“The Pain Period”

I recently read an article on persistence and the value/necessity of it in success over at tynan.net.  The article is here.

I’ll quote my favorite part from Tynan here:

Here’s the progression of success as best I understand it:

1. Get an idea
2. Start working
3. PAIN PERIOD
4. Success

1. Getting an idea is easy. Everyone has ideas and thinks they’re so smart for coming up with them (myself included, of course). The thing is, the IDEA is probably the least important part. Why is Jay-Z a great drug dealer and a great rapper and a great clothing line creator? Is it because these are great ideas? NO. It’s because he’s a hustler (baby).

2. Start working. This is the fun part where you have 99 parts of your project, 50 of which are fun and easy. You work on those and feel great.

3. Pain Period. This is where I ALWAYS used to give up. Things stop going perfectly and it’s time to batten the hatches and start rocking. It’s time to put your WANTS aside and focus on the NEEDS of your project. THIS IS THE KEY PART! If you get past here, you succeed. If you don’t, you don’t succeed. Period.

I could write about 10 posts about this alone. Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about how his one skill is pushing through the pain period. And look! He’s a successful body builder, actor, and politician. Good ideas? Natural talents? NOPE. Just pushing through.

4. Success. This is the holy grail. People think that what you’ve done is easy once you get here. “50 cent is a crappy rapper. If I got to work with Eminem and Dr. Dre I’d be as good as him.” Yeah, but you know what? He PUSHED through the pain period of getting there and now enjoys success, which is a lot easier. You see the result, not the process.

It’s weeks like the one I’ve just had where I need to remember the whole “persist” thing.  Multiple rejections, half of them form letters, have come in.  My shoulder is still hurt, dulling my mind and making me cranky as well as making it tough for me to spend significant time typing.  I cracked a tooth as well playing DnD (don’t ask).  Generally it hasn’t been the best week ever.  And there’s the bigger picture, too.  Some days it feels as though I’m not getting any better, not ever going to sell anything ever again, etc…  It’s easy sitting alone in my office, drugged and tired and cranky, to despair and wonder if I’ve jumped off the high-dive without checking for water in the pool.

I think this is what is called the pain period, at least for me.  Not just the physical pain, but the constant doubts as well.  Tynan’s post is timely, as were Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s two posts on giving up on yourself, found here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).  I especially like Rusch’s point about giving up on yourself by degrees, a little at a time so that it is tough to notice the change of direction.  I think in the “pain period” that Tynan talks about, it is easy to do this, to lose sight of what you really want to achieve because success seems too hard to attain, too far away, with too many unknowns standing in the path.

These articles hit the spot for me exactly.  Keep writing, keep submitting, keep improving and learning and trying.  I just need to remember to hold these things in my mind.  This last week of disappointment and teeth-gritting has been a blessing in disguise in some ways.  It’s helped me think about what I want and where I’m going, helped me make those tiny adjustments to my goals and progress that Rusch talks about being so vital.  Every time I defeat the voice in my head that says I’ll never be good enough, that everything I write is worse than everything I’ve written, every time I press on beyond the doubts and rejections, I find a kind of success.  I don’t know that the “pain period” ever really ends, as each level of goal achieving will likely bring new challenges and ways to fall apart, but I believe with persistence it will get easier;  each success lining up, giving me more ammunition against the doubts.

It never ends.

Characters and Pain

This will be a fairly short post, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, but I wanted to at least get these thoughts out while I was having them.

First, I quit the middle grade novel. I’m done for now, the fun has gone out of it and the voice of the piece isn’t in my head anymore. So I’m setting it down and turning to finishing my suspense/crime novel. Which turned into me restarting my suspense/crime novel. I hadn’t touched the file in a long time, and it turned out that I had only about 6k words done (2k less than I’d thought, oops). Also, the beginning wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve learned so much about setting and character in the last few months that those six thousand words didn’t reflect what I’m capable of now.

So I started over yesterday. It’s been slow going with the writing this whole week because I’ve been in horrible pain from a shoulder injury. Which brings me to characters and pain. I used to watch House, mostly for Hugh Laurie (ok, maybe ALL for him), and stopped watching when the episodes kept focusing too much on the plots and not so much on the characters. Having spent a scant week in horrible, never-ending pain, I now “get” House’s character even better. I’ve been an irritable bitch this entire week, and I fully blame the pain. Pain really does bring out the worst in me, as it brought out the worst in Dr. House. I don’t know how I’m going to work this into characters yet, but I’ve definitely filed away this hard-learned lesson for later.

