Writers write. It’s what we do. To go above and beyond that, by answering interview questions they receive in email, is astounding indeed! For this round of Five Authors/Five Questions, I’ve barged into the workdays of Louise Marley, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Mantchev, E.C. Myers, and Jay Lake.

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Question five: If you could give new(er) writers one piece of advice for the coming year, what would it be?

Louise Marley: Write what you love!  Write what you’ll be proud to have written.  There are no guarantees in this show-business profession.  Maybe you’ll have a bestseller, maybe you’ll have a movie deal, maybe you’ll write a wonderful book that never gets the notice it deserves.  You simply can’t predict, and anyone who tells you they CAN predict these things is wrong.  What we can be certain about is that we, as artists, strive always to create something of value.  And have a heck of a lot of fun doing it!

Lavie Tidhar: Take a risk. Write something that makes you uncomfortable.

Lisa Mantchev: The same as always: treat it like a job. Put in the hours. Do the research. Behave professionally.

E.C. Myers: Set reasonable goals for yourself. You can’t control how many stories you sell, but you can control how many you write or submit. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get an agent, but you can decide to send three queries a week. You might not sell that novel, but you can make sure it’s the story you wanted to tell and it’s as good as it can be before going on submission.

Jay Lake: Write more. Whatever you’re doing, do more of it. Also, the time to write is there if you make it a priority in your life.

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What would you tell a fellow author? Leave us a comment! My deep thanks to the authors for an amazing five weeks of questions and answers! Who will I pester next? Stay tuned!

Writers write. It’s what we do. To go above and beyond that, by answering interview questions they receive in email, is astounding indeed! For this round of Five Authors/Five Questions, I’ve barged into the workdays of Louise Marley, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Mantchev, E.C. Myers, and Jay Lake.

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Question four: What would a successful year of writing look like to you?

Louise Marley: The perfect year would be a completed novel and perhaps two or three short stories.  I don’t think I’ve ever been more prolific than that.  A more businesslike writer would probably talk about sales, but I tend to let the publisher worry about those, as there’s only so much I can do about them.  I like having a year in which I can look back with pride on my output, and look forward with some confidence as to where that work will appear and how my readership will react to it.

Lavie Tidhar: There are two ways to look at this. One is, can I pay my rent? The other–have I written something I am profoundly happy with?

A good year would answer the second in the positive. A great year would answer both!

Lisa Mantchev: One new book out in hardcover, another in paperback. Starred reviews are nice. My next goal is to hit one of the bestseller lists. When that happens, I am going to get the phoenix tattoo on my back enhanced.

E.C. Myers: Probably like some other writer’s career… But in all seriousness, I would say that “success” comes from writing stories that I’m proud of, that are better than what I’ve written before, that no one else could have written. Sales are wonderful, but they’re largely out of my control. I can’t sell anything if I don’t have good work to submit. If I could publish at least one novel a year and a story or two in magazines that I love, and maybe attract some compliments or recognition along the way, I’m doing pretty well. Someone, probably one of my Clarion West instructors, said that as your career progresses, your idea of success changes. You always want a little more than you have: more sales, more foreign sales, more awards, more popularity, maybe an agent or a movie option. It’s human nature and not necessarily a bad thing, because if you don’t give in to jealousy or despair, it only drives you to work harder, write more, and push yourself to improve and develop your craft. Just like every project is different, every writer is different, and it’s not usually beneficial to compare your progress to someone else’s, especially when you don’t know what they’ve had to do to get where they are.

Jay Lake: Well, last year I held down a full time job, parented a teenager, had liver surgery and six months of chemotherapy, crammed in a fair amount of travel prior to being sidelined medically (including being co-host of the Hugo awards), blogged about 250,000 words, and wrote about 250,000 words of first draft fiction. My original plan, had I not experienced another cancer metastasis, was to write 600,000 words of first draft fiction. So was last year successful? I didn’t meet my original plan goals, but I was still pretty productive in the face of some serious medical challenges.

More loosely, I would consider a year with two novels and two dozen short stories drafted, plus revisions on prior work, to be successful.

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How do you define success? Leave us a comment! Next Wednesday, we wrap up these five questions with a bit of advice for new(er) writers. Stay tuned.

Writers write. It’s what we do. To go above and beyond that, by answering interview questions they receive in email, is astounding indeed! For this round of Five Authors/Five Questions, I’ve barged into the workdays of Louise Marley, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Mantchev, E.C. Myers, and Jay Lake.

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Question three: Do you outline or are you a “pantser”? How much planning and prep goes into any given project, and is the process any different for novels vs. short stories?

Louise Marley: I write very little short work, and I would say I never outline those pieces.  It doesn’t hurt to be a pantser with short fiction, because the commitment is so much shorter.  I do, however, have a quite specific process with novels.

I’m a hybrid!  I’m a pantser in the main, but I always have an outline to help keep me organized.  What I like about the outline is not straying off in too many directions, spinning my wheels writing something that doesn’t belong in the story.  What I like about simply setting off on a scene, without knowing precisely where it’s going, is the voyage of discovery, the surprises and revelations that come about.  My process, invariably, is to write three chapters, letting my imagination guide me, and then stop to outline the whole novel.  Much more fun writing the chapters!  Outlining is hard, but I think it’s a necessary exercise.

As it happens, I’ve just begun a series of blogs called “How I Write a Novel” (I blog at Red Room).  This is a question a writer is often asked, and I thought it would be fun to write about my process at the same time I’m actually employing it.

Lavie Tidhar: I prefer to just go at it, without any forward planning, but that can have serious drawbacks. These days I tend to plan more but over-planning will kill any pleasure I take from it (after all, if I already know what’s going to happen, why would I want to write the thing in the first place?). So it’s a mix for me. The best is still when a story idea pops up and then just gets written. But, particularly with longer projects, I often have to stop and plan ahead and then keep going. And of course, occasionally I take the wrong turning and have to delete big chunks of dead-ends… not the happiest thing in the world, but all part of the work!

Lisa Mantchev: No matter how long the piece, I do a skeleton outline and then allow for movement and wiggling as I work my way through it. On any given novel project, I have six or seven versions of the outline that I’ve revised as necessary.

E.C. Myers: Most of the time I’m a pantser. I usually have a clear beginning, middle, and end in mind, and many scenes in between, but I’m “discovering” the story as I write it. I’ve disdained outlines in the past, but on my third novel, which I’m still revising, I was wasting a lot of my morning writing time trying to figure out where the story was going, so early on I stopped and outlined the whole thing. I found that it helped me make more efficient use of my time, because when I opened the day’s file, I knew exactly what scenes I was going to write next, and it didn’t make the process any less organic, as I’d feared; the outline simply changed as I got deeper into the book. The more complicated the world building, the more research and planning has to go into it, as in that novel that I ended up outlining. Every project is different, and what worked for one might not work again. I haven’t noticed any big differences in how I tackle a short story vs. a novel, but I’ve never outlined a short story. The length and scope is usually small enough that I can keep it all in my head more easily, while a novel can be a messy, sprawling thing that represents months of drafting instead of days or weeks.

Jay Lake: For short stories, I am a total “pantser.” I write by following the headlights, in reading order. This is true even when writing nonlinear fiction. That method works up to about 50-60,000 words, then it falls apart.

For novels, I outline. As I’ve progressed through my career, my outlines have grown more elaborate. I had no outline for Rocket Science, a five paragraph outline for Trial of Flowers, a thirteen page outline for Mainspring. The outline for Sunspin (admittedly a trilogy rather than a standalone) is currently 140 pages, and I keep periodically adding to it. That represents months of thinking, planning and prep. So for me the processes are very different depending on the nature of the manuscript.

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How do you plan a project? Leave us a comment! Next Wednesday, we talk about what a successful year of writing looks like.

Writers write. It’s what we do. To go above and beyond that, by answering interview questions they receive in email, is astounding indeed! For this round of Five Authors/Five Questions, I’ve barged into the workdays of Louise Marley, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Mantchev, E.C. Myers, and Jay Lake.

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Question two: How much do you write in a typical day? Is there a time of day you find yourself naturally more productive?

Louise Marley: I used to believe I was best in the morning, but my life circumstances have changed.  I now know I can write at any time, but I agree with a poet friend of mine who pointed out that there are two cycles of creativity in a day.  There is often, and surprisingly, a little rush of ideas and energy quite late in my work day.  I’ve learned to wait for that, and to be ready for it when it comes.

As a working writer, I can’t wait for the perfect time to write, because that time will never come.  At this moment, my brain is getting ready to work, because it knows that the housework is done, the body is exercised, and when I finish this little commitment to Shimmer, there won’t be anything between me and my current novel.

I’m not a fast writer at all.  I expect to turn out between three and five pages a day, which is far less than some of my colleagues.  The saving grace for me is that most of those pages are keepers.  I loathe throwing out things I’ve written, so I do my best to write them well in the first place, and to write the scenes that need to be there.  Only rarely, when I’m revising, do I have to delete entire passages.  I hope to keep that up!  It means a book a year, as a rule, and that’s satisfactory for me.

Lavie Tidhar: Not a morning person! I used to do a lot of writing late at night, which I still love–however these days I try to be up relatively early and then do the whole coffee-e-mails-blog-updates-wake-up routine and get on with daytime writing. I try to aim for a minimum of 1000 words a day–work on one project in the morning and another one in the afternoon, but it all depends. And of course some days you just need to get out of the house and walk or do anything other than write.

Lisa Mantchev: I have two kids and I’m a stay at home mom, so there are no typical days! My new routine, though, is to get up at five am and have uninterrupted writing/editing time until 6:30. I’ve always been a morning person, but now I’m an EARLY morning person. And there’s something so settling about a cup of really hot tea and complete silence. When I’m drafting, I can manage between 1500 and 2000 words in that time period. Editing is harder to measure, but ten to fifteen pages, unless a New Scene crops up.

This morning, I had not only a New Scene but a New Character pop up. I am most perturbed, given her appearance and her chipper attitude.

E.C. Myers: What’s this “typical day” you speak of? Let’s go with an ideal day, shall we? I’m naturally more productive at night, often very late, but I’ve disciplined myself into a morning writing routine that gives me about an hour to ninety minutes of writing time before heading to my day job. Then I try to fit in two or three hours more of work in the evening before bed, which doesn’t always work out. I’ve been revising two novels for the last year, so I haven’t drafted new fiction in a while, but I usually average about a thousand words an hour if the writing is going well, and around 500-700 when it isn’t.

Jay Lake: 2,500 words seems to be my base unit of daily output. That usually takes me 60-90 minutes, though that depends on the nature (and stage) of a writing project. As for productivity, I can write at almost any time of day so long as I’m conscious and not exhausted, but the practical aspects of my life seem to have me writing in the late afternoon or early evening most of the time.

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How many words/pages do you write in a day? Leave us a comment! Next Wednesday, it’s battle on between outliners and pantsers! Place your bets now…

Writers write. It’s what we do. To go above and beyond that, by answering interview questions they receive in email, is astounding indeed! For this round of Five Authors/Five Questions, I’ve barged into the workdays of Louise Marley, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Mantchev, E.C. Myers, and Jay Lake.

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Question one: Do you make yearly writing goals? Monthly goals? Are goals measured by word count, story count, or something different?

Louise Marley: My goal is to write every day.  Even on vacation, I typically spend some time each day on the current project.  As I plan my schedule, working in exercise and household commitments, I try to set aside a block of completely unencumbered time each day when I can eliminate all distractions and concentrate on the novel or story I’m writing. Distractions, I’m convinced, are the greatest enemies of creativity.  In the world of the 21st century, we have an abundance of them:  internet, TV, radio, cell phones, and so forth.  My best work gets done when there’s no interference by any of these things, and the only person who can turn them off or tune them out is ME!

Lavie Tidhar: I’ll aim for a minimum of 1000 words a day, but obviously some days you end up not writing anything, or falling short, and some days you get all your work done before 11am in the morning. My goal for 2012 is just to finish a whole bunch of half- or third-completed projects. Generally I like to alternate, and to work on more than one thing at a time. But I take a fairly relaxed approach to goals. I don’t really think in terms of years or months or even know what I’ll be working on, exactly. As long as I’m enjoying myself–and as long as I do complete things! –I’m quite happy.

Lisa Mantchev: I usually measure my goals by project. “Need to draft a new novel. That’s about 75,000 words,” or “Have a story due for an anthology, about 8,000 words.” I like writing at least one new novel and a handful of shorter pieces every year.

E.C. Myers: These days my goals are purely based on deadlines. Having a contractual obligation to deliver a manuscript by a certain date is a powerful motivator! But left to my own devices, I’m fairly focused on project-oriented goals: to complete another novel revision in X months, to draft a new short story for the next writing group meeting, to submit three short stories to markets. I find word count and story count to be good markers of progress and productivity, but not necessarily goals in themselves. As long as I’m writing and have concrete measures of success, like a completed draft—and, of course, as long as I’m happy with the work—the work takes as long as it takes, and it’s as long as it needs to be… Unless I’m falling behind on those deadlines! Then I’d probably better set some kind of schedule, and stick to it.

Jay Lake: I make yearly goals these days. Essentially, I plan out what I intend to write for the year, in a fairly high level way, and assign a production calendar. It might say something like, “Jan-Feb, draft novel X. March, work on short fiction. April, revise novel Y.” I also have goals for individual projects. For example, when working on a first draft of a novel, I try to write 2,500 words per day. When working on a revision of a novel, I try to do at least an hour a day on the project. I do track these, and self-report, to keep myself honest. Also, I allow myself up to two days off a week for brain breaks or dealing with life’s inevitable interruptions. At other times in my career, I’ve had other kinds of goals. For example, from 2001 to about 2005, my practice was to finish a short story or novel chapter every week, all year long. As I shifted more heavily into writing novels, that stopped being practical, but it served me well at the time.

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How do you structure your own writing goals? What goals have you set for 2012? Leave us a comment! Next Wednesday, we talk about the “typical” writing day. Is there any such thing?