Work in Progress
“I’d love to knowwhat your process is.”
“I wish I could write as much as you do.”
I hear variations on the above comments all the time,whether in person at conventions or via social media. Sometimes I get thefeeling that these people are hoping that I have some kind of secret I can passalong to help them be more productive. The truth is that there is asecret, but it’s not one anyone can replicate: If you want to do what I do, youhave to be me. This is true for any artist. How we get things done is an expressionof who we are, just as our art is. We can discover techniques and habits fromother artists that we can try to emulate, but ultimately, we’re going to end updoing what we do the way we do it because of who we are at any given moment.And of course, this can all change as we change throughout the years. I thinkartists are better served by experimenting with different techniques todiscover what they need in order to be productive than by being concernedwith how someone else produces work.
But that doesn’t mean learning about someone else’sprocess is completely without merit, so here are some thoughts about mine, forwhatever good it may do you.
At this point in my writing career, I’ve traditionallypublished fifty novels, nearly 200 short stories, and dozens of articles. I don’tfeel like I’m especially prolific, but the other day I took a look at my 2023 WritingDeadlines document (I only make these when I’ve committed to so many projects thatthere’s a good chance I’ll forget something if I’m not careful) and since thestart of the year, I’ve written one novel, two novellas, and eight shortstories. (I’ve also written material for this blog – as I’m doing right now! –and for my newsletter.) Work I still need to do by the end of the year: onenovel, four short stories, and an introduction to the ten-year anniversary editionof a friend’s book. A couple other projects are in the works, but no deadlineshave been set yet.
For years, I’ve primarily written short stories when Iget invited to contribute to anthologies, although I do write a few on specevery once in a while. (On spec means on speculation, without acontract already being in place.) The novels and novellas I write are almostalways contracted for as well. (I did write one novella on spec early in theyear, though.) What this means is that most of my work has a deadline involved,and those deadlines hold my feet to the fire when it comes to getting writingdone.
I possess a number of qualities that aid in my being aproductive writer. One is that I have a facility for language (always have),another is I write fast (always have), I tend not to have to revise too muchwhen I’m finished (always been this way), and somehow I’m able to keepcrippling doubt at bay and keep going (always been this way). I’ve always beenan imaginative person, living inside my head most of the time, and I’ve alwaysbeen a creative person. Ideas come to me all the time, mostly without my tryingtoo hard. I love learning about writing and storytelling techniques (this didn’tstart seriously until I was in my late teens), and this knowledge has given mea lot to draw on as I try to figure out my own process (and try to reconfigure it)over the years. I have a naturally analytical mind, I naturally work steadilyat my goals (both my father and maternal grandmother were the same way), and Ivisualize many approaches to a problem before I try to solve it in the real world(including in my writing). I’m also able to make choices easily and quickly.They may not always be the best choices, but I can always fix them later (atleast in my writing!). I can also focus like crazy, especially when I’m doing somethingthat fascinates me.
All of the above qualities are natural for me. I wasn’ttaught any of them, although I have worked to cultivate and sharpen them consciouslyover the years, but they all factor into how much writing I’m able to produceand at what speed I produce it. So I suppose my first piece of advice would be. . .
WRITER, KNOW THYSELF
I started out as an acting major in college, but Ididn’t stay one for long. On the first day of acting class, our professor toldus the only reason anyone should become an actor is because they haveto, that they can’t imagine doing anything else with their life. Only with thatkind of drive would they be able to endure the hardships and make thesacrifices that are often necessary to have a career in acting. I knew I didn’thave that kind of passion for acting, so I switched my major to theater education.That degree had English as a secondary teaching field, and I thought that sinceI liked theater, education, and English, by the end of four years, I’dhopefully figure out what the hell to do with my life. But I then asked myselfif there was anything I loved – that I needed – so much that I’d bewilling to make any sacrifice for it. I realized writing fiction was thatthing, and so I decided to dedicate my life to it then and there (I told you I canmake decisions fast!). Like a lot of creative kids, I tried it all in highschool – theater, art, music, writing – and at one point or another I wanted tomake each of these fields my career. But writing is the only field that alignswith my truest self. I don’t just like to write; I must write. It’s nota job for me and it’s not a hobby. It’s life. I need to write the sameway I need to breathe. It’s that natural and necessary for me.
Maybe your need to write is as strong as mine – maybe stronger!Maybe it isn’t. If writing is just a part of your life (which is probably a lothealthier, let’s be honest) then maybe you don’t produce a lot of work becauseyou’ve got other important stuff to do with your life as well. There’s not adamn thing wrong with that. Accept this about yourself and go forth and liveand write without guilt.
