Work hard for 45 minutes, then take a break

ByJohn Brown

My first semester in college I earned a GPA of, ta dum, 0.68.  How do you earn such amazing grades? Well, I’ll tell you: the super secret strategy is to get an F in everything except ballroom dance. In that you get an A.

I couldn’t squeeze any juice out of my textbooks, but I sure could fox trot.

And I wasn’t partying. Dope and beer bongs were never for me. I wasn’t skipping class. I was lugging this huge valise around with every textbook I had. I think it weighed something like forty pounds. I was stitting in classes looking studious and taking notes. Well, except for physics which started early. 7:30 a.m. if I recall. What kind of a nut job takes a class at 7:30 a.m.? I did. I tried really hard to stay awake. I know I saw the professor shoot a gorilla with a tennis ball once. But the rest of the time I was in la la land catching z’s.

A 0.68, and I was in the honors program.

Obviously, I didn’t know how to go about learning. I’m glad the university didn’t give up on me. They put me on probation and told me I had to take a class on studying. A class on how to take the reponsibility for learning into my own tentacles. A class that shared techniques that actually helped.

One of the techniques was taking breaks. You were to work hard for 30 or 45 or 50 minutes and then take a break. Why? Well, because studies had shown that someone who, for example, was going to study for two hours could learn more by taking a ten or fifteen minute break in the middle than someone who worked the whole two hours.   Spending more time on studying actually meant you learned less.

I’ve found this method applies to more than just reading textbooks.  It also applies to writing. My practice is to set a time for 45-50 minutes. My goal is to write as hard and fast during that period as I can. To be totally focused on the task at hand. And then, when the timer dings, to literally get up out of my chair, walk about, and take a break. Then come back at the top of the next hour and start another 45 minute session.

But I’m not the only one doing this. A lot of folks use this method. Author Annie Bellet writes about her use of it in The Quest for Productivity and shares some of the reasons why it helps her. Read what she says there. If you haven’t done a 45/15 or 48/12 session, give it a go. See if you don’t actually get more done in less time.

Oh, btw, as for my grades, not only did I NOT drop out (or get kicked out) and become a hobo living in a trailer by the river, I ended up getting a 3.8 in my masters of accounting program. I think it’s safe to say I figured that school thing out. 🙂

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  • Indie Thoughts: Tend Your Garden

    ByJohn Brown

    From Joe Konrath.

    Your ebooks function much like a garden.

    One rare occassions, a plant will thrive with little help from you.

    Others may whither and die no matter how much help you give them.

    But the majority need to be constantly tended. Planted, watered, fertilized, weeded, pruned, mulched, replanted, harvested. In other words, lots of work.

    Ebooks aren’t a Mr. Popeill invention where you can set it and forget it. Quite the opposite. You need to pay attention, and keep active, or your garden won’t thrive.

    Everyone experiences slow downs in sales. It’s inevitable, and it seems to be cyclical, but not in any sort of way I’ve been able to prodect. Sales seem to rise and fall for reasons unknown.

    But if you’re doing what you can to make your books discoverable, you have a better shot at sales than those authors who self-publish then self-ignore.

    Here are some tricks to tend to your garden.

    1. Change prices. As an indie, this is one of the biggest advantages you have over the legacy industry. You decide what the customer pays, and this is powerful. Don’t be afraid to weild that power by experimenting with prices, both lower and higher.

    2. Newsletter. There is no excuse why you don’t have a newsletter. People who sign up are actively looking for your titles. Make them aware a new title exists.

    3. Sales. Unlike a change in price, a sale only lasts for a short time. KDP Countdown is what I’m currently using, because it offers 70% royalties when I drop the price. I’ve been pleased with my results.

    4. Advertising. Bookbub and Booksends are the ones I use regularly. If you’ve had success with another company, list it in the comments.

    He names eleven tips. Link to the rest at JA Konrath’s blog.

    This goes back to something Blake Russell said in the myth posts I pointed to a few posts ago. There are some folks who suggest that you can either write the next book or you can promote the current one.

    Folks who suggest it’s either/or leave me scratching my head. Why not do both?

    Applying to BargainBooksy or BookSends takes less than 30 minutes. Sending a review copy out to a decent review site takes about the same amount of time. If I spend just one hour a week on promotion, I can do all three of those things each month plus something else.

