You’ve got to learn to pace yourself

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

and other imponderables…

Writing is a weird job.  Once becomes a job, that is, which for the vast majority of writers, it isn’t.

I noted early on that for most of the writers that made it big, writing was a full time job.  And it was a full time job before it justified the money they made, because they were forced to stay home for other reasons.  For me it was kind of, sort of like that.

In fact, it still IS pretty hard to say that I’m a full time writer.  I’m a full time writer as opposed to working ALSO outside the home.  I’m a full time writer insofar as it is the only one of my jobs that pays in real cash.  Is it the job that takes most of my time?  I’d say that’s evenly divided between writing and housekeeping/house management.  (Yes, I do dream one day of affording one of those.)  And I’d hate to admit to exactly how many days I only work an hour or so as a writer, and the rest of the day as a handywoman/cook/cleaner/bottle washer.  I’d hate to admit it, because several of you, at various times, have offered to come cook and clean for me, something that is PARTICULARLY disturbing when I know and you know you live across the country.  Yes, I do appreciate you love my books that much (Weirdly, mostly Kyrie and Tom) but all the same, you have to agree it sounds a little odd.  (Okay, so I’d have scrubbed floors all day for a peek at Heinlein’s first drafts.  But my dears, I’m not Heinlein.)

Anyway, the thing is, once it becomes job in the sense that you have deadlines and that at least part of your income depends on writing, you get hit between the eyes with exactly how odd it is.

You see, the thing is, at least for me so much of writing depends on the subconscious, that I can’t always say “I’m going to write this now.”  This collides HARD with my personality, which has a strong sense of doing what I’m supposed to when I’m expected to and not whining about it.

For years now, because I was working with main stream publishing, my schedule went something like this: Get an oh wow idea – say, musketeer mysteries.  Write proposal.  Send out to agent.  Depending on the agent (I had four, serially) get back suggestions or simply a “I don’t think I can sell this” which could take anywhere from a week or two to six months to get back.  Needless to say by the time it was six months, I’d be doing something else.  This was particularly vexing for historical, because the research wouldn’t ALWAYS be fresh in my mind, and I could very easilly confuse current historical period with old one.

Send revised proposal in, then wait.  Selling periods for my proposals, from moment they hit publisher desk range from twenty minutes (yes, it was Jim Baen.  Shifters.  I sent it in, email, went for a walk with my husband.  Came home in twenty minutes.  Had an offer in email.)  to eight years.  Needless to say, twenty minutes NOT a problem.  The idea was still hot in my mind.  Eight years… well.  The proposal was written in 97.  Let’s just say… I wasn’t that person anymore and be done with it, shall we?

And half the proposals just never sold.   Which is the average sell-through rate, actually.

Now, I’m not complaining.  I made a living at this for ten years, with one year off (2003.  Man was that year fun – not.)  But the thing was when the books sold, setting the delivery date was a matter or working with the publisher, and… ye can’t always get what ye want…

Which meant that I often found myself with, say, three books due a year for a particular series, while doing three other series.  2007 – which was no end of fun, too – chained six books, one after the other: shifters and musketeer mysteries and MBE.  Which meant I finished GTAC in time to start Soul of Fire, in time to do another musketeer mystery, in time…

It wasn’t the books that killed me.  It was the SILENCE in between, as I tried to “switch heads.”

Of necessity much of the writing for traditional publishing – a creature of deep scheduling – is write it when it’s up.  And to the extent I’ll still do that, I’ll still have to make my subconscious jump through hoops on demand, a process that works about half the time.

But it might be easier if in between I can write what my mind is hot on “right now.”

In fact, just knowing that I can let my subconscious write on spec and that I can always bring it out and bring it out quickly feels like a great calm descending over me.

I think it’s because it gives me a measure of control.  Could be, of course, because I’m insane.

The problem is this.  There are… twenty some novels, outlined, the first three to five chapters written (which is to say the work half done) that are stirring and wakening.

And I’m faced again with the problem I had when I started out.  How do you pace yourself when it feels like everything you do is a collaboration between you and that blind idiot you call your subconscious?  It’s not like the bum cares about deadlines or even Nanowrimo…

At the same time there is this (probably morbid) curiosity.  If I’m not fighting the lack of control, the incredible tiredness, the schedule not of my own setting (at least for most of the books) can I do a book a month?

Or do I have to do what I do on the treadmill, and set it for a pace I can keep up for the long run, instead of a burst of speed and a long rest?

22 thoughts on “You’ve got to learn to pace yourself”

  2. Sounds like you’re facing Sophie’s Choice, which is a much better choice than Hobson’s.

    For me, the day job interrupts constantly. Rarely do I have more than a few days in a row that I can focus on writing. I don’t complain as the day job pays the bills, and I agreed to be the one who pays them for my family. But worse then the interruptions are the times when I don’t have work. Then the fear of the wolf at the door is almost as distracting as work.

    All that to say I’d like to one day have your problem.

    The grass is always greener.

    I’m just starting to write work that is marginally sellable, so I’m watching your dance with self-publishing with a careful eye, AND a big ol smile. Best of luck.

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  3. Care and training of the subconscious, AKA Blackmailing yourself.

    With twenty books available to restart, can you sort them according to subgenre, pick the ones that are hot right now, and then by re-reading _only_ one at a time, wake up those characters from their magic sleep/cryostorage?

    Or are all those old proposals giving you the whole pack of puppies big eyed looks?

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      1. *cough* – what’s “hot” right now doesn’t matter. What matters is what will be “hot” when the book comes out … and if you think anyone can accurately and consistently predict that, well, you probably think the government can “manage” the economy.

        BTW – this is yet one more reason why the publishers are collapsing.

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        1. Yep. Absolutely accurate. I have had the “Millions of books and nothing to read” because they decided “Teh hot” was… women who love shoes. (For the record I love shoes. About once a year I have to go through my shoes and “weed” or I’d need another house. BUT because I rarely wear the fun ones, I don’t buy them expensive, just cute. When these women in books are slinging around brand names that I can’t identify, it leaves me cold. Actually, I can identify no shoe brand. But for about two years all the mysteries were “chickie who loves shoes and sleeps around kind of solves a crime.” Ew.)

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  4. I don’t think I have a subconscious. I more or less have to work out my plot of ideas rationally. The idea that you have some black box or secret assistant that does your work for you (albeit not on your schedule) seems really magical to me. I can’t understand it. I have to work to imagine anything. I enjoy that work fortunately, but the brain doesn’t do it on its own.

    Or am I just an android?

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      1. In my case, I set up black-box models of the characters and wind them up and let them run around bumping into each other. From conflicting goals, plot is generated. Setting certain personality quirks as “given” and working out how to justify them… Sometimes being surprised when the character comes up with “no, that is perfectly logical for me to do” and then figuring out why… Sometimes having them need to do something for the plot and figuring out what in their backstory needs to be Just So in order to justify a moment of Plot-Necessary-Foolishness…

        And then I wind up talking things out with my spouse for logic and whatnot, when I’m stumped. *beth pokes the Squishy Middle of the thing she’s currently working on*

        But mostly, for me, it’s emulating the characters in my head and letting them interact. (Once, I wanted to figure out a folktale for a particular universe. Wouldn’t gel, to my surprise. I had to “drag out” a story-telling character from that universe, to narrate it, and then it flowed pretty well.)

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    3. Beth,

      Thanks for describing your process. That doesn’t work for me. All my pieces parts, plots and characters are engineered and machined one at a time like parts in a machine as I need them. Not sure why. I think maybe because of my academic training where I was taught everything was more or less arbitrary and subjective, I can’t just let a character “be” or if I do, I always look at it, and say to myself “That’s arbitrary. Why does the character have a fetish for lollipops for example? You just threw that in there,” and it usually gets taken out.

      I can’t let my “characters” interact like you say, because I’m always deconstructing them!!
      DAMN PHD EDUCATION!! I guess I don’t really believe in them. Hmm.

      I worry then that since I don’t seem to have this “natural sense” of characters or plots that Sarah describes as her subconscious (or maybe I’ve crushed mine) that my characters all seem artificial, but then my brain says, “They ARE artificial, how can they not be?” and the whole thing goes round again.

      Perhaps I lack confidence in my ability to invent or create. All creation is artifice (oh gad listen to me! Parents, stop your kids form getting degrees in art history! Look on me and despair) so perhaps what Sarah is describing is her intuitive sense that this artifice (which is arbitrary) “works” while another might not. I just look at it all and think, “Why is my BS any better than anyone else’s BS, it’s ALL BS!!” and I can never answer that.

      Any thoughts?

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      1. Every one has their own style of writing. Yours might be more suited toward non-fiction, or historical fiction, where the characters are real. You might try alternate history. Take a real person, and posit what they would have done had some factor changed.

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      2. MataPam

        I actually do write a lot of non-fiction on the subject of visual culture (and a never-ending side-project on labor policy in the 50s & 60s). Alternate history’s ok, but what if what I really want to do is write books about vampires?

        This is so depressing. This whole conversation has made me question my entire future as a writer. It’s like that Monty Python skit where the Chartered Accountant wants to be a lion tamer.

        LOL. Ok, time to go chill out and do some Stuart Smalley into the mirror.

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      3. Travis,

        If I may be so bold, perhaps the study of biology would have put you in better stead. Each of us are unique in significant ways; from the way we look at the world to the ordering of our base pairs. One could even go so far to say that we are “designed” to be different from each other (designed by the process, not by a person). To suggest that your writing style should be the same as somebody else’s would be like suggesting we all have to paint like Renoir or Picasso. And that completely side steps the fact that how we describe our internal workings is based upon, at best, a mis-matched, hodge-podge symbolic language.

        Ideas come from somewhere. How we name that place, and how we describe it tells more about the person than the place itself. Essentially, what I am trying to say is how one writes is indicative of how one thinks. Nothing more, nothing less.

        I recommend you write what makes you happy. Some of it will work, some of it will suck. A process my engineering friends called T&E for trial and error. The more you do, the better you will understand what you do well. Its not hard as much as it is tedious.

        Try writing about vampires, and see how it works. And for gosh sakes, don’t worry about anyone else. I have stories I have started 4-5 times. Each one of them suck, but suck for different reasons as I improve at the craft. I have other stories that I started some 7 years ago, and I am still not ready to tackle.

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      4. Any thoughts? Well, hm… This is going to be long. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!

        1: My way of writing may not be your way of writing. Try anything you want once, but if it throttles your ability to write, throw it out the window and go back to what works.

        2: That said, my suggestion would be to have a plot-experiment where you stop throwing out character traits you “just threw in.” Instead, ask, “What would make that logical?” (Sure, people have illogical things now and then; most fetishes are from the hindbrain where it’s not making sense. Ditto many or most phobias. Can’t stand spiders, m’self. But the more “oh, that’s why” moments you build, the more the reader trusts that the character is a “whole” one.)

        An example: It is necessary that Character A develop a romantic attachment to Character B, who has a temperament like a sleep-deprived wombat. Why on earth would a normally-sane person come to decide that B is a dream come true? It could be that A is in a public position of power and stereotypically seeking a dominant mate for private (fetish, essentially). It could be despite the temperament (if one makes B attractive). It could be “imprinting” — A’s parents’ loud arguments indicated strong emotion, not dislike, and the make-up smooching was observed by Little A. What you pick will impact on how A reacts when B has a fit, and it will also affect how A reacts to other pushy members of the appropriate gender. (E.g., 1: Pushy = interesting at all times. 2: Pushy = ignored if someone’s attractive. 3: Pushy = interesting if someone’s a potential spouse, annoying otherwise.) Very important if you want to have a love-triangle!

        On the other hand, a tendency to finger-fidget behind one’s back is just a quirk that makes a character a little more human, like an overlapping tooth or some degree of chubbiness might.

        Of course, if a quirk is weird enough and not addressed as plot-important in some way, then it’s probably worth ditching, both for the word-count and because if you make it stand out enough, the reader will be upset that you don’t do something with it that’s plot-relevant. Or if you have too many quirks for the reader to keep track of. (GURPS character generation is actually kind of useful; in 3rd edition (it’s in 4th right now), characters could take up to 5 Quirks, and a certain number of disads. The limits were primarily because disadvantages and quirks are supposed to be *important* to the character, and too many of them means they’d be forgotten overmuch. Much like how adding too many disadvantages and quirks to a character just gets messy! Too many advantages can do likewise.)

        …that help?

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  5. “But my dears, I’m not Heinlein.”

    This is a good thing. I shudder at the thought of you wearing a dress if you were. :)

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    1. You know, sweetie, “I’m not Heinlein, but I have better legs” doesn’t, for some reason fill me with the warm glow of compensatory feelings. OTOH let’s be thankful he liked seeing women in fishnet stockings, while I like wearing them. it’s these little specializations that make life worth living!

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  6. Is a “full time writer” somebody who spends 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year putting words on paper … or is it someone who spends 168 hours a week thinking up words to put on paper? I s’pose it is best to term it as somebody who’s primary source of income derives from selling the words they write?

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