Previous two-week goals:

1. Continue writing around 8 pages a day, Monday through Friday, and getting in a few pages on the weekend.

2. I’m about 100 pages from finishing my novel. Thus, as a secondaryword-count goal, I’d like to write 50 pages a week and have this novel behind me on the 21st. That would require that I write more like 10 pages a day, Monday through Friday, which is something of a stretch for me. But stretching one self is sometimes a good thing.

3. Continue reading as widely as possible. Finish the three books I’m reading now: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux, and What It Was by George Pelecanos. 

4. Finish copying out the chapter from The Stand. Begin copying out beginnings and ends of chapters in order to learn about cliffhangers and hooks.

How did I do?

1. The writing slowed down a bit. I hit a part in the novel where I became quite unsure of the story and found all I really wanted to do was write the minimum then get away from the smelly old thing. So instead of averaging 8 pages, I averaged only 5. No too bad. I’d like to get that back up to between 6-7 pages a day this week.

2. I won’t finish the novel tomorrow, 2/21. I have about 35 pages left. At 5 pages a day, even with weekends off, I’ll finish by the end of the month. Which means, of course, that I’m right on schedule according to my revised 2012 writing goals.

3. I didn’t finish The Talent Code, but I did finish The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux and stopped reading What It Was by George Pelecanos. 

I should’ve been able to finish The Talent Code if I’d taken the time, but I let myself get caught up on the internet. In fact, my internet usage has gotten so bad that I’m giving up all web surfing for Lent (which starts Wednesday; I’m Catholic). I’m not going to allow myself to get online unless I have a set purpose to do so: write a blog post, publish a book, check sales, etc. And at that, I’m going to do my best to limit myself usage to 30 minutes a day. This will give me more than enough time to get a lot of reading done, as well as get my spiritual life back in order.

The Summerhouse was my second romance novel in a row, and it was quite good. After two romance novels, one thing I’ve learned is that I’ve never thought about how my readers would think about my characters. With other genres, characters take a back seat to the genre convention: the science fictional element, the fantasy, the horror, the mystery. But in romance, it’s just about characters, and there’s no archetypal villain (at least not in the two novels I’ve read so far). So romance writers work hard at the beginning developing characters you’re going to like and despise. Oddly, in both The Beach House and The Summerhouse — as well as the romance novel I’m reading, Angels Fall by Nora Roberts — I find myself thinking, why does it feel (sometimes) that I’m reading a Stephen King novel? The reason why is that these King spends time developing characters you’re going to love or despise; he doesn’t solely rely on the archetypal villain.

What It Was is an interesting little crime novel that’s well written, has a terrific voice, but which, in the end, left me not caring one way or the other how it ends. Maybe this has nothing to do with the novel, maybe it’s because right now my own reading intersets are pretty far removed from the hard-boiled crime/mystery novel. My reading goes through phases, and when I’m in the middle of a phase, I can’t read a novel from the phase I just left. Unfortunately, I don’t realize this until something like what happened with What It Was happens. These half-read novels become reading casualties I rarely give a second chance. (I’ve yet to try Ender’s Shadow again, even though Card is one of my all-time favorite writers!)

4. My own copying of King’s The Stand went on hold the past few weeks. No big deal there. It’s an exercise, not writing, but I’d like to pick it up again.

Two Week Goals (Feb 21 to Mar 6)

1. Writing Goals: Write 6 to 7 pages a day.

2. Project Goals: Finish novel by the end of the month. Get prewriting work finished for second novel and start writing no later than March 5.

3. Reading Goals: Finish The Talent Code, Angels Fall, and Diving Into The Wreck (a sf novel by Kris Rusch I’m listening to).

4. Writing Improvement Notebook: Continue copying out Chapter 35 of Stephen King’s The Stand. Also, copy out the chapter hinges of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. Chapter hinges, as I think of them, are the last page of one chapter and the first page of the next; the goal is to learn something about cliffhangers.

Thinking Long Term

My two-week reports is what started it all. Looking at my writing habits, I realized I was fairly discontent with my daily writing output. On the one hand, I felt pushed to write more, but on the other hand, I couldn’t bear to write less. I felt like a political flip flopper, jumping from writing more to writing less, whichever way the wind blows.

Why was this?

I didn’t really know the answer until one Sunday afternoon when it hit me: I’d never thought about writing in the long term.

I’d never written down my long-term dreams, and I hadn’t set any long-term goals that would help fulfill those dreams. By setting only a yearly word-count goal, I’d made my daily writing routine stressful. Every day counted toward, or took away from, that goal.

Not good. 

So I thought long and hard about where I want to be in ten years. I spent a long time playing with numbers and trying to see the big picture. I wrote down all my dreams and tried to set some goals, and what I finally realized is that the dream that’s most pressing to me right now is making my writing worth the time I spend writing.

Or, looking at it in a different way . . .

My wife and I have several friends who, once their kids hit a certain age, the at-home mom went out and got a job to supplement the income, particularly college.

I’m an at-home dad, yes, but sorry, but I don’t want to go out and get a job. I want writing to be my job, the way I bring income to the family. Right now, that’s more important to me than anything else

Thinking About Sales

How much income are we talking about? Well, the only thing I’m qualified to do is to teach. In the Dallas area, the average high-school teacher makes around $55,000 a year. Thus, my goal in question form: How much do I need to write to make a $55,000 a year?

Good question. How do I get my answer?

In traditional publishing, I couldn’t get an answer. Getting a publishing deal requires a great bit of luck. But for the indie writer, income is, to a degree, under the writer’s control. The more I write, the more I sell; and the more I sell, the more money I make.

But how what kind of sales are we talking about? How much do I need to write?

Luckily, Dean Wesley Smith has offered some hypothetical sales numbers. I’m too lazy right now to look up those old posts, but they’re on his blog somewhere.

For short stories, you estimate that each title averages 5 sales a month.

For novels, estimate that each novel will add 5 additional sales to every novel you have published under that name. Novel #1 sells 5 times a month. Novel #2 boosts sales 5 additional to each novel; so, both Novel #1 and Novel #1 are averaging 10 sales a month each. When Novel #3 comes out, sales jump again, and each novel is selling an average of 15 times a month, a total of 45 sales a month.

In other words, short story sales are static, whereas novel sales increase with future novels.

Why is this so? Novels sell better. The vast majority of readers read novels, not short fiction. Readers who find a novelist they like want to read other works by the same novelist.

Some Math

OK. So, my goal is $55,000 a year. How do I make this amount?

Suppose I were to write 40 shorts stories a year. That’s a story a week with three months off, about 300,000 words of fiction (40 short stories times 7,5000 words a story). The three months off gives time for illness, leisure, emergencies (God forbid!), and false starts; also, the three months off is what I’d get if I were a teacher.

I sell short stories for 99 cents each, and I collect them into five-pack and ten-pack collections priced for $2.99 and $4.99, respectively. So at the end of ten years, I’ll have 400 short stories, 80 five-pack collections, and 40 ten-pack collections. If each title sold an average of 5 times a month, I’d make $28,000 a year. If each title sold an average of 10 times a month, I’d make a little more than $55,000 a year. That’s writing a story a week, 40 weeks out of the year.

What about novels?

First, I’d probably sell novels for $4.99, which means I get $3.50 royalty per sale.

Dean’s hypothesis is this: the first novel sells five times a month, and every novel after that adds five additional overall sales to each novel. If I write four novels one year, the next year each will average 20 sales a month for a total of 80 sales a month.

Personally, that seems a bit high to me. So I’m going to a very conservative route and say that the basic jump per novel isn’t five, but two. So, Novel #1 sells two times a month. Novel #2 adds two additional overall sales to both novels, meaning each novel now sells four times each, a total of eight sales per month. Novel #3 gives two additional sales, meaning all three novels average six sales each per month, a total of 18 sales a month, and so on.

At a royalty of $3.50 a sale plus an increase of two sales per month per title, I’ll need to write 19 novels to make $30,000 and 26 novels to make $55,000.

19 novels? 26 novels? That sounds like a lot. But is it?

How long is the average novel?

Back in 1950s and 1960s, most commercial novels were around the 50,000-word mark. Nowadays, most traditional publishers seem to want something around the 90,000-word mark. Let’s split the difference and say the average indie novel runs around 75,000 words.

Writing 300,000 words a year (which is the amount of words I’d write writing 40 short stories year), I could write four 75,000-word novels a year, which means . . . it’d take me 5 years to write 19 novels and start making around $30,000 a year, and a 6.5 years to write 26 novels and hit the $55,000 mark.

And just for fun . . . at the pace of four 75,000-word novels a year, in ten years, I’ll have written 40 novels and will be making around $135,000 a year.

Provided that . . .

• all novels are priced at $4.99, thereby earning $3.50 royalties.
• all novels are written under the same name.
• all novels bring an average increase of 2 sales per month to each title.

Analyzing My Original Goal

My original 2012 writing goal was this: 600,000 words, 4 novels, 20 short stories, with some extra words planned for false stars and so forth. Pretty ambitious for me, and I’ve been feeling it since January 1.

4 novels a year, selling at a rate of 2 copies a novels, increasing 2 sales per month with each novel, means that I’d earn about $1,400 next years from the novels I wrote this year.

The 20 short stories would mean four 5-pack and two 10-pack collections. Selling at a rate of 5 copies per title per month (which I think is high, but we’ll keep it there for argument’s sake), these 20 short stories and 6 collections would earn me about $1,400 next year.

That’s $2,800 next year publishing 4 novels, 20 short stories, and 6 collections.

But what if instead of writing those 20 short stories, I wrote novels instead? My average short story is about 7,500 words, and I can write a story a week. So, that’s 20 weeks of work, or about 150,000 words, which is two 75,000-word novels.

So if instead of writing 4 novels and 20 short stories, I wrote instead 6 novels this year — and if those novels sold at a base of 2 sales a month increasing with each sale — I’d earn about $3,000.

That’s $200 extra bucks.

Of course, my selling point on novels is low. Dean used a base of 5, not 2. If my novels were to sell 5 times a month, which each novel raising the total sales of each novel five times, four novels would earn $3,300 and six novels would earn $7,500 dollars.

In other words, those two extra novels would bring in an extra $4,000. But if I wrote 20 short stories instead of two novels, I’d earn only $1,400. That’s a $2,600 difference!

While short fiction is fun to write and publish, it doesn’t help me reach my most immediate goal of earning $55,000 a year.

My 2012 Goals Revisited

So, what does all this mean to me, on the practical level.

1) My long-term goal is to make $55,000 a year. Even if I were extremely conservative and posited that each new novel raised sales an average of one per month on each title, I’d have to write around 36 novels to hit the $55,000 mark. This means I need to write about 4 novels a year. Minimum.

2) I’m moving away from short fiction. Will I stop writing short fiction altogether? No, probably not. I can see myself writing a short story or two between novels, but, then, I’ve never focused entirely on novels, so maybe I won’t. There’s no reason not to move from novel to novel, taking a few days off between each one. Yet, experience has shown me that, right now in my career, hoping that each short story sells an average of five times a month is a fool’s hope. They sell, some more, some less, but the average is around 2.5 sales a month. If I were to write, say, just six short stories a week, that’s around 45,000 words, or one extra novel. One novel will earn more than six short stories, plain and simple. Looking at it that way, it might best behoove me to think about writing an extra 40,000-word novel than six short stories.

3) In the above analysis, I posited writing around 300,000 words a year, but that’s not my number. I am dropping the 600,000-word goal and putting it down to 400,000 words. That was my goal last year, and I would’ve hit it had we not moved, which cost me three weeks of writing time. I found it to a comfortable pace last year, and my life circumstance hasn’t chanced so much from last year to this year that justifies me fiddling with that number. Maybe when all four kids are in school full time.

4) This year is still the year of the novel for me, and my focus is on shorter novels, around the 50,000- to 60,000-word mark. I’m a firm believer that the more you do something, the better you get at it. Therefore, I believe writing six 55,000-word novels is more productive in developing writing skills than writing three 100,000-word novels. 400,000 words translates into seven complete 55,000-word novels. But that number doesn’t take into account false starts, so I’m going to aim for six novels, at a rate of one every two months.

Summary

In a nutshell, here it is:

* Primary ten-year writing goal: Earn $55,000. To do this, I need to plan to write between 30 and 40 novels in ten years.

* I’m comfortable writing 400,000 words a year.

* In terms of craft, in 2012 I’m focused on writing shorter, 50,000- to 60,000-word novels. Two reasons for this: first, the more novels I write, the better I’ll get at writing novels, and second, the more novels I publish this year, the sooner I can see just how well novels sell compared to short fiction.

* All this means that my new 2012 writing goal looks like this:

To write 400,000 words of fiction

To write six novels around the 55,000-word mark.

To write a novel every two months.

To average 1,100 words a day.

To write between 1,500 and 2,000 words on writing days.

That’s it, in terms of production.

In terms of craft, there are two further goals:

To develop my process of writing novels by writing novels.

To have craft goals associated with each project.

Whew.

There it is.

This has been an incredible exercise for me, but I feel really good about everything. That equanimity I’d lost has returned, and I think there’s a real hope that in 10 years (or sooner!) I’ll be making enough by writing that I won’t have to worry about getting a job outside the house. My writing will be paying for the time spent writing.

That’s a nice hope to have.

1. Continue with 2,000 words a day, Monday through Friday, and a minimum of 25o words on Saturdays and Sundays.

2. Continue working with Writing Improvement Notebook.

3. Forget about the mystery/crime genre for a while. Read some science fiction, fantasy, romance, western, mainstream, horror — whatever.

4. Get that short story collection up soon!

How did I do?

1) Word Count. Didn’t quite manage 2000 words a day, but I have settled into a nice groove, writing around 7 pages a day — which is right under the 2,000-word mark. Surprisingly, I have more time to write on weekends than I like to admit. It’s just a matter of using the time that’s given. All in all, very pleased.

2) Writing Improvement Notebook. This is coming along nicely. I copied out the opening chapter of Robert Jordan’s The Great Hunt and am now copying out a chapter from Stephen King’s The Stand. Once that is finished, I plan to get a little more focused and spend some time focusing on chapter endings and beginnings to better understand cliff hangers. Also, I started writing notes about what I’m reading — namely, why I think a book worked well. The big surprise here is that asking that question means not looking at the prose, but at the story. Again, very pleased.

3) Reading. Moved away from the crime/mystery genre in a big way and started reading some romance novels: Georgia Bockoven’s The Beach House and Jude Deveraux’s The Summerhouse. Nice change of pace. Today, I started reading George Pelecanos’s What It Was, a crime novel. I’ve also read some sf short stories by Annie Reed. All in all, a wide variety of reading, and I’m loving every minute of it.

4) Publishing. Yes, I did get that short story collection up; it’s here.

All in all, it’s been a great two weeks of writing for me. And there’s been some a big paradigm shift for me, too. But more on that in another post.

*

Goals For The Next Two Weeks (2/7 – 2/21):

1. Word Count Goals: Continue writing around 8 pages a day, Monday through Friday, and getting in a few pages on the weekend.

2. Project Goals: I’m about 100 pages from finishing my novel. Thus, as a secondary word-count goal, I’d like to write 50 pages a week and have this novel behind me on the 21st. That would require that I write more like 10 pages a day, Monday through Friday, which is something of a stretch for me. But stretching one self is sometimes a good thing.

3. Reading Goals: Continue reading as widely as possible. Finish the three books I’m reading now: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux, and What It Was by George Pelecanos. 

4. Writing Improvement Notebook: Finish copying out the chapter from The Stand. Begin copying out beginnings and ends of chapters in order to learn about cliffhangers and hooks.

1) I’m averaging about 1,400 words a day.

2) I’m averaging about 9,700 words a week.

3) At this rate, I’ll hit the million-word mark since “Getting Serious in 2010″ sometime in the middle of June.

4) I’m on track to write around 507,000 words this year — which would be outstanding for a number of reasons:

4a) It’d be 111,000 words more than I wrote last year, about two short novels.

4b) That’s 500,000 words of practice. I’m a firm believer that the best way to learn how to write is by writing a lot. Lots and lots of practicing. This does not mean rewriting one manuscript over and over in the futile attempt to make it perfect. It does mean, rather, that one writes, finishes, then moves on to the next project, applying all the lessons one learned while writing Project #1 and from a few beta readers to Project #2. Unless you’re writing big, fat epic fantasy novels, 500,000 words of new fiction produces, no matter how you slice it, a lot of complete projects, a lot of practice, a lot of learning.

4c), 2012 is the Year Of The Novel for me. Given that I’m aiming to write novels around the 60,000-word mark, and given my plans to write a few other shorter projects,  500,000 words translates into about seven novels and a few short stories.

5) Reaching 50,000 words when I did has given me some much-needed equanimity. Recently, I’ve been overly worried I’m not writing enough, but it’s hard to argue with these numbers. Just gotta keep it up.

How To Think Sideways

The course is divided into six main parts: ideas, planning, beginnings, middles, endings, and revisions. Basically, Holly walks you through a project from the smallest idea to the final draft of your manuscript. Whether any of this is going to be of any value to you will depend largely, I think, on how much you’ve written before.

In 2010, I’d written on and off for about 10 years, with more time off than on. Three months of writing would be followed by six months (or more) of no writing, for example. This is no to work for way for anyone who wants to be a writer. The primary reason is that you’re not practicing long enough for the skills to take hold. Like playing an instrument, three months of practice with a six-month layoff simply means that when you pick it up again, you’re pretty much a beginner. Everything you learned, you now must relearn. It’ll probably come back a bit quicker, and if you keep on this three-month-on, six-month-off cycle, each three months of “on” means you’ll learn a little more, but the six months of “off” means you’ll forget almost all of it. Simply put: this is no way to develop any skill.

Furthermore, I’ve come to realize one of the hardest parts of learning to write is learning how you write. Dean Wesley Smith just published a wonderful post on his blog about the dangers of blind following. The only way you get beyond this is by writing a lot, by forcing yourself to write week after week, month after month, with virtually no time off. There’s no place for six months of “off” when you’re trying to learn a new skill. But the more you write, the more you learn about writing and the more you learn about process – especially your process. Do you need to outline? Do you prefer to cycle write? Are you a rewriter? How do you organize your ideas? How do you develop a story? When stuck in a story, how do you get unstuck? These are all questions of process you’ll teach yourself if you force yourself to write and write and write, pushing through the hard parts, saying, Damn it, I’m going to do this no matter what; I’m going to find a way to get it done!

Having some kind of answers to the above questions — answers you’ve developed for yourself — is important before signing up for How To Think Sideways. Writing is not like math or reading. Someone can have a bad foundation in math or reading, and if you’re a teacher, you’ll need to spend time helping these students unlearn their mistakes. But there are no mistakes in writing; there’s nothing to “unlearn.” Rather, it’s a continual honing of the craft which depends on what’s already there. No one can teach you how to write better description, for example, until he or she has read some of your own descriptions. And not descriptions in the abstract, but descriptions in the context of a story. You write, you learn, and you apply to the next project. That’s the way it’s done. But note — it begins with You Write.

All of this is my way of saying that I believe you’ll get the most out of How To Think Sideways if you’ve written steadily, finishing more than you leave unfinished, for at least one 12-month period. You’ll get the most out of Holly’s class if you don’t take it as a rank beginner. You need to approach it as a way to sharpen your skills, not develop them.

This background also explains my own reactions to Holly’s course while taking it. Looking a back, it’s not too much of a surprise to me that the “oh, wow, that’s how it’s done” moments all took place during the first two months — when Holly talks about ideas and planning. During my ten years of on-and-off writing, I had a lot of ideas and tried to plan a lot of stories. I had struggled with this part of the process. I had tried to develop my own way of working, but never succeeded. So those first two months of How To Think Sideways was like opening the shutters and looking out upon a brand new world. It was exciting.

The confusion began in Month 3, which deals with beginnings. Remember my own three-month/six-month writing cycle. I’d dealt with ideas, and Holly’s methods taught me a lot. But while I’d written beginnings, I hadn’t written enough complete stories to understand how beginnings were supposed to work. And there’s Holly, talking about letting yourself be surprised and the difference between cheating and sustained narratives. Huh? It made some sense, on the intellectual level, but I felt myself wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing.

Looking back, it’s not too much of a shock that this was when my How To Think Sideways  writing group (you’re put in a group when you sign up, if you want) faded into nothing. We were all very active the first two months. Why? Because anyone who wants to be a writer struggles with ideas and planning, but it’s the beginnings that separates those who are willing to work from those who aren’t. Thus, everyone was having a blast learning how to develop ideas and plan stories. But once the writing begins … well, it’s different. Holly’s now talking about things one doesn’t understand unless one experiences them.

The feeling of confusion became one of disappointment when we got to middles, and that’s because I understood less about middles than I did about beginnings. You see, a story is a whole unit; to understand beginnings, you have to understand middles and ends; to understand middles, you have to understand beginnings and ends; and to understand ends, you have to understand beginnings and middles. And to understand any of it, you have to write and finish stories. Experiential knowledge is what you’re looking for.

So, while I’d written a lot of beginnings, I hadn’t written too many middles and almost no endings. I knew something about beginnings, so I only felt confused when Holly talked about them. But I knew nothing about middles, and I was completely lost — by which I mean, what Holly was saying made no experiential sense to me. I understood it on an intellectual level, just like I understand childbirth on an intellectual level; which means I didn’t understand it at all.

This feeling of regret lasted until I finished the course. In the end, I felt … disappointed. Three-hundred bucks down the drain. That was late summer of 2010.

But I’m not 750,000-words wiser, and I find when I look through my How To Think Sideways material, it’s all very different. I’ve written a lot, I’ve finished a lot, and I haven’t quit since January 1, 2010. That’s two years of steady practice, and when I look back on Holly’s teaching, I find that it all makes a hell of a lot more sense. That excitement I felt learning about ideas and planning is now there when I read what she says about beginnings, middles, ends, and revisions.

So: I’d highly recommend Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways … so long as you have at least 12 straight months of writing and finishing under your belt.

Like all word processors, Scrivener has a live word count. Unlike almost all word processors, Scrivener actually has a two word counts — your overall project word count and your daily word count. By simply pressing Command-Shift-T (on the Mac), you get this little window:

The WIP Target tells me I’ve written 30,510 words toward my target of 50,000 words. The Session Target tells me I have my daily goal set at 1,250 words. Very nice and very easy to use.

Until today, I never really explored the “Options…” button. When I did, this is what I got:

Just for fun, I entered the “deadline” on when I’d like to finish my novel — the last Saturday of the Month. And for double the fun, I also checked “Automatically calculate from draft deadline” and “Allow writing on day of deadline.” I had no idea what these two checks would do. After clicking OK I saw this:

This is a different Project Target than the one above. This is the one from my current novel. You’ll see that I’m an eyelash or two shy of the 30,000-word mark. You also see that the deadline I set is now under the Session Target, as well as how many days are left before the deadline. And you’ll also see that my Session Target goal is 1,223. How did I get that number?

I didn’t. That’s Scrivener’s number, based on how many words I have left to finish the draft and how many days I have left to reach the deadline. By writing 1,223 words a day, I’ll finish my novel on February 25, 2012.

What makes this feature so valuable for me is that I now have a daily update of the minimum I need to write that day. As you can see, I didn’t stop writing when I hit the 1,223-word mark. I kept at it. I know for a fact, given my schedule in February, that daily writing is impossible. To have any hope of finishing my novel by the last Saturday in February, I have to write more than the Session Target goal.

And the great thing is that tomorrow when I sit down to write, I’ll have a new Session Target goal. A great way to keep me honest and working steadily.

Pretty nifty, eh?

The Basics

* I was born in April 1974 — the year Nixon resigned and the year Stephen King published Carrie. I’ll turn 38 this year. (Yikes!)

* I’m married, and we have four kids. (Yikes! Yikes!)

* I’m an at-home dad.

Writing

* The writing bug hit me in 1985, when I was 11, in the sixth grade. This is the year I also started reading Stephen King, playing D&D, and reading the Dragonlance Chronicles – the only novels I’m able to reread as an adult with the same love and excitement as I did as a kid. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I read Dragonlance Legends, too, but they’re not the Chronicles.

* I wrote on and off through junior high and high school. What kept me from spinning tales of fantasy and wonder on a more consistent basis? Girls, football, girls, the guitar, girls, my band, and (didn’t I already mention this?), girls. (And by girls, I don’t mean girlfriends, of which I exactly one during the six years of junior high and high school, and that didn’t last more than six weeks in the 8th grade. I mean a continuous pursuit of a girlfriend. Any girl would’ve done.)

* As a freshman in college, I decided I wanted to be an English major, teach high-school when I graduated, and write … thereby retracing the steps of my literary hero, Stephen King.

* As a sophomore in college, I got caught up in philosophy and, via a Bible study at my church, theology. I ended up in a monastery for a year (I’m Catholic), then ended up at the University of Dallas (a small Catholic liberal arts university) and earned two degrees (B.A., M.A.) in theology. During this time, I not only got married, but I also started thinking about writing fiction again. In fact, years after I graduated, I found my old Western Civilization 101 folder in which there was a sheet of paper on which I listed a bunch of goals I wanted to accomplish over the next ten years. Some of those goals included: writing and selling a science fiction story; writing and selling a fantasy story; writing D&D media novels; writing my own big, fat, epic fantasy series. So: Even though I wasn’t writing, the desire was there, and I was making plans.

* For Christmas 2000, my wife gave me Stephen King’s On Writing, and I started up again. This began a 10-year long road of frustration. I’d write a few months, then quit for double the time, swearing I’d never go back. This horrible cycle lasted from 2001 to 2010. My problem? I’m not sure. A lot of fear, of course. A lot of misunderstanding of what it meant to be a writer. A lot of misunderstanding about the necessity to practice writing by writing. A completely inability (which almost everyone in their 20′s possess) to see ten years down the road. Consider: If after reading King’s On Writing I’d taken his advice and wrote 1,000 words a day, six days a week, between 2001 and 2010, I could’ve written between 30 and 40 average-length novels! This thought is supremely depressing.

* Toward the end of 2009, I told my wife I thought I might start writing again. Her response: “If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine with me. But just stop quitting. Either do it, or don’t.” Like a brick wrapped in velvet hitting me between the eyes, that bit of tough love (along with this post by Dean Wesley Smith) made me decide to make 2010 the “Year I Got Serious.” This resolution led me to completely overhaul my writing methods in May when, after reading every post and skimming all the comments on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, I started writing a story a week and following Heinlein’s Rules of Writing as if they’d come down from On High. For the first time in my writing life, 2010 was the first year I didn’t quit after just a few months (though there were a few weeks in April where I almost tossed in the towel for good).

* 2011 marked the Year I Went Indie. I wrote 396,000 words that year (4,000 shy of my goal) and published 37 titles — short stories and short story collections. I learned a lot this year about writing, publishing, and the business of writing. Anyone who wants to become an indie writer should, I think, spend one year writing and publishing short fiction. You’ll learn more than you can possibly imagine.

* 2012 is the Year Of the Novel. While I want to write short fiction, the novel will take precedence for me this year. I originally thought I’d like to write 6 novels this year, then modified that goal out of fear. But a month into 2012, that goal is back on the table (more on this big change later).

Writerly Education (besides the creative writing course I took in college):

* Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways: An Online Novel Writing Course (Feb – July, 2010). I’d strongly recommend this course to anyone who is having trouble getting into writing and sticking with it. Besides learning how to prepare for an organize a project, you get a lot of writerly wisdom from a long-time professional.

* David Farland’s Professional Writers Workshop (June 2011). A great survey workshop, covering the genre distinction, audience analysis, story structure, editing, publishing, agents, the business, and Hollywood. All about what it means to be a professional writer. Very little craft discussion, however.

* Holly Lisle’s How To Write A Series (current). I liked Holly’s How To Think Sideways so much I signed up for her How To Write A Series. Self-paced, I’m only halfway through Lesson 1, and I’ve learned more about series than I ever thought possible. The few series ideas have come into sharper focus because of her class.

* Dean Wesley Smith’s Character Voice & Setting Workshop (March 2012). Can’t say too much since it’s still two months away. I’ve heard incredible things. I’m so looking forward to this craft workshop.

Well, there you go. It’s nice to meet you.

A few weeks ago, David Barron, a fellow indie writer, and I met on Google Docs to talk about writing and publishing for no other reason than we both had a zen to do so. A spur of the moment decision, the conversation went all over the place. We’ve already posted the first part (on publishing), and here’s the second part, a good 2,000 words on what we learned about writing during our freshmen year as indie writers.

“Wearing the Writer’s Hat”

David Barron: …yaknow, Ambrose Barron would be a really fun pen name. He writes Civil War Westerns and smokes a lot.

Jeff Ambrose: Do you know a lot about the Civil War?

daB: I’ve dabbled. As a political scientist, it’s my duty to know about the birth throes of the Modern Era. (That sounds much more exciting than what it looks like in academic papers.) It wouldn’t have to be about the battlefield exclusively.

JA: This is why Ken Burns is such a blessing … though I’ve heard his documentary on the Civil War is slanted at times. But then, all histories are slanted, if they’re worth anything. Who wants just a list of dates and facts? Good historians offer opinions.

daB: All description is opinion. That’s what writers have to believe or they’re screwed.

Attitude

Copying To Create

JA: I agree! And you have to make it yours, too. But how? By copying first. That’s the only way. One of my 2012 writing goals is to get serious about studying the craft in different ways. One way to do this is to copy out passages you like, passages that strike you as supremely well written. Dean Wesley Smith equates this to letting their words flow through your fingers in order to learn both by analysis and intuitively. Now here’s the thing. Dean says to copy out in Standard Manuscript Format. He says it a lot, too. Why is this important? I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with seeing words in the rawest form, without the pretty font, without the bookish formatting. At any rate, I’ve decided that this year I’m writing using Standard Manuscript Format. I’m copying Dean’s method to a T, no exception. And I suspect that by doing what he does, I’ll not only learn how to write better (because of all that copying I’ll be doing) but I’ll also understand, in part, why he thinks Standard Format is the way to go. Once I understand that, I’ll be free to make it my own.

Now that I said it, I wonder if I’m just too OCD.

daB: Could be, could be… But I’ll sum it up, I think. It’s to ‘demystify’ the process, taking the formatting and spellcraft and sticking the words in Courier New, just like yours. Except written better. Writers aren’t Wizards, they just Work Harder.

Workshops

Career

Word Count vs. Projects

Writing Novels

JA: I must have started anywhere between 10 and 15 novels over the years, but have finished only 2. I haven’t published any. It hit me today that my problem has been trying to write a long novel in the beginning. I mean, we learn by writing short fiction, right? Why not learn to write novels by writing short novels, around 40,000 to 50,000 words? Why set out to write 100,000 words novels, especially in this New World of Publishing, when you don’t have to write that long? So even though my goal is 4 novels, I hope to write 5 or 6 — maybe even 7 — shorter novels in the 50,word range. We’ll see.

daB: My very favorite story length is 20,000 words, almost exactly. I call it a Davidku. It’s long enough for about five characters, but it only takes 2-3 hours to read. Which is the length of time I usually have for reading, unless I’m on a bus.

But, I think the secret of writing a 100,000 word novel is to not write a 100,000 word novel. That is…make some characters, decide a setting and let them roam and see how far they get. Then kill them off one by one, with bathos. I assume one of my novels this year will explode in this sense, and others will be stitched together ‘mini-series’ of three connected 20k stories. They’ll all be priced at $4.99, so who cares?

JA: True enough. Getting my mind around the freedom of length has been a difficult adjustment for me. For so long, a short story was 7,500 words, about 30 pages. So when I’m writing a short story, as I near the 7000-word mark, I can feel myself tighten a little, thinking I need to end it. Short fiction length in this New World is far more fluid than before. Likewise with novels. I have to stop thinking a novel is a 400-page beast. It’s not. And you’re right, the best way to write a 100k-word novel is to not try to write something that long. Just gotta learn to let the story go where it will.

The way I see it, there are two parts of the idea process — idea gathering, and idea honing. Idea gathering is akin to buying a pair of shoes. You try this pair on, then that pair. You walk around. You look in the mirror. And so forth. That’s what idea gathering is for me. I simply think about what I want to write, trying this idea or that idea, until I find something that works.

Idea honing is taking those ideas and putting them in some kind of workable order. I’m not much of an outliner, but I’m not a pure discovery writer, either. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being pure discovery writer and 10 being the outliner, I’m about a 3 or 4. I want something, but not a lot. At the heart of this honing is putting my story into a sentence or two. Since I use Scrivener, I make sure this sentence as a place of its own: for novels, a document in the Research section of the Binder, and for short fiction, a note in the Document Notes.

This technique comes from Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer. It consists of five elements: 1) situation, 2) a character, 3) the character’s a goal, 4) the character’s opponent, and 5) the opponent’s goal. Thus:

1) With the galaxy under the rule of the Evil Empire, 2)  Luke Skywalker 3) wants to join the Rebellion and free the galaxy from tyranny. But will he survive when 4) The Emperor 5) wants nothing more than to convert him to the Dark Side of the Force by having him murder his own father?

Once I have this sentence, I pretty much start writing. Yet over time, I’ve discovered some problems with this process.

