Writing Advice – Craft & Process

2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail.

So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data.

I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day.

I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data is fricken’ awesome. Data means that when I hit the first week of December and start wondering what the hell has gone wrong with my process, I can go back to previous years and see that December is always a goddamn awful month on the writing front.

Data lets me know that I only tend to break the 500 words/day barrier about half the days of the month, on average.

It lets me know that December is the month where I’m most likely to get a haircut, ’cause the increasing heat and humidity in Brisbane makes my head overhea–

Wait, that’s not writing related, is it? Forget I mentioned it. As haircuts go, it’s pretty terrible. As summers go, this one promises to be awful.

Data, though? Writing-related data tells me useful stuff. It highlights the reality of my writing process, rather than the pleasant fantasy of this is how I write that lives in my head.

On the other hand, my data collection was also put together by a version of myself that was fuzzy-headed and skating the edge of perpetual exhaustion, which means I’m spending this week thinking through what I’d like to actually track in 2016.

For all that the word count is a useful metric in some respects, I don’t track enough to be sure of the context. Did I only write 200 words on a particular day because the project was hard? Because I had a work gig? Because I was just fried and disappearing into a marathon game of CIV until my brain caught up? Because I was blogging more? Editing? Or writing pro-wrestling fanfic?

I can follow the very general patterns – Write Club days good, work days not so good, weekends basically non-existent in terms of getting stuff done – but there’s not quite enough there to hack the problems and start resolving them.

So, for 2016, I’m looking at the collection of writing data as my long-term project. I’ve just started revising the excel document I use for tracking writing to add in categories that will give me a little more data – one for other-writing, one for listing distractions and non-writing commitments.

I’ve also added RescueTime to both the home computers, so I can start to see exactly where my time is going on the computer from week to week, complete with a goal-setting that it will tell me if my daily word count actually represents a substantial chunk of writing time or something tapped out in fifteen minutes of frantic activity.

Every week or so, those will get dumped into the spreadsheet along with the other data, so I can figure out roughly how many minutes and hours went into a particular day’s word count.

And, ’cause I actually enjoyed the accountability of updating the 600k word-count spreadsheet during this year, I’ll take a look at doing another one for 2016.

Not quite as flashy as chasing a 600k year, I’ll admit, but probably more useful to me in the long wrong.

Also, hopefully, more likely to result in finished projects instead of a small mountain of rough drafts.

It’s early. My eyes hurt. I have to go to the day-job today, when all I really want is to stay home and tinker with the opening scenes of the novel in progress. Maybe write the ending to one of the hundreds of unfinished short-stories on my hard-drive, that are waiting for me to figure out the endings.

In short, welcome to cranky town. Population: me.

I have it pretty good.

There is a trend, among writers, to ignore the essential privilege of how they do what they do and how they came to do what they do as a semi-regular thing. This frequently means that readers will do the same, since they’re only seeing the process from the outside and filtering it through public statements.

And since most writers are also readers, we can get some bat-shit crazy assumptions about the job.

Case in point: a writer I know recently posted about his yearly word-count on Facebook. When someone pointed out it was rather a lot, my name came up as a comparison point on account of the fact that I wrote rather a lot myself this year.

And yes, it was a joke, but I found myself sitting there thinking no, please, god, don’t do that. My writing life is not like your writing life. My process is not like yours, even if it looks that way on the outside.

For one thing, the writer in question had kicked ass on the writing front.

For another, there are all sorts of surface things that make a big difference, when it comes to getting shit done as a writer.

Some of it is small stuff, that you don’t necessarily consider.

Like the fact that I live alone, which means there’s no-one else tugging on my time. When I get up early to write in the mornings, there’s no interruptions for several hours at a time, let alone other people relying on my schedule. When I choose to write for an extra hour instead of having dinner, its no big deal at all. When I get home, there is no-one demanding conversation or watching something interesting on TV.

There is the fact that I work a day-job that is incredibly beneficial for a writer, both in terms of networking and in terms of understanding the kind of schedules that get kept when you’re on a project.

There is the fact that I work part-time, which means I have two working days every week to fit my writing into alongside the weekend. I have multiple friends in a similar situation, which means I can ramp up my productivity twice a week by heading to a write-club where I have no choice but to work.

These are not advantages most people get when they start out. Especially if they’ve already got a family or a career that they’re relying on to pay the bills.

I got it because I have pretty much arranged my life around writing since I was eighteen.

But it goes beyond that. ‘Cause, yes, I made a whole bunch of choices that led me to this situation after twenty-odd years of chasing this particular gig, but it’s not something I did on my own.

