Top 5 Ways to Be a Happy Writer

I not at all comfortable pretending I know what it takes to be a success as an author. So instead, I think we'll chat a little about what makes me happy as a writer. A subtle shift, maybe, but an important one, I think.

In no particular order, I present Marcella's top 5 ways to be a happy writer.

1.  Writer know thyself.

Know what works for you. Know your process. Know your style, your voice, your genre. Know how your particular weird, creative brain works. If you don't know any of those things, find out. How? By trying all kinds of tools and methods and story types. You find out whether you're a plotter or a pantser by trying to plot a book or by through out your carefully laid out outline and seeing how it goes. You'll figure that one out pretty quickly. 

What's in it for you to know thyself: Trust. You learn to trust yourself and your process. You're harder to derail when a new workshop comes along and tries to tell you that you've been doing it wrong.

2. Create community.

Writing, by necessity, happens in solitude. Writers tend to be just normal enough that few people are willing to off you that 'oh, they're an *artist*' pass, yet writers are categorically odd enough to *need* that pass. Don't believe me? Go visit your browser search history and get back to me.  The best people suited to understand and commiserate with us are other writers. Not our families. Gods. Not our poor, beleaguered families. Your community need not be huge. A few other writers you can talk with about story arcs, business strategies, and writer drama will be enough to keep you from feeling like you've been chained up in an ivory tower.

3. Create accountability.

Use your community to help one another, if that works for you. If a little competition gets your writing blood going, set up a sprint room where other writers can join and you can compare word counts between sprints. Or set up a regular meeting time to write with another writer who wants the comfort of knowing someone else out there is writing, too, but without the pressure of comparing numbers. Meet at a coffee shop to sit together and mutually ignore one another while you write and drink your preferred beverages. While it helps to not always be alone, it really helps to know that someone else in the world is counting on you at the same time you're counting on them. It's common to find we'll do for someone else what we won't for ourselves.

4. Make space.

Make space in your day to day for writing. Make space inside you for deep work - which is a function of focus - which is attained with training. Make space inside your head for learning more, whether from classes or from other writers, or from reading other people's stories. Make physical space for writing, too. Whether it's a specific seat in the house, or a table, or a room, or a local dive bar. You need a place you can rely on where you can go and put the rest of the world on a shelf while you attend to creating your worlds. 

5. Be unapologetically you.

Write what sets your imagination alight. Never forget there's someone in the world making incredible bank writing about sexy, space-going dinosaurs. There's no reason you can't create something completely implausible and weird. In fact, I'll argue that you should. The moment you begin censoring yourself or pulling back out of fear over what you want to say, you begin to die as a writer and as a person. Listen. Just because you write something, it doesn't mean you have to share it with anybody. Allow. No limits. Not while you're writing. Those are second thoughts are for later. When you're editing and deciding what content will and will not be seen by other eyes.

Jeffe's Five Effective Work Habits for Writing Productivity

My series rebrand of the six-book epic romantic fantasy saga, Sorcerous Moons, is complete! Book One, LONEN'S WAR, releases Friday in Kindle Unlimited (KU), with each subsequent book releasing one/day for the following week. 

This is my first (and possibly last!) real test of whether my books can be successful in KU. I've run A/B tests before and I've always made 2-3x as much money in sales on Amazon alone than via page reads in KU. But we shall see! Tell your KU-loving friends. :D 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful? I can only tell you mine and that's defining "success" as being productive. The other kind of success - fame, money, adulation, awards - depends hugely on timing and serendipity. But we're focusing on work habits, so here are mine:

1. Consistency

You don't have to write every day, at the same time every day - though I do extoll that as THE single most effective method for building a consistent writing habit - but consistency is key. I build my schedule around protecting my writing time and that habit carries me through all sorts of difficulties.

2. Persistence

The other piece of building a writing habit is keeping it going. So many writers give up without finishing a book - or finishing multiple books! - or they give up after a few books. Or, when attempting to write consistently, they take time off, change their minds, prioritize something else. Persistence is what gets words on the page.

3. Focus

Shut out the world, ignore the new shinies and frolicking plot bunnies. Close the office door, put in the noise-cancelling ear buds, disconnect the internet and silence the phone. Focus on the writing and only on the writing for the time that you're doing it. Think about the story and only that. All other considerations come later.

4. Integrity

Write what you believe in and write it your way. Don't chase trends or try to make your stories a clone of someone else's. This may not seem like an effective work habit, but it is! Keeping to the integrity of the story YOU are telling allows you to focus on that and not the market, or whatever the loud voices are currently shouting about.

5. Flexibility

The previous four have all been about ritual and drawing firm lines, but with those come a need for flexibility. Be ready to change up what you're doing if you have to. Reinvent yourself regularly. Try rebranding series and putting it in Kindle Unlimited. (See what I did there?) The world changes, sometimes rapidly, and we have to be ready to change with it. 

 

Top 5: Habits of a Professional Writer

The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful?

My Top 5 Habits are all about Getting One's Head in the Right Mental Space for...

1. Putting the words on the pages: Preferably in some semblance of logical order. Even better if that order conveys a plot, character growth, and a setting. James's post from yesterday goes into the WRITE, Damnit habits of successful authors. 
2. Professional and peer accolades and criticisms: Critique partners, development and line editors, copyeditors, and beta readers are recommended resources for authors. Regardless of how pro writers publish, their peer and professional networks are going to have suggestions that should improve the book. Pros know the difference between personal attacks and creative guidance; they also know when to insist on their version and when to accept changes.  
3. Public accolades and criticisms: Once that book is released, pros let.it.go. Sure, many read reviews but professionals never respond to the reviews (because reviews are not written for the author, they're written for other readers...even if the person leaving the review doesn't understand that). 
4. Maturely handling pride, envy, success, and failure: Human nature is what it is, and denying emotions doesn't mean they don't happen. Professional writers know how to manage their own personality quirks so that whatever they privately feel doesn't become public. Whether it's the achievements of friends/strangers that simultaneously delight and disappoint, that negative voice no one else can hear, or the arrogance of attainment, professionals grok the path to success isn't through public tantrums or demeaning anyone.
5. Don't Be A Dick: While drafting works is an isolated individual affair, what comes after that requires responsible collaboration. Long-term success means being the sort of professional with whom others want to partner. There is a wide, wide space between being a pushover and an asshole; successful professionals set boundaries and expectations so they can be firm but pleasant. When it comes to interacting with readers, DBD is the guiding principle (admittedly, the art of dealing with aggressive or manipulative fans requires an advanced skill set so as not to come across as a douchenozzle).

The Write Stuff: What five effective work habits make a professional writer the most successful?

 This  one is easy:

1) Sit your butt down and write. Have a plan and stick to it when possible. If necessary, turn off the distractions, like the internet and the radio and your phone if feasible.

2) schedule a regular time for writing. It's your JOB, treat it like one. Even if it's not your job yet, respect the process and treat it like the job you want to have.

3) Accept that sometimes life gets in the way. Make it the exception and not the rule. By that I mean if you lose a day for whatever reason, then you move on, you don't beat yourself up for it.

4) Set goals. They don't have to be realistic. Go nuts, aim for 10 pages or 4,000 words a day. even if you never achieve it, strive for it like a marathon runner strives for distance It's a goal. You keep trying. As I have said before, when I'm on a roll I can still knock out 5,000 words in a day. My best day was 11,700 words written and edited twice in 8 hours. It hurt, but i did it.

5) read every day, preferably from a plethora of genres and even, gasp, non-fiction. You need to see the work to understand and learn from the work. 

On My Mind: Treating the Writer Gently

 Yesterday, Jeffe shared a blog post from the SFWA blog with me.  Treading on Embers talks about the challenges of existing - much less writing and performing as a public-facing author - while managing chronic disability. In this case, it's invisible disability: chronic migraine disorder. It speaks to any chronic pain disability, though, and brings me to What's On My Mind this week.

How do you treat your writer gently?

Most of us in the writing trenches understand that 80 to 90 percent of the time, discipline is the answer to just about all of our writing woes. But there are days or weeks or months or (gods forbid) years where discipline is crumpled up like a used tissue and cast aside by Life Events (TM). It could be chronic illness that a writer has to contend with and which no amount of discipline will overcome. It could be a crushing and terrible diagnosis and subsequent treatment. It could be the deep pain of sitting in the hospital room with your slowly dying child. Or it could be a tornado of activity, instability, uncertainty, and circumstance changes crushing you into burnout.

Of course taking a break and allowing yourself to rest and heal is the first, obvious answer. But that's physical and mental recovery. There's also a subtler recovery required - more than emotional. I'm thinking about creative recovery.

