Decide to Do Things Now
By John Vorhaus | August 25, 2011 |
Against all foreseeable odds, I have a hit on my hands. A bona fide, number one, widely reviewed and widely praised (well, widely within a rarefied world) hit. It happens to be a book about poker, and it happens to be a hit within that rarefied world largely on the strength of the public profile of my co-author, the wonderful and glamorous Annie Duke, she of Celebrity Apprentice and World Series of Poker fame; she of the 33,000 Twitter followers.
Decide is a case study in collaboration. I could never have written this book by myself. I don’t have the poker theory chops. Nor could Annie have written the book by herself. She doesn’t have the writing chops. Thanks to our complementary strengths and synergy, we have produced 425 of the most awesome pages on poker ever written. That said, the book goes nowhere without the public profile and muscle of Annie Duke behind it. It does no business; hell, it doesn’t even get published. In that sense, it’s a case study in everything we’ve been talking about in this column: how authors in today’s market are greatly aided by being broadly well known – or figuring out how to get well known. Anyway, thanks to Annie’s coattails, I have a book ranked number one (among poker books) on Amazon. (And more than half those sales are Kindle sales, for what that’s worth.) Decide to Play Great Poker has only been out for a couple of months, but it’s already clear that it will sell better than any of my other books. There’s a very good chance it’ll sell better than all of them put together.
I should be happy, and I am.
But I’m also perverse.
So when it occurred to me that there was a wonderful parody of the book to be written – a slender volume called Decide To Play Drunk Poker – I didn’t waste time. I sat right down and wrote it. Knocked it out in, basically, a long weekend, then spent a few weeks refining it, Kindlizing it, bastardizing the cover of Decide To Play Great Poker, and getting it up online, where it instantly commenced to sell literally tens of copies. Less than a month from conception to completion.
Less than one month.
Why was I in such a hurry? Because I knew that the fire of Decide to Play Great Poker was burning so hot it couldn’t last long. If I wanted to leverage my fifteen minutes of fame (in the small world of poker writing) to introduce new readers to my humorous writing and the rest of my oeuvre, the time to strike was now. So I struck. Without fear. Without doubt. Without procrastination. And without the slightest regard to potential outcome. I didn’t think, I Just acted, for I knew that if I let fear or doubt creep in, procrastination would follow, my progress would stall and I’d miss my window. I didn’t want to miss my window.
There’s so much to say for this approach. We writers spend so much time fussing and fretting over what we write – worrying the details to death. But the fact is that most readers aren’t as obsessive about the details as we are. They just want a generally good read, and if we give them that, they’ll forgive the odd underpolished sentence, even a typo or two. Even a slender eBook parody of one’s own successful book.
Don’t think. Act.
If you’ve got a great idea for a great big book, or even a great little book, don’t sweat the details. Just get the thing written and get the thing out there. It’ll either sell or it won’t. It’ll garner either cheers or jeers. But it damn well won’t do anything if it remains just a figment of your imagination.
We know we’re living in tough times, we writers. The huge advances and prestige publications of old, they’re largely gone. Then again, there’s Kindle, and Kindle has kindly (Kindley?) opened a new door for us. Now we may write any damn thing we please, just as fast as we can, and put it out there where people can find it. Of course, there still remains the challenge of helping people find it. No doubt we have to flog and keep flogging our products through Facebook, Twitter, websites, and blogs, blogs, blogs, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes we get lucky and collaborate with someone with 33,000 tweeps. Thanks to that happy accident, Decide To Play Great Poker is selling well, and Decide To Play Drunk Poker is, well, selling.
But again, I want to stress that none of that happens if I don’t decide to do things now. No one said I had to write this parody. No one would’ve noticed if I hadn’t. I don’t even know if it will prove to have been worth my time in the end. I just know that not doing it does verifiably nothing for my career. And something is better than nothing.
There’s a motto I adhere to, one I’ve followed all my life, “Go off in all directions at once. You’re bound to get somewhere eventually.” This little parody project of mine is a manifestation of that thought. I’m going off in another direction, hoping and trusting that it will add another little boost to my efforts to reboot my career in this new, post-modern world of publishing. I’m deciding to do things now. I hope you are, too. It’s the only way any of is us ever going to survive these times. On the strength of our personal hustle. On our willingness to just “throw it off the roof and see if it lands.” On the principle of, “Don’t think, act.”
Oh, yeah. You can find Decide To Play Drunk Poker at https://tinyurl.com/decidedrunk. For just $2.99, it makes a moderately amusing and only modestly time-consuming read. It’s only 15,000 words, by the way, and it’s worth nothing that many people think 15,000 words is the magic number for Kindle-only projects. eBook readers seem to be developing a taste for consume-in-a-sitting works, especially those priced at impulse-buy prices. Think about this when you’re framing your next do-it-now endeavor. It needn’t take a year of your life; it might only take a long weekend.
John Vorhaus has written seven novels, including Lucy in the Sky, The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, plus the Killer Poker series and (with Annie Duke) Decide to Play Great Poker. His books on writing include The Comic Toolbox, How to Write Good and Creativity Rules!
This right here: “We writers spend so much time fussing and fretting over what we write – worrying the details to death. But the fact is that most readers aren’t as obsessive about the details as we are. They just want a generally good read, and if we give them that, they’ll forgive the odd underpolished sentence, even a typo or two.”
I REALLY REALLY needed to hear this today. Thank you. :)
Interesting. I needed to hear this, too — I’m a plotter that tends to obsess, and that can lead to analysis paralysis.
There’s so much conflicting advice out there: with the sheer amount of books coming out thanks to Kindle, I’ve read that “you need to make sure your book is better” AND “you need to make sure your book hits while it’s hot.” Perhaps it’s about taking the risk and perhaps rushing a bit, but also getting a good “team” around you, an editor or fantastic beta readers who can catch what you don’t, and a designer/format person who can make the thing look decent?
I’m going to have to think about this. Thanks for the post!
When I write, there’s certainly a tendency to plot, ponder, and obsess about every detail and a desire for perfectionism that leads to a common writer past time of “not getting anything done.” How can I write something good without a killer outline?
Last fall I discovered NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word first draft of a novel during the month of November. 30 days. 50,000 words. Average output needs to be 1666.66/words per day. And sometimes that .66 word is the most interesting! :)
I learned to shut off the critic and the thinking brain and wrote stream of consciousness. I was no longer afraid of writing something bad or going many pages in the wrong direction.
I now have more than 100,000 words. Portions need to be completely thrown out. Much of it needs some serious editing. And through this process I discovered my story and learned a ton about my characters.
More importantly, I realized that my previous efforts were focused on trying to perfect an outline before diving into the writing and in doing so, I was considering and rejecting an initial idea that wasn’t fully explored. The idea for a story beat might not have been good, and by rejecting it, I wasn’t allowing myself to explore the idea. Not allowing myself to dig deeper and mine it. Not allowing the idea the opportunity to transform into something great, or lead to something completely different that is much better.
And then I’d wonder why writing is so difficult. It turned out all I needed to do was slip some GHB into my inner critic’s drink to silence it long enough to crank out the words.
So now my current process is to take whatever idea or imperfect-not-fully-outlined-story and write it “no holds barred”. Let the vivid details come out. Let inanimate objects speak. Switch from first to third person. Let the characters do things that surprise me. And out of all that comes clarity, the outline gets reworked based on what I learned from the long form writing, which then allows for editing and refining of the story to match. The process certainly isn’t pretty, but it allows for momentum and gets me somewhere. It’s “The circle of writing.”
Doug, around here we have a saying, “Make the latest possible decision based on the best available information.” I never feel like the story outline has the benefit of best available information. It has only glanced at the story, not really lived it. It’s not until the prose is flowing that the story really unfolds. In The Comic Toolbox I describe this as “the Grand Canyon Effect,” noting that you can only know so much of the Canyon from the rim; eventually you have to go down into the thing to see what it really is. That’s my transition from story to script or outline to prose. I go down into the Canyon. It’s hot and steep and scary down there, but that’s where all the cool shit is, so whatever.
This is so inspiring. We hear so much advice about not putting anything out there unless it’s your 100% absolute best, vetted, edited, uber-designed and perfect material. Sometimes you just want to communicate with people and get the work out there for consumption.
Great job!
Awesome success. And I love this – There’s a motto I adhere to, one I’ve followed all my life, “Go off in all directions at once. You’re bound to get somewhere eventually.”
Great post.
“Don’t think. Act.” “decide to do things now” I like these. They apply to most things as well. Most people get paralyzed by overthinking things that they never get to actually do what they want to do. All the thinking and analyzing hold them back and next thing they know, a year or two had already gone by. Thanks for the reminder. Congratulations on your books!
This is a great way to limit our worries and get things started. Thinking we are not prepared and we need to do things perfect prevents us from starting. Being a perfectionist is the most important thing for me to avoid. In writing, I practice free flow writing just to make me comfortable with mistakes.