Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 3

Feisty Fantasy Females Book Giveaway

To welcome spring in, I’m part of the amazing Feisty Fantasy Females book giveaway. Dice Ford, Superhero, certainly qualifies as a feisty female (much to Quanta’s annoyance). You can find all the books here: https://books.bookfunnel.com/feistyfantasyfemales/sbx7j1gkmm

Input Jumping in with Writing Links

Spring is finally poking its head out here in Washington, DC. Still a bit on the cold side, but the days are brighter. According to my sinuses, the oaks and maples have started to bloom. I’m hoping the construction crews clear the fencing so that we can have nice green lawns to the curb again (especially since the fencing is just sitting and they’re not doing anything in the immediate area).

How to write a Epistolary Novel. I had to paste in Epistolary because it’s not a word I can picture to spell out. I have a short story call that requires this as an element, and I’ve never done anything like it before. It’s having letters or journal entries–a written form–in a story. The whole story could be made up of it, like The Color Purple. A challenge with that kind of story is that it’s hard to get depth in, and depth is needed. Me being me, I was thinking of what everyone is likely to use: text messages, email, and letters. So I was busy coming up with alternatives, including writing on Post-Its, spells in spell books, notes in a day planner, flyers, or signs on telephone posts. I like the article saying to do more than one type in a book.

On Listening to (Writing) Advice: This is from the Better-Faster Academy. We’re bombarded with writing advice. Partially, it’s because someone is marketing to us, but it’s also because we want someone to tell us how to do it. That’s the certainty discussed in the post. When I was on message boards, other writers informed me that I wasn’t doing writing correctly because I didn’t outline. We face many of these pressures to go outside of what works for us because everyone else tells us it shouldn’t work. I heard recently about a high intellection writer who takes a year to think about the novel–just think–then writes the entire book in like a week. Try explaining that to other writers and they’ll think something is wrong with you. So much pressure to not work the way we should. Which goes to the next one.

The music industry’s over-reliance on TikTok shows how lazy it has become. You could put book and author in here and have about the same result. But Passive Guy’s second to last paragraph says it all.

Rethinking Self-Help: Cal Newport answers a question about writing a novel with a day job. It features some things no one else talks about. He brings up best selling writers and how they wrote while having a day job–and you’d recognize the names. So it pays to ask what’s going on.

The Definition of Writing Full-Time?

The above question has taken quite a bit of time for me to process. My futuristic always pictured that I would write full-time, and it got me through some very bad times. Then suddenly I discovered that my high adaptability would make that impossible. So I asked about it at a mini-coaching call. Carolyn Ivy Stein wanted me to post about it, so here it is.

The coach: So what is your definition of a full-time writer?

Me: Uh–

And I realized that I didn’t have any definition. It’s been formed by the wave of writers on the internet, all talking about writing full-time. Most of them appear to think it means quitting the day job. I’m also reasonably certain a lot of them don’t understand the implications of that. You know, like Sidney Harris’ famous New Yorker comic showing a complicated formula with a step labeled “Then a miracle occurs.”

I worked with a writer like that. He envisioned himself happily marketing the book to bestseller status (high in woo; he loved marketing).  Writing the book? He kind of skipped over that part.

Erp…

Historically, writing does not pay well. For the most part, you’re never going to get rich off it. Writer Beware has an old post that brings this up in the third paragraph.

This was something I knew early on (the comment about Ernest Rydberg is mine, which is actually how I found the post). I came into the new world of publishing believing that you really had to love writing first, above everything else. Because writing has an apprenticeship that can take years.

I don’t like the word apprenticeship because it implies there’s someone guiding you like a fantasy blacksmith teaching his apprentice how to destroy magic in a cursed sword. I think of apprenticeship as the master needing cheap help, teaching them as they worked.

Writing fiction doesn’t have that. There’s nothing a “master” can off-source to cheap labor (a beginner writer) like that. So our learning often starts out as craft books, articles in writing magazines, maybe interviews with the authors. A writing conference can be a gold mine because of the access. I attended a packed room at a Washington Independent Writer’s Conference for an Agent Question and Answer. All those things that showed up on the top ten lists (i.e., Don’t use prologues, don’t use dream sequences, don’t use adverbs) were what the agents advised. We all dutifully wrote down everything they said.

And yet, all of it was extremely basic, easy to do. There’s little in writing that easy to do,. You might find one skill easy, and another really challenging.

Still, writers look for the mentors to help them. And those tend to write about things that are easy to learn (the internet is not friendly for in-depth learning). Then the writers receive a form rejection from an agent or don’t have sales, so they become frustrated because no one will tell them what they are getting wrong.

Guess what else is easy to learn/teach? Productivity. You can easily tell someone to set goals (except me, anyway, being a goalless person), plug in the writing time on a calendar, and somehow saying that you will write 1,000 words in that time will happen. There are books on how to get even more words with tools and pockets of time.

So this is what the writing industry has evolved into. Writers talk about marketing, sales, productivity, word count, and process. They don’t talk about creativity.

With such intense focus on productivity and marketing, it’s hard to take part in the writing world. I’ve been lectured on not following the proper writing process rules, even though it does not matter. The only thing that counts is writing a good story and fi. But the rules are easy for writers to rely on, and they seek them out.

The creativity is why I got into writing in the first place.  I love learning cool things about writing, making the words dance, and just enjoying the process. My characters have cool adventures, and I occasionally blow up a monster or have a dog or cat be a character. And I love breaking outside the boundaries.

But I don’t know what to make of my original envisioning of writing full time. The coach defined it more along the way Victoria Strauss described it in the post I linked to above. His was that you have a day job, you write 10 hours a week, and finish books.

