Measuring Progress

by David H. Hendrickson, Guest Blogger

Am I getting better? Will I ever become good enough? Am I just wasting my time?

Writers ask themselves these questions over and over. The rejection slips that litter the mailbox provide the haunting answers: You sucked yesterday, you suck today, and you're going to suck tomorrow.

The hard truth is that until you've almost reached the Promised Land of selling your words, there's no feedback mechanism to let you know you're making progress, that you're one step closer to realizing your dream. The stories or novels go out; the polite no-thank-you's come back. The Promised Land is nowhere in sight.

Few other pursuits are so heartless in their lack of encouragement. A golfer's handicap goes down. A chess player's rating goes up. A student's grades or test scores improve. An actor or actress gets picked for increasingly significant roles. A salesperson's commissions grow.

But all the writer gets is: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.

This doesn't just go on for weeks or months. It lasts for years.

Am I getting better? Will I ever become good enough? Am I just wasting my time?

After enough years of negative feedback, the answers seem self-evident. Because years and years -- perhaps even decades -- is what it takes.

The late, great John D. MacDonald once said that the first one million words a writer produces are crap. Derivative and useless.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers talks about how the perceived geniuses in almost every endeavor only got that way by working not just harder than everyone else but much, much harder. To the tune of about ten thousand hours to become world class, whether the pursuit was writing, music, or software.

Ten thousand hours. That's writing three hours a day, every day, for close to ten years.

Which sounds a lot like Stephen King's prescription in On Writing of "reading and writing between four to six hours a day, every day." Elsewhere he comments that after ten years of regular writing, you should be pretty good at it.

Almost certainly, that's what is required in terms of total effort for a writer to get to the Promised Land. (Yes, there are "joggers" and "sprinters," the former producing every day and the latter in bursts, but the total productivity required remains the same.)

So how does a writer track that effort?

The problem with an hourly goal is that too many writers, especially new ones, waste hour after hour. Wasted hours don't count.

Trust me, I was the worst. After that magical moment when I scribbled my first two paragraphs and felt like flames were firing out of my fingertips, I proceeded to fool myself with what I thought was hard work. I'd sit down for a three-hour session and think I was making progress when an hour of that time was spent endlessly rewriting the same few paragraphs, another hour bemoaning that I got a later start than those lucky souls who began as young teenagers, and a third hour mentally composing my Hugo Award acceptance speech.

Foolish as it sounds, I thought I was working hard. I thought I was making progress. But I wasn't; I was fooling myself.

Only productive hours, measured in terms of writing lots of new words, matters. Dean Wesley Smith has written on his blog of how a professional can write a thousand words in an hour. I'm not at that level and perhaps neither are you. So let's say for you it's five hundred words an hour or perhaps two hundred and fifty.

The Outliers prescription of ten thousand hours to become world class -- and you do want to become the best you can be, right? -- means that at a rate of five hundred words an hour, you'll need five million words before you're world class. Give or take a few million.

John D. MacDonald set the bar at a million words to get past the derivative crap. The bar goes up to five million words, give or take, to become world class.

How do you measure the plodding steps you're taking while climbing such a steep mountain? What feedback mechanism can you give yourself to help you keep faith, to remind you that you're making progress?

Here's what I do. On the shelf atop the desk where I write at home, I keep a small goldfish bowl. Every time I complete ten thousand new words of fiction, I put a penny in the bowl. Nonfiction doesn't count. Rewriting doesn't count. Only new words matter.

A hundred pennies means a million words. The John D. MacDonald hurdle. About eleven novels. Five hundred pennies, give or take, means world class.

Give yourself this feedback mechanism. As you hear a penny clink inside the bowl and see the mound accumulate, you'll feel like the golfer whose handicap is dropping or the chess player whose rating is climbing toward master or grandmaster levels. You'll know you're making progress no matter what those slap-in-the-face rejection slips say.

Or use some other ten-thousand-word reward. If you're a romance writer, pin an Ace of hearts on the wall. If you're a mystery writer, try the Ace of spades (honoring Sam Spade, of course).

Pick the feedback mechanism that works for you, but pick something to feel good about your steps toward the writer's Promised Land.

With sustained effort -- writing new words and studying your craft, always learning -- you'll get there.

Now go earn yourself a penny.

---
David H. Hendrickson has published over nine hundred works of nonfiction ranging from humor and essays to scientific research and sports journalism

The Do's and Don'ts of Sending Out Manuscripts

Blogmeister Note: Here's another essay transferred from the former OWN Writer's Blog.

by Laura Ware

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks sending out a stack of short stories I’ve let sit in my office for various reasons. While concentrating on this task, I’ve given a lot of thought about the process. My thoughts on it are listed below, in the hopes it will help someone else along the way:

DO send out your manuscripts. If you want to sell your writing, it has to get off your desk. No one can consider buying a manuscript they haven’t seen.

DON’T sell yourself short. Go ahead and send your stories out to the top markets. Let them decide if it’s right for them. That’s their job, not yours.

DO include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with all your manuscripts. This is common courtesy, and the only way you will get a reply.

DO make a note somewhere on the envelope of what story this is attached to. Sometimes form rejections don’t include the title of your story and unless you make a note on the SASE, you’ll be scrambling through your records trying to figure out which story they’re talking about.

DON’T send enough postage to get your whole manuscript back. It probably won’t be in a condition to resend (and you should always send a fresh manuscript anyway). Save yourself some money and use a standard business envelope for your SASE.

DO keep track of where your manuscripts are. I use three methods: I make notes in the folder I have my manuscript in, a spreadsheet with the markets, and an online database. If one of these fails, the other two should help me recreate it.

DO make backups. Not only of your manuscripts, but of your records. That’s why I do a triple redundancy.

DO use manuscript format. If you aren’t sure what manuscript format is, do a Google search for the phrase. Don’t make reading your manuscript a chore for an editor.

DO double check guidelines and addresses. Magazines and publishers do change their addresses from time to time, and not keeping up with that will waste your time.

DON’T take any rejection you get personally. The editor is evaluating your manuscript, not your personality or your morals. And you will get rejected a lot in this business. So make up your mind not to freak out about it.

DON’T give up. If you get a rejection from one market, send the manuscript to another. Perseverance is key to succeeding in this business.

DO make sure you have adequate postage on your manuscript when you send it out. Sending something with insufficient postage does not endear you to an editor.

DO be polite and professional in a cover letter. This is a business. Be businesslike.

DON’T be impatient. Check a market’s guidelines for how long they suggest you wait and give them extra time beyond that. Publishing is SLOW. And “yes” almost always takes longer to say than “no.”

DO keep writing. You want to have a lot of stories out there. After all, when you sell everything you’ve written so far, you’ll need new stuff, right?

Sometimes You Have To Get Hit Upside The Head For The Learning To Sink In

Blogmeister Note

In order to increase traffic, I am consolidating this blog with selections from the OWN Writers Blog, which will be closing soon. I didn't want to lose some of the great contributions there, so I'm moving them here, one at a time, in the form of guest contributions. Today's guest is Louisa Swann, author of a number of Star Trek stories.


Installment #1: Vasectomies and Other Life Rolls

by Louisa Swann

Got you hooked? Good. I decided to go balls out on this little blog post and dive headlong into an issue that’s haunting me right now: reader expectations versus author expectations.

Sometimes reader and author are on the same wave length. Sometimes not. Take the title of this piece. I’ll bet “reader expectations” didn’t come to mind when you read “Vasectomies and Other Life Rolls.” I’m guessing you expected to read something more challenging, like how I tried to convince a local surgeon I needed a radical vasectomy. You see, I’m afraid of impregnating my words with meaning. Might as well cut those squirmy little metaphors off at the source, right? That way words are just words, no innuendos or implications or undertones of darkness. Just plain old straight talk. That way no one can claim any misunderstandings. Especially my husband. But the doc just didn’t get it. Told me only guys could have vasectomies, of all things. Talk about prejudice.

Even if you weren’t interested in my V-trials, you probably expected to learn more about how life’s been treating me, and maybe, how that treatment affects my writing. If so, you’re going to be disappointed. Wait! Don’t go away. I know I’ve shattered your reader expectations, but I did so with an ulterior motive, well, several, all of which are loaded with innuendos, laced with implications, and heavy with undertones of darkness. Sorry, I tried. Blame it on the recalcitrant surgeon.

Ulterior Motive #1:

To prove that titles are important enough to spend months...um, days....no, hours... heck, maybe five minutes thinking about. Titles should be catchy, appropriate to the story, and definitely appropriate to the genre.

Should be obvious, right? But what’s obvious to the reader often isn’t so obvious to the writer.

This particular little bit of writerly wisdom comes after shooting myself in the proverbial foot several times. For example, some of you will remember PIGGY PIGGY BLING BLING. Cool title, or so I’ve been told. Catchy, memorable. Just the sort of story that should start with a down and dirty scene – like sacrificing lizards, right? I thought so. Or rather I was thinking about starting the story with a crime, thriller-style, to show just how nasty the bad guys were – in a humorous way. That was my author expectation. My readers, however, had a much different expectation based mainly on the title. Something a bit more light and blingy. That opening scene definitely got reactions: a faster-than-the-speed-of-light rejection from an editor who’d been interested enough to ask for the first fifty pages and lots of “Ew’s!!!” from my critiquers.

NOW I’m probably oversensitive about choosing a title, subjecting each and every nominee to intense scrutiny. Which, of course, slows down the whole writing process because I can’t – I just CAN’T – start writing without the proper title, right? Huh. Sounds like a good reason to procrastinate. Especially since the title I give this little gem before I start to write a single word has to be the bestest in the whole wide world because it will never be changed. NOT!!!

New Year’s Resolution #1:

Don’t sweat the title stuff until the manuscript is finished, do review for appropriateness to story and genre, do listen to reader response and don’t hesitate to change the title as needed.

Ulterior Motive #2:

To get you hooked enough to read past Ulterior Motive #1 so I could introduce another Reader v. Author issue: being consistent to the genre. Recently, I inadvertently (it’s a whole ‘nother ball game if the writer does this particular “oopsie” on purpose) started a novel off as one thing and finished it as another. Mystery opening, thriller ending. And who knows what in between! I had no clue I was pulling the big switcharoo. But my faithful first readers gently whapped me with a steel beam and got me headed down the proper road.

New Year’s Resolution #2:

Decide what you’re writing (genre) before giving manuscript to first readers (yes – it’s a mystery AND a thriller. Surprise!!!!) Better yet (big lightbulb switches on) – make sure I stay consistent to the intended genre.

Wow. What a revelation!! Now if I could only get rid of this headache.

Ulterior Motive #3:

To lead you (the reader) down the path to my (the author’s) enlightenment as I struggle to put an end to the steel-beam-to-the-head method of turning “information” into “knowledge.” Let’s take the above issue: Why the evolution from mystery to thriller? No big surprise here. I deal with this particular canker sore on a consistent basis. It’s called “vacillation.” Seems my mind doesn’t like to make firm decisions, so it kind of wavers back and forth between genres, ideas, names – you get the point. That’s why I needed the surgery. Yeah, I know. I mentioned something about innuendos before, thus setting up another reader expectation. See why I need help? Something that will remove this tendency to vacillate? In other words, a vacillectomy. Wait a minute. Vacillectomy... vasectomy.... Oh, my gosh! You probably thought...

New Year’s Resolution #3:

Watch those word choices. The reader can’t know what’s going on in the author’s mind, only what’s written on the page. (Note to self: get yearly Dictionary Procrastination Bug inoculation shot available wherever fine words are sold.)

Hmm - appropriate titles, know your genre and stay true to it, excise vacillation from your life, and word choice. Looks like I’m all out of motivation, for now anyway. All that’s left is to summarize the above in a banner I can put over my computer along with my automated “Hit The Idiot In The Head” monkey (comes complete with monkey laugh and mini-baseball bat which is definitely better than a steel beam. Trust me.)

Here you go – a computer banner blurb composed just for this blog post:
Thou shalt not eat chocolate while standing on your head in the pouring rain.

What? You expected something different?

Odds and Ends and Words

Diamonds in the Sky

http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/

A NASA sponsored anthology of short stories with lessons about space. See my story, "The Moon is a Harsh Pig.'

100 Most Beautiful Words

A scintillating, quintessential elixir

This felicitous list can be a bit esoteric, but in the end it's an exuberant and mellifluous efflorescence of language. See if you agree with the words that were judged most beautiful by "Dr. Goodword" at alphaDictionary.com.

Happy peregrinations...
http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/100_most_beautiful_words.html

(And this is just a sample of lots of other fun stuff at alphaDictionary.com.)

Thomas Christensen's Glossary of Book Publishing Terms

Be careful when you read this funny publisher's glossary, or you could hurt yourself laughing.

http://www.rightreading.com/publishing/publishing-glossary.htm

Another Glossary of Book Publishing Terms

http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/06/publishing-dictionary-expanded.html

This one's a bit more serious, on another useful blog.

A Tool for Developing Consistent Character Speech and Action

Characters, Characters, and More Characters

One of the principal differences between fiction and non-fiction is the role of characters. Yes, we can have characters in non-fiction, but generally they're not fully developed—being there only in service of an example.

In fiction, however, the characters and their development are often the entire point of the story. So how does an experienced non-fiction writer learn to create "real" characters?

In my case, I start a novel by creating a database with four sections based on Orson Scott Card's MICE model: Milieu, Ideas, Characters, Events. Here, I'm just writing about the Characters section, where I have a data area for each character, no matter how minor. At the start, I fill in what I think I know about the character, but this rough sketch will undoubtedly change as I write the story and begin to know my characters better by their actions.

Some of these changes are obvious. A character may start out as six feet tall, but, in the course of the story, hits his head when passing through a normal door, he will have to be taller (or else I have to change the event).

Not only must the character be consistent with the story, she must also be consistent with herself. For instance, if she's Japanese-American at one point in the story, she'd better not be Chinese-American somewhere else (unless it's a story about identity change).

It's no so easy to check a 400-page manuscript for consistency in all the characters. That's especially true if you want consistency in their patterns of speech and gestures, so for some time, I sought a tool that would help me with that task.

It turns out, as so often happens, that I had such a tool all along, though I didn't know how to use it. The tool? My word processor—in this case, Pages, from Apple.

Seeing and Hearing One Isolated Character

Pages allows me to define numerous font styles. The obvious use of STYLES is to develop a consistent appearance in a document. All chapter headings have one appearance. All computer text, another. But for character consistency, I'm not particularly interested in appearance. For the most part, all characters' speech looks the same—Times New Roman 14, for instance. But if the book were being read out loud, each character would sound different.

Because I have only the words to work with, not their sounds, I have to distinguish my characters through their word choices, their grammar, and their gestures. In 400 pages, I create all these factors, but it's hard to make them consistent. I try, but I generally fail.

So, to help me see my failures in creating a consistent character, I give each character a different style. In my novel, First Stringers, the protagonist is Ember, a blind young woman with the power of heat and cold. For her, I create a style called EMBER One of her teammates is Gina, who has the power to read and influence emotions. She has a style called GINA. Whenever Ember speaks or gestures, that text is styled EMBER. When it's Gina talking or acting, the text is styled GINA. Similarly, other characters (Bolton, Cathy, Jakes, ...) each have a personal style—and all these styles are Times New Roman 14.

If They're All the Same, What's the Point?

Though each style has the same font and size, I can change their colors at will. So, if I want to see every one of Ember's words and gestures, I simply modify her style to have a different color from the original black—red, for example. Instantly, I can see all of Ember's behaviors standing out in red from the remainder of the text. I can even eliminate the distraction of the rest of the text by making the other styles have the color "White." Now all I see are Ember's words and actions—nothing else on the page.

Using this technique, I can study one character at a time, or even two characters together. For instance, I might discover that both Gina and Ember use "darn" and "damn" as cuss words. I didn't realize that when writing their words, but now I can see the pattern much more easily. I could decide that Gina is more of a "damn" person, while Ember, raised in a highly cultured environment, is a "darn" character. Using search-and-replace, I can easily change Gina's darns to damns and Embers damns to darns.

That's just one simple example, but once I can see all of a character's actions isolated, I'm able to detect all sorts of patterns. Or, by visualizing two characters together, I can see where, say, Ember speaks or gestures differently when interaction with Gina than she does when interacting with Bolton.

Making It Work for You

The best way for you to see what this tool can do for your writing is simply to try it out, to experiment. Most of the common word processors have this ability to style individual characters, so the only cost to you is the foresight to create and use a style for each character, or perhaps only major characters.

And you will find other ways to use this tool. If, for instance, you're color-blind, you might instead use font-size or font itself to break out once character's words from the rest.

Give it a try, and let me know what useful variations you invent.

Lots and Lots of Tools and Bad Habits

I was finishing up a new manuscript for my eStore when I noticed something about my habits and tools that might be worth sharing.

Like most writers, I have a few bad habits, but I have discovered I also have tools that can be used to counteract those bad habits.

Grammar Checker

My word processor (Pages, for the Mac) has a built-in grammar checker. I've tried grammar checkers in the past and found them less than useless, but I had high hopes for this one, since Mac products are all terrific (right?). I found about one out of 8 suggestions from this one to be useful, especially for detecting a few cliches that I tend to overuse. For instance, I use lots of "lots of" or "a lot of," and the grammar checker caught a lot of them (actually, all of them).

And some of the catches were useful, but not when I had a lot of dialogue involving a character of mine who used a lot of "lots of." I think it might be an improvement for a grammar checker to use a different set of rules for text within quotes, because most people don't speak the way you write a formal narrative.

Other catches were quite annoying. One chapter described a poker game, and every King and Queen was caught with the suggestion that these were sexist words. Another annoyance: most of my characters are nerds, and the novel is science fiction, but every time I used a word like "system" or "interface," the checker said they were technical jargon. Yes, they were, because that's what I was writing, technical jargon.

Overall, the grammar checker was worth a pass over the almost-finished manuscript. (I would never turn it on while drafting a piece. The interruptions would be devastating.) What I'd really like, though, is a checker I could customize. (Perhaps that's possible with the Pages checker, but I haven't figured it out yet.) When I have characters who go to South America and disguise themselves as witches, I don't want to be told that "witch" is sexist language. Besides, a male witch is called a "witch" by other witches.

Spell Checker

Okay, enough on grammar checkers. Perhaps some reader will tell us where I can find a customizable one.

I also have a prejudice about spell checkers, but over the years, I have found a number of ways they can be useful. I do not, again, use one while I'm drafting. Much too disruptive.

Nor do I believe that my spell checker will find all spelling errors in a ms. That's a mistake that causes trouble for many writers.

I do use my checker to catch misspellings of names and places in my novels—with each novel having it's own dictionary of special terms. When you're writing science fiction, with bizarre names, that's a big help.

I used to employ my spell checker to auto-correct some common typos, like "hte" into "the." After a short time, though (perhaps 100,000 words), the spell checker taught me not to make these typos, so I no longer use it that way. The spell checker also taught me to stop misspelling the few words I typed wrong, not because of a typing error, but because I didn't know how to spell them. I now know, for example, that "accommodate" has two c's and two m's.

Nowadays, though, as my fingers grow less functional, I find the checker quite useful at picking up less common typos. For a more accurate typist than I, this function might have little value.

Some writers use the spell checker to fill out abbreviations, thus shortening their typing of long words. I've tried this, but perhaps because I'm a fast typist, it slows me down. It takes me longer to remember the abbreviation than to type the word straight out.

Find/Replace

The tool I use most frequently is the simple and universal find/replace built into virtually every text processor. Here are some examples:

- When I studied typing in high school (on a manual typewriter!), I was taught to use two spaces between sentences. Some time in the sixty-plus years since then, the standard for manuscripts has changed. Now it's one space. Little by little, I've unlearned the old rule, but I still revert a few times per novel (Seven instances in the most recent 512 pages). So, when the ms. is finished, I search for double-space and replace it with single-space. One simple operation and I can forget about the problem.

- Searching for "is" and "was" helped me break the passive voice habit, but I still need to check my drafts. For instance, a search on "was" turned up a sentence starting, "He was mildly dissatisfied with the name ..." When the search stopped on the "was," I looked and realized the sentence would be stronger if it started, "He disliked the name ..." Shorter, strong, and closer to what I wanted to express. "Is" and "Was" have their uses, but often signal places that may be strengthened.

- Like most writers, I often fall into weak language where strong language could make a finer reading experience. Take the example of verbs using "get" with another word or two. "He tried to get the shackles off" could be replaced by "He tried to remove the shackles." Or, "He struggled to get his jeans nice and soft" could be strengthened as "He struggled to soften his jeans fashionably." In a recent ms., I used "get" 35 times, and "got" 7 additional times. After a bit of solid substitution, I got rid of all but three. (Actually, I eliminated all but three.) You probably fall into your own weak language. Another common source is "go," as in "go back" for "return," or "go higher" for "climb." You can use your search/replace tool to spot them for you.

- I also search for habitual patterns that aren't wrong, but overused. I mentioned "lots" above, but I didn't confess that my character wasn't the only person with this speech habit. My search/replace tool found lots and lots of "lots" that were mine, not my character's. If you're using your spell checker continuously as you type, you can achieve the same effect in real time by eliminating the word "lots" from the dictionary. Then, every time you type "lots," you'll get a "spelling error," which you can repair on the spot. I prefer to repair them all at the same time, in the entire ms., so I'm in the mood for that sort of correction.

Other Tools

The tools mentioned above do not constitute my entire toolkit, but I'll save some of the others for another post. These include my thesaurus and dictionary, which I use in conventional and idiosyncratic ways; readability measures, like the Fog Index and Cloudiness Count; various statistical analyses, such as a histogram showing overuse of certain words or phrases; and structural analysis tools, such as outliners and mind maps.

Before I write that next post, I'd love to hear from readers with other tools in their repertoire, so we can all share.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to go nuts going to my eStore lots and lots of times.

Another Learning: Black and White

Well, I put up the sample pages of my eNovels, but I thoughtlessly did them white text on black background, like the rest of the site.

Result: Quick feedback from visitors who wanted to print the samples for easy reading. White on black was too taxing on their printers--too much ink.

Response: I converted all the samples to black on white, just like the full books they will buy (I hope).