Uber Spies Must Keep Their Focus

Continuing my weeklong scary-fangrr dedication to Michelle Kwan:

Focus.
Concentration.
Attention to details.

An uberauthor must have all three to succeed. An uberroofer too. Or the roof will leak, you know.

From watching Michelle Kwan, I learned to solidify these three elements that are the key to her success. If you can conquer your bad habits and daily stuff and make these three elements your daily repertoire, you are on the road to uberness.

Focus is probably the foundation of a writing career. If you have a husband, kids, another career, or most probably, all three at once, you know how easy it is to lose focus. Everything is about daily life. Writing gets shoved into the background.

Decide your goal and focus on it. It has to be big enough that it is a dream, a fantasy, yet small enough that you know it's attainable for now. If you focus on being a bestselling author and you haven't even written a book yet, that is way. Too. Big. Your focus should be finishing this first book.

I started by writing during lunch at the Shit and Grits diner. Two pages a day, minimum. That was the only time I really had to focus on my writing. My goal was to finish my first book, which was the very bad HisTerical Viking-medieval SEALs on horses story. The waitresses from those restaurants still remember me and my yellow notepads ;-), sitting there among my sweaty guys at lunch and writing, writing, writing. They thought I was crazy. A roofer who wants to write? Hahaha. But now they fondly tells the other customers about me eating there. I'm a legend. LOL.

Concentration comes naturally with focus. Many writers have too many plots in their heads; some writers want to write them all in one book. Even worse, some writers abandon their works after a few chapters and start another one, and another. They have a lot of writing done, but no concentration to finish the story. Uber-writers fight the urge to give up in throes of the "sagging middle" dilemma. They concentrate on what they've set out to do--to get the book to the end.

If the figure skater loses concentration, they go splat. Uber-writers do a balancing act of their own--deadlines vs quality vs daily life vs self-expression vs market requirements. They always tell you to write the story you want; do not let the market dictate you. Yet, how could you actually do that when those who do so are punished?

Because if you know you're a MK fan, you are punished by the judges. A LOT. The new market for her is the SeKret Marking rules, a new set of numbers that give points for tricks. Even falls are awarded points! So a program with two failed quads, a splat in the triple-triple, would still win over a perfectly good MK program without a quad or a triple-triple. You think this isn't happening? Check out last night's Men's Olympic Long Program. The guy that had two splats beat out Johnny Weir's conservative but relatively mistake-free free program, and JW is out of a medal. JW's skating style, btw, is lyrical like MK's.

So like Michelle, as an author, you have to do your thing and STILL somehow make it work in the market. That's when they say you put a fresh twist to the (trend of the moment).

Attention to details. Any chimp can use a nailgun. Any chimp can be trained to go bang, bang, six times on a shingle. You can ride around and see lots of roofs done by chimps (think of that commercial on TV with the chimps ;-P). The details tell trained eyes whether it's an uber-roof, a horrendous job, or just an adequate one.

You and I have read plenty of adequate books. If that is your goal, then that's fine. But you want to be the Michelle Kwan of the romance genre, give your stories and characters the extra details. MK finishes every of her elements--perfect landing (no flutzing), fingertips in the right positions, picture-perfect poses--all done on a thin blade. If you watch her life, you very seldom hear her blades on the ice--she floats; she makes it effortless.

An uberauthor makes her writing read effortlessly, giving and adding essential details that make her stories richer. Of course, there's such a thing as OVERKILL of details. Please don't make the reader go ZZzzzzzZZZzzz. That's a sin in writing!

My uber Spies, by the way, have tremendous focus, concentration and attention to details. And they use all of those talents in the bedroom scenes too ;-).

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