I am big, fat liar (the lazy writer)

I am not working hard enough on my dream

My current Work In Progress is a novella called The Singer. It's about a guy named Thatcher Graves who is the lead of a tribute band to a famous (fictional) group called The Light. The Light's lead singer and founder, Rock, disappeared under mysterious circumstances years before. Thatcher hires a run-down drifter (Gordy) who has a gift for playing Rock and The Light's music as a new lead singer. Over a week or so of getting to know the secretive Gordy, Thatcher becomes convinced he is actually Rock for real.

I have written a few drafts now and just made a major revision (over the last few weeks, I have read a printed copy of the manuscript and marked it up with changes and have just entered all those changes into the novel document in Scrivener). It's the best version I can create prior to it going out for its professional critique, or to be seen by Beta readers.

To finish entering the edits, I set a weekly goal of  typing in half the edits per week for two weeks. Every time I sat down to work on it, I kept track in my daily writing spreadsheet. The first week, I managed 139 pages (and procrastinated so I didn't really start until Thursday) so I felt good about myself. Then I reviewed the spreadsheet.

Looking back at the analysis of the time I spent working on my revisions, I came to the painful realization that rather than making remarkable progress on this project, I had managed to take a one or two-day project and stretch it out over four lazy weeks!

Here I was, felling good about myself, making progress on my production plan and thinking I am being professional about my writing but the whole time, was lying to myself about what progress means. Simply put, I was being lazy. My goal was not aggressive enough.

Am I the world's laziest writer?

The chart of my work for the week is pictured above. I am stunned by how little actual time I worked on my goal.

Don't get me wrong, I am a busy guy (working in two businesses, I have a family, fitness goals, and so on), but I had many, many opportunity to work on this editing. I didn't chart them but I bet I spent double or even triple this many hours watching television the same week. I slept in a couple of days. I read a book that week I know browsed Twitter and the news and obsessed over a million things in the world a hundred times for a few minutes each. I have no one to blame for not putting the time into my novel than me.

I'm disappointed in myself. The goal that I broke down into a two-week project, when I look at the actual work involved, could have taken place in two days. One if I was ambitious! Seriously, what am I waiting for?

My legacy goal is to master the art of storytelling in the novel format. To get there, I need to keep writing novels, keep putting them out these for readers to react to, and keep taking that feedback and learning and growing for the next project. I have set a big goal for myself to publish 20 novels in the next 20 years. It seemed ambitious at the time. And I really, really, really want to succeed at this. But now 20 novels in 20 years is starting to feel like a lazy goal. Maybe it should be double? Or the timeline shortened?

The questions to ask about your Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Will I change anything based on this revelation? I think so. I'm starting with questions. I've written them below (in case they help you in your goal-setting). And when I have the answers, I'll share them to.

Do you have a lifetime goal for your writing? Are you on track to reach it? Do you have a clear picture of what success looks like? And are you honest with yourself on whether or not you're doing the work it takes to get there?

How to write a novel in 30-minute increments

Ambition is the root of all creation

It's important to have ambitions as a novelist. Having a clear vision for what you want to accomplish can go a long way to guiding you through the many opportunities you have to give up on the dream. Ambitions is helpful to guide your choices and provide the kick in the pants we all need to stay on track. And your ambition should be big.

So what are yours? Are they financial (financial freedom or getting rich)? Are they metric-based (a million books sold, listed on top of the New York Times Beset-seller list)? Are they merit-based (television or movie franchise made from your books)? Are they legacy-based (change the world with your work)?

Think about your big-picture goal. Create as real a picture as you possibly can about that ultimate place you want to reach with your lifetime of work. How would it feel to be at the end of your life looking back knowing you had accomplished what you set out to accomplish? How would you be living? Where will you be living? What does a bookshelf of your work look like?

My current ambition is to publish twenty novels in the next twenty years. I want to master the form to the best of my ability. I want own the self-identity of novelist. I want to write novels that entertain and inform and maybe even influence people to reflect on what it is to be human, to strive and reach for the greatest version of themselves (because that is what I am trying to do with my life). Success looks to me like respect from other writers, an audience who is affected by my work, and a life that ultimately requires no other sources of income to allow me to explore my creative self.

