Writing Fiction Like a Technical Writer
Apr. 16th, 2010 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jasonandrewI basically took a six month sick-leave from writing.
I’ve been busting my ass to attempt to get back into the game. I’ve had some success, but I’ve had to fall back on some of the tricks of the technical writer to really make things happen. I’m writing this more to remind myself of what I need to so more than anything else.
Time Management
As a writer, your time is your greatest resource. You have to put words on the screen to make the cash. Every moment working but not writing is a tax on your greatest resource. How do you keep track of submissions, deadlines, payments, and every other little detail?
A spreadsheet. I use Microsoft Excel to track my deadlines, submissions, and sales for the year on a single spreadsheet.
This saves me a great deal of time figuring out where I’ve submitted a story and how much it sold for. If a salable story is waiting in a folder on my hard drive, I’m not making money.
I don’t have to guess when a story for an editor is due.
Setting Goals
Once you have the proper information in your spreadsheet, you have to assign goals. You have a finite amount of time available to you. You have to carefully select and choose which projects on which you want to spend your resources.
I create a list each week and rank projects by pay, prestige, interest in the subject. This helps me internally digest which stories or projects I will need to write. If I know that I want to write three stories next week, I start to think about those stories. My internal muse starts playing around with the idea.
It is lonely being a writer. I am competitive by nature. When I set a goal, I am competing with myself to finish these projects. The thrill of success helps off-set the disappointments of receiving rejections.
Knowledge Management
If you tell a good story, a reader will follow you through all manner of strange plot-twists. The one thing you can do to pull your reader out of the story is to break your own rules. Gravity has to work the same on the first page as the last page or there needs to be a reason why.
I have a couple of complex universes that I set some of my stories in. I realized pretty quickly that I needed to codify the rules of the universe, lock down character descriptions, and make sure things are consistent. I keep track of everything via a wiki.
For the Heller Mysteries Universe, I have the following wiki: http://jasonbandrew.wikidot.com/heller-mysteries
I keep track of everything related to this universe here. I know the lineages, the timelines, character descriptions, published stories, stories that reference this universe, and even unpublished stories. Believe it or not, it helps me write new stories.
For the Love of Writing
All writers put words to paper because they love telling stories. It isn’t a way to get rich. We have to remember that we are choosing art a way of life. I like to reward myself by doing other projects. I play in LARPs. Very occasionally, I write fanfiction. Life is about the journey. Time to enjoy the writing life.
I’ve been busting my ass to attempt to get back into the game. I’ve had some success, but I’ve had to fall back on some of the tricks of the technical writer to really make things happen. I’m writing this more to remind myself of what I need to so more than anything else.
Time Management
As a writer, your time is your greatest resource. You have to put words on the screen to make the cash. Every moment working but not writing is a tax on your greatest resource. How do you keep track of submissions, deadlines, payments, and every other little detail?
A spreadsheet. I use Microsoft Excel to track my deadlines, submissions, and sales for the year on a single spreadsheet.
This saves me a great deal of time figuring out where I’ve submitted a story and how much it sold for. If a salable story is waiting in a folder on my hard drive, I’m not making money.
I don’t have to guess when a story for an editor is due.
Setting Goals
Once you have the proper information in your spreadsheet, you have to assign goals. You have a finite amount of time available to you. You have to carefully select and choose which projects on which you want to spend your resources.
I create a list each week and rank projects by pay, prestige, interest in the subject. This helps me internally digest which stories or projects I will need to write. If I know that I want to write three stories next week, I start to think about those stories. My internal muse starts playing around with the idea.
It is lonely being a writer. I am competitive by nature. When I set a goal, I am competing with myself to finish these projects. The thrill of success helps off-set the disappointments of receiving rejections.
Knowledge Management
If you tell a good story, a reader will follow you through all manner of strange plot-twists. The one thing you can do to pull your reader out of the story is to break your own rules. Gravity has to work the same on the first page as the last page or there needs to be a reason why.
I have a couple of complex universes that I set some of my stories in. I realized pretty quickly that I needed to codify the rules of the universe, lock down character descriptions, and make sure things are consistent. I keep track of everything via a wiki.
For the Heller Mysteries Universe, I have the following wiki: http://jasonbandrew.wikidot.com/heller-mysteries
I keep track of everything related to this universe here. I know the lineages, the timelines, character descriptions, published stories, stories that reference this universe, and even unpublished stories. Believe it or not, it helps me write new stories.
For the Love of Writing
All writers put words to paper because they love telling stories. It isn’t a way to get rich. We have to remember that we are choosing art a way of life. I like to reward myself by doing other projects. I play in LARPs. Very occasionally, I write fanfiction. Life is about the journey. Time to enjoy the writing life.