For a lot of us, though? That's just not feasible.
The problem is that, in our modern world, audiences demand that kind of output in order to stay engaged with you. Whether you're putting out books, writing TTRPGs, creating videos, or making some other kind of content for your audience to devour, you need to have a lot of it, and you need to provide it constantly in order to maintain attention.
Which is why you often need to perform some serious sleight-of-hand in order to make it seem like you've always got something new, and to build up your archives of content so you can actually find yourself some breathing room.
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| It's exhausting, but needs be when the devil drives. |
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!
Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Before I get too far into this week's topic, I want to make one thing clear. Yes, it is possible to write one book, make one video, or write one article that just skyrockets you to success. Maybe it's because you're already a celebrity, and so you have a million followers who are ready and waiting to snatch up your latest creation, leading to you making a hefty chunk of money. Maybe you just happen to hit the market in just the right way, at just the right time, and the zeitgeist decides that you are now going to be the hip creator for this cycle.
Can that happen? Sure. You could also buy a scratch off ticket and win a million dollars a year for life. For most creators out there, you're going to have to write, record, etc., a phenomenal amount of content, getting little spikes in activity here and there as a few new people subscribe, or become fans of your work, and word of what you're doing spreads a little bit at a time.
It's a marathon, and like marathons you have to keep going at a steady pace. And to maintain that pace, we often have to cut some corners to ensure that we can keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Take the above audio drama. The story Russian Roulette came out of my Geist: The Sin Eaters supplement 50 Geists, and it was used as a scene setter for that RPG supplement. I'd already written the story (and been paid for it), which meant that the script for this little audio drama was complete, and just waiting for me to turn it into its final form. This saved me a whole step in the process, and at least a day of work, which allowed me to make the audio drama much more quickly than if I'd had to write the whole thing from scratch, and then create the video for the Azukail Games YouTube channel (which you should check out and subscribe to if you want to see more stuff like this). This is, incidentally, why my audio dramas come from either my TTRPG content, or from my previously published short stories, like 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, which is something I wrote years ago.
This is far from an uncommon way of saving time and energy when it comes to making audio dramas in general, and a lot of video-based content specifically. Many voice actors out there will find stories that are freely available (whether it's fan fiction where the creator gives their consent, or works in the public domain that they can use for free), and they'll dramatize them to quickly add videos to their channel. Again, this saves them the effort of having to write scripts themselves so they can focus on making good dramatizations of these stories. And, to be clear, I'm not pointing this out as a mark of shame. A lot of creators are perfectly capable of writing really banging stories (A Vox in The Void and Niva The Puppet Queen are two that come to my mind), but doing the writing yourself adds to the overall amount of time it takes to produce a video, and it takes a far greater amount of effort, because you've added a whole separate task to the production.
And this doesn't just apply to videos; that's the easy example.
Another good example is one of the earliest TTRPG supplements I wrote for Azukail Games. 100 Random Encounters For On The Road, Or In The Wilderness is just a list of things you could have your characters run into when you're moving from one town to another. From huge ads for nearby inns painted on the side of big, flat rocks, to bounty hunters looking for bandits, to roving bears who seem to be searching for something, there's all kinds of odd little encounters on this list. And while the version linked above is meant to be system neutral, simply providing ideas that can be used in any fantasy RPG, we also released a version for Pathfinder, and another for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition that offered mechanics for certain encounters. These edition-specific versions were quite popular, as well, and over time the publisher also converted the supplement to a version for Zweihander, and another version for Castles and Crusades. Again, these versions have sold all right... but more importantly, it took far less effort to put out these conversions than it would have taken to write an entirely new supplement from scratch.
For me, the ultimate example of this kind of cost-cutting measure will be my book The Rejects.
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| Get a copy, if you haven't! |
I released this book back in 2020. I'd published my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife a year and change before, and I wanted to come out with something for the convention season so my readers would have something new of mine to check out (the book dropped in January, I had no idea the pandemic was coming). Since the other novels I had were in submission, I put together a bunch of my short stories that hadn't found a home in any anthologies, put them together into a collection, and put this out there for folks to check out.
It wasn't no work getting the formatting right, editing all the stories, deciding which order they were going to go in, and so on... but it was something I could do in a month, as opposed to the 10-12 months it would have taken for me to write a whole new novel.
It's All About Time, Energy, and Money
I'm going to be the first to admit that I really wish I didn't have to try to figure out ways to constantly produce fresh, new stuff at a break neck pace for people to check out. I would love to be able to just sit back and put out a novel or two a year, maybe write a long-running audio drama podcast (I mentioned this a while back in "Windy City Shadows," A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal for those who didn't see it), but the reality is that I don't have the resources to make that happen. I don't have a big inheritance I'm sitting on, I don't have a rabid fan base of thousands of people giving me money every month, and adding up all the royalties for all my work is basically enough for me to pay some of my bills at the end of the month.
As far as writers go, though, I'm still more successful than a lot of folks out there.
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| And I still qualify for every government aid program out there. |
Now, if one of my books spontaneously rose to the bestseller list? Or if I received a film rights contract to turn one of my short stories into a movie? Then absolutely, I could take a deep breath, and focus on those bigger projects. I could dedicate myself to making something a little more in-depth that didn't have to turn an immediate profit because all of my bills would be paid, and I wouldn't need to have the regular monthly spikes to keep my head above water.
But as long as a creator is scrabbling to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors, they need to make things with quick turnaround... and that usually means cutting corners until the thing we're producing is a pretty passable frisbee.
So keep that in mind whenever you ask yourself why a creator whose work you like is making a lot of stuff that feels like it's dipping back into the same well time and time again. And if you can, please support folks that you want to keep making art. Because it's that support that allows us to reach higher, and to make the bigger, more involved stuff like novels, podcasts, and even films that would otherwise be impossible.
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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 sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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