Some new writing resolutions

29. April 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , ,

So I’ve been following Dean Wesley Smith’s blog pretty closely over the last few days, as he posts about his creative process for a novel he’s ghost writing.  It’s more than a little mind-boggling–he started literally with nothing, not even a working title, and yet he’s averaging between 5k-7k per day.  If he hasn’t already, he’ll probably finish it tonight.

I’m learning a lot from these posts, especially about the importance of switching off your internal critic and trusting your creative instincts.  Over the last couple of days, I’ve tried to do just that with the sword & planet novel I mentioned last week, and I can say that it really works!  By doing all I can to put words on the page and ignoring everything else, I’m averaging about a thousand words per day and the story is unfolding wonderfully.  It’s like a trust fall with my muse, where instead of failing miserably I’ve found she’s there to catch me.

All of this has made me think that I need to reorder my writing routine and make some resolutions in order to keep this momentum going.  If I can overcome some of my bad habits and replace them with good ones, I can be a lot more productive, and writing will be that much more fun.

So here’s what I’m going to do this week:

  • Start every day with writing.  Even if it’s only fifteen or twenty minutes, as soon as I get out of bed I’m going to sit down at the writing computer and pound out a few hundred words.
  • Write in lots of little chunks, rather than one or two large chunks.  In other words, don’t put off writing until the chores are done–put off the chores!
  • Shoot for 1000 words per hour or better.  If the pace starts to flag, switch projects if necessary, even if the other project is fanfic.
  • Go for at least one walk at some point in the day.  Walks do more to re-energize my creative energy than just about anything else.

Basically, I’m going to treat my work-in-progress as something fun, rather than work or a chore.  I’ll use a stopwatch to keep track of how many hours I write each day, but I won’t give myself a quota.

My writing process isn’t the same as Dean’s, and I’m not going to try to imitate his process, but I am going to pick out what I like about it and see what works.  Also, I’m going to focus a lot more on quantity than quality, with the understanding that treating everything as practice will likely improve both.

As for the A to Z blogging challenge, I’ve got two posts left, Y and Z.  I haven’t written them yet, but I’ve got a great idea for both of them.  Since writing takes precedence, though, I may not get to them until later in the day.  It also depends on whether the temp agency calls me up in the morning with a job–they’ve been doing that a lot recently.  Last week I was at a factory making toothbrushes for dogs (true story).  This week, I could be doing anything–or nothing, as the case may be.  I’d like a couple of days of nothing, just for a good chance to write.

4:04 hours and 2.8k words. Not bad!

12. January 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, SW-VI: Benefactor, The Sword Keeper · Tags: , , , , , ,

You know, sometimes I miss the days when I would churn out 1,000+ badly written words and throw up a badly written blog post, still reeling in awe from a white-hot creative heat.

Well, I think those days are coming back!  Except hopefully, my writing has improved since then.  Today was the first day I hit my four hour writing goal, and it was awesome.  Also, I wrote over a thousand words in two different projects: The Sword Keeper (which is my primary project right now) and Star Wanderers: Benefactor (a secondary project, though that may change in a month or so).  Not bad!

The really cool thing, though, is that when I woke up, my brain was actually wordsmithing.  It was weird–I was actually crafting sentences in my sleep.  Of course, being an idiot, I didn’t actually sit my butt in the chair until around 11:00 am.  Still, the words came out all right, and they didn’t stop coming all day.

I think my new time tracking goal is going to work out really well.  For most days this week, I managed to get at least 3:00 hours in.  Also, I noticed a lot of interesting things about the way I write.  Starting is the hardest part, especially first thing in the day.  Frequent short breaks can help, but the internet is a huge trap and should definitely be cut from my writing computer.  If I can’t manage 500 words/hour, chances are I’m not going to stay put for very long, but once I hit 800 wph, it’s smooth sailing.

