Category: advice

It’s November! It’s been November for a week now! We all know what that means, right?!?

Well, it’s meaning a lot of different things than we all probably hoped it would. And I totally get it if that means you don’t want to think about writing today. Or tomorrow. Or until sometime in early 2029 or so.

But for the rest of you… let’s talk about National Novel Writing Month. Why some of you probably aren’t doing it this year. And why maybe you should just write anyway.

And I’m going to try to make it quick and semi-inspiring.

If you hadn’t heard, NaNoWriMo decided to shoot themselves in the foot a few months back and then decided to get both knees, too, because they had a few rounds left. They took on a generative AI company as a sponsor and then—loudly–announced they’d decided it was cool if you wanted to count AI-generated churn as your NaNoWriMo project. Not surprisingly, many folks were offended by this since the whole point of National Novel Writing Month was… well, writing. I mean, it’s right there in the title. There was backlash, commentary, discourse, and a lot less interest in joining NaNoWriMo. Go figure.

This is, understandably, depressing for a lot of of people. NaNoWriMo was an already-in-place writing infrastructure. It provided a solid, clear goal and a community where folks could share progress and encouragement and tips.

It also gave a sense of accomplishment and learning. As I’ve said many times in the past, the whole point of NaNoWriMo is just to make progress on a first draft. Maybe I make a ton of progress and get 60K words done. Maybe more. Maybe I only get ten or fifteen. The goal here is to make a serious effort to write every day, or at least as often as I can, so I can get an honest sense of how much I can write.

Because there’s always reasons not to write. Day jobs. Commutes to day jobs. Spending more time with our loved ones. Dealing with annoying problems and issues that crop up in our lives (I think I need to get my roof redone!!!). Having massive dread about the future. Just needing to get one decent night of sleep. Just one!

So NaNoWriMo was a great excuse to try to focus past all of that. It was a reason to tell friends and family “hey, not this week, sorry.” It was a chance for us to really focus on this whole writing thing.

But… do you really need some website for that?

You can set your own goal for this month. For any month. You don’t need NaNoWriMo for that. You can just tell your friends, “hey, I just really need to make some headway on this book right now.” I did that for years. And there’s so many folks out there offering advice and tips. Heck… you’re reading this on a blog with over fifteen years worth of them.

Look, if you want… I know I go back and forth about my posting schedule here, but if some of you want it, I’ll give you an encouraging post every week this month. Even Thanksgiving week. A little nudge (or maybe a good shove) to keep going, to keep doing it, because you can do this. You can have a contest of one and still come out of November in the same place you would’ve been with NaNoWriMo.

Heck, I’ll tell you what. For the month of November, this can be your writing community space. Post any achievements, frustrations, questions here and I promise you I’ll respond with a high five, a commiseration, an answer, or some kind of encouragement to keep writing. I’ll check in every day. Maybe more often if I’m trying to avoid work. And you can respond to each other, too.

Y’see, Timmy, it sucks that NaNoWriMo made some awful choices. But don’ t add that to the list of reasons you’re not going to get any writing done. You’ve still got everything you need to do this. You just need to, y’know… do it.

Next time—well that’s up to you. More encouragement? Or should I just do a usual post in two weeks about drafts or something like that? Let me know.

And until then… go write!

So, a few times here on the ranty writing blog I’ve talked about diminishing returns. The idea the more you read and study about a topic—say, writing—the less you’re likely to get out of it. F’r example…

Most of us start of by picking up a few books on writing or maybe taking a creative writing course in high school or college. Depending on where you live or what you’ve got for resources, maybe you attended a conference or convention where you got to listen to writers, editors, and agents talk about writing. I know I did.

Eventually, though, we need to stop with the books and classes and online seminars because we hit a point where the information just starts to repeat. We’re just hearing the same things over and over again. Yeah, sure, maybe someone might put a new spin on this or give a better example of that, but was it really worth the fifteen-to-one hundred-ninety dollars I paid to learn it? Or the time I put into reading/ attending it?

But since it’s the start of the year, I wanted to talk about another kind of diminishing return. And this one’s a little more personal. For each of us.

Sooner or later, we all develop a certain approach to writing that works for us. A process, if you will. Everyone’s process is unique. I tend to work at my desk, but maybe you work best at a coffee shop on your tablet, and she writes best on her phone, and he (to fall back on an old example) does all his best work with dictation software while wearing that ren faire corset. Whatever it is, we’ve tried a few things—maybe a lot of things—and figured out what lets us get the most literary bang for our writing buck. And that whole metaphor fell apart but you see where I was going with it.

For some folks, these habits and methods we’ve accumulated work great and continue to work great. Project after project, we know we can do A-B-C-D and get a great manuscript. So naturally, we keep doing it.

But sometimes, for any number of reasons, my process begins to be less efficient. It doesn’t give me the same results as fast. Or maybe it goes just as fast, but the quality has slipped a lot. Maybe time and quality are both the same but it feels like it’s taking a lot more effort. Our returns, one might say, are diminishing.

