Mojo Lost

by Travis Richardson

There was a time when I was writing 700 words a day before work 5 days a week and then another 1500-2000 each weekend day. I tracked everything on a spreadsheet and pushed myself to hit and exceed goals. Those days weren’t too long ago, somewhere between 2010 to early 2016. I had this weird magical drive where I wrote those 700 words every morning before work. In the peak period, I even did a sun salutation yoga routine before writing. I produced several near finished/unpublished novels and short stories that I never took the time to edit because I had fresher ideas to write that were even better than the older material. 

Then things changed. Not suddenly, but gradually until it seemed that I was barely writing anything at all. The biggest change was having a child. The awesome responsibility of caring for another human cannot be understated enough. My heart and attention focused on her. I altered my schedule to drop her off at daycare then to go to work, taking away some of the morning writing time. I started making up for it by writing during my lunch break. In the early part of my daughter’s life I was mostly able to make the goals, but not with ease. Then parts of my daytime job started to shift. I was pushed out of my office and into a general bullpen area, which deflated my ego and interrupted my workflow. Then my boss retired and his job split into two. My workload doubled for a while and I was skipping lunch breaks for weeks at a time. I wasn’t writing much at all. Somewhere in November 2016, depression started to hover over me. I’d have writing streaks now and again, but nothing with a sustained output like I had had.

Things bottomed out around the beginning of 2018. I worked things out with my wife so that either on a Saturday or Sunday, she takes my daughter out for the day and I get to write. I started a new writing spreadsheet with a modest 200 words a day goals. It worked great for a while. But then stupid things like Chrome not working on my desktop stopped me from tracking word count which meant I pushed myself less (even though I could look on a laptop, the desktop is sort of the writing hub…and I still haven’t fixed the problem.) 

Even with my family out, I’m not always hitting those 2000 words a weekend like I used to. My attention gets too scattered and that zone where my fingers try to keep up with my thoughts and I forget about time and food doesn’t happen as much. At times, I feel like a former high school athlete dwelling on the glory days that will never happen again because of age and bad knees. 

But that is BS. 

Writing is a craft that one can continue to improve on regardless of how old you are. I look at authors like the recently departed Robert S. Levinson who wrote into his 90s, keeping a constant creative output all the way through the end. (RIP Bob.) 

And while having a full-time job and kid is a partial excuse, is not the ultimate excuse. Writers such as Rob Hart, Angel Luis Colon, S.W. Lauden, Eric Beetner, and Matt Phillips have jobs, children, and tremendous output. So what is my problem?

I’m not sure. 

I’m not the same person I was five years ago and I wonder if my desire has lessened. I remember when I started going to MWA and Sisters in Crime meetings and listening to midlist authors complaining about the publishing industry, and I wished that I could be in a position like that to complain someday. I never made it that far, but I feel cynical at times and I hate it. I’m still dreaming the impossible dream, for better or worse. I need to believe in it again on a more intense scale. 

In July, I changed jobs, and now I have a bit of a longer commute (on foot) with an earlier start time. I’m trying to get to work a little early and write for a few minutes before the workday begins. That has worked for a few paragraphs, but not pages. I write on most of my lunch breaks too, but that has also been a limited chunks. And I haven’t opened my spreadsheet in months.  

Perhaps I might need to re-transform myself into the night writer I used to be in the unpublished 90s and early 2000s. The problem is that I’m so tired and stupid by 9-10pmish when my daughter falls asleep that I feel I can’t write anything coherent. 

I might also go back to an early carrot trick when I used to reward myself anytime I got a story published. I stopped after a while because I had a decent amount of publications and it seemed indulgent… but maybe it’s worth looking at it again.

Reward 1

Reward 2

In some ways, I feel bad for everybody at Sleuthsayers. You got me at low period. I’m not as interactive as I’d like to be and while I’d like to write a poignant blog that would shake up the writing community (in a good way), I can’t seem to knock that ball out of the infield.

On the positive front, next month I’m going to a writing retreat and I’m hoping that besides creating some output, I’ll have renewed energy to take me through the rest of 2019 and into the upcoming twenties. 

Have you had/have any writing productivity issues? For those who got past it, what did you do to overcome it?

Thanks for reading this!


Travis Richardson is originally from Oklahoma and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. He has been a finalist and nominee for the Macavity, Anthony, and Derringer short story awards. He has two novellas and his short story collection, BLOODSHOT AND BRUISED, came out in late 2018. He reviewed Anton Chekhov short stories in the public domain at www.chekhovshorts.com. Find more at www.tsrichardson.com

                                                                              

But Do You Have a Plot? Bad Girl whittles Popular Fiction Bootcamp down to 10 minutes…

(Bad Girl) 

Last month, I wrote about Endings, and reader expectations for each of the main genres.  The response was positive, and some people have asked that I bring more stuff from class onto these pages.  So here are some notes from the very beginning, class 1, hour 1.

People often ask what comes first: character or plot?

Do you start with a character?  Or do you start with a plot?
This is too simplistic.

Here’s what you need for a novel:
A main character
With a problem or goal
Obstacles to that goal, which are resolved by the end.

PLOT is essential for all novels.  It’s not as easy as just sitting down and just starting to write 80,000 words.  Ask yourself:
What does your main character want?  Why can’t he get it?

Your character wants something.  It could be safety, money, love, revenge…

There are obstacles in the way of her getting what she wants.  THAT PROVIDES CONFLICT.

