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Writing Excuses 15.20: Mental Wellness and Writing
 
 
Key Points: Mental wellness, a.k.a. self-care, not mental-health, writing with depression, and so forth. Physical and mental wellness go together. Remember it's work, no matter how much you enjoy it. When you set your own hours, you need to carve out time for other things. Set aside time for family and friends! Create, sustainable practices. How can you write with physical or mental ailments? Don't equate word count, quantity, with self worth. What is the smallest bite? Do 20 minute sprints. Crack the seal! Try different ways and accommodations to see what works for you. Listen to healthcare professionals and other people. Make yourself accountable to somebody else, and let them warn you when you are overdoing. How can you use writing as therapy? Write out your anger, then let it flutter away in the wind. When you are writing for your own mental health, you are writing so you can have written, not to be read. Outlining lets you write emotional beats that fit where you are when you are ready for them. Writing during bad times? Don't equate self-worth with word count. Sometimes you can't. Remember, writing is writing, thinking, deleting, walking, musing, and so many other things. Replenish the creative well. Try writing with pen and paper to get rid of the extra distractions. If you can't write, maybe you can plot, brainstorm, try variations on scenes.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 20.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Mental Wellness and Writing.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We're going to talk about mental wellness and how you apply it to your writing. We have a bunch of questions from listeners about this, but let's start off… Dan, you have something you want to…
[Dan] I just wanted to make sure that our listeners know upfront that we are talking about mental wellness, which is different from mental health. This is not… We've done episodes before about writing with depression and things like that. We'll probably touch on that a little bit, but more than anything else, this is an episode about self-care. About making sure that you can handle the process of writing, or using the process of writing to help with other things.
 
[Brandon] Okay. Well, let me ask then, what do you guys do in order to take care of yourself while writing?
[Victoria] It's interesting. For me, physical wellness and mental wellness go hand in hand. So, it's hard when I'm on the road most of the year, but I always try and carve out a good 30 minutes a day for either yoga or stretching or watching a really nice television show or putting on a facemask or like taking a long shower. Doing something, it doesn't have to be fancy, but something where the onus is off of me to have measurements of productivity and success. To have something that is pass-fail, right? And you can only pass. Because I feel like so often, especially those of us for whom writing is a part or a whole career, we put so much pressure on, and you can put so much pressure on if you're carving out time to write at 11 o'clock at night or 5 AM in the morning, to just almost consider everything a metric. That just leads to a lot of self-loathing, to a lot of you're not doing enough, you're not doing what you should be doing. So I think taking a chance to reset, to put away all of the metrics, and just take time and remember to human, in addition to… So that your self-worth doesn't become directly correlated with what you're making.
[Howard] I have so very, very many thoughts on this. Let me start by saying that I love my job. It's wonderful. I really do love it. It's fun. But if it's the only thing I do all day, I feel empty. So, if you're looking at a career in writing or in drawing comics or in whatever because you think that will be fun and you think you will be able to work much, much longer hours than you could work wherever you're working now? Be advised that that may be a false paradigm. It's gonna end up as work, no matter how much you enjoy it. I got to draw a munchkin deck a couple of years ago. It wasn't accelerated, fast-tracked project, and I worked… Literally, I'm not making these numbers up. I worked from 6 AM to midnight, every day for a month, except Sundays. My sleep schedule was such that that was actually survivable. Superpower. Only actually needed five and a half hours of sleep per night. It was wonderful. At the end of that month, I learned two things. One, I can do this. Two, I need to stop.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because I was empty and I was burnt out and I knew that I had reached a physical limitation that I did not want to push up against again any time soon forever.
 
