THE FIRST MOMENTUM

By Clay Stafford

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The first time effort changed my world, I felt it before I understood it. It wasn’t a dramatic moment; it was an impulse. We had few neighbors during my boyhood, but as I walked down the road, I saw wild onions growing in their yards. Someone had mowed their spring grass, and the scent of onions was strong. The night before, my mother had cooked beef liver and onions for dinner, which was one of my favorite childhood dishes. Something aligned in my four-year-old mind. We planted onions in our garden, but the onions in the neighbors’ yards required almost no effort at all. Everyone I knew cooked with onions. I saw an opportunity and walked up the Ledford’s driveway. “One cent for five freshly dug, spring onions,” I offered. I didn’t realize the offer was accepted not because they wanted the onions, but because they wanted them gone from their yards. Regardless, I made my first sale. I went home, got a mattock, dug all the onions from the yard, and made a small pile of change. I offered my services to other neighbors.

It all happened quietly in a private corner of my mind, where work first intersected my imagination without witnesses. Even at this age, I wanted to leave my childhood behind and escape for many reasons. Selling wild onions to neighbors from whom I picked them, essentially selling something that was already theirs, caused a shift inside me. A small inner hinge turned, and a life that had once felt mostly imaginary (getting out) started to seem possible for the first time.

Before that moment, effort mainly meant doing what I was told: chores for my parents, helping both sets of grandparents with their farms, working alongside my father as a mason’s assistant, and managing projects when assigned. But with onions, I became self-directed at a very young age. It came from listening to adults talk, especially my father, that if I worked hard, I would achieve what I wanted. Before walking up the Ledford’s driveway, this advice, ingrained from such an early age, felt unfamiliar to my experience. I understood the words, but they didn’t truly resonate with me until I perhaps sensed a hint of opportunity in the smell of fresh-mowed grass.

I had dreams before then, of course. I’d stand between the ties of the L&N railroad tracks and look one way and then the other, knowing that there had to be something at the end of each direction. I dreamed of finding what was at the end of them, like that pot of gold hidden at the bottom of rainbows that my Grandmother Stafford told me about. These were carefree childhood dreams, the kind without experience, simple dreams, the kind that come before the realization that dreams will eventually face obstacles. As a child, I was Superman. I did not yet know my kryptonite. At that age, it’s easy to imagine many futures, even conflicting ones, like a boy imagining a distant city. I had never been to a large city, though I had seen Chattanooga, and that was enough to imagine one. But as I gazed north and south along the tracks, it seemed unlikely that the futures my small, inexperienced mind envisioned could be reached by walking there. It would require the jets I sometimes watched fly overhead.

At that age, I truly had no understanding of how the world worked. Effort felt abstract then, something distant from my everyday life. The outside world seemed vast and complicated as I tried to understand it by looking at pictures from my mother’s National Geographic subscription. Whatever movement or life existed inside it seemed to belong mostly to other people: older individuals, those who knew what they wanted, my older brothers, people who seemed to know things I didn’t and couldn’t grasp. Then, almost by accident, I did something on impulse: I went door to door with a mattock, selling people their own wild onions. Part of me felt I was pulling a fast one on the neighbors, not realizing they were doing the same thing, but I approached this new venture with a seriousness I hadn’t felt before until the wild onions went back into summer hibernation. I know it made me want more, but wild onions only grew so fast, so a second understanding began to develop: patience. Selling wild onions meant returning to the effort more than once, checking the yards to see how fast the onions were growing. This required a stubbornness that even surprised me, even as I felt it taking hold. I didn’t tell my parents what I was doing, nor did I let them see the money I earned. This was mine: my idea and my rewards.

When I was six, something important happened. I had been secretly saving my money in a Mason jar hidden beneath the debris in my closet to prevent anyone in the family from stealing it. My grandfather Parker, Papa, must have known (I guessed the neighbors had talked about what that Stafford kid was doing), and when he appeared, he offered to sell me his eighty-acre farm if I had $10 to buy it. I eagerly accepted, and I now owned a farm, much to the anger of my father and one of my brothers, who believed the farm should have gone to them. This opened a new door. With more money I saved from wild onions and selling vegetables to neighbors from my family’s large gardens, I began buying cattle, then poultry, and then selling cows, poultry, and eggs. I even started breeding and selling mice wholesale to pet stores. The work I started on impulse (selling wild onions) began to open up more opportunities. For a long time afterward, I looked back almost suspiciously at how strange it seemed that a boy like me should own a farm, make money, and plan his own escape.

Although I couldn’t name or verbalize the idea, I realized that my world wasn’t moving randomly. It moved because I kept putting in effort. I understood it not intellectually but physically, the way a body learns something before the mind does.

