Author Interview: Randy Ingermanson, Part II

Can you give us a view into a typical day of your writing life?

That depends whether I’m on deadline or not. When I’m on deadline, I’m very focused. I’ll get up and do the early morning chores and then crank out a chapter. Then I’ll go to work at my day job. (Except I don’t have a day job anymore, I got laid off recently and I’m HAPPY about it.) Then I’ll come home and write another chapter. Then I’ll collapse. I do about 3000 words per day when I’m in deadline mode. I tend to be cranky. I tend to make rude remarks to the cat.

When I’m not in deadline mode, I don’t do much at all. I’ll answer email. Browse the web. Do some research (I love research!) Anything but writing. I’m bad at discipline. I need a deadline to make me write. Preferably a horrible, impossible deadline that gives me palpitations. That’s just the way I am. I’m a horrible example to our youth.

If you could choose to have one strength of another writer, what would it be and from whom?

Well, Steven King’s got some nice biceps, and I could really use those, because I don’t have any . . .

Do you have a dream for the future of your writing, something you would love to accomplish?

Not really. I just try to keep writing a better book with each project. My goals are fairly modest—achieving Total World Domination, being named Supreme Dictator For Life, and possibly, if I’m good, someday becoming First Tiger.

Was there ever a time in your writing career you thought of quitting?

Yes, a year ago I was ready to bag it all. This, after yet another incredibly bad royalty statement showing that yet another book had lost a sum roughly equally to the Gross Domestic Product of Albania. And I thought, “Why am I doing this again? My publisher is losing its shirt again. Nobody reads my crappy books. I’m never going to get out of my Day Job From Hell. I might as well quit and then we’ll all be ahead.”

I actually told my wife essentially that in one of our midnight walks together. She said whatever I wanted to do was fine, especially if it meant I could do more vacuuming.

Then later that week, my agent called and asked me if I wanted to coauthor a novel with Luis Palau. In this business, some days you’re up, some days you’re down. Best to remember to take those midnight walks. And you get extra credit if you remember to vacuum.

What is your favorite and least favorite part of being a writer?

Favorite: Writing the first draft. Love it! It’s like a drug, only it’s legal and cheap.

Least favorite: Getting critiqued. Hate it! How dare mere mortals tell me that my writing sucks???? I, who will one day be Supreme Dictator For Life and First Tiger! I don’t like being critiqued, I have never liked it, I will never like it. Of course, getting critiqued is the only thing that keeps my writing from being a steaming pile of crap, but that’s a minor point.

How much marketing do you do? Any advice in this area?

Too much. Not enough. I’m still trying to learn how to do marketing right. The best marketing is the kind you can’t buy—word of mouth. And how does that happen? Nobody knows! Nobody! Successful writers will tell you what they did. You try it. It doesn’t work for you, because you’re not them.

I’m developing some ideas that I think will work for me. I call them “Tiger Marketing,” because I like tigers. Tigers have a nice powerful image, unless their name is Hobbes. The essence of Tiger Marketing is to create an electronic presence that will let your natural market find you. Then you don’t have to waste time and money trying to sell your stuff to people who couldn’t care less about you.

You spend your time selling to people who know and love you and already want your stuff. If that turns out to be three people, that’s not the fault of Tiger Marketing. It’s just a statement about who you are and what sort of ungrateful weasels populate this cruel earth. But if it turns out to be millions of people, that’s also a statement about who you are and the extraordinary geniuses on this planet who recognize your true worth.

If you want to learn more about Tiger Marketing (or the craft of writing fiction) check out my free Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, which now has over 3600 subscribers:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/html/afwezine.html

Your snowflake method of novel writing really gets a lot of buzz on the internet. I hear reference to it again and again. Have you been approached to put it into book form?

I talked to my agent awhile back about writing a book on the Snowflake. I’d love to do it, but have been too . . . um, snowed under with other projects to do it so far. Now that I’m unemployed/self-employed/retired, I have time to do it. So I plan to write it this coming year.

An overview: The “Snowflake method” is my ten-step process for analyzing and organizing your novel before you write it (and again after you write it when it’s time to do major revisions for your pesky editor). The basic idea is that you start with the high-level ideas and break them down into manageable pieces until they’re small enough to tackle. This is not rocket surgery. This is obvious stuff that I stole from the world of software development. I use it to write my novels. My last four novels have all gotten written in under 7 weeks. The Snowflake makes me massively productive, which is good because I am massively lazy.

I have a page on my web site about the Snowflake at:
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html
This page gets lots of hits. So far, it’s been viewed about 130,000 times. I hear from people all over the world who tell me that the Snowflake has gotten them out of a rut they’d been in for years. No kidding, years. So it helps a lot of people. Not too long ago, I put together an audio CD of me giving a lecture on the Snowflake. It’s available on my web site. For people who are auditory learners or who just want to listen to it over and over while they’re stuck in the commute to work, this is a cheap way to pound it into their heads.

Parting words?

A few: Writing is hard work. It’s also very rewarding work, as long as you don’t need to be rewarded with money, sex, power, or fame. If you need those, go be a rock star. I hear that’s easy.

If writing is not in your blood, then don’t bother with it. Go find some safer career, such as lion-taming or firewalking or insulting angry terrorists.

But if writing is in your blood, you won’t let pesky matters like money or rejections or cruel critiques or vicious reviews or the cat peeing on your keyboard stop you. You’ll just roll right on over those problems, because you’re a writer and that’s what writers do. Carry on.