Category Archives: Improvement

Writing Performance Review for 2023

Few people look forward to performance reviews, and I’m not one of them. As an upside, I’m my own boss. Downside—I’m my own harshest critic.

Time to assess my writing for 2023. As in past years, I’m using The Writer’s Performance Review scorecard by book coach, Jennie Nash.

This year, I examined the rating descriptions in greater detail and it resulted in a lower score than in previous years. For each attribute, you rank from one to five. One = below expectations. Two = partially meets expectations. Three = meets expectations. Four = exceeds expectations. Five = far exceeds expectations.

It’s a comparison of actual performance during the year to expected performance. Based on that, a score of three isn’t bad. It means you’re doing what you expected to do. If you scored three in all twenty attributes, you’d get 60.

As my assessment turned out, I did get a 60. Mostly 3s, but also one 5, four 4s, four 2s, and one 1.

That 1 rating applies to “strategic thinking,” and I’ll do more in 2024 to discover the influencers of my genre by checking out podcasts and Youtube videos by reviewers and authors.

I’ve also committed to some corrective actions in the areas rated as 2:

  • Organization and Planning – I’ll use the Pomodoro method to manage my time.
  • Goal Orientation – I’ll follow the Stephen Covey method of setting large goals, then breaking them down into smaller goals, and weekly tasks.
  • Genre Knowledge – I’ll read more books in my genre.
  • Target Audience Knowledge – I’ll spend some time listing characteristics of my ‘ideal reader.’ That’s how I get to know my fictional characters better, so it might work for readers.

As for writing accomplishments this year:

  • My story “Turned Off” got published in The Science Fiction Tarot. 
  • I finished the second draft of one novel, and
  • I made good progress on the first draft of another novel
  • I completed another round of edits on my upcoming short story collection, The Seastead Chronicles, and am hoping for its publication in 2024.

    Most employers and employees keep annual performance assessments private. As both employer and employee, I display mine to the world as a service to other writers.

    May all of us who scribble words have a successful 2024. That’s the New Year’s wish of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 17, 2023Permalink

    Writing Performance Review for 2022

    As the end of the year approaches, this seems a good time to assess writing performance. As with last year, I’m using the Writer’s Performance Review template created by the Book Coach, Jennie Nash.

    I scored a bit higher this year than last—a 75 out of a possible 100. Worst scores—goal orientation and strategic thinking. In last year’s assessment I scored low in these two as well, but my score improved in industry knowledge.

    Goal orientation means more than writing down a to-do list, which I do. It means assigning numeric, measurable goals for time spent, word count, etc. Although I understand the importance of such metrics, I worry about the dangers of overemphasis. I’ve found I get more of what I measure and less of what I don’t. If that’s true for you, take care in what you choose to measure.

    This performance review template defines strategic thinking to include identifying and connecting with ‘ideal readers’ and their influencers. I’ll do more research into this.

    This year saw some personal writing successes. My short story “80 Hours” came out in paperback and ebook form. A book I co-edited, Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne, got published. I served as president of my local writing critique group, and got a short story accepted for publication in an upcoming anthology.

    Performance assessments bring anxiety, embarrassment, and self-doubt. Now imagine making your assessments public, as I do in these annual posts. You get to see a writer striving to improve, agonizing over failures, and dusting himself off, determined to make next year better.

    If my struggles do no more than to inspire you to improve your own writing, then my self-examinations serve a greater purpose than mere assessments of—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 24, 2022Permalink

    Your Writing Performance Review for 2021

    It’s nearing the end of the year. Assessment time. How have you been doing as a writer of fiction?

    I decided to use the Writer’s Performance Review template created by the Book Coach, Jennie Nash. I encourage you to use it, too.

    For 2021, I rated myself as a 73 out of 100. My weakest areas were: Goal Orientation, Industry Knowledge, and Strategic Thinking. I only gave myself a 2 rating in each of those.

    For each weak area, I need a plan for improvement. Goal Orientation is relatively easy for me—I just lost sight of doing it now that I’m retired. For Industry Knowledge, I committed to monthly checks of publishing trends, easily done with internet searches. For Strategic thinking, I need to do some research about my ideal readers and their influencers.