Momentum is the energy you need to harness to create

Using that lifetime achievement ambition as a flag planted in the ground to guide me, the big question I work on constantly is how can I find the time to create my novels when I have a busy life (work, family, travel, other obligations)? How does a person with creative ambition manage the competition for time to create and the need (want) to provide for my family and myself and live a standard, enjoyable, everyday American life.

I concede that I could drop everything in favor of my writing goal. Put everything else second. let my professional life suffer, spend less, live frugally, and one and on. Damn the consequences. Go all in and muster the pure will to mount the hill of my ambition. I could do that. But I would not be happy. People I love, people I chose to bring into my life (family, business partners, employees), would suffer and I feel it would be a selfish choice to abandon my role in their lives strictly for my own. In fact, not only can I not discard them all in pursuit of my ambition, I will not let my focus shift from what I need to do to make that part of my world work. I believe I can have both.

With focus, clear goals, and discipline, I believe I can create good novels in the space between the more real parts of my life. I can achieve my ambitions. I wouldn't be the first person to do it either. The world is littered with examples of people who achieved creative success starting from within the boundaries of a "normal" life. And the potential to be an example for someone else who is looking to do the same is exciting to me. That's real legacy.

The 30-minute novel

The challenge is more about focus and time management than whether or not it is possible to achieve my goal. I can write a book (create, write, edit, publish) in the space of year with only the fringes of time available. If I'm smart and if I'm ready to deal with the inevitable losses of momentum that will happen, I can make it. It's all in the doing.

I am a planner. I set goals. I create a strategy. I build a tactical plan. I organize my working life around accomplishing the tasks that need to be done every day to move me toward my goals. My approach to writing is no exception. I sometimes need to sit down and plot out a strategy to get a project done. I think best by writing so I wrote out the things I do to get my work done when I have limited time. The plan looks like this:

1. Give something up. For me, television was the biggest culprit. I calculated how much time I watched television ion the evening and did some math and decided to swap that time for writing time. Not a direct swap (because I write better mid-morning). But free that time so everything I need to get accomplished can get accomplished and I also now have 2-4 hours a day that I can use towards my writing without sacrificing the things that are important to me (work, family, exercise, fun).
2. Focus on productivity. Become an expert of focus, being able to turn on and turn off your creativity at will (it takes practice but can be mastered). Learn about and test out different methods for organizing your working day. I use the pomodoro method. It works for me. And I am a consumer of content of productivity and organization so I'm always looking for a new technique to try. What works for you?
3. All you need is 30 minutes. With focus and a little preparation, you can accomplish real progress in a short amount of time. This is probably advice better suited to planners versus pantsers (writers who write their stories without much outlining and pre-planning, flowing organically with their creative process), but decide ahead of time what you need to work on next so when you sit down with a limited time window, you can jump right into the work.
4. Start early and end late. It may not be fun to set the alarm clock 30-minutes early or sit down with my writing just as I was about to go to bed, but those fringes of time, when coupled with planning and a little focused energy, can produce significant advancement of the work-in-progress.
5. Use your breaks. At my day job, I am not always great about taking a lunch break. I usually work straight through. But when I need to kick up some momentum on a writing project, lunch breaks become the perfect time to knock out a bit of work. When I'm really ambitious about putting in daily time on my current work-in-progress, I may even schedule in a mid-afternoon meeting for 30-minutes and use it to work on my story. These writing breaks make a great relief from the pace and responsibility of my day job and actually help me be more productive.
6. Stop on the way home. When I need to get in a little extra time to work on a project, another trick I use to keep the work going is to stop somewhere on my way home from work. A coffee shop or a library usually. I plan ahead what I'm going to do with that time (beats, printed editable pages, marked-up page edits to enter), the knock out an hour or productivity before settling in at home for the night.
7. Track your work. I created a spreadsheet to keep track of the work I do during every one of these mini sessions. When I'm writing drafts, I track word counts. When I'm editing, I count pages. I come up with a score for each session (word or pages-per hour). Keeping score lets me game myself to stay in track and accomplish my micro-goals. Because I'm working with limited buckets of time, being honest with myself about what I accomplish is important to being true to my ambition.

If you're not as much a planner as me, you may read the above and feel like I have managed to suck the magic out of writing (Where is the fun in sex if it's scheduled from noon to 12:45pm every second Tuesday?). Don't worry. There is just as much story magic in a disciplined and organized approach as there is in the free-form (panther) method. I still finish a work session and look back at the work I did and wonder where did it come from. I still feel flow when I write. I just have to organize my life so when its time to create, I can drop into flow immediately.

Again, this is what works for me. What about you? What is your big ambition (don't be afraid for it to be monumentally big)? What is your work process? How are you most productive? And what do you do when you get off the rails?

Loving the Pomodoro

On the search for better use of my time

For anyone who knows Italian, I am not talking about loving tomatoes (pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato). I do not love tomatoes. The opposite in fact. I think tomatoes are a slimy, foul-tasting cosmic error. They are like a collection of pepper seeds trapped in snot balled up inside rotten animal intestines.

And we are supposed to accept the tomato as a member of the fruit family? What kind of nonsense is the science of plant biology trying to foist on us there? Fruit is God's dessert, nature's vehicle for the the delivery of sugar, healthy food that gives the most pleasure. Does any of that describe a tomato?

A tomato needs to be transformed into something else to be palatable. And transformed in such a way as to hide its true nature. Think ketchup. Salsa. Pizza Sauce.

No, the pomodoro I have fallen in love with is definitely not the (air quotes) fruit (end air quotes), it is the pomodoro method of time management and work focus.

If you already know and use it, then there is no need to read this post. Really, just click off and go do something else. If you don't know it (or need a reminder of how frickin' awesome it is), stick around. It's about to get organized up in here.

You don't cook eggs using this timer

In Italy, a cooking timer (commonly called an egg time in England and the U.S.) is shaped like a tomato. The pomodoro timer has, usually and by tradition, a twenty-five minute maximum countdown.

As a writer, I struggle often with momentum and focus. I work on a project for a while then it bogs down or I get distracted. I also travel for work and can occasionally be sidelined by the demands of my two main sources of income when they overwhelm my days.

I am most productive when I work at least a little every day on my current writing project and lose momentum quickly when I miss even one or two days in a row. Breaking writing momentum strains my spirit and my belief in my place in the world as a writer. Picking the work back up takes days, even weeks sometimes.

Back to the pomodoro method. How do you work? Marathon work sessions? Are you a multitasker? A procrastinator? Marathon sessions lead to fatigue after even just two or three hours for most people. Multi-tasking might as well be called multi-failing because divided focus leads to no progress on more than front at the same time.

Italian efficiency expert Francesco Cirillo studied people's ability to create productive work and concluded that on average, we work best in short, focused bursts of attention on one thing at a time. We also benefit from breaks. And are capable of repeating that cycle for long work periods.

Getting your tomato on

The pomodoro method takes his lessons about focus and work/output and turns them into a simple systems. Which is this:

Start a timer for 25 minutes. Work on one focused thing (or type of thing) without stopping until the timer expires. No distractions. No responding to phone notifications. No breaks. Just 25 minutes of one-hundred-percent focus on one thing. Then take a five-minute break. Then repeat.

It's like magic for focus and getting shit done. When I use the pomodoro method, even if I can only go two or three deep in one day due to time constraints, I always make significant, measurable progress on whatever I chose to work on.

I use the pomodoro method when I work on my fiction. For first-draft writing, editing, typing in edits, proof-reading, story creation, etc. It works well for me. In 25 minutes, I can write 700 words or so. When I'm working on a new draft, my goal is to get three or four pomodoros in a day. That's usually around 2,000 words. Which makes writing a full-length first-draft novel an eight or ten week project tops. On the weekends, I can do as many as 8 and really not miss much of the day (that's only four hours of focused work).

Throwing tomatoes at things other than writing

I've even adopted the pomodoro method into my day job(s). When I have a pile of tasks or a particular goal for work, I just schedule in a block of time and use pomodoro's to focus my energy. It is an amazing system for regulating focus and helps me come out of the low-momentum periods that disrupt my writing ambitions.

I encourage you to learn about the pomodoro method. Try it yourself. Adapt the time periods to works for you. And share your thoughts. And if you use some other method for getting your work done when there isn't the luxury of unlimited work time, tell me about your system instead.