wetranscripts | Entries tagged with deadlines

Writing Excuses 20.42: Erin Roberts' Personal Writing Process

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-42-erin-roberts-personal-writing-process

Key points: A grab bag of random processes? getting work, getting in, getting done, and getting right. Should I take on this project? Saying no, or at least, can we do it later? Spreadsheet of projects! Star ratings. On time, good work, pleasant to work with. Geese monsters. Having a personal life. If you're going to miss a deadline, tell them early. Getting in. Hook yourself, with voice or an idea. Go back and write a key moment in the character's life to find their voice. Talk to your cat, or rubber duck, to test ideas. Get it done. Deadlines can help. Have Microsoft Word read to you. Take a nap or other break!

[Season 20, Episode 42]

[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 42]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Erin's personal writing process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] And I have been apprehensive about this episode since we decided to do it. Because I feel like my writing process is like a bunch of random practices thrown into a bag and shaken up, and then every so often, I reach in and see what's working for me or what's not. But you may also be like this, and not have a completely organized idea of your writing process. So hopefully, this is helpful. And I have organized it in my head into four categories, because I still like to be slightly organized.

[laughter]

[Erin] Which is... This is all part of my writing process...

[Dan] This is a very organized grab bag.

[Erin] Outline. Which is, getting work, getting in, getting done, and getting right. So those are basically how do I manage my sort of business creative life, how do I start writing, how do I stop writing and turn something in, and how do I live a balanced life. And because I am a game writer, I'm going to let y'all pick which one you want to hear about first.

[DongWon] I just want to say a thing first, which is, this is not me calling you out. But I do think that there is a thing where... I think... I've had a similar conversation with a lot of writers. They'll be like, oh, I don't have a process. I don't know what I'm doing or whatever it is. And then as soon as you're talking to them, it's like, no, there are these things. You are doing this thing. And I think, one thing that I was excited to sort of talk about this with Erin after she was like I don't have a process, I don't know what you're talking about in this episode, is I think that's how most people feel. I think we're only able to talk about this in a really cogent way right now because we're doing the work that Erin just described, of sitting down and being like, okay, what chaotic things do I do and how do I explain them? And then when you explain it, it looks more cogent and coherent. Right? But I think the process of looking at it is the thing that makes it sound like a thing. I think for a lot of us, it really is instinctual or habitual or whatever it is. So if you're listening to these episodes and being like, well, I don't have a thing like Mary Robinette does, then I think that's totally fine, and you just find it as you go.

[Erin] Absolutely, makes sense.

[Mary Robinette] So since you gave us four things and you said it's like a game, I am rolling a die and it says number one.

[Erin] Okay. Getting work. So that is... Thank you. I love that we gamified it.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] You can listen to this out of order and not miss anything.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, getting work. And it's funny, because I think we have an episode coming up that's about the business of writing. As someone who makes a living essentially writing, like, everything I do is writing, which I think is what makes it difficult to think about the writing process. Because I do freelance writing for games, I do my own prose writing, I do script writing, I do video game writing. It's all writing. Even though some of it is for direct cash, like you paid me to write this thing, and some of it is my own work. It all comes from the creative part of my brain. And so it's hard for me sometimes to separate one from the other. But I have to. Because otherwise, I will get lost. So I have a lot of things that I do in order to figure out should I take on a project. How do I manage the projects that I have in front of me? And, like, how do I know what I need to do on any given day? To figure out if I should take on a project, because it is a mistake you can make, I think, in... No matter what you're doing, is to overcommit yourself to things, because it's hard to say no when things seem really cool. But you are better off saying no, or saying even I can't right now, can I get back to you? Or could we do this another time? Or I can't at the moment. Then saying yes and then being like, I haven't slept in a year. And this is not great, I'm now hallucinating things, which is what happens when you don't sleep for too long. So I have...

[Mary Robinette] This is something that you have personal experience with?

[Erin] I don't... I never hallucinate anything. One time in college, I didn't sleep for several days, and thought everything that started with the letter p was very funny for reasons that I don't understand to this day. But... So I use an Airtable because I... Which I've talked about, I think, on the podcast before. Which is basically fancy Excel, and I actually keep, like, a running tab of every project I have, how many words it is, when it's due, including my own personal projects. Like, I think this story is going to be 6,000 words and I'd like to get it done by June 1st or whatever it is. And then I have them all, like, in different categories and with different tags on them. This is also how I track have I gotten paid, have I put this on my taxes, did I sign the contract, because I am my own assistant. And so I have, like, writing time where I'm writing and assistant time where I'm assisting myself to write. And so I keep it all on a big spreadsheet. And when somebody says, do you want to do this project, I look and I say, based on this deadline, do I have enough hours in the day to get this done?

[DongWon] I'm just going to keep roasting you for the fact that Mr. I don't have a project has a custom Airtable...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To track word count, project deadlines and sequence, and whether you've paid your taxes on it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] This is incredible. This is such a useful framework.

[Erin] It's so messy! If it makes you feel better. My spreadsheet could be better organized.

[Mary Robinette] Oh my God.

[DongWon] I promise you, this is 10,000 times more organized than 95% of writers.

[Mary Robinette] I literally wrote down ask Erin for Airtable.

[laughter]

[I love that... I don't have a process]

[laughter]

[DongWon] I love that you're starting with this, though, because it's such a useful thing to keep in mind. Right? Because I think so many writers when taking on projects aren't keeping an eye on the business side of it. Right? When I say business side of it, I don't even necessarily mean the, like, negotiations or whatever. Right? But in terms of can I get this deliverable to them on the schedule they're asking for? Can I do the word count that they're asking for? And have I been paid for this? Like, just being able to keep an eye on that, like, freelance mindset of how do I slot this into my schedule is really hard and really difficult, and it's really hard to say no to stuff. Right? Like, I go through this all the time with clients who are under contract for the book, but then, like, Star Wars comes knocking. How do you say no? You know what I mean? And the answer is, you say no because you're going to do a bad job on both projects if you say yes. Right? And so I think it's really, really difficult and really hard to learn to say no. But it's also very important. And the other kind of note of caution that I would love to throw in here is there's a thing that I see that, like, I consider the danger zone, which is when you get into that, like, well, what if you... What if we push the deadline by 2 weeks? Could you do it then? And it's like... It's easy to say yes, you're going to want to say yes at that point, but really... You need to be real about the fact that what you need is six more weeks, not two more weeks. Right? And so I think that like trying to fit stuff in too tightly and trying to slot stuff into your process in this really constrained way will lead to a danger zone as well as when considering can I take this project on.

[Howard] Question. Does your spreadsheet track, like, historically how long it took you to do a thing? So that you've got the whole can I take this job, I think it will take this long, and then you circle back and do a post-mortem and say, hey, you know what? I actually was spot on with that guess. It took me exactly 3 weeks. Or, oh, gosh, I underestimated it.

[Erin] So, yes and no. So, yes in the sense that I actually have fields for all of that.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That includes things like a star rating...

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] For like how I felt about the project...

[Howard] What you're saying is...

[Erin] But I don't...

[Howard] What you're saying is...

[Erin][garbled] Fill them out. I don't fill them out, because I'm not...

[Howard] You've asked the same question I've asked, and the answer is not yet, but I have room for it.

[Erin] I do have room for it.

[Howard] Okay.

[Erin] I'm excited about the star ratings that are, like, how I felt about... Like, How did I feel about the project on three... So there's... Okay. There's a thing with freelancing...

[DongWon] You have multiple star rating categories, or is it just one rating?

[Erin] No, it's a multiple rating. Because there's a...

[laughter]

[Erin] Thing.

[DongWon] You're so disorganized, it's embarrassing.

[laughter]

[DongWon] This is the time you do four episodes, because we're only going to get through this one first step. All right. Continue.

[Mary Robinette][garbled] process.

[Erin] There's a thing in freelancing where they say, like, you can be... There are three things that you should be. On time...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Good with your work, and pleasant to work with. And I also think that's true...

[DongWon] The iron triangle.

[Erin] Of the people you work with. You can do two out of three. If you miss the third one, it probably shouldn't be nice to work with, because that's... If people don't like you, they don't like you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But at the end, so what I want to do with my star system is, one is, like, how were they to work with, one is how did I feel about my timelines, and how did I feel about the actual strength of my work. So if I felt like I was on time and they were great, but, like, I did a poor job with this because it turns out I'm not great at writing about 18 forms of geese monsters, then in the future, I'll be like, another goose monster project? Maybe not for me. And so that's how I learn, like, the type of work that I like to do, in addition to how much I can do and, like, is this somebody I don't want to return to because they pay slow, they're mean, they yelled at me that time, they sent a goose after me, a physical goose...

[DongWon] That would be a one-star rating for me.

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled] to my house, that would be no stars.

[Dan] That's amazing.

[Mary Robinette] On the kind of goose, though, I mean, there's a rare [garbled]

[DongWon] All geese are mean.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think there's also an important lesson embedded in here, though, which is you can have these systems, but also you're only going to use the stuff that is...

[Mary Robinette] Immediately useful.

[DongWon] You're always going to want to put, like, more options in there, but the stuff that's actually useful is the stuff you're going to use. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] If that makes sense. Like, I think it would be really cool to have that data, but clearly, it's also like, oh, I don't have time to think about that. I'll do that later. Right?

[Erin] Exactly. It's like at the end of the year I'll do it, but I don't.

[Dan] I want to circle back to something you said earlier when you were talking about saying no to work. Sometimes you can delay, you can ask to delay and say I'm very interested in this, but I don't have time, can we come back a few months later? Because I've been in this situation, and I know that very often, the should I take this decision is not made on how much time I have, but it's made on how much money I need.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And if I'm really hard up for money, my dumb kids keep wanting to eat all the time...

[squeak]

[Dan] I am a lot more likely to say yes to stuff, and knowing that you have the freedom to push back a little and say I'm very excited about this, I would love to do it, but can I do it in 6 months is a really smart and important thing to be able to say.

[Erin] Yeah, and I was shocked the first time I asked somebody and they were like, yeah, sure, I don't care, and I'm like, wait, what?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, it feels like they're like the powerful great and magnificent Oz, and then it turns out there's just, like, a person back there who's also dealing with their own deadlines and their own life, and they understand. I think this is something that being a teacher helped with, because when my students want extensions, I'm like, yeah, sure, whatever. Just get it to me in a reasonable time, so that I can do what I need to do. But I just made up this deadline because, like, it made sense for me at the time I made it up. So it's nice to be flexible. And with that, now that we've done three of the four... Just kidding.

[laughter]

[Erin] Go to the break.

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[Erin] Okay. So, I think we covered getting work before the break.

[Mary Robinette] And I've rolled the die again, so now we're on number four.

[Erin] Getting right. Yeah. This is about, like, having a personal life. So the downside of getting work... This is like the underside of that sandwich... Is that it can sometimes be hard to leave your work behind if you are me and leave the house. I think this is... I'm sure there are people who are saying, like, How can you leave your responsibilities behind? I have kids, I have troublesome work, I have a spouse, I have all these things. [I'm] a single old cat lady that they warn you about on the internet. And the good side of that is that I have a lot of time to write, and the bad side of that is that I can only write. And I could, like, never go out. And so I think it's just important to, for myself, think about my gravestone. That's going to sound bad. But...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, I like to think on my gravestone will they say she worked a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, she's a really hard worker? And so sometimes I will prioritize a personal experience that I cannot have again.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Especially if it's like a friend who I could see in 3 days, I might say, hey, I really have this deadline. But if someone's coming into town, if I'm at a convention having a really great conversation with someone I will never ever see again, I think it's better to have the life experience than to have the work experience. And sometimes you pay the price for that, or you're up late the next night. But I found that, like, I am a better writer when I interact with humanity.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] When I don't become, like, someone who, like, has no knowledge of the world. Ah, one thing that I was thinking about when we were talking about All the Birds in the Sky, is the idea at the end of the book that the people who are running the magic side to become really good at magic, you have to become really divorced from humanity. Which is why the solution that they come up with to save the world is basically to make all humans hate each other. And it's like I don't want to become that kind of magician.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not worth... Like, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] At that point. And so I think sometimes deadlines can feel so imminent, they can... Everything can feel like it's weighing on you. I often like to say, from a friend of mine who worked in public relations, it's PR, not the ER.

[laughter]

[Erin] Which is like... We're not...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We're saving lives, but we're not saving lives.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so I think that, like, trying to keep that perspective is something that is really important to me, and that I want other people to do as well.

[DongWon] There will be a lot of things in the book business that will want to make you... Or the writing business generally that wants to make you feel like it is a crisis and it is immediate and urgent. But at the end of the day, there's very little that is actually a thing that needs to be solved this instant.

[Mary Robinette] I will say that one of the things that I've been struck by when listening to you talk about I go out and I do these things is the number of times that I have gone out with you and you have brought work with you to the bar.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which is also like roasting you a little bit, but also it's... It is a... Sometimes it's both. I know that when I've been on a deadline, sometimes the thing that I've done is either arranged for... When I was building puppets, I'm like, hey, do you want to come over and do crafting while I'm building this thing? And so we can still socialize while that's happening. Or coffee shop dates. We get the socializing done, we both get work done. So sometimes you can actually blend them and do both of them.

[Howard] Douglas Adams said I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And... for 20 years, Schlock Mercenary was never late. Online, every day, new comic strip, for 20 years. That did not mean that I did not miss some deadlines. There were lots of things that I missed deadlines for. And I feel like the knowing that there's a deadline and knowing you have to have a life... It might not be a bad idea for an early career writer to just experience pushing back on a deadline or missing a deadline and discovering, hey, it made a whooshing sound and I lived. But don't pick one that you're going to get fired for.

[Mary Robinette] And warn people that you're going to miss it.

[DongWon] This is the thing. Here's the important thing. If you're going to miss a deadline, tell them early.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Things... If you tell me early that your book is going to be late, I can go and solve all those problems. If you wait until the day the thing is due, and then you tell me it's late, everything else is locked. We've locked the season, the cover's in, blah blah blah in. You know what I mean? And then things get very hard and expensive to move.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And then people are pissed.

[Mary Robinette] And also it messes with the lives of other freelancers...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because copy editors who have held space in their schedule to copy edit for you now aren't getting paid because your work is late.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And then when it comes in, their schedule is... So, it's... But if you let people know, everyone can adjust.

[Erin] And I will say that I think people always say this, and it is true. But I think from the internal side, it never happens that way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] No one thinks I will wait till the last minute to tell people I will be late.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] What happens is you get into a cycle of, like, optimism and shame.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Where you are... You wake up optimistic that today you will suddenly write 10,000 million words. Like, cause you're like if I just get in the zone, if I just do everything perfectly, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine, fine, fine. And then as the day goes on, you're like, oh, my God, it was not fine. Things happened. I needed to eat lunch at one point, why did I do it? And then you think, oh, my gosh, I'm so ashamed, I don't want to say I'm failing. Maybe tomorrow I'll fix it, and I'll be the person... I'll be the best million person version of myself. And I think you can get into that cycle until the point that you actually hit the deadline. At which point, then you're sending like really sad emails, being like I don't know, I thought I was going to do it. And it is really hard to give yourself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Permission to tell people how you are doing along the way, and say, like, hey, I think there might be a problem here. I'm going to try to catch up, but it's possible that there may be a delay. Even if you need to couch it that way so that they understand what's going on and you're not like a black box where you're like I just think... We all want to be the best versions of ourselves. But the idea that, like, you will hit perfection every day just because you have to... It may not happen. And if it does happen, you may not like the way it feels.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a spreadsheet that I use when I'm writing to deadline, which is... I know. But the thing that it tells me is whether or not I'm on target to hit the deadline. Because I know for myself that I lose track of time. That I am not a good judge. And so I have created a tool that allows me to externalize that instead of relying on my own impulses. So I can see, oh, you're dropping off. And that helps me do a little bit more early warning.

[Erin] I think there's a great online tool for that as well, I just wanted to say, called Pacer.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, cool.

[Erin] That actually allows you to set like what your goal is and then you can set several ways. You can be like, I like to start strong and then finish, whatever. On this weekend, I actually can't work at all, and it will actually give you how much word count you should do each day.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[Erin] Based on that system. So I just wanted to throw that out there, just for the fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] We've talked about finding work, and we've talked about finding yourself after work, and you beautifully dodged the question of how do you actually work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, number two?

[Erin] Yes. Getting in.

[Dan] Can we lightning round these last two?

[Erin] Yes. So now we are going to go so fast. I'm sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] No, I was like [garbled] extra long episode, because this is great.

[Dan] Awesome, let's do it.

[Erin] All right. Getting in, and getting done. So these are kind of two... Two of the same coin. But getting in, for me, something I've learned is I need to hook myself into something in order to be able to write it. Like hooking a fish. I've never gone fishing in my life, but I hear hooks are involved, so I'm going to use that.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, also like save the fish at the end, I guess. But... So, like, if it is a piece of prose, it is usually the hook of voice. If I don't understand the character's voice, it is really difficult for me to write a story. A lot of... I actually don't have that thing that Dan talked about on another episode, about like were the characters running away with you. But I do feel like if I can't feel like I'm listening to the character tell the story or I'm helping them tell the story, then it's just like words and it doesn't have any meaning to it. And so I spend a lot of time just trying to find the hook. Rewriting the first page, rewriting the first page again, trying this other way. So I do a lot of work on the, like, early side of things, trying to get myself hooked in. And at points, I was like this is not... Why am I wasting so much time on this? But it turns out that if I try to push myself past it, then I end up coming back to the beginning, but just like 16 Pages later and being like I hate this whole story.

[DongWon] What I love about this is we talk a lot about trying to hook the reader, and you're talking about how you need to hook yourself first. Right? If you're not excited about it, how can you ask anybody else to be excited about it? So I love that that's a great place to start in terms of, like, how do you find the thing that's exciting to you and get you engaged with it? And then that will tell you what you need to know for down the line, when you are like, okay, now how do I get readers excited?

[Dan] So do you have tricks or writing exercises or something like that to help you find that voice, or find that hook that you love about the story?

[Erin] I think there are two things that I do. One is that I will often go back and write an earlier part, like a big moment in one character's life that doesn't appear on the page of the story. Because it will help me understand them. Your voice is strongest, I think, when you're like at a time of emotional crisis. But in a story, I usually don't start [with] an emotional crisis, because it's like why? There's nowhere to go from there. And so I will write the story where the person is like... If I'm like this person is a kleptomaniac, well, I'm like, well, when did they steal the very first time? And why? This person gets... Has an anger management problem. What's a time they were really, really angry, and like what were they angry about? And a lot of times, that will get me the voice, and then I can take the voice, once I have it, and translate it. I also talk to my cat a lot. This I...

[Mary Robinette] Same.

[Erin] This helps me hook, I think, a little bit more when it comes to game writing and nonfiction, where I'm trying to think of an idea. So when I'm doing game writing, and they're like, okay, write a city. And I'll write up the type of city that I'm writing. I will like bounce ideas off by just saying them out loud. I mean, like, what if it was a city where everyone was inside out? No, that might be confusing. What if it was a city filled with geese? Like, just talk to my cat and, like, try to explain it to her. Because sometimes when you say things out loud, they just don't sound as good as they did in your head. And as opposed to inflicting them on my friends, I will usually first inflict them on my cat. And then maybe a friend. Like, I'll say I'm thinking about doing this idea, if it's not something under NDA, like, and just say it to them. And in the process of saying it, I can tell if it's wrong or it's right.

[Howard] There's this whole debugging method for coders called the rubber duck method.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Which is explain the problem to something inanimate, and you'll probably find the solution.

[DongWon] Honestly, the thing that I do, when I need to rubber duck it, is... Because I'm on the west coast, I'm often up after my friends are. So I will just pick a friend and text them a stream of ideas.

[Howard] You are a bad friend.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's... They have to read that.

[DongWon] Then at the end, I'll say ignore all this.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But they've already read through it. But I also... I do a similar thing. But I will interrogate it on the page. Because if I start talking to Elsie, she will start talking back, and that's not useful.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That's why I didn't teach my cat to talk.

[Mary Robinette] I know [garbled]

[Erin] I thought about it, but...

[Mary Robinette] So once you've got the hook, do you have to continue to rehook yourself every day that you're working on a project? Or is it really that once you get into it, you're kind of in and going?

[Erin] Once I'm in it, I'm in, because I will read what I have written previously. And that will get me, like, in... Like, I'm like, okay, oh, yes, this is exactly the way this person talks like. It's like talking... It's kind of like when you talk to a friend, and you're like,, this is the way that their speech goes.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] And you're like, oh, yes, I'm in it again. And then I can usually hurdle myself forward, headlight writer style for a while until I run into like there is no plot or like something needs to happen. And, like, at that point, a lot of it is just like trying to think of like eight different things that could happen, or... I actually have a lot of table top solo role-playing games that are about creating interesting ideas or like what could possibly happen in the world, and sometimes I use those just as a prompt. And even though I don't keep what I came up with, like... Sometimes even reacting, I mean, like it couldn't be that that, will help me to figure it out. A lot of things I also do to keep myself engaged is whatever the premise was of the story that I found was really interesting, like, this is a world filled with geese, like, I'm like, oh, yes, it is a world filled with geese. What else do geese do? Like, let me go read up on geese. Oh, they honk a lot and chase you. Oh, I don't have a chase scene in this. I should have my character chased by a goose. This is great, like, this will give it something to do. So if I go back to the origin story of my story, like, a lot of times, that's a way to kind of keep me going. And then to kind of get into the third one, the final one, which is get it done. It can be, if you're somebody like me, I like to revise as I go. It's easy to get stuck with, like, the perfect story in the front, like, this is in the front, not party in the back.

[laughter]

[Erin] It's bad. It sounds like[garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Zoom here.

[Erin] Yeah, exactly. It's like a zoom out thing, like, it's great from the waist up [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] pants. And so, figuring out like how to keep going, and that is where deadlines are helpful.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because sometimes the perfectionism of wanting to get the exact right cadence of one sentence is holding me back from finishing. So having some sort of deadline. This is why I like applying to fellowships. Because fellowships are an artificial deadline that want your work. And it usually has to be recent works. So I'll be like, oh, I would love to go to McDowell, let me see what their deadline is. And I actually put that on my spreadsheet with everything else so that I know what that deadline is and treat it the way I would treat an employer, so that that way I'm finishing my story, like, at a good time. I think the last thing that's a random writing process of mine is having Microsoft Word read my stories to me, because a downside of being a voice-y cadence person is I can talk myself into liking a story more than it should be liked, by, like, doing that spoken word thing where you just make everything sound really deep, but it's not.

[laughter]

[Erin] Not that all spoken word is that way, but we've all been there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Haven't we?

[Dan] You know that thing about words where they're stupid?

[Mary Robinette] No, it's true. As a narrator, like, one of my jobs is making bad things sound good. And not... Sometimes it's unfortunately true, but I have learned that I can.

[DongWon] Yep

[Howard] There are books that you have not told us about.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly. The Microsoft lady won't do that. She's horrible.

[laughter]

[Erin] And so I think... But she still sounds friendly. She's like friendly, but badly reading your stories.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so like I love to put her on it as I go, like... If I finish a section, I'll go get a snack while I have her read the whole story to me in the background, and hear, like, is there something that I feel like I'm bouncing off of. It could just be that she didn't do a great job, but a lot of times, it's that there's something there...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That isn't quite working. And then I can identify it, and when I get back to my desk, fix it, and then have her read it to me again. If I could get my cat to read my stories to me, that would be ideal, but that has not happened yet.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Teaching cats to read, I think, would be a mistake...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I think.

[Erin] And now, this episode's gone on forever. So...

[DongWon] I hope we've all enjoyed this stealth announcement for Untitled Goose game 2...

[laughter]

[Erin] Homework, put geese in it. No.

[laughter]

[Erin] That's not the actual homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So feel free.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you for letting us know about how you don't have any process at all.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I feel very reassured about that. Do you have homework?

[Erin] I do have homework. Which is, I think what really helps me in sounding like I have more process than I feel like I have is writing down all the tips and tricks that are things that I do. Oh, the one last one I didn't mention is sometimes you just need to go to sleep.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] It's going to sound weird, but if you're up late... Sometimes it's better to nap for two hours...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And come back to it then attempt to push through, because your brain just shuts down.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Your brain needs a break.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's like your brain's like, nah, give me a rest. But I think write down things that you do, things that you are... Like, that have worked for you, any tip or trick that has ever resonated with you. Put them all on a page, and then see, like, is there anything cool about that page? And if nothing else, at least now you have got it all written down somewhere.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go organize your writing process. Maybe.

[Howard] With a spreadsheet.

[Dan] And a goose.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.40: Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process

From writingexcuses.com/20-40-mary-robinette-kowals-personal-writing-process

Key points: What is your writing process? Random schedule. Fitting writing in the gaps. Retrain yourself to work with your brain. Chaotic and gremlins. Write every day? Reshape habits. A thing you do or what you are? Habit or practice? Hyperfocus. Novel, interesting, challenging, urgent. Microsessions. Rice or eggs? Deadlines. Interruptions. White noise, and travel spaces. Defend your writing time. Today's three tasks and timeline. Reward yourself with the next bit of writing fun. Keep learning, it is never a solved problem.

[Season 20, Episode 40]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So, we had this thought. I hear a lot of people say, "But what is your writing process?" and as successful writers, people who are published, what is your writing process? As if it is a key to being able to write. The idea here is that you're going to hear from each of the hosts. We're going to tell you what our personal writing process is. The other people are probably going to look at us like that's what you do? And the idea is that the only important process is the one that works for you. And that that's going to change over the course of your career, over the course of the project that you're working on. So...

[Howard] And by way of clarification, when we say you're going to hear from each of the hosts about this, on this episode we're talking about Mary Robinette's writing process.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Howard] And each of us are going to point fingers and say but how can that even work? Because I do not know how that can even work.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So my writing process is based on having a completely random schedule, but also having started with a random schedule, where I was putting writing in the gaps of everything else I was doing. I started writing novels sitting in a white cargo van in a passenger seat writing long hand while I was on puppetry tours. Because that was the thing that I could do. And then I had this ancient se... I mean, at the time, it was new... This sewing machine of a portable computer. And so then my process was I would transcribe things. The idea of doing that now seems like how did I even. But the kind of lingering effects of that is that I tend to write best in transit still. I love writing on an airplane, a train is amazing. And then at home, my writing process used to work best when I went to coffee shops. And then pandemic completely interrupted that. So, for me, I... I've gone through phases where I'm like I will write every day and I will have this word count. And now it's much more of a... I am having a reasonably good brain day, there are... This is a day of fewer distractions, some of the things that have shifted in my life is that I've had to do a bunch of Elder Care. So I went through a phase where I felt like every time I sat down to write that I would in some way punish the writing. Not by someone in specific, but that if I sat down to write, my mom was going to fall. And so I started to develop this real avoidance of wanting to get into the mode, because something traumatic kept happening. So where I am now with my writing process is that I am trying to retrain my brain and retrain my... I should say I'm trying to retrain myself to work with my brain, because I have an understanding of the fact that I have ADHD, I have depression. I didn't know those things when I started writing. And so, like, I'm trying to learn how to trigger hyper-focus on demand, and how to turn it off, or how to be okay with having hyper-focus broken. So a lot of my writing process now is using binaural sound to say, oh, this is writing time. Or making sure that I have lined up dates with other people. So there's a lot of hacking of my brain that goes on. But people ask me, what is my writing process?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm like it is completely chaotic and gremlins.

[Dan] Right out of the gate, I love this. Because one lesson that gets taught all the time, and I hate it, is that you have to write every single day if you want to be a real writer. And that's not how you work. That's not how I work, either. And being able to recognize, well, this is a good day, this is a good time, and other days and other times, you might have something more important to do. And that's okay. it doesn't make you a bad writer, it doesn't make you an inherently unprofessional writer. It's just how life is sometimes..

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I want to rewind to an earlier thing, though, because the thought that I had as you're describing it is cargo vans don't have very good suspension.

[laughter]

[DongWon] So writing by hand in the passenger seat of a moving cargo van seems like your penmanship is quite remarkable, and I begin to understand why.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I didn't actually think about that. Something that you said, Dan, about the writing every day, reminds me of a thing that I learned for myself, which is that there is value in saying I write every day for me, because one of the things that I struggle with is executive function. And the I write every day reduces the level of executive function, because it means that's a decision I didn't have to make. So I've definitely... and I've preached this on the podcast, I try to write three sentences every day. That's actually not true for where I am right now. I don't actually do that. but that does make it much easier to... For my habit to be I have some free time, I'm going to go on Instagram rather than I'm going to sit down to write. And so that's a lot of what I'm trying to balance is learning how to reshape habits so that I lean towards oh, I have free time, I'm going to write, which is what I used to do. Like, my second novel, I literally wrote, like, probably half of it using a Palm Pilot and graffiti on the New York subways. I was just fitting it into the cracks on everything else I had to do. And now, like, I can arrange my schedule so that I can write anytime I want to, but, like, I have cat videos to edit.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Two things. One, I really love this idea that, like, you fit it into the cracks of your life, and I'm curious about that. But first, I actually read this book on habits, and one of the things that they said is that what habits do is move something that you're doing from a thing you do to a thing you are. And so, for example, people say I am a writer who writes every day versus, like, I need to write every day. And that if you do a habit long enough, that's why people would be, like, I'm a runner versus I am someone who runs daily. And that then shifts so that it just feels like such a baseline of who you are that you go ahead and, like, do it because it feels like it's part of your identity. That can be good or bad. It can become, like, a prison of identity. But that's something that, like... I think that's why sometimes people like that feeling of, like, I am a daily writer.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The way I think about it is the difference between a habit and a practice. Right? A habit is something that you feel you need to do every day, it's on your calendar, or whatever it is, and if you fall off of that, then it feels like a failure. And I think that failure state often prevents people from returning. Versus a practice is something that you're always working at. Right? You're not expected to be perfect at it. You try to do it every day. And then tomorrow's always another opportunity to be the person that you see yourself as. Right? So, I am a writer, I practice writing. That means that you are making time and space in an intentional way, but not holding yourself to an unrealizable standard. Because I think very few people who say they write every day actually write every day. Right? Stuff happens. Right? There are emergencies, vacations, there's travel, there's all these other things, and quite frankly, I think you should be making time for those things, other interests in your life, other people in your life. And so it's okay if... Even if you are a daily writer, that you are not literally writing every day. Right? And so I think a lot of us can get really hung up on this like completionist perfection, and I think the idea of a practice can make that space for you to still see yourself as that thing and doing the thing without beating yourself up.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I have some other ideas about, like, some of the ways that I have found to go in and out of a daily writing practice. And I will talk about those more after the break.

[DongWon] If you've spent any time around me, you've probably noticed that coffee is very central to my life. I'm rarely far from a cup of frankly whatever is available. But, while I'll take what I can get, I do have opinions. Strong ones. About what makes a great cup. If you haven't tried an Aeropress coffee yet, you're in for a treat. Aeropress uses a completely unique brew method, and because of that, you get a completely unique and exceptionally delicious cup of coffee that you can only get with an Aeropress. As someone who's on the road a lot, it's a great solution to get consistently great coffee where you usually can't get it. Hotel rooms, road trips[ camping, backpacking... I've taken one lots of places. It's lightweight, easy to pack, and sturdy. But more to the point, it makes consistently great coffee that lets the lighter notes in the beans shine through. It's a little bit like a Paul Rover, a little bit like a French press, and a little bit espresso. If you like a lighter or more complex roast, an Aeropress is a great solution at home or on the go. Aeropress is shockingly affordable. Less than 50 bucks, and we've got an incredible offer for our audience. Visit aeropress.com/wx. That's aeropress.com/wx and use the promo code WX to save 20% off your order. That's aeropress.com/wx and make sure to use code WX ar checkout to save 20%. It's time to ditch the drive-thru, toss the French Press, and say yes to better mornings fueled by better coffee. Aeropress ships to the US and over 60 countries around the world. And we thank them for sponsoring our show.

[Mary Robinette] So, before we took our break, I said that I was interested in exploring how I go in and out of a daily writing practice. Because one of the things that I realized, as someone who has ADHD, and, like, in hindsight so many of my career choices make sense because... One of the things that fuels an ADHD brain, or that we respond well to, is new things. But we also really enjoy, like, hyperfocus is a pleasurable thing for us. And so in hindsight, it's... I was choosing careers where I was in theater, so I had a new project every couple of months. Novel, interesting, challenging, and urgent. Those are the triggers. And I love doing those things. And so a new novel, very exciting. So I've realized that when I started, I was still participating in the late lamented Nano. And that is binge writing. That is hyperfocus for a month on a thing. And so now I recognize that,, actually, it's okay for me to say I'm going to focus on this for this period of time. But if I'm in a situation where I have to switch tracks, that I have to be able to learn how to take myself in and back out again for that. And so one of the things that I've been working on is micro sessions. Because I think one of the things that happens to someone who enjoys hyperfocus is that you think,, I'm going to get into that and I'm either going to be punished because I will miss... I'll be late to do something else or someone's going to interrupt me and that'll be frustrating. And so I've been doing... Setting timers and saying, okay, 5 minutes. And that will just... Like, look, I got a lot of words done. I can do this in 5 minute bursts. And then kind of building up. So that if I've been in a phase where I haven't been writing for a while, I can ramp myself up into it. Instead of having, like, a day where i'm like, okay, it's time for me to write, I'm going to write 2,000 words. Because that's what I write when I'm writing at pace, and then I'm exhausted because I haven't been writing daily, and then I don't write. So, like, learning to use these micro sessions to ramp up has been helpful.

[Howard] There's a famous object lesson involving a mason jar and eggs and rice, in which you want to get everything into the jar. And if you pour the rice in first, there isn't room for the eggs. If you put the eggs in first, then the rice will fill the gaps. And the object lesson is find out what's important to you, put the important things in your life first, and then let everything else fill the gaps. And what you've described with some of the catch as catch can writing process, is learning to... And I'm going to extend and then break the metaphor because I'm me... Learning to be the monk who can write on a grain of rice. Turn your writing process into something that can fill the cracks. That can be on the grains of rice. Sometimes you want it to be an egg. Sometimes you want to block out 4 hours and just write. But you have to have the ability... I say you... For your process, you have to have the ability to write on a grain of rice on some days.

[Mary Robinette] Right. And so that is actually part of the thing is that when I have a deadline, which is, again, triggers the urgency thing, it's so much easier for me to do time blocking and stick to it. Otherwise, I'm very likely to block things out on my calendar and then be like, oh, well, we can move that.

[Erin] Thinking a lot again about the cracks and you writing on the modes of transit, which I think is fascinating, as somebody who has occasionally, like, written on the subway. What I wonder about this is, like, there's so many interruptions. Like, so, being on any form of transit, like, at any moment, like, things could be happening, a road sign, a thing. But it's like things that you anticipate happening. So it's like an interruption that you... Sometimes it's like an interruption that you have internalized is going to happen versus an unexpected interruption. Do you know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like... And I'm wondering, like, if that's something that you've played around with or thought about?

[Mary Robinette] So I think that the interruptions that happen in modes of transit are either things that you're expecting, so you can plan for them, because I know my stop is coming up. Or they're things that you don't actually have to engage with. The interruptions that I was dealing with were things that I had to engage with. Like I am... My mom passed in 2023. We live in a basement apartment. There are three dogs. I hear something hit the ground. And I still have this trauma response of I need to go deal with that. I'm like 100% don't. The dogs are fine. So I think some of that is the difference between interruptions you have to engage with and the ones you don't. But I think the other thing that, again, in hindsight, was happening for me was that there was just enough white noise, just enough stimulus happening either in the train or the coffee shop, that I had to focus harder, and that made it easier to ignore all of the other chat... Like, in the process of I have to ignore all of this other stuff, it made me also ignore all of the other random chatter in my brain, because I had to focus to block everything else out.

[DongWon] Well, one thing that's interesting, and I was thinking about this as we are talking about fitting the writing in the cracks, but also, your life is very demanding. Right? There's a lot of travel, there's a lot of interruptions. And so the question I had was how do you defend your time? And as you were talking about this last bit, I realized, oh, travel, because it's this liminal space...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Where you're sort of... You know how you walk into an airport and suddenly all societal rules are off?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like you're like, oh, I can eat lunch at 9:00 in the morning...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And you see people drinking like three martinis and you're like, what is happening right now?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It's breakfast.

[DongWon] It's breakfast. Right? But there is this thing about, like, airports and planes and trains and subways where because it's like dead time in between other things...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] No one can actually really interrupt you in that time because you're traveling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You're free in that space. Right? You're protected. So you're... I could see with how much you travel, like, let you have this sort of defended space. But when you're at home, do you have strategies for protecting your time? How are you keeping all the daily demands of your life a little bit at bay for, like, these 20 minutes, this 2 hours, whatever it is?

[Mary Robinette] No one can schedule a meeting with me before noon. Except in very rare occasions, where it's like a time sensitive thing, and that's... And even then, I have let my assistant do that. I don't get to make that call, because I will give my time away. And no one can make a meeting with me after 6:00 p.m.. So I have these windows in which meetings can happen. No one can make a meeting with me on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. And so those are some things that I've done to try to carve out a little bit more time. I also... This is ridiculous, but I've... But it has worked. I have trained Elsie and Guppy that when I am at my desk, and I say, Mary Robinette working now, that they will both mostly curl up and go to sleep. Because they know that they will get treats and that I will play with them when I'm done. And that has made a huge difference. Because as much as I love the fact that I have taught my cat to talk, she is a toddler and needs a lot of attention.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But those are the things that give me the ability to have space to write. The person I have to defend my writing space from the most is actually myself. So...