Keeping a daily time goal also makes me conscious of a lot of things.  For example, when I first wake up, I look at the clock and think “if I do my full four hours right now, I’ll be finished by XX:XX.” That motivates me to start earlier, since it means I can finish earlier (or at least have less pressure later when I’m tired).  Also, it motivates me to write for longer lengths at a time, rather than writing in short, less productive bursts.  And even though I’m still keeping track of how many words I write, the pressure to hit a certain word count is less, since once the four hours are up, the goal is accomplished no matter what’s on the page.

Of course, all this mean I’m actually writing more.  Even on the days when I didn’t hit the full four hours, I wrote a lot more than I otherwise would have.  And the neat thing about writing is that the more you do it, the easier it comes.  It takes a while to build momentum, of course, but if you can just ease back on your inner editor and let the words come, they really will come.

So the next few days are going to be interesting.  I’m leaving Massachusetts on Sunday, to take the train across the country.  That will give me plenty of writing time, I’m sure, but once I arrive in Utah, things are going to get tricky.

My first priority will be finding an apartment, then a job–probably a crap job, though in this economy even those can be hard to find.  From what I’ve heard, things haven’t changed much since I left.  My writing is starting to take off, though, so I’m not too worried about the long-term–it’s the short-term that’s going to be a challenge.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay in Utah this time, but definitely until the summer.  There’s a lot of old friends to look up, and writing conferences to attend.  If I’m not totally broke by August, I’ll do my best to attend Worldcon as well.

That’s just about it for now.  I’ve got a lot of chores tomorrow, so I’d better get some sleep.  Later!

Slow going (but still going)

09. January 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Novels, Stars of Blood and Glory, The Sword Keeper · Tags: , , , ,

I’ve been back in the States for exactly one week now, and while my stomach is still having trouble adjusting, I’m more or less used to the American way of life.  Not much culture shock this time, though that could change once I get back to Utah.  That place is pretty strange.

So without a foreign culture to navigate (or a job, though hopefully that will soon change), I have a lot more time to focus on my writing.  Trouble is…it’s coming slow.  Like, reeeally slow, at least for me.  I’ve been clocking in at less than 800 words per hour, sometimes as low as 500.  I’m still hitting betwen 1.5k and 2k words per day, but still, it’s way more of a struggle than it needs to be.

I think the main problem right now is that I’m writing with my internal editor looking over my shoulder.  Somehow, I seem to have forgotten how to turn him off (maybe that’s why I didn’t get very much written in Georgia, hmmm…).  To compound matters, it seems like every ten minutes I want to get up and do something else.  That’s not a very good way to be productive at anything, let alone writing.

Fortunately, I think I’m slowly getting the good habits back.  I’m writing a little less than two scenes a day, and the momentum is building.  With this timer constantly staring me in the face, I’m much more conscious about how I structure my day.  I haven’t hit four hours of productive writing time yet, but I am consistently getting to three, so I think it’s just a matter of self discipline before I can up that to four.

All boring writer stuff, I know.  But the long and short of it is that I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things.  If I can turn off that internal editor and start writing faster, I think I can finish The Sword Keeper before the end of the month.  That would free me to work on a lot of other things, most noticably publication of Stars of Blood and Glory.  That’s the next one in the publishing queue, though I’m still waiting on a couple of first readers <cough>.

That’s about it.  I just wanted to vent some frustration, since man, writing is tough when your internal editor is breathing down your neck.  But don’t worry–I’ll shut him up soon, and my writing will be better because of it.

Time to get immersed back in story.

A new daily writing approach

07. January 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, SW-VI: Benefactor, The Sword Keeper · Tags: , ,

So last summer, I decided to stop tracking my daily writing word count.  There were a lot of reasons for this, mostly having to do with the way it led me to focus on the wrong things and beat myself up in ways that were ultimately counterproductive.

The trouble is, I’d structured almost my whole writing life around keeping track of word counts.  Without an easy way to measure my daily progress, it was really hard to know whether I was being productive or not.  As a consequence, I didn’t push myself as hard as I could have, and ended up bouncing around between projects without really finishing anything.

