The Most Important Ingredient For Writing Success, Part Two

Last week I wrote about how Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't just write some great tunes and then, presto, had a smash hit with his musical Hamilton. It was clear that he had a plan to succeed. He knew that he had to write an enormous amount and he had to have a focus on how he was going to make it all come together. The message to the rest of us creative-content producers is to realize that you can't just write some stuff or even a bunch of stuff. You have to know how it will all come together, and then you have to doggedly work to assemble the steps, one by one.

A musical is a good example of how a plan is necessary because we instinctively understand that it is a big production. It's not like writing a single novel and then hoping to have a smash hit.

And yet, it actually is very much like writing novels.

With very few exceptions, almost no one has ever written a single novel and then had a smash hit. It sometimes looks from the outside like that is what happened. But when you do a little research, you find that the one-book wonder actually wrote multiple other books under a pseudonym. Or has a pile of books in a drawer that no one has ever seen. Or ghost-wrote books for a celebrity author who has no writing skills. Or, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, wrote a series of books without immediately publishing them, then edited and rewrote and edited and rewrote some more. When the first book was delivered to the agent/editor or was self-published, the advance reviews and blurbs were all ready to print. If you haven't done that, why not?

This is not a write-it-and-the-readers-will-come enterprise. This is a careful, thoughtful process where every major question has been posed and then answered before the writer ever reveals her first book. Lin-Manuel has shown us the way. Have a thorough plan and then execute it step-by-step. Know where you're going. Do your due diligence.

So my challenge to anyone who reads this is the same as my challenge to myself. Look very carefully at what motivates readers (or theater goers) to devour certain kinds of books or stage shows or any other type of intellectual entertainment (as opposed to watching team sports or riding the roller coaster at the amusement park). There are a thousand components. Study them. Sympathetic characters in trouble, gripping plots that intensify those troubles. surprise that worries and surprise that delights.

Next, study how it is delivered and how an audience is built. Miranda learned how the theater works. And he didn't just produce one spectacular show. He built a body of work. Multiple musicals. (And starring roles for himself!) Miranda shows that you don't have to brag your way to getting attention. Instead, position yourself to get noticed. Be ready to take on opportunity. If you write a musical and your skill is such that someone is willing to put up the dollars to produce it, does the starring role go to someone you've never heard of? Much better to take the time to learn to sing and dance and act. Be available for your success! This approach applies to all of the creative arts, including novelists. When the libraries and book clubs call and ask you to come and give a talk, is it already written? Can you give them 20 minutes or 40 minutes plus Q & A? Are the jokes and the self-deprecating lines ready for their laughs? Will you be prepared for the radio interviews? If not, why? You're a writer. Write those talks. Write those jokes. Be ready for your success.

Another aspect to your plan is the big picture. If you are a novelist, don't, I repeat, DON'T just write one novel. Unless you are Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee, you won't go anywhere. Plan your SHELF of books. Plan them IN ADVANCE. Plan a series. Plan characters who will populate that shelf. There are almost no one-book wonders. In fact, even among authors who write multiple books, there are almost none who are successful unless their books fit into a plan, books that are linked by series or characters or, at the minimum, theme. Don't just write. Write to a comprehensive plan.

That may just be the most important ingredient for writing success.

P.S. We saw Hamilton in San Francisco, and it was great. It was obvious that it wasn't put together by someone who merely had a great idea about writing a musical. This was a tour de force, created with great planning and relentless effort and follow through. We can all learn from that kind of focus. That kind of plan.

The Most Important Ingredient For Writing Success

Let's say you came up with a great idea for a novel. Now let's say you sat down and wrote that novel.

Is that a big deal? Yes, absolutely, that's huge. Congratulations. You've done something that very few people have done. If you're like most writers, you don't have any friends who have written a novel. This is a rare accomplishment, so you deserve to feel proud.

Will it bring you writing success?

If all you've got is a novel, even a very good novel, probably not.

Sorry, I realize that's harsh. The unfortunate truth is that there are millions of novels out there, and a significant number of them - if not a large percentage - are good. But hang in there a moment. I'm going to give you an idea of how to get success.

So what else do you need?

The answer came to me like an epiphany, which, as the cliche says, only took ten years to strike me overnight.

What else do you need? A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN. Is acquiring a plan an incredibly hard thing to do? Maybe not. But you must have it, and I'll explain why.

First, let me tell you how this realization came to be.

I was thinking about Lin-Manuel Miranda and his extraordinary success writing the book and music and lyrics for the musical Hamilton. Oh, right, he also starred in it. And it immediately went on to become the most successful Broadway show in memory. It made an ungodly number of millions of dollars. His Hamilton cast recording topped Billboard's Rap chart for ten weeks, and his Hamilton Mixtape album hit number 1 on the Billboard 200. The musical is still sold out on Broadway even as the national touring company is beginning to bring it across the country.

Has Mr. Miranda done anything else notable? Just a little. He wrote the musical "In The Heights" and also starred in it on Broadway. (He completed the first draft of In The Heights while he was a sophomore in college. And he wrote other musicals while in college.) He also helped write the hit Disney movie Moana. He's starring in the upcoming movie Mary Poppins Returns. He's won a Pulitzer Prize, two Grammys, an Emmy, three Tony Awards. And there was that little confidence booster he won called a MacArthur Genius Fellowship. He's written jingles, co-founded a Hip Hop comedy group and a whole lotta other stuff. As a result of his amazing body of work, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Wesleyan University.

Of course, all of this success takes a huge amount of time, right? I imagined that putting together such a career would take many decades of hard work. When I first learned about Miranda, I guessed that he was probably 60 years old. Maybe 50 at the youngest. Possibly 70. Good guess?

No. Miranda is only 37.

So my rhetorical question to myself was this: Did this Miranda dude just happen to write some stuff and it became enormously, immeasurably successful? Was he a one or two-musical wonder boy? No. It seems obvious that he had a plan. A comprehensive, well-thought-out plan. I don't know the exact details, but I have a pretty good idea of how it went down.

Way back in high school, he was focused on writing and working in theater. While the rest of his classmates were, like me at that age, riding their bicycles and skiing and thinking about dating, he was working. When he went to college, he wrote with great determination. I don't imagine he participated in many pizza-and-beer parties.

Is there anything wrong with biking and skiing and pizza parties? Of course not. But Miranda had a plan that was more important. He was one of those people who won't be denied. His future success at writing was like the laws of physics, immutable. I'm certain that he didn't just try to write clever rap songs that would be shaped into a musical. Instead, he no doubt determined that he would find theatrical success by thinking carefully about how to set himself apart from all the other wannabes. And once he decided how he would write to that goal, he pursued it step by step, refusing to be deterred by the uncountable obstacles in the way of all creative people.

Of course, the usual stuff about work ethic and tenacity still applies. Stuff like what Einstein said, that persistence trumps genius. The current popular term is grit. Success comes to those who have the grit to keep going no matter what. The Japanese proverb also applies, Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight.

The problem for writers is that grit and persistence, while very important, aren't enough. Just because you keep on writing doesn't mean you'll find a writing career.

This is where a comprehensive plan comes in. What are the steps in this plan? Tune in next week, and I'll lay out some ideas to get you there.

June 8th and 9th, More Winter In Tahoe

June 8th, 2017. The snow has been gone on the north side of our house (elevation 6450) for a week. Most Tahoe areas below 7000 feet are snow free. (Although there are many patches along the West Shore at lake level.) 

But the upper elevations are heavy with snow. Our season total at our house was around 40 feet. The official measurements at the tops of the ski areas were season totals of 65 feet. Squaw Valley had to dig tunnels down to the chairlifts so that riders could get up the mountain as if riding along a walled-in snow road. Squaw announced that they will be open until July 4th. There has even been talk of them not closing at all and staying open continuously through the summer and fall, a season that would stretch 18 months until spring of 2018. They probably won't, but it will be because of lack of skiers, not snow. 

Every time the temperature goes up a bit, the weather service issues flood warnings, and the rivers and creeks are at the top of their banks with snowmelt. 

On June 8th, we hiked up to Angora Lookout. It is only 7000 feet of elevation, yet the clouds were swirling. The temp was in the 40s. Cold rain soaked us. Looking down at Fallen Leaf Lake, we could see snow patches still lingering at Stanford Camp, elevation 6400. Looking across at Mt. Tallac, elevation 9735 feet, the summit was obscured by a snowstorm. Because the temperature drops 3 to 4 degrees for every thousand feet of elevation rise, Tallac's summit was probably about 30 degrees. And it will drop to the high teens overnight. The precip is supposed to continue, so we'll wake up to fresh white on the mountains.

When we get high wind warnings and gusts to 35 down at lake level, as forecast this day, the Sierra crest often gets 100 mile-per-hour gusts, sometimes much more.

Which means, the summit of Tallac was experiencing a blizzard during the photo below.

