One of the most difficult things about being a writer is figuring out whether you’re getting better at it or not. While there are moments where your own progress is clear and obvious, more often you’re totally not sure if something you wrote today is better than something you wrote five years ago.

Sometimes I’ll sell a story that I wrote a very long time ago (I have a tendency to continue submitting stories well past the point where a sane person might think the story’s simply not that great) and re-read it and think, gosh, that is a pretty good story. I’ll see all sorts of things I’d forgotten I’d done in it, and it will seem to me that my more recent work is simply not as complex or as interesting.

Getting better as a writer is tough to gauge because it’s all so subjective, of course, but you can detect progress by measuring your writing marginal gains.

It’s the Little Things

The theory of marginal gains has its roots in cycling; the idea is that small improvements in a process can ripple out to measurable improvements in an already-efficient system. For cyclists, the idea was that improving one aspect of their training or equipment could result in a 1% or 2% increase in their overall speed on the course. Those gains are marginal—but in a competitive scenario they can be decisive.

You can do the same thing, mostly, in your writing. You might not ever find a web site that will analyze your novel or story and give you a hard number on its quality, but you can work on the individual components of your writing and get feedback from people. Write a dialog exchange, or a description. Write out a plot synopsis, or an internal monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness section. Something short and discrete that you can show to folks and get simple feedback on. Chances are if you start to get better and better feedback on, say your dialog, the stories you’re writing will be improving too.

The improvement might be marginal. But it all contributes to the whole.

Marginal gains can be invisible, of course. If you write a story today that is 1% better in some sense than a story you wrote last month, the difference might not be immediately obvious. But it’s there, and those 1% improvement add up like fractional pennies from the Office Space scheme.

Man, creativity can be cruel, as any writer who’s ever been asked to explain their WIP knows. Somehow ideas and concepts—whole universes!—that exist in pristine, complex brilliance in your brain and on the page turn to sand running through your increasingly sweaty fingers when you try to explain them.

All writers know how it is. Whether it’s at a party or convention or something and someone is actually interested in your work and asks you about your book, or you’re trying to write the dreaded one-page synopsis for your agent or your own marketing. You start laying it out, and about one minute in you realize you’re in your own personal Asian land war as you struggle to sell your ideas. You can tell your audience is increasingly dubious as you backtrack to explain details you forgot and fail to get the expected awed reaction when you drop your plot twists and world-building brilliancies.

Eventually, you trail off and mutter something like ?well, it is a work in progress’ and go off to find the bar.

This is why you need to always have an elevator pitch for your novel. Because having it will give you confidence.

The Power That Preserves

Nothing kills an exciting idea for a story than an underwhelming or sarcastic reaction before it’s fully developed. If you tell someone you respect about your novel and their reaction is to shit all over it, it’s difficult to get back to that excited space where you were clicking along, building a world.

On the other hand, if you can succinctly explain your WIP with a confident, polished presentation, your chances of getting a positive reaction go up, you’ll feel better about the whole thing, and that creates a feedback loop that drives you finish it. That’s why you should start thinking about your pitch before you’ve even finished the book. Because people will ask you about it, and if you can wow them with a great pitch, it juices the whole endeavor with positive energy.

Don’t underestimate the power of confidence. Fiction is the art of selling ideas. When you boil a lot of fiction down, it’s kind of silly—dramatic twists, strange made-up cultures, dialog that no one would ever actually speak. What makes it work is the confidence that talent offers. Confidence is the backbone of great writing—so getting confident about your WIP is key to finishing it in style. So be ready to sell that idea.

Or, to run away the moment anyone brings up your WIP. That might not build confidence, but at least you’re cultivate an air of mystery.

Every writer knows that one of the core components of a story is some kind of conflict. Your protagonist has to want something, and some array of forces has to stand between them and their goal. Sometimes it’s I want to destroy the One Ring but all these Nazgûl and Orcs are in the way, sometimes it’s I love this person but they’re married, but the general idea is that life is disappointment and there’s your story.

That’s what I would define as Macro Conflict. It’s big enough to hang your story off of, and it’s broad enough to invite all sorts of interpretation and give the writer (i.e., you) plenty of room to work in.

Sometimes, coming up with a story and a Macro Conflict is easy. You wake up, and the story is in your head, complete and ready to go—you just need to know how to get in there. How to find your way into the story in the first place. This is where Micro Conflict can be useful.

Go Small

Getting started can be a challenge, because we often see novels and other stories in terms of the big picture, the big twists or the overall atmosphere you want to create. Sometimes finding the right way to just begin is difficult and you wind up writing several iterations of the beginning. One approach is to take your main character and give them a Micro Conflict. That’s pretty much what it sounds like: A short-term goal, with short-term barriers.

It’s an easy way to get things moving. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the overall plot—just take your main character(s) and give them a goal, something to strive for. It can be very simple and very basic, it can be representative of their usual adventures or something you never return to. Just give them a goal and put some barriers between them and it. It’s that simple—like plotting a novel writ small. You get to explore your universe and characters, tell a self-contained story, and boom—you’re in your novel.

Or you could write 50,000 words describing your main character’s morning routine, including 15,000 words in which they stare at themselves in the mirror. Your call.

A lot of writers complain about not having enough time in their lives to work on their writing; okay, when I say “a lot of writers” I obviously mean all writers, including myself. Time is a problem unless you’ve a) got money or b) sell enough books/stories/screenplays to make writing what you like your full-time occupation. For the rest of us, no matter how successful we might be in general, we either have to do non-writing work to get by or we wind up writing stuff that isn’t exactly our passion. And that eats up the time you might otherwise spend working on your novels, stories, plays, or experimental epic poetry told from the point of view of a gerbil.

Finding the time to write (and “time to write” is also dependent on having the energy to write; you can certainly give up sleep altogether to find those extra hours for novel-writing, but it’s doubtful you’ll do good work under those conditions) is a challenge for many. There are things you can do to steal back some time; one of the simplest is something I mention in Writing Without Rules: The Writing Go Bag.

Go Go Gadget Typewriter

A Go Bag, of course, is an emergency bag you keep stocked with the basics—the idea being that if disaster strikes and you have to flee your home without warning, you can just grab the Go Bag and you’ll at least have the fundamentals. It’s a good idea (as a person whose house flooded during a hurricane, I can tell you that suddenly having to flee your home is always a distinct possibility, and having dry underwear and some cash put aside is a great idea.

A Writing Go Bag isn’t designed for emergencies, it’s designed for opportunities. Basically, if you struggle to find time to write, think about areas of your daily life where you might steal some time back. Commuting to work, work itself, time spent standing in lines or in waiting rooms—there are a lot of dead spaces in most people’s lives, and while you might bring a book or rely on your phone or tablet to entertain yourself during these dead times, a Writing Go Bag could help you leverage those moments for writing.

So what’s in a Writing Go Bag? To an extent, you tell me. The idea would be to have whatever you need to be able to write under any conditions. Standing on the bus, maybe you can write one-handed on your phone with the right App. Stuck in a boring meeting at work, maybe a notebook and a pen makes you look like the World’s Most Dedicated Note-Taker. Maybe an old laptop dedicated to word processing always sits in there just in case you find yourself sitting in a waiting room or stuck somewhere with nothing else to do.

The basic idea is simple: Cover all possibilities. Stick everything in there—an old laptop, old tablet, paper and pen—so that wherever you find yourself you’ll be able to get some work done, even if it’s just five minutes here and there. I’d also recommend getting a clipboard—it’s small enough to fit in the bag, and can provide a smooth writing surface or an ersatz lap desk in a pinch. My own clipboard is probably the most important writing tool I own.

Maybe this won’t transform your life, but if you got five minutes back every day you’d be surprised how much writing you could get done. Whether you include a fifth of Early Times in your Writing Go Bag is entirely up to you.

Writing professionally—whether it’s selling fiction or writing things you’re directly paid to write—isn’t always the easiest way to make a living. Even when you get the hang of pitching and submitting proposals or stories, there are plenty of frustrations and misconceptions to get past. And one of the biggest misconceptions writers—especially but not limited to freelancers—is that we’re selling words.

That’s an easy mistake to make because most writing jobs are pitched on a per-word basis. You submit a short story to a magazine or web site and they offer you a per-word rate. Most freelance jobs are structured around per-word rates as well, and when freelance writers sit around the bar complaining (as we are wont to do) we usually discuss the success or failure of our business at least in some part in terms of how many cents or dollars per word we charge.

On the one hand, per-word rates is a decent shorthand for the quality of the work you’re getting and how lucrative it is. On the other, it’s awful, because you’re not really selling words—you’re selling time.

You’re Older Than You’ve Ever Been … And Now You’re Even Older

If you’re going to be selling your work you need to think of it in those terms. If you have a choice between two writing jobs, one where you’re offered 10 cents a word for 1,000 words and another where you’re offered $1 a word for 1,000 words, you might think it’s an obvious no-brainer as to which one you should take on.

But if the $1 job requires hours and hours of research and revision and ultimate takes a month to write, while the 10 cent job takes an hour flat and you can immediately jump to the next one, in the final analysis a higher volume job will actually earn you much more.

There are other variables, of course. Volume is a big one, as my example above relies on the assumption that you can get a lot of those 10 cent jobs; if it’s literally one piece vs. one piece, the $1 job wins, naturally enough. The point is that if you can put together more than 10 of the lower-paying gig, you’ll make more money in the same time. Time is the key—every minute you spend on a project lowers your effective hourly rate, and this means that apparently high-paying jobs might actually be pretty shitty when you realize you earned $3 an hour doing them, while lower-paying work might actually work out to be pretty great if you can bang them out 4 to an hour.

There are other considerations, of course. Fatigue, for one; if your per-word rates are so low you’ve got to write 5 pieces an hour, 8 hours a day just to survive, that doesn’t work long-term. Prestige is another—sometimes the higher-paying job might not be so great when you work out the hourly wage, but getting your foot in the door at the venue is worth it, whether from a career-ladder point of view or an exposure point of view. And of course you should always try to get your rates up, whether it’s per-word or per-hour.

The point is that you have to convert that per-word rate into the rate at which you’re selling your time. That’s the best way to figure out what you’re really making. This goes for fiction as well, although it gets clouded by the fact that most fiction is already written by the time we try to sell it. But knowing what your actual hourly wage was when you finally sell it is useful data, even if you’re less concerned with making a living from your fiction (and considering how difficult it is to do that).

Whatever you do, don’t figure out your hourly wage as a freelance writer and then compare it to other professions. That will just lead to day drinking, lost weekends, and plenty of time you can’t bill anyone for.

There’s often a disconnect between the Exciting Idea and the Good Start to a novel (or story). As in, you have the Exciting Idea and stand up in a crowded movie theater in the middle of a film and shout “JEBUS CRISTUS THAT’S AN AMAZING IDEA” but when you get home and start working, you suddenly realize you’re 560 words in and this is nothing like the amazing idea. It’s crap.

So, you start over.

I don’t know about you, or other writers, but I save my iterations. I start with a file called AmazeballsNovel.odt and when that fails—as it usually does—I save it as a new file called AmazeballsNovel2.odt and start fresh. It’s not uncommon to have a lot of these false starts littering my hard drive.

I think my personal record is 73. Which means I started a novel 72 times—sometimes writing tens of thousand of words—before getting it right. Or as right as I’ll ever get it, which is not the same thing at all.

AMAZEBALLS IS A FUN WORD

I save these iterations for a couple of reasons. Number one is the same reason I have every email I’ve ever received since 1999: My feverish hoarding brain. The fact is, I’m going to be found dead under a pile of trash someday, because we Somers’ were born to keep everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or experienced. The second reason is because I often raid those older files. Sometimes there’s a line, or a description, or a whole chapter that is Aces (a technical writing term) and so instead of re-creating an ersatz version, I simply go back to a previous iteration and re-use it.

The biggest mistake you can make when trying to get a novel off the ground (and a mistake I’ve made numerous times) is to keep pushing when you know on some level that it hasn’t caught fire yet. Eventually, if you push hard enough, you might get that boulder up the mountain and have so many words committed that you’ll finish the book (at least that’s true for me; I am a sucker for a Fallacy of Sunk Costs in a novel) but it won’t be great. I don’t know about you, but I need to feel a certain sense of loose freedom, an exhilaration in those early chapters that tells me the story is singing and the words are flowing. If I don’t get that, I’ve learned to cut my losses and start over.

Once I get past the first few thousand words, it’s different. A story that goes haywire after the beginning can be saved in multiple ways. The key, for me, is to at least get that beginning going. And sometimes that takes, like, 73 tries.

Something else that takes 73 tries is me waking up in the morning. Whoever invented snooze buttons is a saint.

My personal theory on description in your writing—of characters, of settings, of just about everything—is that less is most definitely more. I’ve always been worried about my characters being a bit too similar to myself (white, male, pudgy, prone to lectures) and my settings a bit too similar to whatever room I’m sitting in at the time (though as I point out in Writing Without Rules, using my first adult apartment as a template/floorplan for every fictional apartment I write about is actually a great tool). It’s kind of natural to, as the graybeards say, write what you know and what I know is being a cis white guy in New Jersey, natch.

I have also tried to get away from the Male Gaze a bit in my writing as I’ve gotten older. There’s always a tendency for men to describe their female characters in sexualized ways; we love to describe bodies and tresses and such like a bunch of leering old geezers, while our male characters are more often described in less pervy ways. A lot of my juvenelia is afflicted with that—every female character is described physically, every male character is, basically, blessed with my own rich inner life.

Getting away from that can be tough work, but there’s a simple solution I’ve evolved into: I don’t describe things or characters as much as I used to.

The Mind’s Eye

There’s a trick that filmmakers use, most often in the horror genre, where the monster is kept out of sight for most of the story. A huge example would be the original Jurassic Park, where Spielberg keeps his dinosaurs obscured for much of the film, showing us an eye here, a claw there, until he decides to pull back the curtain in spectacular fashion. But you see it a lot, and not always because of budget issues that reduce your scary monster to a guy in a mask. It’s an effective tool, because it forces the audience to imagine things. And what your audience/readers will imagine will always be better than what you can possibly describe.

So, these days when I write I stay away from lush descriptions of characters and places. I offer as much detail as is necessary, but I ask myself what’s important about a character. Broad strokes go a long way, and your reader will fill those strokes in according to their own experience and sense of the world. And that’s fine. In short, unless a physical trait is important to the story or to the understanding of the character, leave it out.

Of course, determining what is important is your job. Maybe it’s important to the story or the character that your female detective is beautiful. Or hideous. That’s up to you. My point is, think about that before you spend six paragraphs writing about her admiring herself in the mirror and thinking that men are always telling her how pretty she is, for some reason.

Sure, I mean, I do that all the time, but then I’m spectacular looking.

Most writing advice, if you think about it, is pretty obvious stuff. This isn’t an arcane art, this is telling stories to entertain and affect. In a fundamental sense writing is a skill everyone can hone—just about everyone has told a story at some point in their lives, and thus have engaged in plotting, character development, and pacing. Whether or not they did a good job is something else entirely.

Developing as a writer often boils down to equally simple stuff. Read a lot of books, steal and emulate to your heart’s desire, tell stories you’d like to read. Everything else usually involves repetition and the ability to process feedback. But that means it often hangs on the writing part—which means you have to get over that initial hump and actually start writing a book or story. And getting started is sometimes the tallest mountain you’ll have to climb when beginning a new writing project.

Something New

I recently started a new novel. As I write this I am 1 day and 1,000 words in, which means this could all amount to nothing or it could be the next novel I sell; all of that remains to be seen. Those 1,000 words are essential, though, because for a few weeks now I’ve had a few scraps of an idea—a setting, an exchange of dialogue, a title—and nothing else. And I didn’t know how to start.

Knowing the meat of your story but having no clue how to start it is more common than you might realize, because beginnings are where a lot of hard work comes in. I often want to race forward to the epic twists and amazeballs setpieces I have in mind, and the quiet world-building and character introduction of beginnings can seem less sexy in comparison. But I’m also a linear writer who likes to start at the beginning, so I have to nail those early words or nothing else happens.

My trick isn’t all that brilliant or mind-blowing: I start with a short story.

My Chapter 1s—at least in the Draft Zero stage—are usually self-contained stories with beginnings, middles, and ends of their own. They could be torn out of the larger novel and published independently. This takes some of the pressure off, because I’m not going to have to plot out 100,000 words—I just need to plot out 5,000 words.

Another advantage to starting with a cohesive, standalone story is that it takes a lot of the world-building confusion off my plate. I only have a few thousand words to work with, so I know I can’t explain my entire universe in huge detail. I sprinkle in only the essentials and leave everything else off until later, because I have to tell the story I’m telling now. Any time I’ve tried a more open-ended start to a novel I get mired in detail because I don’t have the forward thrust of a focused story keeping me moving, so I wallow.

Will this approach work for you? I don’t know. I do know that if I finish this story (a.k.a. Chapter 1) I’ll have a clear path forward, a solid foundation to build on—and if the novel ultimately fails, if nothing else I have a story I can try to publish.

Also, failed novels give me a perfect excuse to go on a 3-week bender, so really it’s a Win-Win.