Over the years, people have frequently asked me if the time I spent in the magazine business — I ran five national magazines, including Cosmopolitan, for 14 years — was good preparation for my career as a mystery and thriller writer. My guess is that being a former prosecutor, cop, or private eye would have served me better, but overall my background has had it advantages.
For starters, it gave me great contacts in media, as well as a certain amount of name recognition, both of which came in handy when I began trying to promote my books.
But probably the best thing my magazine career did for me was teach me how to stop procrastinating. I learned a technique that turned me from a wannabe author into a real one. If you struggle with keeping your butt firmly in your desk chair, this technique might work for you, too.
I’m not sure how or why I became such a procrastinator, but I do know it began after college, perhaps because the work world seemed so overwhelming. During my 20s, as a young writer for Glamour, I’d put off my assignments until the very last minute, practically pulling all-nighters to finish them (and I’m talking about pieces like “How to Get Rid of a Pimple by Saturday Night,” not ground-breaking journalism). At the time I was also trying to write fiction on weekends and it was hopeless. I’d vow to spend all Saturday working on my first novel and yet I’d never manage to find my way to the computer. I began to think that despite what I told people, I really did’t long to write murder mysteries.
To help combat the problem, I pitched my boss the idea of an article on time management and ended up interviewing some of the top experts in that field. One of them, a guy named Edwin Bliss, taught me the trick that changed everything for me. He called it “Slice the salami,” and though it’s pretty basic, it was a miracle worker for me.
First, the reasoning behind the strategy: Bliss explained that we often avoid certain tasks because we’ve made them way too big — and thus daunting — and NOT because our hearts aren’t really in it. The key to success, he said, is making the steps as tiny as necessary.
He compared the process to slicing a salami. On its own, a hunk of salami can look pretty damn unappealing, but once you slice it, you’ve got something fairly pretty to look at.
What you need to do is examine your task or project and decide how thin the slices need to be for you to want to tackle them.
The technique worked fantastically for me in my magazine work and then later, in my 40s when I restarted fiction writing. When I began my first Bailey Weggins mystery, I told myself that I’d write for only 15 minutes a day. It seemed so easy and doable that I never put it off. After three months I actually had a few chapters under my belt, and by then I was writing longer every day.
I don’t need the salami trick anymore (‘’m on my twelfth book of fiction), but it’s there if I fall back into bad habits.
I know this trick works for people beside myself. I bumped into a former colleague recently and she told me she’d finally finished her novel after six years. I congratulated her and asked how she pulled it off. She laughed and said, “I heard you deliver a speech once and you mentioned a technique called ‘Slice the salami.’ I tried that strategy and it took me all the way to the end.”
—Kate White
Kate White is the author of six Bailey Weggins mysteries and five stand-alone psychological thrillers, including the upcoming The Secrets You Keep (March 2017). She is also the editor of The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook.