by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Launching a product is a pretty scary thing to do.
I launched a product several weeks ago, a poetry book that I spent about five months writing and editing and compiling. A couple of nights before the launch, I wrote this in my journal: “I have to admit that I’m feeling a little nervous about releasing the book, because there’s just so much in it that’s me.”
I felt terrified. I was afraid that no one would see value in the project or that they would be disappointed with the content or that they would never buy anything from me again because of that.
Here’s the truth about launching a product: It’s super scary. Nothing is assured. We don’t know how well it will do or what people will think or whether they will even get what we were trying to do. Writing is so subjective. Not everyone “gets” our kind of writing.
My release was a poetry book, and poetry is one of those things that people either love or hate, and I knew that putting myself out there was going to be a scary thing. But the other truth is this: If we are ever going to succeed at building a thriving business, we are going to have to sell our work.
I didn’t know if I could ask people to buy. Sure, I give out a ton of free content every week, but would people really care when it came time for me to sell something? Would they even pay attention? Would they be able to see the value in what I had done? Would they even remotely care?
But I stepped over that fear tripping around my ankles, and I did it anyway.
And the book did about as well as I thought it would do.
Leading up to the launch, I studied the work of Jeff Walker, a product launch expert, so I could gather every kind of tip there was about successfully launching a product. I followed his tips and released videos about my project and talked it up on social media channels and email lists. But there were many things I should have done differently. So I thought it would be helpful if I shared my mistakes with you.
But before I tell you what mistakes I made, I have to give you this disclaimer: When we’re new to selling products, we’re going to be finding our way into it. We’re going to be testing different theories, seeing what works and what doesn’t on a project-by-project basis. It’s important for us to know that we’re sort of in an experimental stage, because if we set our expectations for that first launch too high, we’ll get so discouraged we won’t want to do it again. Mostly because launching a product is a LOT of work. But it is worthy work.
If I know anything about this business at all, I know it’s built on persistence. We have to have persistence to become the writers we want to be.
My launch strategy was this:
- About a month before the release, I started letting my newsletter people know that I was launching a poetry book.
- I recorded three videos about the book, which I started releasing once a week three weeks before the launch. Video one was about the origins of the book—what made me write it and the inspiration behind it. Video two was about what I hoped the book would do—basically show people a piece of their lives in mine. In video three I talked about the layout structure and shared a couple of poems from it.
- The day of the launch, I sent out an email to my newsletter group to let them know the book was on sale and that I was running a 48-hour special on it.
- That same day, I shared a couple of poems at different times on both Facebook and Twitter.
- When 24 hours passed, I sent another email and did another social media plug, letting people know there were only 24 hours left to get it at the introductory price.
- And again, an hour before the book went off sale I sent another email and shared something on social media.
All in all, I shared about four of the book’s poems on social media during the 48-hour window.
After the launch, my husband (who is my branding and marketing consultant because he’s really good at what he does), and I assessed how it had done. Here are some things we learned:
1. The first pre-launch video was the most viewed, and each video’s views decreased as they were released.
This told us that the pre-launch content shouldn’t just be videos and that we needed to keep them closer together, since releasing them with a week between meant that people likely forgot that I was launching a book and that another video would be coming. So for my next launch, which comes Dec. 2, we will be launching a video a day to see how that works in terms of views and sales. I’ll be reporting on that launch as well.
2. Make a landing page, share it and point to it.
This is a crucial factor. No one signed up for my release notification list for my poetry book, because they didn’t really know about it until the day of the release. I mentioned it casually to my email list in that first email about a month before the list, but I never let anyone on social media or my blog know about it. We brainstormed ways that we could do this more effectively for the next launch, and we thought creating a landing page sooner would help, because when I’m mentioning the project, I can just point people to that page. So that’s what we did. On this new launch page, I have an intro video on the landing page, giving an overview of the project, and then the pre-launch videos will come closer to the release date.
3. Create open loops with the pre-launch videos.
Open loops are part of a story that will logically lead into another story. Think about series and what they do. They leave a few open loops so that people look forward to the next installment to find out what happens. That’s the same thing that needs to be done with pre-launch content. People need to finish that first pre-launch video and say, “I can’t wait to see the next one so I can close that question in my mind.” It’s part of our human nature to want to know what happens next, and story can do this really well when we’re willing to tell a story with our video content.
The pre-launch videos for my poetry book did not contain open loops, which could be why every video released after the first one had fewer views.
4. Generally talk about it more.
I know. I feel the same way. I hate selling myself. But the truth is, if I believe my work is worth having fans gathered around it, then I HAVE TO DO IT. Otherwise no one will ever know what’s happening. People signed up for my email list for a reason: they enjoy my writing. They’re a Facebook fan for a reason: they enjoy my writing. They follow me on Twitter for a reason: They find value in what I have to say. Surely they will enjoy knowing that I have more of that writing packaged up in a book.
For the next release, my husband has advised me to share something about it at least two or three times a week. So that’s what I’ll be doing.
In next week’s blog, I’ll discuss how to get better at product launches. (That right there is all it takes to create an open loop.)
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
I recently launched a poetry book called This is How You Know.
Before the launch, I did all kinds of research on product launches, consuming everything I possibly could to learn how to do this kind of thing in an effective way. I studied the work of product launch guru Jeff Walker and took extensive notes and made a plan and had evening meetings with my husband after the kids were in bed so we could try to create something that would interest people and encourage them to support my career as an author.
For the launch, I released three pre-launch videos, spaced a week apart so that, from start to finish, they spanned three weeks. The first video was met with some excitement from people who read me regularly and were happy to finally see a book on the market. The second one was met with fewer views. The third was met with hardly any views at all.
All of that lack of response made me feel guilty that I was “pushing” the videos on people, because at the end of them, what I was really trying to do was sell interest in my poetry book. And then came the launch week, and my husband, who is a content marketer and branding consultant, told me I’d have to kill it on social media and my email list, letting people know about the book and trying to get sales, and I groaned aloud.
We don’t always like to sell ourselves, do we?
I would much rather have someone else sell me. I would much rather have someone else talking about how much my book will help others. I would much rather defer to others when it comes to spreading the word.
It’s true that every week I give more than 5,000 words in free content away, but sometimes it seems like I’m trying to sell that, too, because I’m posting it on all the social media channels, and I’m letting people read the stuff that will eventually form the basis for book material, so it always feels like they’re doing me a favor by reading and sharing it.
But the reality is that my words provide value. My words help make a murky world clear. My words have a tangible effect on people, bettering their lives or giving them information or just encouraging them with humor and truth. So I’m giving. I’m giving and giving and giving, every single week, day in and day out, and I’ve never sold a thing to anyone before this poetry book.
We can feel like we’re not doing what’s right, because no one really likes to be sold to, but the reality is that what we have, the message we carry, the product we’ve developed, has value, and it has the potential to change lives and minds and hearts, and this is a valuable thing to do—that providing transformation in the form of words. So what we’re really selling is not the actual book but the transformation that comes from reading it. And this is a valuable thing.
What we have to offer holds value, and we have to get over this idea that people are doing us a favor by reading it and sharing it, because no one’s going to do those kinds of things as a favor. Do we give out those kinds of favors, or do we share things when we find value in them?
If we’re going to make a career out of our writing, we’re going to have to get over this not wanting to sell our products, because if we believe that what we’re doing is valuable, then we’re going to have to communicate that value in order to get it in the hands of the people.
And the truth is, if we’re indie authors selling our 70,000-word book for $4.99, that’s not a whole lot to ask of the people who follow us. That’s about the same price as the Starbucks they probably had yesterday. They get a whole story that could change their lives or show them a deeper truth, which is more than Starbucks ever did.
