Building a Writing Habit

We hear a lot about building habits.  If you are a writer, figuring out how to make time for your writing amidst the demands of life, including supporting yourself and maybe your family, too, can be daunting. My suggestion?  Start small.

Habits start with goals and repetition.  A behavior becomes a habit through repeating it until you no longer have to think about it, it is just part of your day/week/whatever.

Here are three tips for building your writing habit through setting goals and repeating the behavior:

  1. Make it easy to repeat.  Choose a time of day, a place, an amount of time that will make it easy to keep writing.  Is your house quiet in the early morning?  Maybe that is good for you.  Are you a night owl?  Maybe that’s your time.  It might be during a break in your day. Whatever it is, try to choose something that you will be easily able to repeat.  If you hate getting up early, don’t try to join the 5 AM club.  HINT: It doesn’t have to be every day either.
  1. Use intrinsic motivation and reward yourself for repeating the habit.  Rewards don’t have to be material.  You can reward yourself by allowing yourself to feel pride, a sense of accomplishment, happiness in reaching the goal of completing your writing ritual for that day.  Take a moment at the end of your writing time and let yourself feel that.  Reflect on it later in the day and feel it again.
  1. Try random reinforcement. Studies have shown over and over that random reinforcement works.  See casinos—people keep playing because they are sure their big win is just around the corner.  Find a way to incorporate this into your routine.  Use a spinning wheel, like this one (you may want to change the labels so that it will be more random) and spin it at the end of your writing time.  If it lands on a reward you have preselected, give it to yourself.  NOTE: every spot can’t be a reward.  Some of them have to be no, otherwise it won’t be random!  If it lands on no, there’s always the next writing time.

Repeating your goals leads to forming habits.  It is all about doing it over and over until it is a regular part of your routine.  

Let me know if you try any of these hints and find them useful.  I am waiting to hear from you.

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What I’ve Learned Working as an Acquisitions Editor…

In the past year, I have begun working as an editor for a small press, History Through Fiction.  I love working with Colin and the crew, because they support writers and work hard to get quality historical fiction published through both a traditional and a hybrid press.

I have learned a lot through my work with History Through Fiction; writers who are submitting their work to agents or editors might benefit from some of the patterns I have seen over and over in our submission platform.

Below are five things that might help you get to yes with your manuscript:

  1. Make sure your manuscript is ready.  Most writers start querying too soon.  If I had to put a number on it, I would say 90%. These days, to get published by a traditional press, a novel has to be almost completely ready to go.  Yes, there will still be editing, but it is usually fewer rounds than in years gone by.  It is the new normal, best to make peace with it rather than lament what has been lost.  The old system was also flawed in many ways, as the barriers to entry were pretty high if you were not born into or able to breach the walls of a certain class.  The new system isn’t perfect either, but just like your novel, it is a work in progress. Deal with what is, not what you wish for.
  1. Pay attention to the submission requirements.  We are a historical fiction press and we publish novel length projects.  I have had to reject novels because they were not historical fiction and because they were not novel length.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the work, but it has to do with the mission of our press.  Read the guidelines.  Save your time (and your heart) and the time of the acquisitions person.
  1. Check to see that the pages match the pitch. Over the past year, I have gotten some stellar pitches that made me super excited to see the pages, only to be massively disappointed when what was on the pages did not match what I was promised in the pitch.  A lot of attention is given to making the pitch so good that an agent or editor will request your manuscript.  However, this does absolutely no good if the pages disappoint. See #1.
  1. Let some other people read your opening pages to make sure they are doing their job. Because we are a historical fiction press, almost all the books we publish are based on the real lives of historical figures.  History nerds, and I am a card carrying member of this group, like the details.  But PLEASE, do not try to squeeze five years of archival research into the opening pages of your novel.  A novel is a story, it is not a treatise, and it has to follow the conventions of story, one of which is to make the reader curious in the opening rather than making them stifle a yawn or skip ahead to see if the story is starting a few pages later. Contrary to what many emerging writers of historical fiction believe, it is best NOT TO START with backstory.  I do not indeed need to understand everything you have uncovered about this person or event to engage with your story. Give me a story first.  The history has to be an integral part of the story, it isn’t the story.
  1. If we pass on this manuscript, please don’t send an angry email.  You want to be seen as someone we would like to work with in the future on a different project.  Don’t make it personal.  Remember that we only make money if people buy the book, so we have to think we can sell it and we need you to help sell it, too. When you respond with outrage, we are certain that working with you is not in our best interest.

I sympathize with writers who send out queries, so many of them, and get so many rejections.  I understand that it can be difficult.  Try looking at it from the other side. A lot of publishers, the one I work for included, are barely staying afloat.  Book sales alone are not enough to keep the lights on, unless you luck into a best seller.  

At History Through Fiction, we are looking for the following:

  • a book that we think we can sell to our audience
  • that will not need a complete overhaul during the editing process

And, 

  • An author we will be able to partner with for the long term, who will help make her books and our press a success

Is this you and your project?  I invite you to submit to History Through Fiction here.

What Thrills You?

On a recent flight to Vienna, I noticed something about myself.  I love that moment when you are on the runway and just about to take off.  It’s the beginning of the adventure. I feel a lightness married to a sense of anticipation for what is to come.  The thing I have been dreaming of is about to happen.

This feeling probably stems from my childhood.  My father was a pilot in the heyday of air travel, the 1960s and 1970s.  As a child, I was fortunate enough to benefit from his profession, in that we were able to fly and take a number of family trips. As a result, flying was not a strange experience to me and it became associated with fun and adventure. Sometimes where we were going changed due the availability (or not) of a flight that had open seats. Many a time, I have been at airports during the wee hours of the morning for a redeye.

When you read a novel, you experience that same sense of anticipation and ensuing adventure in the opening pages.  What will the main character decide?  What will the adventure be?  Whether it is a thriller, a mystery, literary fiction, or a quiet novel, all main characters make a defining choice at the beginning—they get on the metaphorical plane and go on a journey.  

What journey will you take your readers on? 

What I learned at summer camp…

As you may know if you’ve been with me a while, my husband and I work part time with a New Testament church in Tallinn, Estonia.  Every summer we go to camp with the church to help out teaching lessons, playing with the kids, doing whatever needs doing at summer camp.

This year, camp was a little different.  For 29 years, camp was about youth and kids.  It was a camp geared to reach out to families by providing a place for children to go for a week to learn a little English from the various missionary groups who support it, to play, to sing,  and to feel the love of God in their lives.  In 2024, the campground was sold by the Estonian government.  This meant that camp had to be reframed.  

Instead of giving up and deciding that camp was impossible because we had to go to a smaller campground and make changes in the way it worked, our camp director wisely decided to reframe the camp experience.  Instead of being a youth camp, our summer camp became a family camp.  Yes, it was smaller.  In the past, we’ve had 140+ kids and teens attend camp.  This year, we had families and the location could only support about 125 campers.  The activities were different, though some were just reworked for families—we still played Minute to Win It, my favorite camp game. At the end, even though it was different, campers all agreed it was the best camp ever.  (Just like it is every year!)

Does your novel need a reframe?  Maybe you’ve been stuck for a while, thinking that something has to happen a certain way, or that you have to follow ALL the writing rules. What if you reframed it?  What would happen if you let yourself imagine your novel in a different POV?  Maybe added an antagonist, or a struggle to build conflict?  How would that change things?

Maybe it is your writing practice that needs a reframe.  If you are trying to force yourself to get up at 5 AM or write an hour a day and it is not working for you, think about how you could reframe your practice.  What if you wrote for fifteen minutes a day?  What if you did three writing sprints per week?  What if you wrote during lunch instead of doom scrolling?  How could you reframe your writing practice and  make it work for you?

Want to Figure out how much to write each session to hit your writing goals?

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Want to see what it’s like to be coached?

  1. BONUS Podcast Episode and preview of Fall 2024 season Live Coaching with Lauren

Preview:  

  • We’ll be starting the Fall 2024 season with a selection of our favorite first pages.  
  • Books in the Fall discussion series include:  The Marriage Portrait, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Sympathizer, and Ashenden, or the British Agent.  
  • We’ll wrap up with a few episodes featuring first pages by listeners.  Enter to have your first page selected here.

Book Review: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

If you are looking for a novel that combines environmental activism, ambiguous moral decisions, an evil billionaire, and plenty of twists and turns, this is it.  The opening is a little slow, but don’t stop reading!  Once Catton has the players on the board, the game is afoot!

Meet Mira, the de facto leader of Birnam Wood, a group of ecoactivists in New Zealand who do something sort of like Yarn Bombing, only with gardening plants.  They find land that is not public, but that they feel might be better used, and they plant vegetables.  Really.  The group dynamic is starting to fray along with their finances, which are basically on life support, when American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine offers Mira a lot of money for a specific project on some land that he [almost] owns.  The group goes along, with the exception of Tony, who is convinced that the ends never justify the means and that all billionaires are evil, in fact that their very existence is morally wrong.  

When someone is killed at the site of their project (no spoilers), everything begins to unravel and Lemoine  takes control of the situation and the cover up.  The wildcard is Tony and his possibly off-kilter attempt to expose what he is sure is a massive conspiracy at the highest levels. 

The writing is brilliant—Catton absolutely skewers both the Left and the Right for their hypocritical and self-serving messages.  She makes the reader examine how individuals can have conflicting ideas about the world, even within their own minds.  She forces the reader to think about what the options might be for going forward, who is responsible for the shape our planet is in, and what ought to be done about it—all while giving us a satisfying thriller, no mean feat. She lets the story do the work, because there is no preaching!

The characterization is refreshingly nuanced—no one, not even the billionaire is one-dimensional.  In the end, all the loose ends are tied up, but probably not the way the reader might have predicted. This book is wonderful—entertaining and thought provoking at the same time.  

If you want something that is both challenging and wickedly humorous, get it now.

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New Podcast Episode: Wallop Your What If

This is a summer binus episode, part of a webinar recording from earlier this year. Terry and I will be back discussing more books and first pages in September.

How would you like to get to that One Yes with your novel?

Historical Fiction and Mystery, Upmarket, and Literary Fiction work with Robin at Readerly to craft the compelling novels readers crave about people who’ve made a difference.

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The Power of Subtraction

Why is it that when we brainstorm about solutions, we mostly think about ways to add?  Why when I read the comments on the recipes in the Cooking section of the NY TImes, do they always tell about all the stuff they added to make it better?  Why do writers sometimes think that more surprises, more plot events, more twists are necessarily better?

Why do we feel the need to add?

As humans, we have a bias toward adding.  For one thing, when you add, you get credit for making a change.  If you subtract, even if you make something better, it is unlikely to get noticed.  Editors are notorious for wanting to subtract.  They encourage writers to use fewer words, limit adverbs—give the reader just the essentials.  It is one of the few professions where subtracting is the default a lot of the time.  Since my work involves a fair amount of editing, I love the idea of the power of subtraction to make things better.

In my last newsletter, I wrote to you about backstory as sludge and how it can slow readers down.  Using subtraction to make your writing better is a related concept.  How much backstory do you need?  Less than you think.  How can you rewrite a sentence to make it both more beautiful and more meaningful, while at the same time using fewer words?  You can, but it isn’t easy.  The goal is to write beautiful words that make the reader want to slow down—not because they have to digest the family tree of your protagonist or the twenty names of the people in the room, but because they want to be fully present to experience the words.  That is what the good use of subtraction can do for you.

If you want to see an example of some subtraction practiced on a passage generated by Chat GPT, keep reading…

The Power of Subtraction—EXAMPLE

CHAT GPT PARAGRAPH

In the dusky twilight of a sultry summer evening in the year of our Lord 1778, amidst the verdant and undulating hills that cradle the burgeoning yet beleaguered American colonies, there stood, poised with a graceful yet deliberate determination, a figure of striking resolve and ineffable beauty, a young woman of unparalleled fortitude and clandestine purpose. Eliza Harrington, a daughter of liberty and clandestine agent of the fledgling Revolutionary Army, traversed the perilous landscape of her divided homeland with the silent tread of a shadow and the fervent heart of a patriot. Yet, entwined within the labyrinthine corridors of her heart lay a treacherous secret, one that threatened to unravel the very fabric of her loyal convictions: a profound and forbidden affection for a dashing British officer, Captain James Everhart, whose azure eyes and gallant bearing had, against the dictates of duty and allegiance, ensnared her very soul in a web of ardent longing and inexorable passion. Thus, in the delicate balance between love and loyalty, espionage and enigma, did Eliza find herself ensnared, her every step a dance upon the razor’s edge of destiny. Word count 185

Revised Version

Eliza mopped the sweat from her neck with her kerchief.  The cellar of the XXX Inn on the road between YYY and ZZZ offered slight respite from the oppressive August heat and the prying eyes of its patrons. James should have been here by now—she would have to return to her chores soon to avoid being missed. 

She had intended a flirtation with the billetted British officer as a means to gaining information for the patriots, but found that she anticipated their meetings more than she should. She turned to go, tying her kerchief back around her neck.  They would have to arrange another tryst.  The soft click of the latch to the cellar door sounded and Eliza turned to greet the British captain from between the barrels of ale, but her smile froze when she saw that it was AAAA, not James, who had ventured into the cellar.  Word Count 149

Which one makes you want to keep reading?

NOTE:  The inspiration for this post came from listening to the Hidden Brain podcast, an episode entitled:  Innovation 2.0—Do Less

Innovation 2.0: Do Less

Could you use some help simplifying your book idea or your story arc in revision?  The One Pager Session will help you do that.  

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What to do with the stuff you cut out of your novel…

The following is a guest post by a Readerly Writer.  As you can see at the end, her pub date is coming up.  Huzzah!  She writes about one way to use some of the material you cut from a novel.  She has created a bonus prequel for her readers that she is using to build her newsletter list.  You can get it at the end of this post!

When Robin and I worked on my historical romance Secrets to the Wind, we quickly summarized several scenes that I had originally written to be several pages longer. I put them all in a folder marked Outtakes. They did not fit the overall story arc of the novel, and many of them did not have a story arc of their own.

Secrets to the Wind involves abolitionists Annie and Daniel in the midst of the Civil War. The story I harvested from my outtakes depicts a dramatic incident from Annie’s early life on Martha’s Vineyard. I wanted to use the story as a prequel to the novel, but couldn’t figure out how to bring in Daniel. 

My process of turning this into a full-blown prequel involved several steps.

First, I outlined the story, using one of the beat sheets that Robin introduced to me.  Using 6,000 words as a goal, I estimated how many words I would allot to the inciting incident, the B story, bad guys closing in, the finale, and the closing scene. This gave me a framework.

Second, I used Annie’s antagonist from the novel to bookend the short story. This created continuity between the novel and the prequel. 

Third, I did a little more historical research. (Okay, true confession: I went down the rabbit hole for three whole days. It sure was fun.)Serendipity! I discovered that within the timeframe of my prequel, African-American orator Frederick Douglass actually spoke about a thousand feet from Annie’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. His speech provided a reason for her to be interested in abolition.

Using my outline, I crafted a satisfying story. But still no Daniel. Fortunately, I knew that he and Frederick were good friends from Rochester, New York, and that early in his career Douglass was nervous about speaking truth to white audiences. With a couple strokes of the pen, I inserted Daniel as a bodyguard, and Annie got to meet him very briefly six years before their courtship began in the novel. 

I called the short story Songbird in the Swamp because Annie’s music is a theme that runs all through my three-book series. I added word count to each section of the beat sheet to keep the story on track, and it turned out to be 9,000 words–even better than my original 6,000-word goal. After formatting the short story, I included a brief Author’s Note and then attached the first three chapters from Secrets to the Wind.

Creating the cover for Songbird was easy and fun, since I’d labored hard a few weeks earlier to help craft the cover for Secrets. Choosing a significant artifact from the short story and making it the same color as Annie’s dress on the novel’s cover was a great beginning. My designer chose similar colors for the background scene and approximated the font. 

I was delighted. Now I have a lead magnet I can use to build my mailing list for Secrets to the Wind. Both covers look gorgeous on the back of my newly-designed business card, too.

Here’s what I learned from this experience. First, I need not be afraid to “kill my darlings” (or scenes) as I refine my novel. I can resurrect them later to create standalone short stories. Second, I can save considerable time by beginning with an outline and sticking to the word limit for each beat. 

Finally, my muse is not at all inhibited by structure. In fact, she showed up right on time to fulfill my requirement to have both my novel’s main characters figure into the prequel. I think I will name her Sarah Dipity.:-)  

Get Songbird in the Marsh here.

Jeanne Gehret is the author of Secrets to the Wind, scheduled for publication this fall. You can visit her website at www.JeanneGehretAuthor.com. She finds plenty of historical inspiration in her hometown of Rochester, New York.

Outlining is a valuable tool at any point in the writing process: just getting started, revising your novel, or writing your summary to query.

Get your free copy of the Beats of the Heroine’s Journey with examples here.