This article was originally posted on longhandhabits.com.
It’s been a year. Quite a year.
I won a local writing competition and received an honorable mention in another. I learned how to be a full time writer and build up knowledge around self-publishing, writing, editing, marketing, and blogging. I restarted my blog and have been keeping it up weekly. 2018 is the eighth full year that I have written at least two pages a day, and the first full year that I have written at least three pages per day.
While I’ve technically made money from fiction and articles in the past, I’m establishing 2018 as the first year I began to work part-time writing fiction. I’ve always found yearly reviews and author income surveys helpful guides to structuring my writing life and setting long-term goals. See Kameron Hurley’s. Yet, I’ve never seen any for beginning authors, like me.
So, I made one. Here are my numbers.
Some good, some bad.
Methods
Admiral Rickover had a quote about systems that I like to repeat:
“I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.”
A writing career isn’t only putting words down. Pardon my swagger, but I haven’t missed a day without writing in eight years. I can fill up notebooks just fine. But what else makes up the daily life of a writer? And how do I know whether I’m being effective? After reading through author blogs, thinking about my habits, evaluating what I needed to improve, what I knew I would need to be successful, and goals, I made some guidelines for a system.
- The system had to accommodate everything that went into writing.
- The system had to be able to track what went into writing so I could measure it, compare it, and record it.
- The system had to be flexible, free, and simple. Google spreadsheets, Google calendar, and an add-on called TimeSheet worked perfectly together to achieve this.
So, what goes into a writing career? There’s writing itself. Editing, research, outlining, and getting feedback. Marketing and networking. Reading, of course. And all the other small things that needed to be done.
For number two, I needed to capture what I did daily in broad categories that I could measure. These categories had to be specific to distinguish different activity, yet broad enough that I get tripped up recording the difference between editing blog posts and editing fiction.
I chose seven categories: writing, editing, website, research, outlining, reading, and other. Then, I defined each one.
Writing: Writing, rewriting, and typing up old journals. This is anything fiction, blog posts, creative nonfiction, etc.
Editing: If I have a red pen in my hand or Tracking Changes is on Word or Google Docs, it’s editing.
Research: If I have a notepad and pen in my hand, it’s research. It’s purposeful browsing. If I’m mindlessly browsing the internet, it doesn’t count. If I’m printing out articles and saving and bookmarking and adding them to my research binders and folders, or seeking specific knowledge, such as by going to the zoo, library, or interviewing someone, that’s research.
Website: Maintaining, configuring, developing, designing, marketing blog posts and the website.
Outlining: mapping out a story, adding facts from #Research. It also includes marketing strategies, financial planning, and book launches. In other words, anything that involves long-term planning.
Reading: People are always surprised when I include reading as part of writing, as if I’m padding my hours with it. I include reading because a) I consider it as maintaining my muse and charging my creative batteries, b)it overlaps with #Research.
Other: Anything that supports my goals, but happens too infrequently to assign its own hashtag. For example, attending conferences, author signings, book cover design practice.
For number three, I track what I did through the day in my paper planner. At the end of the week, I enter all my time in Google Calendar and run TimeSheet.
For example, I run a weekly blog to practice writing, analyze stories, build a readership, and build a web presence. SEO research, making banners on Canva, and other things like that to be supportive of my goal to be a writer (especially since readers find my work through my blog) So I track its time under the hashtag, #Website, either writing it down in my planner or entering it directly into Google Calendar. Calendar entries with hashtags are read and compiled into a spreadsheet report via TimeSheet.
It seems absolutely anal to record what I’m doing in such detail, but tracking my hours keeps me honest about where my time is going. It also helps me understand how long it takes to do something so I can plan specific writing goals, such as having a complete first draft, submitting to contests, reaching out to editors, etc. I worried that I would fall into the trap of searching for how to be productive rather than being productive, so when I found a system that worked for me, I stopped looking. It takes me about 15 minutes a week to update my hours.
Money, Sales, Downloads
I also keep track of what I’ve spent on writing so far. This includes software, book covers, office supplies, writing conference tickets, and other expenses. And guess what? I’m not breaking even. AT ALL.
Spent: $1371.97
Earned: $111.16
Ow.
I did earn back some of it in a writing contest and through my royalties (woo!), but I doubt I’ll make bill-paying money until I put out a novel (which I hope will happen early next year— but I said that last year). Self-publishing is a start-up activity and I expect to spend over a grand on editing, book cover design, and marketing. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for that yet. Right now I’m saving what I can.
What I did buy, like the website revamping, ISBNs, line edits, et cetera, will pay off down the line. I won’t need to repurchase some of these for years. I included a “Worth it?” column in the spreadsheet with more detailed notes.
