Solve One Problem At A Time

I’m writing today’s entry from a cramped bus seat on my way to work, grabbing fifteen minutes of writing time out of the otherwise dreary stretch between my house and the office. It’s taken me a few weeks to get to this point. For the first week, I tried my old trick of writing on notecards during my commute. That proved ineffective because buses are a very different mode of transport to trains.

For the next week, I busted out my laptop and brought it along each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get used. My old laptop bag was for a different phase of my life, where I had plenty of writing time and often travelled by car or train. That was fine for the last eight years, but isn’t the writing season I’m in. Using it on a train was awkward because it’s basically a backpack, and pulling out a laptop meant digging through my lunch, notebooks, and other paraphernalia.

So, I’ve been pondering the problem since I started the new job five weeks ago, and two weeks ago I bought a new laptop bag. Specifically, this bag. Smaller, lighter, easy to open. I can basically rest it on my lap and unzip it, and the laptop is ready to work on. It’s a small but essential infrastructure change that opened up opportunities to work, and it only cost me twenty bucks. 

Instantly, I have about 30 minutes of extra writing every day, so long as I can get a seat on my bus (about 85% of the time).

Between the commute and the hour lunch break at work, I’ve arrived at a satisfactory answer of when do I write rough drafts while working? An hour and a half is usually enough to get me a decent stretch wf words each weekday.

Which means I focus on the next problem: when do I edit? Rewrite? When do I get these posts live? When do I design book covers?

Important problems, to be sure, but not essential until I had the question of when do I write sorted out. 

WRITERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

It would be easy to turn my current morning writing routine into a pretty cliché piece of advice about finding the time to write if you really want to be a writer. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this kind of experiment. Back when I worked long hours for a writers festival, my available writing time was basically an eight-minute commute every morning, before the rigours of the day burned me out. It seemed an inconsequential amount of time to devote to writing, but I did it, and actually wrote a story a week for my patron for the space of twelve months.

But that’s not what I’m banging on about here. There’s plenty of times in my life where I’ve found the time to write like this, but just as many where I’ve let writing slide. Sometimes, writing isn’t that big of a priority. We’re not supposed to say that out loud as creative types, but it’s absolutely true. 

What I want to focus on is a very different lesson: solve one problem at a time. (Switching to my lunch break here, if you’re curious about what a 15-minute commute generates on the writing front)

Writers aren’t encouraged to think of themselves as “problem solvers,” but I’d argue that almost everything in writing is just solving one problem after another. What is figuring out the opening of a story but asking yourself, “how do I get people interested in what’s going to happen?”, and what is an ending but asking yourself, “how do I make people care about everything’s that just happened?” and “what do I want people to feel and think right now?”

Fixing scenes? Solving one problem after another, often by asking yourself the right questions. Same with rewriting and revision (David Madden’s excellent book on editing is just a series of questions one can ask about one’s manuscript and figuring out ways to solve the problem).

So we fix problems all the time. One after the other.

But because we don’t self-identify as “problem solvers”, we don’t think to apply that approach to the rest of our lives.

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

When the internet and author platform boomed into existence in the last nineties and turned into the “be online and do social media” advice circa 2007 or so, I used to spend time around more experienced writers who lamented the fact that new authors kept trying to solve the wrong problem.

The really days of the internet were filled with advice about building a blog or being on social media or establishing an author platform, and lots of folks rushed to follow that advice even when they didn’t have books to sell. The Q&A section at festivals, conventions, and author events became a litany of folks asking how to be online better, but when prompted to talk about their book, newer authors would admit they focused on the social media first.

They were solving the problem of finding and nurturing a readership before they had books or stories for that readership to engage with. An absolutely fine approach if you were keen on being a blogger, but very cart-before-horse if you intended to make your living writing books.

These days, I notice the same tendency among the folks I mentor and tutor. They want to rush ahead to strategies and tactics, caught up in the latest online buzz about the things writers “must” do in order to succeed.

