But it can also be grueling, disappointing, and a reason to blame yourself when you don’t meet your own expectations.

You have enough stressors in 2020 (and most other years, but especially this year). If you’re going to attempt NaNo, you need a strategy to keep your spirits up.

Decision Fatigue is Real

Decision fatigue is just what it sounds like–when you have to make a ton of decisions, one after the other, your brain is using up mental resources. Too many decisions will deplete your reserves, until you hit a wall, otherwise known as burnout.

You can ease the rate of depletion by putting in place routines or rules, or limiting your options. For instance, getting dressed can be overwhelming on a bad day–there are so many combinations! So, make some guidelines. Maybe this November you’ll only wear black pants. Maybe you’ll set up a weekly routine, of red sweater Mondays, green shirt Tuesdays, and so on. The point is, make it so you don’t have to think about what you’re going to wear.

A morning and evening routine can also decrease decision fatigue. Do the same things in the same order so they become habits. It can also be extremely beneficial to have a writing routine. If you write at the same time of day, you prime your brain to be creative at that time. If you start every writing session with a cue like the same playlist, the same scented candle, or the same flavor of gum, your brain will start to associate those cues with writing and kick into gear.

Save your decision-making resources for your novel.

Writer, Feed Thyself

Food is another area to think about. Again, you have potential decision fatigue. You also run the risk of spending all day writing until you get hungry… only to realize you haven’t grocery shopped, or don’t have time to cook something.

There are numerous ways to solve this issue. You can:

• Plan every meal for the month of November, including when you’ll make grocery runs. Remember, it doesn’t have to be elaborate!
• Choose a small number of easy to prepare meals, and only eat from those during the month.
• Ask someone else to take on some or all of the meal prep. (Offer a favor in return for when your novel is done!)
• Lay in a big supply of easy meals and snacks that aren’t perishable, or are easy to replace. That may mean ramen or TV dinners.
• Prepare big batches in October and freeze meal-size portions so you can reheat and go.
• Clear one day a week when you’ll prepare food for the rest of the week.
• Save up now so you can order takeout or delivery a few times in November, because you will a) have days where you can’t bear to eat the same thing yet again, b) cannot muster energy to cook, or c) want to reward yourself for hitting a milestone.

Keep in mind that all of the above are temporary. You are not setting a pattern for the rest of your life (although you may find some of these helpful outside of November), you’re experimenting for thirty days.

Oh, and don’t forget to hydrate! (Hydration has the added benefit of requiring you to get up to go to the bathroom!)

Keep It Moving

Do not spend November glued to a keyboard. It’s not healthy. And you do not want to give yourself a repetitive stress injury that will make writing physically painful.

That means you should schedule regular breaks to move your whole body, and your arms and hands in particular. Moving around will also help get your blood pumping, and fresh ideas flowing.

I really like Yoga with Adriene on YouTube, and she has a bunch of relevant videos:

• Yoga for Writers (29 min)
• Yoga for Focus & Productivity (9 min)
• Yoga for Wrist Pain (22 min)
• Yoga for Creativity (41 min)
• Yoga for Hands, Fingers, Wrists (11 min)

Look Forward to Something

Set up some rewards for when you reach big milestones! This is supposed to be a fun challenge, and rewards can be very motivating.

They don’t have to be based on word count, you could also associate them with the progress of the story. If you use the The Monster Novel Structure Workbook you could have a reward for finishing the Inciting Incident, or when you reach Turning Point 1, and so on.

Need some reward ideas? You could buy something, or indulge in a favorite food or drink, but you also don’t have to spend money. Sometimes the reward is more about how you spend your time: watching a favorite movie, going for a walk, calling a friend for a long chat, or relaxing in a bubble bath.

Just make sure the reward is something you want so you’re inspired to get another 100 words written.

Remember the Real Goal

NaNoWriMo is supposed to be fun. The true ‘win’ isn’t actually writing 50,000 words. Writing anything during November counts as success, because it’s more than you would’ve had written otherwise.

You should never be so stressed or anxious over NaNo that you stop having fun. If you find yourself dreading your daily word count, it may be time to reassess why you’re doing NaNo in the first place. Yeah, you want to write a novel… but you also want to be kind to yourself while you do it.

Whatever you get done this November, take a moment to be proud of yourself! And indulge in something you enjoy as a reward.

Use the power of bullet journals to prepare for NaNoWriMo

This course provides everything you need to prepare to write a novel–not just any novel, but a winning National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) draft!

• Identify HOW you should prepare
• Choose WHAT you want to do from 13 Tasks
• Estimate how much TIME you really have
• Set weekly GOALS
• Have a flexible PLAN OF ACTION
• Draft with CONFIDENCE

This is a one-time fee that will give you open access to the course. Use the materials over and over again!

Get help from a 10-time NaNoWriMo winner who always does prep work. Give yourself the best possible chance of winning NaNoWriMo this year!

Buy Now

The post Taking Care of Yourself During NaNoWriMo first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The truth is, you, a pantser, already know a ton about story structure. You use it every time you write. You just may not know it yet.

Pantsers Already Use Story Structure!

Pantsers write by the seat of their pants, discovering their story as they go. They’re often guided by what feels like instinct, and is in fact a melding of what our brains already do (seek patterns and meaning), and being socialized in ways to communicate. Basically, your brain draws conclusions and tells itself stories, and when you listen to someone telling an anecdote, or watch a movie, or read a book, you’re learning what makes a story. You already know a lot about story structure, but you may never have articulated it or named the pieces. 

Pantsers are paying attention to their subconscious when they write. They get a feel for how long a section should be, that things are going too smoothly and they need to shake it up, or that they need humor to break up a high-stakes climax. These are good gut feelings to listen to, and some amazing stories have come from listening to those guts. 

The trouble comes when you aren’t sure what should come next. Your internal story compass is no longer able to guide you from A to B, let alone get to C. 

Studying structure is like looking at a map. It’s glowing signposts in the dark distance. It’s a reference when you realize you’ve veered off course or aren’t even sure what the final destination should be. 

Step-By-Step Pantsing With Structure

While you don’t have to use my Monster Novel Structure Workbook, I do recommend it! The steps below refer to tools included with the Workbook, but you can follow the spirit of this guide with another structure system as well. 

• Learn the story beats. Read up, study diagrams, and get familiar with what “structure” involves. The point is not to memorize every beat, but to be able to later recall, “Isn’t there something that usually does XYZ?” You can reference it then.
• Write freely until you run out of steam or reach a split in the road, then refer to the structure. Sometimes the structure will set you back on the right path at once, and sometimes you’ll decide you want to deliberately do something a little differently. Either way, you can keep writing now!
• Keep notes on which scenes correlate to which beat. You might change your mind about them, but knowing roughly where a scene falls within the structure can tell you a lot. 
  • Word budget: How much have you written and how much further do you have to go? How many words are typical for your genre? If you’re aiming for a certain total, and this beat usually falls around 25-50% into the book, how does what you’ve written compare?
  • Fix cause and effect: Why doesn’t the climax work? You probably forgot to set something up earlier! Identifying gaps in your structure can help you make revisions. 
  • Figure out where to go next: Instead of trying to hold a whole novel idea in your head at once, just look one beat ahead. Logically, how would your cast get from where they are now to the next beat? How will your characters react? Build your story one beat at a time. 
    • Use the calendars included with The Monster Novel Structure Workbook! Each day of the 30-day month has a beat assigned to it, ensuring that your story keeps moving from day to day. No more getting mired in the muddy middle! 
• Identify the beats. When your draft is done, use the Monster Worksheet to name all your story beats. Compare them to the structure descriptions and see how your beats hold up. Are you missing any? Duplicated something? Is a beat not doing everything that beat is supposed to do?
• Revise! Now that you’ve identified potential weaknesses in your manuscript you can work on fixing them. 

Pantsers have an instinctive understanding of story, and are good at listening to those instincts. When you formalize that knowledge your writing will get stronger and you’ll be better prepared to discuss the decisions you’re making.

So give your gut a helping hand once in a while.

Novel going nowhere?

Getting stuck in the Muddy Middle of your novel is no fun. But there’s a scaffolding for how your novel should be built–that’s what makes it a novel.

The Monster Novel Structure Workbook: How to Plot Without Getting Stuck comes with downloadable worksheets, examples, and even a Scrivener template.

The post How Pantsers Use Story Structure first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

There are more and more apps out there that help you track what you’ve already done. Where Pacemaker shines is that it helps you plan how much you need to/can write.

Goals

When you set up your plan you’ll be asked how much work you want to do, and how that’s measured. Many writers use words as their measuring stick, but you can also choose from a long list that includes hours, pages, chapters, scenes, stanzas, and more. You can set up a daily target, or an overall target. And you’ll choose the date range you want Pacemaker to measure.

Translation: Do you want to write 1000 words a day, or 30 hours across the whole time period you define?

Strategies

Pacemaker then does all the math for you and generates a graph with your daily work goal, depending on one of several Strategies.

“Steadily” assumes you’ll write the same amount every day, but you can also choose to start with smaller daily goals and steadily increase them, or start with a big daily goal that decreases. There’s also an “Oscillating” strategy that will cycle up and down, and a “Randomly” setting.

That’s very cool, but it’s not the coolest part. That comes under Customizations.

Customizations

Let’s say you work a 9-to-5 job and are likely to get way more words in on the weekend. Pacemaker has settings for that.

Say you’re writing during NaNoWriMo and you know you have to take a few days off for Thanksgiving. Pacemaker will let you identify the days when you can’t write (or are likely to write less).

Have a weekly write-in? Set Wednesdays to as “do more” days. Got a writing retreat scheduled? Set those days to “Push!”

Examples

These are the sample plans you can take inspiration from:

• Nanowrimo, with gradually decreasing word counts, skipping Thanksgiving Weekend
• Nanowrimo, skipping Tuesdays and Thursdays
• Nanowrimo in the second half of November!
• Twelve Days of December Writing gradually increasing word counts every day
• Hard core writing in Spring 2015

Here’s a November-oriented example I made:

Here I told Pacemaker:

• Goal: A total 50,000 words in between Nov 1 and Nov 30.
• Strategy: Steadily, with Gentle intensity.
• Customizations:
  • Nov 1, do more (Starting excitement!)
  • Mondays, do less (Weekly meeting so less time to write)
  • Sundays, do more (Write-in)
  • Skip Nov 26 (Thanksgiving day, will be busy)

The outcome is that most days my goal will be to write 1,568 words. On my Do More days I’ll aim for 3,135 words, and on Do Less days I’ll do 784 words.

If I meet my  daily goals, I know I’ll finish my 50k by the end of the month. NO MATHING REQUIRED.

(I’m not a fan of math, obviously.)

Should I use Pacemaker instead of the official NaNoWriMo word trackers?

No one’s going to yell at you if you do, but there are some pros and cons of both.

Both can be used throughout the year. Both can be used for free.

nanowrimo.org is completely free to use, which is awesome. You may or may not like the big redesign they did recently. It’s most useful for people participating in NaNo.

Pacemaker has a clean interface, and is most useful for people who have tricky schedules to plan around.

The word trackers on nanowrimo.org will keep an archive of all your NaNo projects over time, which you can refer to (I topped half a million words written on NaNo projects in 2019). It’s very cool that I have some 15 years’ worth of novel attempts catalogued there. Pacemaker’s free plan only lets you retain two plans at a time, with no option to archive. For more you’d have to pay on a monthly or annual basis, which also gives you the ability to run writing challenges with friends and a few other features.

The two sites don’t talk to each other, unfortunately, if you want to keep a record in both places you’ll have to do that manually. If you want your NaNo profile to reflect your current progress you’ll have to update there. If you’re not keen on everyone knowing how you’re doing, Pacemaker is a better choice.

You can always confirm a NaNo win without inputting your daily progress. You will have to declare a new project for the season.

Whichever you decide to use, you’re going to rock your writing project.

Use the power of bullet journals to prepare for NaNoWriMo

This course provides everything you need to prepare to write a novel–not just any novel, but a winning National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) draft!

• Identify HOW you should prepare
• Choose WHAT you want to do from 13 Tasks
• Estimate how much TIME you really have
• Set weekly GOALS
• Have a flexible PLAN OF ACTION
• Draft with CONFIDENCE

This is a one-time fee that will give you open access to the course. Use the materials over and over again!

Get help from a 10-time NaNoWriMo winner who always does prep work. Give yourself the best possible chance of winning NaNoWriMo this year!

Buy Now

The post Plan Your Writing Output with Pacemaker first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

Scrivener is amazing, even with its limitations. (Still waiting on Scrivener 3 for Windows… *sob*)

Screenshots are for Scrivener 1 on Windows.

When compiling your document you can specify what you’d like to happen to separate two text documents. In Scrivener it’ll look like this. Your Manuscript folder contains a Chapter folder, and several text documents. You can see that hierarchy in the Binder on the left, and on the right the dashed line is how a break between documents looks in Scrivenings mode.

(Yes, I changed my default background color to green. It’s soothing, less harsh on the eyes.)

