Writing

I’ve not added much here lately. For various – mostly family-related – reasons my writing has slowed over the last two years, and although I have projects in progress, I wasn’t making much actual, well, progress. I decided I needed a motivator, something to get me back in the habit.

My husband coaches teams to perform, and he has told me that it takes 60 days to form a habit. After that time you don’t need to remind yourself to do something, it just becomes part of you. I’d lost my writing habit, and I needed to get it back. In the past I’ve tried NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month, where you set yourself the challenge of writing 50,000 words during November. That’s about 1,600 words a day, quite a lot if you have a day job, and it’s not really sustainable long term. I wanted something less stressful, something to be viewed as a treat, not a challenge. I decided to do #OctNo.

My plan for #OctNo, an entirely made up concept (but then we’re writers, we make up stuff all the time :)) was to do something to do with writing every day in October. I wouldn’t beat myself up about it, and I’d be very flexible on what I considered could be included. I gave myself the added incentive of posting my daily progress on Twitter. I reckoned that if I was writing, 500 words would be a good target. That’s about a page of A4 on a reasonable font (this post is about 760 words in total). And if I was editing, or reviewing, or just pondering, well, that was all progress too.

I currently have two projects in progress. One is a completed manuscript of about 100K words which needs a refresh. The other is a new project. I’m about 40K words in, and considering whether to add some additional voices. If I was going to do this, I thought, I needed to know more about the characters. I set about writing backstory for each of them.

This was the most fun I had during #OctNo. I loved finding out about these people. One was very sweary, one a complete scally, and one was just – well – dull. Luckily she dies early on.

The big manuscript was more of a chore. It needs work, but I’d had differing opinions on what that work should be. I took the advice of someone I trusted and invested in a couple of text books. Some of my #OctNo activities involved reading the books and taking notes, and then reviewing the manuscript. I broke it down into scenes and put a post-it for each on a large bit of card which turned into The Big Pink Plan. Then, when I could see it all, I started adding other post-its to show where things need to change (if you’ve ever read Asimov’s Foundation, it felt like a bad Prime Radiant moment). Once I had that, I was able to think of a way to tweak the story to solve one of the problems I’d uncovered. I’ve re-written the outline, I’ll ponder it a bit more, and then get onto re-writing.

Other activities in the month included reading (well, listening to audiobooks as I commute), drafting a short story, and going to see the inspirational Margaret Atwood talk.

So if you don’t have the capacity to keep up with the needs of #NaNo, I can recommend an #OctNo approach – do plenty of what you love about writing, and don’t beat yourself up. Sharing also helps, because the lovely people of Twitter are always there to support us.

Keep writing!

Final #OctNo Tally

Here is the day-by-day summary of what I managed to achieve:

1 520 words

2 507 words plus review of edits

3 515

4 828

5 733

6 Editing

7 538

8 127 plus short story notes

9 659

10 304

11 529

12 Editing

13 Editing

14 Editing

15 Editing

16 527 plus editing

17 Re-planning

18 Re-planning

19 Reviewing the plan and discussing with fellow writer

20 Despairing about the plan

21 Pondering

22 Reading textbook on re-structuring

23 Reading textbook on re-structuring

24 Reading textbook on re-structuring

25 Just reading

26 reviewing the plan

27 reviewing the plan

28 670 (revised outline)

29 575 (revised outline)

30 Talk by Margaret Atwood

31 Summarising #OctNo activity

In total:

5,787 words of new project

1,245 words of revised outline for current project

About a billion post-its on the Big Pink Plan

3 audio books

1 text book

1 short story idea

1 inspirational talk

I was recently asked by a school to combine my usual author talk with one which included some background on my career track and advice for aspiring writers. As I started making some notes about what I would say, it became obvious that – despite talking about a job I love – I wasn’t going to be painting a particularly rosy picture. Life as an author today has some unique challenges, and I was torn between being realistic and crushing dreams. I started with the daily choices we have to make.

Do you work on your WIP (Work In Progress) or market your latest book? There aren’t enough hours in the day to do both, not when marketing means building relationships on Twitter, writing guest posts for bloggers, pitching for invitations to events and much more. These days very few authors find that their publisher is going to put a big marketing budget behind their new book. The money just isn’t there. So the only way that people are going to find out about your book is for you to get out there and do it yourself. This takes huge amounts of time, and you won’t have a lot of that –see point 2. But if you don’t have the time to write the next book you won’t sustain your momentum with your readers. It’s a horrible conundrum.
Do you spend your limited free time writing or with your family – because, lets face it – those royalties aren’t going to pay the mortgage, and you’ll need another – ‘proper’ – job which will take up most of your days. Unless you hit lucky, or have a supportive partner or (I wish!) a trust fund, reality means that writing will be your hobby and there will be a day job which sustains you financially. I know very few authors who have the luxury of ‘only’ writing.
Do you charge for visits and appearances or do them because they are ‘great exposure’? I just *love*doing school visits and events. There is nothing better than getting to speak directly to the readers, finding out what they like and hearing their opinions. But often the organisers imagine that they don’t need to pay us, that the exposure or the chance to sell and sign books is enough. It isn’t. It’s a day off from the paying day job (or a day out from writing) and the reality is that you rarely sign enough books to compensate for a day’s pay.
Do you try to find an agent and/or publisher, or do you self-publish? It’s an increasingly tricky question. I’ve been lucky enough to be traditionally published – all four of my books have gone to market that way. But many people are now choosing to self publish, some even turning down publishing deals in the process. Their logic is that they will have to do the majority of the marketing anyway, so why not keep a much bigger percentage of the purchase price themselves?

Of course, with all of these I was focussing on the career side of things, the ability to make a living, but there is one aspect of being an author that you really can’t put a price on – that need to get the story out there. I’m constantly buzzing with new thoughts and possible plots, and the more I write, the more I want to explore those strange new worlds swirling around my brain, and get to learn about the characters who are just busting to come to life. Most of us will carry on writing even if those stories never see the inside of a bookshop – we just can’t stop. And that puts all those other problems into perspective. We write because we love it, and it is the best job in the world.

#OctNo – Getting back in the habit of writing

The Best Job in the World. Really?