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“It’s gotta be in a quiet room.”
“I have to have my cup of coffee next to me.”
“I must have Bach playing in the background.”
“I have to be sitting at my special desk in my special office.”
“With Metallica playing in the background.”
“I must write first thing in the morning.”
“I can’t write under a full moon.”
“I can only write after I’ve done my yoga.”

WHAT.  EVER.

To me, that sounds like a bunch of excuses.  If I have to wait until I’m “in the creative mood” or until “the muse strikes” or until I’ve done the dishes – I will never write.

At least, I will produce so infrequently I might as well call it a hobby and forget about having a career as a fiction writer.

Imagine trying to apply those conditions to your 9 to 5 job.  Yeah, the boss will really go for that.  “Uh, sorry boss, can’t come in today, I’m just not FEELIN’ it, you know?”

To me, the only way to conform to Rule #1 is to do away with those ritualistic notions and make like Nike: JUST DO IT.

You don’t need to be able to set aside two hours.  If you have 25 minutes on your lunch break – WRITE.  If you have a 35 minute bus ride to work – WRITE.  If you have ten minutes to wait at the dentist – WRITE.  If you have a four minute commercial break during your favorite TV show – WRITE.

All those increments add up.  Pretty soon you’ve written for two hours – just not all at once.  Two hours a day x 750 words/hr = a half million words a year.  Not bad at all.

I’ve conditioned myself to be able to write on demand – any place I may be, no matter the environment, no matter how much time I may have.  And that has made a world of difference to my productivity.

Of course, every writer is different.  We all have a different “process.”  But I don’t consider PROCRASTINATION a valid part of any process.

For those who say, “I can’t write if there are distractions,” I say – give it a try.  Keep trying.  You’ll be surprised what you can do if you try (and believe you can succeed).

In fact – minimize this window, pull up your WIP, and give it a try right now!  And then report back about your experience!

As AssassinWare’s protagonist, Scott Faraday, likes to say, “There’s no time like the now.”

Of course, that presupposes that there is room for improvement.  Part of the problem is that many writers think that once they know how to put a story on paper, there is nothing more to learn.

But the truly successful writers in the business know that learning and improvement are an endless road.  There are always things you can work on to get better.

And that’s where FOCUSED PRACTICE comes in.

Focused practice is not just writing ANOTHER story (recall the definition of insanity).  It involves making a conscious decision to work on and improve a specific aspect of your storytelling craft.  Maybe you want to get better at dialogue.  Perhaps you want to have richer settings.  Or it might be that you are weak when it comes to pacing and getting the reader to turn one more page – so practicing cliffhangers might be helpful for you.

Regardless of the specific area you want to improve, focused practice is a great way to develop particular writing skills.

Quite simply, a focused practice session can be achieved as follows:

1) Pick a skill to work on – let’s say you’re weak in “setting” – it seems many of your scenes are talking heads in giant white rooms.
2) Sit down and write a short story.
3) Make a conscious effort to OVERDO the setting aspects of the story.  Really flesh it out with lots of rich, detailed setting.  Try to include descriptions using all five senses; utilizing sight, sound, touch, taste and smell at a minimum of every two pages.
4) Go back through the story when it’s done, and look for places to add even MORE setting elements.
5) By now, you may feel like this story is ridiculously chock-full of “setting” to the point of being “over-the-top.”  Now give it to someone to read, without telling them you were doing a focused practice.
6) You may be surprised at their reaction.  They most likely won’t even notice that there is so much description of setting, and they may even tell you it’s one of your best stories yet.
7) Now send that story out to editors who can buy it, and repeat the exercise. Or, if you are taking the indie publishing path, slap a cover on that story and put it up for sale.  You may be surprised to find it creates a few more fans of your writing.

Do that a few dozen times, and before too long, you’ll find yourself writing richer settings without even thinking about it.

As a writer, one of the great things about practice is that you can send out all your “practice” for sale.  No work goes to waste – it all goes into your inventory of stories you can sell.  That’s not the case with most other professions.

Another part of focused practice is research.

If you’re having trouble with executing the above exercise, try seeking out examples of great “setting.”  Find an author you really love, a book of theirs that you love, and find a passage that has terrific use of setting – a piece of writing that you wish YOU had created..

Now TYPE that passage into your word processor, verbatim.

By typing it in, you are training yourself to know what it actually feels like to create that kind of product – you’re training your subconscious.  Now that it’s in your word processor, analyze it.  Tear it apart and look at the building blocks used.  Count the number of senses utilized in the descriptions.  Look at the sentence structure, the punctuation, the paragraph breaks, the point-of-view and the “voice” of the passage.

Now go back and repeat the practice exercise with those things in mind.  Don’t try to “copy” the style of the passage you examined, just keep in the back of your mind the techniques of that successful author.

And above all, don’t try too hard.  If you’re focusing too much on the focused practice, you’ll stunt your creativity.  The critical part of your mind will take over and sap the creative aspect right out of your writing, leaving it very mechanical and uninspired.

It’s a balancing act, but it can really improve your craft.  And if you’re not constantly trying to improve, you won’t grow as a writer.

Focused practice: give it a try the next time you sit down to write!  (Which, by the way, should be TODAY.)

There are lots of essential ingredients to achieving success in a fiction writing career.

Talent (or skill) is certainly key – but a gift for writing, alone, will not get you there.

Some may say “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” Sure, connections are important – and part of building your career involves doing the work to build those connections and personal networks. But again, knowing the right people is not enough.

Others say you just need to have luck. Leaving your career up to chance is not a plan for success. I know of one successful writer who has been known to say, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

In other words, you need to have determination. Persistence. Patience. Faith.

In a word – DRIVE.

That drive is what motivates you to write every day. To finish every short story or novel you start. To submit every work for sale to a publisher who can buy it. To keep it submitted until it sells. (If that list looks familiar, see my previous post on Heinlein’s Rules).

Or, you can opt for the non-traditional route, and take the leap to publishing it yourself using tools like Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords.  All of these things require drive.  (More on becoming a publisher in a future post.)

Drive also pushes a writer to improve his craft through learning and practice, and through accepting valid constructive criticism from trusted sources (your First Readers, and mentors who are further along in their careers than you are).

That takes humility.

How is my DRIVE translated to the written page? By setting goals and meeting them.

For example, two years ago, my goals involved maintaining a writing “streak.” It consisted of the following:
1) Every day (except Sundays) from October 1st, 2009 until mid-July 2010, I wrote a minimum of 500 words a day. Without ever missing. Not once. Not on Thanksgiving, nor Christmas, nor when I had strep throat and could barely sit up. I simply made it happen, without fail. Every day.
2) I also held myself to a weekly minimum word count of 3,500 words. This made up for my work-free Sundays to create a daily average of 500 on a weekly basis. I did not miss hitting this goal throughout my writing streak commitment.
3) In addition, I submitted at least one short story per week, every week, during that streak – to a pro-paying market. Many times, I submitted far more than a story per week. I also made dozens of novel queries in that time period (though my goal was specific to the short story subs).

By writing this volume of words, consistently, I formed good work habits (essential for a freelancer who answers to no one but himself), steadily increased my inventory, and became a better writer all the time via the age-old method of “practice makes perfect.”

And if you do the math, it’s pretty cool.

500 words a day, 313 days a year (that’s six days a week) = 156,500 words/yr.
An average genre novel runs from 60-100k words (say 75k for simplicity’s sake).
So, by writing 500 words a day (about a half hour’s work) – you can produce TWO NOVELS a year.  And all this while working a full time day job.

I chose to end that streak after nearly ten months.  It resulted in two novels and several short stories. That’s a good deal of marketable inventory and lots of great practice. And not bad for only an hour a day of work.

This year, I’ve been working hard on being a publisher, in addition to being a writer. That’s taken away from time I should have been writing, but I had to commit the time to launching the publishing business and getting the first few products off the ground.  In the next few weeks, I will be back to putting words on paper.

I look forward very much to the day when I can just be writing fiction as my only job. Working from home 4-6 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, making six figures – yeah, that will be the life.

And that vision is part of what fuels my drive.

First, a caveat: EVERY WRITER IS DIFFERENT – you know, the whole “your mileage may vary” thing.

But I have some excellent mentors in this field, and having attended some intense professional workshops and maintaining a strong online working relationship through some pro writing groups, here is some info on what works for *most* long-term professional writers.

Again, a caveat: these are tips that apply to those who actually want to make a living writing fiction, not just the casual dreamer-writer. Most dreamer-writers don’t even start their novel, a small percentage start but never finish, a smaller percentage actually publish; and a smaller percentage than that actually end up making a career out of it.

And for the career writer, there are a few rules that can really help.  These are known as “Heinlein’s Rules” (after science fiction master Robert A. Heinlein).

1) You must write (amazing how many people call themselves writers who don’t actually do much writing).
2) You must finish what you write (you can’t very well sell an unfinished product)
3) You must never rewrite except to editorial demand (and only if you agree)
4) You must send out what you write to someone who can buy it (meaning, an editor at a publishing house – not an agent)
5) You must keep it sent out until it sells (meaning, when you get rejected, you must immediately turn around and send it to another editor – keeping it in circulation until it sells)

Take those five rules, print them out (minus my parenthetical remarks), post them on the wall by your computer, memorize them, and live them.  (Note: rules 4 & 5 are specific to pursuing traditional publishing and aren’t applicable to independent publishing.)

About #1: the project will not happen if you keep putting it off. If you can carve out 30 minutes a day, during which you write 500 words, you will have over 150,000 words written in a year (if, like me, you don’t work Sundays). That is two average-length novels. Set your priorities and go for it.

About #2: Same as #1, but I would add that if you’re like many writers, you will reach a point, about one-third of the way through writing the novel, that you will think the whole thing is crud and want to stop. DON’T. Push through that and finish it. I don’t know exactly why it happens, but that critical, defeatist voice rears its ugly head about 25-30k words into a novel. You just have to ignore it and move forward. It will be worth it, I promise.

About #3: The idea that you should rewrite your stuff (or “revise” or “polish” or “fine-tune” or whatever you want to call it) is one of the biggest myths of fiction writing. Fact is, when the words first flowed from you – in the creative burst – that’s when the material has voice and uniqueness and quality. When you “edit” your stuff, you begin to remove that voice and that quality because you are now using the critical part of your brain. Sure, you should run a spell-check when you’re done, and make sure there are no huge plot holes (this is where a trusted “first reader” comes in handy), but other than that, trust your creative side. If there is a gun in Act Three, and you forgot to set it up, go place the gun in Act One with a brief sentence or two, but don’t re-write the whole darn thing.

About #4: Unless you are publishing independently, the book will not reach readers if you don’t get it in front of the decision-makers in the publishing industry. Remember, agents do not buy books. They also do not help you write or improve your book. If an agent was a good writer, he or she would be writing books and making 85% of the cut, instead of taking 15% of the writer’s cut. There are lots of agent myths out there; you can witness the shattering of those myths here (see all the posts regarding agents).  And remember the important fiction career corollary – “money always flows TO the writer.”  Thus, no “book doctors.”

About #5: Persistence is absolutely required. You cannot be a writer and have a thin skin or have trouble with rejection. This business is all about rejection, with occasional acceptances. Never give up, never give in!

Remember: everyone’s methods are so different. For me, I just sit down and write. I don’t usually start with an outline; I am what’s called an “exploratory drafter” and I just keep writing and then start to see where it is going and then start to sketch out some structure later. A lot of times I suddenly see how it ends, and have to restrain myself from rushing to the end too fast.

I see the story like a movie in my head – one that I haven’t seen before – and enjoy the process of discovery as I write the story. It makes it fun.  (And thanks to my extensive training and experience as a TV news writer, I write very clean first drafts that need very little touch-up afterward.)

Advice from the pros is that to write well, you should read a lot of fiction from various genres. I do love to read, but need to somehow set aside more time for it than I currently do.

Writing is my passion. And as my wife will tell you, talking about writing is another of my passions! She often has to remind me, in social situations, to shut up and listen to other people and not just dominate the conversation with the stuff you see above.

If you want to be a fiction writer for your career, start now!  Seek advice from long-term professionals (such as those found on my blog roll) , attend conferences, and WRITE EVERY DAY.

And good luck!

Lots of them.

Lots and lots and lots of them . . .

Over the years, I’ve received hundreds of rejections.  Did I ever get discouraged? Of course not.

Developing a career as a fiction writer is a long road that takes diligence, determination, patience, and a thick skin.

It also is a constant process of learning and practicing and developing your craft, while also gaining an understanding of the publishing business.

Unfortunately, there’s no “fiction writer” major in college. Sure, you can get a degree in literature or English, you can take creative writing courses, etc. But that just won’t prepare you for the real world of a fiction career.

Fortunately, there are well-established fiction writers out there who are willing to “pay it forward” – to teach the next generation the ropes and help them move closer to their goals while taking advantage of their wisdom and experience.

I am fortunate enough to know two such writers: Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. These two excellent writers – excellent people – are a large part of why I’m here today.  I’ve attended a number of awesome workshops that they’ve taught, and I keep up with their blogs.  The things I’ve learned have been invaluable and advanced my career in leaps and bounds.

One of the most important things I’ve learned . . . I’ll touch on in my next blog post.