I’m the product of a white, middle-class family who are enormously supportive of what I do, and if you think that doesn’t make a difference, you are fucking dreaming.

For all that working part-time is a choice on my part – I’m willing to have less in order to write more – it’s also possible because I have a support network in the form of my family who are…well, far better with money and the work thing than I am.

The fact that I can maintain a mortgage? Family. They helped me come up with the deposit, invested a little extra to let me get the apartment I currently have. No bank was looking at my financial history and giving me a loan without that, and there are several points in the year where cash-flow gets tight and my parents will help me out with a loan.

This is not something every writer gets.

My day-job? Ultimately thanks to my family again. I worked at universities all through my twenties, teaching classes while studying for a PhD. That’s a gig that pays well when you’re doing it as a casual, but once again the cash-flow issue is a consideration, and once again I was able to maintain that with my family’s financial support and belief that all the study was worthwhile.

That experience got me my current gig, shaped my approach to work, and generally allowed me to become the kind of writer (and blogger) I am today.

When I started writing SF, I would go to Cons despite being unemployed. Partially this was funded by writing income, but just as much came from my parents supporting me and allowing me to go make the contacts I needed.

When I get a book published, my dad goes on an ordering spree (and generally needs to be restrained from ordering more).

When I do get a significant chunk of money from a writing gig, there are family members around who can advise me on smarter things to do with it than blowing it all comic books, a new pair of sneakers, and a Playstation 4.

The fact that I’ve been writing and publishing work, haphazardly as it is, since I was twenty is largely dependent on other people investing in that dream alongside me. Financially and emotionally.

Whenever you see a writer talking about their process, it’s easy to go straight to why can’t I do what they’re doing. But their process is not your process. Their background is not your background.

I am an extraordinarily privileged fucker and it’s worth taking that into account any time I open my mouth about writing. A lot of hard work went into the career I’ve carved out for myself, but not all of that work was mine.

I should totally go send my parents a thank-you card.

And you should totally be filtering any advice I give through that lens, just as you should be looking at the situation every other writer is in when they offer advice. We often adapt our process to our circumstances and forget how those circumstances shaped us.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, last week was pants.

Nothing went seriously wrong. Nothing went seriously right. It was just the kind of awful, no-good week that doesn’t really deserve that designation. The kind of week where you huddle up in your house, utterly certain that everything you do is wrong, that your body is falling apart and your mind is no good for anything and you indulge in the dream of no longer having to cope. The kind of week where lack of sleep kills your fine motor skills, and every attempt to rub your weary eyes is accompanied by a small vision of accidentally pressing your eyeball into the back of your skull, even if you know that’s relatively insane.

The kind of week where you desperately try to hide the fact that you are a twitchy mess from the world.

The kind of week where your focus is utter crap and you feel yourself getting behind on everything. Where writing consists of sitting at a computer for three hours and typing, maybe, two hundred words.

By you, of course, I mean me.

Last week was pants.

This morning I am dancing. David Bowie. Lets Dance. Red shoes and all. David Bowie, Suffragette City. David Bowie, Jean Genie. The Bowie part is mandatory. Right up until I get started on the back catalogue of Roxy Music and Jane’s Addiction, anyway.

My gut is all about the self-recrimination at the moment. It looks at the spreadsheet where I track my writing and sees the list of bad writing days outnumbering the good ones and it whispers dire thoughts in my ear. You have failed in this, it says, therefore you have failed at everything. You suck, Ball. 

My gut can go get fucked. My gut knows shit.

I feel all this despite knowing the mythology that surrounds writing, telling us that we’re failures until we let our art consume us. Hell, I feel this in spite of spending the last twenty years questioning that mythology and discovering that there’s an awful lot that is not just wrong, but bat-shit crazy.

Despite knowing there are bad weeks, and then there are good ones, and how you do over a lifetime that really matters.

There are weeks when writing isn’t the priority. Weeks where it cannot be the priority. Hell, there are months and years where this is true, periods of chronic illness or family commitments or utterly insane work schedules or, shit, just bad wiring in your head, that are not conducive to being consumed by your craft.

This isn’t a failure, any more than refusing to be consumed by an office job is a failure when you’ve suddenly discovered other commitments. Priorities shift, in life. The thing that gets our focus one week isn’t guaranteed to get it the next. The things that matter to us change, over the years, as we realise what matters to us.

You are not a failure ’cause sorting your shit out matters more than writing.

You are not a failure ’cause you had a bad week of writing, regardless of the cause.

Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Re-align your mental cross-hairs on the things that really matter to you, and if that still includes writing, figure out what’s actually achievable in your current situation.

Or, hell, come join me: put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

Let’s fucking dance.

Writing will still be there tomorrow.