There are some things I’m not willing to sacrifice formy writing, though. I’ve always wanted a relationship, and I’ve always wanted children.Not having these things might’ve given me even more time for writing, butwithout them, I wouldn’t be a fulfilled person, I’d be miserable, and I’dprobably have produced far less work throughout my life than I have. There’s anold bit of writing career advice: Make a list of everything that’s moreimportant to you than writing. The shorter the list, the greater the chance you’llsucceed. My relationship with a significant other and my children are the onlytwo items above writing on my list. If your list has a lot more items on itbefore you get to writing, so what? Accept it and don’t beat yourself up aboutit.
TIME AND SPACE TO WRITE
To finish my undergraduate degree (a B.S. inEducation), I had to student teach at a local high school. It didn’t take longfor me to realize that not only did teaching teenagers drain all my energy,making it hard to write at night, but that I’d be stuck working from 7 a.m. to4 p.m. or so (and probably grading essays at night). I worked at the Writing Centerat my college, and I’d learned that people with an M.A. in English could teachcollege composition courses part-time. I realized that I needed time to write,especially when I was in the early stages of my career and trying to grow as awriter, and teaching comp part-time would give this to me. (And I wouldn’t haveall the life sucked out of me before dinnertime every day.) This was the firstconscious career choice I made to ensure I had time to write.
I was privileged in terms of paying for college. I hadan inheritance that paid for my undergrad degree, and I got a teaching assistantshipwhich paid for my M.A. I left college without any debt, so I didn’t have totake jobs I didn’t want to in order to pay off loans. I taught part-time forten years while I wrote, until I decided that I should probably find a job withbenefits since I was getting older, and it was becoming clear that my first wifeand I would likely divorce before long (her job was the one that gave us andour kids benefits). I found a full-time, tenure-track job opening at SinclairCommunity College in Dayton, Ohio, applied for it, interviewed, and got the position.Yes, it was full time, but not 9-5 full time. There were gaps in my schedule,and these gaps gave me time to write, and I could schedule my grading time, soI could make sure to get my writing done before I had to mark papers. After 24years there, it’s still a juggling act, but I’m good at that kind of juggling,and I don’t find it stressful. When my daughters were very young, I wrote a lotless, because they needed my time (and I needed time with them), and I didn’tworry about how much or little writing I produced. I knew writing time wouldreturn to me when as they grew, and it did, and my production returned tonormal.
So I’ve been able – through a combination ofprivilege, luck, good decision-making, and hard work – to create a life inwhich writing is possible almost every day. Few people have day jobs thatsupport their writing life that don’t swallow gigantic chunks of time andmental and physical energy. I’ve also been fortunate that teaching writing hastaught me as much about writing as producing writing has. Both of my jobs feedinto and support the other. I’m not just a writer or a teacher: I’ve created anentire life in writing.
When I was nine, my first relative died and a few monthsafter that, I nearly drowned. This one-two punch of mortality awareness made medetermined to waste as little time in my all-too-brief life as possible. Thismeans that I don’t waste time playing video games or watching the latestpopular TV show. I don’t waste time drinking or doing drugs. I don’t go out withfriends. I write on weekends and holidays (if possible), and I usually only travelfor conventions. I devote as much of my lifespan to writing as I possibly can,and – for me – this results in my living my best life. The more time and spaceI have in my life to write, the more I produce. Pretty simple. If you don’thave this kind of time to write, don’t get down on yourself. Write when you canand as much as you can and be happy. You’re building your writing life,not anyone else’s.
GOOD HEALTH
It’s damn hard – if not impossible – to concentrateand be creative if you’re sick all the time. I’ve been blessed with good healthfor the most part in my 59 years. My second wife jokes that I have such a strongimmune system, I get sick for about eight hours and then I’m over it. I amdiabetic, but so far, I’ve managed to keep that under control. I know mygeneral good health is a temporary state. As I age, my health will decline(unless I’m hit by a truck tomorrow; then I won’t have to worry about aging!).But being healthy now means I have time to create. My wife has a number ofhealth problems. She’s an artist, but she can only manage to produce so muchwork because of her health issues. I try to help her understand that given hercircumstances, she’s producing as much as she can, but of course, she stillgets down about it at times. It’s only natural.
And when my health isn’t that good, writing can giveme something to focus on to distract me from my illness. I wrote the novelizationof Halloween Kills when I had Covid (and that shit did not goaway in eight hours!).
So factor in the state of your health at any giventime when you assess how much you able to produce, and don’t beat yourself upfor not writing a novel a year when you’re dealing with serious health issues.
My most serious health issue is mental health. I’mdysthymic, which means I suffer from a constant low-grade depression that caneasily slide into a deep depression if I’m not careful. I take meds for thisand I’ve had a lot of therapy to help me learn to deal with it. All of this helps,but I sometimes think writing is therapy for me on some level too. It lets meenter a kind of meditative state while I do something I love, and I can’t thinkof any better way to keep the black dog of depression at bay.
SUPPORT
I’ve also been fortunate in that my family, friends,and spouses have always supported my writing. (My first wife was a bit lukewarmin her support until the checks started rolling in; after that she was TeamWriting the whole way.) Not everyone is as lucky as I am. Many writers have tofight to get even a little time to themselves to write, with women in ourculture especially viewed as selfish for attending to their needs instead of others’.A lack of support can have a huge impact on writing process and productivity,and while people might say Ignore thosepeople or Cut them out of your life, it’s never as easy as that. You need to factorin your level of support when assessing how effective your process is and howmuch writing is enough for you to produce in a given time.
DEADLINES
Open submission calls come with deadlines, and when Ifirst started writing, I found these useful. Often, the calls were for themeanthologies, and I found the theme for the anthology an effective prompt to getme writing. I purposely sought out such calls partially because they wereopen, but also because of their deadlines. When I wrote for myself, I would makedeadlines for myself, and while this helped, it didn’t give me the same solidstructure as real deadlines. Now I have deadlines all the time, and when I dowrite on spec, it’s between deadlines. So my writing life is structured in away that I don’t have the luxury of not producing. Some people would find thissuper-stressful, so I’d advise them not to commit to deadlines, but in generalI find them motivating, and they keep me moving forward.
ADAPT AND THRIVE
Oneof the things I learned early on about my writing process is that I need tochange it when it’s not working. I need to use the same imagination andcreativity to help me find the best ways to produce work that I use to createthe work itself. I’ve tried all these techniques at various times:
· Writingan hour a day at a set time every day. When I student taught in college, I wrotefrom 7-8 p.m every night.
· Writinga set amount of pages each day before I go to bed. It didn’t matter when I gotthe pages done. They just had to be finished before I went to sleep. And if Ididn’t make my goal that day, I didn’t beat myself up about it. I just tried tomeet the page count the next day. I’ve adjusted the number of pages over theyears. I’ve done five pages a day, seven pages, ten pages, twenty pages . . .After my first daughter was born, I did one page a day for a while. The amount didn’tmatter as much as continued forward progress. These days, the closest I get tothis is calculating how many pages a day I need to write in order to meet ashort deadline.
· Igrew up in a noisy household, and a psychologist one told me that I need noiseto block out in order to concentrate. I can use music for this, although it mustbe instrumental music. Music with words distracts me from writing my own words.When my kids were little, they couldn’t leave me alone when I was home so Icould write (they were too little to understand), so I began writing at coffeeshops, where there would be noise and activity around me, but where no oneactually needed me for anything.
· Whenfor whatever reason words wouldn’t come to me when I wrote using my computer, Ihandwrote text and inputted it into the computer later. I did this for years, handwritingat Starbucks until Covid hit. Then I began writing at home on my computeragain, and I still haven’t gone back to handwriting first drafts. Maybe I willsomeday, maybe I won’t. Who knows?
· Ilearned years ago that I have a writing biorhythm. I can write twice a day, onceevery twelve hours, and produce at least five pages each time. If I have ashort deadline or I’m behind on a project, I take advantage of this.
· I’vewritten late at night when everyone else has gone to bed.
· Thesedays, I tend to write early in the morning before anyone else is up. This worksgreat because no matter what else the day brings, I’ve got my writing for theday finished.
· Thesedays, I don’t consciously do much in the way of arranging my writing time. Iwrite in the morning, usually write again in the afternoon, and if a project isgoing really well (or a deadline is looming), I’ll write later at night beforeI go to bed. If I’m close to the end of a novel, I’ll write every waking momentI have until it’s finished.
· Iusually sell novels to editors based on short pitches or outlines, and Iusually have a drafting outline for novels (but I don’t always refer to it as Iwrite, since the overall story is in my head, and things often change somewhatas I write). I may have a simple outline for short stories or I may just pantsthem entirely. The last short story I finished I had a title and nothing else.I just started writing and kept going until I was done.
· Ihave started going out to Starbucks to write during afternoons again, but onlya couple times a week, after my summer MW comp class is over. I don’t know if I’llkeep this up in Fall. It depends on what works best with my teaching schedulethen.
· WhenI write at home these days, I sit on the couch in the living room so mydachshund Bailey can snooze next to me. I have a home office, but I have a lotof Funko Pops and action figures around that Bailey wants to chew up, and she hastrouble understanding she’s not supposed to gnaw on my author copies, so I haven’twritten in my office since we got her last year.
I adapt my writingprocess all the time in order to meet the needs of the moment. This is one ofthe huge factors in my productivity. I do my best not to let anything stop meand I keep going.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO A BE A WRITING MACHINECONSTANTLY CHURNING OUT PROSE, NOR DO YOU HAVE TO BE THE KIND OF ARTIST WHO TAKESYEARS TO WRITE A NOVEL
Writers too often compare themselves to other writers.If we see someone producing more than we do, we think something’s wrong withus. If we see someone taking a long time to write an artistically complex andbeautiful work, we think we write too fast and too simply. If we see someonesucceeding in writing crime novels, we fear that we may be wasting our timewriting horror, or science fiction, or romance, etc.
Whatever you write at any given moment, whatever processyou use, however much you produce, it’s all good. We may write for others toread our work, but we produce that work in the first place for ourselves. Itdoesn’t matter if it takes you ten minutes to write something, ten hours, tenweeks, ten months, ten years . . . All that matters is that writing itselfleaves you feeling fulfilled, otherwise, why the hell do it?
Okay, I sat down in a Starbucks – with music playing,people talking, coffee machines whirring – to write this blog entry aroundnoon. It’s now 2:48 pm as I type this (and it’s 3:27 as I’m proofreading). Thisarticle is around 3,500 words (it was then; now it’s ballooned to 4,260 words).This kind of nonfiction is easy for me to write. I just write about myself andthink about how what I have to say might help other writers. If I’d chosen towrite fiction this afternoon, I might’ve produced about half that many words,maybe less if it was a new story and I was still trying to find my way into it.So the type of thing I write affects my process as well. I won’t make any moneyfrom this blog entry, and although I’ll add some promotional material below, Iknow not everyone who reads this will click on the links below and buy one ofmy books. So what? I wrote this entry to clarify my thoughts about my writingprocess and to have an article to link to whenever someone asks me about my processsince I can never give anyone a simple answer to explain it. I wrote it to hopefullyhelp writers, too. So given what I set out to do, I’ve succeeded, and I feelfulfilled as a writer.
This brings me to one last thought. My friend author TaylorGrant says he tries to write with intention but without attachment to aspecific outcome. This means that he has artistic goals when he writessomething, and if he achieves those goals, he’s succeeded. Whatever happens tothe piece afterward happens, and regardless of what happens, he can’t failbecause he’s already succeeded. I think if all artists could learn to work withthis kind of healthy detachment, they’d be better off. So whatever your processor however much you produce in however much time it takes you, if doing thework fulfills you, you’ve succeeded. I feel as if I succeeded at what I triedto communicate with this blog entry, and I feel fulfilled.
And that’s what matters most.
If you have any writing process tips you’d like toshare, feel free to do so in the comments!
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
But if you’d like to buy something of mine, that wouldbe good too!
Your Turn to Suffer Sale!
The eBook edition of my novel Your Turn to Sufferis currently 99 cents at both Amazon and B&N! I don’t how long this salewill last, so snag a copy while you can!
Order Links:
Amazon:
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/your-turn-to-suffer-tim-waggoner/1137330372?ean=9781787585201
Lord of the Feast Available toPreorder!
My next novelfor Flame Tree, Lord of the Feast, won’t be out until April 2024, butthe paperback is available for preorder. (The ebook edition should be availableto preorder soon.) No cover art to shareyet. This is the last book I was contracted to write for Flame Tree, so ifyou’ve enjoyed my novels for them, the best way to make sure I get to writemore is to buy, review, and spread the word about A Hunter Called Nightand preorder Lord of the Feast.
I’ve alreadyhad a few people ask if Lord of the Feast connects to my overarchingdark fantasy/horror mythos, and the answer is yes, although you can read andenjoy the book without any prior knowledge of my other work.
Synopsis:
Twenty yearsago, a cult attempted to create their own god: The Lord of the Feast. The godwas a horrible, misbegotten thing, however, and the cultists killed thecreature before it could come into its full power. The cultists trapped thepieces of their god inside mystic nightstones then went their separate ways.Now Kate, one of the cultists’ children, seeks out her long-lost relatives,hoping to learn the truth of what really happened on that fateful night.Unknown to Kate, her cousin Ethan is following her, hoping she’ll lead him tothe nightstones so that he might resurrect the Lord of the Feast – and thistime, Ethan plans to do the job right.
OrderLinks:
Barnes &Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lord-of-the-feast-tim-waggoner/1143636012?ean=9781787586369
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