I’ve been working on giving my characters more sides, more depth. Sometimes this comes from giving them better goals, and sometimes from giving them better weaknesses. I’m mostly working on pacing in this current novel, but I’m still practicing character building as well. My main character is a con artist, thief, and absentee mother of a chronically sick kid. Not the most obviously sympathetic protagonist. It’s her voice, her opinions, and her ultimate humanity and struggle that will make or break whether readers like her or not (though having a serial killer douchebag as the antagonist won’t hurt I think). That’s a challenge to write, but I think it’ll be good practice (and I love anti-heroes, personally, when done well).

Anyway, I’m going to go ice my shoulder and take more pills. And maybe watch an episode of House after I write a “please don’t divorce me I love you I’m sorry” card to my husband *grin*

(That last is a joke, he’s putting up with me admirably)

My Goals… And Speed.

I feel I should clarify my goals and my writing speed.  Dean’s already warned me to keep my mouth shut in public about how much or how fast I write, and while I’ll probably take his advice and be more vague at Cons and such, this is my blog and I’m not a prevaricating kind of girl *grin*.

First, my goals are just that.  Mine.  They certainly don’t reflect anything but how I want to go about pursuing writing as my career.  I’ve never been a “kinda” person.  I learned to win at poker by playing 2 cent/4 cent limit online 15-20 hours a day, everyday for weeks while reading every source on poker that I could get my hands on (And I still graduated college, a miracle!).  I did this because I liked poker, I was broke, and I hate being crappy at things (and broke).  I took that same mentality to my jobs over the years, too, and it got me stressed-out with 70 work weeks.  I’m not saying it is always a good mindset, this all or nothing.  But it’s mine, and that’s how I am, so I deal with it.

Writing is the same way for me.  I spent 20 years writing stories, showing very few to anyone because I was certain they sucked (and they did, they really did) and very very frustrated that I couldn’t improve.  I was trapped in the “real writers are re-writers” myth and going nowhere.

Then I basically said “fuck it”, applied to an MFA program, started writing more, realized the MFA program was not at all for me (but I learned some tricks and made a couple friends in one of the workshops at the least, so it wasn’t a total waste).  Then I discovered Heinlein’s Rules, had a writer friend point me to Dean Wesley Smith’s website, and suddenly (or so it seemed), I started improving.  Because I was writing. I was writing a lot (well, a lot more anyway).  New stuff. Not picking over draft after draft, but just taking what I thought worked and trying it again. And again. And again.

Writing all this new stuff has opened methods of practicing things I’d never gotten to really try before.  Picking over the same old story again and again didn’t let me try out the techniques I found in the books I love.  But writing a new story did.  I could take that story and write it with Donald E. Westlake’s surprising way of describing things in mind.  Or with Terry Brook’s way of making you love a character and then twisting the knife.  Or Elizabeth Moon’s way of making kick-ass seem normal and flawed and still cool.  Or Michael Connelly’s way of making each victory both awesome and Pyrrhic. Or George RR Martin’s epic feel. I could go on and on.  Writing new stuff lets me practice these things over and over, and if I fail it isn’t a teeth-grinding ordeal anymore because I know that I can just try to fail differently (fail better?) next time instead of knowing I now have to spend the next six months of my life editing and rewriting the failed story.

So, how this relates to speed is two-fold.  One, I want to be the best damn writer I’m capable of being at any given point in time.  The more practice I get in, the better I’ll get (hopefully).  Second, I have a crazy brain full of a million things all the time and writing is the best way I’ve found to let off the pressure.  The faster I write, the sooner I’ll finish any one thing and be able to start another, and the more quiet I might gain inside my head.  So between the two, and for my goals, I want to get faster and more consistent.  For me, because that’s the way I work.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to work up to full eight-hour days writing (which would get me 7,500 to 10,000 words done) because I am also crazy about other things like reading and gaming (rpgs and videogames).  But I do hope to be able to consistently write multiple books a year as well as keep a goodly number of shorts circulating.  And I want to keep my level of practice up, because every time I open a book it seems I find some new thing or idea or technique I want to try in my own work.

