Archive for October, 2009

Moving on to the next thing

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

A long time ago I wrote a novel I loved.  Loved.  It was a flawed novel, as many beginning efforts are, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love it.  I still love that novel, even though I’m perfectly well aware of its imperfections.  I may in fact love it because of its imperfections.  It is at the same time the worst book I’ve ever written and also the best, and if you are a writer you know exactly what I mean.

 

I spent countless hours on that manuscript, trying to get it perfect even though no amount of effort could save it from being the work of a beginner. Countless.  More hours than I have ever spent on anything else in the universe, with the possible exception of my daughter. 

 

That book meant everything in the world to me, and the smartest thing I have ever done is shove it in a trunk and lock the trunk.

 

Wait! you say (I can hear the dismay in your voice).  Didn’t you just spend the last two blog posts talking about resolve and getting through the tough slog and shouting Never give up!  Never surrender! ?

 

Why, yes.  Yes, I did.  But I mean that in terms of your ultimate goal, which I’m assuming is to be a happily published writer (though we could debate all day about what that means).  Lesser goals work in the service of larger goals.  Writing a book is a lesser goal to being a happily published writer, although obviously you need the one to get the other.  But you can be a happily published writer even if you set aside a particular book to work on one that will be better.  In fact, I can almost guarantee that you will have to.

 

Here’s a thing I’ve noticed among all the writers I’ve dealt with over the years.  The professional ones – multi-published, making a living at it – always understand that you have to keep moving or you drown.  You finish one project and start another.  You realize that your first novel is never going to be published so you start your second.  The unpublished writers are the ones who keep clinging to that first project, never quite willing to leave go of it to move on to the better one.

 

None of those unpublished writers have ever listened to me when I said they need to write their next book, and why should you be any different?  But please, I’m begging you.  That book you’ve been working on for ten years?  Find a trunk for it.  You’ll thank me later.

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Resolutions require resolve

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Getting through the tough slog of whatever goal you’re trying to achieve can be accomplished if you have enough resolve – grit, determination, single-mindedness, whatever you want to call it.  It isn’t enough to have a goal and a list of steps you’re going to take to get there – or at least it isn’t enough for the really tough goals.

 

Note that I’m not saying resolve means you’ll successfully achieve your goal, because I don’t promise that.  Some of our goals are things that are outside our control: we can’t control whether Random House publishes our series of historical novels.  We can’t control whether we end up on the New York Times best-seller list.  What we can control is writing the best books we can, promoting them the best way we know how, and so on.

 

But I am saying that you’ll be able to get through the tough slog if you do two things to build your resolve (that is, the endurance you’re going to need):

 

The first is caring passionately about your goal.

 

Here’s the thing: I may want to have a million dollars.  I may fantasize about the things I could do with a million dollars.  But unless I feel passionately about getting that million dollars, I’m not going to be able to stick the tough slog it will take to make the million dollars.  This, my friends, is why I’m not now and probably never will be a millionaire:  I just don’t care enough about it to make it my life’s work. All of the goal-setting in the world isn’t going to change that.  All of the shoulds I tell myself won’t make a difference: “I should care more about money.  I should do work I don’t like or is harmful in order to make more money.  I should give up time with my daughter to make more money.” 

 

If you’re anything like me, those shoulds strike you as ludicrous (as well they should) (yes, I amuse myself).  What shoulds are you telling yourself to reach a goal you don’t care about?  They’re just as ludicrous.  If you don’t care passionately about your goal, find another goal. 

 

The second part of resolve is believing you can achieve your goal.  This is where people ultimately give up.  They encounter challenges and obstacles and think, ah, I can’t do this after all.  But they need to believe they can.  Usually this requires an effort at self-delusion.  Just because you’ve never lost those twenty extra pounds before doesn’t mean this time you’ll fail!  When I first started in publishing, I had the touchingly naive belief that I was different from all the other writers who tried and failed to establish successful careers in publishing.  If I had known then what I know now, I probably would never have tried.  But I did try, and I did succeed, and in no small part because I just thought I could.  The same with earning my black belt or my Ph.D.  That many of the people who embark on these endeavors never conclude them didn’t make any difference to me.  I convinced myself that because I cared so much, I’d achieve what other people found difficult, if not impossible.

