I’m aware that the title of this entry sounds like a commercial for heart healthy food, or low cholesterol. Bear with me, and read on.
The Outliers post from a couple of days ago received a great deal more attention and more discussion than I expected. If you read that post, you know my plan is to write 12 hours a week until my retirement in 10 years to meet my goal of 10,000 hours of writing by the time I leave teaching to live on my retirement salary and write full time.
I’m taking the focus off of publication and putting it on the development of my craft. This is not to say that I will stop sending things out and attempting to get an agent. As a matter of fact, I expect this commitment will increase the amount of material I have to pursue those endeavors. It also does something new for the kind of writing goals I make, and takes the emphasis off of a product, and puts it on my career. This might be an approach you would enjoy.
Will you join me? Will you commit to a writing time goal? Yours can be more modest, such as one hour a day writing (just like going to the gym), or five hours a week (let’s write the Jim Hines way!). Make sure that the goal you set is attainable (sure, writing 20 hours a week seemed like a good idea when I shared that bottle of wine with Schaff-Stump…) and that you decide what activities are acceptable in terms of meeting that goal (for me, writing, revising, brainstorming, researching, and writer education). And then make appointments with yourself and your writing.
Throughout 2011, I’ll be posting Outlier Challenge updates. Not only time spent, but updates on projects, interesting insights, and deep philosophical thoughts. I hope if you take up the challenge, you might do the same.
So. I commit to
1. Writing 12 hours each week for 52 weeks, a total of 624 hours a year. More is okay too, but this is the minimum require for the 6000 more expertise hours I want to achieve to achieve my goal of 10,000 hours writing (4000 down!)
2. Scheduling my writing time each week so that I can find time to write 12 hours each week and scheduling around vacations and difficulties accordingly.
3. Publishing updates and insights as they come to share in community.
Feel free to join in. Let’s see where it can take us.
And…because it’s been quite a while, I had a hard time deciding between the shiny and the velvety Giulias, but the shinies won.
Catherine
I already use the Jim Hines method, but lately, I’ve been giving myself a lot of passes when other things crop up. I’m going to commit to making up the hours I miss.
Hmmm…
The big one is that I resolve to write the next draft of the novel in a professional fashion. Two to three thousand words in the morning, do line edits and cuts on the previous morning’s work in the afternoon and evening until the first draft is done. Let it sit for three weeks; read it and do any necessary surgery. Give it to two readers to check for grammatical errors and unintentional incomprehensibilities.
Send the sucker out.
Bim bam boom.
But that’s procedural. Which is important, but it’s not addressing craft, now is it?
Storytelling is my big issue. Interestingly, I’m finding it’s not so much story design as it is telling the damned story to the reader. I’m not sure how to address the issue of clarity in storytelling, other than to keep working on it.
But design? I’ve finally got a good handle on studying story design. Watch a movie or read a story. Read a scene; analyze what happened in the scene in terms of plot. Write it down. Go on to the next scene. I’m going to do that with movies and books that I think demonstrate strong storytelling. Think I’ll start with a side-by-side of Red Harvest and Yojimbo.
In terms of improving my prose, I burned my nose on technical grammar. Which surprised me…
So I’m going to kill a couple of birds with one stone and study writing verse poetry. I know it sounds crazy, but popular music really messed up rhyming verse. Have you read any of the Romantics lately? Coleridge, Byron, that crew? Now that was some writing, dead white guys or not. Why isn’t anyone trying to beat those suckers?
I’m going to approach it from a lyrical perspective, partially because that’s how rhyming verse is founded, partially because I’ve got a growing fondness for the ukulele.
So I’ve got some texts on poetry, rhythm in poetry, a rhyming dictionary, some books on songwriting, including one on rhyming in particular, and I am fixing to tear on into them. Let’s hear it for yard sales in academic communities — this is one thing about Berkeley that I really like.
(Incidentally, you know who’s the only person I’m aware of currently who produced credible lyrical poetry during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Alan Moore, of all people. I’m not kidding; he wrote the only version of The Demon where Etrigan’s rhyming dialog didn’t turn the whole affair into a joke.)
I’ll be posting an expanded position on my site. I’ve been out of the loop this week — are my stats crazy or was this a bit of a thing?
Sean:
I think you’re more of an academic than I am.
Have you read the beat poets? They’re the ones who tried to beat those suckers, although they tried to do it from a post-modernist caffeinated stance. Unfortunately, they evolved into the hippies and lost their edge in a sort of inebriated hedonistic haze.
Try some beats. Try Neruda. Try Sandburg and Cummings. See if they do anything for you.
Moore did some nice work. You can tell he’s a lyricist from his prose too.
This was a bit of a thing. A couple of established authors linked to us. No one was more surprised than me. I expected this was sort of a personal cheerleading post, but bringing in pop culture seems to have clinched the deal.
We’re not Ferrett yet. No need to get our hopes up.
See you in Vegas, my friend.
Cath