Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 11

14 Common Critical Voice Traps

One of the frustrating points for me is discussions about overcoming critical voice don’t talk much about identifying how it shows up. Borrowing from the day job, one of the most important parts of solving any problem is identifying exactly what it is.

You can’t tackle critical voice until you identify its presence.

Of course, once you identify one place it’s coming in, it pivots and tries something else. Then it gets sneaky as you get smarter about it. These are the places I’ve run into it, some with me, all of it with other writers.

This first batch is all the common ones. Once I started digging into critical voice, it surprised me how it can work its way into the story. I was also surprised at how many of these connect to other forms of critical voice. It truly breeds if it gets a foothold.

Let’s dive in!

Negativity

Negativity can show up in a lot of ways, some of it as obvious as “writing is torture” to “I’ll bang out a draft.” It’s pretty much anything that puts down your writing. In an article in a magazine, the author referred to “churning out” a draft.

Think about the image that brings up. You’re paddling in deep waters, feet churning, trying to stay afloat.

Most writing memes bouncing about Facebook and Twitter play up on all this negativity. A pie chart showing the time writing (tiny) and surfing the internet (big). Or the writing style assignment chart where you might be “lawful” or “chaotic.” Or ones referencing “Franken-Drafts.”

People laugh at them and can’t see the implied put-down. Lawful sounds like you’re pleasing a teacher. Chaotic sounds like your story is a mess. If you’re a pantser, you always get informed by other writers that your stories are a mess.

Sometimes, you’ll have to listen to what you’re saying about you’re writing. I called my pantser process “screwy” and “throwing paint at the wall to see what sticks” because I was so frustrated with what I didn’t realize was critical voice’s interference.

The negativity feeds on itself until that’s all you can see.

Seeking validation

This one’s fairly common. A lot of experiences here are rooted in school where we write a paper and get a grade back from the teacher. You might have seen writers asking for permission to write something, or want someone to tell them the story is good.

Other people’s critical voices can show up if you don’t comment in the way they expect, especially if they’re unaware that they’re seeking validation. Over the years, there have been some spectacular meltdowns over reviews, even when they’re good reviews. Agents no longer send personal comments because of this.

This is also a reason you shouldn’t give critiques on writing message boards. I did critiques for a little while to help me learn. I was always kind and tried to be careful not to be negative. But I’d still run into writers who simply wanted the validation and they turned extremely nasty.

Writing by committee

Another common one is fueled by how we do things in the workplace. Everyone gets around a meeting table, discusses the report, presentation, or whatever, and then makes changes. They all have a say in shaping the document.

So writers come in, asking for critiques, then developmental editing. And they make all the changes identified, without ever questioning if these changes are right for their story. Essentially, they hand off agency for their story to other people.

Add to that a lot of writers doing the critiques don’t know what they’re talking about, and even some of the developmental editors may not either (and I know that statement is controversial).

The story loses what made it that writer’s story.

I ran afoul of this early on. I asked two family members to read my stories. One didn’t read fiction at all. But I took all their comments as a call to action to fix issues in the story.

One day, I looked at my story and asked, “What happened?”

It had lost me along the way.

I decided not to show anyone the story until I had sent it out. It made me more confident in identifying that I was satisfied with how the story came out.

That’s a big step, though. A lot of writers fear it, and it was pretty scary for me at first. I posted in Anne R. Allen’s blog that I didn’t ask for critiques. Another writer zoomed in and said she would never let a story go without getting critiques.

Really, what’s the worst that will happen? The magazine/agent sends you a form rejection.

Perfecting the story

We’ve all seen it on the cooking channels. A baker pontificates early on in the competition that everything she produces is perfect. She doesn’t let a cake go out until every flaw is corrected and it shines. Then she self-destructs under the timed competition and turns out the worst cake she’s ever created.

Perfection is a way for the critical voice to dangle a candy bar in front of you, out of reach in such a way you’ll never get it.

The standard becomes so high that it’s toxic. Some writers have trouble letting work go because they could fix one more thing. If they submit the story, they fret about the typo they missed on page thirty. Surely that must have been why the editor/agent rejected it.

I never had problems letting the story go so I could submit it. But I did in other areas.

When I learned I needed to add more setting to my stories, critical voice took control. It decided to hit that skill with a battering ram. On Rogue God, setting turned from something fun to describe (as I’m experiencing with Space Dutchman) into “you can’t go onto the next scene until you get the setting right.”

In my day job, the other area surfaced: Typos.

I’m a typo-making machine. I try to get what I write correct, but I don’t always see the typos, especially not missing articles like is, if, or it. The tools have gotten better at helping me catch them (though I have none of those tools are work! Grr!).

At work, I got berated several times for simple typos. In one case, a boss-type person had an actual meltdown—and it wasn’t even my typo!

Critical voice said, “Let’s fix this.” Critical voice and creative voice both hated being treated like this. In hindsight, the reaction from the boss-type person was way over the top. Other people’s critical voice strikes again!

So critical voice came up with this elaborate system for checking presentations:

After I finished the presentation, I read through it, corrected typos and formatting errors.

Printed it and let it sit for thirty minutes (because I was always in firefighting mode and had to get it out). I might take a break and walk away from it at that point.

I read that copy, looking for more typos.

Attached it to an email, opened the file, and scanned it one more time. Sometimes I found yet more typos. Fixed those, and repeated the same process.

And someone would still find what I thought was a glaringly obvious typo. I’d apologize, say “I should have caught that,” and berate myself for not doing exactly that. It was a very unrealistic standard, much like the baker who expects perfection in a timed baking competition.

It wasn’t until I was briefly handed two tasks that required written input from a lot of other people. It was eye-opening!

I had to prepare their submissions to a big boss. This included making sure they followed the guidelines, and that they hadn’t made any typos. It had to get past an administrative assistant who would have kicked it back for serial commas.

Some hadn’t even run spellcheck. Sentences were seventy words long. If a word could be spelled with a space or without, they spelled it both ways. They listed acronyms and didn’t define them because they didn’t know what the acronym meant.

