He turned off Belcher, then slowed and turned on Collier. The street ran north and fronted the warehouses that stored goods from the ships being serviced at the docks. The pace on the docks and warehouses was frantic. It looked to Charlie like a ant nest that had been kicked open. Cranes were moving cargo off the freighters in large pallets. Another freighter was sliding containers down a ramp to waiting eighteen wheel tractor-trailer flatbeds. The line of trucks stretched over a quarter mile by his estimate.

He looked back forward just in time to avoid drifting into the curb at forty miles and hour. He over-corrected and moved into the oncoming lane. He grunted as he planted his foot and shifted back into the proper lane. I gotta pay more attention. I can handle a wipeout, but not a oncoming car. Where is the turnoff to the dockyard? Charlie’s thought was answered a moment later as the road ended at a ‘T’ intersection. He slowed then slewed right, skidding on the loose gravel, then straightened out, slowing to avoid a tumble, and approached the gate. The gate was a railroad crossing re-purposed to be a traffic control. It was currently down as the gate guard was checking the papers on a white and blue UPS truck.

The outbound lane had a tractor trailer slowly moving forward to leave the docks. At his speed he’d bee there before the truck could clear the gate, and with four others behind it, there was no way to use the oncoming lane to bypass the guard. ‘Skid’ slowed as he approached the gate, raising his hand to his pullover mask to make certain it was still in place. The heavyset gate guard stopped talking as the bright red and blue stocky superhero trotted up to the gate.

“Whatta ya want, uh, kid? I’m kinda busy here”, the guard said with a surprisingly soft voice. ‘Skid’ took a moment to realize that the guard was a woman. He could feel himself blush as he tried to sound authoritative.

“Sorry, ma’am. I’d heard that some stuff was stolen last night. I came by to look the, uh, scene over and see if there is something that, umm, would help find the crooks.” He tried to puff his chest out, and got the mental image of a cartoon mouse trying to look tough while facing a cat. The man the guard was talking to had also turned to look over at ‘Skid’, then turned back the guard with a small chuckle, making Charlie blush even redder.

“I suppose I could let you look around. Heck, seeing you prowling might make them guys with sticky fingers decide not to try anything if a costume’s poking around.” She pressed a button, raising the gate, then waved her clipboard at ‘Skid’. “G’wan through. Place that got hit’s on the north side up there.” ‘Skid’ nodded, then trotted around the van, accelerating back to a somewhat leisurely thirty miles an hour. He slowed again as he dodged a swarm of fork lifts moving pallets of crates and boxes to the white concrete warehouse to his left. The traffic was incessant, with two men shouting orders to the stream of men, and equipment coming from a docked freighter. The noise was near deafening and ‘Skid’ dodged awkwardly between the moving vehicles and people.

How to not write? Simple, just stop. Once you get in the habit of stopping there’s nothing to stop you stopping except to get back up and write. You have to choose, writing or not. You can cry to the world that you love writing, but it’s all empty air until you sit down and break your habit of sitting. Writing can be fun, and is it ever rewarding. However, there are many days when writing isn’t convenient, or a struggle to develop a scene or step through the awkwardness of writing about something deeply personal or uncomfortable. That’s when sitting becomes easy, and writing hard. I can’t tell you that you will beat this habit, it’s hard. It’s one of those things all writers face at some point. The successful writers get back up and start writing, the not-so-successful don’t. Which do you want to be?

How do I measure success? With the metric system.

Seriously, success is difficult to describe, which in part is why we’re writing about it here. My own personal measure of success is not by sales or publishing, though, those are great perks of the job. My measure of success is finishing. Yes, I want people to read my stories, enjoy them and even re-read them. But, to me, that’s validation, not actual success.

Success is starting a project, and seeing it through to the end. Did I have the perseverance to finish a story and the belief that it should be finished? To paraphrase an old adage, “Nothing breeds writing like writing.” If I write, then I should write more. It doesn’t have to be a lot, it just has to keep moving forward, and towards its logical end. Without a endpoint, you’ll get the writing equivalent of Winchester House, huge reams of words that are cobbled together and sometimes dead end.

Success though is conceiving a story in whatever manner you use. Doing the writing to create the story, and finishing the story. That is what I judge myself by; Did I start a story, and most important, did I see it through to the end?

After succeeding at finishing, then other successes are editing for spelling and continuity, checking dialog and description so that it matches my inner vision. I know this sounds like a repeat of writing, and it is. There’s no ultimate success, there’s a bunch of small successes that create a snowball effect for the story. Each piece gives me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that I completed my self-imposed task.

It isn’t always absolute fun, as there are days where I would rather avoid anything than face the day. Those are the days that finishing something as small as a 500 word section mean the most to me. I succeeded in pushing myself. I got the job, the challenge I gave myself and I finished it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love, seriously love making stories. There are just days where it sucks to sit down a make them. Those are the real successes. I can’t judge by publishing of a book, or how popular a book is. Like I said earlier, those are amazing perks OF writing. But they’re not success AT writing. Success is much simpler, and much harder to me. The thrill of seeing a book in print, is one heck of an exciting validation of my efforts and focus in writing the book.

People in general desire validation as it means they did something right. But as I said, it’s not success, it’s validation. Success is getting yourself to the end of a project, of getting yourself to write, even when you’d rather just vegetate and watch television or play your favorite app/game.

True success is you, and your goals, getting to the end together.

In my admittedly thin writing experience, I’ve found that creating characters is akin to hitting a constantly changing moving target. I never really take notes about the story. I just tend to dive in and let things evolve.

I like thinking about the main characters. My first view of them is almost always not what they end up as. I’d originally thought that Fern, in ‘Best Intentions’ would be a larger than life character. I first thought of her as the Amazon of the two sisters, but as I started writing, I realized that I’d reversed the view. Fern was actually the short redhead, her sister was the Amazon Princess.

The change worked great, but I had no real clue that the shift of perspective would happen until I started writing.

The creative process is different for everyone. How I think of things is not how you will at all. The following example is some of the things I see in word association.

To show what I mean I’ll use a random word generator to get three random words to start with, and try to build ideas from those words.

I got match, celery, look. Pretty darn random.

To take the words in order:

Match could mean an identical thing, a romantic joining, or a matchstick.

Celery is a lot more narrow. It’s not really slang for anything, and is a vegetable. You might be able to say a noise might sound like celery being crunched.

Look has a number of possibilities. It could mean trying to see something, investigate for subtle nuances, alertly attentive, a particular emotion conveyed non-verbally, or a signature appearance.

It’s how you see the story falling together.  As an example, and in the form so far, here are three story ideas from three random words.

A fashion designer comes up with a signature look that includes a celery colored dress, a color so unique that the fashion world scrambles to try and match the color, but can’t as no one knows how the designer first made the color, or what ingredients are in the dye.  The story could revolve around how cut-throat the designing world is, that a simple color would create a series of attempts at copying, stealing, or extorting the color from the designer.

Another story that comes to mind could be one where a shipment of celery from some location is contaminated, leading investigators to look to match soil samples gathered from the celery with a geographic region, to determine the origin of the shipment. Once the location is found, they have to look for the cause of the contamination.  This might be a good mystery crisis something like the movie ‘outbreak’ was a few years ago.

A third story could be that a child who is told to get celery from the corner store. She’s never seen uncut celery, so she looks at a piece of celery, then goes to the corner store to match what she remembers, which could be a neat children’s book.

Those are a few ideas. There are as many as there are people who love to imagine.

If you’re curious, that’s my wall in the picture. To explain what you’re looking at is a story.

This one’s called ‘No Fury’ the pale yellow card is a background character who has a professional grudge with one of the main characters described on the neon orange card it’s directly above.

The purple cards are significant background characters whose actions impact the main protagonists and the world.

That white quote over the headphones is from Groucho Marx, and reminds me it’s my choice that determines how I face the day.

The big 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper are tasks assigned by the publisher at Paper Angel Press, reminding me of critical dates, and suggestions on how to help promote my book and, in a sense, my career as a writer.

I know a lot of you might think a writer’s job is done after writing. WRONG. It’s only beginning. Self-promotion of your book is the real beginning of your career. I have a lot of problems doing that critical part. No excuses, I’m terrified of self-promotion, of being the one in the spotlight.

I know this lack of promotion will slow me down, and also cause difficulties for the publisher, because promoting a book is very much a team effort. Publishers will work with you on this, but, they can only do so much. Like the cards, they can only do what their position allows. You, as a writer, need to help when and where you can. The more you can view a book as a team promotion, the more success you are likely to have.

I don’t know how someone else gets ideas for stories. I’ll guess that something triggers an idea that ‘something’ is a good story. In my case, there is a trigger. It’s not always the same. As an example, I may read an article about Fuel cells, and that becomes a cascade of linked ideas, such as a fuel cell made of paper ( don’t laugh it’s actually been done) which grows to what about making a paper airplane with whose kind o fuel cells, which goes to why not a regular plane, or a dirigible which uses humidity in the air to power the paper fuel cells in the skin of the craft. Which then goes to what’s the pilot and crew like, what is the world like that has this blend of technology?

Another way an idea seems to form, again in my case, is a story by another author. How would I write that story? What would I change, would the direction of that story actually work in my story. A lot of stories are built upon things we have read, or seen, or even heard being discussed. As another example. The current political furor in the US over Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. That could easily be turned into a monstrous conspiracy theory about the status quo being pushed to the wall by a non-traditional candidate, and one that represents all the vile truths about the established political system. Or, to reverse it, a vile candidate who’s only strength is a cult of personality reminiscent of a pattern in recent history, versus, a flawed but well-meaning member of the establishment who is trying to effect change from within the existing system.

In all of this, the idea is to extrapolate, to expand upon what the writer sees, hears, and feels. Kids do it all the time, so one could say a writer might be a child that never grew out of ‘what if’.

Collaboration is one of the most fun ways for me to write. I like the sharing of ideas, and story. It’s a good way to make characters unique, as your writing partners each have a unique style and voice to bring to the project.

The down side is if there’s a delay, you’re either stuck waiting, or stuck feeling like you’ve let your partner down.

I’ve tried two styles of collaborative writing, and each has pluses and minuses.

The first style is where you trade writing chapters. This works well for plot and storyline, as doing a complete chapter, including shared characters, allows you complete control of the scene and action. The downside is losing the identity of the individual characters, as while you can share the character, writing styles are still different.

Writing for individual characters preserves the uniqueness of each one, but in this instance, there is a lot of waiting back and forth as each section has to be passed back and forth to finish it. The story could become choppy and harder to follow for readers.

The troubles aren’t insurmountable, but the thing you need most is the focus and communication between you and your writing partners. Simply being consistent and communicative helps immeasurably with whichever way you decide to share the writing.

In short, I recommend giving collaboration a go. It’s a really fun way to write and a great way to share your imaginiation.