So…you need a character, with a problem or goal, and obstacles to reaching that goal.  Believable obstacles that matter.  Even in a literary novel.

There must be RISK.  Your character must stand to lose a lot, if they don’t overcome those obstacles.  In crime books, it’s usually their life.

So…you may think you have a nice story of a man and woman meeting and falling in love, and deciding to make a commitment.  Awfully nice for the man and woman, but dead boring for the reader.  Even in a romance, there must be obstacles to the man and woman getting together.  If you don’t have obstacles, you don’t have conflict, you don’t have a plot, and you don’t have a novel.

Put another way:
When X happens, Y must do Z, otherwise ABCD will happen.
That’s what you need for a novel.

GIVE YOUR CHARACTER GOALS

1. Readers must know what each character’s goals are so they can keep score.

2. Goals must be clearly defined, and they must be evident from the beginning.

3. There must be opposition, which creates the possibility of losing.
   >>this conflict makes up your plot<<
4. Will the character achieve his goal?  Readers will keep turning pages to find out.

If you don’t provide goals, readers will get bored. 
They won’t know the significance of the ‘actions’ the hero takes.

To Conclude:
Until we know what your character wants, we don’t know what the story is about.
Until we know what’s at stake, we don’t care.

Melodie Campbell writes fast-moving crime fiction that leans toward zany.  If you like capers like the Pink Panther and Oceans 11, check out her many series at www.melodiecampbell.com

Lastest up:

Prolific Slacker

When Brian Thornton described one project for which he wrote an average of 1,425 words/day (“La Joie de l’Écriture,” my heart palpitated with anxiety. That’s almost 2.5 times greater than my production rate during the best year for which I have records.

In 2009 I wrote 216,310 words, an average of 593 words/day. In 2017, my worst recorded year, I produced only 130,600 words, an average of 387 words/day. Neither average comes close to Brian’s assertion that “most of the working writers” he knows “cite a thousand words per day as a healthy goal.” My writing production isn’t healthy; it’s anemic.

That’s because I’m a slacker, never producing near as many words on any given day as I know I’m capable of producing. I allow myself to get sidetracked—by research, by other story ideas, by Twitter tweets, by Facebook posts, by blog posts, by new online forms of solitaire—and I look up later to discover I’ve only produced a paragraph or two.

And yet, I wrote 75 short stories in 2009 and 32 in 2017, so even my least productive year resulted in a significant number of completed works.

SKEWED NUMBERS

Maybe the way I track word counts skews my numbers. I don’t track words as I produce them; I only count the words in completed, submission-ready manuscripts.

In any given year I produce an ungodly number of partial manuscripts, stories I’ll finish one of these days, if I live long enough.

I set the stories aside for a variety of reasons. Some are beginnings without endings. Some are story doughnuts, missing the all-important middle that gets readers from beginning to end. Some are rough outlines. Some are stories beyond my current ability to write. Many, though, are stories without markets. For example, I continue generating story ideas for confessions, even though the last two confession magazines ceased publication more than a year ago.

SETTING GOALS

As a short-story writer (and, likely, as with any other kind of writer), what matters most are finished manuscripts, so I’ve never set writing goals that involve number of words or number of pages or amount of time spent at the keyboard.

My annual goals, ever since setting them many years ago, are 52 acceptances and 52 new stories each year, or an average of one of each per week. Reprints carry the same weight as originals when counting acceptances, so the six reprints I placed a few weeks ago brought my total acceptances for the year to 32, which put me exactly on schedule as I write this. My production of new stories this year to date totals a paltry 13.

I have several stories near completion, but even were I to complete them all before month end, I would remain behind schedule. There are several reasons for the reduction in output, some of them, perhaps, the subjects of future posts, but the net result is that I am unlikely to meet my writing goals this year.

As a prolific slacker, I don’t chide myself for failing to meet my productivity goals nor do I allow myself to slip into a woe-is-me funk that further erodes my productivity. Instead, I do my best to deal with the things that sap my creativity or keep me away from the keyboard. Then, like now, when I am at the keyboard, I spend a little less time playing solitaire and a little more time stringing words together.

I may never join the ranks of the thousand-words-a-day working writers Brian cited—heck, this post won’t even reach a thousand words!—but I’ve found that my slacker’s approach allows me to produce an ever-growing body of work.

So, no matter how you set your goals—by the word, by the page, by the manuscript, or by the length of time at the keyboard—realize that you may not always meet those goals.

Whether you do or you don’t, the most important thing you can do is to keep pressing forward. As my youngest son recently said, you don’t fail until you quit.

Released at the end of August, Blood Work (Down & Out Books), edited by Rick Ollerman, celebrates the life of Mystery Writers of America Raven Award-winning Gary Shulze, long-time owner of the legendary Once Upon A Crime bookstore in Minneapolis. Gary left an indelible mark on the crime fiction community across the world before he passed away in 2016 due to complications from leukemia. The anthology includes my story “Backlit.”

If you’ll be at Bouchercon in St. Petersburg this week, stop in on “This Ain’t Your Mama’s Orange Juice—Writing Pulp,” a panel in which I’ll join Frank De Blase, Kate Pilarcik, and moderator Steven Torres. We’ll start squeezing oranges at 4:00 p.m., Saturday, September 8.

And I’ll be speaking about “Short Stories: From Concept to Sale, How This Form Can Satisfy,” at the noon MWA-Southwest luncheon, September 15, at Carraba’s, 1399 South Voss, Houston, Texas.