Professional Development for the Professional Writer

I attended another workshop on marketing and promotion last Saturday run by Holly Roberts, USA Today Best Seller author. We can never get enough of this stuff, right?

In the fall, I attended one at our local Historical Novel Society meeting. I paid nothing for this one and gained a purse full of gold from Marylee McDonald’s stellar presentation.

I buy books on marketing and promotion. I read articles on marketing and promotion. I take classes when I can. Since this is not an area I feel confident in, I seek the information from knowledgeable others. As a professional writer, I have a responsibility to keep learning and growing. It’s my career, so I must assume the bulk of the responsibility for my success while being grateful for support from my publishers.

Every source says first write a good book. Well, I try. I do the best I can, but when I compare myself to Louise Penny, Jaqueline Winspear, Diane Mott Davidson, and others, I can see that my writing is not at that level. Yet. But I’m working on it. Honest.

However, the marketing thing can take over your life. At last Saturday’s Holly Roberts’ workshop, I learned so much about how to create a compelling ad, what I need to do on Facebook, and more. With four Facebook author pages, I need to up my game and post more content on each.

Okaaaay!

To figure out, maybe, how to be more efficient while being more effective with marketing and promotion, I am “attending” a Facebook group’s marketing strategies week-long focus beginning next week. For free! Maybe this one will be the magic bullet. Care to join me? Check out the 12-Minute Book Launch Challenge for yourself. 

I’ll be writing a limited series of what I’m learning/have learned about marketing and promotion. Come back next week for tips on building your mailing list and how to use it.

What are you doing that’s been effective for marketing your books without sucking up your whole life? Please share below.

Facebook: Are you struggling with the book marketing energy-time drain, too? Commiserate with Sharon Arthur Moore at http://bit.ly/2F6ntIO

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The Professional Writer Makes Money

Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it? We write these tomes, and we would like to be paid a working wage. In fact, many of us don’t consider ourselves “professional writers” until we’ve pulled down some royalties.

But the odds of making a living from writing are slim. And there is no one to petition to raise our minimum wage. Marketplace purchases decide your royalties.

Here are some facts I gathered from online research of surveys and polls about writers’ incomes.

One in ten authors can make a living from their writing without a supporting, secondary job.

The typical writer earns less than minimum wage.

17% of authors earn $0 a year despite 98% of them having something recently published.

5% of authors earn 42.3% of all writing income. That’s 95% of us sharing the remainder. Talk about the haves and the have nots.

Women writers earn 80% of what male writers earn.

77% of indie authors made $1000 a year.

1.3% of traditionally published authors earned $100,000 a year. But only 0.07% of indie published authors earned that amount.

Oh, there are more of these discouraging stats, but why go on. Your writing is almost certainly not going to support you. If it does, well, bully for you. For the rest of us, we’d better have a back-up plan.

These stats are the reason that fewer presses give advances to new authors. Most new authors don’t earn out the advance in future royalties. The publishers gave more generously in the past because the expectation of future books was that over time the money for the advance on the first book would be recovered by the publisher.

So what do writers turn to for earning a living wage while waiting to get into the 1.3% who do succeed financially?

The majority of writers I know have a job unrelated to writing. But the mortgage gets paid and the kids have milk to drink. In their “spare time” they crank out their books and indie or traditionally publish them. The dribbling royalties justify their identity as professional writer. I tell folks rude enough to ask what I earn that my royalties are in the hundreds not the tens of thousands.

A very large number of my professional writing friends supplement royalties by providing editing services for other writers. These are professionals who are using their talents with others’ words. That service is almost certainly going to return more than royalties. So some authors are able to quit their day jobs and focus on their own writing and ancillary writing, keeping, thus, to the same field.

A smaller number of professional writers I know of supplement royalties by offering other services and/or teaching on-line and in-person classes. I’m hoping to be in the latter category.

I was an educator for thirty-nine years. Even as an administrator, I taught whenever I had the opportunity. It’s in my blood. Therefore, teaching writing classes, for me, is not just about being a professional writer who is paid for her expertise (if not her writing), but it gives me pleasure to be part of another’s understanding of complex materials.

I have approached Writer University with a couple of ideas. Writer University is not just any on-line writing classes group. It began in 2005 when Mary Buckham and Laurie Schnebley Campbell connected over their desire to create quality, affordable on-line classes for writers. They have expanded course offerings and instructors over the years, but the quality remains at the same high level they always envisioned.

The classes are in the categories of business/craft classes, basics, master classes, super classes, and private classes. The topics range from plotting to writing synopses to working on the first draft to so much more. The classes are two- or four-week experiences. And the price is right! Most classes are as low as $35 for four weeks of instruction and targeted homework. These are some of the best classes I have ever taken for any price.

I would love to teach classes for this group. So, wish me luck as I plan and try out a course or two. I’ll be looking for a few hardy folks who want to take the class to help me refine it before making it a general offering. Are you one of them?

Please spread the word about this post. Thanks so much!

Facebook: Can you earn a living from royalties as an author? Well, maybe, but it’s not likely. So how do writers make money? http://bit.ly/2EKYWZI

Twitter: #Writers, tired of trying to live off paltry royalties? There are other ways to use your writing expertise and get paid for it. http://bit.ly/2EKYWZI

5 Strategies to Build Better Writing Habits

You’d think aligned writing goals and priorities would be a given for a professional writer, but that ain’t necessarily so.

[Hand up] I’m one who struggles with the alignment, and you may be, too. Even though I know accomplishing writing goals is integrally tied to priorities I set for writing, it’s more difficult to do than to say.

Okay, so I know morning is my best writing time. I know I need to stay off social media/e-mail until I get my writing done. But . . . What if one of my children sent me an e-mail? What if my publisher is doing an impromptu interview with a fellow author? Do I want to miss those? Uh, no.

But will the world end if I do miss them? Uh, no.

Jeff Goins says that’s one of the problems. We are trying to align goals and priorities, when, in reality, we need to align habits and priorities. Habits are what gets the job done, not lofty goals you post on a list in your workstation.

Jeff Goins, whose e-mail list I subscribe to, says you need to set habits, not goals to accomplish what you want. Goals are too easily put off, delayed, excused. But by selecting the right habits, the goals will fall into place.

However, we all know from trying to break a bad habit or trying to implement a new regime that habit-forming behaviors are as difficult to create as it is to break old destructive habits. It can take 30-60 days to break a habit. It also takes about 60 days to form a new habit. So, you’re right. This is hard stuff to do. You have to ask yourself, how much do you want the habit gone or the habit developed.

On Terry Gross’ NPR program, Fresh Air, her guest, Charles Duhigg, shared how habits form and how to break them. He says habit formation is a three-part loop process.

In the first part, there’s a trigger cueing the behavior to begin. Then the habit starts, the behavior, and finally, there’s the reward for doing something your brain likes and wants you to repeat.

The best way to begin a new habit, Duhigg says, is to start on vacation or someplace not your usual venue so that the cueing trigger for the old behavior isn’t there. He also says that understanding the structure of habitual behaviors is a major key to changing them.

You will need strategies, new cueing systems, you use consistently to form the new habit while breaking the old. Here are a few suggestions:

1)   Set a timer. Tell yourself you will only do the new behavior for twenty minutes. Then at the end, of the time, evaluate whether to keep going or whether to stop . . . until the next time you set the timer for twenty minutes.

2)   Don’t access the Internet when you turn on the computer. Because it’s a habit to turn on the computer and click on Firefox, it happens almost before I know it. One way is to leave the computer on in sleep mode with the writing you were working on left on the desktop. You turn on the computer and what faces you is your project, not your e-mail.

3)   Make a “sticky” cue. The term, sticky, came into use to describe things that you remember more easily based on the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Chip Heath and Dan Heath). The notion is that you create an image or a mantra to help you attach the cue to the new behavior. For example, you might say to yourself at the start of your writing day, “Professional writers work first and play later.” Or, “Professional writers produce xx pages/words each day.” By envisioning your ultimate goal, being a professional writer, you made your cue for the writing behavior “sticky.”

Another way to make a sticky cue is to visualize yourself writing and completing pages when you first sit down to write. Take a minute or so and “see” yourself writing and being successful. Build the image, and it will come!

4)   Control your environment to limit distractions. If the Internet is not on, if you open your computer to your work-in-progress, if you keep a list of your new writing habits on a piece of paper in front of you, you’ll be more successful.

5)   When the new habit breaks down, sometimes called the “What the hell” Effect, step back and examine just when you decided not to follow through on your new habit. What was that cue trigger? Then press the rewind button. Go back to right before you decided not to use the new habit and try again. Examining the breakdown should give you a strategy for a new trigger cue.

Use the If. . . then strategy. If you want to start on a new story because you’re tired of working on your old one, tell yourself, you only have to work on the old one ten minutes then set the timer. Intervene. Break through the breakdown.

Facebook: Making and breaking writing habits is as hard as making New Year’s Resolutions. Use these five strategies to be a more productive writer in 2018. http://bit.ly/2CD5p8v

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The Year of Writing Dangerously

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Welcome back to the Write Away blog and welcome forward to the new year. A year with possibilities, riches (of some sort, even if not money), and fulfillment. At least, that’s the goal, right? The resolution?

This time of year is clogged with suggestions for how you can make a new, improved you. Just resolve to this, that, and the other, and presto bingo! Out pops a better version of you!

Or not.

While about half of us make resolutions, only about 8% of us follow through. I talk more about making and breaking resolutions and a viable alternative tomorrow at Romance Righter, Angelica French’s blog (www.angelicafrench.blogspot.com). Check it out tomorrow if that interests you.

But back to Professional Writer You. Over the years I have tried different genres and writing formats to challenge myself. I’ve dabbled in paranormal, scifi, historical fiction, biography, romance, women’s fiction, and culinary mysteries.

I’ve written short stories, full-length plays, 10-minute plays, novels, novellas, and non-fiction.

I keep learning when I try a new format or genre. One goal this year is to try writing humor. That will likely be my most difficult challenge yet. Humor writing is hard! While everyone thinks that a dying nice guy is a tear jerker, we don’t all agree on what makes things funny. One person’s witty wisecracker is another’s annoying pest.

Another writing goal I have for the year is to write in first person. First person terrifies me! To only know what your narrator knows. Why isn’t omniscient observer good enough anymore? So, of course, I have to try it! What’s to lose? Time, right? Maybe get a bit of a bruised ego? But the old, “nothing ventured . . .” saw comes to mind.

Time and ego are small potatoes in the grand scheme. So, ride along with me? Prod me to tell you how I’m doing. Join me in The Year of Writing Dangerously.

And what are you doing to stretch yourself this year? Tell me of your writing travel plans in the Comments section below and what challenges you expect to encounter. Let’s enjoy our journeys together.

Please share this post with others if you enjoyed it.

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Happy Holidays and Why I Say It

I write this greeting because I have friends from so many traditions that Merry Christmas isn’t appropriate for all, and how I am to know what holidays they celebrate unless they tell me?

Since there are 29 holiday celebrations between November 1^st and January 15^th, it makes perfect sense to be more inclusive with the “Happy Holidays” saying. How that is taking away from Christmas escapes me!

Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Festivus, or any of the other seasonal holidays, I wish you a safe and joyous one!

See you next year!

Contrarian View of the Hero's Journey Character Arc

Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream. And, looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.

This quote by Joseph Campbell appears in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first printing 1949), the metaphorical bible for those wanting to write a classic hero’s journey story. Campbell, an eminent mythologist, looked at myths going back in time and across cultures and noted a number of similarities. He explicated those in The Hero with a Thousand Faces as well as others of his works.

Campbell identified archetypes he noted in myths, which we added into our repertoire of tropes. Tropes aren’t so bad. They are shortcuts and signal character traits so we can focus on other aspects of story. A while back, on another of my blogs, I wrote two posts, Part One and Part Two, on how tropes make writing easier but not easy.

Stereotypes are the extreme end of tropes. Where is the fresh take? Unreliable narrators as in Gone Girl and Code Name Verity turn the hero’s journey into a non-predictable path. The danger with tropes and archetypes who must complete every step of the Hero’s Journey is falling into predictable and mediocre stories. Universality is a strength and a limitation.

Using Campbell’s description of the Hero’s Journey in myths became the chichi (pretentious and overelaborate refinement) thing to do when writing one’s protagonist, male or female. The fact that it didn’t quite fit every story structure or didn’t quite fit females who operate differently in interactions, didn’t affect the popularity of creating the Hero’s Journey positive character arc.

In reaction, I suspect, The Virgin’s Promise: Writing Stories of Feminine Creative, Spirtitual, and Sexual Awakening (Kim Hudson), was penned. What stage is your female character? Virgin, Mother, or Crone? Each has her journey, but the same female journey, like Campbell’s fell into identifiable stages:

Dependent world

Price of conformity

Opportunity to shine

Dresses the part

Secret World

No longer fits her world

Caught shining

Gives up what kept her back

Kingdom in chaos

Wanders in the wilderness

Chooses her light

Re-ordering (rescue)

The Kingdom is brighter

While the Hero’s Journey and the feminine journey make perfect sense to me when analyzing traditional literature (folk/fairytales, myths, and such), using them as a template for writing is not as easy. For me, anyway. I often felt I was force-fitting or having to retrofit to include all the stages.

This may be the most common arc in character development and change, but I’ve found these formulae restrictive. Does a character have to go through each stage? Are the stages appropriate in all genres? I can see the application in fantasy, but what about cozy mysteries? Does one need all of the stages?

I posit that not all of the stages are appropriate in every genre.

After all, Campbell was analyzing myths. I’ve never read that he thought the Hero’s Journey should be a template for writing stories. I wonder what he’d say if he learned his Hero’s Journey had become THE formula for writing character development.

Interesting read? Please share on social media. Here are some copy/paste posts to help.

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What is a Flat Character Arc?

K.M Weiland, author of Creating Character Arcs, has this to say about the flat arc:

… the flat arc is about a character who does not change. He already has the Truth figured out in the beginning of the story, and he uses that Truth to help him overcome various external tests.

In comparison to a positive change arc, the difference in a flat character arc’s Second Act is that the emphasis is not on the protagonist’s discovering and confronting his own inner misconceptions. Rather, the Second Act in a flat arc is where he will be discovering the Lie embedded in the world around him.

The Third Act is where we find arguably the greatest similarities between the flat character arc and the positive change arc, since in both types of story the protagonist will have a full grasp on the Truth by this point. The primary difference, of course, is that the protagonist in a flat character arc will have already been in possession of that Truth almost universally throughout the story.

Hmmm. Did that make sense to you? I had to read it a couple of times to get the gist. The “Truth figured out in the beginning”? The “Lie embedded in the world around him”? So, I kept reading other resources to find out more. As I read, I encountered additional phraseology that I had to puzzle out. Terms like “Crucial Element”, “Focus Element”, “Direction Element”, and more!

Weiland writes that “the fundamental principle of character arc is lie vs. truth.” The Lie the character believes and uncovers in a change arc is under the radar. It is a bedrock belief the character holds. “I’m worthless.” “I’m God’s gift to women.” And so on. That misconception is revealed and dealt with (the Truth), thus effecting character change. This Lie needs to be connected to the story organically. If the story problem and the Lie don’t connect, the story is not as compelling.

In the flat character arc, this doesn’t play out. There are still Lies and Truths, they just don’t affect the story solution substantively. Remember, the Steadfast Character knows the truth from the beginning.

It turns out that the flat character arc goes by many names and is the second most used arc for main characters. You might see it referred to as the “testing arc” or “Main Character Resolve”, or “Steadfast Character.”

It also turns out that the Steadfast Character tends to see the story conflict not as “me against the obstacle”, but rather views the obstacle as the problem by itself, apart from the Steadfast Character. The Steadfast Character moves elements around in the story to restore balance and is unaffected by the move of elements, though the story is impacted for the better.

Most antagonists in our books have flat character arcs. They are who they are. They have a job to do—disrupt the life of the main character—and they do it without changing who they are or seeking/gaining insight into themselves or others. We’re not surprised by the lack of growth of the antagonist, in fact. We expect it.

But many protagonists also demonstrate a flat character arc, and we’re fine with that in a deftly handled story. Think Kinsey Milhone, PI, the main character in Sue Grafton’s Alphabet mysteries. Kinsey knows who she is and what is True. There is little character change within and across books, but she uses her character traits to solve the crimes. Her moral compass is clear to her as are her talents. She gets ‘er done!

Dramatica.com, in their dictionary of terms, says a steadfast character “ultimately retains his essential nature from the beginning of the story to the end of the story.” They also go on to state, “There will only be one Steadfast Character in every story.”

That’s very directive, isn’t it? I wonder why that is the case. Maybe because conflict is not deeply developed when two major characters remain unchanged by events and circumstances?

Or the story conflict could be developed when the two steadfast characters are on opposite tracks. If one is on the right track, and won’t change but has to deal with someone on the wrong track, who also won’t change, isn’t that conflict enough? I wonder what it would be like to write a story flouting the “rule” of only one steadfast character? One would have to “win” (whatever winning would mean), so why not?

However, in that scenario, each Steadfast Character would have the Truth from the beginning and each have the Lie, so maybe that’s why it wouldn’t work. If both know the Truth, where is the conflict? Aaarrgh! See why I am still confused and working on this principle of only one Steadfast Character?

From what I’ve read, the Lie must be uncovered and discounted by the Truth by the end of the story. Maybe that’s not possible with two Steadfastians!

One important aspect of the Steadfast Character’s possession of the truth early on is the role of doubt. Perhaps the character isn’t 100% sure of the Truth or has trouble accepting the Truth to move on in life. Adding in doubt, even if fleeting, includes a new level of tension. Being open to questioning Truth is human and can result in second guessing or hesitating at critical moments in the story.

One important role for the Steadfast character is shis possession of the Truth inspires and props up others. Also, by the end of the story, though heesh may have had doubts or even wondered if the Truth were worth the battle, the Steadfast character will come out on the other side believing in the Truth even more strongly and support others in believing it, too.

The Steadfast Character sounds like a very interesting challenge, encouraging the writer to delve even more deeply than the positive character arc requires.

Have you written a flat character arc story? Tell me aobut it in the comments section.

Bloggers rely on readers. I would be very appreciative of shares to your social media outlets. Here are some copy/paste messages for easy sharing.

Facebook: What in the heck is a “flat character arc”? A “Steadfast Character”? Sharon Arthur Moore is still learning, too, and she wants to share her current understanding with you. http://bit.ly/2nOwfr7

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