It's like what James just said about making things easy on the hiring person, making things easy on the manager. It's not that you have to give 110%, you just have to hit your word count, hit your deadline, make their job easy, and then they're going to hire you for the next project.
[James] Yeah. That was… my very first editor, when I started out in journalism, told me, "Oh, James, you're one of my favorite writers." I went, "Oh, thank you. Like, what is it about it that speaks to you?" He goes, "You're always on time and you're always on word count." I said, "Oh. What about the writing itself?" He went, "Oh, it's fine."
[Laughter]
[James] But he kept hiring me.
[Dan] Yup.
 
[Howard] I… When I was drawing the Munchkin Starfinder stuff, there was a big piece I was doing and I had given one of the very small characters a very large wrench for comedy value. There was this approval process. It kept coming back. The guy at Paizo, I don't know his name…
[James] Probably best not to say.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know what, it's fine. It might've been a Mike, it might have been a Matt. It began with an M, I think.
[James] It was probably Mark Moreland. Sorry, Mark.
[Howard] It had two M's in it. That's fine. But what came back was "make the wrench smaller." Okay. So I did a quick erase, redraw, made the wrench smaller. Came back again. "Make the wrench smaller," again. At which point I stopped and I talked to the art director and I said, "I could be wrong, but I think what Mark means is I hate the whole idea of the small character with the large prop, and I don't want it in the piece. So what I'm going to do for this next fix is I'm going to give the character a flamethrower instead so that it fills the visual space. Let me know if Mark's okay with that?" Now I'm saying it's Mark, because it must've been. What came back around was, "Oh, that's perfect, he loves it." I share that with you because giving the bosses what they want depends entirely on a suite of communications skills that involves you knowing what the boss wants even when sometimes the boss doesn't. That's hard to navigate.
[Mary Robinette] Well… Also, it involves asking questions.
[Yes]
[Mary Robinette] Like, never be afraid to ask a question when you don't understand the parameters.
 
[James] I want to just… To end on an inspiring note, because it can be so intimidating to think, "Oh, well, these people got in. They've always been in the game industry." I would just love to know, like, Cass, how did you break in?
[Cassandra] Oh. To the game industry, specifically, in terms of development? My first big role was because I would not shut up. I was working PR at a convention, and I met someone who worked at Excel. I ran up to him, like, "Oh, my God. Did you work on the original [garbled planet escape car?]?" He was like, "Yeah." I was like, "I want to work in your company." He was like, "I'm just a writer. What do you want me to do?" I'm like, "I don't know. Here is my portfolio. If there's ever an opening that you think is appropriate, please let me know." We kept that up for about four years before I got hired. It was just constantly me just jumping up and going, "Hi! Please?" So, blind obstinence. That's how I got in.
[James] I think…
[Chuckles]
[James] I think that's really important for people to hear, because, like, that is the message. It is just throwing yourself at it. I got in the same way. Where I wanted to work on Amazing Stories magazine, which was run by the same people who did Dungeons & Dragons. They were hiring for an editor-in-chief. So I emailed the CEO of the company and said, "I am totally unqualified for that job, but I have this portfolio of journalism. Is there anything at your company that I might be useful for?" She brought me in and started me out working on their website, finding JPEG's for a nickel a JPEG, which was very far from being a magazine editor, but it got me in the door. So don't be afraid to just throw yourself at the door.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I got in because I… A friend of mine had been asked to write loading screens. He does not write short, at all. It's not Brandon, it's someone else.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But he knew that I wrote short and that I wrote fast and introduced me to them. So I wrote these loading screens. I could get the word count that they needed and I would turn it in on time and I had no problems with multiple iterations. Then they hired me again to do something else, because I had turned things in on time. That's basically… I came in from the side, but it was because I had honed a set of skills in a different area, and then turned up on time and hit word count.
[James] Yeah. Perfect.
[Howard] Dan, you want to go next?
[Dan] Yeah. I'm actually relatively new in the games industry. I have written a bunch of tie in fiction in the past. But about two years ago, I started getting approached by game companies. That's just because I started producing two different web series. We do Typecast, which is the Twitch show that Howard and I and a bunch of other authors do where we play games online and I'm the game master. Then, I also do a weekly YouTube series of role-playing game reviews. So it is… I was not actually, at the time, seeking out employment writing games. But raised enough eyebrows… Or got onto enough people's radar because of all the web stuff I was doing related to gaming that I was contacted by people at cons and stuff. So that's where it came from me. But that's after 12 years of writing books. So…
[Howard] So, about 12 years ago, I've been making Schlock Mercenary for eight years. I was at a convention in the green room with Tracy Hickman who was pitching this idea for this book he wanted to write called Extreme Dungeon Mastery. He couldn't find a publisher for it. I told him, "Well, here's a Schlock Mercenary book. We self publish these. You should totally self publish things." What he heard, apparently, was, "I would like to publish your book, and can I draw the pictures for it?"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] He came back to me and said basically that, and said, "Oh, and can we have it by GenCon?" I did the math and realized… Sandra and I both… We had this discussion. "Tracy, you're asking us to turn around a 160 page role-playing supplement in 12 weeks." He said, "Yeah, can you do it?" I'm like, "I really don't think we can do it, that's too fast. So, no." Then he came back to us three weeks later and said, "But I really want to do it. Can you do it?" I said, "Well, now it's nine weeks. So obviously, the answer is yes."
[Laughter]
[James] That's the story of the game industry.
[Howard] I broke in by doing something way too fast. Sandra was brilliant in assembling all of this. She contacted our friend, Stacy Whitman, to help with the copyediting. We ended up putting a team together to publish a Tracy Hickman book at GenCon. Then I ended up at GenCon, and coming back to what Cassandra has said, at that point I was now networking with games people instead of with comics people, and other opportunities began presenting themselves.
[Dan] Howard, is Extreme Dungeon Mastery still available?
[Howard] I think we might be out of print of the hardbacks. I need to talk to Sandra. I'll post something in the liner notes about whether or not it's still a thing.
[Dan] Okay. Cool. Mary Robinette, what were you going to say?
[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, by interesting coincidence, next week we will be talking about teams. I think that we should probably wrap this episode up and go to homework, so that we can talk about teams next week.
[James] Yeah.
[Dan] Agreed.
 
[Cassandra] Your homework this week is to brainstorm something short you can make to showcase your skills. It could even be the homework from a previous lesson. Then make that thing and post it online for free.
[Dan] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

Jan. 6th, 2021 02:33 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business
 
Key Points: Look at becoming a writer as a business. You are starting and running a small business. You have to manage your business, the publisher and the agent will not do it for you. They are partners, they will help, but it is your business. What do you want, what do you imagine it becoming? Think about a creative mission statement. Make sure your career is deliberate, not accidental. Ask yourself questions. How are you going to handle health insurance? How will you balance your time between writing and promotion? How are you going to handle email? You might silo the non-writing things into one day a week, or chunks of time spread through the week. How are you going to handle taxes? Hire an accountant or DIY? Think about placing a dollar amount on an hour of writing time, and use that to decide whether to pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. Try balancing money, audience, and shininess. Money, how much does it pay or cost. Audience, how many people will you connect with. Shiny, how much do you want to do it. Think of your writing as a career, a business, and make deliberate, informed choices.
 
[Season 16, Episode 1]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Your Career is Your Business.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] As you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary…
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] Robinette.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] We're all fine. I'm Mary Robinette, we've done this a lot.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
 
[Dan] This, as you can tell, is the very first episode of 2021. We are excited to be here. We've got a cool thing that were going to do for the entire year, is, we have split this year into a series of what we are calling Master Classes, or intensive courses is maybe a better way of thinking about this. So each of us has come up with a topic and we'll spend eight or nine episodes diving really deep, kind of teaching the rest of the group about that specific topic. So we are going to start with this really cool kind of inside look at the publishing world class that Brandon has put together. Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about your course in general?
[Brandon] Yeah. So, the idea is to have a course that starts training writers to look at becoming a writer as a business. This is something that took me by surprise when I started into this. I was not aware that writing is a small business. I didn't know I was starting a business. In fact, I didn't incorporate for several years. That's very common. But not knowing that led me to make a large number of mistakes before I'd got my feet underneath me. Even still, I'm making some of these mistakes. But I thought, you know what, one of the things that I really wish I'd known when I began was that I was starting a small business. I wanted to give some tips to writers starting on this journey or who are in the middle of it who just may not have given enough thought to this aspect of it. We all want to be artists, that's why we become writers. This whole thing isn't to dissuade you from your artistic intents. But it is to start you this class and this mindset that just isn't often shared in writing courses. Because we all want to be artists, and sometimes it feels like talking about the business side of things is crass, and we don't want to monetize our artistic intentions, but when you start on this path, you are starting a business.
[Howard] Speaking briefly as the parent of four hungry adult children, who still don't all have their own jobs, I very much want to monetize every last little bit of my everything that I do.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Crass or not crass, I want to eat.
[Dan] Yeah. So, I am very fortunate in that one of my best friends got published about a year and 1/2 before I did. So when I did get my contract, Brandon, the very first thing he said to me was, "You need to think about this. Think of yourself as a small business owner," and gave me some really great advice. So what are some of the bits of advice you want to give us, Brandon, about starting to think of ourselves as business owners?
[Brandon] Right. Well, the first idea is just this mindset change. Which was the biggest hurdle I think I had to overcome. That's why I named this first episode Your Career Is Your Business. A lot of writers, myself included, when we begin, we have in our head that once we get published, the publisher and the agent are going to be in charge of the business. We're going to have people managing all of the business side. We will be able to spend our days in artistic pursuits. This just isn't true. An agent is not a business manager. An agent will certainly help. An agent is, if you're going traditionally published, an agent is the number one resource you will have for these sorts of things. So certainly it's nice to have them. But it's your business that you're starting. It's not their business. They have a lot of different clients they'll be working for. You're going to be expected to care about your career.
[Howard] One of the things that I like to… I developed this mindset when I was in the corporate world. My career in the corporate space really was defined by the people I was working with, but my career as a person who makes things, a person who imagines things, a person who wants to be paid to operate the oven that bakes the cookies that only come out of my brain, that is not a career path that can be managed by somebody else. That is a career path that has to be managed by me. So a literary agent is a business partner. A publisher is a business partner. I already had, when I started doing comics, I already had a big framework in my head for what business partnerships look like and what they don't look like. So that gave me a quick leg up, and it made a lot of things easier early on. But Brandon, you're absolutely right about this mindset. You have to start from that point, believing that what you are doing is your business and, it is, to layer the meaning, a little bit, it's your business, it's not anybody else's business. They're going to try and get all up in your business from time to time, but it's really all about… It's all about what you want and what you imagine it becoming.
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm really glad Howard mentioned what you want, which I'm sure Brandon is going to get into. But I come into this from theater, and being a freelancer for my entire adult life. So, for me, the small business was transforming the small business that I already had. Which was puppeteer, audiobook narrator, and then writer. One of the things that I find helpful when thinking about this small business is to actually have a mission statement. You can think of it as your creative mission statement. But it's going to change over the course of your career. So, initially the mission statement that I had was fairly simple. It was to be able to turn down the gigs I didn't want to do. I've gotten to the point in my career now only gigs I've got are the gigs that I want to do. So now I have to figure out actually what kind of work do I want to be doing and who do I want to be and be presenting myself as. Because I have to start figuring out how to turn down the gigs I do want to do in order to focus on really refining who I am, and this thing that Brandon is talking about and Howard about monetizing. Because it's not… It's not always a straightforward path.
 
[Dan] Let's pause really quick. Do our book of the week. Which is coming to us this week from Howard.
[Howard] Well, I wish I could take more credit for this one. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I read it years and years and many years ago, and absolutely loved it. It has one of my very favorite uses of footnotes. It's widely regarded now as a classic space in which it sits, and recently was made into a TV miniseries available on Amazon Prime. I have really enjoyed and benefited personally from comparing the two. I'll circle back around to that later at homework time.
[Dan] Awesome. So that is Good Omens from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
 
[Dan] Now, I loved what Mary Robinette said about mission statement, which ties into what I've heard Brandon talk about a lot in the past, is making sure that your career is deliberate rather than accidental. Brandon, what do you have to tell us about that, and how to do it?
[Brandon] So, there are all kinds of questions I feel like you should be asking yourself during your unpublished years and during your early parts of your career that you have answers to for when the need arises. For instance, a good one if you live in the US, unfortunately, is going to be how are you going to approach health insurance? This is a big question that you need to think about. I never thought about it a single time in the early part of my career. You would think that that would have come up, but it wasn't until I was married and publishing my first books and realizing, wait a minute. In America, for some stupid reason, health insurance is attached to your job. I'm just not going to have that. How do I get that? Talk to other people, who are self-employed, and figure out how you're going to approach this. Other questions are how are you going to balance your time as an author? How much time are you going to spend on doing the actual writing, how much time are you going to spend on promotion? We'll talk about promotion in a later week in this master class, but right now, the question is when are you going to put these things in? When are you going to do email? I wasn't expecting how much more email would come in…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And how much of it would involve publishers' panic… Panicking about little things. I had to set aside specific times. What I've done in my life right now is I have taken all of the things that are not writing, and I've tried to silo them into one day a week. Thursdays. This is when I'm going to do all of these things, the longer emails. The short emails that can get a quick answer, I'll do at the beginning of my workday. But if there's something that is going to take a long, in-depth thing, I'll say, "Hey, I'm going to respond to you on Thursday." If there's an interview that I need to do for promotion, I always schedule them on Thursdays. If there are company meetings, I put them on Thursdays. This allows me to take off my writer hat for a day and approach being a business person for a day. With me, this helps keep me from being frustrated. If I have good siloing of these sorts of things, I'll stop being resentful of the time that I have to spend not writing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to chime in here, because I'd heard Brandon talk about this before, so I also tried siloing my non-writing things to one day a week. It turns out that doesn't work for me, because my brain is wired differently. That wound up causing me to have more fatigue. But I did have to block out time. So I have blocked out specific chunks of time, but spread them through the week. This… I just want to point out that, much like when we talk about writing, there's no one process that will work for you, but the principle behind the process, which is to be deliberate about it and make space for it, is going to be consistent. You just have to figure out which form it takes for you.
[Dan] I'm going to give a third perspective on this for the very, very early career writers. This is one of the very first bits of advice I got from Brandon when I got my very first publishing contract. I said, "This is happening. It's real. What do I do next?" He said, "What you do now is you sit down and you write as much as you possibly can, because this is the last time you'll have all of that free time to write." That did help me a lot. I was able to finish, I think, a full book and a half of new stuff before all of the revisions and the emails and the editing process in the proofing and all of that business side crashed down on me. So, just for the very early aspiring writer, that is, I think, a fantastic piece of advice.
[Brandon] I do have more time to right now than I did when I was working a job while trying to write. But, one of the most shocking things to me was that by going full-time, I didn't gain nearly as much free time as I thought I would. Because all of these other things crept in. Doing my own taxes. My first few years… I was used to doing my own taxes. Indeed, again, in the US, we have to do our own taxes, for some stupid reason. So… But then publishing made it infinitely more complicated. Because suddenly I was getting a 1099 instead of a W-2. Suddenly, I had sales overseas. Understanding that you're either going to have to hire an accountant or you're going to have to learn how to input sales from other countries and money coming in from other countries and all of this stuff with 1099s instead of W-2s. That's a huge time sink once a year for US writers that I had just not even understood was going to come along and steal a week of my time.
[Dan] We've got an episode coming up about networking, but this tax idea, the finances of being a writer, is a really good reason to rely on other people. My agent, before she became an acquiring agent on her own, worked as a tax person for an agency house. So she was able to help me a lot, which was fantastic. Brandon and I and several other local writers all use the same accountant because the accounting process for professional writers is very different from a lot of other careers. So, using these networking opportunities to find out hey, how do you handle this, is a good way to help you figure it out.
 
[Brandon] One other thing that I would recommend that you think about… This doesn't work for all writers. In fact, this is one of these things I've noticed that can be debilitating for some writers. But it is something that I do that is very handy for me, is, I find out what the dollar amount of an hour of my writing time is worth. Now, you can't be writing 16 hours a day. But, once you become self-employed, as Howard so elegantly put it in an early episode, you… It's great being self-employed, you get to work half days and you decide which 12 hours it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Meaning, there is a danger here in that you can work all the time that you want which would lead to burnout. So be careful about that. But I keep a dollar amount assigned to an hour of actual writing time to me. Then, that dollar amount of an hour of writing time allows me to understand what things I can pay for to gain an hour of writing time. If doing my taxes is going to cost me three hours of writing time, and indeed, I will make more money writing that I would hiring someone to do that, it just gives me an opportunity cost method of determining what I should hire out and what I should do myself.
[Howard] When we started putting Schlock Mercenary books into print, we quickly realized that between cover work and bonus story and whatever else, it took a block of time to put a book out, and putting a book out generated several tens of thousands of dollars of money all at once. I could look at that and say, "Well, I have books that are not yet in print, because I've got this archive online." Going to Comic Con saws three weeks out of my life. There's the week of prep, there's the week at the event, and there's a week of recovery. It's miserably stressful. I did the math and realized that unless I was bringing home $15,000 from Comic Con, it didn't even begin to be worthwhile. We looked at it and said, "Well, gosh, instead of doing Comic Con, if I really want to sell T-shirts, I can just spend that week making a T-shirt and selling it and make more money." Now, we've never done that because I don't love making T-shirts. But that was what I had to balance it against. Without knowing how much your time is worth, without establishing a benchmark over time, you will make lots and lots of very, very bad decisions about your time and not realize what you're doing until you wake up one morning and realize that you're stressed and broke and hating the things that you're doing.
[Dan] This kind of deliberate financial thought is how I knew when it was time for me to hire an assistant. Because I hit the point where I realized, oh, giving me an assistant will allow me to write one extra book per year, which will more than pay for the assistant. So that made it a very easy choice to make. We need to wrap up soon, but I know Mary Robinette has something else she wants to say.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Which is, when you're super early career, the idea of assigning a specific number value to your writing work, especially when you haven't actually sold anything yet, that's difficult. So let me give you another metric which you've probably heard me talk about when I've talked about how to decide where to send a story to. A short story. Which is that you're balancing three thing. Money, audience, and shininess. So money is literally how much is this going to pay me. Or, how much is this going to cost me. Audience is how many people will this connect me to. Then, shiny is just like how much do you want to do it. So, like, going to NASA, it cost money, does not actually connect me to audience, but it's so shiny. So that's a choice that I make. I also know that it's something that I can use, and then will, later, down the line, have the potential to bring me audience and money. But depending on where you are in your career, you're going to value those differently. Like, when you are very, very early career, you may say, "Hey, it's totally worth it for me to go to a convention, because it is… Spending that money will allow me to connect with my peers, and audience, and that networking, the audience layer of it, is totally worth it, and the shininess aspect of it is totally worth it." So it's going to be this constant balancing act, and it will again shift over the course of your career.
[Dan] Exactly. Ultimately, this idea of thinking of it as a career, as a business, and making all of these choices deliberate and informed is what's really going to help. So, thank you everybody. This is a wonderful start to our new year.
 
[Dan] We have homework from Howard.
[Howard] Okay. In 2003, at Comic Con, my friend Jim met Neil Gaiman, and Neil introduced himself, saying, "Hi, my name is Neil. I write comics." Okay. That's a fun story. Neil Gaiman rights way more than just comics. He wrote the adaptation that took Good Omens from being a wonderful novel to being a really amazing television series. You don't know, or maybe you do, the path that your career is going to take the number of different things you might write. I posit that it will be extremely valuable to you to take something like Good Omens, your book of the week, and the TV show. Consume them both and make notes. What kinds of writing decisions were made between the two that you would have made differently? What kind of writing decisions were made that just blow your mind? The adaptation between mediums may, at some future point, be something that you get to do. As an added bonus, I think this homework will be fun for you.
[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career

Nov. 4th, 2020 11:37 am
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Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career
 
 
Key Points: You might be orphaned by editors. Or maybe your books stop selling, the series doesn't click? You have to stick with it, keep going. Dedication, hard work, keep pivoting. Look at your brand right now, and think about how to build on that to do the thing you want to next. Diversify! Multiple pen names, projects, brands. Your skill set can carry across a pivot or reboot. You can use short fiction to explore where your strengths are quickly. "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place." If you quit your day job and write full time, you are a freelancer. Diversify your income stream. Plan ahead. Learn how to track where your money is coming from. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 44.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Rebooting a Career.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm looking for something now.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Well, we have got something new for you. We teased this episode all the way back in our very first episode of the year. Which, for us, we recorded 10 minutes ago, but you…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Had to wait 11 months for it. Thank you for your patience. So, this is something, again, that came up in an audience question. I love this topic, because it has happened to me. I'm actually in the middle of it right now. I sincerely hope by the time this airs that everything's stable and wonderful. But I have been orphaned twice by editors.
[Mary Robinette] Let's define what orphaned means, in this context.
[Dan] Orphaned… Okay. In this context, what it means is the editor who acquired my book initially at a given publishing house, I am no longer with that editor. I was moved to a different one. Then that one actually left the publishing house altogether. A year later, I am currently, as of this recording, do not have an editor at that publisher. Which is sad because now the books are not being shepherded, and my own career is a little bit in flux. So this is something that I've dealt with personally, but I'm not going to answer the question, I'm going to ask the question of Dongwon. What does an author do when they've had some success, they've had some books come out, and then they either get orphaned, or their books stop selling, the new series they have come out just doesn't take off or it tanks completely? They need to change something. How do you know when you hit that point, and how do you know what changes to make? Now talk for 15 minutes.
[Dongwon] I really… I could talk for an hour here. I really love this topic, because it's a really, really important one. I think the greatest determinant in whether or not a writer is successful in their career is their ability to ride with the tough times. Right? That's sort of stick-with-it-ness, that's sort of like ability to just keep going in the face of a lot of setbacks, is the thing that I see more often than not how people get to where they want to be. Right? I've been in publishing now for 15 years, and over that time, I've seen people over and over again who I looked at them, I looked at their sales numbers, I looked at where they're at in sort of the market, and I was like, "Ah. They're such a nice person, it's too bad their career's over." Then 10 years later, they're New York Times bestsellers. Right? I can think of half a dozen people off the top of my head of been in similar situations. Right? So many people we talk about as overnight successes really spent years and years writing books until something hit it. George Martin's a famous example. But I think the guest host for this year, Victoria Schwab's another great example of somebody who was writing for a long time before she really blew up in the way she has. It takes dedication and hard work, and the ability to keep pivoting and keep working with it. It's one of my favorite things is to take a writer who is in a position where… Not necessarily a bad position, but one where you could be doing more, and help them figure out, "Okay, what's next, how do we reposition this to grow from here?" So, I think there's a lot of different strategies. I think the thing that's really important is considering what's your brand right now, and how do you build on that for the thing that you want to do next. Right? So I think Daniel Abraham is a really great example to look at. He had a series with Tor, that was The Long Price Quartet, which was an absolute brilliant fantasy series. Sales were probably not where everyone wanted them to be, because it's a very worthy series, but not necessarily like the most commercial, like, it's not a lot of like big action romps there, right? The thing about Daniel is he had multiple brands going at once. He was also writing as M. L. N. Hanover, an urban fantasy series. Then, when urban fantasy started falling off a little bit, he was looking to pivot again. So at that point, he came to me, when I was an editor at Orbit, and pitched two different projects at once. The Dragon's Path, which is an epic fantasy sort of following in the vein of what he was doing at Tor. But then he also was like, "Hey, we also have this co-written science fiction project with this guy Ty Franck." That was what is now The Expanse. Again, that was under yet another pen name. Right? So the thing that Daniel kept doing is he kept writing new things and different things. He was doing it under different names with different brands. Until one of them just really clicked in and took off. I mean, The Expanse is really one of the big successes in science fiction over the past 10 years. Has the big TV show and all these things. Again, that's somebody who didn't have the kind of commercial success and attention that I think he deserved early in his career. But, just kept going and just kept pivoting and kept trying new things until finally something really clicked in, in the way that it did, with The Expanse.
 
[Howard] In 1998, I was working in tech support at Novell. I looked at some of the things I'd been doing and realized that within the company, within the industry, my brand was talking to people about the way the software works. Kind of being an advocate for the product and being educational about it and being entertaining. I wanted a position in the company where I could keep doing that. I got one. I like the sound of my own voice, and did a lot of presentations and a lot of traveling as a result of those presentations. Until I left the company in 2004. In 2008, I started doing Writing Excuses. Writing excuses has now been running for longer than my entire career at Novell.
[Dan] Wow.
[Howard] Okay. I was just doing the math as I was looking at the spreadsheet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Sorry, this totally came out of left field. The idea that the career that nobody… I say nobody. I don't think many people are going to look at me and think, "Oh, yeah. That guy who was a software communications person back in the 90s and just vanished. Wow. Such a shame his software support career tanked."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] No. They're going to remember me for whatever's most recent. There was a huge pivot in there, from doing software to doing comics. But the skill set of I know how to stand up in front of people and advocate a thing and be educational about it and occasionally be funny, and leverage the comic drop of self-deprecating humor from time to time, that piece of my brand, that piece of my skill set has stayed with me and continues to serve me well. As we are having this conversation, it is September 2019. This is airing in November of 2020. Schlock Mercenary, the mega-arc, ended about five months ago, if everything went according to plan. From where I'm sitting right now, I do not know what my career reboot looks like from 2020. I'm coming up on that, and I'm terrified. But I know that the guy who is terrified is also the guy who has rebooted his career before and made good on it.
[Dongwon] There's always more opportunities, any time you find yourself in that spot.
 
[Dan] Okay. So. Our book of the week is one you've already talked about, Dongwon. This is Leviathan Wakes, the first one from The Expanse. What can you tell us about that book?
[Dongwon] Leviathan Wakes is a really wonderful space opera, that is examining, not necessarily galactic exploration, but the exploration and colonization of our own solar system. So the whole set up is, they don't have interstellar travel yet, but they can travel between the planets somewhat easily. So, the political situation is there's the Earth and then there is Mars, and they're in conflict and in tension over resources. Those resources are specifically being the asteroid belt, which is being mined by both of those great powers. Into the middle of this, a new artifact, biological weapon, has been discovered which kind of sets the whole system to the brink of war. This is a nine book series that is on the cusp of wrapping up right now. It's really, to my mind… And I am biased because I was the editor on the first couple books…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] But, to my mind, it's really one of the most exciting, wonderful, rich character work in a space opera series that I've really ever seen. I could not love this more. The show was also great, but read the books first…
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Because they're even better.
[Dan] We did have Daniel and Ty on the show at some point a year or two ago. So if you want to hear them talk about it, you can find that in our archives.
[Mary Robinette] We'll include that in our liner notes.
[Dan] Yes, we totally will.
 
[Dan] Okay. So, I like what Dongwon was saying about trying new things while still staying true to what you've already been successful with. This is something that I have done. So, just very quickly, I hit the New York Times bestseller list with the Partials series, which is science fiction. Then, my next science fiction series, Mirador, really tanked. Like, I cannot overstate how little it sold.
[Mary Robinette] Which is a shame, because I love that series.
[Dan] Well, thank you. So do I. It did not click with the audience in the way everyone expected it to. It didn't click for the publisher the way we had hoped it would, to the point that they didn't even bother doing the third book in audio. I had to buy the rights back from them. So, as I set out what am I going to do next, I said, "Well, I'm going to continue with science fiction, but I'm going to twist it in a new direction." So I started doing middle grade science fiction. That's where Zero G and Dragon Planet and things like that came from. At the same time, because a far bigger success for me has been my thrillers, like I Am Not a Serial Killer, I didn't want to neglect that audience either. So I'm trying… This is a much more risky experiment. But I wrote a new… I started a new thriller career, essentially, by doing historical thrillers. That's where Ghost Station came from. So I'm trying these two different paths at the same time and just waiting to see, like you were saying, which one clicks in which one takes off. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of faith, and you just kind of gotta hope that… And maybe neither of those does, and I'll… I don't know, come crawling to you at some point and say, "Dongwon, help me figure out what to do?"
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is that… I also got the whole orphaned thing, right after Ghost Talkers. When I was working on Calculating Stars, my editor left, and I got transferred to another editor, who's been wonderful, but it was… The process of learning to work with her. But the reason that we decided to switch me from doing fantasy to doing science fiction was that we looked at what I had been doing in short fiction, and I write all over the map in short fiction. My science fiction that's short fiction kind of consistently gets noticed for awards. The general thing was maybe you should be writing to your strengths, which appear to be science fiction.
[Howard] Kind of consistently, that was… Oops, two Hugos?
[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, anyway…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] So, friends, we have to brag about Mary Robinette, because she's too modest to do it herself.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I only have four Hugos. One of them I got with you guys, so it really doesn't count.
[Dan] Barely anything.
[Howard] Thanks.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's actually the only one I've got.
[Dongwon] The one that doesn't count.
[Mary Robinette] No. I'm kidding. I am… I… Obviously kidding, or I would not…
[Dongwon] Of course.
[Mary Robinette] Have made that joke. But my point being that when people wonder when they're novelists, natural novelists, and they wonder why to do short fiction, one of the things that it does allow is a faster, easier way to see which of your stories are hitting with audience. Like, just, if you are getting more acceptances from your science fiction, that's a thing that's worth noting. So I didn't actually have to go through as many iterations as Dan did to figure out, oh, maybe I should be writing some science fiction novels. And, Calculating Stars have done significantly better than my fantasy.
[Dan] Or, phrased another way, you did do arguably more iterations than I did, but they were in short fiction, so you were able to do them more quickly and see results more easily.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is arguably accurate.
[Laughter]
 
[Dongwon] The thing that I just want to point out is, following again on what Dan was saying, is the key to so much of this is diversification, right? Not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes that is a genre thing, sometimes it's a category thing in terms of adult or YA, and sometimes… That's even an industry thing, like writing for games and writing for comics and writing for film and TV if you can get that work. But often times it's also just not writing for one publisher, right? Having multiple publishers in place, so if you get orphaned at one, even if that's the thing that goes very badly, which it sometimes does, you still have other things in your pocket that you can turn to and emphasize. If that's not working there. Then, sometimes it takes a couple of years to cycle out, and then you can pick up with a new contract or with a different publisher or with a different editor at that publisher. But having lots of different things moving out once is often the way to sort of stabilize your career overall.
[Howard] In 2006, at Emerald City Comic Con, Robert Khoo, K-H-O-O, talked about the business of web comics. This is the guy who went to the penny arcade guys before they were big and said, "You're leaving a whole bunch of money on the table." They said, "We don't know what money is." He said, "I tell you what. I will work for you for free on the understanding that if at the end of the year, I haven't earned for you a marketing guy's salary of $80,000 a year, which you can very comfortably pay me, then I will quit and you don't owe me anything." They were like, "This sounds too good to be true, but it's probably not a trap. So, join us." Robert Khoo totally reinvented them. Out of his work grew the penny arcade Expo, which was the thing that replaced E3 as the big consumer thing of displaying… It was huge. Robert Khoo… So I've established his bona fides. He said, "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place."
[Mary Robinette] This is a…
[Howard] That stuck with me. I'm not very good at it yet. But we go over our books, Sandra and I go over our books every year and ask ourselves, "What is the thing that will hurt the most if we lose it? How do we build something that will cushion that, in case it goes away?"
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is absolutely a thing that they teach you in puppet theater, as well. I mean, just in general as a freelancer, this is a really important thing to understand. If you quit your day job and decide to be a writer full-time, you are a freelancer. Your publisher is your only client, unless you're at multiple publishing houses, unless you're doing hybrid stuff which, in this day and age, is a sensible thing. It's a good thing that you can do if you get your backlist back is bring it out yourself. So, remembering that you are a freelancer and trying to diversify. Like, I diversify my income stream also by teaching. That's one of the ways that I diversify. It doesn't have to be writing. The other thing that I kind of wanted to say about what happens when this moment… Like, I was orphaned by an editor, and that handoff was actually very, very smooth. But it was also because the previous two books had done so poorly, and not through fault of my own. I think. Obviously, other people have different opinions. But I had… The first of those last two books had been Of Noble Family, which was the last book in a five book series. We… There is a thing that happens in a series, where you have a slow decline in numbers. Then, the next book, Ghost Talkers, which is actually one of my favorite things that I've written, came out, and they sent me on tour. My first day of tour was election day of 2016. Everybody's sales tanked. Actually. But mine… Just like, there was… When I was on tour, the audiences were half the size that they normally were. Everyone looked shellshocked. It didn't matter, actually, which side of the political spectrum you were on, that period of time was really fraught. So, yes, obviously, my numbers were lower. But what that meant was, when we were doing… With my new editor, who was working with me on the two new books, when she was looking at acquiring another book after that, there was no incentive to do it until Calculating Stars and Fated Sky came out and did very well. At that point, I realized that my agent was part of my problem because my agent was not advocating for me and was not explaining… Like, the narrative of what was going on. So sometimes when you're midcareer and things are not going well, if you're starting to think, "Well, I wonder if I should go with a new agent?" The advice that I got from a very good friend who is sitting on the couch with me…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Was that when you begin asking yourself that question, you should probably change agents.
[Dan] I had my book, Extreme Makeover, came out the same day. Mary Robinette and I did a signing together…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] In Chicago. Actually, the two of us and Wes Chu. So there were three authors, and I think maybe five people there…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] If you count the bookseller. I actually, like, I love Calculating Stars, but I still consider Ghost Talkers my favorite of your books. I think Extreme Makeover is the best written thing I've ever done. No one's ever heard of either of those books. Because they got completely lost. Anyway, I assume that there are a few people who are listening to this episode who are in this situation who need to reboot their career. But I… And I hope that they do. But I suspect that most of our listeners are still looking at this from the upcoming side. Right? That's why I really want to tell you what I did not know is that you need to be planning for this already. You need to have all these income streams in place before one of them fails. Which is the lesson that I have very painfully learned. And five years later have managed to build myself back up to the point where I more or less okay.
[Howard] Or back even further up from that, we've said… I quoted Robert Khoo. 40%. Don't let any more than 40% come from any one place. Do you know how to do the math to know where your money is coming from? If you don't know how to do that yet, learn to do that. Because if you can get ahead of that, for you start receiving royalties, before you start getting advances, then you are in a position to career plan and to build your bugout bag for…
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to do a plug for something called you need a budget dot com. Which, if you are like me, and not terribly good with numbers, is a very useful way as a freelancer… It's a bud… It's a financial planning kind of tracking thing. But it's very, very useful to get a handle on exactly how much you need to make, and to figure out how to have enough of a nest egg so that if you have a. Where you have to reboot, that you have some money set aside.
[Dan] Which is a great resource. Go for it.
[Dongwon] One thing I just want to point out is as were talking about 40% of your income coming from different places and all that, remember, your day job can be one of your sources of income. Right? So the people, the clients that I work with who have widely diversified careers in terms of doing adult, middle grade, and graphic novels, and tie-in work and film and TV, those generally are the full-time writers. Right? Those are the ones who are only writing as their day-to-day job. If people… If you have a day job, it's much more feasible to focus on one thing at a time and really focus on just having your one main series because you have the financial security of that day job. Which is why my general advice is hang onto that job as long as you can stand it. Or until your… The authoring that you have to do in terms of emails and touring and things like that make having it no longer feasible to do so, right? But then you need to be planning and preparing for that transition by starting that diversification work as early as you can.
[Dan] Absolutely. Now, we are out of time. Though obviously we could talk about this for a long time.
 