Well, I think I’ve figured out a solution to that.  Instead of tracking daily word count, I’m going to use a countdown timer to make sure I spend at least X number of hours each day writing new words.  Whenever I take a break to do something else, even if it’s writing related, I’ll pause the timer, then start it up again when I get back to writing.

I tried it out last week, using a program called TimeLeft.  It worked out pretty well, I think.  Definitely gave me a lot more insight into my writing process.  I think it will help me to get some good habits back, like writing in the morning and staying focused for longer.  It will also help to have something I can accomplish each day.  It doesn’t matter how much I write, just that I spend the time actually writing.

To start out, I’m going to shoot for four hours of daily writing time.  It might not sound like a lot, and without a day job perhaps it isn’t, but I think it’s a good starting point.  Then again, if the guys at Writing Excuses are right, I might end up scaling back a bit.  Either way, I’ll probably end up adjusting that goal over the next few weeks.

Other writing stuff I’d like to figure out this year:

  • How to juggle two projects at the same time.  I’m kind of doing it now with The Sword Keeper and Star Wanderers: Benefactor, but it’s tough to keep one of them from getting the short end of the stick.
  • How to go for a week without checking my ebook sales.  Kris Rusch had a really good post on this last week.  I’ve tried it before, but I always end up breaking down and checking.  Well, no longer!
  • How to write good short stories.  I think I’ve put it off for too long.  Yes, novels and short stories are different arts, but they’re both writing, and I’m a writer.  Time to learn.

That’s just about it for now.  Hopefully, it will turn out well.

Some new thoughts on productivity

01. November 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and productivity, mostly because I seem to be struggling a lot with it lately. With nanowrimo just starting, this is a pretty topical thing to blog about, but I also want to look at it from a long-term career perspective, since that’s what I’m personally more interested in.

As writers, when we spend all our time procrastinating or fail to meet our word count goals, we tend to beat ourselves up and frame the problem in terms of a lack of self-discipline. If only we had greater will power, we could buckle down and pound out five or ten thousand words a day like those super-prolific authors.

While there’s definitely something to say for raw self-discipline, though, I think there’s another dimension to writing productivity that we tend to miss. Not all writing-related activities are productive–and not all non-writing related activities are totally unproductive. In order to make the most efficient use of our writing time, I think it’s more important to understand and respect our individual creative process than it is to merely force ourselves to produce more words.

To better understand my own creative process, I took a little time to group every writing-related thing I do into four different categories:

  • Writing activities
  • Fill-the-well activities
  • Publishing chores
  • Procrastinating

WRITING ACTIVITIES

This should be pretty self-explanatory. It’s basically all the stuff that leads directly to a finished manuscript. It requires the highest amount of energy and produces the most important content.

Activities in this category include:

  • Writing new material
  • Making substantial revisions (putting in and taking out)
  • Updating chapter and scene outlines

FILL-THE-WELL ACTIVITIES

This is the non-writing stuff I do that helps me to be more productive when I switch back to the writing activities. Basically, it’s the stuff I do before and after I write that helps me to maintain a creative momentum.

Activities in this category include:

  • Reading
  • Blogging
  • Catching up on blogs
  • Listening to podcasts
  • Doing mindles chores
  • Going on walks
  • Exploring new places
  • Watching movies
  • Playing RPGs
  • Talking with friends
  • Reviewing first reader feedback
  • Writing character outlines
  • Making book soundtracks

PUBLISHING CHORES

This is all the professional stuff that I have to do, which may feel productive while I’m doing it, but actually takes time away from the stuff I should be doing. I still have to do it, but I should waste as little time doing it as possible.

Activities in this cateogry include:

  • Ebook formatting
  • Producing cover art
  • Writing blurbs and book descriptions
  • Writing author’s notes
  • POD typesetting
  • Handing financial stuff (royalties, invoices, etc)
  • Researching the publishing industry
  • Processing copy edits
  • Sending out email newsletter

PROCRASTINATION

Again, pretty self-explanatory. This is the stuff I shouldn’t do, but end up doing anyway in order to avoid stuff that feels like work. It’s all the stuff that I need to cut out entirely if I want to maximize my productivity.

Activities in this category include:

  • Minecraft
  • Alpha Centauri
  • Any other game that I can’t stop thinking about
  • Checking ebook sales numbers
  • Dicking around on Facebook and Twitter
  • Browsing the Kindle Boards
  • Watching TV and Youtube
  • Minecraft

So now that that’s done, what next?

I’m still figuring this part out, but I think the best thing to do would be to put as much distance as possible between the stuff that boosts productivity (writing and filling the well) and the stuff that doesn’t (publishing chores and procrastination).

The way I see it, there are basically two ways to do this:

  • Physically separate the activities. Do all your writing on a machine that’s disconnected from the internet and doesn’t have any games installed, and do everything else on a separate computer.
  • Set aside blocks of time specifically for writing. Organize your schedule so that writing is a priority, while acknowledging the need to take breaks and refill the creative well.

I can’t really do the first one while I’m here in Georgia, but I definitely can do the second. So far, I’ve found that waking up early to start the day with an hour of writing helps me a ton to build and keep momentum. However, I need to do a better job setting time aside in the afternoon, both for writing and for refilling the well. If I don’t, I usually end up procrastinating by default without realizing it until it’s too late.

So anyhow, those are some of my latest thoughts on writing and productivity. What are yours? Does this square with your experience, or is there a better way to think about it that I’ve missed?

Managing time and mental space in a foreign country

29. April 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Heart of the Nebula, Novels · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Some of you asked for a writing update, so I figure I might as well do a quick post on my current projects and where they are.  I’ve also been experimenting with my daily schedule a bit, so it would probably be good to blog about that as well.

Right now, the main project taking up all of my attention is the 3.0 draft of Heart of the Nebula.  It’s a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and continues the story from James McCoy’s point of view, five years later.  I’m making a lot of changes, toning down the romantic subplot and emphasizing the more interesting social and ethical issues.  When I’m through, I think it will be completely different from the first couple of drafts, but in a way that’s truer to the spirit of the first book.

I’ve only been managing about 500 to 1,500 words per day, though, which is abysmally low compared to my usual word count.  Part of that is because I’m throwing out entire sections and drafting new ones from scratch, but the more significant part is that I don’t have as much mental space for writing as I did back in the States.

Basically, moving to a foreign country and starting a new career has taken a lot more out of me than I thought it would.  I teach 18 lessons per week, some with as many as 30 or 35 kids, across grades 1 through 12.  Culturally, everything is completely different too.  So far, the shock hasn’t been too bad–I really love it out here in Georgia–but it’s made the writing a little bit more difficult than I’d expected.

I have a lot of free time, though, so that’s not a problem: the problem is clearing my mind and keeping the creative juices fresh.  Here’s how I’m going to do it:

  1. Limit internet time.  As tempting as it is to turn to the familiarity of the internet, it’s a huge time-suck and doesn’t really do anything for the culture shock.  A much better thing for that would be to spend more time reading.  From now on, I’m going to limit myself to one internet session per day, no longer than 2 hours (more if there’s something I actually need to do).
  2. Get out more.  I get cabin fever very easily, and it’s only gotten worse now that I’m in a foreign culture.  Fortunately, there are tons of places to explore, and in my local neighborhood I’m kind of a celebrity (hey look, it’s the American!  Let’s chase him and shout ‘hello’!).  The prime time for this is the late afternoon, when everyone’s out and things are still open.  If I check the internet right after school and get out immediately after, I think that will help me better to focus.
  3. Get up early to write in the morning.  I tried this last week, and it was a great way to get focused and build more momentum.  Even if I only manage a couple hundred word, it gets me thinking about the story for the rest of the day, which makes it easier to pick up in the afternoon and evening.

So that’s the plan for now.  My goal is to finish Heart of the Nebula before the end of May, which is going to require a significant change of pace.  It should be pretty straightforward, though, and after this draft it shouldn’t need too many more revisions before it’s ready to publish.  If all goes well, I foresee a publishing date sometime in the fall or winter.

