The Basics

In Today’s Journal

* Just a Thought
* The Basics
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Just a Thought

Since long before I started writing fiction in earnest, I’ve been compiling my own satirical dictionary.

My dictionary is kind of a mix between those of Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce, irreverent and highly opinionated.

Here’s my most recent entry:

unalived, adj. [Frown. What?] Um, killed.

Usage note: If you regularly use non-words like ‘unalived’ in any way other than in satire or comedy, you’ve been in school too long. Your brain’s filled beyond capacity. You’re overqualified for life in a normal society. Like a mushroom, you’ve been kept in the dark and fed so much bullsh*t for so long that all the knowledge you’ve gained has started to abscond, reversing the education process. In effect, you’ve been deknowledged.

The Basics

This is a revised version of a post I first posted back on March 1, 2015.

A fiction writer is a person who writes, who puts new words on the page. It’s a person who loves to tell stories in written communication. There’s nothing elevated about it, and nothing special except that you get to spend your life making up stuff for a living.

(Or, if you believe in yourself and trust your characters, you get to run with your characters through the stories that they, not you, are living and simply writing down what happens. Again, for a living.)

If that definition fits you, or if you WANT that definition to fit you, here are a few basic guidelines that might help:

1. Your conscious critical mind exists to protect you, whether by taking new information on board or by exuding fear to keep you from doing something it believes will harm you. Like the benevolent android in Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands,” its sole function is to keep you from being harmed even by yourself. And even by someone rejecting something you’ve written.

That’s why the CCM introduces unreasoning fears. But ‘unreasoning fears’ I mean fears of things that have zero consequences in the real world. Your CCM evokes those fears to stop you from writing fiction.

Spending all your time outlining and world building and erecting signposts and planning and plotting and whatever else allows you to feel like a writer (or at least writer-adjacent) but none of those things risk embarrassing you, so your conscious critical mind doesn’t care about all that. As long as you aren’t actually writing (putting new words on the page) you aren’t risking rejection.

Likewise, after you’ve written a story or novel, rewriting and polishing instead of publishing and moving forward to write the next story is much easier and less ‘threatening’ to your conscious, critical mind. After all, you also run zero risk of rejection as long as you’re rewriting and polishing instead of submitting or publishing.

2. Your subconscious creative mind is the source of ALL your inspiration, ALL your story ideas, and ALL your stories. If you get out of your own way and trust your creative subconscious, you will write in your own unique, original voice.

Then your only challenge is to NOT go back and rewrite and polish until you’ve erased your unique, original voice and made your story sound like everything else in the slush pile.

And yes, I know your unique voice doesn’t sound like anything special to you. That’s because it’s with you 24/7/365. But to others, your voice is unique. Believe in yourself.

3. Everything in life is a matter of priorities. Your conscious, critical mind often will use that to attempt to ‘save’ you from writing. Ever notice when you’re about to sit down and write, suddenly doing something else (anything else) becomes a priority?

My only advice is to shake your index finger at your critical mind. No! BAD critical mind! Get back in your corner and leave me alone! I wanna run and play with my fictional friends now! You get the idea.

4. Productivity is what I’m all about as a fiction writer, but that’s for practical reasons. The more work I put out there, the more I practice my writing, and the more I practice writing, the better the writing becomes.

Also the more published books and stories I have to feed off of each other, the more income I receive from my writing. This is the same reason every time I get five new stories I slap them into a collection in both ebook and paper. When I get ten, I put them into another collection with a slightly higher price point. That gives me three streams of passive revenue from every story I write. Can you say ka-ching?

Productivity can be reduced to mathematics, and mathematics is a concrete, finite thing. Here’s the equation: P = PW/H(H).

Productivity equals Publishable Words of fiction you can write per Hour times the number of Hours you spend in the chair putting new words on the page. No matter what spin you put on it or what excuses you come up with to not put new words on the page, if you want to increase your productivity, you have to increase one of those two factors.

5. Words per hour—Truly, this is a biggie. I write about 1000 publishable words per hour. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But if you’re writing 1000 words per hour, that’s only 17 words per minute.

Think about that. Writing 1000 words per hour gives you a LOT of time for staring off into space. If you’re writing fewer than 700 or 800 words per hour, you might want to check in with yourself and figure out what you’re actually doing during that hour.

You can safely bet you aren’t writing fiction, and you can safely bet your low productivity is linked to your conscious, critical mind. You’re focusing on getting ‘exactly’ the right word, or you’re focusing on not repeating a sentences structure ‘too many’ times or you’re focusing on whether to use ‘whether’ or ‘if’ or ‘in’ or ‘into’ etc.

Seriously. Don’t tell me or anyone else about your ‘process’ if you don’t want to—it’s nobody’s business but your own anyway—but if you’re serious about being a professional writer, Fix It. If you aren’t, of course, no biggie.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Art of the Short Submitted for your leisurely perusal. (IMHO, 1. Write a good hook. 2. Ground the reader in the setting. 3. Let the story unfold as it will.)

The Numbers

The Journal………………….. 1060
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1060

Writing of

Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX

Fiction for January………………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.…………………… 9240
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 9240
2026 consumable words………………… 9240

2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29