Comments (0) Okay, okay they are LATE! Sue me. I posted my results from last year’s goals in the previous post. Well, I’ve been busy. Not slacking, working! Yes, yes on my goal targets. Hey, I had them I just didn’t POST them!
This year’s goals are presented by: my sons Thelen and Walker (no name comments, please), my dog, Kyra, and my Nelson’s Albino Milksnake, Audrey Lou.
I set goals last January like I do nearly every year. I use SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. An example of a smart goal is: I will write 1000 words per day 28 days of the month. Or: I will complete the first draft of my novel by December 31. What these goals have in common is that I control the outcome. I didn’t add a goal whose outcome teetered on something out of my control like: I will land SuperAgent Mary Jones by June 3. That’s not a good goal because I can work as hard as possible and still not succeed if Mary doesn’t want my work. Don’t write goals whose outcome depends on the actions of other people or forces.
The best goals are measurable in simple ways and can be tracked on a regular basis in something like a spreadsheet or calendar. Daily word counts that you log and monitor are one example, but you can also think about how many potential agents you need to research, classes you want to take or critiques you want to do. When you think about goals think about how you will measure your success.
Finally, make sure your goals are attainable. Nothing is more depressing than a goal that is beyond your current skillset. Stretch goals are great and encourage you to reach just a bit farther but not so far away that you fall out of the tree.
So onto my goals! I always have fun with them. This year I used animal pictures taken during my African vacation for fun illustration, and used a comic layout. But for the goal report, I’m keeping it simple.
So what did I learn? I seem to be able to write at a pretty good clip; however, next year, I likely need to focus more on finished output and less on piles of words. lol. Averaging 2,000 words per day is a decent goal, and I am likely to keep that for next year as I know I can do it and plan to continue writing 2,000 words per day.
I need to focus on getting more critiquing done. I fell short on this and that’s not good because an excellent way to learn is to review others’ works. And I would like to take an in-person workshop next year.
The next step is to use these goals and their results to develop next year’s goals. I’ll take a few days to do this, but you can be certain that when I publish my 2011 goals they’ll be SMART… and will include completing a finished manuscript in less than 5 drafts. ROFL.
I’m an audiobook nut. My iPod is filled with a few songs ~200MB and 31.8 GB of audiobooks. I kid you not. I “read” many books by audiobook. If I have any random mindless task, my earphones are in and I am listening.
When I am trying to master some author’s technique I often buy the book in print and as performed by a reader. I often read along while I listen to see if I would have read the passage the same way the reader interpreted, using the same inflection and emotion.
I am amazed by how often I would not. At least on a first reading where I didn’t know the characters or story. The audiobook readers bring extra emotion into the story, they add their interpretation of what the author intended. I think this is interesting for an author to consider when writing.
Aspiring authors are told to read aloud. I do, I read most of what I write aloud in my voice with lots of emotion and inflection. I pace my office and terrify the dog.
When I read my own work aloud to other people, I’ve heard the comment that what I read was great, and interesting and they wanted more. One person commented that when I read, the story and my characters came to life. Now she didn’t say that it was lifeless on the page, but I’m not an idiot! lol. Clearly, I hear emotion and inflection in my head that sometimes does not ooze out onto the page. Interesting.
I spent some time breaking down some of my writing that I had read before an audience. I did find that I tend to be spare in my emotion in certain areas. I tend toward subtlety and understatement. Now that I know this I can beef up areas of my writing that need to be emotional. I can use my own lively reading style as a double check on the emotional content of my words.
And the audiobooks? I just love them. I do. lol.
Sounds like the opening line to a Space Opera. And perhaps in a way it is, no not really.
This NaNo I’m going for something completely different. No plan, no plot, no mindmaps or spreadsheets. I’ve been very busy with other WIPs and October just got away from me. This will be different. I hope I will not end up with the output from the milllion monkeys at the end of the month.
We’ll see.
I’m not completely lost in the pantsing forest though. I found some great online resources that I have bookmarked.:
This is a community of folks who are entertained by documenting all the story tropes in current popular media. This includes not onlybooks and film, but also anime, computer games, and real life examples. This is an amazing site and I challenge you to leave without new ideas about your story.
Where a great deal of information on the seven plots and 36 dramatic sitations live as well as the hilarious Classic in a Minute. I encourage you to read The Collected Works of EE Cummings. C’mon it only takes a minute!
Which takes it data from the lists of Advice to Evil Overlords, Starship Captains and Murphy’s Laws of Combat. It gives such gems as….
- Further Evil (Advice on Fortress Construction):
- Your Command Center should have a heavily guarded room at the bottom of a 100-story subterranean shaft that contains a sophisticated bus-sized computer with a fake encoded plan, no external links, and no real function whatsoever. The real command center will be a satellite-linked laptop on a card-table with a folding chair, near the top of the elevator shaft, behind a door marked ‘standpipe valves’ that’s accessible through the unlocked janitor’s closet.
When I get stuck with this month’s story I will refer to my list of evilness and tropes. But I am missing one important element! Romance….yes, well that is easily solved by the Telenovelas. This site has all the Telenovela plots, all I need to is choose which….Hmmmmm..
| In the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word, of course. | |
One of Gladwell’s key premises in his popular book is:
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His examples range from curators at the Getty museum who when faced with an expertly executed fake statue failed initially to see it as a fake, to overwrought doctors trying to decide the fate of possible cardiac patients in a inner city hospital in Chicago. He walks us through the dilemma faced by police officers with milliseconds to decide if the dark object in a young man’s hand is a gun or a wallet.
It’s interesting stuff. And the parallels to the current crisis in the publishing industry were obvious. According to Gladwell’s experts, the key factor between making the correct split second decision, the right blink, is the amount of good, no excellent, prior information and research you have internalized or a willingness to follow a set of triage instructions and not waver in the face of conflicting information. The cardiac physicians who used the apparently simple triage rules, ignoring the rest of the symptoms, had patients with better results. The art experts with years of experience trusted their first glances of the statue and identified the fake, but only because they backed it with deep knowledge.
Gladwell found when inexperienced people trusted their initial judgments, or blinks, preconceived results based on bias ruled. Decisions often went awry.
The publishing industry is in crisis and not just from the threat of ebook readers. Personal computers, the internet and easy access to just about anyone makes it seem like anyone can write and publish a book. Just do google search! Slush readers who twenty years ago would get a handful of manuscripts a week to slog through for an editor or agent are receiving, in some cases, hundreds each day. Agent backlogs are months long.
How are these querys and first pages getting read? I bet they’re getting blinked. And in most cases the slush readers are likely experts and know what they are looking for. But some are getting blinked in an unknowable, inexpert way, as well. That’s just human nature and the internet firehose.
Since I am getting ready to query my first novel, this means that anything I can do to elevate myself above the slush pile is crtitical. You can work to gain access through contests and, pitch sessions at sites like SavvyAuthors or other writing sites. Producing squeaky clean pages and a tight query seems like a good starting point. Making sure my unique voice shines in my first pages, and the rest of my novel is one of my priorities, and improving my basic grammar and self-editing skills. I figure in a Blink world it’s all about not squandering any opportunity that drifts my way.
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