Avoiding Burnout

An interesting phenomenon has been noticed occurred over recent months, one that has been mentioned on a number of different blogs. Bloggers have discovered that a number of familiar names in indie publishing are no longer around. Frequent posts to favorite networking sites have disappeared, there's no newly published books, and websites haven’t been updated in some time.

Some believe that the huge number of books now being published annually (I hear that it’s two million or more) has so glutted the market that many authors aren’t selling nearly as many books as they did between 2010 and 2015. Substantial royalties have therefore diminished, forcing some to return to day jobs. Still, others seem to have given up. Keep in mind that a small percentage of authors, particularly in the romance and erotica markets, are still making good incomes.

Another theory also factors in here. Burnout. On indie sites like Kindleboards, authors were touting the necessity of putting out a book every three months to stay visible and on top of Amazon’s mysterious algorithm. To me, this is akin to investing in stocks you don’t know much about, but hoping they’ll rise in your favor anyway. A number of authors have tried to do this with varying degrees of success. As those who follow my blogs know, I’ve tried to step up my pace, but it’s truly difficult.

So, I was really interested by a recent blog that discussed burnout…what it really is, and how to overcome it. Author BelleCooper identifies burnout as a combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. It seems that burnout is not just a matter of overworking, but of losing enthusiasm for what you’re doing to the point where you become inefficient and unproductive. I’ve seen evidence of this in my own life, so I’ve been taking steps to avoid complete burnout.

First, I put four of the six writing projects away to focus on just two. Secondly, I’m improving my diet, getting more rest when needed, and exercising more. Third, I’m adjusting my life/work balance by spending more time with friends, planning, weekend getaways, and even a couple of vacations over the next twelve months. A rarity for me!

It’s already helping. There’s more I can do, and Cooper has other great tips. If you feel like you’re working too hard and are becoming jaded by the lack of reward for your efforts, then please read her blog. Maybe it will help.

Debra

Living a Writer's Life

A little over two months ago, I quit my day job. I’d been pondering this move for several months, weighing the pros and cons, discussing this with my spouse and a few work and writing colleagues. A number of factors at my job contributed to the decision to leave, but the most important decisions were personal.

You see, I turned fifty-five over the summer and while my birthday wasn’t a particularly big deal to me on the day, over the following weeks I found myself pondering my working future. Did I want to continue with salaried employment? Now that I had a publishing contract with a potential for more books to be published in this series, should I become a full time writer? Would I be happy spending most of my days in front of a computer screen? Would I be productive or grow lazy because I no longer had to account for my time? Would I gain weight??

Well, the short answer is that I am happier and more productive than I was while juggling the day job and family responsibilities with writing and promotion, but I’m not yet as productive as I’d like to be. In some ways, I’m still adjusting to the fulltime writing life. Certainly, I’ve been able to attend more book events. I’ve gone to workshops, given a workshop, participated in the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, done a little more promotion, and consequently have sold more books than I would have if I was still in the day job, but there’s always more to do, more I feel I should be doing. The 37 hours a week not spent at the day job and commuting aren't translating into 37 extra hours of writing and promotion.

So, what am I doing? Well, I’m exercising twice as much and cooking more dinners than I used to. I’m even baking a little. My family likes it, although my daughter, who’s never known me to bake anything except cookies at Christmas, said “What’s up, Mom?” It was a good question. The answer is that I’m giving myself permission to do many of the things I’d been thinking about doing for months. I’ve started a few small household projects and am now purging my bursting filing cabinets of articles, newsletters, and other things I no longer need. It’s a project I thought I’d do when I retired.

The thing is, I’m not really retired at all. I’m self-employed, and now that I’ve distinguished those two things more clearly in my mind, I’m ready to step up my creative output, just as soon as I purge the last four cabinet drawers.

My Alex Bellamy mysteries can be purchased at
FATAL ENCRYPTION, http://tinyurl.com/ddzsxl
TAXED TO DEATH, http://tinyurl.com/czsy5n

The Many C's of Writing

I went through my notes about writing to find a topic for this blog, and I came across a reminder to always remember the five Cs:

Character
Conflict
Change
Contrast (contrast in settings, between characters, in dialogue)
Caring (what the character cares for, and making the reader care for the character)

Those should be the main considerations when writing a story, but why stop with just five Cs? As I was writing this article, I thought of several other Cs that can help bring depth to our novels, such as:

Continuity (the hidden structure that relates everything in the story to the beginning)
Creativity (not settling for the first idea that comes to mind, thinking beyond clichés or stereotypes, creating interesting twists and quirks)
Culture (the world your character lives in, not just the setting, but the times, conditioning, habits, expectations and societal pressures)
Connection (the seesawing between connection and disconnection that comprises most relationships)
Complement (contrast is good, but sometimes like likes like. Twins -- whether people, places or ideas -- will show a different facet of the story than two contrasting things. Three complementary ideas can create a theme, two or three mentions of an important point throughout a novel can underline that point)
Challenge (the challenge to find a new way of seeing the same old story, the challenge to write the story only you can write)
Compose (the way you write. All the other Cs are worthless if you can’t write readable prose)

I’m sure there are plenty of other Cs, but this is a start.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I.

If You’re Under Stress, Can You Still Write?

I’ve been following an interesting discussion on a Yahoo forum called Murder Must Advertise. MMA is a really helpful place for new and experienced authors to learn about book promotion and, yes, the writing life, among other things. One of the issues raised this week was the difficulty many writers face while trying to work while under stress.

After the 9/11 tragedy, this topic appeared on a number of forums, where writers lamented the loss of the desire and/or the ability to write for a period of time. Naturally, this particularly affected writers in the New York area, but it stretched much farther than that. Many of these people felt that after witnessing so much real death and destruction, creating fiction was unimportant and even meaningless. As time passed, however, I know some of these people (maybe all) returned to their work.

Given the tough economic times many Americans face these days, writers have also been hit with job loss, financial stress, ongoing health issues, and family problems. Once again, these personal struggles have hampered some writers’ ability to create. Thoughts wander and concentration is reduced. It happens to all of us at some point.

Everyone has different ways of coping with tough times. My tough times came through financial worries in the early days of my marriage, then later, the death of a parent and the illness of my child which lasted three months before her health began to improve. Over time, she regained her health, but those first weeks were horrible. Yet, I kept writing because it was the only thing that took my mind away from real-life worries. My concentration wasn’t great, but I thought if I could write for a half-hour or even forty minutes a day, then at least I was making progress and that kept me grounded and sane.

When you’re under stress, what do you do to cope? Are there any tips you’d like to share with others? Comments are always welcome.

My amateur sleuth, Vancouver-based, Alex Bellamy mysteries can be purchased at
FATAL ENCRYPTION, http://tinyurl.com/ddzsxl
TAXED TO DEATH, http://tinyurl.com/czsy5n

Chekhov's Gun

I’ve been thinking about my grieving woman book of which I’ve written so little it’s not a Work-in-Progress but an IIP -- Idea in Progress. The woman finds a gun in her dead husband’s bathrobe pocket, and I've been wondering what to do with the weapon. Chekhov said that if you show a gun in the first scene you have to fire it in the third. I followed Chekhov’s rule for Daughter Am I, but I don’t see the woman in my IIP shooting the gun. The gun could be more of a symbol, something so out of place in her husband’s life that she realizes she didn’t know him at all, and hence she doesn’t know herself. So the book would turn out to be a search for identity, as are all of my novels.

In googling “the rule of the gun” to find its author (I’d forgotten it was Chekhov), I came across a wonderful site: Glossary of Terms Useful in Critiquing Science Fiction. Only a few terms are specific to science fiction, so it’s a fun glossary for anyone who writes. I especially like:

Black box scene analysis. A convenient means of evaluating how important a scene is. Think of the scene as a black box: characters go in to it and come out of it. What have they gained or lost? What irrevocable things have happened? How are they different people afterwards than before? The black-box scene analysis is a useful means of separating local dexterity (entertaining imagery) from important plot or character development. (CSFW: David Smith)

Card tricks in the dark. Authorial cleverness to no visible purpose. Wit without dramatic payoff. (Lewis Shiner)

Eyeball kick. A perfect, telling detail that creates an instant and powerful visual image. (Rudy Rucker)

Head fake. A plot action that appears to be significant but is rapidly proved to be a net null, leaving the plot moving in exactly the same direction. Excessive head fakes undermine the reader's engagement because the reader becomes trained that they are not real. (CSFW: David Smith)

Inappropriate mystery. An author will often use mystery as a means of propelling a reader forward: characters speak of things that are opaque to the reader, a character goes offstage to do something important, or a development is referred to indirectly ("I was just heading out the door when the phone rang, with terrible news"). Mystery is inappropriate when the expected dramatic follow-up is lacking: the offstage action proves to be a diversion, or the suspense proves false. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

Laughtrack. Emotional countersinking, where the characters' give cues that tell the reader how to react. They laugh at their own jokes, cry crocodile tears at their own pain, and, by feeling everything themselves, eliminate the reader's imperative to do so, so the reader disengages. (Lewis Shiner)

Laughtrack is one I am going to have to be particularly careful of in my grieving woman story. In my previous books, I’ve tried to show the story and let readers infer the emotion, but tears are such a part of grieving that I will have to figure out how to engage readers despite the tears.

Zigzagging Plots

I walk in the desert, sometimes on straightaways, sometimes on hills. I learned something from the hill walks: she who goes up, must come down. And sometimes “down” means a very steep grade. I discovered that it was much easier to get to the bottom of these steep hills if I zigzagged from one edge of the path to the other. By descending diagonally, I can cut the steepness of the hill and am able keep my footing.

This seems to be a good metaphor for plot. While writing, we zigzag down an increasingly steep slope, never quite letting our readers know what direction they are traveling, but always keeping them on the path to the end. Or perhaps they are going up a hill, but the point is still the same: zigzagging.

I sent More Deaths Than One to hundreds of agents and editors, and the consensus was that my writing style was too matter-of-fact for the overly complicated plot. This from people who never read more than a few chapters. (Luckily for me, I finally found a publisher who read the whole novel and understood what I wanted to accomplish.)

It could be that as readers head down the steep slope of my story, zigzagging from side to side, the plot does seem complicated, but when they reach the end and look back, they can see that the story is very simple. A straight path. A man discovers that what he knows about himself is not true, and he sets out to discover the truth. Very simple. All the complications are simply the zigzagging path.

So, how do you keep your plot zigzagging? How do you know when to zig and when to zag? When readers look back from the finish line, can they see a simple story, or a complicated one?