[Victoria] You also bring up a point that I want to expand upon, which is this idea of the hours. There's this idea that when you set your own hours, you can do anything. The fact of the matter is that the freedom of writing and of creative professions where you get to set your hours is also the downside, because writing is a 365 days a year process, in that you can take a physical vacation I'm sure, but turning off, unplugging, these are things which are both very difficult and you end up feeling very guilty about that time that you take. So I think that the less structure you have in this job or in this hobby or in this aspiring profession or this actual like current profession, the more important it is to find ways to carve out time in which you affect those boundaries.
[Brandon] I'm very focused on time management. I'm a very structured person. We've talked about my spreadsheets and things like that. One of the problems I had with this early in my career is I know… I got married a year after I published my first book, right? After I sold my first book. Suddenly, having a wife and family meant that I was unaccustomed to taking my attention away from the stories. Because even though I wasn't writing, they were in the back of my head. I've heard lots of rider friends have this conflict with spouses and with family, that you're always too focused… You're not there with me when you're there with me. I had to learn, for me, what worked was to pick specific times. At 5:30, I can't write. It doesn't matter if my family's home or not, I have a requirement that 5:30 to 9:30 is not work time. I've got to be doing something else. By giving myself that kind of… I turn the clock off, and even training my brain to be like, "We're not going to focus on that. We're not going to think about that. We need these four hours to refresh, we need these four hours to spend with my family, with my kids," whatever it is, that was liberating to me. To train my… It was hard at first, but it was liberating to train myself to turn it off for four hours a day.
[Victoria] It's about creating sustainability. The fact is, you can do anything, as you were saying, Howard, for a short period of time, but most people don't want to have a single project. They want to have a long-standing career, and in order to have a long-standing career, you have to find a way to create healthy, sustainable practices.
[Howard] At the time of this recording, I'm feeling huge like despair-worthy amounts of stress, because there's a whole bunch of cartooning that needs to be done before Monday, and it's not done yet. Last night, one of the kids had a severe medical emotional stuff. I was told that I had to sit next to her on the couch and watch YouTube videos. In fact, I was told that I wasn't allowed to get up and run errands, because my part of the medical process was to be the service emotional comfort Dad or something. I look at that, and I recognize that for my own part, yeah, it was kind of a huge sacrifice to help this other human being instead of doing the thing that I wanted to do for me. But ultimately, those other human beings are more important to me than I am. If they are not happy, I really despair. Me not getting my work done? That makes me sad. But them being unhappy, that is huge. As Brandon said, being willing to carve out time, I have to do it. My schedule isn't as rigid. But when something happens, my moral compass says I will drop what I'm doing in order to be with them.
 
[Brandon] So, there's a question here about writing under the stresses of physical or mental ailments. How can you long-term do this? What measures and steps do you take?
[Victoria] Well, so I have chronic pain, but I'm going to talk less about that because I use physical activity to try and mitigate some of the effects of that. But I will talk about writing as somebody who has anxiety and depression, and are obviously hills and valleys that come with having anxiety and depression. Look, there are some times when you can't write. We'll talk at the end of this about some homework that might help with that during those times. But in the immediate, what I do is I, one, do not equate word count and worth. In the interest of that, I carve down my goals to the smallest possible metric. There are some days when that metric is can I open up the document and sit with my story and think about it for half an hour, because that is going to create… Keep the creative door propped open in my head. Because I think the more time you spend away from the project, the harder it is to come back. Some days that's can I write a couple sentences? Let's not look at this as 2000 words or a chapter. What is the smallest bite? So I am somebody who is extremely structured in my writing, but I also only write for 20 minutes at a time. I probably, even on my most productive days, write for three hours total. That's nine sprints. Really. So I don't think that it's time equals quality, but I do think that by cutting it down to 20 minutes, I can stare at a Word document for 20 minutes. I can think about a story for 20 minutes. Even on a bad day, I can spend 20 minutes not doing anything else. Neil Gaiman has a process where he says, "When I sit down to write, my two options are do nothing or write. It's simply about removing the other distractions. You can either write or do nothing. Those are your two options." For me, I want to make the smallest bite possible. Just the same way that I never sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a book." I don't even sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a chapter." I sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to spend some time in this scene, in this moment." There are some days when I make a paragraph out of that, and I'm so happy. Usually, if I can cracked the seal on the overwhelming feeling, the overwhelmedness of that day, I can get something down on paper. Getting something down, even a small quantity, is better than nothing, and will help me feel better and make things feel a little bit more manageable.
[Howard] I like the idea of cracking the seal, because it makes it sound like the doom of the world is going to spill forth…
[Victoria] It is.
[Howard] Once I've gotten it open.
 
