Why the forty hour work week is killing us.
I think a lot about work. It's what we do, but not necessarily what we want to do. We work in order to finance the lives we want. But what happens when forty or fifty hours doesn't fit in with what we want? We force ourselves through it and that directly effects our happiness. Unfortunately if art is your thing, whatever form it may take, your life will be a support system for that art. And that right there is what is killing us. We are not truly free to do what we want. When bills, student loans, past debts, car payments and taxes all crush down on us it takes away something inside. And it forces us to trudge through a long work week constantly looking forward to Friday. The weekend reprieve. The occasional Holiday. And one or two weeks off a year. But more and more often I wonder what is the point of looking forward to Friday if it just resets on Monday?
The Official Blog of Author Dan DeVeronica
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
The "Write" Setup
In order to produce creatively the setup is the key. If you have the ideas without the setup then you only have the ideas. I have worked like this before, it's frustrating. In order to maximize on your space it you should focus on five important aspects;
1. Privacy - Whether you work better in public or private the best way to maximize your creative output is to reduce distractions. Probably not a good idea to have that Playstation 3 in your office where you work. Also family, they need to know when it is your time to write. It can be as simple as a closed door or as complex as a monthly time schedule on your fridge. At any rate they need to know what times to leave you alone.
2. Research - Your references should be right at your finger tips. Dictionaries, The Elements of Style, hell even old copies of writers digest. I have turned a large portion of my office into a working library. That way if I have anything from pharmacological texts to the Encyclopedia Britannica right behind me. The internet does wonders for the consolidation of information but just remember if that connection goes down you will be screwed.
3. Comfort - The majority of your time will probably be spent hunched over hunting and pecking away at a keyboard. Your chair should be comfortable. Your monitor should relieve eye strain. Your keyboard shouldn't cause any discomfort to your wrist. But most of these factors vary from person to person so a lot of this one is down to personal choice.
4. Organization - Every office is messy. I am not talking about overall cleanliness. Hear I am referring to your writing. There are times when I have had up to thirty documents open spread out over two computers. You must have a good filing system in order to keep track of current projects. You don't want to end up editing the same manuscript four or five times because you forgot what folder you saved it to.
5. You - This is the most important aspect of your writing space; you. It must be tailored to your needs and wants. Everybody is different so go crazy. If you work best at a desk behind your living room couch while your family is home then go for it. If you work best in solitude try that. Decorate and then redecorate. If you start to suffer from writers block move your desk to another wall. Get attached to your office, its an essential part of you as a writer.
Writing is Deleting
When your egg timer goes off and it's time to stop writing for the day don't stop just yet. Read through the pages of what you wrote and find your favorite part. Look for the sentence, paragraph. page or chapter that screams masterpiece. Read and reread that one part as many times as it takes for you to feel fantastic about being its creator. Embrace your inner megalomaniac. Done yet? Okay now highlight and delete that part. Now read what you wrote, does it stand alone? If not make it. You should be able to remove any part of your story and still have a story. And don't forget the words of Faulkner; "Kill your darlings."
A Carrot On A Stick
It's time to talk about having goals. Having day dreams of crowded book signings and readings is great. But how will you get there without laying out a path for yourself? Goals. When your career path specifically goes through the dark woods of creativity it is easy to get lost along the way. Unless you give yourself clear cut goals both short term and long term you will not succeed in this field. So where should you start mapping your path to success?
Word Count - This is a very basic starting point. Pick a word count for yourself to hit every day. I try never to write any less than 250 words per day. Now for me that is a relatively low number and very easy to hit. But that is the point. If I set it at 3000 words and have a fully stacked schedule that prevents me from hitting my goal I will feel like a failure. Negativity is counter productive to creativity. Start small and remember slow and steady wins the race.
Literary Magazines - Both online and small press literary magazines publish on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis. These make for great short term publishing goals and also allow you to gauge the quality of your writing. I try and submit to at least one magazine a month and shoot for at least 4-5 publications a year.
Now remember every good system of goals has an even better system of rewards. In a career where you work largely alone you need to reward yourself for meeting goals. If you make your word count every day for a month treat yourself to a movie or dinner. Just don't ever reward yourself by taking the day off of writing. This is a seven day a week 365 day a year job you chose and you can't risk taking time off. If you can help cut a path for yourself with small goals you will reach your larger ones. And in the end seeing that book on a store shelf will be a greater reward than anything you can give yourself.
A Few Commonly Misused Words
The following is a selection of words that are commonly misused. They are pet peeves of mine when I see them in professional writing; especially mine. Lists like these are very common this one being prepared by Iowa Experiment Station Publications at Iowa State University. This leads me to a favorite editing technique of my own. Pick any of these words then take your longest most recently edited piece of writing and do a word search. See where it pops up and in what way it is used. Was it used correctly? Were you trying to sound more colloquial? Was it dialog? Then once you have determined its usage cut the little bastard out or substitute him for the proper word.
ACCURATE - (an accurate estimate) - accurate implies complete freedom from error or absolute exactness. Anestimate is an approximation. Try "a reliable estimate."
AND/OR - use one or the other. AND THEN - use one or the other.
CHECKED - (The traps were checked). imprecise. use 'examined' or another more precise word.
HOWEVER - do not use with another conjunction at the beginning of a sentence or independent clause ('However, because...' or 'However, since...').
IN ORDER TO - 'To' will suffice.
LESS(ER), FEW(ER) - 'less' refers to quantity, 'few' refers to number.
Now the original list is longer so I will include a link. But when you read through it remember that you don't necessarily have to edit out the words or usages. This is meant as a broad guide to clean up your writing. But strictly adhering to these lists as if they are unbreakable laws will lead to you sounding unreal. It is important to use information like this as guidelines that will let your own personal style emerge.
Some great advice in a letter from John Steinbeck written to writers who are just getting started.
"Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
John Steinbeck"
"Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
John Steinbeck"
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