My advice begins with a simple question: is that the problem we’re solving now, or is it a distraction?

FINE TUNING 

If you’re struggling to find time to write, then adding a social media stream to promote your books probably will not help you unless you’ve already got a massive backlist of 20 or 30 books. There is nothing you can do on social media — paid or unpaid — that doesn’t pay off ten teams better if you’ve got books for people to buy, and your limited time is better spent finishing your first series (if you’re an indie) or getting new books out (if you’re traditional).

If you’re not writing and you don’t have a deep backlist, then the far more pressing problem is how do you get writing again.

Note that I’m saying nothing about quality here. How do I write better? is a problem that’s worth tackling after you’re in the habit of getting new words on the page. How do I get these books into the hands of an audience? is a problem to solve after you’ve got polished books to put in the audience’s hands.

(My lunch break ends here, cut short because I need to leave the office)

Even within these broader questions, focusing on the right problem for right now can be important. Changing my laptop bag was an important step in getting more writing done each day, but it wasn’t the first problem on the list. Before it was writing during my lunch break and maximising the time available there. Our break room at work is busy, so I trialed working in the local food court for a bit…then realised that losing ten to fifteen minutes walking there and another ten to fifteen coming back was a lot of lost words.

From there, I tried different lunch breaks to find the period where the break room is at its most usable. After that, I kept a log of days where I didn’t write for my entire lunch break, and the things that disrupted me. Some of those were unavoidable (dealing with insurance and body corporate calls after some recent damage to our flat), but some were things I could address (feeling like I needed a pick-me-up and ducking out for a coke or coffee). Those I addressed by purchasing a vacuum-sealed mug that lets me bring coffee to work and keep it warm all morning, or by bringing a can of soft drink and bonus snack into work as my afternoon treat. 

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

I bang on about infrastructure a lot when I talk about writing, because it’s often the invisible underpinning that guides how much we write and what we can do with the finished product. Building a readership overseas was incredibly difficult in the days before the internet, which naturally limited what I could achieve as an Australian writer. Even now, my career is shaped by issues of geography and resources: I don’t go to conventions, for instance, because Australia is vast and empty and even our local sci-fi conventions locally are expensive for me to attend from Brisbane.

This doesn’t mean that my career can’t advance, but it limits the strategies I can use to connect with readers and sell books. 

(Another morning stint. 465 words written)

Whenever someone mentions they’re having trouble writing, I start by looking at their infrastructure. Where are they writing? When are they writing? What tools are they leaning into? Where we go from there will often vary, because nobody starts the writing game with a level playing field, but those small logistical issues matter. 

I started my new working routine by trying to get writing done before I left for work, but it just didn’t work. There’s too much going on in our flat, from cats demanding food to a spouse getting ready for work, and my attention keeps fragmenting. It would have been easy to despair at how little I was getting done, but I’ve been at this a long while and I know it’s better to experiment.

Ergo, I focused on the problems one by one. Figured out when and where I could get work done, and refined those windows to let me do more.

It took a few weeks to get right, but once I did, I had a pretty consistent process I could rely upon.

TOMORROW’S PROBLEMS

Are other parts of my writing business suffering while I work this out? Absolutely! I haven’t sent a promotional newsletter in weeks, and managing the Brian Jar Press store has been a little slower than I’d like. Figuring out when to do store stuff was one of the early problems I worked on (early mornings, before I head off to work, which wasn’t being used as effectively for writing as I’d like), but others are just on a list I call “Tomorrow’s problems.”

They’re things I need to solve, but they’re not the most urgent things I need to address. They’re simply further up the Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs than I’m at right now. Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which suggests that concepts like Self Actualisation and Community are less important when you’re struggling with lower-order needs like safety and accessible food, tomorrow’s problems are more important once I’ve got the lower foundation problems sorted.

I had them down a few weeks ago, before I started the new job, but my habits were built around freelancing and spare time. The big change in available hours moved my attention away from the higher-order issues and towards the more basic ones.

Writing new words

Making them good

Getting them out into the world.

Everything else can come after that. I need to nail down the foundation first.

THE SAME PHILOSOPHY WORKS FOR CREATIVE PROBLEMS

Incidentally, I use the same philosophy when dealing with story issues as well. I often tell my mentees that there are three phases of writing: coming up with ideas, putting them on the page, and making them good. We often think the process is linear, but it’s not. What kills many writers’ momentum is some combination of trying to ideate, write, and edit at the same time, or trying to apply the solutions of one phase when the issue is another.

I’ve written about this a bunch in the past. A few years back, when drafting my story The Rise And Fall of Darnell Royce, Cartographer, I stalled out on the draft and got log jammed for over a week. I kept trying to write new sections, but they didn’t work. I tried editing sections, and that didn’t work either. Everything kept coming out awful and disappointing.

So I stepped back and asked myself what problem I was really trying to solve, and it turned out I had an ideation problem. The solution wasn’t writing more; it was sitting back and creating a pool of concepts and ideas to pull from. Once I had the ideas, I could write the end of the story pretty easily, but coming up with them while I was at the keyboard was always going to be harder than ideating on its own. 

THE POWER OF SMALL, CUMULATIVE SOLUTIONS

Over the years, I’ve learned that the solution to problems is rarely a large change. I’ve changed my lunch break and used a different bag. Bought a sealable coffee cup that will allow me to bring coffee to work. Between them, they’ve nearly doubled my daily word count over the last three weeks, even though I’ve had a few days when things went really off the rails.

That’s the power of solving problems one by one—the effects accumulate and add up over time, while simultaneously being easier to implement than big changes. 

I’m keeping this in mind as I try to solve the editorial problems, because I often feel like editing should be big chunks of time, when in reality doing one or two fixes a day will quickly add up.

It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like I’m delving into the world of mass productivity advice, since so many books aimed at business and entrepreneurial types home in on this idea. “A cumulative 1% improvement in your productivity every week adds up to something huge” is a very common promise, and often assumes that continuous improvement is always possible and there’s no end point to the exponential curve.

I don’t want to reinforce that. I simply want to acknowledge the core truth of solving writing problems: start with the little things. 

Too often, writers get caught up in the idea that writing is big, because the cultural myth around art is that it’s all big sweeps of inspiration and dedicated perseverance.

When you focus on the small—what you can do with your time and resources, instead of what you can’t—the opportunities that open up may surprise you. 

WRAPPING UP MY SECOND LUNCH BREAK

I’m finishing today’s entry from the break room at work, having just broken a thousand words for the day (and a little over two thousand words for this entry). Two morning commutes, two short writing bursts during lunch. This is pretty solid confirmation that the new system is working for me. Momentarily distracted by some work colleagues getting literary questions wrong in their lunchtime quiz, but otherwise trucking along pretty well for a Tuesday. There’s even twenty minutes left to give this a once-over and a polish, getting ahead of the next problem on the list.

And while I’m focused on solving the main problem in front of me, I do occasionally brainstorm possible answers to later problems. We’ll be moving house in January, which means my daily commute will basically double and feature a switch from train to bus halfway through. Editing will become the train portion of my commute. Buses will be the writing portion. It may not work, but that’s being tested and iterated in a few months when we actually make the change. 

Until then, everything is theoretical. Solutions for tomorrow’s problems, which aren’t the problems of today. Right now, I’m looking to move from getting things written to getting things out into the world. Building up my writing habits and career step by step.

ADDENDUM

It’s worth noting that a lot of what I’ve been experimenting with starts with a much older experiment, where I challenged the notion that I needed big blocks of time to write. Since then, I’ve gotten much better at using the time I’ve got, rather than cursing the fact I don’t have the time I think I need.

I am, by nature, a short sprint writer. Even if you give me three straight hours to write, odds are I’ll write about three hundred words and pause, pottering about for a few minutes before figuring out what happens next and starting the next chunk of story or blog post.