And yet… we stick to it. Because this is our process. We found it. It works for us, right?

Right?

I was lucky that very early on in my writing process I had a mentor/ professor who emphasized not getting pinned down to one thing. Most of the time our class would be in our assigned room but sometimes, just for the heck of it, he’d have us all move to another room. A virtually identical room, yeah, but oddly enough we’d all end up in different seats, next to different people, sometimes facing a new direction just because of how that room was set up. When it got warmer he had us meet outside by a big tree once. One time (after making sure we were all old enough) he took us to the professor’s lounge at the top of the campus hotel and bought the class a round while we talked about the latest round of stories and writing.

I didn’t like using outlines for a long time. I had bad results with them, so my book-writing process was much more free-form. But eventually I decided I needed to get better with them and have a lot more things figured out ahead of time, because my career was taking off and I needed to be able to talk with my agent and editors about books I hadn’t written yet.

I also tend to write here in my office at my desk. I know the setup. I know my surroundings. Some people (like my beloved) might call it cluttered, but I find it so comfortable and familiar I can easily focus past all of it. And yet sometimes I still do other things. About 2/3 of the first draft of Paradox Bound was written on legal pads in a coffee shop back in LA. At the moment I’m about 60K into a new project (TOS, if you’re subscribed to the newsletter) and that’s also mostly written on legal pads, too, sitting out on the back deck. Because it just worked better.

So here’s your New Year’s nudge. Take a long, hard look at your process. Has it diminished? Is it still working as well as it used to? Does it give you the results you want?

If it isn’t… change it. Try something new. Do something different.

This is a scary idea, I know. The worry that I might try something new and that might not work, either. And now I’ve wasted more of my precious writing time smacking my head with legal pads or drinking overpriced coffee or strapping myself into this goddamn corset that wasn’t even the color I wanted! Trying something new feels risky.

Yeah. It is. Art is risky

Y’see, Timmy, we’ve got to take some risks now and then if we want to improve, and sometimes that means accepting we should try doing things differently. So be open to new ideas. Be open to the idea that you might need to be open to new ideas.

Next time… maybe I’ll talk about a few other things we should accept.

Until then, go write.

And what is this, you ask?

In the past, the majority of the posts were writing advice. Not publishing, but writing as the art of stringing words together into a narrative that will connect with an audience. That was the original point of this, to make up for the lack of basic writing advice out there. But over the past two years, with everything going on, people have asked questions about the business side of things and the greater writing meta-verse, so to speak, and I’ve been trying to help out by answering those.

The ranty blog’s also about a little bit about motivation. Helping you to sit down and get those words out. Maybe suggesting some easier ways to do something. Maybe giving you a little challenge or a tip or a trick to play with when your brain’s stuck on whatever. I’ve tried to do this a few times and a few different ways. For a lot of folks, the biggest, toughest part of writing is actually sitting down and writing, so I’m here to give you the occasional firm kick in the butt. Or a gentle one. Whatever works best for you.

Finally, if I’m doing this right, I’m giving you a little reassurance. There’s so much information flying around out there. We can go looking for it or just get smacked in the face with it on social media. How fast and productive this person is. What a great deal they got. How easy this was for them. It’s easy to see something like this and feel like I must be doing something wrong. I mean, if I’m not writing 3000 words a day and I struggle with dialogue and I don’t understand structure at all… maybe this just isn’t for me? Hell, I only wrote 15,000 words for NaNoWriMo last year, so I must be screwing this up somehow…

If any of this sounds familiar… don’t worry about it. Seriously. Hopefully I can convince you you’re not wrong, you haven’t screwed up, and you should definitely keep at this. Again, everybody approaches this a little differently, and just because somebody’s faster or finds this part easier or accomplished that quicker doesn’t necessarily mean we need to change how we’re doing things.

I suppose at this point it’s also fair to say I use this space for self promotion. Not a lot–I don’t want to be that guy shoving a book in your face every five minutes–but when the time comes, we do what we need to do. And, y’know, I do have a new book coming out in a few weeks so…. be prepared for that.

(The Broken Room, available this spring at your favorite local bookstore, chain bookstore, or monolithic online retailer)

And if you’ve made it this far, a couple changes in the weeks ahead. I’m probably going to be posting a bit more… well, erratically. Still at least once a week, but it won’t always be on Thursday. That was just kind of an arbitrary day and more than a few times I’ve felt kind of stuck and that a few things stumbled because of it. So watch for posts, y’know, whenever. Still probably a lot on Thursday, but other days, too.

Also… I may finally be migrating the ranty blog over to my own webpage– PeterClines.Com . It’s just kind of been sitting there for years and I want to get better about keeping it updated and making it somewhere for people to actually visit, y’know. Plus, that way the ranty blog’s a little more under my own control and not subject to the whim of some corporation. I’ll make sure you all know if it happens.

And I think that’s everything. Any questions? Comments? Requests?

Next time I’m probably going to talk about the people driving this thing.

Until then… go write.

I follow a lot of writers over on Twitter (and I’m friends with two or three of them), and it’s not unusual for a lot of them (and me, too) to occasionally toss out storytelling advice of one kind or another. As best you can in 280 characters, anyway. Or a longish-thread. Sometimes it’s random encouragements or self-care reminders. A fair amount of time it’s basic guidelines or rules. It all depends on what sparked this particular bit of Twitter-musing.

When we’re talking about guidelines that talk usually revolves around publishing–the business side of things—and how it may affect our writing. Manuscript length. Genre definitions. The preferences of a certain agent or editor.

If someone’s talking about rules, it’s usually stuff every writer eventually has to learn. I need to know what words mean and how to spell them. I’ve got to have a solid understanding of structure. A firm grasp of grammar. My characters will need to measure up in certain ways. The stuff that we see come up again and again, oddly enough, when we talk about good writing.

And the sad truth is, learning the rules generally means study and practice and failure. Followed by more study and more practice and more failure. And eventually some success.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, anytime someone offers advice like this… there’s pretty much always someone who argues against it. They’ll mention an article they read about someone who did it differently or another tweet they saw about an editor who bought something that didn’t follow the guidelines. In short, they’re pointing to an exception to the rule in an attempt to disprove the rule.

A lot of the time, oddly enough, these folks are doing this to justify their own opinions and preferences.  I don’t like statement X, or what it implies, so I’ll find an example where X isn’t true and use it as proof that X is never true. Therefore, my opinions and preferences aren’t wrong.

Now, let’s be clear on one thing—there are always exceptions to the rule. Always.  Anyone who tells you that something is never-question-it, 100% always this way can be ignored. Especially if they shriek “no exceptions!!” I don’t care who they are or how many million copies they’ve sold (or not sold, as is more often the case)

BUT…

Exceptions to the rule are very, very rare. You could say exceptionally rare. That’s why they’re the exception and not the rule.

I mean, sure, there’s a double handful of authors who sold awful manuscripts filled with horrible spelling, bad grammar, and not the slightest clue about formatting. But the vast majority of those manuscripts never made it past the first reader for an agent or editor. We can point at a dozen or so people who sold their first book because they knew/ were related to/ were sleeping with the right people. But there are tens of thousands of writers (probably hundreds of thousands over the years)who broke in by taking their time and writing really good books. And, yeah, maybe I can point to a few people who sold the first draft of the very first novel they wrote. But I can also point to the tens of millions of people—actual, literal millions—whose first draft submissions were rejected.

Now of course, the downside of this is… well, it means most of us aren’t the exception. We’re all in the majority. And nobody wants that. Nobody likes the thought of eventually breaking in, we want all the success and recognition now! We want to be the exception!

And maaaaaybe we are. Maybe what we’ve done is good enough that it doesn’t matter I broke a ton of rules and guidelines. But we definitely shouldn’t assume we’re the exception. Because that’s where things get dangerous. Just ask Vesna Vulovic.

(yes, I’m going to tell this story again)

For those of you who never heard me explain this at the Writers Coffeehouse (either at Dark Delicacies or Mysterious Galaxy), Ms. Vulovic was a flight attendant back in the early ‘70s. And in 1972, the airliner she was working on was bombed in mid-flight. She was trapped inside the plane’s hull as it plunged over six miles to the ground. 

BUT…

Vesna didn’t die.  She fell 33,000 feet to the ground and survived. In fact, she was only in the hospital for a couple of months before being discharged. She recovered for a bit longer, but ultimately she was… fine. She ended up with a limp. That’s it. Seriously. She just died a couple of years ago, in her mid-sixties.

So… anyone here want to assume they’re that exception to the rule? Feel like taking that chance? Sure, the vast majority of people would die horribly after a six mile fall—I mean, assuming our hearts didn’t explode during the fall—but Vesna did it so I guess it probably applies to everyone, right?

What? No takers?

As I was saying, it can be dangerous to start with the assumption that I’m the exception.  That the rules or requirements don’t apply to me.  I’m always going to be bound by the same rules as pretty much every other writer, and I’m going to be expected to follow them.  Until I show that I know how to break them.  If I don’t know what I’m doing or why, I’m just a monkey pounding on a typewriter, unable to explain how or why I did something and also probably unable to do it again.

Now, again, I’m not saying exceptions don’t exist. That’d be silly—they clearly do.  But it’s important to understand they are the exception. They’re the unusual rarity, not the common thing.  That’s why we’ve heard of them—because it’s such an oddball thing to happen. Like, y’know, surviving a six-mile drop.

But exceptions can’t be my excuse not to learn those rules and guidelines. All these rules have developed over the decades for a reason, and they apply to all of us. 

Well… the vast, overall majority of us.

Next time… I’m kinda drawing a blank to be honest. I’m about to dive into something new and that’s occupying a lot of my headspace is right now. Feel free to toss suggestions or requests down below, and if I don’t get any, I guess I’ll come up with something.

Until then… go write.