OK, today I know I’m going to get smacked for what I’m going to say, but it needs to be said.

There will be moments when the people and things you care about most will sabotage your writing.  This is a fact, so no point trying to rationalize their actions.  Of course, they don’t try to do this, it just happens.

“Hey Mom, where are my socks?”
“Yo roomie, it’s your turn to take out the trash.”
“Honey, what’s for dinner?”
“Meow, meow, meowmeowmeow.”
Any of these sound familiar?  This is just a small sample of the tactics that our loved ones use to separate us from our time and our writing.

And don’t even get me started on things like gainful employment, grocery shopping, and getting the car fixed.  These alone already make finding time to write a challenge, but then add on all our social and familial obligations and… wham!  Sometimes it seems like everything in our lives are out to get in the way of us doing any writing.

But this post is not meant to be a rant on how life has hijacked my writing time.  On the contrary, this post is about fighting back.  The fact is,  it’s easy for writers to become the victims.  “Poor-writer-me, I never have time to write.  Life always gets in the way.”  Get over it.  I don’t believe in being a victim, I believe in taking action.  If someone tries to steal my writing time, there’s only one thing I can do:

I steal it back.

And it feels great.

What do I mean by stealing time?  Stealing time is when you grab a chunk of time that normally would be used for something else and you steal it for your own purposes.  Most people call this “multi-tasking” but I think “stealing time” sounds more deliciously subversive and sneaky.  I am a chronic time thief myself and I steal time to use for my writing.  For instance, on the trip to Ireland, I carried my notebook with me everywhere and wrote several of these posts while standing in line at the Book of Kells, or over afternoon tea.  Those of you with small children are probably already experts at stealing time, because you have to be if you want to write and have a family.

Over my years of temporal kleptomania, I’ve happily discovered that I’m more productive during a stolen block of time than if I just had a spare chunk of time lolling around waiting for me to grab it.

Why is stealing time so effective?  It gives your writing a sense of urgency.  If you know you only have a short span of time before your responsibilities tackle you back into submission, you’re more likely to be efficient with what time you do have.  For some people, short writing spurts can actually lead to more progress than if they had smushed those short chunks together into a long writing spree.

Today’s Task: Plot a Time Heist.  Steal a chunk of time today and use it for your writing.  Don’t worry if it’s not much (it can be as little as 5 or 10 minutes).  The point isn’t how much time that you steal but that you actually steal the time.  No fair taking a chunk of time you already had free–that isn’t “stealing time,” that’s just “not being lazy.”  So search out a chunk of time that life has taken from you and steal it back.  As with all heists, start small and build to bigger targets with practice.  Pretty soon you’ll be a pro and you’ll be thieving time left and right.

As we gear up for DIY MFA, we’ll be talking a lot of about goals.  Yesterday we focused on operational definitions for our goals (i.e. small concrete and measurable steps that represent the bigger, abstract goal).  Today we’ll be emphasizing the flip-side of that idea, namely the Holy Grail.

What’s a Holy Grail, you ask?  It’s that elusive dream, that unbelievable quest that shapes all your creative goals.  Julia Cameron (of The Artist’s Way) calls this her True North.  I call it my own personal Holy Grail.  It doesn’t matter what words you give it, the idea is the same.

Two people might have similar goals but a very different Holy Grail.  For instance, two writers might both want to get published but to one, the Holy Grail is winning a Pulitzer while to the other the Holy Grail might be getting on the NYT Bestseller list.  Notice how both writers have parallel small goals (getting an agent, editor and having their book published) but ultimately the differences in their Holy Grails will shape how they approach these intermediary steps.  Even if they never reach that ultimate goal, the Holy Grail will influence the goals that lead up to their ultimate success.

But wait, you say.  Didn’t we just spend all of yesterday figuring out small, concrete, manageable goals?  Are we supposed to give up on those all of a sudden and go after wild and crazy dreams?

No.

Here’s the secret: The Holy Grail shapes your goals, but it doesn’t define them.  So go ahead, dream big.  Let your mind go through all those fanciful scenarios you would never admit to anyone.


Your task for today:  What’s your Holy Grail?  Write it down and post it somewhere where you can see it every day.  Here’s mine.

One topic that we’ll come back to many times in the DIY MFA is this idea of measuring success.  Unlike a typical MFA, where you can measure your success through grades, a diploma or post-graduation opportunities, the DIY MFA is, by definition, un-measurable since different people would consider different things to be “success.”

This brings me to a concept that I first learned about in Psychology 101 in college: Operational Definition.  In psychology, you’re usually dealing with outcome variables that are very abstract and difficult to measure.  Stress.  Anger.  Fear.  Part of the reason these variables are so hard to measure is because different people experience them in different ways.  It’s up to the psychologist to find another variable–one that’s concrete and easy to measure–to approximate the variable we really care about.

For instance, you can’t ask a bunny if it’s hungry because it’s a bunny and it doesn’t speak English.  You can, however, count how many carrots it eats in a given time period.  More carrots = more hungry.

Similarly, while you can ask human subjects if they were hungry (say on a 1-10 scale), you could run into problems.  First: what might be a 4 on the scale for one person might be a 2 on a hunger scale for someone else.  Second: people sometimes lie.  If, however, you give everyone the same “snack” during the experiment and then secretly measure how much food is left at the end, you can have a reasonable indicator of who was hungry and who was not.  When you spread that data over a large sample, you can account for individual discrepancies and your concrete measure (weight of leftover snack) actually becomes a very good indicator for your abstract variable (hunger).

OK, I didn’t mean to get overly technical, but there’s a reason I’m going into all this detail.  The fact is, DIY MFA success is an abstract outcome variable, making it difficult to measure.  If we set smaller, concrete goals, on the other hand, we can have a pretty good indication of whether we’ve succeeded or not.  As we work on putting together our DIY MFA individualized programs, remind yourself to keep your goals concrete.

Why is it so important that goals be concrete?

1. Abstract goals are hard to measure.  Telling yourself “I’m going to become a better writer” is all well and good, but how will you know when you get there?  Instead, you could try: “I’ll write and edit three stories in the next three months” or “I’ll submit one story to 10 literary magazines.”  Then with a simple checklist you’ll know if you’ve succeeded or not.
2. Vague goals are scary.  OK, maybe I’m more of a wimp than most people but nothing freaks me out more than a vague goal.  If the goal is too amorphous, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but if the goal is concrete, it automatically becomes more doable.  “Write a novel someday” sounds scary.  But “write five pages a day”?  Well, I know I can write 5 pages today and I guess I could do it tomorrow too and probably the next day… and you get the idea.
3. Checking things off the list feels good.  If you’re measuring success with small, concrete goals, it means you get to check things off the list more often than if you look at it as just one vague goal.  If you look at success as one big goal, then that’s only one thing you get to check off the list but think of how many checks you’d get if you broke down that goal into small, concrete goals.
4. Concrete goals make it easier to track your progress.  Say your goal is to write a novel, but you break it down to 5 pages per day, six days per week.  That means, in 8-10 weeks you should be pretty close to finishing the whole thing.  If you stick to your weekly goals, you should have a good measure of how close you are to finishing your progress.

During DIY MFA month, I want to accomplish the following abstract goals (broken down into concrete goals):

• Finish my novel (8 chapters left – 2 chapters or approx. 4000 words per week words for 4 weeks)
• Read more (one book per week for 4 weeks)
• Submit a short story (Submit A.H. to 5 markets per week for 4 weeks, total of 20 magazines)

What abstract goals can you break down into concrete goals for DIY MFA?

Earlier this week, Elana Johnson wrote a post asking for input on outlining and in response to it, I thought I would share with you all my own outlining style.

Warning:  the following post gives a detailed look at the workings of the gabi brain and these methods may not be suitable for all writers.

The truth is, I’m a visual thinker not a verbal one, which is probably a bit strange for a writer.  In a former life, I was a product designer and a lot of my design training tends to inform my approach to writing.

I’m also a native New Yorker, born and raised and still living in the city.  My love for this city also informs my writing, despite the fact that I have yet to write anything that’s actually set in NYC.

My visual approach to writing has merged with my New York mindset and lately, I have found myself outlining in the form of subway maps.  The basic idea is that subway lines represent story threads and the “stops” on the subway line represent individual scenes.  In some outlines, I have several threads that intersect and come full circle (like the BAX outline above).  In other situations, I might have two separate lines that run parallel but come together in some key points (like my very early outline of my WIP).

In addition, I also make charts to go with my subway outlines, in which I detail what happens at each of the “stops.”  In particular, these charts include the following information about each scene:

• Characters
• Important Events
• Setting
• Purpose (or “Why am I writing this scene anyway?”)

I realize that the subway lines might make sense to me, but to other readers (like my critique group or a workshop) they just look like lines and dots.  This is why I make the charts, to help translate the insanity that is my outline method.  This method might not work for all people, but for me, it helps to think of writing a piece as being sort of like a journey.  It also helps me to think of each scene as one dot in a long list of dots, because writing a dot is easy.  Whenever I start to feel doubts, I try to remind myself that it’s just a stupid dot and I can write one dot.  That way, dot by dot and scene by scene, I get myself to write the book.