How to unstructure a novel

We like to go dancing on New Year’s Eve. We never know what kind of band will play for us. The earnest young people who tone down their playing so as not to spike Boomer blood pressure? The cool old guys who always wear Hawaiian shirts?

The uncertainty is part of the festivities, but there was a band years ago that swung into “Sharp Dressed Man” and immediately revealed that they didn’t know it. Deborah thought maybe someone had described it to them. Why else would they rip the bass line out of “Smoke on the Water”?

Years ago, I envisioned the climactic scene of my novel, from the circumstances that birthed it to the moment when the Forces of Good triumph. I even imagined the soundtrack. I started writing this scene in late May, and here it is July and I am still writing it. The scene, which keeps surprising me, so far covers two chapters and 25% of the entire book. Perhaps my readers could read that and skip the rest. It would save time.

Anyone reading what I’ve written so far would wonder if I had ever read a novel. Perhaps I’ve only had a novel described to me.

Well, it’s the first draft. I’ll fix it in post.

Word count as of today: 61,144

Until next time, keep your head in the clouds and your paws on the ground.

What I did with my New Year’s resolutions

To start the new year, I always make one or two resolutions. This is because I once interviewed a psychologist who told me that if you make more than two, you’ll make yourself sick. And to put an extra string on my bow, I try to start a few weeks early.

In 2024, after I had recovered from everything I ate at Thanksgiving, I resolved that in 2025 I would finish writing the first draft of my novel. I estimated I was writing a 65,000 word book, which is on the slim side for a novel, and I further resolved that I would finish it yesterday–the day of my birthday party. I usually make an absurd speech at my birthday party, and brandishing a first draft in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other seemed like it would impress everybody, even people who know me.

In May, I realized I was writing a much longer book. There was no way I could make my deadline, and, in fact, I didn’t. But the day before the party, while I was writing, I arrived at a gap in the narrative, or in my brain. I turned to the skies and waited for an inspiration. There was no inspiration. But when I again looked at my screen, I glanced at the word count and the number I saw was something I should play in the lottery or something I should announce to a sunny backyard full of friends who were eagerly awaiting their crack at the frosted cupcakes.

I chose the announcement. Here’s the number: 59,590.

The psychologist I interviewed said that it’s OK if, by the end of January or the end of June, you haven’t achieved your goals. So long as you’re still trying, you’ll be far happier than everyone who gave up or forget most of their resolutions in the first month. I’m happy. And not just because I love cupcakes.

I miss rejections!

I don’t miss the act of an editor saying “No.” What I miss is the hope. For example, starting the new year by submitting five stories to 25 magazines. Off they go, and I wait patiently to see which one will change my life.

Will a “Yes” change my life? I can think of two that did. The first time I sold a story, I decided to keep going. And years later, when I won my only contest, I decided to keep going. If I’m submitting stories, I’m part of a literary conversation, even if I’m the only one who knows it’s a conversation. It gives me hope. As Mr. Micawber said in David Copperfield, “Something will turn up.”

When I got serious about finishing the first draft of my novel, I decided to eschew distractions. I couldn’t eschew my wife and our dogs, but I stopped hunting down magazines and editors and submitting stories. In fact, I stopped writing stories. Been there, done that, went somewhere else.

And then I hit that point in the novel-writing game where you ask yourself, “What am I writing here?” And “What happens next?” And “What the fuck…” I didn’t panic. I knew I’d find my way. But I decided to fall back on something familiar.

I have two stories that have been sitting in limbo since the day I finished them. It could be that I never sold them because I think they’re finished but they really aren’t. I don’t know. But I’m giving them one last chance.

For story #1, I hired a service that reads the story, considers what I want (money and social media activity, primarily), and then recommends 10 places to send it. I attended a webinar run by the two editors running this thing and they impressed me. The 10 zines they chose surprised me. They were all lively, interesting, and appeared to be part of a larger conversation. This service cost me $50.

For story #2, I followed my usual strategy of choosing 10 places based on what they pay.

The way literary magazines work, some will be open for submissions when you visit their site and some won’t open until September. Some editors will respond to you within a week and some within a year. Most will say “No.” Stephen Marche, in a depressing book with the uplifting title of On Writing and Failure, wrote that “rejection is the river in which we swim.” He’s right; the majority of us will receive far more rejections than acceptances. Everyone else says to grow calluses; Marche says we should “relish the rejection.” Don’t go down that road. Note the rejection in your log or diary or scratch it into the wall and submit the next thing. Get back to work.

The lesson I learned from this exercise (this vacation from my book) is that I don’t want to submit stories anymore. It takes too long, even though they don’t call them short stories for no reason. They’re only a few thousand words each. A novel, a single work, suddenly seems simpler.

Well, I’ll let you know if I get any takers. Meanwhile, my break is over, and I am again forging–slowly–ahead. I just reached 56,004 words.

How to get things done even if you have to sleep, eat, wash, earn a paycheck, and talk to your family

A writer of my acquaintance once told me that she could only write when she was sitting at her desk, with her cup of tea, with the light entering the window and refracting at an exact angle through the crystal she’d hung there. She didn’t say what happened to her writing when the Earth continued to rotate. She also didn’t say what happened when there was no traveling sunbeam entering the crystal. We lived in a gray, rainy place.

I don’t mean to pick on her. Writing is difficult work, and if the adverbs and the world’s indifference don’t kill you, the solitude will. But if your plan is to write only when conditions are right…you are not going to write.

A routine is more important than whatever you hang in your window. But if you have a life, how the heck can you fit another routine inside it? I struggled with this issue for years, until I read “How I wrote a book in 15 minutes a day” by Julia Dahl.

Dahl believes that all of us can find 15 minutes each day to write, and when she wrote this essay she had a job, a baby, and a husband to contend with. Writing in micro-units is not a new idea—Brenda Ueland suggested it back in 1938 in If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. (Ueland suggested stealing the time from your day job, a suggestion I ran with for decades.)

It’s an idea that has been promoted in other fields as well:

Carving out 30 minutes a day to spend in the garden might be a challenge for you at first, especially if it’s winter and dark for much of the day. But it is amazing how quickly half an hour disappears when you get involved in something you enjoy. (Greg Loades, The 30-Minute Gardener)

I am not a morning person. Ask anyone who ever tried to manage me. Neither is Julia Dahl; she writes in the middle of the day. I am more the type of person to hits his stride after midnight. But I did it. I trained myself to wake up before 6am, an idea I once would’ve considered blasphemy. As soon as I had armed myself with coffee, music, headphones, and my lucky hoodie, I found I had no trouble writing for 15 minutes. 15 minutes was not intimidating at all. In fact, I often wrote for up to two hours, which is exactly what Dahl found when she tried this. Somehow her baby grew up. Somehow my wife contends. This experiment went so well that I often returned to my task later in the day.

That was in October 2024. It was tough sledding for me at first, especially at Thanksgiving, the holiday that throws most of us off the rails. But here I am on June 1, 2025, and the word count on my novel stands at 55,407.

My writing slowed in May as I plowed into the climax of my book, which I envisioned years ago. What I didn’t envision was how difficult it would be to write it so that readers would understand it. I feel like I’m driving a Norwegian icebreaker named Fraya through the Barents Sea.

Many mystery readers enjoy a police procedural, and when the characters and the story are sufficiently compelling, that book will escape genre boundaries. But if, in writing the current scene, I turn this book into a train procedural, no one will read it except for the people who real railroaders fondly refer to as Fucking Rail Nuts. And all the FRNs will do is complain that I got the gear wrong. I am not writing for middle-aged male rivet-counters. Who buys most of the books? The middle-aged women who hold the world together. Their only experience with trains might be the Polar Express or your man Thomas.

My point is that this is how you get things done, or this is how I get things done: One step at a time. Sometimes, very small steps. When the time comes to revise, I’ll set aside a bigger chunk of my day. But for now, and because I have no publisher waiting for me, I’ll take my little slice of dawn. The dogs will wait.

Scoreboard update

As I write this, I have published four stories in four years. How have I maintained this blistering pace? When the railroad was invented in the 1830s, scientists were concerned that women were too delicate to travel so quickly. A forward velocity of 20 miles per hour would surely make a woman’s head explode, whereas we now know their heads explode because of Donald Trump.

I was paid well by today’s standards for all four stories. That’s a miracle here in the 21st century, when writers are so often compensated with likes, hearts, clicks, and “exposure” (that thing you die from). I remember Harlan Ellison hollering “Pay the writer!” in a documentary about his life. “Are you paying your printer? Your webmaster? Your artist? Pay the writer!”

Two of my stories featured women and three featured people in middle age (another miracle, given that most editors graduated from college about a week ago). Two are behind a paywall. My topics included chess, trains, sex, family, marriage, and baseball. All the major food groups. They were all fun to write, though the one I wrote based on my parents came close to killing me.

I find it interesting—to me, anyway—that I’m finding homes for these stories after I decided not to write more short stories. I swore an oath to the head of my order to write novels from now on.

That brings me to my first novel and my first draft, which today hit 52,300 words. I ended last week with 51,920 words. 380 words in one week? That’s barely more than 50 words per day. That’s how things go in the first draft, I suppose. Sometimes the words flow and sometimes I have a lot to think about. Anyone watching me would commit suicide to escape the boredom.

I’d like to finish my first draft by the end of June. How long will my draft be? My guess is 65,000 words. That means I have 12,700 words to write, or 2,546 words per week, or 363 words per day. That’s just a long email…if you know where you’re going.

I’ve been writing 10,000 words per month since December, so I’m confident I can do this. 10,000 words per month, or 120,000 words per year, isn’t much. Barry Malzberg, at the height of his career, claimed to be writing a million words per year. I imagine that Ray Bradbury, Norah Roberts, Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Robert Silverberg, and several others, in their prime, hit one million per year. They are out of my league. My current pace will get me where I want to go, and without my head exploding.

Lucky and Tango rest after a some major deconstruction in my archives.

The blog that came in from the cold

I published my first story in 1979. I received $21.50 and the sense that the world was mine. Neither of these things lasted long.

This week I published my latest story, in the Lemonwood Quarterly. “Two Tickets to Gumstump” is about marriage, trains, recycling trains, and recycling marriage. I was paid $200. I am feeling just as good as I did on that day in 1979 when I opened my mail and found that check from my new editor.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and last, the solid cash. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Obviously, this kind of money is not going to change my life. (Though in Hawthorne’s time, with $21.50 you could outfit a family of 10 and a Conestoga wagon. With $200, you could burn down Chicago and then rebuild it.) But this sale still counts as solid cash.

Here’s how to follow Lemonwood, which has now released its second issue. There’s no paywall, no account to set up, and you don’t have to click an endless series of photos of bikes or bridges to prove you’re human:

Bluesky

Instagram

Facebook

Publishing my fourth story in five years seems like a good time to light a fire under this old blog. Yes, as you can see, I am still blogging, not vlogging, podcasting, TikTokketing, or whatever new thing will be invented this year that will eviscerate all the old things by next year. I’ve been blogging with WordPress since 2009; so long, in fact, that I have a sweetheart deal with them. They’re practically paying me to write this [citation needed]. At least I’m no longer writing and mailing a paper zine.

I’m going to post every Sunday. Next week: What am I doing in this canoe and what’s happened to my writing? Also, more photos of corgis on the attack. Thanks for reading.

Here’s the latest word count on the first draft of my novel as of Sunday, May 11:

51,920

Why I’m ridiculously pleased with myself

Recent editions of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn includes an essay, “Things I Want to Say About My Mother,” by one of Smith’s two daughters, Nancy Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer, recalling Smith’s struggle to keep her family afloat as a single mom with no other source of income, wrote:

She was a professional down to her fingertips. She learned early on to think on the typewriter. Writing was her profession and she handled it that way. She generated projects and met deadlines. It was all she did.

I thought of this quote at the end of April when I read about the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The award is sponsored by the University of Georgia. Every year since 1983, the Flannery O’Connor judges and administrators have selected a collection of stories, 40,000 to 75,000 words long, to be published by the University of Georgia Press. The Flannery O’Connor winners occupy their own Wikipedia page.

When I was trying to hold a job and write, my problem was time. Here in retirement, where I have no job and can write whenever I want, my problem is motivation. Well, here was my project and my deadline. I knew which stories I wanted to include, including two that had been waiting for months for me to rewrite them. And as you can tell from this and my last blog entry, I have one thing in common with Duke Ellington, who said, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.”

My deadline was the end of May. Reader, I made it.

The prize money is practically sitting here in my pocket

There are no downsides to hitching my wagon to the Flannery O’Connor Award. If I win, the Press will publish my stories and shower me with cash. An agent will read the book, because the Press has an agreement with her or she’s too polite to say no. I’ll hold the published book in my hands everywhere I go, including weddings, bar mitzvahs, coffee dates, raves, dog walks, and birding.

And if I don’t win? Did you think I had a chance? My friend Jack Palmer, in a letter to me about doing the rounds of Christmas bazaars, put it best:

Ofelia and I had a triffic day. Got lots of “unique treasures” soon to be passed on the hapless as Christmas presents. Also entered several quilt raffles, which we will of course not win.

When I don’t win, I can still say I finished rewriting two stories. I can say I put together a 60,000-word manuscript that I submitted for a major literary award. I can say that I generated this project and I met this deadline.

Does anyone care? Does that matter?

Be bold, thrust forward, and have the courage to fail. After all, it’s only writing. Nobody is going to die for our mistakes or even lose their teeth. (Garrison Keillor)

Results in August. Meanwhile, I have a novel to write, plus stories still to submit to the hapless.

My biggest victory as a writer

Have you ever won a contest? I haven’t. Not the contests I entered as a kid to win a pocketknife with 100 blades or a BB gun to blast Nazis. Not the contests I’ve entered as an adult, like The New Yorker cartoon caption contest, or the time I was trying to win Arcade Fire tickets but ended up with Lady Gaga.

I’ve won a few chess tournaments. That’s not the same. It was hard work. I want something for nothing.

The contests I’ve entered as an adult have mostly been writing contests. As I am white and male, I have sufficient wealth to pay the entry fees without having to skip meals or sell one of my dogs. But the fees add up, even in my privileged life. At the start of 2022, I said enough is enough. But in June of that year, while reading The Practicing Writer newsletter, I learned about the 2022 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

Moment is a Jewish magazine. I’m Jewish, my parents had recently died, I wanted to write about them, and I had eight weeks. OK, I thought, I’ll try. One last time! I wrote the story. I wrote most of it while sitting under a tree at a coffee shop. I wrote it even though I stopped writing for two weeks while I thought about it. I called the story “Arguing with Reinfeld.” I sent it to Moment on the day before the deadline.

The months passed. I forgot the story. Then in May of 2023, Moment contacted me. I had won the 2022 contest.

What?

I fucking won?!

They interviewed me. They posted my story. They illustrated my story. They recorded me reading the story. They printed the story in their Fall issue. And it’s all because a) I never give up, b) I never surrender, and c) I am too much of a nitwit to do anything else.

(Editor’s note: Mr. Bieler was very close to giving up until he won this thing. But he’s still a nitwit.)

The second- and third-place finishers are half my age. That means I’m still relevant.

If you’re wondering how my life has changed since my victory, it’s too soon to tell. I appear to be married to the same person. I am no taller or shorter. I haven’t been a guest or a guest host on a late-night talk show. And I have, despite this victory, broken my record for most rejections in a year.

