5 Ways To Stay Motivated in Your Writing Career

by Molly King

As humans, we all struggle at times to stay excited about certain tasks at hand. We get bored; we get frustrated; we get distracted (ooh, cat gifs!) and our art suffers for it — we stop writing our novel, we stop writing our next song.
Sometimes you just have to stop and remember why you are doing it in the first place.
But seriously… we recently dug up an old article on Lifehack that reminded us of some simple ways to stay motivated. The article is mostly focused on general life motivation, but it can easily be applied to your creative career as well.
You can read the article in its’ entirety here, or check out our summary below.

How to keep your writing life fresh and active

1) Remember the reason(s) you’re doing it in the first place: A feeling of accomplishment? Personal gain? Cold hard cash? One little step closer to your bigger goal?
2) Have fun: Ask yourself, “what can I do to make whatever it is I am doing more enjoyable for myself (and maybe others)?”
3) Take a different direction: there is likely more than one way to do whatever you are doing, so try approaching your task from a different angle. Ask yourself how other people do this same thing. Try it that way.
4) Baby steps: In order to not become overwhelmed by the larger task at hand, split tasks into smaller goals and celebrate each goal once you reach it. For example, if your goal is to write an entire novel, set a goal of writing one chapter at a time, or just writing for one hour at a time, and celebrate when you’ve done it. You’ll be stoked that you reached your goal and be motivated to move onto chapter two (or hour two).
5) Reward yourself: once you’ve reached a goal, make sure you take time to reward yourself. Whether it’s something as simple as taking a break or buying yourself a lil’ sumpthin’ sumpthin’, it’s important to recognize progress to stay motivated.


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Three Keys to Writing Memorable Fiction

From Ruth Harris on Anne R. Allen’s Blog:

Social, cultural, and political history are powerful tools no writer should ignore.

• John Le Carré used the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the real-life unmasking of a double agent to create a compelling setting in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
• Isabel Allende’s The House Of The Spirits, a family saga partially inspired by the PInochet dictatorship, is set against decades of political and social upheaval in post-colonial Chile.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his experiences in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet prison system to create world wide bestsellers in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

However, writers do not need vast cultural and political disruptions to write powerful fiction readers can relate to. Ordinary, everyday details add enormous power to fiction and bring your story to life.

Whether your book is set in the conservative Eisenhower Fifties, the stylish Kennedy Sixties, Nixon’s Watergate and the gloomy Carter Seventies, the glitzy Reagan Eighties, or the Anxious-Age-of-the-Present, each period offers the writer its own specific backdrop and sound track. Trudeau’s Canada, Thatcher’s England, de Gaulle’s France, Ho Chi Minh’s China, Mubarak’s Egypt, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany—all evoke powerful memories and feelings years after the events took place.

Characters need to be firmly anchored in a specific time and place. Even sci-fi and fantasy need social, cultural and political specifics to engage the reader. George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter draw their power from their authors’ ability to create credible details of an invented world.

If you research and then judiciously set up the specifics of time and place, you will expand and enrich your fiction. Invoking the relevant cultural, political and social details will draw your reader into recognizable settings against which your characters can act out their dilemmas, frustrations and successes.

You shouldn’t give your reader a history lesson—that’s Doris Kearns Goodwin’s job—but you do want to give your characters a relatable world in which to live. Your characters can be—and should be—shaped by the attitudes of whatever period you choose to write about.

• Peggy and Joan in Mad Men deal with the casual sexism of the 1960’s.
• The characters in Downton Abbey are caught up in a long-gone post-Edwardian upstairs-downstairs world.
• Patsy and Edina, the fashion victims in Ab Fab, booze it up, get high and keep up with nutty trends as they attempt to recreate their younger, glory days in Swinging London.
• Carrie and Brody in Homeland are enmeshed in a paranoid present complete with bi-polar disorder, psycho-active drugs and a hero who might also be a terrorist.
• Elizabeth Moss’s character in Top Of The Lake searches for a missing and pregnant twelve-year-old in a remote, misogynistic area of contemporary New Zealand.

The writers’ skillful use of these various eras bring the fictional characters who inhabit them vividly to life.
By using cultural history, high or low, past or current, your characters will become dimensional as they reflect the world around them. They can be limited by it—or they can rebel against it. Some will choose to drop out, some will learn to manipulate it, others will challenge it, some will be defeated and still others will triumph despite the barriers they face.