    Other areas of weakness where I rated myself as 3 were: Self-editing skills, Organization and planning, Genre knowledge, Target audience knowledge, Literary citizenship – peer to peer, and Coachability. Since I meet expectations with these, and since this is the first year I’m doing this assessment, I’m not going to set firm plans for improvement in these areas. That will allow me to focus on the worst areas—the ones with ratings of 2.

    As I mentioned, you can use that Writer’s Performance Review, too. It’s important to be honest as you do so. Still, I found it much easier than annual performance reviews at work. Both receiving them from supervisors and giving them to subordinates were stressful events. A self-assessment skips all that worry about how the other person perceives you.

    The end of each year is a good time for reflection, review, assessment, and planning for the future. If you try to be as objective as possible with it, this tool might very well improve your writing, whether you create fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Improved writing—that’s the shared goal of you and—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 12, 2021Permalink

    Practice Makes Perfect?

    We know practice can help us improve our abilities in various areas. Yet many people believe they can sit down and write a blockbuster novel without any writing practice. Maybe you’re the rare exception who can, but most of us need practice.

    Not just any kind of practice. Good practice helps. Bad practice not only wastes your time, but it also hurts by ingraining poor habits. This wonderful blog post by Barbara Baig inspired the one you’re reading now. She calls the two types naïve practice and deliberate practice, so I’ll stick with her terms.

    When young, I played the cello. I don’t play anymore, but I enjoyed it while I did. Early on, before I learned how to practice, it felt like drudgery. My mom said, “Someday, when you play in Carnegie Hall, remember to tell the audience that you owe everything to your mother, who made you practice.” Sorry, Mom, that opportunity never arose.

    Practice, in those early years, consisted of my playing a piece from start to finish. Once I did that to my satisfaction—a rather low bar—I moved on to the next piece. In Ms. Baig’s blogpost, that’s called naïve practice. Over time, I discovered an interesting thing. Whether in practice or performance, I played some passages well, without effort, consistently. However, I stumbled in other spots—the same spots, and the same sort of stumbling, every time.

    I tried practicing a different way. I focused only on the rough spots, playing them over and over, then backing up and leading into them, then continuing on after them to ensure transitions both ways went smoothly. In this way, I developed ‘finger memory.’ My fingers knew how to play the difficult passages with less conscious thought on my part.

    My skill as a cellist improved after that. I’d learned the secret of deliberate practice, and nearly all my practice time served to better my playing, rather than to reinforce poor playing.

    What does this have to do with writing? Everything. You may be getting plenty of writing practice—story after story, novel after novel. But perhaps you’re not reaching a large audience, not achieving hoped-for sales.

    Perhaps you’re putting in naïve practice, doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get better that way. Improvement might happen, but there’s a quicker path.

    Use the deliberate practice technique I mentioned above. First, identify the stumbling points in your writing, perhaps from a critique group, or a trusted beta reader. You might also learn something from online reviews of your stories.

    Knowing your weak points, assign yourself some brief writing exercises designed to work on those particular problems. Here’s a list of examples:

    • Weak in characterization? Flesh out a character in extreme detail.
    • Weak in setting description? Visualize a setting in minute detail, then pick three facts that really make the setting vivid.
    • Weak in working out plots? Outline the plot of your favorite story, or one you just read. What do you like about that story’s plot? In a similar way, outline the plot of several stories you’d like to write.
    • Weak in use of the senses? Take a scene from your Work in Progress (WIP) and put all five senses into it.
    • Weak in comparisons? Find three to five things in your WIP that are hard to describe or visualize. For each one, brainstorm twenty similes or metaphors you could use to make it clear to the reader.

    They say practice makes perfect. You may never achieve perfection, but getting closer to that ideal may prove good enough. Deliberate practice may get you writing, and playing the cello, better than—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    December 5, 2021Permalink

    Break Bad Habits, Forge Good Ones

    A sad fact of human nature is that it’s easy to form and continue bad habits, while it’s tough to make and maintain good ones. Although this post is meant to help writers, the technique I present could help anyone with a habit problem.

    An excellent post by Leo Babauta inspired me to build on his thoughts.

    Perhaps you’d like to break a bad habit of using too many adverbs in your writing. Or maybe you’d like to form the good habit of incorporating all five senses into your descriptions. Whatever bad thing you want less of, or good thing you want more of, read on.

    The Habit Chain

    Since I last wrote about habits, I’ve refined my thinking. I now think of them as a process, a chain with links. Habits start out as deliberate routine actions. You have to consciously think about them the first few times. They usually are triggered by something else, and I’ll call that a cue. The cue occurs, you perform the routine action, and get a reward. The reward generally satisfies some need you have. (In the case of good habits, you usually have to provide the reward yourself.)

    Eventually, whenever the cue occurs, you feel a strong urge to perform the routine so you can get the reward. With enough repetition of this process, you start performing the action unconsciously, right after the cue, and you earn the reward right away. That routine action has now become a habit. The shorter the time between cue and action, and action and reward, the stronger the links are and the more ingrained the habit will be.

    Obviously, the idea is to break your bad habit chains and forge good habit chains.

    Breaking or Forging Habit Chains

    1. State Your Reason. This method takes some effort, so identify why you want to tackle this particular habit. Later, when the going gets tough, it will be useful to remind yourself why you set off on the journey.
    2. Commit to the Effort. This isn’t an ‘oh, well, I’ll give it a try’ kind of thing. This is heart and soul time. This is not the hen’s involvement with your breakfast; it’s the pig’s total commitment. You didn’t form the bad habit overnight, and you won’t forge the good one quickly either; this will take time.
    3. Obtain Support and be Accountable. Seek an ‘accountability partner’ who will periodically ask for progress updates and to whom you’ll report. Schedule regular meetings with your partner to keep on track.
    4. Identify your Cues. Find the event that triggers your bad habit. Or, to forge a good habit, pick an event that will trigger you to perform that good habit.
    5. Work on the Cue-Action Link.
      • For bad habits, pause when the cue occurs. Try to resist the urge to perform the habit. Also, think about alternate, or replacement actions you could take to satisfy the need, and work on performing those instead of the ingrained habit action.
      • For good habits, perform the desired action as soon after the cue as possible. Whenever the cue occurs, work on making the routine action as automatic as possible.
    6. Work on the Action-Reward Link.
      • For bad habits, think about why you crave the reward. What need is it satisfying? Are there other ways to satisfy it? If it’s possible to deny yourself the reward, try that and see what happens.
      • For good habits, reward yourself promptly after completing the action. Tightening that link will help ingrain the habit.
    7. Remind Yourself. Bad habits become so automatic that they follow the cue by reflex action. Good habits need to follow immediately after their cue. Therefore, you need visual reminders of your habit-breaking or habit-forging effort placed around where the cues occur.
    8. Permit No Exceptions. You’ll never break that bad habit or adopt that new one if you give yourself an out. The moment you backslide and make excuses for that, you’re well on the road to abandoning the effort.
    9. Don’t Beat Yourself Up. Okay, the ‘no exceptions’ rule didn’t work and you messed up. The cue occurred and you went back to your bad habit or failed to perform the good habit. Rather than giving up, or getting a self-defeating attitude, look back at Step 1 and remind yourself of the important reason you started taking these steps. Then, learn from the backsliding episode. Analyze what happened and why. Alter your approach. Consider new ways to break a bad habit chain or reinforce a good habit chain. Focus on the cue and realize there’s a moment of decision between it and the habit, an opportunity for you to change.
    10. Stay Positive. Maintain an upbeat and confident attitude about this habit-changing process. You can do it. You’re not doomed to repeat your past mistakes. You have the capacity to change for the better and you can make those changes work for you. Of course it will be difficult, but few worthwhile things are easy.

    There you have it. Good luck! Remember, some habits are okay and require no change, like my habit of signing all my blogposts as—

    Poseidon’s Scribe

    January 24, 2021Permalink