Elizabeth Shack

In the usual fashion, I’m starting off my planning for 2012 by looking back at 2011. It was a good year, writing-wise.

The most notable point is that I made my first two fiction sales: “The Demon’s Tomb” came out in volume 2 of The Crimson Pact in August, and “A Talent for Death” is in the current issue of Shelter of Daylight.

I finished several short stories this year. My goal was four, plus any interesting anthologies that turned up, so I ended up writing seven. Which surprises me, now that I add them all up, because it seems like a lot. In fact, it’s half of the short stories I’ve written ever. Which makes it completely unsurprising that I blew my previous annual number of submissions out of the water.

Novel-wise, I finished the first draft of one book, and I’m just about done with a revision of another book. I’m also finishing up the planning stages of my next book and itching to start writing.

Last week I talked about goals–something you want to achieve and can control. If you want something, set goals that will help you achieve it, and then make a plan that will make you meet those goals.

So how do you plan? Sounds like a rhetorical question, but I’m curious. For the past five or so years I’ve been making schedules for myself, which originally started back when I read Time Management from the Inside Out and thought her “time maps” were intriguing. Mainly, putting everything onto my calendar ensures that I actually make the time to do it. I still tend to slide into the realm of “I can do 15 things after work tonight and still get to bed by 10″ if I don’t look at how long things actually take. (There is some part of my brain which thinks the rules of time don’t apply to me.)

That covers the “how much writing time can I wedge into this week” and “can I really jog, swim, and play tennis?” elements of my plan. Now it’s time for the bigger picture.

More recently I’ve been playing with a timeline program, because I couldn’t find any free project management tools that were nice to use. I wanted to lay out a year’s worth of writing. Like my daily schedule, this is another area where my brain tries to overreach. Hey, there’s a story a week challenge. Wouldn’t that be fun. Ooh, Nanowrimo. Haven’t done that in a while. Oh, and I should write that cool book about the nifty thing. Sure, I’ll just finish up this revision and then draft the next book and then I can do that new book and these fifteen short stories and maybe I should try poetry and….

Conveniently I know about how much time in a week and (roughly) how long it takes me to write something. Which means I can sit down with a map of the year and say, ok, this short story will take me this many weekends. This outline can take up these weeks. This first draft will be done by x, so after that I can start something new. And so on.

Also conveniently, no one but me actually cares about the deadlines I set for myself, so I have the flexibility to change my plan whenever I want if something unexpected (like an open anthology or a workshop I decide to attend) comes along. I don’t think I’ve ever ended a year with the same plan I started with. My life is not nearly as draconian as this post makes it sound.

So back to the non-rhetorical question. How do you lay out what you’re going to work on for the year (or five years, or month, or whatever)?

Because it’s getting to be resolution time, and time for me to set my writing goals for the next year, I wanted to talk about dreams versus goals.

I see a lot of people (probably not you) who declare that their goal for the next year/five years/decade is “Sell a novel,” “Win the big contest,” or similar things.

Those aren’t goals, they’re dreams.

A dream is something you want to achieve but can’t control. A goal is something you want to achieve and can control. And you set goals to help you reach your dreams.

So you want to sell a novel? That’s not in your control (or in mine, alas). That’s a dream. Make your goals “I will finish my first draft by x date,” “I will revise the novel by x date,” “I will start submitting on x date,” etc. Those, you can control.

Want to win the tennis league? You can’t control how well everyone else plays. Goals could be “I will practice my serves,” “I will practice anticipating where the ball will go,” and so on.

And then make a plan that will make you meet those goals. You might not achieve your dream, but you’ll be making progress.

Last week, Pat Wrede posted about college majors and degrees for writers. This is a topic I always find interesting to read about, despite my not having any experience with being in school as a fiction writer–or maybe because it’s fun to play the “if I’d wanted to be a writer back then, what would I have studied” game. (Or the “if I went back to school, what would I study” game, which is not. going. to. happen.)

In early adulthood, I wanted to be a physicist, so I commented:

I didn’t want to write until I was in grad school, and I didn’t want to have a fiction career until quite a while after that.

Which means my undergrad degree is in physics, and my electives were in more physics, math, chemistry, and biology, and I got a master’s in physics…and then I started writing fiction and went to journalism school.

I wish that when I was in college I’d taken more history, anthropology, sociology, etc. courses (I took four history and one economics, everything else was math and science). On the other hand if I just made myself read more nonfiction I could build up a solid foundation anyway.

Perhaps I should explain that I didn’t go to journalism school to be a novelist; writing novels helped me realize that I liked writing, and I went to journalism school after quitting physics to jumpstart a career in nonfiction.

Reading isn’t going to give me anywhere near the background that a degree would, but see above about not going to happen. I’ve been–very slowly–going through Anthropology for Dummies [1], which was the only general intro on the shelf at B&N the other month.

What have you guys studied, or what would you major in if you went back to school now?

[1] I love the url they’re using for it. It’s really for dummies.

Congrats to those of you finishing Nanowrimo today!

For a while now I’ve been tracking my writing time (and writing a program to analyze it, the results of which I’ll discuss I ever finish it (this is a programming exercise as much as a way to get the results)). Recently I recorded everything I did for about a week and a half–which was incredibly tedious–to see where I can squeeze more writing into the day.

The results were rather depressing. There really weren’t any big chunks of wasted time to get rid of. Alas! While it’s nice to know I haven’t been wasting my life, that means I have to get creative if I want to cram more time into my week. (I’m pretty good about using the time that I have, but I’d like to find more of it, without cutting out anything important. Good luck, right?)

I did learn random nifty things: it was taking me twice as long to get out of bed and down to the basement to work out as it did to get out of bed and leave for the pool. That was easy to fix by getting my workout clothes ready the night before no matter what kind of workout it is. Also, it takes me far too long to shower, dress, and prep breakfast and lunch in the morning, so this week I’m trying out something I’ve been planning for awhile: doing a week’s worth on Sunday. It was a tight squeeze to put 5 containers of muesli, yogurt, and berries in the fridge with all the Thanksgiving leftovers, but nice to know I don’t have to think about it for the whole week. (I didn’t even try to fit the scrambled eggs in the fridge this week, though).

I also applied the data to a new writing schedule. The old one had fallen by the wayside, but I’ve been sticking to a pretty good mental schedule, so I wrote that one up on my calendar to give myself the satisfaction of marking sessions off. (Yes, I am one of those people who will put things I’ve already done on my to do list just so I can cross them off.)

The final piece of my time tracking investigation is to not worry about it nearly as much as this entry makes it sound like I am. Really. I just like having a schedule.