Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled - Posts Tagged "creativity"

I wonder why I assign myself too much to do as a writer. Here's my publishing schedule as per me.

1) Sara Ghost -- a novelette with some promo material added. Should be any time now. I completely formatted it, but then I didn't like how the formatting looked and just stalled out.
2) The War Against Love -- School of the Ages #3. Scheduled for August. I need to edit it. This book is so long that I can't use beta readers and the editing is in my hands alone. It's also long overdue as I finished a 99% draft back in 2010. There was a missing chapter,but I finished it two weeks ago.
3) How to Write Dialogue -- September. A technical book about how to write dialogue for fiction. It features introductory material and samples from eight to ten other self-published authors.
4) Zombies Zombies Zombies Zombies -- four zombie short stories. October, for Halloween season. I finished one of these stories. I need a few hours work on the second. The third is outlined but not one word is written. The fourth has changed concept twice and I don't know what I will wind up including.
5) The Indie Writer Murders -- my next collaboration with Jess C. Scott, set for early next year. Jess and I outlined this novella, but I have asked that we not begin drafting till probably October.
6) School of the Ages #4: it is scheduled for next year and I have only drafted half of it.

...and I have more ideas.


Why am I like this? I have always had more ideas than I could execute. To be honest, if I were writing full-time, I would do four times as many projects. The above is my schedule on top of teaching full-time. How much do I write every day? Averages to less than a page.


I guess I am ambitious to expand my market share in a business setting in which market shares go overwhelmingly to a few Big-Six-anointed authors, and we indies are dividing up our tiny portion more and more. More books = more chance to be seen. More genres = more market penetration. This is why I added nonfiction (Teen Guide) and why I am adding how-to (dialogue) and horror (Zombies x4) and mystery (with Jess).

I started out in fiction as a teenage genre writer. After earning my bachelor's, I spent five years in the academic fiction world, writing academic fiction that was always passed over in favor of the work of mediocrities. Here's a novel by a fourth-rate classmate:


Willy Slater's Lane: A Novel


My colleagues in academe have gone on to a variety of enterprises. Nearly all my professors have stopped publishing fiction. Here's a great book by the one whom I know still to be active, the lovely and kind Sheila Ortiz Taylor:


Imaginary Parents


My classmates have gone one of three ways. Some are academic professionals; some have edited and written for magazines and websites; most have dropped out of the writing game so far as I can tell. Here is a book by the best of my classmates, the immensely talented Cathy Day:


The Circus in Winter


I remember reading early drafts of fiction from this collection. One of her stories at that time won the Playboy College Fiction contest. I always did and still do respect and admire this colleague. But academic fiction is a dead end for all but a few. I am back to genre fiction now, and it will be the bulk of my work, I daresay, from now till doomsday, and the more of it I can produce without sacrificing quality, the better.

So why do I assign myself too much to do as a writer? It's partly my market strategy, as described above. It's very much a desire to reach an audience and become known. Yet I think it's mostly the fact that I am driven by a strong creative impulse. When I have an idea, I damn well want to write it and put it out there. It takes too long to get these projects done. Were I writing full-time, I'd be banging them out left and right, but as it is, I left everything for a summer which must be productive, or else...

Thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments.