A Few Thoughts On Attitude

November 17, 2011
Have you ever met someone who just seems to always look on the bright side of things? Do you just want to kill them and wipe that happy smirk off their face?

Sometimes I do. There are certainly some people - in my experience anyway - who go through life happy, happy, happy never acting as if a bad thing will ever happen.

Then there are others who seem well aware of the gamut of outcomes, but choose to go for the positive.

This was driven home a couple weeks ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. We went to the Sanchin-Ryu Fall Workshop a couple weeks ago, a three-hour karate workshop held in the metropolis of Leslie, Michigan. It was held in the town's middle school gym and there were probably a couple hundred people there. One of the things about Sanchin-Ryu that's a bit unusual is it starts to seem like family - you get to know a lot of people if you spend any time visiting other classes and going to workshops, and in a very unusual tradition, Sanchin-Ryu people are huggers. Yeah, a bunch of skilled martial artists greeting each other with hugs (which is good, because a short time later they may be kicking you in the crotch).

Anyway, before the workshop got going I was chatting with Sensei Chris, who was the sensei (teacher) whose class I came out of. Chris asked me to substitute for his class this week because he was having sinus surgery the weekend before and didn't know if he would be in shape to teach.

Because of my medical background and upbringing, I tend, like most people, to focus on the discomfort and risks of the surgery. Also, just a few days before, a woman my wife worked with went in for sinus surgery and, she was told, died on the table from a hemorrhage. (Actually, Leanne told me a few days later she got the real story, which was that the woman went in for a nose job, got home, started hemorrhaging and died. Either way, horrible story). I wisely didn't mention this to Chris, just told him I hoped everything went well.

As we were chatting, Chief Grand Master Robert Dearman came in and gave us both hugs. CGM is a 10th degree black belt and the creator of Sanchin-Ryu. Chris mentioned the surgery and CGM promptly said, "Well, you'll sure be able to breathe better after that."

Then we joked around a bit about what Chris would do with all the extra oxygen that would be going to his brain.

I've spent some time mulling the conversation over, because I really liked the approach and attitude CGM showed there. It was focused entirely on the positive outcome. I don't doubt he was aware of the discomfort involved, that surgery has risks, but what he focused on was the reason Chris was having the surgery and how much better things would be when it was done.

Which I think is a pretty good way to go through life, actually.

I know that I can't successfully be a freelance writer without having a positive attitude, without believing that good-paying work is just around the corner, that I can stay busy, that my clients will pay me in a timely fashion. I KNOW that there will be droughts, that some clients don't pay, that projects fall apart, that there's a current trend for really low-paying work with "content farms," that the book publishing industry is undergoing a huge change right now, that yes, THINGS GO WRONG.

But I stay positive. I tell myself there's good-paying work, that I'm uniquely qualified for much of it, that I'm quite good at what I do, I work hard, and I prepare myself to deal with the droughts by managing my money reasonably well, etc.

That's different than being all happy-happy-happy that everything will just be all kittens and unicorns and rainbows. You don't run a steeplechase without figuring out how you're going to get over the water hazard. You prepare.

And you keep a positive attitude.

Thoughts?

Should You Write Every Day?

August 2, 2007
Joe Konrath had a recent post on his blog concerning 9 writing myths. His first one was Writers Write Every day. Here's what he had to say:

Myth #1 - Writers Write Every Day
I'm sure there are some writers who actually write every day, who force themselves to sit at their computers until they get their three hours, or four pages, or 1500 words. I'm not one of them. I do prioritize my writing, as all writers should. It's important to submit stories, finish books, meet deadlines. Hence the label writer. But in today's hectic world, I simply can't find the time to write every day. If you can't find the time either, don't sweat it. Write when you can. You can prioritize something without being a slave to it.

I don't actually disagree with Joe here and I think his last line: "You can prioritize something without being a slave to it" is absolutely true for a balanced, enjoyable life.

But, should you write every day?

I'm a fulltime writer, which means I make a living doing it, but I don't write every day. I try to. Although actually I now try to take weekends off unless my deadlines get crazy. But a significant chunk of my workdays are spent on research, interviews, transcribing interviews, promotion and just generally dithering around.

At the same time, I think there's a point in your life if you're trying to break into this business, if you're trying to develop your craft to a professional level, that you should probably try to write every day.

I also think that if you're honestly in love with writing and have fantasies about doing it for a living, you're kidding yourself if you're not compulsive about sitting down at the keyboard and writing just about every day. (But that's okay. If you can't lie to yourself, who can you lie to?)

As a fulltime freelancer, I pretty much treat it like a 9-5 job (more or less). In the summer I'm actually to my desk earlier than during the kids' school year, but I typically am to my desk by 9:00, work until 10:30 or so, go to the gym, then catch lunch, then work from 12:30 or 1:00 until 5:30 or 6:00. I'll work in the evenings and weekends if necessary or if I'm caught behind a deadline (it happens from time to time).

Other freelancers, like, say, Eric Mayer and Mary Reed, I believe tend to work more like noon to eight or nine (or ten or eleven or twelve). I heard freelancer and novelist Lev Raphael say once that he couldn't stand a regular schedule, it was soul deadening or something like that, so he works more irregularly. I think that's fine if it works for you.

Ultimately, one thing I've noticed about writers who actually make a living at is we get a lot done. If that means we sit our asses in the chair at 8:00 in the morning and work until 5:00 like a real job, then so be it. If we're night owls and prefer to work at night, hey, if it works for you. My friend Tobias S. Buckell seems to be much more of a crash-through-the-night kind of writer.

I like to point out a couple things to people who say, "I don't have time to write."

One is, we all have 24 hours a day. What we do with it is pretty much up to us. If you can't find time to write in that period, it's probably not that important to you. That's okay. Life is full of other things to do that you might find more rewarding.

Two, when I worked 9:30 to 6:00 at the lab in Detroit, had a 1 to 1.5 hour commute both ways, with young children, I still found time to write. Not much time. Thirty minutes, maybe an hour. Typically after the kids went to bed at 9:00 or so in the evening. A lot of times I would be so tired or fried that I didn't want to go down to the office and write. But most of the time I would say: Come on, write one page. You can do that in five or ten minutes, then you'll be done. Then I'd go to my office, write a page and it would often turn into two or three or five pages. Because writing energized me. But if it was a struggle, I wrote the one page and called it good.

One page a day for a year is a novel.

THE DEVIL'S PITCHFORK was mostly written during my lunch hour in longhand at the hospital where I used to work. I had other writing projects going on that paid me some extra money and those were my writing priorities in the evening, but I wanted to keep writing novels, so that's when I found time for it.

So, do you HAVE to write every day? No, of course not.

SHOULD you write every day? Well, that's up to you. Priorities and all. But if you have hopes of getting published and maybe even making money doing it, chances are you're going to need to write every day for at least a while. It's like any other skill, whether playing the guitar, painting, cooking or baseball. You might have talent, but it's going to take practice--regular practice--to get good at it.

I do want to confess something, though. Over the years, as I was able to write a novel a year (at least) while still managing to hold down a day job, I was puzzled as to what fulltime novelists did with their time. Like a lot of aspiring novelists, I dreamed of writing novels fulltime (still do) but on my more honest days couldn't quite figure out what they did with their time. Unless you're one really slow-ass writer, it just doesn't take 8 hours a day, five days a week, 50 or so weeks a year to produce a good, clean, publishable 400 page manuscript.

Now I understand that a lot of time and energy goes into promotion, etc., but even then, I have to wonder. I'm a fairly fast writer, but even if I slowed way down, I can't imagine a fulltime writer (except maybe William Styron) only writing a paragraph a day or a page a day when they have all day to do it. Anyway, I'll let you know if I ever get to that point.

Cheers,
Mark Terry

A Talentless Schmuck?

February 23, 2007
Well, the Academy Awards are Sunday night and I suppose I'll watch some of them. I don't think I've watched them to the end. I was thinking about them during "Good Morning, America" today, especially where Jennifer Hudson is concerned.

For those of you who aren't aware of this, Jennifer Hudson has been nominated for, I believe, Best Supporting Actress for her roll in "Dream Girls." What makes this apparently notable to the media is that Ms. Hudson got booted off the TV show "American Idol" well before the finals a while back. The media has decided to use this as a hook for many stories about how the "American Idol" judges, especially bad boy Simon, is full of crap.

Except he's not. And if you get past his bluntness and look at the fact he's the guy who created the show, he's a guy who ran a successful business and lost all his money in the stock market crash in the '80s and has come back to have a hit TV show and run a very successful talent and booking agency, etc., the man must know something.

When this story first came out, I commented to my wife that although I hadn't watched much of "American Idol," I had seen most of the finals and without a doubt, every single person in the finals has talent--a lot of it. And from what I've seen, every single person who makes it to the top 24 has a tremendous amount of talent.

And what the winner is going to face is a possible 6 month to 12 month concert tour where you perform 5 or 6 or 7 nights a week in dozens of different types of venues under all sorts of conditions. And the "American Idol" show structure is designed to weed out the people who just aren't ready for that kind of grueling schedule. If you're going to phone in a performance you had a week to prepare, how are you going to act when you've been on a bus or a plane all day and have to do a show at 8:00, then hit the hotel and be back on the road at 7:00 the next morning in order to get to your next show?

Doing a movie where you're allowed take after take to get it right is a very different gig.

Anyway, I was thinking about talent and writers. Aspiring novelists often get the sense that the industry thinks they have no talent. Undoubtedly in some cases they don't. What I've tended to see in bad manuscripts by unpublished authors is a lack of skill and craft; talent is almost impossible for me to determine at that level. If they work harder and persist, persist, persist and are willing to stay open-minded and learn and take feedback, then it's possible they might get published in the future.

Talented writers are a dime a dozen.

Talented writers who have really learned their craft are much rarer.

Talented writers who have learned their craft and persisted until they succeed are even rarer still.

And talented writers who have learned their craft, persisted and then had a little luck? Hey, you figure that out. Rare of the rare.

I also think the Jennifer Hudson story might be an example of something else I believe. Sometimes we're talented, but not necessarily in the areas where we are striving.

Lawrence Block wrote a column once about a friend of his who desperately wanted to be a novelist but kept getting rejected. Somewhere along the way the gent wrote a travel article, which got picked up and turned into a wonderful career as a travel writer, being sent by numerous magazines all over the world to write about all these exotic locales. Block said he was pretty jealous of the man. But the man only wanted to write novels and couldn't be happy with just being a wildly successful travel writer.

I also remember reading an article by a couple of literary agents who told a story about a client of theirs, a woman who was a PhD in biology, who had written a novel. They sold it and it did okay, but they suggested she try writing popular science books, which she was resistant to doing. Eventually they convinced her to give it a try and she was very, very successful at it.

This sometimes hits me where I live. Had I put the energy into nonfiction that I put into fiction when I was in my twenties, I would have been freelancing for a living by the time I was 30. By the standards of almost all freelance writers, I am very successful (if success is defined by money). Yet a part of me will only view myself as successful if I make a living just writing novels. (Is there a medication for this? Sign me up.)

I also think I have found a certain kind of niche with thrillers, which suits my worldview and my writing style better than straight mysteries. And if what my gut is telling me about my nearly completed children's fantasy adventure is correct, I may have found another area I can write well in that I never would have considered writing in even three or four years ago, let alone fifteen or twenty.

The point is, I think, that most of us that write are talented. Some are undoubtedly more talented than others, but we may have talents for different things. That isn't to say that if something really appeals to us we shouldn't try to develop our talents in that area. In fact, I think we should--that's part of the creative journey, which is an important part of life for us creative types. But I think it's safe to say that having a sense of your talent's strengths and weaknesses and working very hard are more important to eventual success.

Best,
Mark Terry