Tag Archives: success

advice, Business, fiction, Marketing yourself

34 Ways to Tell If Your Writing Goals for 2013 Have a Chance in Hell – Part 2

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto

Failure is an option.

Trust me.

And who knew you could fail in so many spectacular ways?

Well, as your fearless, Freelance-Zone correspondent, I’ve tried them all in an effort to bring this travesty to light.  (Oh, noes, the brightness of “travesty light” is too much!  I must be carried offstage on soft bedding, surrounded by the cliché of cabana boys!  Quick, quick, boys!  Pamper me….)

Take the Failure Quiz:  #19 – #34

Do you answer YES to any of these? If so, your goal may not have a chance in hell.

(Just joining the fun?  #1 – #18 are HERE.)

#19 You think if you get behind today, you can make it up tomorrow.

Goals fail one day at a time. The first day of failure is your only chance to catch the problem and create a solution (which is never the word ‘tomorrow.’)

HINT #1:  The solution is to re-plan, not to work extra hours.  For you to stay on target you’ll already have to work extra hours, because everyone –even you—underestimates the time needed to achieve a goal.

HINT #2: Re-planning involves changing something!  The deliverables, the goal, the date, the people involved, the success criteria, or something else substantial.

And yet, what do people do?  Everyone decides the human resource (you) should just work harder and faster.  If that were a solution, you’d already be doing it and not be behind.

#20 You don’t track meaningful metrics.

Met-what? Units of meaning.  For example,

  • Hours spent writing are only useful and meaningful if you’re paid by the hour.
  • Words or pages per day are only meaningful metrics when combined with project milestones (what needs to be accomplished by the end of those words or pages).
  • Marketing effort and investment only makes sense compared to results (unless your goal was to spend a lot of time and money with no results).

So what does make sense?

  • Progress through a story by Act and Scene/Event.
  • Forward movement through a script based on the steps in the Hero’s Journey.
  • Effectiveness of hours spent writing. (3 hours writing =  completed 1 article, plus Act II, Scene 37)
  • Success of marketing efforts. Called 5 business to partner in January marketing event, got 1 yes. Time: 45 minutes.
#21 You don’t use your metrics as a reality check.

If it consistently takes you about 15 hours to write a scene, you might not like that fact, but it is all yours to own, for better or worse.

Soooooo tempting to want it to take only 2 hours.   Yes, my preciousssss.  Other people… they can do it in 2…..

Stop that.  Magical thinking is not your friend.

#22   Tangents R  Us.  You don’t know your critical path.

You’re focusing on the wrong things.  Doing the wrong things.

(Sometimes it’s even your focus/obsession on the planning down to the tiniest detail, color-coding it, and putting it all in Excel.)

Know your critical path.  Track the critical path.  Everything else is just pretty and shiny.

What is your critical path? It’s the core doing-ness that actually puts you one step closer to your goal, in a real way.

It’s not just a task that is linked to your topic or would be nice to do.

This is the task that if you don’t do it, the next piece of work can’t be done. Making it (ahem) critical.

Want a little test? It’s the work that (a) if you don’t do it today, the project can not move forward tomorrow, and (b) you won’t reach your goal ever.

It’s easy to spend time on tasks that aren’t on the critical path.  Frankly, when something matters less, it’s less stressful and easier to approach.

But it doesn’t really help no matter how you justify it, even if you need it eventually.  Eventually isn’t your critical path.  Eventually is la-la land. Continue reading 34 Ways to Tell If Your Writing Goals for 2013 Have a Chance in Hell – Part 2 →

advice, fiction, Marketing yourself

34 Ways to Tell If Your Writing Goals for 2013 Have a Chance in Hell

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by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto

Are Your Goals Doomed to Fail?

As you know, I’m a fan of Big Hairy Audacious Goals.

But big hairy goals don’t mean much without thousands of small wins.

— Bob Sutton, Work Matters

Yes, thousands of small wins. And that’s why most New Year’s goals are doomed to fail.  It takes a lot to pull them off.

How many goals (another word for projects) fail? A whopping 78% according to Ian Sample, science correspondent at The Guardian.

But you’re going to succeed, right?

Take the Failure Quiz

Do you answer YES to any of these?  If so, your goal may not have a chance in hell.

#1 Your goal is fuzzy-general and way too rah-rah.

(Unbridled optimism is the language of a thousand small failures.)

#2 This is a goal or project you don’t really want.

(You think you have a good reason for making this your goal. You don’t.  It’s like you brainwashed yourself to not notice this.

Perhaps it’s someone else’s goal or maybe just a would-be-nice goal.  Or you got caught up in the goal-setting moment, but the moment is pretty much over.)

#3 Your goal hinges on something or someone you have no control over.

(Get published by a New York publisher, anyone?  Unless you buy the company, you can’t actually control these folks.  You can control writing a fabulous book, however.)

#4 You’re not using any of your best, most unique skills, attributes, or gifts in this goal.

(There’s no chance for you to bring your A game or outshine your competition, because they are using their uniqueness every day. )

#5 Strategy and logistics are missing.

(What you have is a dream not a goal.  Dreams magically happen in a bubble over your head.  Goals require that stuff called doing, insight, management, and accountability.)

#6 You haven’t gathered all the needed tools (tangible, like a computer, and intangible, like time and focus).

(Again with the magic.) Continue reading 34 Ways to Tell If Your Writing Goals for 2013 Have a Chance in Hell →

editorial, fiction, lifestyle

Find A New Dream

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

dream bigYour dream is about writing.  I already know that.  But what I want to know is if you’re living your big writing dream today? 

Because I’m not.

And, in a way, I’m farther away than ever.

(How in the world 20 years of hard work can lead you farther away, I have no idea!  But reality is like that.  It’s illogical and ill-behaved and apt to squash your hopes and dreams.)

Now, some of you are getting close to your dreams, so this article won’t help much.  But if you have worked hard every waking moment and still aren’t “there,” then this article might help you ask The Big Questions.

Should I let go of my dream?

Should I stop giving it CPR?

Should I find a new dream to dream?

The more you fear these questions, the more important it is to ask them.

And yes, your new dream can be a new writing dream. Or not.  I’m not imposing rules on your dreaming.  Not my job.  But basically you have all of reality to play with, so don’t panic.

The Importance of Today

In all my years of hard work and dreaming, what have I been doing?  I’ve been clawing my way toward a future goal.  The Dream.

I thought that was how it was done.  Everyone said so.  You set your sights on a big dream and then you don’t give up.  You use your fingernails if you have to, as you dig in and keep going. 

But now, I’m not so sure.

  • What about all the todays on the way to your dream? 
  • What if you don’t reach your big dream, ever? 
  • What if your fingernails break before you get there? 
  • Does that mean you have no dream to live, because you never made it to your dream location?

What if the future is today?  How would that change things?

The folks over at The One Question put it this way:

“…to find your life purpose you have to live your life purpose. You can start living your life purpose immediately.”

If you don’t live your purpose (or your dream), then you’ll never find it.  And if not today, then when?

Just For Today

Instead of a big dream, I wonder if the key isn’t found in what you dream just for today?

What you live for today

Maybe all you have to do is find your dream for today.  Or as John December says:

Find a way to gain some aspects of your dream today.

The pieces of the dream ARE the dream, just smaller.  To ignore these small pieces is to miss the whole point of having a dream.

Gain your dream, piece by piece.

Own your dream, today by today.

By owning a piece of your dream today, you are eliminating the space between you and your dream.  In fact, you and your dream are one.

Dreamer and dream.

Now Back To The Big Questions

Is it time for a new dream?

It really comes down to today, doesn’t it?

Do the small pieces of your dream create a wonderful today?

That’s the one question this whole article comes down to.

Until you can answer this question, you can’t ask any of the others. 

How can you know if you should let go of your dream–if you should stop giving it CPR–unless you ask yourself about the reality of how you live your dream.  Or how you don’t.

After all, if your dream doesn’t even exist until some dim future, then what are you planning on letting go of?  Something that never existed?

And what about if you decide to let go?

There are so many, many changes you can make to your dream and how you experience it.  And beyond that there are a multitude of dreams you can call your own.

You’re the dreamer.  It’s your call.

It’s okay to make a change.  It really, really is.  And it’s okay to keep your dream exactly the same.

I just wish we talked about the small pieces more.  The day-to-day tasks.  the way we tried to move forward.  About how we see these small pieces as “living the writing dream.” 

I think we might be a lot happier with a dream we live just for today.  A dream we can touch.  A dream that makes us… US.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

editorial, fiction

Top 10 Ways To Tell If You’re Creative

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

Creative Child Hands

10. See a problem, brainstorm solutions.

You can’t help yourself.  It give you happy feet.

9. See the box, play outside of it.

Color the box.  Take an object from inside the box on a little trip outside the box.  Remove the box altogether. Cut box up into little pieces to see if they make something better.

They do.

8. Every word has a certain feeling to it.

You want to explain how valuable this is.  Sometimes you even try.  But ultimately it takes a Jedi to feel the Force.

7.  Mental leaps.  Take them you will.

Yet each looks totally logical, practical, and the speed of all worthwhile thought.  Everything else is slow and painful.

6. Stories are essential to mankind.

Good news:  everything is a story.  (Or would be if you ran the world.)

5. Real life can always be made more meaningful.

Especially when seen through the lens of fiction.  Also non-fiction and limericks.

4. Creative people can be fearless and full of fear at the very same time.

Certainty and uncertainty.  High gear and the emergency brake.  When people say you should create a balanced life, you think this is exactly what they mean.

3. The moments when we’re brilliant make everything else worthwhile.

You don’t even need very many of them. You can go for months on the fumes of one moment of creative genius.  Imagine what you could do with two?

2. Compliments are currency.

A fan letter is like an Oscar.  They like us!  They really like us!

Sob.

1. Epic idea = writing crack.

It’s your biggest superpower.  The thing from which everything else flows.  And this feels normal to you.  Totally, 100% normal.

Ordinary, really.  Like a wheat bran muffin, ordinary.  Except it’s made of sparkles and travels mach10 around 25 billion brain cells, in a world made of only your favorite colors. (Except the bran muffin is really chocolate.  But you knew that.)

After all, in an ordinary day, there’s always enough time for your mind to be blown.

And THAT’S how you can tell if you’re creative.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

fiction

How To Screw Up an Action Scene

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

As a thriller writer, I love me a good action scene.

CartoonBomb

In fact, there are no thrills without something actually happening.  Color me obvious, but a lot of writers don’t link these two concepts together.

Thrills without something happening?  How would that work?

So, this is the first part of an occasional series about how writers screw up their action scenes and what to do to fix them.

Today I want to focus on the order of your action.  This is something more than story, plot, or scenes.  It’s how you break story information up into little pieces to give the reader an adrenaline rush.

And how you can screw this up.

It’s all about “Visual Grammar”

OpenCulture’s recent post The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene, features a brilliant breakdown of action-scene failure by film critic Jim Emerson.

Read it.  Watch it.  Master it.

Even novelists must master how to create a movie in the reader’s head.

The danger of “The Storyteller Cut”

One of my favorite fiction experts is Terry Rossio.  And of all his brilliant articles (on his site and available free), I find myself recommending The Storyteller Cut over and over, even to advanced writers.

Okay, especially to advanced writers.  Sometimes this is the only thing holding an advanced writer back.

I truly believe that understanding the pitfalls of this type of storytelling can save your novel, script, or stageplay.

—

Okay, that’s it this time!

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

fiction

Where Should I Start My Story? (the truth)

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

FEARS

Where to begin: Isn’t this the worst question ever? 

questions It’s so important (readers won’t read on unless you nail the opening), so frustrating (why isn’t it right yet?), and so "unprovable" (this one is 93% right, woohoo!). 

And heck, even if you do happen to stumble upon the right place to start, you’ll never know it. 

It’ll still look like lame words on a page.  You’ll rewrite it into something worse. (Oh, the agony.  The shame.  The total irony of being a writer and finding out that Words. Are. The. Enemy.)

SANITY

The idea that there’s a perfect place to start at story is wrong.  There are many perfect places to start a story.

We writers get confused, because we study stories that are already written, and we talk about how opening X is the perfect opening for a specific book.  As if it’s the only opening that could ever exist.

But in truth, what we’re really noticing is that a particular opening did work very well, and the writer avoided a sucky opening.

So, if there are many perfect openings and many sucky openings, how do you find at least ONE perfect opening?  How do you know where to start your story?

And this, my friend, is where all the advice fails us.

ADVICE THAT DOESN’T HELP THAT MUCH

Pretty much all the advice out there falls into this category for me.

Example 1:  Open "in medias res." 

You mean “anywhere” anywhere, as long as it’s in the middle of things will do? Boring things, violent things, things that don’t matter? 

Of course it is Latin, so it sounds smart. 

Example 2: When things change!  (Or at the Inciting Incident or In The Ordinary World of the protagonist, etc.)

There’re lots of changes, so which one?  But more importantly, doing this doesn’t make it a "right" opening.  You’re not guaranteed an opening that works for the reader.  There’s nothing here about quality, nothing about the needs of your story or the hopes of the reader.

Example 3: Open with the character and setting, and make sure to get across everything we need to know, plus a really good hook!"

Thanks for the laundry list.

But isn’t this advice sort of like telling a chef to make sure to use food, probably a protein and a carb?  Oh, and vegetables are nice, too?

THE TRUTH

Open any place where you can…

(a) enter with a JUICY piece of story information (character, plot, setting, anything!)…

(b) that captures the reader’s IMAGINATION and…

(c) ultimately PULLS her into a story JOURNEY…

(d) that SPANS the book or script or whatever.

A NICE EXAMPLE:

‘Gone Girl‘ By Gillian Flynn

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very ?rst time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a ?nely shaped head.You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I’d know her head anywhere.

DOES IT WORK?

(a) Whoa, a husband who obsesses about his wife’s head and can imagine the skull quite easily.  Now that’s a creepy-interesting character.

(b) This isn’t going to turn out well, is it?  I’m already imagining stuff that could happen.  Bad stuff.  Oh, noes.  Maybe it’s already happened….

(c) I’ve got to find out where this goes, because I know this links directly to the story I was hoping for (when I read the back blurb):

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

(d) I’m being pulled into the story question that matters, the one that will be resolved by the time the book is over:  What happened to the wife?

Plus there’s all that mighty fine prose.  That’s a bonus for sure.

Put it all together and bam!  The reader and the story are well served.  And they’re joined together for all the pages to come.

And that’s how you start a story.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.