Category Archives: Writing

Writer’s Block: Three Strategies to Beat It

The Complete Writer

Section IX: Creative Strategies

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[48]

Writer’s Block: Three Strategies to Beat It

Back in the day when I was a working journalist, various writers’ conferences would invite me to speak. Invariably, aspiring freelance writers would ask that classic question: How do you cope with writer’s block?

Well, I didn’t: reporting on assignment is not an activity that elicits writer’s block. A reporter an artiste does not make. The collected flip answers lacked something in the helpful department:

  • Visualize your byline on a paycheck’s Pay to the Order of line.
  • Imagine your editor’s response when you call to say you’ll be late on deadline.
  • Write a letter to your mom describing all the things you learned on assignment. The story will write itself after that.
  • Go play with the cat.
  • Pour yourself a (glass of wine, cup of coffee, can of soda).
  • Go for a walk.
  • Quit with the drama already and get down to work!

Fiction, however, is one heckuva lot harder to write than nonfiction. So much so, in fact, that you really do reach impasses where you know what you want to say (you think) and you imagine you know what your characters are going to do and you can envision the time and the place and the action but it just won’t come out in words!

Nothing makes coping with this phenomenon easy, but a few strategies have come to hand. Try this one, for example:

§

Enter your notes, no matter how fragmentary, at the bottom of a chapter or scene. Use these notes as cues to help jump-start the narrative and keep it rolling around.

§

In this problematic scene, Lhored Brez of Grisham Lekvel (he’s roughly equivalent to an Anglo-Saxon king) visits the widow and two sister wives of one of his followers (Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos), murdered while catting around the trading center of the known world. Bett Kubnath of Cham Fos is a potentate in her own right. Her son Lenn is a chip off his father’s block, not an altogether flattering comparison. The action is seen through the eyes of Hapa Cottrite, a kind of public intellectual who has been sent into exile among the backward peoples of the north.

Draft

She nodded patiently. “Let’s sit down.” She waved us all toward the fine leather and wool chairs and benches that populated the hall. Lhored was directed into a comfortable armchair and I was seated nearby. The three women pulled up smaller chairs to make a conversation circle around Lhored, the two mayrs, and me. Food and drink appeared, borne by two [women who look working class] and a young boy, and we were all served, the solid stoneware dishes a luxury after our weeks of eating off tin plates.

“You’ve heard the news we bring,” Lhored began.

“Yes. We heard before Mak’s men reached Rittamun. One of the outlying herdsmen brought word a couple of days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She let this rest briefly. “They say he didn’t die in battle. Can you . . . will you tell us how this happened?”

Lhored looked pained. This, he had said more than once, was the conversation he dreaded, and here it was upon him. “Bett,” he said, “we don’t really know.”

Notes at the end of the file:

What is going on here? What is Hapa observing? Move forward into some other part of this chapter and then come back here. This piece is going nowhere!

Lhored is about to speak when Lenn shows up. Lenn is surly, aggressive, and obnoxious. He demands to know what happened to Mitch. What was he doing out there alone? Then he demands to know why they let him go out alone and D says he tried to go along and was rejected & the others say that’s so. They work their way around to saying HC was sent as a gift from the seeyo; they’d prob’ly better tell them about the elaborate funeral and the loot first.]

 All right. Let’s try that. It’s better than working, anyway. I guess.

Next draft

The front door opened, letting in a beam of light and the shadow of someone passing through the vestibule. A tall, slender young man, still beardless, entered the hall. Dressed in work clothes and boots, he pulled off a pair of riding gloves and offered a hand to Lhored, who, with Mak and Jode, stood to greet him.

”Grisham Lekvel,” he said, accepting a firm squeeze on the shoulder from the brez. “And gentlemen: thank you for coming. Mother,” he addressed the kubnath, who remained seated, “sorry I’m late. We were working the stallion up on the other side of Nole’s Butte. I came as soon as Wood let us know you were on the way up the road.”

”It’s good to see you, Lenn,” Lhored replied. “And good you were able to be here.”

He gestured as though he was about to introduce me to the young new kubna, obviously Mitchel of Cham Fos’s son, but Lenn interrupted.

”Lhored,” he said, “let’s get down to business. What the hell happened to my father?”

Meji gasped softly. The other two widows glanced at Lhored expectantly. Jode and Mak looked on, stolid as ever.

If Lhored was annoyed or otherwise perturbed, he didn’t let it show. “He was murdered,” he said.

”Yeah, so we’re told. How did that happen? And who did it?”

”He died on a street in Lek Doe. Apparently the killer was a thief that jumped him.”

”That doesn’t make any sense. My father would take out anyone who tried to bring him down.”

”He probably didn’t see the guy come up on him. It was stone dark that night.”

”Night?”

”Mm hm. We think it was pretty late. He’d been out on the town. And he was in a lane where all the shops were closed.”

”Come on, man! What the hell was he doing out in the middle of the night, on some godforsaken back street in Lek Doe where nothing was going on?” Behind him, Bett sent Lhored a narrow-eyed [CAUTIONARY? GIMLET? PIERCING? SHARP???] look and shook her head, almost imperceptibly, no.

”We don’t know, Lenn. He must have gotten turned around and lost his way.”

”How the devil could something like that happen? Who was with him?”

”No one.”

”No one? What was he doing out there?”

Lhored regarded Lenn while he let this set for a second or two. “He was celebrating, lad. Far as we can tell, he’d just come from a saloon.”

Salon was more like it, I thought. Liana’s place did let the liquor flow, so one could call it a bar. Sort of.

“Celebrating? If he was partying, why wasn’t anybody with him?”

Notes at the end of the file

At least we’ve got some conflict going on, between the chief warlord and the surly young son of the deceased potentate, heir to his father’s rank.

We haven’t gotten around to the delicate matter of why Mitchel refused to take anyone with him when he went out for a night on the town—he was haunting his favorite houses of ill repute—nor have we explained the potentially explosive matter of why Hapa Cottrite is present: he was sent by the town’s governing councilors as a kind of “gift” to express their regret at the loss of a powerful and dangerous warlord, their hidden motive being to exile a troublemaker to the farthest of all possible boondocks. But at least we have something in glowing little computer characters.

§

Remember that gold is a soft metal. Your golden words are malleable—NOT graven in granite!

§

Regard what you’ve written as draft at all times. Never stop revising. And be aware that it’s a lot easier to revise and rework than it is to choke out brand-new creative content. Just get it down on paper. Or on disk. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Not the first time around, not the second time around, not the third time around.

Knowing that you can always jimmy the copy, add to the copy, cut the copy, totally change the copy makes it a lot easier to get something out.

Just write it, and don’t worry if it isn’t perfect.

Chapter 1, take 1

It should feel good, Kay thought. Watching this happen should feel good. He ought to feel back-slapping, hollering, falling-down-drunk happy, or at least for God’s sake like raising a swig of whiskey to the moment.

He and his cousin, Mitch–Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos–stood atop a promontory, just a low butte, actually, about a hundred feet tall, and surveyed the battle’s aftermath. Fallon, still clad in his leather chest armor, saw them climbing up here. He followed and joined them a few minutes after they stopped at the bluff’s edge. When he reached the two, he shook Kay’s hand, punched Mitch on the shoulder, congratulated them on a fine day’s work.

And the men had done a day’s work. Together the three looked out over the scene. Hengliss allies–Okan and A’oan marching under the Okan brez, Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel–had taken the town in three weeks flat. It was an incredible feat.

Roksan, the principal city of their principal enemy, should have been impregnable. But they had shown it was not. Now the men, scruffy irregulars, most of them, pressed into duty by the obligations of their betters and not because they knew much about soldiering, spread over the plain before the burning town’s gate. No one down there seemed to suffer any qualms. Their noise reached the hilltop as unruly hubbub like a huge outdoor party gone too far in drink. Men laughed and shouted, a few surviving women squealed as the boys had their fun with them, horses and wagons rattled around. Guys compared plunder, traded booty–some had set up open-air markets to trade or sell the loot they’d carried from the city before the heat pushed them out.

A brown and gray pillar twisted upward toward white clouds that galloped before a chasing wind, and Kay knew the smart breeze would keep those fires going until they had done their job. The place would burn to the ground before they smoldered out. The flames would leave a pile of ashes, maybe a few blackened rafters, charred bricks. And scorched bones.

Fal, wiry and saturnine, his dark beard and mustache trimmed as if to cut down wind resistance, offered his boda to the two older men. They accepted the liquor cheerfully. The drink passed between them while they gazed at the scene below.

“Beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Mitchel remarked.

“Oh, yeah,” Kay said. “That it is.”

“Must do your heart good.”

“You bet.”

“How long has it been for you?” Fal asked.

“Twenty-eight years,” Kay replied.

This actually was not the first but  the third or fourth time I’d tried to craft this opening scene in Kaybrel’s point of view. Hated it the first time; still wasn’t thrilling me. So I tried a new tack.

Chapter 1, take 10 or 12:

Fallon Mayr of Cheyne Wells rarely gave himself over to speculation. If on this good day you had asked him how the Hengliss tribes came to see themselves as one being, a living organism whose limbs and body and soul formed a single piece—or even if they did—he would have laughed. He would direct your attention to the pillar of smoke twisting skyward where Roksan burned, and he would turn your question obliquely around. He would ask you, then, had they not, the bands of Okan and A’o fighting as one under the Brez Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel, had they not done a fine thing?

He passed the lambskin flask that was making the rounds among several companions to Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek. Bova, a chunky flaxen-bearded northerner whose heft made Fal’s long, wiry frame look slight by comparison, lifted the boda in a friendly salute, swigged its unrefined contents as though he were taking a deep drink of water, and passed it to Kristof Mayr of Oshin.

“That was one hot maneuver you two pulled inside them gates,” Robin Mayr of O’a remarked to Fal. A slender, muscular young man with a smooth chestnut-colored beard, he accepted the boda from Kristof and lifted it vaguely in Fal’s direction.

“Mostly Kay’s idea,” Fal said. He shrugged as though he’d had little to do with the swath they’d ripped through the defenders in the long chaos after the Hengliss had breached the enemy city’s entrance.

“Bull!” said Jag Bova. “He couldn’t have done it by himself. And I’ll tell you—when he takes them kind of ideas into his head, I’m sure as hell glad I’m not the one who has to fight on his flank.”

Fallon laughed with the others. But he was glad, too, that it wasn’t Bova. He wouldn’t have traded his place at Kay’s side for any honor the brez could dream up.

“He had his reasons for going after the bastards like that,” Kristof remarked.

“Must have felt damned good,” Robin added. “If it’d been me, I’d have tried to squash every cockroach I could catch.”

“Yeah. Well, we just about did that,” Fal said. “Not too many of ’em left in there.”

Even where they were standing, a mile away, heat from the fires burning the sacked Espanyo city reached them. It took the chill off the cool air that drifted down the distant snow-covered Achpie and Serra peaks flanking the wide bottomland along the Wakeen Ribba.

“Ain’t none of ’em gonna crawl out of that place no more, no how,” Robin agreed. He passed the drink back to Rozebek.

Bova raised the flask to that, and they all murmured their appreciation of Robin’s whiskey-laced profundity.

“There goes your kubna with his cousin now,” said Bova. “Looks like they want to get a view of the doings.”

By “your kubna” he meant Kaybrel Kubna of Moor Lek, the man to whom Fal, Robin, and Kristof owed their first loyalty. The cowndee of Rozebek belonged to the house of Puns, and Jag Bova served its kubna, Rikad of Puns.

They watched Kaybrel and Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos stride through the festive troops gathered on the plain before the burning city. Kay was carrying his leather helmet in one hand, his silver-streaked hair flowing loose around his shoulders. To Fal’s eye, he looked tired, but the others didn’t see that. The two kubnas cleared the mob and headed toward a low butte that rose above what had a few hours earlier been a battlefield. They disappeared around the side of the promontory, seeking the gentle rise up the hill’s backside.

“How long has it been for him?” Robin asked.

“What? Since Moor Lek fell?” Fallon read meaning into Robin’s question. “I think he said . . . no, it was the kubnath who said that. Maire said it was twenty-eight years ago this spring.”

“Twenty-eight years! She wasn’t even born then, eh?”

“Neither were the rest of us,” Fal replied, and what he said applied to everyone there but Jag Bova, the only man among them to have reached his early thirties.

Sometimes if you can’t move forward with the new writing, going back and revising material you already have will help. Notice how radically different Take 2 is from the first effort: a different character’s point of view, an entirely different set of characters with the protagonist taken off center stage, facts presented in a slightly different context through the mouths of different characters, and a different kind of characterization of a central figure.

Every time you rewrite a scene from beginning to end, it improves. Often, even very small changes—a turn of phrase here, a gesture there, a detail or a word choice—have a large effect.

You may never use this evolving material. Or you may use some of it, whole cloth or much massaged. Whatever becomes of the drafts, it will give you some insight into what’s going on with your writing, and that may be all you need to put your Jeep back in gear.

[1] https://writersresidence.com/blog/2009/12/02/samples-of-query-letters-that-work/

[2] “The Good Order: Routine, Creativity, and President Obama’s U.N. Speech,” The New York Times, September 25, 2014.

[3] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf

Jump-Starting the Creative Engine

The Complete Writer

Section IX: Creative Strategies

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[47]

Jump-Starting the Creative Engine

A client, needing to do rewrites of several chapters, suddenly felt a bit stymied. Mostly, I think, this happened because he was feeling tired and impatient to get finished. The end was in sight, and he really just wanted to get the book done!

While we were thinking about how he could re-energize himself for the last sprint, an Insight! occurred to me. And it’s an insight that appears to work.

Before inflicting it on him, I experimented with it on a passage of my own novel, where I also had run out of gas and dropped the narrative.

Here’s the idea: Whatever genre you’re writing in requires you to use a set of techniques specific to that genre. In the case of fiction, for example, these would be dialogue, narrative, description, setting, characterization, point of view, and the like. Other genres require other techniques—poetry, for example, demands more attention to imagery, iconography, meter, form, and the like.

When you feel you simply can not move forward with a scene, try writing that scene in some other genre. Instead of prose fiction, what if you wrote the passage as a scene in a stage play or a movie script? What if you wrote it in verse? What if you wrote it as a letter from one of the characters to one of the other characters? Or as a letter from you to your best friend?

With fresh ideas and action on paper, now go back and convert what you’ve written into the genre you’re actually writing.

Different genres require different writing techniques. Engaging these different modes requires you to engage a different set of mental skills and attitudes. If you take what you want to say and write it in a different genre, you force yourself to shift gears.

Let’s see how this worked on the passage of mine that ran out of energy.

First draft, replete with frustrated notes to self:

Shortly after midday, Jag Bova’s bands crested the pass through the low hills that cradled the southeast end of Rozebek Town. Warm as an Indian summer, the pleasant autumn afternoon was still and clear. A sapphire sky, unblemished but for a few distant, fluffy clouds, rested over the brown and gilded farmlands below. In the orchards, apple and walnut trees had already dropped their leaves, but here and there a maple or a pear clung to its scarlet and gold.

When he saw the village spread out before them, Bova’s heart filled with joy. Narrow lanes led out from the town plaza like spokes on a wagon wheel, the spaces between them filled with stone houses built four and six and sometimes even eight to a compound. Huddled together around common walls, the dwellings gained a little extra shelter from winter’s deepest cold. And there, entwined within the village, stood his own home, Rozebek Keep. Its high defensive fortifications were built of local gray stone, as was his private family compound’s tower that rose above the stokhed walls.

Alone among the Okan aristocracy’s fortifications, the Mayr of Rozebek’s keep formed a part of its village. The people’s homes came right up to the moat, making the keep an island in a small lake of human activity. Usually a kubnath’s or a mayr’s keep and dwelling stood atop a low rise anywhere from half a mile to two miles from its village. This difference pleased Jag Bova. If anyone disapproved, they hadn’t ventured to complain.

No one was complaining now. Around him men cheered, hooted, and laughed, delighted to find themselves within sight of home. [THEY SHOULD PASS A WATCHTOWER—AN OLD PERSON—MALE, FEMALE? SHOULD COME OUT WITH A COUPLE OF KIDS TO GREET THEM.]

A distant sound wafted up the hillside: music. Horns and fiddles, drums and tambourines, whistles and ghitters and recorders and pipes rose a merry clamor down in the village.

Semel, [WHAT DOES HE LOOK LIKE?] Bova’s monja, grinned when he heard the racket. “The party’s started without us,” he said.

One of the other men overheard and added, “Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.”

“Little Mama’s a-callin’,” another voice exclaimed. Here and there, men broke out of line and started to run or jog ahead.

“Get a grip on those clowns,” Bova said to Semel.

“Whoa! Settle down there!” Semel shouted. A few marchers, rowdy and not inclined to settle anywhere just then, gave him puzzled glances.

“Now listen to that, boys!” Bova hollered. His large presence got immediate attention. “The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?”

“What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?” a grizzled fellow on the sidelines hollered back.

“Let’s play them a tune or three of our own,” Bova replied. “Let’s us get ourselves

lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, get the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town.”

A ripple of laughter washed over the company closest to Bova and Semel. “That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights,” someone remarked.

“That it will,” Bova said. “Into columns! Where are those pipers?”

