We’re finally starting to settle into a good daily routine here at the Vasicek homestead, which is really helping me to make good progress on Captive of the Falconstar. Since Piper usually gets home from work around 4pm, we eat an early dinner around 5pm, giving me about an hour to go write at the library before it’s time to put the kids down for bed. That extra little writing time at the end of the day is absolutely great.
Also, instead of journaling and updating my writing and reading logs at night, I now do that first thing in the morning after waking up, which really helps with going to bed earlier. I’ve found that if I’m on the computer late at night, I usually end up spiraling down a black hole on YouTube, just because I’m exhausted and don’t have any energy left for self-discipline. But if I do all that journal and other stuff in the early morning, I can get it done real quick and move on to everything else that needs to get done.
We are still adjusting to life with three small children. It’s insane how much crazier things become when you go from two to three. When we had our first child, it was definitely a major adjustment, but since there were two of us and only one of them, it wasn’t too difficult. With two, it definitely got more complicated, but really it was just more of the same. As soon as we were outnumbered, though, everything changed. It’s as if we just started living life on hard mode. No breaks. Constant chaos. Always falling behind.
That’s why it’s been so nice to get an hour at the end of the day to work on my current WIP—and work, I definitely have. Right now, I’m about 40% done with the AI draft of Captive of the Falconstar, and somewhere between 10% and 20% of the human draft. At my current rate of progress, I estimate I’ll have a finished, publishable draft by late March / early April. If I can get a chance to do a mini writing retreat one of these weekends, I could cut down that time by as much as a week or two.
So that’s what I’ve been up to. Now, to get a few more things done before the kids wake up and the daily battle with the forces of entropy starts all over again.
It’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I had planned to keep a regular twice-a-week posting schedule, then went a little more than that for about a month before falling out of the routine.
We just got back home from a family road trip, where we drove out to Omaha and back again, making the Mormon pioneer trek in both directions. It was our first time going on a road trip with the baby, and we had a really fantastic time! Saw Chimney Rock, Independence Rock, Martin’s Cove, Sixth Crossing, Fort Bridger…and then we decided to go straight home, instead of finishing the trek with a tour of Salt Lake City. But that’s only a quick day trip for us, so we’ll probably do that soon.
It was a really awesome road trip, and definitely a good thing to get away and actually vacate for a while. But now that we’re back, I need to pick up some of the balls I’ve dropped and get back into the saddle. Writing is a high priority: I haven’t written hardly anything in the past week. Another big priority is publishing. I was supposed to put out a new short story single last weekend, but decided to put it off until we got back home. So that’s something I’m going to do right away.
I also want to get back into blogging. While on vacation, I DNFed a dozen books, most of them recent Hugo, Nebula, Dragon, and Goodreads Choice nominees. I have a lot of thoughts. Also, the 2022 Dragon Award nominees are out, and I’ve got to be honest, it looks kind of schizophrenic—which is exactly what you would expect to see with rival political tribes battling for control of fandom. But that’s been the case for the Dragons ever since the award’s inception. Again, I have thoughts.
Point is, I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, but I hope to get back into a good blogging routine before the end of the month. That’s the plan, and it’s not a lack of content that’s the problem: more just a question of routine. Expect to see more here soon.
Just a quick update post. My parents came over to visit last week, and we’ve all come down with a mild cold, so our family routine has been more or less up-ended. That’s just the nature of routines, though: they work until they’re inevitably disrupted, at which point you need to reassess and adapt to the new circumstances.
In our case, the big thing we need to adapt to is our two year-old daughter. Currently, I watch her in the morning and my wife watches her in the evening (we both work from home). Which works out pretty nice, especially since she’s just started taking one long nap (usually in the morning) instead of two shorter ones.
I’ll have to talk with Mrs. Vasicek about how we want to adjust our schedules because of that. But before we do that, I suppose I should break down the elements of what I need to accomplish, and figure out how best to do those:
Writing
My daily writing goal is to hit at least 1k new words, and 2.5k words on what I call the daily index. Basically, new words count 1x and words revised or other words (such as what I’m writing now for this blog) count .5x. So I could hit the daily index by writing 2.5k new words in my WIP, or 1k new words and 3k words revised.
It’s a fairly modest goal, but I’ve found it quite challenging to hit it consistently. For that reason, I allow myself one admin day (for doing all the mindless work and/or refilling the creative well) per week, but I really do need to hit those daily writing goals more regularly. And I’ve found through sad experience that the longer I put off doing the writing, the harder it gets to actually do.
So what I really need is to start writing first thing in the morning. If I can get 500 words in before breakfast, that would be fantastic. But the trouble with that is that I’m the one watching the baby while Mrs. Vasicek makes breakfast, and the baby is always—always—super hangry when she wakes up. I know we’re supposed to minimize screen time, but I usually put on something for her to watch to keep her happy. But that’s usually either piano music or Tabernacle Choir, so I suppose I could write on my other monitor while the video plays on the other one. And sometimes I get lucky and the baby wanders off to the kitchen to get a piece of whatever Mommy is cooking. So I could probably fit in some writing that way.
The other obvious time to fit in some writing time is during her nap. I usually need at least a little time to decompress first (putting the baby down can be an ordeal) but if I set a timer, that would probably help keep the down-time from taking up all of naptime. Also, it would probably help if I read a book instead of browsing the internet. Reading is much better for decompressing than vegging out on the latest clickbait trash.
If I can hit 500 words before breakfast and another 500 words during naptime, it should be much easier to hit word count later. The first couple hundred words are always the hardest. After hitting 1k words, it’s surprisingly easy to write another thousand. So getting those words in early is the key.
Publishing
In my experience, there are four kinds of publishing tasks, forming a 2×2 grid:
Takes very little brainspace
Takes a lot of brainspace
Tend to enjoy
Tend to procrastinate
Tasks that require a lot of brainspace are things like writing a blog post, or writing a book description, or responding to fan mail. Tasks that take very little brainspace are things like crunching numbers, typesetting a print book, or submitting books for promotions.
The procrastination angle is a bit more personal. I imagine the kinds of things I tend to procrastinate are very different from the things that other people procrastinate. But the big danger here is that the tasks I actually enjoy will become the excuse for procrastinating something else—like writing. For that reason, I try to limit myself to only 1 hour of publishing tasks per day.
But when is the best time to fit in that hour? If I do it first thing to get it out of the way, there’s a very good chance I’ll just keep working through the timer and end up having an admin day. On the other hand, if I put it off to the end of the day, then writing tends to fill up that space instead—which isn’t terrible, but these publishing tasks do need to get done sometime.
What I probably need to do is set a time in the middle of the day, maybe around 3pm when we start intermittent fasting. That should be late enough not to turn the day into an admin day, but early enough that I still have time and energy. Besides, for me writing isn’t usually a continuous thing: instead, it tends to happen in creative bursts with a little bit of necessary downtime in between. So setting 3pm as the publishing tasks time shouldn’t interrupt my writing time too badly—and if I happen to be in the flow, I’ll just push on to the next stopping point and do publishing tasks then.
I have a pretty good accountability system in place to maximize the productivity of that hour, so I’m not concerned about needing more time or dropping the ball on the important-but-not-urgent tasks. However, I will procrastinate some of those important-but-not-urgent tasks if I’m not mindful enough. So this is probably the best way to handle all that:
Takes very little brainspace
Takes a lot of brainspace
Tend to enjoy
Leave for the next admin day.
Pay closer attention to the time.
Tend to procrastinate
Start first, then listen to podcasts.
Plan it out ahead.
Of course, this will change depending on how urgent/important the task is. The mindless enjoyable tasks tend to be neither urgent nor important, but that isn’t always the case. And by “start first, then listen to podcasts,” what I mean is to start it off with a good amount of focus, then switch on a podcast in the background after I’ve hit my stride.
Reading
Reading is something that I enjoy, but it isn’t a mindless activity, so if I’m not careful I’ll end up filling my free time with useless things like playing a phone game. So reading time needs to be scheduled.
My wife and I have found that reading before bed tends to work really well, so long as we don’t put off going to bed. The key to that is to turn off the computer before getting the baby down, which means accomplishing all of my work (including personal stuff) before about 7pm. Also, on the nights when it’s my turn to do the dishes, it helps to do those sometime during the afternoon, to keep the rest of the evening free.
