Are you scared to check in today?

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

In Friday’s Finding the Button post, Shiloh said:

So what I did…I made myself focus. (…) I cut my blog-hopping in half (sob).

Over the last several months, I’ve done the same thing. Part of it was necessity; I was working the day job and on deadline and I had no choice but to stay offline. But you know what I discovered while cutting back on the online involvement? I didn’t miss it. Yes, of course, I kept up with my friends, and remained on the few writing loops I participate in - yet even those I set to digest and would only read once a day.

Now that I’m writing at a much more comfortable pace, guess what? I still have those loops on digest, and I don’t visit but a half dozen blogs a day, and the ones I do visit are the ones where discussions are industry related, craft related, inspirational, etc. I rarely visit the sites I once lived for, where comment threads would run into the hundreds. Looking back, I recognize that I used those as distractions, thinking I needed to be on top of what was going on in the online world.

Guess what? I don’t. You don’t. What we need is the focus Shiloh mentioned, and that focus needs to be on our work, our health, our families, our writing, our editors and agents and publishers and what they want from us. We don’t have any need at all to keep up with gossip, or industry disasters. No, there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but look at the time you spend going out and seeking information on everyone else and what they’re doing, and then consider what you could accomplish spending that same time on YOU and YOUR writing. Trust me. You don’t need to know everything happening online. Not unless it has a direct impact on your writing career.

Week two. How’s everyone doing?

I write fast. Always have. But I’m also very lazy…..I put the pro in procrastinate. Has nothing to do with not enjoying the writing process, just has to do with enjoying the procrastination process.

So when the first 70 Days of Sweat writing challenge rolled around, I figured I’d give it a shot, although I didn’t expect I’d change my writing ways much. Just because…well, I’m lazy.

I didn’t count on my competitive nature, though. I am very competitive. Doesn’t matter who I’m competing with, what it’s about, what it’s for. I don’t necessarily have to do better than others, but for some reason, the thought of competition motivates me. I take taekwondo, technically speaking I’m a blue belt because they started me back at white (which I hated) even though 9 years ago, I tested for my brown and was getting ready to test for red, then I got pregnant. You put me up in front of a black belt, it doesn’t matter that I’m an overweight asthmatic with little coordination… I go after them. It doesn’t matter that I might get my tail kicked, not as long as I make them work for it.

I’m competitve. So the challenge just pushed the right buttons for me. What did I do to boost up my writing output? I already mentioned I write fast. I can put out between 1500-2000 words in an hour or so if I’m left alone. And if I focus on the computer.

So what I did…I made myself focus.

I used to write with the TV, just for noise more than anything. No longer.

I stopped playing around on email.

I started keeping a spreadsheet towards the end of how many words I wrote in one day and then next day, I try to top it.

I stopped going back to re-edit ad nauseum, because that can wait until after the book is written.

I cut my blog-hopping in half (sob).

And what happened? My writing output went through the roof. I completed one full length book for Berkley, a novella for Berkley, two category length books for two of my epubs, and I started several new projects. I wrote more in those 70 days than I had in the previous five months.

The trick to getting a book written really involves no trick. It just requires writing. Whatever it is that motivates you, whether it’s competing (even if it’s against yourself) or promising yourself something special if you meet your goal at the end of the challenge, whatever it takes, find that button, and push it. Keep pushing it.

“As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.” ~ Carl Van Vechten

To me, being a writer has a lot in common with the way I feel about living with a cat.

Cats can be difficult. They wreck your furniture. They wake you in the middle of the night, retching up fur-balls. They have no compunction about using their claws and teeth on you whenever they deem it necessary. For instance only last week my ‘darling’ Kuffer played rough and sliced open my lip so badly that I thought I might need stitches!

But all these issues fade into insignificance when a cat purrs at you when you’re sad, or snuggles up against you when you’re worried or ill. Or simply delights you by doing something cute or funny or loving clear out of the blue and just because he or she can.

Even without consciously being aware of it, cats give back a hundredfold to compensate for any trouble they might cause you.

It’s the same with writing.

Ideas are hard to find. Plots seem impossible. A work in progress can be a dead duck that drives you crazy and makes you wonder if you’ll ever write a single interesting word, ever again.

But all this angst is forgotten in those breathtaking moments when your characters are suddenly alive and talking and acting in a world that you, yes you, have created. When they make you smile and exclaim and sigh and they reward you for all the effort and the stress and the swearing that you’ve expended on them. The moments when your eyes fill with tears over their trials and tribulations, and when your heart sings at the end of their story because they’ve achieved the beautiful happily ever after that can be so elusive and hard to hang on to in the real world.

That’s why I write. Because when it purrs you forget the scratches and the fur-balls.

Another mid-week check in. How goes it?

I had a moment a week ago that maybe you’ll relate to: An idea hit. And when I say hit, I mean smacked me in the head like a two-by-four. This idea was pretty well formed, although no details were included, but that’s not the part I want to talk about. It was the idea itself-it immediately scared the crap out of me.

I know someone could write the hell out of this story. It has the potential to be evocative, compelling, surprising, and emotional. The question was, could I be that person? Do I, in fact, have the chops to pull it off?

The truth is, I don’t know. I could knock it out of the park, or I could write the whole thing only to find out it’s not something I would want on the shelves.

This is a good thing.

Fear is healthy. Fear is the thing that makes us stretch, that takes us to the next level.

When we’re first starting out, that fear is very present. Can we do this? Can we tell a story that’s cohesive, that has a beginning, a middle and an end? That isn’t repetitive, shallow, stupid, derivative? Can we evoke emotion in the reader? Sadly, the answer is most often no. Most people who try to write a novel don’t succeed. It’s just the way it is. If it were easy, everyone would be published. Sometimes the answer is not yet. That’s a good place to be. It means there’s more work ahead. The apprenticeship is ongoing. With dedication and a willingness to learn, a willingness to be afraid and do it anyway, there could be a career ahead. To a few, the answer right out of the gate is Heck, yes! But even those who sell the first book still have - and need - the fear.

If you’re lucky, even after you’ve published a book, or several, or dozens, you can still be intimately acquainted with fear. It’s easy to become comfortable, but is comfort what you want?. Because the only way to be comfortable as a writer is to write what you’ve written.

In the interest of honesty, there are writers who have long, lucrative careers built on writing one book over and over again. There are readers who count on the sameness for comfort and ease and love those writers.

So, perhaps I should have said that comfort is the death knell for me and for writers like me. Writers who turned to writing because most every other career seemed too boring. Who need a constant challenge to get the juices flowing. One of the things I love most about this gig is that after 40+ published novels, I can still get scared.

I know Sven is about forming habits and giving yourself the opportunity to stretch your persistence, your dedication and your commitment. There are also a number of ways in which to fail this challenge: give yourself an unreasonable goal, create chaos in other areas of your life which gives you an excuse not to write, let one or five or ten days of not hitting your goal convince you that you can’t do this thing. It’s pretty easy, and a lot more comfortable not to keep your word and do the work.

But may I suggest asking yourself some critical questions - questions that aren’t just about the Challenge, but where the Challenge is representative of your ultimate goals - Do I want Comfort? Or do I want to prove to myself that I can accomplish that which feels undoable? Do I let fear own me? Or do I kick fear’s butt?

Let the Sven Challenge help you nurture your relationship with fear. Just as developing a pattern of writing on a daily basis will give you the tools to do the work of a successful career novelist, facing and overcoming the fear of the Challenge will serve you well with each new step up the writing ladder.

I sold my first book three years ago this month. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. None. I knew nothing about the publishing business. Nothing about the industry. Nothing about promotion or plotting. Phrases like “deep POV” and “limited third person” weren’t part of my lexicon.

I was on bed rest with a surprise pregnancy and wrote a book. Several months after the baby was born I sold the book and what a ride it’s been since then.

One thing has been a constant from then to now – I treat writing like it’s my job. Now, I use job in basic terms. I’ve had jobs, jobs I hated but had to do to pay the bills. Writing isn’t working at Swenson’s and getting carpal tunnel from scooping ice cream all day, it’s not working in a coal mine. It’s a pretty damned cool gig and I’m thankful for it every day.

What I mean is, it’s what I do. Every day. It’s not a hobby. It’s not something I do only when I’m in the mood. Even when I’m blocked, when I hit that point in the story where I’m convinced it totally sucks, even when every word is like the worst job I ever had (cleaning toilets when I was in junior high with my mom at nights and on weekends).

Do I want to quit sometimes? Honestly? Yes. There are days, usually those days when I hear from my agent I’ve been rejected or when I’ve been waaaaaaaaaiting to hear back from someone who’s had my manuscript forever and a day and I feel like it’s never going to happen.

Do I quit? No. Because I know what it feels like to finish a book. I know what it feels like to muster up the courage to show it to people who’ll crit it. I know what it feels like to revise and revise again. I know the agony that is a synopsis and I know the feeling of fear followed by elation when something is submitted somewhere. Then there’s the pain of rejection and the joy of acceptance and contract. Honing through edits and revision and at last, the incomparable feeling when your book releases. Seeing it on a screen or holding it in my hands. Hearing feedback from readers, positive and negative.

Writing can be the loneliest job ever. It can be a rollercoaster of frustration, joy, pain and desolation. There’s nothing like it in the world and if you give up, you’ll never get to that point where you’re standing in line at RT and someone sees your name and says, “Oh my god! I love your books!”

In the end, it’s simple. Put your butt in the seat or in your bed or wherever you write, put your fingers on the keyboard or on a pen and do it.

One week into the program . . . how’re we all doing?