Productivity

I have a dream. (Enter rest of song from Tangled here.)

Anyways. My 5 year goal consists of me making my living from writing novels and other creative pursuits. To do that I have a plan. And you have to have a plan. There is no way to get a to a goal other than to have a plan.

So what is my plan.

Easy.

Well. Kinda.

It is to be able to write six novels a year. That means writing everyday. No stopping. No days off. No fun.

Kidding. Kinda. Days off are fine. As long as the work gets done. As long as the projects get completed and published.

The way to do that is to vary the length of the projects. I have ideas for longer works as well as shorter works. By varying lengths I am able to complete more publishable works than if  I did one long work. Writing a 500k word novel is good if your last name is Sanderson and have huge advances to keep fed.

Me, however, I don’t get huge advances. I don’t have the capability of writing those long works. I also feel that the market for indie books is not for the doorstops. The people that buy indie books want smaller fiction that costs less and that they are able to get through faster.

So that means pulling back the scope of the books from 150k novels to 70k novels and making two novels. I also want to write even shorter length works. I like writing my 6 yr old middle grade sci fi book.

What does this mean?

That means that I must be writing for half the year. I must be be editing novels for the other half of the year. I must be writing between 1ooo to 3000 words a day. This is assuming that my editing takes half the time. If I can get my editing time down that means that I can spread the writing out between other days.

How do you do that?

Cleaner first drafts. Do I mean less spelling mistakes? Kinda. I mean less developmental edits. I mean that I am going to have to do more outlining. I have to plan my stories. Plan the work better. Get the story right the first time.

But this is not an over night thing. It will take time to build up to that. It will take time to get the productivity up to a point where I am writing enough. I do, however, have planned projects to get me to that part.

That is 4 projects under development. The 4 projects is translated into multiple planned novels. I have one current stand alone being beta read. One trilogy with the first novel being edited. My middle grade has the first book out of six being edited. The last project is a pair of novels. I might change it to a trilogy by cutting the same length of book into three parts.

But I will have to figure out how to add a projected 50k words into the ‘first’ part of the project. My wife says that I need to take a page out of the TV version of game of thrones. Add more sex scenes. I am not sure if she is joking or not…

That means that if I get the current projects completed that I will have thirteen novels. If I can get that done it will be amazing.

But this brings up the question of the night. How can writing and publishing works regularly mean that I can eventually quit my day job and write novels for a job?

By writing and publishing work, on Amazon, builds up a library of work that people can buy. As more books are published, means that more people will see the books and buy the books. They may go back and buy other books in your library. People do that.

Well. I rambled enough. More later.

Cheers.

Nathan Pedde

Ramblings: 6 ways being Anxious about your Novel is incorrect.

Everyone feels anxiety. I comes to each of us differently. Some of us feel scared by circumstances. The fear of the unknown is very common to a lot of people. Change does too. All of this can cause anxiety. When you know change is coming, but you are unsure how it is going to change things or how you are going to be able to enact that change.

How you overcome that anxiety says a lot about your character. Some people can handle it better than others. Some can roll with the situation, while others get chocked up by it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t judge people that have anxiety issues. I have them too. I get anxious about the unknown and change. I have to plan and then plan some more. I talk able the different options that are available. I do research on options that may or may not be possible. It is how I handle my anxiety.

The important thing to do is to recognize that you have a problem and to figure out a way to overcome that problem. Which is a tall order. I understand.

What brought this one?

I am apart of a couple Facebook writing groups and there was one guy on the site that had a friend that was holding an idea of hers to her chest and wouldn’t tell many people about it from fear that it will be stolen.

I understand that mentality. I was there at one point in my writing life. At the time I was suffering bad from anxiety and fear. I felt self-conscious that my writing was no good and if someone were to read my work that they would ridicule me and tell me that my writing was no good. I though that if they heard my idea that they would take it , use it, there work would be better than mine and then they would get all the glory for such a wonderful idea that I had come up with.

There is a couple problems with that concept.

First. Ideas aren’t copy-writable. Anyone can write an novel with any idea out there and it is fine. It is the execution that is copy-writable.

Second. In order to get your work better, the work needs to get read by someone that you don’t know. Someone that will be honest and tell you more than it is good. You need to suck it up, and hear the things that you may not want to hear about your project. Sometimes the truth hurts.

Third. By reaching to fear in this defensive way, you are letting the anxiety control you. Anxiety is not the boss. You are.Fear needs to be confronted and overcome. Libraries worth of books are written on this subject.

Four. Beginning writers always suck. Period. Writing is hard. Drawing is hard. Graphic design is hard. Any creative pursuits worth going after is hard. It takes hours and hours of work to be able to get your art to an advanced level. Refer to my blog post about my full opinion on the word talent. Here is a link. https://napedde.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/ranblings-anxieties-readers-and-talent/

Five. Nothing is original. All stories, movies, art has been done before and will be done may times after you are done. It is a fact of the creative life. You can’t get away from it. Avatar is from Pocahontas and the story of Moses. Star wars is a heroes journey. Like Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was a take on the Authurian legend.

Six. If you disagree with me about the no ideas point. Look at this. We are being surrounded and pummeled to death with media. Youtube, radio, tv, movies. Everything that we get bombarded by can potentially inspire us. You read the news about a heist. Two years later you are writing a novel about one, that has been inspired by it. For those that are creatively minded, these ideas sink into our psyche to resonate until we can use them. They are there underneath the surface. Waiting to strike. They are not original. Sometimes the ideas that you get are cliche and bad. But that is a story for next time.