Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Can you get a novel published if your grammar ain’t no good? That’s a good question and it deserves a better answer than a mere “yes” or “no.”

Elizabeth posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

My question is about grammar. I’ve just started to take my writing seriously and noticed that my grammar is not all that great and needs some real improvement. I’ve tried reading grammar books, but they seem to confuse me as to what I should do. Do you have any suggestions on this? I know I need to have good grammar to get published later on in life.

Randy sez: This is a good time to talk about your strengths and your weaknesses. Everybody has strengths. Everybody has weaknesses. Is it better to focus on the strengths or the weaknesses?

Strengths are those things that you do Xtremely well. An editor says “yes” to your book because of your strengths. But no writer on the planet is strong in everything. Some writers are strong on plot and only mediocre on character. Some are the opposite. Some writers shine on dialogue. Some on their creation of a compelling Storyworld. Readers have different tastes, but they typically gravitate to writers who are strong in what they like, even if they’re not so strong in other areas. If you’re going to get published, you need to be strong in at least one area.

Weaknesses are those things that you do Xtremely badly. An editor says “no” to your book because of your weaknesses. A weakness is a show-stopper, and you will find it very hard to get published if you have any serious weaknesses.

The strategy I teach for improving as a writer is the two-pronged approach:

• Identify your strengths and find ways to make them even stronger. Never outsource this, because if something is truly your strength, then it’s almost impossible to find somebody else who could do it better than you do.
• Identify your weaknesses and find ways to bring them up to the acceptable level. Don’t waste time trying to turn a weakness into a strength. That would be pointless and would waste vast amounts of time. Either find a resource that can teach you how to make your weaknesses at least acceptable, or else outsource this task.

Just as an example, if I were back in high school and wanting to go out for a sport, it would be idiotic to try for the weightlifting team (I’m a beanpole and always will be) or the baseball team (my eyesight is too bad). But my lean physique makes me a good candidate for the track team and I’d be ideal for the 5k, 10k, or marathon. It would make all kinds of sense to do mostly endurance training (my strength), with just enough weight training (my weakness) to give me a decent finishing sprint, and with no attempt at all to improve my eyesight (my other weakness).

Now moving on to Elizabeth’s actual question, her weakness is grammar. Elizabeth, you have two choices:

Door #1: Improve your grammar to the point where it’s acceptable. You’ve tried this and it isn’t working. Stop trying.

Door #2: Hire a freelance copyeditor or proofreader to bring your grammar up to snuff. This seems to make the most sense to me.

The bottom line on weaknesses: Either get the help you need to become acceptable, or outsource it to somebody for whom it’s a strength.

The bottom line on strengths: Focus a substantial amount of your effort on becoming world-class in your strength. Most of the rewards go to those who are really, really, really good in one particular thing. Remember that nobody can possibly be really, really, really good in everything. Pick one strength or two and focus your efforts on those.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Bill posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Well I think I am ready to get started. I purchased your book to day and downloaded the Snowflake software. I was also a system architect and I know the power of databases and sequenced activity.

This question has probably been asked a thousand times and I apologize in advance.

Should I read the book first or jump into the software and read the appropriate section for that stage later?

Also, it would be really cool to have a forum here so that struggling writers can share with each other and you. If there is one then I apologize for being too dense to find it. LOL.

Randy sez: A lot depends on what your learning style is, and that depends on how your brain is wired. Some people learn best by trying first, and then learning a bit of theory to help them understand what’s going wrong. Other people learn best by reading the theory first, and then going and doing it.

The hazard of writing first is that you might spend a long time writing badly, when you could have saved yourself a huge amount of work by learning from the experts.

The hazard of reading first is that you might never actually write anything at all, because you’ll always want to read “just one more book before I get started.”

If you’re a “write first, read later” kind of person, I’d suggest that you give yourself a set amount of work you’re going to create on your own. You might decide that you’ll spend one month writing every day. Or you might set a goal of writing three chapters. You’re free to choose your goals here, but I strongly recommend that once you hit those goals, do these things:

• Get somebody else to read your work and critique it.
• Once you have a critique, go read up in a book on how to deal with the weaknesses that were exposed in the critique. (Since you’ve already bought my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, just leaf through the table of contents, find the chapter that deals with a particular topic, and read that whole chapter.)
• Set yourself another writing goal and repeat the whole process.

