For more encouragement in building your inventory, take a look at Ray Bradbury’s record. He’s written a story a week, on average, since he was 12 years old. He started writing in 1932. Doing the math, that’s nearly 4000 stories. That’s a lot of inventory. And Ray sent those stories out to magazine editors, many before they were any good, as he later learned. But he kept on writing and he kept on sending them out.

He writes 1000-2000 words a day, every day, even now, though he has switched to dictating his stories to his daughter over the phone.

His advice to writers:

…stop being an intellect. Get your work done. Don’t worry about what you’re doing. Don’t plan anything. Just do it. Throw it up. Throw it up, and then clean up. I was at a bookstore last night and a book clerk there said, ‘I’m having trouble with a novel I’m writing. I do this, I do that.’ I said, ‘Stop that’ — no outlines, no plans. Get your characters to write the book for you. Ahab wrote Moby Dick, Melville didn’t. Montag wrote Fahrenheit 451, I didn’t. If you let your characters live, and get out of their way, then you have a chance of creating something individual.

Can you write a story a week? A chapter a week, if you’re working on a novel? You can. Try Ray’s method… don’t think, don’t plan, just write. See where your characters take you. Get words down on the paper and then clean them up and make them sparkle.

Building your inventory of stories and novels gives you a lot of manuscripts to send out to agents and editors. But how do you work up to creating so many stories? One way is by building your writing muscles. Shannon Donnelly has written an article to help you build up those muscles for the long haul.

10 Steps to Big Writing Muscles

1. Pay attention to your body. Eat well-balanced meals, limit alcohol and caffeine so your mind stays sharp.
2. Establish a habit of “warms-up” that begin every writing session. Sit at your desk and write one page of anything.
3. Go over last five pages of your current project and do light editing.
4. Stretch yourself by writing one more page each week than you consider productive and comfortable.
5. Plan your training. If you write short stories, work your sprinting muscles by write a new short story each week. If you write novels, write every day to develop your marathon muscles.
6. Avoid writer’s block with two strategies – stop writing in mid-sentence and mid scene and no staring at the blank screen… write something, anything.
7. Pay yourself as motivation. Set your per page rate and put the money into a piggy bank to be spent after you finish your first draft and a second-draft edit.
8. Make your writing place comfortably yours with the proper furniture and equipment.
9. Ease yourself back into your training schedule after vacation or illness.
10. Take short breaks during your writing sessions.

Daily writing progress will build your writing muscles. Get started today.

Here’s some more encouragement to build your writing inventory. Jay Lake, author of four science fiction novels, has laid out his four guidelines for writing fiction. The day I discovered them, the light bulb went on. I hadn’t ever considered that writing a lot of stories would give me a lot of stories to potentially sell. I know… it seems like a ‘duh’ statement. But I thought that I should concentrate on only my BIG ideas. The novels that I would sell for million dollar advances. (Dream on.) Jay’s guidelines were a refreshingly different perspective.

1. Write a story every week.
2. Finish everything you start.
3. Don’t self-critique while you’re writing.
4. Work on one thing at a time.

A story every week seemed impossible at first. Is he kidding? What kind of quality is going to come out of something written so fast? And what if I can’t come up with a story idea every week? To my amazement, I didn’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. And the quality of the finished stories wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.

Finish everything you start seemed like a no-brainer. But then I started mentally counting the number of unfinished stories I have on hand. Hmmm… maybe this one does apply to me. Half-written stories don’t do me any good. I can’t sell them. I can’t even revise them properly. Not until they’re finished. So another good rule.

But don’t self-critique while you’re writing seemed a bit much. On the rare occasion that I write something dreadfully dull, I want to fix it as soon as possible. Light editing while I’m writing makes me feel good. Like I’m actually turning out something decent. But as I read through his reason for this rule, it began to make sense. Let the story flow out of you until it is done. Don’t gag the muse when she’s speaking to you. When it’s done, you can go back and judge it. You might just find that the uncensored, unedited voice of your story is actually pretty good.

His final piece of advice to work on one thing at a time speaks to our multi-tasking tendencies. It’s too easy to start several different projects (so many good ideas out there!) and then ramble around on them, making little progress. Start a story, work on it until it is done, then start another.

If Jay’s guidelines work for you, you’ll find yourself quickly building an inventory of stories that you can send out. If short stories aren’t for you, you can modify the guidelines. If you’re a novel writer, then write a new chapter a week. Work on it until it’s done. Don’t edit until you’re finished with the entire novel. Just work on one novel at a time. There’s some pretty sound advice in Jay’s guidelines.

Next up, a way to build your writing muscles for the long haul.

If you don’t write it, you can’t sell it. Seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? But it can be easy to get caught up in the creative side of writing and forget all about the business aspects. After all, we’re writers, artists… we take our imagination and weave stories of adventure, passion, intrigue to beguile our readers. Art takes time to produce if you want a quality product.

But the word “product” is the one we have to remember. Yes, you’re telling a fabulous story to entertain and enthrall your readers. But it is also your product, the thing that you produce and, with a lot of work, some luck and the stars aligned just so, the thing that you sell.

So many of us are striving to quit our day jobs and work full-time as writers. We’ve all heard the statistics about how many achieve that. And how many don’t. If you want to support yourself as a full-time writer, you need to have stories (short or novel-length) to sell and they need to be available on a regular basis.

Quality is important in what you write, so just churning out words is not the best way to build your inventory. By focusing on completing more pieces, though, you can build your writing “muscles” and have more available to sell.

Angela Booth gives the advantages of building your writing inventory in her article Build Your Writing Inventory where she talks about building inventory for both fiction and non-fiction writers.