When you compile to a Word doc using the default settings it comes out like this:

The hash sign separates the two text sections, but it’s not very visually distinct. It’s cramped. I find it easy to skim through a document and miss the break.

I want something like this:

There, now that’s a clear distinction!

So, how do I make Scrivener do this for me automatically? With a little cheating.

In the Compile dialog, click on the Formatting tab.

On the right, select one of the folder levels under Type.

Click on the sample text that says “CHAPTER ONE”, then click the Section Layout button.

The next window that opens allows you to customize the chapter title. By default, the format is to say “CHAPTER NUMBER” followed by a line break and then the title of the chapter. The line break is marked by that blue-purple reverse P icon. That’s what we want!

Highlight just the reverse-P icon (more accurately called a pilcrow) and copy it. 

Cancel out of the Section Layout box.

Now we’re going to move from the Formatting tab to the Separators tab.

By default the Text Separator is set to Custom, and the only thing in that box is the hash symbol.

Paste the pilcrow you copied both before and after the hash. They’ll be invisible in this box, and act like a space, but they’re there!

Now when you Compile you’ll get one line of spacing before and after the hash!

The more times you paste the pilcrow, the more line breaks you’ll get. You can also replace the hash with asterisks, or other common symbols. Unfortunately, there are limits to which symbols Scrivener will accept here. Experiment!

I do this formatting trick each time I set up a new Scrivener file, and I find it a lot easier to read and analyze the resulting documents.

(One day a professional manuscript formatter may yell at me for doing this, but nyah.)

What’s your favorite little-known Scrivener trick?

The post Scrivener Tip: Nicer Section Break Spacing first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

I’ve also learned an awful lot.

1) I’m grateful for my graphic design & tech background.

Indie publishing is not cheap. Editing, covers, graphics, formatting, etc. The responsibility for those costs rests with the author, rather than a publishing house.

I’ve been extremely lucky that I was able to bootstrap a lot of this. I taught myself HTML when I was a teenager, and it turns out that epub files are essentially the same thing. In high school I learned to use graphics software, which I used to create the graphics in MNSW and the cover. I paid for these things in time, rather than money. (Well, I did pay for the software. Which is a post for another time.) And under ‘time’ you have to count the two decades of playing around and working with websites and Photoshop.

2) I understand why traditionally published books take so long to produce.

In traditional publishing it takes years to make a book go from purchased manuscript to final product in a store. Indies can do that work in weeks or months… but they’re usually doing a straightforward text-only manuscript.

I just had to be different and include a bunch of tables and graphics. That meant more time formatting the ebook (and more potential points of failure). Formatting the print edition was a lot of work. It was more akin to laying out a textbook or a magazine than a novel.

In a publishing house, a book like MNSW would’ve gone through a whole team of people: editor, copyeditor, proofreader, designer, formatter, and so on. Each time it’s handed off to the next person in the chain they may notice new things and send it back, like a game of Candy Land.

While I did have external eyes consulting (so many thanks to all of you!!!) I was the final arbiter, the one who made things happen, and I got to say when it was good enough to go without needing a bunch of other people to agree with me.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, and neither is inherently better than the other.

3) A book launch is not the be-all and end-all.

When I was working on the manuscript and materials, I did a lot of research into how to launch a book successfully. Thing is, success can look like different things.

In traditional publishing the pattern is to front-load all your efforts to try to hit a bestseller list in the first week of sales. After that sales of most books taper away in the following months to a trickle. The next book supplants the old one.

Indie publishing puts more of an emphasis on the long-term sales, while still giving the first week to a month a lot of emphasis.

Since this was my first book, I did a lot of wait-and-see. It sold a bunch of copies in the first two months, then tapered off gradually. I did very little marketing, none of it paid, and let it ride. That taught me a lot about how well the book stands on its own two feet.

4) Marketing must be a sustained effort.

Remember how I said I didn’t do a lot of marketing? That I wanted to see how the book performed all on its own? Yeah, that’s not how you make money. But it was an interesting experiment and I don’t regret going that path.

This year I’m being much more deliberate in marketing. I’m paying for advertising for the first time ever. Why? Because discoverability is the #1 struggle for all books. No one’s going to buy it if they aren’t aware of its existence. Advertising makes the book available and the viewer can choose to investigate further or not.

So far, advertising is working well for me. I’ve had a couple algorithms skew off course, but overall I’m not paying a ton to put my book in front of more people. I keep close tabs on how things are doing, and make adjustments as needed.

5) There’s always more you can do. And you have to know when to stop.

You know that joke about writers looking back on their past work and cringing? I’m not at cringe-level yet but I have gotten that itch to change things.

One of the freedoms of self-pub is that you can change things… but that doesn’t mean you should. Significant changes, or changes to the title mean making a new edition with a new ISBN. And all your reviews get wiped. So, yeah, that’s not a route I want to go down if I don’t have to.

It’s a lesson in restraint, and also in where to be more thoughtful next time.

The process of self-pubbing has been interesting, challenging, and illuminating. I’m sure that there are more things to learn still, and I look forward to discovering them.

Self-publishing MNSW has benefited me, but I’m happiest that it’s benefited its readers.  Thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey!

The post 5 Things I’ve Learned Self-Pubbing The Monster Novel Structure Workbook first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

My first thought was to see what custom-printed white boards would cost. Turns out they’re both hideously expensive and hard to find. That doesn’t stop you from, say, using washi tape to mark out the 21 sections of the worksheet but it’s not really ideal.

Then I remembered that glass functions just like a white board–you can use the same markers and everything. Which means you can use a glass-fronted picture frame to hold the worksheet and still write on it!

I went on a little quest to find such a frame, and ran into some trouble. I wanted something inexpensive but with a large surface area because white board markers are rarely fine-tipped. Cheap frames often use plastic instead of glass, and that flimsy plastic will not work. I mean, it’ll work for a little while, but the minute scratches will trap ink and you’ll never get it fully clean again. It has to be glass. And preferably fairly thick glass, since you’re probably going to put some pressure on it when you’re writing. If I had unlimited resources I would commission a custom frame and put a piece of really thick glass in it.

But this is a pandemic, and my resources are not limitless. So I had to get creative.

Anyway, after hunting around I found a really cheap frame we already had that would work for demonstration purposes. It’s 11″x14″, has very thin glass (again, cheap), but it does have this nice crossbar on the back to make it sturdier. It’s also at least a decade or two old, so I don’t know where you could get something similar. Apologies!

My next task was to print the worksheet so it would fit. If you need a custom-sized worksheet for printing, drop me an email. There’ll be a small service charge but I’m happy to help you out! Because I don’t have the capacity to print at 11x14in I had to break the chart across two overlapping A4s. (I also had to print in grayscale because my printer was messing me around.)

Once printed I cut the pages down and taped them together, and aligned the combined worksheet in the frame.

Voila! It works!

As you can see in the picture, my markers aren’t as fine-tipped as I’d like for a sheet this size but it does get the job done for big-picture elements. Not all colors worked equally well, which is a symptom of them being cheap markers more than anything else.

And look, it erases beautifully!

Would I use this myself? Totally, although I’d like it to be bigger and sturdier, and my markers finer. And to get it printed on a poster-size sheet of paper. And, and, and. Maybe one day!

In the meantime, I hope this has sparked some ideas for how you can make something similar to suit your needs.

And if you know where to custom white board printing that doesn’t cost a small fortune, let me know!

The post DIY a Dry Erase Monster Worksheet first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

With all this pandemic stuff going on I’ve had to postpone my plans for a print edition of The Monster Novel Structure Workbook. It’s something people wanted, and I promise it will happen one day when the shipping companies aren’t so overwhelmed.

In the meantime, I know there are lots of people who would benefit from hard copies, especially while we’re all home. That’s why I’ve added the PDF of the print edition to the download bundle, for a limited time. 

There is NO COST for this extra file.

I hope that you enjoy the new layout and consider buying the print edition when it’s available.

Previous

Next

Limitations:

This file will be available only until an official print edition becomes feasible. I don’t know when that will be, but I’ll send an email reminder in advance of taking the file down. To make sure you don’t miss the reminder, you can join my mailing list. I send once every two weeks, and in addition to the free Write A Novel Curriculum, a new freebie is on the way.

This file is only for your use to print at home. Please don’t distribute this file to others.

How to get the new file:

When you purchase the ebook it includes a link (In Chapter 7: Resources) to download the files via Gumroad. If you created a Gumroad account you can log in and access them that way, otherwise you’ll need your email Receipt. Instructions are here.

If you haven’t yet purchased the ebook, find a retailer here.

Best wishes to everybody in this difficult time.

The post Print-at-home Monster Novel Structure Workbook! first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

Plans For a Print Edition

I polled my list a few months ago and got resounding answer: readers wanted a print edition of The Monster. So I got to work researching how I would go about that. I do all my own designing (thanks, graphic design background) and turning a visual-heavy ebook into a print book isn’t easy. (Nor vice versa, I assume.)

I was making really good progress on this in February and March, when the world officially imploded thanks to a certain one-celled organism. Postal and delivery systems are overtaxed at the moment and for the foreseeable future. Amazon isn’t even shipping physical books for the moment. So, the beautiful bound edition I was working on is going to have to wait until the crisis abates.

But I also had a lot of readers who would be happy with a print-at-home edition. When I did my early research I worked out that taking a PDF to a copy shop to have a nicely printed edition made (not even counting the binding), would cost at least double what a professionally printed copy would. So I was going to skip the print-at-home idea entirely in favor of print-on-demand.

Obviously the world looks quite a lot different now than it did in February.  I’m looking at ways to make the print-at-home edition available at a heavy discount to those who have a receipt for the book. I should have that pulled together in the next couple of weeks. To find out when I do, make sure you’re on my mailing list.

New Blurb

Part of planning for a print edition means coming up with the copy to go on the back of the book. This is often the same as what’s on the ebook sales page, but it doesn’t have to be identical. I patterned my blurb off the new back cover’s text, and also referred to Bryan Cohen’s webinars on writing Amazon ad copy that sells.

I think it’s greatly improved over the original copy. We’ll see if it makes a difference!

New Cover

I love the new cover. It’s more mellow, it suits the genre, and it really showcases one of the essential concepts of the book without giving it away.

I have a full wrap cover ready for the print edition, but I’ll save that when it releases.

Refreshed Interior/Content

When I worked up the new interior for the print edition it was also a good opportunity to do some cleaning up. I tried to make sure I replicated all those changes in the ebook. I also cleaned up the code so that it should display more nicely. I reproduced some of the images with my new software, and added divider bars on the chapter splash pages.

To see the new interior, you may need to delete/remove your existing file and redownload the book.

Downloadable Files: New 30-Day Challenge Calendars

I mentioned that I have new graphics software, and I’ve been getting used to using it. While I was doing all things Monster I figured I should also get around to making the next year’s 30-day Challenge calendars for people doing NaNoWriMo, Camp NaNo, and so forth. I worked out a much faster way to make these, and made a new set of calendars. No matter which day of the week your 30 days start on, I’ve got a calendar for you.

I like these much better than the previous versions, too. They were also a lot easier to make!

Gumroad Storefront Refresh

I use Gumroad to distribute the downloadable files that come bundled with the book. When I did my brand refresh last year I neglected to update my Gumroad storefront, so I’ve done that now with a bunch of pretty new graphics.

So yes, I have been busy the last few months! And there’s plenty more I have still to do, like getting the print-at-home PDFs ready. To hear about the print edition and print-at-home PDF, sign up for my newsletter.

The post Cover, Interior & File Refreshes! first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

What does COVID-19 mean for our writing?

Let’s not beat around the bush. Our lives have changed drastically, or will soon. This is not an isolated phenomenon, but a worldwide one. It reaches into every neighborhood, every home. And it’s changing the way our daily lives operate.

Then there’s the question of what happens when the disease is contained, or cured, or whatever. I’ll be completely honest, I see three ways forward.

1. We muddle through and go back to some semblance of normal, which was never ideal, and remain vulnerable to the next virus.
2. We fail to make big changes that can save the vulnerable among us, and descend deeper into dystopia.
3. We make those changes, we band together as humans, and make a conscious decision to treat one another better so that we can weather the next storm together.

I want #3 with all my heart. I fear #1. I think there may be pockets of #2, but I really hope we avoid it altogether.

Whatever happens, even #1, things will have changed in a way that will be profound.

So, how do you write about and for a world that is actively in flux?

If you write nonfiction

If you’re writing creative nonfiction you’re in an ideal position to document what’s going on now on an emotional level. That said, doing a deep-dive into everyone’s fears while living through your own fears is not good for the psyche, so please, please, please be gentle with yourself.

If you’re writing prescriptive nonfiction, you have a particular challenge. Prescriptive nonfiction like self-help and how-to books is all about telling people how to do something. But the way to do a thing may change drastically. Now is a good time to move away from nitty gritty directions and focus instead on core concepts that are transferable. Instead of telling me I need a No. 2 pencil, tell me I should look for a soft-leaded pencil and how to test for that. Instead of telling me where to click on a website that could change tomorrow, teach me the principles of what I need to do.

When things settle out (and there may not be a clear “it’s over now” moment) there will be lots of space for how-to material that does address our new landscape. If you write about small business funding there will likely be new laws and funding opportunities to guide people through. If your subject area is changing, take notes. Those notes will be useful when you sit down to write your next prescriptive book or article.

If you write fiction

Here’s where this starts to get personal. I was working on a YA sci fi novel set in the aftermath of massively disruptive climate change and a deadly plague… Yeah, that feels like tempting fate now. I had to put it away. It was a really difficult decision, because I was so enthusiastic about the project and I felt like I was doing good work on it. I felt it could be The One. And now, 28k in, it’s trunked indefinitely. I may go back to it one day, but I don’t know when. I’ve talked to a bunch of other writers who also had dystopias and post-apocalyptic stories brewing, and they’ve also lost their enthusiasm. It sucks. It really, really sucks when you dream up a worst case scenario and then life imitates nascent art.

But, it’s not just speculative fiction being impacted. What on earth do you do with contemporary stories? If your book was set “now” and then Now radically shifted, do you change the book? Do you set it a year earlier? Do you try to incorporate what’s happening? Or do you accept that your fictional 2020 is now effectively an alternate timeline, wherein things didn’t go to hell in a handbasket?

There’s no right answer to this. I suspect that we’re going to see a lot of writers choosing to write about historical, fantasy, or sci fi stories as a means of escaping the real 2020. That was certainly my first instinct.

Paramount right now is to write what you’re comfortable with, and what will not damage your mental health. We’re all fragile right now. Look after yourself. For some people, that means avoiding anything dark for a while. Others exorcise their fears by diving right into them, learning as much as they can, exploring the most terrifying parts by shining a light on them. Do what feels right for you, day by day, hour by hour.

If you’re self-publishing

Be selective about what you choose to promote right now, and how you promote it. A lot of readers don’t want anything to do with plague fiction right now. On the other hand, have you seen the Popular on Netflix list? It’s 90% movies and shows about rampant diseases. Entertainment is an outlet. It can be comforting to immerse yourself in a horrifying fictional world for a little while because it’s not the real horrifying world we find ourselves in. And, you can stop watching or reading the fictional version at any time, which provides a sense of control in an uncontrollable world.

Self-publishers are businesses, and many businesses are taking time now to ease the strain on their customers. A lot of authors are lowering prices, or recording themselves reading. If you can afford to do that, awesome. If you can’t, that’s okay, too. No right answers.

There are wrong answers, though. You don’t want to be seen to be profiteering off the suffering of others. So do your market research, and read the room (as it were).

If you’re in traditional publishing

Hooray, more up-in-the-air-no-one-knows stuff! Publishing as an industry is conservative and slow to change. They’re also highly risk-averse. We don’t know where publishers will choose to put their money in the next couple of years, so acquisitions could change.

So far agents are split as to whether they’re business-as-usual (some have more time) or whether they’ve had to give priority to other parts of their life, like caretaking. Editors are in similar positions. As of now, the industry is is still acquiring, and making decisions about whether to push back release dates.

To keep up with all things trad pub, Publisher’s Weekly is making all new issues public for free during the crisis. I also highly recommend Print Run podcast for perspectives on how publishing can and should change.

So, where to next?

Your number one priority is to take care of yourself and your family. Writing can be a great tool for making sense of tough times, but you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re unable to create right now–or not able to do the same kind of creating you did before.

I hope you’re safe and well right now, and stay so through the months ahead.

The post The big COVID-19 Question Writers Are Asking first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.

This round I offered to critique for two people. One got right back to me with her material ASAP. The other said hello but was taking time to send their materials. And a part of me wondered, Are they nervous?

Maybe they were afraid to share. Maybe they were worried what I’d think of it. Maybe they were furiously polishing up their material, afraid to get it wrong.

Don’t be nervous! I instinctively thought, then I caught myself. Being nervous is not in and of itself a bad thing. It’s normal to be nervous.

When I sent my first queries to real, live agents I was so scared. Terrified of messing up. I researched the hell out of the whole process (as I am wont to do) and prepared a bunch of email drafts, meticulously triple-checking them. Anything to avoid actually hitting Send.

But Robin Lovett was at writer’s group that day and she encouraged me to do it. Just get it over with. Make it happen.

I hit Send.

I was still a nervous wreck. Just like I was giving presentations in school, and reading my work out loud, and the first time I passed a full novel manuscript over to someone else.

Being nervous isn’t bad. Letting your nerves get in the way of what you really want to do is bad.

It would be weird if you weren’t nervous! I thought about the person whose materials I was waiting to critique, then caught myself again. Because that’s a lie. I’m rarely as nervous about submitting now as I was when I first started.

Let me tell you, I got a lot better about sending queries, and entering contests, and sharing my work with others.

I play a game with myself. I’m allowed to be nervous and nitpicky in the lead-up to sending. A little stressing out now can mean you catch typos and things you simply couldn’t recognize until you imagined someone else reading it for the first time. So I do my best to make my entry a good one. I hit send.

Then I forget the entire thing exists.

That’s right. I don’t check my email obsessively because I pretend that I didn’t enter. The contest doesn’t exist. The agent doesn’t have my query. None of that is happening, and I can go back to whatever else I need to do to stay busy and distracted.

Why? Because it’s 100% outside of my control at that point. Worrying about it after you hit Send is a waste of energy. You no longer have the power to change it. (The odds of you making a massive, critical change in the last five minutes before hitting Send are also minor, so hit Send already.)

This is remarkably effective. The nervousness dissipates as I throw myself into the next thing. (If you’re querying, work on a new project. It is the best cure.) And when I do hear back, I’m always a little surprised. “Oh, right, I hit Send on that, didn’t I?” If something good comes back, I’m pleasantly surprised. If not, I can shrug it off, because I wasn’t all that invested in the outcome.

The nerves, the fear, the anxiety, those are an instinctive response. Your brain is warning you that danger lurks. It wants you to be ready for a saber-tooth tiger. Your brain is still running software from hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s really hard to turn off instinct that’s embedded in your operating system for so long.

The fact that you may get nervy is not a problem.

How you handle the nerves makes all the difference.

Do the scary thing anyway. Seize opportunity. Don’t let your nervousness hold you back from reaching for what you want.

So, I totally get why the person I was critiquing for might’ve taken a while to actually hit Send. And I can say that with practice and the right mindset, the nervousness alleviates.

Ultimately they did send me their pages. Turns out they’d had unavoidable Life Stuff that got in the way. Shit happens.

And then they rocked their revisions so hard.

You can, too. Go forth and do battle.

This round I offered to critique for two people. One got right back to me with her material ASAP. The other said hello but was taking time to send their materials. And a part of me wondered, Are they nervous? 

Maybe they were afraid to share. Maybe they were worried what I’ll think of it. Maybe they were furiously polishing up their material, afraid to get it wrong.

“Don’t be nervous!” I instinctively thought, then I caught myself. Being nervous is not in and of itself a bad thing. It’s normal to be nervous.

When I sent my first queries to real, live agents I was so scared. Terrified of messing up. I researched the hell out of the whole process (as I am wont to do) and prepared a bunch of email drafts, meticulously triple-checking them. Anything to avoid actually hitting Send.

But Robin Lovett was at writer’s group that day and she encouraged me to do it. Just get it over with. Make it happen.

I hit Send.

I was still a nervous wreck. Just like I was giving presentations in school, and reading my work outloud, and the first time I passed a full novel manuscript over to someone else.

Being nervous isn’t bad. Letting your nerves get in the way of what you really want to do is bad.

“It would be weird if you weren’t nervous!” I thought about the person whose materials I was waiting to critique, then caught myself again. Because that’s a lie. I’m rarely as nervous about submitting now as I was when I first started.

Let me tell you, I got a lot better about sending queries, and entering contests, and sharing my work with others.

I play a game with myself. I’m allowed to be nervous and nitpicky in the lead-up to sending. A little stressing out now can mean you catch typos and things you simply couldn’t recognize until you imagined someone else reading it for the first time. So I do my best to make my entry a good one. I hit send.

Then I forget the entire thing exists.

That’s right. I don’t check my email obsessively because I pretend that I didn’t enter. The contest doesn’t exist. The agent doesn’t have my query. None of that is happening, and I can go back to whatever else I need to do to stay busy and distracted.

Why? Because it’s 100% outside of my control at that point. Worrying about it after you hit Send is a waste of energy. You no longer have the power to change it. (The odds of you making a massive, critical change in the last five minutes before hitting Send are also minor, so hit Send already.)

This is remarkably effective. The nervousness dissipates as I throw myself into the next thing. (If you’re querying, work on a new project. It is the best cure.) And when I do hear back, I’m always a little surprised. “Oh, right, I hit Send on that, didn’t I?”

The post On Nervousness first appeared on Bronwen Fleetwood.