Clown Car
Evacuating the Vehicle Safely and Efficiently
Today’s article takes its name from the circus routine wherein a bunch of clowns—like a simply, ridiculously improbable number of clowns—come out of a small- or ordinary-size car.
Look, I don’t know why this is supposed to be funny. I don’t know why anything clowns do is supposed to be funny. I don’t find clowns funny and I don’t know many or any people who do. I suspect clowns are a holdover from an earlier time in humanity when our collective sense of humor was less evolved. One hundred percent of my exposure to clowns has been the scary variety in horror movies. I just do not see clowning as a viable mode of humor.
Some may argue that’s a sign of our collective sense of humor de-evolving, not evolving, but ask yourself: Would the people of the 1970s have appreciated Kate McKinnon?
Anyway today’s Shelf Life is about what to do when you have ideas for things stuffed into your head like your skull is a moderate-to-compact car and the ideas are an improbable quantity of unfunny clowns.
This isn’t going to be relatable to every writer because some of us don’t have an improbable quantity of ideas we’re excited about at any given time, and then some of us write so quickly that we can get to every idea in a reasonable amount of time. But it’s going to be relatable for some writers, where some is a quantity greater than or equal to two because I was in the car the other day with a friend who is a writer and she said she didn’t know which of her ideas to start work on as she wraps up her current thing, and I concurred that I have the same issue. So that’s two of us.
Now I am going to turn to another metaphoric image, which is the snowball. You may have heard of the snowball-related method I’m going to talk about in reference to debt reduction; it’s often espoused (though not invented) by Dave Ramsey. I don’t endorse Dave Ramsey as a source of personal finance wisdom; but he’s definitely the first person I think of when I think “snowball method.”
The idea is, as a snowball rolls down a snowy hill it picks up more snow as it goes, growing in mass and therefore rolling down the hill faster and faster as it goes and grows. In the snowball method of debt-reduction, the concept is:
Aggressively pay down your smallest debt first (while paying the minimum on all your other debts).
Then, roll what you were paying toward your now-paid-off smallest debt plus its minimum into your next smallest debt, in addition to the minimum on that debt.
Keep rolling funds into the debts one by one, adding the minimum payment on each debt to the snowball as you go.
???
Debt freedom.
Okay. That’s the concept. Will it work if you stick to it? Probably, eventually. Is it the optimal way to reduce debt? No. So why does finance guy recommend it? Because it’s an easy way to put your debts in a straightforward order from which to tackle them. And, because you will pay off your smallest debt faster than a larger debt, you get a “victory” as soon as possible and that gives you momentum and motivation to keep going.
A big reason why it’s not always optimal is because different debts have different interest rates, and if your smallest debt has 0 percent interest while your highest debt has a much higher interest rate, you’re losing money over time as you accrue interest on a debt you’re not paying while you pay down an interest-free loan instead.
True story: My finance guy (not Dave Ramsey) yelled at me (gently) for paying my 0-percent-interest car loan down faster than I needed to. “Catherine, that’s free money oh my god.”
Sorry, this isn’t Wealth Life.
Story ideas are like your writing debt and writing them is paying them and finishing them is paying them off. That’s how this is related to the snowball method of debt reduction. The first step in the snowball method of debt reduction is to list all your debts from smallest balance owed to largest. But we the people of Shelf Life are going to be more strategic about this, so we’re not going to list out our writing projects or ideas simply from smallest word count to largest, although that’s a factor. We’re going to take into account other factors. Ultimately, we’re going to come up with an ordered list of the writing projects we’d like to do so we can see at a glance what’s on our writing to-do list and get a sense of the overall size of the project in terms of length, complexity, and difficulty so we can decide where to start.
I advised my friend and I am now sharing the same advice here. The first complete novel I wrote was not my best or most compelling or favorite idea, but my easiest. It had the simplest, most linear plot and fewest characters. In the end I finished a manuscript that I felt was not really publication-quality and I stuck it in a drawer, where I’ve revisited it from time to time.
With the benefit of hindsight, I’m grateful I went about it this way. Here are the reasons why:
Most first novels won’t be publication-quality on the first try, and a simple novel is easier to revise than a complex one.
Once I completed a novel, no matter how simple it may have been, I knew I had the ability to complete a novel. I no longer have to wonder, as I worked on future ones, whether I had it in me.
I learned things by writing an entire novel end to end that I couldn’t have learned if I quit halfway through to work on something else. The experience of writing a complete novel is invaluable to the process of writing any future ones.
I was able to knock it out faster than I could have any of my other ideas.
So I recommended to my friend, assess your ideas to find the easiest one and tackle that first if you can’t decide where to start. From there, if you still don’t know where to go next, just snowball method it.
Right. So! How do you find your easiest idea or project? I’ll walk you through the method I use to assign various values to projects to help me sort them. Your own values might be different than mine, but hopefully my method will get you thinking about how to assess difficulty of various projects, whether you use that for ranking them or for some other devious purpose.
Length
The first—and maybe easiest—factor to assess is project length. You can typically ballpark the length (word count) a project should end up being when it’s done based on the type of manuscript it is and the market in which you hope to sell it.
For instance, let’s say you’re writing a short story. Right there that tells you you’re going to target between 1,000 and 7,500 words. If you came in under 1,000 you’d be writing flash and over 7,500 is a novelette. Let’s say, further, that you’re writing a science fiction short story and you hope to sell it to one of the major magazines in this space like Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, or Asimov’s. Those magazines all take short fiction up to 7,500 words (and several consider novelettes), but prefer (or more often accept) stories in the 4,000- to 5,000-word range. That may help you narrow your target word count further, for instance, to 5,000 words.
If you’re writing a novel, you can find guidance all over the web about word counts for various genres and market demographics. YA stories in most genres tend to be shorter than the adult stories in those same genres; middle-grade stories are usually shorter than YA. So if you’re writing a science fiction novel for adults you might target 80,000 words, while 60,000 might be more appropriate for YA science fiction and 40,000 for middle-grade science fiction.
This doesn’t need to be reflective of your final word count once all is said and done. Maybe your science fiction manuscript ends up running to 150,000 words. You’re not setting a limit to the number of words you’ll write, but just assessing the probably length of your projects relative to one another. Put another way, you don’t have to know for sure that your science fiction novel will be 80,000 words and your science fiction short story will be 5,000 words—just that, in terms of length, the short story is about 6 percent of the workload of the novel.
Complexity
If we were doing the snowball method of debt reduction we’d stop after length. That would be the only factor we need. But it isn’t so we’re not. The next thing to tally up is project complexity. This is to help gauge the difficulty of writing the story irrespective of length. A long work can be very straightforward and a short work can be very complex.
To assess project complexity, I take the following into account:
How many named characters does the project have (major and supporting)?
How many subplots does the project have besides the main plot?
In how many distinct settings does the project take place?
Do I have in mind an unusual or complicated narrative structure for the story?
Under “unusual or complicated narrative structures,” consider: Second-person narrator; epistolary; multi-perspective/head hopping; dialogue-only story (such as “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson or its send-up, “They’re Made Out of Corn” by Katherine Crighton).
For bullet items one through three above, a higher number means a more-complex story and a lower number likely means a less-complex story. For bullet item number four, a yes is likely to be more complex than a no.
Depending on how many projects you have in the works, you may want to rank your projects in order of complexity or you may want to assign a handful of values (eg, “low,” “medium,” and “high”) and assign a value to each depending on how they score. You don’t want to invest more time ranking them than you do actually writing. Just try to get a sense of how complex they are relative to one another.
Motivation Level
Motivation level is the free space. This is where I assess how excited I am about the project, or how motivated I am to work on it. I might be highly motivated to work on something long and complex and less motivated to work on something short and simple, so I (personally) don’t want to go by motivation level alone. I don’t necessarily want to jump into something long and complex and burn through my motivation and wind up stalled when I could have used that same writing energy to complete something shorter or simpler.
I assign all my projects a motivation level of “high,” “medium,” or “low.” When I’m assigning values, I try to be realistic about it. They can’t all be my highest motivator or priority. I try to give no more than two or three projects a “high” (that’s about 10 percent of my list to be candid) and sort the rest among “medium” and “low.”
Project Stage and Completeness
Next I sort out where each project is currently sitting in terms of stage and completeness. Since I have many projects, I stage them along the following spectrum to help me keep track of where they are:
Ideation (I have the idea but I’m still fleshing it out)
Planning (I am working on a detailed synopsis or outline)
Drafting (I have started writing it)
Revision (I’ve completed a draft and now I’m revising)
A project that is further along the spectrum should in theory require less work to complete, other things being equal (the other things are never equal). I usually do my ideation process before I put something on the front burner to actually begin the planning and drafting. That is, I don’t usually make something my main focus while it’s still an idea. I just kind of add to the idea here and there till it graduates to “I have enough detail now to make an outline.” I usually knock an outline out in one or two sittings (for short stories I usually do a synopsis rather than an outline).
If I’ve completed planning, I can jump right into drafting. If not, there’s prework to do (for me—not everyone outlines!) and prework is a place I’m liable to get stuck.
If I’ve already begun drafting, I gauge current against projected word count to get project completeness; that is, if I’ve written 10,000 words of a projected 60,000, the project is approximately 17 percent complete.
Initiation Date
Finally, I take a look at when I came up with the project idea to get a sense of how long it’s been sitting around not being worked on. This isn’t an important factor, but it’s something I take into account if I need a tiebreaker. Interestingly, older and newer can both be a pro for me to pick a project to work on depending on how I feel right then. Sometimes I give preference to something older that’s been “waiting longer,” and sometimes I give preference to something newer that might be more timely, relevant, or current.
Parting Thought
Finally, the secret weapon for choosing what to work on. Whether you take all or any of the above into account when ranking your projects according to how much effort they might need to complete, or whether you write all your project ideas down on paper and pull one out of a jar at random, if deciding to work on the project makes you feel a little deflated like you wish you had decided on a different project—you picked the wrong project. Find the one that doesn’t make you feel like that, and write that one.
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