A #ROW80 Partnership and Time To State Your Goals

Welcome back on this glorious holiday weekend, y’all!  

The Geek Out

If you were around for the tail end of Round 2, you got to see me geek out over one of my new favorite tools, Pacemaker.  Pacemaker lets you set your goal (words, pages, etc.) and your timeline–and THEN it allows you to adjust things based on life stuff.  Got a business trip out of town scheduled?  You can set those days to either skip or have a lower goal.  Want to work more on weekends?  You can set that, too.  And the system updates everything to show you what you need to do in order to reach your goal by the deadline you set.  Even better?  You can turn your project into a widget or into an iCal in order to make sure your writing time is FRONT AND CENTER on your calendar!  It is the absolute perfect tool to enable you to manage your writing goals!  And it’s free!

Turns out the makers of Pacemaker thought so too!

The Partnership

So ROW80 has OFFICIALLY partnered up with Pacemaker for Round 3!  They have designed for us a special page for our challenge.  You can create up to 5 projects (since often people work on more than one thing during the course of a round).  Or, if you’re less focused on a specific book, there’s absolutely an option to track your writing as a habit.  On our challenge page, you’ll be able to see everybody who’s participating and how they’re doing on their goal.  You can copy their plan and customize to make it your own or start from scratch.  Here’s my first project for the round, which I’m already 2/3rds finished with.  You can see how my productivity jumps around, and how I’ve scheduled time off for my vacation this week.  There are so many options to customize.  While writing is the most obvious, you can also track editing, reading, study or work as a goal.  You can measure words, pages, chapters, characters, verses, acts, scenes, stanzas, lines, items, minutes, hours, or tasks.  And there’s a whole long list of types of projects already built in.

My Challenge To You

Pacemaker is an incredibly powerful tool that can enable you to take control of your writing life.  I can’t count the number of times participants goggle at what I manage to get done with everything I juggle.  And the fact of the matter is, it’s as Thomas Jefferson once said, “It’s amazing how much can be done if we are always doing.”  This is pretty much the theme of my life.  I’m always, always doing something, whether it’s plotting the next book, working on a character sketch, or just spewing out a hundred words in a spare ten minutes.  I don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, I don’t wait for the perfect time.  And I don’t beat myself up if I don’t reach some lofty, perfect goal (most of the time…).  Because the absolute truth of the matter is that any progress is better than no progress.  If your goal is 1,000 words a day and you only manage 250, that’s 250 that you didn’t have before and your brain stayed at least a little bit in the story.  THAT is what I want to reward this round–ANY consistent progress toward your goal, no matter how small.  Whether you’re chipping away at that final word count by inches or feet, I want you to make an effort to do something each and every day.  Stop letting everything else in your life come first.  No excuses.  If you want to be a writer, then writing has to be a priority.  Just remember that making it a priority only means making SOME kind of progress, not ALL the progress (although if you can make All the progress, that’s awesome!).

What are you waiting for?  Go sign up for Pacemaker today and set up your project for Round 3.

Set Your Goals

Don’t forget to write up your goals on your blog and link back to the post on the linky below so we can all swing by and cheer you on.   And if you’re jumping in after this linky is closed, just scroll to the currently active check-in linky and do the same thing.

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Bravery Not Perfection (And State Round 2 Goals) by Kait Nolan

I’m a big fan of TED talks.  In a world where I sometimes watch a shameful amount of cute puppy and cat videos (don’t judge), it sparks my brain to actually think about stuff.  I came across this one last week as I was trying to decide what to post about today and the lightbulb went off.  Now, specifically, Ms. Saujani is talking about girls and the tech industry (coding in particular), but I think the message applies in a much broader context.  It’s well worth watching the full thing.  It’s less than 13 minutes.  Go ahead.  I’ll be here when you get back.

This was very eye opening for me in some ways.  Not the idea that girls are hideously outnumbers in the tech industry, but thinking about this idea that girls are raised to be perfect and boys are raised to be brave.  In many ways, I am not very girly.  I’m brash, outspoken, bold, and I believe I can do anything (we aren’t going to talk about that failed stint in ballet in the fourth grade).  I am, by many accounts, fearless.  And looking back, I think it’s no mistake that I grew up where the only kids to play with were boys, where my dad had wanted a son and so taught me to do all kinds of traditionally boy things (I could out-shoot most of my male peers in high school.  This did nothing to improve my date-ability, but that’s a whole other story).  On the rare occasions my mom managed to arrange playdates with other girls, I was BORED OUT OF MY MIND by all the games of “house” and “school” and [insert game to socialize traditional female gender roles].  I wanted to be out with the guys, building bike ramps, playing pirates, doing all the rough and tumble, generally risky things that little boys do.  I didn’t always come out unscathed, but I kept up.  I didn’t acquire any close girlfriends until 6th grade and on, so during those seriously formative years Saujani talks about…I learned bravery, not perfection.

What does any of this have to do with writing?

Something talked about among writers of both genders all the time is a serious inability to declare something done and just let it go.  There’s always that desire to keep tweaking and messing with stuff, trying to dial in that final product to the nth degree closer to our vision.  I call this George Lucas Syndrome.  He began with Episode IV because the technology in the 70s didn’t allow him to bring to life the rich and varied worlds he envisioned for Episodes I-III.  Then, once technology caught up, he began to go back and “fix” parts of the original trilogy.  Some of it was innocent enough.  Erasing the Vasoline smudge beneath Luke’s land speeder that covered the wheels.  Showing Han moving up in the frame as he steps on Jabba, while moving around him in Mos Eisley.  But he couldn’t stop there.  He had to go and replace poor David Prowse in the end with Hayden Christensen (nevermind the fact that Obiwan and Yoda’s ghosts were exactly as they were when THEY died, aka OLD.).  I mean, dude, this is AFTER Prowse learned all the lines and delivered them, only to have them bring in James Earl Jones to do the voiceover work.  That’s just RUDE.  But I digress.  Lucas just kept tweaking and kept tweaking the original trilogy (while also delivering Episodes I-III, in which he clearly went for flash and special effects rather than effectively executed plots–no, I’m not bitter.  Why do you ask?) until the end results cast a serious pall on the films the fans adored.

Why would Lucas do this?  Apart from the fact that he COULD (a danger also faced by those who self-publish, who absolutely have the capability of going in and doing everything from fixing errant typos to overhauling an entire book), I think it came down to this obsession with perfection.  In his mind, the movies were flawed and he was rectifying that.  He didn’t trust the fans to just support the franchise on its own merits, flaws and all.  He wasn’t brave.

I’ve realized that I’m something of an anomaly among writers.  I don’t have this obsession with perfection.  Now that’s not to say my work is sloppy.  It’s not.  I have incredibly high standards and I won’t release a book until I believe I’ve made it as good as I can make it.  But once it’s out in the wild, other than fixing wonky formatting or catching mistakes that made it through proofreading, I don’t mess with things.  I don’t even feel compelled to.  Once a book is out of my hands, I’ve already moved on to the next story.  And since my production schedule could easily take me into 2030 writing full time, it is to my benefit not to dwell on books already past.  It’s not that I’m not afraid of what people think of my work.  There’s always that fear that it sucks and people are going to hate it because writing is an intensely personal thing and each book baby sent out into the world for judgment feels like our head on the chopping block.  But I figure, I gave it my all at the time I was writing, and that’s all I can do.

So many writers struggle with this.  They write and rewrite and reread and rehash and revamp and revise and regurgitate THE SAME BOOK.  Yes, revision is an important and necessary part of writing.  But there’s a difference between turning your basil into pesto and turning it into the stuff hanging out in a cow’s third stomach.  If you keep messing with stuff you run the risk of ruining it (I’m looking at you George Lucas) and of not truly learning anything.  You have to be willing to put it out there, let it go, and get some feedback (no matter how harsh that feedback may be).  You have to be brave enough to fail so that you can LEARN.  Failure teaches so many more lessons than success.  Hanging on to something until you think you can get it perfect runs too much risk of it never getting out there at all.

So that’s my challenge to you this round.   Be brave with your work instead of perfect.  The world will thank you for it.  ~Kait Nolan

STATE YOUR GOALS!

If you’re new to this process, write up your goals on your blog and link directly to the post in the linky below.  If it’s past the start of round, then just find the most recent check-in and link there.

 

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list of #ROW80 participants.

#ROW80 Round 1: The Importance of Honing Your Craft and State Your Goals

FYI: Round 1 officially begins Monday, January 4th, but I had time to do this today and I know a lot of folks will be thinking about goals with their New Year’s Resolutions and stuff, so I opted to go ahead and put this out there.

After 5 years of running this challenge, I’ve done a lot of cheerleading because I think creating a positive and encouraging space for writers is important.  I’ve talked about the importance of  creating sustainable  change, being kind to yourself, and owning your moniker of writer.  You can troll back through the archives for the fluffy cheerleader posts.  That’s not what I’m here to do today.  Today I’m getting tough and talking about the importance of honing your craft.

We all know that continuing to write regularly is important.  Getting BICHOK (Butt In Chair, Hands on Keyboard) is an essential component of improving as a writer because WRITERS WRITE.  And yeah, just straight up practice should help us improve.  But mindless repetition without an intentional effort to learn and change isn’t going to give you the best results.  That’s like dog paddling in the dark instead of striking out with a clear and steady stroke toward a light house.  You might get there.  You might also drown from wasting your energy.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that most of you are in the same boat as I am–writing on top of some kind of day job (be that of the traditional paid variety or full-time parenting or whatever).  Limited writing time means you have to make that time COUNT.  And that means no dog paddling.  Now I don’t mean that writing has to be this militant, all work all the time with no fun to what you’re doing.  But happy, fluffy, fun writing isn’t going to make you the kind of writer who will someday be able to pay the bills.  You have to TRAIN.  You have to STUDY.  You have to WORK.  You know, like you do with every other meaningful job on the planet.

Now there are a lot of aspects of craft you could choose to work on.  Realistic dialogue.  Character arc.  Straight up refinement of prose.  But the single most USEFUL aspect of craft that I have ever learned is STORY STRUCTURE.  All marketable stories adhere more or less to the same one.  Doesn’t matter what the plot-level trappings are.  All good stories boil down to the same recognizable structure.  It’s part of how we are wired as humans.

Now writers tend to fall into one of two camps (ish–of course there’s a spectrum, but go with it).

You have your hard-core plotters (like me), who approach building a story from the ground up, like an engineer or architect.

Or you have the pantsers who prefer to reveal the story as they go, like one of those chainsaw carvers who find a bear or moose in a log.

It doesn’t matter if you gravitate toward plotting or pantsing or somewhere in between–knowing structure will improve your work.  You’ll either have your skeleton from the beginning and know what to build on or you’ll know what you’re aiming to uncover in your exploratory draft.  And structure is a thing that, once learned, you can’t UNSEE.  In every movie you watch, every book you read, you’ll find yourself recognizing those beats.  And in every one you watch or read that doesn’t work…you’ll be able to trace it back (often) to a violation of accepted rules of structure.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but it’s that whole thing where you have to KNOW and understand the rule before you can effectively break it.

So that’s my challenge to you this round.  If you aren’t familiar with story structure, LEARN IT.  If structure isn’t your issue, pick some other aspect of your craft to work on.  Read blogs.  Read books.  Watch tutorials.  Go beyond your own work to LEARN STUFF.  It’s time to LEVEL UP as a writer.

Here’s a list of my favorite resources for story structure:

• Story Engineering by Larry Brooks (worth getting in paperback so you can sticky tab and underline)
• The Hero’s 2 Journeys (only available in audiobook but cheap at $5.95 and SO WORTH IT)
• Channel 101 (6-parter–go through all of them–be prepared for some irreverent language, if that’s a thing for you)

With that in mind…

State Your Goals

Click here to enter the link to your goals (be sure to link to the specific page and not your main blog) and view this Linky Tools list of other ROWers participating.

Data Driven Decision Making For Writers and Round 4 #ROW80 Goals

Prior to every new round of ROW80, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what I want to write about to launch things–what challenge I want to issue or wisdom I want to impart.  Some rounds I do better than others.  Sometimes life gets bananas and I’m lucky to have three sentences to string together along with the goals linky.  And some rounds I have so many ideas, I hardly know where to begin.  Today I’m caught up in the latter.  Usually I have my post written and all the linkies laid in well before the start of the round so that things run like a well-oiled machine.  But I’m sitting here the day before Round 4 launches, trying to keep my eyes open and my cracked out squirrel attention focused long enough to get this done.  I’m coming off a serious hell week at the Evil Day Job and it’s thrown me off my game.  It was the kind of week that spurred me to start this writing challenge in the first place.  Life.  Lots and lots of LIFE happening.  Under those circumstances, it’s easy to get discouraged and think that you’ll never manage to carve out more time to write, that you’ll never be able to crank out more words.

Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.  

The power of what you think you can do is tremendous.  Those of you who’ve been around for a while will know that I regularly push you to add just a hundred words to whatever goal you set.  Another half hour to your butt in chair, hands on keyboard time.  Stretch those writing muscles.  If you don’t challenge yourself you won’t get better.

I encourage all of you to track how much you’re writing.  For those of you who are struggling to get words, you may think this serves as a reminder of how little you’re getting done.  You need to change your perspective.  By tracking what you’re producing, how much you’re getting written each day, you have a baseline.  And that gives you a frame for getting better.  How’s that?  Through data driven decision making.

Say what?

Okay, so I have what might be deemed an unhealthy addiction to spreadsheets.  I like tracking things.  I especially like tracking things and seeing them go in the direction I want.  I approach my writing no differently.  I began tracking my daily word count back in 2010.  That was the year I decided to take this writing thing as seriously as my Evil Day Job.  I figured it would be good practice for eventually having writing BE my day job and also that I’d never get there without some serious discipline.  That first year, I managed just over 100k and felt like I’d run a marathon.  I averaged just over 600 words on writing days, and I wrote fewer days than I didn’t.  In 2011, I set myself a goal to average at least 700 words a day on the days that I wrote.  I did that (735 average, which is a 21.4% increase for you math geeks).  My number of writing days stayed about the same.  In 2012, I pushed for 800 words average (because increasing my output by about 100 words a day had proved to be doable) and also vowed to get my butt in chair to write more days.  And so it went.  In 2013 I decided I should start counting the words I wrote on plotting (which was a lot).  Each and every year, I’ve tracked, and each and every year, I’ve written more and more, figuring out where I could stretch myself.

What’s that look like?  Well, see for yourself.  This is the annual tab from my spreadsheet as of today.

At this point, I’ve just about maxed out how many words I can write on average, and I write almost every day, so the area I’m striving to improve now is to reduce “waste” (I tend to lose about 35% of my words in revisions, so I’m trying to do a better job with first drafts–I won’t bore you with the spreadsheet tracking THAT).  Anyway, my point is, I wouldn’t have any clue how much I’ve grown and improved in my ability to get stuff done as a writer if I hadn’t been tracking.

Now, I’m not saying you necessarily need to have anything as elaborate as I do (although I have my spreadsheet available for download on my blog if you’re into that), but track something this round.  After you’ve got a week or two under your belt, take that number of words or number of days and strive to increase it by just 5%.  That’s it.  5%.  So, if you’re cranking out 500 words a day, you only have to add 25 words.  That’s IT.  That’s two sentences.  You’ve got that.  Keep tracking, and each time you feel yourself getting comfortable with whatever level you’ve reached, add another 5%.  And when it comes time to set your goals for the first round of 2016, figure out how you can push yourself to be better, to write more.  I’ll be right there with you.

Now, GET READY!  GET SET!  STATE YOUR GOALS!  GO FORTH AND BE AWESOME!

~*~

Kait Nolan

Click here to enter the link to your goals post (which should be posted on your own blog–be sure and link directly to the post and not to the main blog).  Then hop around and visit some of your fellow ROWers to leave encouragement.

The Habit of Excellence and #ROW80 Round 3 Goals

There has been a LOT of life stuff going on in Chez Nolan between the end of Round 2 and gearing up for Round 3.  Hubby and I had to make the difficult and heartbreaking decision to put our 14 year old disabled border collie to sleep. We’ve been living with her disability since her stroke 4 years ago, so this wasn’t a sudden thing, and she finally reached a point where she was telling us it was time.  So that sucked.  And we brought a new edition into the family–a Huskinees or Pyrsky (Husky/Great Pyrenees) puppy.  His name is Huck and he’s awesome.  Daisy sent us a good one.  So we’ve gone from a necessarily pretty sedentary furbaby family to an active puppy household.  OMG, it’s been a long time (7 years) since we did this last.  Our Malanees (Malamute/Pyrenees) Callie has not decided what to make of all this and has mastered the art of the aggrieved older sister.  Plus we’ve had family in town for over a week. Anyway, all that to say that life has been nuts and I, frankly, forgot I needed to write this post until Sunday morning.

As I was searching around for inspiration this morning, I came across this quote.  I love this.  There’s plenty of talk about excellence being a result of hard work.  There’s that whole 10,000 hours to become a master at something.  And holy crap, y’all, that sounds like this huge, overwhelming thing.  See also: Reasons you can’t think of the mountain and must instead think of each individual step.  Anyway, the thing that I loved about this is the idea of excellence as a habit.  Because the whole point of habits is that they’re things we don’t think about.  There’s a certain degree of automation involved.  Whether they’re good or bad things, they’re stuff we do all the time without too much conscious thought.  That could run the gamut from flossing to stuffing our faces while watching TV to getting out the door first thing to work out.