    Some folks suggest that promotion doesn’t work when you only have a few books out. And forget about it if you only have one. Promo can’t do anything for you if you only have one book out. At least, not as much as completing the next book can.

    Let me ask a question.

    If I open a McDonalds down some back road where nobody sees it and nobody travels, do we think that releasing a second McDonalds down some other back road where nobody travels is going to increase sales?

    Nobody is going to go down those roads except by accident.

    Is that how McDonalds or Walmart or whatever company you want to name built their vast empire? They did it by accident? How about the diner everyone loves in your town? They hid it at the end of a dirt road, told nobody about it, definitely did not put up a sign (good grief, not a sign), and, shazam!–the customers started rolling in?

    Mcdonalds11

    Some folks say, no, you’re missing the point. The purpose of a promotion is to get people to buy other books in your list at higher prices, so if you don’t have a lot of other books, your promotion can’t do anything for you.

    Using loss-leader or sampling strategies with one book to sell others is certainly a smart thing to do. Because it works. With cheeses at Sam’s Club, with books, with a lot of things. But is that really the only thing you’re trying to do?

    How about building a base of readers who have some degree of loyalty to your brand? You don’t need ten books to start to do that. You don’t need two books. You can start with one.

    I started two series last December—a thriller and an epic fantasy–and (writing gods willing) will be releasing book 2 in the fantasy series this month. Since December I’ve sold close to a thousand in each series. It was easy to see that at least half of my sales, maybe more, came because of some type of promo. I know this because I watched the numbers.

    This means I now have hundreds more folks waiting for book two than I did for book one in both series. I’m going to be releasing book two in both series with a bigger customer base than I would have had without promo. Why would I not want to start at a higher level for each successive book?

    More readers means more word of mouth. Why wouldn’t I want more word of mouth about my books?

    More word of mouth means higher odds that an influencer will hear about, try, like, and then promote my books. In fact, I’m looking at at least double the odds. Somebody remind me: why wouldn’t I want those better odds?

    One of the main keys to this business is to get a big enough customer base so that the word of mouth takes on a life of its own. I am building that base more quickly with promo than without. Why would I want to build that base more slowly?

    Finally, I have twice the money I would have had otherwise to invest in promo and covers and editing etc. Or just go spend on my wonderful wife and girls. Why wouldn’t I want this revenue?

    Traditional publishers have built reader bases for an author one book at a time, often spaced a year apart, for decades. They put money into the promo that works in in-store venues: covers, pre-release reviews and the necessary ARCs, catalogs, a sales team, and co-op visibility in the stores. And while that promo didn’t guarantee anything, it made the odds more likely the book would get readers to sample and build that reader base.

    Why shouldn’t we put money into the promo that increases the odds for online stores?

    What business out there can’t benefit from good promo?

    Of course, the next question is what methods of promo work? There are a many methods that are a waste of money. But not all of them are. I think it’s our job as entrepreneurs to test and find ways that are effective a la The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

    Anyway, Konrath’s advice to not self-ignore, and Blake’s “do both” approach make a lot of sense to me.

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  • Zing Generators

    ByJohn Brown

    Where do you get your ideas? How do you turn them into story?

    Those are fabulous questions. The answer is a bit longer than I have time for today. But I have posted my list of idea generation methods, structured ways of performing creative Q&A.

    These have been collected over the years from a number of sources and are now passed on to you, faithful reader. Use them, cherish them, and, if you wish, start an order of crazed monks to preserve the fabulous secrets.

    John Browns’s Idea Generation Method List

    Enjoy!

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  • Edward Bear Shares More Proofreading Secrets

    ByJohn Brown

    Mr. Edward Bear (pseudonym) shared an awesome secret for sussing out quote issues in a previous post. He’s back with a nifty way to help spot spelling issues.  It helped me spot a number of inconsistencies in Bad Penny, which I recently fixed. Take it away, Mr. Bear.

    * * * *

    Augmented Proofreading 2

    Last time, I mentioned checking spelling and spelling consistency, and this note is to fulfill my promise.

    To begin with, I’ll admit freely I do not recommend just running a spieling chucker over the text. And yes, I’m using the phrase deliberately. The spelling checker in the program I’m using to write this just waltzed right past it, despite the fact that neither word makes sense in this context. I got started trying to get some mileage out of spelling checkers a while back, when I realized that OCR scanners will work like hell trying to find a word and probably will come up with a word, but it will be the wrong word. Over at Project Gutenberg, they use the term “scanos” as an analogue of “typos.”

    The other adversary is consistency of spelling and usage. Examples might include “canceled” and “cancelled” or variant possessives, such as “Jones’” and “Jones’s” in the same text, or simply variant spellings of the same character’s name, such as “Erik” and “Eric.”

    So what do I do for these sorts of problems?

    What you need is a list of all the unique words in the story, and it’s easy with a dollop of regex. (See the first post on this topic. The one I’ve taken to using is the following:

    [^-‘‘’\w\d\r\n]

    This one I can explain, since I wrote it. 🙂

    What it says is to look for any individual characters within the brackets([]). The leading caret (^) says “Nope, they should not be in this list.” Following that are the hyphen(-), the straight  quote(‘), and the opening and closing curly single quotes(‘’). After that, it’s any character that would normally be in a word (\w), any digit (\d), any carriage return(\r) or any new line aka paragraph terminator (\n).

    And what you do with the above is to set Textpad (see previous post again) to replace all of them with a newline (\n) character.

    Here’s what the search and replace box in Textpad looks like for this:

    Augmented Proofreading image001

     

    Notice that the “Regular expression” box is checked. And then you choose “Replace All”.

    The result is to turn this:

    Once upon a night we’ll wake to the carnival of life
    The beauty of this ride ahead such an incredible high
    It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead
    This moment the dawn of humanity
    The last ride of the day

    into this:

    Once
    upon
    a
    night
    we’ll
    wake
    to
    the
    carnival
    of
    life
    The
    beauty
    of
    this
    ride
    ahead
    such
    an
    incredible
    high
    It’s
    hard
    to
    light
    a
    candle

    easy
    to
    curse
    the
    dark
    instead
    This
    moment
    the
    dawn
    of
    humanity
    The
    last
    ride
    of
    the
    day

     

    For a book, this means what you have as a multi-thousand line long document and LOTS of repeated words. The next step is to lose the repetitions by sorting the list. For TextPad,  you’ll find Tools->Sort on the menu bar, and I generally set the sort up as the following:

    Augmented Proofreading image002

    This is a case-sensitive sort and “Delete duplicate lines”, of course, gets rid of all the duplications of words like “a”, “an”, and “the”.

    For the above text, you get:

    It’s
    Once
    The
    This
    a
    ahead
    an
    beauty
    candle
    carnival
    curse
    dark
    dawn
    day
    easy
    hard
    high
    humanity
    incredible
    instead
    last
    life
    light
    moment
    night
    of
    ride
    such
    the
    this
    to
    upon
    wake
    we’ll

    34 unique words.

    And here’s the payoff for all this funky text munging: Run a spelling checker over this, and it will find typos, of course, but it will also generally complain about most names, which aren’t generally kept in spelling checker dictionaries, and it will also show you words and their variants, nestled fairly closely together. Here’s an example from one of my projects:

    Swiss-born
    Take
    Talking
    Tallmadge
    Tallmadge’s
    Tarelton
    Tarleton
    Tarleton’s
    Tavern
    Tecumseh
    Tell
    Ten
    Thames

    The spelling checker landed on Tallmadge and its possessive form, but do you notice the “Tarelton” on the list? That’s the time for the Aha!, and you can fix the “Tarelton” form. The same thing applies to possessive variants and any other variant form you find.

    As with the last post, I’ll be peeking in on the comments and answering any questions that come up.

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    Writing Update: 5/21/11 – visualize first, scene goals, the power of research

    ByJohn Brown

    I finished two chpaters this week. I’m quite a bit behind my stretch schedule which has me finishing the beginning of August although not too far behind my my conservative schedule which has me finishing the end of September.  A few more weeks and we’ll see if I’m giong to meet the stretch schedule.

    A lot of these first seven chapters are the same scenes as from before. Well, the same idea. But because enough has changed in the situations and because I’m writing some of the scenes from different points of view I have to rewrite them. So while I hope to catch up with some copy and paste from the last draft, I just am unable to do that here. 

    Visualize –> Report

    I thought I’d share one of my key methods for writing scenes. Here’s what I’ve found: when I can visualize the scene, it’s fairly easy to tell the reader what’s going on and to structure it in a way that achieves my purposes. When I can’t visualize it, I have nothing to tell. So for me the first thing I have to do is to see what’s going on. Then I can report as if I were there. Or if it’s from a more deep point of view penetration, I can report from my character’s eyes.

    So the sequence is to visualize (do the things that help me get that visual, feel, sound, etc.) then report in a way that will transport the reader and present the things I feel I need to present because they’re cool or because I want to generate a specific effect. 

    This is why I use the sketch/draft method. I sketch things out to get an idea of what’s going on first. Sure, I’ll discover details as I write. I’ll sometimes realize my first idea was off or wrong or won’t work. But if I don’t have an idea in the first place, I simply can’t write. It’s all a blank screen. One of the biggest causes of writer’s block is simply a lack of invention–of not having anything to write about because nothing’s in the mind of the writer.

    First have something to say. Then say it.

    Of course, you have to come up with the scenes in your mind before you have something to say. That takes some exploratory drafting, sketching, creative Q&A. You can see Orson Card doing some takes here in his writing lesson “Beginnings“, trying to help flesh it out in his mind. 

    The main tool I use to sketch is the summary–a bullet point or chapter outline like a posted about last week. However, sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes I need an actual map to block out who does what and where. This week, for example, I was writing about Sugar coming into a village. She needed to enter then encounter some dead bodies.  I spent something like 45 minutes typing hardly anything and then realized-duh!-I don’t know what’s going on, where she’s going, why. I can’t see this place at all. I needed helping visualizing it first, not in super detail, but enough so I could report.

    So I took five minutes to sketch a simple map of the village, where she was when she entered, and where she was going, what was likely in the yards, the fences, etc. Once I saw it, I could then report, just tell what I saw as plainly as I could to the reader. I know these scenes fairly well, this being the FOURTH FREAKING DRAFT of this novel. And yet I’ve had to do some drawing for two scenes so far (the other drawing was for an ambush that wasn’t in the last draft). Because again, things had changed. And I had to see it before I could report it.

    Other tools that help me visualize and hear are actual photographs of things or people. Or audio of people’s voices. I was struggling getting a character in my mind for my short story LOOSE IN THE WIRES. I was listening at the time to Susan Grafton’s O IS FOR OUTLAW and when the actor performed this one character, suddenly I HEARD it. Boom, the guy came alive in my mind. Once alive there it was relatively easy to put him down on paper. Again, I was just relaying it to the reader.

    So I believe that what a writer must do is bring the situation to life in his or her mind first. It won’t be everything in exact detail. There’s a lot to be discovered in the writing. But it will be enough that it will feel like you’re simply telling something you saw or experienced.

    Scene Goals

    While writing, of course, I have objectives for my scenes. Sometimes I’ll do exploratory drafts, not having any goal except to see what happens and invent something cool. But that’s usually in my pre-draft stage. At this point I have a rough idea of where the story is going to go. I’ve already done a lot of the inventing. Now I have to translate it to scenes. And so I find having a quick list of objectives for the scene, along with my brief summary of what I’m expecting to happen, helps me visualize as well.

    Here are two examples of what a list of scene goals might look like for me.  These were for two scenes in draft 3 of CURSE.

    Example 1:

    • This is the time for her to make her HEROIC CHOICE. I want a heroic moment.
    • Terror of Legs being lost
    • Legs seeing her for the first time the next morning—he IS going to experiment because Urban is gone. Does he give something to her, his weave, twisted—Flax helped me.
    • Some tenderness
    • Last time with Mistress until the final battle

    Example 2:

    • Skir battle coolness. Need some surprises
      • Ayten dragging off souls
        • Sees it below on the ship
      • Seafire
      • What cool skir thing could there be?
        • Whirlwind
        • What would happen if a skir dived?
        • Some missiles, stones in the wind
        • First sight of that. She ship has slingers etc.
    • Sugar having to choose to leave people, see the beginnings of harvest
    • Oh Crap moment at end—this is going to be bad
    • This is the setup for the next scene where She and  Urban are spying and after the assessment, he says, we need to go. And she’s in indecision, and he says I will wait until, and then I will leave.

    They’re fairly simple.  Of course, I have other goals in mind that I don’t need to write down–“start and end with a hook,” or a rest, depending. “Transport the reader might be another,” meaning make sure I use what I know about presenting details. Another might be “bring the character on in an interesting way.” And because I generally know the big picture of what’s going to happen, I can focus on these other details as I write.

    Research: Monster Zing & Visualize Method

    Research is also a monster method for visualizing and for zing. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me in the past and on my current projects. In the thriller I’m working on where the main character is ex Special Forces, I could barely visualize anything. Some I’m reading books about it and talking to people who are in Special Forces and watching films about it. There’s no way I could build a story I cared about and believed in without research. I’m going to be doing a ride along with a cop, visit our state prison, and maybe talk to some ex-cons for this as well.

    Tim Powers came to the Writer’s of the Future workshop I attended many years ago. He talked about many things. But research was one of them. In fact, one of the idea generating methods discussed in the workshop, one on which Hubbard himself had written a fine article that we read called “Search for Research” (click the Next or Continued link at the bottom to continue through all the pages of the essay), was about the power of research. So Powers recently did an interview about the latest Johnny Depp Pirates release , which is inspired by his book of the same title (which I read and loved), and restated what he did so many years ago:

    Q: What inspired you to write On Stranger Tides?
    A: I was already hooked into using real historical places for settings. And so I thought, you know you loved Treasure Island…And I thought I bet you can set a nice fantasy story in among the pirates, Black Beard, that crowd. So I read a million books (that is probably fifteen books) about that particular crowd of pirates that were in the Caribbean in 1718 like Stede Bonnet, Black Beard, and Anne Bonny.

    What I always do when I’m writing a book is first I read all the history and biographies and things like that that I can find. And I look for stuff that’s too cool not to use. ‘Ooh that’s neat. Look at that. I like that.’ And I’ll write it down. And then I’ll find something else and say, ‘Oh wow this is great. You got to have a scene happening in this place. Oh you gotta use this guy.’ Eventually, I’ll have twenty or thirty things that are too cool not to use. And it’s kind of fun then because you say, ‘Well okay, here’s twenty or thirty parts of your book. You just have to connect the dots.’ And so I thought, ‘Ok, what was Black Beard really up to?’

    So to sum up.

    1. Visualize, then report.  That’s what I’ve found I have to do. It makes it so much easier to write when I have a picture in my mind.
    2. Scene goals help me visualize the scene and what needs to happen.
    3. Research is a huge tool for helping me find zing and to visualize and invent something I can visualize. 
    4. The Sketch/Draft process (I explained it in last week’s post and in the interview with Maya Lassiter) is another work horse of a tool for helping me visualize and invent by degrees.
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  • How many copies do average authors sell?

    ByJohn Brown

    I posted earlier about the sales number for best-selling authors. What about the average author?

    Here’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, in an interview on io9.com about the future effects of e-text on publishing:

    io9: Does it make a difference to you if an author has an online reputation? Does that go into your decisions to acquire books?

    PNH: Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

    The whole interview is interesting. In fact, he says something that I think is important to note about what today’s novelists and, to a lesser degree, short story writers are actually providing:

    One thing I’m sure of is that we’re [Tor Books] going to be in linear immersive narratives that produce the reading trance. We won’t be moving towards a “choose your own adventure” thing. People will do those things, but those are different art forms. There’s something about immersive text that you can read in order – it’s persisted through many technological changes. This fiction stuff works pretty well. It’s been around a long time

    I think he’s right. The EXPERIENCE you get in the reader’s trance, similar to the one you get in a movie, is a strong experience. The media used to convey that experience doesn’t really matter as long as it makes it easy to get into the trance.

    Check out the whole interview.

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    Workshop: The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories

    ByJohn Brown

    Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

    Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

    Time: 2 PM – 4 PM

    I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

    For more information go to the CONduit website.

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3 Comments

  3. Came to say the same thing about the Pomodoro Technique. 25 minutes of hard work, 5 minute break, and after every 4 pomodoros, then you take a longer break. I wonder if 25 minutes is long enough to get a lot done when writing, though. 45/15 might be better for that.

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