ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

So here’s the thing about writing no-one tells you: the money is going to fuck with you and affect your creative process. O-ho, there, you may be thinking, foolish Peter, there is no money in writing, and I totally understand why you’re thinking that. You’ve been hammered with that message from day one, ever since you began stringing words together to generate meaning. People will gleefully inform you that writers don’t make a living, and even those who skip that step will imply it by asking the kind of questions that make it clear your options are: a) become JK Rowling and have books in every store every time they walk in, or b) die in a gutter. And that’s where the fucking with your process begins, because you do not want to die in the gutter. Which means your process is shaped by the perception that making a living as a writer is either a one-in-a-million chance where your craft matters not at all, or by the perception that the only way to make a living as a writer involves constantly delivering at the top of your game because only the very best of the best get to make a living. You can probably be a competent at most jobs and make a living, but there are few where you are actively told that competence will never be enough. What we get is this: You don’t get to be good at writing if you want a career, you have

I started reading time and project management books a few years back, when it became apparent that my ability to manage my studies was fairly limited. I ramped up my reading in 2011 when I found myself working in an organisation with multiple people for the first time, since I was pretty much used to working on my own or in small groups. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of systems and kept stuff from each of them, but this list collects together three of the quick-and-dirty time management hacks that have been particularly useful to me as a writer. All are part of larger, more complex systems that have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I am pretty ruthless about keeping the things that work for me and searching for new options when something doesn’t. HACK ONE: PRIORITISE THE TASKS THAT UNLOCK OTHER PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO WORK ON YOUR BEHALF I picked this one up from Dan Charnas incredible book about chefs, time management, and mise-en-place, Work Clean, and it remains the advice I turn to every time I found myself paralysed by indecision about what needs to come next. One of the base-lines of Charnas’ approach is simple: the action you take now is infinitely more valuable than the action you take in the future, because the action you take now can trigger next actions. The action you might take later, even if it’s a slightly better call, cannot start follow-up actions until then (and sucks up psychological

Fun fact about writing: it’s going to feel like you’ve fucked up, a lot. There will be days where it feels like things are so fucked up that your career is 100% over, never to be resurrected or rebuilt, and the best thing you can do is wander off and get a job in the fast food industry. The reasons it feels like you’ve fucked up are varied. Maybe it’s been caused by a decision that seems stupid in hindsight, or a book has come out and done not-as-well-as-expected for reasons outside your control. Perhaps you said something you shouldn’t have in a professional context, or vomited on the first agent you met because you were nervous. It matters not, in the end, because the feeling that settles over you is invariably the same – like someone’s fitting you for cement shoes and escorting you to the nearest pier. You have fucked up, and you are done. Hasta la vista, baby; your writing career is over. I spent most of last week in that mode. After GenreCon wrapped up a bunch of mangy, you-suck brain-weasels dug their way into my head and started insisting that the con had been a bad cal. Sure, it was successful, but look at the opportunity cost – no writing time, no PhD time, no real gains to speak of. They moved on to whispering dire things about my shoddy work ethic when it comes to writing, then started a refrain about always being the guy

A thing I’ve been thinking about this week. It’s tempting to say there are no shortcuts to becoming a published writer. The default published writers tend to give is simple: write a lot, keep improving your craft, submit a lot, keep going. This is how many of us got our start, and its how many of us keep our careers going, year after year. It’s tempting to say there are no shortcuts, but it isn’t exactly true. Every now and then people do find a work-around to the old ways of getting published. They wrote a novel and published it to their blog, only to have it picked up by a publisher. They launched their backlist as ebooks after years of being rejected, and suddenly they had a massive career. There are people who fanfic on Wattpad that got picked up, or they cultivated a project on social media, or they podcasted their story, or they did an early iteration of crowd-funding. There are dozens of stories about people who found their way around traditional publishing’s gatekeepers, and those stories tend to get repeated in every news article or review that springs up around their work. None of these things are necessarily shortcuts, as they still require work and effort. They just took a different path to publishing, because publishing likes it when authors show up who can write, possess and audience, and come with a ready-made marketing hook. These people get talked about because their path into traditional publishing