The band began to fall into rough columns, and shortly two men with small bagpipes, a couple of drummers, and a fife player gathered at the head of the company. Meanwhile, Bova lifted bags of gear off his charger, loaded them on a pack pony, and climbed into the saddle. Semel scouted up company’s banner, unfurled it from its pole, and handed it up to Bova, who secured it to its saddle, where it waved cheerfully in the crystalline air.

DESCRIBE THE CHIVAREE

§

This was where I gave up. Wrote the second half of the chapter. Went on to another client’s work. Sent a bill. Came back. Gave up. Did some other paying work. Graded student papers. Came back . . . and so on. I simply could NOT get past this scene or move on to the next one.

Here’s what happened when I switched from narrative mode to screenplay mode:

Second draft:

Characters

Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek, late the recipient of the honorific “Snow-Killer,” a massive chunk of a man with blond hair and a thick, curly blond beard.
Samel: Bova’s second-in-command (“monja”)
Gray-Bearded Regular Soldier
Assorted impressed fighters in the raiding bands of Rozebek
Pipers
Fifer
Drummers
Lieze Mayreth of Rozebek: Bova’s only wife; in her early 30s, plump, pretty, and self-contained.
Ada: Lieze’s mother; Bova’s mother-in-law, an aging image of her daughter
Erysa: Bova and Lieze’s elder daughter, a pretty young woman of about 16, as blonde as her father.
Mandeh: Bova and Lieze’s younger daughter, about 12
Deke: Bova and Lieze’s young son, about 8
Townspeople of various ages and gender
Rand, Belindeh, and Cammish: townspeople assigned to watch duty
Willard: Belindeh’s grandson

Scene 1

The crest of a low hill above a fertile valley. At the forested hilltop, birds sing, squirrels call, and a hawk drifts overhead as if watching the procession. Below lie farmlands, pasture, and the town of Rozebek, dominated by its mayr’s keep. The time is past noon on a clear, crisp autumn day. Jag Bova and Samel are leading their rag-tag band of Fighting men, all of whom are tired and anxious to get home.

As they reach the trail’s summit, they pass a stone watchtower. Its occupants, Rand, Belindeh, and Cammish turn out to welcome them.

Rand is a teenaged boy, Belindeh a hungry-looking middle-aged woman, and Cammish, an old man. They are all dressed in the homespun clothing of the time a nd place. Like the men, Belindeh wears rough work dungarees rather than a skirt.

Rand, fairly bouncing out the tower’s door: Mister Mayr! Mr. Samel! God bless you!

Belindeh, following Rand by some yards, advances to BOVA with arms extended and hugs him.

Belindeh: Thank God you’re home. Thank God!

Bova shakes Rand’s hand while he’s being hugged by Belindeh. Cammish, supported by a walking stick and hobbling after the other two, takes Samel’s hand and then Bova’s.

Cammish: Where’ve you been, boys? We’ve been waiting dinner for you so long the food’s gone cold!

Rand: Where are my brothers? Are they with you, mayr?

Bova: Sure they are, lad. They’ll be down the line a ways.

Rand starts to make his way along the trail in search of his returning brothers.

Belindeh: And Willard? Did you bring my grandson back to me, Jag Bova?

Bova: Yes, ma’am. And hale and hearty he is. In fact, yonder he comes—in search of you, I reckon!

Belindeh and Willard spot each other at the same moment and fall into each others’ arms.

Samel, soto voce, with a look at Bova” Thank God for small favors.

Bova: Getting all three of them back here alive and in one piece is more than a small favor, Sam.

Samel responds with an affirmative nod and a grim smile.

Cammish: Tough campaign, was it?

Bova: Yessir, Mister Cammish. That it was. You’ll be hearing about it soon. And all winter long, I expect.

Cammish: I’m sorry to learn that, Jag Bova. How many men did we lose? If you don’t mind my asking?

Bova: Thirty-eight. That’s the ones who made it into the other world. More are coming home wounded. They’ll take some time to heal. Those that ever do.

Cammish falls silent briefly, staring toward the village below.

Cammish: The boy has already ridden into town on his mule, a-spreadin’ the word that you men be coming up the road. Then he come back to greet you all, looking for his brothers. Listen to that racket down there!

From the distant valley, a sound of music and celebration reverberates up the hillside. The men toward the front who can hear it laugh and jostle. Bova and Semel also smile and look pleased.

Semel, grinning: The party’s started without us.

Fighting Man 1: Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.

Fighting Man 2: Little Mama’s a-callin’!

Men break ranks and begin to run or jog ahead, down the trail.

Bova: Get a grip on those clowns!

Semel, shouting: Whoa! Settle down there!

Several men give Semel puzzled glances.

Bova swaggers in front of the restless Men: “Now listen to that, boys! The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?

Gray-Bearded Fighter: What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?

Bova: Let’s play them a tune or three of our own. Let’s us get ourselves lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, call the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town!

Men nearby laugh.

Fighter (ironically): That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights.

Bova (deadpan straight): That it will. Into columns! Where are those pipers?

Men begin to assemble into rough columns while Bova moves bags from his war horse to a pack pony. Two men with small bagpipes approach, followed by two drummers and a fife player. Bova mounts his horse, and Semel hands a banner up to him and Bova secures it to his saddle. It waves in the light breeze. Pipers, fifer, and drummers strike up a bright marching tune.

They march down the hill in a celebratory mood, the wounded riding in supply wagons. As they approach the town, townspeople come up the road, dancing to the sound of fiddles, drums, and horns. Women, children, and old men stream into the band of weary, road-worn men. Shouts of joy and relief ring out as family members find their wandering men. A few call out names repeatedly, getting no response.

Bova soon finds Lieze, Ada and his three children, proceeding up the road amid a knot of followers and friends. The moment Lieze spots Bova, she runs through the crowd to greet him. Ada grabs Mandeh and Deke, murmuring an admonition to let their parents say hello before rushing their father. Bova looks like he would melt into his wife if he could. He sinks his face in her long chestnut hair, which she has allowed to flow loose for the occasion.

Bova: Oh, my God, Lieze, I’ve missed you so!

Lieze hugs him tightly.

Lieze: We’ve all been worried about you. Thank God you’re home and safe.

Bova kisses her face and then plants a passionate kiss on her lips. A couple of men nearby cheer this. Lieze blushes. Bova laughs, takes her hands and spins her around him exuberantly. Ada approaches, the three children in tow.

Ada: Welcome home, son!

Ada and Bova hug. The three children can no longer be restrained. Deke jumps on his father, who easily lifts him for a hug. Bova puts him down and greets Mandeh and Erysa with hugs, too. The two younger children chatter excitedly at him. Erysa’s manner is more contained; she has a natural dignity like her mother’s.

The party of townspeople and returning fighters enters the town, many gravitating toward a park and paved square in the town center. Bova and his family go with them.

Lieze: We have a wonderful dinner for you—a lovely lamb, and your favorite sweet winter squash, and two grand pecan pies… And we have so much to catch up on. Wait until you hear what the kids have been up to all summer!

Bova smiles and laughs in undisguised pleasure.

Bova: What’s this son of mine been up to now?

Ada: He’s started to learn his fencing. Lieze decided he’s getting big enough to start some lessons, so old [NAME] has been coming to the keep every few days to work with him. And he’s been helping Mandeh and Erysa practice with the bow.

Bova: Is that so? Well, those two could shoot a walnut off a tree. And as for you, Mister Deke, can you hold your own against this Mandeh?

Deke: O’course I can! I’m so good now, I bet I can beat you, Dad!

Bystanders laugh. Mandeh rolls her eyes heavenward.

§

Interestingly, the stage-play iteration of the scene that I wrote so unhappily came out with a great deal more detail and action, with new characters, and with some convincing forward motion.

Writing stage directions forces you to articulate details that one too easily elides in writing narrative, simply because a fiction writer may have the large picture in his head and so presume that everyone else can see it. In a stage or movie script, you have to provide enough specifics to allow a stage designer, a costume designer, a director, actors, and a whole slew of other folks to bring that picture vividly to life for the audience.

The momentum established by the genre switch allowed me to keep rolling into the next scene, which eventually will bring the mayr and mayreth (approximately the equivalent of a Middle English duke and duchess) Jag Bova and Lieze to the problem of how to address the large number of families whose men were lost during the summer’s disastrous engagement with the enemy.

Third draft:

Shortly after midday, Jag Bova’s bands of weary, road-worn men crested the pass through the low hills that rose above Rozebek Town. Birds whistled in the hilltop forest, and a squirrel, still busy stashing acorns and pine nuts for winter, chattered shrilly as the men hiked past them. A hawk drifted overhead, looking for all the world like idle curiosity brought it to watching the procession pass.

The autumn afternoon was clear and crisp beneath a sapphire sky, unblemished but for a few distant, fluffy clouds. Below lay farmlands, pasture, and the town of Rozebek, dominated by its mayr’s keep. In the orchards, apple and walnut trees had already dropped their leaves, but here and there a maple or a pear clung to its scarlet and gold.

When he saw the village spread out before them, Bova felt his heart rise. Narrow lanes led out from the town plaza like spokes on a wagon wheel, the spaces between them filled with stone houses built four and six and sometimes even eight to a compound. Huddled together around common walls, the dwellings gained a little extra shelter from winter’s deepest cold. And there, wrapped within the village, stood his own home, Rozebek Keep. Its high defensive fortifications were built of local gray stone, as was his private family compound’s tower that rose above the stokhed walls.

Alone among the Okan aristocracy’s fortifications, the Mayr of Rozebek’s keep formed a part of its village. The people’s homes came right up to the moat, making the keep an island in a small lake of human activity. Usually a kubnath’s or a mayr’s keep and dwelling stood atop a low rise anywhere from half a mile to two miles from its village. This difference pleased Jag Bova. If anyone disapproved, they hadn’t ventured to complain.

A fieldstone watch tower stood at the height of the pass. Three villagers came out of the door at ground level to greet the arriving fighters. The first, a wiry youth barely more than a boy and not quite a young man, fairly bounced up the road.

“Mister Mayr! Mr. Samel! God bless you.” He bounded over and shook first Bova’s hand, then Samel’s.

The men at the front of the line pushed forward, pleased to see the first of their kin and friends that they’d laid eyes on in five months.

“Would that be Rand the cooper’s boy?” Someone said. Another laughed in unfeigned delight. “You’ve grown a good three inches!”

Shortly behind the lad came a tall, lank, and wrinkled woman clad in rough-cut homespun pants and shirt, her grey hair straggling out beneath a knitted woolen cap. She advanced to Bova with arms extended and wrapped him in a hearty hug.

“Thank God you’re home,” she exclaimed. “Thank God!”

“Sister Belindeh,” Samel greeted her, accepting the next round of handshakes and crushes. “You’ll be doing guard duty now?”

An even more grizzled man hobbled after her, supported by a walking stick. “Where have you been, boys?” the old fellow exclaimed. “We’ve been waiting dinner for you so long the food’s gone cold!”

A ripple of subdued laughter murmured through the men within earshot.

“Where are my brothers?” Rand asked. “Are they with you, mayr?”

“Sure they are, lad” Bova replied. “They’ll be down the line a ways.” Rand made his way up the trail to find his returning relatives.

“And Willard? Did you bring my grandson back to me, Jag Bova?” Belindeh asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bova said. “And hale and hearty he is. In fact, yonder he comes—in search of you, I reckon.”

Belindeh and Willard spotted each other in the same moment and fell into each others’ arms.

Samel glanced at Bova and said quietly, “Thank God for small favors.”

“Getting all three of them back here alive and in one piece is more than a small favor, Sam.”

His monja nodded and smiled grimly.

“Tough campaign, was it?” the old man asked, overhearing this.

“Yessir, Mister Cammish,” Bova agreed. “That it was. You’ll be hearing about it soon enough. And all winter long, I expect.”

“I’m sorry to learn that, Jag Bova,” said Cammish. “How many men did we lose? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Thirty-eight. That’s the ones who made it into the other world. More are coming home wounded. They’ll take some time to heal. Those that ever do.”

Cammish fell silent briefly, staring toward the village below. Then he said, “The boy has already ridden into town on his mule, a’spreadin’ the word that you men be climbing up the hill. Then he come back to greet you all, looking for his brothers. Listen to that racket down there!”

A distant sound wafted up the hillside: music. Horns and fiddles, drums and tambourines, whistles and ghitters and recorders and pipes rose a merry clamor down in the village.

Semel, Bova’s monja, grinned when he heard the racket. “The party’s started without us,” he said.

One of the other men overheard and added, “Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.”

“Little Mama’s a-callin’,” another voice exclaimed. Here and there, men broke out of line and started to jog ahead.

“Get a grip on those clowns,” Bova said to Semel.

“Whoa! Settle down there!” Semel shouted. A few marchers, rowdy and not inclined to settle anywhere just then, gave him uncertain glances.

“Now listen to that, boys!” Bova hollered. His large presence commanded immediate attention. “The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?”

“What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?” a grizzled fellow on the sidelines hollered back.

“Let’s play them a tune or three of our own,” Bova replied. “Let’s us get ourselves lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, get the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town.”

A ripple of laughter washed over the company closest to Bova and Semel. “That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights,” someone remarked, boldly sarcastic.

“That it will,” Bova said. “Into columns! Where are those pipers?”

The band began to fall into rough order, and shortly two men with small bagpipes, a couple of drummers, and a fife player gathered at the head of the company. Meanwhile, Bova lifted bags of gear off his charger, loaded them on a pack pony, and climbed into the saddle. Semel scouted up the company’s banner, unfurled it from its pole, and handed it up to Bova, who secured it to his saddle, where it waved cheerfully in the crystalline air.

§

Another draft to come. As you can see, a fair amount more is already in draft, ready to be transposed out of script format into narrative, description, dialogue, and whatnot.

This strategy was time-consuming. But it worked. And I suspect it’s no more time-consuming than sitting for minute after minute and hour after hour staring at an empty page or a blank screen.

If you’re worth your salt as a writer, you’ll write several drafts anyway. Why shouldn’t one of the drafts be in a different genre?

Managing the Creative Workload

The Complete Writer

Section IX: Creative Strategies

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[46]

Managing the Creative Workload

Creative workers, especially those of us who are self-employed, often find ourselves trying to cope with a workload that entails tackling too darned many things at once. Managing this workload can be a real challenge.

Normally, I organize my workdays and keep more or less on track by using to-do lists posted on white-boards, one hanging in the office and the other on the door that leads out to where the car awaits.

Sometimes, though, these may serve more to discourage than to help get work done.

Listing all the tasks that need to be done today leads one to try to accomplish 87 gerjillion things on deadline. And that is untenable.

Overload and the to-do list

One day I happened upon another approach.

What if you didn’t set yourself a slew of tasks, an endless to-do list, but instead aimed to get just one important thing done during any given day? That would free up the day to do things you would like to do (as opposed to have to do). And accomplishing one thing a day would mean five goals would get done during a week.

Five things accomplished in a week is a whole lot more than zero things accomplished in a week.

So on a Monday I set out to do the following:

  • Start building a Goodreads presence, somehow
  • Proofread 30 Pounds page proofs; order twenty hard copies to fulfill orders
  • Meet with client; work on his book
  • Post another Camptown Races book
  • Plug the latest Fire-Rider collection; update websites accordingly.

Five chores. By Thursday, I’d accomplished four of them.

I resisted listing any daily to-do chores. The goal was to get through five projects in a week.

Amazing results

Without the nagging pressure of a horde of tasks waiting in the wings, I found myself focusing on a given project for longer periods and with fewer self-imposed interruptions. The result: I got through a lot of work, including some unplanned extra chores for a client. This spun off quite a few other small chores that also got done . . . so in fact, more than five tasks were accomplished that week—before Friday rolled around.

Effectively what had happened is that setting fewer goals meant more things got done! Many, many more things.

The take-away message

Focusing on the bigger picture makes it easier to get moving, and five things to do in a week are less discouraging than ten in a day.

And if one strategy isn’t working, try something different. Even if it’s a tried-and-true strategy, sometimes changing gears (or getting a little help!) can make a big difference.

Making Time for Writing

The Complete Writer
Section VIII: The Writing Life:
Sittin’ by the Dock of the Bay?

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[44]

Making Time for Writing

A while back, New York Times editorialist David Brooks held forth on the daily habits of famous writers,[2] the implication being that if you want to be a famous writer (or even an infamous writer), you would be well advised to establish a regular schedule that devotes a set period to the work. Or, if you prefer, to The Work.

Plumbing the depths of Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Brooks reports that Maya Angelou arose each morning at 5:30, had coffee at 6:00, and then would set off at 6:30 to a hotel room she rented as a kind of office. There she would write from 7:00 a.m. to 12:30 or 2:00 p.m.

Anthony Trollope, on the other hand, would set a goal of 2,500 words a day, to be accomplished at the rate of 250 words every 15 minutes.

The examples are a little extreme. But the fact is, if you want to become a Writer with a Capital W, the number-one thing you have to do is apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. And you can’t do that when you’re trying to accommodate other people’s schedules or working around all the “I’d better get this done first” demands you set for yourself.

Some years ago, my department at Arizona State University brought a speaker to advise about strategies to help crank out the articles and books required to achieve tenure and, once tenured, to manage promotion to full professor.

He suggested we carve out a small window of time three times a week in which all we would do is work on the writing project. We did not have to write. We could research. We could plan. We could outline. We could just think. But whatever it was, it had to be related to the project at hand.

The time didn’t have to be long: even fifteen or twenty minutes. A half an hour would be good. An hour at most. Over time, you might extend it to a couple of hours. But don’t overdo it, he said. In any event, limit the time to a specific period, scheduled for a limited number of days per week.

This strategy has several advantages:

  1. It allows you to keep the spouse and the kids at bay. If they know that at a certain time you’ll be at their beck and call, they’re more likely to leave you alone for the time you’ve set aside.
  2. Three hours a week, while not much, is three hours more than you would work on your project otherwise.
  3. You can work up from a half-hour or an hour to an hour or two, giving yourself six or more hours a week—again, time you wouldn’t otherwise spend on writing.
  4. Working regularly on creative work primes the creative pump. When you work a short time on a creative project, set it aside, and come back to it, you find yourself coming up with all sorts of new ideas. As Brooks puts it, “order and discipline are the prerequisites for creativity and daring.”

All of it is easier said than done, especially if you’re self-employed.

Obviously, if you have a regular job, you can find regular times in which to work: 5:30 to 6:30 a.m., before you have to get the kids out of the sack and yourself ready to go; or 10:30 to 11:30 p.m., after the kiddies are put to bed and the dishes are washed.

By contrast, when you’re self-employed work comes in irregularly and deadlines can be erratic. Sometimes you need to put in 14+ hours a day to get the job done. New tasks come in, clients get squirrelly, new business must be hustled, meetings must be met.

When on earth do you find time to do your own thing?

Well, you don’t find it. You have to make it. Got a fourteen-hour day? Either add another hour or two for your writing schemes, or make Tuesday a sixteen-hour workday so as to break free an hour or two on Wednesday.

Personally, as contract editor, I tend to prioritize my creative work over my clients’ work. At some point, I decided I get to have some time of my own to do what I want to do. Selfish, yes. But creativity demands a certain degree of ego.

The only way I know to make broad priorities stick is to create a schedule. You may have a strategy that works better for you. For me, unless I’m following a list of to-do’s that need to be accomplished on a given day, a typical seventeen-hour day looks like this:

Up at 5:30 a.m.: answer the e-mail.

6:00 to 7:30: Write. Or at least think through the project.

or

6:30 or 7:30: Walk one to two miles with dogs, if weather permits. If not, continue writing.

7:30 to 8:30: Breakfast, coffee, read paper.

8:30 to around 2:00 p.m.: paying work.

2:00 to 3:00 p.m.: Prepare and enjoy full dinner-type meal.

3:00 to 4:00 p.m.: Rest and regroup. Take time to think about creative work, characterization, action, or organization and approach to nonfiction or editing projects in hand.

4:00 p.m. to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m.: Write. Answer e-mail.

7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.: Paying work (or, as time permits, writing). Spend part of this time blogging (Funny about Money, Plain & Simple Press News) while ogling Netflix.

10:00 or 11:00 p.m.: Walk dogs, if it was too hot to take them out in the morning.

What it boils down to? If you wanna be a Writer, you’ve gotta work. If you’re gonna work, you need to make time to work.

The Business of Freelancing

The Complete Writer
Section VIII: The Writing Life…
Sittin’ by the Dock of the Bay?

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[43]

The Business of Freelancing

Someone once asked Don Dedera, author of ten books and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles, how he accounted for his success as a freelance writer.

“I attribute it to two things,” Dedera replied. “A working typewriter and a working wife.”

Freelance writing is a tough, unremunerative affair, not one for the frail ego or the free spender. Average incomes range from $4,000 to upwards of $50,000 a year, depending on the survey. An annual take for a freelancer of $25,000 can be considered exceptional. If one’s ambition is to make a living as a writer or editor, one is really better off to get a job on a magazine or in a publishing house. Editors rarely develop much loyalty toward freelance contractors, and publishers try to extract as much work in return for as little pay and commitment as possible. Turnover in the publishing industry is breathtaking. So is the bankruptcy rate; when a magazine is in trouble, the first supplier it will short is the writer. If you have any ideas about freelancing to support yourself while you stay home with the kids after school, live in a Rocky Mountain retreat, and work whatever hours you please, think again.

Given these grim facts, one might sensibly ask why on earth anyone would take up such a dismal occupation.

Three good reasons:

  1. It’s a way to eke out a few pennies and work a small tax break between jobs. Like many “business consultants,” writers who call themselves freelancers often mean they’re unemployed. By freelancing, you can keep your hand in while you look for regular work.
  2. Because it lets newcomers display talents to many potential employers, freelancing can open the back door to jobs in journalism. After selling several stories to an acceptable magazine, you let the editors know you need a job. Then you wait and keep writing for them. Sooner or later, someone leaves and you have the inside track for the vacant position. This is the hard way to get hired, but for many a writer-turned-editor, it has worked.
  3. For all its agony, frustration, and penury, freelancing is just plain fun. It’s one of the few jobs in which you never do the same thing twice and you truly learn something new every day. You meet people you would never encounter otherwise, and you get to ask all sorts of nosy questions. You go places and see things that a desk-bound editor can only dream of while she reads your copy. Established writers decide what they will write about and decline projects that don’t interest them—a choice you don’t have on staff. And yes, you get to pick your hours: any eighteen hours of the day you like.

Building a professional image

Let’s assume, since office rentals are expensive, that you will work from your home. This alone tends to diminish your credibility.

If you are to sell magazine articles—or any other kind of writing—you must go about it in a businesslike way. Editors and other clients are not interested in dealing with amateurs. To persuade potential clients that you are a pro, you must act and appear professional. Among the strategies for accomplishing this:

  • Establish a web site and be sure it looks professional. Services such as WordPress.com and Blogger offer free server space; however, to engineer a professional-looking URL, one that doesn’t end in .wordprss.com, for example), you’ll have to pay something, and you may have endure annoying conditions and ads placed on your site. GoDaddy and BlueHost are among the several web hosts that charge reasonable prices for server space and assert no sovereignty over your site.
  • Hire a professional web designer to establish and lay out your site, even if it’s based on a WordPress template. Once you have a good design and understand how to add to and take away from it, you can change content to keep your facts up to date. But unless you are a trained web designer, you should avoid a DIY job on this important tool.
  • Create a letterhead with matching envelopes and business cards. You can do this in Word and store the results on your computer, or, for not very much money, have quick printers at places like Kinko’s or OfficeMax do the job for you.
  • Establish a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Do not, ever, publish frivolous posts or images on these sites! Do not troll, and never engage trolls in arguments or pissing matches. Keep your image friendly but professional on all social media.
  • Join trade organizations. The best writer’s groups for these purposes, in my experience, are the Society for Technical Communication, the Society for Professional Journalists, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Business groups are even more useful for those who seek remunerative corporate accounts; joining the local Chamber of Commerce will bring you into contact with many potential clients.

Operating your business

Set aside time every day for writing. Treat the time precisely as though you were in an office. Use it only for work. Friends, relatives and neighbors, who generally regard work as a place, not an activity, will assume you are free to operate at their beck and call. Resist impositions on your work time, at all costs.

Set goals. Once you’ve staked out some time, you need to organize it by setting goals and arranging your time to meet them.

Assignments provide built-in goals. On your calendar, block out the time you’ll need for backgrounding, interviews, and writing. Plan to finish a first draft several days before the real deadline; then schedule a day to let the copy cool and a day or two for revising and polishing.

Remember to build delivery time into your schedule. If your editor or client accepts e-mail delivery, send the attachment a day ahead of the agreed-upon deadline, to account for Murphy’s Law. This will give you time to resend should your editor not receive your message. If you’re shipping hard copy, figure four working days to send first-class mail coast-to-coast.

Meanwhile, you should aim to send out a certain number of queries in any given period. A reasonable goal is to launch four good, solid proposals each month. When matters lapse, it can take about three months to land a new assignment. So the freelance writer must always stay in circulation. While you’re working on an assignment, search out new ideas, devise fresh angles, write up proposals, and keep them in the mail until they sell.

These, then, might be your short-term goals:

  • To meet your deadlines
  • To develop a certain number of ideas each month.
  • To keep several proposals circulating at all times

Long-term goals address what you want to accomplish over, say, a year—or a lifetime. These are issues you must articulate for yourself and perhaps change as you mature. Writers have various motives. The most common probably follow these lines:

  • To get published, anywhere, at any price
  • To make money
  • To break into national publications
  • To write a book
  • To get a full-time job in journalism
  • To quit worrying about money and produce high-quality writing on subjects that matter for people who care

Market yourself. A website, a blog, and a presence on one or more social media sites not only help to build a professional image, they let people know what you have done, what you can do, and what you want to do. Membership in professional groups and business organizations also helps build visibility in your community.

If you want to write magazine and newspaper stories on a freelance basis, you must to learn to pitch your ideas to editors through the use of the query letter: a formal proposal targeting a specific market. This is a skill unto itself: in one to two pages, you need to show an editor a) that you can write for her or his publication; b) that you understand the publication’s audience and purpose; and c) that you have an idea that fits. Probably the finest discussion of this skill appears in chapter 18 of Bruce Garrison’s Professional Feature Writing. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I refer you to his excellent work.

Most of the Writer’s Digest books on freelance writing include passages or chapters on query letter. Surprisingly little advice appears online, but Monica Shaw at Writer’s Residence provides a nice collection of successful examples.[1]

Successful freelancers sell all the time. When your blog hits the top 100 in its niche, when your book hits print, when you win a writing award, send out press releases to all the local and regional media. If you have a specialty, call radio talk shows and offer to speak on matters of current interest. Write short articles for local shoppers and business publications, and be sure your bio tells readers what you do and how to reach you.

Watch good sales agents in action. And read a few how-to manuals on sales technique. You can use much of what you learn in your own marketing efforts. The key is to stay in motion. Never stop hustling. Never allow yourself to become discouraged, never waste time with people who aren’t live prospects, and always make yourself keep trying to sell every day.

Keep good records. You must maintain records of all your transactions for tax purposes. Keep every receipt, every canceled check, and evidence of any financial exchange for at least five years. Large accordion-style folders are cheap and work nicely for this purpose.

Make records of any toll telephone calls. Some magazines will pay these expenses. You can write the rest off your taxes, but only if you can prove you incurred them for business.

For the same reasons, maintain careful records of your automobile mileage. What you can’t get a publisher to pay for, you can write off your taxes.

Keep a copy of every manuscript you submit, as well as contracts and correspondence with editors. Obviously, electronic data must be backed up regularly. It’s a good idea to have an external hard drive for this purpose. However, remember: all hard drives fail sooner or later. So, it’s useful to back everything up twice, once on an external hard drive and once on a flash drive. You may want to look into free or moderately priced server space on the Internet, such as DropBox or Carbonite. Some writers keep hard copy of all important papers, including manuscripts.

It’s wise to keep old copy, research notes, and interview tapes (or digital audio files) indefinitely. Often you can recycle this data, and occasionally some question comes up that can be answered by something you wrote five years before. Consider using inexpensive cardboard file boxes to store hard copy in a closet or garage. These boxes are also convenient for collecting sample magazines and hard-copy writer’s guidelines.

Keep the production line moving. Your business’s “production line” generates work for pay. Keep it moving steadily. If your client doesn’t give you a deadline, set one of your own. And always meet your deadlines, even if it means working all night to do so.

An odd phenomenon afflicts most writers. I call it “work-avoidance maneuvers.” One starts the day with delaying tactics to keep from sitting down to work: brew another pot of coffee, write a personal letter, water the plants. Because I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t do this routinely, I think it serves a psychological purpose. Some projects, for example, seem so huge you must back into them to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

You can indulge the work-avoidance impulse in constructive ways. Try reading the newspaper, studying a potential target magazine, or reviewing and polishing yesterday’s copy.

If your day’s schedule requires you to telephone people you don’t know—always a stressful task—start the morning with the toughest call. This makes the rest of the day feel like skateboarding along the beach.

When you have a hard time beginning a story, skip the lead and start at the nut paragraph or some later point in the piece. You can work out the lead later. If that trick doesn’t work, try writing a first-person narrative, like a letter to a friend or sympathetic editor, describing what you saw and heard as you interviewed people and did your legwork. If you still can’t get a handle on the piece, set it aside and work on some other assignment; the momentum of accomplishing a small project will carry through to the more difficult one.

Use telecommunications professionally. Consider the telephone a business instrument during business hours. Ring tones for your cell phone should be conservative and discreet; not cutesy, loud, or annoying. Voicemail messages must be professional-sounding and give callers the impression that they are calling an office. If you have a predilection for land lines and your family uses the phone heavily, consider installing a separate line in your office (do not tell the phone company that you will be using it for business, to avoid being charged at a higher rate). Better, get a VoIP service that will let you use your desk phones and also provides NoMoRobo, the only effective phone solicitation blocker.

When crafting a voicemail message, women may want to imply that several people work at the establishment; “none of us can come to the phone right now.” It is unwise to advertise that you are at an address alone or that no one is likely to be there for awhile.

Whenever you call people, they’re always “in a meeting.” This means you spend your day leaving word all over town—or all over the country. When someone returns your call, it is to your advantage to sound like a professional, not like a stay-at-home mom or dad with a laptop on the kitchen table waiting for the brownies to bake.

When I began freelancing, I once left word with a top executive at a Fortune 500 electronics firm. He called back, and I answered the phone with my customary housewifely “Hullo?”

A long, eloquent silence ensued. He clearly thought he had the wrong number or something eccentric was going on.

Business people do not want to talk with eccentrics. During business hours, answer the phone as though you were in an office—with your name or with your business’s name. Set up your voicemail to sound businesslike, too. This is an effective way to build credibility.

Accounting. In this area, you must hire expert help. It’s fine—even advisable—to keep your books in Quicken or at an online budgeting site like Mint.com. But while TurboTax works well for many folks’ personal tax returns, a business return is another matter. Have a tax professional, preferably a certified public accountant, prepare your tax return, at least the first time you fill one out as a self-employed writer. People who claim deductions for home offices make tax collectors itch. Because the tax laws are complex and capricious, you should never try to deal with the Internal Revenue Service yourself.

Deposit the money you earn from freelancing in a separate checking account, and pay your business expenses from that account. This much simplifies the task of keeping track of receipts and business expenses, and, by never mixing freelance income with other money, you can help a tax preparer see how much you earn and how much you spend on business costs. Using a separate telephone line only for business calls also simplifies your bookkeeping.

To deduct the costs of running a home office, you must prove you are truly in business—not playing at a hobby. You have to be earning money, and you must make a profit three years out of five.

The Internal Revenue Service requires self-employed workers to establish a permanent, separate place within the home to use exclusively as an office. The space must be demarcated from the rest of the dwelling with room dividers or portable walls; to be safe, however, you should reserve a separate room for this purpose. You must use the space on a regular basis, not on and off, and it must be your principal place of business. If you have an office somewhere else, you can’t deduct a home office used for the same business.

Once you establish yourself as a for-profit enterprise, you may deduct “ordinary and necessary expenses.” These include rent, utilities, supplies, research costs, travel, subscriptions to professional magazines, membership in trade groups, certain conventions and meetings, communications and postage costs, and the like. Depreciate expensive assets, such as a computer, over several years; IRS rules govern the period over which you must spread the deduction of depreciable items. You are permitted to take a one-time deduction for such equipment, but the deduction may not exceed the income you earned in the year of the purchase.

The possibility of a tax audit is the best of all possible reasons to establish a well organized filing system, electronically and in hard copy. Copies of query letters, proposals, contracts, statements, receipts, and manuscripts will serve as evidence that you are trying to make a profit. If you are audited, you will have to produce all your receipts and expense records for the years in which you are challenged. Keep careful, accurate records and store them for at least five years. Among these records, you should include your appointment calendars.

Literary agents

Magazine writers do not need agents, and few agents will try to market magazine articles, because there’s not enough money in it.

Agents are useful in marketing certain kinds of books. Most writers find agents by word of mouth, through recommendations from other writers. Agencies list themselves in Writer’s Market and Literary Marketplace. To choose one blind, pick out several names and start telephoning.

If you should seek an agent, bear this in mind: legitimate literary agents do not charge reading fees. Avoid those who offer to think about marketing your work for a price.

Literary agents offer your work to prospective buyers and negotiate contracts and fees favorable to you. They retain 10 percent of the take as a commission and pass the other 90 percent along to you. Their services are worth this premium because agents usually can obtain higher rates than a writer can negotiate alone. If an agent agrees to represent you, he or she may provide advice and editorial guidance as a service—for free. Most effective agents live in or near New York City, because they depend on person-to-person contact with book editors and publishers, whose offices are concentrated on the East Coast.

Other jobs for freelance writers

If you have the hustle, business has the money. Some people make a good living writing for businesses. They write annual reports; edit in-house newsletters; write press releases, reference and credit reports, company manuals, company histories, brochures, proposals—you name it.

Get this work by word of mouth, advertising, and chutzpah. One method is to print up a professionally polished brochure describing your manifold skills and take it door-to-door, introducing yourself and offering your services. Another is by advertising in business and trade journals. If you have any gift at translating technical language into plain English, advertise yourself in county and state medical, legal, dental, and veterinary journals.

Put out the word to your editors that you’re interested in working for businesses. Magazines often receive calls from people seeking writers for brochures, newsletters, or press releases.

You can also take your brochure to printers, typesetters, graphic artists, and fast-print franchise outlets. These entrepreneurs often have customers who need writers.

Public relations agencies are another source of freelance jobs. When business is good, agencies may have more work than staff members can handle, and they will hire freelancers to write press releases. Writers with magazine credits may be asked to hack out self-interested trade journal articles for clients, at much higher rates than the magazine would pay. Agency fees to freelancers range from $20 to $120 an hour.

Associations and nonprofit organizations also need writers. They may not pay as well as businesses, although some do. They especially need people to write or edit newsletters.

You can write book reviews. You can write blog entries for pay. You can write resumés for job seekers. You can ghost-write memoirs. You can write genealogies. You can do outsourced public information for government agencies. You can handle public relations for schools and libraries.

Everybody needs a writer. All you have to do is see the need and fill it.

Scams for Every Writer

The Complete Writer
Section VII: Publishers and Self-Publishers

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[41]

Scams for Every Writer

Plus ça change . . . As a young journalist and book author, I was often invited to speak at writers’ conferences. There I first observed that people who yearned more than anything on this earth to be Writers with a Capital W were subject to the most astonishing scams.

In those days, it was harder to get yourself published. Still, if you couldn’t persuade a publishing house to take you on, you could pay a vanity press to print up your golden words, which would make you feel entitled to go around calling yourself a Writer. The fee was hefty.

There were various fake literary agencies, too, that would charge you a “reading fee” to tell you how brilliant your undistinguished novel was. Here a scam, there a scam, everywhere another scam.

But now, when anyone can “publish” by posting whatever they please on Amazon, publishing itself is a kind of scam. And it breeds scamlets as cats breed kittens. The entire book industry is overrun with scams.

The ego gratification game

At lunch the other day, a dear and talented friend, self-publisher of an urban fantasy that’s been getting good reviews and selling reasonably well, reported that she’d found a place where you could sign up to get free reviews. And hallelujah, sister! You could enter your gilded book in a CONTEST! For a small fee . . . Reader’s Favorite, said she: one of her friends won first place in his book’s category. So worth it!

ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding

The old scam alarm went off inside the head. Where had I heard about writer’s contests with big prizes and prestige that cost just a few bucks to enter your book? Yeah . . . that one is old as the hills.

A little snooping around on Google, that treasure chest for cynics, brought up a rumination from Writer Beware,[23] one of my favorite no-bullshit sites. As you might expect from a hustle that’s been around for so many years, there’s now a vast array of “contests” that will put you in the running for “awards,” in exchange for fees. Once you’ve won a Reader’s Favorite “award,” you get to spend more money flying to Florida, and you’ll have even more opportunities to spend money on any number of bits and pieces of merchandise.

These profiteering “contests” are only one of many types of grift aimed at wannabe writers.

Really, e-book publishing itself is exactly that: a form of vanity press that looks like it’s free but is not.

Back in the Day, my feeling was that if you couldn’t persuade someone else to publish a book, it likely wasn’t worth publishing. Never would I have paid somebody to publish something I wrote: people paid me to write, not the other way around.

That, you see, is the definition of a professional writer.

The self-publishing grift

Today the landscape has changed—publishing has been “disrupted,” we’re told. But how much has it changed? That still remains to be seen.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try self-publishing on Amazon and waypoints. It’s free, after all. In a way.

But it’s not free, because publishing and marketing, when you get right down to it, are publishing and marketing.

If you have half a brain and no real-world publications experience, you will hire an editor to advise on your book’s quality and to copyedit, and you’ll hire a graphic artist to design your cover.

Editors cost money. Graphic artists cost money.

If you’re not very techie or if your book contains even slightly more complexity than a table of contents and a few chapter headings, you will need to hire an e-book formatter.

E-book formatting costs money.

If you wish to publish your book in print, you will need the graphic artist to redesign your cover to accommodate a back cover and spine.

Graphic artists cost money . . . again.

And you will need a graphic artist or a professionally designed template to lay out the interior content.

Graphic artists cost money . . . again.

Alternatively, book layout templates cost money.

Then you will need to print the thing.

Printers cost money.

Once you’ve “published” the book (“posting” is probably le mot juste), you need to sell it. That means you need to let the world know it exists, through advertising, social media marketing, consignment, and face-to-face pitches.

Advertising costs money.

Navigating the shoals of the intricate and by and large opaque social media platforms requires a professional.

Professional social media marketers cost money.

Persuading retailers—especially bookstores—to carry your book costs money.

Amazon as scam

One could argue that, for most authors, the whole publishing industry is a bit of a scam, at least for those who don’t understand their real occupation will not be “author” but “ad copy hack and self-employed marketer.” That’s most egregiously true for people who style themselves “indie authors” and self-publish on Amazon.

Case in point: a report from Laura Jane Williams over at The Financial Diet.[24] She shares some straight talk about the economic facts of life enjoyed by a number-one best-selling author—that would be one published through a real publisher that pays a real advance (yea verily, a Big Four publisher). Without going into detail, let’s just note that she’s trying to support herself as a part-time nanny.

Very few writers ever make earn a living at their craft. Publisher’s Weekly, the sine qua non of trade journals for the publishing industry, reports that most authors’ earnings fall below the poverty line,[25] and what is more, author income has been dropping since 2008.

Authorearnings.com reports optimistically that 1,340 writers earn over $100,000 a year,[26] and half of those are indies. This revelation is extracted from a mind-numbing aggregation of data gleaned from Amazon. AE claims, probably correctly, that the share of the market for books sold on Amazon is increasingly going to independent (i.e., self-) publishers. This is no doubt true: publishing on Amazon is the hot new thing to do. But that you are in a market does not mean you’re making any money in the market.

1,340 authors

Let’s think about that. It’s not very many, when you consider that Amazon has 14 million books online. If half of those six-figure writers are indies, then only 670 writers in the whole world are making a credibly good living at their trade.

Amazon sold 22 million copies of Kindle books alone in 2010.[27] Imagine. How many authors are required to produce 22 million sales?

Amazon itself deems only forty self-published authors “successful.”[28]

Between Amazon’s price-fixing practices and the enormous saturation of the book market, independent publishers and all authors face daunting challenges.[29] Getting a self-published book on the shelves of a real, physical store is not easy. The other day I learned that the pre-eminent independent bookstore in my state charges indie authors $300 for shelf space—and I can assure you, your chance of selling $300 worth of books there is almost nil. By and large, sources through which real-world bookstores order their stock do not carry self-published books. You can get access through IndieReader and Ingram Spark . . . assuming you can afford to pay for it. Additionally, attracting media coverage from recognized mainstream newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters is extremely difficult: indie authors just don’t get no respect.

I’m often told that instead of clinging to my pessimistic view of life—the view from which one is never disappointed—I should try to be an optimist.

The optimist, then, would say about those forty “successful” authors, Why shouldn’t I be one of those?

But I can’t get past the realist’s challenge: Why should I?

 

Ella: This Week

Yeah, you’re right: I haven’t finished writing this week’s installment of Ella’s Story, even though it lurks inside the brain ready to jump forth like Athena springing from the forehead of Zeus. And yes, yes, I did have three weeks to crank a paltry 1500 words or so, and so no, no, there’s no excuse. But…well…yes, I do have a whole slew of excuses, not the least of which is the demise of my beautiful little sidekick, Cassie the Corgi.

Cassie died, two weeks and a day ago, of adrenal cancer. Or possibly of veterinary malpractice, depending on your take on the sequence of events: she was not autopsied. That was quite a trauma — a long-drawn-out one — for the Human, who remains considerably depressed, even though Cassie was 13 years old and past the mean life expectancy for a corgi.

So: Excuse No. 1: I’m stunned. Crushed. Paralyzed in the creativity department.

Yeah. Sure.

Actually, getting yourself all wrought up and depressed usually spurs creativity (and truth to tell, I now have any number of Varn  scenarios floating around in the head),. So: yeah, sure.

But there’s more:

Toward the end, Cassie had to be lifted on and off the bed many times a day. In her last day or two, though she was awake and responsive, she was almost inert. And she had a habit of positioning herself in clumsy poses just out of reach of the Human. Once when I picked her up, I felt something go r-i-i-i-i-i-p in the vicinity of the rib cage and thought “ohhh shit!” And yup: back pain that’s damn near crippling.

Managed to get her to the vet and attend her passing to the Other World. But after that? The pain has been blinding.

Trust me: after those adventures I did not feel like articulating a fantasy about imaginary people in a galaxy far, far away…

Then…oh yes, then: I fell and sprained my wrist. Even though nothing was broken and it’s slowly healing, this added another layer of long-term pain.