It was the sloppiness you see from writers dashing off the first draft to get it out of the way.

Maybe, I thought, I shouldn’t put as much weight on the typos as I was.

Recently, I’ve been watching the TV series Better Human, Better Dog. A lot of the stories are about how the dog owner’s fears and tension translate into confusion for the dog. It’s made me wonder if my fear of typos translated into how people treated me.

Just something to think about.

Critical Voice Report – Week 3

This was a strange week for my writing.

As I was writing Space Dutchman, I bumped into the climax. At which point, I knew I was going to have to do a full cycle over the entire story before I could finish the climax.

But with the entire story being cycled through, I couldn’t do that in conjunction with a word count goal. Some writers put too much it and have to pare back. Others put too little in and have to add. I do both at the same time (yeah, got to be different).

Some examples of what’s happening in my cycle:

A character is coming out of the bulk of the book. He’s still there; he’s just not on the mission. I discovered he kept self-editing, so that was a sign he needed to come out.An early discussion with two characters created a big problem in the story later (as in, “Then why can’t anyone rescue them if this an option?” Whoops!)Fixing the above caused about half a page that followed to come out because it no longer fit.

Time Management for Writers is in the same place. Cycling on non-fiction tends to be a very messy process for me, more than for fiction. I find places where it was in my head but I didn’t get it down clearly on paper (intermediate packets!).

That’s odd for me, having two books coming to a close at about the same time.

But this week, I also went to Nostalgia Con. That’s a movie and TV con where they bring in older actors. Robert Fuller from Emergency was one of the guests, and I wanted to meet him. He’s 89, so realistically, this might be my only opportunity.

He was very nice and enjoyed all the attention from the fans (not always true for all actors).

The writing:

Saturday (Sept 10)

Space Dutchman:

804 words

Time Management for Fiction Writers

1057 words

Sunday

Space Dutchman: 834;

This session was a slog. The weather is starting to change and I had a bad sinus headache. If I didn’t have the 800-word requirement, I wouldn’t have written at all.

Monday

Space Dutchman: 818

I suspected I needed to do the full cycle. But I wanted to keep up on the word count, so I did only the first two chapters for about 30 minutes (then panicked a little because I netted 100 words out of that cycle).

Time Management

Straight cycling. I cleaned up consistency issues, eliminated repetitions, clarified some points in more detail.

Tuesday

Space Dutchman: 1037

I cycled through two more chapters. But it was very clear I’d bumped into the climax.

Time Management:

More clarifying.

Wednesday:

Space Dutchman

I decided here I was going to focus on the cycling, rather than the word count. So more extensive cycling, mainly for story continuity.

Thursday

This was the drive to Nostalgia Con. I thought I would easily get more cycling on. That was overly optimistic. I did a little, but I was going to sleep, so it wasn’t much.

Friday

Did a lot better with the cycling. The word count’s actually staying about the same as I bounce around, even when I take out the extra character (it’s obvious he was self-editing).

But exciting that the book went from dragging along to getting done!

14 Common Critical Voice Traps

One of the frustrating points for me are discussions about overcoming critical voice don’t talk much about identifying how it shows up. Borrowing from the day job, one of the most important parts of solving any problem is identifying exactly what the problem is.

You can’t tackle critical voice until you identify its presence.

Of course, once you identify one place it’s coming in, it pivots and tries something else. Then it gets sneaky as you get smarter about it. These are the places I’ve run into it, some with me, all of it with other writers.

This first batch are the common ones. Once I started digging into critical voice, it surprised me how it can work its way into the story. I was also surprised at how many of these connect to other forms of critical voice. It truly breeds if it gets a foothold.

Let’s dive in!

Negativity

Negativity can show up in a lot of ways, some as obvious as “writing is torture” to “I’ll bang out a draft.” It’s pretty much anything that puts down your writing. In an article in a magazine, the author referred to “churning out” a draft.

Think about the image that brings up. You’re paddling in deep waters, feet churning, trying to stay afloat.

Most writing memes bouncing about Facebook and Twitter play up on all this negativity. A pie chart showing the time writing (tiny) and surfing the internet (big). Or the writing style assignment chart where you might be “lawful” or “chaotic.” Or ones referencing “Franken-Drafts.”

People laugh at them and can’t see the implied put-down. Lawful sounds like you’re pleasing a teacher. Chaotic sounds like your story is a mess. If you’re a pantser, you always get informed by other writers that your stories are a mess.

Sometimes, you’ll have to listen to what you’re saying about you’re writing. I called my pantser process “screwy” and “throwing paint at the wall to see what sticks” because I was so frustrated with what I didn’t realize was critical voice’s interference.

The negativity feeds on itself until that’s all you can see.

Seeking validation

This one’s fairly common. A lot of experiences here are rooted in school where we write a paper and get a grade back from the teacher. You might have seen writers asking for permission to write something, or want someone to tell them the story is good.

Other people’s critical voices can show up if you don’t comment in the way they expect, especially if they’re unaware that they’re seeking validation. Over the years, there have been some spectacular meltdowns over reviews, even when they’re good reviews. Agents no longer send personal comments because of this.

This is also a reason you shouldn’t give critiques on writing message boards. I did critiques for a little while to help me learn. I was always kind and tried to be careful not to be negative. But I’d still run into writers who simply wanted the validation and they turned extremely nasty when they didn’t get it.

Writing by committee

Another common one is fueled by how we do things in the workplace. Everyone gets around a meeting table, discusses the report, presentation, or whatever, and then makes changes. They all have a say in shaping the document.

So writers come in, asking for critiques, then developmental editing. They make all the changes identified, without ever questioning if these changes are right for their story. Essentially, they hand off agency for their story to other people.

Add to that a lot of writers doing the critiques don’t know what they’re talking about, and even some of the developmental editors may not either (and I know that statement is controversial. But some developmental editors are writers who couldn’t make money writing.).

The story loses what made it that writer’s story.

I ran afoul of this early on. I asked two family members to read my stories. One didn’t read fiction at all. But I took all their comments as a call to action to fix issues in the story.

One day, I looked at my story and asked, “What happened?”

It had lost me along the way.

I decided not to show anyone the story until I had submitted it to a magazine. This made me more confident in identifying that I was satisfied with how the story came out.

That’s a big step, though. A lot of writers fear it, and it was pretty scary for me at first. I posted in a well-known writing blog that I didn’t ask for critiques. Another writer zoomed in and said she would never let a story go without getting critiques. Her critical voice definitely had its hackles up!

Really, what’s the worst that will happen? The magazine/agent sends you a form rejection.

Perfecting the story

We’ve all seen it on the cooking channels. A baker pontificates early on in the competition that everything she produces is perfect. She doesn’t let a cake go out until every flaw is corrected and it shines. Then she self-destructs under the timed competition and turns out the worst cake she’s ever created.

Perfection is a way for the critical voice to dangle a candy bar in front of you, out of reach in such a way you’ll never get it.

The standard becomes so high that it’s toxic. Some writers have trouble letting work go because they could fix one more thing. If they submit the story, they fret about the typo they missed on page thirty. Surely that must have been why the editor/agent rejected it…

(If you get a form rejection, the first reader probably didn’t get past the first sentence.)

I never had problems letting the story go so I could submit it. But I did in other areas.

When I learned I needed to add more setting to my stories, critical voice took control. It decided to hit that skill with a battering ram. On Rogue God, setting turned from something fun to describe (as I’m experiencing with Space Dutchman) into “you can’t go onto the next scene until you get the setting right.”

In my day job, the other area surfaced: Typos.

I’m a typo-making machine. I try to get what I write correct, but I don’t always see the typos, especially not missing articles like is, if, or it. The tools have gotten better at helping me catch them (though I have none of those tools are work! Grr!).

At work, I got berated several times for simple typos. In one case, a boss-type person had an actual meltdown—and it wasn’t even my typo!

Critical voice said, “Let’s fix this.” Critical voice and creative voice both hated being treated like this. In hindsight, the reaction from the boss-type person was way over the top. Other people’s critical voice strikes again!

So critical voice came up with this elaborate system for checking presentations:

After I finished the presentation, I read through it, corrected typos and formatting errors.

Printed it and let it sit for thirty minutes (because I was always in firefighting mode and had to get it out). I might take a break and walk away from it at that point.

I read that copy, looking for more typos.

Attached it to an email, opened the file, and scanned it one more time. Sometimes I found yet more typos. Fixed those, and repeated the same process.

And someone would still find what I thought was a glaringly obvious typo. I’d apologize, say “I should have caught that,” and berate myself for not doing exactly that. It was a very unrealistic standard, much like the baker who expects perfection in a timed baking competition.

It wasn’t until I was handed two tasks that required written input from other people. It was eye-opening!

I had to prepare their submissions to a big boss. This included making sure they followed the guidelines, and that they hadn’t made any typos. It had to get past an administrative assistant who would have kicked it back for serial commas.

Some hadn’t even run spellcheck. Sentences were seventy words long. If a word could be spelled with a space or without, they spelled it both ways. They listed acronyms and didn’t define them because they didn’t know what the acronym meant.

It was the sloppiness you see from writers dashing off the first draft to get it out of the way.

Maybe, I thought, I shouldn’t put as much weight on the typos as I was.

Recently, I’ve been watching the TV series Better Human, Better Dog. A lot of the stories are about how the dog owner’s fears and tension translate into confusion for the dog. It’s made me wonder if my fear of typos translated into how people treated me.

Just something to think about.

Critical Voice Report – Week 2

I’m going to start with an oddity that veered straight into critical voice. Not mine. Someone else’s.

A writer on Twitter was likely looking for confirmation of his opinion/decision. He was doing a book cover for his book and didn’t want to put his name on the front. His friends told him he needed to put his name on the cover.

I told him the same thing. Readers don’t find books by titles; they find them by author name. Plus, there’s a standard the covers have. If something doesn’t follow the standard, the reader will pass it by. They won’t know why.

Publishing also tried something similar a few years back. They released a book that made the Washington Post because of the new style cover. The book title was just a letter like Q (I don’t remember what the letter was, but I’m a Star Trek fan, so Q works). So the publisher just put a big letter on a black background. No writer name. The commentary about how it looked reminded me of people lavishing praise on a white canvas with a black spot on it (and such a painting hangs in the National Art Gallery).

Readers? Well, no publisher has tried that type of cover again. I’m guessing the book tanked. I saw in Borders, and it did stand out, even from the stairs. But I couldn’t tell from the cover what kind of book it was.

So covers are pretty important at inviting the reader in. Well, when I told him that, he responded back with all the might of critical voice. According to him, having your name on the cover was for the artist’s ego…

He was actually quite hostile. I think he was afraid of success, so his critical voice was busy sabotaging the book.

Week 2 of excising Critical Voice from word count

Saturday:

Time Management: 863Space Dutchman: 804

Sunday:

Time Management 1670Space Dutchman – 1142

Monday:

Space Dutchman – 862

Tuesday:

Space Dutchman – 823

Wednesday

Space Dutchman – 800 *

*Approximate. My writing process is sometimes messy and things come in out of order. I’m writing in Scrivener for Windows, so I cut a section and put it into another chapter. I’d just looked at the word count, and then it jumped a thousand words. Not even the amount I’d cut and pasted! So there’s a bug involving the word count tracking in the tool.

Thursday & Friday

More work on my publishing website.

This project is an outgrowth of my inventory view. I hadn’t quite finished that. But because I’d focused on the speculative fiction side, I’d neglected the mystery side. I updated two covers (the first two) that were nagging at me and needed it, and better branded my Al Travers’ series with the third. I had trouble with it because it’s set in the 1940s and most of the images from that era are too gangster.

I also discovered that several of the mysteries were published, but I didn’t put them up on the site. I’ve been making sure when I publish or refresh, that’s part of the final step because it’s so easy to forget.

Reflections on Critical Voice

So far, it is always harder to get started on Space Dutchman, and it’s where I want to procrastinate. This is where it’s pretty important to have a set time to do the writing. That way, when the procrastination bug pops up, I’ve got the habit built in to migrate to the writing chair.

