When you’re working a day job, there’s a clear set of guidelines for getting stuff done: show up and get paid. There’s a performance review every year, and sometimes you’ll get feedback from your bosses and coworkers.
And yet these metrics have nothing to do with whether you actually accomplished something, do they? Not really. Which is why we all have that one coworker who does the bare minimum to keep the system off their backs.
When you’re a freelancer, things get more complex. How do you know when you’re getting stuff done? When you get paid. Except that many of the tasks that you have to complete, from doing taxes to hustling for new jobs to continuing education to doing advertising and promotions have no clear relationship between action and payment.
And sometimes it’s not so much a question of getting paid as it is how much you’re getting paid. Are you getting paid enough? Are you working on projects that will build your career, or projects that will disappear so thoroughly that you can’t even list them on your resume?
I had been measuring my getting-stuff-done factor by measuring word count. For the last two years, I had no problem breaking 500,000 words per year. Easy peasy. But most of that wasn’t on stuff that I was writing for myself, and a lot of it was on redrafting over and over the stuff that I was.
I actually did better for myself as a writer when I a) was working toward a number of rejections (100 per year), and b) having a goal of self-publishing one short story a week. And yet those goals won’t work anymore–I had less freelance work and more time on my hands back then.
I’m going to guesstimate that over the last year or so, for every ten thousand words I wrote for someone else, I wrote a thousand for myself, and then put maybe ten thousand of those out into the world.
I updated my process recently again, after searching around for something good over most of this year.
I’ve always liked Heinlein as a writer and have read most of his published work. (I know there are issues with him as a writer; that’s a discussion for another day.) He has these rules for writers, though, that I’ve always admired but never felt like I was a good enough writer to follow:
–You must write.
–You must finish what you write.
–You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
–You must put your story on the market.
–You must keep it on the market until it has sold.
Well, I’m following them now. With a spreadsheet.
I gain or add points based on how closely I follow the rules. One point gained if I write 1000 words. A hundred points if I finish what I start; a loss of same if I don’t. A rewrite costs me 25 points (spell checks and final cleanups are fine; I may give myself a pass so I can work on a plotting technique that I’m using to help me get past some weaknesses). A point for putting a short story out on the market; ten for a novel (each time–so 5 points for 5 short story rejections, or 50 for sending a novel out to five publishers). A hundred points for selling a story, OR for self-publishing it.
Ray says I get a treat for every hundred points.
It’s weird the ways your brain just automatically tries to game the system. As soon as I had this worked out and Ray pointed out that I should be rewarding myself, I went, “I should stop being a lunatic wuss and send out my Patreon files.”
It wasn’t until I sat down to write this post that I went, “And of course that would be 100 extra points.” I’m currently having this little mental argument over whether I should get separate points for this (the book’s already published, but clearly I have to bribe myself to post on Patreon at this point…). I think I’ll probably go with some extra points, but not the full 100, because that’s giving myself double points, and, and, and…
(Not counting the hypothetical posting-to-Patreon points, my total since September 1 is 19 points. Woot!)
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In other news…
I also read this other bit of advice where you should use some software program to randomly send yourself positive emails over the next week. I tried it but all the emails went to spam…[Sigh.]
I’ve completed two classes lately from Kris Rusch and Dean Smith:
http://www.wmgpublishingworkshops.com/
I finished “Advanced Depth” and “Character Development.”
Attached (for your curiosity) are three story openings from the last character development assignment. The general idea was to take the same event and the same character, but have three different secondary characters to accompany the main character through the event. The general idea was to have the main character at a bar or something, and just change who was sitting next to them and see how it affected the scene.
I completely missed on that part. What I found absolutely interesting was that the openings of the stories changed completely based on the type of secondary character was involved.
One of the openings involves a Sherlock Holmes character (with the main character being the Watson). Another involves a kid, the main character’s daughter. The third involves a team (like on many TV shows, where the main character, e.g., Dexter, has a cast of regulars who help them through their adventures–they may not be technically a “team,” but are definitely regulars the main character can draw upon as resources).
The Sherlock character had so changed the Watson character that, even retroactively, the Watson character had a much more secure outlook on the world.
The daughter character being put into focus made the main character even more insecure.
The team characters just felt silly–but were fun to write. For some reason I was stuck on the idea that the main detective wouldn’t be the main character, who was herself a minor part of the team that happened to be the center of attention this time and wasn’t really sure what to do with it.
The main event: an interesting-sounding boy from Ray’s school is found dead in a park by the main character. I would have gotten to the same event at some point in the story, honest!
Additionally, Dean suggested that we all try using ourselves as the main character a week earlier, too, which had had interesting results, so I used myself as the main character in all three versions this week, too. The openings were a lot easier to write than they would have been otherwise (not to say they were easy).
Anyway, have fun and see you soon,
De