This post is called ‘on niches and time wasting’ but I could have called it ‘The Drama Book’ instead! I wrote a drama textbook years ago (2002 – 2003) – it was published around the same time as my first novel. It was making me around £25 a year. Not huge cash. But then, I didn’t write it to make huge cash, I wrote it for me. I’m talking about the ‘me’ that was a beginning drama teacher back in the day, thrown in at the deep end. I realised there was a need for drama lessons that you could ‘pick up and teach’ and I couldn’t find a resource like that anywhere. Also, I had worked with people with special needs (particularly profoundly disabled adults), teaching both Drama, Creative Movement, and Art, and I wanted to write down the ideas I had while I was doing it. The small press I submitted to said they wanted Drama books and Special Needs books, so – without really knowing it – I found a niche. I wrote a book called Drama for Students with Special Needs.
Recently I heard that the small press that published it had gone under, so it would no longer be available. It may have been ‘only’ a textbook, but it stayed in print longer than my novels and if my ‘big why’ is to make a difference in people’s lives with my writing, then I can say without exaggeration that Drama for Students with Special Needs helped teachers across the country for over a decade.
So, I figured that the Drama Book (as I call it for short) deserved to be out there, even though nowadays there are far more resources out there, including lesson plans that sit online if you know where to look. In fact, I listed some of these in the new version of the book. I rewrote it, updated it, and instead of targeting it at special needs teachers, or even drama teachers, I wrote it for busy teachers who need ‘pick up and teach it’ lessons. This time, I was deliberately looking for a niche. (If you read Day Seventeen, it was part one of the new improved Drama Book that I was proof-reading while my son trained to be an astronaut.)
Here’s how I did it, for those of you interested in eBook production:
I certainly found a niche. In fact, I found a whole community of lovely people on the Drama Teachers’ Sharing Group on Facebook. When I asked if anyone would like a review copy, I was inundated with requests. Way more than I expected. Most of these requests were from people saying that this was exactly the kind of book they needed. Now, these people are mostly trained drama teachers. They could write their own lesson plans. Some of them could do it with their eyes closed. Several of them have published or are writing their own resources. To a man or woman, what they all were was, yes, you guessed it: BUSY! My niche wasn’t drama teachers, it was BUSY teachers who need drama lessons, and quick, and really, that was what I had set out to write all those years ago.
So, the million dollar question now. Was I wasting my time writing a non-fiction book instead of working on my novel? Should I have gone into my garret (or writing shed – which hasn’t actually arrived yet?!) and cut myself off from the world? Was I procrastinating? Possibly, if I were single-minded enough, I would have found a space where I could focus on nothing but fiction. However, there were a couple of things looming large. 1) Distractions – one of them the forthcoming week-long camping trip. 2) The dawning realisation that I did NOT need to generate words.
I don’t really have a problem generating words. I’ve written a lot of them. In fact, knowing when to stop is harder. However, I find sequencing difficult, and I need quiet concentration without distractions (see number one) in order to do it. It took me a while to work on number 2 because the cultural idiom when it comes to writing focuses on the first draft, not on sequencing. I have read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, but it wasn’t until this summer that I realised this truth: focus time for me is all about the sequencing. I’ve written about it here, in case you’d like to know how I solved the problem.