What do you think writing full-time means?

Highlights of Superstars

I just returned from my annual visit to Colorado Springs for Superstars, a writing conference. This time around, it seemed kind of messy. The writer I shared my hotel room with broke her ankle, so everything revolved around where she was in the healing process.

I came into it trying to figure out where I was in writing because I’d discovered my high Adaptability makes it impossible to write full time. Yet, everyone talks as if writing full-time is everyone’s goal is to be a 7 figure author (apparently, Author Nation is shifting a little and will be focusing on different ranges instead of only this). So I got some things to think about.

Highlights:

I was in one panel, on using subject matter expertise to teach classes at community centers and schools. Surprise, surprise! Two other women came up with military topics. An incredible coincidence that there would be three women veterans at Superstars. One was Lila Holley of Camouflaged Sisters.

David Weber gave a presentation on Characters Matter, which was an abbreviated version of a class he is releasing in a few weeks. He said he would be announcing it on his Facebook page, so you might have to follow him.

His definition of plot is “what the character has to do.” He also recommend naming all the characters because you never know when they may come back into the story. Also, you might think about giving them a little bit of history.

One of the most striking things though was that he was an advocate of there not being only one way to write. He said that you have to use your tools because that’ll help you become a better writer.

Editing Under Deadline from Jonathan Maberry. This panel originated from his second book. The publisher wanted a certain length, and then the economy changed, and they wanted him to cut 30,000 in a month. He set a goal of 1,000 a day so he wouldn’t get overwhelmed, then went over the book skill area by skill area. Anything complicated like structure or big cuts was last. Easy changes like grammar and continuity were first. The idea was that if you focused on one skill area, it was much faster than correcting some continuity, then fixing dialogue, and running into a timeline problem that was complicated and took more time. He also said sometimes the easier fixes fixed the harder ones.

He has an online class coming on March 2 for Thrillers and Chills. It is focused more on horror, but it covers some topics you could apply anywhere.

Short Stories: This is the one that kicked me out of one place where I’d gotten stuck and didn’t know why. I started out writing short stories, and I like reading them. But during the last year, I was frustrated with doing them. They don’t sell much indie-wise, and it’s challenging to submit them. It hit me that I should question some of the premises:

That if a short story takes longer than a week to write, there’s something wrong with the way I’m writing. This thinking comes from Dean Wesley Smith and Harvey Stanbrough. My high intellection does need time to think about the story and process it; sometimes a week isn’t enough. If I push for the week, Adaptability takes over.
 That if the story isn’t indie published, it needs to be out in submission. Meaning, if it gets rejected, it has to be back in play right away. Also Dean Wesley Smith. He’s a full-time writer, and there it is important to be aggressive her–Dean had something like 60 or 70 stories out at a time. For me, as a part-time writer, it’s a lot harder to manage something like that, and frankly is an unrealistic expectation because of time and market limitations.
 That you should always be paid pro rates (6-8 cents a word and up). This is from a lot of writers. But what if the story doesn’t sell at any pro rate market? Then what? In this case, I’m pondering the reason for short stories, which might be to help pay for cover images, editing, etc, for the novel length fiction. If I change that thinking, then maybe semi-pro might give me additional markets.

I’m still thinking over all of this and will have some additional stuff about short stories.

Meanwhile, here’s non-Superstars link to take a look at. Cal Newport did a podcast on minimalist note taking (at 2:55). He takes on the current–and offensive–trend off-loading everything into your notes so you can get it out of your head. And Zettelkasten’s complicated linking system that makes so much work that it’s much easier to simply not take any notes at all. How did we get so complicated? Everyone’s selling a system. Cal’s–freely given–is very simple, doesn’t require distillation (hate the way everyone uses it), and relies on you having some of it in your head because that’s part of the creative process.

The State of Learning

Sometimes I’ve wondered if people are getting stupider.

We have a collision of events…technology that does everything for us. I’m sure there are some people who don’t have a good grasp of grammar because…why bother? The AI will do it for you.

Big universities are in trouble according an article in the Wall Street Journal.  They charge a fortune and the degree doesn’t mean what it used to. Some people don’t even pay attention to the education as long as they get the certificate.

Learning itself feels superficial, almost since online learning showed up. There, the instructor doesn’t have to engage with the students. It’s challenging even in a live online environment to ask questions, or question the instructor on a point. A guru who taught an expensive online class stated on Twitter that he was willing to discuss the topic with his followers…as long as they agreed with him. Learning is processing all the information (I dislike the phrase distill) and then forming your own opinions. You should always disagree with some elements of what an expert says and understand why you disagree. (This is different than a beginner stamping their foot and saying, “I don’t like this and you can’t make me do this.”)

I’ve done the online learning for the day job for a number of years. I’m sure many companies have gone to that because it’s cheaper than spending a couple of grand and TDY money to send the person to a day class (which I’ve also done). The day class was so packed with information I was exhausted. The online learning was an hour. The early ones focused on a narrow subject and had fifteen minute modules. Now? The classes are 30 minutes and the modules 5 minutes. Obviously a sign of short attention spans, but it hardly allows for much depth.

The Learner in me feels very unsatisfied by this. It feels more like I’m checking a box than actual getting any information to think about. Contrast that to reading the book Unsupervised, which is on artificial intelligence. I had to stop reading because I needed the time to process what I was reading.

Writing craft has suffered as well. The beginners are taught the rules, but those are very basic.  You might find an online workshop for two hours on how to write a novel, an extremely broad topic. Or, like the upcoming Romance online conference for ProWriting Aid, it’ll be a lot of classes where the instructor is selling something. While I don’t have any problems with writers making money, those feel like infomercials and some aren’t honest about the purpose.

There are advanced classes out there. However, I can count the number of instructors on one hand and have plenty of fingers left over. This makes what we learn entirely their opinions.

An example: One instructor states that humor is hard to do. It’s a generalization, perhaps true for most writers.

But.

It’s easy for me to do, and fun. Most of my publishing successes have been humorous stories. My Dice Ford series is humorous, and I’ve done some with my GALCOM series. The skill comes from my #4 Adaptability. That strength is also good at another skill: Writing in present tense.

During the Great Challenge I wrote some short stories in present tense because that was the way they felt like they wanted to be written. I’m debating doing a novel like that because it would be a fun challenge. But present tense is generally discouraged because it’s hard to do well, or from personal opinion of the writer. If you have only one or two experts teaching everything, what would you do if you wanted to learn more about writing present tense and they said not to do it?

This is why I want to see diversity of writing opinions. It’s too easy to fall into personal preferences. And I get that some writers will try something and it won’t work, like present tense. I read one book years ago and it threw me out because it was in present tense. The writer hadn’t done it well (at the time,  it was trendy). But I also read Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians and thoroughly enjoyed it…and that series is in present tense. I didn’t notice for a while because she executed it well.

But also, someone may fill in a gap that I didn’t know was missing. When I was in high school, I had to take the required Basic Algebra class. The teacher got up in front of the class, his chalk slashing out formulas on the chalkboard. I saw x and y and was confused by it. He went through everything so fast that I couldn’t process it.

So I asked a family member who was a math guy who talks about solving the hardest math problems. He walked me through the problems, and I checked the answers in the back of the book. Got them all right.

When I got the paper back, there were red slashes through every single problem. I’d gotten them all wrong!

We went back and forth the entire semester, with the math expert helping me, me checking the answers in the back, and the teacher marking them as wrong. The math expert thought the teacher wasn’t teaching it very well (that turned out to be true, but the same problem existed with the expert). We met with the teacher at school, who I felt like now blew it off. To him, I was either lazy, or stupid, or just bothering not to learn the lessons.

At the end of the very long semester, I got in a D in the class, probably because the teacher didn’t want me repeating the class with him.

Time traveling forward some twenty plus years, I’m roaming around the internet and stumble into a site discussing algebra.  Bing! Two things jumped out at me, and I realized I hadn’t known them…but both were important:

The formula to get the answer is the goal.

The format of the formula was important.

Until the class, all my math classes had focused only on the answer, so I had kept thinking the answer was the goal. And the teacher had just scrawled the formula across the board and expected everyone to grasp that he wanted the problems to look exactly like that. Then I asked the math expert, who is a maverick when it comes to anything like that (having done homework he despised in a sonnet).  Though he helped and I did the formulas, it was apparent years later they hadn’t exactly fit what the teacher wanted.

The teacher could have said the formula requirement in class. I don’t remember. But he drove through everything so fast that I had little time to process anything. And he never told me what I was doing wrong. Part of me gets that teachers have too much on their plates to spend too much time with students, but part of me wonders why he couldn’t have said I wasn’t following the exact formula he wanted. Surely, that would have taken less time than grading all my papers wrong.

More likely, he never even thought I was missing those two pieces of information. To him, they were obvious.

Online learning makes this extremely challenging because it’s a lot harder to ask questions when we’re confused.

Another issue that comes into play is that we all learn differently, and at different paces. The time we have available is sometimes limited, especially with Sunday Writers.

But there’s also an ugly piece behind all this: The assumption that all learning should have a goal.

The evil word: goal. At least for me, the goalless person.

But goal sets up an expectation that it has to be for something specific and measurable (the evil metrics). The implication is that you will immediately see benefits from the learning. You could probably do that with a Microsoft Excel class.

Writing craft?

It might take years of practicing to understand something you’ve learned, especially with the more advanced skills. Very little is an actionable task you can do with instant results. None of it measurable.

And people now have short attention spans because of cell phones and technology.  They expect the tools to do things for them and identify if they’ve accomplished their goals.

What does this do to something like writing that requires long term learning for mastery? And how do we overcome it?

Some things to think about.

The Rise of Sunday Writers?

Peggy’s comment last week about writing fiction being the only creative hobby that society drives you to make lots of money has fired up my Intellection to understand this problem. You can be a “Sunday Painter,” enjoy creating paintings off your off time, and maybe make money and maybe not.

With writing today, fiction writers are expected to:

Be a writing machineProduce lots of booksMarket the booksLive off the money the books make

When I was growing up, I started writing when I was eight years old. My great uncle, Ernie Rydberg, was a former pulp writer, though he always had day jobs. I loved the idea of creating all day (without understanding the reality of that).

A well-meaning relative said that fiction writers never made money writing.  He steered me into writing where I could make money…if I could break in. Because I lived in Los Angeles, that was screenwriting. But I would have to learn to write a script a week to be successful (this was the relative’s advice).

So I started writing a script a week. Computers were just becoming available. I wrote scripts on the old WordStar program, then on a Commodore 64. The scripts were sitcoms and movies primarily. So I wrote a complete story, beginning to end, anywhere from 50 to 120 pages every week.

The relative knew someone who knew David Angell, then working on Family Ties. I wrote a Family Ties script and we met. He’d done the meeting as a favor for the friend, but it came through that he didn’t want to be there. I understand now about being put on the spot and knowing it wasn’t going anywhere, But then, it was the tipping point for the burnout that was already heading my way. I didn’t write for two years. The well was completely dry.

I ended up writing fan fiction for a while because I could have fun. No one cared, even about quality, as long as they got a continuing adventure with the characters they liked. The zines were still paper, and most editors produced one a year. Once the internet took hold, the fans demanded production because the technology permitted instant access. One writer struggled to keep up with the sudden demand. She’d been a decent writer before, but with the demand, she got really sloppy. She stopped writing stories she enjoyed and focused on producing stories, riddled with typos.

Writing has always had this problem. But why is it different from painting or knitting, just to name a few?

With a painting, you have to travel to an art store and buy the paints and other supplies. Then you do the physical act of painting. You might have to let the paint in some sections dry before you can work on a different color.

Most creative endeavors have several physical aspects like the actual movement to do the creativity and supplies. This has built-in limitations, including supply availability and your budget.

But writing? When the typewriter was invented, people started using it to write. They also started using typewriters to do office work. We segued into computers, with about the same result. The only requirement was the one tool, and a software program that came with the tool.

Writing has another issue that comes into play. If you’re an artist, your canvas sits on an easel. People can see the artwork in process. If you knit, people can see the pair of socks you’re making. If you play a guitar, people can listen to you play.

Writing? You can’t see the creativity in action or experience it until it’s published.

Lawrence Block brings up the same point in his book Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. Though he also notes that most writers don’t have fun writing to start with. Could this be the source of the problem?

Writing is much maligned, sometimes by the writers themselves or the people around them. Some writers find unfriendly territory with family or friends. There are many stories about writers being discouraged by how they’re treated. Each time someone sees the writer, they might ask, “Is it finished yet?” driving home that publication is a must.

This has resulted in some emotional trauma for many writers. They see publication as validation to all these negative voices. But if you’re shooting for traditional publishing, first you have to find an agent in an increasingly shrinking fiction market. You also have to be careful not to get scammed. Then that agent has to find a publisher and that market is small. If the agent can’t find one, he drops the writer and the process starts over. It can take many years.

This encourages writers to make bad decisions because of emotion. During the early days of the gold rush, writers jumped on with Publish America, not understanding they were signing their rights away for 7 years and that they were the PA’s market, not readers. They would do bizarre things to sell books like leave them in public bathrooms  or even slipping copies in at the bookstore (not sure how this is selling). One writer intentionally signed up with a scam agent, knowing this, saying that it was their last chance get published.

Of course, indie allows writers to self-publish their books. Many start out focusing entirely on “It must sell” the day it’s published. If the sales numbers are disappointing, they drop money on Amazon ads because that’s what everyone does. On unmoderated writing lists and hashtags, these writers spam other writers with “Buy my book” like this is their audience. I’ve been asked to do reviews by authors who never bothered to even see what I wrote.

A writer from a past critique group thought that a book just needed to marketed correctly to sell. Therefore, there wasn’t any reason to work on craft. He never thought it was important (and still submits to agents and paying magazines and gets form rejections while another critique group tells him his writing is great).

I’m finding now that despite the fact that there are tons of indie books out there, I struggle to find authors I want to read more from. Some of this is personal taste, obviously. However, I find many books forgettable. Too many have the same voice, even with varying characters.

Other issues:

Minimal world building in urban fantasyNo mention of weather or time of the yearMinimal five sensesNo metaphors

I’m not nitpicking. These make a story stand out. Without them, the story sounds like every other story.

But these craft skills are hard to learn, and not easy to teach in a culture of impatience. People want a checklist, which the other areas like marketing and word goals work well for that.

Worse, for the breakneck pace of publishing, learning some craft skills can take a lot of time. Sometimes years.

Dean Wesley Smith noted in several of his classes, and probably his blog, that if your books stop selling, it’s not a matter of more marketing, it’s because you stopped learning craft.

We may be seeing a reckoning coming. The online market shifted, and writers who went exclusive are now going wide to find more readers–instead of working on the craft side.

Maybe we need more Sunday writers who take pleasure in exploring the craft.

Sharing a New Writing Resource

When I was cowriting many years ago, cowriter and I jumped on the founding of International Thriller Writers. I’m a charter associate member, so I get correspondence from them.

They have created a new site called Write2Thrill. Still in the early stages, but so far it looks like has some good craft advice. One of the videos hits on setting and description.

Are Heinlein’s Rules Worth Your Time?

This is probably one of the more controversial opinions I’ll have. My Intellection is giving inner critic a job, and inner critic is happily rolling up its sleeves.

When my former cowriter started attacking me out of what was likely fear, my inner critic jumped into the fray to protect me. It was a fierce warrior. So you’re going to see the inner critic punching back on a sacred cow: Heinlein’s Rules.

To restore my fun of writing, I have to debunk the sacred cows. When I did that for the beginner craft advice, it took identifying the bad advice, understanding the origins of the advice, and the reason why it was good and why it was bad. Often, advice has elements of both.

The Provence of Heinlein’s Rules online

Heinlein’s Rules are a pretty big sacred cow. I’m going to do the complete history so you can follow the trails to why and when it surfaced. As Ross Dawson notes in his book Thriving on Overload, it’s important to trace things on the internet back to its origins (if possible). I think it’s also important to understand if the opinions are coming from multiple and diverse sources, or if writers are repeating what another writer said (sadly true in beginner circles).

The rules first showed up online in 1996 with Robert Sawyer (a decent interpretation, and mercifully short). Patricia Wrede picked it up in 2010, as did Charlie Dane Anders presenting the only post I could find taking a deep dive into issues with them.

There’s a smattering of posts discussing it, as well as one on Absolute Write from James A. Ritche, a ghost writer. Between 2011-2012, Dean Wesley Smith appears to have discussed the topic in a sacred cows post (taken down). In 2013, Dean Wesley Smith published the first blog post on the rules. Absolute Write also discusses a post from Dean, though it’s been taken down. I found it refreshing to see someone questioning the “musts” of the rules instead of agreeing with it.

In early 2015, Harvey Stanbrough started writing about Heinlein Rules. There are numerous posts on the topic, though as part of other topics.  At the end of the year, Dean blogged a book on the rules, then published it.  He also created a $50 lecture, which I’ve seen. The late David Farland also has a course on the rules for $199, though the link is broken (I’m assuming his estate is doing something with the site).

I also found a smattering of posts from other writers, varying between providing the list, defining the rules, or how they’re following or not following them. So it appears this is the point where people started to take some notice.

Harvey Stanbrough’s posts that bring it up continue through the years and he comments enough to land a guest post on Killzone. James Scott Bell writes a post on the topic in 2018 because of Harvey’s comments. There continue to be regular blog posts as recent as 2023. In 2022, Dean Wesley Smith created a six week course on the rules, seven years after creating the book.

The visibility of these rules comes from one person.

Robert Heinlein was a master science fiction writer who came up during the pulps. He wrote many science fiction novels, both for adults and children. In 1947, he wrote an article for Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (the link provides a list of all the articles and writers published in the book). The rules were part of his article:

You must write.You must finish what you start.You must refrain from rewriting (except to editorial demand).You must put it on the market.You must keep it on the market until sold.

Dean Wesley Smith defines them as business rules. But, as Peggy noted in her comment Why Word Count Goals Can Be Bad For You, many writers are defining writing as business, not publishing as business.

Onward to my opinions of these rules. I promise no lecturing.

You must write.

Definition: Self-explanatory.

This one likely is first on the list because Mr. Heinlein was asked by wannabe writers the secret of how to write without doing, well, the writing. In fact, it’s rather pointless to state this to modern day indie writers, and the wannabes aren’t going to read it. Or if they do read it, they’ll still root around for the secret.

You must finish what you start.

Definition: Self-explanatory.

But …

There is truth to this rule, but it’s not black and white. I knew a writer who would write three chapters, then ask for a critique. He was auditing if the idea was worth his time, which translated into if people made any comments, then it was no good. So he’d abandon perfectly good starts after a critique and start over again. Other writers would get stuck on a story, go to another one, get stuck, go to another…you get the idea.

They’re also not likely to read this rule and go “Ah ha! I need to finish my stories.”

And here’s the gray area: Clifton Strengths.

My top five are:

IntellectionIdeationInputAdaptabilityFuturistic

Ideation comes into play here. It’s common for me–and Ideation–to have lots of unfinished story starts. I don’t abandon them in the middle because I get stuck. Rather, it’s a few pages. I’ve always written like that, since I was eight. The idea was exciting, but something was missing (often needing a collision of another idea), so ideation wandered off to find a different story to play with. During the Great Challenge where I did a short story a week for an entire year, I mined those story starts.

When I wrote the story Alien Pizza that was my first pro publication and landed a mention in Publisher’s Weekly, it was one of the story starts. I didn’t quite know what to do with it until I saw the call for Monsters, Movies, and Mayhem. The original idea collided with movies, and the story was done.

In 2022, I went temporarily crazy and took Dean Wesley Smith’s six week Heinlein’s course (because I had a lifetime subscription, it was free). Blame input. Sometimes it has done some ill-advised learning because it must learn All The Things.

In the second week, the assignment was to create these metrics:

Count the number of completed storiesCount the number of unfinished stories.Divide them to get the percentage of how successful you were with Rule 2

We were rated on how well we followed the rules, with single digits of unfinished stories the ideal. My percentage was demoralizing (and I know one of the gurus I used to follow would say with sneering condescension that I was clearly stuck in the myths). I never sent in Lesson 2 and called the class done. I didn’t want to see what would show up for Rule 4 and 5 as you will see below…

You must refrain from rewriting (except to editorial demand).

Definition: Don’t use revision to procrastinate.

This rule is much disputed, especially by the beginning writers to justify the amount of revision they’re doing, and the indies to justify not revising at all.

I think you should do what you need to do. But if you’re hitting 20 drafts, that’s not a bragging point. You should question why you’re doing that much revision. There might be some fear lurking in there. My former cowriter was afraid of the story getting rejected by an agent, so he was happy to keep revising the first chapter endlessly on the pretense of making it more marketable. The worst part of this is that it looks productive while you actually never finish.

You must put it on the market and You must keep it on the market until sold.

Definition: Get the story in submission until you sell it (and really, it should be one rule, not two).

When Mr. Heinlein published these rules, the pulp era was in full swing. There were many, many magazines you could send the story to. If it was rejected, you could keep it in play until an editor bought it.

That’s not as true today, making both rules dated. And I know what the writers pounding their fists about Heinlein’s Rules would say, and I’ll say back “Bullshit.”

For short stories, the market has contracted a lot. If you want to be paid pro rates, it’s hard to find markets for some genres like mystery. Speculative fiction is more popular in short stories, and it’s still hard to find a pro paying market. Many of the spec fiction markets have additional author requirements that you may not qualify for, cutting the number down further. Others may have elements that you don’t want to be involved in as well. I’ve seen a lot of political topics and I steer clear of those. Aside from getting too much politics as it is (I live in political ground zero), that makes for a story you will never sell anywhere else if it gets rejected.

It’s hard keeping a story on the market with so few opportunities. The indie gurus would say to publish the short story to get it in front of readers and that it’s more visibility. Okay…well, that’s a lot of work to do and it probably won’t sell (anecdotal experience). Despite having short attention spans, people want longer fiction.