[Brandon] Dan, I know you've had some chronic pain issues before. You had your tailbone. You were trying to record, while your tailbone was hurting. You also had carpal tunnel. How did you write during these times, with these chronic pains? What did you do?
[Dan] For me, those were chronic issues, but they were not long-term issues. They were a few months at a time. So, for me, it came down to being willing to change my routine. I am a creature of routine. I like to write in the same room every day during the same hours. So, forcing myself to say, "Well, actually, you know what, for the next year, I'm going to use a standing desk instead of a normal desk." Or "I'm going to try a different keyboard layout." I had one that was split up… I am using gestures that you can't see the thing because this is audio only. But trying to find different ways and different accommodations. But, at the core of it, it comes down to, am I willing to do this in a different way than I've ever done this before? Which is kind of how I do my whole career. That's why I jump genres. That's why I find new programs to be a part of. I'm always trying to find the new thing, because I don't know until I try if that's going to be a thing that works really well for me. Some of these accommodations that I have used in the past, like a standing desk, I keep coming back to over and over because I genuinely have come to love it.
[Howard] I'd like to go on record real quick to say there are healthcare professionals out there. Some of them may be related to you. They might be part of your circle of friends. People you can listen to who are going to tell you, "Oh, wow, that thing you're doing? Maybe don't do that." I've failed to listen in a couple of key places. I can't take much ibuprofen anymore because I took a whole bunch of it in order to be able to draw a lot, and now one or two of those will give me IBS in all the best let's not talk about this on air sorts of ways.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There are things that you may be doing to push through and get it done that make you feel like a superhero that are actually not good for you. Being willing to listen to other people and step back into the mortal realm a little bit might be good.
[Dan] I recognize that not everybody is in a position to have someone else to listen to, but if you do, whether it's someone who lives in your home with you or just a friend that you can text, making yourself accountable to somebody else is a huge part of self-care. Because we can't always be the best judge of have I spent too much time on this? Am I fixating too much on this? Am I burning myself out on this? So having someone who can check in every now and then and say, "You know what, it's three in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything today." "Okay, yes. Then I need to put this down and I need to go eat."
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Lab Girl.
[Victoria] Yeah. Lab Girl. It's interesting. It came out a couple years ago. It's by an author named Hope Jahren. J A H R E N. It is a book that is very hard for me to quantify. But it's something that I recommend to anybody who is… Once an exploration of mental wellness and mental health issues, especially, as they intersect with creativity and with writing and identity. Hope Jahren is a brilliant botanist and biologist who was sensibly is writing a memoir through an examination of her relationship with the natural world. Underneath that is an examination of her mental state as it shifts and she processes it through this motif. I found it at the time when I needed it. I think it is a beautiful book, regardless of when you find it. But I hope that it will just find some of your listeners at maybe the right time, and just make them see themselves a little bit and understand that you can find beauty and that you can have some really incredible experiences. And, that really, like, sometimes if you struggle with mental health, because that's something that I do struggle with, even though this is a self-care podcast, I think sometimes it can feel like a deteriorating condition, where you can feel like, especially if you're in one of the hills… Or one of the valleys, that you're never going to have a hill again. I think it can be really grounding, the same way that you need people in your life that can kind of call you back to yourself, it can be grounding to see yourself, especially your mental self, through other works as well. I found it just an incredibly powerful book.
[Brandon] So, that is Lab Girl?
[Victoria] Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren.
 
[Brandon] So, as we move into the last few minutes of this podcast, there's a question here about tips for writing as therapy. Including, how to draw on personal grievances in a tasteful way, and help you make both more powerful writing and work through, perhaps, some issues. Anyone done this? What are your thoughts on this?
[Howard] Let me begin by saying that there are… If you are furious, if there is rage, and you just want to get it out of your system and put it on the page, write it using a tool where it does not immediately go online.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Write it in a way where it is disconnected from the Internet. Maybe write it and print it and then delete the file. Because we say things when we are in these frames of mind that are valuable for us to have said. But their value decreases dramatically as they get read by other people. I can't remember what the story was that I was listening to… I think it actually might have been Amal El-Mohtar when she was doing her oracle of buses thing, and somebody was saying, "How do I make this one emotion I'm having go away?" She said, "You write down the full description of this emotion, and then put it on a piece of paper and then tear up the paper and let it flutter away into the wind," or something. It was a beautiful thing that she said, and I haven't done it justice. But there's this idea that when we are writing, we are writing so that we can be read. When you are writing for your own mental health, you're writing so that you can have written. Those are two different things.
[Victoria] I definitely use writing as a form of catharsis. I've done it since the very beginning, since far before I was published. It felt like… A lot of circuitous thinking, a lot of spiral thinking, and it can feel very tangled up in my mind, and I feel like focusing on a story and putting things into word can be a way for me to make straight lines out of a lot of the clutter in my head, to kind of channel my energy. But I also… I write as catharsis for very specific emotional beats. One of the reasons that I outline my stories so rigidly before I write them is so that I can write them out of order. So that I can pick the scenes perhaps that have emotional beats that I want to write that day. Some days you wake up and you want to write a murder. Some days you wake up and you want to write a love scene. Some days you wake up and you want to write… Or you're prepared to write some of those really difficult emotional scenes. Those very difficult emotional scenes, you're probably not prepared to write every day. So then rather than sit around and wait for the day that I'm ready to write the next scene, I basically have it prepped and have it blocked out in my story and then set it aside until I have a moment or a day in my life where I feel either very stable and thus ready to explore this darkness or feel very unstable and very ready to explore this darkness. But I definitely earmark different emotional beats that I know I can't write every day. I wait for something to happen or for some state to come along for me to be ready to do those moments justice.
[Brandon] Dan was smiling over there when you said…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Some days you don't want to write a murder…
[Victoria] Yeah.
[Brandon] Or whatever it was.
[Victoria] Some days you do want to write a murder.
[Dan] I don't know what that's like, to wake up and not want to write a murder.
[Victoria] I know.
 
