Time Management Tuesday: Understand What You're Getting Yourself Into Before You Get Started

Today's TMT was inspired by an article I read on the Medium platform. 

First, a little bit about my impression and understanding of Medium--The culture there is very into experience over acquired knowledge/study. It's not at all unusual to see self-help/how-to pieces that are totally based on the writer's personal and often somewhat limited experience. Think article titles along the lines of I Did _________ For __________ Days And Here's What Happened or I Made $100 Doing ________. You Can, Too. Personally, I think those kinds of things should be flipped into memoir rather than advice, but it appears that Medium has plenty of readers who don't agree with me.

Got Lots of Unfinished Projects? Here’s Why. | by Addie Page | A Different Page | Medium may have appealed to me because the author supported her experience with a professional study. I am a sucker for studies.

Essentially what author Addie Page is saying here is that making a decision about choosing a project on the basis of the end result without considering the work involved, may be a mistake. If you look at the study she cites, we're talking the difference between understanding the process involved to achieve a desired outcome versus the desirability of the outcome itself.

The Life o' Gail

Here is an example from Gail's life, something that would probably go over well at Medium: For many, many years I was interested in earning a master's degree in writing. After I had had a number of children's books published, I even got to the point of taking a graduate level essay writing course, as a first dip in the water, so to speak. It was a very good thing I did, because the reading and writing for that course took all my writing time that semester. I was unable to do anything professionally except work on that course. In order to get the master's degree, I would have had to give up any other kind of writing for however many semesters it would take me to earn the degree. I decided the process was not worth the outcome.

How To Use This Concept For Managing Writing Time

If you have the option of choosing your writing projects rather than having them assigned to you or being under a contractual obligation of some sort, really analyze what is required to get to your end result and whether or not you can reasonably expect to do it or even want to do it.

• What are you talking about for project length?
• Do you need research time as well as writing time?
• Do you have other writing-related demands on your time in the immediate future, because, say, a newly published book needs promotion?
• Do you have other writing-related demands such as teaching or conference work?
• Do you have a day job and what can you expect that to require of you during the period you will be working on a new project?
• Do you have family responsibilities and what can you expect those to require of you during the period you will be working on a new project?

Do all this before you get started. 

After you've analyzed the process you're going to need to write something, consider how much you will enjoy doing it. If you have a choice, go with the project you think you would enjoy working on the most. I'm not suggesting you go that way because life is short, live for today, smell the roses, or any of that stuff. I'm suggesting it, because if you enjoy the process for a project, you probably have a better chance of completing it. It's harder to keep plugging away at something that's an ordeal.

Having to abandon projects can be very discouraging, to say nothing of being a waste of the time you put into them. It's far better to use a little thought and planning and avoid that kind of situation.

The Weekend Writer: Charles Finch And The Differences Between Professional And Amateur Writers

Since the Weekend Writer began as a sort of training opportunity for beginning writers, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss Charles Finch's guest post, The 5 Differences Between Professional And Amateur Novelists, at Writer's Digest. Finch is the author of the Charles Lenox mysteries (I've read at least two of them), making him a professional.

Finch explains his points in greater detail, but basically he argues that the amateur and professional writers differ regarding tools, patience, focus, habits, and practice. Tools, patience, and focus are of most interest to me.

• Tools: Professionals are interested in nitty gritty aspects of process.  Amateurs haven't gotten to that point yet.
• Patience: Amateurs suffer from what has become known as the "rush to publish." Professionals have had the experience of recognizing problems in a manuscript after it has sat for a while. They want to find and fix those problems, not publish them.
• Focus: Amateur writers often don't focus, spreading themselves too thin over an array of projects.

Today's lesson, then, is:

1. Create a process and pay attention to it
2. Accept that writing requires time, then take the time to do it
3. Stay on task. 

Brushing Up On Plotting For The May Days Project

My May Days project involves coming up with an outline for a book I've been thinking about writing for, maybe, ten years. I got started with research and a few notes twice. But with my last few writing projects, I've been trying to get away from the organic writer thing and do more pre-writing plotting. So that's what's happening this month with this latest shot at this book.

Sometime before I wrote my last, for the time being, unpublished book, I invested in a copy of Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. As a result, I've been very interested in plots starting with a disturbance to the main character's world, which he writes about. I really don't care for the give-characters-a-problem thing that I've heard so much about, but a disturbance to their world makes perfect sense to me. In fact, that's how almost all my books began before I'd even heard anything about disturbing a world. Disturbing people may come naturally to me.

Needless to say, that's how my May Days project is starting, with a disturbance.

Looking at my Plot & Structure notes this morning, I saw that Bell talks about plot patterns. I have three significant characters, and I'm going to try to give each one of them a different pattern, which is more or less their goal. For instance, one character's plot pattern/goal is revenge, the second's is a quest, and the third's is what Bell calls "one apart"--a loner who is forced to act.

Now, sometime in the past I found the following story structure plan at a website called Storyfix. It involves thinking of your plot as having four parts with a mid-point.

Part 1. Set up.

Part 2. Collecting information. Either the author, or the protagonist  Some people will talk about complications at this point in a story, but as an organic writer, that leaves me wondering “What complications? Where am I supposed to get those?” Sending my character out to collect more information about what’s happening to her or her world, makes more sense to me and it’s phrased dynamically.

Mid-point—Plot twist or maybe moment where protagonist changes

Part 3. Protagonist uses information

Part 4. Ending

I like this structure because it is so simple. And it tells me what to do. And it is a structure, not a formula, like the give-your-character-something-to-want-and-then-keep-it-from-her thing that I have also heard a lot of in the past.

So this is what I'm working on this month with my May Days project.

"Ideas Are Probably In The Air"...Like Cigarette Smoke

I am not much of a Rod Serling fan. However, I like this clip at Brain Pickings very much. In it Serling says that ideas come from "every human experience." He goes on to make the point that "the hardest thing on Earth" is to put ideas down. By which he means to do something with them.

Yes, getting from an idea to a completed piece of work is often brutal. To be honest, it's almost always brutal.

Actually, A Long Walk Will Fix Most Things

Brain Pickings has one of those lists of writerly advice, this one from Helen Dunmore, who wrote The Tide Knot. The title to my post refers to her Item 9, "A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk."

Revision

I found this post on Revision thanks to the Kidlitosphere listserv. It looks so meaty that I plan to go through it when I can give it an hour.

In fact, the blog it comes from, the SCBWI Tri-Regions of Southern California Schmooze, looks extremely interesting. It reports on the activities of a number of children's writer and illustrator groups in Southern California.

Training Report: Glad things went so well yesterday, because today ended up being all about spreading cheer and good will. Well, that and getting my butt whipped by a pre-teen girl who is seven ranks lower than I am. She's faster than I am and has more endurance than I do. But I outweigh her. I've got that going for me, anyway.