Thoughts on Results
I’m mostly pleased with how my time is divided. More that half of my time is spent writing; the next largest chunk is reading, followed by editing. The rest is Other, Outlining, Website, and Research, together making up a little more than 10%. I wish I had been more detailed and tracked what I was writing, editing, etc, more thoroughly, but I think this is still a decent breakdown. 2018 has been invaluable as a year of incubating, learning, self-disciplining, and goal-setting.
Most Valuable Things I Learned This Year
#1 How to self edit
It used to be that I would start a short story and it would take me months and months to edit. Why? Because I didn’t know what to look for! I was dependent on epiphanies to solve my problem or have a friend point it out. Now I know how to sift through my words to seek specific things. The most valuable books I read this year were Peak, The Artful Edit, and re-reading my old college notes. I wrote a post on how I edit for NaNoWriMo.
#2 How to Split My Time
Routines, quotas, and deadlines makes every day productive. 3 pages everyday in my notebook. 5 pages typed up everyday. Monday blog posts must be scheduled before Sunday. I make monthly goals in my planner, like having 3 journals typed up by the end of the month. I have yearly goals, which I never make. But I know they’ll get done eventually.
#3 How to Self-Publish*
*Without making a fool of myself. I have the basics of uploading and formatting and sharing short stories on Kindle only, but that’s all.
#4 How to Improve
I wrote a blog post about Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise and how I would apply it to blog writing. I’ve since applied it to more areas of writing, and everything has been improving at a whalloping pace. See #1.
What I Need to Improve Next Year
#1 How to market/ getting my work out there
I used to work in a call center, and, astonishingly, I loved it. So I don’t know why it’s been such a pain in the ass to do internet marketing. I’m always hesitant to submit my blog posts as links on Reddit or share my work; though I know I’ll need to before I start publishing longer work.
#2 Priorities
I have several long-term projects in the pipeline and I’m unsure how to prioritize them. On one hand, I know I need to get my work out into the world, get feedback, and improve. On the other, once it’s out in the world, I will have to start thinking of reader expectations, how publishing changes them, and what I want to write fits into them. I think I will probably edit and send out my shorter stuff first so that I get a feel for editing, and then work on my longer stuff.
#3 Formatting & Cover Design
I’ve decided that I will learn how to format my own ebooks, and at least do my own covers for my shorter works. I like learning about book design, so I feel like I’m having fun and working at the same time when I post my satirical book covers on tumblr. I’ll probably go with a professional for print books, but otherwise, I feel confident formatting my own work for digital.
#4 Reading
I want to read more, but I’m also impatient to finish my work! A tsundoku rises at my right hand whenever I dive into an editing project.
#5 Writing
I always aim to be better, and I will always include writing in things to improve. Specifically, I want to learn how to incorporate symbolism and metaphor and improve my sense of rhythm and style. Also, I’d like to write more blog posts on a wider variety of media, like podcasts, longform journalism, and other things like that.
I’m going to poke at editing and writing a little further. This summer, I started using this weekly blog to practice editing. Since then, my blog posts feel tighter and more alive. However, it takes time to research, write, and edit these. While they’ve helped me improve, the posts don’t get as much traction as I would like. I read too many different kinds of books to establish a niche.
My true goal is to be a fiction writer, not a blogger. I felt like the weekly blog has been a detour away from my goal— a detour that has helped me become a better writer, but still a detour.
2019 New Year’s Resolutions
2018 was the first year I’ve worked at least part-time hours for fiction writing; my growth during that time has been incredible, and I’ve accomplished things that I didn’t know I should have been on my radar, such as restarting my blog, learning book design, and learning how to self-edit. I also received surprising honors: an honorable mention in a state-wide writing contest, reaching the top 15% in an international competition, and outright winning a local literary contest. It’s heartening to see that people like my writing, because that’s the entire point— to writing stories that people enjoy and find deeper meaning. This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t set goals for 2018.
To shape goals for 2019, let’s look at 2018’s goals:
- Submit to at least two contests, publications, or magazines a month. That’s 24 submissions for the whole year. Doable. But I only sent 20. I stopped applying in the summer after reevaluating my goals and budget (submitting to literary magazines gets expensive). Though, I received good responses from the submissions, so I don’t believe it was a total wash.
- Write or do writing-related work at least 20 hours a week, 25 hours stretch goal. If you calculate my yearly average, I made my stretch goal! If you only include my weekly average post job switch, I overshot the stretch goal by 11 hours. (graph)
- Publish the goddamned audiobook. Unfortunately, this goal will probably go unheeded. The audio quality of the recorded short story, Without Magic, isn’t great. I don’t know when I’ll be able to rerecord it. For now, audio projects are shelved.
- And finally. . . three pages a day. I did it! Never missed a day!
What should my goals be for 2019? Consider how I spent my time in 2018 and evaluating where I am at now, I think my priorities for 2019 should be getting my work published, either through magazines, on Amazon, or elsewhere. With that in mind. . . .
Writing
- Continue writing 3 pages a day. Gotta keep doing what works.
- Continue practicing self-editing. Ditto. But, rather than practice self-editing on blog posts, I’ll do it for fiction.
- Write or do writing-related work 36 hours a week. Stretch goal: 40. This is adjusting for my new job hours. I won’t know how the future will change or how my priorities will change on a month to month basis, but as long as I make time to write and do everything to support it, I’ll be okay.
- Type up 6 pages from old notebooks per day. When finished, keep no more than one notebook untyped. I write first drafts longhand (if you haven’t guessed by the name of the website). Unfortunately, sometimes I don’t have time to type up my notebooks, and they accumulate, pushing back my ability to edit and polish my work in a timely fashion. I’m struggling to pare down my backlog now. So this year, I’ll work on keeping everything updated.
Publishing
- Post on blog at least twice a month. Yeah, I know. It’s not enough for a blog. But it’s not going to be a priority this year.
- Begin working with editors, cover designers, and formatters on a novel-length story. Stretch goal: self-publish a novel by the end of the year. Self-published authors will point out that publishing frequently is better. I doubt I’ll self-publish more than one novel than one this year, due to the expense of hiring someone to do cover art and print formatting, unless I break even on the first novel.
- Publish three works, either self-publish or in magazines, or submit at least to 25 different places. I’m kicking myself for only self-publishing one short story this year. Next year, I want to push for getting my work out, either self-publishing or through literary mags. I still write literary fiction and creative nonfiction essays, and I want to place those in homes that suit them.
- Set marketing goals. I asked for Harvard Business Review books for Christmas, and I’ll refine my marketing strategy after I read them.
- Set sales goals. Again, I’ll have to set them after I do more research. Tentatively, I’d like to make back through sales what I spend on editing, formatting, cover design, submission fees, etc. Though, I’m taking the long view in self-publishing, and I imagine it will take years to be solvent.
Closing Thoughts
I’d love to say that this all is due to my work ethic and smarts, but writing 36 hours a week and spending over $1,000 on this writing dream wouldn’t have been possible without my parents letting me live at home. Granted, my job is decent for being part-time (26k with benefits, in a cheap state), but it’s not enough to move out on my own. Plus, if I did move out, I wouldn’t be able to save. I’ve talked to both of my parents about taking part-time work while I write. My mom thinks it’s perfectly fine— I have a feeling that she would keep me at home forever if she could. My dad wishes I could be more self-supporting, but also knows that times are different from when he was my age. It helps that he knows I’m not piddling around. For Christmas I ask for things like printer ink, books on writing or business, subscriptions to literary magazines, and other things like that. It’s cliche, but it’s true: I couldn’t have done this without my parents. Looking back over the year, the schedule, my circumstances, and my life, I see how little of my success depended on my work ethic and talent, and how much depended on having parents, teachers, and friends who believed in my potential.
Overall, I’m satisfied with how much I’ve done over the year, though I’m still impatient. I’m kicking myself for only self-publishing one short story. For not having both short stories proofread before putting them up on Amazon. For spending money on a cover I never used.
John McPhee, in his appropriately named book on writing, Draft No. 4, included an anecdote about an editor at the New Yorker. The editor had brought the magazine up and shaped its vision and mission, and, now ready to retire, was seeking his replacement. At the same time, he also sat down with writers and other editors to lead fine-tuning of articles for the magazine.
McPhee asked him, “How do you spend so much time and and go into so much detail when [The New Yorker] is yours to hold together?”
The editor replied, “It takes as long as it takes.”
I keep this quote above my desk as a reminder to stop comparing my beginning to somebody else’s. In 2017, I attended my local writing conference, discovered that the winner of a short story writing debut contest was my age, and it really irked me. While she was reading her work, I kept having these petty, nasty thoughts; she’s making too much mouth noise as she speaks into the microphone, her story isn’t interesting, I don’t get it, et cetera. But after she was done reading, I thought, “Why am I jealous? I didn’t even submit to this contest.” Consequently, I reevaluated what I was doing to reach my wants. Hint: I wasn’t doing much. My jealousy stems from my frustration that I’m not where I think I should be as a writer—published, award-winning, a genius (I know). When I reevaluated, I realized that I had no good reason to think that I would be a published, award-winning genius, because I wasn’t working like a published, award-winning genius. I read in Shounen Note, “The person I want to be is so far away that it makes me cry. . . even so, I’ll do what I can.”
I wonder sometimes if I’m so focused on improvement and productivity that I will lose the joy I feel from writing. I love writing, but it’s not tender loving. Sometimes I feel nostalgic towards my past work, because those are records of how I was then, like looking at a scrapbook or graduation pictures. Writing consumes me. There are times when I don’t feel like doing it, or am frustrated when whatever I’m slogging through won’t shape up. The times when I’m writing, when the words connect one after another, and I submerge into a waking dream, when life around me mutes, the pen has no resistance on the paper as I transcribe imagination to page. Those times are too rare to be dependable. I don’t write everyday because I love writing so much that I have to do it every day. I write every day to like what I finish writing. Finishing something to the best of my ability that meets the standards I’m writing for is satisfying. My satisfaction comes from watching myself grow, working language and ideas to develop a story, and hearing how others enjoy it. It’s fascinating to learn about the world and how we try to understand it, and how language can or can’t capture it. On the days and nights these are absent, that words don’t come easy and images are nebulous, I write anyway. And often, I fall into that trance all writers know. I write for more than joy. I write for a deeper satisfaction.
Borges said about writing and work that best captures what I mean:
“A writer’s work is the product of laziness, you see. A writer’s work essentially consists of taking his mind off things, of thinking about something else, of daydreaming, of not being in any hurry to go to sleep but to imagine something . . . And then comes the actual writing, and that’s his trade. That is, I don’t think the two things are incompatible. Besides, I think that when one is writing something that’s more or less good, one doesn’t feel it to be a chore; one feels it to be a form of amusement. A form of amusement that doesn’t exclude the use of intelligence, just as chess doesn’t exclude it, and chess is a game I’m very fond of and would like to know how to play — I’ve always been a poor chess player.”
It’s work, but it’s not. It can be tiring, but a good, satisfying tiredness that comes from exerting yourself. Sometimes it’s frustrating and difficult. I can be impatient, like waiting for birth. I want to know how it turns out, it being my life, the story, and how readers like it.
I didn’t feel this way until I realized that I would never be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with my heroes unless I got my shit together. Technically speaking, I’m a full-time writer. Yet, I know I’m still emerging. I don’t think I’ll consider myself a full-time writer until I have a print copy of my novel in my hands. I’ve always considered myself a writer of novels— that’s what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was told, “Write the books you want to read,” The stories that I first wrote were huge, unfinished things. I finished the first first draft of a novel in high school, which has been put to rest somewhere in my computer. Back then, I just wrote. My stories were shit, but people encouraged me, and I thought that was the same as being good. There wasn’t a defining moment where I started competing. Somewhere along the line it just became harder to write without noticing other people. I became jealous of others’ successes, even if they weren’t writing in the same genre or starting in the same place. I realized that my stories weren’t great. (I recently began revising some college stories I wrote. I should apologize to my writing teachers.) Something had to change. So I changed. Or, rather, I changed back to how I was when I first started writing. I reread the books that inspired me to become a writer— Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Fahrenheit 451, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn— and the books that awed me in college— Autobiography in Red, Desert Solitude, and The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I remembered that I became a writer because I love reading. I love that reading helps me understand the world, the magic of language, and the connection to ideas. How a great book makes me see something in a certain way, that makes me say, “I didn’t think of it that way, but it’s true.” How a great book changes the way you look at the world.
I love writing, and everything that goes into it. It’s overhearing a musical, evocative phrase on the bus to work— “She’s got a body like a dropped lasagna.” It’s reading a book and finding a solution to a problem in a story or something that sparks my imagination, which kickstarts a period where I’m jiggling my legs at work and clockwatching because I want to rush home and write. It’s the pleasure of watching a story come together, from atomized words and free-floating ideas, arranging, building up, or grown to be something vivid and responsive to the reader. The catharsis in watching someone enjoy it. It’s sitting at my desk and watching light play across it one quiet afternoon. The snow smoothing the edges from the mortar and stone of the window ledge; it’s watching dragonflies sewing across the lion-colored lawn of summer; it’s the daffodils trumpeting under the sycamore; it’s the frogs who stick to my window and lunge for the gnats and moths beckoned by the light from my midnight sessions.
Shounen Note said, “[w]ithin the gradient of everyday life, I changed and became who I am before I knew it.”
It takes as long as it takes.