Do you have any other ideas for ways to manage creativity in a totally foreign culture?  If so, I’d love to hear it–that’s my biggest struggle right now.

Writing log results

21. January 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Novels, Stars of Blood and Glory, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

For the last month or so, I’ve been keeping track of my daily writing habits to look for patterns that might give me some insight on how to improve my creative process.  I’ve amassed somewhere around 65 data points, and I think the results are clear enough to notice some trends.

Just some preliminary background information: for most of this time, I’ve either been on vacation or at my parents’ house, waiting to start an English teaching job in another country.  I haven’t had school or a full-time job, so my schedule has been pretty open and flexible.  Also, the numbers track progress on the first drafts for Star Wanderers and Stars of Blood and Glory, and do not count revisions of any kind.

Here are the results:

The first graph plots word count by duration spent writing.  As you can see, there’s a definite trend: the longer I write, the more I tend to write.  No surprises there.  Most writing sessions are somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes, or 500 and 1,500 words.

The second graph plots the average writing rate (in words per hour) per session by hours spent writing, and it’s a little bit murkier.  In writing sessions of less than 45 minutes, I tend to average a little over 1000 words/hour, but things get murkier between 45 and 90 minutes, and after 90 minutes, I tend to be around 600 and 800 words/hour.

The overall trend appears to be down–that is, the longer I write, the slower I tend to write–but there appears to be a counter-trend, too, where if I start off slow I can increase the pace by writing for a longer amount of time.  Is that true, or is that simply a sharper downward trend line?

I think it’s a genuine counter-trend, and here’s why:

This graph shows writing rate plotted against word count, and it pretty clearly shows two trend lines: one starting at 1,000 to 1,200 words/hour and going slightly down, the other starting at 400 to 600 words and going up.  At about 1,500 total words, they converge at around 800 words/hour and appear to remain flat, though there isn’t really enough data to be able to say.

What I think this shows is that I have two different writing styles.  The first is to start off slow and gradually write my way into the story, picking up the pace but never really going over 800 words/hour.  The other is to start off at a sprint of 1,200 words/hour or so, but to slowly drop off to 800 words/hour at around 90 minutes or 1,500 words.

The next graph plots the total word count of each writing session by the time of day in which I started the session.  Interestingly, there is no trend; the points are all over the map.  This tells me that there is no “best time” for me to write.  Other time-related factors might influence how much I can write, but time of day itself does not.

A quick glance at the next graph confirms this.  It plots writing rate by time of day, and the results are much the same as the graph for word count.  I tend to write at a more consistent pace in the afternoon–around 1,000 words/hour–but really, there is no consistent trend.

This tells me that my first session of the day tends to be slow and gradual, but that once I’ve written myself into the story, the writing comes a lot faster.  In other words, if I wake up early and hit the ground running, I tend to write more and write faster throughout the day.  If I get lazy and sleep in, the whole day tends to be shot.

The last two graphs plot word count and writing rate by date.  Before January 3rd or so, I was either spending time with family or on the road / traveling cross-country by train.  Even so, there wasn’t a whole lot of variation, though my writing rate converged around 800-1,000 words/hour for a while before fluctuating again.

What this tells me is that stability and momentum tend to lead to more consistency in my writing habits.  If I’m constantly on the road, it becomes more challenging to keep up the pace.  Even so, as long as I can find make at least 45 to 90 minutes to write, I can pound out about the same number of words per session.

So in conclusion, it seems that the best way to improve my writing habits and streamline my creative process would be to:

  1. Get up early and start the day writing.
  2. Write in short, condensed sessions of 45 to 90 minutes each, with periodic breaks in between.
  3. Don’t worry about time of day when planning time to write; just do it whenever time can be made available.

However, unless I can get to the point where I’m regularly averaging +1,000 words after two hours, it’s going to be really hard to put in 10k words or more per day.  At 800 words/hour, it takes 12.5 hours to hit 10k, and after about four or five sessions at 1,000 words/hour, the well starts to dry up.

A much more practical goal, for now at least, would be to shoot for a consistent 5k words per day.  The week before last, I hit about 5.5k on Monday, a little less than 4k on Tuesday and Wednesday, and back around 2.5k for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  My running 7-day total for the entire week was above 20k, which is pretty good, but if I could get to stay between 25k and 30k for some time, that would be an accomplishment.

I haven’t totally given up on hitting a 10k/day average, but at this point, it seems that I need to set some stepping stones first.  5k/day seems like a much better goal for now–especially since I don’t know how things are going to change once I’m traveling again.  But at least I have a better idea of how my own process works.  I expect I’ll be writing a lot more in the weeks and months to come!

Climbing the 10k mountain

16. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Bringing Stella Home, Desert Stars, Edenfall, Genesis Earth, Novels, Stars of Blood and Glory, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles, The Back Burner · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Many Bothans died to bring you this.

I recently read an amazing blog post by Rachel Aaron, in which she explains how she went from writing about 2k words per day (about what I’m doing) to routinely breaking 10k.

This is something I really want to do with my own writing.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I need to pick up the pace if I’m going to keep up with my professional goals.  If I could go from 2k to 10k, and make 10k the standard…holy cow, that’s a 500% jump in productivity.  Who wouldn’t want that?

From Rachel’s blog:

Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty easy, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the ability to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I’m a giant nerd, I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine. I never start writing these days unless I can hit all three.

The point that I probably need to work on the most is time: I tend to start off the day slow, checking Facebook and blogs and other stuff before getting into the writing, then write for a little while before running off and doing some chore or allowing myself to get distracted again.  Sometimes, I don’t really buckle down until a couple of hours before I should go to bed, and that’s bad.

But really, I think the main obstacle is just thinking that writing is difficult.  If everything comes together in the right way, there really isn’t any reason why 5k or 6k or even 10k should be too difficult–and yet we naturally think that if 2k is hard, anything more should be that much harder.

I’m in a weird state of limbo right now between moving and preparing to go overseas, but I’m going to start a daily writing log so that I can figure out what time of day is most productive.  You can’t wait for life to settle down before you get to work; you have to roll with what you’re given.  Also, I’m going to put a lot more effort into outlining and planning, so that I don’t get hung up by research when I should be writing.  Even discovery writers need a little bit of time to ponder things before putting words to the page.

Also, after considerable thought and effort, I’ve decided to put Star Wanderers on the back burner again.  I finished the novelette last week and submitted it to Writers of the Future; I think it’s quite good, and stands a good chance of finding a home in one of the short markets.  But the full length novel, for various reasons, just isn’t coming to me.  I don’t know if it’s because I lack the life experience to write it, or because I’m too close to it to see what’s broken, but regardless of the reason, I need the break.

I’m not sure whether to do Edenfall or Stars of Blood and Glory next, but I’m leaning towards Stars of Blood and Glory.  This is a novel set in the Gaia Nova universe, with characters from Desert Stars, Bringing Stella Home, and Heart of the Nebula.  I’ve been itching to write it since this summer, but never got around to it because other projects got in the way.  Well, hopefully now that will change.

I know from emails and other correspondence that some of you are really looking forward to Edenfall, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to it soon.  In order to do it justice, I feel I need to reread Genesis Earth and immerse myself in some Carl Sagan, but right now I’m still running on a sci fi adventure trip.  If I can implement some of these metrics and push my daily word count upwards of 10k, it shouldn’t be long before Edenfall gets my attention again.  My goal is to finish it before the end of the year, so there’s a very good chance it’ll be published sometime in late 2012.

As for Star Wanderers, I’ll shop the novelette around after I hear back from Writers of the Future.  I think it has a good chance at winning the quarter, but of course I can’t count on it.  At this point in my career, I should probably be playing both the traditional markets as well as the indie field.

That’s just about it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to write…

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