If you’re a “read first, write later” kind of a person, I’d suggest you set a limit on how much study you’re going to do in advance. Since you’ve already bought my book, and my book is a general book that aims to give you a broad foundation, I’d suggest you read carefully through Part 1 (Getting Ready to Write Fiction) and Part 2 (Creating Compelling Fiction). Then SKIM the rest of the book (on editing your book and getting it published). Then get busy writing.

• Work through Chapter 3 of my book (on choosing your target audience–this is critical)
• Read Chapter 4 (on creative paradigms) and choose the one that seems best for you.
• Do any action items in Chapter 5 (on managing your time and your work space)
• Start writing! This may mean starting in on the Snowflake method, if that is your creative paradigm. It may mean just typing words every day (if you’re a seat-of-the-pants type of writers.
• As you feel a need to study more, do so, but don’t let that keep you from writing. Most all writers ultimately learn by doing. Learning the theory is great and it’s very important. That’s why I wrote my book and created my lecture series–to teach you the theory. But you will only get good when you internalize that theory by writing.

One final note on your comment on the need for a forum: I would like to have a forum. It’s been suggested several times by my Loyal Blog Readers, and I think I’m long overdue to create one. Like everyone else, my time is limited and I haven’t yet found the time to launch a forum. I work best when I focus on one thing and execute it well. I have a strategic plan for this web site, and a forum is part of that strategic plan, but it’s not the next step. When the time is right, I’ll do so. So stay tuned. I do have some major improvements planned for the next several months.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

David posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

If an unpublished writer, with a completed and polished but still unsold novel, and maybe more novels (and some non-fiction ideas) in various stages of development, has severely limited time to put into writing (let’s say 10 hours or less per week), how will that time be best spent? The way I understand it, these are the demands for a novelist’s time:

- writing
- craft development (the words)
- art development (the story-telling)
- story research
- market research
- querying
- industry research (queries, proposals, agents, trends, etc.)
- publishing industry relationship building
- platform building
- self-promotion
- marketing education/development
- idea capturing and future work development
- critique group
- probably something else I’m missing

How would you rank these in importance for an unpublished writer?

Randy sez: Holy Smokes! That’s a hard question, and one we all face. A lot depends on where you are on the road to publication. If you haven’t read my article, “Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!” then you should probably read that first. It spells out the various stages you pass through as you go from novice to pro.

If you’re a Freshman, then you should focus on craft first. Learn the skills of writing good fiction. You do that by writing a lot, by getting your work critiqued, and by studying the theory of fiction (from books or lectures).

If you’re a Sophomore, keep doing that, but also start learning a bit about the industry and also how to write a proposal.

If you’re a Junior, your craft should now be very good. Keep improving it, but now begin to focus on how to sell your work. You should be going to conferences and meeting agents and submitting your work. This is hard and scary and can be crushing (if you have an attitude that you must succeed instantly or your life is a failure). But it’s necessary and all published authors go through this stage.

If you’re a Senior, then all of the above, but now you need to be also thinking about building your platform. This may be public speaking (for a few authors) or a blog (for others) or magazine articles (if you prefer print to the web) or podcasting (if you’re good at talking) or some other way of building your platform. Or you can do as the vast majority of writers do, and simply skip the platform-building altogether. You won’t die if you do this. You may end up with a GREAT publisher who promotes you effectively. But the odds are than any publisher will work harder for you if they think you’re already working hard for yourself.

So the answer to David’s question is this: “It depends on where you are. You can’t master everything all at once. So focus on where you are right now and do the things you need to do to get to the next stage in your career.”

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Last time I blogged about your “Hopes and Dreams” file. Hopes and dreams are great things. But they aren’t enough. None of them will ever happen unless you translate them into something a bit more tangible.

That thing is a project. A project is one of your hopes and dreams that you’ve taken two further steps on:
1) You’ve defined what it looks like, in tangible terms.
2) You’ve made a definite commitment to achieve it.

As an example, one of your hopes and dreams might be to be a published novelist someday. If you’re reading this blog, that’s either something you’re hoping for, or it’s something you’ve already achieved. How do you translate that into a project?

First, you define what it looks like in concrete terms. You can’t be a published novelist unless you actually write a book, sell it, and see it through the fiery process of editing and all the way through to publication. That means that you need to choose your category, pick a title, and choose characters and a storyline and a storyworld.

Second, you commit to writing that particular book. Commitment means that you won’t quit when things get hard (they will). You won’t quit when your critique buddies find flaws (they will). You won’t quit when the agents say they’re not interested in that particular book (they will). You won’t quit when the editors say no (they will). You won’t quit when the substantive editorial letter comes back with 20 pages of requested revisions (it will). Commitment means that you’re in all the way. Commitment means that you work on the book until one of two things happen — either you realize that the book is fatally flawed, or you finish the book.

I think it’s a powerful thing to make a list of annual goals, listing all the projects you’ve committed to (or the ones you might commit to) during the year. So every year, I make a list of annual goals. I run a small corporation, and I’m required by law to have a Board of Directors meeting and a Shareholders meeting at least once a year. Never mind that the Board of Directors is just me and my wife. Never mind that the Shareholders is also just us two. I write up a formal President’s Report for the previous year, and I present my Annual Goals for the coming year. We vote on it. (It always passes unanimously.) Then I show it to my accountant, who likes to make sure that I’m being legal with my corporate responsibilities.

Right now, I’ve got my Annual Goals for 2010 stuck to the filing cabinet beside my desk. I look at it every morning, first thing, to remind myself of all the cool things I want to get done this year.

Understand that we all suffer from the tendency to bite off more than we can chew. So I don’t really expect to achieve everything on my Annual Goals list. Last year I had ten items on my list and I only got two of them done. But they were the two most important ones, and it was an outstanding year. This year, I have nineteen items on the list, but there are three that are really important. I’ve got them highlighted in yellow. If I get only those three done, it’ll be an outstanding year.

Do you have an Annual Goals list? If not, it’s not too late. And if you have one, do you know which items are the absolute Must Do items, and which aren’t? Make an Annual Goals list. Highlight the ones that will give you the biggest bang for the buck. Commit to those few. Then look at your list every day.

Ten months from now, I’m betting you’ll have those done — or you’ll have busted a lung trying.

Awhile back I was at a writing conference hanging out with a group of friends. I happened to catch a fragment of a sentence one my friends asked another: “What are your hopes and dreams?”

That caught my attention for a couple of reasons.

First, hopes and dreams are the things that keep you going. They’re the fuel that powers your jet engine (or your go-cart, if you’re not a high-flier).

Second, the writer who asked the question IS a high-flier. He’s won some major awards and has been on the New York Times bestseller list a few times.

If you’re a beginning writer, one of your hopes and dreams is probably to get published someday. Once you get published, one of your hopes and dreams is probably to hit a bestseller list somewhere or to win an award. (Generally, the folks on the bestseller lists are dreaming about winning an award, whereas the award-winners are all longing desperately for bestseller status. Everybody wants whatever they don’t have.)

Hopes and dreams come in all flavors and sizes. Maybe you’d love to shave off a few pounds (or add them in strategic locations). Maybe the thing you long for is a fatter bank account. Maybe you just wanna be a rock star. Whatever. Your hopes and dreams are yours, and you don’t have to explain them to anybody or justify them.

The one thing you should try to do with your hopes and dreams is to achieve them. And that is most likely to happen when you know what they are and when you regularly remind yourself about them.

Typically, those pesky hopes and dreams are of three main types:
* Something you want to HAVE
* Something you want to DO
* Something you want to BE

I find it useful to keep a “Hopes and Dreams” file. (Actually, it’s about a dozen different files, covering all areas of my life.) When I think of another thing that I want to have or do or be, I write it on a sheet of paper and stick it in the appropriate file.

Of course, files are useless by themselves. The point is that when you’ve got it written down, it becomes a little more real. If you review your Hopes and Dreams files regularly (say once every week or once every month), at some point, you’re going to commit to one of them.

Understand that many of your Hopes and Dreams are going to lie fallow for years, maybe decades. Many of them will NEVER happen. You can’t do everything, be everything, or have everything that you want. There just isn’t time, energy, or money enough for them all. But when you want something bad enough, eventually you commit to it.

At that point, it becomes a project that you can move to its own project file and start working on. This is actually not very hard. Just ask yourself: “What’s the next action I should take to get this or have this or be this?” If you don’t know the answer to that question, look it up or ask somebody.

Then go do it.

Hopes and dreams never materialize unless you take action. You can’t achieve all of your hopes and dreams in this life, but . . . there’s a good chance that you can achieve some of them — those that are most important to you.

That’s what the Hopes and Dreams file is for — to remind you of what you want, to help you decide what you want most, and to motivate you to take action to achieve it.

On Wednesday, I talked about the hazards of multitasking. But what’s a busy writer to do? We can’t very well shut out the world, can we?

No, but yes.

No, we can’t shut it out forever. Yes, we can shut it out for periods of time.

Some people do this naturally. If I have one talent in life, it’s the ability to focus on things. Sometimes I am embarrassingly good at this, such as when my wife is talking to me and I literally can’t hear her. Sometimes I am conveniently good at this, such as when my wife is asking me to change the kitty litter. (”Dang! Didn’t hear ya! What’s that horrible smell?”)

But even if you’re not good at shutting things out naturally, you can simulate it by being intentional. I learned this trick from a guy named Eben Pagan, an internet entrepreneur who teaches people how to be more productive. Eben says to buy a kitchen timer and set it for a certain length of time. Then give yourself permission to ignore everything until that timer goes off.

Everything. Phone ringing? Ignore it. Email chiming? Worry about it later. Cat meowing? Shove outside into blizzard. Kid bleeding? Yes it’s OK to deal with a bleeding kid. Anything else? Save for later.

You really can do this and it works if you’re weak on focus. The reason is that you’re playing a psychological trick on yourself. You know the timer is going to go off soon. That timer sets the boundaries on your focus time. It’ll make sure you come back to the real world. But until it does, the time you’ve set aside is yours, all yours, for whatever task you’re doing.

A timer gives you boundaries that protect your time. Try it and see. Eben Pagan recommends that you set the timer for 50 minutes and then when it’s done, set it again for a 10-minute break in which you detach completely from whatever you were doing. Then if you still have work to do, set the timer for another 50-minute work jag. You can get an awful lot done in life in 50-minute chunks.

You don’t even have to spend the ten bucks on a kitchen timer. I went to VersionTracker.com and did a quick search and found a Mac program with the sexy name “Timer Utility”. It’s free and it lets you set up an alarm clock, a stopwatch, or a countdown timer. I have one running on each of my computers.

You may be wondering why I use a countdown timer if I have such excellent powers of concentration.

The answer: Because I have excellent powers of concentration. I can easily get lost for three hours straight on a task. That’s not good when I have other duties. A timer helps ensure that I don’t get lost in la-la land for too long.

Furthermore, I can use a timer to set myself a challenge: “I bet I can get this blog post written in 15 minutes.” That ensures that I don’t lollygag in la-la land.

Or if I set the timer before a phone call, then I put limits on how long I’ll be gabbing to Weird Aunt Muriel. (”Sorry, Auntie! The doorbell just rang. Gotta go!”)

As I noted in my e-zine this past week, many people say that “multitasking makes you stupid.”

The converse of that is also true: Singletasking makes you smart.

What do my loyal blog readers think? Do you have tricks to get out of multitasking mode and into singletasking mode? Go ahead and leave a comment to brag about how clever you are.

I hear occasionally writers saying that they get a lot of writing done because they’re good at multitasking. And I have to say I doubt it.

