Writing success can be like the story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare accomplishes a lot in a short time, gets tired, and takes a break. The tortoise takes it slow, doesn’t get tired, and passes the hare to win the race.

We sometimes follow the hare’s philosophy in our writing efforts. I know I have. I will spend four to six hours a day on articles or my novel and get a lot done. I feel like a writer on fire.

Then some milestone is reached and I realize life is missing something. It can’t be all writing, working, eating, and sleeping. Relationships are important. Entertainment is important too. I take a week or two off and then find it hard to get back into the writing groove.

The Japanese literary writer Banana Yoshimoto follows the tortoise’s philosophy. She spends half an hour a day writing. Every day. She has published 12 novels and 7 essay collections. Two of her novels have been made into movies. She’s made it as a writer.

I’m making the change. I like writing experiments. This one sounds like a winner.

Novel Writing

My main writing goal is to write some novels. This is the writing I will do for a half hour a day every day.

I know that I won’t be able to stop at half an hour when it’s going well. It won’t go well every day. It never has. By the time I’ve written enough to be on a roll every day, I will have written several novels. I see two scenarios.

In the first scenario, my novels will have failed and it will be time to give it up.

In the second scenario, my novels will have succeeded and I will have become a writer.

Article Writing

Most of my article writing is for my blogs. My visitor count dropped when I recently increased my posting from every five days to twice a week. This made me look at my blog’s history of posting and visitors. The blog had the most visitors when I posted once a week. That will be my new posting plan.

This doesn’t fit well with Yoshimoto’s half hour a day writing plan. I feel like it will work best as a half hour a day hobby. When my novel writing goes into overtime, article writing is out. When I have a busy day, article writing is out. Three and a half hours a week is plenty of time to write an article and I have many ready for here already.

My mission is clear.

Which are you, the tortoise or the hare? Is your mission clear or are you still looking for the perfect writing plan too?

Article by Ivan Izo.

You need to take a break from writing now and then. Many authors recommend taking a break when you know what you’re going to write next. That prevents you from returning to a blank page and finding yourself immediately stuck. Sounds like a good plan. Now what about those breaks? There are good breaks and bad breaks.

Some breaks are necessary. You must eat. You must sleep. You must go to your day job. You have other musts. I hope your life isn’t too musty.

Breaks That Don’t Work

Hobbies, TV, video games, and the internet are the worst breaks. They can use up all of your free time. If you need one of these kind of breaks, you should take it after your writing is done for the day.

There are other breaks that aren’t as time consuming: e-mail, bookkeeping, phone calls, to-do lists, and other things that can be done as often as you like. They don’t need your immediate attention. They could be put off. They’re excuses to do something else for a while. Something easier. Why not do something easier that leads back to writing?

Breaks That Work

Other writing can be a break. Switch between books and articles. Switch between fiction and non-fiction. Switch between first drafts and revisions.

Doing nothing or taking a nap. You’re going to think about what you’ve been writing. Some errands fall into this category. I think about my writing while grocery shopping. I either have a list or I’m only interested in half price sales. My thoughts can be elsewhere.

Reading material that inspires you to continue writing. Books and articles about writing can be great for inspiring you to get right back to writing.

Reading books in the genre you’re writing are good too. If you’re writing a page-turner type of novel, reading a page-turner can be inspirational. How does the author decide where to end their chapters?

Doing something unpleasant. Haruki Murakami has his characters doing housework for procrastination. That would certainly make me anxious to get back to writing.

Break’s over. I must get back to writing my novel.

Article by Ivan Izo.

Self-talk is the voice in your head that almost never shuts up if it has a chance to talk. It is usually quiet when you are listening or reading, but even then it may interrupt. Unwelcome interruptions are called attention deficit. By itself, attention deficit is not a mental health problem. It happens to everyone.

The voice, of course, is just your thinking. You may believe that the thinking is you; that the thinking expresses your personality. But, not everything you are thinking is you. It is a combination of your personality, what you hear and read, what you think about what you see, what you are influenced to think about by other people, and your knowledge and memories.

Buddhist writers talk about how all of this thinking creates the illusion of an ego. If the illusion picks up maladaptive ideas, it can lead to all kinds of problems. Buddhism proposes some metaphysical solutions for the unhappy ego, but the goal here is not to solve your existential crises. You only want to become a better writer. For that, you can use a simple idea from cognitive therapy.

Anything you think about gets reinforced and you think about it more. Cognitive therapy has you examine your thinking and choose to think about adaptive ideas while dropping the maladaptive. It’s not necessary to put any effort into dropping the negatives. They will fade away on their own when you focus on the positive.

