Writing

Early this month in the comments for “the Gazebo post”, I wrote:

I’m definitely in the camp that believes you have to be the greatest defender of your time.

Sometimes, you need to defend your time from yourself.

I want to dig into this in a little more depth.

“Time Management” is the sort of catch-phrase that makes people nod along when it’s mentioned and roll their eyes when no one’s looking. Books like First Things First and Getting Things Done are often quoted, rarely read, and even more rarely put into use. (Or, if they are, they become a ritual of masturbatory to-do-list-maintenance that doesn’t actually accomplish anything but which looks and feels like you’re doing something. Productivity Porn, is what it is.)

Now, I read those books because part of my day job involves taking high-concept crap like that and boiling it down for blue-collar guys who need to know it. The end result of all that reading was a two-hour class during which the students get a blank pocket notebook and a double-sided business card on which I printed the entire ‘manual’ for the class.

About two years after I started teaching that class (and generally adopted its methods for myself), my wife came to me ‘in an emotional state’, as they say.

If you don’t know, Kate runs a pretty successful literary agency, specializing in YA and middle grade fiction. She does a great job, but she was starting to feel like some things were getting away from her: emails were backing up, for example.

She asked me if I could help.

So I showed her my little business-card manual, and gave her the gist of the thing.

“That’s it?” she said. She looked doubtful, but muttered something about giving it a try.

Months later, she’s so caught up on her work that she gets private emails from other agents and editors that say “I don’t know how you do it! I can barely find the time have a nervous breakdown anymore, let alone keep up with actual work.”

So… just for fun, let’s say the little system works. Let me give you the absolute basics.

The crystalline core of the thing focuses on Doing, because we as a species suck at Doing. Between people interrupting us and babbling away with no provocation, reminders from our email and calendar, our phones, Twitter, IM clients, facebook, Tumblr, new readers, and… you know… a life, it’s just hard to block out some uninterrupted time and then actually use it for whatever task it was intended to be used for.

So we try solve that problem by doing two things at the same time: Checking Twitter while visiting with family. Emailing while making lunch. Writing while doing… anything else.

I’m mentioned before that there are very few activities during which I’ll multi-task; I think the list starts and ends with “folding laundry while watching a TV show”. Pretty much anything in my life that I think is important enough to do, I believe is important enough to get my full attention. When that doesn’t happen, the end result of the two ‘intermixed’ activities is usually substandard. In fact, every single activity you try to do while also dealing with some other activity will probably suck, even if you don’t notice it right away.

You must avoid doing that.

That means focus.

So, here’s a few rules I (try to) follow to help me DO during those times I have allocated for Doing.

1. Focus on one task at a time.

This single-minded focus doesn’t have to go on for hours at a time. If you get on a writing streak then sure, go for it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Do 30 minute sprints. Do 20 minutes. Do 10. Whatever works.

Eliminate all distractions. Shut off Twitter, Gmail, YIM, AIM, GTalk. Close your door, if you can. Make sure the cat, dog, kids, spouse, and coworkers are all are fed, then ignore them.

Don’t multi-task, and don’t let yourself get interrupted.

2. Seriously, don’t #*$#ing Multitask.

The supposed efficiency of multitasking is an illusion — it hurts your productivity, increases the chance of error, and generally makes the end product suck more than it should. It’s a good way to avoid two things you don’t really want to do by fucking them up simultaneously. Don’t do it.

The human brain is amazing in many many ways, but it positively sucks at concentrating on two things at once. As soon as you try, you can guarantee you’ll miss something important.

3. Control Who Has Access to You

“Timmy, Daddy needs some alone time right now, okay?”

Stop and think about something for a second: who has unrestricted access to you at virtually any time?

The answer to that question says a lot about who you are.

I set my GTalk Status as Busy most of the time because I know that there are very few people who will be comfortable sending me an instant message anyway (provided they feel they have a good reason). The people that know me well enough to ignore that message are the people on my All-Access list.

If you don’t control this, you’ll be typing along, just getting into a groove, and someone will ping you. You need to answer, right? You don’t want to be rude.

So you answer, and they need you to do something for them, and… well… you don’t want to, but pretty soon you hear yourself saying:

… and you’re screwed.

4. No one else gives a crap if you Finish.

No.

No they don’t.

Not even him. Not her either. No one.

Not even me; I’m distracting you RIGHT NOW with this post.

You are the only person who cares about getting your story done, and the only way to make that happen is to viciously (perhaps anti-socially) defend the blocks of time you set up to write.

“Sorry dude, but I’ve got another two pages to get done.”

You must do this, even if the interruption sounds like fun.

You must be cruel, even to yourself.

There are a lot of rules when it comes to writing. Writers love to scribble down mandates like “don’t do this” or “always do this” and pretend that we’ve solved part of the vast jigsaw puzzle of creativity.

But the thing is this: pretty much every one of those rules can be broken or ignored, if you have a good reason for it.

I want to be clear, here: I think most rules about writing are good rules, and are valuable. “Try to leave out the part of the story that the reader’s going to skip.” That’s a good rule.

