So my pal Kameron Hurley has an excellent post up about how she hacked her writing process which you should totally go read because it’s excellent insight into how she works and more importantly why she works that way. Kameron is the author of the God’s War trilogy and also The Mirror Empire which blew up the epic fantasy scene last year and you should totally buy all the copies of all her books.

One thing in particular that struck me while I was reading her post was just how incredibly different creative processes can be. In her post, Kameron talks about why writing in 90 minute chunks wasn’t working for her and why she’s decided to go against the Typical Wisdom of Writing Every Day.

It was particularly striking to me because as I’ve been working on the third book in the Duskwalker trilogy, I had to re-evaluate and reinvent my own process. Writing Morningside Fall was extremely difficult for me, and I think in some ways I broke myself finishing that book. (I’ll probably talk more about that one of these days, when I get past my current deadline.)

Suffice to say, I was struggling mightily with this latest work until I tried a new thing: fifteen minute sprints, twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. You might think fifteen minutes isn’t enough time to do much of anything. That’s certainly what I thought for a long time … until I tried it.

And it’s true, I don’t get HUGE CRUSHING WORD COUNTS in those fifteen minutes.  Sometimes I get maybe up to 300 or so, which isn’t a bad pace.  But what’s more important is what happens when I sit down at night (after a full day at the Ol’ Day Job, and a couple of hours of Family Time, when I’m tired and grumpy and still have to open my laptop to do Moar Work).

Which is, I write a bunch more words.  Like, a lot more.  I’m way more productive now than I’ve been in previous months, and maybe even ever. I’m still not exactly sure why this particular change helped get me moving again. I just know that for the first time in a loooong time, I’m actually enjoying writing again, and I guess success tends to beget success (where in this case success is defined as hitting word count goals).

If you went and read Kameron’s post, you’ll see why it struck me so much. If you didn’t, well I’ll spoil it for you; her basis for taking a single long day of writing stands pretty much diametrically opposed to my fifteen minute sprints.  CLEARLY WE CAN’T BOTH BE RIGHT.

Except, we can, and we are.  Because we’re two different creative professionals, each professionally creating.  And, perhaps most significantly, we’re both interested in figuring out how we each create best.

All of which is to say, if you’re a writer and you’re still trying to figure out How to Do the Work, don’t worry if your process doesn’t look anything like anyone else’s process.

It cannot be stressed enough. Everyone Is Different. Part of the work of being a professional writer is figuring out How to Work. It’s certainly helpful to have access to other writers to see what works for them and what doesn’t, but it’s important to recognize that what works for them might not work for you. In fact, trying to replicate someone else’s creative process might actually be worse for you.

If you want to be a serious creative professional, you have to be serious at evaluating yourself, and you have to be brave enough to make the necessary changes to improve. The process that worked on Book X might not work on Book Y. You have to be willing to tear down what used to work and replace it with what works now.

There are many stories floating around out there about how Tiger Woods has, over the course of his career, broken down everything about his swing and rebuilt it from scratch multiple times. As creative professionals, we need to approach our work with the same seriousness and the same devotion to excellence.

Learning how other folks Do Their Work is great for opening up possibilities, but ultimately it’s up to each creative to get down in the mud with their own process to figure out how they work.  How to Work is part of The Work.

Apparently the word for today is work.

Mmm, work.

 

I had a chance to sit down and talk to the most excellent people of Dungeon Crawlers Radio and, despite a number of technical difficulties, had a great time (as usual).  I can say “as usual” because this is the second opportunity these guys have given me to go on the air with them, and they are two-for-two in making it fun and adventurous.

If you’d like to hear me chat about things like…:

• whether the Duskwalker series is dystopian or post-apocalyptic
• why I chose to start the series so many years after the Collapse
• how a lecture by Vernor Vinge something something (a story which I may or may not complete because every time I try to tell it the connection drops)
• and other fun tidbits about writing in general and the series in particular

… you can catch the episode here.

Thanks again to Revan and the guys for hosting me!

Neil Harbisson is a Spanish-born artist and musician living with a condition called achromatopsia, which has rendered him completely colorblind.

He’s also a cyborg with an amazing gift:  the device he wears, his “electronic eye”, enables him to hear color.

You should watch him explain it all in his own words in this video.  But Vodaphone recently worked with Neil to help him achieve a first, and his dream was to conduct a concert using only color.  I highly recommend you watch the whole piece, but if you don’t have time, here’s a quote from Neil:

I’ve been living in my own world hearing color.  And when you hear a group of children sing color, it feels like we are sharing the same world.

There’s been a handy #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag floating around the Twitters, and I was going to chime in, but then I realized I’m not clever enough to do it in only 140 characters (or fewer, since I’d have to include that hashtag gah I’m terrible at this stuff!), so I’m cheating and using this space to join in.

There’s already a lot of great stuff being talked about out there around diversity, but one thing I think people sometimes miss is the fact that diversity for the sake of diversity isn’t the point.  Just sprinkling in a few “different” characters into your work doesn’t address the underlying issue that people are longing to resolve.  If the perspective isn’t authentic, it can even be more harmful … “That’s how they see me?”

I believe the cry is for a culture that says: We see you.  You matter.  You are not alone.

Like Neil, we all long for connection.  We long to have companions who share our world.  And books have long been the portal through which we can escape our own personal worlds and enter into some other magical realm.

When you take that leap into someone else’s world and you find that there, too, even there, there appears to be no room for people like you, it can be a crushing emotional blow.

One of my favorite artists, Makoto Fujimura, recently said:

Culture is not a territory to be won; it is instead a resource we are called to steward.

Authors contribute so much to culture, and the more we can do to broaden the experiences and perspectives available to the world, the better off we all are.  It’s not a zero-sum game.  Adding your voice to the mix doesn’t silence mine.  In the best of worlds, it strengthens them both.

And for the audience out there, it increases the chances that they, like Neil, can capture that moment when they feel like someone shares their world.

By joining forces with writers of different ethnicities and genders and political leanings and abilities and sports affiliations, we’re all helping to shape a culture that recognizes that significance, that dignifies the individual, and that sends an important message.

We see you.  You matter.  You are not alone.

 

Like lots of middle-aged dudes in our country, I’m still pretty much a child.  A bit tall and beardly for a normal child perhaps, and okay sure I responsibly hold a job and pay a mortgage and am generally handy around the house, and all that sort of thing, but you know …  I saw the LEGO movie.  And I loved it.

There were lots of great moments in the movie for a long-time LEGO lover like myself, but, perhaps oddly, the thing that stands out most for me, the thing that makes me really think fondly of the movie, is Benny the Spaceguy.

More specifically, Benny’s cracked space helmet.

I’m not sure if Kids These Days picked up on that little detail, or if they did, if they understood it.  But for anyone who grew up as I did playing with those early space sets, that helmet crack was a wink from the moviemakers.  I’m fairly certain that was no random decision and no carefully focus-tested, marketing-approved character decision born of a corporate desire to sell vintage 80s LEGO Spacemen (though it may have that effect).

I had many LEGO sets growing up, and the space sets were always my favorite in those early days, so I had a fair number of little LEGO astronauts, and after so many deep space explorations and hard moon landings and harrowing flights in experimental spacecraft and rough rides in poorly-engineered land rovers, pretty much every single one of them had that same crack in that exact same place.

For me, Benny’s cracked helmet wasn’t just a nice touch, it was a beautifully chosen detail that said “We know. We had the same experience that you did.”.  I still would’ve enjoyed the movie whether Benny’s helmet had been cracked or not.  But the fact that it was took me from feeling like I was watching a movie made for my children to feeling like I was watching a movie made for me. 

As a creator, it’s always important to try and get the details right.  That’s what research is for.  But there’s nothing more powerful than going beyond just getting the details right, beyond just showing you’ve done your research.  When you get those intimate, experiential moments right, it establishes an almost magical connection to the audience members who’ve been there; it reminds them they’re not alone, that they’re not the only ones who feel that way, or who have been through that.

Getting it wrong can have exactly the opposite effect, alienating the people who would be your biggest supporters if only you’d gotten it right.  This is part of the power of the old maxim to “write what you know” … creative writers can write just about anything, but when you write from a place of honesty, and write about the things that you know deeply, you infuse your work with the kinds of details that like-minded people recognize and feel embraced by.

There might be a point in here.  It’s probably just an incomplete thought.  But I’ll leave it here in case anyone else wants to think about it too.

In closing, SPACESHIP!

There’s this nasty rumor out there floating around about publishing that seems to suggest that if you want to get a book published by a Traditional Publisher, you have to get lucky.

I’m here to assure you that this rumor is 100% true.

I’ll say that again.

If you want to be a Published Author, you have to get lucky.  It’s exactly like winning the lottery.

Sort of.

It’s kind of like winning the lottery, if the way you won the lottery was by devoting yourself to the study of statistics and risk management and the algorithms that particular lotteries use to generate their numbers, and then maybe developed your own system to model a carefully-selected and targeted lottery, and then you analyzed your costs versus potential payouts, and you took an extra job solely to fund your lottery-playing, and you refined your system through years of playing and further study and talking to experts, and you stuck with it and stayed within your budgeted lottery-funding, and re-invested your minor lottery winnings back into your lottery-funding pool, and played consistently for a decade.

And then finally won a reasonable sum that was more or less in line with the amount of work you put in (or maybe somewhat less).

Many published authors will tell you that they are published because of their Sheer Determination and Amazing Skill.  (While this is obviously true in my case, I’ve heard that other people simply got lucky.)

Actually, every author who has ever gotten a book deal has had luck on their side to one degree or another; the manuscript hit the right person’s desk at the right time, when the market was doing the right thing, and the publisher happened to have money to spend on acquisition, and so on and so forth.  Sometimes great books languish unnoticed for years.  There are just far too many variables that are completely outside of the Author’s control.

BUT.

It’s never just luck.  Entirely too many not-yet-Published-Authors like to use the luck angle to escape the painful truth that they don’t really want to put the work in.  Some folks want to dash off a manuscript over a weekend and then email it directly to a few Big Time Publishers and then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

In other words, they treat it just like the lottery.

So yes, if that’s the approach one takes to authorship, then it probably does take quite a bit of Luck to “win”.

The fact is, the vast majority of Published Authors have spent years positioning themselves for that kind of luck.  

They have worked hard at learning their craft.  They’ve done research to target the right kind of publisher (or agent) for the kind of work they do.  They FOLLOW SUBMISSION GUIDELINES.  They stick with it.  (Not me, of course, but I mean real authors who have talent and things.)

In short, they make their own luck.

A few years ago there was a delightful study about Luck, comparing people who thought of themselves as having Good Luck and those who thought they had Bad Luck.  You should check it out for yourself but because this is the internet I will summarize it by over-simplifying and use my own over-simplification to further my personal agenda:

People who were ‘unlucky’ generally didn’t give themselves as many opportunities for success as ‘lucky’ people.  It more or less came down to playing the odds.

That’s not actually a quote from the study or anything, I just wanted to use WordPress’s neat quote button on something and that seemed like a good place to do it.

So, on the one hand, now that I’ve been lucky enough to become a Published Author, it’s really tempting to sit here and tell you that it’s not luck, it’s hard work and I earned it and I deserve it because I’m better than EVERYONE AND WHY CAN’T YOU SEE MY GENIUS AND I SHOULD HAVE WON ALL THE AWARDS!!! (which haven’t been awarded yet there’s still time to nominate me nudge nudge nudge!!!)

But being honest, I have to admit that I had met the right people who helped me get my manuscript to the other right people who had to think very hard about the realities of their business and the state of the market at the time and a lot of moving pieces had to line up to make it all happen.  Being a man of faith as I am, I of course think of it as Providence rather than Luck.

But also, it was a long and difficult road of 10+ years, studying, practicing, learning, failing, getting rejected, weeping, gnashing teeth, dusting off, trying again, etc. etc.

I have no idea what the ratio is between the two, but I’m pretty sure it takes some of each.