Round 2 Goal Post

No, this is not a post about one of these.  This is that part of the ROW80 where we plan for the next Round.  Round 1 is done, over…  it can’t be changed, for good or ill.  But that’s OK.

We have a beautiful new 80 days coming up to achieve something special with our writing lives, and to do that, we need to start out with some goals.  What do you want to do, how do you think it will take get there, what will you get when you reach the end…  So set yourself some S.M.A.R.T goals and use them.

The image pretty much says it all.  S.M.A.R.T goals are:

• Specific — work daily on The Greatest Magnum Opus Ever as opposed to write every day
• Measurable — do 10 pages of revision each week on TGMOE instead of revising things as they catch your eye
• Attainable — set a Test Mile; if you exceed it, great, but plan to do an amount of work you can guarantee to do.  I’m a big fan (of course!) of Those Five Sentences, but maybe you’re working on queries or line edits…  you can use the same strategy there with a bit of tweaking
• Relevant — if you’re trying to write an article on hippos, you may not want to spend your ROWnd researching the craft of iron smelting in Industrial New England (though, with enough time and effort, I’m sure there is a story there!)
• Time-based — because our Rounds of Words go for 80 days, there is already a built-in time-frame to your goals, but not everything you do will need that long.  Some things might need a day or a week…  some might need all year; the point is to make sure you give yourself a time to get those things done

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So… now you’ve done it…  you’ve created some goals, and you’re ready to ROW80.  Well, then add yourself to the linky and share your intentions with your supportive fellow ROWers.  That way we can all help you meet those goals…  and you can help us meet ours.  See you in a week for the opening of Round 2.

And remember….

Some Changes With Round 4 of #ROW80

So y’all, let’s have a little talk. I started ROW80 back in 2010 (!!!) because I wanted a writing challenge that was more flexible than National Novel Writing Month. I felt like it was important to give writers a place where they could get that kind of support but set goals that work for their lives. From that standpoint, ROW80 has been, I think, a huge success. We’ve developed a great little community here–and that’s the thing. We are a COMMUNITY. Communities are (or should be) inherently SOCIAL.

The original incarnation of ROW80 was blog-based because that’s how the other non NaNo challenges I’d participated in were set up–and also because I was a super active blogger back then. But the world has changed. Where those first years, we averaged 40-50k visitors over the course of a year, we now are going to be hitting less than 20k. There’s been an enormous drop in traffic to the site because blogs just aren’t how people tend to do things these days. I’ve maintained the site and the linkies (not free) all these years and coordinated sponsors every round, and over the last couple of years it’s just gotten harder to do as I’ve had more and more on my professional plate. I didn’t even manage to recruit enough sponsors for Round 3, so some of these kind, awesome people have been pinch hitting and doing double duty.

ROW80 is not going away. But it is going to change. I have made the decision to put the blog in stasis. Well, it’s not going anywhere, because there are a lot of awesome inspirational posts here, but it’s not going to be the focal point of the challenge. Instead, we’re moving things TO OUR FACEBOOK GROUP. It’s just flat EASIER to post your updates there and get comments. And it makes for more of a community-oriented focus than the way we’ve done things up to now.  There will be those who complain “Oh, but I’m not on Facebook!” just as there were those who argued “Oh, but I don’t have a blog!”  I’ll say the same thing now as I said then: My challenge, my rules.  This is a FREE support group maintained by me and it is your choice whether to participate or not.  It costs you nothing to create a Facebook account, just as it cost you nothing to create a blog for the original version of the challenge.

I want to open the doors for everybody to post inspiring things there. Memes, articles, whatever. Not only because it relieves the burden of me needing to recruit sponsors, but also because it’s YOUR community and I think you have lots of valuable things to share.

So for the start of Round 4 (October 3, 2016), we are officially moving to Facebook!

Your fearless leader,

Kait

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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Pantsing, Plotting, and Round 4 Kickoff

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the whole pantser vs. plotter debate.  It’s on my mind now as we start up this last round for the year and on the eve of NaNo, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the subject.  I was, for many years, an inveterate pantser, with some romantic notion that exploring a novel organically was like getting lost in Ireland and finding unexpected treasures.  Which, yeah, you might.  But more likely you’ll wind up wasting your limited vacation being stuck on some rutted track (i.e. wrong path) with a flat tire (i.e. broken plot) and no cell service, without being rescued by some handsome Irishman with a twinkle in his eye (i.e. good editor to help you fix it) (y’all, I write romance…go with the analogy).

I started my quest to learn to plot when I got out of grad school and got a real job.  Or I should say jobS.  I worked 2, then 3 for a long long time, which meant that my time was a great deal more limited than it was in school.  Whatever else you may say about pantsing, it is incredibly inefficient and tends to require multiple drafts because you do all your discovery in the thick of the prose.  For someone like me, who tends to write slowly, this is a Very Bad Thing.  You can’t build a career as a writer if it takes you years to write a single book.  Well, unless you’re Diana Gabaldon or Kristin Cashore.  Which most of us aren’t.  But I digress.  I wrote about the transition in detail for Left Behind and Loving It in 2009, if you care to read.  But I thought I’d talk about some of the misconceptions floating around out there about plotting–a word which, by turns, invokes a reaction of hives, making the sign of the cross to ward off evil, or is, at the very least classed right up there with the vilest of profanity by many pantsers.

Misconception: Plotting means I have to know everything about “What happens” in the story.

Wrong.  And this was probably one of the biggest eye openers for me.  What I finally learned is that what I REALLY was looking for was not actually how to plot–I never had any trouble coming up with stuff to happen.  What I was looking for was that formula for making sure that what happened in the story actually, functionally WORKED.  I was really looking for STORY STRUCTURE.  Think of this as the skeleton of your story.  Just like we each have an underlying skeleton that’s more or less the same, so too does story.  There are certain components of plot that serve a particular function in a story and need to hit at a particular point for correct narrative pacing.  If you read no other book on craft, read Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering.  This book changed my writing life and showed me what I was missing.

Misconception:  Plotting ruins all the surprises and joy of discovery and I’ll get bored.

Not true.  Well, a qualified not true.  It depends on the level of plotting you’re doing.  If you feel like you have to plot out everything, down to the specific conversations and what that character had for breakfast, then yes, I can see how you’d get bored.  If you’re plotting that kind of stuff, you don’t have a clear idea of what the point of plotting IS.  What I need to know for a scene is what it accomplishes.  How it moves the story forward.  What is the action?  How is it personal?  And most importantly of all, what is the conflict?  If I happen to clearly hear some of the dialogue, I’ll jot it down, but in general, I want a high level overview of the scene.  That leaves plenty of room for surprises.  I can’t count the number of times a scene turned into more than I intended or the characters took it in a direction I hadn’t anticipated–which still fits within the bounds of what I outlined.

Misconception:  Once I outline, I have to stick to it. I can’t change anything.

Y’all, that’s just stupid.  You didn’t sign a contract when you wrote that outline.  Nobody’s holding a gun to your head to force you to stick to it.  One of the great purposes of an outline is to give you a roadmap–because if your brain has a destination in mind, it’s free to consider other details.  That doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t take a detour if you hit a road block or a bridge turns out to be washed away.   If something’s not working, CHANGE IT.  Case in point, I plotted out To Get Me To You (Available for preorder!  End shameless plug) back in February–beginning to end.  I dove in the writing of it in March.  I hit roadblocks with my middle not once, but twice, which necessitated that I go back to replot (and rewrite a fair chunk) of the middle.  I prefer not to think about how many words got relegated to the scratchpad.  But this whole process saved me MONTHS of work.  Because I stopped, traced it back to the point where it stopped working, tried another idea, and followed that thread through to the end (something that took a matter of days) instead of pushing through with the idea I had and winding up with a book that would’ve been fundamentally broken and required another draft or three.  I’m bearing down on the end of the book now, and just yesterday I ended up replotting the second half of Act 3 (thankfully, not yet written at all) because my black moment wasn’t…well, black enough.  And once I did that, my shero looked at what I had and was like “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” and yelled at me until I changed it.  Three times.  And all of these periods of stopping and reorienting involved changing the outline.  It’s so not a big deal.

Misconception: There’s a right way to plot.

I’m sorry, that’s just ridiculous.  There are as many ways to plot as there are writers in the world.  What works for one person, won’t necessarily work for another.  Just because you may have tried one method of plotting  DOES NOT mean that you can’t be a plotter.  It just means that method didn’t work for you.  Keep trying stuff.  Feel free to pick and choose the bits and pieces that do seem to help you out.  My process has continued to evolve over the last five years, and I expect it will continue to evolve over the rest of my career.  And that’s cool.  One of the things that I’m learning, too, is that every single book is different.  I have elements of my system that are consistent, that I go through for every book, but I always deviate somehow.  And that’s fine too.  Keeps things interesting.

So if the very idea of plotting makes you quake in your boots, I challenge you this round to try something new.  Play with some kind of plotting.  You just might be surprised at the results.

All that having been said, it is time to STATE YOUR ROUND 4 GOALS!

Write them up on your blog and link back through the linky below.  Be sure to link directly to the post, not to your overall blog.

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Round 1: State Your Goals!

Usually I start off the Round with some words of wisdom and inspiration.  But I’ve been struck down by the stomach flu and reduced to a single personal goal of just SURVIVING.  So I’m passing the words of wisdom off to Stephanie Nickel with her poem Writing for One.

There are billions of people on Planet Earth,

Millions zipping through Cyberspace.

Perhaps I could reach thousands

Or hundreds.

But who do I really write for?

I write for one.

One I can cheer,

Encourage,

Lift up.

One I can come alongside,

Offer a hand,

Root for.

One I can warm with a smile,

Touch with a look,

Strengthen with a hug.

Is the world brighter

Better

More beautiful

Because of my words?

If I have touched one life . . .

It is!

This poem first appeared on http://stephseclecticinterests.wordpress.com/ November 29, 2013.

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Practice Deliberately and State Your Round 4 #ROW80 Goals

It is my practice to kick off every Round of ROW80 with some kind of post that makes you think, that inspires you to push beyond whatever it is you usually do when it comes to your writing.  Most people join us with this challenge because they’re looking for some accountability with flexibility–something that isn’t the one-size fits all goal of NaNoWriMo (although for Round 4, we always have a fair chunk of dual challengers or peeps who use ROW80 to both prepare for and come down from November).   In the past I’ve talked about goal setting, making good choices, finding your writing test mile,  building discipline, learning to fail small, and being the best YOU among other things.  Our archives are FULL of fabulous inspirational posts from our other sponsors–all other writers who GET IT and have words of wisdom to share.  I encourage you, as you hit that inevitable wall during this Round (it ALWAYS happens), to take a little time to troll through the back posts and see if you can find something to jar you out of it.  You never know who might’ve said exactly what you need to hear.

This is the 12th Round of Words in 80 days.   This round finishes up our third year.  And looking back at my productivity spreadsheets (yeah, I’m one of THOSE PEOPLE), I’ve churned out over 480,000 words in the company of other ROWers.   That’ll be solidly over half a million by the time this year finishes.   Since I started this, my number of writing days has increased each year, my number of total words has increased annually, and my average number of words on writing days has more than doubled.  Some of this has to do with discipline and goal setting and all the stuff I’ve talked about before.  But it’s not just numbers.  The quality of my work has improved in that span.  I’ve grown and learned as a writer because I have practiced my craft with deliberation.

Traditional theory about elite performance used to hold that it was all about aptitude–inborn talents and innate passions.  And yeah, that stuff HELPS.  But that only take you so far.  So if you weren’t born with a natural silver tongue?  Guess what?  You put in enough deliberate practice and you can learn it.   In the end, deliberate practice will ultimately outstrip natural aptitude.  You can read more about the whole idea of deliberate practice here (and I encourage you to–it’s a really interesting article).

My challenge to you for this Round is to pick something to work on deliberately.  Maybe it’s finding better ways to describe the feels.  Maybe it’s writing more authentic dialogue.  Maybe it’s doing better about planning each scene out before you write such that you nail what it needs to do on the first pass.  Whatever it is, pick some aspect of craft to focus on and really, DELIBERATELY work on fine tuning that thing when you sit down for your writing block.  Because writing is not entirely a matter of just spewing out the words.  If you’re not making an effort to get BETTER, to IMPROVE your performance, you probably won’t get where you want to go.  Think about that as you compose your goals for this round.

Click here to enter the link to your goals post.  If you are joining us after the goals linky has closed, simply write up your goals post on your blog and link to it in the most recent check-in linky.

Gandhi’s 10 Rules For Writing and State Your Round 3 Goals!

I’m subscribed to all kinds of random inspiration/positivity/interesting stuff newsletters.  Last week I got one from Daily Good about Gandhi’s 10 Rules For Changing The World, and as soon as I read it, I thought they just as easily applied to writing.  So…Gandhi’s words, my riff–all stuff to consider as you’re formulating your goals and working through the next 80 days with us:

1. Change yourself.  For all that I preach that we aren’t alone in this (since the point of ROW80 is community and support and accountability), nobody can do anything for you.  If you aren’t seeing the results you want in your writing, then you’ve got to change yourself and your habits.  You can’t blame anybody else if you don’t MAKE the time to sit your butt down and get in some words.  If you’ve got kids and spouse and other people haranguing you, then maybe that time is the 5 minutes you lock yourself in your bathroom with your phone, but FIND IT.  MAKE IT.  DO IT.
2. You are in control.  Of your behavior.  Of your plot and your characters (I know, your characters might actually say otherwise, but remember, in their world, you are god).  Don’t let anybody push you around and don’t make excuses.
3. Forgive and let go.  All that being said, if you don’t make your goal today or this week, don’t waste time beating yourself up about it.  It’s already past.  Forgive yourself, let it go and start fresh tomorrow.
4. Without action you aren’t going anywhere.  The difference between amateurs and pros are the people who actually take action, who DO, who WRITE.  Don’t just pay lip service to the dream.  Put in the work.  Take a step every day toward it, even if it’s only writing one sentence, or a new question for your brain to mull over.
5. Take care of this moment.  There is this temptation for people to live in the past (often with failures) or in the future (where stuff is magically supposed to be how you want it to be–see number 4), but you know what?  You will never actually live in the past or in the future.  You are only ever in THE PRESENT.  That is THE ONLY state you are capable of experiencing.  So realign your vision and focus on WHERE YOU ARE.
6. Everyone is human.  Publishing is full of those 1% miracle success stories.  People who got that 7 figure deal or sold  100,000 books in a week or whatever the latest poster child is.  Don’t make a myth out of these people.  Don’t disconnect from them.  Because regardless of their amazing successes they ARE human and probably didn’t sell their soul to achieve their successes.  If they’re human, then you are as capable as they if you put in the work.
7. Persist.  It’s easy to get discouraged in this line of work.  With the exception of a rare few, publishing is a long haul game for everyone.  Almost no one achieves that overnight success.  For everyone else it’s about getting out more books, better books, building that backlist and reputation.  One foot in front of the other.
8. See the good in people and help them.  This is where we come back to community.  Instead of looking at other writers and seeing competition, see the good in them and do what you can to help.  Earn some good writer karma.  Retweet their book release, legitimately be interested and ask them questions, review that good book you just finished and tell a friend.  Do what you can to help others and eventually it’ll work back to helping you.
9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.  This applies not only to how you behave in social media (be a person, not a bot!) but also how you write.  Particularly when we’re young in our writing career, it can be tempting to try to mimic whatever out there is popular.  Don’t.  You write what you want to write.  You write with YOUR voice.  It is uniquely you, and you should be proud of that, and strive to grow a career around it.
10. Continue to grow and evolve. This is a biggie.  Don’t ever stop learning.  Always strive to improve your craft, learn more, become better.  You should never, ever stagnate as a writer because there are always more things you can learn.

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