To make things more interesting, I’m allergic to NSAIDs. Yeah. All of them: aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, you name it. Though I have some oxycontin left from piles of pills the doctors foisted on me during the Year of the Surgeries (six surgeries in 12 months…), I do not use addictive drugs. So…no…I have another plan for those, which has to do with the Final Exit, whenever the time comes. I ain’t using that stuff for a pained back and a pained wrist.

That left, as the only viable analgesic, booze. Whiskey. Or wine. Depending on the mood. Works, you know. So, to some extent, do physical therapy exercises and yoga poses, which one can manage when one is adequately numbed by a shot of whiskey or a glass of cabernet.

So: excuses two and three:

  • In too much pain to write
  • too shit-faced to write

Hey. Even writers get sick leave, eh? And bereavement leave, right?

Right.

Them’s my excuses, and I’m stickin’ to them.

Two steps backward…

…for every one step forward, eh? Doesn’t it sometimes feel that way? 😀 Lately it’s felt like that way all the time, here at the Funny Farm.

Like just this instant, f’r example: I actually did write a coherent first paragraph to this damn post. Then wanted to italicize a word or two, highlighted and hit command-I for the purpose, and AUUUGHHHHHH! Whatever keys I hit formed a magical mystery “delete” command…and disappeared the entire post!

Doing it all over again is getting to be the story of my life. The exceptionally tedious story of my life. One catastrophe after another has been holding forth in these parts, leaving me too tired to write anything on Ella’s Story, when I’m not too distracted.

Rejiggering the “publication” schedule so as to post one chapter of just ONE of the three books in hand per week was a lucky move that turned into a godsend. Because The Complete Writer and If You’d Asked…” are finished and sitting in Word subdirectories, it was relatively easy (though incredibly ditzy) to post all the chapters for both books and schedule WordPress to publish them on specific dates. This freed me from a weekly brain-banging computer hoop jump, two weeks out of three. And this, I imagined, would free up a couple of hours a week to write Ella.

Yeah.

So…why wasn’t I making any progress? Yesterday I realized that every time I sit down to work on that thing there’s another interruption. Yep. I started to type a sentence, got through ONE phrase, and had to jump up and tend to another crisis, phone call, barkfest, doorbell ringer or whatfreakingEVER. Even when I’ve got time carved out to do my thing, I can’t stay focused long enough to build up a head of steam.

It is amazing how much ditz the computer adds to chores that ought to be fairly straightforward.

Today, for example, I wanted to install live links in the Ella’s Story page, so that if a person wanted to read the thing, said person could simply run down the page and click on links to the chapters, in the order of the narrative. Et voilà! Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?

No. Installing links to 33 posts is an activity that consumes freaking HOURS.

To locate the post, get the URL, go back to “edit page” for the Ella’s Story page, insert the link, make it open in a new page, change the color of the link to match the theme’s color scheme, and on and on requires NINE point-and-click-and-copy-paste-or-type maneuvers for EACH LINK. Consider: for 33 posts that’s TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY-SEVEN DITZY MIND-NUMBING OPERATIONS!

By the time you’ve fixed the 87 gerjillion typos your flapping fingers insert, it’s well over 300 operations. Brain-banging tedious!

No wonder I don’t get around to doing it…one can always find a way to avoid doing that kind of workoid.

Where’s Ella?

Lost in space, of course… 😉

Seriously: it’s been one frustration after another in the Creative Department. I’ve been cranking my way through chapter 30 of Ella’s Story, verrryyy slowlyyy, as one interruption after another falls from the heavens, like meteors upon the dinosaurs. Some of those interruptions have been paying work, which you may be sure supersedes all other demands and cravings. Others have been various little personal crises — surgery for skin cancer that turned out (surprise!) not to be skin cancer (please, can we max out the stress and drama a little more?); the dog at death’s door but refusing to go through; one unholy doggy reaction to one unholy medication after another (three times, I thought that dog would die before day’s end); friends dying right and left; a week or ten days’ worth of pool renovation going on in the back yard; editorial jobs flying in over the transom; and of course the unceasing sideshow that is our national politics, a constant and constantly amazing distraction.

Last week as I was trying to wrap up the chapter, in came not one but two new assignments within a few hours of each other, both from Chinese authors. One was a doctoral dissertation in, of all things, accountancy.

Who knew accountants did Ph.D. dissertations?

This, while not especially lengthy, was difficult to read because of the annoyance factor: they were making the kid emit an elaborate covariance analysis to prove…the obvious. The thing went on and on and on, essentially saying the same damn thing 15 ways from Sunday and demonstrating…nothing, really. Other than the obvious. It was an exercise in pointlessness.

By the time you removed all the tables and the references section, you ended up with a magnificent 29 pages of narrative. I mean…say what?

This, from my point of view, added another layer of annoyance. My dissertation was a full-length book that contributed a whole lot of new information based on months of archival research and that was published by a major academic press in its field. And you may be sure that my first full-time academic job did not start in the five figures, as his will.

So I leave Ella up in Word as I plod through this thing.

Then as soon as I shovel that back into the ether, I have to turn to the other author’s project: Chinese math. Transmission of HIV through certain high-risk groups in Guangzhou…don’t ask. Turns out to have been quite short, adding another layer of annoyance: I should’ve done this writer’s project first, because I was able to move it off my desk in a day. Better to have returned it promptly than to have made this person wait while I plowed through 28 pages of pointless palaver.

Math papers sent to American editors from China are commonly written in a program called LaTex, then converted in a crude way to Word with the equations stripped out. This, as you can imagine, occasionally creates an unstable file. And yea, verily…

The minute I wrapped that damn thing up and hit “save” for one last goddamn time, it crashed Word! Everything went down, including the Ella’s Story file I’d left open.

And yes, even though I’d saved, saved, and re-saved that file as I was working on it, and yes, even though I’d hit Command-S before I turned to the paying work, Word lost the new stuff I’d written in it.

Infuriatingly, Wyrd is set to save every five minutes on this computer, because of its propensity to crash at the most impossible times. So even if I hadn’t manually saved to disk, it should have auto-saved…many times over, during the several days I was working on the customers’ papers.

Wyrd is supposed to back up to what is called an “autorecover” file. If you know how to get at it, you can find the most recent autorecover and that will contain most of what you’ve done. In my case, it would retrieve everything done up until the previous 5 minutes.

But n-o-o-o-o-o-o-ooooooo, No chance. I can NOT find an autorecover file with the passage I wrote and felt so smug about.

Shit, Hell, and Damn!

I brought the computer down to the church office, which normally is quiet as the tomb, figuring I could sit here in the silence and, if not reconstruct what I’d written, come up with something new.

At the risk of repeating myself: n-o-o-o-o-o-o-ooooooo! The phone has been jangling nonstop. People have been wandering in and out the door, most of them wanting nothing more than to chat. EVERYBODY on the clergy and the staff is here this afternoon, meaning they’re all here to receive calls and try to dodge time-sucking visitors.

An hour and ten minutes to go. Then I have to fly home, bolt down a few bites of food, feed and wring out the dogs, and then turn around and fly back down to the church for choir rehearsal.

I’ve done almost nothing on the Ella opus — certainly not try to reconstruct the lost passage, except to realize I can’t remember any of it — and obviously there will be no time for any of that this evening.

Just hope my dog is still alive. That’s about the best I’m up to…hoping the dog hasn’t croaked over yet.

There’ll be some changes…

…maaade today! There’ll be some changes made! 😀

So distracted have I been by the various harassments and stresses of the past month or two that I haven’t had the remotest chance of keeping up with the ambitious schedule I posited for this site: posting a chapter a week from each of three books, one of them a work in progress. This required me to post three chapters a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

😀 Not a CHANCE, not when your life goes s-p-r-r-o-o-i-i-i-n-g-g!!!

Okayyy…if the Plain & Simple Press blog is to stay alive, we’ll have to rejigger that scheme, by quite a bit. The new plan: Post a chapter from one book once a week, preferably on Monday or Wednesday (the day’s TBA…too busy right this instant to set that in stone). So — say — one week, a chapter from The Complete Writer, the next week one from If You’d Asked Me…, and the next week from Ella’s Story, cycling along in that order from month to month, now and evermore.

This would give three weeks to write a chapter for Ella — I’ve been so fully knocked for a loop that I haven’t been able to struggle through to the end of the chapter that supposedly has been under way for…how long? A month or so, for sure.

It would mean a slower pace for readers, but it would give me more time to cope with some of the ongoing, apparently never-ending crises and catastrophes. And I could also post on writing and editing topics occasionally…which is what I started this blog for in the first place.

What might these little dramas be, you wonder? Here ya go: the chapter outline of the soap opera that is my life, Dispatches from Hell: