Early Decisions with Long-Term Impact

When we write, we often have our eyes on what’s right in front of us: the current project or even the current chapter. What we often don’t realize is that decisions we make right now with one project might have a ripple effect long after that project is done.

For example, when I first started DIY MFA, I had the opportunity to submit my Masters thesis for a contest. I decided to opt-out of the contest altogether because I had too much on my plate getting DIY MFA off the ground. I can’t help wondering, however, whether that choice to put DIY MFA ahead of my fiction writing hasn’t had a long-term impact on my writing career, pushing me in one direction rather than another.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my work at DIY MFA, but I’d be lying if I said that it afforded me tons of time for writing. That early decision to put DIY MFA ahead of my fiction has had a ripple effect that has lasted until now and will probably continue well into the future.

The same is true with renovations. It boggles my mind that we haven’t even started on demolition yet and already I have had to make choices about what tiles go in the bathroom or what the lighting in the living room will look like. Of course, I understand that there are things that have to happen at the gut level of a living space (electrical and plumbing, for example) that have a ripple effect on everything else. Still, it blows my mind that I’m making choices now that I’ll have to live with for thirty or forty years. It’s a little bit terrifying, to be honest.

Similarly, at the draft level of a book project, we might make choices early on that will have an impact far beyond what we would expect. Suppose you decide to combine two characters into one, or you choose to have your character do one thing instead of another, those things can change the entire shape of a story. Think of the movie Sliding Doors, where the story explores what happens when one simple twist of fate—making a subway or missing it altogether—can have a huge impact on a story’s direction.

Realizing that small decisions can have a massive impact can sometimes leave us stuck in our tracks. We become so afraid of making the wrong choice that we don’t make any choice at all and our story flounders. In the words of Maimonides, “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.” This means that sooner or later we have to take the leap and make a choice or risk being stuck in decision-making limbo forever.

The thing to remember is that unlike home improvements, that messy first draft is supposed to be in flux. Sure, we might make the wrong choice at first, but we can always backtrack, something that’s not quite so easy to do when it comes to construction. Rather than think we are locked into our choices, we must think of that messy first draft as an experiment, where we try out different ideas to see what works. Then we can always course-correct down the road.

Understand Gut-Level Structure

I’m not a contractor, an architect, or an engineer. I don’t understand the inner workings of construction, but with this renovation I’ve had to develop a basic working knowledge of how things are put together. This means being able to look at construction drawings and make sense of what I see. It means trying to visualize what the finished product might look like, even if I don’t have an example in front of me. It also means having a basic understanding of the timeline and what steps need to come at what different points in the process.

The same is also true with writing. We may not need to be experts on the three-act structure and know all the story beats down to the scene-by-scene level, but we need to have a basic sense of what comes first and what comes later in the story trajectory. Whether we are plotters and like to plan every inch of a novel, or we are a pantsers and write by the seat of our pants, there are certain fundamental storytelling elements that we need to know. These are:

Act 1: The Status Quo. Whether your Act 1 is only a few chapters long or takes up half the novel, the purpose of it is to establish the status quo. The idea is to give the reader a sense for what “normal” is like for your main character, so that when you shake things up, the reader will notice the difference. This is important because it bakes the idea of transformation right into the heart of your story.

Pivot Point 1: The Point of No Return. At some point in the story, some external event will happen that will force the character’s hand and push them to make a choice. That choice often operates as a one-way door, where once the character makes it, they can’t go back to how things were. Think of Katniss Everdeen volunteering to take her sister’s place in the Hunger Games, or Dorothy’s house getting picked up by the tornado and plunked down in Oz. Once these events happen, the character can’t go back the way they came, they can only move forward.

Act 2: The Quest. This part of the story is where you deliver on the premise. If your story is about a girl magically plunked down in a strange new world called Oz, then this is where you have her exploring that world and making new friends. If the story is about a girl fighting in a tournament called The Hunger Games, then this is the part where the games play themselves out. Act 2 can be as short as a third of your book and as long as 80-90%. Really it’s all about what you need to happen in your story and how much space those plot events will require. Just keep in mind that the longer you make Act 2, the shorter Acts 1&3 will have to be. Also, remember that it can feel like a long slog to get through Act 2—there’s a reason some people call it the “muddle in the middle.”

Pivot Point 2: Dark Night of the Soul. At some point, the character must hit their lowest point. Things need to get bad before they can get better, and this is the darkest moment before things turn around. At this point, the character must legitimately feel that it’s okay for them to give up. (Of course they don’t give up, but it has to feel plausible.)

Act 3: The Ending. This is the point where things start ramping up and building momentum toward the climax. The Climax is the scene where the central conflict of the story comes to a head and gets decided one way or another. Either Katniss wins the Hunger Games, or she does not. Either Dorothy gets back home to Kansas or she does not. The climax is where we get a sense of resolution.

This is the basic foundation of how stories are built, but this structure should not be constraining. Think of it as a basic framework… like a floorplan. Different apartments might have the exact same floor plan, but it’s the design and detail that gives a space its own unique flair. Similarly, this basic structure can serve as a guide while still giving the writer ample space to build their story their way. Just as in home improvements it’s important to understand basic structural concepts, the same is true with writing as well. The three-act structure can serve as a framework for us to build something magical.

Hurry Up and Wait

I’ve talked about the publishing process in the past and the realities of what it takes to get a book out on the market. One thing that cannot be stressed enough is that the pace of publishing is weird. One minute you’re scrambling to make a deadline, the next you’re stuck waiting for months before you get any updates. We can sum up the pace of publishing with one phrase: “Hurry up and wait.”

The same is true with home improvements. It can feel like the construction is dragging on forever, and then the next minute you have to scramble to make some fast decisions or else you’ll hold up the whole process. Publishing and home improvements both require us to become phenomenal jugglers, being able to hop from one task to another without missing a beat.

When I first published the DIY MFA book, I got flustered with this feast or famine timeline. Why couldn’t things get planned more slowly and methodically? Why did I always have to drop everything and rush? Of course, what I didn’t realize is that just as I was having to hurry up and wait on my side, everyone else who was part of the process also had to do the same thing.

When you have a lot of different moving parts to a project and each section is done by a different person, everyone has to hurry up and wait or the whole process would grind to a halt. Yes, it means that sometimes you have to drop everything and focus on that one thing that demands your attention right now, but once your step is done and you hand things off to the next person and take a breath… at least until you have to hurry up and wait again.

Everything’s a Mess… Until It’s Not

When I was 14, my parents decided to renovate their living room, dining room, and kitchen all with us still living in the apartment. It was a fiasco. If you’ve ever gone through a major renovation while still living in the place, you know exactly what I’m talking about. We ate nothing but takeout for months on end. Everything was covered in dust. Plus, my parents wanted to redo the living/dining room floors so we had to walk across those areas on planks like it was something out of a pirate movie.

Home improvements are messy and you have to make a mess before you can clean things up and make it all look beautiful. The same is true with writing. That first draft you write is going to be garbage. It will be embarrassingly terrible, and that’s okay because it gives you a starting point where you can build something wonderful. That first draft doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to do one thing: Exist.

Other forms of art—like sculpture, pottery, even painting—have raw materials. You have stone and clay to shape or empty canvases to fill. In writing, we need to create our own raw material and this is our first draft or “draft zero.” The raw material doesn’t exist before we make it, and we have to embrace the fact that this initial draft will be a complete mess. The artistry comes from what we do with that mess, how we shape it and mold it and make it beautiful.

Remember, writing is a slow and steady process. A book doesn’t get written in a day and it’s all about putting in a consistent effort, one word at a time. So keep taking those baby steps and in a few months, you’ll see the miles of progress you’ve made. 

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: How Home Improvements Are Like Writing a Book appeared first on DIY MFA.

Getting the Idea

It all started at graduation. I had completed my traditional MFA and was sitting in an uncomfortable wooden pew in a West Village church waiting to get my diploma. After two years of workshopping and dedicating myself to the craft, I expected that the skies would part, light would stream in through the stained glass, angel choirs would sing down from the heavens and a voice would whisper from on high: “You are now a writer.”

You see, I thought that in order to be a writer, I needed someone else to give me permission. What I didn’t realize until much later was that I had already given myself permission, and that was far more important than what anyone else said.

As I sat in that creaky wooden pew, my mind ran over all the things I had learned and accomplished in those two years of graduate school. I was so happy and grateful to have had the opportunity, but then my thoughts turned to my writing friends outside the MFA, talented writers who didn’t have the chance to go back to school. A wave of sadness flooded over me and I thought to myself: maybe I could share some of what I learned in the MFA program with them.

As I thought about this, I began to realize that a lot of the things I learned in the MFA program are things I could have learned on my own. For example, the program provided me with a workshop, but I already had a wonderful critique group full of talented writers who gave me valuable feedback. In the MFA program, I also took literature courses where I studied books in my chosen area of writing, but I was already doing that on my own by building a personalized reading list of books relating to my work-in-progress. The MFA also required that we attend readings and lectures by visiting authors, but I regularly went to readings at bookstores and attended conferences as well. In other words, all the things that the MFA provided I had already been doing in some capacity on my own.

That’s when a wild idea hit me: What if there was a do-it-yourself version of an MFA?

That night, I did what any self-respecting writer would do when they got a wacky idea: I went home and blogged about it. Now at the time, I had a teeny-tiny blog with 12 followers (one of whom was my mother), and I wrote up a post essentially asking: If there was a DIY version of an MFA in writing, would you do it? Given the microscopic size of my audience, I expected that blog post to fizzle out in the ether.

But that’s not what happened.

The next morning, I awoke to dozens of emails in my inbox and a bunch of comments on that blog post, all saying “YES! I’d totally do it!” So, that’s when I realized I’d hit a nerve. I’d landed on an idea that resonated with people.

Finding the Market

As writers, we often have lots of different ideas, some of them awesome and some of them not-so-great. One of the best ways to build our creative muscle is not to get too precious with one idea and instead focus on generating lots of them. Think of ideas like subways in NYC, there’s always another one coming. With DIY MFA, I knew from the get-go that there was interest in my idea, but that wasn’t true for many of the other ideas I’d had before.

What I didn’t share as part of this story were all the failed business ideas I had leading up to DIY MFA. There were many of them. For instance, did you know that at one point I had a jewelry-making business? I was fairly successful with it and even had some pieces on consignment in a Madison Avenue boutique. The trouble was, I liked using high quality materials, which were expensive, and it meant that to make any real profit, the markup had to be pretty high. Given the high-end nature of the product, it was difficult to find the right customers. I ended up pivoting my jewelry making to more of a hobby and using my skills to create gifts for friends and family instead of trying to sell my work.

There was also a time when I had a knitting blog, thinking maybe I could be the next Stephanie Pearl-Mcphee. The problem was, I couldn’t knit fast enough to post with any real frequency and a blog without regular content just flounders. Then there was that phase in the early 2000s when I thought I might want to pursue graphic design as a freelance business. I got a gig doing pro bono work for a nonprofit, which helped me build up my portfolio, but I had no idea how to grow the business past that point. Fun fact: those graphic design skills have come in handy at DIY MFA because I do a lot of the graphics for the site.

The truth is, I had tons of creative business ideas, many of which I tested and then decided not to pursue. It was only when I came up with DIY MFA that I realized I had hit on something that people wanted.

As writers, we have to remember that publishing is a business, and that in order for a book to be successful, there have to be readers interested in it. This means that you have to have a clear idea in your mind of who your readers will be. Perhaps the biggest mistake I originally made when I tried out all those other business ideas is that I focused on creating what I wanted and I didn’t stop to think whether other people would want it, too. So, think about your readers, even as you’re working on that very first draft.

Keep in mind, though, you don’t want to chase the market. Don’t write about vampires just because that’s what’s hot at the moment. Remember that it takes 2-3 years for a book to get to market (unless you indie pub) so what’s hot right now may not even be a thing when your book comes out. That said, if you love vampires and that’s your jam, write the story that’s in your heart. After all, you’re going to have to read and revise your story dozens of times before you publish, so you might as well write something you love.

Testing the Concept

After getting all those positive and encouraging messages about DIY MFA, I realized I needed to test the concept. Specifically, I wanted to test two things:

1. Did I have enough to say on the subject?
2. Did I really have an audience?

After thinking about it, I realized that the best way to test these two things was to pose a blogging challenge. Back in 2010, it was the heyday of blogging and there were all sorts of blogging challenges on the internet. I figured I would do a blogging challenge… on myself. The idea was simple, I would blog about DIY MFA every single day for an entire month. I figured by the end of the month, I’d have a pretty clear answer to each of the two questions above. Either I would have run out of things to say, or I’d still be brimming with ideas. And either I’d have gained a bigger audience, or my existing followers—all twelve of them—would have abandoned me.

I decided to run this DIY MFA challenge in the month of September because it was back-to-school time and that somehow felt fitting. Also, it gave me the whole summer (between graduation, when I first had the idea to September 1) to collect my thoughts and map out my posts. This way I could hit the ground running as soon as September rolled around.

Here’s what happened: I got to the end of September and I still had ideas for DIY MFA. In fact, 14 years later, I’m still coming up with new courses and workshops so clearly I have a lot to say on the subject. Not only that, my small group of twelve followers grew to four hundred, just in that one month. Now, that might not seem like a lot in today’s influencer-driven world, but at the time, gaining four hundred blog followers was a big deal, and it showed me there was an audience for my concept.

We writers often don’t test our concepts nearly enough. We often commit to a long project like a novel and we don’t take time to test and see if the concept lands with our audience, or if we have the stamina to see it through. Sure, many of us want nothing more than to hide away in our writing space and focus all our energy on creating The Big Project. But that does us no good if the project doesn’t have legs. This is why it’s so important to test our concepts.

One way to do this is to focus on writing short form work for a while and trying to get that work published. We have several members of our word nerd community who have chosen to focus on short form work and have had excellent success publishing their stories, essays, or poetry. The great thing about short form work is that you can start and finish a project in a much shorter span of time, and you can get feedback on it by submitting it for publication and seeing if it resonates.

For folks who are working on long form work like novels or memoirs, another way to test the concept is to take some aspect of your project and see if you can adapt it to a shorter piece. For example, if you’re writing a novel, what if you wrote a short story about one of the supporting characters? Or if you’re writing a memoir, how about taking an anecdote that doesn’t fit the memoir’s theme and making it into an essay? The idea is to try to test the market for your concept before you’ve committed a ton of time to writing that longer piece.

If your writing stamina is the thing in question, the best way to test it is with a challenge. Every November writers around the world dive headfirst into a new novel project and write with abandon until they hit 50K words. But you don’t have to wait until November to pose a similar challenge for yourself. Give yourself a word count goal and a window of time to see if you can stick to it. Maybe your goal is writing 2,000 words per day, 5 days per week for two weeks straight. Or maybe it’s writing 500 words every single day for a month, rain or shine. Come up with your own version of the challenge and use it to help you see if you have the stamina to get through a long project.

Developing the Structure

Structure is a huge factor, both in terms of developing a business idea and in writing a book. As I’ve shared on previous occasions, DIY MFA comprises three pillars: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, and Build Your Community. But it wasn’t always this streamlined. In fact, that first month when I did the blogging series, I had something like ten different subcategories of DIY MFA. These categories were: productivity, motivation, creativity, craft, workshops, reading, literary analysis, conferences, platform, and publishing. When I did that first blogging series, I posted about all these different topics, assigning different themes to different days of the week, even doubling up some of the topics to make them fit the weekly schedule.

It was a mess.

And it took me a little while to put that mess in order. It was in 2012, when I decided to rebuild the website and have it professionally designed, that my web developer said we only had room across the header for three topics. Somehow I had to take those ten things and cram them down into three. Plus, I had to make them sound catchy so they’d look good on the website.

What I realized was that those ten topics could be grouped together into larger buckets of writing, reading, and community. Once I made that discovery, the solution was simple. Our header would be Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community, and those would be the three pillars of DIY MFA. Once I had those pillars figured out, the rest of the DIY MFA structure quickly fell into place.

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants), sooner or later you have to think about structure. For plotters, structure comes into play early in the process, before they even start writing. For pantsers, on the other hand, structure often happens as part of the revision process. Personally, I recommend a “plantser” approach, where you write by the seat of your pants for a while (maybe 10K-20K words), and then you pause and take stock of what you have. Extract an outline by mapping out what you’ve already written, then figure out how to fill in the gaps. Then, when you get back to writing, you’ll have a direction for where you want your story to go.

So, there you have it: the background of how DIY MFA came to be, along with some insights you can apply to your own creative life. Remember, ideas by themselves are not all that useful. Instead, you have to test the ideas and see if there’s an audience for them. Once you’ve tested a concept, you also have to give it structure, so that it can take shape and become something great.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: How DIY MFA Got Started appeared first on DIY MFA.