 

That doesn’t mean getting published or earning my black belt or getting that degree was simple once I cared passionately and thought I could do it.  I got knocked on my butt more than once.  It was just that getting knocked on my butt didn’t stop me.  Possibly it should have, but it never did.  I call this “being the last one standing.”  In many areas of life, even — or maybe especially — in the achievement of difficult goals, being the person who keeps showing up despite being a bit bruised and battered around the edges is all the difference you need to get what you want.

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Getting through the tough slog

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

My friend and colleague Greg Korgeski, a psychologist and writer, said the other day, “Tell you the truth, I’ve seldom felt that life was all that welcoming for many of the gifts we want to share . . . it’s slow, slogging, frustrating . . . just enduring sometimes and living on hope.  There is also so much luck involved.”  

 

Okay, so Greg wasn’t in the cheeriest mood ever when he sent that note along to me, but I think we’ve all been there, in the middle of the tough slog, and wondering if it’s worth continuing the trek. 

(On reading the above characterization, Greg told me, “I might not agree that it reflects a less than cheery mood, though. . . .Gritty people say this kind of thing with joy, not grumpiness.”)

But anyway.  (Work with me, here.)  If you’re a writer who has ever thought of giving it all up to become an accountant instead, raise your hand.  Right.  That would be all of us.

 

Is the slog worth it?  Some days I know the answer to this question.  Other days I don’t. 

 

Probably because of my past experience, I don’t tend to have too much trouble getting through the tough slog when I’m working on non-fiction.  I’ve been in the middle of plenty of 320-page books when it looked like all I would ever be writing about for the rest of my life was baby brain games, but it turned out that by keeping my butt in my chair, the task was accomplished.  The book was finished and published, and I got to revel in the feeling of accomplishment and, you know, the advance money.

 

With fiction – and with any goal that I haven’t achieved twenty-two times before – I’m more inclined to self doubt.  Will this be worth it?  Wouldn’t my time be better spent doing something else?  In every novel – as in every worthy goal – there is the middle part.  This is the hardest part.  The excitement of the beginning has worn off, and the end is not in sight.  This is the Sahara desert, and what made you think it was a good idea to wander into it?  You could go back, but that doesn’t seem like any kind of answer.  You could go forward, but what if you’re just wandering around in circles?  You could just stand there, but then you’re going to die of thirst.

 

Okay, enough with the uplifting analogies.  The secret to getting through the tough slog is resolve.  You want to know how to get some?  Stay tuned. 

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Jump start your training

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

A version of this article appeared some years back in Martial Arts magazine, and though it has to do with martial arts training, quite a lot of it is applicable to motivating yourself to do anything.  Hope you enjoy — Jennifer

 

 

It happens to everyone sooner or later.  You lose intensity and quit making progress.  Your training program bores you and you start skipping work out sessions.  What can you do to put the spark back in your training?

 

Identify Goals   

Determine your training goals.  It’s easy to lose focus with vague goals, such as “I want to stay in shape.”  In order to jump start your program, create new goals.  In my years of teaching and training in the martial arts, I have seen this happen over and over again.  A serious student achieves the rank of black belt – and quits training.  These people have focused only on the achievement of rank.  Once that was done, they lost interest. 

 

When this happened to me, I made a list of all the kicks I had difficulty doing.  In Tae Kwon Do, the flashy jump and spinning kicks aren’t all that useful in self-defense scenarios.  I had neglected them for this reason. But I committed to learning how to do them perfectly, even when I wasn’t entirely certain I could.  This helped focus my attention for many months, gave me confidence that I could learn other difficult techniques, and reminded other students that even short, older women can master impressive kicks. 

 

Remember when you first started training?  What did you want to achieve?  Some of those goals might be unrealistic, but others might be within your grasp.  Identify those goals and arrange your training so that you can strive to meet them.

 

Enter Competitions

Sometimes training gets stagnant.  We’ve mastered the fundamentals and feel stuck in a rut of merely repeating what we’ve done for the last months or years.  Change this “stuck in a rut” feeling by preparing for competition.  Many people don’t pursue competition because they feel they don’t have the time, money or skill.  However, tournaments and competitions are held all over the country; some will certainly be within driving distance.  Participating in a competition doesn’t have to be expensive, especially if you enter area tournaments.  And most tournaments are organized so that people of similar skill levels and age groups compete against one another. Whether you win or lose, you take something away from a competition experience.  You will see other martial artists in action, not just those you train with, and you will be inspired to improve your own performance. 

 

Recruit Others

When I talk to martial artists about the reasons they stay involved in the martial arts, even as they grow older, suffer injuries or illnesses, and meet the demands of growing families or careers, they invariably use the word “camaraderie” to describe why they continue training.  It’s hard to get camaraderie if you’re training by yourself in your basement.  It’s easy to lose focus if you have nothing in common with the people you train next to. Try recruiting friends and family members to work out with you.  I have dragged myself to class when I didn’t feel like going just because I knew I had friends who were counting on me to be there. Some younger friends have mastered difficult techniques that I have dismissed without trying; seeing them work on their techniques makes me want to do so, too.  When friends push me during sparring, I am encouraged to do some extra training on the heavy bag to sharpen my skills. Nothing like having a buddy tease me about falling down trying a kick to make me determined to master it.

 

Teach Your Art

You can open up an entirely new way of looking at your training if you pass your skills along to others.  Volunteer to teach a class once a week, or to lead part of a class.  Even if you can’t teach formally, don’t miss opportunities to pass along your skills to others informally.  As you teach, you find that you have to understand why you perform a technique a certain way, and that you have to explain the reasons to someone with less experience.  You may become eager to learn more about your art and to devote more time to improving your own skills in order to be a good role model for others.

    

Along the same lines, consider demonstrating your art to outsiders.  Often, school groups and others invite martial artists to perform.  I have done demonstrations for the Boy Scouts, for a group of sororities, for a young women’s political organization, and for the grand opening of a mall, just to name a few.  Other martial artists have performed during half time of basketball games, and at summer camps. Some demonstration teams are invited to perform all over the country.  You don’t need to go that far, however. One of the simplest methods is to hold an open house (if you are affiliated with a school) and put on a demonstration then.  Otherwise, simply put the word out that you=re available to demonstrate self-defense techniques (or whatever you’d like to call it) and develop a short ten or fifteen minute program that demonstrates the basics of your art.

 

Learn a New Style

Traditional martial arts instructors often discourage their students from exploring other styles.  There are sound reasons for this – if you flit from one style to the next, you’ll never master anything.  At the same time, martial artists such as Bruce Lee have advocated learning what you can from various arts and incorporating them into your arsenal.  You can do this without abandoning your traditional art simply by attending seminars and training camps.  These fuel your training by introducing you to new ideas.

    

Select a training camp or seminar that offers something your style does not.  My traditional style of Tae Kwon Do does very little grappling, so I have taken seminars in jujutsu to flesh out my skills.  Consider seminars in weapons if you practice an empty hand style.  Take a combat hapkido course if your style emphasizes formal sparring rather than street fighting techniques.  The new ideas will help you hone your skills and will increase your enthusiasm for training. You can also cross-train by adding weight lifting, aerobics, or another sport to your program.  Often you’ll see immediate improvements in your martial arts performance.

 

Learn History

Your art is more than just a good way to get a workout.  What is its history?  Who are the important figures?  What do they have to say about it?  You can pump up your interest in your training by reading books or watching videos about your style – and others.  Immerse yourself. Incorporate research into your traveling.  One year, instead of taking a traditional vacation, I went to South Korea to learn more about my art.  I was inspired to work harder in order to show my respect for my art.  I realized I was part of a vast group of people, a history that stretched back hundreds of years, and the fact that I had had a bad day today seemed relatively insignificant.

By setting goals, challenging yourself, and learning new ideas, you’ll increase your determination and improve your focus.  Your training program will cease to bore you, and you’ll find you can hardly wait to get started working out.

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Things that make me smile

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

The last roses of summer are sitting on my desk right now, and they smell wonderful.  Every now and then I catch a whiff of them and every time it makes me stop to think how beautiful they are and how lucky I am.  Their distinct perfume isn’t something you get with store-bought roses.  Of course, these roses aren’t as perfect as store-bought roses; the garden pests have gnawed on them a little, and no one has carefully removed the thorns from their stems and wrapped them with baby’s-breath in green tissue paper.  But they are more wonderful than store-bought roses because Jessica and I picked the bush out together and planted it in the garden this spring, and neither of us had the first clue what we were doing.  I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a gardener.

 

So the roses are a triumph of hope over experience, and I’m sure I don’t have to beat you over the head to make the analogy: the store-bought roses may be perfect and commercial, but it’s the ones I grew in my front garden that mean the most to me.

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Getting started in freelancing

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Today’s post is from freelancer writer Randy Hecht, who, like many writers, juggles a number of different types of writing assignments to keep her bank account fat, or at least out of the red.  For more about her, click here. 

 

A writer contacted me this morning to ask for advice about succeeding as the owner of a writing business. Notice that I’m framing the discussion in terms of being the owner of a writing business, not a freelancer. If your goal is to support yourself financially this way, that’s not just a semantic distinction; it also reflects the mindset that can help determine your earnings. So the first thing you have to ask yourself is not whether you want to be a freelancer. It’s whether you want to be a business owner.

A full time freelancer can expect to spend 1400 working hours a year, or 175 8-hour working days, doing income-generating work. Some of the rest of the year’s working hours/days will be consumed by administrative, accounting, and business planning/management tasks, but the majority of that time needs to be devoted to marketing.

If the idea of spending a lot of time on sales and marketing doesn’t appeal to you, business ownership is probably not a great choice for your full-time job. Yes, there are alternatives, like subcontracting, working through an agency, or using freelance bidding sites, but all of them involve taking a significant cut in income. By engaging in active, rather than passive, marketing, you can establish a direct relationship with clients who are willing to pay well for your services — and that pay goes to you, not to a marketing intermediary.

Figure out which companies and industries are most likely to need to buy what you’re selling, and network within those industries, not among other writers. Listen when they speak — often, their comments will reveal needs to which you can market. Develop as many one-on-one relationships as you can, because in the end, people are far more likely to offer an assignment to someone they know than they are to Google for the contractor whose website’s keywords best match their search terms.

When you market, be sure you are speaking to prospects about their needs and the solutions you offer their companies. Don’t tell them what you do. Tell them what your skills can accomplish for them — how your services can help them to increase revenue, improve efficiency, reduce costs, or achieve some other tangible business goal. Show them that you know their companies and industries. Position yourself as a valuable resource in their plans for growth.

Be realistic about how your abilities mesh with your goals. Some areas of writing — pharmaceutical copywriting, for example — are open to freelancers only after they’ve gained substantial experience in a staff position. Don’t allow yourself to fall so in love with a subject area that you’re blinded to its viability as an income generator. There’s writing you do for love and writing you do for money, and they don’t always intersect — and you need both the love and the money to sustain your business.

Finally, plan for the long term. Too many aspiring writers take the copycat route and follow what they perceive to be the money trail attached to the trend of the moment. That’s why there are so many writers out there who claim to be experts in, say, green business, frugal living, and SEO. Many of them are just trying to board a train that’s already left the station. Instead of trying to claim a share of income from a trend that’s already hit, look for ways you can get ahead of the curve and bring something new to the market. It may take longer for you to see results that way, but those results will have legs that will support your business’ viability and profitability long after today’s trends have faded to nostalgia.

Hope that’s helpful to you, and best of luck mapping out your strategy for owning a successful writing business!