So how does this apply to writing?

Whether you think about it or not, you have all sorts of habits surrounding your writing.  Where you write.  What tools you use to write.  How often you write.  What kind of music (or not) you listen to when you write.  Whether the internet is accessible when you write.  Whether you look back at the last thing you wrote before you start.  Whether you outline or pants.  Whether you have a tendency to make sure you get x, y, z done before you write or whether you attack distractions like a rabid honey badger.

When it comes to writing, your habits can either be detrimental or facilitate excellence. Tweet This

So my challenge to you this round is to answer two questions:

What habits do you have that are detrimental to excellence?

And what habits can you create that facilitate excellence.

With that in mind, STATE YOUR GOALS FOR ROUND 3.  For those who are new, write up your goals in a post on your own blog and enter the link in the linky below.

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Are You Author or Victim?

One of the reasons I began ROW80 is because I wanted to create a community of accountability for writers that fostered a climate of acceptance and being kind to ourselves when life happens and derails our plans (not a lot of room for that in challenges like NaNo).   We writers are so often INCREDIBLY hard on ourselves and running around with emotional bruises from our own mental hands is hardly conducive to creative pursuits.

But today I want to talk about the flip side.

I’ve been reading The One Thing by Gary Keller, which is fantastic and a highly recommended read.  There are lots of quotable bits, but as I was preparing for Round 2, this one really spoke to me.

When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it.  Those are your only two choices–accountable or unaccountable. –Gary Keller, The One Thing

Sometimes fitting writing into your life is a hard thing.  You have all these demands on your time from your job or your children or your friends or any number of other places.  You may have family who doesn’t support you and don’t understand why you’d want to devote all this time to something they perceive as having no value.  You may struggle with getting your head in the right space during that half hour you’re stealing from who knows what in order to get words.  Your kid didn’t tell you that he has a science project due tomorrow.  Your husband is bringing his boss home for dinner at the last minute and the house is a disaster.   All things that can derail you, and there’s no sense in beating yourself up about it because they weren’t in your control.  But.  You can absolutely go too far in the opposite direction and let yourself off the hook too easily when life happens–instead of revising your plans to make up for missed work time, you just let it slide…and eventually you get into a place where little or no work is happening.

There is a balance.  While you must be kind, you must also be firm and dedicated.  You have to choose to be an author of your own life (and work) instead of a victim.  So my challenge to you this round is to be accountable.  Choose responsibility instead of victim mentality.  If something blows up your plans to write, you need to revise them.  MAKE some time to make up for the lost work time.  Nobody can or will protect your writing time other than you, so you must be vigilant and set those boundaries.  They’ll likely be resistant, but they will eventually get used to it.

Are you bleeding?  No.

Is the house on fire?  No.

Is there a flood?  No.

Then whatever it is can wait.

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The Myth of the One True Way (And State Your Goals)

We writers are adventurers.  I don’t mean just our tendency to spend vast quantities of time in other worlds, but I mean our Indiana Jones-like pursuit of the Holy Grail.  We read books and blogs and listen to podcasts and test out this method or that method, all in search of The One True Way to Write A Book.

I’m here to tell you a secret.

There is no one true way.

There’s not.  What works for one person may or may not work for you.  Like, say, writing 50,000 words in a month.  :whistles innocently:  That’s why I started this writing challenge.  You absolutely cannot feel like a failure if one method doesn’t click for you!  The important thing is to keep trying things and take away the pieces of methods that work for you.  Eventually you’ll cobble together a system for you.

But there’s a cautionary tale there, too.

There’s no one true way for each person from book to book!

That’s been a hard won lesson for me, too.  Once I settled on a method that worked on one book, I was convinced it would work for everything after.  Um, yeah.  No.  Every book, every story, every set of characters is different, the same way that every person is different.

Even when you find a system, it can be a great thing to change things up once in a while.  If you tend to be a rabid plotter (I am), it can sometimes be good to pants a little.  If you usually write long, try short.  If you normally write in the morning, try an evening session.  Shake it up.  You never know what you’ll get out of it.

So that’s my challenge for you this round.  Try something NEW and SHAKING THINGS UP!

Without further ado, STATE YOUR GOALS!

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