Tag: On Writing

Why I’m not a fan of writing groups

I was listening to a recent episode of I Should Be Writing today, and it got me thinking about writing groups and how my philosophy on them has changed.  Long story short, I used to love them, but now I’m not such a huge fan.

I should probably start out by mentioning that I lead a college writing group for two years, and I don’t regret the experience at all.  The Quark writing group was extremely helpful, both in terms of my own growth as a writer, and the connections it gave me with other writerly people.  I still keep in touch with many of them.

But now…I just don’t think writing groups are all that great.  In fact, I think that they often do more harm than good, not just for experienced writers, but for the beginner who lacks the confidence to strike out on their own.  Here’s why:

The group dynamic gives inexperienced critiquers a false sense of authority.

Most writing groups consist of writers who are at roughly the same level of expertise.  For beginners, this means that the people critiquing your story might not know any better than you whether the story is broken.  However, because of the dynamics of the whole thing (captive audience, desire to impress peers, etc), these people are likely to act as if they have more authority than they really do.

To be fair, I’ve had plenty of critique partners who have managed to be modest and down-to-Earth when offering their critiques.  However, I’ve also seen plenty of others get puffed up and offer some really dumb advice.

Beginning writers often naively look for someone to show them the answers–some mentor or authority figure whose every word is true, who will light the path and show them the way.  Put a bunch of them into a writing group together, and more often than not you’ll end up with the blind leading the blind.

The weekly submission process does not simulate the reading experience.

Logistically, most writing groups have to set a limit on the size and number of submissions.  For the Quark writing group, our limit was three submissions of four thousand words each.  It worked out fine for short stories, but most of us were writing novels, which meant that we had to workshop our books in little four thousand word chunks.

The problem is that nobody reads novels at that rate.  Either they get hooked and finish the thing, or they get bored and stop reading.  Therefore, while the feedback you receive might be good for helping out with craft issues, by the time the next week rolls around either everyone has forgotten what happened already, or they remember it wrong, or they were expecting something different and are ticked off because they have to wait another week.

After I revised Bringing Stella Home a couple of times (after–see below!), I workshopped it through a writing group I’d put together after leaving the Quark writing group.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard “why are we in James’s point of view this week?  I hate James!  I want to get back to Stella!” I got this comment so often, for a while I thought the book was really flawed.  However, when I got the feedback from my first readers, no one had this problem at all.

The reason?  They read the book the way it was actually meant to be read.

Workshopping a work in progress is the surest way to kill a book.

Committees might be good at doing some things, but they’re absolutely horrible at producing anything innovative or original.  Make no mistake: if you’re workshopping something you haven’t already finished and you follow most or all of the feedback you receive, you’re writing your book by committee.

Most writers agree that when you write your first draft, you should not revise anything until it’s done.  This is because the act of revision makes you so critical of your own work that it’s very easy to get discouraged or “fix” something that was actually a good idea.

Workshopping a work in progress does exactly the same thing: it puts you in a critical frame of mind that will literally kill your book.  Even if you manage to finish it, it won’t be nearly as good as it could have been because you’ve probably nipped all your best ideas in the bud, before they had time to grow and develop.

A truly great book does not appeal to everyone.

There’s a word for something that appeals to everyone equally, that runs about middle of the road and doesn’t upset anyone.  That word is “average.”

No truly great work is loved by everyone.  This isn’t just true of controversial stuff–it’s true of everything.  For every one of your favorite books, there’s a one-star review of it on the internet somewhere.  So if everyone tells you your book is good, that might not actually be the case.  In fact, it’s a much better sign when some people hate it and others can’t stop raving about it.

The trouble with writing groups is that the group dynamic can lead to a herd mentality, where everyone goes along with the first opinion that gets expressed.  Ever played Werewolf?  The same thing happens there.  One person throws out an accusation, the vote gets called, everyone starts looking around to see who is raising their hand and before you know it, all the hands are in the air.

So unless one of the seven or eight people in your writing group loves your work enough to stand up and defend it, chances are the feedback will err on the side of being too negative.  This makes it very difficult to tell whether your story actually sucks, or whether it’s just above average.

Writing groups teach you to write to rules, not for readers.

One of the dynamics of writing groups is that they encourage people to find and latch on to certain writing rules, where people can say “this story is broken because of x” or “this writing is flawed because of y.” Over time, this becomes so ingrained that people stop reading to see whether the story actually works and instead read to see whether the story follows the rules.

The truth, however, is that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to writing.  For example, you’ve heard of “show, don’t tell”?  Yeah, go and read Ender’s Game.  The entire book is one giant tell–and it’s brilliant.  It was the first sf novel to win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in the same year, and has remained a perennial bestseller ever since.

Nothing hit this home for me more when the cryo scene excerpt from Genesis Earth won first place in the 2009 Mayhew contest at BYU.  Parts of the scene lapse from first person past tense to second person present tense, and the members of my writing group pointed that out as a major no-no.  However, even though it broke the rules, it worked well enough to win an award.

To be fair, there are some things that writing groups are very good for.  They can be a good way to learn the basics of craft (ie “the rules”), and they do give you a sense of community that can be very encouraging when you’re just starting out.  However, the drawbacks are so great that I don’t think I’ll ever go back.

Personally, I’ve moved from writing groups to a core group of first readers whose feedback I value and whose opinions I trust.  I finish my project, send them the entire manuscript with a deadline in which to read it, and thank them graciously for whatever feedback I receive.  Most of them aren’t even writers, in fact–but all of them are readers.  Most of them don’t know who the others are, and none of them ever see any of the feedback from the others.

Criticism is good; if you want to grow as a writer, you should welcome criticism and constantly solicit it.  But I do believe it’s possible to grow out of a writing group–or to succeed without ever being a part of one at all.

The interior designer’s approach to story

I recently read a fascinating post on John Brown’s blog with an interesting exercise for analyzing the kinds of stories you most like to read.  By finding out what really turns you on in a story, you can have a much better idea what to write, and how to make your own stories better.

He prefaced the exercise with a story about the interior designer who helped them to decorate their house.  The designer spread out a number of home magazines in front of them, and told them to go through and tear out the pictures that most turned them on.  After doing this, they analyzed the pictures to see what they had in common, and thus discovered how to best decorate their house.

The exercise works much the same way.  First, pick out five books you really like that immediately come to mind.  Mine are:

As many of you know, these are some of my favorite books of all time.  I’ve reread three of them, and I intend to reread the other two at some point.

Next, pick out the elements that these books have in common.  Here’s what I came up with:

1) Set in a different time and place.

Not all these books are science fiction, but the all take place in a world far removed from our own.  Only Spin takes place largely on Earth, but the events of the story transform the world as we know it so much that by the end of the novel, it’s completely different. SPOILER (highlight to see) Besides, at the very end, the two main characters leave Earth by going through the giant portal to another planet, so the novel is arguably about escaping the world as we know it.

2) Stakes that are much more personal than global.

This was interesting, and highlights something I realized when I compared Merchanter’s Luck with Downbelow Station.  In all of these stories, the central driving conflicts are extremely intimate and personal.

To be sure, many of these stories also have an epic backdrop; Mistborn certainly does.  However, I was much more interested in Vin’s growth and development than I was in how the Ska would overthrow the Lord Ruler–in fact, Mistborn is my favorite book in the trilogy for that very reason.

3) Encourages deep introspection.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if you’ve followed this blog for a while, but I love love LOVE stories that make me see the world in a new way.  Thrillers and adventures are all fun and good, but if it doesn’t make me think, I’m usually like “meh” at the end.

4) Female characters who aren’t weak or passive.

This one might be a bit more controversial, but in all of these stories, I’ve noticed that the female characters are pretty strong, even if they aren’t all kick-butt Katniss wannabes (ugh…I hate Katniss).  Even in Legend, which is largely dominated by men, you still have the earl’s daughter, who is one heck of a spirited woman.

5) Life and death conflicts.

This is interesting: in all of these books, the threat of death is immanently real.  Some of them, such as Legend and On My Way to Paradise, are among the most violent books I’ve ever read.  I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about life and death struggles that really draws me.

6) Romantic in a broad sense.

I’m using Tracy Hickman’s definition here, in which romance is all about teaching us to feel and bringing us in touch with our deepest feelings.  That’s the central theme of On My Way to Paradise: learning how to be a man of passion after witnessing some of the worst atrocities of war.

All of these books not only make me feel, they are about the feelings that they inspire.  In other words, the emotional elements of the story are both a part of and deeply embedded in the story’s central theme.

The exercises isn’t complete after this, though.  For the last part, take another five books and analyze them to see how they compare.  My second list includes:

So how does the list stack up?  Let’s see…

  1. Definitely true.  NONE of these stories take place in the world as we know it–and that’s awesome.
  2. A Canticle for Leibowitz might seem like an exception, since it follows the broad rise and fall of human civilization after the nuclear apocalypse.  But the things that really drew me to the story were the more personal elements: the novice who makes the illuminated manuscript of the electrical diagram, for example, or the abbot at the very end who SPOILER tries desperately to convince the single mother not to take her baby to the mercy killing station after the bomb fatally irradiates them.  In any case, it’s telling that A Canticle for Leibowitz made this list, whereas none of Arthur. C. Clarke’s books even came to my mind.
  3. Definitely true.  Even Citizen of the Galaxy, which is more adventure fiction than high concept sf, features a fascinating society of interstellar traders that really made me sit back and think about the way we structure our society.  Heinlein has a really awesome way of doing that with everything he writes.
  4. The only possible exception here might again be Heinlein, who had some very extremist views of women (putting it lightly).  However, if I recall, Citizen of the Galaxy has a female character at the end who helps pull out the main character from his indigent circumstances and helps him to come into his own.  Again, they might not all be kick-butt tramp-stamp vampire slayers, but they certainly aren’t weak.
  5. Less true of The Neverending Story and The Dispossessed, but while the central conflicts might not be about life and death, the threat of death (or a total loss of identity) certainly comes into play.
  6. Definitely true.  Few books have taught me to feel more deeply than The Neverending Story.  An absolutely magnificent piece of literature.

So there you have it.  According to this exercise, I should write books set in another time and place, where strong female characters face life and death decisions that personally impact the people in their lives and make the readers think and feel.  Interestingly enough, that is a PERFECT description of Bringing Stella Home, as well as Desert Stars and Into the Nebulous Deep.

Cool stuff.  Makes me want to write.  So on that note, I think I will.

Writing is like tending an orchard

So I was hiking the Y tonight, pondering various things, and the thought occurred to me that writing is a lot like an olive orchard.

First, you’ve got the land, both cultivated and wild.  Cultivated land is like your conscious mind, where everything fits neatly into order and you have control over what you create.  The subconscious is the land beyond the fence, where things grow wild.

Ideas are like seeds; they’re everywhere, but only a few ever take root and sprout.  Those that do need to have new sprouts periodically grafted into the old, in order to preserve the entire tree.  These grafts may come from the cultivated ground of your cultivated mind, but more often than not they come from the wildlands of the subconscious.

Each novel is like an individual olive tree.  It takes a lot of time and work to grow one to maturity, but once you do, it can live for a long, long time.  The fruit itself is like the earnings you get by licensing copyright; if you prune the tree carefully (aka do a good job managing your intellectual property), it just keeps on producing.

Of course, in order to make sure your trees grow properly, you need to be constantly enriching the soil of your mind.  That’s where education and life experience comes in.

Since trees sometimes die, you have to maintain several trees at once in order for your orchard to succeed.  And even though it’s a hell of a lot of work, over the long run the returns are enormous.

For the ancients, olives were a major staple crop. In Greek mythology, Athena was chosen as the patron goddess of the city of Athens because her gift of an olive tree was considered more precious than any other.  And just as good books help us expand our minds, better understand and empathize with others, and generally rise above the boredom and mundane-ness of our daily lives, so also the fruit from this metaphorical orchard is truly of great worth.

Anyhow, those were some of my random ponderings, climbing down the mountain.  Someday, I want to have an orchard that covers an entire hillside and produces thousands of pounds of olives!  Just thinking of it makes me hungry.  Mmm, olives…

Rocking the rewrite

I am well into the third draft of Worlds Away from Home, and oh man–it is so much fun! That might seem a bit counter-intuitive (revising = fun?), so let me explain my process.

In a first draft, I have a ton of ideas, but it’s hard for me to keep track of them all (and they also tend to change even as I write them).  I’ll cobble together a story out of them, but it’s a rough, misshapen story, with subplots that go nowhere, characters who seem schizophrenic, scenes set in the wrong point of view, and setting details that are inconsistent.  The main throughline is still there, but it’s buried under a ton of crap, sometimes so much that even I can’t see it.

In a second draft, I cut out the worst of the crap and try to dig out the core story elements.  I’ll cut entire chapters and subplots, throw out characters, rework the world, and fix as many of the glaring errors as I can.

Some writers call this a “triage edit,” and that’s as apt a term for it as any.  I’m not doing surgery yet; I’m applying the field dressings that will get the wounded from the battlefield to the operating table.

But the third draft, by far, is my favorite.  That’s when I take a hard look at the story and figure out how everything connects.  It’s like dumping out a new Lego set and opening up the instructions.  This is where I iron out the major character arcs, where I start to intertwine the subplots properly, where I get a sense of the book’s themes and figure out how to make it insightful and thought provoking.

Writing the third draft is absolutely glorious, and I love it.

Right now, I feel so immersed in the world of my novel, it makes me want to lock myself in a room and do nothing but write.  I have to force myself to go to bed, otherwise I’d be up until 4am writing.  Even with some of the major changes I need to make with this book, I wouldn’t be surprised if I average 4k or 5k words per day for the next two weeks (about all the time I have before I have to go back to work).

I finished the third draft of Genesis Earth in less than three weeks.  I finished the third draft of Bringing Stella Home in considerably more time than that, but that was partially because of other real-world stuff out of my control (like a nightmarish internship), but between that and the fourth draft, it was much the same thing.

So anyhow, I’m having an awesome time revising Worlds Away from Home, and the finished draft is going to be AWESOME.  And next to changing someone’s life with one of your books, that’s probably one of the best feelings you can have as a writer.

Man, writing is so much fun. 🙂

Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 is finished!

That’s right; my fifth novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, is finished! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 447
words: 101,215
file size: 230 KB
chapters: 20
start date: 7 March 2011
end date: 14 May 2011

And the wordle:

Wordle: Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1

This novel is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and takes place within the same universe as Worlds Away from Home (note to self: find new title for that one). I got the idea for the novel from a conversation with one of my first readers for BSH, who mentioned that James didn’t get a whole lot of closure at the end and still had a lot of maturing to do. Immediately, I saw that there was a story there, and got to work figuring out how to tell it.

This was back in October, and like so many other things, the project quickly started going in about twenty different directions. I was still on something of an sf romance binge, so I decided to throw in a love story, and that quickly turned into a love triangle with a weird sf twist. But then, I started getting interested in the girls’ stories, which led to other subplots, which led to more stuff…and…and…

Actually, for a rough draft, I feel I pulled it off pretty well. I dropped the ball on some aspects of the story (didn’t develop the techno-democracy elements of the Colony hardly at all, and dropped James’s sidekick without giving his character a satisfying arc), and forgot to throw in other stuff until well past midway through (the wolf vs. sheepdog debate–Lars has a rather feisty take on that, which should be interesting), but I think the overall structure is mostly intact. For a rough draft, I’m rather pleased.

Of course, it will need a major triage edit before I can send it out to any first readers. It has problems, I know what they are, and I need to give the draft a major overhaul to get it to the point where feedback would be helpful.

But after ten weeks of working on this thing, I’m ready to move on to something else. Next up: my second revision of Worlds Away from Home. I am sooo stoked to get working on this project–it’s going to be AWESOME!

The song that had the biggest impact on my as I wrote ITND was probably this remix of hot head bop on ocremix. I think the lyrics sum up James’s character pretty well, especially in this book:

Now, onto other exciting things!

More thoughts on indie publishing

Since my last post on indie publishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject.  I haven’t decided to take the plunge into self published ebooks yet, but I have decided to make some changes in my writing and my career strategy, in order to position myself more favorably if/when I choose to do so.

Basically, my new strategy is something like Japan or Saudi Arabia’s approach to nuclear weapons: they don’t have an explicit nuclear program (since that would violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty), but they have gathered the equipment, resources, and expertise together so that if they decided to go nuclear, they could do it in a year or less.

First, though, I attended Brandon Sanderson’s class lecture this Thursday, in which he had some very interesting things to say about ebooks and the publishing industry.  This was part I of his “how to get published” lecture, and here are some of the more interesting points he made:

  • Almost all the indie writers who are making it big have at least one loss leader ($.99 or less) on their list.
  • No one really knows whether indie publishing will be viable for large numbers of writers, or whether authors like Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath are outliers.
  • Successful indie published books are typically:
    1) short (70k to 80k words)
    2) written in a pulp genre (thriller, romance, paranormal, sword & sorcery, etc)
    3) promoted very well through social networking
  • We have not yet seen any indie successes in epic fantasy, young adult / middle grade, historical fiction, or non-fiction.
  • The produce model vs. unlimited shelf space argument for going indie doesn’t apply as much to science fiction & fantasy as other genres, because:
    1) sf&f stays on the shelves in bookstores longer than other genres
    2) sf&f series grow better with a big push on the first book
    3) sf&f makes a lot of money on hardcover, unlike other genres

A lot of these points tend to mesh with what I’m hearing from my other sources–and Brandon really represents the last of the successful writers to make it big on the old model, before the ebook revolution began to take off.  He doesn’t make as big a deal on the current 25/75 split on net ebook sales as I would make, but then again, he’s making most of his money through print.

So anyways, here is what I plan to change about what I’m doing in order to better position myself to best take the ebook plunge, if/when I decide to do so:

1) Write at least 2 polished novels per year

Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith make very good arguments about how being able to write well quickly is a huge asset for a writer these days.

There are many good reasons for this:

1) Writing faster gives you more practice with craft, which tends to improve quality.
2) The best way to promote  your books is to constantly write new books.
3) The limited shelf space argument against writing quickly is now moot with ebooks.

In particular, I want to increase my writing speed in order that I can have a larger list to put out if/when I decide to go with indie publishing.  It’s much harder to be successful if you’ve only got one book available for sale; if/when I decide to take the plunge, I want to have at least three.

So far this year, I’ve finished one (Bringing Stella Home), but that’s because it was already sitting in the queue and only needed a quick touch up.  I would like to get Worlds Away from Home polished before the end of the year, and possibly one other project, such as Edenfall.

2) Reduce production time to as close to one year as possible

Right now, it takes me on average about two years to write a polished, salable novel.  That’s not a problem, because I have a lot of projects in the queue, but it’s not as fast as I would like.  I wrote Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home while I was still a journeyman writer, figuring out my craft.  I should be able to produce a lot faster.

Towards that end, I’m going to try to get Edenfall finished and polished within a year.  Since it’s already March, that might mean getting it polished by February of next year, but I still want to try.

