What Schedule?

Beginning a column of counter-intuitive writing advice that likely only works for me. Here is the one time I will quite unironically recommend people do NOT do as I do.

I’ve come across a couple of writers who have written of their super-tight work schedules. The successful ones always perform specific tasks within a generally set time frame, so there honestly is no knocking this. You do want to be successful, right? 

Some might point out that this isn’t so much “intuitive” advice as it is obvious common sense. Well, you’d think, but it’s a big world full of people out there. For those, I invite them to bookmark this page, lest they pay others for this commonsense advice when I’m giving it away free:

Make a schedule and stick to it. Get up at a set time, sit down to do your emails and social media at a set time, schedule your edits and rewrites for a set time, and set aside a special stretch of time, at a precise time, to do your new composition. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be in that order. For instance, I’ve recently learned the best thing for me to do is ignore social media and emails for at least the first hour. Spontaneous writing first thing in the morning awakens the beast.

That’s a post for another time. The point is there must be order.

Of all the counter-intuitive advice I give—don’t join writers’ groups, don’t force yourself to write every day, etc.—this is the one time in which I say, “Don’t do what I do.” 

Lovely antiques, but I’m grateful for text I can correct onscreen before printing and a digital camera that doesn’t require me to wait/pay to have film developed.

I don’t have a schedule. I don’t even do deadlines. I find them oppressively irritating and self-sabotaging. 

My approach is leisurely, and would horrify most for its perceived waste of time. 

They’re entitled to their emotional distress and I’m entitled not to care.

Ooooohhh, 2 EDGY 4U!

Here’s what most people cannot be made to understand under threat of torture, but I’ll mention it anyway. I am not in this to make a whole lot of money right away. 

Oh, I intend to make money, all right. (By this point, most people are already confused.) However, my business model is to maximize income by selling a product that is as durable as it is readable. This means I need to take my time with it.

As the great dramatist Orson Welles would intone at the sad end of a great career, shilling for a mid-shelf adult beverage on a network television commercial no one remembers anymore, “We will sell no wine before its time.”

Pictured above is one of the greatest creative talents who ever lived. At age 22 he famously pranked radio listeners across the USA with an adaptation of War of the Worlds for radio that made it sound like the alien invasion was really happening. (The CBS reporter dying on air “live” as the Martian black smoke crossed the East River was the most memorably horrific scene for me.) At age 25 he would direct and star in what is widely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest films of all time, Citizen Kane. Orson Welles did lots of other stuff, too, any one of which we’d be happy to dine out on, but this is what most people remember him for, if they think of him at all: the fat guy selling supermarket wine on TV. Whenever I start hating on myself for being such an underachiever, I think of Orson Welles—and potentially destructive self-loathing becomes tolerably generic depression. You do what you gotta do.

I learned this lesson the hard way with the release of my second novel, Grace Among the Dead, in 2014. I’d hoped to finish that book mere months after the release of Bleeding Kansas, as I thought I could easily rewrite the proto-novel from which most of Grace’s story came.

That was a nigh-catastrophic error in judgment on my part. I’ll never forget that night I leaned back blearily in my chair and realized I had to drop what I was doing, and start going backwards in pages until I found the point where my narrative left the rails. Trying to edit a clumsily written text (this was my proto-novel, after all — Hemingway smartly threw his over the side of a boat) was a mistake.

For all the time it took, I might as well have started cold. In hindsight, I should have scrapped the whole thing and done just that. Instead, I spent an entire year slogging through for the sake of a few good scenes, with the battle with Bo Hemoth during the tornado being the centerpiece. Because I wanted so badly to turn my manuscript in at the same time I’d turned in Bleeding Kansas the year before, I submitted what I had of Grace Among the Dead at the time, figuring I had a good month to go through the manuscript while it was being processed.

The process I’d gone through with Bleeding Kansas the year before was accelerated, to say the least. I can’t blame the publisher. They’d waited a year already for this thing.

It was quite a tangle.

My misadventures in writing the third book would take several posts, but for our purposes here, I will state that my caution in regards to how everything looks and reads has played a large part in the years-long delay. If you’re on the indie scene, it’s a stone-cold reality you need to adjust to—Maxwell Perkins is dead. That is to say, the great and wise editor who will advise almost line by line how to go is long gone. You’re lucky to get properly proofread.

All of that is on us, the creators. And when you put it like that—creators—your responsibilities make a lot more sense.

However you choose to feel about it, it is what it is. It’s why I’m taking my time. It’s why I’ve revised Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead twice, because I want the tone and style running consistent throughout all three books.

These may be the only novels this old guy writes. They have to be right.

Meanwhile, you make a schedule and stick to it. Me, I’m doing this the only way I learned how.

Until I run out of road. 2018 was my Cancer Year. I need a new theme.