writerly process


Finishing the Unfinished

Edited March 14th 2023: The link that this used to go to no longer works, so I decided to simply post the full text here. I’ve left my old intro here in quotes for posterity.

Last month I actually wrote a blogpost—and posted it over on the Pandamoon Blog instead of here. I figure it’s aroundabouts time that I posted a link to it. 🙂

It’s called “Finishing the Unfinished,” and it’s about some of the failures and fears that might prevent someone from finishing their manuscript.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!

Finishing the Unfinished

Writing a book is a massive project to tackle, a veritable marathon of words. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that book will go unfinished. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Not all manuscripts need to be finished to accomplish what they are meant to do for their writer.

For those manuscripts that need to be finished, though, I ran across an applicable quote some years ago, though I can’t for the life of me remember where or by who. If my intensely paraphrased version rings a bell, please let me know where it’s from in the comments. 🙂

The gist of the quote was this: most of the time, a project will go unfinished for one of six reasons. Three are failures in action on the part of the writer and three are fears that prevent them from moving forward.

The failures: Going too fast. Doing too much. Lacking perseverance.
The fears: Fear of finishing. Fear of bitter work. Fear of your own ferocity.

Going too fast

You wouldn’t think this might be a failure, but consider how often a writer burns themselves out after the first several thousand words by jamming all of them into the span of a day. Or perhaps you outstrip your own creative momentum, running out of things to write because you’re not giving yourself enough thinking time.

And I certainly understand! Going too fast and needing to slow down is difficult in part because enthusiasm is a bright flame that can gutter if not fed, and inspiration comes and goes. For the massive project, understand that it will take many days, certainly weeks, often months, and sometimes years. It does not need to happen all at once. You eat an airplane one bite at a time. Settle in, find new ways to feed your enthusiasm for your project over time, and forgive yourself for not being done right this moment.

Doing too much

Over-ambition can kill a project before it’s started. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the kind of undertaking a manuscript can be, especially if you’re still grappling with plot and structure and characterization and dialogue and literary conventions and genre conventions and avoiding stereotypes and researching and knowing that someday, people are going to read your baby so it has to include everything and be perfectly executed, and and and.

Breathe and narrow your focus. You are allowed to have multiple drafts, and those drafts are allowed to focus on only one aspect you’re polishing. If you’ve ever watched a digital painter’s timelapse of their art, you’ll see them rough things out, sometimes cannibalizing old work, and then they’ll gradually refine until they’re jumping between elements for the fine details. You don’t have to know everything at the start and you’re allowed to make discoveries and learn during the process.

Also release the idea that you need to devour the entire banquet. Your novel or manuscript–especially a later one in a series–does not need to tackle everything. Not all the plot hooks. Not all the passingly-mentioned characters, elements, or research topics. Your future books in your series will thank you for all the lovely plot hooks that you left laying around as you base entire adventures on a single unexplored pathway. Plus, you honestly don’t need to digress about whales (Moby Dick) or sewers (Les Mis), and you don’t need to have us follow your new side character for three chapters. I’m sure your research and your characters are lovely, but focus, please. You will never finish your book or, if you do, it’s going to be more words than a publisher will publish.

Jamming too much into the story itself will confuse it and make it stop working. At this point, even if you have a finished manuscript, it will be nonfunctional. Large, complicated stories with a lot of moving pieces are glorious, but they’re created with a mixture of precision and serendipity, and everything on the page feeds into the story. What story are you telling? Does your reader really need everything? What mysteries can you leave within your story’s pages?

Lacking perseverance

Of the three failures, this one is the most straightforward. You can’t finish if you don’t actually try to finish. This refers to all the advice of Butt-in-Chair (BIC), write every day, sacrifice to get ‘er done, etc. and so on. Make time, do the thing, yes, of course, we’ve heard this again and again.

The thing about perseverance? It isn’t flashy. It’s quiet, consistent, and it doesn’t even need to be every day. It can be cyclical or sporadic or routine. Perseverance is, at its heart, about priorities and limitations. Is finishing important to you? Then finishing will need to come higher in your priorities and you will need to work within your own limitations. Some writers have written on their phones when they don’t have access to a computer. Some writers must find a dedicated first-reader to help encourage them before they can make any headway. And some writers have children and can only write in a gasp during the wee hours of the morning.

These writers are willing to make writing important to them, and they’re willing to acknowledge their unique circumstances might mean their writing time won’t look like anyone else’s.

Fear of finishing

Whether it’s fearing what comes after the manuscript is done, or fearing that once it’s done you’ll be adrift, or that your book is too awful to finish and will never be anything better, finishing can be terrifying. The fact that this project has been important to you somehow only makes the fear of finishing worse. It’s common to stop at a point in writing (different for everyone) and wonder if you should even try.

A finished manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect, however, and the only people who expect perfect are pedants. Yes it’s worth it, especially if it’s important to you.

Fear of bitter work

Writing can be difficult. There’s too much to keep track of, and the creative process can be messy and exhausting. At a certain point, all of that New Manuscript Enthusiasm is going to drain away and you’re going to be left with only your manuscript and all the reasons you started it to try and figure out how to move forward from there. For those that hate writing but love having written, this fear can be especially brutal, and even if the joy is in the puzzle, it’s a complicated puzzle.

Some important things are hard to do. That does not make them any less worth doing.

Fear of your own ferocity

Of all the fears, this one is probably my favorite. Your ferocity is your uniqueness—your voice, your passion, your commitment. What you desire and what you need to share. Writing true things, unique thing, requires a certain amount of risk, and putting yourself out there, revealing your thoughts and experiences and emotions, even through fiction, is absolutely terrifying. Passion is often punished, especially when we’re young and fitting in with the pack is a matter of survival. Writing is an exercise in training yourself out of shame and approval-seeking to a point where you understand that standing alone on the stage of your craft is a necessary expression in order to offer the world something new.