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way lays out a 12 week path to creative recovery. The program is laid out as a 12-step program because it was the way Julia Cameron charted her course for creative recovery after managing alcoholism. It is useful and it can be powerful. The current issue with the program for me is that it demands going out in public once a week. For me, that's a dicey commitment both with a pandemic that hasn't resolved in our favor and a chronic pain issue. It isn't that I don't *want* to go on Artist's Dates - it's that working a day job means there are no spoons left at 5pm to do anything but take a pain pill and collapse. That doesn't negate the rest of the program, granted. 

I'm just interested in how other people recognize their need for creative recovery and then what they do (or don't) in order to treat that writerly part of themselves with compassion and care - tempering discipline with a bit of nurturing. 

If you've considered how to treat your writer gently, what are you favorite ways of doing that? How do you approach creative recovery if it's ever been necessary for you?

On My Mind: eBook Retailers

  

 Barnes & Noble is running a pre-order sale for the next couple of days - apparently on any book up for pre-order - though the only book I have up for pre-order right now is THE STORM PRINCESS AND THE RAVEN KING (out May 31!). So, if you're a Nook reader, you can pre-order THE STORM PRINCESS AND THE RAVEN KING for 25% off from April 20-22 with the code PREORDER25. Order other books, too! Have a Nook party that goes on forever, because the presents will keep arriving for a long time!

A bunch of us who self-publish - this could be true of trad-pub sales, too, but we can't see which retailer sales come from on those numbers - have noticed that our sales on B&N have gone way down. I don't have any exact metrics, but even with new releases, I can see that my payments from B&N are much lower. Several other authors have mentioned it, too, along with a few readers who use Nook saying that it's super hard to find books on their device. It's really too bad. Everyone bitches about Amazon's dominance over the book-buying marketplace, but then the sites that could be providing competition - like B&N, Apple Books, Google Books - seem to be phoning in the effort. The only retailer that seems to be really working at competing with Amazon, and doing a creditable job of it, is Kobo. With the recent merger/acquisition (I'm not sure which it is) of Smashwords and D2D, maybe they'll up their efforts. We can hope!

And, apparently, that's what's on MY mind this week :-) 

 

The high cost of living.

 Well, I'm moving again. Not by choice. The landlord has decided to sell the place where I'm living and for the next ten or so days I'm scrambling to find a place to live, to move into the new place, and, of course, I'm trying to afford the first month, last month and deposit. 

Yay.

The subject for this week is "What's on your mind?" That pretty much sums it up, I'm afraid. It is all-consuming. I hate moving. I hate the uncertainty. I am grateful I made the latest novel deadline, but that's really all I've got.

I need a home. again. this is four times in the last seven years I've had a landlord pull this sort of thing on me. I get it, you sell when the market is good, but seriously, they're all dying in my books. It's the only catharsis I'm getting out of this. 

If you have a spae good thought or prayer to shoot this way, they are appreciated.

Keep smilin,

Jim

Writing for a Living

 Full time writer? Used to be. Not anymore. These days, out of necessity, there's a day job gumming up the works. I used to nurse a fantasy about being able to write swiftly enough and well enough that I'd be able to out earn my day job with books. It might still be possible and I'm still working on building a system to support that effort. Writing full time was a great privilege. But it also wasn't writing full time. It was writing half time. So maybe I've never really been a full time writer. Or maybe I'm more of one now that I'm a technical writer getting paid for what I write on a consistent basis. That's a little soul crushing though, because I don't even want to read what I write in those documents. Too few explosions, honestly. No romance at all, so what's the point?

The writing half time crack comes out of the fact that I had to make a deal in order to give the whole writing full time thing a go when I first embarked on it. I had to promise to take care of everything that supported day to day life. The house. The cooking. The cleaning. The finances. The errands big and small. ALL THE THINGS. It worked for many a long year. I enjoyed it all very much. Getting to write for several hours a day. Taking care of my family. But life changes. Breadwinners lose jobs. Loved ones die. You lose your home. It doesn't matter what the story is. Stuff just happens. And then you recover from it. Recovery meant me returning to the workforce. If you think THAT was a simple thing after fifteen years of not working for someone - dang. I have a great job with a great team that's full of other authors and aspiring authors. We do Nanowrimo each November (no one ever 'wins' because work) but we do try to support one another.

But. I always have my eye on what tweak can I make in my life to steal a little more writing time? Another block of space that would let me write.

I had the writer-without-a-day-job gig. I want it back.