In other words, choose the contents of your self-talk.

Focus your-self talk on your goals. You can do this spontaneously, but your mind likes to wander. You start off thinking about your writing goals and soon find yourself thinking about video games or a recent conversation. By writing out a motivational self-talk, you can improve your focus.

The following is something that works for me as a motivation for writing. Modify it to work for your writing goals.

The “I Am A Writer” Self-Talk

I am a writer.

I start every day with writing.

I write whenever I have an idle moment.

I am always looking for more writing time.

I have writing goals and I’m working toward them.

I have writing projects that I work on every week.

I am writing faster all the time.

I am getting better at writing first drafts without editing myself.

I am getting better at fixing problems during revisions.

I am taking the three draft process more seriously.

I will someday earn my living writing.

I am a writer.

Everything you put in your self-talk does not need to be true. Some of the items may be goals that you will make true over time. A paper version of the self-talk is best so that it is always available. Add new motivations as you find them. Remove those that aren’t working. Life is always changing. So should your scripted self-talk.

Article by Ivan Izo.

We all want to write more. Even when you’re happy with your output, you would like to write faster. What’s the solution?

The simple answer is to write more, but that’s not a great answer. We need some ideas. To be anything, we need to study it, discuss it, and practice it. What can we do to make sure we write more?

I’ve already posted a few articles about deliberate prolific writing methods. Today, I want to mention a few ways of being prolific on the fringes.

Marginal Writing

What is marginal writing? Journal writing, Commenting, E-mails, IM Clients… Anything that gets you in the habit of sitting down to write something and writing it without a lot of thinking. Some of these may not work for you. Some don’t work for me. I can’t write an e-mail without revising it, for example.

Marginal writing is unedited writing. That’s how you write your first drafts when you write seriously. This is practice. Are you having trouble writing without editing. One solution is to write a deliberately terrible book. Plan to throw it away after you’re done, but write the first draft from start to finish without editing. You may decide to revise it into something good.

Throw-Away Writing

If you read my earlier articles about writing like Martin Caidin or Ryoki Inoue, you know that their methods (my guess at their methods) are likely to result in something you wouldn’t try to publish.

I’ll repeat the point from those articles. If you can write three pulp novels in the time it would take to write one high quality novel, isn’t it worth it for the writing practice? Once you’re selling your work, you’ll change the strategy, but as long as you’re a writer in training, practice is more important than perfectionism.

Persistence

Sometimes it seems like you just can’t get any forward momentum. You need to do more research and get caught up on the related readings. The ideas you need to bring together aren’t melding. You need something more before you can continue and don’t know what it might be. Persistence is the only answer.

You can move forward with all of the above problems. Leave a note in bold or a different color text. Leave a mess behind. Just keep forging ahead. That’s what revisions are for.

If you can’t seem to get going on any of your writing projects, go back to marginal writing. A bit of that can shift you into a better writing mood.

Brute Force

Getting in the mood is good, but you should be able to write when you’re not in the mood. Other professionals don’t need to be in the mood to do their job. As well, a lot of writing doesn’t need to be good. I’m thinking first drafts again, but also journal writing that may inspire articles and short stories.

Force yourself to write by brute force. If you’re like most writers, you generate plenty of writing plans, ideas and rough documents when you’re in the writing mood. Move all of those forward by doing the best you can on bad days and you will have more rough work to turn into final draft material on the good days.

By writing on the fringes, you write more often and get more done. Much of it may be poor writing, but your total output of good writing will also be higher.

Article by Ivan Izo.

When searching for new topics and stories to write, you will often search for inspiration by reading material in the same subject or genre. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it keeps you busy reading instead of writing. Reading is so much easier than writing, isn’t it?

It can be difficult to get good inspiration from other writers because their writing style, topics and background are different from yours. It’s your unique focus that makes your writing interesting, not the ways you’re the same as everyone else. How can you keep your uniqueness?

Read yourself.

Revising

You already read your own writing when you revise your work. I know there are methods for writing in one draft, but even when you’re good at that, multiple draft revisions seems to be the default.

During revisions, you add, cut and rewrite. Writing that made no sense in rough draft become great in some places and terrible in others as you add more material. The bad goes and the good gets revised further. That’s why even the most tenuous ideas should go in your idea file. As you revise your writing, new ideas appear, especially if you revise many times.

Adding may be the most important part of revision. If you have too much material, you may have another article. If you’re writing books, you can never have too much. It’s always good to have more material available to cut. Even better is having chapters to cut (and save elsewhere) since they may be the inspiration for another book.

Revising for Productivity

Revising whatever is next isn’t always the best plan. There are so many levels of writing you do. To maximize productivity, you can read each type early in the day and see what takes off. What are these levels?

        – Article and short story idea files, rough drafts, and second drafts.

        – Book outlines, plots, first drafts and second drafts.

        – Fiction and nonfiction versions of the above.

Why am I suggesting reading several writing types? To find your mindset. Are you left brain or right brain this morning? Is your imagination taking off or would you get further doing editorial work? If you already know the answer, you don’t need to experiment. Work on ideas and first drafts if you feel creative. Work on second drafts and nonfiction if you don’t.

Reviewing

When you review your own completed writing, the material is written in your style, on your topics, and with your background knowledge and education. Just as you get inspired with more ideas during revision, you can also get inspired when rereading your old articles and books.

The ideas that come from reading yourself can prompt new articles and books. You will have more to say about some ideas. You will also find gaps in the original information. And you’ll remember ideas you passed over because you were too busy writing.

There’s a limit to how far you can take rereading. How many times can you review your own writing and still find something new to say? Not forever, for sure. But, as long as you keep writing new material you will have more to review.

Don’t abandon your other sources of writing inspiration. But remember, you can get a lot of ideas just by reading yourself.

Article by Ivan Izo.

How can book reviews be fun? That’s something you had to do for school? And profit? People give away their book reviews.

It’s not that kind of fun or profit.

I’m suggesting you write a review any time a book gives you something you can use. Books supply us with new information and ideas. A great idea that’s only in your head can get lost in the noise. Write it down and you will have it forever.

It may be something that gives you insights into your personal and social life or that demonstrates writing techniques worth imitating. With practice, you can find something that feeds your writing in almost everything you read.

How Reading Feeds Your Writing

Nonfiction Arts

The humanities tell you about human behavior from many different perspectives. Psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science, and anthropology all have different ways of looking at the human condition. This feeds into character development. Three dimensional characters are more interesting to read about than a cast of clones.

Nonfiction Science and Business

Your characters need to do something for a living. Your most believable character careers will be ones you’ve had yourself, but you don’t need to stop there. When you’ve studied a field well enough to know the basic terminology, you can give that career to a character and do further research as it’s needed for the story.

Fiction

Novels and short stories can be a gold mine of writing techniques or cookie cutter imitations of what has been written before. If you want your writing to stand out, you need examples of how it’s done.

Those ideas are fine for fiction, but what about nonfiction? There are variations there too. Even though the main point is to get information across, there are different ways of doing it. How long do you make your chapters? How many subsections should you have? What about graphics? How can you write effective anecdotes? Everything you read can be an example of how to write.

How to Write a Book Review

I’m sure you know how to write a book review according to someone else’s specifications. But how do you write one for yourself? Ask yourself a few questions as you finish each book.

Was there anything special about this book?

If not, don’t bother with a review. If the author has a unique style, but this book is the same as all of their other books, you might want to review the author’s writing style.

What was special about the overall story?

Were there amazing twists? Did the story build up to the conclusion in some special way? Were the chapters painfully long or ridiculously short? Did it get you interested in something you never would have thought could be appealing?

What was special about the characters or their descriptions?

Did this book have any characters unlike any you ever saw before? Did the author use any special tricks to reveal character? Were the characters only names with no special traits? Did the authors choices about character depth make sense in the context of the story?

What points of view were used?

Is the story told from first person, third person or God mode point of view? Was it a combination of views? Multiple first person? A combo of one first person and one third? Why did the author pick these views and were they the right picks?

Has this book done anything to make your life better?

Did this book have something you considered an important life lesson? Did you learn something new? Was it worth the read for the entertainment value alone?

What is your final impression?

Are you glad you read the book? Any reservations? Where did the author triumph? Where did they fail?

Whatever you put in your review, a good finish is a description of what the book did for you. What does it inspire you to do in your own writing? Give yourself a call to action in the conclusion.

Now, how about writing a report on the last great book you read?

Article by Ivan Izo.

If you’re thinking about reviewing your old blog articles and making changes, forget it. Who will see it? Almost nobody. The best way to update an old article is with a new article. The only update you need in the old article is a link at the top pointing them to the updated information. If both articles are significantly different, put the link at the bottom.

Linking related articles within a website is always a good idea. It keeps visitors on your site and improves their chances of finding the information they want.

There is one case where you should update the old article. When you notice some information is wrong, an update prevents you from steering archive readers off course. Now. About those updates. When should you write a new article?

Signs that it’s time for a new updated article

1. There’s new information on a topic. Keep your content current by keeping yourself current. Read a variety of sources related to your niche.

2. Reader feedback prompts you to write an update. Even bad comments may give you useful direction. A clear article has a bias. Arguments against your position may need to be answered.

3. Your sales are changing. There may be seasonal changes. There may also be changes with the group that follows you. This ties in to keeping current. When a new concept appears in your topic area, this can prompt many new articles because of the way it changes old ideas.

4. It’s been a long time since you mentioned a topic that’s important to your subject area. For example, a writing blog can’t ignore writer’s block for long. It’s a problem for many writers.

5. Reviewing your old articles gives you ideas that take them in new directions. Since writing the earlier articles, you’ve read more and written more. What new insights do you have?

The best part of updating old articles with new is that you can produce the new articles much more quickly than writing from just an idea. And that’s what you need most for a blog; more posts.

Article by Ivan Izo.

Like many writers, I enjoy reading more than writing. It’s so much easier. We can always tell ourselves we’re learning more about writing by reading examples. And it’s true. We do pick up ideas for our writing from the ways others write.

The cost of books can be high if you read a lot and always buy them new. I’ve heard a few people complain about paying $20 a book. A book doesn’t need to be new to be good. The books on the “best books of” lists have been out for a few years, sometimes for thousands of years. Even the latest bestsellers make it into used bookstores quickly.

If you’re an experienced reader, what follows won’t be educational. You know all this. But, maybe there’s an option you’ve forgotten.

Used books – Stores

This is my favorite source of books. They’re open year round and even when I’m down to my last $20 I can still come away with a stack of books. On low budget visits, the trick is to look for older books of low quality. That’s low physical quality, not low writing quality.

Used bookstores are the only place you will find some of the great authors of the past. They don’t get re-printed unless a publisher can get the rights and sees a market demand.

Trade in the books you’ve finished reading. You won’t read most books twice anyway. Your reading interests change over time. Am I right?

Used books – Amazon

Every year, around 30,000 more books are published. There’s a limit to how many books will fit in a used bookstore. To get around that limit, we have Amazon’s used books option. Almost any book that was ever popular can be had for as little as a penny plus shipping and handling. Their profit comes from the shipping and handling, I’m sure. We can’t complain about that. Every business needs to make a profit. This is the book buying option to take when you must have a specific book.

Used books – Yard sales

This is even cheaper than used bookstores or Amazon. Most people sell their used books for between 25 cents and a dollar. Buy everything that looks like an interesting read. At that price, it doesn’t matter if you get some you don’t like. You can put those in the pile for trading in at the used bookstore.

I would have put yard sales first in the list, but they are fair weather friends. When it’s cold or raining there are no yard sales.

Libraries

This is the cheapest way to get books. I don’t use them enough myself. If your local library is set up for inter-library loans, you can get almost any book ever written. The only costs are late fees and a replacement fee if you lose a book.

New books

If you have a tight book budget, this is your last resort. If you must have the latest Haruki Murakami novel, it may be your only option. The same with many non-fiction books. Computer books, for example, go obsolete so fast you must buy them new.

What have I missed? Trading with friends? Borrowing books? Shoplifting? Writing your own? Those don’t seem to be good options. Tell me I’m wrong.

Article by Ivan Izo.

When you research something, you make connections that inspire you with ideas for new writing. There are good ways to combine researching and writing, and there are bad ways. The worst way to research is to treat it like entertainment. Passive reading minimizes your writing productivity. You can spend hours reading, get no inspiration, and produce nothing.

You need to refine the process to maximize the benefits of both researching and writing.

Researching

When reading for ideas, you should be making notes. For the best notes, go for the big picture. How does the information you’re picking up fit with related topics? What sub-topic of your field is your reading concerned with and how can you relate it to other sub-topics? Find analogies, comparative methodologies, and anything else that broadens the scope of your research notes. Once you are able to see the big picture, you have enough to write an outline for your book or a series of articles.

Writing

Writing goes in the opposite direction. You start with the big picture as you create the outline for what you will write. Then, fill in points for each major item. If your research has been thorough, you should have no problem with this step.

Next, you write the first draft and write extensively under every heading. Unless you took a course of studies to learn your topic, more research will be indicated many times during this draft. That’s okay, but it’s not going to happen here. Leave notes along the way indicating research to be done and keep writing. The first draft of a book is the biggest part of the project. You don’t need to make it worse by adding research that can come later.

When your first draft is done, you revise, edit, and cut until you have a final draft. There are many reasons to revise. There are those notes for sections to be researched further. There will be awkward sentences, typos, run-on sentences, and other problems. If it’s one of your first books, there will also be changes in the quality of your writing as practice helps you improve. There will also be differences in your zest for writing from one day to the next; some days it will be full speed ahead and others it will be more like slavery. Enthusiasm shows in your writing. You want to even that out.

One of the most important revisions is the delayed revision. That’s when you put the manuscript aside and work on something else for at least a day. Then, read it again and see what problems were hidden by your immersion in the project.

Maximize the Benefits of Your Research

I’ve been writing here mainly as if you’re working on a book, but the same applies for a series of articles on the same topic. If you’re going to do either, why not do both? You won’t want the articles and book to be identical, but after writing one it will be much easier writing it all again from scratch based on the first outline. Assuming you find your topic really interesting, you will have continued to learn more about it anyway and this will result in new work when you flip to the different length of writing.

Focus in Fiction

The same method could be used for fiction, except there’s a lot less to research. Let’s say you want your characters to develop a video game. You research and find that they will need a minimum of five million dollars and twenty employees who are highly computer literate. You have enough to write the first draft of the game development scenes but not enough to write the conversations. You will need more details and the research on that can wait for the revisions.

Once more, focus starts big and zooms in as the writing project moves forward. I must zoom off to another writing project now. Thanks for dropping by.

Article by Ivan Izo.

One of the problems that plague writers is planning too much. Spending a lot of time thinking about what to write instead of writing is a form of writer’s block. You know the first draft is not going to be the final, yet there you sit searching for the perfect word. Let’s consider the same situation in reading and studying, related fields where you aren’t tempted to think before acting.

When you’re reading and concentrate on every word, you read much slower than when you take in entire sentences and phrases. If you’re saying every word in your head as you read, you can’t read any faster than you can talk. Speed reading courses teach you to get over that block and a few other tricks. The time saving benefits of speed reading are paid for in a loss of comprehension. Read twice as fast and you comprehend half as much. If a book turns out to be important, you can always speed read it again.

When you learn a new subject, you need to read the important texts three times if you want to keep the knowledge forever. You don’t need to memorize every last detail your first time through the textbook. You fill in what you miss on subsequent readings, stopping to memorize where your knowledge is weak. You learn the main concepts first, integrate them with what you already know and build up the details on subsequent study passes. As you master the subject, memorization disappears as a study method because you keep adding new information to your existing big picture for the subject.

When you write about something you already know well (or fiction you’ve plotted well), you may feel like you’re writing perfectly on the first pass. That doesn’t stop you from revising your work later. Why do you let yourself get held up on first draft writing when you don’t have a clear plan?

You have something you want to write about or you wouldn’t have started. If you feel you must present the topic or story in the right order, write an outline first. That will have the same problem of order, but it’s easier to move things around since there’s less material. Whether outline or first draft, all you need to do is get everything written out. The mess can be cleaned up later. I’m talking to myself as much as to you. I often get caught by perfectionism. The solution would seem to be switching from over-thinking to under-thinking. How is that done?

Over-thinking

Thinking gets in the way when you write something you don’t know so well, something you just researched, or something you know well but are presenting in a new way. You ask, What is the best way to get my idea across? How can I make the transition to the next step? What details should I be adding to finish this paragraph? Your internal editor works overtime and can stop your writing dead.

When you write, you’re thinking on paper. The thing is to write in first draft style with editor-mode turned off. We know that, but how do we do it?

- When you’re writing an idea and another idea pops up, finish the current sentence, start a new paragraph and write the new idea out. If you find that you sometimes lose ideas that way, write them immediately. Put them inside brackets or use a different color text if that helps.

- When you need more info, type NEED MORE ON THIS or RESEARCH and move along to the next step.

- When you could go in many different directions, type all of those directions as a list. Then continue. You’ll find all of your orphaned notes and ideas when you revise.

Under-thinking

This is nothing more than switching from making plans for every step in your writing to just writing. Make the plans while writing by writing too much. When you write it all out and put too much information down, you’ll have something to work with instead of just ideas in your head. It is far easier to sort written ideas than thoughts.

Once you have an idea on paper, you have it forever. Learn to have the gift of gab on the keyboard. You can always edit later.

Sitting down to write and not thinking about what to write is an evolutionary step for a writer. Learn to write what you’re thinking immediately and your productivity will take off.

Article by Ivan Izo.