Month: December 2021

How to Finish Part 3

How to finish is about becoming aware of your story’s flow is just the beginning. Now you need a few more tweaks to polish your process habits.

Schedule your writing habit.

I find that developing a daily habit is better for me than scheduling my time. I do recommend having ‘office hours’ in the day, but I choose to focus more on the habit of getting the work done instead of adhering to a set time schedule how to finish. If allotting your day on a time schedule works for you, go for it. For me it’s all about building a habit and time is not quite as relevant.

Either way you need to control your calendar so that you get work done. For me I set down due dates on a calendar and I also make annotations for completing a day’s given projects as I go through the day. That way I don’t miss what is coming up or due on one hand. On the other hand I can get reinforcement for habit runs.

Start your how to finish habit

Now it’s time to figure out what habits to build. Start with some basic questions: What habit do you want? When do you want to write?

Get specific as possible. Days and times are a must here.How long will you write? Do you have fall back times? What production levels will you use? Days done, pages, words, chapters by the week, etc… Find what you can reasonably produce.

Take the time to look at what works for you to build the habit and keep it. Hint: a good habit that sticks is better than over ambitious effort that burns out. Learning how to habit is learning how to finish.

Be sure to cover the entire publication process from draft to final edit and publication. As Seth Godin points out, you must ship it to finish it. Do not wus out when you reach publication time. You need a time line for all of this. Timelines keep us on track, work more efficiently and coordinate those steps where others come, like an editor, beta reader edits, book and cover design, your release and marketing plans, etc… into the process to help us finish.
Even if you self publish and do everything through Gumroads and or Amazon, you still need to put these people into your game plan.

Stay realistic

How to finish starts when setting up your schedule. Take time and stay realistic with your goals and timelines. Look at what your commitments are like right now. You might not be in a position to get a book written in 45 days because you don’t have enough time per day and this is your first rodeo.

That does not mean you cannot write the book but be ready to change thing up as you progress. If you can only work half the hours of an ideal deadline, well then move the deadline. If the daily word count is too low or the work takes you longer per day, then change your work out line, work schedule or due dates.
In the end writing is a big time lesson in humility. Take heed and learn from the harder lessons. Change things and make new goals as needed. That will help you make your targets while you build confidence and skill. Both of which will improve each other so that in the future you will run more smoothly and become more productive.

Being honest with yourself in the process when things are not working, figuring out things in a logical manner and setting realistic goals that you can achieve is the recipe for shipping, building a library of published works and staying motivated. Even if you find ways to write faster, you still need to set reasonable goals. Unrealistic and unchanged goals will only demoralize you and leave with zero books.

How to finish comes with accountability

One thing all writers should consider is having a critique partner/group. Getting together with fellow writers to go over the week’s work for everyone in the group is a great way to ensure you get your work done and get some early feedback to end problems before they become problems. It’s also a good way to get ideas for how to deal with your process issues, find fixes for setbacks and stay on track.

Start a blog

Talking about your upcoming work is a great way to build a writing platform to market your book. The conversation also will give you a need to meet, specifically public expectations for a finished work, on time. Deadlines you can not move are your friend and the key for how to finish your work. We all need motivation and deadlines are a great one to build that habit.

Setup a reminder

A physical outline or mood board hung where you can see it where you write or a profile sketch on your phone’s background is a great reminder.

The trick for accountability is to remind ourselves about our project every day. That keeps the mind working on solutions.

Get out of the belly of the beast

No first draft is perfect. The secret sauce is to get the first draft done fast. That only happens when we write instead of edit. We act first then reflect. As Steven Pressfield says, “Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork. Believe me he is. … Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think.”

Skip the burnout

You know that feeling that your writing is trash? You think nothing you write is important, no one cares about your subject, or you are stuck in writer’s block. That is an illusionary trap, sometimes referred to as writer’s rut. Many writers walk away from projects because of this rut.

Never stop writing cure.

True the current work in progress may be draining your joy way like giant leach, but it has nothing to do with you or your writing. It is the project itself. You are just stuck. That’s all and there is a solution. Switch what you are writing on, but do not stop writing.

Try a different kind of work like a poem, a blog post or a short story. Even a side gig working for another writer’s blog is a good change up. The critical step is to set a time to return to the book. You want time for the mind to figure things out but not so much that you cannot get back into the work. Take a breather but set a specific time to get back in the saddle.

Asimov was famous for switching projects when he got stuck. That’s why he had so many typewriters. Each one was a separate project in process.

The Answer for How to Finish is Within

The answer we are looking for is that we are finished with a work when it rings true with our human soul. That’ is why it’s part of the mastery path.

Photo by Katelyn Greer on Unsplash

How to Finish Part 2

How to finish is an essential tool a writer must develop. Writing just does not finish by itself. We have to make it happen. There are literally thousands of ways to do this. We can improve our chances of finishing our work with a good writing process.

Many writers find themselves left alone in the wilderness to fend for themselves once they leave school. That’s not bad, if you can replicate what you did in school. If not, as is often the case, you need to create a process on your own.

How to finish is a process

Having a process goes a long way. Even with a solid process we still need to know, when is our work finished and how to finish it.

The short answer comes down to how we feel about the work itself. We are finished when the story jives with our soul.

So how do we learn how to finish?

We study the craft to learn about us. It starts with learning things like creating an outline, theme and a beat sheet. Then we learn the key beats of our genre so that that we know when all the beats are filled properly. We even ask ourselves the important questions such as What’s missing? A writer has to learn why a story or article or copy works or does not and why.

Finishing is why a study of the hero’s journey is important. How to finish is literally a feeling for most. The most detailed outline will not tell you what the finished work will look like, though it can help you get there. The search for that feeling is the reason pantser work the way they do. They look for that full steak and potatoes feeling when the book is done. They want that kind of satisfied feeling. We all do.

Satisfied or Not Satisfied

Leaving a journey hungry and unsatisfied is why we don’t like a given book or movie or show. We don’t use specific words and examples to nail down the reason. We tend to say that we don’t think it works. It is a feeling from our guts instead of a thought from our heads.

A work that fills us emotionally, even if we have never even heard of the hero’s journey, will leave us satisfied when we close the book, leave the theater unable to talk of anything else or endlessly rave to our friends about a broadcast.

When writing does not ring with the soul, we walk away somewhat pissed if not ranting to the gods themselves about how “It fell apart at the end. Something was just not there. I was not hooked. It was boring or just died at the end.” Nothing works for a story that is not grounded with our souls.

The corollary is also true.

We find the story “Grabbed me with line one. I could not put it down. It was a page turner. I was up all night. I hope they do a sequel.”

Well what can we do to get there?

Time to get in touch with your soul. No, you do not have to get religious, just become more aware of yourself. Humans are pretty much the same as far as what resonates with us. What works for one follows the same pattern for everyone else. Since everyone works much the same around the world, quite a lot of people have already found the pattern we all use instinctively. We have to just follow their maps.

The writer’s job is much easier than those who originally found the path through the mountains. Our starting point is to read up on the hero’s journey. For homework recommend starting with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It is meaty, so re-reading is going to happen. It helps. George Lucas owes a lot to having read it. I keep it on the book shelf next to my desk or on it.

You can dig down more with Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat and Sean Coyne’s The Story Grid What Good Editors Know. That should get anyone started on the process.

What’s a clinker?

We reach the next stage of our development when we learn to identify when we have a clinker.

Back in the old days of coal fired stoves, every batch of coal usually contained a piece or two that did not burn. Those were called clinkers. Over time some people amassed quite a pile of them, but most just threw them out.

The interesting thing is these deposits were often from either low quality fuel or the equipment was not burning the fuel right. At the end you were forced to remove the unburnable lumps and just start over with fresh coal. Writing can often work the same way and we wind up with a work that just does not work no matter how much heat and time we put into it.

The best way to solve this kind of issue is the same way they did clinkers back in the 1920’s, clean up your material and look at your process so that you can burn the material the right way.

