Category: tips

Hey! I’m here encouraging you! FEEL ENCOURAGED!!!

Well, as I’m writing this we just passed the halfway point for the month, which means we’re halfway through The Writing Exercise That Used To be Known As NaNoWriMo (I’m working on a good acronym).

Hopefully you’re still going. Working on any project starts out fun. It’s great at the beginning, when we can just sort of be a firehose of ideas. We can spray clever dialogue and cool action beats and creepy moments everywhere. Cool thing, cool thing. cool thing, damn writing is easy!

Of course, the tough thing is then at some point—weirdly enough, often right around that halfway mark—all this stuff needs to start tying together somehow. I’ve got to take all those clever/ cool/ creepy ideas and make something coherent out of them. And that means this just became work! And work sucks! I’m pretty sure at least one of you is reading this thinking “I wanted to be a writer so I wouldn’t have to work!”

Plus, NaNoWriMo was this sort of group activity, and without it suddenly we’re all just… y’know, sitting alone in our rooms typing for no real reason. There’s no prize. No actual deadline. It’s easy to miss a day or two, think about how much work it’d be to get back into it, and just say “Ehhhhh… I’m done.”

But you don’t want to give up now. We’re on the downhill slope now. It’s half done. Yeah, it is. You don’t need to hit any set word count, you just need to keep at it. Again, this is more about doing it—sitting down and writing as much as you can, as often as you can—for the course of the month.

And yes… it’s going to feel like work sometimes. I wish I could tell you it doesn’t, that there’s a point when it’s going to be nonstop fun. But I’m not going to lie to you. Somedays you just have to sit there and glare at the screen and pound the keyboard until you figure out how Ashley believably ends up with the canopic jar when Devon didn’t’ know how to do it. But the cool thing is, it’s your work. You’re doing it for you. For your story. And nobody can write this story except you.

Also… this is supposed to be a first draft. Don’t worry about too many things lining up. First drafts can be gloriously messy things. Heck, my most recent first draft had a blank page with <KILL FRED HERE> on it. That’s it.

For now, just keep going. You’re more than halfway there. You, as the kids say, have got this.

And hey—my offer from last time still stands. For November, this is your writing community space. Post your achievements, frustrations, questions here and I promise you I’ll respond within the day 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.

Next time… well, next time’s just in a couple of days. But since I just turned in edits on one book and I’m working through the third draft of another, I figure I’d talk about drafts and revisions.

Until then, go write!

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.