Dawn of Mammals 4 update

This book is in the hands of a pro proofreader right now, and I'm planning to release it on or before December 15. If I can get it up before then, I will!

I don't believe in talent

During National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I post about writing issues, rather than my typical posting on science, natural disasters, and emergency preparation.

“You're so talented as a writer.”

I hear this from time to time in emails, and before you think this is just bragging and quit reading this article before this sentence ends, let me assure you, I am NOT talented.

And neither is any other novelist.

That's because writing isn't a talent. Language is learned. Writing skill is learned. No two-year-old child sits down and pens a perfectly structured screenplay or novel, proving to me it’s not an innate skill. In the past five years there have been a number of articles and books written on the concept of how much work it takes to get to achieve competence in a field. There's the 10,000 rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell . There's Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice and his book, Peak, which also debunks the concept of “innate talent.” Before that, SF writer David Gerrold reminded us that it takes a million words of practicing fiction writing before we'll write a novel anyone will want to read.

A lot of people think they want to write a book, but they don't understand that they'll probably have to write three to five bad ones (or a hundred bad short stories) before they can write a decent one, and three decent ones before they write a good one. It takes years of work to achieve skill, and some of those years are frustrating. Few people seem to be able to stick through them.

I don't know why I was, why I was willing to sink 25,000 hours into learning the craft and the business when it rewarded me hardly at all, before indie publishing and my lovely readers gave me the chance to be a full-time writer. Beyond having parents who worked hard at jobs and community service and provided excellent role models without ever lecturing us on the topic, I believe that people like me are congenitally stubborn. We don't quit because we're a little mad. We bang our heads against the brick wall until we see cracks in the mortar. Or we just bang our heads until we die.

Before 10,000 hours was a catchphrase and before Ericsson’s research, in 1989 western novelist Jack Bickham wrote, “Talent is something people attribute to a successful person after years of hard, hidden, agonizing work.” Amen to that.

So thank you for the “talent” compliment, and I'm not a complete ingrate; I did take it how you intended it. But I hope you forgive me if I correct you: if you like my novels: I’m not talented. Talent would be a fairy godmother hitting me on the head with a wand. Skill is earned. I put in my hours, and if I have any skill to speak of, effort built it.

And this is good news to beginning writers struggling to figure out how to make it all come together. It means with enough effort, you can become skilled, too.

Writers, consider the source

A vast community of online writers now exists, with many people giving advice to other writers for free, sometimes when asked, sometimes just blurting it out on forum or blog. ;)  Some of the advice-givers have even written how-to books about craft or business and put them on Amazon for 2.99, and despite all the good free advice out there, lots of people buy those books.

Whenever you read advice from a writer, before you begin to believe it, do this for yourself: CHECK THE AUTHOR'S BOOK RANKINGS AT AMAZON. If you are published, indie or traditionally, and they have a book or two ranked higher than you, sure, give the advice some consideration and decide if it sounds like a fit for you. If they are ranked lower than you, or if they are ranked (as is shockingly common), lower than 300,000 at Amazon's book store, you can safely ignore that advice. To be blunt, if the advice was good, they'd have more readers.

Subject me to this test, too. Either my proof is in my pudding, or it ain't. (This year, I'm mostly talking about me rather than giving direct advice, but if you see implied advice in my posts, it counts.) My newest book's link is always next to the top "gadget" in the right-hand column of my blog. Usually, though not always, an author's newest book is his top ranked book.

And for heaven's sake, don't buy some book or service from the advice-giver unless he's a top seller! That's being the "sucker born every minute." And none of us wants to be that.

Writing a million words of fiction in 2016

During National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I post about writing issues, rather than my typical posting on science, natural disasters, and emergency preparation.

One million new words of fiction per year?

I know there are a few people out there who write a million new words of fiction a year, but I worked my hardest in 2016 and discovered that I’m not going to be one of them.

I’ve navel-gazed about the question of whether or not I was just being whiny (something 99% of writers are tremendously skilled at, so I try to monitor myself for this), but I don’t think I am this time. People who write a million a year generally:

1. Write every day or nearly so
2. Sometimes dictate into Dragon Naturally Speaking
3. Often write in a genre where there’s a formula, and they stick to it with each book
4. Hire out all editing and proofreading
5. Are capable of revising Book A in the afternoons while writing the first draft of Book B in the mornings

But...

1. I do write every day or nearly so, though I have a limit of three hours of creative work. After that, my creative brain just shuts off, and I seem capable of writing only the equivalent of “uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” If I push it past four hours, I get a headache and might lose the following day to that. After this many years at it, periodically pushing myself for more production, I’m fairly certain this is a real limit of my imperfect brain.
2. I’ve tried dictation, and even after training the VR program for weeks, it still introduced 70 new typos into every 1000 words, and about once every 1000 words I couldn’t even discern what I had meant, it had typed something so far away from what I’d said. As proofreading is difficult to trade for and/or expensive from a pro, I had to say “no, thanks,” as it seemed to me that I’d only bought myself more unpleasant hours of proofreading work later on.
3. Every one of my stand-alone novels is a new creature altogether, and even the three novels of the Gray series are very much different from one another. I’ve tried coming up with a reusable outline, but it’s impossible for me and my genres. The best I can do for myself is a twelve point plan, but it’s vague and it doesn’t get me very far. (One bullet point is “a reversal,” as an example. Not a whole lot of help.) 
4. I have proofreaders lined up, some volunteer and some paid, but I would feel bad about turning it over to them without doing any revision or proofing myself first. I have tried to talk myself into a lazier mindset, but I. Just. Can’t. It’s a mental quirk, I suppose, wanting to do the best work I can manage on my own, and I’m stuck with it. The most I’ve been able to do in this realm is write an editing macro for myself to speed up revision and trade in my former three revisions for the macro plus one this year. (Mumbling “the perfect is the enemy of the good” the whole while to force myself to not obsessively rewrite.)
5. The eight-hour work day, divided into new words in the morning and revising/proofing a different novel in the afternoon, is something I tried, but it didn’t work for me. Seven days a week, eight hours a day of writing/revising work is exhausting, and then there’s a business to run, too. It’s also confusing to me to jump back and forth between projects every day.

And so I now work for my three hours every morning, but it is either new words or revision or proofreading, not all three. I also do an hour or two of business work daily: mailing list, blog, emails, social media, accounting, etc. And every day includes a couple hours of research/non-fiction reading for the next book in line. Seven hours a day, seven days a week, and very few days off: 49 hours of work per week. It’ll just have to do.

Because the other thing I fear million-word writers must do can be seen by looking at it through the lens of David Sedaris’s “four burners theory.” A friend of his says there are four burners in a life: work, friends, family, and health. Unlike on a stove, where you can crank them all up to high for a long while, in real life, you cannot. If you turn work up to high, friends, family, and health will suffer. To be really successful, she said, you have to turn off two burners.

I think she has a point. For any one person, there is no such thing as infinite time. Or infinite energy. Or an infinite number of days functioning on three hours sleep. We have limits, and if we don’t respect them--if we don’t keep an eye on all four burners--we might find ourselves with fifteen novels written this year, but have no friends, high blood pressure, and are being served with divorce papers or bailing a kid out of jail because he acted out just to get our attention for a few minutes.

I tried as hard as I can, and I turned friend and health burners down too low, but I don’t think I’ll quite crest a half-million new words by December 31. (If I get to count blog posts, yes, I will). Other people can write a million, and my hat is off to them. I did my best, yet I found I am not in that group.

Next year, I’ll aim for about 333,000 new words...and I will reconnect with some friends whose invitations I turned down too often in 2016.

2/3 of the way through revising Dawn of Mammals 4

Here's a word cloud from an action scene in the novel coming out in December. (mild spoiler alert!)