Scale Your Process

My process is to look at the scale of the project first. It is easy to skip steps at any point, but I have found that the larger the project the more likely I am to treat it like I would a short story, article or any other short work. A larger project like a book or a blog is a more long term issue. The longer you have to work on a project the more time you furnish the inner critic for sabotage. It takes more time, discipline and endurance to win out over the long project. I have found that you need to address those needs in your attack plan.

When we don’t plan for the scale, we fail to put into play the resources we need from the start. At best we manage to fix things as we go along. At worst we fight a long and losing battle. This is one reason why many writers tend to fail midway or windup with another clinker lost in a drawer or gathering dust somewhere.

When we have a process that fits the type of work we are working on, we are much more like like a mechanical coal burning furnace. We reduce the chance of a clinker with a process that focuses our energies and mental focus to burn through our fuel, ideas, evenly enough to produce a solid work flow instead of an overheated process resulting in another clinker.

How to finish by outline

Let’s get this part out of the way. Everyone outlines. We just do this in one of three ways. We have writers, plotters, who plan all the details before writing. Some are discoverer writers, pantsers, who amass everything by instinct then cut away the unnecessary bits. The rest of us are a bit of both. No matter the method, we all outline. The only difference is just how much detail we create and time we use to draft it.

Even the most vehement plotter like Steven King will make an outline. His recipe is a rough draft (detailed exploratory outline), a draft edit and a polish. The closest to the plotter ideal and a real single drafter I have studied was Isaac Asimov. He is famous for running things through his brain before he sat down to write. His outline was in his head instead of on paper. What came out on the page was only what he had already figured out. Unlike King who writes an entire book in, as he puts it, as season, Asimov tended to work on multiple books at one time. That way when he reached a sticking point he could let his mind simmer a bit to find the right solution.

An outline by any other name

My inner pantser might not like calling his rough draft an outline but then he can fall back on terms like ‘discovery or zero draft’ to ease the angst. However, I have found that a simple outline like the foolscap method is not only a good way to stay on course and on schedule, even during a discovery draft, the time spent creating the single page outline adds thinking time that clarifies my vision before I write word one. More importantly it also lets me flush out the theme I need to tie everything together.

Even if I start without the theme to go with my foolscap outline and still not finding it till I am much closer to done, I have found I am further along in the process. It makes the manuscript work far better than I would have gotten otherwise.

How to finish is a personal choice

Outlines tend to be a personal choice so I recommend you try a few to find which ones you might find useful. I have tried several other methods. All gave me some insight into the process. They also gave me ideas to modify the process I use. Some of my more favorite outlines include the clothes line method favored by PG Wodehouse, the beat sheet Blake Snyder covers in Save the Cat, and the basic idea bullet point method I found used by journalists.

As a bit of a panster, I have tended to use the write a lousy “First Draft” method. It does work, but I have found that any method can be modified by ideas from the other methods. For instance a “Draft Zero” approach can use a time limit equal to the amount of time need for a planning and outlining to write the first draft. This prevents the panster from spending forever to get the idea on paper and stalling out.

I picked up is to use a “liquid outline”. Keep it flexible as you progress. Start with a bullet point outline of what you think will happen. Then write each chapter following it. Circle back every now and then to clean things ups and fix changes you find in the copy as you go forward. Revise the outline to fit the changes. This keeps you organized and on track. This process allows us to know how to finish while it allows you to remain free to make on the spot pantsing moves in your book.

What I use

Personally I have found the foolscap method coupled with a beat sheet to be the winner for me most of the time. I tend to use that for longer works. I also tend to like the journalist method for shorter things like articles.

A lot of finishing is all about becoming aware of yourself. The more aware you become, the more able you will be to know when things do not work.

Check out How to Finish Part 3 here.

Photo by Gustavo on Unsplash

Writers Finish and Ship How to Know Part 1

All writers finish and ship. You got this. Everything is ready. Now it is time to ship. Are you certain? When did you Finnish the writing? When is that? Tricky questions for all creatives from the artistic side’s writers, artists and performers to the pragmatic side’s architects, engineers and business builders.

Being finished can be easy or hard, it depends on the variables. For our talk here I will stick to writing, but the base concepts are universal for all creative types.

Theory says that a writer is done when they can ship. Practice often stalls shipping. Shipping has several options and depends a great deal on the writer. When we ship happens a lot for writers in the process and can be when we send the work to an editor, publish the article on line or deliver that white paper to a client. Writers ship at several stages, some are harder to get past and are toally different for most writers.

For the most part to ship is the point where we can no longer make changes to our draft. We go live. For many writers this is where we get cold feet. We feel that inner critic just hammering away at us. It is not always easy to know the answer to the question in the back of 0ur head. When is this work ever really going to be done?

Do I have to finish to ship?

A lot of people make the mistake of bouncing between the belief that their stuff is crap and over editing or thinking that every line they put down on paper is golden and waste time trying to make the work work. Neither is hardly the case. They are both stalls to ship.

Every writer needs to know when to let go. Our job is to filter through our raw material to find the pure ideas we are aiming at. Sometimes that means we have to know to let go of the clinkers.

What’s a clinker?

When we used coal fired stoves people often found one or two pieces that did not burn in every load. The nonburnable pieces were called clinkers. They were often the result of either low quality fuel or not burning the fuel right. The common answer back then was mostly just to shovel them out and start over with a fresh load.

Writing works much the same way. When we form clinkers we have to know to shovel things out and start over. We have to know when to let go.

Did you go all Picasso or George Lucas or Sir Author Conan Doyle?

If it were easy to know when a creative work is done masters like Picasso, Lukas and Doyle would have had a far easier time of it. Knowing when we are done is as much a sense from our guts as it is a plan spelled out in great detail on paper.
Picasso was showing his newest collection to his friend and Paris art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler when his voice fell silent. In that moment Picasso could see his work had not really reached his vision. Picasso knew his work was not done. He seized a palette knife and shredded each one in turn.

All the time Picasso destroyed months of work his friend kept trying to stay his hand. “Arrête Pablo. Arrête.” Nothing could stop him. In that moment Picasso took himself back to square one. Sometimes you have to know the work is not ready.

Our early success can prevent finishing and shipping also

George Lucas found his work incomplete for decades. Fans raved about this along with him, but it was a case of misunderstanding of what the work scale was. Fans loved the story and demanded the remaining unfilmed six films he had used to craft his back story, story line and characters.

There is little doubt that Lucas could have finished all the films sooner if he had not piddled around fine tuning the original three through several incarnations. The question real question was should he tell the story for the audience or for himself?

Lucas’ vision only wanted to tell the story of the first three films, chapter four to chapter six. Lucas focused on perfecting the vision for the first films instead of finishing the rest of the films and shipping them to his audience. He spent years remaking the films after they had been in the theaters for various versions as the technology allowed him to expand our view of his original vision.

Lucas’s Answer

As Lucas said in an interview on his 2004 updated version of the first film from 1977,

“The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.

I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.”

Fans and Lucas aside, the industry is far better off tech wise because of all that time Lucas spent to advance the tech he needed tell his story. The main thing is that in the end it is the writer who says the works done. Though eventually Lucas did bow to the public desires. He made the first of the remaining six films and he set the stage for the reast of the films to be made from his notes and guidelines.

Doyle Changed his Mind

Sir Author Conan Doyle was not consumed by perfecting a vision of his work. He was tired of writing about Sherlock Holmes, so he killed Holmes to get free of the story. The ire of the public over the untimely end of the story, including bricks through his publisher’s window, forced Doyle to bring Holmes back. It was much later that he could quietly quit the tale.

For Doyle the return of Sherlock Holmes ensured immortality for the Holms story, but very few of us today know of his Lost World that has been used for many Jurassic type worlds since including works like Jurassic Park.

So who knows when best to end the story the author or the audience?

Many would like to see ourselves as Picasso with the steel nerves to raze our work to the ground. I am certain some do have Picasso’s direction, but most of us either fritter our time with clinkers or just yield to demands of the audience to decide when we are done. In the end it is the writer who must decide to let go or press on. We have to listen to Picasso and Lucas. Writers are done when we say. We say when to finish and ship.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash