Thirty-Second Rule

Nothing to Do With Dropping Food on the Floor

Welcome to your last Shelf Life of June and possibly (?) last exhortation to read “Assistance” in The Quiet Reader magazine’s new sixth edition, which is only new for one more day (today) before I will begin referring to it as “June’s sixth edition.” Anyway, I hope you will read if you have not already. I’m very proud of this piece and to be part of the table of contents with so many talented writers.

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Today’s Shelf Life is on one of my favorite rules of writing (drafting, specifically). I have talked about writing rules I don’t care for at all in Writing Rules to Break At Will and I’ve shared my 99-percent rule of worldbuilding (that article has a graphic!). I’m big on rules sometimes and also not at all big on rules other times, rules being colonial.

Most conflict in storytelling (and in general) can be sorted into a series of categories, for instance:

• Person versus person

• Person versus nature

• Person versus society

• Person versus themself

A fun fact is when I was taught this in elementary school it was as “man versus man, man versus nature,” and so on (and all the examples were Jack London stories, for some reason?). When I was taught again in college, it was “woman versus society, woman versus herself” and so on. I’ve modernized it appropriately for the present day.

Rules are like this, too. There’s rules imposed on you by society (that is, laws of the land you have to follow); rules imposed on you by other people who have some kind of authority over you (like your boss or your parent); rules imposed on you by nature (like the laws of physics); and rules you impose on yourself (like “you have to write Shelf Life before you go to bed”).

This all follows with writing, too, where there are the “natural” laws of writing—I mean things like grammar and usage, which are actually not natural at all—as well as the rules imposed by society and other people (“what stories are selling at market?” for instance, or “you can’t just sit there and write while you’re on the clock at work!”) and so on. The rules I impose on myself are the ones I’m on about today.

As a person who is easily distracted not because I lack discipline but because I have only-sporadically-managed ADHD, rules for myself help me stay on track with the things I want to do. Writing is something I want to do but I do it at a computer and that is the most dangerous place for me to be, it’s the place where I store all my video games and it’s my day job workplace and there’s 50 million social media tabs open in my browser. It’s a distraction minefield. But I also know myself and I know I am never going to write a substantial amount of text by hand, like with a pen on paper.

Since discipline isn’t the problem, rules can help. I talked about using my pomodoro timer to do 25-minute-on, 5-minute-off springs in Round Robin, for instance, and that’s a good example—no window but the word processor window during those “on” 25 minutes. That’s a simple rule, not always easy to follow, but it’s straightforward and I can remember it and I can usually stay on task for 25 minutes.

Another lifesaver is the thirty-second rule, which I’m sharing with you today. It is not the thirty-second rule in the sense that it comes after my thirty-first rule of writing, because I definitely do not have thirty-two rules (or do I?). It’s a rule of thirty seconds.

I’m going to tell you the exact origin story of this rule, even.

I have learned that one of the places—if not the single place—I am most likely to go of the rails and get distracted is when I can’t think of the right word for something. This is a trigger situation for me. I just typed “more on trigger situations later” but then I thought nah, heck with that, more on trigger situations now. 

I’m using trigger situation to mean an event or occurrence that routinely produces a behavior in a person. Example: My partner likes the house to be really chilly when he goes to bed, so he has the thermostat set to turn down around 10 so by the time he’s ready for bed the house is cold. I never associated “cold” with “sleepy” before I lived here but now whenever I feel chilly I get sleepy because subconsciously I think it’s bedtime. 

Trigger = Cold temperature
Thought = “Hmm, it must be bedtime.”
Behavior = I get sleepy

Another example is that when I get frustrated with work, I tend to get up and walk away from my computer for a few minutes, and I usually wander to the kitchen and end up eating something. So the chain begins with the trigger that I’m frustrated with work and ends with me eating even though I don’t feel hungry. I didn’t want to keep snacking in the middle of the day so I conscientiously worked to change this behavior so when I feel frustrated with work, instead I go sit outside for like ten minutes. Trigger remains the same, but the behavior it causes has changed.

Back to trying to think of the right word for something. This is the number-one trigger for me getting distracted while I’m writing. Whatever something is—person, place, thing, idea, action, color, smell, whatever—I don’t have the right word for it off the top of my head so I pause to try to find the right word. That’s the trigger: I don’t have the right word.

This could be a name for a character; a name for a fictional place, object, activity, sport, or animal; or even a regular old word but I just can’t think of it.

Example: 

• I am writing and I can’t think of the right word. “Dang what’s the word for when you hate something so much it’s like, it’s antithetical to who you are, it’s like, incompatible with who you are as a person?—Heck. What’s that word?”

• I stop writing to try to find the word; this may involve googling or looking up words that are close but not quite right in an online dictionary or thesaurus (I like Merriam Webster).

• After some amount of time and sleuthing, I locate the right word—“anathema, that’s it”—and then I can continue with my draft.

The danger is in that sleuthing step when I open a web browser because now we’re in the wild west of distractions. One minute I’m trying to remember the word anathema and the next thing I know I’m like six Wikipedia pages deep in the Enya discography. Did you know she’s the best-selling Irish solo music artist in history?

And that’s just when the word I’m looking for is a real word. A character name or a name for a fictional thing or activity is way worse. I could lose hours just trying to come up with one word.

The thirty-second rule was hatched one night while I was writing, and a friend (Matt, who is not reading this) was chatting with me on Discord, and I came to a fictional word I had to make up, for the home a person was living in on a run-down, bordering-on-derelict space station. Apartment seemed like too normal a word for this, and flat also did not feel right, so I was like “Okay I need to come up with a word quickly for what these people call their homes” and I was trying to figure it out and then my friend was like “What are you writing about anyway?” and I was like “Oh sweet maybe this guy can help me figure out the right word.”

Anyway three hours later I went to bed and we had not come up with a word to use and I made a rule that hereafter, I will never spend more than thirty seconds trying to find or create a word or name for something while I’m drafting, period. 

I know this is a problem for other writers because I see authors on Twitter like “help should my main character have blue eyes or green eyes?” and I’m like “Team Green or Team Blue, if you opened Twitter while you were drafting you done lost the war.” I know this from experience. I have lost that war many times.

If you do not already know this writing and publishing trick, let me introduce you to the magic of TK. TK is an abbreviation that means “to come.” Why is it “TK” instead of “TC”? Because the letters T and C occur next to each other all the time in the English language (witchcraft, stretch, streetcar, patchwork) but the letters T and K rarely do (unless you’re writing about latkes or pocketknives). As a result, TK and its elder sister TKTK are regularly used in publishing to indicate where material is to be inserted later, because when you search for “TK” you’re probably only going to find your placeholders and your search function won’t get caught up on every instance of “TC” in the whole manuscript (if you are writing a book on the history of latkes or pocketknives, use a different placeholder).

Under my thirty-second rule, if I can’t come up with the right word or name for something in thirty seconds or fewer, I give up and put the first or closest thing I can think of and tack “TK” onto the beginning or end of it and move on.

For example:

• “It was the end of a long shift and Bernadette was headed back to her TKapartment.”

• “Using magic wasn’t just forbidden by his society, it was antithetical(TK) to him.”

• “And then they met up with the governess, and the governess’s name was . . . uh. . . .EnyaTK.”

In each case I have tacked TK onto a word or name that I know is not quite right so I can quickly find all the places I stuck the placeholder when I am revising, or even at the end of my drafting session when I want to take some time to revisit and think about the word or name, dive into the thesaurus, or whatever. As long as I don’t let that research or creation process take over my drafting session and drag me down a distraction rabbit hole, it’s all good.

If I only need to come back to a single instance of a word (like the middle bullet) I use the parentheses. If I’m going to be using a word or name several times as a placeholder before I go back and fill in with the final choice, I make the letters TK part of the word. A long manuscript is going to probably have plenty of TKs and (TK)s so it’s helpful to be able to search for them separately.

This is a pitfall for plenty of fiction writers. No matter how carefully you plan in advance, you’re going to find yourself at some point needing a character you didn’t plan on or needing to come up with the name of the fictional town where some character lived while they were in college and a lot of us resist going with something simple like “Jane” or “Springfield.” We’re creative people okay we don’t want to call a character Jane unless there’s a significant reason to do so. We want to give characters names like Arabella and Sabriel. But nothing will waste your entire writing session like a trip to the baby name dictionary. Just call her TKrudy and move on.

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