Writers, Are You An Ant or a Grasshopper?

There is an old story about an ant and a grasshopper. During the summer months, the ant begins preparing for the winter to come, but the grasshopper is just jumping around, playing his legs like a fiddle, and doing whatever his little heart wants. The grasshopper even mocks the ant for his daily work, saying that he's just wasting his summer by spending all this time working. Surely the work will wait, won't it?  And while the ant reminds the grasshopper that winter is coming, the grasshopper keeps blowing it off. As the leaves change color, and the temperature starts dropping, the grasshopper realizes he's in real danger. And while he tries to throw something together at the last moment, he simply didn't have enough time before the snow began falling.

Now, this story doesn't take into account the way these insects actually work, and the fact that surviving the winter isn't always a thing. However, the point of the story is a simple metaphor that we should easily grasp as writers; if you want to prepare for the hard times, you need to do the work now, while the sun is shining. Because if the snow is falling, it's probably too late to get started.

Left... left... left, right, left...

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No Summer is Eternal

I want to open with a little fact here. According to some, author Terry Pratchett only wrote an average of 400 words per day. A prolific novelist whose work had a rather large impact on literature as a whole, he managed that with an output that's shorter than some people's Facebook posts. The key here is that he did it every day, rain or shine, sickness or health. Because it may not sound like much, but 400 words a day is easily a novel a year. Two, depending on the length of the genre you're working on.

But you have to roll up your sleeves, and do the job.

You don't get here over night.

There are a lot of writers out there who do things for the love of the craft, or the enjoyment of the exercise. And, to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you are someone who just wants to create when the urge strikes you, or when the project is fun, that is perfectly fine.

However, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to write professionally.

I say that because, at the end of the day, writing is a numbers game (as is making YouTube videos, TTRPG supplements, audio dramas, or any other creative endeavor out there). The odds are not in your favor that the first book you write, or short story you tell, is going to be the thing that explodes. It's possible, absolutely, but not likely. And while the numbers vary depending on genre and conventional wisdom, I've seen it said that you need at least 10 novels in genres like sci-fi and fantasy, or 20 novels in romance, before you've built the momentum it takes to take your foot off the gas a bit.

Let's return to that earlier example. In fact, let's say that you were a little more ambitious than Sir Terry, and you wrote 500 words per day. This is my personal writing speed, and it allowed me to put together my dystopian sci-fi thriller Old Soldiers in 10 months, and the first book of the Hardboiled Cat series Marked Territory in about 7 months. So if you had roughly the same amount of fixes and changes that I did, you could hit that 10 books in 10 years. If you were a little more put-together and focused (or maybe you're more skilled than I am), you could hit it in 5 years. And if you were writing romance novels, you've got 20 years on average, 10 years if you're a tight writer.

That's how long it would take for someone who has a plan, and who has dedication to work on their stories every day, using a perfectly realistic word count. But now ask yourself how long it would take if you only wrote sporadically? If you only wrote a handful of weeks, or months, and then didn't get back to your manuscript until after the holidays? Or, worst of all, what if you wrote half the book, then just set it aside in favor of a new idea that had seduced you away from your original manuscript because it was young and fun, and it hadn't yet become a daily slog?

If that's the case, then you may only put out a book every 2 years. Or 3. Or it may take you 5 years to finally get it done. And if that book hits big, it's all good! But if it doesn't... well, as the words of House Stark say, Winter is Coming.

Final Thoughts

I want to be clear, here. This is not some kind of sigma-grindset, up-at-dawn, work-16-hours-a-day message. The point of this week's entry is to remind folks out there that if you want to make a living as a creator, then you typically have to make a lot of stuff... especially if you're not already famous for some reason (Instagram influencer, former national politician, film star, etc.). But making stuff takes time, and as they say, time is money. So if you're depending on the money your work earns to pay your rent, keep the lights on, and buy you food while you work on the next piece, you need to either produce your work quickly enough that you build up a suitable backlog, or you need to have some other source of income in order to keep the wolf from the door.

Lastly, this isn't about who's a real writer. If you write things, then you're a writer, plain and simple. But if your writing cannot pay your bills, or if you aren't able to make yourself produce that work reliably enough for it to satisfy a fan base, it's important not to put all your chips on a single number and let the roulette wheel ride.

Have You Ever Wanted To Be a Professional TTRPG Creator?

A bit of a hard segue, but I wanted to let folks know that I recently started a show titled Tabletop Mercenary, which can be found on both the Azukail Games YouTube channel, as well as over on my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary. On this show I talk about the business side of tabletop RPGs, what it takes to find success in this little corner of the publishing industry, and how folks can avoid the pitfalls I've dealt with for the past 10 years or so.

If that sounds interesting to you, then check it out, and subscribe to my channels so you don't miss a beat!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business 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 gangland noir thrillers starring Leo the Maine Coon Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Deadlines Are Really More Like Guidelines (If Your Publisher Didn't Set Them)

As most of my regular readers know, I'm no stranger to deadlines. When I started pushing my fiction writing career forward back in 2012, I was mainly submitting stories to anthologies. Each of those projects had a theme, a word count, and a submission date in order for my work to be considered. After two years of that, I got into a comfortable routine. I'd find a project I liked, spend a few weeks writing a short story for it, and while I let it cool, I'd get to work on the next piece. I'd edit the first story, send it to my betas, and have the next story almost done by the time the first one was submitted.

Nothing stops the machine.

It was a pretty sweet strategy, if I do say so myself. While not every story I wrote got accepted, a quick glimpse at my Amazon author page is enough to see I had a pretty good batting average when it came to short stories. However, after two years of publishing shorts, I decided it was time to get down to business. So I rolled up my sleeves, and got to work on a dystopian sci-fi novel.

I finished that manuscript, by the way, and I learned an important lesson while I was writing it. Unless the deadline is given to you by your publisher, or you've promised a really big fan following you'd be done by a certain date, then assigning yourself a deadline is just putting jump leads on your genitals for no reason.

Arbitrary Deadlines Are No Good For You, Or Your Book

I knew, in the front of my mind, that writing a novel was going to be hugely different from the way I'd been writing and submitting short stories. I knew, for example, that there wasn't a specific call for my book, and that I'd be playing publisher roulette when it came time to submit the manuscript. I also knew that, while there are general guides for word count, I had a lot more latitude with how long my novel could be than I ever did with how long one of my short stories could be.

Lastly, and most importantly, I knew in the forefront of my brain that I didn't have a deadline. But because I was so used to writing to a certain date in mind, I didn't feel right about starting until I'd marked out a finishing point.

Three days before the apocalypse ought to be fine.

I noticed as I was working along, though, that I was getting more and more stressed. This became particularly true whenever I hit a plot snag, and I had to delete the past two of three days worth of work in order to take the novel in a completely different direction. I was falling behind, even though it was impossible to fall behind, because there was no penalty if I didn't make the deadline.

Slowly, I began to realize something; books work on their own timetable.

This wasn't my first manuscript, but it was the first one I'd written after years of working as a one-man fiction assembly line. And while there were similarities between the two endeavors, the sheer scale of writing a novel rendered a lot of the hard-and-fast rules I'd been using for shorter projects irrelevant. In the end, I was adding new word count to the project every day, and I was working my way along the blueprint I'd created at the beginning. Did it really matter if I finished my novel in December 2015, or January 2016? Were a few days, or even a few weeks, going to make that big of a difference?

Not really.

Finishing a novel was, in a real sense, like deciding I was going to lose weight. If I went to the gym, changed my diet, and kept making my goals, I'd see the results I wanted. If I set an arbitrary goal to weigh a certain amount by the end of the year, though, then it's possible I would have done some unhealthy stuff just to meet the meaningless deadline. Cut out meals, overworked myself, lost water weight, all so that a number would be at a certain point at a certain date. The same is true with a book as with your body. The closer you get to that date, the harder you crunch, hoping to slide in by the deadline. However, ramming extra word count into your book, and rushing through the closing chapters so you can get to the end isn't going to do you any good. Worse, it's just stuff you're going to have to fix in the editorial phase anyway.

There's No Rush

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. If you were building a house, you wouldn't just jam some plywood under the eaves, call it a wall, and be done with it. If you were building a car, you wouldn't spin the lug nuts halfway on, and duct tape the headlights in place just so you could finish faster. In much the same way, cramming in word count to reach a deadline that doesn't matter won't help you or your book.

Seriously, take your time.

Think of your writing like a weight lifting routine. Getting through the routine is important, but so is maintaining your form, and your control. If you sacrifice form and control you can get through it faster, but it's just going to hurt you in the long run. So take a breath, relax, and remember that unless your name is already on a contract, you've got all the time you need to get this done.

As always, thanks for stopping by to see what I've got to say. If you'd like to support me and my blog, then why not visit The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a patron today? Also, if you haven't done so yet, why not follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter?