by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
One of the most challenging things a writer has to do is publish or, if you’re looking for an agent, send that email.
I say challenging because we can work and work and work on our manuscript and never feel like it’s completely done. There is always something more we can do. We will always find a place that could be better, a weak spot that could be strengthened, a change that would make what we think is a big difference.
So how do you know when it’s finished? How is it ever finished?
I used to be one of those writers who would tinker and tinker and tinker with my projects. In fact, before I began self publishing, I rarely ever published anything and often felt really inhibited when it came to sending my work to agents. Even now, I have an agent who is representing a manuscript that we have edited three times so far. And it has not yet sold, which means that when it does, there will be more edits.
The problem is that skilled writers are perfectionists when it comes to our work. We want it to be the best that it can possibly be, and this is a great thing. This means that already we’re above the cut of many of those who self-publish. But our perfectionism also has repercussions, because it makes it really, really difficult to publish or share anything. We get in our own way. We think that before we let our public see what we’ve written, we have to do our best work.
Here’s the thing, though. Our best work today was not our best work yesterday. Our best work tomorrow will not be our best work today. We are constantly, intentionally improving, and that means that if we don’t release what we have today, we will never release it. Because we will never stop getting better, we will never stop learning more about our craft, we will never stop writing better things tomorrow than we did today.
I feel like I need to say this again: What you produce today isn’t as good as what you will produce tomorrow but it is better than what you produced yesterday.
There is a good and viable reason that we should release our project today rather than tomorrow, and it is this: Releasing projects throughout a number of years provides a clear map of our growth.
A clear map of growth is the most effective way that we can beat our perfectionism and grow more comfortable releasing our work as we produce it. The book that is out with my agent right now is a really good one. But it is not my best, because my best work will come in the future. I know this, so I can afford to write The End on that project and move on to the next one. Every project from here on out will be better than the last.
Now. There is a difference between hesitation in publishing because you are crippled by perfectionism and hesitation because you intuitively know that something is wrong with your project. If you know that something is wrong with your project, please fix it. Don’t release it. But if your project is good enough, if it is your best work today, release it. You owe it to yourself to record how you will improve over the years. This is how we gain mastery. This is how we beat perfection.
Your work today is never going to be perfect, because if you are doing what you are supposed to do—improving your writing day by day by day—you will never reach perfection. That sounds negative, but it’s really not. It’s a good thing. We don’t want to reach perfection. We only want to master our best work today.
Here are some suggestions for how you can release your work rather than revising it forever:
1. Make a deadline.
I carried this from my newspaper days, but it has been vital in helping me stay on track with publishing goals and book ideas. I set a deadline for myself, and sometimes it’s even a movable deadline, because I know by now that I will release my project and I will not tinker with it forever. I don’t have time to tinker with it forever, because there are many more stories that need to be told. So make a deadline and reward yourself for meeting it.
2. Practice finishing in small ways.
I blog every week, which means that every week I have to finish something and hit publish. This has given me practice in good enough. I also attribute my newspaper days to my ability to call today’s work good enough. When you write stories every day that will print in tomorrow’s newspaper, you reach a certain point where there’s simply nothing else you can do. You can’t get any more quotes, you can’t add to your graphs, you can’t change your lead for the thousandth time. You finish. And you do better tomorrow.
3. Do what you can to learn and grow so you can become more confident in your skills.
Publishing anything was definitely more difficult in the beginning of my career. I didn’t yet feel confident in my abilities. But after working full-time as a writer for more than three years now, it’s really no big deal for me to publish something. After millions of words written, I am confident in my storytelling abilities. The more you practice, the more you will be, too.
Don’t be afraid to release your work now, today. This is not the only work you will create—or at least I hope it’s not. If you’re in it for a career, there will be many more years of creating—and your work then will be miles better than your work now.
Week’s prompt
“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”
—Jean Racine
Write an essay titled “On Secrets.” Write about why we keep them or what yours are. Don’t worry. You don’t have to show anyone if you don’t want. If you do want to show someone, it might be safer to disguise the “essay” in poetry.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Earlier in the week, I was assaulted by debilitating doubts. This is something that cycles through every writer, and I know this. I’ve spoken about this. But still, when I was faced with my latest manuscript, trying to get it ready to send to my agent, all I could hear was, “She’s not going to like this. What will I do if she doesn’t like this?”
There was so much pressure on producing something amazing, that I could not produce anything at all.
So I logged onto Facebook, typed a message to my mastermind group, and waited to hear from them. The encouragement came pouring in. “Every writer goes through these times of doubt,” they said. “You know your writing is good enough,” they said. “There’s always something else you can do if it doesn’t work.”
All things I knew. All things I had momentarily forgotten.
This is what community can do for a writer.
I’m a part of several different communities. I have early readers who read first drafts of my work, I have writers groups where I ask questions and sometimes answer others’ questions and interact with people who have the same goals I have. I have a mastermind group where I pick master writer brains and listen to their professional opinions. These are all important communities to be a part of. Writing can be a lonely profession, and in order to thrive at this work, we must have groups to which we belong with people who can encourage us, provide feedback and sometimes just stand in solidarity.
Here are a few of the benefits that a writing community can give you:
1. Feedback.
Groups exist where you can get early feedback on manuscripts, blogs, nonfiction books and ideas and collect helpful suggestions for how to improve your manuscript or strengthen some weak spots. These are valuable perks for being a part of a community.
2. Encouragement.
I’ve already mentioned that encouragement is a big deal. Writing is mostly mental, which means that some days we’ll crumble under that mental burden. Everybody does. That’s why it’s helpful to have a community of people who understand that today you only wrote 50 words because you couldn’t get out of your own way.
3. Tips and tricks.
Some groups exist just to provide tips and tricks for writing mechanics, career choices, business decisions, etc. These are helpful groups to have in your array, because many have been where you are and have helpful things to say about their own mistakes and what they wish they’d done.
4. Connect.
Being a part of a writing community helps connect you with other writers and experts in their field. This can open up the opportunity for collaboration or introduce you to industry contacts. My writers groups are populated with professional editors and cover designers, too, which makes it really easy to secure services when I need them.
Being a member of a writing community is a vital part of becoming an expert writer. Feedback is essential. Interaction is essential. And learning from the mistakes of others (and our own mistakes, of course) is also essential.
Being a member of a writing community can also present its challenges. We’re parents. It’s really hard for me to get out of my house and attend a local Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators meeting on a Saturday, because children. I attend the ones I can, and I stay informed, and I find other groups in places like Facebook or through paid community sites. I don’t prefer online, of course, but sometimes this is the best we can do when we’re a parent.
Our kids won’t always need us, and I want to enjoy this time when they’re little, which means I have to excuse myself from things for a while. Don’t feel badly if you have to as well. But do find some kind of community that will work. Because writing is tough. And community helps carry us through the shaky places.
Find your community and watch your writing thrive.
Week’s prompt
“If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.”
Susanne K. Langer
When you were a child, were you encouraged to ask questions? How did this encouragement or discouragement help or impair you? How do you approach questions today? (Use this exercise on your character.)
Or write about the right kind of questions that should be asked.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Last week I talked about the power of purposeful practice, and one of the most important perquisites to purposeful practice is knowing our strengths and weaknesses. While we want to practice our writing strengths, of course, to hone them into even greater strengths, what we really want to focus on when we’re practicing is our weaknesses. But in order to even begin the process of strengthening those weaknesses, we first have to know them.
(I do want to say, however, that we can’t just focus on our weaknesses, because that’s demoralizing. We know plenty of our weaknesses, so every now and then it’s perfectly fine to celebrate our strengths. What I’m talking about here is not to dwell on our weaknesses but to extract them empirically so that we can practice through their challenge and actually turn them into strengths.)
I’m also not just talking about our weakness in the writing mechanics. I’m also talking about the many other weaknesses that can beset an author—things like productivity and writer mentality and the sort of things that can put us on a fast-track of feeling stuck and inefficient. We need to know our weaknesses when it comes to actually writing, and we need to know our weaknesses when it comes to reading our own writing or engaging with our writing.
For example, I know that every now and then I will be almost crippled by a voice that says, “You’ll never be able to top that last one.” Sometimes that voice is really, really loud. But I also know that I will top that last one. It may not be with this next project. It may not be with the next project after that. But I will top it, because I’m always growing and learning.
Other people know they have a weakness for the backspace key. So something they can put into practice is writing without hitting delete (which, by the way, slows you down way too much for a rough draft. A rough draft doesn’t even have to be readable. It just needs to get the story or the thoughts down on paper. The hard work comes in the revision).
As far as writing mechanics are concerned, I mentioned last week that I know I have a weakness when it comes to establishing the settings of my books. Settings are important—not for every book, but for many. And because I want to have this skill—creating vivid settings—in my arsenal and actually choose whether or not I want to use it, rather than avoiding it altogether, I want to master this weakness by purposefully practicing it.
This is the self-awareness I’m talking about. We need to know, as writers, where we get hung up, where we don’t write as well as we need to, where we lose significant time or feel uncomfortable. How do we get to know these places? Many of them we’ll know intuitively. But one of the things that I’ve done to increase my self awareness in the past few years is something called morning pages.
Morning pages are something I do every morning at 4:30 a.m. I write three whole pages, and in them, I will dump everything that’s in my brain, which usually takes about two pages. And then, for the last page, I’ll write about the things that feel hard to me, or the places where I’m struggling in my writing. I’ll never let anyone read these pages, but they have been helpful for me in sorting through my weaknesses and recognizing where I need improvement.
Here are some questions we can ask ourselves to identify some of our strengths and weaknesses:
- What feels easy? (These can be strengths.)
- What feels hard? (These will likely be areas that need improvement.)
- What do I want to improve?
Sometimes our improvement areas are not just things that feel hard, they’re weak places we’ve noticed in our writing. Mastery becomes more important to us as we notice the techniques of other writers. Sometimes what sticks out to us in the books we read are the places in our own writing that we most want to improve. Our brain has a nifty way of bringing those things to the forefront.
It can be difficult to become more aware of the places where we struggle in our writing lives. But with practice, and with recording, we’ll begin to see patterns, and after we see patterns, we can work on a plan for improvement.
Because a writer who is not constantly improving purposefully is a writer who will never gain mastery.
Week’s prompt
“I dwell in possibility.”
Emily Dickinson
Think about positivity. What does it mean to live positively, to believe in the good? Where is the border between optimism and pessimism? Which do you identify with more? (Use this on a character to discover their attitude about the world).
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Purposeful practice is a term I picked up from Anders Ericsson, who is a Swedish psychologist who has, for many years, studied expertise and human performance. He recently came out with a book called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, which detailed how anyone can become an expert at anything they want.
One of the most important things we can do to become an expert is to engage regularly in purposeful practice.
Whenever we start talking about expertise, there’s this one number that has become really popular in detailing how long it takes to become an expert. It’s the rule of 10,000 hours, in case you haven’t heard this. But that 10,000 hours varies greatly among experts. Some have to put in far more than 10,000 hours and some far less. It all depends on how you practice. If you put in purposeful practice (as opposed to just practice), you’ll be able to master something at a faster rate than someone else who only practices the same thing every day.
So what is purposeful practice, and how can we, as writers, make sure we’re doing it?
Here’s one of the best ways to become an expert writer: choose one aspect of writing that you consider a weakness—such as dialogue or the ability to craft a realistic setting or your ability to craft funny one-liners in your essays—and once you have only one thing, work on it over and over and over again, until you see a marked improvement.
Now, obviously, there’s more to this than just choosing something and working on it over and over. But before you begin a plan of action, you first have to know what you want to work on, which means you have to know your weaknesses.
I know that one of my writing weaknesses is crafting good descriptions. So this year, I’m working on descriptions. I’m carrying around a description journal so I can make sure that I’m paying close attention to the world around me, which is only the beginning of becoming a great describer of the world. I also set aside fifteen minutes every day where I can work on this specific writing process. I copy down great descriptions from books and try my hand at recreating them. I evaluate all of my progress. This is all purposeful practice.
Writing is hard to quantify, so this might seem a little abstract to you. But we also intuitively know when something feels hard and when it feels easy during the writing process. So the first step in purposeful practice is to evaluate what our strengths and weaknesses are. If we never explore our weaknesses, they become limits instead of potential.
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I’ll talk more about this next week, but that’s all you need to know for now.
Once you have explored your weaknesses, it’s time to make a plan for turning them into strengths. Here’s how you do that:
1. Make a goal.
State how, specifically, you would like to improve. Something like “Write a description of a mountain range so effectively that someone who has never seen it can envision it in his mind” is a good, specific goal to have for a practice session. You can use your kids to test whether or not you’ve succeeded.
You’ll want to have larger goals, of course, but purposeful practice works best if you take those larger goals (one like “Write descriptions like Jonathan Stroud”) and break it down into smaller, more doable goals.
Ericsson says, “The key is to take a general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation for improvement.”
I know a writer who is crippled by the backspace key. So I made him commit to writing with touching the backspace key for a whole six weeks. He’s in his third week now and has already seen improvement.
2. Focus.
In order to improve anything, you have to focus on it. Eliminate distractions, and give the practice session your full attention. Take just fifteen minutes a day and practice on your specific goal. If you do it for the entire fifteen minutes, you’ll find that not only will your focus improve, but your skill will improve exponentially.
3. Solicit feedback.
You can assess your own practice writing, or you can get someone else to do it—whether a group or a teacher or even your children, if you write children’s books.
To assess it yourself, pay attention to what parts of your purposeful practice cause you problems. Make notes on it. Some of my notes include things like, “This one felt hard” and “My word count here was atrocious, because I couldn’t get it going.” Those notes tell me how I can further improve—continue working on what feels hard.
I have set up a feedback loop for myself, because it’s often difficult to get out of the house or talk with another person, because kids. Here’s what the feedback loop looks like:
At the end of every week, I ask myself questions like:
What is working in these practice sessions?
What is not working?
What has been effective when I’ve tried it?
What did I do well in my writing?
What can I still improve?
What is one specific thing I will do next week to make sure that I continue improving?
These are usually questions that I answer for the business side of things, but they would also work wonders with the writing side. When we take a step back from our writing, we can look at it with impartial eyes. Don’t be afraid to admit it’s really bad. We all start somewhere.
You can also set up a feedback loop by identifying the experts in your field (I usually study the award winners), marking down passages that strike you as particularly good, and trying to rewrite them in the same way they do—not so you plagiarize or absorb the voice of another writer but so you understand where your weaknesses lie.
4. Challenge yourself.
Ericsson says this is probably the most important part of purposeful practice.
In order to see improvement in any part of our lives, we have to first be willing to step out of our comfort zones and challenge ourselves. Our goals can’t be simple things that we’ll reach in a week or two. Make your goals big, something that will take a year, at least, preferably longer. One of my lifetime goals is to win a Newbery Award. In order to do that, I have to learn how to write like a Newbery Award winner, which means I have to practice the skills that are weak, and, as I talked about in the last several weeks, I have to study and read and constantly learn.
I have to step outside boxes and try new things and fail at them, too, because it’s all a road to improvement. We think of failure like it says something about us, but all failure can be used to improve. It’s always a learning experience.
I hope you have a wonderful week and some majorly productive writing sessions.
Week’s prompt
“Violence is a calm that disturbs you.”
Jean Genet
Write about something that was violent and disturbing, either in your life or in the life of someone you know (or one of your characters).
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Believe it or not, I meet a lot of people who want to write well but say they don’t read. How do you know what good writing is, then? I don’t think we can, outside of reading widely and voraciously, and here’s why:
If you read often, you are picking up things that you don’t even notice. If you’re reading fiction, you’re picking characterization, point of view, dialogue, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and story structure, among other things—all of which is important for writing your own stories. You can study those elements on your own, of course, but until you see them in action, in a story, they will remain abstract concepts.
If you are reading nonfiction, you’re also picking up characterization, sentence structure, idea organization, grammar, spelling, point of view, humor techniques (if you read humor), and the shape of nonfiction.
These things happen with your even trying.
I’ve said before that one of the most important things you can do for your writing career is to make writing a habit. I believe that making reading a habit is even more important than that. Not much more important, but still more important.
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Becoming a good writer doesn’t start with writing. Becoming a good writer starts with reading. Reading introduces you to new ideas that broaden your understanding, whether or not you’re actually reading about writing. Reading, as I’ve said, shows you technique and, if you pick the right books, what mastery of language looks like. These are crucial to your writing. If you don’t read, you will not become an expert at writing. You might be able to become a decent writer, but you will not achieve expert status, because to know good writing, you have to read it. To know bad writing, you have to read it. You contain within you all the stories you have read in your life, and the more stories you read, the more skilled you will become at writing them, as the techniques and ideas of other writers flow out of your subconscious.
I believe our subconscious will pick up on these things without our even thinking about it. But if we want to learn more and faster from the texts we read, we’ll have to take notes and analyze what we like and don’t like about passages or books as a whole. I do this with about half the books I read every month, because it gets exhausting if you do it for every one. Here are some questions I ask myself when I read a brilliant passage:
- What do I like about this passage?
- How did the writer do this?
- What can I learn from this text that I can apply to my own writing?
Reading in this way puts us on the fast track toward excellent writing.
Some of you may be thinking, well, that’s great for you, but I don’t have time to read. So I want to close with a few quick tips for making habit a reading:
1. Grab every moment.
If you’re waiting in line at the store, pull out a poetry book. If you are driving in your car, listen to an audio book. If you typically scroll through social media at night, pick up a book instead. Your brain and your eyes will thank you.
2. Find opportunities to read with others.
Start a book club. Read with your family. Make a goal for how many books you’ll read this year, and tell someone, or, better yet, drag them into it, too. All of this can become accountability, so the next time you reach for your smartphone, a little voice in your head might say, “Maybe you should read instead.” If you’re my husband, that voice would be mine.
3. Reward yourself for your efforts.
Sometimes, when we’re not used to reading anymore, our attention is hard to hold. So reward yourself for the days you spend 30 minutes or more reading. Build up your attention span. It can be done. You just have to practice, it, like everything else.
I believe that reading holds the keys to a better, kinder society that could even eradicate poverty, which is why I choose to write more books. But that’s a story for another day.
For now, work on your habit of reading, and watch your writing skills flourish.
Week’s prompt
“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”
—Margaret Mead
Write about the nuances of caring. What does caring look like to you? What did it look like to your parents, your siblings, your friends? What is the relationship between these acts of caring and love in your mind? Can caring be used for ill gain? How? (You can use the same exercise for your character.)
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
On the surface, this seems like a really obvious improvement tactic: Study the writing craft, and you’ll become a better writer. But you would be surprised how many writers I hear from who say they don’t really like to read writing craft books. They don’t really learn anything from them.
To which I say, that’s a shame. We learn quite a lot from reading writing craft books, even if it reiterates everything we already know about story and story structure, point of view, writing great essays, writing poetry. Even if we know everything there is to know about every facet of writing, which I certainly don’t and I suspect no one does, there is value in reading about and studying our craft.
I have bookshelves full of writing craft books I’ve read and ones that are still waiting to be read. Many of them say the same things. Many of them teach on story structure and things I already know inside and out. I still read them. Why?
Well, here’s what studying writing craft books can do for you:
1. They teach you techniques you might not yet have mastered.
I have yet to attain my standard of mastery at any writing technique, which means that every time I read a writing craft book that reviews a technique, I am cementing it more in my mind. I’ve read more than twenty books on story structure. That knowing is etched pretty deep, but I’ll snatch up any new story structure book that comes out and devour it, etching the information even deeper. Do you know what happens when information is etched this deep in a brain? It becomes effortless to access it. When story structure is part of your brain’s neural network, you don’t have to think about stories anymore. You can write them intuitively.
There’s some advice that’s often repeated in business, and it’s this: In order to begin know and understand something, you have to hear it seven times. That means to even approach mastery of a particular aspect of writing, you must have read or heard about it seven times. Writing craft books can help with that.
2. You learn how to break the rules.
Of course there are rules to any sort of writing that we do. Some of us don’t like to abide by the rules, but if you want to break them effectively, you have to know them first. Writing craft books lay out all the rules. And when we read them consistently and voraciously, those rules, again, become part of our neural structure, so the next time we decide we’re going to break the second person point of view rule for an essay or a story, we’ll know how to do it well instead of doing it in a way that distracts the reader and pulls him or her out of our story. The more you understand the rules of writing, the more effectively you can break them.
3. Your brain understands that writing is important.
When we spend time learning about our craft, in addition to practicing our writing, we signal to our brain that this is important information. When we read multiple craft books that etch knowledge on story structure, on essay setup, on how to write short stories, into our brain’s neuronal structure, our brain takes notice. It says, “Hey. She’s already been over this. This must be important.” And the more we read, the more we tell our brain that it cannot get rid of these neurons, because we need this information.
Think about it like this: I took two years of high school chemistry and a year of college chemistry. I was really, really good at chemistry. But I have not used that knowledge since my first year of college, and today, the best I can do is fire off a few elements from the periodic table. I once had the entire table memorized, but because I didn’t use that information, my brain did not see the need to keep it. It’s gone. I’ve got K, potassium, H, hydrogen, O, oxygen, Na, sodium, Cl, Choride. That’s about it. Sorry Mrs. Patton.
Reading writing craft books alerts our brains that we are interested in learning more about writing, and it will supply the necessary pathways for us to grow and develop and become better writers. Before long we’ll be reaching toward mastery and writing books faster than ever before.
Next week I’ll have a list of some of the best writing craft books I’ve read in the last several years. I have many more that are waiting on my bookshelf, waiting to be read. But the list will at least get you started.
Week’s prompt
“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
–Gustave Flaubert
Write about an unbreakable routine in your life or your character’s life. What do you (or your character) do every day, without fail? Why?
