Last week I talked about my plunge into the six-figure strategy proposed by an agent. This is a plan to reach a six-figure salary by writing three hours a day in the morning and marketing three hours a day in the afternoon. My report was posted on Thursday last week, when I was 4 for 4—four stories over four days. I finished the week with five stories. But I also finished the week with very little marketing, perhaps an hour or so in the afternoon. So where am I now?
Like many other writers, I keep notes on paper or on my computer (and sometimes my phone) of ideas for stories—novels, novellas, full-length novels. Over the previous two or three months I’d come up with and rejected a number of story ideas, but six or so remained, blinking at me from the page but never stirring enough interest to get me to start writing (or typing). But last week pushed me to write.
The psychological pressure to produce verbiage over three hours pushed me to take the risk of developing a story every day, of trampling doubt and hazy thinking to make an idea into a character with a plot. Each day I finished a complete story—beginning, middle, end. I might not be happy with parts of it, but overall the story felt finished.
Marketing was an entirely different matter. After editing in the afternoon I explored outlets for each story. Some journals are clear about what they want and don’t want. What they don’t want can be more important than anything else. If you send a noir story to someone who prefers humorous cozies, you’re wasting your time. But even then, as all writers know, a story that matches the guidelines of theme, etc., may still not catch the editor’s eye. So far I’ve sent out three of the stories.
What else did I learn?
In a composition class in college, a professor took me aside and pointed out that I had a habit in my writing that I should work on. Manuscript in hand, he pointed to the opening paragraph, which he approved of, and then the following paragraph, which he said just went around in circles. “That’s what you do,” he said. “You keep writing while you decide where to go next, and then you write on.” Under pressure to take an idea and complete a story in three hours I managed to break the habit of writing while I thought about where to go next.
As you can perhaps divine, I didn’t take on the challenge for this week. I’m not writing a short story every morning this week. But the idea is worth adopting—writing according to time instead of scene or pages or words. I’m considering trying it again, perhaps once a month. I’ll let you know. Right now I'm developing story ideas--a sentence or two, perhaps a paragraph, that gives the general idea. I like having a known starting point even if everything that comes after that is totally different.
Correction: During NaNoWriMo, my total output was 40K words, not 48K. That was wishful thinking.
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