The Rookie Writer Show

The most important systems you’re going to set up in readiness for NaNo and your writing life belong are your Resiliency Systems.

It helps immeasurably to have made time for writing, set up systems and learned little tricks to make the most of your writing time, figured out your best outlining, research, and drafting systems. However, they can all end up abandoned and untouched if you don’t have your resiliency systems in place. Sooner or later, something is going to come your way that makes you doubt yourself (talent, discipline, whatever), your story, or both. Be ready.

Mindset is your first line of defense. Knowing what motivates you, facing your fears, choosing carefully the words you say to yourself, valuing yourself (including your health) and your own contributions to the world are the foundation of everything else. For some refreshers on ways to develop some of those habits and skills, check out these episodes:

* Episode 003 | What Motivates You?* Episode 016 | The Value of Fear Lists* Facing Your Writing Fears by The Rookie WriterRewrite Fear Worksheet by Sage Cohen* Episode 017 | The Words You Say to Yourself* Episode 004 | Self Care: BECAUSE not SO THAT

Other Writers are invaluable. You can’t have too many of them in your life. Who knows better what you’re going through than someone else who’s out there doing their best to get their words down onto the page and then to get those pages out into the world to their readers? They can offer you context, they can offer you advice and feedback, they can tell the difference between when you need a shoulder to cry on and when you need a (gentle, but firm) kick in the pants. They speak your language, and they know stuff — the name of a new agent that just tweeted that they’re looking for a story like yours, the deadline for a contest that’s perfect for your type of story, etc. Find them and then make them a part of your day-to-day life.

* Episode 008 | Who You Need in Your Writing Squad* NaNo Site Buddies* Facebook Groups

Family, Friends, Fans, and Faith (as you understand it) are there to love you and remind you that you’re more than you’re writing, that you need to take breaks, take a nap, take a chillpill, whatever. Remember to keep them at the center of your life and you can’t go wrong. When they ask how it’s going, tell them. When they ask what they can do, give them a job. Can they help and/or trade off with you on childcare? Are they good cheerleaders or natural born coaches? Do they read in your genre and would be good beta readers? Do they have a knack for grammar?

NaNoWriMo is as good a time as any to really pay attention to your tools. It’s a month-long challenge that deliberately pushes most people to write a little faster than they would like. As a result, it’s great at helping writers shut their inner critics up for a little while (or at least turn the volume down on their nagging). It’s great for that. It serves that purpose well.

However, it’s a lot of writing, and it’s not a great time to have your systems working against you! Even though you’ve created more time and thought about some things to try to make the most of the time you’ve had, and maybe you’ve even put together a bangin’ outline, you still don’t want to be out searching for notes that you took or fighting with your computer program.

This week, ahead of our November 1st start date, I’d like for you to make a few decisions.

1 Decide What You Want to Use to Store Ideas, Notes, and Research. Whether you prefer to go old school and use post-it notes, notecards, notebooks, or binders or whether you make use of your digital options (apps on your phone, files on your computer, etc.), figure out your way and then stick with it. I mean STICK. WITH. IT. Ideally, you’ll have everything in one place so you don’t have to go chasing across a variety of platforms and methods to find where you put that great name you came up with for your antagonist or what year the protagonist’s grandmother (and mentor) was born. People do everything from keeping a notecard in their pocket (a la Anne Lamott) to keeping a single notebook (tabbed or otherwise), like Judy Blume, who goes through it at the end of every book to make sure she got everything important, to sending themselves emails to being the world’s greatest Evernote or Bear user. Some people might choose to take all their notes in a google file. Or choose a specialized program like Story Planner or Campfire. Or make great use of the research organization features in Scrivener. Again, there is no one right way, just your right way. Go find it. And consider checking out the options listed in today’s show notes, with links to a variety of programs.

* Analog* Post-It Notes * Notecards (Anne Lamott is a fan of this method.)* Notebook (Judy Blume is a fan of this method.) – easier with tabs! * 3-Ring or Disc Binders – easier with dividers!* Digital* Voice Recorder Apps: BrainToss * Digital Post-In Notes: Post-It Plus (App)* Index Card Apps/Software: Story Skeleton/Google Keep * Web Highlighters: Diigo (Can also pull from Kindle)* Note-Taking Apps/Software: Bear/Evernote/* The 10 Best Note-Taking Apps in 2019 * Plotting Apps/Software:

This week we’re going to address outlining systems (AKA plotting systems AKA planning systems), but first I need to talk to you about a few common terms tossed around in the writing community: pantser, planner (or plotter), and plantser (or plotter).

Now at the beginning of this episode, when I mentioned outlining systems, my guess is that some of you just felt a little flutter of excitement in your heart, while others might’ve felt a cold wave of panic wash over you. Lean into these feelings, people! They’re telling you something important about yourself.

For those of you who got excited, you might identify as more of a planner (or plotter). You like to know a lot about where your story is going before you sit down to write. You may not take it as far as James Patterson famously does with his outlines that go on for dozens and dozens of pages, but you feel more comfortable writing, have more fun writing, in fact, when you have guideposts to follow.

Pantsers, you panicked when you heard we were talking about planning. Or maybe most pantsers saw the topic and moved on their merry way, putting some distance between themselves and this week’s topic. Pantsers like the surprise of writing, They like to sit down with a basic idea or question, perhaps a flash of an imagined scene or character and then just follow the story where it takes them. Stephen King is a big pantser. In his seminal book On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft, he talks pretty extensively about it, in fact.

People have finally come to terms with the fact that this isn’t a binary condition, but instead a continuum. There are lots and lots of “plantsers“ (or “plotsers,” if you prefer) among us. In fact, few of us fall into the outer ranges of pure pantsers or planners. Most of us live somewhere in between the two writing extremes.

So which are you? How can you find out? You can’t necessarily base it on how you respond to other situations. Your affinity or aversion to structure in your daily life may or may not carry forward into your writing life. We’re complicated creatures and sometimes we simply don’t make sense.

For instance, In my twenties I had a friend from work come over for the first time. She’d only seen me at work, where I kept my desk super organized and my workflow streamlined. Not so much at my apartment. She just kept saying, “How are you the same person?”

In Judy Blume‘s Master Class (and I may have told this already, but if so, here we go again!), she talks about how her agent had a similar reaction when he went into her writing space for the first time. The rest of her house was reasonably orderly, whereas the office where she wrote most of the time looked as if a hurricane had blown through. It was how she felt most comfortable writing and she leaned into it.

You may be the kind of person who alphabetizes your spice rack and still not be a planner/plotter/outliner, but instead prefer to fly by the seat of your pants when you’re writing.

Like me, you may not know where your car keys and phone are half th...

If you listened to last week, you know that we’re trying to get our productivity systems on point in readiness for National Novel Writing Month. We kicked things off by going through the process of carving out time for this challenge. This week, we’re going to look at ways to make the most out of that time. Think of it as sort of an expanded remix on #1 from last week: “Finding Your Writing Zone.”

Almost 20 years ago, four researchers of the National Writing Project of Acadiana in Louisiana published a study on writing rituals. They studied over one hundred writers of all types, across a wide range of ages and experience levels. They found that “regardless of sex, nationality, genre, or age, rituals are an integral part of a writer’s creative process.”

While some of the rituals were more compulsive or eccentric than others, all of them helped the writers to:*Decrease writing related anxiety,*Increase a sense of control over their writing efforts, and*Improve their writing.“Who, What, When, and Where of Writing Rituals.” (The Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4)

Sound like something you might like to add to your writing life? Helpful, right?! So how can you find the best ritual(s) for you and your writing career? My answer is to “Get Meta.”

Merrian-Webster defines “Meta” as “showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of the category: cleverly self-referential. That’s not exactly what I mean. What I’m really referring to is “meta-analysis,” but their definition of that (“a quantitative statistical analysis of several separate experiments or studies in order to test the pooled data for statistical significance”) is enough to put you to sleep.

I think that, believe it or not, the Urban Dictionary actually does a better job. Taking a break from listing the most unsettling things that humans can come up with, the Urban Diction defines meta this way: “Meta means about the thing itself. It’s seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.”

