Category Archives: Writing Tips

Uptime for Writers

You’re a fiction writer who wants to crank out better books faster. Maybe this blogpost will help you do that.

Intro to Uptime

I just read Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing by Laura Mae Martin. The author worked as a productivity expert at Google who helped employees do more work faster, with less stress. Could her techniques work for fiction writers?

She packed her short book with numerous techniques, and many might work for you. I’ll focus on one of those here.

Power Hours and Flow

She discussed the concept of ‘power hours,’ the few hours of highest productivity in your day. That sounded a bit like being ‘in the flow’ to me. I’ve blogged about that wonderful feeling before. Picture the flow state as focused concentration, effortless action, a lack of self-consciousness, unawareness of time, and obliviousness toward bodily needs.

When I wrote about it, I imagined doing the more creative phases of writing while in this flow state. But fiction writing includes more than creativity and that complicates the picture.

Off-Peak Hours

In addition to power hours, Martin discussed off-peak hours, during which fatigue sets in (or continues from the night) and you’re less productive. Each of your workdays contains power hours and off-peak hours, and they’re somewhat stable, occurring at the same times each day. However, these cycles vary between people, so you’ll have to experiment to discover your own power hours, if you haven’t already identified them from past experience.

Uptime, Downtime

Uptime, if I understand her concept, can include both power hours and off-peak hours. During uptime, you’re performing work, but not always at the same level of productivity.

However, for your health, you require downtime, too. Downtime includes non-work-related activities, particularly those requiring little concentration. Examples include meditating, showering, walking, mowing the lawn, gardening, etc. Unlike power hours and off-peak hours, you can schedule downtime. You’re in control.

Funny thing about downtime. People report their most creative ideas occur then. Fiction writers can use that to their advantage.

Fiction Writing Tasks

The fiction writing process contains many tasks, including generating ideas/brainstorming, outlining/researching, writing the first draft, editing later drafts, and marketing. Some require more creativity, some less.

If you had the option, you’d choose to accomplish your highest priority writing tasks during the power hours—in the flow, ideally. You’d save routine or less vital tasks for off-peak hours.

Don’t forget the advantage of downtime, which you control. Say you get stuck while writing—a plot problem, a character motivation issue, etc. Take some downtime, a few minutes off from writing. Your subconscious may work on the problem and solve it when you least expect it.

Get Real

I know—most fiction writers have day jobs. You seize as much writing time as you can, cramming it in among all the other obligations of life. Some days you barely write for half an hour. Perhaps your writing time varies from day to day. How are you supposed to make use of this uptime/downtime/power hours/off-peak hours concept?

Maybe you can’t. But perhaps just being aware of your daily productivity cycles and the creativity-laden power of downtime will help you reschedule as close to your optimum writing times as you can. Also, this knowledge may help you squeeze the most from those rare days you can devote to writing.

Uptime over. It’s now downtime for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 29, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Dying Writers, Dying Readers

Author Annie Dillard once wrote, “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.” The quote intrigued me. What did she mean?

Source

It’s from a 1989 essay in The New York Times titled “Write Till You Drop.” The paragraph continues, “That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What would you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?”

Picture the situation. You are near death and so are your readers. The pen and pad (or computer) sit before you. How would you write differently than you do now?

Answers?

As morbid as the thought experiment may seem, some answers to that question occur to me:

  • Don’t waste time. You haven’t much time for writing, nor do your readers for reading.
  • Don’t ‘enrage by triviality.’ Write about what’s important, vital to being human. Write the thing you’d regret not having written, the thing readers would regret not having read.
  • Don’t save your best for some later time. Don’t keep that masterpiece in reserve. There will be no later time.

Wonderful Concentration

English author Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dillard admonishes us to write that way all the time, with a wonderfully concentrated mind.

Socrates

Consider the last words of Socrates. At his trial he received a sentence of death. Imagine the ‘wonderful concentration’ of his mind as he drank hemlock and felt his limbs going numb. Some have reported his final words as, “Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Don’t forget to pay the debt.”

How can that be? On his deathbed, one of history’s greatest philosophers prattled about not having paid for a rooster? Is that not enraging by triviality?

Newer interpretations of those last words paint a different picture. Greeks considered Asclepius a god of medicine and the rooster a symbol of rebirth or eternal life, for it crows every morning. Some now think Socrates’ words a metaphor, a way of saying, “Athens may kill me, but philosophy lives on.” If so, that satisfies Ms. Dillard’s advice to write as if you were dying.

Triviality

Regarding the part of her advice referring to triviality, that confused me at first. What is trivial and what is not?

After all, author and politician Bruce Barton said, “Sometimes, when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think that there are no little things.”

No little things? Aren’t they the trivial things?

Perhaps not. Mother Theresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

Ah, that might provide a clue regarding what Ms. Dillard meant by triviality. You may write about anything, large or small, but do so with great love. Use up every drop of your literary skill. It’s not the triviality of the subject, but the treatment of it by the writer.

In sports, we say a player ‘left if all on the field,’ meaning he gave it his utmost. I may be wrong, or I may be over-analyzing it, but that’s what I believe Annie Dillard meant in advising us to write as if we were dying, and as if our reading audience were dying as well.

If your next written sentence were your last, would readers say you ‘left it all on the field?’ Aim to write with a mind as wonderfully concentrated as that of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 14, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Write With Fervor

You long to write stories like the ones you enjoy reading, but doubt you could. Writing seems tedious and you think you lack the required expertise. You just know you’d get bored and disillusioned after a few pages. The late author Ray Bradbury offered some advice that might help you.

In his 2001 lecture at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, he provided great tips about writing, including these two gems:

  • Make a list of ten things you love, madly, and write about them. Make a list of ten things you hate, and write about killing them. Make a list of the ten things you fear, and write about them.
  • Don’t write self-consciously, commercially, what will sell. Find the deep stuff, your inner self. Don’t ask what will sell. Ask who am I?

Exercise

First, you’ll be jotting down three lists of ten items each—things you love, things you hate, and things you fear. No one else will see these lists. Think of ten as a minimum number. Bradbury chose ten to prod you to think beyond the first few easy ones. You’ll be stretching to reach ten, and that’s the point. He’s trying to get you to dive down to your essence, your core.

Given that introduction, I suggest you do the exercise now. Really. Now. Stop reading this and generate your three lists of ten each. I’ll wait until you finish.

Intermission

After the Exercise

All done? Good. You’ve got lists of things you love, things you hate, and things you fear. For every item on all three lists, you feel some level of passion. Positive feelings of adoration accompany each item on the ‘love list.’ Feelings of anger boil up in response to those on the ‘hate list,’ and feelings of dread ooze out of those on the ‘fear list.’

The lists, then, provide two things you’ll need—subjects to write about, and feelings to sustain you while writing.

Subjects

As a fiction writer, you don’t have to write about the exact objects of love, hate, and fear you listed. Perhaps it’s better if you don’t. Use a stand-in, a metaphor, something to represent one or more of the specific things listed.

Say you wrote ‘my spouse’ on the list of things you love, and decided to write on that topic. I’m suggesting you shouldn’t write about your own spouse, but rather write about a character’s love for that character’s spouse. Readers won’t know it’s really your own spouse—they’ll just note the tenderness with which you convey the love.

Caution

I offer a quick note about the list of things you hate. Don’t turn your writing into an angry manifesto. The list should serve as a catalyst for writing, not a prelude to violent action. Take out your vengeance on fictional characters only.

Feelings

The real power of Bradbury’s advice comes from the intense emotions you feel about every item on each list. Those emotions should make it easier (1) to write ‘in the flow,’ (2) to know, at any point, what to write next, (3) to stay enthused about the project until completion, and (4) to infuse your writing with spirit. Your strong feelings about the subject will pass through to readers.

Digging Deep

The other piece of Bradbury’s advice really nails it. “Find the deep stuff, your inner self. Don’t ask what will sell. Ask who am I?” By listing things you love, hate, and fear, you’re getting at your essence, your basic humanity, your soul. Write from out of that core, and your words will ring true. They’ll shine.

Writing from the heart, with fervor, gives you a better chance of reaching readers, too, especially those who care about the same things, readers whose own love/hate/fear lists—if they made them—would reveal some commonality with yours.

Thanks to Ray Bradbury, you’ve got the tools you need. Your lists have fired the coals of an inner boiler. That high-pressure boiler powers a potent writing machine—you. The steam is up, the throttle is open. Go! Nobody can stop you now, least of all—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 5, 2024Permalink

Perseverance and Luck—Advice from Shawn Warner

An author sits at a table in a grocery store, trying to sell his book. He’s sat there for hours, ready to sign books for buyers, but few stop to talk, and even fewer to buy. At last, one man does stop, and offers to post a video of the author on TikTok. Soon after, the post goes viral and book sales soar.

Luck?

You may regard that author as the luckiest writer alive, the chance winner of some literary lottery. But I’ve left out parts of Shawn Warner’s story. He might well agree with a quote attributed to filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Perseverance

That book signing in the grocery story hadn’t been Warner’s first. He hadn’t just dashed out a book. He’d been writing for fifteen years, without much success.

The TikTok influencer, Jerrad Swearenjin, hadn’t chosen to post to an uninterested audience about some third-rate tale. The novel, Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor, delighted the young TikTok readership.

I took the opportunity to hear Shawn Warner speak this past week, and he seemed well plugged in to the current publishing scene. He gave his audience sound, up-to-date advice about the writing business. Although I’ve heard and read some of these tips from others, Mr. Warner conveyed them in plain, easy-to-digest nuggets. I’ll just summarize a few of my takeaways.

Plot vs. Character

You may write either a plot-driven story or a character-driven story, Warner said. But today’s publishers are rejecting the former and accepting only the latter. (This disappoints me, for I like reading and writing the plot-driven kind.)

Characters

You should make your protagonist seem a real person with strengths, weaknesses, and friends. Your antagonist, too, must seem real, with strengths and weaknesses, but the bad guy requires no friends.

Warner discussed what he called the ‘A-Story’ and the ‘B-Story.’ The A-Story involves the external plot, with the protagonist reacting, at first, to events that strike at that character’s weaknesses. The B-Story involves the protagonist’s internal struggle against weaknesses. For books being published today, the B-Story takes precedence. As the tale progresses, the protagonist begins to solve the internal flaw and acts (with what is called ‘agency’) to resolve the A- and B-Stories.

Edit by Audio Recording

Warner suggests making your own audio recording of your manuscript. Then listen to it and edit your written manuscript based on what doesn’t sound right, or where you stumbled while reading.

Taglines

Warner suggests you develop a one-sentence tagline to answer the question, “What is your book about?” For his novel, he says, “It’s about a teenage girl who teams up with a ghost of multiple personalities to solve the mystery of her parents’ murder.” He advises that you memorize and rehearse your tagline until you can roll it out without hesitation. Obviously, you’d want to do that for all your published and upcoming books. Further, I’d suggest a tagline to answer the often-asked question, “What do you write about?”

Conclusion

Mr. Warner offered other bits of advice, but I’ll keep this post short. I’ve blogged before about Malcolm Gladwell’s theory in Outliers that genius requires 10,000 hours of practice, plus luck. I consider Shawn Warner a good example of that. Yes, luck smiled on him that day in the grocery store. But it occurred only after the 10,000 hours of writing, the perseverance to sit for book signings, and the writing of an excellent book.

Perhaps, after the same amount of perseverance, a similar bolt of luck will strike you and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 17, 2024Permalink