Also, more than once, I’ve had a story I indie published and then an anthology call popped up where it was a perfect fit…and I couldn’t submit it because I’d already published it. So I have very mixed feelings about these rules.

Besides, it’s a lot of work to fire off submissions to every magazine available. Many take a year to respond, if at all.

But there are people who never gets story out as another form of procrastination.  I knew a writer who was pretty decent, but she’d been beaten up a lot by other people’s negativity because she was disabled, so she put the stories in her drawer.

Overall, today’s gurus make these rules out in black and white, like a checklist that you’re supposed to paste above your writing computer to make sure you’re following them. Really?!

One guru endlessly lectures about these rules, patiently explaining them as if you were two years old and misbehaving. Unfortunately, a lot of other writers repeat the message without every thinking for themselves (seems to be a trend across all sides of writing). I think exposure to this has helped erode my fun of writing.

The indie writing gurus boast, “I follow all Heinlein’s Rules to the letter,” with implication, “If you don’t, you’ll never be successful like me.” We have no way of knowing if they actually are doing as they say, only that they are saying it. This gives them an authoritative tone (that thing experts need), and may give them an ego boost to lecture other writers. I’ve seen writers pontificate authoritatively about beginner craft advice on message boards. Why not with something like these rules?

My advice on Heinlein’s Rules?

Read the rules as if you stumbled across them in a resource from 1947. Which means in the original list form I pasted in above.  Not another writer’s interpretation.Think about them briefly, as you would any other piece of writing advice.Form your own opinions.Then move on.

And for goodness sake, go read Heinlein. The man was a classic science fiction writer. He should be remembered more his fiction than for five rules he slapped in an article. Just saying.

Why word count goals can be bad for you

After writing my post “What happens if you can’t do goals?” the comments hit a nerve. I realized that writing had lost some of its fun for me. This was a very subtle change, so much so I hadn’t noticed it until Peggy brought it up.

I think it’ll be a theme for 2024, because I want to find that fun again. That starts with exploring why it faded. One of the reasons was word count goals.

Word count goals can work  for some types of people (High Achiever or Focus on the Clifton Strengths, for example). That doesn’t automatically mean they work for every person.

So…

Everything about writing falls into two camps:

Writer experts explaining the rulesWriter experts explaining word count goals, process, and marketing

The first is for the beginners, and it’s a huge industry. The writer expert just has to hit the right emotional notes and beginners will flock to their site and spend money. These experts will offer one or two-hour seminars on a very broad topic, priced for beginners (who are notoriously cheap). One Writer’s Digest 100 sells outline software, and another sells a school. Many offer developmental editing services. Everyone does affiliated links.

The second category shows up in indie publishing primarily. The experts here differ from the ones for beginners. They will be actively writing and have produced a lot of books. Some are New York Times best-selling writers.

These writers flock to a small group of writing experts. The writers give advice on productivity, usually on how to write more words. This can include:

Establish a daily word count, or a weekly quota. Harvey Stanbrough calls it “The Invaluable Daily Word Count Goal.”
Create a sprint to build momentum (the logic being that you won’t want to break the sprint). Dean Wesley Smith has an ongoing sprint of writing every day for his blog, even writing through a shattered shoulder, surgery to replace it, and recovery.
Using pockets of “wasted” time to get more words (like when you’re standing in line at the grocery store). Recommended by Michael La Ronn
Using dictation because we speak faster than we type
Outline your story/Don’t outline your story, depending on the writer. There’s a book on how to write 10K in a day, for example (by the way, that number is a total fantasy if you work full time. You need 10-12 hours at least to write that much in a day).
Track your words in a spreadsheet or on a calendar
Post your word count on your blog regularly. This was popularized by Dean Wesley Smith as part of his sprint, and Harvey Stanbrough also did it for a while.

There’s even an app that’ll plan all this out for you and give you pretty charts to show your progress. What on earth would you do with something like this? It’s not like you’re briefing leadership. But that’s also my opinion, and I know there are some who would find this motivating.

Data like this is very appealing. Businesses love data and metrics. PowerPoint presentations are filled with bar charts, pie charts, and line charts.

Businesses also don’t like creatives, or thinkers. What we do can’t be measured, as Peggy noted in the comments from the posts on goals. Our creative process does many other things besides apply black marks to a computer screen. Other tasks that are writing-related and important to the process include research, outlining, revision, cycling, proofreading, and copyediting. But not one of those can be measured, other than with time.

So the metric we end up with is word count and anything that doesn’t fit that metric is ignored. We’re told that the ideal number is 1,000 words an hour. When National Novel Writing pops up in November, that number is 1,667 a day to get 50K in a month. Dean Wesley Smith is running a year long challenge where you have to write 2,024 words a day, every day for an entire year.

I’ve also had experiences elsewhere where the metrics disconnected me from what should have been something normal and a non-issue:

Google Fit and 10,000 steps: I tried this originally because of Noom (which had its own issues). Initially, it was fun getting to 10K steps because I didn’t think I could do it and I did. One day though, I was scrambling in the evening to grab my last 3K to make the 10K…. and I suddenly asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” It wasn’t fun; I was merely checking the box Google Fit told me to do. I turned off the app and said good riddance. People have been so obsessed with making step count that they will march in place in a room after having surgery. Can you imagine freaking out over your word count goal and trying to make it on your cell phone because the power went out? Yikes.

Sleep Apps: This started for me because I disliked having an alarm clock blare me awake. At the time, sunrise clocks were quite expensive, so Sleep Cycle was an ideal solution. It has gentle wake-up music that’s not disruptive. It also tracks my sleep, and it’s really inaccurate. It’ll say I slept 6 hours, but when I look at the data, it’s clearly 7 hours. But seeing the data made me think I was sleeping poorly. I couldn’t understand why nothing improved my sleep, so I purchased an Oura ring because it was supposed to be the best app. That lasted about four months. It did show me I needed to buy a new mattress (#8 Deliberative then stepped in. I wanted to save up for it, and Deliberative immediately spent the money). But Oura wasn’t accurate either. Worse, it would flag “problems.” I’d get a flag that my temperature had gone down late during the night so I should “pay attention”–in bolded red. Or my resting heart rate didn’t go down until late that night, so I should “pay attention.” Or that I got 5 hours and 23 minutes of sleep (possibly inaccurate) so I should “Pay attention.” It became apparent that the apps were the problem, telling me I didn’t get enough sleep when maybe I had. Can you imagine using a word count tracker app or a spreadsheet where if you don’t meet your word count for the day, it turns red or tells you to pay attention?

This is what word count quotas can lead to. At one point, I used a book about writing a book in 30 days (it’s the one with the orange cover). I dutifully targeted 1,667 words a day. I didn’t feel I could cycle as I needed to, or think, for that matter (which Intellection needs) because I had to meet the daily word count or I would fall behind. I couldn’t even miss a day because if I did, I would fall behind. That meant I wrote on some days where I was dog tired (read: it felt like I was punishing myself to get the word count goal). By the time I felt like I was getting near the end, I could plainly see a problem: I was writing words to get to the word count, not paying attention to the story. So I called the story done. How much of that did I use? None.

Jennifer Brinn notes that word count goals are binary. Did you complete your goal? Yes or no. Dean Wesley Smith, in his early blog sprint, said that the number of words you wrote didn’t matter (this, while blogging about the number of words he wrote and providing an accumulated total for the year). You were supposed to feel like you accomplished something even if you didn’t meet the goal and that not reaching it wasn’t a failure. Easy for him. Not easy for most people.

Picture being in school and taking a test. If you get a certain number of answers wrong you fail the test, right? I once skipped one answer on a Scantron test and got 17 questions wrong, It was demoralizing.

Numbers do count and can have an emotional hit. If word count goals work fine for you, great. Continue what you’re doing. If they don’t work for you, question it when someone tells you this is the way to do it.

Frankly, we need more of that.

Next up, I’m going to tackle a big sacred cow: Heinlein’s Rules.

What if you can’t do goals?

On wooden brown background transparent numbers 2024, small tricolor kitten among Christmas decorations balls on texture of foil golden tinsel, burgundy fabric. New Year symbol, planar, calendar.

Photo © farmuty.gmail.com | Deposit Photos

This is a question no one asks, ever. When I searched online for this phrase specifically, I got a lot of reasons you can’t accomplish your goals:

No motivation (read: You’re just lazy)Poor planning (What if you can’t do planning?)You don’t know how to do it (this sounds suspiciously like what outlining people say about outlines)Excuses, excuses, excuses (Dean Wesley Smith says a form of this)

Is this just me, or are these really pretty negative?

Goals surfaced as a big deal thing with productivity advice. According to Cal Newport in one of his podcasts, productivity today originated in Silicon Valley. Basically, productivity is computer programming. And goals are linked with productivity, and career.

I’ve ready many, many productivity books. Probably too many. Most of them followed the same general pattern. Link your tasks to your goals (always The Career as if you had no life outside of work) so you can accomplish them. In an Annual Review class I took several years ago, Tiago Forte of Building a Second Brain said he believed that productivity would be replaced by goals.

I think he’s right, but not in the way he thinks. Goals are productivity. We see a variation of this in the diet culture now: Relabeling the marketing. Diet culture stopped selling in 2017-2018, so they rebranded as wellness. That’s when Weight Watchers changed their name to WW. Wellness lectured on eating the correct foods and avoiding a laundry list of foods as “inflammatory.” But wellness may have run its marketing course. Now, as we roll into the new year when the companies sell us on weight loss goals, they’re changing the labels again, back to diet. Now the companies are selling, “Eat what you like.” Others are using longevity.

Goals are all wrapped up in diet culture, as well as fitness, your job, and, of course, writing. Many people promoting goals are marketing. To get you to buy that diet program, to get you to buy that app/tracker, to get you to buy that planner. The marketing spiel shows up in the emotion in how they sell: “Powerful goals,” “achieve your goals and succeed,” and “higher performance.” I pulled these from a general search on goal setting and didn’t have to work hard to find them.

Somehow, New Year’s resolutions shifted to goals as if they were the same thing. Resolutions are more fuzzy and hopeful; with goals, we think of football.

Of course, I looked up the meaning of both words in Merriam-Webster:

Goals: “The end toward which effort is aimed.” The rest of the definitions are sports and games, so it’s easy to imagine football. This one’s based more on winning (and if there are questions on how writing is treated with this, anyone hear the phrase, “Win Nano”?)

New Year’s Resolution: “A promise to do something in the new year.” That’s a completely different meaning than goals. This one’s based more on hope. But hope is fuzzy and you can’t sell it.

For writers, goals show up with only things that can be measured:

Write five books in a yearWrite 1,667 words a dayWrite every day

Everyone leaves off the non-metric things, like researching, revising, cycling, proofreading, and even thinking. The last is even scoffed at by some writers.

At 20 Books Las Vegas last November, I attended a mastermind session. I thought it might have some craft-based areas. Nope. Not at all. I supposed learning craft is hard to define as a goal because there aren’t any metrics. You can measure the number of classes you took, hours spent, but not the actual learning. It’s fuzzy, too.

Instead, everyone in my group—we all had published ten books—did a round-robin discussing what our goals were. I mentally cringed. I’ve always hated it when people ask what your goals are. Because, when it was my turn, my answer was, “I can’t do goals. They’ve never worked for me.”

I got a very brief silence (kind of like being a pantser in a group of outliners) and then everyone launched into a discussion about production goals. Oddly, no one in the group knew what those were and the one goalless person had to explain it.

Goals have always perplexed me, though I could never explain why. I just don’t connect particularly to them. If I create a goal, they don’t motivate me to complete them. When I’ve had to create one, like for the day job, I start with “What do they want to see?” Even when I was in the Army and my sergeant was preparing to send me to the promotion board, he asked what my goal for NCO was (the only “goal” for promotion for me was more money in my paycheck. There are priorities). 

But I’ve tried the usual for writing, because everyone said you were supposed to do that. Joanna Penn describes a production schedule and measuring daily words. James Scott Bell tells us to do word count quotas (is it just me, or do you think of speeding tickets when you hear quotas?). Dean Wesley Smith defines levels of pulp speed, because, well, you’d have to track the words to know you were fast.

Most often, when I set word count goals and moved forward, I simply forgot they existed. I often would find the spreadsheet I was tracking it in several months later, with maybe a week filled in. Even when I got a really pretty one that I liked, with the calculations done for me, it made no difference.

Some will say that I haven’t picked the right goals or didn’t do them right. That sounds an awful lot like what outliners tell pantsers, that if the outline didn’t work, it wasn’t the right one or I didn’t understand how to do them. Or that I should put a reminder on my calendar, based on the assumption if I saw it there, I would do it. Others will tell me I don’t want writing bad enough if I can’t make a daily word count (this to a person who went through a terrible period where I felt like I had broken my writing ten ways to Sunday and despaired I would never finish a novel. Most people would have quit).

None of it’s true.

For me, 2023 was a big change. I took the Clifton Strengths test after reading Becca Syme’s Dear Writer You Need to Quit. And it explained a lot. One of those things is why goals don’t work very well for me.

These are my strengths:

IntellectionIdeationInputAdaptabilityFuturistic

Adaptability and Futuristic are time-driven goals. Futuristic is, well, futuristic. Another high futuristic writer took great pleasure in feeding her strength by working out goals for the next decade. I can’t do that myself because of the opposing one of Adaptability. Adaptability is the “now” strength. It takes all its energy from firefighting. It thrives on change.

From Gallup on Adaptability.

“Worry less about long term goals. Annual resolutions are not going to seem real to you. Focus more on what you are doing today. Don’t worry about doing too much prep work.”

And from another Gallup post:

“Because they find fulfillment in taking each day as it comes and living in the here and now, those with strong Adaptability talents may not be able to clearly present goals and objectives — nor may they be particularly able to articulate past processes or connect the past to the present.”

This video charmed me (dogs! Golden Retriever!). But it’s a perfect description of how Adaptability goes through the day. At work, I’m working on Task A, go look something up, and next thing I know I’m on Task D, though I have no idea how that happened. If I set a goal, as I move further away from it, everything else comes in, and Adaptability happily follows the flow. This is how I can set a goal and completely forget it exists.

I note all of this because we get shaped a lot by marketing, most of it subtle. I think even some of the writers are unaware that they are repeating the marketing spiel they’ve heard. Worse, we hear it repeated so often, we think it must be true for everyone.

Productivity stopped selling as well, so everyone relabeled it as goals, habits, and even passion. They make money off telling everyone we’re all the same (because if they said we were all different, the marketing doesn’t work). All you need to do is look for the emotional connection:

Don’t you want to be successful?Don’t you want to hold a book in your hands?Don’t you want to be published?

Followed by “Goals are the way to do this!” (Or habits or passion.) Of course, this leaves writers like me who can’t do goals at all, thinking something is wrong with them. I’m not the only one who can’t do word count goals. Another writer friend says she focuses on the metric (the numbers) rather than the writing.

Something to think about: Word count goals are a relatively new trend, because you have an app that counts the words. SMART goals, which states goals should be measurable, also showed up in 1981 at the same time as personal computers, leading today to app trackers of all kinds. But when writing was done on a typewriter, no such word count was available. Writers still had to provide a general word count so the editor would know how much space the story would take up. If memory serves, you counted the number of lines on the page, then picked an average line and counted those words. Then you did the math to figure out what the average number of words were per page, then multiplying that by the number of manuscript pages.

The writers of that time most likely measured productivity by number of pages, since it was a physical page that you pull out of a typewriter. But probably wasn’t tracked anywhere; it would have been more likely it was more of, “The story needs to be in the mail by the end of the week, so I need to make sure I get three pages done today.”

The modern day obsession with goals—yes, obsession, driven by marketing to us—leads writers to describe how to get more and more word count. Michael La Ronn mentioned in one of his books that you could take your cell phone with you and write in all those little pockets of time where you have ten minutes. A writer friend tried to do that, and just couldn’t. She needed time to warm up into the story. I think the pockets of time method works for Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing into the Dark, but that assumes you can write exactly like DWS does.

Pockets of time can be very problematic, as is the focus on getting the numbers. This is classic productivity thinking. In many of the productivity books I read, the authors talked about jamming more and more into your day. If you had five minutes before a meeting, that was a great time to catch up on email. You could keep a list of easy, quick tasks to do when you suddenly had ten minutes free.

Exactly when do you have time to be a human being?

So when you go into 2024, think about your differences. If goals don’t work for you, that’s fine. You’re not broken. If goals do work for you, don’t let them turn you into a machine.