Episode 227: November Writing Challenge, Part III - Overcoming Roadblocks

The Pulp Writer Show

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In this week's episode, we continue our November Writing Challenge, and take a look at the most common roadblocks writers face. We also check in with our transcriptionist, and see how she is progressing in our November Writing Challenge.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 227 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 15th, 2024, and today we are discussing part three of our November Writing Challenge, which will deal with overcoming roadblocks in your writing progress. First we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will have Question of the Week, and then we'll get to our main topic of overcoming roadblocks.

First up, writing projects. I am almost/very nearly done with Cloak of Illusion. In fact, I would have finished completely yesterday, but I had some unexpected home repairs come up and now that those are resolved, as soon as this podcast recording is completed, I'm hoping to finish up completely on Cloak of Illusion and publish it this weekend. So hopefully when this show comes out on Monday the 18th, the book should be showing up on the various ebook stores. Be sure to subscribe to my new release newsletter as well and you will get a free Nadia short story called Trick or Treat in ebook form. I am 24,000 words into Orc Hoard, which will be the next Rivah book, and I'm hoping to have that out in December as my final book of 2024. My secondary project while I'm working on that will also be Shield of Deception because I am hoping to have that out as my first book in 2025. Hard to believe we're about halfway through the 2020s already.

In audiobook news, Shield of Conquest came out this week and you should be able to get it at all the usual audiobook stores, and that is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Cloak of Spears, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, should be out before too much longer as well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.

00:01:36 Question of the Week

Now on to Question of the Week, which had a lot of responses this week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week’s question: do you buy any hardback books? No wrong answers, obviously. I asked this question because I was reading an article about for many traditionally published authors, hardbacks used to be the primary source of royalties. Nowadays, for many authors, that has been superseded by audiobooks. Since I’m indie, my main source of revenue has always been ebooks. We had many different responses to this question.

JL says: I only read ebooks now. I have not bought a physical book in over a decade.

Surabhi says: Hardcovers, being very expensive, are a big no-no for me. I’d love to be able to afford hardcovers, it’s always either paperbacks or ebooks.

Justin says: If I’m getting paper, I will do my best to make it hardback. Paperback books have a limited lifespan and number of readings in them compared to hardback books. Most of my book purchasing is ebooks but reference works and great stories get the hardback treatment.

Mary says: Only if there’s no paperback.

Dave says: Ebooks and audiobooks all the way. They’re generally cheaper or easier to read, or with audiobooks I can do other things while I listen. Also as I get older, being able to increase the font size makes it easier to read.

I definitely agree with Dave on that, let me tell ya.

Jenny says: Can’t afford it usually. My hardcover budget goes to RPG books.

I myself do have quite a few RPG books, which is amusing because I don’t actually play the game but I just like looking at the artwork.

Juana says: Yes. I have 60+ signed editions of authors I like. Some paperbacks of the Frostborn series (Wonder who wrote those?).

That is indeed a mystery.

Catriona says: I used to collect hardbacks of favorite authors- buy each new release e.g. Terry Pratchett. But when I moved from Hong Kong to Thailand I got rid of most of my fiction books and bought the Kindle versions. Shipping after COVID was just extortionate!

Morgan says: I don’t really buy physical books anymore. My brain is too fried to read so I mostly do audiobooks while I work. I only have so much money, so it is hard to justify buying a physical copy of a book I already have the audio copy for when I know I probably won’t physically read it.

Gary says: I prefer hardbacks. When buying new though, I generally buy paperbacks unless it is for reference or one of my favorite authors. I always check though because now the hardbacks are often not much more.

Jeanne says: Depends on the book. I would totally invest in hardcover copies of Lord of the Rings, for example. I am currently investing in leatherbound versions of the Word on Fire Bible, which is a step up from the hardcover. Authors I don’t know or who I read for light fun, I’ll get as ebooks.

Marilyn says: No, but used to buy only hardback books. Ran out of room on my bookshelves and didn’t like to get rid of my books. I ended up buying an ereader. I have 1,729 books. I do have a few hardbacks but not many. Not everything is in an electronic format. When I used to travel, my suitcase would be full of books. Now I have room for clothes.