[Howard] Say that again for the people sitting in the back.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The person I have to defend my writing time from the most is myself. Because I will give it away. I will think, oh, I can do it later. I will prioritize other things. So I've found that the best practice for me is that I get up in the morning, and when I've managed to do this, I have a really good day. Or I'm already in a good brain space. So I'm able to do it. Cause-correlation. Who knows? But I write down these are the things... The time-sensitive things that I have to do today. Here's the places I need to be. Here are three tasks that I'm going to try to accomplish. And if I don't write down writing as one of those three tasks, I will... I have effectively given my time away. But then I do a timeline for myself of what I'm going to be doing. So what I'm basically doing is I'm clumping my executive function at the beginning of the day when it... When I have the most of it. So that when I finish a task, I can look at my notebook, and go, oh, now I'm supposed to move to this... Move on to this... Now I'm supposed to write. And reframing it as... I just said supposed to. I've been trying to reframe it as now I get to write. Because supposed to comes with a certain amount of shame and guilt if you don't do it. So, now I get to write. And then I have a couple of things that I only get... Like, I have this candle that I love and I only get to light the candle when I am writing. I have a playlist of music that I really like, but I only turn that playlist on when I'm writing. So I have a couple of things. And then there's usually... the other thing that I've found that works very well for my brain is to have another piece of writing that is my reward for finishing this piece of writing. It's like once I finish this, then I get to do that. And once I finished that, then I get to do, like... Then I get to write the scene where they make out, and then I get to do the scene where the dragons are flying. And then I get to that... seeing the next bit of writing as the reward for this bit of writing helps me... It's like linked excitement.

[Dan] The thing that I really love about this, and I suspect that we will find it is true for all of us, is that your writing process is continually evolving.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] It's not one thing that works for you. It's things that are changing. And some of that is your circumstances have changed, who you are living with, what job you have, but a lot of it is just you are learning more about yourself. You just said that you... Something you have found...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] About yourself. Giving yourself a reward. You are an incredibly accomplished and experienced writer, and you are still discovering things about yourself and your process. And that is, I hope, really beneficial for aspiring writers to hear. That on the one hand, maybe the downside, is that you never hit the point where you've perfected everything. It's never a solved problem. But the upside is that you are continually learning, you are continually growing, you're continually figuring out new things that work well for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, that's our hope for you, our listeners, as you are listening to us talk about our writing processes. Because all of us are going to have... All of us have different brains and all of us have different strategies and challenges and goals.

[Mary Robinette] For you, I have some homework. What helps you want to do the things that you aren't writing? The other things in your life, the other tasks, the other joys that you have. What helps you with those? Because the tools that you use for those also work with writing. So is there anything that you use, like, is it lists, is it spreadsheets, is it by doubling? What is it that helps you want to do something? And can you use those same things to guide your writing process?

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-02-qa-aboard-the-writing-excuses-cruise-with-mark-oshiro-and-kate-mckean/

Questions and Answers:

Q: How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

A: Is the character redundant? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Is this a more interesting character, so I need to make them the star? If you take the character out, does it affect the story? Are they filling a role that nothing else fills? Is this a protagonist, main character, or hero?

Q: If the story is very plot focused, how can you make it more character focused?

A: Who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Why is this character staying in this plot? What ability do they have to participate in this plot? Why is this character unsuited to solve this problem?

Q: Say you have some cool thing that doesn't quite fit the story. How do you decide whether to rip it out or find a way to shoehorn it in?

A: Is it going to baffle readers? Save it for a later opportunity. Can it do some other things? Don't buy cool solar powered lights for your garden path if you don't have a garden path. Does it fit with the characters?

Q: What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline when there are other fun things to do instead?

A: Money. Fear. Think about what you will lose if you don't finish it. Don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. Reward yourself with joy. Break it into small pieces, and use checkboxes. Think about why you don't want to do this. Write the ending first, and then use it to remind yourself where you are going.

Q: When do you call a manuscript done?

A: Everything can be made better. Can this be more of the thing that I want it to be? Art is never finished, only abandoned. Realize that there is a lot of refinement afer the point where you say it's done. First, is there a little voice saying, "Chapter 3 is really weird?" Second, make it hard for the editor to say no. You get more than one chance.

[Season 20, Episode 02]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Q&A on a ship.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And we are joined by Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean here on Navigator of the Seas. Hey, Mark, tell us about yourself real quick.

[Mark] Hello everyone. I am a young adult, middle grade author of some books that I've won some awards and been on some lists and I'm trying to pet every dog in the world.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Short and to the point. Kate! Tell us about yourself.

[Kate] My name is Kate McKean. I'm a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm very excited to be here.

[Howard] Well, we're excited to have you. And our students here at WXR right on the Navigator have been excited all week to learn from you guys. This has been awesome. But they still have some questions. So, let's turn it over to our students and have someone ask a question.

[Someone] Well. How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and possibly never have been in your book at all?

[Howard] Restating the question, how do you know when a character is taking so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things I look at is… The same things that I look at… I evaluate the character in many of the same ways that I evaluate a line. Is it redundant? Is the character doing things that other characters are doing? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Those are the things that… It's the same kind of metric. But you're just applying it to a different sort of experience.

[Dan] There's a… One of the things that I do in this case and in many other cases, any time the outline goes off track, is ask myself, do I need to get this back on track or is this a better track than I had in the first place? It could be that the character's taking up so much space precisely because you love them and they are more interesting than what anything else is going on. So you might need to just retool a little bit and let them be the star.

[Mary Robinette] Also, then, in some cases, where those two guys should be one guy. And you can just give all of that stuff to one guy, and then cut but you don't need.

[Mark] Yeah. Any instance I've ever had, where I've had to completely excise a character, the question became, if I take this character out, does it actually affect the story? If the answer is no, bye. Goodbye. Throw them overboard.

[Laughter]

[Mark] To fit the metaphor where we are. Please don't throw anyone overboard.

[Kate] No crimes.

[Mark] No crimes. No crimes on this ship.

[Erin] I actually… It's funny, because I was just thinking about the other side of that, which is it's possible that the reason that this character is taking up so much space is that they're filling a role in the story that there's nothing else there to fill. Like, they're the one who is advancing the story, at a time where no one else has that plot information. They're the one representing the characters back story, because there's nobody else to talk about. So maybe the answer could be that you could either add other characters, give part of what that character is doing to other characters, or figure out if there's a way that this story can hold it. Because you don't want to, like, knock out the supporting wall of your house, because you don't like it, and then be like, oh, no, it all fell down.

[Howard] I come back to the tripartite definition, the protagonist, the main character, and the hero. Who can all be the same person, but they can also be three different people. If someone is taking up a huge amount of page space in a story, and they are not fulfilling the role of protagonist or hero or main character, then I am well off outline, I'm now writing a different story, and it's time to figure out which story this character actually fits in.

[Someone] So, if you're writing a new book, and your plots tend to be very plot focused, what are some tricks to making the book more character focused?

[Howard] Restating. So, if you're writing a book, and the story is very plot focused, what are some tricks to making it more character focused?

[Mark] A question I ask myself, actually, because I'm also an outline or as well, is, very early on in my process of developing an idea, is who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Instead of just creating a character whatnot, think of possible… Not just possible conflicts, but, like, what's a contrast? What's a very interesting contrast of this happening to a specific person? That often can help me find a way into a much more character driven story, still within the very plot heavy story.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I… Similar to Mark, but one of the things that I will specifically look for within that is why the character can't just nope out of the plot. So that, for me, then means that being on that plot fulfills a lack, a hole in the character, it's doing something for them. That can usually allow me to find out what it is that they're missing, what it is they're lacking, that they can be on a journey for, separately from the plot, but that the plot is intersecting with, and that that's part of why they're moving forward.

[Kate] Exactly. Like, if they are on the plot because it fell in their lap, it is… They can easily nope out of it. But they have to want to be there for a complex reason. If the reason is too simple, you can make it more complex and that will deepen their… At least that character.

[Erin] I also sometimes think about what is the… What is it about this character that gives them the ability… Not only the desire, but the ability to participate in this plot. What is it that lets them take the action that moves this plot forward, and what is that rooted in? What is it that they're bringing with them to the plot that makes them an interesting person to be advancing it forward? Then, for that interesting thing, what's a way that you can work in… Somewhere where we see that area of interest outside of the plot? Where can we see it on some… In a side scene, or something else that's not necessarily plot focused?

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that… One of the other tools that I'll use is to look at the character and ask why are they uniquely unsuited to solve this problem? That, again, opens up a lot of tension and just… A lot of juicy, juicy stuff.

[Someone] So, say you have some really cool, awesome worldbuilding thing that you wanted in your story, but it just doesn't quite do it. How would you balance just ripping it out and just saving it for another story versus trying to find an excuse or a place to fit that into the story?

[Kate] Does it pass the smell test? So, if you're trying to shoehorn it in there, and you can find a way to make it work, but you're the only one who recognizes why that works, the reader's going to be like, "What? Why? Huh? Where?" So you're better off saving it for something else, which is an opportunity. You have this cool thing, you get to use it later. Not that you don't, like, use it now.

[Mary Robinette] I had this thing in Martian Contingency that I was extremely stubborn about. Which is that in the real world, when you're looking at time on Mars versus Earth, you use Sol for Mars, and Earth… Day for Earth. That's so that people who are talking back and forth can tell whether they're talking about next Sol or tomorrow. Because they're not lined up. I was extremely stubborn about including this. People were not getting it. But it did a bunch of things. It helped… I actually needed it, technically, to be able to talk about those two concepts. It also did, like, this is a really cool worldbuilding thing that actually did a bunch of heavy lifting. But it was so hard to explain to people. So I took an opportunity and I took another scene that was a little bit flat, and used that seem to just explain it to the readers as a point of conflict between two characters. So it was… It… Looking for what else can this do. If it's doing only one thing, you probably save it for the… Look, everybody, here are my extras. Here's my acknowledgments, which is where the Mars speed of sound went, because I couldn't fit it into the book.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think…

[Mary Robinette] It's different.

[Howard] I think about that one time I was shopping and saw some just really cool solar powered garden path lights. I was like, oh, these are amazing. They're so neat. I mean, you can program the… I don't actually have a garden path. This is one of those situations where no matter how cool it is, it doesn't belong in my yard, because it's just going to end up as, like, a fairy ring or something. See, that would have been awesome.

[Dan] see, that would have been amazing.

[Howard] Oh, well.

[Dan] For me, this comes back to character. Which is kind of what Howard was just saying. Howard, as a character, had no plausible interaction with a garden path. So there was no point in putting extra time and effort into one. Because one didn't exist. If my characters can plausibly interact with and be harmed by and make interesting decisions about the cool thing that I'm struggling to include, then it will be fairly easy to include. Whereas if it's just some neat bit of worldbuilding that I made up that doesn't actually affect the characters in any way, then, yeah, it needs to go.

[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 say, 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.

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[Someone] What are some strategies you have for finding the willpower for finishing a project that you have a deadline on, so you have to finish it? But you don't want to work on it, you've got another cool thing… [Garbled]

[Howard] What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline, but there's… There are other fun things to do instead?

[Mary Robinette] Money.

[Unknown] Spite.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fear.

[Laughter]

[Dan] They're very primal urges here.

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to give them actual useful information, Erin?

[Erin] I'll try. I don't know. But I think part of it is not thinking of it as motivation. You know what I mean? Because I think there are certain things in life we just do because we have to. But because writing is so personal, sometimes you think, like, I will always write when, like, the moment is there and when I want to. But as somebody who does a lot of deadline work, ultimately, it's about… It is a little bit about fear. Like, I'll lose this… I will lose this next opportunity to write something cool if I burn this bridge by never getting back to this person when I said I would. I will lose the money that I was going to receive from this project. But part of it is thinking, like, I don't actually need to be motivated to work, you just have to work to work. If that makes sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it is just putting down one sentence and saying that's all I'm going to do for today, but at least it gives yourself a small goal to get through that doesn't require motivation, just action.

[Howard] There's an aphorism that I come back to all the time that I think applies to just adulting in general. It is, don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. I come back to that all the time. In my doing this thing now because it's just what I want to do now or am I doing it now because it's leading me to what I really, really want.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar thing, which is what gift can I give to my future self? But the other piece that I will say is that one of the tools that I use is coming from dog training. We're having… We're working with a dog trainer on Guppy and while I said money, the fact is that my dog gets a form of payment for doing the things. It's a joyful form of payment. So, for me, the thing that I have to do… That… I shouldn't say that I have to do. The thing that I've found that is most effective… I can force myself to work. But that just makes work worse. It makes me resent it, and it starts to bleed over into the writing that I'm doing for fun, when I'm having to force myself to write. So, if I can make it more joyful, that helps. One of the things that you do with dog training is you do a lot of small sessions. So I will break things into smaller pieces. I will give myself ticky boxes, because the joy of watching a ticky box turn green is like… Um… Like… It should not be that effective. It makes me mad that it is.

[Howard] Our episode spreadsheets… I went to great trouble to program our episode spreadsheets so that all the little checkboxes are red until you check them, and then they turn green. That gives us joy every time we finished recording.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, it's like oh, when I finish this, then I get to do the next piece of it. And I get to cross something off. Like, I have literally given myself gold stars before.

[Kate] I have also done that. And I love a checkbox that I can physically do…

[Chuckles]

[Kate] What I do is turn it around and say why do I not want to do this? What am I scared of? If I'm scared to take the next step on this project, or I don't know what scene I'm writing next, or when I… I have to do the big edit when I finish this task. So when I… Even just say, like, I don't want to do this because I don't know what I'm doing after. Saying it out loud makes it less scary. It doesn't mean that the actual fear goes away, but you're like, oh, I'm just afraid. Great. That's easy to be afraid.

[Dan] That's so much better than the technique I got from dog training, is I wear a shock collar.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then, anytime I get off of the main document, it buzzes me. Don't actually do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually need a different trainer.

[Laughter]

[Mark] If I can add to this too. I… A thing… So I do actually something before I'm drafting. Some of you have heard me speak about this. Which is it's very important that when I'm about to start a book, I know how it ends. And I want to be absolutely unhinged and feral about that ending. Because then when I'm in those moments where I'm stuck, I will actually turn to the end, because I actually write my final scenes, final line first, and remind myself, like, that's where I'm going. Which often sort of related to you will help me figure out, subconsciously, why am I stuck in this moment? Why does this moment feel unmotivating? I will also say if you do just really require motivation, often, for me, it's I want to get this done so I can go to the shiny new object over here and work on the other thing that is also making me slightly feral and unhinged.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. Sorry. One last last thing which is, like, what I love about all of these different answers is I think what they remind me is we're also different in the ways we handle this. I think one way that's good is how have you ever forced yourself in your life to do anything else? Like, if you are like I always… When I don't want to go to a party, make… Say, I can get a pizza on the way home, then maybe you're, like, reward, like, focused. If you're somebody who… Like, whatever the thing is that works for you in other areas of your life can also sometimes be repurposed for your writing life.

[Someone] When do you call a manuscript done, because it seems like you could be stuck in each [garbled step of the process?]

[Howard] You had me at when do you call a manuscript done.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing. Everything can be made better. There is not anything in the world that can't be made better. I think if… Some people have heard me talk about this when we've been doing office Hours where you've come to me for one-on-one. So I know I've said this multiple times on the ship. When you're… If you talk to someone who worked on the Princess Bride, which is a perfect film, I am certain that they would say, "If I would've just had one more day." So, for me, the question is not can this be better, but can this be more of the thing that I wanted to be. Like, if I got a chair, if you look at the chair, listener, that you are sitting in right now. There's probably a scuff on it. Could you fix that scuff? Yes. Would it make it more of a chair? Would it make it more useful, would it make it better for you? No. So, when the thing is doing what you wanted to do, then it is done. Can you make it better? Yes. But you don't have to.

[Howard] I think it was Picasso who said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." And I have taken that as a gospel truth. I never finish anything, I decide to abandon it. Which is very emotionally liberating.

[Dan] Yeah. One thing that I did not realize when I was very early career, when I was still trying to break in, is how much refinement there still is to do after that point when it is done. Right? The agent is going to help you make it better. Your editor is going to help you make it better. The copy editor, the proofreader, like every step of the process will continue that refinement. It doesn't need to be completely perfect. It never will be. But it's good to remember this is good enough right now, and there's a whole army of people that's going to help me make it better later.

[Kate] I did two kind of litmus tests, both as a writer and as an agent. The first thing I do is I ask myself, whether it's my book or somebody else's, is there, like, this little voice in the back of your head going, "Chapter 3 is really weird." The quieter it is, the more I need to go back and look at chapter 3 or whatever part. The loud voice that's saying, "This is horrible and you're a blah blah blah blah blah." That's not your intuition, that's just fear and anxiety and all those things. It's the tiny little bit, like, yeah, this scene doesn't make that much sense. Then you go back and fix that one. When I'm in… When I have my agent hat on, and I'm editing a client's manuscript, my goal is to make it really hard for the editor to say no. But that goal is not make it perfect and ready to go to the printer. Because that's not my job and I don't have the power nor the time to do that. But when I look at a manuscript and say, okay, well, the beginning's a little slow. That might derail an editor. Let's fix that. Let's address that, and then not worry about some hand wavy things in the middle. Because by the time they get there, they're invested and they'll want to know the end.

[Mark] Most of the time, I'm teaching to young kids who haven't written at all, or very interested in it, have never even finished a short story. So a lot of their questions are around, like, well, how do I know it's done? Like, when do I know? Is it just writing The End? Which, often times, I'm like, yeah. Actually, yes. Then you're done. It's done. But I also like to talk to them about how those of us, especially here in the States, we have been raised in a system in which we are taught you have one chance. Right? You write an essay, you take a test, you get a grade. The end. That's it. So they often approach writing the same way. I see adults then struggling with that in adulthood, of I only have one chance to do this. So I love how all of us can sort of dispel the notion of, like, the thing you're writing is… You don't have one chance. It's not you write this manuscript, it's done, and that's the only chance you're ever going to get. So, for me, at least with my process, I know a manuscript is done initially, just when I reach that ending point that I've already written. It's done. Then I can give it to my agent. I can start having conversations with my editor. Then, even then, as it goes through developmental edits, line edits, and then we all get down to pass pages, where we're reading the proof of your pages. For me, I know it's done when I can read long periods of the book without stopping and going, oh, this doesn't make sense, something here is tripping me up. That's when I'm like, it's done. Maybe five or six things over the course of a whole novel, I'm like, I don't know if I landed this. But if it's very few of them, then I'm like, this is done. Like, I can let this go. Or abandon it, to use that language.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The UK edition of Shades of Milk and Honey is three chapters longer, and 5000 words longer, than the US edition. Because they made the mistake of asking me, "Is there anything you'd like to change?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You made the mistake of answering.

[Erin] I think that just shows the power of time. Because I will sometimes abandon, whether temporarily or permanently, a story because I'm like, I am not where I need to be at in order to make this any better. Like, I have done… All that I'm doing now is… I… Always call it like shuffling, is on the Titanic. All I'm doing is making very minute changes. Nothing is changing at the core. Because if there's something wrong at the core, I cannot figure out how to change it now. Sometimes I send it out anyway, and it's like, I hope that the editor at the magazine is, like, oh, actually it is this, or, you were wrong, it's fine. I accepted it. Then I'm like, oh, well, maybe that was all in my head. But sometimes, it is years later, I'm like, oh, I could have written this different, better story, but the story I wrote was fine for the writer I was at that moment. I think it sometimes nice to, like, acknowledge who you are and what you can do now, and worry about what your future self can do later.

[Howard] So you freeze the document in your trunk cryogenically until you've developed the technology to really fix it.

[Howard] We've got time for one more question. No we don't. We do not have time for any more questions. What we have time for is homework.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to give you the same homework that we are giving the participants in the Writing Excuses workshop here on the Navigator of the Seas that is the daily challenge. Asked and answered. Ask someone a question about writing. Either to learn more about what they're working on or to work through a project of your own.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.25: Breaking Into Game Writing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/20/16-25-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/13/15-37-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.14: Agent Query Trenches

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/04/05/15-14-agent-query-trenches/

Key Points: In the trenches, dealing with querying? How do you survive, emotionally? Don't go into a holding pattern, keep writing, keep making things, keep submitting. Don't give up the day job! Be honest with agents or publishers about your ability to work, when the deadlines are. Set your own success thresholds, your own goals, and be upfront with the publishers. Don't like queries? Try first chapters! Be aware, it's a lot more work, going to conventions, talking to editors, and asking to send them sample chapters. Learn to write a synopsis, which may be your query, before you write the book! Use Howard's checklist: a character, a conflict, a setting, and a hook. When should you give up? If it's making you ill. You may want to just write for fun! You may get someone to act as your shield. Think about what you love, you may be able to get it another way. Before you start, decide what the failure modes are. Be aware that even published authors have to deal with editors criticizing their stories, bad reviews, criticism! Learn to cope with it early on.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 14.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Agent Query Trenches.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] This title comes from a specific question that people asked us about what to do when you're in the trenches dealing with querying. We've actually gotten… We have seven questions…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] All along the same idea. Which meant we needed to do a podcast on this.

[Dan] We asked you what you wanted to hear about, and so many of you were like, "Please help me. This sucks." It does.

[Brandon] Yeah. Queries are miserable. Let's just do the first one. What are your best tips on how to survive the query trenches? I think they're asking kind of emotionally, right? How do you deal with the fact that you're getting lots of rejections or just never hearing back from agents on queries?

[Howard] Years ago, at… I think it was at LTUE, I was talking to a woman who'd handed a manuscript to Tracy Hickman, who was going to pass it along to an agent. She said, "What am I supposed to do now? I'm in this holding pattern." I said, "Well, if it gets handed back to you and you're told that it's awful, are you going to stop writing?" She said, "No." Okay, cool. So if it gets… If it comes back and they say it's awesome, but it's not what we want. Do you have anything else? Have you written anything else? She said, "Well, not yet." Okay, if it comes back and they said it's perfect but it needs revision, are you ready to keep writing on it? She said, "Yes. Okay." All of these sound like you can spend your time waiting still writing. Because this validation that… Because it sounds a lot like your question is about I'm in a holding pattern because I'm expecting validation and I'm nervous about it. Whether I am told I can write or I can't. For me, the best answer personally has always been regardless of what they think, I'm going to keep making things. So I keep making things.

[Brandon] That's great advice.

[Dan] There's a lot of self-care things you can do, but this is, for me and for Brandon, this was our baseline. Back when we were trying to break in, our rule was always be writing and always be submitting. Because once you send that thing off, if you sit on your hands and wait, it is going to eat you alive. But if you spend that time creating something new and doing what you love and following your passions, it makes it a lot easier.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ditto that. So, not to repeat it, what I will say also is that the thing about your emotional state while this is going on is to understand that the fact that the query has gone out, and you're waiting, that you're in a Schrodinger state. That it can either… You either have a published manuscript or you don't. The beautiful thing about it is that you currently don't have a published manuscript. So, the only state change is going to be a positive state change. Once you know that, I think that a lot of the pressure goes away. Because if that thing comes back, you can just send it out again. There's no… There's like actually no risk.

[Brandon] The thing is, the more stories you have on submission, that you can be submitting, at least, for me, the less any one rejection hurt, for me. This is just, I think, kind of natural, if you've got all these different options. You're not so invested in a single one that a punch to the face right there hurts way more than if you've got lots of different options. I'm not sure how to make that metaphor work.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But it really did for me. Beyond that, do remember that a rejection of a manuscript is not a rejection of you. I know we've talked about this before, and it's hard to think that way, but this is how you have to be. You have to be like these are pieces of writing, these are pieces of art I've created. It might be, when they get rejected, that there's something wrong with them. It might be that it's just the wrong match. They may be fantastic pieces of art. Either way, there the pieces of art you created, and that imbues them with a certain level of validity, no matter what happens. Right? They may not be ready for a professional publication, because they might not hit the market. They might not have the skill level. There are all sorts of reasons. That doesn't mean they aren't your wonderful pieces of art that are valuable because you made them. I really think that is the case. So, do lots of art and be submitting lots of places. Try not to let the rejections hit you too hard.

[Brandon] Someone else asks, "Is it reasonable to be able to go through the process of getting an agent/working to publish with a traditional publisher, while working a busy job or being a student?"

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Not only reasonable, but arguably, requisite. Definitely don't quit that job until you've got a bunch in the bank.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's the more standard model.

[Brandon] Having something else to distract you is also really handy when you're waiting for all of these responses to come to you. Yes, in fact.

[Brandon] Although the next question is along the same lines, "If I'm slow making edits or accomplishing tasks because I'm busy with school or work, does that run the risk of an agent dropping me or a publisher canceling my contract?"

[Mary Robinette] I think as long as you're honest when you go in… This is a thing that I do see happen to writers, that you take 10 years to hone a book, and you turn it in, and you have never had to write something in a year, which is what most publishing contracts are. When they come to you and say, "We would like the book on X date," it is okay to tell them, "I think I might need more time than that." They'll negotiate with you some. If you want to make a living as a writer, it is easier to have more books coming out. But there are also plenty of people who have a career where they bring out books very slowly. It's just a different shape of career.

[Brandon] Yeah. There are lots of people whose goal is to publish this wonderful novel that they've written. That's… They're the Harper Lee's of the world. They want… They have this one thing, and they work hard and get it published. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be writing a book every year. You have to decide what your success thresholds are, and what that shape is, and what it looks like. It's okay to kind of set your own goals there. I would reinforce what Mary Robinette has said, that if you are… The publisher would rather have the person who is upfront and says, "This is going to take me two years," then the person who is always a year late on their contract. The person who is upfront and says, "This is going to take me two years," they can plan, they can schedule, and you'll be just fine.

[Dan] Yeah. Don't think of it… The problem is not that you take your time, the problem is missing deadlines. So if you just establish the correct deadlines upfront, you should be okay.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Seven Deadly Shadows.

[Dan] Yes. So, a good friend of the podcast, one of our guest hosts a couple of years ago, Valynne Maetani. She is Japanese by heritage, and she cowrote a wonderful Japanese urban fantasy with another great local author, Courtney Alameda. This just came out at the time of recording from Harper. It is wonderful. It is about a girl in Japan who works with her father in… er, grandfather, in a shrine, a Shinto shrine. While she is going to school in dealing with all these standard high school things, the shrine is attacked by Japanese ghosts, by yokai. It spins off into this really dark… Courtney is a horror author, Valynne is a great thriller writer. The two of them together have put together a really cool urban fantasy with this really strong Japanese flavor. I absolutely love it.

[Brandon] Seven Deadly Shadows.

[Dan] Correct.

[Brandon] Awesome. So a lot of these questions are digging out an idea that I actually don't think that we've covered yet this podcast, I think we need to highlight, which is, they're saying, "How do you deal with all of this? How do you deal with this emotionally?" I had a strategy for dealing with the query problem. Because the query problem is, and everyone I know admits this, yet there's not really a better method. It is that a query is a bad pitch for a book.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Usually. Right? The first chapters are a good pitch for a book. You read the first chapters of a book, for most novels, that's going to give you a really good indication of the writer's skill level, how good they are at making promises, how engaging their characters are, and things like that. None of that comes across in a query. All that comes across in a query is maybe the basic idea behind it, and some of the skills that you can bring to it individually and things like that. My goal was always to skip the query stage.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] After the first year of querying, I realized I was bad at writing queries and good at writing chapters. This is hard to do. But it is what got me published. I never got anything other than blanket form rejections on queries. So, I went and I listened to editors at conventions, I talked to editors at conventions, I watched what people were saying, and I asked if I could send them sample chapters. A lot of times, if you ask someone in person, they will say, "Yes. Send me sample chapters and an outline instead of a query." That doesn't really help if you're like, "I'm sending queries and getting all these rejections." Brandon's saying, "Well don't do that." But I will say that is what worked for me. I got, in all of my years of sending queries, one single non-form rejection letter. That was from Joshua, who eventually became my agent. But he had forgotten who I was by the time I met him in person and asked… I sent him sample chapters for something that was a bad match for him, and he had rejected them. It was a comedy piece. So, what do you guys think on that? Like, is this helpful? Is this not helpful? Is it…

[Mary Robinette] I do think that there is some merit to that. With the caveat that you should ask the editors and agents that at the appropriate time. You should not, like, just come up to them randomly. Like, don't target them. But I think there is something to that, that if it's not your strength. The other thing that you can do, honestly, if writing a query is not your strength, is that you can get help. There are people who will write query letters for you.

[Brandon] Yeah. This isn't disingenuous. Again, the query is a, generally a bad pitch for your writing. It can be a good pitch for your story. Someone else can write that.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, one of the things that a query letter, and this is a solid reason to get good at it, is that often, not always, but often, the publisher will wind up pulling the language from your query letter for the catalog copy. So it is an opportunity for you to control which of the things you are comfortable with people knowing and controlling spoilers.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's not perfect. But it is an opportunity. Also, the other thing about learning to write a really good query is that it is a way to focus your story. So, I now write my query bef… The synopsis query, the little pitch thingy, I write that before I write the book most of the time. I found that that really helps me hone it. So it is… There are arguments both ways.

[Brandon] I must have query PTSD, because I never query on anything.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I don't even want to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, Brandon, we're just…

[Dan] You're also a household name. So…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, there's…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There's a little bit of a difference there.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, Brandon says, "I have this cocktail napkin." "We'll publish it!"

[Dan] Although, I do think it's worth pointing out, just to emphasize this, you hinted at this, when you decided your strategy was to avoid queries, that ramped up your level of work significantly. You have to do a lot of extra things in order to make that work. So if somebody wants to follow that same path, they need to be prepared to do a lot more legwork, a lot more personal contact.

[Mary Robinette] It's more expensive to go to conventions.

[Brandon] Way more expensive.

[Howard] I have a back cover copy checklist that actually works really well for creating a synopsis, which is character, conflict, setting, hook. It's just those four things. Gimme a character. I don't care if your book has 20 characters in it. Just give me one. Just focus on one, because that'll be more interesting. What's the conflict? Gimme a sentence that shows what the conflict is. What's the setting? Put them in a room, put them in something. Now plant the hook. One of my favorites is from the back of… I think it's Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George. Meet the Castle that changes itself every night and the women… Or the children who will do anything to protect it. I'm in. So having that formula for me… It's not a perfect formula, but having that as a starting point, makes writing a query, which is essentially marketing copy, much, much easier. Much, much easier.

[Brandon] So, we have the question here, when is it time to give up?

[Mary Robinette] This is a…

[Dan] On your dreams as an author?

[Brandon] It just asks, "When is it time to give up?"

[Mary Robinette] So, it's time to give up when it is making you ill. This is… Like, this is a thing that I think we do not talk enough about. That it's… First of all, it's okay to write just for fun. It's… You don't have to be on a publishing track. No one goes up to someone who plays the guitar and says, "Well, where's your recording contract? You play the guitar, you've got to have a recording contract." It's like, no, everyone accepts that you can just play the guitar for fun. You can just write for fun. If the process of jumping through these hoops is making you ill, it's okay to stop. It's okay to put it down. It's also okay to say, "I'm going to put it down for a while and then come back to it later."

[Brandon] You know what else I've heard is also okay? If you have a significant other or loved one who is willing to be a shield for you, and you are going to give them the works, and you're going to say, "When one of these gets picked up, tell me. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume they're all out there in the aether." I know people that, for their mental health, that is how they have to work. It works really well. The creator focuses on creating, and the partner focuses on making sure that these queries are going out and even sample chapters and things are happening.

[Dan] I've got two friends who, over the last year or so, have both given up. Which is… Which makes it sound like a failure, and neither of them see it that way.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Dan] They're both authors. They're both creators. For one of them, it was the realization that what she really loved about art, she could also get through visual art. So she said, "I haven't had success with this, I'm going to pursue a different direction." So she still has something very fulfilling in her life, that she loves to do, and is finding that she's excelling in it, which is great. For the other one, and this is stuff that she shares publicly, Natalie Whipple, who wrote what is still today my favorite eSport science fiction novel, just kind of said, "You know what, what I really love is storytelling. I think I'm just going to play D&D. She now GM's two different Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Some with her kids, some with friends. She is getting all of what she was happy writing would give her through a different outlet that is leaving her very fulfilled and happy.

[Howard] There's an entrepreneurial principle here that runs parallel to the… You've set a trigger event, Mary, a trigger pull event, which is when your health begins suffering, it's time to change. It's time to change something. The entrepreneurial aspect is before you go into this business endeavor, you need to have decided what the failure modes look like. It may be that the failure mode is when I have paid the bills for all of the things in my life using my credit cards for three months in a row, it's time to give up this business and go get a real job. Okay? Because putting that pin in the ground ahead of time means that when you look at this financial disaster you've created, you can say, "Oh. I actually predicted this as a failure mode. It is now fine for me to quit and to move on." I do not know what this looks like for writers. I know that as a cartoonist, in 2006, Sandra and I were literally on our last seven or $8000 of savings, and that was what we sent the first Schlock Mercenary book to the printer with. If that had not paid for itself and paid all the bills, then it would have been time to go get a job. We knew that that was the signal for time to give up. I got lucky, didn't need to give up.

[Brandon] We're out of time on this, although our homework this week, we wanted to find some way to kind of help you with some self-care. If you'll forgive a little bit of a diversion here, this doesn't necessarily get better once you get published.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the thing you have to realize. Right?

[Mary Robinette] So true.

[Brandon] Now, those of us in this room, me in particular, sit in a very privileged position where we're able to earn a living off of our writing, which certainly does take away some stressors, right? I understand that. But, once you get published, you are still going to be dealing with editors sending you long sheets of notes about how bad your story is, right?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Once the book comes out, you are going to hope for reviews, because reviews are very important to you, like Amazon reviews and things. Some of those are going to be bad. They're going to be scathing. If you are fortunate enough to get very popular, every place you go on the Internet, you risk having people… Running across people having a discussion about you. This is where I am right now. I can't go anywhere that I used to hang out without just running across threads. Though often times the first comment is laudatory, the second comment is the opposition, right? Why do people like this guy? He's terrible. Point, point, point, point, point. That is just… You're going to have to, as a creator putting your work out there, get used to the idea that you are going to face criticism in some form or another every day of your life. So. Learning to cope with this early on can be really handy.

[Brandon] The homework we suggest is something that some of us here at this table do, which was, we go read one star reviews on Goodreads of books we know are brilliant. Right? I do it for Terry Pratchett books, right? I go in and say, "Okay. Who could possibly, possibly hate Good Omens?" I go read about the one star reviews…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Oh. Art is subjective. People are allowed to like different kinds of art. It's okay for them to not like my art. A one star review does not… Is not a personal attack, it is just this art isn't working for me."

[Dan] You practice a much more kindhearted version of this. I will read the one star reviews and go, "Man, the world is full of idiots."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, go do that. Go familiarize yourself with the idea that art is subjective and then keep making your art and meeting your own goals. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/27/14-43-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.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/15/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-25-the-business-of-writing-comics/

Key points: Professional relationships and keep plugging. Don't be afraid to try other things, you need a portfolio more than a specialty. Make your deadlines and be easy to work with. And work hard -- it takes passion and love to break into the comics industry.
( Under the covers )
[Howard] I have a writing prompt.
[Dan] Writing prompt? Let's hear it.
[Howard] Our superhero gained his superpowers by writing technical articles for Wired.
[Dan] Excellent. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: nasal

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.24: Author's Responsibility to the Reader with Kevin J. Anderson

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/02/13/writing-excuses-5-24-the-authors-responsibility-to-the-reader/

Key Points: It's all writing-related, but the core is words on paper. Treat it like a job, put in the time, and meet your deadlines. Be professional. Use the mathematics of productivity to be prolific. Set aside working time, and take it seriously. Readers, don't hound writers. Writers, get to work.
( Steady work times words per hour equals? )
[Howard] Do we have a writing prompt?
[Brandon] Dan! Writing prompt us.
[Howard] Oh, dear.
[Dan] Writing prompt. Okay. You're going to write a story about a world in which writers are subject to the whims of their readers on a pleasure-pain system in real time. So as readers are reading your books and enjoying them, you are happy. If they start to dislike them or if they start to get impatient, then you experience physical pain.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: deadlined
Current Music: In This Song by Charice

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 32: What Dan Learned Last Year

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/05/17/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-32-the-most-important-thing-dan-learned-in-the-last-year/

Key points: being a full-time author is a lot of work. Self-employment means you are a small business owner, taking care of finances, taxes, publicity -- everything. Forums and websites and fans, oh my! Beware editors bearing changes -- that we need tomorrow. Learn to deal with long-term task switching. Get used to working on a schedule, with deadlines.
( dreams of Dan in pajamas? )
[Brandon] Let's wrap this up with a writing prompt from Mister Wells.
[Dan] A writing prompt? All right. I want you to write the first page of a story. Then stop and write the first page of a different story. Then go back and finish the first story.
[Brandon] Part of the fun of these podcasts is listening to us make each other struggle to come up with a writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. Join us next week for the last episode of the season.

Current Mood: garbled
Current Music: If You're Going through Hell, Rodney Atkins

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Four: Viewpoints, Plot Twists, Etc.

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/11/02/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-4view-point-plot-twists-and-being-a-part-time-writer-with-eric-james-stone/

A question-and-answer session at Mountain con with Eric James Stone

Key points: advice for balancing work, writing, and other necessities of life? Set aside some time to write each day, treat it as a job, and find a balance that keeps you sane. It's gonna be hard. Deadlines are necessary. Set them, and reward yourself. Plot twists need foreshadowing and smoke and mirrors. Avoid self-description by staring in a mirror, but do sneak in what you can.
( mucho gusto )

Current Mood: breezy
Current Music: Friends in Low Places, Garth Brooks

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

December 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.42: Erin Roberts' Personal Writing Process
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.40: Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.25: Breaking Into Game Writing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.14: Agent Query Trenches
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.24: Author's Responsibility to the Reader with Kevin J. Anderson
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 32: What Dan Learned Last Year
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Four: Viewpoints, Plot Twists, Etc.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 20.42: Erin Roberts' Personal Writing Process

Writing Excuses 20.40: Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

Writing Excuses 16.25: Breaking Into Game Writing

Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines

Writing Excuses 15.14: Agent Query Trenches

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics

Writing Excuses 5.24: Author's Responsibility to the Reader with Kevin J. Anderson

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 32: What Dan Learned Last Year

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Four: Viewpoints, Plot Twists, Etc.

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