You know all’s right in the world when you can count on your mom to buy your art for a quarter.
And that makes five subscribers, with Kate, Ian, Max and Tennille making up the balance. That’s a 100% conversion rate, for anyone keeping track. Hey, and I thought I couldn’t sell!
It occurred to me this morning how excited I am about this experiment, and how this has got me excited about writing the book again, where it had felt like a chore for the last couple months. I was looking back on the teenage years I spent playing role-playing games, and thinking about how the reason I enjoy ‘having written’ more than ‘writing’ is because, to me, the point is the story-telling. The storytelling necessarily involves an interaction between the teller and the listener, and you can’t enjoy that interaction until you ‘have written’, though you can anticipate it when you’re writing.
I’ve known of a lot of authors who don’t want to share their book until it’s done, but that just hasn’t worked for me. What energizes me about writing is that mental dialogue with the audience - real or imagined.
In his book, On Writing, Stephen King talks about how you should write for a single person that represents your ideal audience. I think in trying to write a full novel I was having trouble with that, because I do want this published eventually, so I got caught up in imagining the eventual faceless crowd that I want this to be read by, and because the ‘eventual’ part of that imagining is so far off. The whole thing was too vague, I pretty much couldn’t envision an audience at all.
So opting to share the writing process has given me my mental audience. Now, when I think about writing, I can quite specifically imagine my audience. And I predict that will make a big difference to my enjoyment of the writing.
Installment 2 is coming today. And that will pretty much have published everything I had written before this experiment began. Then, new words for Monday.
My synopsis has grown and changed so much over the last ten years, but the skeleton is the same. I have a fantasy world with a gods and scorcery-created crisis and a strong heroine who joins her country’s militia, is taken as a prisoner of war and eventually saves the world. Five years ago, I would have flat out said that I needed more life experience before I could write the book I wanted to write. This year, I thought I was ready.
But the book remains unwritten.
I’ve been at home on maternity leave for ten months now, and my partner, Ian, suggested ten months ago that I should use as much of my time as possible to write this book. I’ve kept my older kids in daycare, and I don’t do housework while I’m home with the baby, and now I’ve got the baby in daycare for three hours a day to free up time. But the book remains unwritten.
I’m actually very good at getting things done, when the circumstances are right. I’ve spent my adult life being very effective when I’m working for clients and on a deadline. But now that I want to take the time to work on something for me, it feels like a waste of time and I feel very blocked about actually doing it. So I thought, well, I can spend a lot of time on self-discovery, I can try to uncover the issues behind why working for myself doesn’t feel worthwhile when I sit down to write for my own enjoyment. Or I can work within the parameters of how I know I do get things done, and just get on with it.
So here’s my experiment. I’m going to make myself accountable to a client (or clients) in order to get this book written. I’m approaching four or five friends, whom I trust to be supportive and interested. I’ll suggest that for the price of $.25/week, I will promise them a minimum of 1000 words every Monday. I’ve become very good at answering the novel-inquiries of family and friends in the shame-faced-negative - after all, if I’m not writing right now, I’m only letting myself down, and my friends are just well-wishers who will understand. For $.25/week, they become clients, and I have a deadline. And if I don’t write in a week, then I will have to return their money, which is only a dollar, but it’s a dollar that must be given out in four payments and with four apologies to valued clients.
While I won’t be making the book, itself, public (hey, that’s for subscribers only), I’m going to blog a bit about the process. Like many people, I’ve fought with a lot of my own resistance to working on things I’m passionate about, and I’m curious how this will go. It’s my hope that once I get rolling, the momentum will carry me through more than 1,000 words/week, and I’ll be able to finish the novel in under a year. Even if we abandon the experiment prematurely, I’ll still be a few-thousand words ahead of where I am now, and it will give me an excuse to shamelessly solicit feedback as I go.