The Camera is Watching

My daughter’s friend told a story of a girl who set her phone camera on time-lapse as she did her homework. The goal was discipline: when she looked back at her time-lapse video, she didn’t want to see any wasted moments. The threat of unproductivity motivated her to keep focused. 

I was intrigued. I personally haven’t tried this, but I like the idea of being accountable to yourself. Given that writing is such a long process—and that some of your writing times may feel sluggish—could this help you keep going? It’s a bit of a “Big Brother/Sister” is watching, only, in this case, the “higher power” is you. 

Writing can be a lot of “downtime”—staring into the cosmic void of nothingness we call writer’s block—so the resulting video may not reveal obvious progress. On the other hand, could it stop us from going down rabbit holes on the Internet or social media? If good writing starts with A.I.C. (Ass. In. Chair.), could filming ourselves be a way to remind us that while we’re sitting there, we should actually do some, well, writing? 

I’m not always one for gimmicks, but I am one for strategy. Since we all have a different writing processes, motivations and discipline, I’m always intrigued to how others work.

Or, my camera will just show me writing blog post after blog post—which is, of course, so much easier than my half-finished work-in-progress. 🙂

Crunching The Numbers

There’s always so much talk, worry, emphasis and hand-wringing over social media. How much should you, as a writer, be on it? What kind of content? How does it help you build your author platform? 

The conventional answer is to use social media to build your audience and find your readers. That in and of itself isn’t easy, so a lot of writers (me included) get frustrated. 

That’s when my problems with social media dawned on me! I was always looking at the numbers! But I’m not a numbers person. There’s a reason I choose words over numbers. Numbers are a foreign language I have yet to master, yet conventional social media wisdom wants us to grow the number of followers or subscribers, to net the most likes and comments and thumbs up and whatever other metrics are necessary for “success”. 

I get wanting to build connections online. But numbers don’t do that. Nor do they show you whether you’re succeeding at that. Because connections online aren’t about quantity. They’re about quality. Do you feel good about the content you’re posting? Would you want to read it yourself? That’s what’s important. Since we’re not uber-celebrities with bajillions of followers, numbers don’t actually matter. ONE reader is enough for you to have made a difference. One smile on one person’s face, making one person’s day is worth it. 

Damn. “One” is a number. Okay, I concede. Numbers do count. “One” is my new favourite. 

Or Not

I’m sure you know the expression, “know the rules before you break the rules.” It holds true for writing, absolutely. There is such a thing as a bad story; writing may be subjective, but yes, there are “rules” that can make a story better. 

Consider, though, what rules make a story better and what rules are just convention. A convention is simply the way something is usually done. It is a convention of a murder mystery to have, well, a murder—otherwise we couldn’t call it a murder mystery. Conventions help us organize and understand. 

But conventions are still artificial. People made them up, then others followed. That’s not to say you can have a murder mystery without a murder, but you can have a mystery without a murder. Your mystery simply gets filed by other people in a different genre. 

Remembering this gives me freedom in my writing. It’s not just about conventions of genre, but any “rule” of writing. I’m not going to dismiss them all, but I am going to question each one. If it serves me and my ideas, then I’ll follow that rule. If it doesn’t, well, there are no story police set on arresting me. Given that many, many amazing stories break conventions (and start new ones) and many, many stories follow conventions and don’t get published, writing rules are not your holy grail. 

Your own story is. 

Wisdom of the Ages

My daughter was telling me about her Radical Political Thought class at university, and her reading of 16^th century political theorist Jean Jacques Rousseau’s thoughts on the origins of inequality. He argued it came from what he called “armour proper”, which is the desire to gain esteem from others and fulfilling your own needs in relation to what others have instead of absolute terms. She gave me an example. Instead of finding food until you are full, you search for more food than your neighbour—meaning you will never be fully fulfilled. 

I love when conversations with my daughters results in connections to my own writing life. Isn’t this true about writers? That we look around us for what everyone else (seems to) have? We compare ourselves to the bestselling authors out there; we look to replicate their success so we’ll have it, too. Relational writing objectives vs absolute writing objectives. 

I’m not suggesting we all put away our query letters, nor do we stop searching for our readers. But what if we stopped to consider what needs our writing serves us in its own right? Without the relational perspective, without looking at what they have compared to what we have, what is the purpose of your writing? 

Remind yourself of your why and then let the publishing and marketing chips fall where they may.  

Romance For All of Us

In one activity I used to teach debating skills in my English class, I would ask those who identified as male to stand on the right side of the room; all those who identified as female to stand on the left (I asked those who identified as gender fluid to, for the sake of the exercise, artificially choose one side or the other). 

I wrote the proposition on the board: Be it resolved that romance movies are better than action movies. I made the male side argue the affirmative (i.e.: that yes, romance movies were better!) The women were arguing the negative (that, in essence, action movies were better). 

It always got a laugh because obviously I was working with gender stereotypes. Romance movies are “chick flicks” and thus, not taken as seriously as “men’s movies” like action thrillers. The students understood the spirit of the exercise—a pointed criticism of the patriarchy, but they could also play up the humour in obviously false stereotypes. 

Romance novels are the biggest selling genre, with upwards of 80 per cent of readers being women. Yet still, there’s a stigma attached to them as “less than” because they are predominantly read by women. 

It’s disheartening that we cannot allow men to value emotions (and love and happily-ever-afters) as much as women, but since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, I want to celebrate a genre that can offer all of us an escape into a world filled with love. Doesn’t that sound like it should belong to both women and men? 🙂

Getting the Most Out of Your Books

I rarely buy new clothes. My style is classic, so I’m okay not to shop for the latest trends. Besides, I’d rather save my money for what’s really important. Books, books and more books. 

But my attitude toward clothes got me thinking about my attitude toward books. I have a library overflowing with books, plus more full bookshelves around my house and a to-read pile beside my bed that makes me almost invisible from the doorway. I have a few books that are perennial favourites, ones I’ll read and re-read, but often the others sit on the shelves, always loved, but read only once. And, many, many of them are books whose contents I forget. I remember the emotion, but not the details, and I wondered…

…should I stop buying new books? Should I, instead, re-experience the plethora of books I already own? There’s tremendous benefit from re-reading a book in a different period of your life, and heavens knows my stash is enough to keep me reading for at least a decade. It would save money, too, something I’m never mindful about when I’m let loose in a bookstore.

Nope. Can’t do it. Yes, I might move some of my existing tomes onto my to-read pile, or I’ll make a new to-re-read pile. But with all the exciting, fascinating stories always getting published? I’ll always want more, more, more. 

Which leaves plenty of room on my to-read pile for your book, too, so keep writing! 

Tough AND Love

“Missed opportunity”. “Inadequate world-building detail.” “Not enough character motivation.”

These are phrases a writer friend got from a developmental edit. It’s not that they weren’t true—my writer friend is always prepared for tough love when it comes to feedback—but the comments didn’t land right.

If we get negative feedback, we often blame ourselves for our thin skin. I guess I can’t accept criticism. Yet there’s diva behavior (“You, the expert, are just wrong!”) and then there’s valid concern that the feedback hurts. 

That’s because there has to be love in “tough-love”. And it’s not because writers are wimps. In fact, with the amount of rejection writers deal with all the time, we’re stronger than most. But we’re also humans with real feelings and we pour our hearts and souls into our work. Having some compassion and empathy with our medicine helps. 

It’s not that the experts offering this advice are cruel. Often they simply don’t realize the effect of their words (ironic, I know). I think it’s because not all of them are teachers (and I don’t mean they need to have a teaching degree). They may know how to write but actually providing empathetic, useful, constructive feedback that will encourage and help a writer improve is in itself a learned skill. 

It’s what I strive to offer my clients in my own coaching business, and what I look for when I work with other professionals. 

You deserve the same. 

Maintenance

Recently, I passed an unusual sight. I was crossing over railroad tracks near my house—tracks I’ve crossed a hundred times—and I noticed a railroad worker on a tall ladder cleaning the warning lights. 

Huh. In all my years and in all the train tracks I’ve driven over, I’ve never once seen this kind of maintenance. Yet, in our snowy, road-salt-ridden winter climate, one in which we often have to clean off our own cars’ headlights, it makes sense the signals would need to be cleaned, too. 

It got me wondering about all the behind-the-scenes of, well, everything that I never see or even think about. Every job, profession, product or service out there doesn’t just appear, fully functional, before us. Usually we’re not curious—which is fine, since we can’t know the inner workings of everything—but I am curious about writing and publishing. There’s a lot I’ve learned over the years, but a lot I still need to learn. When writing became my daily thing, it was also easy to become “house blind” to it—you do the same thing over and over, like crossing those railroad tracks—without always seeing what needs to be done. 

So that one worker on their tall ladder cleaning a warning light reminded me to not get complacent. There’s always “maintenance” I can do on my own writing. I’m now going to keep my eyes open to better see what needs to be done. 

Planning Vs Process

When I taught high school, I’d have a semester plan, broken down into unit plans, broken down again into daily lesson plans. It helped me stay organized, but every time I finished one plan, I’d be looking ahead to the next. Even the end of the semester wasn’t “the end” because I was planning for the next one, and the cycle would repeat. 

The same mentality followed me into writing. I would plan to write a certain number of pages, or edit a certain number of pages. But there was never an end! Even when I finished one manuscript, I wanted to jump into the next one.

The only “end”, I realized, was the final one. You know, with a coffin and tombstone. In other words, I’d be planning, then starting, then finishing, then planning again forever. 

Which meant, if I waited until “the end” of the planning to feel good about my progress (i.e.: a finished manuscript or a published novel), I’d never get there. I’d always be striving, never arriving, because there was always the next plan to, well, plan. 

Given that writing process is long to begin with, I had to reframe my perspective. I had to stop looking at my plan, and start looking at my progress. Because looking back at everything I had already done vs. looking forward to everything I had yet to do, became much more encouraging. Keep organized, absolutely. Plan ahead. But take a moment to look back at all you’ve accomplished, too. 

Imagination Creation

Sometime I get overwhelmed with my own imagination. New story ideas are always popping into my head; plot ideas, characters, or even just titles. They’re fun to run with, but for a long time, I felt guilty. 

Ideas were dangerous. Not the ideas themselves, but to focus on them instead of the story I was specifically writing was dangerous. I’d been warned. Those insidious little beasts would tunnel into my brain and draw my attention away from the hard work of writing. Of course it was easier to brainstorm new ideas than to flesh out old ones into comprehensible stories. 

I tried to rid myself of them by jotting my ideas into various notebooks. I was drowning in half-started journals. 

Guilt followed me. How could I finish one story if I’d already jumped ahead to the next? And with more than a dozen journals already, how could I possibly have time to turn them all into their own story? 

The answers struck me out of the blue. I don’t have to turn each one into its own book! I can just enjoy the process of brainstorming! And what about the very real danger of distraction? That, I realized, was entirely in my control. All I had to do was set aside some fun brainstorming time in my writing schedule. If I plan it, the tsunami of ideas will get their time to shine without drowning my work-in-progress. 

Now I’m even more excited to romp around in my imagination.