Find what works for you. Do it. Keep doing it until it’s natural.

If you find yourself stuck, ask if you’re doing what works for you. If not, why not? Did it stop working? Or did you just lose the habit?

If you lost the habit, pick it back up, and do what works for you.

In the past four days, I’ve dictated at least 12,000 words. I haven’t counted yesterday’s and today’s words yet, but I’m confident I hit 18,000 words, possibly 20,000 (some on another project, because that’s how authors take a break: we work on another book). Adding in the weekend before that, I’ve written probably 36,000 words in the past 11 days.

All because I stopped fretting and just got in the Aldrin Express and started driving and dictating. That’s what works for me.

That burst of productivity far outstripped anything I have written in months. The only time in recent memory that I’ve been productive like that was last September — when I jumped in the Aldrin Express, drove completely around Lake Michigan (1,000 miles), and dictated the last half of The Last Campaign.

That’s what works for me. So I’ll keep doing it.

Find what works for you. Do it. Keep doing it.

– Martin L. Shoemaker

I’m often wont to say that plot is Soylent Green – it’s made of people. Meaning, people make decisions, and that’s what forms an overarching plot or story, not some external hero’s myth, not some skeletal framework of A to B to C. And that’s in narrative, yes, but it also translates to the real world. Science and history are both driven by people – their decisions, their choices, their observations and recordings.

– Chuck Wendig

The main things to remember when asking yourself “How can I improve my writing skills?”

1. Remember, free writing advice comes from the heart.

2. But watch out for ignorant advice.

3. Beware of teachers who hold back vital information.

4. Even the greatest writers can be poor teachers.

5. When seeking wisdom, search widely. Test the advice.

– David Farland

Tonight I read a story by an author. A really old idea, one I had seen a hundred times and rejected almost a hundred times. But the difference?

I had not seen this story, this idea done by this author before.

Understand that simple statement?

I had seen the plot, a very old plot, and the setting, a very old setting, hundreds of times. Cliche didn’t begin to describe it, and normally I would have stopped reading when it became clear it was going to be the same as all the others because the writer was imitating and rewriting. But this writer allowed personality and voice, both author and character, to come through the story from the first moment. And what was old to me became new and wonderful.

Each of us is what makes a story unique.

It is the writer that creates a story that will sell. Not some genre or some sort of plot or some sort of secret marketing handshake. Nope, it is the writer, if the writer allows himself to be in the story with the character.

– Dean Wesley Smith

If you think about things like questioning the premise of, let’s say for instance, ‘writers write.’ Some writers think and some writers need to think to write. If I’m forcing myself to write just because somebody said writers write and it felt very resonant to me or they believed it a lot, they had a lot of certainty about it and I never think to question like, ‘Does that actually work for me?’

Or, ‘You can’t edit a blank page,’ is another one. People edit blank pages in their head all the time. It’s just, for about 50% of people, we found editing a blank page does not actually help them be more productive. But for about 50% of writers, it does help you be more productive if you allow yourself to edit before you write.

So there’s so much of this advice that we hear for writers that we just accept without thinking about it because the person who is telling us is either very certain and worth sensing their emotions of certainty or they sound smart or they’re successful. We assume if they’re successful, we should listen to what they say.

And, again, it’s not to say no one should give advice. That’s definitely not what I’m saying. It’s to say, when it doesn’t work for you as an individual, don’t assume you’re at fault and you’re stupid or unmotivated. Assume that that advice is not for you because no advice is for everyone.

– Becca Syme

And I’ve said as much myself, that for me, plot is Soylent Green: it’s made of people. Characters do shit and say shit, and they do so in pursuit of solving problems, chasing desires, and escaping fears. As they do this, they create plot. It’s watching an ant colony forming — they’re making art, chewing those tunnels. Characters are doing that. But of course, lots of folks also write differently and consider plot considerations first, and then slot in characters who fit that plot, and that’s fine, too. It’s all fine. The only bad way to write is a way that stops you from writing and readers from reading it. That’s it.

– Chuck Wendig

(…) what also doesn’t change is creating valuable intellectual property assets, which is, I think, how I’m framing it for 2020 in my goals is “I create intellectual property assets,” which goes beyond “I write books.” That’s how I’m really trying to think about it going forward, which again, it’s two parts of the brain, I know, the creative side, the business side, but they have to go together. And that’s how we’re going to do this for at least another decade.

– Joanna Penn

What do you do if you don’t have an insider team? You find one. This is the age of the internet. You offer to read for others first, in your genre. Don’t make the mistake of taking anything you can get. And you read as a reader, not as a budding author trying to show off your chops. Would you keep reading or not? That is what you’re looking for. Keep reading, need to know what happens. That is the epitome of a minimum viable product. It makes no judgment of your grammar or spelling. That’s what editors are for, unless your writing takes the reader out of the story, then you need to do better before you float it past someone.

No one said being an author was easy, but it doesn’t have to be an insurmountable barrier either. There are story elements and basic writing skill that one can learn before moving forward to discover whether your book will sell before you’ve written it. And that is not science fiction.

That is how professional authors get the most from their time investment.

– Craig Martelle

So if you’re having trouble pacing yourself, try switching gears. Perhaps you could start your day by writing a fifteen-minute “blast” where you get ideas on paper. Then time yourself and do some “stress-free” writing using the technique that Dan Wells does, then finish off for another hour to two working to use my precision-driver method.

That’s what I’m going to try this morning.

– David Farland

Writing advice: Read and reread. Think of a story you have never read but wish you had; then write it as carefully as you can. Finish it, and send it around till it’s published.

– Samuel R. Delany

That’s what the critical voice does. It makes writing hard, unpleasant, and something to be avoided, rather than embraced.

All of us who write face that. We just have different battles with our critical voices. Some writers battle the voice in the words on the page. Other writers battle the voice in the types of stories it’s okay to tell. And apparently, some, like me, battle the voice on expectation of production.

So I need to revamp. Again. As I seem to do annually with that pesky critical voice.

Since I had the realization so soon after the workshop, I thought I would share.

As is always true with any workshop I teach, I suspect I learn more than the students do. And I never know what I will learn.

Although I usually do learn something new about myself.

– Kris Rusch

I’m still here. Which, in the digital age ,says A LOT.

Still HERE, in your corner. Here to give you tough love, more love, hard truths, more laughs and let you know that you matter. Your writing matters—regardless the reason you do it—so do yourself a huge favor and take time finding your WHY.

Then once you find it, always keep searching. The world needs more dreamers, more storytellers and more stories.

– Kristen Lamb

That’s writing a novel into the dark. Buckle in and believe you will end back up in the station, breathing hard and laughing.

Yet so many writers have bought into the myth that writing is “work” and you must suffer for your art. And that you can’t make a mistake or have a wrong word and everything has got to be planned out ahead because, heaven-forbid, you write extra words.

And, of course, everything has to be rewritten, edited by someone who doesn’t write, rewritten again, and so on in search of a perfection that never can exist in the arts.

That’s torture and writers who write that way seldom last for more that a few books or a few years.

Sitting alone in a room and making shit up is fun. Plain and simple. Sometimes fun because of how well a story is going, sometimes rollercoaster fun of pure terror and worry and fear (and maybe even panic).

But fun.

So go have fun. Gets some words done. It’s Friday night and I have a movie to watch.

– Dean Wesley Smith

Being a great writer takes a lifetime. There are hundreds of skills that all work in tandem, and then there’s the mental and emotional maturity earned from experience that makes your fiction resonant.

It’s very tempting to get to a point where you’re pretty good and just stop. You’ve found your comfort zone. You say to yourself, “I’m a good writer now, this is the kind of stuff I write, and it’s working. I’ve found my place and I’m going to stay in this lane for life.”

It’s such a relief. No more struggle. No more failure. Consistent success.

At least that’s how it seems.

In reality, your comfort zone as a writer is a path to stagnation, to atrophy, to becoming a plagiarist of yourself instead of a creative writer.

The temptation of the comfort zone is exacerbated by the publishing industry. Publishing is a business first and foremost, and the strategy is usually “this made us money, so do it again and again!”

Many successful authors fall into this repetition pit and spend the rest of their careers regurgitating their past successes ad nauseam. Authors need to make a living just like anyone else, and a comfortable life doing what you love is an admirable goal for a writer. Right?

I would posit that this is an unfulfilling life for a writer. A life of diminishing returns, and of slowly, steadily waning quality.

The only way to grow as a writer is to consistently step out of your comfort zone.

(…)

Writing is not something you do in your room alone. It’s not an excuse to hide from the world. Don’t let your home become your comfort zone. Get out and experience life or you won’t have anything interesting to write about.

Fail. Learn. Grow. Repeat.

It’s the only way to become the best writer you can be.

– Dave Terruso

The real key for time management with licensing is this:

Your primary job is writing. Your secondary job is to make sure the public sees your storytelling in one form or another. For most of us, that’s in book form.

After those two jobs, then you’ll need to learn licensing/negotiation because you will need those skills down the road, no matter what. I was a baby writer with a handful of stories out when a theater in LA approached me to license the rights to use one of my stories as a monologue. I had no idea what I was doing. But if I had known then what I know now…

And that’s the key. Make learning your third job, followed by some kind of schedule. You might have time to figure out how to license one teeny part of a property. So schedule that first. Then move to the next, and the next, and the next.

The key here is this:

You can’t do this all at once. None of us can. Nor can you do everything. Again, none of us can. But you can get started.

And you can stop being afraid of licensing. It’s part of your business. In fact, licensing is how your business reaches the public and earns money. So you need to learn how to leverage licensing in the way that is best for your business.

Manage your time using the formulas above along with the WIBBOW test. Keep track of what you do in some kind of spreadsheet/calendar/diary.

You’ll be surprised what you will have accomplished by this time next year.

– Kris Rusch

Talent is so utterly subjective. How can we know if we actually have it? Recently, I was chatting with my cousin who’s an incredible artist.

She mentioned how, no matter how many compliments or how many sales, she can’t help but feel like an imposter.

I, of course, responded that authors suffer the same malaise. Imposter syndrome is alive and well, and it doesn’t matter how many books we write, the titles we earn or how many books we sell. For a lot of us? We still can’t help but feel like a fraud.

That we don’t actually have any talent. Oh, and that any moment someone might find out we’ve fooled the world and have no talent at all.

– Kristen Lamb

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

– Joanna Penn, The Successful Author Mindset

I believe that you will find that your inner joy is still tied to the arts. So the old band gets back together, minus a player or two, with a couple of new faces. Or the painter picks up his brush and begins a new work, or the writer wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t get a dream out of his head until it transforms into a story.

The thing that I want to say is this: In life, we undergo creative highs and lows. At the highest points, we might sit and write for sixteen hours a day and it feels as if the book is merely “writing itself” while all that we do is type. At a low point, we might wonder if we will ever be able to write again.

I think that there are some things that young writers can do to protect themselves from burnout.

First, don’t obsess about your writing. If you don’t give yourself time to grow intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, the truth is that you run a risk of stifling yourself as an artist.

Take care of family and social problems when the fire is still small, and don’t wait for it to consume the house.

If you have creative differences with an editor and an artist, and that person is too immature to handle them gracefully, recognize that it might be time to terminate the relationship as gently as you can.

And if you do burn out, recognize that this, too, is just a phase that you’re going through.

– David Farland

“My jump is not high enough, my twists are not perfect, I can’t place my leg behind my ear.” Please don’t do that. Sometimes there is such an obsession with the technique that this can kill your best impulses. Remember that communicating with a form of art means being vulnerable, being imperfect. And most of the time is much more interesting. Believe me.

– BARYSHNIKOV

I’ve blogged at length about the differences between goals and dreams, but TLDR: goals are within your control, dreams are what you want but beyond your control.

While self-pubbing has allowed writers unprecedented control over how we publish and promote, there are still four things beyond our control that writers seems to get stuck on.

(…)

You should go to conventions and meet like-minded authors and have coffee-break/beer-rant conversations with them. If you find a kindred soul, you should trade manuscripts with them for critiques (they aren’t critics, they are fellow artists) and attempt co-writing a few times. It’s helpful, and fun, and a nice break from all of the lonely solitude of being a writer.

But it’s okay if you don’t make any lasting friendships, or co-write any stories, or trade manuscripts.

It’s even okay if your peers don’t like you.

Other writers aren’t necessary for you to succeed in this business, and their acceptance of you isn’t necessary for you to feel good about yourself and your career.

Friends in this biz are great, but don’t worry if you don’t have any.

– Joe Konrath

After we choose a genre (or genre fusion like mystery-thriller, historical romance, dark fantasy, etc.) then we need to refine the experience another level. This helps us pitch to the right group of people.

How long is our work? How dense? What book(s) are most like ours? Do we specialize in long, heavily researched books with a lot of world-building (Michael Crichton) or are we prolific, focused on shorter works of fiction that cater to those who inhale pulp novels (Louis L’Amour)?

Or are we somewhere in between? Maybe we do both?

Crichton didn’t compete with L’Amour. They had vastly different audiences with diametrically opposite expectations.

***No one expected Crichton to release multiple books a year. Conversely, L’Amour wouldn’t have become a legend if he’d only released a book every eighteen months.

– Kristen Lamb

I also know that being scared is part of owning a business. There’s no guarantee of success. No guarantee of continued success. No guarantee that if you do A,B, and C, you’ll be as rich as Nora Roberts or as famous as Stephen King. So what?

Be your own writer. Be your own business owner. Be someone who tries, and eventually you will succeed.

Stop making excuses.

The only path to success is a path of risk-taking and failure. Instead of fearing that failure, learn from it. Try again. Try smarter. Eventually those risks will pay off. That failure will help you carve the path you need to walk. Failure will teach you how to be better and stronger, and prepare you for the difficulties of success.

Because there are a lot of difficult elements to success, things you can’t plan for until you’re there.

Most of you won’t get there, if your comments to me are any indication. Because you’re all searching for reasons not to try.

– Kris Rusch

Whatever the case, with this book and with Wanderers, it has been proven resoundingly that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m actually quite happy about that. It makes each book its own peculiar journey, and it also releases me from a certain kind of pressure. If I enter every book feeling like I need to have everything locked down, if it needs to be a well-trod path, it’ll be frustrating. There’s a level of performance anxiety there. But if every book is a portal into a whole new place with all new rules, I can be forgiven for having to stumble around blindly for a while.

(It’s amazing the things to do inside our minds to make this process feel better, to absolve ourselves of certain stresses and sins. We do what we must because we can, as GlaDOS said. Also, but there’s no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying till you run out of cake.)

– Chuck Wendig

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

– Stephen King

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

– Clayton M. Christensen

If you want to be a writer, then the first thing you need to do is define yourself as a writer. Then you give it your best effort.

When you write a manuscript, you have to think of it as an investment. You create an “intellectual property,” one that may or may not sell.

Sometimes the property doesn’t sell for years. It just sits like an empty building lot, ready to go.

(…)

So when you invest your time in writing a novel, you don’t know how or when it might pay off. I had a friend once who wrote six books and began sending them out. She felt that she was at the end of her rope when she suddenly got offers from three different publishers in two days. Another author I knew tried publishing for several years, but gave up because she wasn’t making any money. Two years after she quit writing, her novels went huge and she made millions.

In short, it can be a crazy business. If you believe in yourself and you keep on pushing, then you’re a real writer, regardless of whether you’ve ever made a nickel at your job. You shouldn’t let anyone try to tell you different.

– David Farland

THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT LUCK

No one can predict what will sell. If they could, every book would be a hit.

Everyone can tell you why a book sold well after it has already sold well, pointing to various things that were done that they claim led to the book’s success. They are full of shit.

NOTHING guarantees success.

Not quality.

Not past success.

Not a big advertising budget.

Not a big marketing budget.

Not publicity.

Not social media.

Not any sort of plan that you read anywhere.

You can write the Best Book Ever, do Everything right, spend a Fortune, and not even come close to making any sort of money.

– Joe Konrath

For the past ten years, I’ve been saying that the changes in publishing have given writers a real shot at doing what they want to do. We can write what we want, publish what we want, and make more money at it than we can in traditional publishing.

But, with those changes has come yet another upheaval on the ways we measure success. And I use the word measure on purpose.

I’ll wager that, if you ask Adam Levine, he’ll tell you that Twitter saves and overnight live votes, stirred up by social media accounts, aren’t the way to measure what makes music successful. I don’t know what he considers as successful. I just know how frustrated he got with the way that someone tinkered with The Voice. It wasn’t what he had signed up for, so he left.

Clearly it’s not about money for him either, or he wouldn’t have left $30 million on the table. He would have (grumpily) stuck it out until the end of the new contract.

But television, like music, like publishing, is trying to find a new metric, one that everyone will agree measures the audience in a way that we all believe is accurate. The key word in that sentence, by the way, is believe since we never had accurate measures in the past.

As artists, we can continue our search for a new metric or we can just tell our stories and put them out there, letting them build organically, and finding the audience in their own sweet time.

Eventually I’ll read all the books on my TBR pile. I have some books by new-to-me writers there. If I like those books, I’ll buy more from the same author. But it might take me two or three years after I bought the first book to do so. And by then, no metric will be able to track that first sale as something that led to the latter ones.

Maybe we should stop trying to find the perfect way to measure, and focus on our writing. After all, that’s what we love. That’s why we got into this business. And, I assume, that’s what we all do best.

– Kris Rusch

Agents have never done marketing, even before digital. And actually people are reading more now than ever. Paper sales are increasing. As the data is coming in that screen time should be limited with adults and PARTICULARLY children, we are seeing a LOT more parents who are going for good old-fashioned paper books. This is why the remnant indies are coming back strong.

Yes, we need to do the hard work. WRITE. Write good books and lots of them. But marketing and advertising hasn’t been effective since the 90s. Brand and platform are totally different creatures and ones we—the artists—can control and grow.

And if mankind and readers are evolving, then I think it’s fair to say writers should evolve, too. This isn’t 1955 where we can use a typewriter and write a book every year and a half and make money to live off of while we do book tours. Might as well get in the horse and buggy business.

If a writer wants to write for pleasure? Sure. Go for it. Don’t change or evolve. Want to make a living? Then there is a LOT we need to do well and a TON of new niches that are paying very well.

– Kristen Lamb

Be as true to yourself as possible. Create the work you want to create! People will try to get you to water down your style, be more like someone else. Politely say no. If a client wants you to be something else, they are not your client. You are where you are right now because of who you are. Do not change that. Listen to others, but ultimately, follow your own instincts. Be kind. Be humble. Don’t hold grudges; we are all flawed human beings trying to make our way through this crazy world. Stay laser-focused and follow your dreams. Do not let anyone create your life for you. You hold the power. Take ownership and get out there and do it!

– Clinton Lofthouse