On the other hand, I can easily jump in on the non-fiction book. Critical voice has no problems with that (even when I’m writing about it. Go figure).

So my only expectation is to get used to hitting the 800 words under the rules.

Goals

I had a bit of a revelation this week with goals. I almost immediately fell off using the Focus Planner and the three goals. Some time management gurus would probably say that’s a discipline issue. But I just spent the week getting 800 words of fiction on the designated days. I was also in the Army, where discipline is its middle name.

I think this issue might be something unique to creatives. And I’m talking the people who go back again and again to create. Not the person who randomly decides to write the Great American Novel.

Most people need help via goals to get something done. There’s so much swirling around that the thing they want to do can easily drop off. Then a year goes by, and they’ve done nothing with it.

But creatives–we choose to go into our projects with the intent of finishing them. It doesn’t make as much sense to create a goal for it because we’re always pushing forward with the next story.

My 800 words of fiction was more of a rule to make sure critical voice didn’t mess with me while I was working on fiction. Having a physical goal on paper of doing it felt superficial. Checking it off? Meh. I get more excited over seeing that the story is almost done and having fun with the characters.

But it made me think about a book I read in passing: The 12-Week Year for Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to Getting Your Writing Done. I think it had been on BookBub for pretty cheap, so I thought “Why not?”

It is goal-focused. The title is deceptive though. The 12 weeks is only for the first draft, with the assumption of revision. Two of the co-authors don’t have a lot written.

So maybe goals don’t matter that much, at least when it comes to fiction writing.

13 The Influence of Critical Voice

I was inspired to add this chapter after reading Stephen Covey’s book and discovering one of the habits involved critical voice. He never used any of the traditional words like ‘inner critic.’ From there, I found a rabbit hole of some aspects of it that I hadn’t thought about.

Our image of critical voice is often what TV and film gives us. On the TV show NCIS, Agent McGee was a best-selling writer for a few seasons. In one book, he tangled with critical voice, typing “The” on his ancient Royal typewriter. Then he would glare at the word, yank the page out of the typewriter, and crumple into a ball. That ball went into an even bigger pile of paper balls.

Critical voice is a terrible time waster. You suddenly have four hours of time available, start writing, and end up with only fifty words on the page.

But when critical voice is dominating, it’s hard to see its influence.

It’s even harder when it’s subtle.

When 2021 rolled in, I took an annual review workshop from Forte Labs (they discontinued unannounced the following year). Between the impact of COVID-19 and the success of writing a short story a week for an entire year, I thought it would be good to see where I was at.

Instead, I learned something I didn’t expect.

I wasn’t treating myself the way I would treat a child.

Of course, that’s critical voice. But it was very eye-opening because we don’t always listen to how we treat ourselves, sometimes right down to the very words we say.

Writers are terrible at it. Pantsers get it even worse because outliner writers constantly tell us we don’t know what we’re doing, prime critical voice territory.

You’ll have heard all these examples, and have probably said some of them to yourself. The negative words are bolded:

The worst part about this kind of critical voice talk is that it becomes self-fulfilling. Saying your draft is shit gives your critical voice permission to take control.

When you hit the revision, you see the impact of that, and it confirms your fears. Now you believe it’s true that first drafts are shit. The more you fix, the more you find, and the more your critical voice digs in.

These words the critical voice tells you are always negative. Sometimes it’s subtle. During the day job recently, I was tackling email. I auto-piloted straight into reactive with the email. Unfortunately, bad habits are never far away.

Critical voice popped up and said, “I’ll never get through all these emails!” I only had one screenful of emails, so you can see how critical voice blows things waaaayyyy out of proportion. But it was being fueled by interruptions in chat. I’d start on one email, someone would interrupt with a text. Go back to the email, another interruption. Get the email out, start on the next one, and then another interruption.

It took a little time for me to get a clue. I stopped and wondered why I wasn’t flagging emails and archiving them. Once I did that, I felt more in control over what I was doing. The critical voice gave me a raspberry and retreated.

The obvious negative words are easy to spot once you’re aware of them. But critical voice can get pretty sneaky and slide in when you’re not paying attention.

Plot was a way mine got into my stories. First, let’s define plot since a lot of writers use it interchangeably with story. They’re not the same thing. Plot consists of the events that happen in the story. So if you’re writing a mystery, the murder of a crucial witness is plot.

Some years ago, as I was wrestling with critical voice on my first novel and feeling like I would never solve the writing problems, I agreed to co-write a thriller with another writer. It started out fun, then turned messy when our critical voices collided. We broke up, and after was a difficult time for me.

My creative voice felt like it had been punched and pummeled by the whole thing. Critical voice’s role was to get creative voice going again in another book, Rogue God. It was both a good thing and a bad thing because it made the book special.

Critical voice took over the writing of the story. Rogue God was running too short for traditional publishing, so critical voice kept adding more and more plot. It made the still too short novel incredibly convoluted, twisting it into knots and those knots into more knots.

It’s also the book that got me in deep with the writing message boards and most impacted by bad advice. The more I looked for help to solve the problems critical voice was causing, the more bad advice I got that helped feed critical voice!

I finally redrafted the book to jettison all the baggage, though I later retired it. Critical voice was obvious right away. The deciding factor was that when I reread it to check for typos, I expected it would be better than I remembered. That’s been the case with every story. It wasn’t with this one. But I learned a lot writing it, so I’m not complaining.

It got me to Crying Planet, which was a huge win because I’d dumped all the trauma that led into Rogue God.

Now I’m writing the fifth book in my GALCOM series. I’m focusing on practicing tags, both for the characters and the spaceship setting. It’s been a lot of fun doing them, and it’s forced me to let the setting develop.

Critical voice started freaking out because several chapters had gone by and “There’s no plot! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” It tried to wrestle control of the story and steer by plot several times. I’ve had to drop those words and step back a scene to get control back.

Rogue God took nearly five years to write because it was a constant battleground with critical voice. My recent books have been measured in months.

But I also find I have to be careful of what writers I associate with. Many of them are mired in critical voice and probably don’t know it.

You might see this more obviously with the day job. Everyone’s overwhelmed, and there’s always going to be someone who tries to pass the blame. Seems like a common pastime to say, “It’s not my fault. He did it.”

Pure critical voice.

We’ve all had that person who doesn’t follow through with a task and then tries to assign blame.

For me, other people’s critical voices ignited mine. It’s one of the aspects of social media that’s toxic for writers.

Because of the bad advice I was getting online, I thought I couldn’t produce a book long enough for traditional publishing. So I agreed to co-write a book, believing it would solve that problem.

To be fair, it was the best I had available to me. Initially, co-writing a book was a lot of fun. There was a social aspect to it you don’t get with writing normally.

What I didn’t know then—many years later, another writer identified the problem—was that the co-writer feared success.

 He could happily fantasize about marketing the book to best-seller status.

If we submitted the book to agents and it was rejected, that destroyed the fantasy.

Me? I was like, “Let’s get this done and submitted to agents so we can work on our next one!”

I blundered into his fear, and his critical voice struck back.

It started by trying to sabotage the story. He complained that something was wrong with the first chapter. When I asked for specifics, he said, “I don’t know! But something is wrong and we have to fix it!”

 I couldn’t see how we could fix a problem in the first chapter if we didn’t know what the problem was (Problem Solving 101 from the day job).

He then fussed about sending queries, preferring to network with the agents in person to get a foot in the door. This didn’t make sense to me. We’re in a fiction dead zone. We’d be more more likely to run into aliens at a cocktail party than a literary agent.

It became a battle to get the book finished. As we neared the end and I readied a query letter, his critical voice turned nasty, regularly picking fights with me.

I was at a complete loss for how it had gone from fun to a battle. I literally couldn’t see either critical voice, though I can now. My own got involved to protect me and gave as good as it got. It had a job!

Then I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done with my writing. I walked away from a finished book to save my creative voice. I was terrified that I might never be able to write again.

Unfortunately, my critical voice didn’t want to give up the ground it had already taken. It turned back on me again when I tried to write the next book. I was so mired in it, I couldn’t see it for a long time.

But it hides everywhere, including even in critiques.

Critiques are another place that gets the critical voices of others involved. It’s one of the reasons why they’re often really bad options. A lot of writers like them because it takes them back to when a teacher told you if you were getting the answer right.

Some people also enjoy the feeling of superiority when they inform another writer of problems in their story. I was on a Facebook group where one writer zoomed in and sternly lectured writers who had typos in their posts.

The moderator jumped in and said not to do that. The writer’s response? “How else are they supposed to learn not to make typos if I don’t point it out?” The moderator banned the writer.

Critique groups are often all beginning writers. If you’re lucky, some of them have finished a book. But their critical voices have read all these various writing “rules,” so they lecture and admonish. Some even see their role as being harsh to prepare you for the realities of publishing. This means they can let their true nature come out under the pretense of “helping” you.

Yeah, we all know what that looks like.

Worse, the rules can vary, depending on the group, or even the writer. A writer friend reported she’d been in the “critique group from hell.” The person in charge sneered openly at genre writing. My friend was writing a fantasy, so she got his critical voice with the speakers cranked up.

The problem with these is that if you’re already absorbing the bad advice that’s everywhere, it all sounds reasonable. You doubt what you’ve written.

In the early days of co-writing, the co-writer asked a romance writer to beta-read our thriller. “She’s published!” he said.

I was doubtful because romance and thriller are opposites. I think he envisioned she would recommend us to her agent and the story would be a best seller. Heck, everyone imagines this for their first book.

Reluctantly, I agreed. What harm could it do?

Well.

We got two pages of comments back, single-spaced. They were scathing.

I read them once, put them down, and came back to them a couple of days later so I wasn’t reacting emotionally. It was obvious she hadn’t liked the book and couldn’t figure out why. So she spent two pages trying to justify it by nitpicking.

Sometime later, we found out why. She was vehemently anti-gun and should have passed on the story entirely. She knew it was set during the Civil War. It was pretty unrealistic to assume there wouldn’t be guns in a book set during a war.

We both dismissed the comments for what they were.

But when the co-writer’s critical voice pushed back at me toward the end, he returned to this old critique and declared it was a call for action to fix the story.

When you mingle with other critical voices, it makes you second-guess everything. Your critical voice says, “They commented on it. It must mean there’s a problem.”

Suddenly you’re changing the story based on what everyone else is saying and somewhere along the line, you lose agency of your own story.

With our limited time because of the day job, spinning our wheels with critical voice shouldn’t be an option.

But how do you identy critical voice?

Critical Voice Report – Week 1

For my first week, it was a success at getting the word count (and coconut ice cream!). This is the breakdown:

Creative Voice

Space Dutchman (novella)

Saturday – 808Sunday – 838Monday – 855Tuesday – 801Wednesday – 830

Time Management for Fiction Writers (non-fiction)

Sunday – 895Wednesday – 1063

For the novella, the number I set myself was high enough that I could see the total word count rising significantly. So big wins there.

Critical Voice

It didn’t like the requirement for 800 words. As you can see from the numbers, I didn’t go much above the minimum, so that’ll be something in the future to work on. I also watched the word count, so that’s another habit I want to break.

I also did the Time Management writing first, and critical voice kept saying, “But you already have 800 words. You don’t need to do the novella.”

This is why one of my rules was that I had to do both.

It took me about 90 minutes to do the 800 words. I’m not sure if that’s critical voice or because I’m doing a lot of setting. It’s much easier to get it into the story than in the past, but I still sometimes feel like I have to rewire my brain.

Admin

My admin plan started as doing a refresh of Golden Lies. But I changed course to building a publisher website. I want to take advantage of reviews for both of the above books. I can’t do that without a publisher site. It’s a pretty big project so I’ll be whittling at it. The company name: Bad Gnome Press.

12 Creativity and Messiness

Thanks for joining me this week for Part 12 of this series. I’ve been continually surprised at how much there actually is. Being a pantser, I’m following where my creative voice wants to go. Feel free to suggest topics. Might be something I haven’t thought of and need to! Next up will be critical voice.

