Category: time

Did you know most Olympians run the 100 meters in about ten seconds. Seriously. Ten meters per second! Men tend to come in a hair under that, women just a bit over, generally speaking. Usain Bolt’s held the record for about fourteen years now with a time of nine-point-five-eight seconds.

So we can say that taking part in an Olympic event requires about ten seconds and then you’re done.

That’s not much of a time commitment at all, is it? One sixth of a minute and I can call myself an Olympic runner? Makes you wonder why more people don’t try it.

Of course, we all know it takes a lot more that ten seconds, even for someone as fast as Usain Bolt. There’s probably going to be months of training for that one specific event, not to mention years of work before that. Most of the major runners were probably training two or three hours every day while they were still in their teens.

So it’s not really about the ten seconds. It’s about all the years before those ten seconds. That’s what makes the ten seconds possible. That’s how you get to the Olympics.

And we understand that. It takes time to be good at something, It’d be silly to think otherwise. Running. Cooking. Dancing. Painting. Brain surgery. There’s some folks who may have a knack for it, may start a rung or two up the ladder, but everybody has a climb ahead of them. Nobody decides they want Olympic gold and just walks out onto the track at… well, wherever the Summer Olympics are this year. Paris? Really? Okay.

Anyway, you can guess where I’m going with this, right?

A while back I saw a self-publishing website talking about how easy it is to write a book. They’d broken it all down into math. According to them, it takes an average of 475 hours to write a novel. Just under twelve standard work weeks to complete a book. Not even three months.

Now, in all fairness, that’s about what it took me to write the first draft of –14-. But this number’s very misleading. It doesn’t count all the hours I put in before writing this book. There were only a handful of outline pages, sure, but that was still a few weeks of random scribbling and thinking. Not to mention all the books I wrote before it. Yeah, they count. Do you think Usain Bolt went straight to the Olympics without running one other race? D’you think he didn’t learn anything from those earlier races? That they didn’t help him?

I think (he said, pulling out his thick cardigan and pipe) there’s a lot of folks out there trying to convince us that time doesn’t matter. That spending time to get good at something is wrong. You shouldn’t have to practice at writing. You already know all the words! Just throw ‘em down and put that first draft up on Amazon! Why wait? Why listen to those gatekeepers who tell you you’re not ready for the Olymp– sorry, to be published! Ignore them and publish now.

What’s that? Don’t even know all the words? Well double-screw those gatekeepers. AI will write the story for me. That’s just as good as me writing it myself. I mean, if Usain Bolt sells me his gold medal, it means now I’m the fastest man alive, right? And I didn’t have to waste any time with all that “years of practice” nonsense. Heck, he doesn’t even have to sell it– AI can just copy his medal and now I’m the fastest man alive. It’s that easy. And heck, if AI copied his medal without permission and just stuck my name on it, well… I mean, I’ve still got the thing saying I’m the fastest man alive. That counts, right?

Whoooo. Sorry Getting a little warm in here. The ranty writing blog’s feeling especially ranty today, isn’t it?

Look, my point is, if you want to do this… don’t be worried about time. Yeah, it looks like she did something so much faster than you or he just popped up out of nowhere, but usually those numbers are just what’s on the surface. You’re only seeing a small part of the writing iceberg. We all had to put the hours in. You’re going to have to put the hours in.

I’ve mentioned here again and again how much writing I’ve done (and still do!) that nobody’s ever seen. So many half-completed (or fully completed!) books, comics, stories, and screenplays. So much stuff. But it’s all experience. It’s training.

Because you’re never going to make it to the Olympics without training.

Next time, I’d like to talk to you about paint. And Arabic grammar.

Until then, go write.

I’d already planned this week’s topic and then the writing discourse, as some call it, veered toward length anyway. So call it happy coincidence. Or serendipity.

Like, we’ve talked before about how long it takes to write a book. Some folks consider the starting point when they started outlining. Some consider it when the idea first struck them. And others say they started writing when they typed Chapter One.

And when did I start writing? When I was eight and blocking out original Star Wars stories in my Kenner Death Star playset? When I started using my mom’s massive electric typewriter? When I first started submitting stuff? When I started writing the first novel I actually finished? When I quit my film job to start writing full time? When I quit that job to start writing fiction full time? Any of these is a valid starting point, but they cover about thirty years.

Actually, before I talk about next time—if you happen to be of the reviewing type and have access to NetGalley, my new novel The Broken Room is now there and can be requested. For the rest of you… holy crap, only eighteen more days!

So, I talked about prologues recently, and I wanted to toss out one more thought on them. Well, y’know, one more for now. This one’s an easy warning flag to look for as I’m trying to figure out if my prologue is worth saving or not. It’s not a guaranteed catch, but I’d bet at least three out of four times, that flag’s popped up for a good reason.

If you’ve ever followed along with my Saturday geekery, you know a common B-movie complaint I have is the opening where everyone dies. A bunch of people show up, have some bare bones character development, maybe flash some skin… and then die horribly. Usually by monster, but sometimes it’s a serial killer. Or lava.

Anyway, there’s a slight offshoot to this, and I’ve seen it in book manuscripts too. It’s when our main story doesn’t start until

SIX WEEKS LATER

You’ve seen this, yes? I’d guess 83% of the time that opening scene’s about someone dying. Or doing something vague and “mysterious.” Or maybe it’s really clear what’s going on but it just feels irrelevant because, seriously, who are any of these people?

And then we flip the page and see that header right under “Chapter Two.” Or maybe it got a page of its own. In the movie, they probably did a fade-to-black and then maybe a little chyron at the bottom of the next shot—Two Years Later

Like I said, this isn’t a guaranteed problem. Not so much a red flag as maybe a safety orange one.

And also, just to be clear, the problem isn’t the timestamp (so to say) itself. Just like with prologues, the problem doesn’t magically vanish just by saying “Okay, I won’t tell the reader it’s four months later, I’ll just let them figure it out.” This isn’t going to take care of anything and it’s probably going to cause more problems.

Y’see, Timmy, that tag is a warning to my reader—and it should be to me. It’s making it clear just how disconnected this opening is from the actual story on the temporal measuring tape. And if it’s that set apart from my main story… how important is it?

Seriously, look at all the different rules and conditions we’ve talked about before when it comes to prologues. No, go look—I linked to most of them up above. I’d bet you four out of five times, if the story opens with a scene or chapter that gets followed with SIXTEEN DAYS LATER (or something similar, don’t get pedantic), it’s breaking a bunch of those rules. Which means I’ve probably got an unnecessary opening. Heck, my manuscript might be a lot stronger without it.

Sure, this isn’t an absolute. There are lots of examples of stories that start here and then jump days, weeks, or months ahead. But there’s also really solid reasons why those examples work with those stories. We can break down exactly why that separation between then and now is so important for this book or movie.

So if you find out you’ve added that flag, maybe take a moment and give that opening a good look. Does that separated beginning really add anything? What does the big distance between them bring to my story? What does pointing out that distance add to it?

So says the guy who just started a new book, and the only thing on page five is

ONE THOUSAND YEARS LATER 

Next time, there’ll be some more experience to share with you.

Until then, go write.

It’s Thursday morning and it struck me that I don’t have anything ready for the ranty blog. I’ve had a few different ideas rattling around in my head for posts about endings and comedy and jargon. But they’re all kinda big things and a bit… delicate? I don’t want to be giving bad, half-thought-out advice, and I’m not 100% sure that I have good advice on these precise topics quite yet. Thus all the rattling around in my head.

Or maybe those are LEGO bricks? Might be. Really, anything goes in 2020.

Hey, speaking of years and what’s possible and what’s acceptable, I realized I could babble on for a minute or two about a topic that pops back up every four or five months.

See, I recently watched an adaptation of something I loved many years back. And, being a proper nerd who read and re-read the original and then read it again a seventeenth time, I picked out little changes here and there. I mean, yeah, it’s an adaptation. Things are going to change. They always do because they need to. But these were different changes. A lot of them were in how people were addressed. How other people reacted to them. Nothing gigantic, but it stood out to me because—as I said—I was a big fan of the original.

Okay, fine, I was nitpicking.

Anyway, I can’t remember at what point in the movie it clicked, but it hit me that the movie had updated a lot of the original story’s views on sexuality and gender. Just little tweaks, nothing that affected the plot in any way. But the movie was a bit more modern, inclusive, and—in a few places—a little less mocking.

I thought Good on them.

But then, shortly afterward, I had another moment. Because, hang on a minute, I’d read this many, many times back in those formative years and I’d never noticed any places where people were excluded or mocked or anything like that. The book was fine. Was this movie overreacting? Were they just changing things in the adaptation to please a tiny, vocal minority?

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized ohhhhhhhh no. No they weren’t. I just didn’t notice because, at the time… I was cool with all of that. My views then echoed a lot of the views of, well, then. Just like the book did.

This book was big for me. If someone asked me, it’d probably end up on my personal list of “twelve most influential books/authors” or something like that. But… yeah, it’s got some flaws. The book is a fixed artifact of thenand there are aspects of it that the world has moved past. And, thankfully, I’ve moved past.

It’s a rough thing to go back and realize things you loved in the past don’t quite measure up anymore. Sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in… well, really big ones. I re-read a classic sci-fi novel a year or two back and it terrified me with some of its views on sex. Re-read another formative series to my partner when she was really sick and discovered wow was there a lot of casual racism in it. Just a few weeks ago I watched one of my favorite comedy movies from my teens, one I must’ve seen this at least a dozen times (yay USA Up All Night) and holy crap that was just full-on, no question sexual assault, arguably attempted rape from the main character. That was seriously uncomfortable to watch.

And I get why admitting this sort of thing can be tough for people. To admit these early, formative works are flawed. That the people who made them were flawed. Because admitting this means opening ourselves up to the idea we might be flawed. We might’ve absorbed views and lessons that, in retrospect, were not good.  It’s painful to think the movie adaptation of our life might get that same horrified reaction.

The world always changes. It progresses, it moves forward, and hopefully… we move with it. We learn more. We understand more. This sounds really dumb to say, but I’m very happy my views have grown and evolved since I was five. Or fifteen. Or twenty-five. Not on everything, but on a lot of things. It’s not weakness to say I’ve changed my views—it’s growth.

This doesn’t mean we have to abandon those old, formative works or throw them on bonfires. But we need to be honest and acknowledge what they really are… even when it means a bit of apology and internal cringing on our part. I can say this book and that book are on my list of formative things because… well, they were. I can’t deny it. They’re part of why I’m a writer today.

But I don’t need to embrace them or constantly defend them. I can admit their flaws—some minor and some seriously glaring—even if it possibly means admitting some flaws of my own. Because in writing and in life, I can’t improve if I never admit that I need improvement.

Anyway… just some random thoughts. I know other folks have said similar things in a better way.
 
Next time…

Well, as always, if anyone’s’ got a specific question, feel free to drop it in the comments below. Or over on a Writers Coffeehouse videoif you want to get answers from better writers. And if not, maybe I’ll sort out some of those bigger ideas to talk about.

Until then… go write.