Category: tips

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!

Okay, so… I’m flailing a bit right now. I think I’ve mentioned our two sick cats, yes? Then I ended up one of the many, many people who caught covid at SDCC (despite being masked). I isolated pretty quick, but it wasn’t a big surprise when my beloved tested positive a few days later.

So life’s been fun here.

But let’s talk about you and your life.

And your writing.

So, as promised last week, here’s a simple tip for checking what kind of shape my story’s in. Pick something you’ve written—it can be completed or a work in progress or whatever. It’s okay if it’s not fully written out. I just need to know it.

Now I just want to tell the story. Not word for word, more like beat for beat. Just tell it like you and I are sitting at a bar or hanging out or whatever. Maybe it’s a very casual pitch session or something like that. That’s the level of “telling my story” I’m aiming for.

Have I ever talked about pitching? Maybe I should do that at some point. Would that be interesting to anyone?

Anyway, now that I’ve got this simplified story in my head… write it down. Go for speed. Seriously, we’re not worried at all about typos or grammar here. Run-on sentences are fantastic for this. I just want to fill a page and tell the story as quickly as possible.

Go!!!

Okay, got it?

Now I want to go through this abbreviated version or my story and look for conjunctions. Specifically and, but, and or. Yes, just like Conjunction Junction. ha ha, you’re old if you know what that means.

Everywhere there’s an and (or a plus, also, in addition, or so on) odds are that’s me character- or worldbuilding to some extent. It’s me expanding on things, adding details and facts and more details. Every place there’s a but (however, although, you get the idea) that’s conflict. We want this, but unfortunately that. And everywhere there’s an or, there’s a good chance it involves one of my characters making a decision.

Knowing this, it’s real easy for me to look at things and say, huh… my story seems kind of short on conflict, doesn’t it? Maybe my protagonist doesn’t really seem to make that many active choices. It’s possible there’s so much going on that nothing’s ever really explained.

Simple, yes?

Now, right up front, this isn’t an ironclad, infallible test. There’s a chance I did some weird phrasing at some point and managed to skip a conjunction or two. By nature of rushing through, there’s stuff I probably left out. Other things I over-simplified. And that’s going to affect how I put things down in my page of text. So again, not a perfect test.

But maybe I could also ask myself… why did that point get left out when I knew I should be listing all the key things? If it’s not an important thing, but I want to use it to balance out all the things that are important… maybe that’s worth looking at a little closer. This is one of those exercises that can always give me a little more if I’m open to looking at it.

And that’s your quick and easy tip for the week.

In other news…

Like, I mentioned up top, my life’s been kind of hectic lately, and to be honest… since consolidating things here the ranty writing blog isn’t getting anywhere near the interest/ response it used to. Which was never gigantic to begin with. I don’t know if it’s because I moved it over here and a lot of folks didn’t follow? Or maybe it’s just another sign of social media collapsing and people just don’t know I’m posting? Perhaps we’re just all flailing on the internet now, trying to be heard and seen? Maybe I’ve gotten very boring and repetitive and not offering the tips people are looking for. Any of these is plausible.

Whatever it is, I’ve decided to scale the blog back to biweekly for a while. That and the newsletter—have you signed up for the newsletter? It’s completely free—will still keep things coming here. Oh, crap, and I really need to update the FAQ, too.

And, of course, if anyone wants to ask any writing-related questions, I’ll still do my best to answer them.

Next time… maybe I’ll talk about three act structure real quick.

Until then, go write.

I almost didn’t do this one because I couldn’t figure out the exact way to phrase it, and it’s obviously an important one. Wouldn’t want someone to miss out because I used the wrong word. Plus, to be honest, I’m waaaaaaaay behind this week between a birthday weekend combined with StokerCon weekend and friends in town and a shingles vaccine that made me kind of useless for a day, so I almost didn’t do this at all.

But here I am. And here you are. So let’s do this.

Are you ready for the ultimate networking tip? You should probably get ready to write this down. It’s going to change everything for you. Bookmark this page, at the very least. Right now, before we go any further.

Damn. I could’ve had t-shirts made up. Finally an excuse for a merch store…

Anyway, ready? Here it is. My ultimate networking tip that’s going to make your attempts at networking so much easier, more efficient, and much, much more effective. Ready?

Stop trying to network.

Seriously.

Just stop.

I got to see a bunch of writer friends this past week, and—especially with StokerCon as the backdrop—I thought a bit about how we’d met. How we connected. And so often it was really mundane, non-writery things. My first real conversation with two writers I’m friends with was about Doctor Who (and weirdly enough, now that I think about it, both were Dalek-related). Another one was about fencing (the with-swords type). One time I was talking with someone and discovered we both had a connection to the weird little amusement park in my hometown. Plus so many chats about the film industry and different aspects of it.

And yeah, sometimes we’d talk books. Rarely our own, but other people’s we’d enjoyed or loved or perhaps even quietly been, y’know, less than impressed with. Or publishing. Many long talks about publishing, sales, marketing, social media, all that sort of stuff.

But the key thing is, I wasn’t trying to bond with them over any of this. It wasn’t a calculated ploy. It was just stuff that came up. Things we were interested in. They were the kind of casual conversations you’d have at someone’s cookout or a party or a random bar meet-up.

I know I’ve said this before but active networking is dead. It’s been dead for decades. Seriously, people were pushing it as the big secret to Hollywood success thirty years ago and you might notice that Hollywood’s still just as difficult to break in to. And then this belief slipped over into publishing circles and… well, I’m sure most of you know how easy it is to succeed in publishing these days.

Simple truth is active networking has never worked and never will. It just comes off an weird, intrusive, pushy, and sometimes just flat-out creepy. And I know some folks would respond by saying hey, if there’s only a one in a million chance of it happening, that’s still a chance! Someone just told me recently that’s how it was explained to them.

But here’s the thing. It’s also a 999,999 in a million chance of being labeled as weird, intrusive, pushy, or maybe creepy. So what do you think’ll happen when that one in a million editor/agent talks to any of their colleagues about this writer who just showed up in their mailbox…?

So stop networking. Right now. No more handing out business cards to every single person you meet. Please, please, please stop showing up places or randomly mailing things. Don’t seek people out just so they’ll carry you further along the path you want to walk. And I’m begging you not to give some guru money for their very exclusive networking event that will take your career to the next level.

Y’see, Timmy, don’t worry about networking. Just make friends. Friends you actually care about and respect and share interests with and like being with.

Believe me, we all need friends in this industry.

Next time, I’d like to talk about what happened last time.

Until then, go write.

I’ve got a big birthday coming up—a double number birthday—so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about health and exercise. We’ve turned about half our garage into an exercise area, and I try to get out there at least three times a week (preferably four, but at least three) to stretch and do weights for 30 or 40 minutes. I’m also trying to be better about doing at least an hour on the treadmill. And if that fails, we also live right on a canyon, so there’s always a good hike right there.

Seems like a lot for an old guy, right? Well, part of this is my ongoing desire to see the 22nd century, but that’s a whole other story. A lot of it, though is just a general desire to exercise, well… everything. If you’ve been following me for a while, you may remember me talking about working with a physical trainer named Jerzy. He was really big on balance with his workouts. Some days were more reps, others were more about weight. Some days favored arms and shoulders, others favored legs and core.

He was big on working the body as a whole, because focusing too much usually meant getting kind of out of proportion. You’ve seen guys like that, right? The ones who over-work their arms and shoulders and usually end up, well, skipping leg day.

And a lot of time, this sort of partial exercise actually interferes with their actual goals. They want to look good, but they twist up their posture. They try to build stamina, but they actually end up weaker and slower because they’ve only worked out one or two parts of the bigger, overall system.

So what does all this exercise stuff have to do with writing?

I’ve met some people who do nothing but write. Write, write, write, write. I’ve seen pro writers brag about never taking vacations or even just a day off. Hell, years back I had one aspiring writer excuse their lack of familiarity with a popular book series by saying “real writers don’t have time to read.”

And I can’t help but notice that a lot of the time these folks… aren’t actually producing that much. For all their non-stop work, their output is… kind of average. In frequency and, well, quality.

Now, this is just my personal opinion, but I think in a lot of ways the brain works a lot like the rest of my body. I can exercise it and train it. Repetition can build good habits and reflexes.

But I can’t over-focus on just one aspect of it. Because that’s when things get off balance and grow… well, distorted. The exercise doesn’t help as much as it could because I’ve overworked that one element without working anything else.

You know what most of the other successful, prolific writers I know have in common? They’ve got other interests. I know writers who are into painting and photography and drawing. I know some who run, do martial arts, play basketball, box, and fence. A few of them are musicians. A bunch of them cook—like serious prep time, multiple-burners cook. And sooo many of them play games– video, tabletop, and miniature.

Me? I make a point to take at least one day off every week. A day to do something different. Something that lets me. I make my brain solve completely different types of problems than the ones it gets during the week. I tend to start the day with lawn and garden work, and then I build model robots and LEGO sets and paint little toy soldiers. I focus on shape and color and spatial relations

Plus, during lockdown, I got really into cooking. Italian food. Korean food. Pizza. I like making dinner for my beloved. I like that it requires actual prep and usually more than one pan. That happens several times during the week.

And yeah, I’m trying to squeeze in some exercise, too.

Take a moment. Take a breath. Try doing something else—anything else—and exercise a few different mental muscles. It’ll help your writing in the long run. Honest. And maybe try some actual exercise, too. Increasing blood flow is never a bad thing. That’ll help your writing, too.

Next time… well, like I said, I’ve got a birthday coming up, so I’ll probably bore you with some deep thoughts of some kind.

Oh! And StokerCon is a week from today. I’m not actually attending, but it’s right here in my city, barely ten minutes away. So I may lurk at the bar and say hi to some folks. Maybe you’ll be one of them.

Until then… go write.