In Today’s Journal
* My Quote of the Day
* Ambition, Talent, Skill, and Outcome
* Update on My Own Writing
* So TNDJ
* Of Interest
My Quote of the Day
“‘Luck’ only means when the knock came at the door you were prepared.”
Ambition, Talent, Skill, and Outcome
Don’t confuse ambition, talent, skill, or even outcome with excellence. They’re different animals inhabiting the same world.
Ambition is only desire and the willingness to work toward a goal or dream. Talent is only a degree of natural ability, and skill is only a marker of your level of proficiency at the time.
None of those in any combination guarantees excellence. You can only achieve excellence through roughly 10% studying, 10% learning or absorption, and 80% practice.
A great deal depends on the writer’s willingness to intentionally study and learn.
In the writing of fiction, we study and learn or absorb in order to bring in ideas and techniques that are new to us to combine with our own. Then we practice (and continue learning) by applying what we’ve studied and learned or absorbed. See the cycle?
In the writing of fiction, practice means putting new words on the page. That is the only way to reach new levels of skill and, eventually, achieve excellence.
Then there’s Outcome.
Outcome, whether ‘success’ or ‘falling short’ (however you define either of those terms), is only a result. It will always be either good, bad, or on a sliding scale somewhere between the two, and again it depends on your own definition.
Excellence also is only an outcome, albeit in my world, it’s the best possible outcome. Your best possible outcome might vary, and that’s fine.
Excellence in fiction writing (storytelling) is more important to me than publishing, and it’s exponentially more important to me than bestseller-dom, high sales numbers, or anything else.
Of course, all of that would be nice, but if I had to choose I’d choose excellence every time. Maybe because it’s the one outcome that’s within my control.
The others, at least in my experience, depend on seemingly random lightning strikes. (That’s why I recommend you collect email addys and build a list, which I did not do.) And I am admittedly not good at chasing thunderstorms that otherwise don’t interest me on the off chance that lightning might strike.
Which is why (having expended far too much time attempting both) I don’t publish to paper (a thunderstorm) and probably not, as it turns out, to audiobooks (another thunderstorm).
The clouds are still building in that latter thunderstorm, but I’m near an outcome either way. I’ll write more on audiobooks soon in another post and divulge my experience, good or bad. Maybe it will help you, maybe it won’t.
Update on My Own Writing
As I told a friend recently, the new novel (not the one some of you are reading on the Stanbrough Writes Substack) is going well at almost 30,000 words in.
The fiction writing and TNDJ provide pretty much my only excitement and are my only reasons to get up, make coffee, and trudge out to the Hovel every morning.
In fact, between my ticker problems and my lousy back, I only actually feel good and pain-free when I’m in my writing chair and lost in writing whatever fiction.
Writing TNDJ in an attempt to help others cut their learning curve ranks right behind that in the Feeling Good department. Very little else matters at all to me. Even publishing to ebooks pales by comparison.
In fact, I only bother to publish at all because Robert A. Heinlein thought it was a good idea, and I try to adhere to Heinlein’s Rules.
So TNDJ
As I said above, for me, teaching via TNDJ is second in importance only to continuing to improve my skills and achieving excellence as a fiction writer.
But frankly, when I offer to invite other writers to study along with me in the pursuit of excellence—as I did recently in “…and Point of View”—and get only crickets in response, I have to wonder whether writing TNDJ is worth my time.
Anyway, as I told the one writer who did respond, I am proceeding as planned (as I have time) through studying “Chapter 23,” which for study purposes has become a story in its own right. When I’ve finished (if I finish) I’ll share my notes on focusing down and POV and whatever else with that one writer and maybe with paid subscribers (on request).
Sorry. No late sign-ups. But after I’m through maybe I’ll make “Chapter 23” and my notes on focusing down and POV available to others for a small fee.
Still, I want to teach those who want to learn, so I’m rethinking some things and maybe resetting some priorities. I’ll update you here if and when I come up with a new plan.
Of Interest
Web Version of the Indie Advantage This is a newsletter I get from D2D. Some great links in this one, so I hope you can view it.
Pleonastic Compound Adjectives As my friend Nan D noted when she sent me this, it’s a goldmine. To see what I mean, click the link, then click any color on the page.