Once that understanding arrived, even in its smallest form, it changed the atmosphere of everything around me. I got involved in small businesses, using the money I had to generate more money. I opened a bank account by the time I was eight and moved money from my Mason jar to a safer place where it earned the most interest. By fourteen, I started my own production company, which I even registered as a DBA with the state of Tennessee. I didn’t realize it then, but it would change the course of my life and open the door for the escape I had hoped for so long. The world didn’t seem easier through all of this; it felt more demanding, but it was a demand I welcomed. Most importantly, life and effort no longer felt indifferent. My father was right: if I worked hard, the things I wanted would come.

There is a current beneath everything that effort seems to touch. It felt intoxicating to me in a way I didn’t yet recognize, but I sensed the addiction and the rush. Effort carried the promise of movement: the gap between imagination and reality might not be as wide as I thought. I began noticing what effort could do in everything around me. I saw it in the quiet persistence of people working long after anyone was watching. I saw it in the small improvements from consistently returning to the same unfinished task. I saw it in the steady accumulation of results that, from the outside, looked like sudden success. But nothing was truly sudden. Patience played a role once again. Yet what stayed with me most was that initial feeling of discovery: if you knocked on the door, people would buy their own onions. Effort created something, even as simple as a knock and an offer. It wasn’t luck. It had nothing to do with timing. It only existed in the realm of self-chosen and self-directed effort.

I still didn’t realize how complicated the truth would become later in life. I hadn’t yet understood how often my future efforts would face resistance or how many things the world would refuse to move, no matter how patiently I pushed. In my young Appalachian life, things moved more simply and slowly than what would eventually come. But I knew one thing, and I would never forget it: selling onions changed my life. Work could change things, and because I had felt that even in its simplest, smallest form, I could never forget it. Early effort shaped the way I approached everything afterward. Not exactly with confidence; confidence would come much later, but with quiet curiosity about what might happen if effort was applied again, and then again.

Effort as an adult can be unpredictable. Sometimes it yields nothing, and the world remains exactly the same. But at times, in those precious moments, things change. A little progress here, a small breakthrough there, a quick “yes” when it’s most needed, a faint sense that movement has begun where there was once only stillness or even stagnation. Looking back now, I see that what started on the day I walked up the Ledford’s driveway wasn’t success; it was momentum. It was the subtle pull forward that appears when effort and possibility first meet. There was no certainty or clear direction. It simply came as an impulse: the feeling and belief that once motion begins, it can create something new, and perhaps even keep offering its own kind of blessings in response to the effort I put in. That was enough. Once I sensed the world responding to my effort, even once, like when I pulled those first pungent wild onions from the Ledford’s front yard, I would never again believe that standing still was all the world knew how to do.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Productivity

By Dale T Phillips

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“Writing a novel is like driving at night with your headlights on- you can only see a little of the road ahead, but you can make the whole journey that way.”

—E.L. Doctorow

You write a novel the way you’d eat an elephant—one small bite at a time.

Writing even one novel is a lot of damned hard work. Continuing to write them is little short of obsessive. But to be successful, you’ll have to keep doing it over and over. Unlike singers, however, you get to do different ones each time, not the same thing over and over. 

Every writer has a different way of doing the work. Two major types of writers are (with many of us doing one or the other, or both):

• Plotters, who carefully detail everything before writing, doing the outline, and setting the scene first.

• Pantsers, who write “by the seat of their pants,” just jumping in without a complete structure in advance. Dean Wesley Smith uses this method, which he calls “Writing into the Dark.” He has an advantage, though, in having done it several hundred times!

It’s good to keep files of ideas, titles, character sketches, and turn of phrases. When you need a new idea, scan these files for things that spark your imagination. I’ve got hundreds of potential titles in one file and ideas for new stories in another. I’ll never run out of things to write.

The best way to be productive is to write every day if you can. It builds the habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. If you can do that, it’s a wonderful way to be productive. On the other hand, I do it the “wrong” way (even though fellow writers compliment me on my productivity, which I find amusing). I have to be inspired by the ancient Greek concept of “The Muse,” which many say is not effective, because you won’t write as much. Lucky for me, I take The Muse seriously, and She often drops by to tell me what to write next. It sometimes messes me up because I shift projects at a moment’s notice. 

For too long, I was working on three different novels and not completing any of them. One was 75 percent done, another was 50 percent done, and the third was 25 percent done. Which all adds up to zero percent finished. There were some publishing strategy changes and various issues in the narratives which bogged me down. 

Then I finished one novel, but before I got to the other two, another novel sprang into being. I wrote most of that, and got stuck again when illness, depression, and Covid-19 hit in rapid succession. I was down and out for too long before I decided that writing would give me back my life. Indeed, it did, and I burst forth with a completed and published novel, a new story, and a finished draft of another novel. 

Write whenever you want or can: early morning, late at night, on lunch breaks, whenever. Find the time that works best for you. Short stretches or long marathon sessions, it doesn’t matter. Keep a notebook handy for ideas that come to you when you’re doing other things like driving, showering, or taking a walk (when many ideas turn up). 

If you have trouble, try the “Pomodoro Method” of sprints and movement. http://graemeshimmin.com/the-pomodoro-technique-for-writers/

NaNoWriMo is a fun method to put out a lot of work in just a few weeks. If you’re having trouble getting words down, think about giving it a try to kickstart your brain into fevered word production.

One good habit is to set aside your writing time as the primary task for the day. Writers procrastinate better than anyone else, and it’s so easy to get sidetracked that writing time can easily slip away. Write first, do all else later. Don’t do research in your writing time because it’s easy (and lots of fun) to fall down the rabbit hole. If you come to a passage that needs to be researched, just mark it as such and move on.

Doing the Math 

If you’re just starting out, you may produce at a slower rate. That’s okay, it will just take you longer. If you’re going to be a successful indie writer, you’ll need a fair amount of good work. Do you know how long on average it takes you do finish, edit, and publish each book? If not, start with an estimation of writing one book a year, 50-100,000 words. When you get more experienced, you’ll definitely want to increase this output, but it’s a good place to begin. At that pace, it will take you roughly five years to write five good books, which will (simply by that output) put you in the top 20% of all published writers. 

Have you got at least five good books in you, just as a start?

So, your first novel. Say 75,000 words, and you want it done in a year. That’s only 1500 words a week (a few hundred a day) and around 5 pages. Fifty weeks later, you’ve got 250-plus pages, and those 75,000 words. Congratulations! You’ve done more than many who set out to do this. It may not be the best yet, but you got it done.

Celebrate!

Then get to work on the second novel. You’ve practiced for a year, so maybe this one will go faster. Up your word count to 2500 words a week. Still quite doable. This means you’ll get this one done in just over six months. How about that? Almost half the time. You learned a lot more, and it’s probably better than book one.

Celebrate! 

Write the third book, slightly better pace. Finish. 

Celebrate! 

Two years total, three books under your belt.

Starting to get the hang of it? Hopefully. Rinse and repeat. 

If you need a million words to get really good, how many can you write in a year? A book a year is a decent pace, better than most, but for more success, you might want to step it up some. If you can put out 5,000 words a week, you can have 250,000 in a year, and a million words in only four years. 

One book a year might net you a few hundred dollars in income (or a few thousand), but you want more, you want volume. The more you write and publish, the more you’ll make. If you want to make 48,000 dollars a year, you’ll need 4,000 dollars a month, or roughly two thousand total sales at two dollars profit each, or 500 sales a week. One book will sell x number of copies, ten books will sell much more. So you want to get to ten good books published, as quickly as possible. That takes discipline and dedication. 

Figure out how much you make per hour, and scale up. If you make a penny per word, an hour of good writing at one thousand words nets you roughly ten dollars. That’s your scale. If you want to make $48,000 a year, you have to either write faster or get paid more. Daunting, yes. 

After six to ten books, you should be selling more of everything. Each new book adds to the total. The “Halo effect” means that other books of yours are bought because people discovered a first book, then went on to others. Especially if you have a series or connected books. 

In the old way of publishing, some authors could get by with one book a year. Today, you’ll likely have to be far more productive to make a decent income. It’s up to you to determine your level of success.

Dean Wesley Smith calls his copyright and production output The Magic Bakery.

Imagine that you have a storefront with all your items for sale within. If you have one book in one format, you have one product. Have you ever walked into a store and bought a single product? You likely won’t stay long. As a successful author, you want variety and choice, different price points, and for shoppers to come back again and again to buy more. A series can bring them back for more. Put your work out as an e-book, in print, as audio, and other formats, such as graphic novels. The other aspect of The Magic Bakery is that as an indie author, you can keep licensing pieces of each product, while keeping the original. Traditional publishers buy the whole product, which you cannot resell. Dean made thousands of dollars from one story, by licensing different pieces of it. Make your work into a virtual storefront, and fill it with tempting merchandise. 

It’s amusing to me that when I set up my display at book events (24 books currently, plus anthologies with others), people look at the output, and think I’m prolific, when I feel like a slacker who doesn’t do enough. I smile and say, “If you want it badly enough, you’ll work for it.” I sell more than most writers at these events, because of my sheer variety, and the different price points (with prices shown for each book, so browsers don’t have to ask). A few secrets of my success. I point out that someone can grab a book of short stories for little more than a cup of coffee or get a good novel for half the price of a hardcover in a bookstore. And because people love a bargain, I’ll give them a price break if they want to buy more than one book. By having so much available, with ebooks and audio of everything, I’ll offer them other free versions of the work when they purchase print (which costs me nothing). People will remember and come back in subsequent years to buy more. And every year they come back, there’s more to sell. 

Advantage, productivity.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime.