The Great Fiction Writing Challenge Begins
The Great Fiction Writing Challenge — Introduction
It’s about time I included you in this next great challenge.
I’d started along this path some time back, but yesterday I started keeping track. And what you measure, you can improve.
There’s a work in progress titled: “Feeding the Beast.” It’s a method of working out how to produce content faster than you can publish on Amazon, and so get a working income under your own control.
The current design for traditional publishing is severely flawed. It doesn’t allow people to make a real living from publishing, and is designed to slow down everything about the process. Two years on average to get a book to market. 10% or probably less of the sales receipts as income, and your agent will take a substantial portion of those.
The conventional wisdom of that publishing format has infected indie publishing with their flaws. There are a rare few who can publish even a full novel every month. The false standards are at least 80,000 words, and edited at least three times. Some service-providers recommend spending at least $2–3K on each book to make sure it fits the “standards” and will sell well.
Yet, only 4 out of ten thousand authors on Amazon make enough income to support themselves, let alone their family. (See the Author Earnings May 2016 report.)
Yet most authors only publish a single book.
Yet these books commonly sell for $3.99 ebooks and only sell 250 copies.
The author in those cases are making around $729 total for a work that usually takes them from three months to a year to produce. That’s .009 cents per word, and $2300 in the hole.
Keep your day job, you’ll need it.
Entering a New Age of Pulp Speed Publishing
In the days of the “pulps,” authors could get a penny per word for short stories. According to Dean Wesley Smith, these authors were churning out over a million words per year and were well paid. As our entertainment media expanded into electronic forms, the magazines started disappearing.
Traditional book publishers started demanding more wordage per book, pushing for 100K-word books in their contracts. Educators started teaching people to expect three and four drafts per book, often throwing out the first draft entirely. As the traditional book publishers started cutting staff to stay afloat, editors started setting up shop on their own. And editors (service bureaus) of course push that their services are needed for every book.
But pulp fiction writers were known for writing only a single draft, re-typing only to remove typo’s. The magazine did the line-editing before publishing. In our electronic age, we can now wrestle with a book into oblivion. Constant re-writing is the norm. Some great books are never published because of that.
The rise of Indie Publishing allows a return to pulp-fiction author speed, and making a living at it.
I’ve just finished nearly two solid weeks of reassembling and cross-sorting all the material on plotting a book. Now that it’s done, I can throw it all away.
No, not really. But it will go up as reference, not for regular use. Once you know what you’re doing, then you know what that scene is supposed to be producing. You keep a running tally, and assemble the book so it best follows what people want in their entertainment.
Check out the high-earning authors and they’ll tell you that they don’t use a development editor any more. A lot of them actually never did have one. They’ve learned from their readers and internalized what they want.
The book idea I’m currently working up follows a very long story arc. There are probably five series of books in there. Epic. But it won’t be produced in the conventional way. It’s being built up as short reads/short stories and as serials that then build up a longer book.
I know that each book, each chapter, each scene has a beginning, middle, end. The middle has rising complications. The beginning has a hook and twist called the “inciting incident.” The end has the big hero moment called a climax, and often a twist for the ending. Ideally, it sets up the next book to start.
That’s about as much outline as I want to do. Figure out where your end and start, then rip out two or three thousand words to get there. Smith calls this “writing into the dark.” I prefer to consider “writing with the headlights on.” You can’t see the end, but you can see enough to keep it on the road.
Read Robyn Patterson (http://robynpaterson.com/?page_id=4343) posts to get up to speed on all the variations of these plotting structures. You’ll find in there a write-up on Lester Dent (http://robynpaterson.com/?p=4083) which you should digest and internalize. This guy wrote hundreds of books. Hundreds. Isaac Asimov (who started in the pulps) cranked out over 500 himself.
Dean Wesley Smith and Pulp Speed
Smith launched the idea of Pulp Speed in 2014. (https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/the-new-world-of-writing-pulp-speed/) He’s known as being prolific, but considers that his top speed still isn’t what these pulp fiction masters did routinely. (Get his many books on this area, and check out his paid courses where he describes the processes he uses. Your short-cut introduction to Smith is through his “Heinlein’s Rules.”)
I’d already grounded myself with Chris Fox, who challenged himself to write a full novel in 21 days. That book has continued to sell well. And he wrote another book to get you up to 5K words per hour.
Down that line is the many courses of Geoff Shaw, who points out your success is from many shorter works produced more quickly so you retain your reading audience and grow them. This is not unlike the Content Marketing successes who published two or more long-form blog posts each week for years to develop their audience. Also, writing short stories and scenes is an easier way to teach yourself how to write concisely with all the conventions needed by plot structures.
All three of these people recommend (and practice) writing fiction, as the market is bigger.
Speed and Volume Production is Key
Around this time, as Shaw suggested, is to get into telling your story aloud and then transcribing it. This can double or quadruple your word production. In theoretical terms, this could give you around 10–20K per day in only a couple of hours (outside of editing.) That’s a full-length novel per week.
Even 3K per day, as Smith recommends is the minimum, could give you a publishable short read every day. (Amazon’s minimal text is reportedly 2500 words.) That’s still 21K per week, and a novel per month (maybe two, if you throw out the proscribed lengths of what “everyone knows to be true.”)
But most people have been trained into the laborious process of plotting and drafting your book, all by typing. Telling stories aloud, reading off the movie running in your mind, just isn’t a skill most of us have developed.
Smith says his writing is contained in one draft, which goes to his line-editor, and then is published — Heinlein’s rules. Sure, he will edit as he goes, since he’ll back up a thousand words or so and tweak the text as he comes back down, then start adding on. So he may tweak the whole text several times before he’s through, which he compares to digging out a tunnel. Everyone admires the finished tunnel, but no one sees all the dirt that has to be taken out and how the sides are smoothed as you go back and forth. That’s his personal approach and he’s already produced well over a hundred novels and several hundred short stories, in addition to a flock of videos.
The idea is that you talk your short stories, edit the transcription, get a line-edit, and you’re done. All of these points take time. And doesn’t count the amount of time you’ve spent internalizing the “Hero’s Journey” and other plotting approaches, much less Coyne’s massive Story Grid.
Once you’ve internalized them, then you can use them as you see fit. They are now tools, not processes.
Otherwise, like everything, you have to practice. And you practice by doing.
My Tests Tend to Prove This
I started keeping track. The first day I cleared 800 words. I uploaded an audio I recorded on my smartphone, then edited it on Trint.com, then took that transcript and checked it with ProWritingAid.com for errors. 24 minutes of recording gave me 800 usable words. It was so long as I’m simply not used to speaking out loud.
I kept at it, recording during my pasture-walks, which could be 45 minutes or more in order to check on all the animals we raise. That’s where the first test came from.
The next go at this was another 24 minutes, but I got 1600 usable words out of it. This time, I edited the audio down to 10 minutes by cutting out the blank spaces (saving cost of transcribing, which is per minute of audio.) After editing the transcript and wrestling it through ProWritingAid, I had used about 4 1/2 hours of production time.
Yesterday, I recorded 47 minutes, and submitted a 15-minute audio. I still needed about 4 hours to produce a result, but that was 3600 words. Meaning I had set a bar. Pulp speed was possible. It just needed to be consistent.
I had no outline, other than knowing where the story needed to wind up (roughly.) There was no second draft. Without the line edit, the recording and editing time produced double the words I usually typed per hour.
And my blog posts give me that hourly figure. I have never run through some editor. (I do spend at least as long tweaking them as writing.)
As I use these tools and techniques, my production quickly rose to a point where is was possible to maintain high production. As I keep using the line editor online, I learn how to structure my sentences (avoiding excess adverbs and run-on sentences.)
All I have to do is to measure it, so I can improve it. There’s a year-long calendar in my room, laminated so I can use a wax-pencil to keep track. Those three days are written down. Now I’ll be able to note this all out as I go. This will probably also get a spreadsheet to track the other times in editing.
I’ve attached here the short story I recorded, transcribed, and edited this morning. It’s really just a scene. And it only went as long as it needed. It’s only 727 words. You’ll find the text and the edited audio.
I still have another 14-minute recording to edit from yesterday’s afternoon pasture walk. This wasn’t as clean, so I expect to take longer getting the transcript in shape.
The Great Fiction Writing Challenge
I still owe you another post laying this out. And I have to set up a mailing list and landing page just for the Challenge itself. The idea is to test all I’ve researched about how to write and make a living by cranking out fiction at Pulp Speed. I have a book mostly ready, about 44K words. But I’m not going to publish it until I have tested this material for myself.
The rough outline is that I’ll be pushing this model for a year. The object is to get myself up to Pulp Speed and still have time to run the business of publishing, manage a working farm, and read all the fiction I can in the evening — all designed to train myself as a fiction writer, to build an audience, and to create an additional viable online income in that year.
This will get it’s own podcast, which will stand on its own for reference. Every week, I’ll go over my production and what I’d learned. The pen names I publish under, and the book titles will remain unknown, in order to have a clear test of the publishing separate from the podcast. I’ll also tell you more about that in an upcoming article.
For now, just enjoy…
Tigsooshemeteor171001 — Great Fiction Challenge
PS. You’ll note me choking up a bit when I describe their “burying” the pilot. Because we lost a great friend last night. That’s her picture up above, and explains the caption.
PPS. That’s telepathic wolves talking to a teen-aged human who escapes a moon colony to land back on post-dystopian Earth. Young Adult Sci-fi-Fantasy.
PPPS. This post (which will go into the “Feeding the Beast” book above) plus the 738 words immediately above, gets me to 2742 already…
Originally published at Living Sensical.