We also do a fair amount of reading in the early morning (theoretically, we wake up at 5am, though we haven’t been as good about that lately), but when the baby gets up, it’s usually time to start the morning routine, so it isn’t good to rely on that time.
I could probably also fit in some reading time while watching the baby. The key here is to cut back on podcasts, which probably would be a lot healthier, considering how many political podcasts I listen to. Also, as I mentioned above, reading would be a great way to decompress after putting the baby down for a nap.
So that’s pretty much what I have in mind: start off each day with writing time, carefully schedule and limit publishing time, and be more deliberate about reading time. Hopefully that works.
This author’s note originally appeared in the July 25th edition of my author newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.
So Mrs. Vasicek has been sick with the flu for the past two weeks. She’s getting better, but we’ve both been less than productive, and any semblance of a daily routine has basically been shot. Turns out that having your wife around all day is a very distracting thing. Who would have thought?
All of this has got me thinking about habits and routines:
how important they are, how to make them work, and how not to get
discouraged. I’ve been self-employed basically since graduating from
college nine years ago. I’ve worked a lot of side jobs, but nothing that
I’d call a “day job,” at first because there weren’t any (graduating in
a major recession is tough), and later on because I wanted to focus on
my writing career—which so far, has been working out.
When you’re self-employed, you basically have to make your
own daily routine, because there isn’t anyone else to make it for you. A
lot of people struggle with this, especially after quitting their day
jobs. If you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself sitting on the floor
in your underwear eating peanut butter straight from the jar (not that I
have any experience with this, of course). But if you buckle down and
push through that phase, you learn a few things.
First, you learn that even the best routines always fall
apart at some point. It’s just the nature of the beast. The
circumstances of life are always changing, which means that you’ve got
to be constantly adapting to them. Hanging on doggedly to a favorite
routine just for the routine’s sake is setting yourself up for failure.
Goals are a mean to an end, not an end in themselves.
Second, guilt is not a very good positive motivator. It’s
helpful to keep you from doing the things you shouldn’t be doing, but
it’s a horrible way to get yourself to do the things you should. I’ve
known a lot of writers who constantly beat themselves up for not meeting
their writing goals, to the point where it’s practically a full-time
job. For a while, I’ve been there myself. Not good.
The best way to make yourself more productive is to find
ways to make it more enjoyable. Personally, I find that writing is most
enjoyable when I’m immersed in the story that I’m trying to tell.
Sometimes, the best way to get immersed is to take a break, and
sometimes, the best way is just to sit down and write. It takes a while
to figure out what works. I’m still trying to figure it out better.
Third, when making a new routine, make sure to keep your eye
on the end goal. What good is eating an elephant one bite at a time if
you’re eating the wrong elephant? That’s why, when your routine starts
to fall apart, it may be better to rethink what you’re trying to
accomplish and rebuild it from the ground up, even though it’s easier
just to tweak it.
That’s where I’m at right now. I could just push my
deadlines back a couple weeks and try to go back to how things were
going, but there’s a lot of other business related stuff on my plate
that I’ve been neglecting, and I get the impression that the best way to
move forward with writing is to prioritize that other stuff and get it
out of the way.
So I missed a couple of blog posts last week, and I don’t currently have any more lined up in the queue. I know I said I’d try to blog daily from now on, and I intend to work up to that, but I’ve got to get other things in order first. Here’s what I’ve got going on:
Wedding stuff
Tax stuff
Writing Edenfall
Revisions for Edenfall
Copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth
Metadata, formatting, and publishing Gunslinger to Earth
Writing a short story for March
Catching up on emails (there’s a lot of them)
It’s not that the workload is overwhelming, it’s just that there’s a lot of moving parts. Also, the daily routine has fallen apart and I need to build it back up again. This tends to happen periodically, so I’m not too worried, but it is frustrating and it does mean that balls are going to get dropped.
First things first: finish the copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth and get that up for preorder, preferably by the end of the week. Taxes also need to be done ASAP. The wedding stuff is mostly being handled by other people, but I need to be available, so that’s an ongoing thing. But if I can tackle those big ones, then the rest should fall into place hopefully.
Also, sleep. Can’t function without it. Caffeine is not a long-term substitute.
I’m not gonna lie, there’s a part of me that wants to shut out everything else and just do family history all day. Then there’s making family history, AKA spending time with Future Mrs. Vasicek. But she’s got school and work, so there’s a hard limit to that.
Then there’s reading. So much reading to do. Books are piling up everywhere.
Anyways, that’s enough for now. I’ll post as often as I can, but it’s going to be touch and go for a while, at least until everything else is in some semblance of order.
One of the things about being a creative person is that it’s very hard to keep an organized daily routine for very long. Usually you’ll have one that works out well for a couple of weeks before something happens to make it fall apart completely, and then you have to recalibrate and start over. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is something you have to adjust for.
I’m in one of those recalibrating phases right now, as you can probably tell by the fact that my unfinished WIP is past the self-imposed deadline and I haven’t posted in this blog in over a week. Don’t worry, though—things are going well, and I’ll soon be back up to speed.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t LTUE that blew up my writing routine. I actually managed to write every day while I was there. It was a bunch of stuff that happened afterward, most notably taxes and car issues. The taxes are completely squared away, but the car issues are ongoing, so I dropped the writing to take a temp job all last week.
Gunslinger to the Stars is still unfinished but at a good stopping point. What I’m probably going to do is put it on the back burner for a month or two as I work on other projects.
Top on that list is to get Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) ready for publication. The copy edits are back and I have the cover now, so it should be up for pre-order before the end of the week.
Also, there’s another J.M. Wight short story I’m getting ready to put out. Just need to get some feedback and write the author’s note. Though what I may do is bundle that with another J.M. Wight story that I haven’t written yet, so that I can justify putting it out at the $2.99 price point. And the author’s note for this one is going to be a bit unusual too: an essay that tells my own personal story of how I got into family history and some of the spiritual things I’ve experienced from it.
So it may be another month or two before that J.M. Wight bundle comes out. But one thing that definitely is coming out is my short story “L’enfer, C’est la Solitude.” It will be appearing online at Perihelion for their March issue, where you can read it for free. More links as that becomes available.
I’ve also got some short story ideas that I want to flesh out. I’ll probably take the next week or two to work on those, but you won’t see them for a while since they’ll be on submission. But I do have a lot of blog posts that I want to write as well, including:
#RIPTwitter and the ongoing controversy there.
Thoughts on making a living with short fiction.
The guest lecture I gave to Sanderson’s English 318 class.
Cover reveal for Captives in Obscurity.
Some book reviews.
As for the personal issues that blew up my writing routine in the first place, don’t worry—everything’s fine. Right now, my plan is to buy a scooter and sell my car, just because a scooter would fit my needs better (and would be a lot of fun to ride!). It would also help me to save up for another vehicle next winter, possibly a truck. I’m not too keen on taking out an auto loan, but with taxes out of the way my personal finances are actually in a pretty good place—much better than I expected them to be. So things are looking up.
In any case, that’s what’s going on with me. I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth yet, just recalibrating and making some adjustments. Expect to see some more stories very soon!
When I decided back in college that I wanted to write professionally, I made a point of tracking my daily word counts. I even made graphs with the data, showing both my daily count and a seven-day rolling total (some of you may remember how I used to post those graphs on this blog). Tracking my daily word count like that was very helpful when I first started out. It helped me to develop the discipline to write daily, and gave me the encouragement I needed to push ahead even when I didn’t feel like writing. It also gave me a lot of satisfaction to see how much I had written over time.
But then I started to notice some problems with that system. For one thing, it didn’t track revisions very well. I eventually decided to count progress on a revision the same as counting new words, but that meant that whenever I revised something, my word count shot up dramatically. Consequently, I focused more on revising old stuff than on writing new words, since that was the fastest way to boost my word count. Also, because I didn’t feel as much pressure to push forward, I sometimes spent months at a time on revisions that should have taken just a couple of weeks.
Then I went overseas, and everything about the old system threw me into a funk. Adjusting to a new culture can be difficult and exhausting, not to mention that it takes up a lot of mental headspace. These made writing extremely difficult, but because of the daily word count tracking, I didn’t feel like I could take a break. But when I tried to write, it didn’t come out well because of all the stress I was going through. Of course, the more I failed to meet my word count expectations, the worse I felt for it. The thing that had been such a great motivator at the start of my career now threatened to drag me down.
So I did what all good creative people do and abandoned the routine that wasn’t working. And it helped–it really did. Without all the useless pressures and misplaced incentives, I wrote a novella in little less than a month.
But then I started to feel lost. Without those word counts, I had no way of measuring my productivity. The pressures were gone, sure, but so was any sense of orientation. I had no idea whether I was writing as much as I could reasonably expect to, or whether I was falling behind. My daily rhythms would fall out of whack at the slightest interruption. The self-imposed deadlines that I thought would keep me in line instead gave me one more thing to procrastinate about–and I am a master of procrastination.
So I looked for other metrics that I could use to gauge my productivity. For a while, I tried using a timer, with the idea that measuring time spent writing would be better than measuring raw word count. That experiment ended in disaster. It added even more pressure than the word counts did, and drove me so hard to busywork that my creativity was almost stifled. For some people, the clock might be a good source of motivation, but for me it was absolutely horrible.
I looked around for something better than word count, and never really found it. Eventually, I learned how to do my work without a direct way to measure it. When writing is your calling, you can’t not write, so I learned how to listen to my own creative rhythms and nurture them. That worked pretty well when I was excited about a project, but when I ran into a block, everything took a hit. And even when everything was going well, I still felt kind of lost without a concrete way to measure my productivity.
Last month, I ran into a pretty big block with Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III). I had expected to finish that book by the end of May, but instead I ran into some problems and had to go back and rewrite a few chapters. That should have taken two or three days, but instead it took two or three weeks. And during those weeks, I figured that I needed to change things up a bit.
I decided to base my new system on word count, since that seems to be the most reliable and objective measure of writing productivity. Instead of measuring it quantitatively, though, I decided to set a daily minimum word count, and mark on a calendar the days where I reach it. For new words, that minimum is 2,000, and for revised words, it’s 4,000. That seems to work with my natural rhythms–just enough so that I have to push myself, but not so much that I put it off and procrastinate instead.
So far, the new system seems to be working. As soon as I implemented it, progress on Strangers in Flight took off, to the point where it should be finished in just a couple of days. This past week, my daily routine was thrown off a bit from getting Comrades in Hope ready for publication, but even while I was busy with formatting and uploading, I managed to get 2k words written (on the author’s note and a short story). That surprised me, and makes me wonder if maybe the next time I publish a book, I can still manage to keep my writing routine intact.
The really nice thing about having a concrete way to measure your daily productivity is that it helps you to separate your work life from your personal life. When you’re self-employed, the two tend to blend into each other a lot, so that you’re always wondering if you should be spending your time doing something work related. But by keeping a daily minimum word count, I can say to myself “all right, today’s work is done–time to go play” and not feel guilty about it.
The danger, of course, is that the daily minimum will become a ceiling instead of a floor, holding me back from being as productive as I could be instead of pushing me to do that last little bit. However, I think I have a way around that. On the calendar that I’m using to keep track of all this, I’ll mark down not only the days where I hit my minimum word count, but the days where I double (or even triple) it. That way, if I hit the 2k mark a little early, I’ll still have incentive to push farther. Besides, that 2k minimum isn’t set in stone. I plan to review it each month, and change it accordingly.
In any case, that’s my new system. If you guys want an update in a month or two on how it’s working, let me know–I’d be happy to share any insights I might have. But blog posts don’t count toward my daily word count, and since the rest of my afternoon is wide open, I’d better get cracking at it!
So since it’s February now, I figure it’s worth checking back on my January resolutions to see how horribly I’ve failed how well I’m doing. Here goes!
1. Publish something every 6 weeks.
I’m actually still on track with this one. The next 6 week deadline is February 15, and if all goes well I should be able to publish Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) by then. Derek Murphy is working on the cover, and all I have to write for it is the author’s note which shouldn’t take more than a day or two. After that, it’s just a matter of compiling and formatting the thing–shouldn’t take more than two or three hours–then upload it to all the retailers.
So yeah, still on track with this one!
2. Write at least two short stories per month and submit them to traditional markets.
For this one, I’m not doing so well. I did write one story, “The Open Source Time Machine,” and sent it out to Writers of the Future, but that’s about it. I am working on a second story, but I haven’t finished it yet, which is annoying because the whole thing is in my head but not yet on the page. Better get on that. Also, there’s another story that got rejected in January that I still need to send out to the next market.
Well, one out of two isn’t so bad. If I take off the weekends to work on these stories, I can probably get back on track before the end of the month.
3. Read a book every week.
Yeah, about that … I was doing so well the first two weeks, but then things got disorganized and this goal kind of fell through the cracks. It probably didn’t help that I spent upwards of 50 hours on Steam in the last two weeks of January. What can I say–XCOM is an amazing game!
I’ve got a huge TBR pile and the book I’m reading now is really awesome, but I just haven’t been good about making the time to read. That’s gotta change. Evenings are the perfect time to read, when I’m too tired to do much writing but too awake to go to bed. Instead, I usually end up browsing the internet or playing on Steam, neither of which are as fulfilling as reading a book.
So yeah, this is one I’m going to have to work on. Fortunately, it shouldn’t be hard to adjust my habits.
4. Keep a detailed weekly personal journal.
This is one resolution that I have been keeping extremely well. I’ve completely redone the format for my personal journal keeping, and now it’s one of my main Sunday activities. The last month wasn’t very eventful for me, so it wasn’t too hard to keep up, but I’ve solidly gotten back into the habit of journal writing and I’m still quite motivated to keep doing it.
If I only keep one resolution this year, it’s going to be this one. Fortunately, I’m still on top of it 100%. Now that’s satisfying!
5. Get to the point where I can run a mile every day.
AHAHAHAHA!!!! Oh dear. The last time I went running was probably three weeks ago. For a while, I was going on some long daily walks, but then the Google Fiber job landed in my lap and all of that kind of got put to the side.
Fortunately, the job is starting to fall into something of a routine. It’s an on-call thing, which means that if I go running I need to keep my phone on me and a change of clothes in the car, but I can still probably do it. The track at BYU’s Smith Field House is open until 10pm, and the parking lots open up around 6pm or 7pm. I prefer to run in the mornings, but the evenings can work too.
So yeah, this one is definitely a fail, at least for January. But with a bit of work, I can get back on track again soon.
6. Finish hiking the seven peaks.
Because it’s winter, hiking any of the higher mountains around these parts is pretty much impossible (at least without professional equipment). But there’s still a lot I can do to prepare for the spring.
For one thing, I need to get new shoes. My hiking shoes from last year are pretty torn up and definitely not in shape for a big climb. With the Google Fiber job, I now have enough of a discretionary income to spend on things like that. And since I’m going to need new shoes for my next overseas adventure anyway, I don’t feel so bad about taking out from the money I’d be saving for that.
I need to get in shape for hiking, though. That’s probably the biggest thing. Not much I can do with snow on all the peaks, but I can hike the Y, and maybe Squaw Peak as well. One thing I’d like to do this season is go snowshoeing, maybe for a date or something. Definitely need to look into that.
Other than that, all I guess I can really do is make plans and wait for the snow to thaw. When it does, you can bet I’ll be doing some serious hiking!
Conclusion
So out of six resolutions, I’m doing really well at two, doing marginally well at two others, and failing at the last two. Not too bad. It isn’t perfect, but it’s not like it’s fallen apart yet either.
Most of the time, it seems that people drop their resolutions around February/March after failing to keep them perfectly. That’s just silly, though. If you break a resolution one month, why not pick it up again the next? So what if you don’t keep it the whole year? If it takes you until July or August or even October to master it, that’s still a lot more months that you’d be keeping it than if you dropped it in March.
So this year, I’m going to try to revisit my resolutions at the beginning of each month and start over with them as if each month were January. That’s kind of what you’ve got to do when you lead a freelancer’s life–plans always change, routines always fall apart, but if your goals are clearly defined and you keep your eyes on them, you can get back up just as quickly as you get knocked down.
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.
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.
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?
