Posts by Bill Ferris
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
This holiday season, give yourself the gift of lowered expectations by making some Old Year’s resolutions.
What are Old Year’s resolutions? Let’s start by talking about what they’re not. I’m not suggesting you scramble to finish the New Year’s resolutions before December ends, nor am I asking that you go back in time to cross them off your list.
Instead, all you have to do is resolve to do things you’ve already done. For instance, I resolved to finish this very column before the end of the year, and here I am keeping that resolution. A champagne toast to me!
What if I’ve already told people about my resolutions?
Many writers make the rookie mistake of sharing their resolutions with others in the name of transparency and accountability (commendable but foolish), or perhaps to try and impress someone at a NYE party by talking about finishing your book in an effort to get their phone number (totally worth it). Whatever the reason, you most likely have several personal enemies and professional rivals who would cackle with glee to see you fail in public, and Old Year’s resolutions help you find some plausible conditions to declare victory.
First, find your old list of New Year’s resolutions. You may have wrote them on a napkin, typed them into a neat list and posted it above your computer monitor so you could see it every day, or worst of all, posted it on your social media in the hope that you could shame yourself into productivity. Well, good news, nobody’s reading your blog anyway, so they won’t notice if you tweak your resolutions just a bit.
Instead, you take your New Year’s Resolutions that you made at the beginning of the year and amend them slightly, like how the Bill of Rights modified the U.S. Constitution. And these Old Year’s Resolutions could end up being just as—if not more!—important. Let’s look at some examples:
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Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
As the years go by, I often think back to my early years as a writer. I had so much energy! So much passion! So many bad ideas! If I could send a letter back in time, I could tell myself when to avoid wrong turns and when to stay the course. I could tell myself to buy Bitcoin. Alas, I can’t go back in time. I can, however, impart the wisdom I’ve learned to the next generation of writers.
On Authenticity
Always be true to yourself. However, if you ever get the urge to be a big phony, remember that you are a writer and a creator, and therefore can create myriad personas and pen names. You’re not being inauthentic, you’re being true to those other versions of you, the ones who are richer and more interesting.
On Writing What You Love
Write what you love.
On Writing What You Hate
Write what you love long enough, it will gradually (and inexorably) fall into this category.
On Stress
Stress will be your constant companion as a writer. If you don’t have stress, you are probably not pushing yourself hard enough, which is actually not the worst idea. The world will be fine without your writing. Old writers like myself are so very tired, and we can’t compete with your youthful energy.
On Risk
I’m so proud of the risks you’re taking. And so fascinated that you thought this was good. Wow, this idea of yours is something you want to spend the next two years writing, huh? That’s just so very brave! I sure wish I had the courage to do something as awful as that!
On Criticism
People will criticize you. Some of it will be valid, some will not. The important thing is to identify which is which. You can safely ignore any criticism unless it comes from someone who:
On Sucking
Give yourself permission to write poorly. It’s not failure, it’s practice! Save your bad writing so that you can one day look back on how far you’ve come, and we envious nobodies can mock you for it when we want to take you down a peg or two.
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Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
National Novel Writing Month (sometimes referred to as “NaNoWriMo” or “November”) is just around the corner, which means it’s time to fool yourself into thinking you can write your literary opus in a mere thirty days. That’s a lot of work, especially considering you’ve got a lot of eating to do on Thanksgiving and a lot of mall doors to bust down on Black Friday. I know you can do it, though. In fact, you can finish your novel in November easily by using one weird trick. You see, NaNoWriMo is much easier if you take a shortcut, by which I mean, take a longcut: start your novel in early October and pretend you wrote it in only thirty days.
That’s right, I want you to cheat.
Welcome to NaNoCheatMo!
Here’s how to do it:
There are many good reasons to participate in NaNoCheatMo, including but not limited to:
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Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Enjoying your long Labor Day weekend? I sure as hell hope not.