[Dan] But we do have some homework for you, which is coming from Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will happen to you when this happens, or in the early part of your career, is that the imposter syndrome is going to kick up. It's like you feel… You can feel a sense of despair, you can feel like blah. So here's a weird bit of advice, which is that I want you to write a letter to a role model. This role model does not have to be a living person. Explain to them all of the things that you're afraid of, and all of the problems that you're struggling with. Then, I want you to write a letter from them back to you with the advice that you think that they might give you. The reason I'm suggesting this is that a lot of times you, in fact, know the answer to the problem. But we are often kinder to someone else then we are to ourselves. So, by putting yourself in the shoes of someone else who has been through this, I think that it might be a way for you to access the part of your brain that knows how to handle this. You do. It's just terrifying.
[Dan] Sounds awesome. So. That's been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines

Sep. 16th, 2020 11:28 am
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Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines
 
 
Key Points: Writing to contracted deadlines is hard. Sophomore slump! Writing in a bubble. It gets worse! New level, new devil. Train yourself to write against deadlines. Train your good habits. Build sustainability. Watch out for the year and a half deadline -- you need to work consistently at the start, to avoid crunch time at the end. Remember you won't have a boss. Pay attention to your own nuances. Make time to have a flat tire. Watch out for the other cooks in the kitchen! As your career grows, more things take time away. Learn to juggle early! Build a trunk full of pieces to use. Being good at deadlines, able to juggle multiple projects, means you will always have work. Learn to make your own schedule. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 37.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing under Deadlines.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're in a hurry, too.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I've gotta go. I've got writing to do.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] I'm not sure if we ever even talked about this before. Maybe briefly. But I don't think we've ever had an entire episode on writing to deadline. Which is something we should totally do, because, I don't know about the rest of you, but the first time I had a contract, I was surprised by how much harder it was to write under someone else's deadline than my own goals.
[Victoria] Yes. I think this is called the sophomore slump for a reason. The first book you write usually is not under contract. If you're lucky enough to get a contract, and the contract extends for more than that book, the next book you write will be the first book that you write under contract. I say that it's like going from riding in a cave to going into writing in a bubble. Where all of a sudden, everyone can see you, and everyone has a stake in it, and everyone's watching you, and you no longer have unlimited time, you have give or take six months. It is one of the most trial-by-fire processes. It's one of the reasons that second book hits so many people so hard. Because second book… All books are difficult, but the first book you write under contract is an eye-opener.
[Brandon] For me, I had two big distinct moments like this. The first was writing my first book under deadline. The second was when I had The Wheel of Time. Suddenly, a lot more eyes were on me. I'm glad I was able to step into that. That I… My early books were not as… I was a brand-new author. They did fine, but it was when I suddenly had everyone at the company, at the publisher, focused all of their attention on me, that suddenly writing under that deadline was a very different experience.
[Victoria] Well, that's the horrifying thing, right? If any of you out there are writing your first book under deadline, it's only going to get so much worse…
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Because you're still a new author. That first book you write under deadline feels like… Much like when you're a teenager and everything feels like a 10 or like the end of the world. That first book you write under deadline, you feel like it's never going to be this hard again. Until something else… My agent would say, "New level, new devil." The idea that every time you step up a level or into a new spot, you have that same sophomore horror reaction again at a new hurdle.
 
[Brandon] I think a lot of our listeners will, again… I say this a lot… Will be thinking, "Wow…"
[Howard] Luxury!
[Brandon] I know, wouldn't it be so nice?
[Dan] Wish I had that problem.
[Brandon] but I do think training yourself to write under deadline can be very helpful for preparing for a career in writing.
[Victoria] Absolutely
[Brandon] I've had many friends as writers hit this in it be really hard for them. A lot of times you'll find someone whose first book comes out and then there's a long gap to their second book. I'm not even talking about the famous examples that you might point to. A lot of my writer friends, one book came out, and then it's like four or five years til their next book. That's a really bad time to be making a big gap between books. Really bad time.
[Dan] So, when… Brandon and I were in writing groups together forever until he finally got published, and he got published a year, year and a half, two years before I did. So I watched this happen to you. I thought, "Okay, well, this is what I need to be ready for." Because as soon as you had a contract, then your time was not your own, and you were under all these other pressures. So I was trying to teach myself how to write. So I started setting my own deadlines. Because I knew this was coming. So that was, I guess, the first step, if we're going to give people advice. Give yourself an artificial deadline that you know is going to push you, that you know is going to be much harder than you want to deal with, and see what you can do with it.
[Brandon] This is part of why we like Nanowrimo and why… I did it years before I broke in. It was really helpful. For doing that first time I actually had a deadline to have practiced having deadlines.
[Howard] In the world of web cartooning, I made my entire career out of this deadline thing. Because I went 20 years without missing a daily update. There's this rolling deadline which says there will be a comic strip up every day. As we are recording this episode, that deadline, the inked buffer is only seven days out. Which is a terrible place for me to be, but I know, after 19 years of practice, I know exactly how long it takes to get out of this hole. Do I know exactly what I am going to write for the two weeks of scripts that I want to write and pencil and ink next week? No. But I've done this enough times that I am confident that if I focus myself on Monday and I look at my outline and I fall back on craft… Mary Robinette has talked about this a little bit, there are times when we just fall back on craft. It's not about inspiration, it's not about the Muses, it's chopping wood and carrying water. I know that I can do that. I just have to knuckle down and make it happen.
 
[Victoria] Part of this is a matter of training yourself into good habits. Because, as I said, it's only going to get harder. The better habits you can devise, the better habits that you can really start… Not perfecting, but creating for yourself early on, are really going to come in handy if you move farther into a career and you have multiple deadlines or multiple publishers or multiple anything. Really, like, they also come in handy if at any point you move from writing as hobby to writing part time or writing full-time. Every one of these habits about enforcing your own deadlines, finding accountabili-buddies, like finding a generational buddy, like finding anybody that you can really look to as support system and people to keep you accountable, these are key things for more sustainability of deadline.
[Dan] You have to decide at what point you want to add this. Because if you don't know how yet to write a book at all, you don't necessarily need to step up to this hard mode. Play easy mode first, because that's what it's for. But if you look at your own career, your own writing that you have done thus far, and you think that you are ready to add a new skill on top of it. Even if you maybe haven't even finished a first book, this is something to start building early.
[Brandon] The difficulty with being a writer… I mean, you may be sitting there thinking, I've dealt with deadlines, I've had schoolwork. We all have. This is a familiar thing to all of us. That's good. You have some practice. But there is something very dangerous about having a year and a half to do something, that if you don't do it consistently every week for the first eight months of that, your life is going to fall apart trying to do it for the last whatever, eight months of that. So, learning to be able to when it's not a pressure, keep to your deadline, that's a key skill. The other thing you've got to remember is you won't have a boss telling you to. Even if you have an editor, most of the time, your editor's not checking in that often. There assuming the book is working fine. They will go four or five months for checking in, and seeing how things are going, sometimes, if they're busy with other projects. If you have let yourself spend these five months being like, "Oh, I can get to it," or "I'm feeling really stressed right now, I'll play Xbox," and then… You're just setting yourself up to crash.
[Dan] My grandmother grew up on a ranch. She had all these awesome aphorisms. One thing that she always told us as kids was, "If you don't have time to do it right, you definitely don't have time to do it twice." Which is a principle that I apply to this. That it is about not just setting a deadline, but making a plan that is going to work now. So that you are using your time well now while it's not crunch time, because you don't want to get to crunch time, you want to avoid that as much as possible.
[Victoria] Also, especially early on in your deadline-written career, when you don't quite know all of your own nuances yet… All of your own… Like, I know that the first third of a book takes me roughly three times the amount of time to write that the last two thirds do. I cannot allot the same amount of time for every act in my book. So… You really only learn these things, because whatever works is what works for you, you only learn these things by doing. You need to make sure that you don't lean into procrastination techniques early on, or else you might find out the hard way that you don't work like that.
[Howard] Back in May, we talked about mental wellness. Just how to take care of yourself, and how sometimes you need to take days off. I mentioned the Munchkin deck project that I was involved in, and how incredibly educational that was. Crunch mode is definitely a thing that many of us, a lot of us, can do. But it's not something that you can maintain. It's never something that you should build into the project plan. The… When I have… It happens all the time. People will say, "I can't believe, how did you do this without missing a day? How is that…" Well, you do it, not missing a day, by having a huge buffer. My dad used to say, "You don't leave for the airport unless you've got enough time to change a flat tire." Which is not something I've ever had to do on my way to the airport, but that was just the way he built the plan. You have time to change a flat tire. I have time in my buffer, except this week, to get sick. To have the sewer line rupture. To have whatever.
 
[Victoria] Well, there's something else that I do want to bring up, which is once those deadlines become contractually inputted instead of personally inputted… The reason that it's so important that you stay on top of your side is because you're not the only cook in this kitchen. You can hit every one of your deadlines, but if you're the only person that you're planning on, something at another point in the pipeline can go wrong. An editor becomes late, a publisher becomes late, and all of a sudden, your very carefully orchestrated machine falls apart.
[Dan] And once you have multiple projects going, and you've made your perfect plan and you think this book is working great, then the other project that you've already handed off to the editor, they throw it back and say, "Hey, sorry this took me an extra month. I need you to turn around these edits by the end of the week." You're like, "But… That ruins everything!"
[Brandon] Well, I mean, this even happens with… This year it happened to me with, I got beta reads back on a book and there were some responses to the book that I was not expecting. Where I'm like, "Oh. I need to do another revision. I can see now why these are happening. But it means I need to take an extra month on this book." Although I was going to say, when Victoria was talking about editors being late, Dan and I know nothing about that.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Oh, no.
 
[Brandon] Let's do our book of the week, which is actually a YouTube channel that I really like. This isn't to give you excuses to not write. But, Overly Sarcastic Productions is a delightful YouTube channel where they do summaries of history, summaries of mythology, or look at various writing and storytelling tropes, and present them in a funny way. Just explaining to you what they were, give you the Cliff Notes version of the history of Herodotus or the Cliff Notes version of what it is, the amnesia plot, and how it's used in various books. They are funny writers, they are funny deliverers. The woman who runs… Who is part of it does sketches for all these things and her art is a lot of fun. I just highly recommend it as 15 minute, 10 minute beats that you'll probably like because you like this podcast, that are focusing more on tools that can help you be a better storyteller. So, give them a look, Overly Sarcastic Productions.
 
[Brandon] Now, coming back around on this idea of deadlines. One thing that I wanted to bring up is it actually gets harder and harder the better your career goes. This is not something I was prepared for. You usually do get, when you first go full-time, a nice breathing room dump. Where you're like, "Oh. I have extra time. I have more time than I thought, than I ever had for my writing before." That's the most time you'll ever have. That year while you're writing before your first book comes out. My experience has been that once a book is sold, agents tend to be really good at getting you another project if you want one. It's generally a good idea to get a second project and be working on that. Once the book comes out, suddenly there's publicity to do and promotion. The more popular you become, the more successful you become, the more this takes a bite out of your time. To the point that I have less time to write now than I did when I was full-time working a job. Now, granted, I had a weird job where I could write at work. But I have less time than I did then. You would think, "Oh, Brandon, you're full-time as a writer. You would obviously have more time now."
[Dan] Just to give our listeners an idea, arranging this recording session with both Brandon and Victoria took us almost a year of planning.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] To find the right holes in the schedules. Because they're so busy.
[Victoria] I will say I'm definitely one of those that… I'm very grateful for how my career is going right now, but between… I have four publishers and I've been in 16 countries so far this year. If you don't think that takes a bite out of writing… And I know, I can hear people saying, like, "Oh, but you're so lucky." I am, but if I don't also find time to write more books, that luck is going to run out very quickly when I run out of products.
[Brandon] This is a good time in your lives, before you're published, to practice being able to juggle all of these things and know that you can work to a deadline even if other things are interfering. I wish I'd practiced it a little more during my unpublished days.
[Howard] It's… Boy. It may seem hard as a new writer to take the novel you've been working on and that you've revised and to say it's really just not ready yet and put it in the trunk. But… Boy, I gotta tell you, late career, having a trunk full of things that you know exactly how you put them together and you know exactly how to fix them and you've got a pretty good idea of how quickly that would go. That means that when an opportunity comes up where, hey, maybe I could file all the serial numbers off of this and turn it into some money, you can do exactly that.
[Victoria] Related to that, as well, I just want to say, do not undervalue the time between when you sell your first book and when that book hits shelves. That is the most beautiful time you will ever have. It is the clearest, free-est mental time you will ever have or reviews start coming in and before your monologue becomes a dialogue when it comes to your creative energy. But, like, cache anything you can, ideas, balance, learn good work life balance. Also, my favorite productive… Like, procrastinatory technique is the idea that social media is absolutely part of my job. I can do a whole lot of not writing being on social media and justify it as marketing. Really start to analyze, figure out what your best times of day for writing are, figure out when you can do this, figure out what's going to be anything sustainable. Because it's only going to get more complicated as you go down that path. So any… I know I've already said good habits, but any good habits that you can build early will serve you later.
 
[Brandon] If you can become one of the people that is really good at deadlines, that is worth gold in the industry. Because so many writers are… I won't say bad at this…
[Victoria] I'll say bad at it.
[Brandon] I would say…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] There are a lot of professional writers that the best they can do is keep up to date on the one thing they're working on, and that's a struggle. People who can juggle multiple things become very in demand. Even if you're not ending up as a bestseller, if you are a mid lister, but you are someone who can deliver something on time, there'll be work waiting for you at every corner. You'll never go hungry if you can turn in things on a deadline that is good quality work.
[Howard] My friend Jake Black has said on several occasions, be… You can be on time every time. You can be the absolute best in the industry. You can be awesome and fun and enjoyable to work with. If you can only pick two, you'll probably find work. Pick easy to work with and always on time, because being the absolute best at everything in the industry… Boy, that one's hard. The other two are so easy.
[Dan] Well, I wanted to say, that this is extra valuable, especially if you are mid list or even low list. Because you're going to need multiple revenue streams to pay the bills and feed your children. My kids want to eat every day. I don't know…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Where they get off. But you have to have so many different projects and so many different irons in so many different fires that being able to come up with a good schedule is really valuable. I literally will take a print calendar, old caveman style, and I will mark on it every time that I can't write. Then I will start reverse engineering. Well, I've got this project that needs to be done by this day. Build into that how much do I think I can write in a day. How much… Give myself some extra days when I know I screw up, so that I am not immediately behind on the treadmill. Give myself some self-care time. Then, see how much I can compress that. That's how I do it.
 
[Brandon] Let's go to our homework, which hopefully will help you with this.
[Victoria] So. This homework theme of the day is, writing friends, not surprisingly, trying to get you to put some structure into that free-form of writing. I use a very particular app called the Forest app, it leans into the Pomadera method, essentially a timed writing sprint. The thing I like about the Forest app, it's only a couple of dollars. It is gamifying the entire process. You essentially pick a tree. You earn different kinds of trees to go in your forest. You grow different kinds of trees or certain amounts of time, while the Forest app is going. You cannot touch your phone and exit the app, or else the tree will die. The tree dies, and at the end of the day, you have a sad little dead defecated tree in your forest. The only thing I think could make it better would be if it were kittens or puppies instead. But, in the meantime, the Forest app is a nice way to keep track of writing sprints and find a way to just add a little bit of structure.
[Dan] You heard it here first, Victoria wishes she could kill kittens and puppies.
[Victoria] No one wants… I would never kill kittens and puppies.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] I would never miss a writing sprint.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

Feb. 26th, 2020 11:14 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship
 
 
Q&A Points:
Q: What have any of you learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
A: Talk to your editor early in the process. Use an outboard brain. Do the hard thing. Take a chance, make mistakes, and do something because it might be fun. Go watch Lindsay Ellis Three Act Structure. (Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/o0QO7YuKKdI)
Q: My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
A: Look at the problem, what is the barrier to moving the story forward? Make yourself a checklist, an inventory of things that can go wrong. Trust your instincts.
Q: As published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
A: Committed idiot. Plan ahead, but publishing is volatile. Strategy, planning, but be ready to drop it. Be ready to jump in a different direction. Have a roadmap, and build a new one if you need to. Diversified income. Make plans for multiple scenarios, for whatever happens at cost points.
Q: How do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
A: When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
Q: How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
A: Learn by teaching. Externalize and explain, talk through the process.
Q: When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
A: Identify different phases, and avoid doubling up on phases.
Q: If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
A: Try it. See how it reads.
Q: What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
A: The end is a frame, matching your beginning. Show who the character is now, how things have changed, and give the reader the emotional punch you've been aiming at.
Q: What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
A: Rhythms that are linked to the character's personality, idioms, metaphors. Make the character feel specific and vivid.
Q: How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
A: Experience and personal preference. What are you looking for in readers, how are you using them?
Q: My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
A: Does it connect to your story? If a horse is just a horse, call it a horse.
Q: How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
A: Agents work with people, not projects. If they believe in the person, they get lots of leeway.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Eight.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on a Ship.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Howard] I've been on this ship for several days now.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Which is a lot longer than 15 minutes. We are here at the 2019 Writing Excuses Retreat on a cruise ship in the Caribbean Sea. Actually, right now we're in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a live audience in front of us. Say hello, live audience.
[Whoo!]
[Dan] Awesome. We have asked them to ask us some questions. Our theme this whole year is the questions of the audience. We've been trying to answer them, we'll continue doing that throughout. Now, we have some live ones. So, our first question. Tell us your name and your question.
 
[Caleb] This is Caleb. I'm wondering what any of you have learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
[Mary Robinette] What any of us have learned in the past year that has improved our craft? I actually learned the value of talking to my editor really early in the process. One of the things that happened to me this year was that I had a number of events that derailed me from writing. I was working on a novel, and my usual process did not work. So… When I say editor, what I guess I mean is using an outboard brain. My usual process was not working, because I kept having life things go wrong. There were some family members at hospitals, then we were moving, and it was just a lot of things. Going to someone else and saying, "I cannot hold this story in my head. Please help me focus." was immensely valuable and actually got me back on track.
[Dongwon] That's convenient, because the lesson I learned this year was to talk to my clients early in the process.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] To make sure that everything's on track. I think one of the things that I learned that kind of lined up with that is to not be afraid to push people to do the thing that is hard. Right? In that sometimes when you're giving editorial feedback, because you're working with somebody who puts their heart and soul into a manuscript, into a book, you want to be… You want to be nice, right? You want to go easy on them in certain ways because you like this person, you work with this person. For me, one of the things I had to really learn in this past year is to get involved early and don't be afraid of saying, "Is this really the right choice? Is this the best way to get where you're going?" Sometimes, breaking it down and doing the hard work is the most important thing. Whether or not that's going to make someone upset.
[Howard] For me, it was when I joined the TypeCastRPG role-playing game and decided that, you know what, for fun, I think I'm going to try to live sketch things that happen during the game. The pressure there being I need to turn out a… What is ultimately a single panel comic strip that depends on the context of the game in a minute and a half. Then we did a live show at [FanEx] and they set up an Elmo and I… To borrow the metaphor, screwed the courage to the wall and said, "I'm going to make terrible, terrible mistakes and I'm going to do it when my arms are 10 feet long on this screen behind me…"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "But I'm going to do it anyway because it might be fun." It unlocked a piece of my brain that allowed me to visualize more quickly and draw faster and draw things I've never drawn before.
[Dan] Fantastic. Just, really quick for me, I talked about this in one of the classes that I taught here on the retreat, the Lindsay Ellis's episode about three act structure and the way that she explained it made three act structure work for me in a way that it never has before. So everyone go watch that. It's brilliant.
 
[Dan] All right. We have another question.
[Allison] Hi. My name is Allison. My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
[Mary Robinette] I wish I knew the answer to that one.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a really super common problem. The way I evaluate it is whether or not… Is to interrogate the quest… The problem that I'm having. I look at the problem and I'm like, "Okay. What is the barrier between me and moving this story forward?" If it's… If I can't identify a barrier, that means that it's probably me, it is not actually the story. If it is… Sometimes it is… There is actually a problem with the story that is really difficult to diagnose. That's when handing it to someone else to look at becomes useful. But most of the time, if I ask just what is the barrier that is between me and moving forward, or the character and moving forward, that will unlock what the problem is.
[Howard] I've found that, for a lot of people, by the time you reach a point in your writing career where you're comfortable answering this question, you may have moved beyond actually writing down the equivalent of a preflight checklist. But having a preflight checklist, having a way to take inventory of the things that can be wrong… They might be diagnostic tools like pacing, three act structure, character arc, conflict, seven point whatever… The sorts of things that we talk about here on Writing Excuses all the time. When I'm writing jokes, I have this sort of checklist. I've internalized it. But what I found is that when I'm stuck, I have to take inventory. A lot of the times, it's me. I haven't had enough sleep. I haven't eaten correctly. I'm exhausted because of an emotional thing. The temperature in the room is wrong and it's making me grouchy. This character is at the wrong point in their character arc for me to write the scene that I want to write, therefore, I don't feel justified in writing it. By the time I'm able to articulate these things, the unlocking starts moving really quickly. I can see where the problems are, and where the problems aren't.
[Dongwon] I think it's probably the most frustrating advice I give, and also the most important advice that I like to give, is that you need to learn to trust your instincts. Right? But this is a case where it's very hard to tell where the line between your conscious thought and your instinct is. So, the thing I think about a lot is what Howard was just talking about is the ways in which your conscious and subconscious mind are connected to your embodiment, right? So, a lot of things that can help you are really core mental health and mindfulness techniques, right? Meditation, yoga, go for a run, go take a shower, go take a break. Find something that uses up part of your brain so that your subconscious can chew on it. Then come back to it when you're feeling calm and relaxed and centered, and try and get in touch with what is your core emotion here? What is your instinct telling you, versus what is your fear telling you? Right? If that instinct is saying, "Actually, it's a structural problem here," then focus on that, and do that hard work. On average, if you're having that question, you're probably right, that the problem is bigger than I don't feel like writing right now. On average.
[Mary Robinette] I forgot that I have an entire blog post on this that we'll put in the liner notes. Which is… For those people who never go to look at the liner notes, you can search for it. It's called Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. I talk about how to diagnose the kind of delays that you are having and the kind of… Like, if your drowsy, it's probably that your story is boring. If you are restless, it's probably that you don't actually know the next thing that's going to happen or you don't believe it actually, I think. But, anyway, Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. It includes how to diagnose it, and then a long list of tools for when it is… The problem is not with the manuscript, but external to the manuscript, to your own life. Some things to help you move forward.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Next question.
[Matt] Hello, my name is Matt Chambers. My question is as published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
[Howard] 10 years ago…
[Dan] Now I'm just depressed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] 10 years ago, I could have told you that 10 years from now, I would definitely still be doing Schlock Mercenary. Five years ago, I could have told you when the major Schlock Mercenary mega arc was going to end. Two years ago, I could have, but wouldn't have, told you how it was going to end and what all the book plans and plot plans were around that. This year, I am re-thinking all of that, because I was probably an idiot, but I'm committed, so I'm sticking to it in a blind panic.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Committed idiot is actually a great thing to put on my business cards. Six years ago, I had the very best year of my career up to that point, and since.
[Howard] Oh, dear.
[Dan] I thought at the time that I knew I would be doing six years later, and had no idea that one of my publishers was going to dry up completely, that one of my series was going to tank abysmally. So, kind of my answer to this is that it is very smart to plan ahead, but that this industry is very volatile. A lesson I did not learn early enough is how to plan around that volatility. The good news is we're going to have one, and possibly two, episodes on this exact topic later in the year with Dongwon about how to plan out your career and how that career can change and how to reboot it when it falls apart.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I love talking to my clients about strategy. A lot of times, what most of them are planning three, four… Not even books, like 3 to 4 contracts out, right? And a contract can be 2 to 3 books. So it's what are we doing here, what's coming after that, what's coming after that? The important thing, as Dan kind of touched on, is that you have to be sort of ready to throw all of that out at the drop of a hat, right? Publishing is extremely volatile, you have no idea what's going to happen when that book hits the market. So you have to be kind of ready to jump in a different direction. Sometimes you have backup plans, and sometimes you don't. But always have something… Some roadmap of where you want to go. Then be ready to build a new one when you need to.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I… Much like everyone else, my plans change. The things that… For me, the metrics that have been working is that I have… I have kept my income stream diversified, so that's why I have three different careers running simultaneously. So that when one of them is not doing well, I can fill in the gaps with one of the others. I also think about the shape that I want my career to take. That, generally, is that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. Which means that if a really lucrative contract comes in, and I'm like, "That looks… I mean, the money looks really great, but I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing that kind of work," that's not… That is something that I can think about turning down, and that I can decide in the moment. I have a giant list of novels that I want to write. I won't get to write them all, probably. But I keep them. Then, I think, the last piece of advice that I was just given this past year… I was in an enviable position, which is that I had just won the Nebula and the Locus, and we were looking at the Hugo. I was like… People kept saying, "Well, you're going to win it." I'm like, "You can't think that. That's not healthy. Certainly not healthy for me." Then my agent, Seth Fishman, said I should think about it like applying to college. That you don't know whether or not you're going to get into college, but you make plans for both scenarios. You make plans for well, if I get into college, I'm going to need to be able to put these things into place. If I don't get into college, then these are the backup plans that I have and this is how I'm going to occupy my life. So I think that that's one of the things that is very useful, is to think about the possible cusp points in your career, and to think about positive outcomes for either cusp point. So that's… That has been very helpful for me. Fortunately, I did get into college, in this particular scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it was also… Even the positive things can rock you if you are not prepared for them.
 
[Dan] Awesome. I want to pause right now for our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about a book called Jade War, which is the sequel to Fonda Lee's… Wait. Yes. The sequel to Fonda Lee's Jade City. I just had this moment of thinking that I had them backwards. So, I blurbed the first book, and the second book is every bit as fantastic. It is the Godfather meets like a Kung Fu wire film. It's secondary world fantasy, but it feels like 1960s or 70s Earth. But there are people who can use jade and they can do magic, except they don't think of it as magic, it's just part of an… It's just completely woven into the world. It feels so real that I am surprised that it is not. The relationships are compelling. If you are someone who likes a well-written sex scene, it is not the entirety of the book, but there are a couple in there that are some of the hottest and… Like, really beautifully drawn consensual sex scenes. The consensual parts is the part that I find appealing. But the…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Just the entire thing, it's great. It's Jade War by Fonda Lee.
[Dan] Cool. Thank you very much.
 
[Dan] Now, we still have several questions to get… Left. We want to try to get to them all. We're going to let this episode run a little long. But we're going to call this the lightning round, okay? So ask your question, and then one of us will answer it instead of all four. So, go.
[Cameron] Okay. Hey, guys, my name is Cameron. I was wondering how do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
[Dongwon] When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
[Laughter]
[Dan] [Haha!] Excellent answer. Next?
[Chuckles]
 
[Caitlin] Hi, I'm Caitlin. How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
[Mary Robinette] I learn by teaching. When I was a pup… Getting trained in puppetry, what my instructor had me do is he would have me learn everything with my right hand, he would teach me with my right hand, then he would have me teach my left hand how to do it. What he said was any time you have to externalize and explain what you're doing, even if it's to yourself, that it causes you to hone your craft and to get rid of the parts that aren't important. I find that when I am teaching students, even if it's someone that is a peer and just saying, "Hey, this is the thing that I've learned today." Even if they don't necessarily need to know it, but I'm talking through the process, that it makes me better at my craft.
 
[Jessica] Hi, I'm Jessica. When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
[Dan] My answer to that has always been that I will identify the different phases that each project has to go through, and then make sure that I'm not doubling them up. So I'm never writing two things at a time, but I could be writing one while revising another or outlining another or editing or proofing or whatever it is. That way, it makes it much easier for me to keep them in my brain, because they're all in different parts of my brain.
 
[Kevin] Hi. I'm Kevin. If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
[Howard] I love the way POV use changes in our culture over time. I think that that could work. I don't know that I've seen it done, but I've thought about doing it myself. I think that 20 years from now, that could end up being the rule rather than an exception, because these sorts of things are cultural. If it's what you want to do, go for it.
[Dongwon] I just want to jump in with one little note, is the thing I run into a lot from writers and in the writing community, is people think about POV really, really rigidly. So, like, if I start in third person limited, I have to stay that way all throughout. Whereas, I think, we're seeing a lot of things that are really pushing back against that. N. K. Jemisin's Fifth Season is a really great example. Even Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside, you'll see POV jump around from first person to third person, you'll see tense shifts, things like that. So feel free to really sort of experiment with the different perspectives and the different POV's that you have. You can drop into one just for a chapter or a scene, and then they can never reappear again. So, feel free to try different things and experiment and see how it reads. I think writers and crit groups are very focused on consistent POV. I don't think readers even notice.
 
[Emma] Hi. I'm Emma. What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
[Oooo]
[Howard] Your Patreon.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So, what I think about when I get to the end is it is a frame. I am framing something that I set up at the beginning. At the beginning, I made promises to the reader. One of the things that I promised them is that they would feel a certain way when they get to the end. So when I look at that last paragraph, I think about it as the beginning in reverse, the inverse of that. I try to make sure that I'm showing who my character is now, where they are now, and the ways in which things have shifted. Doing that in a way that makes the reader have that emotional punch that I had been going for through the whole thing. Like, if I had been wanting them to have a sense of dread all the way through, and then the catharsis of relief, then that last thing needs to contain relief. If I want them to still feel dread, then that last thing still needs to have dread in it. So it's a… For me, it's the frame, it's the button, and that's what I look for at the end.
 
[Jess] Hi. I'm Jess. What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
[Mary Robinette] I can take that one.
[Dan] Do it.
[Mary Robinette] So. Coming from theater and audiobook, the thing about third person and the way… Is that it is actually still very much first-person in this real simple way. The narrator is telling a story to the audience. The narrator is sometimes very closely linked to a third person character, but even so, there is a storyteller who is speaking to the audience. What you're looking for with the voice are rhythms that are linked to the character's personality. If it is a tight limited third person, you want to use everything… You want to make sure that the idioms that you're using, the metaphors that they're using, that these are all linked to how they self define themselves. All of that is going to make the character feel specific and vivid in ways that aiming for the so-called transparent prose will not.
 
[Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
[Howard] Sad, sorry experience.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah. I mean, that really is the answer. I know Mary Robinette and I, for example, have very different criteria as to who we count as an alpha and who we count as a beta reader. That… It all comes down to experience and personal preference, I think.
[Howard] For my own part, an alpha reader… When I've handed it to an alpha reader and gotten it back, I want to feel energized about doing the things that need to be done to fix it. I want my offer readers to energize me. My beta readers I want to be a little more critical and help me fine-tune things. But I'm fragile that way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm… Just to demonstrate that we are sometimes counter. The thing that I'm looking for in a beta… In an alpha reader is someone who is asking me the right questions to help me unpack it a little bit further so that the beta readers are getting something that is closer to the story that I'm trying to tell. The beta readers, I am using them as a general, but the alpha reader… For me, the alpha reader in this case is Alessandra Meechum [sp?], most of the time, and she is… She's what is sometimes called the ideal reader, which is that she represents the core audience that I am writing for. So when I'm writing, I am specifically writing to see whether or not I make her go, "Oh, I love this," or "I hate this so much."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That often pleases me a great deal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So it depends how you're using them. I'm using her to shape the story. I've spotted… Sometimes I'll spot someone in beta and go, "Oh. You also sit in that ideal reader category." There are some stories that I'm going to write at some point that she will not be the ideal reader for, and I'll switch out alphas for that story. But that's what I look for.
[Dan] It's worth pointing out that Alessandra is in the room, and beaming like the sun to be referred to as an ideal reader. So.
 
[Nick] Hello. I'm Nick. My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
[Oooo]
[Dongwon] I would say only rename things if there's a big sort of… If it connects to the core of your story, right? If the question you're asking is about, I don't know, national identity, for example, then it can be very complicated to use an existing country or an existing sort of language structure. So… If… Unless you're asking the question of what is the meaning of horse, then I wouldn't rename it, right? But if you're trying to disrupt ideas of like what do we consider animals, what do we consider our relationship to them, what are beasts of burden, then that's a case where maybe playing with it would give you an opportunity to really do a lot more there. But, in general, if it's a horse, call it a horse.
 
[Matthew] Hello, my name is Matthew. How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
[Dongwon] I wonder who's going to answer this one?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I don't know. Well, I'll take… No.
[Dongwon] The thing that I talk about a lot is that I work with people, not projects. Right? I sign a client, I don't sign a single book. So, the answer is if I believe in the person, then all the leeway in the world, right? That's something that we'll work together to make it right. What goes into that decision is hard to articulate in a lot of ways. But I have to be excited about this person's potential to do something really interesting… Even if they're not quite there yet. So there are clients I've worked with for years and years and years, and we haven't gotten out with anything. But we're still working together, we're still honing in on what the right project is… Or how to do X, Y, or Z. So, the answer is, it depends a lot on the person. The right circumstances, it's okay if that book isn't quite there, so long as I can see you're doing something interesting and I can see that you are someone who has all the chops, all the drive, all the ambition to get to where you need to get to.
 
[Dan] Great. So, that is all our questions that we have. I'm sure that there are many more burning in your hearts right now, but… Thank you for listening. We have a piece of homework for you. So, once again, we're throwing this to Dongwon.
[Dongwon] So, I think that the openings of novels are really, really important. It's a great opportunity to hook your reader. More than that, it's an opportunity to get someone to say, "Yes, I'm going to spend $20 or whatever it is to buy this book." So what I would like each of you to do is take the first line of your work in progress or something that you've finished and rewrite it three separate times. Make sure that when you write each one, it's not three variations on the same sentence. Try and shake those up as much as possible, right? Try a different voice. Try a different style. Try different… Even like points to start the scene and see what jumps out at you. What is the most exciting, what grabs you, what are you excited about to keep going with. I think that will tell you a lot about how your opening scenes should work so that your pulling the reader into your story as forcefully as possible.
[Dan] Perfect. Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

Feb. 5th, 2020 11:32 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career
 
 
Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…
[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?
[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.
[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…
[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.
[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…
[Dan] Hufflepuff.
[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.
[Dan] So, give us some examples.
[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.
[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.
 
[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.
[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Don't we all?
[Dan] We've been friends for decades.
[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.
[Laughter]
[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.
 
[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…
[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.
[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.
[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.
[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?
[Laughter]
[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]
 
[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.
[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…
[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.
[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.
 
[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.
[Victoria] Mortality.
[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.
[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.
[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Ghost Station.
[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.
[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…
[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.
[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.
[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…
[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.
[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?
[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.
[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.
 
[Brandon] We are a little overtime…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.
[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

Jan. 9th, 2020 11:12 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career
 
 
Key Points: This season is going to be organized around topics taken from questions from the audience. So this is what you wanted to know! Starting off with the evolution of a career, goal setting for a career as a writer. How do you choose a book for early in your career versus saving it for later? Work on what you're most excited about. Start with something simple, tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight. Sometimes you want to push yourself, set a challenge for yourself. When you look back on first projects, you are sure to think you could do it better now. But that opportunity cost comes with everything you write. Pick an area to improve, but focus on the things that give you joy. If you have an idea, you're excited about it, it's ambitious… Go for it! Even if it doesn't work, you will learn. Don't worry about using your best idea too early, you will have more and better ideas later. The path you expect, the path you plan, is probably not the path you will follow. Grieve for the untaken path, but rejoice in where you are walking now. You always learn from experience. How do you plan for the next stage? Have a plan, but be ready to toss it. Look for options. Avoid closing doors. Don't brand yourself by your first project. Do a couple of books to prove you can do it, then do something else. Leave breadcrumbs for your readers to follow. Pay attention to what your readers like. Think about who is this book for. Brands evolve. As you plan your career, make sure you have a plan, and make sure it's something you love.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode One.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Evolution of a Career.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Awesome. We are very excited to have Dongwon with us for this, the very first episode of 2020. We are doing something a little different than we've done in the past with this new season of our show. Mary Robinette, this was your idea. Can you tell us what we're doing?
[Mary Robinette] Well, we realized that the podcast is 15 minutes long, this is 15 years long at this point, and we're not that smart, but you all are. So we decided that rather than trying to come up with a topic, what we would do is go to you and see what things you wanted to know about. So we've collected a bunch of questions, and we're using them to guide the season this year. So you will not, in most cases, hear a specific question from an audience, but the topics and the questions that we're trying to answer for you have all been generated by you.
 
[Dan] One of the things that we saw a lot of, and this shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did… Maybe a third of the questions we got in were all based around career. What does a career look like as a writer, and how does it change over time, and how do you decide what you're going to do? So, since we've got Dongwon with us, we wanted to talk about the evolution of a career. How do you set goals for your career? So let's… Let me actually start with this question that I think is really interesting, and I'll throw it to Dongwon first. When you're starting to look at your writing as a career rather than just a thing that you do, how do you choose a book that is very good for early career versus one that you might want to save for later on when you're better or more established?
[Dongwon] It's kind of a tricky question. Because… The thing that I always, always, always tell people is when it comes to you picking the project that you want to work on, work on the one you're most excited about. That said, I do talk to a lot of writers who at some point will say, "I tried to do this thing and it was too big for me at this stage. I didn't know how to do this, I didn't know how to do that." So sometimes, when it comes to that first novel, and a lot of debuts… Often times, you can read a book and know that this was a first novel, that this was a debut, that this was the first thing you did. Because it has sort of a clear, sort of straightforward through line. It tends to be A to B to C. It tends to be much more straightforward, in terms of how we naturally as people tell a story. Right? So sometimes what you want to think about for that first book is keep it a little simpler, right? Don't try to do the 15 POV's with complicated tense things, complicated structure. Focus on telling the story that you already know how to tell. Tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight.
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes talk about this with my students as setting things on the easy setting. There's nothing wrong with an easy setting. Like, you can do beautiful, beautiful work if you are dealing with things that you are confident in. So sometimes I think about that, like, waiting until you have the writing chops, or picking one aspect of the novel that you're going to put on the difficult setting and everything else is well within your comfort zone. I also want to say that having a practice novel as your first novel is… There's nothing like wrong with saying I'm going to write this without the intention of publishing it. If you finish it, and you're like, "This is publishable." Potentially. Sure. But we don't say, "I have picked up the violin. I'm going to go to Carnegie Hall…"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "With the first thing that I've learned to play."
[Dan] Yeah. Well, I do want to emphasize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting yourself a challenge that is kind of beyond your level. That's how we push ourselves. That's how we learn. But I do agree that when you're sitting down and saying, "Okay, I've got a few books under my belt. I think it's time to do one that I'm going to really try to get published." Maybe back off on that difficulty level, like Mary Robinette was saying, and do something that you know you can really hit out of the park.
[Howard] Sorry. At risk of overthinking things, there is nothing in the first five years of Schlock Mercenary that I couldn't go back now and do an infinitely better job at. There are no first projects that later you is going to look at and say, "Boy, that… I really only could have written that as an early career thing. I'm not ready to write that anymore." No. You're always going to be leveling up, you're always going to be improving. There's a story in the second year of Schlock Mercenary where I start telling the story from the point of view of the bad guys, and Schlock is the monster. I decided to use marker art for it. It was all hand-lettered. I… This is me… This is in 2001, 2002, I think, that I'm telling this story. I remember thinking at the time, "Yeah. There's no way I could have told this story or illustrated this story when I was first starting out." I looked back at that now and I think I was not ready to tell that story then.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I could do such a good job with it now. But now it's done. Now I've told it. Now I can't tell that story again. There is an opportunity cost associated with that for me. But that opportunity cost is associated with everything you write. You don't get a do over. You know what? Life is grief.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Just own that. Own the fact that your first project is always forever… It's going to be your first thing. We all had to do that.
[Mary Robinette] My… So, the first novel I published, Shades of Milk and Honey, is the fourth novel that I wrote. When the UK edition came out and they asked me if I wanted to do anything different, I'm like, "Well, yes, in fact." So that novel, the UK edition is two chapters longer than the US edition because I had a better idea of how to do endings. But every novel I do is an iteration of like, learning where my weakness was. So I think that's the thing… Like, when I say do the easy setting, I don't mean for the entire novel and don't… But what I mean is pick something… Pick one area. Just one area to improve, when you're thinking. Like one area to stretch in, and focus on the things that make you… That give you joy. Chase that. Rather than doing the thing that I see a lot of writers do in their early career, they put so much effort… Focus on "I gotta have an original idea. It's gotta be original, it's gotta be new and exciting." So, as a result, the emotion that they're trying to evoke in the reader is that writer is clever. Which is… That's like wanting someone to say, "That person is funny." Instead of trying to…
[Dan] Instead of trying to make them laugh.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.
[Dongwon] One last point I want to make on this, and to contradict myself a little bit. I do really want to encourage people, though, that when it comes to writing that first book, if you have an idea and you're excited about it, and it's an ambitious project, swing for those fences, right? Like, go for the big thing. Don't go half measures. Kind of talking about Howard's point a little bit, resolve to not have a regret about it. Just do the thing! If it doesn't work out, you still learn so much in that process. Then it's on to the next book. Right?
[Dan] Yeah. Given that we've raised the specter of the opportunity cost, I do want to point out, the more you practice this, the more you do it, you're going to have better and better ideas every time. So don't worry that you're burning your best idea too early. Because 10, 20 years from now, you're going to have such better ideas than that one, and so many other cool things to do.
 
[Dan] Anyway, we are going to stop now for our book of the week. Which is actually a musical theater production of the week. We were… Mary Robinette and I were absolutely just geeking out about what turns out to be one of our shared favorite musicals of all time. Mary Robinette, what is it?
[Mary Robinette] Follies, by Stephen Sondheim. I love this musical so much. The idea is it's an old vaudeville house… Like a Ziegfeld follies kind of thing. It's shutting down, and all of the old performers are coming back for a reunion. So the whole thing is told in present day and flashbacks. You get to… They have cast present day elderly actors and their younger selves. It's a fascinat… It's like beautiful and heartbreaking. Some of the singers can't hit the high notes that they used to be able to hit anymore. But the depth of their performance is so much more. So it's… When we're talking about the evolution of a career, this thing that we had just been geeking about is a beautiful portrait of that.
[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite songs in the show is called The Story of Lucy and Jessie. Where it is a woman singing about how now she is older and more experienced and much more interesting, but she doesn't have her youth and energy, whereas the youth and energy person was such a bland, boring person that nobody wanted to talk to, and how she can never be happy because she can never combine those two parts of herself. The way that it looks at age and youth and early career and late career is stunningly cool.
[Mary Robinette] So that's Follies by Stephen Sondheim. You can find it on many different forms of media. I am a big fan of the original cast. Dan is a fan of the new cast.
[Dan] I do prefer the original cast, although the new cast does have Bernadette Peters on it. She really hits it out of the park. So. Awesome.
 
[Howard] I arranged music for an a cappella group, when I was [hhhhh] 25 years younger than I am now. They did a song called Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home. Nine guys. At the end of the song… One of the guys was a contra tenor, who just killed it. Squeaking up there in the stratosphere. Another guy who was a… one of the sons of the university's music faculty. Amazing voice. End of that song, they are scatting and noodling around. The two of them duel very briefly with notes that most of us can only admire from a great distance. It was an amazing and beautiful thing. I caught up with the other singer a few years ago, and found out that… Boy, not five years after singing that, he developed vocal nodes and could no longer perform at all. But now works as music faculty. I have the recording that I was present for, where he was… I almost have guilt, because I wonder if the things that he was doing to his voice to hit those notes that the other guy was just born to hit might have been part of the problem. But that thing that he was able to do in that portion of his career will always be with me, will always be with him. It always exists. But he had to take a different path. When we talk about the evolution of careers, we have to recognize that the path that we think that we are on, the path that we have laid out for ourselves, is not the path that we will be on 20 years from now. It is going to change. We can't hit it regret free. There will always be… I said, life is grief.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You get to grieve for the path untaken. You get to grieve the expenditure of what you thought was the best idea when you couldn't write it as well as you could now. But you also get to rejoice in where your feet are right now. You've got to be agile and keep them moving.
[Dongwon] The thing I want to say about that, though, is also there's no wasted time. You always learn from that experience. You can take so many lessons from a moment that… I'm a big believer that the only way, literally the only way we learn new things is through failure, right? You hit that wall and you learn lessons from how you hit that wall. You pick yourself back up, and then you keep moving forward. Right? So. Even if it doesn't work out, take the lessons from it, right? Examine it to see what other things you could have done, how you could have pivoted from there, and do that next time.
 
[Dan] We… I don't want to spend too much time on this specific topic, because we're going to dedicate an entire episode to it later in the year, called Rebooting Your Career. But for now, we've talked about the early stage of your career, let's talk a little then about career planning. So another question I'm going to pitch right at Dongwon. Once you've got that first book, maybe you've made your first sale you've done some self-publishing and found some success. How do you plan for the next stage?
[Dongwon] This really is one of my very favorite topics. It's one of the things I love most about my job is working with writers to help them strategize about how do we want their career to look. What are we planning for this first book, for the book after that, for the contract after that, for the contract after that? Right? So, roughly, generally with most of my clients, not necessarily everybody, with most of them, we have a sense of here's what we're doing now, here's what we're doing in five years, here's what we're doing in 10 years. Right? Now, the thing is, publishing is a system that is designed to be extremely random. Right? What makes a book work is highly unpredictable. What makes a book tank, also highly unpredictable, right? So when you're thinking about this… There's two things you need to keep in mind, is, always have a plan. Always know where you're trying to get to. But also be ready to throw that plan out the window at the drop of a hat. Often, what we're doing is, when we're planning for those decision points, right? You're looking at… We have contract one, contract two, contract three. Then, what you're doing is, at each of those junctures of when we're deciding what are we going to write next, the thing we're solving for is having options. Right? We're not solving for we will do A to B to C. What we're doing is solving for, okay, once we do this, what are the three moves we can make at that point? How do we make sure that the first move we make doesn't close doors for the next move we want to make? Right? If we get that movie deal, then we can do this. If the book sells five copies, then we can also do that. Right? So you're keeping all those things in your mind, and trying to build out a little bit of a decision tree. But you will go completely mad if you try to map the whole thing. So you pick your path, but then you're ready to know, we can pivot wherever we need to. Right?
[Mary Robinette] This is a really important point that you… Having those options open. One of the things that I see writers do at the beginning of their career is that they pin their identity and their… They brand themselves around their first project. That is, let me just say, a mistake. Because the first project is unlikely to be the first one that takes off. If George RR Martin had done that, we would all be looking… His entire brand would be vampires on a steamboat.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Because that was… Fever dream.
[Dongwon] It's a very good book.
[Mary Robinette] It's a very good book. It's not what he became known for. I did a lot of Regency stuff, but one of the things that I did, very consciously, when I was… This is, speaking of closing doors. We sat down and talked about book 2. It was a sequel. But the classic sequel in a romance is that the sister of… Or the best friend of the main character now becomes the POV character in the next book and does… It's another romance structure. We made the conscious decision not to do that, because had I done that, I would have… That would have put me on the romance path very, very firmly. I like romance, but I didn't want that to be the only thing I did. So we made the conscious decision to not do that. That's the kind of thing that you're looking for.
[Dongwon] My general rule of thumb, strategy, is you have book 1. You do book 2 in a way that's similar to book 1, either same category, similar voice, similar topic, to prove you can do it, you can do it again, and then in book 3, prove you can do something else. Right? That's generally how I think about it. It's not always that pattern, but it's why… If we're going to do a series, I like duologies, I like linked standalones, I don't like a seven book series. Right? Because if you have a seven book series, then you're trapped in that for seven years of your career at a minimum. Right? So if you're doing track… So, what you want to keep is maneuverability. You want to keep the ability to jump to something else if things go wrong. Or even if they go right, sometimes the right move is to jump to something else.
[Dan] Yeah. I want to… Excuse me. I want to jump in on this because I very specifically went maybe much farther over the line then I should have with my second project. My first thing was first person, modern day, contemporary horror. Then the second project was third person, post-apocalyptic science fiction. Multiple viewpoints instead of one, female protagonist instead of male. Like, I made it as different as I conceivably could because I wanted to not be pigeonholed. I wanted to present myself as the person who can do anything. Which has had both pros and cons. It is very difficult for a giant audience to follow me book to book. Because not everyone's interested in the same things that I am. On the other hand, I've got a historical fiction that came out last year. Everyone was like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Of course he's going to jump out of the other four genres he does into a brand-new one, because that's the brand he's established for himself."
[Mary Robinette] I looked… So, when I was… When we were first talking, it was like, "Do I want to do a Tad Williams career, where every single book is different, or do I want to do a series, genre, where you are doing a series?" I write all over the map in my short fiction. So the thing that I have been doing is I've been doing the same, but different, path. So like book 1, straight up Re… Austen pastiche, book 2 is a courtroom thriller… Or is a wartime novel, spy novel, disguised as a Regency romance. Like, the same is the set dressing and the characters. That is my same. My plot structure shifts. When I got to Ghost Talkers, I kept a plot structure that was similar to one that I had already done, and I stayed in historical, but I jumped forward by 100 years. I also knew by that point that what people liked in my books was that I had happily committed couples. So I stuck with that. With the Lady Astronaut books, it's science fiction, but it's still historical. That, again, it's like that is a very conscious choice. The book that I have coming out this year is another Lady Astronaut book, but the one that I am working on for next year is… It's straight up science fiction, but I am deliberately giving it a 1920s noir feel, in terms of the aesthetic, to retain that sense of familiarity, to make it easier. So, I think of it as leaving breadcrumbs for my readers to follow me. Which has…
[Dongwon] I mean, really what this is is having a brand.
[Dan] One of the things we talk about a lot, and that new writers hear all the time, is don't chase market trends. Don't try to write what you think people want. This advice sounds like it's the opposite of that. Because you're saying, I know what my readers like. But it's because they're your readers. You're not trying to chase an entire market. You have found your people and you are giving them what they want. Which is a very different thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I am looking at expanding out of that, because I'm like, I don't want to stay just with the historical Regency. Which, obviously, I love my Regencies. But I… Like, how do I bring science fiction in? How do I bring mainstream people in? Like, I'm trying to add each time without losing my core.
[Dongwon] I talk a lot about how all of publishing is reducible to one question. That question is, who is this book for? Right? So what you're doing isn't writing to the market. It is being very intentional about who this book is for. You know this is my current audience. I want to grow my audience. I want to push my audience to also follow me to these other places. So, sometimes when you make the big jumps, as Dan was talking about earlier, it can be hard to hang onto that audience even though you know who the audience of the new stuff is, right? So in terms of transitioning and growing, I think there are two very different strategies that can work really, really well.
[Mary Robinette] I did lose people when I didn't do the traditional romance structure for the second book.
[Dongwon] I mean, you always will, right? Because you take risks when you write a new book, otherwise, why are you writing a new book? So, there are chances you will lose people, but you will also gain people, hopefully.
[Howard] When this episode airs, I'm six months away from ending the 20 year Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. In terms of career decisions, that is a conscious decision built around… Big surprise, making money. The two words…
[Dan] That's a good career goal.
[Howard] Schlock and mercenary…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Either of those words should suggest that I'm all about the art. When you reach the… When you get to the bookshelves and you are holding something and you see that it is the first book of three, or the third book of 10, and book 4 isn't out yet… There is a group of people who won't spend money yet. Well, I'm right now, in print is book 15 out of 20. I need to be able to say, "The end." And have everything in print, because there is a group of people whose money I don't have yet.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That is…
[Dongwon] There's 10 of them. You're going to get them.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm coming after all of them at once.
[Mary Robinette] I've never bought one of your books.
[Howard] That's just fine.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, you keep giving them to me, so…
[Howard] But this… So, this decision, I need to be able to say the end. There are people who are asking me, "So, what comes next?" No matter what the answer is, there's a group of people who won't be satisfied with that. The most important person for me to satisfy right now, and Sandra and I have had this conversation several times, is me. What do I want to do next? Part of what I want to do, and this is the sort of thing that's dangerous to put on the Internet in a recorded permanent sort of format. One of the things that I would love to do is no longer be putting out a daily comic strip. Because there are things that I can't do while I have that deadline pushing down on me. But the thing that has set me apart from almost every other comic strip out there is that it has been daily and has updated without fail. So, am I sacrificing my brand in order to do the thing that I want? Or am I making the right career decision? As of this recording, I don't have a good answer to that.
[Dongwon] I mean, but this brings up a really important point, that the thing about strategy is that brands evolve. Right? They have to evolve. If you remain static over time, you don't have a strategy, you have a pattern. Right?
[Mary Robinette] My brand when I began was the puppeteer who was also Regency. Right now, it is the writer who can talk about tea in space.
[Dan] Yeah. Which, there's a huge market for that. Who knew? We… Excuse me. We have let this episode run a little long because it is the very first one and we wanted to introduce the whole year. I do want to end on the point that Howard hit on. Which is, first of all, as you're planning your career, a) make sure you have a plan, but b) make sure it's something that you love. Because otherwise, why are you doing this? Goodness knows, there's not enough money in it to make it worthwhile. But if it's something that you genuinely love to do, that is what is going to see you through everything else that happens to you.
 
