The Six Steps to Publication (in less than two years!)

Hello there. This is Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. And, oh, boy, it's been an intense weekend where we got. We started our first podcast and we just. So many different things going on, trying to get the year going, trying to get everything working in the same order. It's like I really let myself shut down for the year over Christmas and New Year's, actually starting with Thanksgiving, really, I mean, because I've been driving myself so hard. So in putting the pieces of the puzzle back together, it's going to take me a little while to get up to speed. So, you know, please, please forgive me for, for that. I want to be here for you, but the. Our. Our podcast, which can be found@lifewritingpodcast.com is now live. And so we're going to be doing that and we're going to want questions. One of the things that I want to do is to answer people's questions on the podcast. We're still trying to figure out what the format should be. It's going to be some combination of tonight, just talking, sharing our lives, talking about the things that go into our lives and the way that we organize these things, our relationship, our physical health, and the work. Of course, the work is critical. If you don't make the money, you can't sustain your mission. So acting as if that's not important is naive and childish. As far as I'm concerned, that art has to be in that framework, has to be in relationship to that if it's going to be an occupation. I mean, if you're just doing it for fun, then that there's no need to worry about that at all. But in terms of time to take care of yourself physically, your physicality, you know, leading into the ability to make more money and to protect your family and serve your family in different ways, and your family being both a source of motivation and what it is that we. We take care of ourselves physically and make money for, to protect and uplift. So these things are all connected. And how these things are connected and why they're connected and how to create that connection yourself is a part of what I want to talk about. Now, if the weekly is going to be a deep dive into what's going on with my relationship with Tananarive in our work, then it is, you know, it raises the question, what should the daily be? And I think that the daily is, you know, kind of a dump of what the last 24 hours have been, the last 48 hours, last 72 hours have been. So to that end, I Wanted to go through the other steps. The thing that we start with in terms of helping people understand how to build a writing career is sort of the atomic theory where you take the smallest unit that is actually a self contained unit of your craft or your destination, your goal, and make sure that you do that every day. And it should be a small unit, something that can be done in five minutes or less. So in meditating, it is literally five minutes of breathing, Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing, once every three hours. That's literally what that is in terms of the physical body. It is probably three repetitions each of the five Tibetans, which takes about 10 minutes perhaps. But there are smaller things. I'm looking at crawling. Crawling is a very interesting exercise because if you do it properly, it's both very, very safe. And after the first minute or so, it's hideously difficult if you're not used to that. I mean, you watch babies doing it and say, oh, that looks easy and cute. But it is a foundational movement. So I'm looking at that and asking myself the question, could crawling. And you're going to want to do some research into this. Could crawling be the kind of foundational exercise where if you don't have anything else, you could practice laying down on the ground and standing back up again, which is the foundation of the Turkish getup. Or maybe you could look at joint mobility drills. Those are really, really great. Or you could look at crawling and some combination of these things. So I'm looking into that. I'll share my conclusions about, about these things with you as time goes on. But I wanted to clear out the rest of the six steps to being a writer. This is. Once again, you could create six steps like this for any discipline. But I think that writing is something that I've gone into deeply enough that I can make a positive statement about. I can be pretty clear and I can be pretty certain that if you will do these things, you will get the result. The result in general is can you go from zero to your first publication in a year? I think that anybody with an average level of command of the English language can do it. We will see. It will depend on you. But the six steps. First step is you write a sentence a day. The second step is you write one to four short stories a month. They could be very, very short stories. It could be a two page flash fiction. The third step is you polish and submit those stories. The fourth step is you don't rewrite except to editorial request. In other words, you don't Keep rewriting your stories endlessly. Once you've finished and submitted them, you move on to the next story. The fifth step is you read 10 times as much as you write. It's really critical that you get a lot of reading, a lot of input, so that you can soak up style and learn, you know, learn structure on an unconscious level. And the sixth and final step is you repeat this process 100 times. So until you have gone through this process 100 times, and I suggest that you relate your story writing to the structure of the hero's journey, something we'll deal with another time, you don't even begin to question whether you can make it, whether or not the field will be open to you, whether the field will be receptive to you. You've got work to do. You've got to write a hundred stories and be circulating them and be researching constantly. By that time you should have read at least a thousand stories. So how long will it take you to do that? That's up to you. If you were me, I'd be writing two stories a week and they'd be very, very short. But if it's a story a week, I could do that. They say one to four short stories a month. Okay, okay, we'll just say four stories a month, in which case you would be writing if four stories a month is say four times 12, it's about 50 stories a year. So you are talking about two years to get to 100 stories. Okay, so that's two years to getting published. If you can do that, you can write a story a week and go through this process for two years. I'm betting that you will get your first publication. And I think that stepping across that line is a really beautiful thing. And it is a life changing thing. And there are so many other things that you can slot in there. Find the minimum dose of this, the minimum dose of this, the minimum dose of this, and then you put all of your discipline behind that. And if you're suffering from adhd, executive function, whatever, then then the smaller the thing you have to do, whatever amount of executive function you have, whatever amount of discipline you have, you put it behind the smallest grain of sand that will get it done. You take whatever strength you have and you put it behind the smallest thing that will get you the positive effect. Because once you start getting the positive effect, It's self reinforcing. I do this, I feel something good or I decrease the amount of bad. You will automatically want to do more than that when what you do is only Giving you positive feedback after a year of practice, you're not as likely to feel good about it. Okay? It's harder to sustain your discipline. I had lunch with Larry Niven on. On Saturday, and my mentor, my dear, dear friend, my brother. And he was saying that the entire time that he's known me. It's like I've been trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of all the different pieces that I wanted to fit into my life. The relationship I wanted, soulmate relationship, the physicality that I wanted, measured in both physical vibrancy and certain levels of accomplishment within the martial arts. Learning certain things in the martial arts. And remember, this was never a matter of being better than somebody else. It was always a matter of being better than who I was yesterday. So get that straight. And then a certain amount of quality in my writing and a certain amount of financial reward for that quality. I have to make a living. So making the money, having the body, having the relationship, all at the same time. It's difficult juggling all three of those things at the same time. And I'm closer than I've ever been. There are ways in which I've already done that in terms of my childhood dreams, but those childhood dreams were reformulated once I became a man. And I don't quite have that balance that I want, but I feel like I'm almost there. So he has had a lot of fun watching me go through this process, and he's been very entertained by that, and I'm glad. I'm happy to entertain the people that I love. So at any rate, I wanted. I kind of rushed through the six steps because I want the ability to just kind of talk about where I'm. What's going on in my life, and to give you pieces of that puzzle that work for you. So that's what it is today. What I wanted to do once again, is to invite you to join our podcast at www.lifewritingpodcast.com. let us know what we can talk about for you. If you download it, please, and you like it, please leave us a review. That's how things grow. And aside from that, have a wonderful day and a wonderful week, and I'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.