But, like most things, if you get good enough at the work, you’ll run into some situation where the rules you love are not only inapplicable, they will actually make the situation worse if you adhere to them.

(Warning: If you are at all unsure you’re qualified to decide whether or not to ignore a rule, I would like to humbly suggest that you aren’t. You will know when you’ve reached that point, without checking with anyone else first. Until then, stick with the rules. I know how pretentious this sounds. Please trust that I don’t mean it that way.)

This is why I tell people not to listen to the advice I have about writing (as opposed to NaNoWriMo): when it comes to writing, I’m going to automatically assume that I’m unqualified to give advice; I’m not an expert yet.

Let me demonstrate that by poking holes in the rules I’ve mentioned here in the past.

When you’re writing, write.

The basic idea here is that when you sit down to write, you must get some words out on the page — you should be producing, not wasting time — the first million words that you write are going to be glittery unicorn shit anyway, so you might as well get them out of the way as fast as you can.

That’s not entirely true. If you sit down like that every single morning at eight o’clock, you’ll develop your work/write habit, yeah, but there’s a tendency when you’re in that mindset to approach the whole thing in a very rational frame of mine, and we aren’t any of us very rational people. If you’re in that kind of frame of mind, and you get stuck, you’re going to give up on writing for that day in about fifteen minutes.

So sometimes when you sit down to write… you don’t write. You woolgather. You shut the fuck up and listen to the echoes in the empty spaces of your head, because those echoes are coming from somewhere — some whispers and hints and intuitions that are sneaking around just past the corner of your eye, and you need to lie still to trick them into the light. Do that. It’s okay.

Rules of Three

The basic idea here is to describe everything in your story by using three facts only. A good guideline, yes, but be ready to cast it aside when you need to. Maybe (like me) you never describe the physical characteristics of your main characters for the entire length of the story — the readers never find out if her hair is auburn or blonde, kinky or straight; what kind of shoes she likes, or what color her jacket, eyes, fingernail polish, or lip gloss are. If that’s the right thing to do for you, then go for it. On the flip slide, maybe you feel a pressing need to describe one particular character in your story in absolutely excruciating detail. Will anyone remember all that stuff? Hell no, but if you’re dishing that kind of detail, then the detail itself really isn’t the point; maybe it’s telling us something about how obsessed the observer is, or how fastidious the subject is, or… I dunno. I’m not you: I don’t know why you decided to drop a microscope on this guy, but if you did so, there’s probably a good reason for it, besides needing to bloat up your word count.

Right?

“Any word you have to look up in the thesaurus is the wrong word.” — Stephen King

I’m a big fan of this rule, but it’s one that attracts a lot of flak. Non-writers often comment with something like “But… what if I actually pick exactly the right word? Are you saying I’m stupid? Are you saying the thesaurus is always wrong?” Writers, on the other hand, can almost always trot out some example where they’re writing a character with a particular kind of vocabulary: someone who would never say shit when they can say excreta. Yes, fine: you’ve nitpicked the particulars of the statement to death; you win the Internet again. Go you.

They kind of miss the point of the statement, which (taken in context) is simply that you should write with the language and vocabulary that you have immediately to hand; the tools with the most worn and comfortable grips. Writing with those words helps you sound exactly like yourself on the page, and that helps your story’s authenticity and honesty. It helps the story be true, at least in the sense of a realization, if not as an actual fact. Taken in context, it’s a very nice rule.

And, of course, there are times when you should — when you must — ignore it. Aside from anything else, you will grow as a writer/reader, and your vocabulary will expand, and what was once a thesaurus-word may become a you-word. Even then, sometimes the word you need — the perfect word — will be a word only found in a thesaurus.

(I’m still suspicious of perfect words: perfect things are rarely true things, and true things are rarely perfect, and on the whole I’d rather be true than perfect, but I’ll leave that navel-gazing alone in this case.)

Kill Every Adverb

Oh… man. I dunno. This one is tough. I like this rule. This is a good rule. Adverbs are largely useless, lazy, slugabed motherfuckers and I won’t have anything to do with em.

But sometimes…

Sometimes… an adverb is just the right way to say it.

Sometimes. Yes. Fine.

God that hurt to write. Ouch.

Some Things Are Not Rules You Ignore

There’s a difference between rules and tools. Rules are the things I mentioned up above. We will learn when to ignore those, just as we’ll learn that most of the time we shouldn’t.

Tools are something different. Tools are things like spelling. Grammar. Punctuation. Tools require respect. You don’t paint your house with a screwdriver; you don’t frame a wall without your hammer.

Create whatever you want to create, but build the fucking thing correctly, is what I’m saying.

Leave the AWOL punctuation and a weird aversion to quotation marks to guys like Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier. On anyone else (and, in fact, even on them) it looks like pretentious fuckery, and that’s all I have to say about that.

Now, I need to get back to the woolgathering.

You: get back to work. Have fun.

1. Write-ins

I’ve never been a fan of meeting new people. That’s an odd thing for an undeniable extrovert to say, but it’s true: walking up to a crowd of unfamiliar faces that all turn toward you with a blank lack of recognition? Not my favorite activity ever.

That reluctance kept me away from NaNoWriMo write-ins for many years.

The other thing that kept me away? The part where you go to a gathering of nanowrimo folks and don’t end up getting one fucking word written. Not really surprising, when you think about it: take a bunch of people who are working on a brand-new, shiny story, sit them all down with readily available caffeine, and watch them (us) turn into cute little chatty hunks of non-productivity.

That was my experience with write-ins for the first couple years I showed up. It got to the point where I didn’t go unless I was ahead on my word count for the day, and since I’m almost never ahead on my word count… well, you see where this is going.

Saturday was different, though. Saturday, after a long day in a long class, I decided to drop in at a local write-in to clear my head.

It won’t help me get caught up, I thought, but at least I’ll get a free nanowrimo monkey sticker out of it.

I showed up about an hour after it’d gotten started at the local bookstore (Tattered Cover), snagged a frozen latte, and walked over to the circle of couches and comfy chairs where our particular nerd herd tends to assemble.

Good turn out. Lots of folks, most of whom I didn’t recognize.

No one looked up.

I mean it: no one. Hands on the keyboards, butts in the chairs, eyes on the screen, tappity tap.

Damn, I thought. I found a chair, pulled out the writing machine, and got to it.

About fifteen minutes later, everyone suddenly looked up, blinked, and started chatting. Some got up to snag another coffee or hit the head. I looked around for the professional hypnotist. Folks compared word counts, chatted about disobedient main characters, compared their laptops and recommended writing software they liked. The local ML came over and hooked me up with my monkey sticker.

This… this was the nanowrimo write-in I knew; the one I expected.

About twenty minutes later, though, it all came to a stop again. Everyone was back, everyone got settled, and the ML said “Okay, are we ready for another sprint?” There was a general murmured agreement.

A gah what-now? I thought. The only time I heard that phrase was when I’d used Write or Die in the past.

“How long are we going this time?” she asked the group. “A little shorter? Fifteen?”

Again, agreement. She set a time on her laptop, tapped a key, and said “Go.”

They went. We went. Boom. Writing. Heads down, fingers going. Focused.

I may not know much about how the writer-brain works, but I’ll tell you one thing that’s pretty consistent: it responds to deadlines. It responds especially well to looming deadlines.

I take back everything I ever said about the write-ins. Maybe the (excellent) MLs in Denver are the only ones to figure this little trick out, but maybe not — and if not, I have to recommend dropping by a write-in in your area. Socializing with the other nanowrimo crazies is always a good thing in the long run, but now it’s something else: now it helps.

2. Twitter

Now, I like twitter, but I don’t love the easily available distraction it provides when you need to get some writing done, so what changed my mind? Two things.

2a. The #nanowrimo hashtag

If you need a little inspiration, I humbly recommend checking out the #nanowrimo hashtag on twitter. For one thing, it’s really kind of neat to see all these excited and creative people talking about what they’re working on, but it also really encourages to you to get your butt in a chair and write.

How does it do that? The same way that seeing a guy you really don’t with an “I Voted” sticker on his shirt will get you to the Ballot Booth — all it takes is about four tweets where some rat bastard is all like “Just broke 30k on my #nanowrimo WIP” to get me back in my chair. Shame and Resentment, baby: that’s what makes the world go ’round.

Yeah, yeah: “shared creative energy” blah blah blah… sure. Whatever. Bottom line? We wanna beat that other dude.

2b. NaNoWordSprints

I hadn’t heard about NaNoWordSprints until a few days ago, and I highly recommend it if you can’t make a write-in but still want that feeling of someone firing off a starting gun and saying “Go!” It’s like a write-in for shut-ins. It seems to be something semi-official being done by the NaNoWriMo folks. Check it out. Make Twitter actually help you out this year.

Here’s the Thing

Marathons are hard; even people who run them all the time know they’re hard. People who do them for fun are a) crazy and b) actually running a more difficult race than the ‘regulars’ are, because they probably trained less, run less, and may not really know what they’re getting themselves into. They show up for the race and the veteran runners are like:

This NaNoWriMo thing is the same kind of deal. As De points out, professional authors like to say they they do NaNoWriMo every month and while that’s a cute answer, it’s not – strictly speaking – true. Yeah, they’ll often knock out 50k in a month, but for most everyone doing NaNoWriMo, it’s not just about getting the word count, it’s about getting the word count while holding down another full time job, filling out TPS reports, getting the kids to school, taking care of all the things that need to be done around the house, and all that.

Have help. Make friends. Connect with the folks who are running this crazy-ass race with you — who also don’t know really know what they’re in for. The whole thing may drive you crazy, but at least you’ll have company.

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(Personal hurrah: Hidden Things is heading back out to publishers today to see who salutes. I am pleased. Agent Shana is pleased. Even some of the editors getting it are pleased. A good way to start the day. I took a look at an old copy of Hidden Things this weekend — the version that I actually queried with several years ago — it’s approximately 68% the size of the current manuscript, and even that version was a far different animal than the very first NaNoWriMo copy. I will throat punch anyone who tells me their NaNoWriMo story is ready for publication as of December 1st. I will do so jovially, but still: throat punch.)