So basically to sum up:  I want to get faster with my writing because writing lots is how I practice and I want to practice as much as I can (and hopefully someday sell as much as I can, cause hey, this *is* my career, after all).  That’s it, I’m just long-winded at 4am I guess.

Getting Over Lazy

I’ve been writing a fair amount in the last month, but when I looked at the results in terms of finishing projects, it doesn’t look so good.  I’ve finished two things in the last month. Two.  Not exactly on target with where I want to be by the end of the year.  It’s time to quit being lazy and work on the second of Heinlein’s Rules: finish what you write.

It’s easy for me to finish short stories generally.  Once I’m writing one, I tend to just get it done (usually within one or two sittings).  Novels are tougher to finish, though the endings so far of them are a lot easier than the beginnings and middles.  I’ve been tinkering between two novels lately, getting some done on each but not really making huge progress with either.  Part of this is fear.  Once I’m done, I have to send it out.  I’ve worked out a way to overcome that fear by putting together the package for each novel before I finish, so at least that part of the work will be done so I can just focus on getting the book done.

The other part of this is just sheer laziness.  I like to work in bursts, when stuff “comes” to me because I’m lazy and making my brain focus and compose is annoying if I’m not in the mood.  Yep, just lazy.  I know it is laziness because if I have deadlines (real or imagined), I have no problem dumping the “must be in the mood” and getting the work done.  I think I can combat my current lazy with some good old habit-forming.  I like to take days off writing, but for the next while, I’m not going to.  I think I need to build up a nice streak, get in the habit of not letting myself take days off (usually I justify days off because I know I *can* write 10k words in a day to catch up if I have to).  So starting today, I’m going to get in at least 3,900 words of fiction a day at least 6 days a week, with the seventh day goal being 1,250 words.  At that pace I should be able to finish everything I want to finish by the end of the year.  It really doesn’t help that I keep adding things I’d like to finish to my project list.

When I started out this year, I was thinking I’d write four novels and get to 30 or so short stories out to markets.  Then I kept having novel ideas, so it turned into five novels.  Then because of a conversation at one of the workshops, I decided I was going to aim for 80 short stories on top of that.  I’ve since revised that down to 40 or so shorts, not because I don’t think I could write 80, but because at 27 I’m already a little sick of the admin work of keeping track of them so I don’t accidentally sim-sub or something that I think 40-50 will be the max I want to track at a time (and it’ll be a level that, god forbid, if I start selling some, I can replace them).  And on top of that, the novel ideas just keep pouring in.  I’ve shunted four over to next year already.  I’m aiming at seven this year (two of which are shorter, one 50k, one 65-75k).  Frankly, I’d love to slow down, but my brain won’t let me.  See why I can’t afford to continue being fearful and lazy?  I don’t have time!  At the least I’ll be getting a lot of practice in and hopefully improving.

Current projects and current word count:

MG novel- ~12k

Suspense/Crime novel- ~8k

Sci/fi novel- ~7k

Sekrit Experiment project- ~1k

Paranormal Mystery, Horror Western, Irish Historical, and Regency Romance- no words yet

Also have one novella that stands at ~1300 words and another that had nearly 5k on it (which I haven’t touched in a year since I really need to redraft the whole beginning, grr).

So… plenty to finish.  I should get on that.

At Least Now I Can Stop Counting

Rejections 99 and 100 came today.  One personal, one form letter (on a third of a sheet of paper, I admire the thriftiness). *grin*

Time to plan the party.  At least, as the subject says, I can stop counting now until I think I might be close to 200, or 500.  We’ll see.  It’s just easier to not keep track.

Time to get another story into the mail. Can’t lose my race score points.

Random Thoughts #209

That thing I said last week about starting long stuff? I guess I meant medium stuff.  I finished a novella, which will be my WotF Q3 entry.  It kept trying to become a novel.  I won though, the story stayed under 17,000 words.   Now, to actually finish a novel. Seriously.  As soon as I finish just one last short story. (I’m like an addict, one more hit, just one more, ooh, wait, okay, one more).

First up on the plate is my middle grade novel.  I’m practicing not doing any research.  I realize this is a strange thing for a writer to practice, but I think sometimes I clog my brain with needing to find “true” details to stick in and don’t let the imagination run where it might.  The story is a fantasy with entirely made up everything, so it seemed like a good time to just, well, make shit up.  I’ve always believed that internal consistency matters a hell of a lot more for storytelling (especially in any story with magic or a made-up world) than having things be “realistic”.  I decided to make this novel my practice for making shit up after I was brainstorming about it and realized the princess in my head had bright pink hair.  My first thought after that was “oh, she can’t have pink hair, that’s totally unrealistic.”  Yeah, this is doubly funny if you know me, since I rarely have ‘hair’ colored hair (it’s blue and purple at the moment).  That was when it clicked that maybe my critical side was interfering in the fun of writing.  So I’m rolling with my imagination, whatever it wants, it gets this time around.  Pink hair it is!

I’m attending two more workshops this year, and hopefully Orycon as well (I’m thinking of seeing if I can’t get on a panel or two).

4 more rejections until I throw a 100 rejection party.  The more stuff goes out, the faster the responses stack up.  I figure once I hit 100 I’m going to go back to not keeping track anymore until I think I might be getting close to 200, when I plan to throw another party (100,200,500, 1000, 10000 etc).

Oh, and in cool news, an artist friend of mine is doing up a graphic novel version of one of my favorite stories (story hasn’t sold yet, sigh, but I’m hopeful).  Even if I never sell the story, I originally envisioned it as a script for her, so that is pretty sweet.  She and I used to do a webcomic together years and years ago, and I miss comics as a medium.  It’ll be cool to see what she does with the story visually.

From Short to Long

I seriously need to stop writing short stories for the moment and get some real work done on my novels.  I’ve been poking at the novels a little, 500 words here, 1000 words there.  That would be fine if I wanted to write one or two books a year.  But I don’t.  I intend to write five.

Short stories are so satisfying, however.  I can start and end in the same sitting and have a finished product in relatively few hours.  Writing a novel takes more time, a lot more.  Even at my fastest typing speed while composing new words (I think I’ve written about 1500 words in an hour before), I couldn’t write a novel in a day, much less in the 4-7 hours a short story generally takes me.  I think if I absolutely had to, I could write a novel in about 7-8 days (novel here being defined as at least 85-90k words).  I’ve written 13k words in a day before, but my hands and tendons were not my biggest fan afterward.

I’ve been trying to write short stories and novels at the same time, and really, I just end up doing short stories because it still counts as writing in my brain and they are much more satisfying in the short run.  But the novels have to get done  for me to stay on goal this year (and on goal for my career plans).  So after this week (because I have three story ideas that HAVE to get done right now according to my brain), I’m done with short fiction until a couple of those novels get out the door.  Three more stories will put my total up to 29 on submission, which is respectable I think.

Then, longer stuff.  I think I can finish my middle grade novel by the end of may if I buckle down next week.  After that I’ll have five or six weeks to finish my thriller novel before I leave on vacation in July.  Then I plan to use July as a break month and write a more short stories before August when I’ll hopefully complete another (shortish) novel.  I figure Sept and October I can get another novel done, leaving Nov and Dec to finish the fifth novel, as well as more short stories.  Looking at the numbers and knowing I need to get novel writing done, I’m thinking I won’t hit 80 short stories out by the end of the year.  But five novels will make me happy and I think I can still manage to get 50 or so shorts out by January.

Of course, in the middle of this I’ve decided to take on another project that will be a giant experiment (and I’m not going to jinx myself by talking about it too much here).  I will say that I’ve been doing a lot of research into getting multiple streams of income going and have an idea for something that might or might not pay off.  But it will be awesome to write, so that’s a perk already.

Ok, time to get some words done on a short story or my middle grade.  I have the sneaking suspicion that two out of the three stories I want to write this week will end up being 7-12k words long.  I’m going to try really hard to keep them under 10k so as not to limit my markets too much, but in the end the story will be as long as it requires.

But I Get Up Again

I never realized how stuck I’d gotten after writing that story that just failed.  I’ve started and not finished three stories in the last week.  Not finished.  I usually finish shorts in one sitting.  It’s the novels I poke at (and I’m poking, I’m poking.  Gotta get the MG one done soon, seriously).  I got stuck because I’m afraid that every word is more fail.

Fuck it. Seriously.  So I failed. That story really doesn’t work at all and nothing will save it (maybe the setting, the setting might, the setting is good.)  I have to get over that.  Move past it.  It’s so easy to dwell on what doesn’t work, what feels or reads wrong.  I think my academic side lets me down here, because I’ve been trained to pick things apart.  It’s time to get back up.  The mini self-inflicted rollercoaster of “I suck!” and “I might not suck!” annoys me.  It’s stupid and it is stopping my writing.

In 11 minutes I turn 29.  I hope that someday I’ll look back at my 20s as the years it really started.  Addicts have their sobriety dates, I guess writers have their “got serious” dates.  Mine is Feb 4th 2009.  I’ve got a year left of my 20s.  I want to make it a good one, one where I did everything in my power to reach my goals.  For my birthday I wrote myself a check and dated it Feb 4th, 2020.  I won’t say the amount, but it is fairly ambitious, at least I hope.  As I enter the final year of this decade of life, I want to know that I didn’t let the little things get me down.  And that when they did, I got back up.

Now, I should go practice what I preach and finish some damn stories.  Because no one is going to buy stuff I haven’t written and submitted.

Prison Break

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love disaster.

Last week I got to a point one day where I was just done writing.  Nothing seemed to be working and I was ready to go on vacation again.  So I quit for the day and booted up the xbox and ended up browsing Netflix.  Where I saw that all the seasons of Prison Break were on instant play.  Now, when it was on, I’d never watched this show.  I like some of the actors in it, however, and had heard good things about the first season at least, so I figured I’d just watch an episode or two.  Then I figured the premise would run dry, so I’d just watch the first season.  But I wanted to find out what happened ultimately, so I went to the fourth season and watched the last few episodes of that, too.

Then I got to the end of season 1 and really wanted to see what happened next, even though I know that in the end they are just going to kill off my favorite character.  I know what happens. But I’m still watching.  Each episode I try to tell myself that will be the last one.  But it is like crack. Just one more hit. Then I need one more. And one more.  I sit in front of the show looking for a place to stop watching, a reason to quit.

How is this relevant to writing? Because I’m learning a ton about pacing watching this show.  I want to write books people can’t put down (who doesn’t?).  This show, which I’m not even sure I like that much, won’t let me put it down.  Each episode there are clear goals followed by disaster after disaster.  Nothing goes exactly right, even when the characters are getting what they want.  That’s good.  I mean, I know the end, I know that as a viewer I hate the choices they make at the very end, and I STILL get sucked in by the episode by episode issues.  Scene by scene they won’t let me stop watching.  Partially because the characters are pretty awesomely done, partially because the pacing never lets up.  There just isn’t a good quitting place.

It’s been a good learning experience.  I’m currently working on what I hope is a thriller, and pacing is a big issue for me.  I have issues with putting the torch to the characters at every turn, because writing characters into disaster after disaster just seems mean and it can be really hard to figure out a way to get them out of one situation while keeping the pressure on.  But watching Prison Break, I’m learning how to do that.  I think I understand the try/fail cycle now better than I ever have before, because it is so baldly laid out with no coating in that show.  The very structure of that show is try/fail.  And it works.

So I have a new trick to try in my fiction.  I’ve already started practicing it in the current story I was stuck on.  Instead of having her leave the cabin and nearly get away from the bad guy, she’s going to get stuck in the one place she really shouldn’t be, so that when he returns she’s already cornered.  So far that scene is now working way way better than I had originally envisioned it.  I’m enjoying the process again.  So thanks, Prison Break.  And damn that show. I will stop watching. Soon. Really.  Just one more episode. Or not.

A Little Ray Of Sunshine

Well, after the tiny flood of rejection last week (and another one this morning), I’ve got a tiny ray of hope.  A couple months ago I sent out five submission packages of my first novel.  Today, I got the first response to one of those packages.  An editor has requested the full.  It isn’t a sale, but at least it means that my query package isn’t sinking me in the slush pile.  And it means my race score goes up to 33.

I probably won’t hear another peep about this submission for anywhere from 6 months to a year, but that’s okay.  The process is working.  Last week was tough, I started spiraling into the feeling that I’ll never be any better than I am now, that all of this was going to just be rejection after rejection.  So this little injection of hope came at just the right time and is a great reminder to me of the rules I just need to keep following.

Write. Finish. Submit.  It works!

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