Waves of snow sweep across the sky.
At center left on the photo, there are still snow patches down at Stanford Camp.
The summit of Mt. Tallac is obscured by a June blizzard.
I wouldn't want to be up there!

The next day, June 9th, I gave a talk to the Incline Village Golf Club. I took another picture of Mt. Tallac, this time from 20 miles away. In the picture, Tallac is the mountain on the far shore with sunlight shining on the snow fields. The day was blustery. There were multiple showers. In conditions like this, rain showers look gray. Snow showers look white. So it appeared that the heavy shower to the right of Tallac was snow. Later on the 9th, I looked at the weather forecast. On Sunday (when this blog will post), they are predicting snow for Tahoe. Life in the mountains is Fun!

Mt. Tallac as seen from the Northwest Shore, 20 miles distant. The showers to the right are snow falling over the water.

The Hardest Part Of Writing, Part Two

Last week, I left off with my poor, lonely first novel, floundering out there in a vast, rough sea. Agents and editors were cruising in life boats, but they weren't going to take a chance at hoisting me aboard.

But if an agent or editor had responded to my novel, they might have said that my prose was purple, full of adjectives and, worse, adverbs. My dialogue tags also included the dreaded adverbs and called attention to themselves instead of being invisible helpers. My points of view jumped around from character to character within any given scene, destroying any ability of the reader to identify with a single character. My tense moments were filled with passive verbs instead of active verbs. And those same tense scenes had long, languorous, run-on sentences, taking all the brisk tension out of the scene. My dialogue was so realistic that it was like, what do you call it, totally, you know, um, whatever, boring, I guess. I had multiple scenes where there was no conflict or trouble. My hero wasn't sufficiently sympathetic for the reader to care. It took three chapters of stage setting to get to the beginning of my story. The bad guy had no believable motivation and read like a cartoon character. My other characters showed no emotion. The violence was cheap and sensational. My single love scene was cheap and sensational. It appeared that my characters had vision, i.e., they could see, but they couldn't smell or hear or touch or feel. The most important plot points hadn't been foreshadowed, so they just fell out of the blue and, hence, were unbelievable. Even worse, things happened by coincidence. Here and there I'd used big vocabulary words for no apparent purpose other than to make my book seem smart. My book had nothing to teach a reader. And possibly no reader would want to spend much time in this world I'd created because there were few redeeming qualities to my story or my characters.

I can go on. But you get the picture.

In many if not most of the arts, it's very easy for an amateur and expert alike to make an immediate assessment of quality and be fairly accurate. But with any writing at the level of someone who's actually succeeded in completing a novel, it's very difficult to make that assessment. It's especially difficult for the writer to judge his or her own writing because the writer's perception is completely shaped by their internal sense of the story they were trying to write. A writer doesn't see what they wrote. They see what they think they wrote.

So how does one get past this difficulty? By writing lots and lots and lots. You need to put in ten thousand hours at it. Very few writers create a good novel the first time they write one. In fact, most of the one-book wonders out there actually wrote a great deal of fiction before that "first novel." They may have written under a pseudonym as well. The public never knew what was still in their drawer. Most writers have to put in the equivalent of writing multiple novels before they start to develop the skills to do it well or even to simply judge it clearly.

As I've often said. You wouldn't think of putting on your first pair of figure skates and performing spinning leaps. Nor should you think you're going to produce a great novel on your first attempt.

While it's easy to judge if a figure skater is doing it well, even when the judge is a novice figure skater, it's very hard to judge if a novel is any good.

It's possible that, more than any other art, writing requires editors. Sure, a painter can benefit from the critique of a trained art teacher. But when a good painter finishes a canvas, he or she can often tell if it's good. Whereas, in writing, the input of editors is critical. It may be that the single greatest mistake novice writers make is to forego getting/hiring editors. (If you are relatively new to this writing gig, note that all professional writers use editors. It is only an amateur writer who doesn't hire a professional editor or three. And most readers recognize that by the end of the first page of their novel.)

This is also why very few successful writers think of writing as a one-book effort. They plan, from the very beginning, to write a shelf full of books. They put in enormous amounts of time.

After enough practice, that hardest part of writing gets easy. Once they can see the full picture of what makes for decent writing, it becomes much easier to do it.

If writers are persistent enough, the rewards are great. They live in a fascinating internal landscape. Many live in fascinating external landscapes. They are never bored. Never. They get to live by their own terms and their own schedule. They have no boss. And, for some writers, they even earn good money making up stories.

I highly recommend it.

Okay, time for me to go work on some fiction.