Well, we’re back, and we’ve rescued our time travel episode. Unfortunately, almost all mentions of Lincoln have been redacted, and his gold is conspicuously absent. Instead, Brandon, Dan, and Howard all travel in time (sort of) to offer advice to our past selves.

What do we have to say to our earlier incarnations?

• Stop playing video games.
• What you’re doing is actually working. Keep doing it.
• Stop waiting on your collaborator.
• Don’t try to write to the market.
• Try outlining all the way to the end.
• Try new things.
• Stop worrying.
• You can make a living as an artist.

So… there’s the advice. Now listen to the ‘cast and get all of it in context.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

Special Plug: Superstars Writing Seminar — Brandon will be presenting this January with Dave Wolverton, Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Eric Flint, and Sherrilyn Kenyon.

Writing Prompt: Go forward in time and get next week’s writing prompt.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Treat your writing professionally. Learn your own process. Don’t just wish, start! Shut up and start. Be wary of collaboration. Be true to yourself, write the books you care about. Try out different ways of writing (outlining, discovery writing, etc.) early. Try new things! Pay attention to what you love, and don’t worry. You can make a living writing books.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Five Episode 12…
[Dan] Time Travel! [strange voices WHOOOHOOO]
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Brandon] OK. Well, it’s not actually about time travel, so you’re probably going to be sad.
[Howard] It is about time travel.
[Brandon] No, it’s us time traveling. We’re going to give advice to our past self. This is kind of a play on the whole what have we learned, but really, we want to look back at ourselves before we were established professionals in our fields and give ourselves advice. What would we say, specifically to ourselves? We’ll see if this actually works. If it doesn’t, then we’ll go back in time and tell ourselves not to record this episode.
[Dan] Not to do this.
[Brandon] All right. Dan! You’re first off.

[Dan] OK. Here’s one piece of advice. I would go back in time to myself about let’s say 12 years ago and I would say, “Stop playing video games.” This is a big change that I made when I sold a book. I said if I’m going to do this professionally, I need to treat it like a job. I need more room in my schedule than I have, something has to go, so I cut out video games. That increased my productivity so much, and I wish I had done it years earlier.
[Brandon] That’s very good advice.
[Howard] So you wanted to go back to 1998 and tell yourself to quit playing…
[Dan] StarCraft.
[Howard] StarCraft. You know what, that’s fair, because all those video games in 1998, they sucked. They didn’t have the frame rate…
[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, if only they knew…
[Howard] You couldn’t play them on a widescreen.
[Dan] That’s true. If I went back in time and showed my old self StarCraft 2 and said, “Just wait for this one…” [garbled]
[Brandon] But then you would have sucked when StarCraft 2 came out.
[Dan] I know. I would be horrible. I’m horrible at it anyway.
[Brandon] No, this is great advice. We often tell people… they say, “How do I write? I don’t have time.” Dan is the poster boy for this, because you… having… what did you have, three kids at the time?
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] Three kids at the time, working a full-time job, still found a way to…
[Howard] And now you’ve got seven? Five?
[Dan] I now have 12 children. Only four of them have names [garbled]
[Howard] I thought it was a prime number.

[Brandon] No, I was actually fortunate in a lot of ways. I’ve talked about this before, but I consider myself very lucky in several instances. There are several things I wouldn’t change about what I did. Number one, I wouldn’t change the fact that I was too scared to submit at first. Now, that’s odd advice. A lot of people will tell you, you gotta start submitting stuff, start sending out. But the fact that I was too frightened really to send things out meant that I could kind of write in my own little writer’s personal enclave for a little while. I completed a number of books before I started showing them to anybody, which really helped my confidence. The fact that I could finish books. Now, that’s not going to be great advice for everyone.
[Howard] So the advice you’d go back and give yourself is, “You’re doing fine. Do it just like this. That’s perfect.”?
[Brandon] No, there are a few things I would change though. I just wanted to bring that one out because it’s contrary advice to what most people get. It’s… again not everything is going to work for everybody. I think one big piece of advice I would give myself is the one that I give to new writers a lot on this podcast, which is, it doesn’t matter if other writers do it, you don’t have to. Meaning try out a lot of different things, but understand that this process of becoming a professional writer, this is all about learning your process. Howard! What would you… what advice would you give yourself?

[Howard] I would go back to 1995 when I had an idea to write a science-fiction story and have a friend of mine illustrate it and post it on the Internet… understand, back then I didn’t even know what a gif file was. I didn’t even know that there was image compression that would work for things like this on the web. But I thought, “A comic on the Internet. It sounds like a great way to tell a fun story.” I would go back to myself back then and say, “OK. First of all, your friend is never going to draw any pictures. Second. This is a fantastic idea. You’re going to execute on it in five years, and you’re still not going to know how to draw. So you might as well start learning to draw now.”
[Brandon] That’s great advice.
[Howard] Don’t waste time wishing that someone else would draw this for you. Just… because… five years of drawing practice? If I had just drawn one picture a day for five years and nothing else, then when I finally got around to launching Schlock Mercenary, the art would not be quite so…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] Primal. Primal. That’s the word were going to use for this.
[Howard] Primal. What an awesome word.
[Dan] Primal. With untamed talent seething beneath the surface.
[Howard] Yeah, that’s what people see when they look at that. They say, “Wow, look at that…”
[Brandon] Untamed talent.
[Howard] Raw, untamed talent, just spilling off the page. Almost as if he didn’t know how to hold a pencil.
[Dan] That’s very good advice, though. I remember hearing this from… I think back when we were in a class with Dave Wolverton and he said that one of the best pieces of writing advice is write. Everyone has an idea they want to do. The difference between writers and everyone else is that the writers just sit down and do it. Yes, you’re not going to be good at it, at first. But that’s why you do it, is so you can become good.
[Howard] I think for me there was this mystique behind the writing part, where I thought that this is something I could never do. There’s probably people out there who want to be able to tell a story and feel like, “Oh, I’m just not ready to try and tell that story yet. I need to learn something else.” Oh, shut up and start writing. Shut up and start drawing. You’re not going to learn it until you pick up the pencil, put your hands on the keyboard, slap yourself down and start making your art.

[Brandon] Something else about your story there that raised a red flag for me is the whole idea of collaboration. There are a lot of people… OK, there are a small number of people out there for whom beginning collaborating is a good way for them to start.
[Howard] Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are the textbook example of… they started collaborating and have a multimillion dollar Penny Arcade empire as a result.
[Brandon] It does work. That’s… it’s one of these sort of… it doesn’t… don’t always take every bit of advice, but for 90% of the people I’ve met who say, “We’re going to start writing a story together,” or “We’re going to start working together,” it’s a disaster. It makes them both procrastinate. One is never as dedicated to it as the other. Or they’re both kind of dedicated to their own ideas and don’t want to do the other person’s ideas secretly. It just…
[Dan] It’s dangerous. It’s something that we discussed in an entire podcast before, so if you’re wondering about this, go back and find that one.
[Brandon] Yeah. Collaboration.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s do our book of the week. My wife is actually going to do the book of the week for us this week.
[Emily] The book of the week is Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. It is about nine-year-old Tiffany Aching. She learns about sheep, about her family, about witches, and has lots of crazy experiences with a bunch of redhaired, blue-skinned, Scottish-sounding pixies. It’s hilarious. Even though the protagonist is a nine-year-old, the humor is funny to anyone, I think. It’s also very thought-provoking, and makes you think about… it made me think about families and about loss, as well as making me laugh.
[Brandon] All right. You can download a free trial copy of that by going to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. Support us and the podcast, and support Terry Pratchett in his awesome writing.
[Howard] I’d just like to echo Emily’s plug. I love Wee Free Men. I love the whole Tiffany Aching series. Lots of fun.

[Brandon] So I’ve got another piece of advice for myself. I’ve written about this on my website before. I may have mentioned it on the podcast. I entered something of a little bit of a dark time for myself in writing… it wasn’t that dark, but. It was actually after you left, Dan, our writing group and moved to Logan. I was getting very discouraged with my writing and I started writing toward the market. I produced a couple of books that were really dreadful for me, because I was… instead of saying, “Oh, this is awesome stuff that I want to do,” I was going and saying, “Well, what are people buying?” instead. I would give myself that piece of advice. Stay the course. Keep going. You aren’t the only person who has written nine novels and not had any of them get published area and the longer I’m in this business, the more I find that there are plenty of people who wrote even more than I did before getting published. I hadn’t been going that long at that point. I mean, five years, six years is not a very long time in this business to be trying and not breaking in. I was starting to think I was hopeless, though.
[Howard] Now, this begs the classic time travel question which is, if you had told yourself that, “Stay the course and don’t bother trying to write towards the market.” Would you have learned? The you who’s listening to the advice… would you have learned enough just from getting the advice to benefit and be the strong writer that you are today, or are there a couple hundred thousand words in there that you just need to write?
[Brandon] I don’t know. I mean, we don’t want to really delve into the whole change… go back and tell yourself this and suddenly Hitler rules America somehow sort of thing. But I mean, I wrote Elantris before I wrote these books.
[Howard] OK.
[Brandon] I wrote White Sand before I wrote these books. Elantris and White Sand are the two books that generally my friends and even the professional contacts consider the best books of my unpublished career. I wrote Dragonsteel which was the most ambitious. It didn’t quite work, but it was the most ambitious. I wrote all three of those books, and then after that, went and started working on the books that didn’t sell. I didn’t feel comfortable, even after having written them, even sending them out places. Now maybe there are some things I learned in the course of writing those books… certainly there are. But I wonder if I could have learned more by writing books I actually cared about.
[Dan] Quite possibly.

[Howard] Advice I would go back and give myself after I had actually started cartooning… I would tell myself to try outlining much earlier on in my writing career. Try to outline from the beginning of the story to the end of the story, and think in terms of making promises to the reader and then fulfilling them. Just structurally, I think that that lesson is one that conceptually has been one of the most valuable for me. I still don’t do a whole lot of outlining. I’m not especially good at it. Some of the very best things I’ve written were things where I managed to outline my way all the way past the big reveal before I started writing the first strips.
[Brandon] I still think one of the best things you’ve written is that Mad Scientist Residents bonus story which I believe is one of the ones that you hashed out ahead of time.
[Howard] That… yep, we outlined that and then wrote it all the way out and actually penciled it all the way out and took it to you, Brandon, and Dan for critique and then added a page as a result.
[Brandon] Me, Brandon, and Dan? Which other Brandon… are you two timing me with another Brandon?
[Dan] No, he was talking to Abraham Lincoln.
[Brandon] Oh, that’s right.
[Howard] Oh, Mister Lincoln. Hello.
[Brandon] That’s right. Time traveling. We’re doing this in the theater. By the way, Lincoln, DUCK! Okay…

[Dan] Okay. Here’s the advice that I would go back and give to myself, which would be, try new things. I for the longest time thought that I was going to be a fantasy author, because that’s what I read all the time.
[Brandon] Epic fantasy. You thought you were going to be epic fantasy.
[Dan] Epic fantasy specifically. You guys, unfortunately, may have the opportunity to hear some of that in an upcoming episode. But I stuck with that for four books before I started branching out and trying new things. At that point, I said, “Well, I’m going to do a historical. I’m going to do a horror. I’m going to do all of these other thing.” Eventually, I found a genre that fit me much better. I wish that I had done that much earlier. So that would be my advice, is don’t marry yourself to one genre right off the bat. Try new things. Play the field.
[Brandon] That’s excellent. If I could go back in time, I’d actually go back in time about an hour and ask Howard to wear pants to this podcast tonight.
[Dan] I already tried that, and that resulted in the pants not being on, which is how we see time travel messing…
[Howard] I’ve got my coat in my lap. We’re okay.
[Brandon] Howard’s also on medication, so…
[Howard] Yeah. That’s why the witty repartee from my end of the room is not quite as… witty.
[Jordo] It’s about 10 seconds behind everyone else.
[Dan] Or reparcious.
[Howard] I’m surrounded by about 6 inches of really slow air.
[Dan] Yeah, that’s Abraham Lincoln.

[Howard] I’ve got a serious one. I would go back to 1993… 1993? No, 1992. October of 1992 when I first met Sandra. I played this scenario out in my head where I asked myself, “Howard, if you’re really in love with this woman, would you be willing to give up your music career in order to be married and have kids?” And I answered… in my own head, I answered, “Oh, absolutely. But don’t be ridiculous, I’m not going to have to do that.” I would tell myself, “Yes, you are going to have to do that, and it’s going to be okay.” That would cheapen the whole decision and probably destroy my marriage. There’s a butterfly effect for you.
[Brandon] Well, another butterfly effect one, but one that I would tell myself and I would tell a lot of our writers that are listening is to stop worrying. This is… I mean… we are… by nature, we just worry. But I worried a lot about publishing. You guys didn’t know me. I’m not a very high stress person, but it was a pretty high stress thing for me, looking forward and thinking, “Wow. I have put all of my eggs in this basket. I have not really trained myself careerwise to do anything other than write. I spend all of my time writing. If I fall face first on this, I’ve got nothing. Am I ever going to be able to support myself, let alone a family?” All of these things. I spent a lot of time worrying about this that is just a lot of wasted time. Because at the same time, I was loving what I was doing. Absolutely loving it. I enjoy writing to an extent that I… there are very few things that come even near. If I would’ve just focused on that, and less on the worry, I think I would’ve been better off. So guys, stop worrying.
[Dan] plus, I totally could have gotten you a job writing catalog copy with me over at the shampoo place.
[Brandon] Yeah, you totally could have. If I would’ve known that I had a great fallback, that I could be writing shampoo catalog copy with Dan…
[Dan] Oh, the heady days that might have been.
[Howard] Well, it’s better than turning very grammatically correct burgers.
[Dan] Had Abraham Lincoln found his gold. I’ll finish up with a really quick one. I would go back in time to myself in high school, and tell myself that you can make a living as an artist. That was a huge, life-changing thing when Dave Wolverton told me that in college. It had never occurred to me that that was possible. I had this dream since childhood and had never followed up on it because I thought, “Well, of course you can’t do that. You can’t write books for a living. You have to have a job.”

[Brandon] That reminds me. Do you guys mind if I take a self-indulgent moment and plug the writing conference that I’m doing next month?
[Dan] Please do.
[Brandon] Dave Wolverton is going to be one of the presenters. It’s being put on mostly by Kevin J. Anderson, but it’s got Eric Flint and Rebecca Moesta and myself all going to be there. It’s in Salt Lake. It’s called Superstars Writing Seminars. It’s basically a crash course in the business of writing. All the stuff that Dave taught us in our class plus a lot of really great professional writers talking about contracts, about getting an editor, getting agent, what agents do, really a lot of access to professional writers. We did this once before last year. It was fantastic
[Howard] I looked at the website for that and realized that with the exception of the one guest who’s new, I have heard every one of the people there speak and they have all been awesome. Fantastic.
[Brandon] Eric Flint knows so much. You guys don’t understand how much this guy knows about the business. He’s worked as an editor, he’s worked as an author. Kevin and Rebecca, of course, are just brilliant, and Dave too. So, anyway, you can look that up. Superstars Writing Seminars. It’s going to be a fun time.
[Howard] So in 2015, when we record another time travel episode, I’ll probably be telling myself, “You know what? You may think you know everything, but you should go ahead and go to that thing in January, anyway, Howard.”

[Brandon] All right. Your writing prompt is to go forward in time and get next week’s writing prompt and write a story based on it.
[Dan] Nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.