First, I don’t do enough idea gathering. I think I might be too quick to jump into a story, and not give it long enough to develop. In order to correct this, I’m staring an Idea Notebook, writing down ideas that stay with me more than a few hours, and looking through the notebook every few days to keep the ideas churning in my head. I’ll make notes, additions, changes, letting the idea grow until it’s ready to write. I tried to do this last year, and it didn’t work. The main reason, I think, is because I was focused on writing short fiction — a story a week. Now, because I’m focused on novels, and because novels take considerably longer to write than a short story, I have time to grow this Idea Notebook.

Second, I think I might be stopping the idea honing process a bit too early.  I don’t want to start outlining. Every time I’ve tried to outline a story/novel, I’ve ruined it for me. But maybe creeping up on outlining is a better way of going about it. To this end, I plan to revisit the four lessons in Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways: An Online Novel Writing Course on planning. I don’t intend to do everything she says with my next project, but maybe one thing with the first project, and another thing with the second, and so forth, until I find that comfort zone.

About two weeks ago, I set these four goals for myself:

1. Get into the 5-page/10-page groove.

2. Type out 50 pages of The Deep Blue Good-By.

3. Finish the books I’m reading now (Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, The Wellspring of Worship by Jean Corbon, and Drop Shot by Harlan Coben) and read two more. Read at least six short stories.

4. To get a new short story collection up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at Smashwords.

How did I do?

1) Word Count. I didn’t get into a 5-page/10-page groove, but I did get into a writing grove. I really paid a lot of attention to how I felt at the end of each day and how well I spent my time. I realized two things.

First, 2,000 words a day, Monday through Friday, is a good goal for me. It pushes me just enough that if I don’t hit the goal, I can look back over the day and determine if the reason I missed was a good reason (a doctor’s appointment, say) or a lousy one (getting hooked on YouTube for two hours). Also, 2,000 words puts me just at that prime place where a.) I’m tried for the day and b.) I wake up energized to write the next day.

Second, I realized that when writing a novel, I must write every day — which means I have to find time to write on the weekends . . . even if it’s only 250 words. This has never been the case with short fiction. I could be on page 25 of a projected 30-page story, take the weekend off, and finish no problem. The reason why I could do this was because rereading 25 pages on Monday morning to write a 5-page ending was enough to put me back into the story. That’s not as easy to do with a novel. But I find just taking fifteen to thirty minutes to write a few hundred words on Saturday and Sunday is enough to keep me in the story.

So pretty much my new, modified word-count goal looks like this: 2,000 words a day, Monday through Friday, a minimum of 250 words on Saturdays and Sundays. I can honestly say I’m pleased with this goal. A perfect balance between pushing me beyond my comfort zone and not over doing it.

2) Writing Improvement Notebook I didn’t type out 50 pages of John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-Bye, but I did type out about 20 pages. I then switched to Robert Jordan’s The Great Hunt, and have typed out about 1,500 words of that book’s first chapter. But really, the reason for the goal was to get in the habit of using my Writing Improvement Notebook — and it worked. I’m getting involved in it four or five times a week, copying blog posts or bits of books I like into it for future reference, and yesterday I started developing a game plan for some deep and focused practice. Also, typing out another writer’s work is an incredible experience – especially when you’re in the middle of composition yourself. You get ideas for how to phrase something you might not have had before. It’s really, really cool.

3) Reading Goals. One thing I learned these past two week is that I waste a lot of time on the Internet. On the other hand, I did manage to finish Harlan Coben’s Drop Shot and Daniel Pink’s Drive. I read one short story. I quit Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (because I didn’t care for), but started The Specialists by Lawrence Block (which I don’t too much care for, either) and resumed my reading of The Fires of Heaven, the fifth novel in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I’m also reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. I suppose from a certain point of view, I’m reading a lot. But I know how much time I waste. And I’m also frustrated that I’m not finishing too much of what I start. I wonder why this is? I’ve been reading a lot of mystery and crime fiction. I’ve found that I get hooked on a genre for several months, then burn out. So maybe my inability to finish anything is a sign that it’s time to change genres.

4) Publishing. That new short story collection still isn’t up for sale yet, but it will be. It’s just a matter of doing it.

*

Goals For The Next Two Weeks (1/24 – 2/7):

1. Continue with 2,000 words a day, Monday through Friday, and a minimum of 25o words on Saturdays and Sundays. This means in two weeks I should have another 20,000 words to my novel, putting me at around 40,000 words.

2. Continue working with Writing Improvement Notebook. Since this is very new to me, I don’t want to set any goals. I just want to keep copying out other writer’s works and setting up some deep and focused practice sessions.

3. Forget about the mystery/crime genre for a while. Read some science fiction, fantasy, romance, western, mainstream, horror — whatever.

4. Get that short story collection up soon!

First Quater Goals (Jan – Mar)

1. To finish novel.

2. To write 5 short stories (4 more to go).

3. To write at least one nonfiction work.

4. Continue steady reading plan.

5. To do all this as well as get ready for the Character Voice Workshop at the end of March.