Practice Makes Professionals.

Nice lady. Please don't throw that at me.

by Louis Shalako

On Kindleboards someone asked, ‘Does haste affect the quality of the work?’

Comments mentioned some author friends posting big word counts on Facebook and the like, which people tend to do mostly during Nano-Month. (I’m up to ten or eleven thousand words for the year, by the way, by the time I’m done this post, and it’s only January 9.)

It’s a very good question.

The answer is yes and no, and I know how you all love that one.

What I kind of said on Kb was, ‘It depends on who’s doing it.’

Hopefully that wasn’t too snarky.

But, ah, please bear with me.

If you wrote ten stories in a year, say from two to four thousand words each, that represents from twenty to forty thousand words. In a year. In ten years, that would be anywhere from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand words, maybe from two to four books, or a bunch of shorter works.

Forget about past experience, mine or yours, forget about quality.

How much practice does it actually represent?

Speaking strictly in scientifically accurate terms, it represents 20,000 to 40,000 words of practice, no more and no less. Per year.

Ignore everything else. It’s just practice of the craft of writing—putting words down on paper, constructing sentences and paragraphs, (most of which should be almost subconscious or second nature at some point) and working with ideas.

Now think of the guy who grinds out twenty to forty thousand words a month. Some of it is crap. That might never be published. Some of it’s okay. It might end up being self-published or given away for exposure, it might go in a contest, he might publish it on a blog or website, under a girl’s name even.

What does he care? He likes the work. He’ll tackle any genre at some point just to see if he can do it, or just to have some fun with it and do something different, something no one else dared do because they were worried that somewhere out there in the world, there would be one person who didn’t much care for that author. They didn’t like a certain book or story.

Well, big deal. After a few years, we have the right to forget all that. We can move on.

Twelve months times twenty thousand words is two hundred forty thousand words…of practice, per year, if we give the guy credit for nothing else. He’s also publishing more often. He also problem-solving and trouble-shooting more often, creating more marketing images, writing more blurbs, typing in more meta-data, reading more blog posts on writing, publishing, craft…

It all adds up over time in a cumulative fashion.

Within one year he has twelve times as much experience as the guy (or girl) who writes twenty to forty thousand words a year.

That’s like twelve years of ‘experience.’

And with practice, and with experience, and no doubt, in some small way, with some confidence in the result, quality actually improves—it does not diminish with practice or experience.

It can only get better, in that sense practice is not a zero-sum game. Because so many different learning curves come together—developing a work ethic, studying other masters, listening to them talk, watching what the real pros do, and more than anything, writing story after story and book after book creates quality because it creates skill. To practice all the different aspects of self-publishing results in knowledge, skills and experience that are greater than the sum of all the individual parts.

I’ve been writing for over thirty years. Most of the progress has come in the last four or five years. But then, in the last four or five years I wrote my ass off, and it shows.

For too many years I pecked away at this and that project and dreamed of a future that sure as hell wasn’t going to be coming around and knocking on my door.

I had to go out into the world, take some risks and meet Fate halfway at least.

And now I’m knocking on your door. Because in ten years, I will probably write a minimum of five million words! It might even be more than that.

That is a veritable shit-load of books and stories, ladies and gentlemen.

I have every expectation of being pretty good at it, at some point—and let the critics fall where they may.

END

Rational Writing Goals for 2014.

Click > Free wanted posters.

by Louis Shalako

About this time last year I set some rational writing goals, which are different from business or professional goals.

That time has come again.

For 2014 I would like to write three novels in the 60-65,000-word range. If they go a bit longer, that’s not a problem. The first thing on the agenda is another science fiction novel. By May or June I need to start writing another mystery novel, Maintenon Mystery # 4, and that leaves one fluff project. I say that because it doesn’t need to be so deadly serious. I can go on a romp, or if I really did have a serious idea, then I could drop it in a heartbeat and so do the other one. Writing three books a year falls right in line with my long-term plan, which is to be a writer until the day I die.

I also want to make some money at it—real money.

Assuming that I am fortunate enough to live another twenty years, I will have an estimated seventy-two novels to my credit, and if I live another thirty years, maybe more than that. Our productivity tends to drop off at some point when we stop caring, or it no longer matters in the sense that it can no longer significantly affect our own personal outcomes…more on that another time.

In 2013 I wrote Third World, (SF) and Blessed Are the Humble, (mystery) and I’m 32,000 words into Whack ‘em and Stack ‘em, my bizarro thriller-parody. That one demonstrates the value of having some flexibility. I wrote 18,000 words back in the springtime before getting serious about Third World.

I still have six weeks to go and I know I can finish Whack ‘em etc by the end of the year, publish it, all that sort of thing.

What I did in 2013 I can do again. Also in 2013 I wrote a shitload of novellas for my pen-names, to the tune of something like another 100,000 words, plus a few shorts for myself and pen-names. Louis Shalako wrote twenty or thirty short stories this year, maybe more. I lose track at some point, in fact just the other day I found an un-submitted story in a folder. I just forgot it was there.

In 2013 I also blogged pretty regularly for all five pen-names, and I would like to continue that on a regular basis, say to the tune of another 3,000 words a week, maybe a bit more. (This blog post is about six hundred eighty+ words.)

So in 2014 I will write up to 200,000 words in terms of novels, say another hundred thousand in short stories and novellas, and Darwin knows how much in terms of blog posts.

What I do is to write fast, edit slow, and publish with attention to detail. None of these word-count goals take into account professional goals—to say I would like to make it into a professional magazine, or get a traditional contract, these would be related to writing goals but the word count is everything. The more stories I have, the more books I have, the more options I have. The more I write, the more opportunities it brings.

Practice is never a bad thing, ladies and gentlemen. Don't believe me? Ask Tiger Woods. And then go tell it to the Marines.

When I write a short story, I usually submit it to pro markets, semi-pro markets, and so on down the line until I get tired of it and then I can publish it on my blog. I can submit a novel to one of the top publishers in the world and then sit down and begin writing a mystery novel for my own Maintenon series.

If I feel like writing poetry, I would try and do as much poetry as I possibly could until I got sick of it and stopped. Then I would submit poetry until I'm blue in the face, and have stuff to publish on my poetry blog.

The plan is flexible, and complete.

I expect I will learn much by doing this.

When learning becomes play, then it’s really not work after all.

It’s just a whole helluva lot of fun.

END