Talking About Your Story Might Stop You From Actually Writing It

If you're friends with a writer, chances are good you've experienced what it's like when one of us has a story to tell. Under good circumstances you can sit with us over dinner and coffee, and spend hours exploring this strange world that lives inside our skulls. Under bad circumstances, you get drenched by the downpour that comes with our brainstorms.

However, there's an issue that I've found a lot of writers have... namely that once we've opened our mouths that we often forget to engage our hands, and actually write the stories we talk about.

It is, unfortunately, the hardest part of the process.

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Undercutting The Process

Before we go any deeper into this topic I want to be very clear, here; talking through your story is always a good idea. For a lot of writers it is an extremely necessary part of the process, allowing us to explore certain ideas, think out loud, and to get around problems in the plot.

With that said, sometimes writers get so enamored of talking about our stories that we don't actually write them. Put another way, it's like we showed up to bake a cake, but instead we just ate all the icing and called it a day.

If you slather it on thick enough, it will still support candles, right?

What I mean by just eating the icing is that, for a lot of writers, talking about the idea is the fun part of the process. Taking notes, building the world, engaging with the characters, asking questions, and sharing all of that with our friends is usually an engaging activity. It's where we have the most fun, and it's where we get the satisfaction of feedback, and sharing an experience with someone else.

However, this activity can actually make us take a shortcut past the actual hard work of writing the story if we aren't careful. Because we sat down and talked through the tale, we walked someone through all of the twists and turns, and explained the ending and themes we're going for, our brains then lose interest in it. It doesn't want to actually write that story anymore. Now it wants a new idea to get excited about, and to go through the whole process of exploration again.

This can be exhausting for everyone involved. If you're the writer who finds themselves constantly avoiding the final step of writing the story, you may feel like you're constantly caught between the boring drudgery of forcing yourself to chronicle an idea you're no longer interested in and taking hits of good brain chemicals while you daydream about newer, more exciting ideas. Those who get pulled into these exercises might also feel tired after a while because for all the fun of the creative process, it can feel like the story is never going anywhere; that it's all just a bunch of hot air that's never going to lead to anything.

How do you fix it, though?

Sadly, I don't have an answer to this. If I did, I'd write a book, become a bestseller, and retire. But the best advice I can give is that you need to want the book done more than you want the enjoyment of just playing around in another sandbox. I'm not saying you shouldn't think about other ideas, and that you shouldn't give yourself moments of play and fun while you're slogging through a novel, but you need to make sure that you don't abandon the story you had just because you've moved from drawing the blueprints to actually building the thing.

If I do find more useful tricks, though, rest assured that I'll share them as soon as I come across them!

Looking For Some Additional Reading?

I don't really have any neat segues, but I figured I'd leave some additional links for folks who just want to kill a little time, and help me out a bit. If you're down for giant robots fighting alien bugs in a life-or-death battle in the grim darkness of the far future, check out Broken Heroes if you haven't seen it yet! If you'd like to step into an ongoing saga about resistance to fantasy fascists, and the deeds of a shadowy vigilante attempting to free the city from the boot on its neck, then read the first of The Silver Raven Chronicles!

And if you're a fan of the World of Darkness, you should definitely take a moment or three to listen to the latest adventure Jacoby has found himself on in The Butcher's Door, dramatized below! Don't forget to subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel if you enjoy it, as well.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Authors Need To Seize The Initiative To Get Work

Most of us are familiar with the general process of finding a job. When a business has an opening, they post an offering. People interested in that position respond. The business then reviews applications, conducts interviews, and decides who they're going to hire. And despite what your parents might tell you, you should under no circumstances hang around to talk to the manager, call, or send any messages asking about your application. In today's job market that basically gets you written off as, "person who has no idea how to follow instructions," and that's not someone most businesses want to deal with.

Then there's being a writer, where that kind of behavior is basically a necessity if you're going to get anywhere. And for the purposes of this blog, I will refer to the practice of reaching out and contacting potential paymasters as seizing the initiative.

Yo! You need a writer?

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Seize The Initiative (It Gets You Way More Work)

One of my favorite stories to tell is how, while browsing the FAQ section for Paizo publishing I ended up sending a request to write for the company. I hadn't expected anything to come of it, but less than a week later I got a return email asking me what I was looking for in terms of writing assignments. This is how I wound up writing the short story The Irregulars for the Golarion setting, and it also led to me contributing to Blood of The Moon and Bastards of Golarion as well.

