Skeleton Key
That Which Unlocks All Doors
Spectrum has launched. I repeat: Spectrum has launched. Spectrum is an anthology of queer, neurodiverse short horror fiction, edited by Aquino Loayza, Freydís Moon, and Lor Gisalson. This anthology contains twenty short stories, including mine—“These Thirteen Simple Tricks Will End Your Sleep Hallucinations For Good.” You can order Spectrum at Third Estate Books or snag the Kindle edition from Amazon. What are you waiting for? You could be reading it right now!
If you have purchased Spectrum and you would like to receive a bookplate signed by yours truly, you can reply to this newsletter (or click here to email me) with your name and mailing address and I’ll get one out to you.
Today I’m sharing the secret. If you’ve been reading faithfully—like, all the three-hundred-some essays that came before this one—then today’s the day your sticktoitiveness pays off. Today I am giving up the goods.
This is not the grand finale of Shelf Life, by the way. Shelf Life will still be back on Tuesday with some more nonsense. I owe you an article on how the NaNoWriMo organization is devouring itself like an ouroboros but I haven’t had the time to read all the documentation I found. That article is still in the works. As long as there’s even one Shelf Life in the works, Shelf Life lives on. Vive l’étagère.
So anyway, before I hand you the key to all doors, let’s take a walk down Shelf Life memory lane, hand-in-hand together. It’s relevant to the topic at hand.
One day several years ago I went on a rant about something or another to my friend. I sent too many messages in the middle of the night. She said: Catherine, I love you, but you need a blog or something for these thoughts. It was not the first middle-of-the-night rant. It was one rant too many. It was the rant that broke the biffle’s1 back.
The next day I made a list of topics I wanted to explore and write about in essay format. I came up with approximately 80 topics. For reference, here is a photo of that list. (Of page one of that list.)
Anyway, it turns out all you need is a good list. A good list is not the skeleton key but it sure helps you out. I do love lists.
When I began Shelf Life, I had a notion to write essays around 1,800 words long, twice weekly. I arrived at the 1,800 word length using the average reading time and the amount of time I thought people might be willing to spend reading an essay. While 1,800 words is a perfect Shelf Life, just so you know, I aim for anywhere in the 1,650-to-2,250 range and try to never go below 1,350 or above 2,750. Those are my personal parameters.
At this time this seemed like a very ambitious amount of writing. I was very anxious about it after I started. Once I settled on Tuesday and Thursday as the new-essay days I would spend all week and weekend working on my essays. An essay might take two or three days of work to write in full. It was exhausting and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to keep it up. I promised I’d be kind to myself and not beat myself up if I missed an essay here or there. I was also convinced I would run out of topics and come up empty the very day I exhausted my original list, and would have to shut down for lack of content.
But a wild thing happened: I didn’t run out of topics; instead, topics multiplied like bunnies. And the essays didn’t take up all my free time for long—my writing pace got faster and faster the more I wrote. Soon, I developed and settled into my current schedule: With few exceptions, I sit down on Monday night and Wednesday night at 7 o’clock in the evening and complete the next day’s essay by 9 o’clock. As in, two hours later, not fourteen hours later.
The anxiety of not having an essay ready evaporated. More important, I developed what I now think of as the most useful skill in my entire creative arsenal: The ability to think about something I want to write when I am away from writing, plan out what I will write in my head, and then sit down and spit it out onto paper exactly as it was in my head.
I have been writing fiction—not well, but writing it—for most of my life. But I did not develop this skill until I had been working on Shelf Life a while.
The skeleton key is consistency. By consistency I mean an enduring, ongoing adherence to the same thing. That could be a schedule, or a habit, or an output—but the key is doing whatever that is consistently.
Consistency doesn’t mean every day. Or, it doesn’t have to. Think about this: A day is an arbitrary measure of time, just like a minute, an hour, a month, a year, and so on. It has its basis in physical reality (that is, one turn of the planet around its axis). But to do something on a daily basis is often arbitrary. I mean it’s not arbitrary to sleep or eat a certain number of times daily or weekly but—to go to work five days out of seven? Arbitrary. Saying an affirmation or doing yoga or journaling every day—arbitrary. Why not once an hour? Why not once every two days?
We think consistency means daily but it needn’t. Sometimes pressing to do something daily is exactly how you burn out and demotivate. I have found that pushing myself to write every day doesn’t work for me. I wind up sitting in front of the computer staring at a document wishing I were washing the dishes or ironing my shirts. Then I get discouraged and I give up for a while—maybe a few months, maybe a few years—until I get a surplus of motivation to try again.
What does work for me—really well, extremely well in fact—is writing a few times a week at designated times and in a designated physical space. Over time, adherence to these parameters has conditioned my brain to write when it’s writing time. When I sit down to write, my brain and body have learned to sit still and focus on writing. Not checking social, not getting up to get a drink, not asking Alexa about the weather for the next 10 days, not remembering that the plants need to be watered—writing.
Focusing is no small feat for me: Remember, I have ADHD and I am not medicated for it at this time. I’m doing my best to manage it with mindfulness, good habits, and a whole lot of Post-It notes. That I can sit down and pour an 1,800-word essay out of my brain twice a week is huge.
I’ll add that my writing pace has increased significantly since I began. It’s not unusual for me to write between 500 and 1,000 words per hour during focused writing time. When I started, 500 words an hour was a stretch and I often wrote at a slower pace. This ends up having a snowball effect on my habit: I can write more in less time so I get in more writing practice per hour. Naturally, there’s an upper limit. I’m not sure if I’ve reached it, but I know there is a ceiling. Once I reach that, my writing pace won’t continue to go up.
Writing pace and ease of writing when I want to are not the only areas where I’ve seen consistency help my work blossom. I also try to be consistent about submitting work for publication and sending out agent queries. I don’t do it every day. I don’t do it on a precise schedule. But I do try to make sure I’m submitting and querying regularly—as in, multiple times per month. Until I reach a point where every written thing has sold, I’m working on selling the written things.
My two published short stories have come out of consistency-based submitting. That is, I did not finish a story and shoot it off to a publisher (or publishers) and get an accept in that first wave of submissions. Instead, I continued to submit the same stories over time, consistently, until they eventually received accepts. I still continue to submit more stories that I have in the can, over and over, hoping to hit the right editor or agent with the right work and make a sale.
Is the consistency of sending out submissions and queries making it more likely that I’ll get an accept? Yes and no. It’s like rolling dice, right? If you roll a pair of dice 1,000 times, the probability of rolling snake eyes at some point is nearly 100 percent. However, your odds of rolling snake eyes on any individual roll is always the same: one in thirty-six. If you have not rolled snake eyes 999 times in a row, your chances of rolling snake eyes on the 1,000th roll are still one in thirty-six—not 100 percent.
Submitting manuscripts is like this. If I submit 100 times the probability of getting an accept is greater than if I submit once, but the odds of an accept depend upon many factors, some mathematical (like the accept rate of each individual venue) and some not (like the quality of my work and the editor’s taste). I do not believe that submitting more times has lead to the accepts I’ve gotten but my consistency in submitting has had another important effect: I have become completely desensitized to (manuscript) rejections.
While I’m always hopeful for an accept, I no longer experience any pain or sadness when I don’t get one. I have, in essence, built a callus up over that part of my soul. If I stop submitting for a while and then go back to it, the callus has gotten thinner and the rejections start stinging again. In this respect, submitting consistently has been key to my ability to submit a lot—I don’t need a break from it anymore to recover from the rejection blues. I simply do not get them.
Whatever it is you’re trying to do, consistency is the answer to getting you there. If you want to run a marathon you have to run consistently. If you want to regulate your sleep cycle you have to go to bed and get up consistently at the same time each day. If you want to good at writing—not in the sense that you’re writing will be good but in the sense that you’re good at putting words down on paper—all you need is consistency. The rest follows from that.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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Biffle is a pronunciation of the abbreviation BFFL, or “best friend for life.”