It’s fairly well-known that creatives are on the messy side. So much so that organization gurus lecture us about not being disorganized and try to force us into a very structured system.

It makes non-creative people nervous and can bring out the worst in them. I experienced a lot of this in the Army, to the point where I thought my organization was broken.

I lived in barracks, and the Army controlled how that looked. They didn’t differentiate between the young male soldier who leaves his dirty underwear on the floor (sad but true) and a magazine sitting on a table, waiting to be read.

The latter example is straight out of a policy on what each room was supposed to look like. Magazines and books had to be put away at all times. I never understood that. How were you supposed to read?!

Everything always had to be arranged for inspection at any moment. That always left me feeling like I couldn’t do anything in the place I lived.

When I left the military, I took a personality class on the Meyers-Briggs Indicator. You take a test and are identified as a certain personality type. I’m an INTP, which is not one of the more common ones but fits for creatives.

The most amazing thing? The instructor said that you don’t have to be neat to be organized.

I’ve since had people admire my organization. A lot of it developed because I have to beat back the chaos of overwhelm!

So I’m messy. When I work, I might have papers strewn all over my desk. When I write, it’ll be on the floor.

However.

Messiness can turn into clutter and disorganization, and even to chaos.

During my days of pure overwhelm, it turned into chaos. Most notably, the chaos was at home. I didn’t know it then, but it was a sign of the stress I was under. Piles formed because I didn’t have the brainpower to decide what to do with the stuff.

Sometimes I’d realize I needed to do something with all this stuff, so I’d buy plastic storage boxes. The boxes replaced the piles. I couldn’t find anything.

My then co-writer suggested geological filing after I couldn’t locate my car title (in the safe deposit box). The way he described it—or the way I interpreted it—was dropping receipts in date order in the box.

It, too, became a clutter-fest of paper. The biggest problem I had was that paper was everywhere. I had boxes in every corner it seemed and critical voice kept nagging me to do something.

I finally purchased a filing system from the Container Store (which appears to be discontinued now). It came with printed labels for all different categories, like Auto Maintenance and Medical. It helped somewhat.

I could find everything important. But it was still challenging for me to get anything into the folders. It seemed like the work chaos was short-circuiting that part of my brain. The last thing I wanted to do when I came home was do anything that felt remotely like work, and filing was something I did at work as well.

It became apparent that I needed to do a long-term cleanup. Every time I came home from work chaos, I arrived into home chaos. Not good for the writing.

So I started by looking for solutions for the creatives. I tried Organizing for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals by Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Dolores Cotter Lamping and several other books that have since disappeared. I also read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. It reminded me a little too much of the Army pressing their organization on me.

Nothing seemed to help.

Paper was clearly a problem, so I decided to stop the paper flow as much as I could.

I went online to every company I got bills from and attempted to sign up for online bills. The results varied with this. Not every company had moved to online billing. One had an option to either have paper or have paper and online billing (since updated). My insurance company was so slow to get to this that they only did it in the last two years.

Major impact on paper inflow!

Without new paper flooding in, the chaos receded enough that I felt like I could tackle the boxes.

I picked one that annoyed me and started a fast pass through it. My goal? Find anything I could immediately trash. That included envelopes, the advertising junk credit cards send (a lot of it), and yellow sheets I’d written random, long-forgotten notes on.

Then I circled back and repeated, still finding more I could trash. After that, I did a fast, very general sort into categories that I could file at one time. The categories stayed very broad, so I wouldn’t bog down on asking where it was supposed to go.

Some papers required more decision-making that I wasn’t for. I just dumped them into the next box I sorted and eventually dealt with them.

Then I set the goal of getting rid of all the plastic storage boxes. They’d become clutter themselves.

The empties went first. Then I worked through the ones that had stuff in them, throwing out a lot I’d forgotten about. And I counted the boxes to see how many I’d had.

It was forty-four.

It was astounding I had accumulated so many (though not all of them were big boxes). It was also amazing how freeing it was when I let go of the clutter. I hadn’t realized how much it had been crowding in on my creative voice.

As a reward for getting the clutter under control, I have a maid come in. I can hand off tasks I don’t like, and it keeps a boundary on messiness turning into clutter. When I know the maid’s coming, I tackle the clutter before it gets out of hand.

I’m still messy when I create. For both my writing side hustle and my day job, I use portable whiteboards (11X14) to keep the paper inflow down. Instead of stickies or notepads, I just erase what’s on the whiteboard.

Because I have better control of this, I can also see when stress is causing the messiness to turn into clutter. I had a bad two weeks at the day job owing to a situation that had suddenly changed on me. My creative side was terrified that I would slide back into the way things were during the days of chaos. Critical voice said, “Nope, I’ve got you covered.”

It noticed that I started to accumulate clutter. In this case, I’d ordered a few things online and had let the packing materials sit out for too long. It was an amazing sense of agency reminding myself that it needed to be disposed of.

Now, especially since I’m teleworking, I also clean up around my desk at the end of the day, and especially right before the weekend or if I’m headed out on vacation.

One of the worst things about gurus is they tend to be cheerleaders and say, “Once you follow my system, you can go on autopilot.” If I go on autopilot, the worst traits of critical voice and creative voice come out.

The reality is that managing the natural messiness that comes with creativity will always be an ongoing process, with skirmishes along the way.

An Experiment of Sorts

This experiment comes out of the writing of the time management book. I’ve both been surprised at what I already know and what I’m learning.

One of those revelations came while taking a work-based course from Franklin Covey on the 7 Habits. Turns out Habit 2 is on….wait for it…critical voice.

It doesn’t actually say inner critic, so subtle went right over my head. I’ll have to take a second look at the book now!

Critical voice has reared its ugliness with word count. It started on my first, trunked novel when the book ran too short for traditional publishing. I was horrified when I learned that a novel was 90K, not the 50K like I thought.

Indie allows me to do whatever word count I want, so that barrier was removed. I’ve also had to tell myself that it’s okay to write novellas. But I’ve not been able to track a daily word count because it ignites the critical voice.

I want to break critical voice’s stronghold on that. Moreover, I think I need to.

In turn, that made me look at the Focus Planner. I started with Franklin-Covey but felt like it was too business-focused. After attending a webinar, I thought I could risk a 90 day experiment to see what happens.

The planner is only for 90 days and is fairly expensive. However, there are many, many videos available on how to use each section. The original webinar convinced me because the two instructors said, “Start only with the daily pages” and then work your way into the others.

Forewarning: If this planner interests you, the company will send you many, many, many emails. I had to Sane Blackhole them.

So I’m starting with some basic rules (that may change):

800 words on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Thursday is shifting over to learning and Friday will still remain for Admin.

800 is a good number because it’s pushing me a little out of my comfort zone and not setting such a high standard that I can’t meet it like the more traditional 1,600 words a day does.

The 800 words only applies to books or short stories.

I had to include this rule because otherwise, I’d count tweets and random blog posts. But that means I’m not getting books done.

The 800 words must apply to fiction.

I’m working on two projects concurrently, Time Management for Fiction Writers and GALCOM 5. I was appalled to see that I started GALCOM 5 a month before TMFW and I have a lot more words on the latter. Non-fiction clearly doesn’t have the same critical voice problems as fiction does.

So if I write on TMFW, I have to get 800 words, but I still have to write on GALCOM 5 and get 800 words.

There’s going to be a reward.

The reward (which is part of the goal in the Focus Planner) is coconut ice cream at my favorite restaurant. If I make the weekly goal, I’ll do that for lunchtime so I can get the smaller scoop. Indulge, but not overindulge.

Starting word counts:

GALCOM 5: 11,512Time Management for Fiction Writers: 22,981

11 Dealing with Deadlines

Deadlines are something we get on both sides of our life. It might be a document due to another department for the day job or an anthology call for a story (of course, that’s one we want to do!).

Since I was struggling to keep up in the days of chaos, I often knocked deadlines out as soon as I got them. I was afraid that if I waited until I was closer to the due date, I’d forget!

Which meant I didn’t trust my system.

Always goes back to how I was handling the inflow of work.

But is it a good practice?

First will not win you any prizes, even if everyone says you’re being proactive.

Dean Wesley Smith talks about this for writing. He’d receive some edits from an editor. Looked routine, took about thirty minutes. He was about to send it off when his wife reminded him that the editor would think he hadn’t done anything because it was too fast. So he waited until when it was due and sent it in.

With work, most people will submit it close to the deadline or ask for an extension. If you send it in when everyone else, it’ll be viewed under the prism of all the submissions. The requester is likely to be happy they have it because they’ll be tangling with someone else who’s late.

If it’s early? It gives the requester more opportunity to nitpick it because now they’re assuming since you rushed it out, it must be sloppy. The common fiction writing myth applies here: If you wrote it fast, it must be crap.

What if they change the requirements mid-stream? What company doesn’t do that? Waiting to turn it in when it’s due gives you the opportunity to make sure it’s correct for the submission.

None of this says you can’t complete the work earlier, though. Put it on your calendar so you’re taking advantage of your agency.

The first step is to read all the requirements and make sure you understand them. Work deadlines have an amazing ability for being poorly written. If anything is unclear or you have questions, ask them now. Save any responses. Sometimes people reverse themselves and say they never said that, so you might need proof.

Before you start on it, reread the portions that apply to what you’re working on. I’ve found—actually on the writing side—that sometimes I remember it wrong. This is a good practice from Sheila Chandra’s book Organizing Your Creative Career: How to Channel Your Creativity into Career that can be applied anywhere.

After you finish, recheck it to make sure it fits all the requirements. You don’t want the requester sending it back to you for correction. If you’re submitting a lot of documents, it might be useful to number them to make sure you don’t miss any.

Set up an email—assuming Microsoft Outlook—with delayed delivery. Set that for the day it’s due, adjust the time of delivery, and click send. It’ll sit in your outbox until that day. Your email will need to be open for it to send (don’t schedule the email while you’re out of the office).

If you have to amend the response in the email (i.e., the requirements change), make sure you click the send button again.

On the fiction side, we might have several types of deadlines. The first is an anthology call deadline. An editor posts a call with the guidelines of what he wants for the call, which includes a theme and word count.

The first thing here is to set up a template in Microsoft Word for the Shunn manuscript format. This format is often listed in guidelines for submissions. Read through it in its entirety, then create your template to match accordingly. It’s much easier to do that than spend time formatting your manuscript each time. Once you have a template, you can save it to your story folder, then do a paste special of your story into it, and update the title, word count, and headings.

The second step is to create a basic cover letter template. If you submit a lot of short stories, it gets tedious redoing the cover letter each time. Plus, if you update your credits, it’s one change and done.

Next, scan through the guidelines, looking for if the rights revert. If they don’t mention it, skip the submission. Also, check for how much they pay. If it’s not five cents or more, skip the submission.

Non-paying, token, and semi-pro are a waste of your time and sends a message to your creative voice that it’s not good enough to be professionally published.

Assuming that everything is good, read the guidelines more thoroughly, looking at word count requirement, genre, and theme.

When you’re ready to submit, review the guidelines again. I recently wrote a witch cozy short story. I was about to submit it and discovered, hidden in the middle of a paragraph, that a crime was required. The rest of the guidelines led me to think of something different. Fortunately, because I caught that, I was able to make a change at the beginning of the story to highlight there was a crime (the creative voice was smart and picked up on it).

Make sure that you’re following all the requirements the editor has for submitting. If they want a specific email subject line, paste it in from the guidelines. If they want specific information in the cover letter, add it.

According to Kevin J. Anderson in Slushpile Memories: How NOT to Get Rejected, the biggest slushpile headache is not following the guidelines. If you submit near the end of the call when the editor is being flooded with submissions, they may reject you solely because you didn’t follow the guidelines.

It was a wake-up call for me after he commented that not one person had read the manuscript format guidelines for an anthology I’d submitted to. Oops! I’d read “manuscript format” and auto-piloted with what I thought it was.

Unlike the work version of this, try not to submit it near the end of the deadline. One of my stories was rejected by a magazine and perfectly fit an anthology call. I submitted it in the last three days. Would have been my first pro sale. Rejected because they already had another similar story.

Another type of deadline you might see for writing is edits for an editor or publisher. Do not be late for these!

Kevin J. Anderson talks about this in Million Dollar Professionalism for the Writer and how it can even impact the publishing schedule. Being late is what lasts ican the editor’s memory.

I used to co-write with another writer. We were submitting a manuscript to agents and had a full into an agent. It was suddenly real! I expressed concern to the co-writer about our writing speed. I knew if we landed a contract with a publisher, we’d have a deadline for our next book.

He poo-poohed it, did that hand-wavy thing. “Everything’s negotiable.”

I nearly had a meltdown. In his day job as an entrepreneur, that was true. He could reschedule things as needed because everyone was always shuffling schedules. But if it was a publishing house, being late meant the publisher might have to push back the book’s release date. That impacts everything from their catalog to the bookstores (we did not stay co-writing for long after that).

I also think that some of this view about “flexible” deadlines comes from our day jobs. Most of our departments have built in extra time, so everyone responding knows they can ask for an extension and probably get it.

Always be on time for your responses to editors!

10 The Perils of Writing Message Boards

Being a pantser, I sometimes write out of order. This topic appealed to me more this week. I actually popped into one of the old boards to poke around (like five minutes). Yeah. Glad I got off them.

Any writer these days has to be on some form of social media, whether it’s a blog, Twitter, or any of the other usual suspects. Writers flock to where there are other writers and talk about writing.

For those of us with day jobs and writing on the side, this can take up what little time we have for writing. The worst part is that it’s about writing, so it looks productive and not the time suck it is.

Then there are the unintended consequences…

When I first got online, I discovered the wonder of writing message boards. In the gold rush days of the internet, they were fun places to be. A bunch of writers getting together and talking about writing. How cool was that?

People even said that you have to give back to the writing community. It felt good giving advice.

So I jumped in on two big writing boards for more engagement (one is still active; the other folded a few years ago). I wanted to learn more about craft, and this seemed like a wonderful way to do it. Some of the writers there said they learned things from even the most inexperienced of writers.

That was a big red waving flag that my critical voice happily ignored.

Little did I realize what I would learn…

I was having several writing problems that I couldn’t find solutions for. One was getting stuck at the one-third point (actually pretty common, though not discussed anywhere). Another was that story ran too short for traditional publishing. So I was looking for answers.

The first issue that surfaced was a conflict because I’m a pantser.

It’s fairly common on message boards for writers to tell you to outline. Usually with great authority that this is the “way to write.”  Pantsers are pressured to conform.

It makes pantsers second guess their process. My critical voice, ever vigilant for opportunities, wondered if my writing process was causing the problems.

The anti-pantser attitudes were pervasive. When I asked for help, the advice I got was often, “Outline it. That’ll fix it.” If I said the outline didn’t work, they told me I wasn’t doing the outline correctly. In hindsight, the other writers showed a huge lack of respect for me because I wouldn’t follow their rules.

So I kept bouncing from bandage fix to bandage fix. I gave in and tried outlining. Nothing worked.

Instead, the story got so twisted up in a mess that I would have described it as going from a four-car pile-up to a plane crash that takes out an entire city. Or that I threw paint at the wall to see what sticks or that my writing process was screwy.

Pure critical voice all the way, fostered by beginning writers mired in the mud of critical voice.

Meanwhile, I regularly soaked up all the advice on message boards. I spent hours on it, reading and commenting. I kept looking for solutions to my problems.

A second issue surfaced: Bad advice.

I’d grown up reading the books for the serious writer like Dwayne Swayne and Jack Bickham, though they were well beyond my experience. Those had largely disappeared by the late 1980s in favor of the ones we see today. These focus on holding the hand of a newbie writer through the baby steps of writing their first novel (read: not getting the novel published).

One writer on the message board actively discouraged writers trying to better themselves. If they tried to learn from a best-selling writer, he’d say, “That writer can get away with that. You can’t, so don’t even try it.” He worked very hard at keeping other writers at his level so we could all share in the solidarity of not getting published.

It wasn’t until I took Dean Wesley Smith’s Productivity For Writers course I realized what was happening. One assignment required me to list all the writing advice I’d picked up along the way, aiming at the myths we get from teachers.

Message boards were poisoning my writing!

All the message board advice came from beginners, many of whom probably hadn’t finished their first novel. They’d read another beginner giving advice and regurgitated it, often acting like they were an expert.

The worst part about this advice was that it sounds credible and even reasonable. And the more you hear it, the more it seems to make sense. I even passed some of it along myself.

Even when I knew a piece of advice was bunk, seeing it reinforced repeatedly on the message boards subtly invited the critical voice in. It said to my creative voice, “See? You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Considering how much time I spent on the message boards, it was no wonder I had problems writing. Some of the worst of the advice included:

Always outline your story. You must know how it ends. No one respected me as a pantser. Their automatic default was that I was doing it wrong.Have an inciting incident. This always got a “huh?” from me. My critical voice tried to add it manually to the story. Now I think it’s something that comes out of MFAs, where the students are critically analyzing published works.Cut your darlings. Cut anything that doesn’t move the plot forward. This one never set right for me, though now I know why. You can cut out pieces of fun characterization in favor of plot and suck the heart out of your story. Still, I found myself self-editing the words before I got them on paper.Description is boring. Do it in drips and drabs. This was the worst for me, especially seeing it over and over. I’m not detail-oriented, and it took me years to figure out how to get more description and setting into the story.

In 2014, I cut myself off from message boards and unsubscribed to popular blogs that catered to beginners. I couldn’t risk the constant exposure to bad advice. I wanted to be published more.

But now, I also suddenly had more time to write. Who knew?

Follow message boards at your own risk. But with the limited time after a day job, why bother? It’s a question I wished I’d asked myself.