 

 

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Staying motivated

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I’m getting ready to start another day of motivational boot camp with writer-buddy Linda Formichelli.  If you don’t know what motivational boot camp is, read this post.  If you’ve never done it, try it.  You’ll get more accomplished in one day than you normally do in a week.  Of course, it’s possible you may have to have Linda Formichelli kicking your ass in order to get it done, but I’m betting that can be arranged.

 

Today is a rainy gray day in the Midwest, and there’s nothing quite like a rainy gray day in the Midwest to sap your energy, unless it’s getting forty-seven rejections in your inbox this morning.  Not that that has ever happened to me or anything.

 

For me, the cure for feeling discouraged and unmotivated has always been action.  Sometimes that action involves chocolate, tequila and/or a Greek sailor, but usually it’s something that will get me closer to my personal or career goals, even if it’s a simple action like asking a friend if she has contact information for a responsive editor at a magazine I’d like to write for.   

 

Some days when you’re feeling discouraged, though, even a simple action like that seems hardly worth the effort.  So here are some other things that help me stay motivated:

 

  • I keep an accomplishment list.  It’s very easy to focus on all the negatives – the editors who’ve turned you down, the clients who dropped you, the projects you haven’t finished yet.  An accomplishment list helps you remember all of the good things you’ve managed to do, even when you weren’t sure you’d be able to do them.
  • I keep my workspace neat, organized and attractive.  I know there are “file” people and “pile” people; I do both.  That doesn’t mean my work area can’t be neat and organized.  It just means I have decorative boxes in which to hide my piles.  I like to have pens in a variety of colors, just for fun.  A friend of mine just bought a new keyboard (with purple backlighting!) that I’m coveting and am going to order for myself.  I keep fresh flowers on my desk as much as possible.  All of this makes me feel good, and feeling good is a powerful antidote to feeling discouraged.
  • I remember my priorities.  My daughter and I make vision boards together, and seeing this week’s picture on the living room wall always reminds me of why I’m doing what I do.  I also have a written vision statement that I keep in a file on my computer.  I open it now and then to remind myself of what’s important to me.  Sitting here doing crossword puzzles because I don’t feel like doing something else doesn’t help me live my priorities.  A quick review of that vision statement usually revs me up to get something done.
  • I connect with community.  These don’t have to be writer friends or writer-related organizations for me to feel inspired by hanging around with them, although there is something motivating about having a group of like-minded people encouraging each other.  Now and then I need a reminder that the world doesn’t consist of just me and the crickets.

What are your motivational tricks?

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Accentuate the positive

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in publishing these days, although if you’ve followed along on this blog, you’ll know that book publishing has been doomy and gloomy since about 1847, and that I encourage people not to get too bent out of shape over it.  

 

“But!” you exclaim.  “This time it’s different!”

 

Every time it’s different.  And every time it’s the same.  

 

Here’s the thing: there is nothing you, the writer, can personally do about the recession, imprints closing, publishers trimming their acquistions, editors losing their jobs, and agents retiring to Peoria.  Except maybe to go buy a bunch of books and encourage your friends to do the same.

 

Here’s the other thing: even if publishing weren’t having a few, err, struggles, the sky would still be falling on writers because: they’re too old, they’re too young, they’re not talented enough, they’re too talented for the hacks in the publishing world to appreciate, they’d get this book done if only they didn’t have to work their day job, they’d get this book done if only they didn’t have to worry so much about money, they’d get this book done if only they didn’t have so much money and needed to, they’d get this book done if only their kids were grown, and they should have written this book when the kids were little.

 

You see where I’m going with this.  I’m not saying you’re crazy and neurotic for thinking this way and I’m not saying that some or all of these beliefs are not true.  It’s just that none of them are helpful to you.

 

I had lunch with the amazing Neil Salkind yesterday and he reiterated a point I’ve made time and again about perseverance: so much about success in publishing is about not giving up.  That’s it.  And not giving up is the one thing you can control.

 

Whenever I want to go to my room and quietly suck my thumb, I keep in mind these two mantras about writing and publishing:   

 

Seek constant improvement

Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t

 

Easier said than done, I know (I came up with that list of disasters from my own brain, after all).  But worth the effort.

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