Next week I’ll be talking about all the things I learned about product launches from this poetry book launch, and the week after that I’ll be talking about how we can get better at product launches. But for now, I wanted to get this out of the way: We have to become comfortable with selling ourselves if we’re ever going to make this a career.
Here are some ways we can do that:
1. Recognize that what we have to offer holds value.
Maybe it’s just an entertaining story. People love to be entertained, so our offering has value. Maybe it’s just truth wrapped in the veil of humor. Well, the world could do with a lot more humor, if you ask me, so it has value. Maybe it’s something you’ve learned along your journey. Not everyone has learned the same thing, so they will find value in what you have to share.
There are people who would tell you that if all you’re doing is writing stories about yourself, people will never be able to find value in what you do, because there’s not an actual takeaway that has “takeaway” flashing in gigantic neon lights. Don’t buy into that. Your story has value to people because it’s you, and the right people will be able to see that. So believe in your value and then sell.
2. Understand that what you’re selling is not you.
What I mean is that when I was selling This is How You Know, I was not selling me. I was selling an opportunity for my readers to participate in the mystic art of finding themselves in a book of poetry. If we open our eyes widely enough, I believe we can see ourselves in any story or poem or song or essay. There are snippets of truth that hide in our story, that can change our audience for the better, and that’s what we’re trying to sell—the benefit to the reader, not the product in and of itself. With This is How You Know, I told my readers that I hoped they could find a piece of themselves in the poetry that recorded my everyday comings and goings, as I have done with countless poets over the years.
And, at the end of the day, if people don’t buy my book, that doesn’t mean they don’t like me. That they don’t find me valuable. Writing is a subjective field to be in, anyway, and sometimes we can put a little too much of ourselves in it. It can feel as though if a person doesn’t like what we sell or if they don’t buy it, they’re essentially saying something about us. That’s a lie.
I am so much more than the sum of my products. I am so much more than the sum of my art. I am so much more than the sum of my stats and shares and likes. It’s not easy to see this truth when we’re only selling our book for $1.99 and we have thousands of friends on our social media sites, and surely they’ll buy it, even if they don’t have a Kindle or they don’t like reading ebooks or they don’t even like poetry, because it’s only $2 out of their pocket. Except they didn’t, and now I’m wondering why they don’t like me.
We just have to break free from this. Whether or not we sell well does not change who we are.
3. Remember we are helping people.
It definitely isn’t easy to wrap our heads around this one when what we’re selling is entertainment, as in humor or even some narrative nonfiction. The value proposition is a little subtler, so we have to dig a little. But it’s also true that the human experience needs entertainment, and so we are really selling something that will brighten the world and make it more beautiful or fun or interesting. That doesn’t seem like such a hard sell.
4. Know we can’t give away free stuff forever.
This is really the long and short of it. If we’re interested in taking our writing from hobby to career, we have to get comfortable with selling things. It takes work to get there, but every product we launch is giving us more practice in the process.
So launch.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
By default, I’m a pretty competitive person. Put me in front of a board game with my husband and sister and brother-in-law, and I will try to tear it up in the winner’s circle (mostly, though, I just want to beat my husband). It’s not about proving my worth or declaring I’m best; it’s just something ingrained in my personality—doing my best at whatever I try.
This inherent characteristic can come back to bite sometimes when I sink into the comparison game. I start thinking I’m the one losing, because that person over there is so much more successful and doing so much better at building their audience than I am. There must be nothing left for me. Maybe I should just quit playing the game. Maybe I should find something else to do. Maybe I should stamp “Just not for me” on a silly dream.
When I fall into this black hole, I have to work hard to climb back out. I have to work even harder to convince myself that the only competitions we have is ourselves.
The only person we’re competing against is the person we were yesterday. The only writer we’re competing against is the writer we were last week, and the way to win this game is to improve day by day, week by week, month by month. That means getting better at word counts, at our writing technique, at the schedule we keep that maximizes all the hours we have in the most effective way we can.
There is no room for us to look at some other writer’s word count and think, “I must not be playing this game right, because he’s beating me by 10,000,” because the only writer whose word count we should be worried about is our own. Are we writing more words this week in the time we had than we wrote last week? Are we writing more efficiently today than we did a month ago? Are we expressing our ideas more clearly than we did a year ago?
Then we’re winning.
What I have to often remind myself is that we’re not playing against each other in the writing world. We’re all on the same team. And if we think we’re not, then we’re not going to make many friends in this business. And I may be a little biased, but I think writers are some of the coolest friends ever.
Some of my favorite people are the writers who so generously give away their tips and tricks for producing more words or helping me get to the next step of my career, who know and understand that we are not in competition with each other.
This can seem like a revolutionary concept, that there is no real competition, because don’t we all share products in this digital world that is overfilled with content?
Well, maybe I’m just idealistic, but I like to think that if a reader is paying attention to one writer, they will be more interested in paying attention to other writers, too. It doesn’t mean that my audience can’t become your audience or that your audience can’t become my audience. There are so many people in this world. There are enough to go around.
Let me say that again: THERE ARE ENOUGH TO GO AROUND.
There will always be someone, somewhere, who could learn something from you. There will always be someone who will find value in what you say. There will always be someone who will love you and your work.
If we can’t seen one another as fellow friends and colleagues along the journey toward lending the world beauty with our words, then we will miss out on the beauty of community. It’s in community that we become who we were made to be.
So compete with yourself. It’s a better-matched competition anyway.
How to compete with yourself:
1. Keep detailed logs of your word counts.
Lately I’ve been keeping logs of how many words I write for each of my projects and tallying them up at the end of every day. I’ve only done this for a couple of weeks, but I’ve steadily been adjusting my work and increasing my word counts, and this is super helpful as a writer with very limited time.
That said, some weeks we will obviously write more words than others. Those weeks we log 39,000 words are followed by a week with only 20,000 words, but that doesn’t mean that we are stalling (or moving backward) in our improvement. I try to think in terms of rough draft and final draft words. Rough draft words are easier to crank out. Final drafts take a little more time and effort. So keep track of both, and see if you’re getting better at each.
2. Learn all you can about this game.
I’m always reading books on structure and plot and characterization and business, because I believe that if we’re not always getting better, then we’re just getting stale. We should always pursue resources that will make us better writers, whatever that looks like in our lives. Compete against other weeks in how much you learn.
This is strategy. We can’t win against who we used to be if we’re not always trying to learn more and grow into better writers.
3. Set your own goals, without worrying about anyone else’s.
The reality is that your journey is your own personal journey. Maybe you have two kids. Maybe you have five. Maybe you work a full-time job. Maybe you’re doing writing full-time. Maybe you just got married. Maybe you live alone. All of those factors affect how many words you can write in any given week. So set your own word count goals, and don’t worry about anyone else’s. At the end of a week, assess how you’re meeting your goals and whether they need to be adjusted and how you feel about them (because if we’re stressing ourselves out with our goals, then they aren’t really effective goals at all).
4. Keep a writer journal.
I write in a writer journal most nights, or at least most writing nights (I don’t write on the weekends. It’s my family time). I write about how writing felt today, what I’m learning, things I really want to improve on and how I might turn those weaknesses into strengths. Sometimes I even work out plot lines in a less-formal way. I only write about 200 or 300 words every night, but those words have been great for helping me remember ideas and work out problems and analyze how that particular word count goal made me feel a little too stressed that week. Writer journals help us keep records we can refer to for years and years. I find this helpful.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
The last few weeks writing has felt really hard. I’ve been maintaining large word counts, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s felt like work. I find myself fidgeting and my mind wandering, and the focus just isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be.
So I set up a standing desk in front of my dresser, with books stacked to make the computer sit at a proper height, and when I feel my mind wandering, I do a little sway or I stretch my muscles or I just bounce a little on my toes, because movement gets the brain working much more efficiently than sitting sedentary for four hours a day.
But still, even though my makeshift standing desk has been helping me write faster, it hasn’t made the writing feel any easier. I thought maybe it was because I was coming up on a much-needed Sabbatical, but then I realized it’s more than that.
Right now I’m working on four fiction projects. I’m writing one of them in first-person point of view, but I’m writing the others in third-person point of view. I’ve never written in third-person before, so this is something that feels really hard to me as a writer. I don’t like doing things that feel hard, and that’s why my focus has been everywhere all at once.
Maybe I would get more words written if I switched those three projects to third-person point of view, and maybe I would be saving time with those projects, but I also wouldn’t be growing as a writer. It doesn’t serve me and my craft to only remain where I’m comfortable. If I only wrote in first-person point of view for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be growing at all as a writer. I might be getting better at first-person, but I wouldn’t be a well rounded writer. And mostly I just want to be a well rounded writer.
So I forge on. Every week I write in that third-person point of view for each of those projects is another week I get better at it.
We don’t gain anything as writers by staying where we are comfortable, in that small little space of comfort where we feel we can be good. Maybe even the best. Sometimes we have to write something bad—really bad—to grow as a writer. Sure, I write mostly literary fiction, but I’m trying my hand at some young adult romance and a mystery romance thriller and some sci-fi and fantasy, because I’m not really sure which one I’d like to do best. I just know what comes easiest—literary fiction in first-person point of view.
Writing will always feel hard when we’re trying something new, whether it’s nonfiction or new fiction ventures. But what we can know when writing feels hard is that we are getting better, as long as we don’t give up. It’s like when our first-grade teacher asked us to do a description of a vase of flowers, and we said all the normal things that first time—the flowers are yellow and the vase is white and the water is clear. And then, as we grow and practice and continue to write, we begin to notice that the flowers aren’t just yellow, but they’re the color of our sister’s hair, and the vase isn’t just white, but it’s white with tiny veins cracking it, and the water isn’t so much clear as it is sparkly, because of those bubble breaths the stems take.
Description, when we were kids, felt hard. I know, because I have an 8-year-old who doesn’t always like doing these exercises when he’s in school, because it’s not all that fun to try to describe something when you can see it right in front of you and so can everybody else. But you keep at it because you want to get better. You want to turn a picture in your head into a picture in someone else’s head.
We keep on, because we want to improve as writers.
So when writing feels hard, here are some things you can do:
1. Remember that it won’t always feel this hard.
Things feel hard when we aren’t used to doing them. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean we’re bad writers. I let my hard time with writing third-person point of view make me feel like maybe I wasn’t quite as good as I thought, but it’s not true. If something feels hard it only means we’re learning and growing as writers. It won’t always feel this hard, because the more we practice, the better at it we will get. One of these days, it will feel so easy we’ll have to move on to something else.
2. Take a break from the project.
It doesn’t have to be a long break. Sometimes our projects just need a day or two to breathe. Sometimes it just needs a little space to develop. So put it aside for a couple of days or a week even. Whatever it takes to look on it with fresh eyes, because the truth about when writing feels hard is that we don’t really want to do what’s hard. We don’t get any better if we’re not constantly challenging ourselves with things we don’t really know how to do.
We can use the break to learn something new. I spend time outside of writing constantly seeking knowledge and information, like how to write mystery stories or how to craft a good romance or how to best write a long-form essay, because it serves my craft to always be learning. Short breaks can be good for getting us unstuck and making writing feel a little easier. But not too easy.
3. Maybe it’s time for a Sabbatical.
If you’ve never had a Sabbatical, maybe it’s time to try one. I can always feel when my Sabbatical week is coming up, because my exhaustion is overwhelming and my love for writing is not quite as thick as it used to be. Writing begins to feel really hard. I write an average of 40,000 words every week, and that can be grueling for a writer if there is no rest between. Taking just a week away where I’m not working on any of my projects or posting on any of my blogs is enough to help me start the following week with fresh perspective and renewed love and energy for what I am so privileged to do.
I take a Sabbatical every seventh week.
4. Stare fear in the face.
Many writers have a fear of trying something new. We’re not alone. But if we’re only letting that fear rule what kind of stories and essays we’re producing, those stories will start to sound canned. Formulaic. Unoriginal. We have to be willing to throw wrenches into our projects, and sometimes that means trying something new or introducing a completely different character or picking a different point of view that we’ve never written in or giving ourselves a word count constraint. Constraints can be good for us. So can facing our fear and doing what we fear anyway.
No matter what, don’t let that fear tell you what you can and can’t do. Prove it wrong. Do it anyway, and watch how you become so much better as a writer.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
As writer parents, we may not have much time to write. I do most of my writing in 18 hours a week, and that’s probably stretching it for most parents—especially if you work another job.
But I used to do it for only 30 minutes a day. One thing that that helped me immensely with my limited time was brainstorming.
Some writers shake their heads at brainstorming. They don’t want to be put in a box. They want to go where the story goes. They want to use the freshest voice to tell the best story, and they want to be surprised just like their readers.
I used to be that writer. And then I discovered, through an experiment that tracked daily word count, how much brainstorming can speed up my writing. So now I use it all the time.
For my nonfiction work, I keep a brainstorming notebook readily available at all hours of the day. In it is a running list of all the blogs and essays I plan to write in the next week.
I don’t write on weekends, because I’ve chosen to spend my weekends with my children, but I always record in my brainstorm journal all the essays I plan to write in the coming week—the topics I’m exploring, the tone I’d like to take, the thoughts I’ve already had about them. I take this notebook everywhere with me, and when I’m sitting in my car waiting for my kids to get buckled, I look at the list and jot down random ideas. Sometimes they don’t even make any sense in terms of coherent writing. Sometimes they make perfect sense, but either way, I’ve found that when it comes time to write the articles, they are written in at least half the time.
I do things a little differently as a fiction writer. I used to fly by the seat of my pants. In fact, I’ve written three whole novels without a brainstorm. And then I started on a fantasy series that required lots of characters and lots of action, and I decided it would help keep everything straight if I just plotted it all out.
It took me about five hours to plot and plan about 20,000 words worth of brainstorm text, which will result in about 150,000 or more words of story. Because of all the effort I made to plan the story out, I worked much faster than I ever had. In an hour and a half I could log 6,500 words. That means if I was only writing on that story once a week for an hour and a half, I could end up with an entire rough draft finished in about 23 weeks—just a little more than five months. And if I worked on it more than once a week, it would get done even faster.
When I’ve written books without a brainstorm, the rough and final drafts have taken me longer. Mostly because the rough draft meanders, taking me to places that aren’t really needed in a final draft, and then I have to spend time cutting out large pieces of text and piecing together the rest. But in the process of brainstorming, you learn before you start writing what needs to stay and what can go. That’s valuable time saved.
Now. Brainstorming fiction doesn’t work for everyone. I totally get wanting to stay open with the writing and deciding you don’t really need a scene-by-scene synopsis before you start writing, but we’ll never know what works until we try it. For me, brainstorming has made my writing much, much faster, which is incredibly valuable as a parent pinched for time.
So if we’re parent writers and we’re limited on time, brainstorming might be something we want to try. Here are some things to remember before we brainstorm:
1. A brainstorm is not set in stone.
Just because the brainstorm says that A must happen and our character suddenly wants B to happen, that doesn’t mean we have to force the character to do A instead. We can defer to B, because characters usually know best. A novel doesn’t have to go by the book every single time, but if we’ve done our work brainstorming and getting to know our characters thoroughly before we even begin, we won’t likely be surprised a whole lot. It may still happen occasionally, but not often.
Sometimes, when I’m looking at a brainstormed nonfiction piece and it’s come to the day of the writing, I have a completely different idea about what I want to say. That’s okay. In that case, what the brainstorm helped me do is further clarify what I really wanted to say, which likely still saved me time and, inevitably, frustration.
2. Brainstorming will take some time, too.
But it’s not nearly as much time as writing a rough draft without a brainstorm, at least not in my experience. Mostly because when we’re just writing thoughts on a page, it’s going to take a few drafts to turn those thoughts and fragmented words into a final draft. If we’ve already gotten those fragments out in a brainstorm, our rough draft is going to look a whole lot like the final. What I’ve found when I’ve brainstormed an essay before I write it is that it doesn’t take very long to massage those rough draft words into a final draft, because they’re much more concise and polished from all the thinking I did beforehand.
But if we’re hoping that brainstorming will just eliminate the need to do a final draft, we’re going to be disappointed. We still have to put in the work to make our words the best they can be.
3. Leave adequate time between the brainstorm and the rough draft.
Time helps our subconscious work out any problems that we might meet on the screen or the page. Problems like wording or connection, because sometimes our brainstorms will come out random and unconnected and seemingly confusing. But when we allow space between the brainstorm and the rough draft, we can often work out all those problems before we even get to the actual writing. For my nonfiction essays, I try to leave at least a few days between a brainstorm and a rough draft and another day or two between a rough draft and a final (this means I have to work with a production schedule). For fiction I leave much longer periods of time, because it’s beneficial to take a longer break between drafts so you can read it with fresher eyes.
4. Brainstorming will feel hard at first.
I didn’t really know what to do with brainstorming at first. I didn’t know what I was supposed to write or how it was supposed to be done. But there is freedom in brainstorming, fortunately. There is no right or wrong way to do an effective brainstorm. No one will be able to tell us how, because it’s different for every person. Some people outline. I can’t stand outlining, so I basically dump. For nonfiction, I write points on my page, sort of like an outline but with no numbers. For fiction, I write in scenes, just jotting down all the scenes that will happen in a novel and then rearranging them in a way that makes sense (they might be rearranged later, too). I also do extensive character histories and analyses, because it gives more depth to y characters. I brainstorm all the possible settings for those scenes and everything necessary to create a new world, if I’m writing science fiction and fantasy. But when I first started, I didn’t know all this. I just wrote myself into a process that worked for me.
Don’t be afraid to find what works for you. And don’t believe that just because brainstorming feels hard it’s not for you. Keep trying. You’ll find your groove. And I think you’ll be glad you did.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
I can’t even tell you the struggles I’ve had the last few weeks. I’ve been cranking out enormous word counts, but they’re mostly rough drafts. I’ve been staying away from final drafts, because I just keep thinking, “I’m not doing this right. I’m not doing this right. They’ll all know I’m a fraud.”
If you’ve been a writer for long, you know that there are weeks like this. Sometimes there are whole months or years (God forbid) when the voices keep talking to us, stealing our courage. Your characters aren’t developed enough, they say. Your plot line sags in the middle, they say. Why in the world would you choose that point of view? they say.
Those internal editors can be a drag. I’ve gotten really good at ignoring them on the first drafts of my stories and essays, because all I’m really trying to do is get all my words down on a page without logical organization or readability per se. Sometimes I use abbreviations or the completely wrong word with an asterisk behind it because I’m just trying to get the words on the page, as fast as I can. When I need a new name for someone or I’m writing about a new place, I’ll often put a line where the name should be, because I don’t even stop long enough to figure out what I’d like to call it.
This works for me, because I’m getting words down on a page crazy fast. It’s why I can write 6,000 words in an hour and a half. It’s how I log an average of 40,000 words in a week of only 20 writing hours.
Not so for final drafts. Last week I blocked out three hours to begin writing the final drafts of episodes one and two of my Fairendale series. It took me a whole three hours to write about 3,000 words.
Part of it is because, up until now, I’ve written all my other novels in first person point of view. The Fairendale series is told by an omniscient narrator, which I have never actually done before. So I’m trying to get it right, and the entire time I’m trying to get it right, that pesky internal editor has been bothering me. “You’re not getting it right. They’re all going to hate this,” he says.
And I’ve believed him. I’ve wanted to quit writing the story altogether. And I would if there weren’t a lot of people (mostly my mom) who are really excited about this series and can’t wait to read it when I finally release it. That makes me want to finish it. It also makes me feel pressure to get it exactly right. I’m a perfectionist. I try to make everything 100 percent, even if people would be perfectly fine reading a story at 80 percent.
Internal editors can come to us at different stages in the process. Sometimes they come to us between the first and second drafts. Sometimes they come to us during the writing of our final draft, and we can’t seem to hear our gut over their shouting. Sometimes they come to us before we’re going to hit publish, and we can’t even do it. We just can’t.
Do you know what those voices really want us to do? They want us to give up. They want us to see that story written in a point of view that we’ve never tried before, in a genre we’ve never written before, and they want us to close it up and say it’s just too hard. They want us to forget that we can make mistakes.
That’s why, as writers, we have got to power through them. We have got to write anyway. We cannot let those voices dictate what we do next or how we write our story.
WE ARE WRITERS. WE CAN DO THIS.
Whatever “this” is.
We have the ability to challenge ourselves and grow and make mistakes and recover from those mistakes. No one who ever came to this business ever came to it perfect. As far as I know, no one has ever looked at their first books and said, “Wow. I was perfect then. What happened?” because just like we’re growing and learning as people every year of our lives, we are also growing and learning as writers.
So let’s get to it.
Here are some ways to beat the internal editors.
1. Try something new.
Write in a new genre. Write in a different point of view. Start a story from the middle and then figure out the beginning and end. Do whatever it takes to prove to those voices that you can do this and that you’re in it to stay. Right now I’m trying my hand at middle grade fantasy, middle grade science fiction and adult romance/thriller/mystery. I’ve never done any of these genres before (mostly because I typically write literary fiction in first person) and it is HARD. But trying something new is how we grow as writers.
2. Keep writing in that writer’s journal.
We talked about a writer’s journal last week. It’s important to see where we’ve come from and where we’ve been. A writer’s journal can help us make sense of our writing world and what kinds of things we need to do to eliminate the internal editors. Sometimes they come calling when we’re tired or burned out, and we just need a break. Sometimes they come because of fear. Sometimes they have a little grain of truth in them, and we need to learn something new along with trying something new. We can write about all of this in our writer’s journal, and when we feel them calling again, we can go back to the day they bothered us last time and know that we made it through that one; we’ll make it through this one, too.
3. Identify the voice of the internal editor.
Sometimes it’s an old teacher who didn’t really believe in us. Sometimes it’s a parent. Sometimes it’s just us. We have to know those voices.
I know that mine belongs to a creative writing professor from college, in his mid-to-late forties, with balding hair and a stubbly chin. He was the professor who didn’t like my writing in college, and I still hear his public criticism in my head sometimes. Sometimes I imagine a published manuscript in front of my old professor’s face, and me pointing at it saying, “Look what I did, Dr. Jerk.”
We have to know our voices to shut them up. So don’t be afraid to get to know that voice. They can only be damaging if we let them.
4. Take a short break.
Sometimes the internal editors come out because we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves (I was trying to make the final drafts perfect. That puts way too much pressure on a writer. Who decides when it’s perfect, after all?). Sometimes we just need to take a step back and give ourselves permission to fail and fail in an epic way. Failure is only another way to learn, so every time we fail, we get the opportunity to take that experience and turn it into something that benefits us by making us better.
Writing is a vulnerable pursuit. It takes courage to share and put ourselves out there like that. Internal editors can make us afraid, but they don’t have to have power over us if we don’t let them.
