Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more: “Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!” Fuck. You. I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training kung fu every evening and weekend. You make time. — Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) March 10, 2019 I was intrigued by the tweet, for two reasons. On hand it, it’s because Alan is right about this–something that’s bourn out in the suite of writers that offer their own experiences making time to get work done in the early days. It’s a useful read, if you’re interested in being a writer. The kind of advice I’ve been talking about in writing classes for years, among the self-selecting people who show up to learn such things. But I found myself really irritated at the tweet when it first

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in. One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting. This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing. PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID The process I’m using ran something like this: Grab a bunch of index cards

I logged to Amazon this morning to see how pre-orders were going for A White Cross On A Lonely Road. The nice thing about the dashboard they offer is the way it lines up a whole lot of books you’ve published in a row. If you’ve made a decision to adopt a standardised layout, that means you get a neat little visual when you log in. I’m still working through some of the older releases, bringing them into line with the standardised approach, and I’ll admit that I’ve gone back-and-forth between this and trying for a more genre appropriate cover for certain kinds of work. Today, though, was the first time I looked at them as a whole and felt satisfied with the effect. The approach is very much an approach that is designed to work with my relatively limited graphic design skills and keep the production side of things fast, but theres just enough scope to try new things

Elizabeth Bear wrote a fantastic newsletter about creativity and bad habits last week. You can read it online, if you’re not a subscriber, but subscriptions are a magical thing. The really useful take-away, meditating on the internet and productivity and the psychology of creativity: Measuring one’s self against the internet rarely turns out well. Unless you’re reading dub one-star reviews of your favorite book to make yourself feel better about the dumb one-star reviews of your own book, because obviously some people failed reading comprehension and don’t know it. (This works until you start getting angry on behalf of Watership Down, because it deserves so much better than “There are no boating accidents in this novel, if I could give it zero stars I would.**) The thing is, a thousand good words a day is a pretty good rate. But it’s hard to remember that when everybody around you is engaged in wordcount escalation, or the deadlines and the sewer bill are

My website seems to have spontaneously created this particular post, throwing up the headline with no particular content to share, and broadcasting it to the usual channels. I originally came in to delete the post and take it down, then figured, what the hell? It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for today: I’ve just finished ten days straight of grading assignments, making comments on first chapters for forty-two different novels, and my brain is feeling rather scraped out and devoid of things worth saying. The thing about marking creative work, as opposed to essays, is that it gets horribly repetitive. You don’t have time to explain everything that’s going wrong across three or four thousand words, which means you focus in on the stuff that will help the manuscript get to the next level. Inevitably, when dealing with new writers, this comes down to the same conversations about scene structure and developing beats and figuring out what your characters want,

There are days when the internet feeds you an interesting series of posts, comments, and articles that all seem to weave together in interesting ways. For example, this quartet of things have all showed up on my radar within a twenty-four hour period: Charlotte Nash’a comments about the limits of time on Tuesday’s post about bad systems and newsletters, which I read a few hours before… Kameron Hurley’s Locus essay about burnout, the expectation of productivity, and the reluctance to say “do less” in our culture at the moment. This post by Daphne Huff about writing a novel when you have zero time due to running a family, a full-time job, and a podcast (which seems like madness when read alongside everything else, but the final section about focusing on one aspect of craft/publishing at a time in the final section orients it with in this list). And this highly interesting twitter rant by @GravisLizard about the way we react

I’ve been reading ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work over the weekend, processing the business advice of the 37 Signals/Basecamp founders who have rejected the notion of building a growth-at-all-costs business. The former is very philosophy focused, while the latter is a ore process-oriented approach which implements that philosophy. One of the ideas that intrigued me in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is the discussion of heartbeats–a way of overcoming communication challenges in a decentralised workspace without devolving into meetings and reports. There’s a more detailed discussion of it over on their blog (and another discussion here), but at it’s core its a system of automated check-ins where folks list what they’ve worked on with their day, coupled with a system for discussion and requests for updates. It’s a really intriguing idea, but not terribly useful in a company of one (which, essentially, most writers are regardless of whether they self-publish or not).

There are books that I keep on my bookshelf because they are pleasurable artefacts to have around, even if I’m no great fan of the text that exists inside them. Occasionally, these objects are what you’d expect: leather-bound tomes and special editions, books that look like something out of a movie. More often, they’re smaller books. Paperback novellas or chapbooks whose slim page-count is wrapped in a beautiful, simple design, turning what should be a weakness in the marketplace with regards to page count and paper quality into a strength: I may care very little for Freud’s work, but I love this book. It’s a compact hundred pages long, four essays bundled together in a very pleasing package. Maybe 25,000 words in total, and part of the Great Loves series from Penguin that shares the same design aesthetic while being recognisably related to the longer Penguin Classics line. It’s not designed to take up much room on a shelf as

I’m writing the first half this post on campus at UQ. It’s approximately 7:03 in the morning, and the cleaner is working their way through the offices. I’m here early because I teach a class at 8:00 AM, because it’s the first week and I still don’t know exactly how to find the room, and because I like to get on campus an hour early for classes. That’s my buffer, should there be traffic problems or train delays, and on the days when there are no such problems, it leaves me with approximately 47 minutes of time to fill once I arrive. Occasionally I have a plan for this time: going to the library, for example. Catching up with friends before class. Today — and for most of the coming semester — my plan is this: Do not give this time to Facebook or Twitter without a damn good reason. Instead, I’m making a conscious decisions about the way you’ll