Now is the time to begin againThere's a lot of talk about starting up right now. Authors are thinking about this, too. Earlier today an author told me about her project, a novel with a good 25,000 words written. Those words are now development edited, too. After my edits, the lockdown kicked in. Everybody had to shoulder the extra burden of losing life as we knew it. Books got put aside, even though some of them represented months of work.
My author is ready to lift the fog off her project. Creative projects like books represent the safest thing to restart today: our dreams. Several other authors are working in their next stages of the act of creation. No matter whether it's a fiction project, or nonfiction, you have something to give the world. It might be entertainment and escape, education about what's vital to making a better life, or a history lesson to teach us all about facing tomorrow.
I'm happy to help wherever I can. Zoom is connecting us all by now. This pandemic is bringing us together in ways we never knew were possible. Consider what your protocol is; that's what we're all asking about today. Consider your protocol for creating and refining your work. Here's some links to help.
Being a genius about story
For just $59 you can get the best class I have ever taken, all about how to build a book from the powerful foundation of story genius.
One stretch of Lisa Cron's Story Genius class sums up the importance of backstory. Your story is not about what your protagonist does. We don't come for the what, we come for the why. And the answer to why anybody does anything, ever, always lies in the past. The class is a five-hour adventure. If the free introduction of 10 minutes doesn’t inspire or connect with you, there are other ways to study story. This one altered how I tell fiction.
Journal your way to creativity
Slower days have returned my journaling practice to me. You might have heard of bullet journals. One great roundup of the practice reminds us that there's not any rules about using a bullet journal except one: you should try to keep all your plans in a single book. I like using the Passion Planner series of journals to help get things done. Something about writing it out with pencil and paper motivates me to remember what I intend to do.
Write your book in small Pomodoros
If you resist getting started on your writing or revising, you can break the work into 25-minute pieces, with five minutes of rest after each period. They're called Pomodoros, these pieces. Focus Time is a $4.99 app for your iPhone that times your practice sessions. Anybody can do something for 25 minutes, and when you string of few of those together, you can get to 90 minutes of work a day. The 25-minutes can be customized, by the way, like so much of what we do to create our writing.
Get it off the handwritten page
My novel and my memoir started in small passages written in notebooks. After months of work, I had acres of pages of handwritten narratives. I like my first-draft voice that I discover with pen and paper. It needs to become digital, though. Dictating the pages into any piece of software, Word or Scrivener or Pages, helps transfer the writing while I preserve its tone. Windows and the Mac have built-in dictation, and it works pretty well if you speak out your punctuation ("comma" or "period").
My novel and my memoir started in small passages written in notebooks. After months of work, I had acres of pages of handwritten narratives. I like my first-draft voice that I discover with pen and paper. It needs to become digital, though. Dictating the pages into any piece of software, Word or Scrivener or Pages, helps transfer the writing while I preserve its tone. Windows and the Mac have built-in dictation, and it works pretty well if you speak out your punctuation ("comma" or "period").
If you're working with interview recordings, or longer passages that you've read into your phone and then transferred as audio files, a $14 monthly tool, Descript, is a marvel that auto-transcribes spoken words.
Writing for the fireplace, or to fling into the world
Writing for the fireplace, or to fling into the world
I like to tell authors who self publish that it’s probably not going to deliver as much money as you want, for a while. You shorten the time to significant profits if you have money to invest, plus the nerve to wait on sales to arrive. That’s the period where you create art (the books) and then see if you have an audience. In the meantime, the advertising bills must be paid. PR can help, but it can be breathtaking to see how much the services cost. $150 an hour is not unusual.
Art is subjective, of course. It’s a matter of taste whether somebody unleashes their $6 for your latest book in a series. With the right investment in advertising, and no desire to make paperbacks, you could earn your way to getting paid for writing books.
Here’s a good question to answer for yourself. Would you rather wake up one morning to have a book in the world, and have no memory of creating it? Or would you rather revel in the making of the book, then finish it and throw it in the fire?
Everybody says they want the making of the book experience as well as the waking up. You can make the book and revel in that, then do the publishing work. The publishing has little to do with creating stories, with one exception. You need to write about your book, marketing-style, to get a readership. Or get good at the four parts of query letters: Connect, Compel, Context, and Credentials.
Then you must make the first 10 percent so riveting they decide to buy the book from Amazon after having read that book's sample of 10 percent. That making it riveting part is where you revel in creating the book. I can help with either aspect, as development editor or production editor -- or in the happiest of engagements, the full spectrum of your book's life.
I've been cycling to keep the soul settled during the sheltering time. We rode to the Cuppa Austin shop, me and my pal Steve, to give a local business a little boost while everyone practiced good protocol. Stay safe and be well.
Ron Seybold
Ron Seybold
512-657-3264
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