Are you writing about a period in which people feel positive about the future and confident about their prospects? Or are your characters coping with the Depression of the Thirties or the financial crisis or downsizing of the recent past and present? How they think and feel and what they do to deal with opportunity (or lack thereof) offers a potent way to explore and expand the inner and outer lives of the people you’re writing about.

Early Elvis, swinging Sinatra, Abbey Road Beatles, Motown Soul, Latino Salsa, Madonna’s Material Girl, Gangsta Rap, Lady Gaga’s and/or Rihanna’s latest immediately evoke times and places your reader will find familiar.

• Did your heroine’s first serious romance—maybe with her tweedy, pipe-smoking Literature Professor—begin and end to Mozart?
• Did your MC come of age when Michael Jackson was moon-walking?
• Did that bad-boy rascal of a boyfriend give your heroine heartache only Patsy Cline could express?

Selecting just the right song and just the right singer can illuminate the emotional life of a character in a memorable way. (Anne here: Just remember to use the title, not the actual lyric--unless you're prepared to pay. Here's a recent blogpost on how to do that.)

Then there’s wardrobe:

• Garter belts or Spanx?
• Turtlenecks or bustiers?
• Lip gloss or va-va-voom Marilyn Monroe red lipstick?
• A natural Fro, an old-fashioned perm, a blow dry bob or a Gwyneth dead straight ‘do?
• Punky pink streaks, Bergdorf’s blonde or let-it-all-hang-out grey?
• A hedge fund titan in a five-thousand-dollar suit?
• A dude in jeans and a pack of cigarettes in the rolled-up sleeve of a T-shirt?
• A genius techie billionaire in hoodie and sneakers?
• Are their clothes worn ironically? Or un-?

Choices in clothing, makeup and hairstyles telegraph different personalities and different attitudes. A wise writer will make use of each telling detail as s/he creates characters readers will relate to.

Writers don’t need to know everything but they do need to be interested in everything from the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s to today’s California surfers.

Research used to mean trips to the library, flipping through card catalogs and then waiting for the books to be pulled from the stacks. Research once meant slogging through microfilm, piles of old newspapers and magazines. It was time-consuming and often frustrating. Now, thanks to the web and Google, just about anything we want to know is instantly available.

Our world—past and present—is rich in incident, personality and conflict. It’s an oyster with a different pearl for every book, each character and every writer. An open mind and lively curiosity, a habit of reading widely, your own unique memories, passions and interests, plus basic research are your friends.

Embrace them and use them thoughtfully. Your readers will love you for it.

What about you, scriveners? What details do you use to anchor your book in time and place? Are there books that have more detail than you'd like? Do you read for setting as well as story?

 

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Robins and Snow.

  

I was looking out the front window and noticed a Robin on the front lawn. He lands back here every spring and has done so for years. He is attracted by the last apples that fell last fall. It seems to be his morning snack every day. As I watched him, I noticed snow flurries again. The 6th of April and still we get snow.

Although I bought a new snow blower a couple of weeks ago, I am certainly not hoping for more snow. I can happily wait till next winter. My neighbour gave me a key to his shed so I could have his snowblower when I needed it. I have a 32" - it is extremely heavy, and it only throws the snow a few feet. Needs a new belt, and again, it is just too heavy to manoeuver.

My wife and son went over to Sears Clearance one Sat. and saw they were getting rid of all blowers. They had a whack of them. They took photos, then came back and showed me. I finally capitulated and went over for a look. By then, there was only three remaining. So I picked up a 27". What I liked most about it was the new feature. There is another switch on it. Just squeeze it and it lifts the wheels and front off the ground. I can just slide it to the next row. There was also one screw missing which is not a problem.




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5 Writing Tips from Blake Bailey

1. Write about things that really interest you. Notwithstanding what my pal Mike claims was his spooky prescience, I never dreamed I'd be a literary biographer. I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it. Which brings me to how this miracle came to pass. "Blake, fiction isn't working out for you," my would-be literary agent told me several years ago. "All your success"--such as it was--"has been with nonfiction. Look: write me a nonfiction book proposal about something that really interests you right now, and I'll try to sell it." As it happened, I was really interested right then in Richard Yates: he'd written two of the best novels of the postwar era, Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, one of the best story collections, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and he was all but totally forgotten. Then, too, his life had been a fascinating train-wreck: ghastly childhood! alcoholic! bipolar! sole speechwriter for RFK at the height of the Civil Rights Movement! the subject of a hilarious Seinfeld episode! So I put it all into my book proposal and, miraculously, my agent sold it to a good publisher--with this catch: I had all of 14 months to finish my (vast) research and write a 500-page biography. The published result, A Tragic Honesty,  was 613 pages not including notes and index. I'd worked on it almost every waking hour; my wife only saw me at meals, and sometimes not even then. But it was thrilling labor. Emerson said, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." He was right. Pick a subject that bores you and you'll write a boring book (if you manage to finish at all); but if you're fascinated with your material you'll have a ball and just maybe write a book that conveys that excitement to the reader.

2. Be quiet and listen. Maybe the nicest compliment I ever got was from the splendid Chip McGrath, who wrote: "Bailey is in some ways an unlikely biographer. He’s capable of spending hours in the library, days on end, but he’s also lively and sociable. He laughs easily, likes to tell jokes and do impressions." All very true--I am sociable; I am a recluse. I think you need to be an almost ideal combination of the two to be a writer of book-length nonfiction--at least nonfiction about more or less contemporary subjects that entails interviewing live people. It's not for the morbidly shy. You have to cold-call a lot of perfect strangers, and in some cases get them to tell you their gnarliest secrets. When I talk, say, to the widow of my biographical subject, I don't want to know how he liked his vegetables prepared--well, I do, but I also want to know what it was like (in the case of John Cheever's widow) to live with a man who started sneaking gin at 9:30 in the morning and had a pretty sharp tongue even when sober. Why should she tell me these things? I'm going to broadcast it to the world! Here's why: because it's all part of the essentially noble project of seeing a great artist in the round, a fully fleshed human being--and besides my heart goes out to her. I understand, more or less, what she went through. I sympathize. And I'll listen for however long she's willing to talk. The fact is, most of us don't have that many people who are willing to listen to all our sad stories, and when someone comes along who wants nothing better, people often seize the opportunity and talk. So, when interviewing: don't just tick off a laundry list of questions; let the person talk, be quiet and listen, and respond to what she's saying. You'll be amazed what you learn.

 

3. Action is character. This is what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes while working on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, and he wrote it in caps: ACTION IS CHARACTER. If one of our greatest narrative writers had to remind himself of that right up to the end, it must be pretty important. It is. Human beings are far too complex to explain away in so many words: imperious; timid; pompous; vain; bombastic--and so on. "Imperious"? "Bombastic"? What do those words mean exactly? In Lillian Ross's note-perfect profile of Hemingway, she shows us the great man in a narrow elevator at Abercrombie & Fitch. Aware that a woman is giving him the stink eye, he suddenly erupts: "FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!" Just that: no elaboration on Ross's part; only what happened. (The woman looked at the elevator floor after that.) So was Hemingway a "bombastic" man? Well, yes, sometimes, but consider all the other implicit nuances of his behavior: sick of his own fame; moderately aware, too, maybe, that the woman isn't staring at him because he's Hemingway but rather because he's a big sweaty guy with a three-day beard who stinks of booze and just stinks period (fun fact: he rarely bathed); and finally a man who was getting rather tired of living in general. Let us see and hear how your characters behave, and let us (for the most part) draw our own conclusions. It's more fun that way, and it does more justice to the paradox of human nature.

 

4. Be prepared. If you're Faulkner, it's okay to fill a glass with bourbon and branch water and get slowly potted while you (or your genius or daemon or what you will) channels the deathless prose of Absalom, Absalom! But most of us aren't Faulkner. Still, fiction writers can get away with a certain amount of spontaneity in their writing; indeed, half the fun (and agony) of fiction writing is finding out what exactly your story or novel is as you write it. ("Now let's see," thought Cheever, as he sat down to write his greatest story. "The guy likes to swim in other people's pools, so one day he decides he's going to swim all the way across the county from pool to pool . . . ") Nonfiction writers don't really have that luxury, and biographers certainly don't: you have to do your research, and then find your structure (important), and then put all those quotes and factoids in their proper order. When a biographer's research is done, his computer is ready to explode with undifferentiated data. This, frankly, is the part I like best: putting it in order. What's my structure? Is it chronological, thematic, a little of both? (The last.) I find a nice place to lie down with a legal pad, and, looking at nothing but the pad, I write down all the main episodes of my subject's life; if I can't think of something offhand, it can't be all that important. Then I type this up, and cut and paste it into a viable structure. Then, using only that bare bones outline, I begin to plug in my research and the outline waxes and waxes in complexity, and I see themes and sub-themes and sub-sub-themes develop, all the while revising (and revising and revising) the structure, until finally--maybe a year or two later--my notes have been trimmed down to six or seven hundred single-spaced pages in meticulous order. At last I'm ready to write, and I rarely get stuck: It's all laid out in front of me.

 

5. If possible, be funny. Take Lytton Strachey, author of the great Eminent Victorians. He saw the world as if from a great height: with detachment, a little sadness, and a lot of humor. Read the page where one of his four Victorians, Thomas Arnold, dies. I've read it a thousand times; it's one of my favorite pages of prose. Nothing fancy: Dr. Arnold, in agony from an attack of angina, asks his distraught wife to read the Prayer Book to him. "Yes!" he barks here and there. At some point he asks his puzzled son to thank God for giving him the pain. (See: Action is character.) And then quite suddenly (for Strachey was nothing if not laconic), Dr. Arnold "passe[s] from his perplexities for ever." I always chuckle, I'm not sure why. Not because I rejoice in Arnold's death; but rather because I see his absurdity, and my own, and forgive us both. Somehow the whole human condition is there: very sad, but seen in perspective, pretty ridiculous too.

 

 

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Working at Home and Workplace Productivity

from daily Writing Tips

The recent news that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is banning employees from working at home has caused a flurry of commentary in the media and among workers in the Internet industry. One aspect of the issue is how such a decision affects content producers.

Banning telecommuting is a heavy-handed strategy. The rationale for the policy change, according to a leaked Yahoo memo, is that the company needs employees to be available to collaborate with colleagues in person, but the irony in this statement from an Internet company is delicious.

Commentators have debated the wisdom of Yahoo’s approach, some arguing that telecommuting encourages slacking and others insisting that it boosts productivity. The truth, as is often the case, is somewhere in between.

At my last job before my current freelancing stint, I worked for a company that allowed most employees to work from home one day a week — until management decided that it wasn’t working out. The implicit reason was that some people were abusing the privilege, staying home and not getting much work done. In my case, what had been my most productive workday became just like any other, punctuated with interruptions and distractions and noisy coworkers.

Fortunately, the privilege was reinstated after a while, during which interval managers presumably were encouraged to keep closer tabs on the employees who reported to them. It is this point that any company considering whether to introduce or retain telecommuting should keep in mind: Some employees will game the system whether they’re working on site or at home. Also, it’s disingenuous to use the excuse about the necessity of working in physical proximity with colleagues when much of one’s work is solitary or involves communication with people at other company locations or other businesses.

There’s also another issue, one that makes this topic relevant to a site called Daily Writing Tips. Many employees do a significant amount of writing or editing even if their employer is not a publishing or communications company, and telecommuting gives them an opportunity to produce content in an environment with fewer distractions than the workplace offers.

I have worked at several companies where coworkers whose responsibilities entailed little or no composing of content played music, talked loudly or incessantly, and otherwise made it difficult for me to do what I was being paid to do. If this predicament sounds familiar to you, and even minimal telecommuting is not part of company policy, consider these possibilities:

1. Ask your manager to try to accommodate your need to work with minimal distractions, if only occasionally. If you cannot be relocated to a quieter workspace, perhaps you can at least sit somewhere else — a vacant office, a seldom-used conference room — from time to time, as when you need to draft an important report or produce some other significant amount of text.
2. Request the option to work on an offset schedule (starting very early in the morning or ending later at night) so that you have a couple of hours at the beginning or end of the day during which few, if any, other people are in your work area.
3. Ask your manager to monitor noise in the work area and follow up with reminders to employees to minimize sounds and distractions, including telephone conversations — and ask him or her to ban use of phones’ speaker functions. (And if people are allowed to listen to music at their desks, ask that they be required to use headphones.) Supervisors who have their own offices are often unaware of excessive noise (especially when certain workers suddenly become subdued and intent on their work when a manager appears), and they may need to be nudged to address the problem.
4. Suggest a policy that any conversation that takes more than a moment must take place in a meeting room or another area, because trying to write while the person seated next to you discusses a job-related problem (or a recent vacation) with a visiting colleague for half an hour is half an hour of your workday wasted.
5. Ask to be allowed to telecommute one or two days a week on a trial basis, suggesting that you and your manager agree on baseline productivity expectations. If your request is granted, make sure that you significantly exceed those benchmarks.

You may hesitate to make such suggestions, concerned that you will be viewed as a troublemaker, but emphasize the improved productivity and morale that will result for all, not just for you, if such policies are implemented. Your success, of course, will also depend on your manager’s competence and on the company culture.

Consider, too, asking for support from your colleagues (most, if not all, of whom are likely to sympathize and to agree that a quieter work environment would be beneficial). Finally, determine to go to your manager’s superior or to your company’s human resources director if your immediate supervisor does not resolve the issue.



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"Think before you write…"

by Susan Orlean

How did you become a writer? I began writing -- that is, telling stories in written form -- when I was a kid, and never stopped. I began publishing when I got out of college, having lucked into a writing job at a small magazine in Portland, Oregon. Then I learned on the job.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.) My high school English teacher, John Heaps, made me believe I could write, and made me love reading and writing even more than I already did. Reading great fiction (Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce) and great non-fiction (Wolfe, Didion, McPhee) made me dream of what writing at its best could be. My editors -- too many to name here -- have been great teachers, too, and I've learned something from all of them.
When and where do you write? I write whenever I have a deadline looming, but my best time is mid- to late afternoon. I write wherever I need to be, but my favorite writing place is a little studio I built for myself about two hundred yards from my house. It's private and quiet and cozy and there are not that many distractions.
What are you working on now? I'm in the stage that's the most invisible to the observer: I'm thinking of new ideas. So I'm not writing or researching, but I'm percolating. I want to fall in love with a few story ideas and perhaps a new book idea.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I've been stuck, of course, but never experienced what would be called "writer's block." I have found myself confused about what I'm trying to say, and I've found myself tongue-tied because I don't really know my subject well enough yet, but I've never felt phobic or "blocked" when it came to actually writing.
What’s your advice to new writers? Write as much as you can; read as much as you can. Think before you write. Feel passionate about your subject or about the process of writing. Work hard. Have fun.


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Critique

by Susanne lakin

Just the word alone makes many authors cringe. Why? Because it reminds us of another word that has a negative connotation: criticism. Yet, as authors we understand the need to have another pair of eyes look closely at our manuscript and give us constructive advice and direction so we can make our book the absolute best it can be. And the best person to give a critique is someone with years of experience in the publishing industry.
Some copyeditors claim you should never get a critique because it is entirely subjective. They say you should just get your book edited by a copyeditor and fix all the grammatical mistakes. Getting a thorough copyedit is essential. But few writers think about getting their book critiqued first. However, in my twenty-five years of experience writing novels, becoming a multipublished author, and working professionally as a copyeditor and writing coach in the publishing industry, I have come to conclude that most authors–whether a new writer or seasoned published author–need a critique and preferably in the early draft of their manuscript.

Yes, Critiques are Subjective

Sure, critiques are subjective. But when your novel or nonfiction manuscript lands on a literary agent’s desk, or is placed in an acquisition editor’s hands, it will be read subjectively as well. But here’s the thing authors need to understand: a professional in the publishing industry will temper a subjective read with years of experience; an understanding of current market needs and trends; establish or accepted writing styles, structure, and formatting; and a honed sense for an original and compelling writer’s voice. There is no such thing as an objective critique, but that should not be an issue.

A Kind and Gentler Critique

As an author who has gone through the trials, frustrations, setbacks, disappointments (need I go on?) along the road to publication, I bring to my critiques some things that perhaps a copyeditor or even another critiquer may not. When I critique your manuscript, my goal is to not only help you make your book shine, make it all you envision for it but also to encourage you, instruct you, and help you along this rocky road. A good critique should not come across as a nice pat on the back with a few muttered words like “Good job. Keep it up.” However, we as writers grow attached to our words, and an insensitive editor can cause a lot of pain. It takes courage to hand your project over to someone–this book you’ve spent months or perhaps years writing, sweating over, all the while second-guessing yourself and the merits of your book–only to have someone heartlessly rip it to shreds. For that’s our greatest fear–that despite all our hard efforts, we may have produced something that should go in the round file.



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