[Dan] So, we want to leave you with some homework. Let's get that from Dongwon.
[Dongwon] I think the homework is, a lot of times when I talked to a writer I'm considering working with, I'll ask them this question of whose career do you wish you could have if you look out in the market today. When I asked that question, I'm not asking who do you want your books to read like. It's not about the style of the books, it's not about the voice of the books, or even the subject matter. It's look at their career. Look at how fast they publish, what kinds of book they publish, kind of who they're publishing for, are they doing YA and adult, are they doing like all different genres, categories, and things like that? So, take a look around at the market and really pick one or two authors. Really examine how have they published. What years… What was the pace of that, when did they start taking off, and those kinds of things. Consider, is that the life that I want, or do I want something else? Then that will help start helping you inform a decision about the career choices you're looking over the next year, five years, 10 years.
[Dan] I would add to that, look at the other ways they spend their time. Are they the kind of person that does a lot of news stuff, a lot of convention appearances, do they make most of their money speaking rather than on their sales? Kind of look at all of that peripheral stuff as well.
[Dongwon] Are they doing a lot of school visits? Yeah, exactly. What's their lifestyle like, too? Do you want to live that life? Right? Do they have a day job? Or, all they are, are chained to a desk, putting out books every six months?
[Dan] Awesome. Well, great. This is been a cool episode and we're excited for the rest of the year. Please join us next week when we're going to have Brandon Sanderson and our 2020 special guest, Victoria Schwab. We're going to talk about theme and subtext. It's going to be awesome. So, for now, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

Oct. 30th, 2019 01:04 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome
 
 
Key points: What do you do after you sell the first book? Or what do you do when the series did well, but... then there's a slump? You can't predict exactly what will happen. Look for decision points. At least have a sense of if this happens, I'll do this. Good or bad things! Know when to change approaches. You can stop and take time to plan! Think about multiple exit routes. You may want to balance several things, not just do one thing full-time. Think about careers you might like to emulate. Take a look at self-publishing, freelancing, write-for-hire. There are many outlets. Think about income streams. Know your bandwidth! What are your limits, both up and down. Don't get locked into one genre. Think about production schedules, think about lifestyle. What is your creative throughput, and how do you want to use it?
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 43.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Sequencing Your Career Genome.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.
 
[Howard] We're going to talk about the sequence in which you do things to plan your career, based on the kind of career that you want your career to grow up to be. I shortened that into something that sounds all science-y, but we're not going to break out the CRISPR in order to… 
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Bacterially inject your career with pieces of my [immune?].
[Dan] Oh, man. I wish you would, though. That would help me so much.
[Mary Robinette] That would be so much easier than actually trying to think about what I wanted to do.
[Dan] Yeah, genetically engineering a career instead of raising one from birth.
[Howard] I think Dongwon's headband… We wear headbands to keep these microphones on our head. Dongwon's headband actually has some of Brandon's DNA in it.
[Mary Robinette] Actually, no. I'm wearing Brandon's.
[Howard] Oh, are you wearing Brandon's headband?
[Dan] Oh, okay.
[Dongwon] We're really just going to Frankenstein into one large monster by the end of this.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] So, Dongwon, this is an episode you pitched to us. How does an author, new or established or even old, make these kinds of career plans? 
[Dongwon] Well, career planning is not a thing that we talk a lot… Talk about a lot in the industry. Especially, I don't hear it being discussed at writing conferences, and especially for new writers. In part, because you're so focused on how do I find an agent, how do I sell this first project? But the thing that I always see happen is once you sell that first book, then there's immediate pressure to have a second book. Since you spent the first 10 years of your life… Writing life, writing that first novel, now suddenly you have to produce a second book in a year. Everyone panics and runs into a very common problem, which is the second book in a series or sequel is not as good or is a much more painful process than writers really want it to be. So one thing I really like is if authors can start thinking about what they want their career to look like in the early stages. Then you can start planning for not only this book but what's next, and then what's going to come after that.
[Dan] Career planning is something that I wish I had known more about when I got started in this process. Because I feel like I did a pretty good job of the first one. I had a series. My second series actually hit the New York Times list. I thought I was doing pretty well, and then hit a slump. I had not planned ahead for it, I had not planned for it, creatively, emotionally, or financially. If I had had… If I had known then what I know now about how to plan ahead and look further into the future, it would have been so much easier to avoid that, to avoid kind of just relying on the publishing industry to stay consistent, which it never does. I know now that, okay, if I have more irons in more fires, and branching out into a… More forms, more mediums, more outlets for my fiction, then it would have been so much easier at that time to kind of navigate that when it happened.
 
[Dongwon] One thing I want to sort of reinforce as we talk about this is this isn't about having perfect predictive abilities, right? It's not about clarity about what exactly is going to happen when you publish your second book or your second series or your fifth series or whatever it is. It's the fact that the publishing industry, like many businesses, but especially media businesses, is extremely random. What happens from one book to the next book could be affected by anything from… I think Mary's talked about this in the past. Your book coming out the week of a disastrous election result, or there could be natural disasters, or I had a recent issue where one of the publishers ran out of paper, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] What?
[Dongwon] These are apparently things that could happen. I mean, this has been resolved, it's fine.
[Howard] That's the last time he prints a book on the skins of small children, but… 
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] But that's how you summoned the demons, Howard, and the demons are how you make mon… Anyway, sorry.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Alex, we're [templating] this.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] So, keep in mind, career planning isn't necessarily about here's I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C. Career planning is looking at decision points. In two books, I'm going to have to make a decision. Do I stay with this publisher or do I go to a different publisher? Do I stay in this genre, do I go to a different genre? Do I write a sequel to this series or do I come up with something new? What you want to do is have some sense at least… You don't have to have a super concrete plan, but some sense of okay, if this happens, if the good outcome happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this book tanks and nobody ever buys it, here's what I'm going to do. In part, having a plan in place when you hit the wall, when the bottom falls out of something, means that you're not also going to collapse with it. You're going to have a plan in place, or at least an outline of a plan, and be able to recover and continue to build to something new. Or, on the flipside, when your thing blows up and there suddenly 10,000 people clamoring for your attention, you're not going to panic and die, because you'll have a plan. You'll have already started that next book in the series that suddenly has a huge demand and a huge audience for it.
[Howard] I have two examples here, both from my own life. One when we first started going full-time with Schlock Mercenary. We established a trigger point at which Howard was going to go look for a day job. The trigger point was when we have paid the bills for two months using credit cards. Because that is the point at which we are no longer realistically financially planning things. We are living on the blind hope that some payday is coming down the road, and we have failed to bring the money in the way we meant to, and we must now do something else. I can't… I cannot overemphasize that to you. Knowing when… Quit is the wrong word, but knowing when to get off this bus…
[Mary Robinette] To change gears.
[Howard] To change gears, to take a different route. That is… It saves lives. The second… When we did the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter. It funded in like a minute and a half, and overfunded through the first two stretch goals within 15 minutes. What I posted was, "Wow. Thank you for your enthusiasm. We are flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Sandra and I are now going to take 24 hours in which to reconsider our plans for the rest of this project, because you want it more than we expected you to. Forgive us for being silent during that time. We don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but we also don't want to fail to deliver after having funded." That's the mistake that most commonly gets made. That thing that I said got quoted dozens of times through the Kickstarter marketplace as people realized, oh, my gosh, they ran up against something they didn't know how to plan for, and they told us that they were going to go plan. That is so smart.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] There's the old saying that when a door closes, a window opens, or something along those lines. It… In my experience, it really helps if you go and make sure that the window's unlocked and maybe put a stick under it so that it's propped open.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] So when that door slams shut, you have another exit route. Right? Like those… So, belt and suspenders is a really useful thing. If you start thinking about what are your exits from this room, then you won't end up trapped in it forever.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that a lot of writers think, "Oh, someday I want to write full-time." This is when we're talking about career planning. Is that something you want to do? Because writing full-time means being a freelancer. So that exit strategy thing… That's something that I've had to do for my entire adult career. My goal has been to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. That is… When I reach those cusp points, it's like, well, I can write this. But it's a project I don't want to do. Is that going to push me down a path where I'm going to have to keep doing that kind of project, because I am now reliant on that income stream? Or do I pick this other path which will allow me to find different income stream sources? So I feel like… That's when you're talking about not just the door shutting, but it's like, do you want to go out the window? What are the choices you want to be making to get closer to the career you want to have? Like, I don't actually want to write full-time. I want a career where I'm balancing puppetry and audiobooks and writing. Because I enjoy all three of those. But I want to do the audiobooks I want to do. I want to write the books I want to write. I don't want to have to go do ghostwriting just because I want to be a full-time writer.
[Dan] Well, we've actually had that conversation about Writing Excuses as well. The four core podcasters sitting down to say, "How big do we want to let this thing get?" We've actually made some decisions where we turned down opportunities because it would have taken up too much of our time, and therefore too much of our lives, and kind of locked us into a path that took away some of our freedom to do other things.
[Howard] I will make very, very different decisions if I'm trying to be a full-time podcaster versus if I'm willing to let Dongwon be the smart one. Not that that was a choice that I was making.
 
[Howard] On that subject, we're talking about, in part, scheduling and time. Dongwon, I think you have a book to pitch for us that has time right in the title?
[Dongwon] I would, and it does have time in the title. I would like to pitch This is How You Lose the Time War, which is a book that is co-written by Amal el Mohtar, which you guys know from the podcast, and Max Gladstone. They wrote this book together as a… As an epistolary novel, so it is letters exchanged from one character to the other character. The two characters are rival agents in a war that is fought through time as the title implies, and they both represent two possible futures. They are trying to affect things that happened down the threads to make sure that their future is the one that wins. It is slightly possible that these two characters, as they engage in this brutal, bloody battle that sets civilizations on fire and conducts massive battles in space, that they might start to have some feelings for one another, and maybe that will go somewhere. I'm just saying it's a possibility.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
 
[Howard] So. What are some careers that we've seen that we would like to emulate? I think… Well, one of the ones I think of is… I panned one of his books because it wasn't actually one of his books. James Patterson, who writes everything. But I haven't actually done any research to find out how he made that work. My kids love the Maximum Ride books. But that isn't all that he does. Are there authors whose careers you've looked at that you love?
[Dongwon] One of the first questions I ask, whenever I'm looking at signing a client… I like to have a phone call with that writer. The question that I asked them, and it stymies them about half of the time. But it's always an interesting conversation, is, if you could have the career of any author in the marketplace, whose career would you want? I'm not asking what do your books… What kind of books do you want to write, in terms of the craft or the style. But, in terms of the publishing cycle, how many series they do, who their books are bought by like who their audience is? That answer's going to be really different if that person is Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire, even though they write in some ways very similar things about magic in our contemporary world. But their careers look extremely different.
[Dan] I want whichever career means I don't have to work. But still get paid for it. Whose career is that?
[Dongwon] I mean, that's a really important question. Mary was talking… Mary Robinette was talking about this a little bit earlier, in terms of do you want to write so that you don't have to have a day job? If you're not going to have a day job, that usually means you're going to have to publish more frequently or publish… Or get bigger book deals than you would in another situation. So, the way you get bigger book deals involves a slightly different strategy that if you want to publish once a year in a sort of a series-oriented format. Right? There's different ways you can optimize. You take bigger bets. You take wider shots, or longer shots, than you would if you had a reliable income and you wanted to be doing something that had a reasonable readership, but not necessarily needing to shoot the moon on every book.
[Dan] As you're thinking about what kind of career you want as well, almost everything we've been talking about in this episode is traditional publishing. There's so many more options than that outside of it. There's so much self-publishing stuff. There's so much… And we have talked about freelancing, and write for hire. There's so many outlets for you to find work in. Choosing which one of those you want to use, and if you are saying no to an income stream, can you afford to say no to it? Are you willing to put in the work to rely on the other income streams? Making these decisions ahead of time so that you know what you're getting yourself into and how to make it work.
[Howard] There's a…
[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, that's one of the reasons that I don't self publish. Because I don't want to be a publisher, which is me turning down a gig I don't want to do. That's not anything about whether or not it's a… That's a personal choice about where I want to be spending my time and energy.
[Howard] There's a writer, illustrator, teacher who I… Whose career I admire. Jim Zub. He studied animation, went into like project management and sales for a company that was selling art cycles to the big three comic publishers to say we can take over on this issue for this title so you don't slip your dates. Then they kind of became their own publisher. He went from that… He did a web comic for a while. He went goo goo over… Or gaga, I guess, over Neil Gaiman when he accidentally met him at a party and Neil said, "Hi. My name's Neil. I'm a writer." Jim was like, "Oh. That's what I want to be. That's… I want that level of humility that is absolutely not required because I'm that guy." He now writes, I think, half a dozen titles per month for Marvel plus some of his old work, and is regarded by many people as one of the hardest working writers in comics. When I met him as a web cartoonist, that is not the career plan I envisioned for him. That's not my job. I don't know how much of this he planned, but he kept his job as an instructor at Seneca University, because, like Mary, he wants to have more than just the one thing.
[Dongwon] One thing that's really important, though, is you need to have a really clear self-assessment of what your bandwidth is. Right? What I see so many times, and you're describing someone who is very hard-working, but he also has the capacity to do that. A lot of people simply don't. It's okay if you only write 30,000 words a year. Right? It's okay to write a novel every two years, three years. You can still build a career out of that. What you can't do is build a career of somebody who writes a book a year when that something you're not going to be able to do. The more you can be aware of what your limits are, in both directions. I've also seen writers take on writing 500-600,000 words a year, and really skirt that line of burnout and risk not being able to deliver on a number of deadlines, which would be disastrous for their career. So, what you need to do is have a really clear-eyed sense of what can I actually do, and then experiment within that to make sure that those are your limits, or maybe you actually can write more than you think you can. Or, oh, this feels like too much, the quality is starting to slip. I need to back off of that little bit. Those are all really important questions you need to ask yourself, and have a really clear sense of what your process is. Then you can build a career around it. There's no wrong answers to that question. Some might be easier than others, but the most important part is you are realistic about what your goals and what your bandwidth actually is.
[Mary Robinette] The time to do this is when you are early in your career. Like, a very deliberate choice that I did make with my career was that I wrote in a bunch of different genres. Because I had seen often enough a friend sell a book and then get locked into that genre. It just happened to be the first book that they sold. Like, the book that I wrote before Shades of Milk and Honey was a science-fiction murder mystery. The book that I wrote after Shades of Milk and Honey was an urban fantasy. But Shades is the one that sold. After that… We finished that series, the decision that Tor made was we wanted to have me try a bunch of standalone to see what hit. So when you're thinking about what kind of a career do you want to have and who do you want to emulate, you're not thinking about the genre that they're writing in. What you're thinking about is their production schedule, you're thinking about the lifestyle that they live. That's the kind of thing you're thinking about, not the genre.
[Dongwon] Often, how many careers are they maintaining at once? Are they a comics writer, a YA novelist, an adult novelist, and a screenwriter all at the same time? I know people who do that, and they do it very well. That may not be you, if you have a really demanding full-time job, or you just don't have that much creative throughput in any given day.
 
[Howard] That brings us around beautifully to the homework. Identify an author whose career you would like to emulate. Research their career timeline, including the release dates of their books. That's pretty easy. Possibly, the order in which these things were written, and maybe actually the things, the order in which these things were actually sold. Who were their editors? Who is their agent? Look at all of this, and try and give yourself an accurate picture of what goes into that thing that you want to be or have. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.34: Author Branding

Aug. 28th, 2019 02:27 pm
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Writing Excuses 14.34: Author Branding
 
 
Key Points: Branding, or making you and your product identifiable. How do you define your brand, how do you control it? Think about Hamburger Helper! What are the expectations, what kind of relationship do you have? What is the public persona you want to have? Separate your private person from your public persona. It's a version of you, but selected. Think about what happens if you become famous. Be careful to build a brand that is big enough for the range that you want to work on. Think about a career brand, with series and book brands. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 34.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Author Branding.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
 
[Howard] We are talking about branding.
[Mary Robinette] Not Brandon.
[Howard] Not Brandon.
[Dan] Not Brandon.
[Howard] He's not even in the room, because that would make it too hard to keep the words straight, because I always swallow the ing.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Branding. I came from a marketing background. When we talked about branding, it was always huge, and we always tried to break it down into pieces that were easy to assimilate. I can't imagine it being any different in the publishing world.
[Dongwon] One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is when I talk to writers, they treat branding as this taboo word. Right? If you say branding, then suddenly you've violated some sacred trust.
[Mary Robinette] It's supposed to be about the art!
[Dongwon] The Muses have now abandoned you and you'll never write again.
[Mary Robinette] The Muses are fictional.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] They have excellent branding. The reason I want to talk about it is because it's unavoidable. If you are publishing books, if you are asking people to go to the bookstore or go to the Internet and pay money for your words, you are already a brand. There's no way to escape it. Whether you find that to be a dark apocalypse or a blissful mercantile utopia is irrelevant, because you have to live in it. So the more you can understand how branding works and what your role is in defining your brand and controlling your brand, the more you're going to be able to build a brand that you're happy with, you're comfortable with, and that is sustainable for you over the course of your career.
 
[Howard] A good way to examine this for those who just don't like the idea of a brand is to consider the grocery store. There are many people who have a favorite box dinner, like Hamburger Helper or Zatarain's or something. And there are folks who say, "Oh, that's terrible for you. You shouldn't buy those branded goods. You should go get fresh fruits and vegetables." Okay. When I walk into the grocery store, and I look at the fresh fruits and vegetables, that is the brand that I am looking for. It doesn't come in a box. It was fresh. Doesn't have to have a sticker on it that says what the brand is. But there is a judgment that I have premade for this thing that I am looking for. As an author, yeah, you can tell yourself you don't want to be a box dinner, you want to be more like a fresh fruit and vegetable. That's still a brand.
[Dongwon] To put it in publishing terms, you'll often have people who will say, "Oh, I don't want to be a brand, I want to be like this authentic author." The David Foster Wallace's of the world. Right? Somebody who's a curmudgeon, somebody who doesn't participate in the system. I hate to break it to you, but that is their brand. It's extraordinarily well defined and extraordinarily effective. You will find someone who… You won't find a writer who is better branded than David Foster Wallace was.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you guys are kind of hitting on that I just want to break out a little bit is that what we're talking about here is expectations and relationship. These are the two things that you are manipulating when you're manipulating a brand. So when we talk about going to your favorite coffee shop, you don't go there because they have the best coffee in the city. Like, the one you go to over and over again. Every now and then, depending on who you are… And those of you who I know are serious coffee drinkers, I apologize. But… 
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The point being that frequently the reason you go to this coffee shop is because of a barista. Or because of the staff, and they recognize you, and that it feels like there's a relationship. This is one of the things that encourages brand loyalty, why you keep going back. Why, often, you will go to someplace where it's not the best coffee in the city. That it's because of that relationship. So, as an author brand, a lot of what you're doing is building the relationship with your reader. Then, the other aspect of it is their expectations. Giving them a sense of what that relationship is going to be like, what sort of experience they're going to have. So, like the fresh fruit experience is very different from the boxed dinner experience. Both of which are valid, and both of which have audiences that appeal to them. But you want to know which one… Where you're landing. So, like, I have the puppeteer brand. That tells people a little bit about the kind of expect… You can reliably expect that at least once an episode, I am going to talk about puppetry at some point. But the other thing that I have is that I'm open about aspects of my personality. Like, I'm open about the fact that I have depression. These are… This is part of the relationship. But I'm also… There are things about my life that I don't talk about. So you can have an authentic open honest relationship with your… As part of your brand, and not have to word vomit your entire emotional experience.
[Dongwon] One important thing to think about, and this is one of the differences between having a personal brand versus a corporation having a brand. Right? Those do operate slightly differently. Is, as a person, really what you're branding is having a good set of boundaries. What you're going to start doing is drawing lines around certain things that you're comfortable talking about in public with your fans and certain things that are only for you and your close personal friends. Once you are a published author, you are no longer just a person. You are now a person and a public persona at the same time. Knowing when you're talking to a person, if they have expectations of the public persona version of you or the actual you is really important. When I see this relationship go awry, when I see fans get their feelings hurt, or when I see other writers interacting in a way that ends up causing drama, it is often around this disconnect. So having a crystal clear idea of what is you, what do you keep for yourself versus what do you put out into the world is going to help you manage that and make being a public persona much more sustainable for you, and much less taxing when you're at a con or online or whatever it is.
 
[Dan] On that note, it's important, I think, especially for an author, when it's just one person instead of a corporation, you're not so much defining a brand-new identity for yourself as you are defining a version of the self that already exists. I… My brand is basically me, but slightly flavored for the Internet or whatever. It's not an entirely different person that I have to think of and then maintain constantly. That's more work than you need to put into this.
[Dongwon] You just find the murderer within and put it on stage.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Part of what you're describing here is a compartmentalization. In 2004… 2003, I think, I was still working at Novell, and I was briefing a bunch of salespeople. I was the hard-hitting, knows all the facts, project manager. I was managing an audience full of people who were really kind of hostile, because the salespeople don't always want to sell what it is that you've made. You need to convince them to do that. At the end of the presentation, one of the guys came up to me and said, "So. My son read stuff on the Internet." I said, "Oh. Okay. Yeah. I'm the same guy." "No. Hear me out. He reads this comic strip and he says it's by a guy who works at Novell." "Yeah, I'm the same guy." "No, hear me out. It's this guy, he's named Howard." I'm like, "Dude. It's me." He stopped for a moment and stared at me, like, it can't be you. That was where I realized that my brand as a cartoonist was incredibly different from my brand as a guy who is talking to the salespeople. To the point that this person couldn't even imagine that I was the same person. Do I feel two-faced for that? Not really. Because I had two different jobs. I'm the same guy doing both of them. That was one of the first points where I realized that I never wanted the brand of me as a project manager to be the person that people see as the cartoonist. Because the project manager was the designated jerk.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's not the guy I want to be.
[Dongwon] But one thing I want to point out there is that both were authentically you. Right?
[Howard] Yes.
[Dongwon] Therefore, both are sustainable almost indefinitely, right? You may not want to sustain the angry project manager guy because that sounds exhausting after a certain point in time, but it's really important that you aren't constructing a totally artificial brand. If your brand is the exact opposite of your personality, you might be able to sustain that for a few years, but at some point, it's going to start breaking down, and just the mental effort it's going to take to keep that up online every day or in newsletters or personal appearances, it's going to be very draining. It's very important to try and make sure that when you're choosing your brand and you're developing it, you're making choices that are really organic to you.
 
[Howard] I've got the book of the week. I got to read… About a year ago, I got to read Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone. I've been waiting for this thing to hit the streets ever since then, because I was so excited by it. It is like post-singularity space opera launched by a near future sci-fi thriller. That twist where we make the shift from the near future thriller to the post-singularity was beautiful. I mean, it wasn't seamless because I'm like, "Well, that was abrupt." But it is beautiful. I loved loved loved loved loved this book. It is… I don't need to say anything about it other than that. Max Gladstone and Empress of Forever. When I was tweeting with some of my author friends about it, I'm like, "Oh, I just got to read this thing by Max." The response was, "Uh. Oh, that thing with the Empress? Oh, that thing! Oh, that thing." Nothing but enthusiasm. My friends, you need to get this book. Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I'm just going to say as a counter to creating a brand is that it is actually possible to create a brand that is artificial. The person I'm thinking of is Gail Carriger, who's open about the fact that she has created a persona as her author persona. There are absolutely personality traits that are completely in line with the real person. But the physical nature of the brand, the choice in clothing, the set dressing, the costuming of the brand is different than the real person. That was a conscious choice, because she wanted to be able to go to conventions and go incognito. So while it would be lovely if this was a concern that all of us had that what happens if I become famous… It is actually a thing to think about. Like, what happens if you become famous? Because George R. R. Martin can no longer move through space without anyone saying, "[gasp] You're George R. R. Martin!"
[Howard] He must traverse now with a bodyguard of sorts. A handler.
[Dan] That can be something as complicated as what Gail does, and you're absolutely right. I should have thought about her earlier. Or it can be something as simple as I wear my hat. In Latin America, which is the only market in which I get recognized on the street, I can take that hat off and turn invisible and nobody knows who I am. Then put it back on and be recognized. I did want to talk about a problem that you can have with branding. I'll use myself as an example. But first, I'm going to use… I'm going to go back to Hamburger Helper, which is where Howard started us off. So let's imagine the beginning of Hamburger Helper. I don't know what the first flavor they had was, but I'm going to pretend like it's stroganoff.
[Howard] I think it was helper flavor.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Let's say that some guy invented this cool stroganoff thing, and he's like, "Oh, I can sell this. People can make it in their homes for dinner, and it'll be great." He could have decided that he was just going to be the best stroganoff for dinner guy in the world. But what he… He took the time to look at it and say, "Actually, no. What I want to be is the person who helps you make your own dinner, regardless of the flavor." So he focused his brand in that direction instead, and Hamburger Helper now represents much more than that initial stroganoff idea.
[Howard] In terms of brand, it's not just that. It's that when you are buying hamburger, which is a thing that you might be buying anyway, and which comes in all kinds of grades, and maybe you're making burgers and maybe you're making tacos, and I don't know what you're making with it, you go out to buy hamburger. Hamburger Helper is a thing that you know will go with this thing you just bought, because it's right there in the name. They put that in the brand. It's are there ways for you as an author to create a brand that is similarly associative?
[Dan] When I started, I branded myself wholly around my first published novel. My first Twitter handle was John Cleaver who was the character in the book. I was that guy. I was the John Cleaver horror guy. And very quickly realized no. I want my career to be so much more than this one character and this one series, and had to rebuild my brand, let's say three years into my career, so that I could encompass the much wider range of stuff I wanted to work on.
[Howard] Can I… Oh, go ahead, Dongwon.
 
[Dongwon] Just to the point there. Branding is a very tricky thing. Because what you want to do is have your own career brand. Then, underneath that, you need to make a bunch of smaller brands for each book or each series that you're doing. At this point, Mary's maintaining four or five different brands, in addition to her career brands, which is actually two or three brands put together. Right? If you map it out that way, it can feel enormously complex. This is part of why I encourage make your brands as natural feeling as possible, because it's easier to maintain a bunch of them at once, because they're different parts of you and they're different parts of your work. Then, you'll have structured ways you can talk about each series, structured ways you can talk about each book. But when you're thinking about your personal brand, your author brand, Dan's absolutely right. If you tie it to one book or one series, then immediately when it comes to transition to the next thing, you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble and having to rebuild more than you would want to at that point in your career.
[Mary Robinette] Let me use Calculating Stars actually as a quick example of what you're talking about with the managing of the brand. I am picking aspects of Calculating Stars to put forward that are the things I'm already interested in. So I have a character who's a mathematician. She's a woman in STEM and working in rocketry. Woman in STEM and rocketry, super excited about math… I really don't care. I'm terr… It's not… I think it's a wonderful thing, but it's not something that I have any personal enthusiasm or passion for. So when I am pushing my brand, my Calculating Stars brand, the stuff that I put out on social media, the stuff that I'm super interested in… Like, saying, "Look, I'm at NASA. I'm looking at rockets. Look at this really interesting woman in STEM." You will… If you look at my Twitter stream, I don't think I've ever tweeted anything about look at this cool math thing. Because I'm sure that they're out there. But I don't understand them. It's… So it is, again, you can make something of a brand that is still an authentic representation of you, while being part of that sub brand.
 
[Howard] I'd like to try something that might not work. But I want to try it anyway. The four of us sitting here. Do you have a short description of one of our brands? I'll go first. Mary Robinette. Didn't see it coming, historically accurate, makes me cry.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Huh. Nice. I'll take that. Which is funny, because I would say happily married couple for myself is a core part of… Or happy relationship.
[Howard] This is me speaking as a consumer of your books. Not necessarily is someone who knows you personally. Because the brand is expanded for me.
[Mary Robinette] Nonono. But that… For my books, that is the thing. Happily married couple. That is the thing that… I feel like that is one of the things that you're signing up for when you pick up one of my books is that there is a committed relationship someplace in there. Yeah, that's an interesting exercise. Like…
[Howard] Anybody else want to try it? I had more time to think about it.
[Mary Robinette] I would have if you had warned me.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah, I don't think I can do it off the top of my head.
[Mary Robinette] So, my brand for Howard. Jerkface McJerkface.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Mic drop. Comic drop. Excuse me, comic drop. Cartoons.
[Howard] You know, you said you didn't like math.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But that… The math checks out.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] For Dan, I mostly have murder and hat.
[Mary Robinette] Not…
[Garbled]
[Dongwon] It's murder and hat. It's not a murder hat. It's not like the Dexter outfit.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's what you think.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] It's very hard to get blood out of leather.
[Dan] It does underline something I've talked about before, which is the trouble that I sometimes have trying to sell science fiction. Because I went in so solidly on that horror brand when I started. Like I said, about three years in, I had to rebuild it. I am still in the process of rebuilding it.
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things, having seen other people do that, with my first series, that was one of the reasons that I did a different elemental genre with each novel while I maintained the same set dressing. So that I could try to train people that look, I can write more than one thing.
[Dan] Well, Brandon's not here. But I'm going to confuse Howard by talking about Brandon's branding. We often, on the podcast, when we are behind the scenes planning out what guests we want to have, we'll talk about getting someone who's in YA. Mary Robinette and I will both say, "Oh, that's great, because we need more YA." Then Brandon will be like, "I've got three different best-selling YA series." But nobody thinks of him like that. He's the epic fantasy guy.
[Dongwon] Which is both the power and peril of a brand. A brand can be limiting in some ways. As Dan is pointing out with his work and with Brandon's, sometimes it can be hard to break out of that if your brand is very strong. That said, you have the upside of you have a strong brand, which is in the category of good problems to have. Doesn't make it not a problem, but it does mean that you have already taken up mind share among a group of readers, and that's a great place to be.
[Howard] Can I do Dongwon?
[Dongwon] Do it. I'm dying.
[Howard] Okay. Knows everybody I know.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Knows people I didn't know were even people. Can sell any of them anything.
[Mary Robinette] You left out fabulous dresser.
[Dan] That's true.
[Dongwon] I'll take it.
[Howard] That is… I was just picking three.
[Mary Robinette] I know, but…
[Dan] He's the only one of us… We wear these stupid headbands when we record. His actually matches his outfit. And it's not even fair.
[Mary Robinette] What's amazing…
[Dongwon] I would say Mary kindly gave me the one that matched my outfit. I could have ended up with that orange one.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. No, you couldn't have, not while I was in the room.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] Okay. So you've just seen us struggle with this exercise. It is not easy. I believe Mary Robinette has some homework for us for you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Time to do some soul-searching. You need to identify your brand. For this, what I want you to think about is the aspects, the core aspects, of your personality that you don't mind highlighting for the public. The things that… It doesn't have to be your entire personality. Like, focus on three things. If you look at my bio, I say puppeteer, author, and… Audiobook narrator. Like, what was my third thing?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Those are three jobs. Right? But I could… You could also define my brand as historical fantasy, mentor, and theater person. You can pick three things and figure out what you want to do. But pick at least three. Pick, like, your three major things. Make sure that they're things that you are… Topics that you're passionate about, that you will probably be passionate about for your entire life. Make sure they're not a transitory passion. Try to find something that is a passion that is not strictly tied to your books. You will notice that in the things that I listed, I did not list Regency although I love it. I did not list space, although I love it. I did not list World War I, although I love that too. It was a bad time, but still…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The point being, pick things… Pick three core aspects of your personality that you want to highlight, three core things that you're passionate about that you want to highlight that are not directly related to your work.
[Howard] Thank you very much. The bar has been set pretty high, and you watched us fail to clear it. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent

Jun. 27th, 2019 10:43 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent
 
 
Key points: Your agent works for you. You have a choice, make it a good one. Think about who you want to work with, who is going to be the right business partner in the long run. Someone who can help you run your business. Who do you want as part of your brand? Make sure they can do a good job. Look at online resources, talk to your network. Ask the agent to talk to their other authors. You may need to change agents as your career changes, or their career changes. Keep the lines of communication open, talk about goals, figure out what you both need. To find an agent, look for authors who have a similar communication style, and talk to them about their agents! Think about someone who can fill in your weak spots. Check which genres the agent works in, and what level of editorial involvement you want. What communications style, how frequent do you want contact? Remember, charisma is not a dump stat. Consider the Kowal relationship axes, mind, manners, money, morals… Murder! Or the Marx Brothers.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 25.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Choosing Your Agent.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
 
[Howard] Dongwon is joining us again. This is his third episode with us. Dongwon, I understand that you have spent some time working as an agent.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] I have. I actually started my career as an agent, and then wandered off for many years doing other tasks in the industry, and have come back to being an agent in the past 3 and a 1/2 years now.
[Howard] Well, this morning, we had the opportunity to hear you talk about the publishing business. One of the parts that was most interesting to me was that opening salvo of choosing your agent and what that relationship ends up looking like.
[Dongwon] One thing I like to talk about a lot is making it really clear to writers that your agent works for you. If you're in the query trenches right now, the power dynamic feels very weighted towards the agent's side. You're trying to get their attention, you're trying to get someone to pay attention to you and make an offer of representation. But one of the things I like to really drive home is once that offer of representation has been made, the power dynamic completely inverts. Now, what the agent wants is for you to choose them. One of the reasons that we chose this phrasing for the episode title is the idea that you have a choice in this relationship is a really important one. It's one that I think a lot of writers lose sight of, because they're just so focused on getting an agent, any agent. Instead, what I'd like people to do is start thinking very carefully about who they want to work with. Who's going to be the right business partner to them over the course of their career? Ideally, an author-agent relationship will go on for years, and hopefully decades. Optimally, it's the course of both of your careers. You need to think carefully about who you're going to be working with over that period of time, and who you want to be helping you run your business.
[Mary Robinette] This is… I want to say, something that I stumbled on, you've heard me talk about on previous episodes, where my first… My very first agent was not a good agent. We often people say, "A bad agent is worse than no agent." The concrete thing that I had happened was that my first agent… I was… I had warning flags that went off. But it was an agent, and they were excited about my work. I had heard so much about how difficult it was to get an agent. So, even though I had some warning flags that this person might be flaky, I went ahead and signed. What happened was they sat on my novel for a year without sending it out. That was a year in which it was ready. So this was a… actively holding me back. The other thing that can happen with a bad agent, or with an agent who's… This is… These are people who are just like not good at their job, is that if they try to sell your work incompetently to a publishing house, and then you leave them and you come back, it's going to be very difficult to sell that same title later.
[Howard] That's the… There's a principle here that… It's a broader business principle, harkening back to, Dongwon, what you said earlier about you're choosing a business partner. This business partner is carrying your authorial brand as the flag when they march into the office. If they misbehave, if they do a bad job with the pitch, if they happen to be somebody that's for whatever reason, that editorial team, publishing team, just really doesn't like having in the room…
[Mary Robinette] That one actually is less of an issue, because, as long as they've got good taste…
[Howard] As long as they've got good taste. But you just know that whoever you are picking, a portion of who they are ends up as part of your brand, at least to the editors and publishers.
[Dongwon] A lot of the industry's interaction with you will be filtered through your agent. So if your agent has a certain reputation, has a certain way of operating, that is going to influence how people see you. It's not entire. You will have your own brand, and, I know, many writers have the opposite reputation of their agents. But Howard is absolutely right, that in those initial contacts, those initial meetings, that would definitely color it. So, sort of… The first step in choosing an agent is don't choose someone who's bad at their job. This last year, there were… Have been a couple sort of highly publicized incidents of agents who turned out to be acting against their own writers' interests. That's been a very challenging moment. My heart goes out to all of those writers. It can be hard to spot that person. There's some online resources that you can use to check out, like query tracker or query shark, but really, your best defense is having a good network. Talking to your friends, making friends with other writers, and asking around about somebody's reputation before you make a decision to go forward with them.
[Dan] You're also well within your rights to ask that agent if you can talk to some of their other authors. I get a lot of requests from my agent, "Hey, could you talk to this person? I would like to acquire their book." I'm always happy to recommend my agent. If you get an agent whose authors are not happy to recommend her, maybe stay away.
[Howard] Are you still with the agent you were with a year ago?
[Dan] Yes. Sarah Crowe. She's amazing.
 
[Mary Robinette] So I just… I actually just changed agents in the last year. The reason I did that was not because I had a bad agent. My agent was very good. But my career trajectory was such that I needed a different type of agent than I did at the beginning of my career. So the thing that was happening with my career trajectory was… The reason that I felt like I needed someone who was a little more aggressive, was that I was in the downward spiral. This happens to a number of writers in the course of their career, that there's what they call the death… The series' death spiral. So I'd had that happen. Then I had a novel that came out, and my book tour began on election day in 2016, which was a fraud year regardless of where you were. Book sales generally were declining. But when people are looking at your numbers, they don't look at the current events that are going on around it. They just look at the numbers. So I needed someone who was more aggressive. It was a difficult choice, because it would have been easier if my agent was doing things that were actively wrong. That wasn't the case. It was just I needed a different style. This is one of the things that I think you have to… While it's ideal to have an agent that stays with you over the course of your career, it's also important to know kind of what you need going into it.
[Howard] That is… And again, coming back to the general principle of business partners, there is this point of diminishing returns between what I need out of a new agent, what I lose if I don't switch, and the cost of switching. It's easy for us… in crossing that chasm, it's easy for us to overestimate the size of the peril, and just, out of fear of changing, stay in the same place.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] It's difficult.
[Dongwon] Many, many writers will have multiple agents over the course of their careers. There's nothing… There's no inherent problem to that. Like any long-term relationship, what you need out of it will change over time. It's also important to remember that your agent is also not a fixed point. They're evolving in their career as well, and how they operate, what circumstances they're in, what agency they're at, all those things can shift and change over time. Those changes will impact, and impact how the business operates. So it's very important to keep that line of communication open, and be talking about your goals, and are they being met in this relationship or not, and then figure out what you need out of that.
[Mary Robinette] That was very much the case with my agent, my previous agent, was that they had had a promotion at work, and were suddenly handling more things than they had been. So the attention that they were able to give to individual authors was shifting. Like, none of us were being neglected, it was just the communication style had changed. The aggression, I think, had shifted, or at least my perception of it. So that was one thing that was also going on there, was that a change in my agent's life as well.
 
[Howard] Let's take a quick break and talk about a book. Dongwon?
[Dongwon] Yeah. This week, I want to talk about Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars. This is Sarah Gailey's debut novel, coming out from Tor Books. It should have just come out on June Fourth. It is a murderer-mystery set at a magical school for teenagers. It is not a young adult novel. It is a very adult novel about a woman who is called in to investigate a murder of a faculty member at this school. The protagonist's twin sister also is a teacher at this school. As you would have it, that sister is magic and she is not. She needs to figure out what happened and unpack this really gruesome murder and figure out why teenagers are so goddamned terrifying.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Especially when they have magic powers.
[Howard] Okay. As the father of two current teenagers, I would love to know the answer to that question.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. I'm a big fan of Sarah's. Their cowboy hippopotamus books.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Loved those so much.
 
[Howard] Okay. I want to talk about your toolbox as an author. I'm big on the toolbox metaphor. What are the tools that authors have at their disposal to start searching for agents who meet their criteria?
[Mary Robinette] We've talked about a couple of them on previous podcasts. The advice that I'm often given… Had been given and often give is to pay attention to what authors are happy with their agents. Specifically, looking for authors… There's… We always are told to look at the authors whose work is similar. But I actually think you should also try to look at the author… Authors whose process is similar. Because that's going to be people with whom you have a similar communication style. I'm going to continue using myself as a useful representative example. When I left my previous agent and moved on, because of where I am in my career and I am… I do have multiple Hugos. I am marketable. I had the good fortune of having a couple of choices. I was doing due diligence, and I went into it expecting that at the end of having done due diligence that I would be signing with Dongwon. I was just like, "But I'm going to check with some other people just in case."
[Howard] Oh, she went there.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I cleared it… I cleared this with him before, before we got into it. It was a really hard choice. Because, like the authors that he represents are people that I like, there people that I have a lot in common with. I think he's wicked smart, and there were all these different things. When it finally came down to, Dongwon and Seth Fishman, who is my agent now, was I realized that what I needed was someone who filled my weaknesses. The difference between their agenting styles, in a lot of ways, they're both very good with developmental stuff and things like that, but Dongwon is about building relationships, and Seth is a shark.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And…
[Dongwon] I'm a nice shar… No.
[Mary Robinette] I know. Well, that's the thing. It's like you're the nursemaid shark. He's… There is nothing…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But it was basically, I was, like I'm good at relationships. That's not the spot that I need bolstering. So both of them would have been a good choice, but it was really about learning what I needed. It's quite possible that that is what I needed early in my career as well, but I didn't know myself as well, as an author and what my process and how I was going to fit into the industry was. So when you're looking at the toolbox, it's important, yes, to be able to find the agent, but just knowing a list of agent's names is not as useful as knowing what it is you need out of the agents. So, Absolute Write is a good source for checking to make sure that the agent isn't shady. I also find that if you type in the agent's name and scam afterwards…
[Dan] And hope there's no hits.
[Mary Robinette] Hope there's no hits, yes. Harassment after that. These are… Scandal. These are good words to just kind of…
[Howard] Good things to not be attached to.
[Mary Robinette] Then, looking at Publisher's Weekly, Locus. Looking at who made sales, and…
 
[Howard] In 2006, I, we played with the idea of having Schlock Mercenary represented, agented, shipped out to a publisher, because self-pubbing actual paper books that weigh actual tons of actual mass is hard work. My friend Rodney had written a technical manual a few years earlier, and had an agent… His experience with the agent was funny. He said, "Yeah, I've already sold the book. I can't mess with… There's nothing you can do." She said, "I tell you what. Let me represent you. I know the contract's been signed, but let me represent you." She went in. She got him a 50% raise on the book. Her 15% came out of that, and Rodney was like, "Oh. Oh, I do need an agent." Rodney introduced me to that agency, which was the Barbara Bova agency, which does a lot of science fiction. So I came into this from outside the industry, through a contact to was just somebody I knew in the tech world. Part of the toolbox is talking to people and listening to their experiences. That experience of Rodney's… Like, I want that to happen to me. That agency… The results were the best possible results. Which were… Everybody we talked to said, "We love this, but it's not what we do." Or, "I mean, we already read it, but it's not what we do." And, "Wow, this sounds awesome, but it's not what we do." The agent went out and determined that the market I wanted at the time didn't exist. The relationship's over now, because the agent's not going to make any money. But that is… I consider that a success story.
[Dongwon] It really is.
[Howard] Because I found an agent who, in the space of six months, told me that the business plan that I already had was the right one.
 
[Dan] So, let's expand this toolbox a little bit more. When you're talking to people, when you're talking to other authors, what are some of the questions you can ask them to find out how they work with their agent? Two of the big ones for me. First of all, is what genres does your agent work in? Because I got the… I started with Sarah because I had written a horror novel, but I knew that I wanted to write more than that. One of the reasons that she and I work so well together is that she covers horror, but also science-fiction and also YA and middle grade, which kind of covers all of the playgrounds that I wanted to play in. Not every agent does. So finding someone who's willing to go with you when you start hopping genres is valuable, if that's what you want to do. One of the other ones is what level of editorial involvement do you want your agent to have. Because different agents do it differently, different authors want different things. So if you want an agent who will be very hands-on or very hands-off, ask their authors what that relationship is like.
[Dongwon] That's one that you should also ask the agent directly. Going back to Mary's example, we had a series of very long conversations. I mean, we probably spent upwards of seven or eight hours on the phone over the course of a few weeks talking a lot of this through. When… I get nervous when I'm signing a new client if they're not asking me questions, then I start to have a little bit of a hesitation in my mind, actually. Just because I'm worried that they're not putting the work in to make sure that this relationship is going to work out, and that I'm going to be right for them. Really, at the core of this, is communication style is really one of the most important things. Do you want someone who's very formal in their communications? Do you want a letter that's laid out? Do you want something that's very casual? Do you want to be… Talk to your agent once a week, once a month, once every six months? I have certain clients I talk to almost daily, and there certain clients I talk to about every three or four months. It depends on what it is. I am very informal in how I relate to a lot of my clients. I think, for certain people, that would drive them nuts, right? There's certain people who really appreciate that, and sort of need that ability to check in periodically and be like, "Hey, is everything okay? Am I on the right track? Is this going well? What's happening with this?"
[Howard] At risk of going over-general again, this is the… Your reminder that charisma is not a dump stat.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The ability to have a conversation with someone in which the two of you connect and determine what you expect out of this kind of relationship… You can build that skill set without talking to agents. Learning that skill set when your feet are in the fire is frightening.
 
[Mary Robinette] So you remember in a previous episode, I talked about the Kowal relationship axes, which my mother-in-law came up with as a way to describe someone that you're dating. That you want to be roughly aligned on intelligence, you want to be roughly aligned on where you feel money is important, morals… Actually, you want your… You want a moral agent. Towards you!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But manners, similar communications style. These apply to your agent as well as to a character. There's a really good agent that is someone that I could have gotten because they are… They're the agent of a friend, they're very successful. I would have run a fire poker through them within two minutes of conversation. Because our communication styles are wildly out of alignment. At the same time, you're not looking for a best friend. Right? It is a business partner. It's good if you can be friends. But that's not… You need someone who is good at their job first, and then someone you can communicate with second.
[Howard] Mind, manners, money, morals, murder…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Marx Brothers. We try to be more positive about it.
[Howard] All right…
[Dongwon] I will say, I often try to avoid the romantic relationship analogy when talking about finding your agent, but it is inevitable that it comes up at some point, because I think there are a lot of similarities and parallels.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Howard] There definitely are. On those notes, Dongwon, do you have homework you can assign to our listeners?
[Dongwon] Yeah. So, your homework assignment is going to be a little bit of self-examination. I want you to think about your career and what's important to you and how you like to operate. Think about times you've been in a business setting, at a job, in a meeting, and think about the things that you found very frustrating, and what you would find your dating to work with over a long period of time with somebody who is working with some of the most important work to you. Make a list of those attributes. What are you looking for in an agent? What kind of communication style? Do you want someone who edits you, do you want someone who doesn't? How would you like them to pursue a deal? Do you want them to go all out all the time, or do you want them to build relationships and be very targeted? Those are questions you should ask yourself, and start making that list of the attributes that are important to you.
[Howard] Make the list. You gotta write this down, because this is Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses. Now, go write.
 
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NaNoWriMo 2018 Mini-Episode 2

Nov. 9th, 2018 09:58 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
NaNoWriMo 2018 Mini-Episode 2
 
 
[Amal] So, I hear it's November and NaNoWriMo is happening. I am here to confess to the world that I have never successfully done NaNoWriMo. In fact, I've only made the attempt once, and I gave up very early on because all my friends who were doing it seemed to have an ethic of "You just have to write, you just have to write. If it's terrible, you're just going to cut it afterwards and it will be fine. You just have to hit 50,000." That was so completely, completely not the way that I write that I just dropped the whole notion. I am here to tell you that it's okay to feel that way. All your friends are doing NaNoWriMo, they're doing this supercool thing, and they're all cheering each other on. Maybe you are totally by yourself, just being like, "Oh, I wish I could do this thing." Look. I am here to tell you that… I don't know, I won a Hugo. I never wrote NaNoWriMo. But hey, that's okay. It's cool. I'm fine with it. I'm totally not overcompensating in saying this right now.
[Laughter]
[Amal] I'm super okay with not having written NaNoWriMo before. How about you, Maurice?
[Mary] I was going to sit here and be all quiet, and I'm like, "Yeah, this has really hurt your career."
[Laughter]
[Mary] Write the way you write.
 
[Maurice] And then, on the flipside, I am one for one on NaNoWriMo. I've tried it exactly one time…
[Amal] Well done.
[Maurice] It resulted in the first draft of my novel Kingmaker which kicked off my entire career.
[Dan] So, there is that.
[Amal] High five! Yeah!
[Maurice] But, you know what, NaNoWriMo was completely… It was the first time that… It completely freed up my whole writing process. Because, you know what, I couldn't overthink it. It was just like, hey, you know what, just get words on the page. Get words on the page. Normally, what slows me down in writing is me overthinking the process. But it's like, you know what, there's no consequences to this. I can just write. Whatever happens, happens.
[Amal] That is so great. I'm literally in year five of the novel that I'm working on and still have the first sentence. That is how it's gone for me. Oh, Brandon, you're so adorable right now.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That face you are making is so cute. But, yeah, you write how you write. It's wonderful to stretch your writing muscles in lots of different directions. But you don't want to strain them. Sometimes you just… Sometimes the way that you write just doesn't go in a certain direction. Doesn't fit a certain mold. That is super, super, super okay.
[Mary] So, listeners, here's the thing you just need to know. November is about celebrating the fact that you're a writer. It's not about trying to write in any particular way. So you're out of excuses. Go write the way you write.
 
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Four: Agents -- do you need one?

Feb. 21st, 2011 02:43 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Four: Agents -- do you need one?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/31/writing-excuses-4-4-agents-do-you-need-one/

Key Points: Why get an agent? Expertise in negotiations, contracts, foreign rights, etc. that you don't have. Wider view and experience. Career builder and consultant? A key question: do they have skin in the game? (I.e., are they invested in you or not?) Beware: there is no quality control for agents. Bottom line: everybody doesn't need an agent, but you might.
( Secret agent? )
[Howard] Write yourself a story about a famous recluse author and his or her agent. The author dies. The agent is now scrambling to keep that career alive without telling anybody.
[Brandon] That's awesome.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Howard] That's skin in the game.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.
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