Of course we may be talking about different things, but the way I define multitasking, it’s a great way to NOT get much writing done.

Let’s remember where the term comes from. It’s a technical term from the world of computers. In the bad old days, computers had one CPU — the central processing unit that does things. If you wanted it to do several things at once, you couldn’t do that, but you could fake it as follows:

Each program that’s running was only allowed to work on a task for a short time — say 20 milliseconds. Then it would give up control of the CPU and another program would take control. That one would run for a short time, and then it would give up control.

That works fairly well with computers, so long as all the programs play well together. If any of them decides to hog the whole system, then all the other programs are out of luck.

It didn’t take long for computer manufacturers to realize that if multitasking was going to work well, it had to be brainlessly easy to program. The operating system (Mac OS or Windows or Linux) had to enforce the rules and break in on each program and keep it from hogging.

That works pretty well for computers. But what about for our brains?

Our brains have a bit of an advantage over computers. The simplest computers only have one CPU. We humans have multiple brains that handle low-level bodily functions like breathing (you don’t have to think about this) and higher-level physical actions like walking and chewing gum and high-level conscious activities like doing our taxes and writing fiction (which are considered by some people to be the same thing).

So we’re naturally designed to multitask at a bunch of things, within limits. You really can do a bunch of things simultaneously, so long as they don’t take conscious thought.

When you start trying to do things consciously, though, you run into problems. Go ahead and try to write two emails at exactly the same time. Can you do it?

Yes, you can. You can open two email windows at the same time on your screen. Then you can type one character in the first window, grab the mouse, move it to the other window, type one character, grab the mouse, move it to the other window, type one character, and so on.

That’s multitasking on conscious tasks, and it’s horrendously inefficient. Most of your time is wasted in switching from one context to another. Context switches kill you.

Even if you’re trying to do something a lot more normal, such as watch TV and do your calculus homework at the same time, the context switches kill you. Both tasks suffer, even if you think you’re doing great at both of them. If you think that, you’re fooling yourself.

Now look at what most people mean when they say, “I’m a great multitasker. I can watch the kids and talk on the phone and cook supper and keep an ear on the washing machine all at the same time.”

Yes, of course, most people can do all those things at the same time, but that isn’t multitasking because only the talking on the phone really requires conscious thought.

I sometimes hear people say, “I’m good at multitasking. I can do email and handle the phone and work on a spreadsheet and have an instant messaging session going and be texting my friend, all at once.”

With all respect, the only reason anyone can do all those things at the same time is because most of them allow for short context switches of a few seconds. You can do a line of an instant message or a text in a few seconds. You can work on an email for a minute or two, then interrupt it and come back twenty minutes later. If you’re on the phone, you CAN in principle zone out and resort to saying “Uh-huh” repeatedly while you do something else, but that’s beginning to cheat. If you’re trying to do two phone conversations at once, you’ll see this right away, and so will the people you’re talking to. And if you’re working on a spreadsheet, you can in principle keep cutting away to do other things, but it’s going to take time to get back into the swing of things every time you return.

Things like doing a spreadsheet or writing a novel take periods of concentrated thought. After each interruption, when you can resume work on them right away, but it typically takes up to 20 minutes to really get into the flow and work at your highest productivity level. If you keep cutting away every five minutes to attend to something else, you CAN get some work done on that pesky spreadsheet or novel, but you won’t be working at nearly the level you could be working if that was the only thing you were doing. And if you try to be like a computer and work on it in 20 millisecond snatches, then you are completely and hopelessly dog meat.

There’s a big difference between what you CAN do and what you can do WELL. And tragically, we humans can only work well on one task requiring focused concentration at a time.

All of which reminds me that my latest humor column has been out for about a week now. The title of it is “Multitaxing” and in it, my plumber Sam and I argue the merits of multitasking. Want to guess who wins the battle of multitasking. You can read it all here.

I was up past midnight yesterday getting my latest issue of the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine out. Today has been a catchup day, plus it was my monthly day to see my accountant and make sure everything is clicking.

A few comments caught my eye:

Daan wrote several comments that somehow got caught in my spam filter. Sorry Daan! It’s usually very reliable, but it must have seen something it didn’t like. I sent that spam filter to bed without any dessert.

Daan wrote:

I have returned from vacation yesterday and I spent quite some time reading all the posts by you and Susan as well as all the comments and questions. It was great!

Two months ago, I was inspired to translate an English novel in Afrikaans and, thanks to the holidays, I have translated 216 of the 338 pages, which is 73 326 words.

Randy sez: Yes, Susan’s series of guest posts is probably the most popular series I’ve ever done. Wow, Daan, you are really cooking on that translation. I know how hard translation is and what an art it can be. Have fun and good luck! Welcome back to the blog. We’ve missed you.

Sylvia asked:

What is the advantage of incorporating your business? It sounds like a lot of work and at least some expense, so what is the advantage to you?

Randy sez: That’s an excellent question. I only recommend incorporating when you have a business that is earning a substantial part of your income. Incorporation has some advantages, but it also has some costs. Bear in mind that I am not a lawyer or accountant, so the following does not constitute any sort of legal or accounting advice:

The advantages are as follows (and you can talk with any accountant about whether these apply to you):
1) A corporation is not you, so if somebody sues your corporation, they may conceivably bankrupt it, but they won’t bankrupt you. This is a minor point, but we’re writers and we say things in public that may make people angry.
2) There can be tax advantages for having a corporation that earns the income and then pays you a salary. An accountant can explain the differences between a C corporation, an S corporation, and an LLC, along with the tax advantages and disadvantages of each. Which of these is right for a writer depends on circumstances. I have an S corporation, but one of my writer friends has a C corporation and another has an LLC.
3) Drat, I forgot the other advantages. But the above two can be quite important. In particular, the tax advantages are very important.

The disadvantages are as follows:
1) It costs something to register as a corporation. The State of Washington is a good state for corporations and quite inexpensive. I have to pay my registration fee every year and pay a corporate agent.
2) A corporation is not you, and it must have at least one annual meeting of the Board of Directors and another for the Shareholders and proper minutes must be kept. My wife and I are the entire Board and the entire set of Shareholders, so we held our two meetings back to back in about half an hour. I wrote a President’s Report which I presented at the meetings and wrote up minutes and that was that. My accountant looked it over today and said I did an excellent job.
3) You can’t mix your personal money with the corporate money, because the corporation is not you. If you mix money, then the government can decide that the corporation is just a sham and can take away your tax advantages, which are generally substantial. The laws are written to make life good for corporations, so it pays to be one.
4) You have to have a good accounting system, which usually means getting an accountant. The fact is that if you’re earning much money, you need one anyway to keep track of it all, because doing the taxes just gets more complicated every year.

Cathy wrote:

Thanks Randy for your blog. Your last one, asking us to tell what we planned to do that day, got me motivated to choose something that would help clean up the clutter in my office as well as in the rest of the house. The job is far from done, but a lot of progress has been made. Some of this is because my husband also jumped in to help with this chore . . . and I didn’t even have to ask him.

Randy sez: I’ve found it useful to take a 15 minute break each day and get up, stretch, walk around, drink some water, and then declutter one small part of my work area. That may be my out-box or my desk or one shelf or whatever. The other day I cleaned up one drawer that contains my checkbook, checks, and all that. Not a big job, but that drawer had been causing me confusion whenever I opened it. Now it’s in good shape. You need to take breaks every hour or two anyway, so you might as well do something useful (and boring so you’ll be happy to get back to work).

David wrote:

I don’t know what your take is on the critiquing the work of other writers in an online fashion. I mentioned that I have joined a critiquing website www.critters.org which is basically a web version of the writers getting together to look at each others work. I must say it is a good move because just reading how to critique and then doing it forces me to edit my own work that much better. I would highly recommend this site for two very good reasons: First it has writers from novices to published and it archives all of the critiques so you can see what actually catches the eyes of people. The only way it could get better is if it had seasoned editors. Secondly it is free! You must perform critiques in order to be allowed to post your own ms. Seems fair to me!

Randy sez: This sounds like a great organization to me! When I started writing, nobody was online except us techie geeks, and there was no web. I lived for my monthly in-person critique group where we used real paper and red pens and sat around a table. But some months were well-attended and some weren’t. Online, somebody is always there, and you don’t have to be there at the same time. It’s a whole new world, and an online critique group can move you forward massively.

Getting critiqued is part of continuous improvement, and that is Xtremely important.

I’ve just now read through all the comments that my blog readers have left since my last post. Wow! I’m impressed by the detailed action plans some of you have put together. That’s great!

I had to laugh at Karla’s comment that it sounded like a good idea to have a Board of Directors meeting and a Shareholder’s meeting. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law–at least if you run a corporation. I incorporated all my writing and teaching activities about a year ago. (I don’t recommend this until you are earning a decent amount of money, because there are expenses that must be paid to run a corporation, AND you have to do pesky paperwork such as keeping minutes on official meetings. And annual meetings for the Board of Directors and the Shareholders are required.)

Even though it’s a boring legal requirement, I’m glad I was forced to do it. Before the meeting, I took a few hours and wrote up a President’s Report for 2007, which listed all my accomplishments for the year, including one failure. (Failure is OK; it’s good to fail occasionally, because that shows you’re taking risks; it’s also good to fail quickly, which I did in one project in 2007.)

I also did an analysis of which tasks earned me money and which ones didn’t. That’s very helpful in making plans for next year. In doing the analysis, I learned that keeping track of time is something that should NOT be done on paper, it should be done by computer. It’s far easier to analyze the information if the computer does the hard work. For 2008, I am eliminating paper records of time-keeping and am using an online service that costs me $9 per month. I think that’s a bargain. They actually have a free version that manages only one project, but I have more projects, so I’m using the payware version.

I also had to wince in sympathy at Gerhi’s comments:

I’m in a bit of a bind. This year I have decided to quit my job and start a business with my wife. Maybe it is more, quit my job and help her to make her business make enough money so that we can have a decent income - so that I can spend time on my projects, expecially writing. It involves selling the house, quitting my job, moving accross country to be closer to family and support, AND building the business as a matter of priority.

Randy sez: That’s where I was about two years ago. I had recently been laid off from my irritating day job, and decided there was no good reason to stay in San Diego any longer. So we sold the house, moved halfway across the country, bought a new house, and ramped up my writing/teaching business. That pretty much shot all of 2006. So 2007 was a year of getting back in the swing of things, learning to live in the Pacific Northwest, and learning how to schedule my time when I have apparently all the time in the world, but still have to earn a living.

If there’s anything I learned in 2007, it’s this:

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

There are people who will tell you to focus on one or the other of these to the exclusion of all else. That works for awhile, but eventually things get out of kilter. I believe the great trick of managing your writing career is to continuously improve in each of these areas.

I am consciously spending time in each of these areas every day. Today, three of the actions I took were:

1) Cleaning up ONE drawer in my desk that had gotten out of control.
2) Editing the three sample chapters of my novel.
3) Writing up a strategic plan for products I plan to create and market this year.

If you look at those, that’s one organizational action, one creational action, and one marketing action. Actually, I had several other actions on my task list, so these are representative of what I did for the day.

Continuous improvement is essential, because improvements tend to multiply. As a rough example, if you learn to type twice as fast AND you learn to write twice as well, your writing time will be four times as effective. If you then learn to market twice as well, you could in principle end up earning eight times as much as originally.

Quality, of course, is hard to quantify, but the basic point is clear: small improvements multiply. Small improvements can mean; learning new skills; buying new tools; getting better organized; or automating your processes. Anything that makes you a better writer is an improvement. I’ll talk more about this in my e-zine tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Yesterday, I challenged my blog readers to post comments on their goals for the coming year and actions that they plan to take today. I’ve read through all the comments, and many of you have your Big Picture clearly in mind. You have goals for the year (some of you have lots of goals.) But not many of you mentioned what actions you planned to take today to move closer to your goals.

This is really fundamental, so I’ll talk about it some more. One of my goals this year is to sell and write my next novel. That’s a goal–the big picture. But I didn’t complete it today. Was today a failure? No, because I took two specific actions that will move me closer to that goal.

One of those actions burned several hours of my time. I completed and submitted an article that may eventually end up getting widely read and enhancing my name recognition. So this was a marketing/publicity action. It needed to get done today, because of deadlines with the publisher, so I did it today. This was a Must Do action, so I did it first.

The second action I took was to do one particular exercise on my first three chapters. These are the chapters that I’ll be sending in with my proposal, so I want them to be as good as I can make them. I analyzed all three of them–almost thirty pages, and I saw some things I can improve on in my writing. This type of action is the kind of thing we writers have trouble with, because there is no immediate penalty if we don’t do it. The only penalty is that nothing actually gets done, but since we typically only do a small increment of work every day, it feels like it’s OK to miss a day. And it’s all too easy to miss a lot of days, and wind up getting nothing done.

The third action I’ll take (as soon as I finish this blog) is to hold my annual Board of Directors meeting, followed by my annual Shareholders Meeting for my corporation. These will be short meetings because my wife and I are the Board of Directors and the Shareholders. I wrote up a President’s Report for 2007 last week, which I’ll present at both meetings. The report tells what I achieved last year and lists some goals for 2008. (Since I have a corporation, these meetings are an annual requirement.)

Three actions in one day–one marketing, one craft, and one administrative. That’s enough for me!

A few of you mentioned actual actions that you took today (or planned to take). Let’s look at some of those.

Aimeestates wrote:

I subscribed to your newsletter!

Randy sez: Good! That’s a very specific action that you can easily do in one day. Tomorrow, there’ll be a new action that builds on today. A side note: the normal date for sending out my e-zine was Tuesday, which was New Year’s Day. I decided that it would be better to NOT send out the e-zine on a holiday, so it’ll come out NEXT Tuesday.

Sally wrote:

I made 12 phone calls today to build my speaking platform!

Randy sez: Sally, you just became my hero. I LOVE to see a writer who gets out there and takes action. That’s a lot of action. If even one of those calls leads to a speaking engagement, then you earned yourself some money today, AND built a solid plank in your platform. Waytogo!

Lois wrote:

Today: I will reorganize my workspace to be free from distractions when I’m working on a project.

Randy sez: Once again, that’s a good solid action. You may or may not complete it today, but I’ll bet you made more headway than you expected. A year ago, I committed to getting better organized, as many of my e-zine and blog readers know. In quite short order, my desk and office became a much more pleasant place to work AND I began getting more stuff done because I could find stuff when I needed to. For those of you who need a kick in the butt to do something similar, let me recommend the “Clean Up Your Act!” series of teleseminars that I did with Allison Bottke, who was the driving force behind me finally getting my act together.

Robert wrote:

Inspired by your last topic with Susan Meissner, about a week ago I setup a log where I am tracking my writing efforts.

I already have an estimate of how many words I have left to write, and so from that I have made the spreadsheet “Writing Log” calculate my predicted finish date.

Based on the progress I have made over the last week, it is predicting I will be finished on May 26th! That assumes that I write a little over 400 words a day, which should not be a hard goal to achieve. Obviously if I can go faster, that will be better, but just seeing that date motivates me to not let it slip and to keep plugging away.

I have been slowed down doing plot-rework during December, so it is really exciting to be back writing again.

Thanks for the inspiration, Randy!

Randy sez: Excellent! When I am writing a first draft, I do this too. I always work with a spreadsheet that contains my list of scenes for the book (using my Snowflake method of designing my novel). I just add a column that tells how long I spent working on each scene and another column on how many words the scene is. Then I can track how many actual hours a book takes, and can predict pretty well how long the book will be and how long it’ll take to write. Waytogo, Robert!

Now for those of you who posted goals for the year, I’ll ask again: What action are you going to take TODAY to step toward that goal? Get specific! It doesn’t need to be a big action, but it should be specific and concrete and achievable in one day.

Nothing happens unless you take action! What action will you take today?