6.9.16 - On Planning, Tracking, and Rewards (Perfection Series, Part IV)

I’m wrapping up the series on perfection today. We’ve discussed how perfection can be paralyzing, and also how it can push you to great success. I think it’s also important to talk about HOW we beat this pernicious beast. Because in the end, the only thing that matters is finishing your manuscript.

All creatives experience fear and resistance. The professionals are the one who conquer them.

There are many ways up this particular mountain, all of them worthy. But I think there is an overarching functionality that can be applied to the process of finishing, regardless of which method you choose. 

First, and most importantly, you have to find your time.
 

Whether you’re getting up 30 minutes early to write before anyone in your houses rises, staying up after your people go to bed, or you have all day to yourself, every creative has a sweet spot during which their creativity levels shoot through the roof. If you don’t already know when your creative sweet spot is, start experimenting. Work in the morning, the afternoon, the evening. See what feels right. Then rebuild your world around that time.

My very best time is from 2–6pm in the afternoon. I try to get going well before that, but I really hit my stride in the late afternoon. Knowing I work better during that time frame, I usually do business in the morning, then I turn on my Freedom app and block everything else out for some serious deep work time.

Second, once you’ve found your ideal time, guard it with your life.
 

No one will respect your time if you don’t respect it yourself. Create a proverbial lion’s den for yourself. Lock doors, make signs, whatever you need to do, but train those around you to stay off your creative lawn from X o’clock to X o’clock, and don’t allow anyone to deviate from this (including you) unless it’s a real emergency. It might be difficult at first, but people are malleable. They’ll come around. 

Third, when you do have your sweet spot and you’ve created your lion’s den, don’t waste time inside of it.
 

Fifty years from now, which would you prefer to be known for: writing great novels (paintings, stories, sculptures, etc.) or having a fantastic Facebook page? Stay focused. Set a timer, use an Internet blocker like Freedom, hang a Sword of Damocles above your desk—whatever you need to stay on point, do it. 

Fourth, create your quantifiables.
 

This is the reward system you have in place to keep you motivated. By reward I don’t mean a bucket of chocolate every 100 words. I mean a system for tracking your work. I use these spreadsheets. I love the detail I can create—from time served (ahem, spent) in the chair to how many words I get a day. I can set goals, track my word output from month to month, annually, every thing. I’ve been using this system for years, and it works great. 

But for fun, I have added a second tracking system. Remember back in school, you’d get a gold star or a silver star on your paper when you’d done a good job? My friend Victoria Schwab has invented this means of reward, only for adult creatives.

I've been getting asked fairly frequently about the "calendar trick" I'm always referring to, so I decided to make a little video explaining what it is, and why it's awesome. I first heard of this trick from Jessica Spotswood, who learned it from Erin Bow.

Visual goal tracking is a huge help when you’re trying to stay on target. I’ve adapted this for myself, with a calendar I can bring with me everywhere, and slightly different measurables. It’s wonderful to be able to glance at the month view and see where you are. 

Four steps to success: Find your time, create your lion’s den, do the work, measure the work. Simple. Straightforward. Doable.
 

I can hear some of you, right now, saying, “But JT, why do I need to track all of this. What a pain, what a hassle.”

To which I say, bosh. All professionals track their productivity in some way. If they don’t track it themselves, their bosses track it for them. In the professional world, if you don’t meet your goals, you get fired. Why is creativity any different?

Yes, you’re a creative, but you’re also in business.
 

The sooner you cast aside the dewy-eyed notion that you’re only in it for the exploration, the faster you’ll start to see success. 

How do you measure your success? Is it word count, books published, sales? Reviews, followers? Money earned? 

That, my dears, it completely up to you. 

Whatever measure you go by, consistency is key. You have to hold yourself accountable if you have any hope of building a career in the arts.
 

And with that, here endeth the series. 

5.19.16 - The Positive Side of Perfection

For the past two weeks, I’ve focused on how a life-long pursuit of perfection has created issues in both my creative and personal lives.

Today, I’d like to turn all of that on its ear.  

Because, honestly? Striving for perfection has created great success for me.

The term success in and of itself is subjective. The traditional definition—the accomplishment of an aim or purpose—seems less than the word’s current connotation. Success means so many things to so many people. What is your measure? Is it wealth? Fame? Book sales, reviews, touring? Or something more intrinsic to your happiness—the accomplishment of your aims?

We all measure ourselves by different yardsticks—yardsticks we hold next to someone we’d like to be or emulate, instead of our own shadows.

Think about that for a moment.

When is the last time you looked inward and said, “Hey, I’m pretty awesome!” What did you hear instead? “So and so got a better review/better coop/sold more books/landed that spot in PW…” Or is that just me?

Because I admit it. As much as I try to stay focused, my yardstick does creep away sometimes, to mock me from afar.

I preach—PREACH—to all my writing friends that you absolutely cannot compare your path to another writer's. Everyone’s publishing journey is different. Unique unto them. So your yardstick can only be used to measure yourself. It’s mano e mano—in this case, you against you.

I believe in the individual’s path. But I also understand that without a little healthy competition, sometimes you don’t push yourself hard enough. And there’s a difference between competing and coveting. A huge one.

Competing makes you stronger. Coveting makes you weaker. 

And here’s where the relentless pursuit of perfection comes in. Every book I write, I try to improve on the last. Stronger writing, better structure, deeper characters, scarier villains. I don’t want to do the same thing twice, so I experiment. I push myself. I write things and allow them to stay on the page because I know if I trust my subconscious, it will all make sense in the end. I force words onto the page, even when I’m not feeling it.

I create. No matter what—good, bad, mediocre—I create.

And then, in competition with myself and with writers I admire, I push myself to up my game.

I edit the wee word beasties into submission. I push them around like a coach facing an unruly and recalcitrant football team. I scream at them, beg them, cajole and woo. Whatever it takes to get them perfect.

Am I a perfect writer? Hell, no. No way. Not even close. But my personal drive for perfection, to top my previous best, makes me come to the page, day after day after day, and find ways to make it all work. I might drive myself crazy in the process, but I’m all over it. I am living this path. It’s mine, and I love it.

That drive to create, to better each book, to perfect the process, find easier paths to better work, is why I feel like I’m having some success. Do I feel like I AM a success? Not yet. But I am having a decent measure of success in my career now. It’s taken a decade of showing up to the page, Sisyphus with his rock, pounding out the words, for me to feel like a real writer.

There are other people who do this so much better than me. Writers I so greatly admire, because their pursuit of perfection leads them to something I like to call intentionality.

I know several intentional writers. They are not waiting for the writing to come to them. They aren’t letting their careers unfold as they will. They enter into this business mindfully, purposefully, intentionally. They are in complete control of all aspects, from what they write to how they write it, and for whom.

The first who comes to mind is one we all know and love—J.K. Rowling. Look at how she planned out the Potter books. Look at how she took complete control of her career when those books took off. How she held back rights because she knew somewhere down the line, she was going to need them as a negotiating tool. Audio, digital, film—she was careful and deliberate every step of the way. She make the choices that were right for her and her work, and no one else.

Now, JT, you say, Rowling isn’t a good example, because she has so much money she had the power of choice.

OK. I’ll give you that. But I still assert she’s an intentional writer. Come on, she put out a book under a pseudonym to get the story out there unfettered by her success.

Still don’t buy it? All right. Let me give you a case that might strike closer to home. A young writer named Elizabeth Heiter.

I met Elizabeth at a conference last year. We shared a panel, and as always happens, the questions evolved into the typical, How did you get published? At the time, I remember being rather awestruck at how knowledgeable, how intentional, and how focused she was. She knew things as a debut that I’d only learned after several years in the business. You can always tell when a new writer is going to make a career at this. There’s something in the way they talk, the way they approach their career, their work. They’re intentional. Elizabeth is intentional. Read this piece she did about her journey. It will explain what I mean.

I posit that the pursuit of perfection drives us to succeed. While there may be pitfalls, and it’s certainly easy to fall into them, without this desire, without this impetus, there would be no success.

If we didn’t try to top ourselves, to be intentional toward our work and our lives, we’d never create another piece of art.

Last week, I mentioned the scene from the movie Burnt, where the protagonist Adam and his therapist discuss how Adam feels the apocalypse bearing down if he doesn't achieve perfection. Sometimes, the fear of the impending apocalypse does help us. The good that comes from the drive to perfect—the work product, the personal goals met, the ceilings we set for ourselves shattered—are Janus twins, aren’t they? They can crush us, or they can make us. 

If you’re lucky, you can use this desire and drive to make your career.

Next time, I’m going to dive into the tangibles of how I set goals and how I reward myself when I achieve them. Until then, I’m curious to hear whether you think the pursuit of perfection is a positive or a negative in your creative life. 

5.5.16 - On The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

From the time I was able to hold a pencil and write, perfection was my friend, and mistake my enemy.  

It was a paralyzing combination.  

I wanted to be an artist, but when faced with a blank sheet of paper, I was terrified. Not with fear that I couldn’t draw, couldn’t create. I knew I could. No, my fear was I would ruin the pristine paper with a line out of place, and I’d have to throw it away.

I would have ruined the paper with a mistake.
 

When I realized writing was a simpler thing for me than drawing, I had the same issue. If I misspelled a word, or miswrote a word, that was it. The paper was ruined, and I had to start over.

Nothing but perfection was (*ahem* is) acceptable. 

This holds true for most everything I do, all these years later.  Now I understand that this urge for perfection is a manifestation of OCD, and I find ways to push past the early paralyzing moments when faced with blank pages. For new novels, I have a formula for starting. This includes building a book journal, building a file, naming the book, putting together epigraphs… little things that mean the pages aren’t entirely blank.

But that’s easy to do when you’re in a computer screen. When you’re doing it by hand, it’s a whole different story.

All these years later, I’m still always terrified that I’m going to make a mistake on that first page and have to rip it out and start over. Trust me, there are a number of notebooks in my house with a first page missing.

I’ve been examining these urges lately, because I came across something interesting. It’s a story about how dependent we’ve become on the Cloud, and how we’re losing a lot of our history because everything is typed on computers.

Thinking about this, I had a realization. This is directly related to how we’re so carefully curating our lives for one another. If you think about it, we are always striving for perfection in our written work, so much so that we’ve become dependent on spellcheck and grammar checks, and nothing that makes it to public consumption hasn’t been edited to death.

What are we losing by working electronically? What bits of genius, or specialness, are we losing when we can so easily delete and write something fresh? 
 

Not only are we curating our lives for one another, we’re curating our thoughts… for ourselves.

Whether your desire to have a clean, perfect document is pathological or simply a result of the way you want to present yourself to the world, we are eliminating some of our finest work when we edit ourselves online, on the computer screen, in our writing programs.

Think of what we’re losing? That original thought, that original impetus, the original words, edited into coherent [[thoughts]]… *

*I JUST did it. I saw the words “thoughts”, and even though it’s correct, I immediately backward deleted to come up with something else, something unique that isn’t a repetitive word. It’s instinct; I do it without thinking. Which makes me wonder: How much do I delete throughout a day? I don’t keep track of how many words I type in a day, I keep track of the end product. At the end of the day, I have X number of words.

What if I didn’t delete and rewrite? What if I was forced to write by hand, in a notebook, and had a record of all those words I decided weren’t right, weren’t correct, were misspelled?

I’ve always wanted to write a book by hand. I do a lot of handwritten work already, from journals to note taking to planning and processing ideas. Could I stand to write a whole story by hand? Could I stand the XXed out words, the arrows drawn to realign paragraphs, the hundreds of mistakes I make in a day of writing? Moreover, how many words am I REALLY writing in a day? I’d bet I write two to three times as much as is recorded at the end of the day, trying out sentences, trying ideas, words, themes. I immediately delete when something isn’t working.

What if I stopped doing that?
 

We’re talking a monstrous sea change for me. For us all. Paper isn’t the precious commodity it used to be. Ink and pens are easy to work with. I don’t know that I could give up my laptop—the ideas seem to go through my brain directly into my fingers onto the page, without stops or bypasses, and I don’t feel that flow when I’m writing by hand.

But it’s doable. It’s totally doable.

And I would have a record—a real record, a true record—of the words. It wouldn’t be perfect, and all that markup would probably give me hives, but it’s something worth thinking about. At the very least, I’m going to try and be more intentional about how I self-edit.

In the next few weeks, look for a few more posts with the theme of perfection stifling our art. It’s something I really want to explore.
 

So….

What say you? Are we losing our culture to autocorrect and spell check and the keyboard?  Do you write by hand or by keyboard?

4.28.16 - The Most Popular Post on My Website

This is the most popular post on my website—and for good reason. This information is evergreen, and I hope you find it useful.

P.S. If you haven't been to my For Writers page in a while, check it out. I've reformatted the essays for easier digestion, and added pretty pictures. Who doesn't love pretty pictures?

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How Well Do You Know Your Characters?

Are you as intimate with them as you should be?

Coming up with a character is easy. You give them a name, an occupation, and a reason for visiting your story. Developing that character into a living, breathing, vital aspect of your manuscript, one that successfully propels your story forward, is another phenomenon entirely.

There are a few things that are an absolute for me when I develop a character.

The Most Important Is A Name.

As I begin writing a new manuscript, I make a cast list. All the main characters are there, as well as all the secondary characters. Everyone who is going to make an appearance in the story is named and accounted for.

A couple of rules that I like to follow when it comes to developing character names:

1. Make the name pronounceable.
2. Especially for secondary and tertiary characters, make their name fit. If you’re writing a story about white slavery, an unhappy stripper named Tatiana will convey the message more effectively than an unhappy stripper named Jane.

Where do the names come from? I’ll admit, there have been the times, (in the past, of course, cough, cough) I’ve been in a pinch and looked to my reference bookshelf. I pick a first name and last name at random. Problem is, when you’ve been working on a manuscript for four straight months with the same bookshelf of reference material, you’re going to duplicate yourself. I was caught by one of my readers. I’d used Richard Curtis and Curtis Richard. For shame. Now, I use every available resource. Magazines like Maxim and FHM always have great names. There are websites that use algorithms to mix and match names to degree. You get the drift – finding sources to pull from is easy.

Since I generally write series novels back to back, I’m intimately familiar with my main characters and the people they work with on a daily basis. Secondary characters that are making their second or third appearance are simple to keep up with. But the new primary and secondary characters need defining, and I need a new list of tertiary characters and one-timer throw-in names.

My very first step is to build the list of names.
 

In my new book, there is a big cast of secondary characters. A big cast. My list has sixty-eight new character names on it. I know I’ll use up at least twenty-eight right off the bat. I have a new character who has a whole team behind her, so there’s another nine. See where I’m going? I never want to be left out in the cold when it comes to naming my characters.

Unfortunately, as well intentioned as I am with my cast list, there are characters who pop up unexpectedly and announce, “Hey, I’m here. This is what I’m going to do to wreck havoc on your story. But I need a name, please.” Hence, the pre-built characters list.

What works for me is to name my secondary characters off the bat, but leave some of the tertiaries for later. That way I can satisfy my spontaneity gene and grab a name at random a few times through the book. Now that I’m a little wiser, I only take it from the proscribed list of tertiary character names, rather than inventing off the top of my head.

But What’s In A Name? There Needs To Be More To Make A Character Come Alive.

Some characters are so big and bold, they parade right out of your mind onto the page with no effort. Some need to be coaxed a bit. For the reluctant characters, there are a few absolutes that must be answered before they get to show up in print.

The first things I decide on are age, hair color and eye color (subsequent to race), height, weight, and level of education.
 

While it’s generally easy to define a character by social class and educational status, I have the joy of writing books that are based in Nashville, Tennessee. This is a southern town, and there are many colloquialisms here that can be misinterpreted by outsiders. Brilliant, well-educated people here use terms that Yankees would deem dim-witted at best. I try to be especially careful when I dip into that particular well. It’s a unique issue that’s been written about by many more capable writers than I. Suffice it to say you need to be aware if you’re writing regionally specific characters.

Back to building a character. Age, looks, race, education and socio-economic status are first. Those are the main ingredients for me.

Now it’s on to the spices. 
 

I can’t say that I do the same thing for each character. Some have more information on them than others. Some I know how they walk, what they wear, how their hair is styled, whether they are straight or gay, who their family is. Some I just have a mental picture of who they are. If they are a one-timer, I try to be cognizant of their surroundings, so the character can help me set the scene.

One of my writer buddies, Jennifer Brooks, came up with a brilliant idea while writing a book with an omniscient POV and several main characters. The BMW’s (my critique group) were having trouble keeping all of them straight, and we badgered her to do something about our inability to “get” who was who. (Many times, POV problems are a result of not knowing your characters as well as you should. If you know exactly how your character will react in a certain situation, what they’ll say, how they’ll feel, your POV will fall into place.)

Have you ever been sent an email survey by one of your friends, the kind that has a huge list of questions that either you or said friend must fill out? They ask detailed questions that are meant to show how much you really know someone.

My friend, in all her brilliant glory, decided to fill out the survey as her characters. Since many of her characters are in relationships or strong friendships, she allowed the characters themselves to ask the questions of their friends and lovers. It gave her a stronger grasp of who each character is and how they can be presented in the story to help us, the readers, keep them straight. It worked wonderfully.

Another quick note on character building.

One of the most important questions I ask each of my characters is, “What do you mean to the story?”
 

A tertiary or one-time, one-scene character can steal the show. Let me rephrase that. They should steal the show. I try to make my one-timers feel special. Give them something important to do or say. You should never have a character who doesn’t advance the story in one way or another.

Sometimes, even these tricks aren’t enough to really give you a sense of who your characters are. Since we’re talking crime novels here, let me point out that victimologies are vital to the success of your book. If you don’t have a victim, you don’t have a crime, and you don’t have a book. Making sure your victims are as well developed as your speaking characters – it makes a big difference.

I tried something a little different in my first manuscript. I had several girls who were killed. They were all in different states, and they shared a physical resemblance. I was struggling with their deaths, mainly because it’s so hard to kill someone in a book, no matter how gleefully we might go about it. There was one that I felt so close to, it hurt me to kill her. My protagonist was struggling with the issue, just as I was. I had him on a plane, desolate, looking at the MISSING posters that accompanied each girl’s disappearance. I envisioned him getting off the plane, going into his office and tacking up the MISSING posters. Hmmm.

The next thing I knew, I was up to my, ahem, elbows, in imaginary dead girls. There are a couple of glossy color magazines here in town, so I went out and bought them, looked to the society pages, and cut out pictures of girls that fit the killer’s profile. I then mocked up the MISSING posters. Based on actual fliers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, they each had a picture of the victim, all her particulars, where she was last seen – all the information I needed to use to drive the story and build the plot.

Since that worked so well for me, and my second manuscript had the same kind of situation, so I took the time and picked out my victims. In the manuscript, these pictures go in a dossier for the antagonist to peruse. They go in a dossier in my files as well, so I can experience what my character experiences as he looks at them.This has been one of the most successful tricks I’ve learned.

Dead characters deserve as much respect as living characters. 
 

Bringing them to life makes it harder to kill them off, but the goal is to create believable, sustainable characters for your readers. And you'll stay away from being gratuitously mean to them, which is the goal.

I also make my setting, Nashville, a character unto itself. I know people have received those constructive rejection letters that claim the reader didn’t get a good “sense of place”. Make sure your setting is a character just like your protagonists and antagonist, and you’ll never hear that again. Get to know your characters, and they’ll never let you down.

4.14.16 - On Writer Tribes and Indie Bookstore Love

This was originally published in SIBA's Lady Banks newsletter. I thought you guys might enjoy it, too.

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A few nights ago, I attended a signing at the wonderful Parnassus Books in Nashville.

The signing author was Ariel Lawhon, who was launching her brilliant story chronicling the doomed flight of the Hindenburg, FLIGHT OF DREAMS. As Ariel and I hugged and kissed hello, bookseller extraordinaire Bill Long-Innes smiled benevolently and asked, “Do you guys have a writer tribe? It seems like Nashville authors really make an effort to support one another. I wonder if any other cities have such a tight knit group?”

Ariel and I nodded.

Because we do have a tribe here in Nashville.

Our literary community, dubbed the Nashville Literati, is tight. There are cliques within it—young adult writers in the SCBWI, crime fiction in Sisters in Crime, romance writers in MCWR, literary authors big with Salon 615 and Humanities Tennessee and The Porch Writers’ Collective.

But when it comes to supporting another author, we cross genres like a boss.

We lunch together. We attend each other’s signings. We hang out in East Nashville at East Side Storytellin’. We pull together all our writing buddies when a writer friend comes to town. We even go on writing retreats together.

And now one constant we all have in common is our indie store, Parnassus.

I think the store’s staff has made it such a welcoming, open place for writers of all genres, of all stripes, that we can’t help but want to gather there.  

When our beloved former indie, Davis-Kidd, closed its doors in 2010 (and Parnassus didn’t yet exist), it suddenly became much harder to get everyone together. We have the annual Southern Festival of Books, which is always well-represented with local authors. We did lunches and cocktails, drove out to other counties to attend signings.

But not having an indie store that represented and celebrated all the writers in town was hard. A town without an indie store is a sad one indeed.

Davis-Kidd had a long history in this town. As a matter of fact, it was one of the reasons I was okay with moving here. When my then boyfriend (now husband) brought me to Nashville in 1993 to meet his parents, he drove me around, and our last stop was Davis-Kidd. “See?” he said. “This is the best bookstore in town. You’ll have plenty to read if we ever move here.”

(I’m not sure if I was more entranced by the idea of books—books!—or the fact that my boyfriend had just hinted strongly he wanted a long future with me.) 

Davis-Kidd was everything you could ask for in a bookstore: great staff, great events, a huge, diverse collection of titles. I attended my very first author signing there (John Connolly! My writing hero!). At that signing, I met a woman who became my other mother, who mentored me through years of writing, getting an agent, getting a deal. I did one of my first signings at David-Kidd. I hit my first bestseller list while I was launching my fourth book there. I attended Sisters in Crime meetings there. I wept with everyone else when it closed.

To have an indie in our midst again is incredible.

It’s been very fun to watch Parnassus take hold in our community, to see stories being made there. The Nashville Literati grows stronger day-by-day, with new writers coming up to join the established ones. And Parnassus is our hub. Several writers are booksellers there (And one co-owns it. You might have heard of her . . . her name is Ann.). This lends a verisimilitude unmatched anywhere else.

Yes, Nashville has a writer tribe, just as strong as Chicago, New York, and L.A.

And thanks to our favorite indie, we have a place to call our own, too.