• Lack of pressure. There’s no pressure when you’re writing for inventory. This means you can be creative, and can take risks.
• You’ve got lots of work extant, so you can court a new market immediately, as soon as you find it. This increases the likelihood that you will get your foot in the door with a new magazine, or a new publishing house, and have your work purchased simply because you showed up when your work was needed.
• When a new market appears, it takes several months for it to register on the radar screen of writers. Once the market has been listed in a writers’ marketing guide, they’ll be flooded with work. If you can get in early, the chances of your work being purchased goes up, simply because it will be read with more care.
• You’ve always got something to sell. “Rejection” has no meaning for you. Rejection simply means that you haven’t yet found a home for a piece of work.

While you’re working on your best-seller, keep these things in mind:

1. You can’t make money as a writer without a product (i.e., novel, short story, article) to sell.
2. The more products you have, the better chance you have of selling something.

In the next few days, we’ll talk more about how you can build your inventory of writing products, so you’re ready when the right publishing opportunity comes along.

Writer’s Digest is having a sale until September 26 on three CD’s.

Writer’s Digest 2007 Compilation – All the 2007 issues in PDF format with active links and an index to easily find specific articles.

Writer’s Digest Presents: The Best of WD Interviews – 100 pages of past interviews with writers from the magazine.

The Writer’s Ultimate Resource Guide 2008 – information on markets, contests, writing organizations, agents and websites.

Each CD is $10.00, down from $14.95.

The last tip (that I’m sharing anyway) from Bob Mayer’s The Novel Writer’s Toolkit is that Idea Does Not Equal Story.

Many beginning writers hesitate to share their story idea for fear that someone will steal it, write their story and become a bestselling author with it. Bob explains why that fear is unfounded.

The original idea is only the foundation for your story. It’s often (intentionally) generic and somewhat vague. But a story includes characters, settings, timing, point of view, pacing, etc. The story answers all the questions that your idea raises – Who, What, When, Where, How.

“What if a person with limited mental capacity interacts with the world?” The film A Dangerous Woman uses this idea. So does Forest Gump. And they are very different stories. (Films work the same way as books when it comes to idea vs. story.)

Take any idea and give it to two writers. I guarantee they’ll write completely different stories.

You don’t have to worry about someone stealing your idea. Instead, worry that your idea isn’t interesting enough for someone to want to steal it.

Have you ever taken an idea and had a writing challenge with a friend to see what kind of stories you each came up with?

Today’s tip from Bob Mayer’s The Novel Writer’s Toolkit is about more pre-work before you start to write your story. He proposes answering six questions before you write:

1. What do I want to write about?
2. What do I want to say about it?
3. Why do I want to say it?
4. Why should anybody else care?
5. What can I do to make them care?
6. What do I want readers to do, think, or see?

The first three questions focus on the writer and are usually easy to answer. The last three questions focus on the reader and can be harder to answer. But if you’re writing with the intent to sell your writing, you need to consider the reader. You want the reader pulled into your story, so engaged that they can’t put it down. The best (and easiest) time to plan the reader’s reaction is before you start writing.

Do you think about your reader before you write?

I’m currently reading The Novel Writer’s Toolkit by Bob Mayer. I picked it up a couple weeks ago in the Writer’s Digest Book Club Buy-One, Get-One-Free, Rinse and Repeat sale. (It wasn’t really called that, but it was a fabulous bargain, so I bought a LOT.) I loved Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob and decided to try out his book on writing. There are some good nuggets in here.

Today’s tip: Write down the original idea for your story. Say it out loud, write it down, post it near your writing space so you can keep focused on it. Beginning writers tend to wander all over the place in their story and start too many subplots that go nowhere. Staying focused on the original idea will help you write a more focused, coherent story.

A key to making the original idea work is to keep it generic… and specific. How’s that for conflicting advice? He gave an example. “What if Mary had to stop a band of terrorists?” You can improve it by substituting “a housewife” for Mary. This is making your idea statement more generic–not a particular person, but a role/occupation descriptor. “What if a housewife had to stop a band of terrorists?” Now you’re not locked into a particular character. (Just in case Mary turns out to be a Mary Sue and you have to ditch her for Carrie Lou.)

The second improvement we could make is to make the idea more specific. What are the terrorists trying to do? “What if a housewife had to stop a band of terrorists from assassinating the President?”

These two changes open up a lot of possibilities for your story and allow you to change different details of your story while still maintaining your original idea.

Do you have a one-sentence idea for the story you’re working on?

It can be difficult to find a good crit partner. You need someone who’s a great reader and who understands writing well enough to give you constructive suggestions. If you’re the only writer among your friends and family or you live in a rural area, it can be tough to find anyone to even talk to about your writing.

Enter the Internet and a lady named Seanchai.

Seanchai has created a site for writers looking for a crit partner over at Ning. Imagine eHarmony or Match.com for writers and you get the picture. When you join, you fill out a profile with questions on what type of writing you do, the genre, etc. You can then post in the different forums (by genre) to introduce yourself and locate a partner. Crit Partner Match currently has 75 members and is looking to grow. Head over there today and sign up.

If you’re looking for a speedy way to map out a plot for your novel, here are three quick methods you could use:

The Snowflake Method – created by Randy Ingermanson, the Snowflake guy. It starts with one sentence and builds into a detailed synopsis with character profiles.

Outline Your Novel in 30 Minutes – this article by Alicia Rasley walks you through creating an outline for your novel in nine quick steps.

Notecarding: Plotting Under Pressure – Holly Lisle details a fun method of using notecards to create various scenes for your story and then walks you through putting them in a coherent order.

Do you have any quick plotting methods you use?