I will continue to write, but I’ll probably not go on writing short stories. I just won a short story contest sponsored by a magazine that was founded by Elie Wiesel. They paid me a lot of money. I’m done. When the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, ending their run of 86 years of not winning the World Series and lifting the curse from my New England childhood, I felt released. I never had to watch another baseball game again. Baseball ceased to exist in the wake of the ground ball that ended game four.

From now on, I’m only writing novels, which I will report on here.

And no more contests.

Because I won!

Let’s celebrate with some strategies for defending yourself against a corgi.

The writer’s life is a numbers game, and the numbers don’t look good

The Way the Future Was: A Memoir
Frederik Pohl, 1978

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) had the amazing good fortune to be one of the New York City teenagers and young adults who formed the Futurians in the late 1930s. These brilliant, arrogant kids (mostly male, completely white) became the writers, editors, and publishers who created the Golden Age of SF in the 1940s and ’50s.

The entrepreneurial, hard-working Pohl deserved his success. He wrote a hundred thousand words a year, was an ace at editing, won four Hugos and three Nebulas, was voted a Grand Master of science fiction, and was inducted into the genre’s Hall of Fame. But you have to admit, as an example of a person who was born in the right place at the right time, Fred Pohl is hard to beat.

The Way the Future Was has its quirks. Pohl prefers to confine any emotional upheaval to a page or two; his mother’s death was a page, his daughter’s cognitive challenges three pages. John Updike could’ve gotten a novel out of the musical beds Pohl’s circle indulged in in the 1950s, but Pohl casts it off in a paragraph. He resolves the mid-life crisis that ends the book by taking his doctor’s advice to exercise, watch his weight, and get more sleep. Thump.

What I enjoyed was Pohl’s account of editing SF zines and writing freelance in the wake of the war. His goal of writing four pages per day, every day, whether it took him 45 minutes or 12 hours, is a good reminder for miscreants like me: create a routine and stick to it. That’s how you make progress. Even John McPhee, who said he rarely wrote more than 500 words per day, explained his prolificacy by saying, “You put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”

Out where the paychecks begin

In 1959, right before the collapse of the pulp magazine market, there were more than 30 SF zines. (And plenty more pulp zines publishing detective, western, railroading, romance, and war stories.) According to Pohl, the best rate a writer could shoot for in that era was 3 cents a word. Today there are online zines publishing SF, fantasy, and horror short fiction that pay 10 or 12 cents a word; they are not dragged down by the costs of printing on paper. But check any inflation calculator: to match a rate of 3 cents per word in 1959, genre magazines today would have to pay writers 27 cents per word.

Writers will see 27 cents per word in 2100, if the oceans don’t rise up and swallow us first.

The other thing that strikes me about the writer’s life in 1959 is that you could expect to publish something and get paid for it many more times. Pohl estimated his total income for 1959 as a freelance writer at about $9,000. Half that money was from reprints. Everything he published was published again, in the herd of SF reprint anthologies that once roamed the plains. Stories he published in the ’40s were still being reprinted in the ’70s! Today we call that “passive income,” but for writers, we might as well call it “impossible.” Only one of my stories has ever been reprinted. It appeared in a magazine in Latvia that never paid its writers. I know they never paid me.

Reading The Way the Future Was is a voyeuristic pleasure in an age when writers are commonly offered nothing for what they write (meaning no money) or the glory of “exposure” (meaning no money).

Most individuals don’t have time to write for no compensation and no hope of compensation, which only increases barriers to entry for minorities, low-income individuals, those with families, those with disabilities and so many more.

Brenton Weyi, “Literary Entrepreneurship in the Twenty-First Century,” Boulevard magazine, Spring 2020

If you are a writer, prepare to be amazed by the tales in this book.

The way the future was on Earth 2

In the alternate universe where I was born in 1919, if I had survived World War II (not all of the Futurians did), and if I had had 30 or more science fiction magazines to write for in the 1950s, I would’ve published dozens of stories and two novels (Poor Little Starman and Nomads of the Galaxy) before being wiped out by the New Wave of the ’60s. Finding myself unable to adapt to new themes and approaches, and increasingly ridiculed for the recurring virgins-in-peril motif in my stories, I would’ve given up writing and gone into advertising.

My last credits would’ve been a script for the third season of Star Trek (Episode 25, “Ring Around Rigel,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola, three years before The Godfather) and “They Only Send Their Heads,” a story Harlan Ellison wheedled out of me for the infamous The Last Dangerous Visions. Some of my work might be fondly remembered today, and perhaps praised for injecting some humor into the genre, but it would all seem hopelessly dated. I would’ve had a great time, though, plus I would’ve made actual money for what I wrote!

Two interesting books on the writing life

Manjula Martin, editor. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living (2019). Emphasis on strategies to get through the day-to-day. The overall tone is stubborn but not wildly hopeful.

Lesley Conger. To Writers, with Love (1971). Leslie Conger was the pen name of Shirley Suttles, a Vancouver, B.C., mother of six who wrote a monthly column (collected in this volume) for The Writer magazine. The writing is witty, supportive, and philosophical, plus you get a look back at the tumultuous ’60s.

Random acts of pandemic kindness

Here in Portland, Oregon, we have a school of writing called the Attic Institute. The Attic is located in the attic of an old brick building; I recommend the classes, but not in the heat of August, because, well, attic. A community has grown up around the Attic and its open-mic reading series on the first Friday of each month, called Fridays on the Boulevard.

On March 25, the Fridays organizer emailed us to say that the April Friday had been suspended. But then she wrote:

I also want to extend an offer for anyone in this community to send me a piece of writing (up to 3 pages of prose or poems) at this email address, and I will send you feedback on what I find most successful and engaging about your piece.

Additionally, if you submit a piece to this email address between now and April 1st, I will create a small digital collection and distribute it to this group. It will be a fun way to feel connected and engaged, and give us something nice to read!

I immediately wrote to this person, whom I won’t name because I don’t want to embarrass her and anyway I don’t have her permission. I thanked her for her generosity, said I’d like to volunteer once the series gets going again, and sent her the first three pages of the story I’m writing. She wrote back on April 2 with some helpful, morale-boosting comments.

On April 4, true to her word, she distributed an 8-page PDF with all the contributions she’d received, including an interesting poem called “I’m tired of constantly tabulating right and wrong.” That’s exactly how I feel when I’m fumbling with masks, bleaching what seems like an infinite line of door knobs and light switches, and wondering if I’ve properly decontaminated my groceries or will my pasta kill me.

Writing is a rewarding but tough way to live. The generosity shown by this one person has benefited many, starting with me. Living through a worldwide menace like the coronavirus makes you wonder what’s the point of anything – a question only humans are capable of asking. What’s the point? Maybe asking what’s the point is the point. Geoff Dyer, writing about how “everything non-COVID-related seems so pointless” in the April 13 New Yorker, says it better than me:

We routinely say of a setback, “It’s not the end of the world.” Well, of course it’s not. Even the end of the world as we know it turns out not to be the end of the world. So, to downgrade Fitzgerald’s rhapsodic claim at the end of The Great Gatsby, we plod on – or don’t stop plodding on – for the simple reason that, with few exceptions, we are programmed to keep putting one foot in front of the other. That’s what feet are for.

Editors are back on the job! Has Trump reopened the litmags?

In the first half of April, I received rejections from Copper Nickel (which pays real money, at least by litmag standards) and Joyland (which does not). Editors are a healthy lot, or maybe they just harbor a healthy skepticism toward me. Did they break their self-isolation just to squelch my dreams? Or was this a welcome break in the boredom of their social distancing? Here’s a real question: How many litmags will still be publishing in 2021?

Days since last rejection: 9. In the words of Stan Ridgway in the song “Factory,” “I do what I’m doing ’cause I don’t know what to do when I’m not doing it.”