Gabriela Periera, the mastermind behind all things DIY MFA and a personal hero to me, says the following when she talks about the importance of this process, which she refers to in a larger way as “iteration.”

When you iterate and test out different aspects of your writing process, it pushes you to become a more mindful writer. Mindfulness and meditation are techniques that I’ve been exploring, both in my writing life and my real life over the years. The idea of mindfulness is to become aware of your mind–to observe your thoughts and where they go– but then to be able to let them go.When you practice iteration in your writing process, it makes you more aware of your habits: both what works and what doesn’t. As you iterate and observe your habits, you’ll become better able to shape your process and become a more effective and productive writer.When you iterate and test your process, it pushes you to adopt a meta-view of your writing. This creates a certain distance between you and your work, distance that can help you gain a more objective perspective about your project.https://diymfa.com/writing/more-productive-writer

Writers’ rituals often involve more than one of these four valuables. To make the most of your writing time, get meta about them to discover your current optimal mix of circ...

National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) is almost here! (Cue confetti sound.) All this month I’ll be focused on getting you ready for NaNo.

For those of you who haven’t already heard of it, the gist is this: Write 50,000 words (the length of a 200-ish page novel) in the 30 days of November. If you finish, you win! (And honestly, I would argue that even if you don’t cross the 50,000-word line, but you establish a solid writing habit, you still win.)

There are always a variety of articles about this time every year touting the benefits of NaNo (e.g. sending the inner critic on a month-long vacation!) and testimonials about how NaNo was a game-changer for that person. I absolutely advise you to go seek some of these out. Communications from the NaNo organization itself will be full of these sorts of resources. Google some or head on over to the NaNoWriMo site and skim a few. They’re fun reads! Enjoy!

And there are about 47 million different podcasts, YouTube videos, classes, blogs, and books that will walk you through exercises to test your premise, help you develop your character, and flesh out an outline with sufficient detail to send you off on November 1st with a clear picture in mind. You should absolutely take advantage of these resources! If you’re in the Bloomington, IN Area, you can even come to my classes.

But this is primarily a writing productivity podcast, so we’re going to focus on the tools and systems you need to set up to keep track of all these brilliant insights on character and all those mind-blowing twists you’ve dreamed up for your plot.

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you may remember Episode 015 | 5 Essential Systems for Writers. In that episode, I gave an overview of the kinds of things a writer will need to track. This month, however, we’ll be getting into the brass tacks, discussing some specific tools helpful for tracking your time, your ideas and research, and your actual manuscript drafts. Here we go!

We’re going to start with the foundation of every writing project ever: making space and time for your writing.

1Find Your Writing Zone –Where you write can make a huge difference in how productive you are. How much do you know about your writing preferences? Are you working with or against your own instincts?

Which of the following descriptions do you think best describes you? Choose any and all answers that you think best apply to you. I prefer to write…

* In the following locations:* Wherever I find myself* At a designated/usual spot* At home* Anywhere BUT home* Outside* Inside* With the following conditions:* With people I know* With people I don’t know * Alone* With sound* In silence* Using the following methods:* Longhand* On a computer* Using dictation* Using an app on my phone* Using a typewriter or wordprocessor

Now test these out!

For the last three weeks, we’ve been looking at the array of fiction opportunities available to you: from the 6-word story to the million plus-word serialized fiction that shows up online and everything in between. Even with all that opportunity (or maybe because of it), you may be feeling a little frozen in place. Whether you’re just feeling a little sluggish or you’re full-on “deer in headlights,” here are a few tricks to try to get things moving again.

1Picture Your the Process and the Outcome -Knowing what you want and why you want it is the foundation on which everything is built.

“[Studies show] that focusing on attaining your goal–as opposed to the effort it will take to succeed–will increase your chances of failure.In one study, researchers at the University of California asked one group of students to visualize themselves getting a great grade on an exam. They asked another group to visualize themselves studying for the exam.The students who visualized themselves getting a good grade scored lower on the test than the students who visualized themselves studying. Students who visualized themselves studying put more time into preparing for the test and ultimately, they scored much better.That’s just one example. There are a multitude of studies that show athletes, students, and musicians perform worse when they visualize themselves succeeding, as opposed to visualizing themselves going through the steps it takes to succeed.–Why Vision Boards Don’t Work (And What You Should Do Instead) by Amy Morin

Try These 5 Minute Exercises:

* Set a Timer and Freewrite: Remind yourself of what you hope to accomplish and why you decided to undertake this process in the first place. Remind yourself of how you like to write: When? Where? Using what tools? No matter what you do, don’t stop writing. You may find that you answer to what’s been blocking you will come out of your subconscious.* Take 5 Minutes and Visualize Yourself Writing. Where are you? What are you using to write? What materials are at hand? You might find that you’re either missing some key piece that will help you get in the writing zone or that there’s something that’s posing as an obstacle to getting in the flow.

2 Choose the Smallest Task – Now that you’ve taken a pause to examine what process and outcome you would ideally like to have, look for the smallest task that will move you in that direction. Small victories can serve to “prime the pump,” creatively speaking, making way for the completion of bigger tasks. Or as Eric Knabel said in his interview, “There’s a lot of power in taking small steps.”

Try These 5 Minute Exercises:

* Set a Timer and Braindump: Write down absolutely everything that’s on your mental writing to-do list. Again, do this without stopping. Once you have a list, grab some highlighters and sort your tasks on your list by size. Pick a task that looks doable, easy even, and knock it out. And then do another one. * Design the Writing Version of a “Couch to 5K” Type Program for Yourself. Think of it like getting back in shape after being a little too cozy with the couch. If you’ve ever done anything akin to a “Couch to 5K” program, you know that they always have you start small: walking vs. running and short distances vs. long ones. Also,

In the last installment of our 3-part series, we’re taking a look at longer forms of fiction, beginning with the basic building block, the novel.

Novels

The sweet spot for most novels is between 80,000 and 120,000 words, but within that window, different genres have more finely-tuned sweet spots where most of their novels live.

There are a number of ways to think about categorizing novels, and we’ve already talked about different types of novels on earlier episodes of this show. I invite you to check out the following for some deeper understanding of the different types of novels.

Episode 010 | Commercial vs. Upmarket vs. Literary

Episode 006 | Genre 101

Epics

Obviously, another way to think about novels is by length. Epics (sometimes also known as “Super Novels”) tend to be longer (120,000 or 125,000 words or longer) and often features some elements from the original epics like The Odyssey and The Illiad, such as a journey and/or a quest. This journey or quest can be physical, spiritual, or temporal. There is no hard and fast number for how long these can be, but I had a hard time finding books longer than 650,000 that had found a wide audience. Prominent examples of epics include:

Series

Most novels are stand-alones, meaning that they aren’t meant to be read as part of a collection of books and/or have no special connection to other books’ storylines. However, when two or more books are connected in some way, they become a part of a series. Series fall into two basic categories:

1 Overarching story arcs that are too big to fit into one book and require two or more books to tell the complete s...

Reasons to Write Short Fiction

1 It’s a Great Place to Start – Build Your Skills – Confidence Builders – Great Training Ground

* Writing short stories is a great way to build your understanding of genres and audiences. For instance, Mark Twain published short stories in his local newspaper more than 20 years before his first novel, helping him to develop his inimitable voice.* Writing short will help you to learn pacing, structure, and spare writing. You’ll learn to make every word count while working to make a character or a setting to come alive. All these skills also come in handy during novel revision time.

2 Test or Flesh out a Character and/or Story Idea – Clear Out Writing Distractions

* If you’re not sure about whether the project you’re considering (or working on) is a story or merely a premise or interesting subject, write a short story about it and see where it takes you. Hemingway reportedly wrote dozens of stories featuring a character named Nick Adams both before and after his first breakthrough novel was published. * If you want to know more about a character’s backstory, consider writing a short story about it. * It helps you deal with the distractions caused by the other stories that are scratching at the door (or what Eric Knabel referred to in his interview as “Shiny Project Syndrome”). There’s a quote by some famous writer that I can’t find when I need it, but it goes something like: “Having been assigned to write on Vermont, I find myself obsessed with Mississippi.” Deal with your “Shiny Project Syndrome” by taking a little of the pressure off. Take a couple of hours and write up a draft of a short (or a short-short) story. Then put it aside to get back to your main project.

3 Discoverability – Gain visibility – Resume Builders

* You can get published sooner. There are more than twice as many literary magazines that publish short stories as there are book publishers. More than twice as many ponds to fish in. Stephen King famously had a stack of rejections on his wall when he was getting started. But eventually, he had some acceptances, too. And that was enough to keep him writing. Which is why a lot of people urge writers to go for 100 rejections a year. because you’re likely to get some acceptances mixed in there, too. It’s like Ray Bradbury said: if you write a short story a week for a year, you literally can’t write 52 bad stories in a row. Some of them are going to be exactly what a publisher is looking for.* Plus, agents and sometimes

So that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with a quick overview of the commonly-accepted ranges for different types of fiction.

LengthSix-Word Story6 wordsAmerican SentenceOne sentence with exactly twelve syllablesTwitterature280-characters or lessHint Fiction25 words or less50-Word Stories/Ultra-Shorts/Minisaga/Dribble50 to 55 words or less(Sometimes exactly 50 words with up to a 15 character title or exactly 55 words with up to a 7 word title)Micro Fiction/Drabble100 words or lessMicrostory250-300 words or lessSudden Fiction750 words or lessFlash Fiction100 to 1,500 words(Usually 1,000 words or less)Short Story1,000 to 7,500 wordsNovelette7,500 to 17,500 wordsNovella17,500 to 40,000 wordsNovel40,000 to 125,000 wordsEpic or Super Novel125,000+ wordsSeries2 or more connected novelsUnlimited words

Are You a Flasher?

Many of us start out writing with the idea of being a novelist and jump straight into that form. And some will have produced some number of novel drafts or partial drafts. (Can I get a shout out from my NaNoWriMo crowd?!) There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting with the novel (or even a series) in mind. If that’s working for you, keep at it! If, however, you’re struggling a little (or maybe even if you’re not), consider Ray Bradbury’s advice on this subject and give shorter fiction a go:

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.Ray Bradbury – “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001

In next week’s episode, we’ll be chatting about short stories, novelettes, and most likely novellas. For today, we’re focusing on the shorter end of the spectrum: Flash* AKA Flash Fiction AKA Short-Short Stories AKA Short-Shorts.

These stories develop plot and character with a brevity that is sometimes extreme, using as few as six words. The shorter the work, the more it relies on suggestion and evocative language to make the reader an active partner in developing the plot and/or character. (A great example of this is a 6-word story often attributed to Hemingway: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”) However, even the author of a 1,500-word flash fiction piece will need to be mindful of how they choose their words. Those six pages will fly by, I promise!

*One fun little thing that sometimes leads to confusion: “Flash Fiction” is also a term for a subcategory of Flash. See table above.

That being said, use the words you need to tell your story. Here’s a great example from Laura McMillan and John M. Cusick, Editors of Armchair/Shotgun:

“Take advantage of shades of meaning to paint the picture you want with maximum economy. If “blue” doesn’t cut it, you could try “a vibrant shade of blue-green that reminded him of that time he flew over the Caribbean,” sure. But if you’re limited to 300 words,

Eric Knabel is a physician in Bloomington, Indiana, naively clinging to the idea of the traditional family doctor. He is fortunate to live with his spouse/muse Robin and their two children. When he is not sharing his new hard rock discoveries with his son or learning the nuances of K-Pop from his daughter, he stares at his guitar with every intention of learning how to play it. His writing has become a wonderful diversion from the frustrations of 21st century medicine, and he hopes one day to be half the man his dog Nestlé thinks he is.

To contact Eric with more questions or to inquire about being a beta reader or a critique partner for his series, email him: ericknabel [at] gmail.com or reach out to him on Twitter.

Here are the links to some of the things that came up in conversation…

* New York City Midnight Short Story Challenge* Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Writing Contest