If you think something is important, you’re the only one who matters. Be impassioned! It is okay to love your story, to need your story told. And if you need it told, someone out there needs to read it. Your ferocity is what’s going spark the connection between you and your reader, and that connection is vital.

Before I sign off, one final comment: neither these failures nor fears are referendums upon anyone’s character. The world is complex, as are individuals, and not every manuscript needs to be finished or need to be finished with the goal of publishing. Each of these fears or failures could have a hundred reasons for being, some of them excellent.

They’re simply reasons. The ‘why.’

But if you know why something is happening, you can fix it.


The Dulcet Tones of Genre Convention

I’ve been squirreling away blogpost seeds for ages, and it occurred to me that there’s no point in hoarding them if I never use them.

So! Today was prompted by an io9 article from, oh, July 15th, 2013. Ahem.

In this io9 article entitled ‘What does it mean when people say your story’s “tone” is wrong?’, there’s a fairly good breakdown of what tone even is. The definition it settles on is something along the lines of the mix of emotion, atmosphere, genre convention, authorial voice and style that creates the experiential landscape of the prose. More or less. The author, Anders, relates the idea of tone to music (logically enough), and how the whole of a musical piece and the resultant emotional impact is dependent on the sum of its mechanical parts. That’s a fairly good definition of tone, as far as trying to define something so subjective as to how a particular piece of art might feel to an audience.

To put it even more simply: Tone is the gestalt of how a writer conveys events and experiences.

Tone is also a tool, which is what I think the io9 article touches on but doesn’t necessarily drive home. It’s not something that just sort of happens as a result of style/voice/etc. and it’s something you can manipulate. In conveying ideas while aiming for a specific tone, a writer can influence a reader towards emotion, towards expectation, and play with different kinds of tension, among other things. Most writer’s tools are also fractal-like, where each component part is made up of different, other tools, which are made up of others, which are made up of others and so on from deciding who your main character has to be to tell the story you want all the way down to the actual, physical arrangement of words on a page. Even just coloring text or blacking out a page can have an effect on the tone, like in House of Leaves or the Series of Unfortunate events, respectively. Tone is no exception, and I consider it one of the more abstract tools a writer can utilize, which means there’s an infinite fractal contained inside.

So. If tone is a megatool and each subtool consists of a set of choices in how to present ideas, then ultimately tone becomes a matter of tiny choices. And following the idea of choice, even a short list off possible choices reads like the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch, where every iteration has a new item to consider. For example, amongst our weaponry (with respect to tone), there’s the choice of diction and the choice of structure and the choice what to describe (out of all the possibilities) and the choice of whose opinion the narrative is reinforcing and the choice of when to reveal twists and the choice of when to increase tension and the choice of how long or short sentences are and and and…

If ‘possible choices that impact the tone of a story’ were turtles, it’s turtles all the way down.

So, sometimes a writer just hasn’t considered enough turtles, simply through lack of practical experience, and the tone of a work will reflect that. The tone could be ‘wrong’, as in the io9 article above, or it could simply be bland. A just-the-facts-ma’am mechanical tone that is otherwise absolutely correct with respect to the basic choices of grammar, syntax, and idea conveyance can make an otherwise exciting story very boring. Boring is the kiss of death. It’s this complete lack of tone, rather than a work having the wrong tone, that I consider the reason why most people’s work ends up being passed over, be it fanfiction or a self-published work trying to stand out from the crowd or a manuscript angling to be traditionally published out on query.

And, even better, sometimes in trying to tackle a change in tone a writer (like me) will discover that there are way, way too many turtles. I actually consider ‘too many turtles’ a type of writer’s block that, when confronted with the sheer gonzo number of choices to be made when working with tone, where literally every word can be deliberately placed to provide a certain effect, a writer can get blocked by something between ‘analysis paralysis’, ‘choice overload’, and ‘tyranny of small decisions’, where there are simply too many decisions to make, too many options for each decision, and each of decision influences the whole on a chaos theory level where even a tiny change might propagate to fundamentally alter the entire final product. Yikes.

Insert genre.

The io9 article linked above points out that genres all have their own distinct tone, whether it’s dark or light or sexy or suspenseful or epic or something else entirely, and that reading in your preferred genre is the best way to absorb the tone. I agree, and in spades, because what a writer learns from absorbing the tone of a particular genre is all the myriad different genre conventions that form that genre. Genre convention makes certain choices in structure and how for you, which feeds into tone. With that, genre becomes a powerful tool in a writer’s toolbox, because its conventions break your turtles into manageable hordes.

For the most basic of basic examples, convention for a book in the romance genre is that the conflict with be romantic in nature. If the writer’s genre of choice is romance, this gives a boundary and a framework, limiting the number of turtles they have to wrangle to ‘how to write a specifically romantic conflict’. The terms are set, and it’s a narrow enough area that it gives somewhere to grip in the attempt to gain mastery over the form. The end goal is defined (these idiots fall in love), the conflict is defined (these idiots have hang-ups that prevent them from falling in love), and the rest is nuance and detail and complication that makes each romance unique. Tone, here, will end up having elements of suspense, angst, and interpersonal tension. It will feel like a romance novel.

In this particular example, genre defines tone. Tone, however, can also turn around define genre conventions. If you want something to encourage a lot of tension and have a very action-oriented sort of tone, you can put a time limit on it (race-the-clock conventions in spy thrillers), or have the story build up to a do-or-die event (sports and heist stories), or have the stakes be astronomical (superhero and most fantasy). You can make decisions about what genre you want to utilize by examining what sort of tone would be ideal for your story, reading within a genre that has that tone, and stealing the conventions–or, more precisely, the techniques that those conventions are made of. There’s nothing that says a writer can’t make use of other people’s turtles to help create something entirely their own.

Meandering aside, I just want reiterate that tone and genre (and genre’s ever-so-useful genre conventions) are all tools to tailor a reader’s experience. I know I’m repeating myself, but this cannot be stated strongly enough. I think, too often, that there can be a sense that tone (and to some extent genre) is something that simply arises from the process of bringing a bookbaby into the world. Tone is a tool! If someone tells you your tone is wrong, or it’s bland and your writing is mechanical, ask yourself: what tone am I aiming for? Hopefully that’s a question that will give you ideas of what sort of turtles you want to be looking for.

Good luck with your tones, and happy turtle hunting!


… and the Importance of Peers

So the first half of this topic was about how self-doubt will wander in when the insecurity at the core of my Writer’s Ego pounces. This second half (well, ‘half’. Part two?) talks about one of the best ways I’ve found to combat insecurity beyond hacking your brain and modifying your expectations.


When last I wrote, I said that I pestered my friends for reassurance when self-doubt rears its irrational little head, and that’s true. More specifically, rather than just bothering my friends, I actually approach my writing peers. There is no replacement that I’ve found that fills the role that a writing peer does, nor one as effective as shaking my Writer’s Ego until it calms down.

I use ‘peer’ here very deliberately.

The dictionary definition of peer is a little bit bland, I admit. Merriam-Webster only says that a peer is an equal, especially one within the same age, status, or social grouping. I’m calling up more of the current connotative definition as I understand it. A peer, for me, is someone who–more than a friend or simply someone of equal status or age–has similar experiences and can thus understand your frustrations and insecurities.

A writing peer, then, is a fellow writer who is treading their own path on a similar journey. This is to say that peers aren’t necessarily mentors–and, in fact, there is an inherent power differential in the idea of a mentor-mentee relationship that nixes a mentor from the ‘writing peer’ grouping–and they’re not necessarily friends either, though they can be. The crucial thing that makes writing peers helpful (aka the best people ever) is that they are the people who are going through the same struggles as you are, who can commiserate with you and share what works for them without coming from either a position of authority nor as a writer whose inexperience causes a disconnect.  These are the people whose opinions you trust who are also doing what you are doing. In a very individual-oriented and solitary profession, in a way, these people are a writer’s colleagues.

To chase the colleague metaphor very briefly, writers, artists and other freelancers don’t have the benefit of a social environment in which to do their work unless they seek one out. In Ye Olden Days, that’s how you ended up with great writers of different eras and nationalities clustered in various cafes all over the world. It’s also why there are now coworking spaces that basically mimic an office environment for people who’d otherwise just be stuck in their homes slowly starving for human interaction. Writing is one of the few professions where being an introvert is more the norm than not and holing up away from people is considered commonplace, but not everyone prefers the hermitage model. In addition to the social aspect, which really shouldn’t be knocked, discussion with writing peers can mimic the mutual forward progression that sharing ideas and strategies between colleagues fosters. You and your writing peers may not be working on the same project, but half the reason there’s any progress at all in cutting-edge disciplines is because of people bouncing ideas off of one another until pieces click together. I’d argue that writing is one such cutting-edge discipline, if only because of a reader’s thirst for new experiences.

Colleague aside, though, finding good writing peers is a little bit like joining a support group. This isn’t to say that that you need a formal group, however, mostly because a writer’s group is a different sort of animal and there are many different kinds of groups that fill different needs, and that’s very much a topic for a different time. It’s just that a support group and a loose collection of writing peers can serve the same purpose. You share stories. Triumphs and failures. The little ins and outs of your day that, really, are best understood by others who write. Not that stories of your tribulations can’t be amusing for people who are not writers, but finding people who have the spark of shared experience is a reassurance all its own.

It’s sort of like, for example, one of my pregnant friends joined a pregnancy forum that allowed her to chat with people who were in the same stage (and the same month) of pregnancy as she was. Being right down in the middle of something at the same time as someone else creates a sort of bond, because no matter how good your memory, details get lost by time, and the emotional spike of ‘that’s what I’m struggling with also!’ is a powerful thing. To be connected in some small way with people doing what you’re doing, experiencing what you’re experiencing, helps you, as a writer, keep from losing perspective. Insecurity, especially in the moment, is a force that skews perspective and (as you’ve probably seen in various author scandals) can cause a writer to sort of go off the rails a little. Having a connection with the grounding influence of peers is not just wise, it’s often necessary.

Plus, this idea of traveling with others at the same stage as you neatly segues into the concept of a cohort. Again, I’m using more of the connotative definition for cohort. Strictly by the dictionary, a cohort is a friend, or a group of people in a study that have some demographic thing in common. A cohort, in the sense I’m using it, is the general group of other writers and artists who you travel through your life milestones with. They’re the ones that started their careers around the same time you did, like a bubble of people traveling through life following roughly the same patterns. This cohort consists of all the people you get to know as you go to events and get involved.

The idea of your writerly cohort is actually how you get the fun-and-interesting phenomena of having all the famous writers of an era somehow know each other. You see this with Tolkien and Lewis being friends and swapping mentions in their books, and you see it in how Gaiman and Pratchett co-wrote Good Omens. Your cohort is going to be the people you collaborate with, the people you have professional relationships with, the people you meet at conventions and readings and random writers groups and retreats as you pursue your career. Additionally, a cohort is all of the people you know right now that– if you’re just starting–are also just starting. None of you are fabulous and famous yet, but your cohort are the people who will become fabulous and famous right along with you as you all improve and get your names out there. They’re your fellow travelers on the rocky road toward having people read what you’ve written.

Your writing peers come out of this cohort.

Peers, however, aren’t your therapists, or even necessarily your friends (especially if you met them in a professional capacity), so you don’t necessarily whine to them about how everything sucks when self-doubt hits and your Writer’s Ego starts chewing the mental furniture. Your peers can relate to you, though. Their experiences can inform you on how to get through a nasty spate of self-doubt, and even if there’s no advice to be had, sometimes a peer can give you feedback on the success or failure of a work and put some of your insecurities to bed that way. The idea of feedback elaborates on the idea from a few paragraphs ago that a peer can help you put everything in perspective. Writing peers don’t just help mitigate your anxiety responses when dealing with the uncertainties of audience, but they are also valuable for a reality check on the work itself.

As I’ve been singing the praises of cultivating writing peers, I should probably make it pretty clear that it is an excellent idea NOT to alienate your peers, but cherish them. I recently read an article (and if I could FIND it, I’d link you, because it was fascinating. My googlefu fails me),  wherein the writer had gotten a book deal and her writer’s group/critique group went cold on her. Whether it was jealousy or some other cause for the relationship to sour, it did so and the woman who wrote the article was by turns baffled and ‘good-riddance’ about her former group. This article got brought up in my writer’s group recently, and we universally decided it was bullshit of the highest order. First, because we enjoy each other’s company and work and only want what’s best for one another, and second because (and I might not have mentioned this one out loud at the time), because our careers aren’t going to progress in lockstep.

A writing career moves forward in fits and starts, and your friends, your peers, aren’t likely to all get a magical publishing deal within the same week, same month, or even the same year. You’re a cohort because you travel through milestones in a general sense. Someone is going to get there first. Someone is going to get there last. There’s nothing in the timing that makes one writer inherently better than another.

In that vein, too, even if there can be a sense of rivalry (and sometimes that’s unavoidable), a writer is not in competition with her peers. Even though you’re possibly at similar stages of writing and even if you’re competing in a general sense for eyes via internet advertising, or traditional publishing slots on the yearly publishing schedule, there is no physical way you can satisfy every reader’s tastes. Hell, you can never write fast enough to satisfy even just one reader. There’s no reason to get caught in a trap of superiority/inferiority based on the whims of an audience, especially because of how very insecure a writer’s relationship with any given audience really is. It’s sort of like the time Joshua Bell played in the Metro as part of a Washington Post social experiment and only a handful of people stopped to watch. You could be a brilliant writer (or concert violinist), and the wrong audience will earn you 27$, an interesting article in the newspaper, and not much else.

Now, all of this is well and good, but writing peers don’t spontaneously generate. Luckily, there are a wide variety of place to find other people who like to write. In no particular order:

  • Nanowrimo
    • Nanowrimo stands for Nation Novel Writing Month, and it’s an event that takes place in November where you write as fast as you possibly can to get as far as you possibly can toward of a goal of 50k words by the end of the month. The reason it’s a good place to meet other writers is because it sections you out by regions and encourages you to go to write-in and chat with other people in your area who also like to write. I moved to LA last year, and going to write-ins was a great way to get me out of the apartment and socializing with other locals. Plus, you’re all there for the same reason, and it’s very welcoming to new faces, whether you’re a new writer or a veteran.
  •  Meetup.com
    • Meetup.com always, always has critique groups popping up, some pretty active. Since there are often a good number of them (depending on your area), you can also shop around a little until you find a good mix of people you like.
  • Local Community Colleges/Universities
    • Now, I’m not recommending you take a class, necessarily. Though, of course, you could. If you’re in college or younger, check in and see if they have options. If you’re an adult, you could try a class if you can scrape up funds for a continuing education class. As a writer, you never stop learning, and even a grammar class as a refresher course wouldn’t hurt. What student environments like this have, however, are clubs and interest groups and other ways to connect to one another. Even if you’re just checking out the class list for the name of the teachers, oftentimes you can find a teacher has other writing-group opportunities outside of the academic structure. If a club/group is well-established, they might have ties to their alumni members and you could sound those out to find people who might be willing to link up.
  • Cowoorking Spaces
    • I mentioned coworking spaces above, where you basically pay a fee to subscribe to a workplace. It’s similar to getting a gym membership. Downside: costs money, sometimes quite a bit of it depending on the space. The good news, however, is that most coworking spaces have some sort of ‘free trial’. If you’re just looking to meet a few fresh faces and swap a few business cards, all of the coworking space owners that I’ve met have been very enthusiastic about trying to show you just how brilliant their space is.
  • Writer’s conventions
    • Writer’s conventions are one of the few event-type things I know of that really allows you-the-writer to bridge generational gaps, especially if you’re on the younger end of things. They’ve been around for years and they’re full of people Just Like You really wanting to make connections and find their peers. Plus, this is also where you can sort of take the pulse of your genre and swap knowledge. They’re fun, too, especially if you’re an extrovert or a social introvert. An important thing to remember if you go to a Writer’s Convention, is that you’re there to immerse yourself in your own industry (because publishing is an industry, no matter how artistic a writer you consider yourself to be), and while ghosting around without interacting might be nice, you’re also there to touch base with your peers. And, of course, this list is about Places To Find Peers.
  • Writer’s Organizations (join them!)
  • Libraries
    • Libraries continue to be amazing. Hunt down your local one and poke their events listing. Authors will roll through and give talks. Teachers will come in and basically hold panels. Libraries and the attendant Librarians will lure local speakers in with promises of an audience, and you’re likely to find kindred spirits in whatever room the event is held in. Plus, again, learning more is always a good thing for a writer.
    • Weirdly, some bookstores also function like libraries in this respect, and they’ll hold events for writers’ groups. If you’re looking for peers (and friends, perhaps), poking a bookshop’s event list might also be wise if you want to leave no stone unturned.
  •  Growing your own writer friends
    • I’m biased about this because I have had excellent results, but I encourage literally everyone I talk to who has even the barest inclination towards writing to set down and start. Encouraging people to write is how I ended up with my current writer’s group being so robust (it originally more focused on physical arts, if I recall correctly), and it contains some people who only barely considered writing before. I’ve encouraged my past roomates (one of whom is now published!), as well as far-flung friends and random people I’ve met at writing meetups. As a writer, and as I previously mentioned, I’m not in competition with anyone else who writes, and I absolutely love seeing the writing that people come up with.
  • Friends of friends
    • Everyone knows someone who is a writer, and sometimes pursuing those leads can end up going pretty well. That’s how I ended up with an excellent beta reader, and how I began chatting with some of my current peers. Of course, sometimes the friend of a friend thing ends up putting you in touch with someone who is a hilariously poor fit personality-wise, so use caution. Social dynamics being what they are, always use caution when pursuing this method of peer-hunting.
  • Become a Regular
    • This… is one of the more nebulous of my suggestions. The basic idea is that you show up to someplace repeatedly, and the people who also show up to that place repeatedly have a higher chance of being those sorts you’d like to interact with. Originally, this was ‘go to coffeeshops or the library’, but this can work pretty much anywhere where there’s space enough to write. Like a park, or a beach, or campus.
    • Some coffee-shops encourage a studious environment. I know when I lived in Boulder, most of the coffeeshops near CU campus were filled with students camped out with their homework. Further north, however, I started to see work-from-home types venturing out. Saying hello to faces you see again and again at the places you frequent has nabbed me a writing peer or two. Also, even if they’re not fellow writers, you might end up with a new friend.
  • Online communities
    • Last but not least, the internet has a plethora of places that you can prod to produce peers. These range from informal to organized, and even a tiny forum can be helpful if it suits your niche and is an environment where you can both contribute and get the sort of feedback that best helps you.
    • Some examples:
      • Challenges:
        • Get Your Words Out – A Writing Decathalon – GYWO has a healthy livejournal community and a presence on dreamwidth, plus a friendly group of regular chatters.
        • Camp Nanowrimo – Like Nanowrimo, but instead of being in November, it’s in April and July and they sort you into ‘cabins’ to help encourage socialization. It’s (potentially) not as stressful as November Nano, because you can choose your own word goal.
        • {insert name here} Big Bang – If you write fanfiction, and certain sorts of original fiction, you can join a Big Bang for the type of story you want to write. It’s basically a fiction festival that pairs you-the-writer with an artist, and when you post your story (either to LJ or some other media venue) you are gifted with art. I joined a Dragon Big Bang a couple of years ago, and I’ve written for fandom specific ones as well. A Big Bang is not something you join to produce something saleable, due to the nature of fandom’s gift economy, but if you’re looking to simply meet people, they’re fun challenges to join.
      • Forums:
        • The Absolute Write forums – Home of ‘Writer Beware’, the best listing of scams and shady dealers to watch out, the Absolute Write forums are a place where pros as well as the aspiring go to chat around the virtual watercooler.
        • There are also smaller-scale forums out there, though none that I’m personally on at the moment. Any further recommendation would come from my googlefu, so I suggest investigating further into your genre-of-choice if you’re going to find some sort of forum to support you. Over the years I’ve bounced through several small ones, though, like any community, they often have a lifespan of only a couple of years, even if you hang on to some of the people you met there.
      • Social Media:
        • It must be said, but you can always flail around on social media. Whether it’s twitter, tumblr, or something else, the people who might have stuff in common with you are shouting into the void waiting for some response other than an echo. If you shout back, you might find yourself with a new peer (or even a new friend). There might be a learning curve on the culture of any particular social media platform, but generally there’s a way to find other aspiring writers, whether it’s through people getting connected via advice-giving tumblog contests, or complimenting people throwing their 140 character tweet pitches at agents.

In conclusion (now that I’ve written way more than I thought I would on this particular topic):

Having writing peers when you’re a writer is a positive thing, especially for kicking self-doubt in the face. As a writer you need your peers to give you reality checks and feedback to reassure you that it’s okay to keep going, that no matter the past, success is still on the horizon. Also, sharing ideas with your peers is one of the crucial ways in which you grow as a writer, since it’s all too easy to fall into the trap where an unsuccessful piece becomes solely the fault of the audience not ‘understanding’ your vision and a solid boot to the head by a peer is can help you recalibrate. Whether to combat arrogance or insecurity, though, finding your writing peers is a necessary part of being a successful writer.


And that wraps up my two-parter on self-doubt, friends! Next time it’ll be a whole different ball game. 🙂


The Cyclical Nature of Self-Doubt…

I’ve always conceptualized all of the separate bits of my personalty that pertain directly to my writing as my ‘Writer’s Ego’. I picture it as sort of a fuzzy ball with eyes and feet, rather like Fizzgig from the Dark Crystal:

Fizzgig from the Dark Crystal aka a Writer's Ego

My Writer’s Ego (It’s so fluffy!)

So my Writer’s Ego is this little ball of fluff that needs a great deal of cuddles and brushing. If properly tended, it will bite anyone or anything that tries to stop me from writing, and will stubbornly cling to good writing ideas that I’m not quite yet sure how to write about. It’s this bulletproof, bulldog-perseverant mush of beliefs and desires that is the reason I want to write and keep writing.

It’s also this ball of hair, teeth, and ego that I blame for self-doubt.

There’s a lot of good advice out there about self-doubt from a bunch of awesome authors, and all of them sort of acknowledge how self-doubt is something most (if not all) writers suffer from and that it’ll attack no matter who you are or how good you are. It’s a thing that happens.

Of course, me being me, I hate it when things just happen. I need to know why.

To that end, I’ve found self-doubt to be almost entirely cyclical. It doesn’t just leap out from behind bushes and out of darkened hallways. It might pounce and dump its payload of ‘What the heck am I doing?! Who let me near the written word‘, but the resulting surprise (and despair) is more akin to falling out of your chair after you’ve been nodding off.  Depending on who you are, there are often warning signs and patterns and predictable triggers, and when you start to look at it from the oh-no-here-it-comes perspective, self-doubt becomes less an insurmountable barrier to writing and more one of those things you have to wait out, like an epic line at the DMV, the last few minutes of a particularly one-sided ball game, or one of those freak storms dropping golf-ball sized hail.

The actual why, though, depends on my Writer’s Ego, because the idiot ball of fluff is both arrogant and deeply, deeply insecure.

Writing is one of those subjective things, though ultimately the axis upon which it’s judged isn’t really good vs. bad, but successful vs. unsuccessful, and a particular piece of writing’s success is really only determined by the intended audience’s opinion/reception. A piece you thought was decent but not brilliant might strike a cultural nerve and become an instant bestseller and win ten million awards. One you think is stark glorious might sell five paperbacks and mosey into obscurity never to be heard of again. Like any art, the audience’s reaction is largely out of the writer’s control, able to be manipulated only a little by various tools in a writer’s toolbox. There’s really nowhere solid for a writer to stand, view their work, and definitively say: ‘my audience will love this.’ You can guess, but you don’t know.

Well, unless of course the writer is the intended audience, which is probably one of the best ways to combat your Writer’s Ego’s insecurity I’ve ever found. If you’re the one making the final decision on whether something is a successful piece of writing, then everyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter, does it?

Insecurity, however, is a fun thing, because it only really evolves out of relationships. You can have an insecure relationship with a person, certainly, but you can also have an insecure relationship with a job, or a home, or food. Insecurity is the state of not knowing if something will be or won’t be, this Schrodinger’s Cat quantum in-between state that seems to fry the decision-making process. It’s the ‘not knowing whether the action will produce the intended consequence’ that makes gamblers into addicts or mice into button-pushing maniacs. It makes you cling harder in the fear someone/something might leave you behind, it makes you deeply anxious that you haven’t done something that needed to be done and now it’s far too late,  and it makes you burn up and burn through whatever you’re insecure about because if you don’t now then it might not exist later. It’s both a fear of change and a fear that you’ll never know for sure.

Consider the moment of maximum tension in a horror movie right before the actor turns the doorknob and the music has become this violin tremolo to prepare you for a jump-scare. Is the closet empty? Is someone about to be eaten? Insecurity is that moment stretched out over time.

The fluffy little heart of my Writer’s Ego is formed of insecurity based on the relationship that I have with my audience. It’s why I was terrified of my critique group’s opinions in the beginning, because I didn’t know if they’d be kind or get awkward or my writing wouldn’t affect them like I wanted to. I didn’t know, and the ‘not knowing’ meant I didn’t share at all. That’s why the best advice against self-doubt and failure to launch is always some flavor of ‘control what you can control and let go of the rest‘, and that’s why the Serenity Prayer is part of twelve-step programs and printed on bookmarks and wall placards.

My Writer’s Ego can be shaken up by even the smallest change, too, and I absolutely admit that. As secure as I am in most aspects of my life, my Writer’s Ego hates that it can never predict how my audience responds. It’s anxious about me sharing with my critique group. It’s anxious about me putting my words in front of people I don’t know. It’s anxious about me exploring certain themes and using certain words and putting all my subconscious biases down in writing.

Heck, my Writer’s Ego is even anxious about me getting better at writing.

I have a concept of ‘leveling up’ that I use relatively often, and I’ll probably dedicate a whole post it it eventually, but it boils down to the idea that every once and a while you make a jump writing quality. You figure something out, epiphany-style, or you read just the right advice column at just the right time, or something else – and everything clicks into place. Then you go back and read your work from a month ago, or a year ago, or five years ago, and you go: ‘this was AWFUL’ and ‘I thought this was GOOD’. So you doubt yourself and your skills and pretty much the opinion of everyone who has ever complimented you since kindergarten.

My Writer’s Ego hates leveling up because its angry, toothy core of insecurity takes it as an excuse to call into question my self-perceptions and everything is a little wobbly for a while until I find my feet again. Except–the definition of leveling up is that I’ve gotten better. I’ve gained greater skill (or at least greater self-awareness), and it’s a natural byproduct of gaining experience as a writer. Since a writer never stops learning, that also means that this leveling up process is something that’s going to happen again and again over the course of my life. My Writer’s Ego also hates the prospect that the stuff I think is good now is certainly going to be less-good than the stuff I produce later…

But, honestly, that way lies madness, and since I’d much rather improve than remain stagnant forever, my Writer’s Ego doesn’t get an opinion on this topic.

Beyond petting and coddling my Writer’s Ego and foisting it on friends to deal with when I’m 1000% done with the obnoxious little thing–and beyond the solid advice from some of the linked anti-self-doubt blogposts that people have already written–I try and remember two things: my audience isn’t likely to lie to me and my audience isn’t a monolith.

The success of a novel or a short story or a poem or anything else can only be determined by this audience in aggregate,  and on the whole, an audience is going to respond as they’re inclined to respond. Just like the audience for live theater, or live comedy, there’s a vibe you get back from your audience as a full group that’s different in character than the feedback you get from an individual. It’s a sense of engagement, of energy, a thrum that makes a ‘good’ audience very different from a ‘dead’ audience.

The writer gets this too, though audience feedback starts to come in pings on a radar that encompasses many vectors. It’ll be a cheerful email to your inbox thanking you for a pleasant evening’s reading, or a post on a book club’s forum about how awful an author you are because they are now emotionally scarred, or it’ll be a nasty Amazon review,  or it will be the fact that you never hear anything from anyone. Most of it’s indirect, though, like taking a pulse rather than asking the patient how fast their heart is beating. Eventually, though, there’s a sense of how successful your writing was, and now you have that knowledge as ammunition for next time you ‘perform’.

Overall, there are very few situations where even a smallish audience can lie to your face, and I think there’s a certain amount of stability to be gain from trusting in that, even if you later decide that the feedback wasn’t particularly useful or the reader(s) giving the feedback missed the point entirely.

Additionally, even when looking at your audience of readers as a group, there’s also something to be said for remembering that ‘readers as a group’ is going to encompass a lot of subgroups. One of those subgroups is going to be the five or six of your ‘1000 true fans‘ (you’ll note, they probably don’t actually number in the thousands). Another is going to be ‘people who review books while hating the genre and who have no concept of the conventions’. Another group is ‘people vaguely offended by your content’. Another is ‘people who will read any and everything in your genre regardless if it’s good and probably don’t remember you name or your book’s title.’ One friend even sent me a review by a person who didn’t understand protagonist’s main motivations and so panned the book because she thought it was ‘unrealistic’.

It’s understanding that not all subgroups within an audience are going to respond the same, but that they are going to respond in a way that’s authentic to them, takes away a lot of the insecurity surrounding the writer-audience relationship.

My Writer’s Ego is more enthusiastic about putting things out there now that it’s ever been, because I’ve done a lot of work to convince it that the core of its relationship with my audience is less about validation and more about ‘reading’ the audience right back. When I’m focused on determining how effective I’ve been at achieving my goal, it’s like being any artist standing in front of a group and practicing my showmanship. There’s not a lot of room for my Writer’s Ego to start wailing if my audience, my readers, are giving me what I need to improve. Even silence on my readers’ behalf is a sign that I need to change something if I want a response, even if that ‘change’ is the decision to stop chasing after someone who only responds with silence.

That dealing with self-doubt is sometimes just a matter of hugs and a kind word, of repeated reassurance, certainly, but attacking the heart of the problem is always my preferred method. Anything I can do to remove the inherent insecurity of the writer-audience relationship, and re-frame it to give me a little bit more control over what I get out of it, I will. I can’t get rid of the in-between waiting awfulness, but I can trust that if and when my reader (whether publisher, not-quite-Mother-in-Law, writer’s group, or unknown audience) finally reads my book, that whatever feedback (or lack thereof) I get is going to give me more information than I had before.

If there’s one thing my Writer’s Ego does like, it’s more information. Knowing whether that horror-movie closet is empty or not gets that decision-making processes started up again, and there’s nothing my Writer’s Ego likes more than ordering me around.

I mentioned above, a couple of times, that I will sometimes pass my Writer’s Ego off to someone else when I’m frustrated with it, but it’s a bit more complicated than simply pestering a friend for reassurance. However, that is a topic all it’s own, and I plan to explore it in my next post.


** This is one of the first topics I decided I wanted to write about when I started this blog and, just my luck, once I actually sat down and began it ended up being a two-parter.


Hitting the Sweet Spot

Writing, much to my dismay, is an ongoing process of figuring out what works, doing that for a while until everything breaks and then figuring it out all over again. I am always poking around writing advice blogs to read about other peoples’ processes, and whenever my current battle plan goes sideways I’ll try out some of what works for others. Recently I’ve been ruminating a lot on the idea of daily word counts. Having a daily word count is one of the methods that works more or less often for me, especially when I have a longer project, but I’m starting to realize that my approach to daily word counts is a little bit, shall we say, unconventional.

Most of the advice I’ve found makes your daily word count into a goal. You have a daily goal, that’s what you hit come hell or high water, and forcing yourself to meet your goal is the only reason the words come out some days.

Hilariously, this does not work as intended for me, because setting even a reasonable goal has the unfortunate side effect of making my brain fluctuate between three states: the ‘I have not hit the goal today, I have failed, I am a failure’ state, the ‘I’m going to not hit the goal out of spite, because I don’t take orders from arbitrary self-expectations’ state, and the ‘I will hit this goal if it kills me and it might’ state.

I do not do well with high daily word goals.

When I use a daily word count, it’s actually a minimum word count.  As far as I can tell, the reason for a daily word goal is really motivation. It functions as the butt-in-chair mechanism, and it will keep you at your work until you’ve hit your goal. That’s not a problem I have – once I start writing I’ll usually continue until I can’t, regardless of goal.

To that end, my minimum daily word count is actually only 100 words. It’s just high enough to sink me into writing mode after I’ve sat down, but it’s low enough that my brain decides that we are very certainly not done with writing. Something that low also lowers the inertia I need to overcome to start writing. It’s only a hundred words. I can do that in ten minutes. Ten minutes is easy and I have no reason not to.

Once I’m writing, however, and I’ve breezed past my hundred words, how do I ever get anything done? I’m glad you asked, my friend, because the ‘goal’ part of my daily writing is an abstract goal. The thing that motivates me the most is having an event or task or endpoint within my writing piece. Sometimes I’ll simply shoot for the end of the piece, for one thing, but I also use the end of the chapter, or the end of the scene, or – if none of those are within how much I can reasonably write in a day, then my goal is to get to the next natural break-point in the narrative.

To be perfectly honest, I consider a daily world goal to be unsatisfyingly arbitrary and a little too vague. I’ve done Nation Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) for the last six or eight years and while I can do the 1667 words a day for a month, it’s hard to sustain that pace when the larger, more abstract goal of ‘finish the 50k in one month’ is removed. If I don’t have an abstract goal like’ finish the book before August’, or ‘post the story before May’, then I don’t have the sense of investment and urgency that leads me to get stubborn about reaching my goal. Even if the abstract goal is very short term, such as ‘finish this scene before Monday’, I find that a far more effective motivator than ‘write 2k on Saturday and 2k on Sunday’, even if they are functionally identical.

An important thing to reiterate, however, is that the combined ‘daily minimum word count and abstract goal’ package is all about motivation, so when I talk about how many words I write a day, it’s actually based on the metrics I’ve kept for the last two years and anecdata from the last ten or so. How many words I write in a day really doesn’t have anything to do with any daily goal I’ve set myself, it’s merely a description of my past performance with respect to writing.

Until 2014, my metrics mostly consisted of a handful of disparate sources: My Nanowrimo tracker, the Ares Accord that I and a couple my writer friends set up to help do consistent word wars, a few other scattered challenges and projects, and a general sense of how many words I can accomplish on a lunch break. I liked to try and keep metrics of when I’d write and how much, and the tracking got more complicated and more comprehensive over time.

At the beginning of last year, however, I joined ‘Get Your Words Out‘ in an attempt to find a community of like-interested writers to help keep me connected. Billed as a writing decathlon, GWYO allows you to set a yearlong goal and then calculates out how much you need to write per day to reach it. I didn’t reach my goal last year (and I’m not sure I will this year), but that really doesn’t matter. The most useful thing about the challenge for me was their very slick spreadsheet a level above what I have previously been able to produce for myself. Barring any other benefit, I ended up with a year’s worth of cold hard data and that is more than worth participating.

In 2014, I wrote 561 words per day, averaged across the entire year, including days I didn’t write. Counting only days I did write, my average is 1102, which I suppose implies that I wrote only about half of the days last year. I write between 700 words a day and 1400 words a day normally, and it varies wildly between those two points. My ‘very good days’ are about 2000 words, and those usually happen when I near the end of projects. My ‘bare minimum’ days are 300 words, and that’s when I’m squeezing writing in between ridiculous amounts of busy.

As for my writing pace, I am surprisingly consistent. I write about 300-400 words in half an hour, and 600-800 words in an hour. If I’m loose and limber and have enough momentum, I can bump up to 1000 words in an hour, but that’s about as fast as my brain goes to produce something that isn’t going to be rewritten in full. I’ve written this fast for as long as I can remember, since my very first ‘win’ at Nanowrimo when I was in college, to the five years at my first job, to every single word war I’ve done for Nanowrimo or any other challenge.

I have yet to reach a solid daily upper limit. Previously, my upper limits have been nearing 4000 words in a day before my brain fizzled, but I blew past that this last November and managed a couple of 6000 word days. Those days were awful and caused immediate burnout, however, so clearly large word count days are not sustainable for in the long term for me.

That’s the important part, actually. Writing a book is a marathon, even if you’re trying to go as fast as you can, and a sustainable word count is vastly more important than slamming out ten thousand word days if you’re utterly useless for the next week.

This brings me back around to daily word goals. A post over on Jennifer Ellis’s blog, entitled Minimum Daily Word Counts, gives a short rundown of the various word counts of famous authors. It’s full of excellent advice on how to increase your word counts and reach new heights of productivity. However, the post is very much rooted in the idea of pushing yourself to find your upper limit and – perhaps – lingering there.

If you don’t know what your limits are yet, then hell yes go get some great ideas on how to push yourself higher and faster.

However – riding along your upper limit is an awful idea, because one misstep and you fling yourself into either burnout or unsustainable territory. If you’re going to use a daily word goal (instead of a ludicrously low minimum and an abstract goal like me), then in my humble, humble opinion the optimal word count lies in a ‘sweet spot’. It’s a word count that you can blow past if you feel inspired while still being doable if your life throws shit at you, because your daily target goal is just that. Daily. It happens if you’ve got to mow the lawn and do chores and go grocery shopping. It happens if your day job was a royal pain in the ass and you just want a nightcap and an early bedtime. It happens if the sun is shining and the snow is gone and spring is dragging you out to the park for ultimate Frisbee. It happens around feeding and transporting children, taking the cat to the vet, and lunches with friends. Barring emergencies, this is a daily word goal that somehow fits into your life.

If I were to set an actual word count goal, in comparison to some of these famous writers over here, mine would be 800 words a day. That’s what I can hit consistently even when life happens, barring the depressive doldrums. (Last year was a bit awful in that for me.) It’s on the bottom edge of what I know I write on an average day plus a bit more, and it will only take me a couple of hours if I’m writing fiction. It’s doable, but it is an actual goal that requires me to stretch myself on off days and it’s not so high I can’t look at it as just the start to my writing for the day on the good ones.

The secret is that the goal you set for yourself should not be so intimidating as to scare you away with the threat of failure. You want the barrier to putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or butt in chair to be vanishingly low. The idea is that you’ll get there when you get there, and the point is to set a pace manageable for the long term so that when you do inevitably (and I do mean inevitably) miss days, you don’t lose your momentum. Even if you do have a deadline, the only way to ‘make up’ words on missed days is to take a page from Nanowrimo’s notebook and redistribute your needed words across all your remaining days, otherwise your target word count will snowball to something you can’t hit without burning out and starting will be that much harder.

I’m not sure I’ve read this very often in writing advice blogs (and I’d love links that do, if you have them!), but sitting your ass down and starting needs to be made as easy as humanly possible for you. Nothing else about writing is easy and if your brain is anything like mine, it will take any excuse not to do something that’s hard no matter how rewarding it may be.

So make sitting down easy. Trick your brain. Figure out what motivates you and how and why. Become a scientist and experiment with yourself, changing variables like location and medium until you find something that makes the act of sitting down something you can do without thinking too hard about it. Don’t let your writing become something that needs a superstitious ritual to start, where you’re afraid to change elements for fear you’ll never write again.

Find your preferences. Find your inspirations. Find your limits. Figure out your highest word count and your lowest and your average, and when you’re done figuring all of that out? Find your sweet spot.