Joss Whedon on being prolific

It's Friday, Friday...!

From Joss Whedon, some great nitty-gritty advice (sprinkled with characteristic Whedon wit) about being prolific, or trying to, or... er... bribing oneself to:

REWARD YOURSELF EARLY AND OFTEN

Whedon has acknowledged the ironic fact that he hasn’t finished Getting Things Done. And he has mentioned eating dessert first. So I must ask, “Is dessert a metaphor?”

“No,” he replies. “No, I’m saying give me cake. Why didn’t you bring cake? Didn’t they explain how these things work?” And then he gets serious, more or less. “I have a reward system. I am the monkey with the pellet and it’s so bad that I write almost everything in restaurants or cafes [so] that when I have an idea, I go and get chocolate." He doesn’t wait to flesh out the idea and then reward himself, he rewards himself simply for having the idea. "I’ll write it down and then get some chocolate. I have the idea, I get my pellet . . . I mean I’m terrible. I don’t put that on the list because that’s not advice. That’s something I’m seeking help for. It’s a vice and it’s different than advice."

Oh, come on, you’re obviously making it work.

“But I could be better. I can make it work better and I’m trying to teach myself more discipline because when you have children and you are an artist, you already have more than fills a day. I would also like to have friends, hobbies, maybe read a book sometime.”

Read the whole article here! It's a good'un.

The man has no shortage of ideas, so my takeaway is that he must have the metabolism of a hummingbird. Or he's exagerating. But probably the former.

See you Sunday! With your stories! About fifth floors, or lack thereof!

These pages will not turn themselves!

From J.A. Konrath's blog, some of Ann Voss Peterson's techniques for crafting a page-turner of a book:

Pacing isn’t about speed.

That’s right. Pacing doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with how fast the action unfolds on the page. Think about it. We've all read thrillers where plenty of action takes place, but they still feel as if they’re moving as slow as a Prius driver at a four-way stop. We've also read literary novels or family dramas which don’t have a lot of exterior “stuff” happening, yet leave us breathless. So if a novel’s pace isn’t about speed, what IS it about?

The secret to pacing your novel—whatever genre you're writing—is making your reader NEED to turn the page.

Well I just happen to be a reader. I’ll bet you are, too. So I asked myself what makes ME want to turn the page, and I came up with four things.

1. Conflict: I turn the page to discover who wins the fight.

2. Sequence: I turn the page to uncover what happens next.

3. Delayed Gratification: I turn the page to learn the answers to my questions.

4. Escalation: I turn the page to see how on earth the protagonist gets out of this unholy mess!

Read the rest here!

Joe's advice at the bottom of the post is just as good. Read it. Read it all!

Week Twenty: The elevator did not have a button for floor 5

Okay, so Freshman Me did not know how "elevator" is spelled.

If you can find it in your dark, withered heart to forgive the error, this week's prompt (the twentieth! that's a milestone, right?) is interesting in that it was intended to be the first line of a story. 

So! This could be your first line, or, like the others, you could use it as more of a thematic starting point.

The world is your oyster! (I hope you like oysters.)

500 words, Sunday, midnight, hoo-rah!

Week Nineteen: Traveled!

Post 'em if you got 'em!

This-here is mine.

Joanna Penn speaks of ways productive

Happy Friday!

Having trouble applying butt to chair for this week's 400 words? Here are a slew of producitivity tips from Joanna Penn and her readers:

Do not check email or social before I have done my first creation block of the day

e.g. 1500 words on latest WIP. In order to achieve this, I have removed my email app from my mobile phone and am using Antisocial software to block access to those while still allowing me on the internet for research (which I often need as I write). I started doing this at the beginning of the year, but I fell off the wagon. [Now] firmly back on it.

Read the rest of them here!

Long have I known about this tip, and yet rarely if ever have I been able to resist the siren lure of my email (and the many blogs I read) before breakfast. I've even borrowed a book about this from the library and subsequently sat on it for months. One day I will do this, though not today. Clearly.

How about you? When you are productive, how the heck do you do it?

"Aren't you too old for this?"

From a recent New York Times column by Edward Kelsey Moore:

Among the many things I wasn’t prepared for after publishing my first novel at the age of 52 was the question I’m asked most often. I’ve heard it at book tour events in England, Germany, and here in the United States. The wording and language vary, but the gist of the question is the same: “Aren’t you too old for this?”

People ask for different reasons. Some mean it as a compliment. Young writers ask because they want to avoid the missteps that left me unpublished until such a frighteningly ancient age. Others hint that I must have wasted decades by indulging in foolish pursuits.

Read the rest here!

Though a different situation, this reminded me of the Twyla Tharp quote I posted about artists who "burn out" young simply because they didn't stick with it. 

We really do have funny ideas about our authors, don't we?

Week Nineteen: A time-traveler recognizes you...

Okay, so remember in Week Eighteen's prompt when I said that this was the last prompt of my Freshman year box?

...That was not true, for there is a whole notebook of Spring semester class notes that I had misplaced, and lo! many questionable prompts therein.

Here's the first. The full text, for those who cannot read the scrivenings of a mad man, reads

A time-traveler recognizes you and is shocked to have met you. This provides the driving force for your future success.

I must have stolen that from somewhere, right? I mean... it's kind of too good for Freshman Me?

Anyway, it's yours now. 400 words by Sunday at midnight! Who's up for some SCIENCE FICTION?

Week Eighteen: Renewed purpose'd!

Aaaaaaaaand go! Post 'em here or link to yours.

This is mine. Evidentally I like cats or something.

15 minutes/day = writing career

Happy Friday!

I love it when Dean Wesley Smith talks math. I dislike math in general, but he always paints such a beautiful, achievable picture with his numbers. A fantasy in which I (and you!) can have a writing career by spending at least 15 minutes a day hardcore writing. A fantasy that, actually, could easily be reality:

If you type 250 words in 15 minutes, and considered your writing important enough to type for 15 minutes every day, you will finish 91,250 words in one year. Or about one longish novel. (Sorry, but it’s true. 250 words x 365 days = 91,250 words. By the way, I passed 250 words in this article somewhere in the middle of the paragraph about Kris above.)

Note that if you type for 15 minutes every day and produce 250 words and work only on short fiction, by the end of a year you would have completed about 18 short stories of average length of 5,000 words.

If you work for one really, really tough hour of writing (snicker) five days per week, and take two weeks off from the really rough pace (more snickers), you will produce (1,000 words x 5 days x 50 weeks =) 250,000 words in one year. Or about three novels.

Or about 50 short stories (at average length of 5,000 words).

That’s right. 250,000 words in a year. Working one hour per day and taking the weekends off and two weeks vacation.

So to make a living writing short fiction, you need a work ethic that will drag you to the computer at least one hour per day, five days per week. I know that’s tough. But if everyone could do it, there would be a lot of writers making a living with their fiction.

Read the whole thing here!

So put into this context, Sunday's 300 words should take you something like 20 minutes. That's not even a whole lunch break!

You could do it right now and then you would be done for the whole week. Utterly free to enjoy your weekend. Mmm.

Writing advice from Kurt Vonnegut

Here's something you probably didn't expect to read today: a facsimile of "How to Write with Style" by Kurt Vonnegut, from a 1986 issue of SPIN Magazine.

Also, check out Aimee Mann's hair on the next page...

(via Austin Kleon)