Category: Creative Work/Career

Business Advice for (Young) Artists

In Advice for Young People, Creative Work/Career, Electronic Music, Metaprogramming, Music Business

Jondi & Spesh — Phreek Out EP (our first vinyl release on Loöq)

I recently finished compiling royalty statements for all the artists on Loöq Records, an activity I do twice a year. Even with the custom database I designed specifically for the task, it’s difficult and takes a long time. We receive reports from our various distributors — detailed spreadsheets with a row for every iTunes download, streaming music click, mobile ringtone, youtube view, etc. I import these records into the database, crank the digital wheels, and churn out beautiful, detailed royalty statements for every artist and remixer who has ever had a release on our label (over a hundred different statements, and growing each reporting period).

I love this process — partly because I’m a database nerd, and partly because there are always a few artists in the bunch who receive unexpected, sizable payouts. It’s fun to share that kind of news.

You may have heard that the music industry, and music labels especially, are dying a slow death. This may be true for the big labels, but many of the independents (like us) are doing pretty well. It’s true that people are buying less music, and that people tend to buy individual tracks instead of entire albums. And piracy does have a negative impact, though it’s not as great as the RIAA would have you believe. But the main reason for lower sales per release is that there are way more releases out there. The digital floodgates are open — it costs almost nothing to put out a “record” these days. So sales revenues for each release are, on average, lower. But there are also unexpected new sources of income, like shared ad revenue. For example, every time you watch a video on youtube.com that uses a Loöq Records track, that Loöq artist gets paid (after I compile and send out the royalty statements, that is). Tracks also generate revenue (for both us and the artist) when we license them out for use on television shows, movies, video games, and commercial websites (if you’re interested in licensing a Loöq track, please get in touch).

CD cover of Jondi & Spesh “We Are Connected”

But for a young artist starting out, are things all that different than they were ten or fifteen years ago? Now you can submit a track to a label, or two dozen labels, with a simple email (linked to an mp3). When I was twenty years old I was sending cassette tapes in padded envelopes to music labels individually! So some things are easier. On the other hand, I would usually get a cash advance when I would sign a track, in addition to royalties. These days, at least in the electronic music world, cash advances are rarer (though royalty rates are higher — Loöq offers 50% of gross sales and licensing, and that’s not uncommon).

So the business landscape has changed. Artists have more power, as they have the option to go directly to consumers (skipping labels altogether). Labels still have their place — they can expose artists to wider audiences, provide distribution outlets, and promote the artists’ work. For the music consumer, labels act as a valuable filter (artists, myself included, can’t always tell when their work sucks and needs to be shelved). On the other hand, some things remain the same.

Setting Yourself Up For Success

There are some things that artists (not just musicians, but also writers, visual artists, choreographers, all creative types) can do to increase their chances of success. By “success” I mean fame and fortune — too often an artist achieves the first but misses out on the latter. I’ll leave “artistic satisfaction” and other fuzzy elements out of the equation for now — those are too hard to quantify.

Tila Tequila — is that the kind of “artistic” career you want?

Blogging, tweeting, having a presentable website and a large online social network — these things can all have a positive impact. But other areas are more important. You don’t want to end up like Tila Tequila, do you? (Over a million MySpace friends but no artistic respect.)

I put “young” in parentheses because these ideas make sense at any age. Young people might be more inclined to seek advice, but these days people are starting new careers at all ages (myself included).

Am I qualified to give advice? To date, I’ve done a few things right, and I’ve had some great luck. I’ve had releases on my favorite labels and I’ve had my tracks played by the DJ’s I respect most. Over the years I’ve received tens of thousands of dollars in sales, performance, and licensing royalties. Perhaps my musical success to date has been limited by my unwillingness to tour, my reluctance to give up my freelance programming work (I enjoy it, and the income it provides), and my tendency to take on too many projects in various creative spheres (I’ve released music under at least eight different aliases, and now I’ve taken up writing). So I’m not going to be the guy to tell you to quit your day job, sling your guitar or synth over your shoulder, and hop on a train (that might be good advice — I just haven’t tried it myself).

So for what it’s worth, here’s my advice for artists (young and not-so-young):

1. Prioritize quality (and if it sucks, don’t release it).

At least half of what people call talent is simply a fascination with a particular art form — an interest so deep that you are willing to engage with the practice long enough to get good at it. Eventually you may accidentally create something half decent. Your peers may be impressed — they may tell you something like “You’re a good artist.” Don’t believe it for an instant — just keep working. With some luck, you’ll create something half decent again.

Onstage, you *should* believe your own hype.

One of the biggest pitfalls for an artist is to believe that they’re talented. Even if you are talented, you’re perfectly capable of creating stinkers. If you believe your own hype, you might end up spending more time defending your reputation than getting down to work. Avoid this trap; instead keep quality consistently high by giving each composition the time and energy it deserves, by getting feedback from trusted advisers, and by constantly improving your skills and knowledge (and gear, when you can afford it). If a particular piece of work doesn’t meet the incredibly high standard you should be keeping for yourself, then shelve it. You can always steal the good bits later for a future composition.

You should always aim high — with every creative attempt you should try to achieve transcendent brilliance. You’ll probably fall short most of the time, but if you don’t aim high you have zero chance of creating something great.

2. Keep the pipeline full (and be patient).

In any artistic career, it can take a long time to see any kind of tangible success from a creative work. And most of what you do will probably result in a whole lot of nothing. Keep working anyway, and keep releasing (or submitting) work at regular intervals. If you focus on quality and keep up your efforts, something is bound to connect with somebody at some point. Remember that success is always uneven (see my “positive black swans” post for more on this idea).

The unpredictable nature of this process is frustrating, but it’s rewarding when something finally does take off. It can happen five or ten years after you finish the work, in completely unexpected ways.

The biggest Jondi & Spesh track to date, “We Are Connected,” was released as a vinyl 12″ on our collective DIY label Trip ‘n Spin Recordings. Sales were not so great — nobody really “got” the track except for a few DJ’s in San Francisco. After languishing in record shops for a couple years, the record was “discovered” by John Digweed (a widely respected, world-famous DJ). Once he playing the track, other people noticed. Re-releases, compilation deals, and licensing deals followed. But it took a long time, we didn’t see any real money from the track until many years after writing it. Same with Momu’s track The Dive which was championed by Nick Warren and Paul Oakenfold (the link goes to the music video of the track, directed by Kia Simon).

Momu — The Dive

If you’re going through a dry stretch in terms of tangible rewards (money, fame, respect from your peers), it can be hard to keep working. You need to develop an indomitable spirit, a conviction so great that it cannot be moved by fortune’s fickle whims. Think Tina Turner style resilience. How you get there is up to you — it’s a spiritual question — but you need to have a rock solid core. Hope, love, persistence, courage, realistic optimism, creative problem-solving, a sense of limitless possibility — all those are part of the equation.

3. Join a crew (as long as that crew respects/values/needs you).

If you can find a group of like-minded people who share at least part of your artistic vision, by all means join forces. You’ll probably waste a lot of time in unorganized “business” meetings, but if the chemistry is right then the potential for fruitful collaboration and needed morale-boosting will be worth it. Dealing with artistic rejection is part of the game, and it can help to have a creative partner or group to help pump you up again (and talk about how everyone who doesn’t understand your work is a tone-deaf cretin).

On the other hand, if your crew doesn’t respect you and your contributions, if they don’t really need you, you’re better off on your own (or starting a new crew/business/collective with more enlightened people).

4. Maintain as much ownership as possible (and don’t be afraid to negotiate).

Getting your first contractual offer is terrifying. I remember reading mine — I broke out in a cold sweat. I was elated to get an offer from a real music label, but worried that I might be getting ripped off. I didn’t understand most of the language in the contract, and I didn’t have any other contracts to compare it to, so I felt pretty lost.

In the music industry, there are many types of royalties payable to artists: sales royalties, master use fees, sync rights fees, performance royalties, and mechanical royalties. It took me years to get even a cursory understanding of what each of these terms means. This article provides a good introduction. And you should own and read a copy of this book.

Whatever your creative area, you should always try retain a sizable ownership percentage in your own work. If you want a label to release your work, you’ll probably need to give up a percentage of ownership for at least a period of time — in that case you want the rights period to be as short as possible.

Don’t be afraid to ask for better terms. It helps if you’re willing to walk away from the deal — that gives you an extremely strong negotiating position. But even if you aren’t — even if you’re so hungry to get the damn thing released on any terms — it’s still a good idea to ask for better terms. Ask for a larger advance, a shorter rights period, a smaller territory, a larger marketing budget, and/or a higher royalty percentage. The label might say no, or they might meet you halfway. But they’re not going to walk away or get mad if you politely ask for better terms (and if they do, they’re not worth working with). Remember, they like and value your work — otherwise they wouldn’t have made you an offer.

As a label owner, I might be shooting myself in the foot by sharing this information. But we don’t low-ball artists — our first offer is usually as high as we’re willing to go (generally 50/50).

On a side note, you should also have written contracts with artistic collaborators. These can be simple, plain-language contracts that you write yourself, but they should describe in detail what the ownership shares are (on both the profit and loss side). Err on the side of including too much detail in your partnership contracts — it will help you avoid disputes down the road. And don’t assume that if you just have a conversation with your collaborator that it’s handled. You will both forget the terms within months (or rather, you’ll both remember, but differently). Write it down.

Careful what you sign.

5. Limit your exposure to criminals, sociopaths, and bumblers.

This sounds obvious and easy, but in fact it’s quite difficult. Criminals and sociopaths are some of the most charming people around. They’ll sweet-talk you, acquire your assets, and then deliver nothing. For an audio example listen to the hidden track on the end of the first Jondi & Spesh album, Tube Drivers (released in 1998). Skip to 14:40 to hear the voice of the guy who still owes us $80.

These days, it’s easier than ever to do a little background research on a music label, gallery, or publisher. Find other artist who have worked with them, and contact those artists directly. Let’s say you’re researching a music label. Ask the label’s other artists what it was like to work with that label — did they fulfill their promises? Did they respond to calls and emails? Did they do a good job on the release, promoting it sufficiently? Did they ever send a royalty statement?

In some ways newbie bumblers are even more dangerous than outright criminals. Filled with idealistic, inspired ambition, they start a label (or gallery, or whatever), even though they have no f*cking idea what they’re doing. They might pull through and become the real deal (we did, after years of bumbling), or they might crash and burn. As an artist, you might benefit from getting in early on these new, idealistic ventures. On the other hand, you might see your works die in limbo if you throw your lot in with these types. Play it smart — if you believe in a new venture then dip a toe in (do a single release or a show or whatever to see how it goes) — but at the same time try to get your work released on more established, reputable labels.

6. Do whatever it takes to get inspired, and then act on it.

The work itself should be fun. Even if you are putting in long hours and struggling to overcome obstacles, you should feel engaged and alive while you work. If you don’t, if it feels like drudgery and toil, you probably need to recharge your creative batteries, or change something up in terms of your focus or work process. Try working in a different genre, or listening to new artists. Learn what activities tend to create inspiration within you and then do them.

Don’t wait to drink that inspiration.

When you do feel the rush of inspiration, act as quickly as possible. If you wait too long, the spark will fade. Inspiration is like raw milk — at room temperature you have less than a day before it starts to sour. Now I’m mixing metaphors. Drink that spark of milk — get to work immediately.

7. Be good to absolutely everyone.

You don’t have to be nice to everyone, but you should at least be respectful and courteous. Why? I remember once when I was in high school, an old Deadhead got mad at me because I wouldn’t give him any spare change. He started yelling about karma, about how what goes around comes around. I had no idea what he was going on about — but he was drunk and he smelled bad.

I don’t believe in invisible forces that reward or punish us for our good or bad deeds, but I do believe that we are social primates who keep close tabs on each other, and talk about each other a lot. If you consistently treat someone well, they’ll remember it for a long time, and perhaps tell other people that you’re a good guy. If you slight someone even once, they’ll remember it forever and tell everybody you’re an asshole.

It’s easy to accidentally slight someone, forgetting to return an email or a phone call, or not saying goodbye when you leave a party — that can be all it takes. In fact, it’s impossible to avoid — the human ego is generally pretty fragile. Just going through life is like being a bull in a china shop — you’re constantly knocking over egos and stepping on feelings. Though is sounds cheesy, you can counter this natural tendency by projecting love, by infusing everything you do, say, and write with compassion.

A personal code of ethics is also important — you should of course treat people fairly. But people can’t necessarily feel your ethics. They can feel your love. I’m not talking about being mushy or flowery or affectionate — I’m talking about being engaged, giving someone your attention and respect, and keeping your heart open to their experience — simple empathy.

Can you be a total dick and still get to the top? Of course you can! But most of the people I’ve met who have achieved a high level of artistic success are warm, caring, and down-to-earth (at least in person — their stage persona might be different).

That’s it — that’s all I’ve got. As always I write about this stuff so that I can take my own advice. Please feel free to share your own thoughts on artistic success and business advice for artists below.

The Joys of Throwing Out Long-term Plans and Lowering Quotas

By J.D. Moyer

On January 22

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Writing

This year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions or making a list of goals for the year (something I’d done since 2006, with mixed success), I decided to take on one big goal for Q1, and leave the rest of 2010 unplanned.

My planning/goal-setting horizon has been getting shorter and shorter over the years. I remember having grand life-arc type plans in college, and even as a child. Once I entered the working world and decided I that I basically liked what I was doing (having my own music business and doing freelance database consulting), the “future-vision” shrunk to two or three years, and finally to one year.

Why shorten my planning horizon to a mere 3 months?

A big part of it has to do with reading Tim Ferriss’s blog and, more recently, reading his book The Four Hour Workweek. Ferriss makes the point that long-term plans often function as dream deferrals. Why start something now if it’s on the agenda for 2015? The problem is, it’s too easy to defer those large, difficult, potentially life-changing actions indefinitely, perhaps so long that we die before we try. This is true even if the deferred plan of action is a central part of our identity. I’ve been thinking of myself as novelist since approximately age six, but it took me another thirty-four years to actually write my first novel. Talk about procrastination. Anything you’ve been putting off for thirty-four years?

Already a novelist in his own mind.

There’s a natural tension between identity and intention; some parts of our identity evolve out of performing the related actions (if you play soccer enough, you might start to feel like a soccer player), while in other areas the identity and intention come into being first (a high-school student decides to become a doctor and starts planning their academic path). The distinction has less to do with the profession than it does with the character of the agent. You could just as easily decide at a young age to become a professional soccer player, or, in your adult life, fall into practicing medicine (perhaps a weak example — of course you can’t just start practicing medicine without a medical degree — but many people do learn a great deal about human physiology as a hobby and end up giving informal health advice to their friends and family).

It’s the intention-related parts of our identity that are vulnerable to deferral, as opposed to the professions that sneak up on us. For myself, writing is in the former category; computer programming and music production are in the latter. Who knows why. What about you?

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I decided to take on one big, potentially life-changing goal in Q1 of 2010, and that was to write a first draft of my second novel. It’s a big enough goal to get me excited and motivated, and simple enough to keep in my head every day without constant review (if you have fifteen goals for the year, it’s hard to remember them all — not to mention that by August half of them are irrelevant).

At the same time, I threw out any preconceptions about what the latter three-quarters of 2010 might look like. Maybe Kia and I and our daughter will spend a few months working remotely from somewhere on the Mediterranean coast (I recently ran the numbers, this option could potentially be less expensive than our current lifestyle, especially if we can get in on some of that free European pre-school — you parents of young children living in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about). Or, depending on the availability of Spesh or Mark Musselman, maybe there will be a new Jondi & Spesh or Momu album in the works. In any case it’s exhilarating not knowing.

So — back to my grand plan. I came up with what I thought was a fail-safe strategy to bang out novel #2. I whipped out (or rather, clicked on) my digital calculator and figured out approximately how many words I would need to type every day in order to have a more-or-less novel length manuscript on my hard drive by March 31st. I gave myself weekends off, as we don’t generally have childcare on the weekends (you try writing a novel while a two-year-old is clambering onto your lap demanding to look at pictures of choo-choo trains on your computer) and also planned on taking several “creative sabbatical” weeks where all I would do was write.

1150 words per day, on the regular working days. That’s what the calculator said. Okay, no problem. My work was cut out for me. Here’s what the first few writing days in January looked like, in terms of actual output:

Day 1: 297 words
Day 2: 402 words
Day 3: 351 words

Ouch.

I wasn’t spending eight hours each day in front of the laptop — nor was this ever the plan. I still needed to eat, after all, and running Loöq Records takes some time. I was hoping to hit my quota after two or three hours of focused work, first thing in the morning.

I liked the material I was coming up with, but at this rate it would take me all year to get a draft. I kept thinking of Stephen King’s observation that after three months, “the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave radio during a period of severe sunspot activity.” Nope, don’t want that to happen.

It was my favorite goofy-hat-wearing vloggers, Tim Ferriss (again) and Kevin Rose, that came to the rescue, with this video post. It’s long and (as the title warns) random, but somewhere towards the end Tim makes a reference to a story of how IBM achieved the highest sales by setting the lowest quotas. The idea was to boost productivity by removing pressure, and in IBM’s case it worked. Tim Ferriss is currently applying the low quota idea to his own writing project, with the goal of writing “two crappy pages a day.”

That sounded good to me. I needed less pressure. The 1150 word quota was looming over me every morning like a flying Nazgûl. I reduced my quota to 750 words a day. The next two days my word counts were as follows:

Day 1: 1147 words
Day 2: 1120 words

Go figure. This was just two days ago, so we’ll see if the trend continues, but at the moment I’m feeling the lower quota. I think the point of a quota is to get one’s ass in gear, and to have a minimum standard of productivity. Quality is more important than quantity, but you can’t get to quality unless you produce something. Ideally, you get started and catch a wave, you achieve flow … then you hit your goal before you know it. But for me having a quota is useful; it’s a guardian against sloth and inertia.

Did Rodin have a sculpting quota?

The Reward Is The Job – Do You Want The Reward?

By J.D. Moyer

On January 11

In Creative Work/Career, Electronic Music, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Music Business, Writing

Clubbers in Oslo

I’ve been thinking about “long-tail” careers and the people who pursue them (myself included). For careers where there is no “average” success, “long-tail” describes the success curve distribution. Most musicians, artists, writers, and athletes are never going to get much in the way of fame or fortune, while a few extremely lucky and/or talented individuals are going to get the lion’s share of the rewards. So you don’t actually want to end up on the tail … you want to end up as high on the slope as possible (if fame and fortune are what you’re after).

My hypothesis is that the “rewards” of a successful long-tail career are mostly illusory. If you generate a NYT bestseller or Top 40 hit or get picked up by a big league sports team, then of course you get paid and get famous, but what you really get is the JOB of being a professional writer or musician or ball player. So you had better like the job itself; the day-in day-out nitty gritty of consistently performing at a high level.

About six years ago I fell into a long-tail career of being an electronic music DJ. I had co-produced an album (Jondi & Spesh – The Answer) and our label (Spundae) arranged a North America DJ tour to help promote it. The only problem was that I didn’t know how to beat-match (seamlessly mixing two songs together by adjusting the tempo and manually synchronizing the vinyl or CD’s). Beat-matching is no longer a required DJ skill (these days laptop DJ’s can let the computer beat-match for them) but back in 2004 it was a non-optional part of the skill set.

Spesh arranged a “DJ boot-camp.” For weeks he trained me in the mystical art of beat-matching. Imagine a kung-fu training montage, but instead Shaolin monks with swords and spears, think of two white dudes in a studio garage with Technics 1200’s and Pioneer CDJ’s, drinking lots of tea.

The boot-camp worked, more or less. At the end of training, my skills were not world class, but I could get away with mixing records in front of a nightclub crowd (and in most cases not clear the dance floor). During that tour, Spesh pulled more weight behind the turntables, but we played some good shows. Opening for James Zabiela at Circus in LA was especially fun. Amazingly, we were well-paid for these gigs, stayed in the best hotels, and were ferried about in limousines. Ridiculous!

You have to realize that most DJ’s “work their way up” with blood, sweat, and tears, and would kill to have the kind of opportunity that was handed to me. It would be like playing a game of pick-up basketball and getting offered a position on the Lakers, without even having to try out.

On top of this incredible luck, Spesh and I had the additional good fortune of already running our own successful electronic music event in San Francisco (Qoöl). Spesh, along with our talented residents and guests, had built up the crowd for years. Returning from that first tour, I had a resident DJ slot to step into, along with an enthusiastic home-town crowd. I took advantage of the opportunity, continued to improve my skills, and had a great time playing at our own party and at other parties around San Francisco. Spesh and I (well, mostly Spesh) organized a European tour, and we played at clubs in London, Bristol, Hamburg, Berlin, Eindhoven, and Oslo.