Writers labor on Labor Day. This is the weekend you’re going to regain all the writing momentum you’ve lost. No matter how far behind you are on your goals, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to convince yourself that you can atone for it all if you really buckle down over a weekend that is one whole day longer than any other weekend.
Does this sound unrealistic? I’m sorry, but it’s time for some tough love. You’ve spent the last year and a half making excuses like these:
I’ll bet you think that you deserve a break now, huh? The long Labor Day weekend has arrived not a moment too soon, you say, and you finally have a moment to catch your breath.
You fool. You rube. Writing is your break. This is your purpose, your calling, remember? You want rest and relaxation? The best way to “relax” is spend the “rest” of your time off hammering out 5,000 words a day to make up for all that you didn’t get done while you were trying to hold it together.
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Everybody loves the smash-hit TV show Ted Lasso from Apple TV+. The ongoing saga of Jason Sudeikis as an aw-shucks football coach from Kansaz who gets hired as a Premier League soccer coach in London is equal parts hilarious and heartwarming. Expertly performed, directed, and written, Ted Lasso is a masterclass of writing lessons for everyone from the most famous of authors to the hackiest of hacks. I’m a little bit of both, so here’s what I learned from watching Ted Lasso.
*sense of humor required
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Writers talk a lot about killing your darlings—those wonderful ideas and sentences that you just love, but you cut them because you can’t make them work in your story. But they’re just so great! Do you really have to cut them? Unfortunately, yes. You can’t spell IDEA without DIE, and there’s no better place for your ideas to perish than in your idea file.
What is an idea file, you ask? Well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll explain anyway so you won’t know I’m judging your stupid question: An idea file is a document (or a folder containing documents) in which you store ideas you haven’t yet fleshed out, paragraphs that don’t fit, flourishes that sound great but disrupt the flow of the story, and writing that’s obviously crap but you can’t bring yourself to delete because you have weird attachment issues. (If that last bit sounds judgmental, it is, but take solace that I’m judging myself most harshly of all.)
What I’m saying is you don’t really have to kill your darlings. Simply cut and paste them into a different document! Your idea file will make you a better editor. It’s easier to wield the knife when you know the trimmings can be re-attached any time you like. But if a month goes by and you’ve forgotten about the bits you cut? They probably weren’t necessary in the first place. You’re not killing your darlings, you are simply entombing them forever in a sub-folder on your hard drive, like walling up your best frenemy in your catacombs next to the amontillado.
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* sense of humor required
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Despite all of your big talk about having lots and lots of writing time, you just couldn’t pull it together to finish your book. It’s okay to feel disappointed, but may I suggest you instead avail yourself of one of these handy, bulletproof excuses that will fend off any judgement from your writers group, your readers, and most importantly, yourself. Let the enabling begin!
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
So you want to be a writer? Maybe you can string together a few good sentences, but good prose can take you only so far. Your daily routine can can affect your writing career just as much (or more!) as the words you type. Set yourself up for literary success by developing these writing habits.
Write every day. The more you write, the better you’ll get.
Go to a prestigious creative writing program. These programs are competitive and costly, but you’ll get to hone your craft and make connections that will benefit you your life long.
Get rich and famous before you start writing. Having the finances and social capital to quit your job will free up so much of your mental energy. Having the financial freedom to take exotic vacations and party like it’s 1999 will give you so many stories to tell.
Cultivate a love of reading when you’re still a child. This one will be more difficult for those of us who are already adults, but some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten was that if something is important to you, you’ll figure out a way to make it happen. If you first fell in love with the written word when you were ten, see if you can make it happen by age nine.
Have at least one parent who is a successful author. Our parents are our first mentors, teaching us life lessons and passing on the benefits of their wisdom without the pain of their mistakes. If your parents are famous authors themselves, that will give you a huge advantage in your own career. Talk to your folks about their literary aspirations and see if they’d consider changing careers from motel manager or retiree to having been a literary darling since age twenty-six.
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*sense of humor required
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Writers, like diamonds, sparkle under pressure. Without pressure? They’re just lumps of coal, best known for being set on fire or given to brats at Christmastime. Writers need deadlines the way Dr. Frankenstein needs electricity—it takes a dangerous outside force to inject life into our abominable creations.
The power of the deadline is at the root of the Hack’s Paradox: You have no deadlines because you haven’t sold your book, but how can you sell your book if you don’t have deadlines to motivate you? (Please note that if you HAVE sold your book without finishing it, you are not a true hack, in which case why are you reading this column?)
It can be tough to motivate yourself when you have no external deadlines. Pressure is what transforms a generic ham sandwich on white bread into a fancy and delicious panini that costs $9.95. If your writing career is withering under the tyranny of a peaceful and balanced lifestyle, this column will help you inject some much-needed stress and anxiety into your writing process.
Set an arbitrary deadline. Just give yourself a due date. In his seminal book on writing, On Writing, Stephen King says you should try to finish a book draft in like three months or so (I’m too lazy to look it up, and too temperamental to be corrected, so if I’m wrong, please keep it to yourself). Mark your calendar for three months from today and make that your goal. Will it work? It might, but based on the fact that you’re reading this column right now, I’m betting it won’t. It sounds plausible enough, though, and I’m on a deadline to write this column, so I’m leaving it in.
Reward yourself. Give yourself a treat for finally writing “THE END” in your draft, whether that’s a fancy meal, a nice bottle of something or other, or a new book you want to read. Never underestimate the power of holding life’s small pleasures for ransom from yourself.
Find an accountability buddy. Why should you suffer alone? Find someone in your writing group who needs both outside motivation and the visceral thrill of laughing in your face if you don’t finish your book on time. This sort of positive peer pressure can be very helpful, and it also provides you with someone to drink and commiserate with if and when neither of you are able to finish a draft.
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* sense of humor required
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Happy Quarantiniversary! Time flies, does it not? Now we’re one year into the pandemic, and many of you reading this have already been vaccinated. It’s time to celebrate not just the prospect of life returning to normal, but also your forthcoming literary success. When all this nonsense started, writers everywhere said, “This sucks, but at least I’ll have more time to write.” A whole year has gone by, and based on how much extra writing time you had, you must be putting the finishing touches on your novel, right? Right?!
Let me remind you of my advice from a year ago:
They say Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague. This is not inspirational; this is the baseline. Shakespeare didn’t have wifi. With the tools you have at your disposal, and with the abject terror you have as motivation, you should expect nothing less of yourself than to create an artistic masterpiece that high school English students will write formulaic essays about for the next several hundred years.
And now that you’ve put in all that hard work for the last twelve months, you get to reap the rewards. It must feel good, after a year of wondering whether you will live or die, to know that you at least have an artistic triumph to show for it. I mean, how bad would you feel if you hadn’t finished your book? It’s a good thing you’ve used all of this extra time at home wisely! Had you not done that, why, that would be enough of a failure to cause a full-blown existential crisis! Ha ha!
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
It seems like only yesterday you woke up with an idea. That idea metastasized in your mind into something grander, something that screamed to be written down lest it sit and fester inside your brain a moment longer. Each day, your book ruled your life, either by cracking the whip as you sat at your writing desk, or haunting you like a phantom on the days you dared take time to relax. You skipped parties, blew off friends, and alienated your family in service to your craft until one day you finally finished the book. After all that work, you’ve earned a small slice of cake!
Obviously, the ultimate reward for any author is to have your book turned into a prestige TV series. When does that day come, though? Writing is, at its core, an exercise in delayed gratification, with wide variation in the length of that delay and the quality of that gratification. Even the fastest writer can spend months pouring their heart and soul into a book that can be consumed in a matter of hours—a ratio that is, at best, a meditation on the nature of art, and at worst, an outright scam. For many writers, “After my book is finished…” has the same energy as “When the pandemic is over…” and “When Daddy gets back from the store with cigarettes…” When writing success always seems just over the horizon in perpetuity, it’s up to you to reward yourself for finishing a draft, a chapter, a single page if that’s what you need to keep going.
To tide you over until you sign your big publishing deal, here are a few ways you can reward yourself for meeting your writing goals.
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Happy 2021! Now that the longest year in history is over, it’s a good time for reflection and taking stock of things. And by “things” I mean those Christmas and/or Hanukkah gifts you got. If you’re a writer, you probably got a lot of writing-centric gifts. I’m going to say it so you don’t have to: some writer gifts are better than others. (I know, you don’t want to seem ungrateful, but another coffee mug? Really?!)
If Santa decided to go off-list for you, take heart that even the worst Christmas gift for you may be a reasonably serviceable birthday gift for someone else. That’s right, we’re talking about the greatest of holiday taboos: regifting. Some may frown on it, but a properly executed regifting prevents waste and saves you a trip to the store, which is more important than ever during a pandemic, so really you’re doing everybody a favor. The 2021 Regifting Guide for Writers will help you decide what to keep, what to give away, and how to do it without looking like a jerk.
Let the foisting begin!
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*sense of humor required
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
You can’t help but underestimate chairs, as they are literally under you. Since you’ll be doing almost all of your writing while sitting down, though, a chair is perhaps the most important component to your writing routine next to pens. A bad chair can cause you give up after an hour due to butt or back aches, but a chair that’s too comfy might cause you to skip writing and take a nap. The right chair can be worth its weight in gold, literally—some fancy office chairs cost a thousand dollars! But you don’t have to take out a second mortgage to find a chair that suits your needs. In this month’s Hacks for Hacks column, we’ll look at the best chairs for you and your writing style.
A chair at the kitchen table. Simple. Classic. Maybe a little wobbly. But sometimes the old reliable option is the best one.
Your desk chair in your home office. If you already have a home office, this is a no-brainer. And if you’re lucky enough to have a job where you can work from home, you don’t even have to commute, ha ha. Between work responsibilities and your writing, you could spend nearly every waking hour in that chair! Doesn’t that sound great?
Your couch. You know you’re probably wreaking havoc on your posture, but writing whilst reclining on the couch is just so comfortable. And it offers a great view of the television your laptop.
A car. This sounds ridiculous, but it makes more sense than spending a thousand bucks on a fancy office chair. Plus the sound system is better. For improved productivity, though, don’t write while driving. Have someone else drive you instead.
A park bench. A wooden bench isn’t the most comfortable seat for long periods of time, but the scenery and fresh air are second to none. Of course, the October chill is setting in, and we’ve still got this pandemic on, so you probably can’t do this one for five or six months at least. Sorry :(
The chair you made as a woodworking project. Don’t you feel accomplished for completing this? Writing involves so much time at a computer creating digital artifacts, isn’t it satisfying to create a tangible object with your own hands? You often think about this chair while you’re writing on the couch, as this one is too uncomfortable to actually sit on.
Your chair at work. Nothing like banging out a few hundred words during your lunch break. Carving out a few minutes from your workday to write feels almost subversive, does it not? Your chair at the office is way nicer than anything you could afford for yourself. It’s even got wheels and spins around. Whee!
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Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Raise your hand if you’re still managing to meet your writing goals during a global pandemic.
Ha! Trick question! If you were really writing, both hands would still be on your keyboard. And you know what? That’s okay! It’s hard to find the mental energy to create when so much of it is consumed by work, social distancing, missing friends and loved ones, keeping kids safe during the new school year, and just trying to stay alive. If you’re stressing about your writing career, go easy on yourself—you’re already doing a lot more than you think. A lot of your daily tasks are perfectly valid parts of the writing process. Don’t believe me? Let’s review a few everyday tasks that totally count as writing time.
Prewriting
Brainstorming
