Dean's Online Fiction

Writing, by it's very nature tends to be filled with 'soft' concepts. There are rules, but every aspiring writer is told that once they've mastered the rules they can go ahead and break them.

Plotting, characterization, setting, they're all easy to talk about, but hard to measure absolutely. Still, I'd like to talk about a few things that are possibly even more nebulous. I've assembled them here for the simple fact that none of them really fit anywhere else, and I think they all have direct impacts on a writer's productivity and oftentimes their success.

Attention span: A little while ago I found myself essentially unemployed for a period of about three weeks. Prior to that I'd had my hours cut down to three-quarter time for a couple of months. An interesting thing happened as I proceeded to dedicate more time each day to writing.

Initially it was hard to write for more than half an hour at a stretch. I'd sit down, begin writing, gut my way along until I felt I could write no more without a break, and find that a mere thirty minutes had passed. If I happened to be working on an especially exciting part of a manuscript, or one that was extra clear inside my mind, I'd sometimes make it an hour before breaking.

As time progressed, I found that changing. My attention span had lengthened out to where I regularly worked for an hour before breaking to use the necessities, and I occasionally went up to two hours at a go. The impact to my productivity was enormous, and I suspect that the pieces I wrote in one long stretch were probably less choppy.

It's been acknowledged for a quite a while that the human body will adapt as it's used for new activities. If you spend four or five hours running each week you'll probably find that you're faster as time progresses, that you can clock much greater distances with relative ease as the various systems inside you become better suited to the task to which you've devoted yourself.

I'm not sure that it's as generally acknowledged that the mind tends towards the same adaptation, but I believe that it very much does. We become better at that which we do often, and writing is no different, so if you're finding it hard to crank out your daily goal don't despair, as you persevere it should become increasingly obtainable.

Location: I read an excerpt out of a book one time. I don't remember the title, or the author, I can't even say for sure where it was I read it, but I think it was while I was helping out at an after school club in New York.

I'm fairly sure it was dated when I read it, and has only become more so over the last decade, but there was a piece of advice inside that has stuck with me for years now. The author was trying to instruct parents on how to help their children do better in school, and he suggested that location was a key ingredient to productivity.

He wasn't talking about lighting or fresh air, instead his core concept was that our minds can be trained so that they come to expect to do certain types of work at certain locations. Pick a spot that you don't use for anything else, and go to it every time you want to write. At some point you'll notice that as soon as you sit down your mind will be ready to write. He claimed that the process generally took three weeks, which happens to be about the length of time for me to notice that my attention span had doubled.

On a side note, lately I'm a big proponent of getting out of the house to do my writing. I find that there are too many distractions if I sit down at my desktop and try to write. Instead I grab my laptop and head to a bookstore. Of course there are plenty of distractions there too, but I seem to manage those better.

Subconscious: I should probably look some hokey statistic up regarding how much of the normal person's information processing takes place below the level of conscious thought, but I'm not going to go there. Instead I'd just like to say that it is amazing the sheer volume of ideas that your subconscious will generate if you give it a chance.

Always keep a pad of paper next to you, or a digital recorder, otherwise you'll forget the gems that tend to surface when you're not really thinking about writing. A case in point is this article. A few weeks before I started work on this one I began contemplating the need for a website. I'd also been kicking around the idea of putting together a presentation that could be taken to schools as a way of drumming up some publicity for anything I ended up self publishing.

I remember wondering what in the world I'd even talk about. Less than a week later I was reading a critique someone had done of some of my work and I had a kind of mini epiphany that lead to the breadcrumbs page. All by itself that would have been a pretty good week's work for my subconscious, but over the course of the day I recorded another fifteen minutes of verbal notes for other items I wanted to put on a website and develop into a presentation.

I'm convinced that most cases of writers block happen because people become such severe critics that they can't let their subconscious work. Don't let that be you. Pay attention when your subconscious offers up an idea. Maybe it's not obviously great, but usually there is a kernel of genius there that you can work with. Learn how your subconscious works and put yourself in a position for it to be crunching away at your problems for you.

Motivation: When I think about motivation I'm generally contemplating the external, more transient types of things that can cause us temporarily to get more or less done. A good example of this for me is what happened when I first read Twilight.

I know most of the more high-brow people out there look down on the series, but I quite enjoyed it, and was intrigued by the story of how Stephenie Meyer came to write it. According to several interviews she gave, she never even intended to be a writer. If I remember correctly she majored in Literature in college, but the real start to Twilight came from a dream she had of the meadow scene between the two main characters.

Stephenie Meyer was so impacted by the dream that she wrote it down when she woke up, but it stayed with her and she soon found herself writing down what she thought would happen from there. When she got to the end of the story, she went back and wrote the first half leading up to the meadow scene.

The only person who knew anything about the dream was Stephenie's sister, who she was sending each 'chapter' as it was finished. Once Stephenie finished with the chain of events on both sides of the meadow scene, it was her sister that pointed out that she had a manuscript and urged her to try to get it published.

To make a long story short, a few months after Stephenie's dream she had a deal inked for a million dollar advance and three books. I don't remember the exact time frame in question, but I believe the entire episode took somewhere less than six months.

Sometimes I wonder if some of the criticisms Stephenie receives about her writing stem from envy on the part of those of us who've unsuccessfully trying to get published for years.

I'd propose that we take a different spin on those events. To me it is incredibly reassuring that someone who never intended to be a writer could break into the industry in such a big way. Obviously there are various elements of skill and chance at work in getting any writer published, but she did it, and if I keep trying long enough, and am actively trying to improve my writing, I believe that eventually I'll be able to do so as well.

After reading Twilight and researching Stephenie's story, I started 'Broken' and despite a very demanding work schedule managed to hammer out a rough draft in a little over nine months. According to the log I kept, I spent on average an hour a day working on the manuscript, and a very large part of the motivation came from thinking back on the success of the Twilight series.

I've probably rambled on more than I should have, but the key takeaway point here is that none of us write in a vacuum. There are always going to be forces pushing to write, or trying to discourage us from continuing. Find the things that help motivate you to continue writing, and then hold on tight to them.

Nature: Many of you probably already anticipated this last section, but no discussion on the intangibles of writing would be complete without touching on the intrinsic motivation that most writers draw from to make themselves write despite whatever else may be going on in their lives.

Novel writing especially is a fairly daunting task. In a really good hour I can get a thousand words of (relatively) high-quality work down on a page. On a good day where I don't have anything else going on, I can sustain that pace for six or seven hours, but generally those words are written at work during lunch, after work when I should probably been paying more attention to my poor, patient wife, or on Saturday's when all I really want to do is let someone or something else entertain me instead of putting in yet more work.

If the average fantasy/sci-fi novel is 80,000 words, thats 80 hours of time spent working over and above the demands of the job that actually pays the bills. If someone really commits to writing a novel, they're going to give up a lot of golf, reality tv, basketball, or something else that they love.

That's a big sacrifice, especially considering that the story will still be sitting there waiting to be finished long after the initial rush of your decision to write a novel is spent and gone.

Why do people do it?

If you listen to some writers it becomes an almost mystical explanation. They write because that is who they are. They write because they can't not write.

It's not my place to judge, but I've never been able to relate to that. I've gone through large chunks of my life without feeling the need to do any writing, but lately I've come to better understand my own nature.

As long as I can remember my dad's wanted to be self employed and I never really understood why. Now that I've got the better part of a decade's worth of experience working for someone else I finally understand.

I've worked for some really good companies and some really bad ones, and the one common thread is that I miss the freedom to set my own hours and pace that I had while attending to college.

I'm fairly fiscally conservative, so I'm doing a good job saving for retirement, but in the final analysis writing represents my efforts towards being 'self employed'. It is a super long shot, and unless I manage to hit it big on my first couple of novels I'd still be dependent on the publisher and marketplace for my income, but there's still that hope that I can do really well out of the gate, become financially independent, and then write simply because I love writing.

I guess you could say that writing is my best effort at establishing greater control over my own life.

It really doesn't matter whether or not your reason is anything like mine, but I think part of becoming a writer is learning to understand yourself. As you think about what really makes you tick, you can learn to use that to your advantage, to draw strength from it when you need an extra push, and to compensate for the times and instances where it isn't going to be enough to get you over the next hurdle.