Jondi & Spesh were even voted among the top DJ’s in San Francisco from Nitevibe’s popular poll for several years running. For someone more comfortable in the studio behind a computer monitor than on a stage in front of a throbbing crowd, it was all somewhat unreal.

So, was I a DJ? I was acting like one, and externally I was doing all the things a professional electronic music DJ does. I was playing gigs, I was getting paid, I was writing and releasing dance tracks, I was listening to hundreds of free promo tracks emailed to me every week by hopeful producers and labels, and (along with Spesh) I was running my own record label and weekly electronic music event. But I never really felt like a DJ. I had no problem with the label manager or music producer roles (and still enjoy those), but the DJ role never really clicked.

I had gotten a glimpse of what the next level of success looked like, and it didn’t appeal to me.

I don’t like airports. I don’t like sleep deprivation. I don’t like crowds. I don’t do any drugs except for the occasional nootropic. I’m happily married and don’t want to chase club girls around. I don’t adjust quickly to jet-lag. I don’t like hustling for gigs. And I don’t like listening to hundreds of bad dance tracks to find a few that I’ll feel good about playing out in front of hundreds of people.

In short, I’m ill-suited to handle any of the hardships of that career, or appreciate any of the rewards.

OK, that’s not altogether true. DJ’ing is REALLY FUN. There’s nothing like playing great music in front of a great crowd when you’re in the flow. But I’ve admitted to myself that I have no interest in “taking it to the next level” with that particular activity. In fact, I’m going to take an extended break to focus on writing fiction and writing music and running Loöq Records.

I suppose it’s possible that if I had a run of success in one of those other areas, I might get disillusioned with all the hard work involved. Maybe at that point I would run back to DJ’ing. But I think I’m better suited to these other paths, especially writing. I like working long hours in quiet solitude. I like creating characters and worlds. Revisions are difficult, but also satisfying.

I don’t know what the future will bring. I’m going to keep writing every day and do everything I can to become a professional writer. I would love to be able to write fiction for a living. If it means getting up at six am every morning and locking myself in a room until I’ve written 2000 words, so be it. That sounds like fun to me.

The Writing Habit – Eleven Things I've Learned This Year

By J.D. Moyer

On December 20

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Metaprogramming, Writing

Of all the things I’ve tried to do in 2009, trying to write every day was by far the hardest. I haven’t even come close to meeting that goal, but I have written well over 100,000 words. It’s surprising how quickly those words add up, even if I only write a few hundred a day.

I’ve been writing stories since childhood, but I’ve only been writing in earnest since 2008 (the year my daughter was born). Having a kid was a wake-up call. Turning 40 this year was a kick in the pants. Mortality. I got to work.

I’ve taken a number of fiction-writing courses, both during and after college. Most of the teachers I liked and admired. I learned quite a bit about technique. But the things I’ve learned this year, actually trying to live like a writer, have been more eye-opening than any classroom experience.

Eleven Things I Learned This Year About Writing

1. I’m happier on days that I write at least a few hundred words. In fact, I feel a little crazy if I don’t. Not just like I didn’t get something important done — actually a little crazy. I feel gloomy and irritable and have thoughts like “What’s the point of it all?” You’d think this would be motivation enough to write everyday. You’d be wrong.

2. On any given day, I’ll do almost anything to avoid starting to write. When I’m in the flow, writing feels great. But getting there is usually difficult. As a newish writer, the parts of my brain that upload the storyline of the entire novel, reflect on each character’s desires and emotional state, consider the experience of the reader, etc. are still a little weak and flabby. On most days it takes a fair amount of time and a good chunk of willpower to load up the brain-RAM and start processing. To avoid that strain, I find distractions. I’ve got Leechblock installed in my browser — I only get 5 minutes of my big time-wasting sites before the app cuts me off — but that doesn’t mean I can’t do the dishes, exercise, work on a track, do some programming, read a book, take out the trash, pay the bills, etc. before starting to write. Sometimes I end up with no words and a very clean house.

3. Same time, same place, concrete goal, no distractions. You have to take what other writers say with a grain of salt — what works for them might not work for you. Bucketloads of successful writers sing the virtues of writing longhand, insisting that working on a computer leads to sloppy writing. To me, to write anything longer than a poem in longhand sounds unreasonable (if not ridiculous). How would you back up your work? How would you do a “Find and Replace” if you decided to change the name of a character?

However, one piece of advice that I’ve read from many different authors that I admire, and that I’ve found works for me as well, is to write in the same place, at the same time, every day, and to keep working until you’ve reached your daily word count goal.

When I follow that advice, the work gets done. When I don’t, it doesn’t.

For me, the earlier I start, the more productive I am (in terms of both quantity and quality of work). On days that I get up a 6am, sit down at my desk, and just start writing, I can usually bypass all the tomfoolery the lazier parts of my brain throw my way.

Distractions come in a thousand varieties (some people seem trapped in a purgatory of permanent iPhone/Twitter/Facebook/RSS feed distraction). This is an area I still need work in — my biggest weakness is checking email. Getting up and wandering around my house is also a problem. Putting on headphones and listening to blip.fm helps keep my butt in my chair, and the right music can loosen up my imagination.

There’s no single remedy to conquer distractions, but I found this article on concentration to be illuminating.

4. Physical state matters, and the right vitamins and nootropics can help. I try to stay in reasonably good shape. I eat a not-very-strict version of the paleolithic diet, get enough sleep, lift (not very heavy) weights, stretch, and meditate all because it provides the minimum amount of energy and mental clarity I need to write. I realize this isn’t true for every writer, but for me, the quality of work I produce is directly correlated with my physical and mental well-being. If you’re the type who can stay up half the night drinking whiskey and still write brilliant prose in the morning, well, lucky you. Most other kinds of work I can do if sleep-deprived (or even mildly hungover), but not writing.

If getting enough sleep is important, is being even more awake better? To some extent, I think yes. I drink coffee and tea, and eat dark chocolate. I’ve noticed several vitamins give a slight boost to my ability to concentrate and “find the right word,” most notably thiamin (B1) and niacinamide (B3, the non-flush form of niacin). If I really want to ramp up the productivity then I’ll take a few milligrams of Hydergine, or a nootropic blend called Get Smart. I stay away from the stronger stimulants like modafinil and any type of amphetamine like Adderrall. The possible boost in productivity isn’t worth the risk of getting addicted to speed. Same goes for nicotine.

One underrated brain fuel is lactic acid. Have you ever wondered why your thinking gets sharper after you’ve just exercised? It turns out the lactic acid might be an even more efficient fuel for your brain than glucose.

5. Reading quality fiction is important, but you don’t have to make yourself eat spinach. By this I simply mean that there are so many great works of fiction in the world that there’s no reason to make yourself read books that you don’t find compelling. If you’re slogging through something, why bother? Put down the book, ask someone what happens in the end (if you care), and find something new to read that lights up your brain. Think of the opportunity cost! If I hadn’t put down these books:

Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Middlesex by Jeffry Eugenides

I might not have had the time to read these books:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Terror by Dan Simmons
The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

The Antarctic voyage of The Discovery was a cakewalk compared to the saga of the H.M.S Terror

Your list might be reversed. Or maybe you are one of those people who blasts through novels so quickly that it doesn’t matter if you’re only lukewarm about them. I’m not a fast reader, and I’ve gotten slower since I’ve started to pay more attention to how prose is constructed.

6. The deconstructive habit — reading will never be the same. Once you start, it’s almost impossible to not deconstruct something, to take it apart in your mind and observe how the pieces fit together. There’s something a little sad about this, but I don’t see any way around it. I still immensely enjoy reading fiction and expect that I always will, but the experience of reading is a shade less immersive than it once was.

The flip side of this is a newfound respect for my favorite authors. Here’s a passage from Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet that recently impressed me:

He had now come to the mouth of the very defile in which he had left them. Even in the darkness he could recognize the outline of the cliffs which bounded it. They must, he reflected, be awaiting him anxiously, for he had been absent nearly five hours. In the gladness of his heart he put his hands to his mouth and made the glen reëcho to a loud halloo as a signal that he was coming. He paused and listened for an answer. None came save his own cry, which clatterred up the dreary, silent ravines, and was borne back to his ears in countless repititions.

Conan Doyle -- great mustache, great prose

Doyle seamlessly describes the physical environment, the emotion of his protagonist, and the foreboding nature of the situation with just the right amount of detail. The prose is neither spare nor overwrought. It’s just right!

My point is that once you start to write in earnest, you notice things about the prose itself. The analytical part of your mind is engaged. If you were playing a video game, it would be like keeping a window open where you keep an eye on the sourcecode of the game application. It happens with musicians too — a bass player singles out the bassline in a composition and thus becomes less aware of the music a single thing or unified experience.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this … it’s just something that I’ve noticed happening.

7. Technique happens. Writing courses often focus on technique, and that’s probably appropriate for a classroom setting. It’s something concrete you can teach about writing. An instructor can show students examples of the active voice vs. the passive voice, an awkward sentence vs. a well-constructed one, etc. There’s nothing wrong with courses like this, or with books that explain how to improve the quality of your prose, but neither is a substitute for steady, incremental improvements made by writing (and carefully reading and revising) hundreds of thousands of words.

I say this as someone who is still very much in the process of fixing problems with my prose. When I read something that I wrote a few months ago, I invariably see room for improvement. But I no longer cringe in horror. Writing, like anything else, improves with active practice. I’ll keep reading and re-reading books about writing (Stephen King’s On Writing will make you cross-examine every adjective) but now that I’ve seen my prose get better, I won’t worry about it so much.

7. Finding an authentic, comfortable voice. I can’t explain how exactly this happened, but one restless night in October of 2008, I woke up with a few paragraphs of prose in my head, expressed in a new, unfamiliar voice. The new voice spoke in the third-person, but it was less formal and more inside the heads of the characters (at least compared to the voice I had been using in recent short story attempts). I lay awake in bed for about an hour, composing lines in this new voice (which felt more like me than anything I’d experienced before), until finally I got out of bed, turned on my laptop, and started typing. The words flowed more easily than they ever had before, like a dam had been broken, and I continued writing in that same voice until I had a first draft of my first novel.

I wonder if other writers have had similar experiences. I wouldn’t say that writing is now effortless — it’s still quite difficult — but the words come more easily now. Even if I’m walking uphill, at least I’m walking in shoes that fit.

I don’t suppose this is a permanent condition. I’ll probably need a slightly different voice for the next novel. I can imagine slowly feeling less and less comfortable with my current writing voice over time, until I have to reboot and find a new one.

8. If you’re bored, they’re bored. I don’t have any proof of this, but I intuitively feel that if I’m bored while I’m writing a passage, then I’m probably writing a boring passage.

I don’t think writing should ever feel like a chore (as for revisions, that’s a different story). It it feels like I’m slogging through, something needs to change. My own active interest in the prose serves as the canary in the coal mine.

9. Just follow. It was an interview with William Gibson that gave me the confidence to not worry if I didn’t know where the story was going. Gibson follows his characters, and they decide where the story goes (whatever they decide to do informs the plot).

I find great joy in writing this way. The process becomes more akin to exploring or uncovering as opposed to building or constructing. If, like me, you are prone to boredom and restlessness (even with your own creations), then I recommend this method. I’m excited to get up every morning and see what the characters are going to do.

This won’t work for every type of story. Writers of mysteries, in particular, need to know what happens in the end. If they don’t, you end up with floundering stories like the plot arcs of Lost or The X-Files. I’ll bet those shows were fun to write in the beginning though, before the writers wrote themselves into a corner.

10. The most valuable 10 minutes of the day. That would be the time when I wake up, but am only half-awake. If I remember to reflect on my characters during this time, I’m often rewarded with an insight, or a plot twist, or a connection I hadn’t before considered. I wish I could call that state-of-consciousness up on demand.

11. Go ahead, quit! If you find yourself discouraged about writing, with your resolve wavering, then why not quit? Give up your dream and your ambition. Give up the headache and the difficulty. Give up writing altogether. I promise you’ll be happier for it.

I can recommend this course of action with such enthusiasm because I’ve done it a number of times myself. Reading my own wince-worthy prose, I’ve sworn off fiction writing at least five times in my life. Each time, after a year at most, my resolution would crumble, and I’d give writing another go. Does the world need my books? I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m happier writing, and working towards being a novelist, so I’m going to keep doing it. For the moment, I’ve sworn off quitting this habit.

Category: Creative Work/Career

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