Seriously, check it out if you haven't yet!

This was far from the last time, either. I made contact with TPK Games at Gen Con basically by walking up to their booth, shaking the owner's hand, and offering him my business card. I got all of my jobs working for newspapers by sending emails or making phone calls, asking if there were positions for contributors open. Ditto for the few magazines and ezines I worked for which are now defunct (sadly for my bank account).

So why is it okay to do this when you're a writer, but not for any other kind of job? Well, it's generally because writers, by and large, aren't hired on full-time. A majority of writers, from the lowliest newspaper stringers to the highest-paid novelists, are hired as mercenary talent.

Do not attempt this strategy to get a staff writing position. I promise it will blow up in your face.

When a business is hiring on a regular part-or-full-time employee, there's a certain protocol that needs to be followed. There's proper channels to go through, and there's routine to be established. For freelancers and mercenaries, though, paymasters tend to be more concerned about drive, ideas, and their project record. This is particularly true for RPG companies (who do a majority of their work through freelancers), but it holds true for a lot of the serialized publishing industry. Whether you need fresh movie reviews on the company blog, new short stories for the monthly magazine, or just someone to put together a fresh list of weird encounters for a fresh DND supplement, everyone is always looking for another set of hands.

Lastly, though, most companies who use freelancers will want to keep as large a pool of talent on-hand as possible. Because unlike hiring people to fill salaried positions, freelancers get paid on commission. So it costs a business nothing to put someone new into the writing pool, as they're not going to have to pay anything until the writer has turned in an assignment and it's been selected for publication.

In short, they lose nothing by keeping you around.

Caveats

Now, there are some important caveats I'd add to the very broad statements I made above. So if you're psyched to start knocking on digital doors, wait until you've finished the briefing.

Hold your fire.

First and foremost, seizing the initiative works best when you are attempting to get assigned work from a company who needs a constant stream of material from writers. Newspapers, magazines, websites, RPG publishers, the idea is that you are looking to be assigned work to complete for them. If you already have something complete (a short story, a novel, a roleplaying game, an article, etc.) then you need to instead see if the publisher in question has a submission procedure for you to follow.

If you can't find the query procedure, then reach out and ask for it. That is going to be more helpful to you, and it will probably start things moving more smoothly if you're attempting to place something you've already finished.

Secondly, before you start reaching out to potential paymasters and asking if they have any assignments available, make sure you have a portfolio of previous work, as well as a list of potential pitches. Your portfolio can be made up of anything you're comfortable being judged on, but both it and your pitches should be geared toward the publisher you've reached out to in order to give them an understanding of what you're bringing to the table.

Why is this necessary, you might ask? Well, if you reach out to a short story magazine, they're going to want to have some idea of the kind of fiction you've written before. Ditto if you want to write articles for a newspaper, or mechanics for a game; your potential publisher is going to want to see some samples of your work to get a sense of what your output is like. As to the pitches, sometimes a publisher will test you by asking what you think would make for a good project. It's a backdoor way of testing your knowledge of a subject or area, and seeing how much supervision they'll need to put in. Sometimes the publisher will take you up on a particular pitch, sometimes not, but either way you should always have 2-3 in your back pocket just in case.

Eventually Work Comes To You

I'll be the first one to admit that when you're an author you end up chasing a lot of work. However, the more assignments you complete, and the more your name gets out there, the more people are going to recognize you. When that happens you're going to find that people will, eventually, start coming to you with offers. Whether it's because they saw your name in enough publications, you've made the right contacts who've bigged you up in their circles, or because you seem approachable on social media, people will seek you out sooner or later.

That doesn't mean every offer you get is going to be a banger, but eventually you'll get solid offers. Just keep your nose to the grindstone, and when in doubt consider sending an email and asking if there are currently openings for content creators.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

"Soft Canon" is Something More Writers Should Consider

There are a lot of writers out there who try to nail down every corner of their setting so that it's as solid and immovable as possible. There will be hard rules about what is and isn't possible, timelines of events and developments going back ages (and in some cases to the dawn of time itself), and everything from the level of technological development, to the specific customs of particular households will be drawn out in exhaustive detail.

Generally speaking, you can never know too much about your own world, and the stories you're telling in it. However, I think that a lot of us really underestimate the benefit of what I'm going to call the "soft canon" approach.

Because seriously, it can make your life a lot easier.

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Leave Yourself Some Wiggle Room

We're all familiar with settings and worlds that have hard canons... but what does a soft canon setting look like? Well, two of the most prominent examples I can think of are the grim darkness of the far future in Warhammer 40,000, and the sprawling public domain horror project that is the SCP Foundation.

You'd think for settings so focused on paperwork there would be harder edges.

For readers who aren't familiar with these two settings, I'll break them down for you, explain the nature of their soft canons, and talk about why you might want to consider this kind of approach.

Warhammer 40,000, as a setting, is a sprawling galaxy of a million inhabited worlds. There is no single protagonist, and the works range from the grand, sweeping scale of things like the galactic war that was the Horus Heresy, down to small-scale investigations from inquisitors just trying to get to the truth, or fire teams of soldiers attempting to survive an impossible situation. Not only that, but we see so little of the galaxy that there could be a thousand and one astonishing things that we never even hear about; especially since major themes of the setting is ignorance, the loss of past, fact becoming myth, superstition, and secrecy.

The SCP Foundation universe is set in the modern day, and it deals with anomalous creatures, entities, objects, and events. The conceit is that the Foundation, along with dozens of other organizations, movements, and factions pursue things that cannot be explained. Monsters, ghosts, magic, and worse all exist in this setting, but these incidents are experienced piecemeal through the reports and files recorded by researchers. And given that this setting covers multiple universes, and that anomalies are by their nature inexplicable, things may often seem contradictory. Themes of secrecy, hidden worlds, and things which simply cannot be understood run rife through this setting as well, making it difficult (at best) to establish any kind of complete view of events.

Both of these settings are expressly designed to allow for multiple creators to tell a wide variety of stories, and having a softer canon makes that significantly easier to do without every contributor needing to be intimately familiar with every other creator's work to make their own stories fit. Not only that, but leaving things more malleable gives you more freedom as a creator. It also stops you from writing yourself into a corner by putting too many details too firmly in place.

Mechanisms For Soft Canon

Okay, so we've established what soft canon is (a setting where there aren't as many hard details of what's possible, and what history is and isn't fact), and talked about a couple of settings that use it. But what methods can you use to embrace soft canon in your own work?

Well, there are two major methods it seems to boil down to.

Let's begin at the beginning.

First, and arguably the easiest, simply don't mention too many details on the page. This is not to say you shouldn't be descriptive, but rather that you should strive to have a small-picture view of your setting and story. So whether your protagonist is a fighter in the astro marines, a noble born knight on a quest, or a young priest on a journey to combat evil, try not to include things they shouldn't (or wouldn't) know. This can be a big ask for fantasy writers, who are prone to the, "let me tell you about my world," condition, but if you just don't tell your readers everything there are plenty of mysteries left for them to seek out and experience, in addition to extra blank space you can fill in later.

The second method is to use rumor, belief, and conjecture to tell a history that may or may not be accurate. Instead of an unreliable narrator, we have an unreliable setting where much of what was once known is lost, and much of what is known now may not be as accurate as people believe. Lord of The Rings, Dark Souls, and other settings use this method to let the reader know that while some things are still known, there are huge gaps in history that have been lost due to death, destruction of empires, etc. This is also more accurate to our own history, where commonly believed things are actually falsehoods that have just been accepted over the years, and things that were once common knowledge are mysteries lost to time.

The key with soft canon is that you leave a lot of things in the background, or up to conjecture. Did the myths of the gods really happen the way the priests say they did, or are those stories made up? Has the great war that happened several thousand years ago become a story told around modern campfires, the fact faded into fiction and belief? Do the practitioners of the arcane arts know where magic draws its power from, or are they merely content to wield it even if they don't understand it? Or was that knowledge known once, and has been lost after the witch purges, and the destruction of the great libraries?

While you should have some ideas as to the true timelines of your setting, what really goes on in the corners of the galaxy, etc., your readers don't need to know those things. Especially if they are outside the scope of the story you're currently telling. And a little uncertainty can go a long way in driving reader speculation, encouraging fan theories, and giving you as much latitude as possible when telling future tales.

And if you are designing an RPG setting, I would highly recommend taking this method under considerations. It's what I've been using for Sundara, and it's been a godsend. More on that in What is "Sundara: Dawn of a New Age"? for those who are curious, or check out the AMA I did a little while back instead!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Talking About Numbers Again (What Creators Need in Order to Survive)

I talk a lot about making a living as a creative professional in my Business of Writing updates. It's kind of the whole purpose of this section, after all; talking about the business side of the job, and what it actually pays you. This week, though, I wanted to talk about how most of what people think of as the job of a writer (or even just a content creator) isn't what pays the bills... I wish it was, but the numbers don't pan out that way most of the time.

So, let's talk about that, shall we?

There's a lot of math here, but I'll try to keep it simple.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

How Many Eyeballs Does It Take To Pay Your Bills?

We all have bills to pay, and unless those debts are getting settled you're quickly going to find you've got bigger problems than writer's block. So I wanted to take a moment to break down the sort of action/attention that writers need to garner in order to actually survive. And I'm going to be using bare bones numbers here, showing that even subsisting at the lowest possible level is still playing the game on Hard mode.

So, let's start with bills and expenses.

Let's say that you live in a small town, in subsidized housing, or some equally cheap location. Even then, you likely have a rent of around $800 or so a month if you're in a 1-bedroom, or $900-$1,000 a month if you're living in a 2-bedroom spot. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you found a very cheap location, you're splitting your bills with someone else, and you're keeping things as cost-effective as you can. Even then you might be looking at a combined rent and utility cost between $500 and $550 every month.

Now, that's without talking about food, gas, a gym membership, streaming services, or even Internet costs. But I'm leaving those out specifically to bring what comes next into a starker relief. So keep in mind this is literally just the cost of shelter, not anything else.

And now, down to brass tacks.

But how much do authors make for the stuff we put out there? Well, I mentioned a lot of the numbers in Direct Donations Really Are The Best Way to Help Creators You Love, but I'll go back over it for folks who missed that installment.

- Book sale: $1-$3 (depending on cover price, digital or physical, etc.)

- Sale of RPG Product: $0.15-$1 (this is generally for smaller supplements below novel earnings)

- Podcast Stream: $1 per 200 listens (average taken from Spotify)

- YouTube: $3-$5 per 1,000 views (ish)

- Reads on Vocal: $6 per 1,000 reads (if one has VIP membership)

So if we break out the calculator, what would we need to manage just to pay our rent as an author based on these numbers?

- Book Sales: 275 per month (or roughly 9 books sold per day)

- RPG supplements: 916 to 2,750 (depending on costs)

- Podcast Stream: 110,000 streams

- YouTube views: 110,000 to 183,000 depending on ad revenue

- Vocal reads: 91,000 reads per month (or over 180,000 if one doesn't have VIP membership)

There are additional factors to consider with a lot of these earnings as well. For instance, if you're putting content on YouTube (or like my channel on DailyMotion), not every single view is going to get counted. People stop watching early, or they had Ad Block on, so those earnings are only based on the number of people who actually watch the whole video, and who stay for the ads. A similar note on Vocal reads, the site tracks how far down one actually goes in an article, so just clicking to open an article doesn't count as a read; folks actually need to finish what they start for you to get paid. Lastly, sales on sites like Drive Thru RPG or Amazon have to wait between 30 and 60 days to clear, so even if you make enough sales this month to pay your rent, you won't get that money till next month, or the month after.

Just some things to keep in mind.

Now, consider how much you'd need to earn through Patreon. If you could find 500 people to each give you $1 a month so you could pay your rent, that's significantly more doable than writing an article, making a video, or creating a new game supplement that goes viral every single month so you can keep your landlord happy.

Incidentally, if you'd like to make sure I can keep the lights on and the content coming, go visit my Patreon page today!

You Need Audience Participation Regardless

The important lesson to take away from this is that if you're a creator, you depend on audience support. Whether they're reading your articles, watching your videos, buying your books and associated merch, or just giving you a tip every month, you cannot do what you do without folks who are willing to support you.

And if you're someone who wants to support the creators you love, even putting $1 in their tip cup goes further than consuming all the free content they put out there. It's why we're constantly asking our audience to share our links and boost our signal... we need to reach not just thousands, but literal hundreds of thousands of people just to pay rent for 1 month.

And any help we can get to do that is much appreciated.

Lastly, as a little bonus, I'm still extremely proud of the latest video I put together. So if you haven't subscribed to my DailyMotion channel yet, consider doing so, and sharing this piece around!

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!