That is one nice advantage of the ebook revolution. Back in the day when I would pack for a trip, I would have to choose which books I would bring but now you can just bring your phone and you’re set.

MG says: If I can get a hardback I do, but I haven’t bought any recently.

Barbara says: I purchase very few print books these days and those I do purchase tend to be theology related. Whether I purchase hard or soft bound print books will depend on the availability and price. And since I’m no longer in seminary (I graduated in 2021), my theology books tend to be digital because that’s what I read. If I purchase print books, I’d run out of room to store them. Especially since I’m already out of bookshelf space.

Michael says: Not really, not anymore. They take up too much space. I might buy a very posh one if it looks amazing (stuff from the Folio Society perhaps) but that’s it.

Bonnie says: I mainly read ebooks now. I think the last hardcover I bought was Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.

Jeff says: Since I got a Kindle in 2010, I haven’t bought a physical book. I am approaching 500 ebooks. I was a SF Book Club member for many, many years so I do have hundreds of hardcover books. A lot of them are stored in totes because of lack of room.

Juan says: Used to. Space is a factor now. So now only for my son because I don’t want him to have an electronic device in his face so much, but usually the first thing I do at a bookstore when I see a good book is look for it on Apple Books. Usually half the price or so. Always less expensive as well.

Barbara says: Used to buy lots of books, got at least 3,00 but with arthritis in my hands, I’m now stuck with ebooks. Got at least 3,000 of them, too. I’ve got to get rid of some of my physical books, but I’ll still keep the ones that aren’t replaceable.

John says: I only buy collectible editions at this point, or if there isn’t an ebook for something I want to reread (but then it’s usually paperback). Sometimes old hardbacks have been cheaper than the Kindle versions. When I reread Wheel of Time a few years ago in anticipation of the Amazon series that was the case. Ended up just donating the books just a couple of years later.

Carol says: I do love the feel of a hardcover book, the smell, the sound of pages turning, but I’m fully converted to ebooks. So convenient, can read anywhere, carry everywhere, so sadly I haven’t bought a physical book for years.

Cheryl says: I only have hardbacks of the “classics” as collections to hand down to my grandchildren. Haven’t bought any paper versions of books for a few years now and they were paperbacks. Most were on Kindle.

Venus says: I will buy certain books in hardcover but only the ones I wish to have available after a collapse of society.

David says: I have always preferred hardback, but space constraints have left only those of my favorite authors. I have over 2,000 books on my Kindle.

Michael says: I do.

For myself, I do buy hardbacks but still very, very selectively. If Timothy Zahn, Jim Butcher, and a few other select authors I’ve been reading for decades have a new hardcover, I’ll buy it. Otherwise, it’s ebooks or paperbacks. For nonfiction books, I’m a bit less choosy. If I read say, a historical ebook and liked it, I might get the hardback or possibly the paperback to keep as a reference book.

It’s interesting from the general consensus of the comments that it seems like ebooks are the dominant format for books now and that if you really want to know if you’re someone’s favorite author or not, see if they buy your hardbacks. Given the expense and space premium of hardbacks, that’s how you know they really like your book.

00:07:43: Main Topic of the Week: November Writing Challenge

Now on our main topic of the week, week three of our November Writing Challenge. The topic we are discussing this week is overcoming roadblocks. If you're not familiar with our podcast series for November, you can listen to the previous two episodes, and we have a short summary here. If you feel like you're missing out when others are working on bigger writing challenges this month and you want to start writing but not to feel overwhelmed, a smaller writing challenge for the absolute beginner, 300 words a day (or some other small number of your choosing). The key is that it should be small and something you can manage daily.

As I mentioned on previous episodes with this topic, I wonder if National Novel of Writing Month is akin do a sort of crash diet for people where you can lose weight very quickly, let's say like five pounds in a month, but then once you do that, you go back to your old habits. In fact, you go back to your old habits with as much force as before and you end up gaining 10 pounds and you're worse off than you were before. I think a more gradual writing challenge might be akin to losing one pound a month, but you keep it off and that adds up over time. So follow along with our podcast transcriptionist who has never finished writing a book and feels overwhelmed at the ideas of starting one. We can follow her progress and see what advice I have for her as she faces writing challenges.

So week three, overcoming roadblocks. If you've ever done any writing or you've ever had anything to write, as you know, there are many roadblocks that can come up to impede your writing progress. The first ones we'll address are logistical roadblocks and we'll recap some points from Episode 220: 8 Tips For Finishing Your Rough Draft.

Perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks is time. It's trying to find the time to write. I found is a good idea to schedule your writing time and take advantage of smaller moments of opportunity to write. There is a difference between the perfect time to write and the available time to write. As I've said many times before, the perfect is the enemy of the possible or even the achievable. You might have in your head the image of the perfect time to write and the perfect environment. That may take a lot of work to achieve and be difficult to find.

Additionally, I found that many people in their days have what tend to be wasted chunks of time that you kind of have to waste based on the circumstances, like you're in a waiting room, you're on hold, or you are sitting in a room with nothing to do. You have to watch for somebody to arrive or wait for the phone to ring, that kind of thing. There are a lot of ways to pass the time that way. If you're in, for example, the doctor's waiting room, you see everyone sitting on there on their phones reading the news or whatever, but that could be an excellent time to get some writing done. You could obtain a cheap laptop like a netbook type laptop or you could even teach yourself to write on your phone with your thumbs. Those kind of chunks of wasted time throughout the day are an excellent time to squeeze out a couple hundred words and if you can squeeze out a couple hundred words every day, that will add up very quickly. The biggest enemy of finding writing time I found are the many distractions we have in our day-to-day lives.

And in fact, I was just talking about your phone. If you have your phone with you, that's a built-in distraction machine where you could maybe write 15 words and then reward yourself by checking your email or your Facebook or whatever. And then before you know it, you've been on your phone for 20 minutes and your writing time has disappeared. The same thing obviously can happen if you're writing on a laptop or a desktop computer or whatever. To manage these distractions, there's a couple of different tricks. You could just shut off the internet on your phone for a while and not turn it on again until you've reached your writing goal. If you find being distracted on your phone or your computer is a consistent problem, you could use apps or browser extensions to manage digital distractions that will prevent, say notifications from interrupting you, whether from email or turning off the internet and keeping from getting into it until a set period of time has passed.

For environmental distractions (and what I mean by environmental distractions are noise, people interrupting you and so forth), it can be a good idea to find a place where you'll face fewer interruptions. At various times, I have written in a school or a university or a public library where people tend not to bother strangers too much and therefore, if you sit quietly and get on with your typing, no one's going to bother you. Some people enjoy writing in a coffee shop. I've never really found that to be an enjoyable experience. I have done that many times based on what the circumstances were at the time, but if it was up to me, my favorite writing place would be in my office with the door shut and headphones on and music playing and I'm just writing away. But life doesn't always give us that luxury, so I have written in other locations, but if you can figure out the best way to give yourself a distraction free writing environment, even if it's just noise canceling headphones, that might be the way to go.

Another thing to watch out for that can eat up your time is writing adjacent tasks, things that are connected to writing but not actually writing itself, such as researching, outlining, reading about writing, listening to podcasts about writing, et cetera. These are all keeping you from the goal of getting your words down, which is and the ultimate purpose of our November Writing Challenge, to get your words done every day.

Some of these things may be necessary, but you can do them later and some of them are not necessary and not helpful to your productivity, like reading about writing or social media relating to writing or authors is only giving you the illusion of productivity rather than actual productivity. There may be value in these activities, but they are not helping you get the words down on the page.

So let's move on to what could be a more difficult type of roadblocks, the mental roadblocks, roadblocks where you just don't feel confident or you don't feel like you want to write or you don't even feel like you're good at writing and you're wasting your time by writing.

So motivation is a thing to consider. It's like you might want to write down a few reasons why you started a writing challenge in November. Why do you want to write? Why is this important to you? Do you want to be able to finish a novel and say that you finished a novel? Do you want to create something cool that's similar to the vision of the creative things you see in your head when you think about it? And what's the best outcome of you writing each day and what's the best-case scenario of what will happen if you keep writing? It might be a good idea to consider all of these things.

If you feel bad at writing or feel that you're not good enough, that seems to be a bigger problem for many people. There are a couple tips and tricks that you can use to work around that. The first thing is to don't revise as you go. Don't revise, don't look back. Just keep going. Get it all down on page as fast as you can and then keep going.

And the secret is if you're writing a rough draft, you can ignore your inner critic because the point of the rough draft is to get all the words on the page and then you fix them later in editing. An amusing anecdote about that-one of my audiobook narrators wanted to get caught up on projects and he asked if I could send him the rough draft chapters and then as I was writing the book and then he could narrate the rough draft chapters and then he could make any changes I made in editing later. I had to turn him down because the truth is I do a lot of editing on my rough drafts, like Cloak of Illusion was originally 96,000 words, and I think when all the editing is done, it'll be like 94,000 words, maybe 93,500.

So that's a lot of things eliminated. I moved around a lot of scenes. I changed a character's name six times, which is one of the reasons why I had to turn down that idea from the narrator because when I introduced a new character, sometimes I change the character's name four or five times during the course of writing until I'm finally satisfied that this is what the character's name should be. So imagine having to go back and rerecord that all the time, but that returns to my original point, where it's best to just ignore your inner critic while you are writing and just get all the words down on page and you can sort them through later. I found editing to be something of a less harrowing process than writing the rough draft.

A metaphor I've used before is that a couple years ago, actually, well more than a couple years now, I moved into a third-floor apartment with no elevator, and so I had to carry all my books up those stairs to the new apartment, which since I had a lot of books at the time, was a lot of work (this was before ebooks). Once all the books were carried upstairs to the apartment, only then could I take them out of the boxes and put them on the shelves. That was a lot easier than carrying all those books up three flights of stairs, let me tell you. But I use that as a metaphor to compare the writing process, the first draft is carrying all the books up the stairs and then arranging them on the library shelves as the editing process.

Another metaphor that people have found helpful is that the rough draft is like building a sand castle. You first have to drag all the sand to your sandbox and only then is it time to start building the sandcastle. You got to fill up that sandbox first.

Now what to do if you hate what you're writing, you absolutely hate it. You don't like what you're doing and you're dragging yourself to the word processor every day. It might be time to ask yourself a couple of hard questions. And the hardest one is, is this really what you want to write? Are you writing something that you want to write or are you trying to write something that you think would sell well or market well to the audience? I talked a bit about this way back in Episode 191: The Worst Writing Advice, about writing to market. Writing to market, if you go too far with it, is a bad idea because by the time you finish and the book is ready to sell, the market may have already grown tired of the trend and moved on to dystopian mermaid stories or something else. Readers also have a sense of when a story is rushed or written in a way that the author hates, not always but very often sort of picked up that the writer hated what they were writing and didn't want to be doing it.

It's much better to write something that you're excited to write. You can do a little bit of writing to market in that you look what's popular and say something like, hey, romantic suspense is popular and I enjoy romantic suspense and I want to write romantic suspense. So go ahead and do that. Something else to keep in mind is that tastes change. I saw an interesting article the other day arguing that sort of cynical anti-heroes and deconstruction of popular tropes is going to become less and less popular because that was very popular in the US in the 2000s and the early 2010s when the US in general was more stable and more prosperous. Although I don't think anyone would disagree to say that the United States in the 2020s, thanks to Covid and a variety of other factors, seems to be less stable and less prosperous than it was 20 years ago.

And so times are more troubled, then people have less of an appetite and troubled times for cynical anti-heroes and are more drawn to straightforward tales of noble heroes prevailing over evil, whatever the genre might be, whether fantasy or mystery or thriller or whatever. That's the kind of thing to keep in mind with how taste change. So you're really better off writing what you want to write rather than chasing trends because the trends we were just talking about went over a 20 year period. But trends on a smaller level can change very quickly within the space of a few years or even a few months. So you should write in a genre that interests you and you should write characters that you respect and characters that are dealing with an action and conflict that you find interesting. That is one way to hold your interest as you're writing is because you like the characters, you like what you're writing, and you want to see what happens next.

Another problem that you might face if you hate what you're writing is that you might be writing something boring that doesn't need to be in the book. Mystery writer Elmore Leonard famously said in his rules for writing, try to leave out the parts that readers skip. In other words, leave out the boring stuff. So if you're writing a scene and you don't enjoy writing the scene, and you're not looking forward to writing the scene, and you find it boring, maybe it's time to ask yourself: does this scene really need to be in the book?

We've all read books that had scenes where it was clear the writer was trying to fill space or thought necessary to go into more detail of, for example, a thousand mile river journey than was really necessary for the plot. If something's boring, just cut it out. There's a famous story that veteran actors who are really good at their craft will sometimes convince the director to cut out dialogue when they say that the actor can convey the meaning of the scene with just the look or expression rather than clunky dialogue. And that is often the case for these experienced actors and is very often the case for writers as well. So if you find yourself struggling with a particular scene, it might just be a good idea to cut it out or sum it up in a paragraph. Like if you have difficulty writing a journey, you could say, just sum it up in a paragraph that they got on a plane and went from New York to Los Angeles. There's no reason to devote two chapters to that. So those are our tips this week for overcoming roadblocks in your writing.

Let's have an update from our transcriptionist on her progress with our November writing challenge. “An episode on roadblocks is good timing because I hit some roadblocks last week. There was a day where I wasn't able to get time to write because of what was happening in real life, but since I have been averaging over my goal a day, I still averaged 363 words per day this week, even with missing a day. It took me an average of 13 minutes each day. I wrote out a plan for the challenge that said I could miss a day under specific circumstances and my word count for previous days could apply to that day or if I didn't have extra words, I would make up the words on a Saturday, so I didn't beat up myself or feel like I failed the challenge for missing a day. I had a plan for if I missed a day.”

So that seems like a good approach to planning the challenge. And she had a few questions for me actually.

The main question for me was: how do you manage distractions? For myself, I use a couple of different techniques. I've mentioned before when I'm writing new stuff, my main method is the Pomodoro method. That's where you set up a timer for 25 minutes, turn off the internet, and just focus on your task for 25 minutes. And I found that if I adhere properly to the Pomodoro method, I can usually get about 1,000 to 1,100 words every Pomodoro for 25 minutes. To reset my brain between Pomodoros, I will usually play Classic Super Mario Brothers on the Switch for five minutes (because you're supposed to take breaks between Pomodoros) and then back to a 25 minute Pomodoro.

I do try to hit a minimum word count during the day, ideally 5,000 to 6,000. If I get more, great. If something goes wrong, I tend to have a fallback position if of like 3,000 words. That's usually good on a busy day. I do revise my goals if something comes up because sometimes things come up that you have to pay attention to immediately and it can't wait. Home repair is a big one. For example, a couple times I have this very old wooden fence on my property that I really need to get replaced, and sometimes the wind will knock something loose and a couple times I've had the wind knock the beams of a segment loose from a fence post. If I spot that right away and fix it immediately, it's not a problem. But if I miss it and the entire fence segment falls over, then that's like a couple hours, maybe even a half a day repair job to fix that.

So sometimes you come across things like that that need to be addressed immediately. And if that happens, I just roll with it. I try to fix the problem as quick as I can and then try to get as many words as I can in the time that's left, which is why I talked about having a fallback position of 3,000 words if something goes wrong. Sometimes you just lose the entire day to writing until something more important comes up and that's just the way it is. But if you have a no writing day, don't despair and remember the words of Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind: Tomorrow is another day. If you have a bad writing day, that doesn't mean tomorrow has to be a bad writing day and you get another swing at the ball, so to speak.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and Week Three of our November Writing Challenge. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

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