[Brandon] Last question here. How do you manage to keep writing during bad times in your life?
[Victoria] You try. I mean, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier about you don't equate self-worth with word count. I mean, like, you try. You try when it helps you. You understand that if for some reason you can't, or if the world just feels too big, it's okay to go into a creative fallow period. I've said online many times that writing is writing, but so is thinking. So is deleting. So is walking, and musing, and doing lots of things. So is reading. So is consuming. There are times when you just… You're not ready to put work out of yourself onto paper, but that's a really great time to take work in. That's a really good time to find shows or comics or movies or books and try and replenish that creative well for when you are feeling ready.
[Howard] I need to tear the question into a couple of different elements here. Bad times. That is such an enormous bucket. How do you keep writing during bad times? It is entirely possible that the very best thing for you during a particular bad time is to not write, is to not think about writing, and to do something completely different, and I can't answer how to categorize that. I just gotta come out and say that time might exist. Then there are bad times. I remember at one point my daughter talking about how she had a whole lot of trials and everything was really hard. What she was describing was I'm a teenager. I'm here to tell you that, yes, that is terrible and it is really hard. But when you are a teenager and you are experiencing that, many of the adults are looking at you and saying, "Oh, sweetie. I do not want to tell you about my 30s."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I do not want to tell you this. Because the lessons you are going to learn right now are going to allow you to function when you're in your 30s. It is possible that the bad times you are having are things that… The lesson that you learn from them is, oh, I need to change my schedule. I need to change my diet. I need to get some exercise. I need to do something in order to mitigate the bad time and carve out time to write. I don't know… To the person that is asking the question, I don't know what kind of a bad time you're having.
[Victoria] That's true.
[Howard] So I don't have the answer.
[Victoria] I also just want to say, last note, because I think this is getting into a question that we don't get to answer, really, is that often times we become very distractible especially in these days. Like, your computer is a great tool of distraction. Sometimes it can also feel like a very precious thing. You look at a Word document or a blank screen and it feels very official, because everything that you write becomes a typed thing. When I am feeling… Like, specifically susceptible to these moments, I switch to pen and paper. I scribble along the top of the page so it's already not blank anymore. I might just doodle or do something. I find that it helps me turn off some of those extra voices, some of those extra distractions. It's not to say that what I put down on paper will be great. Often times I don't use it. But it's a great thinking tool to re-open that door. Or maybe I'm not in a good enough place to write, but maybe I can plot. Maybe I can brainstorm. Maybe I can play a choose-your-own-adventure with those scenes, where I'm how can I make this scene worse or stronger?
[Howard] I would love to have a three hour session with me and Victoria and Dan and Brandon and half a dozen other people where we just talk about unlocking.
[Victoria] Yes.
[Howard] Because all of our strategies are going to be different, so my suggestion… I did unlocking session at WXR on the cruise ship. It was one of the most beautiful discussions we've had because we were able to look at this question and talk about our respective bad times and come up with strategies. It may be, listener, that the answer for you is to talk about it with someone.
 
[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you have some homework.
[Victoria] I do have a homework. I like this homework because it involves getting a piece of paper and some colored pencils. I feel like that just…
[Oooo]
[Victoria] it taps back into like that elementary school or that young, like, joy of, like, creating something. I want you to create a lifestyle tracker. This is a very simple grid where you essentially make like an x-axis and a y-axis and down one side you put different things. I want you to put at least three things which are craft oriented, reading, writing, planning or plotting. I want you to put three things which have nothing to do with your chosen craft. Is it eating healthy, is it taking a half an hour walk, is it stretching, is it self-care? Then, across the top, I want you to put the dates. You can start with a track that just goes for 30 days. I tend to get overwhelmed by that, so I do a 10 day tracker. The point of this tracker is I want you to track each of these things every single day and color in the squares if you do them. The reason is because when you get overwhelmed, it can be very easy to lose track of time. If you struggle with anxiety and depression, a day becomes a week becomes a month. Suddenly you haven't written in a month, and you don't understand why. I am very good about that thing of if I start something at the beginning of a month, and then I mess up on the third day of the month, I'm like, "Oh, well, try again next month." The goal with the lifestyle tracker is the most that you can lose is a single day. Every single day a fresh start. I find that even if you get to 4 PM and you think this day is lost, again, you're not losing a week. You're not losing a month, you're not losing a year. You've lost a few hours. Go and nail something else on the lifestyle list, if you feel like I can't make today, I bet you can do 30 minutes of self-care. I bet you can take a bath or put on a facemask or like, do something nice for yourself. Then color in that square and see every single day as a fresh start.
[Brandon] Awesome. So this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go take care of yourself.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career
 
 
Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…
[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?
[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.
[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…
[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.
[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…
[Dan] Hufflepuff.
[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.
[Dan] So, give us some examples.
[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.
[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.
 
[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.
[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Don't we all?
[Dan] We've been friends for decades.
[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.
[Laughter]
[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.
 
[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…
[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.
[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.
[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.
[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?
[Laughter]
[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]
 
[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.
[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…
[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.
[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.
 
[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.
[Victoria] Mortality.
[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.
[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.
[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Ghost Station.
[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.
[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…
[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.
[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.
[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…
[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.
[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?
[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.
[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.
 
[Brandon] We are a little overtime…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.
[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.44: NaNoWriMo 2017 Primer

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/29/12-44-nanowrimo-2017-primer/

Key points: Nanowrimo is a community of people who are all pushing for a goal, giving you a sense of participation, community, and commiseration. It can also push you to up your game, seeing other people turn out words. Look for tools, for word sprints, or roleplaying games with monster writing challenges. Motivators! Nanowrimo can help you learn to be a professional writer, to set goals and get the job done. It teaches you to get the words out. "You can't find those awesome words without writing the crappy ones." You can also do Nanowrimo just for the fun off it. Writing quickly and writing well are two different skills, and Nanowrimo can help you practice and learn to write fast. Nanowrimo is a tool to help you be a better writer. It's one way to learn that you can write 50,000 words in a month. 
Here comes Nanowrimo! )

[Brandon] We're out of time. With that… On that wonderful note, you guys… Your homework is to find a way to use Nanowrimo to your advantage. Set some goals this month. Some writing goals. It doesn't actually have to be the 50,000 words. It can be whatever is going to fit your schedule. But I want you to push yourself. And I want you…
[Howard] Use this month to make words that you would not have made otherwise.
[Brandon] That's right. That, simply, is your homework. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.4: Newton's Laws of Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/24/11-04-newtons-laws-of-writing/

Key points: Tayler's Three Laws of Writing. [1] A word count at rest tends to remain at rest, while a word count in motion tends to remain in motion. Motivation? To keep writing, write some more! To start writing, start slow, then bump your goal. Build your writing inertia by writing every day! Oh, at the end of a session, don't stop at the end of a chapter. Write the first page of the next scene, and then pick up with that jumpstart. Dan it all! Don't sweat the zone -- fight to make the most of each chance, and make sure people understand don't interrupt me! Think before you start writing, don't waste time ramping up. [2] Word count equals motivation times focus. Motivate by thinking about what comes next. Focus BICHOK and clear distractions. Consider word count per hour. Try a timer (sand timers don't beep!). Meditation might be your ticket to a clearer mind? [3] For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you write words, the words write you. You also are affected. Writing is its own reward. Every word you write builds your writing skill. The goal of writing stories is to become a better writer. The equal and opposite reaction to writing is that you become a better writer!
Three Laws of Writing in Motion? )[Brandon] Now, we are out of time on this episode. I'm going to give you a writing prompt. It's going to actually be a classic writing prompt. One of these ideas that popped into my head and I was on the cruise, and that I was actually pretty excited about. So maybe someday I'll write it. They were talking about art auctions, and it just sent me down this weird spiraling path to thinking about, "You know, it would be kind of smart to take artists, buy up all their paintings, and then murder them so that the art spiked in value."
[Howard] Nice.
[Brandon] So the story somehow is about somebody who is a serial killer of artists, specifically in order to bump the value of all that art up and try to make money. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. Please don't kill any artists.

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