My biggest weakness is first drafts; I always tend to get stuck midway and drop the project for a while before I feel ready to finish it.  That’s something I would like to change.  Then again, that might just be part of my writing process, and shouldn’t be forced.  However, I certainly could go through my revisions much faster.

3) Write out the direct sequels while the first book is still unpublished

Previously, I thought it was a bad idea to write out all the books in a series or trilogy before the first one is ever picked up.  After all, a rejection from a publisher on the first book is a rejection on all the other books in the series as well.  Using this reasoning, it was much better to write the first book of another trilogy, in order to maximize how much I could submit at any given time.

With indie publishing, however, it’s much better to release the whole trilogy all at once, so that readers who finish the first book can immediately pick up the others.  Again, the paradigm here is that the best way to sell books is with other books; if they loved the one, they’ll buy the others, especially to find out what happens next.

Of course, the best model is probably to have an open series with several indirect sequels with recurring characters in the same world.  With the Gaia Nova books, that’s exactly what I plan to do: Worlds Away from Home is set in the same universe as Bringing Stella Home, but with different characters and different story arcs.

However, Genesis Earth has serious trilogy potential, and with Edenfall I’ve decided to actually write the other books.  If/when I decide to take the plunge, I want to be able to release at least the first two books in that trilogy at the same time.  In fact, Genesis Earth is perhaps the biggest reason why I’m thinking so seriously about going indie, but that’s a subject for a whole other post.

4) Experiment with pulp genres such as space adventure stories

When Brandon said that the pulp genres tend to do better, I wasn’t sure whether that includes what I write.  I write primarily science fiction, but not the kind of stories you’d read only for entertainment and promptly forget once you’re finished.  If anything, I want to write more like Ursula K. Le Guin, whose stories are so meaningful they stick with you long after you’ve finished them.

Then again, there tends to be a lot of overlap in science fiction between the thoughtful, meaningful stuff and the pulps.  Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers immediately come to mind as awesome, entertaining stories that also have a lot of depth.  In his lecture, Brandon made it clear that “pulp” does not necessarily conflict with high art–just that the primary purpose of the story is to entertain.

I can live with that–and I actually have several story ideas that would translate well with the pulp mentality.  I’d like to do a novel (or a series of novels) with Danica from BSH and her mercenary team, perhaps as a sort of origin story for Roman, Anya, Artyom, and the others.  I’d like to revisit the Hameji as well, with a sort of “Ain Jalut in space” involving Sholpan’s son (BSH was basically the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in space).  I’ve already started an “Odyssey in space,” as told from a female Telemachus character–that’s To Search the Starry Sea.  All of these are, at their core, space adventure stories, and might translate well as pulps.

5) Commit to releasing one book every 6 months if/when I take the plunge

This is related to the first strategy on the list, but it’s more of a business plan than a personal writing goal.  Basically, if/when I take the plunge, I want to:

1) have at least 3 finished, polished books to put out at first,
2) know that I can put out one book every six months at least.

This not only means developing a backlist, it means doing some soul searching as a writer to find out how difficult it is to keep up with this pace–and adjusting my writing habits accordingly.  I’m optimistic that I can, but it’s something of a paradigm shift, and I want to make sure I’ve made that shift before I take the leap.

Anyhow, these are my thoughts on how to alter my current writing strategy.  I haven’t yet decided to go indie, but when the time comes, I think that these things will help me to maximize my potential if/when I decide to do so.

Of course, what do any of us really know?

Worlds Away from Home 2.1 is finished!

Yep, that’s right! I finished another novel, in this case the second draft of my fourth. It’s not without its flaws, but good enough that I won’t feel humiliated for life by sending it out to my first readers.

Anyhow, here are the stats:

Worlds Away from Home 2.1
ms pages: 450
words: 96,212
file size: 219 KB
chapters: 20 + prologue
start date: 14 Jan 11
end date: 4 Mar 11

And the wordle:

Wordle: Worlds Away from Home 2.1

Yeah, there are a few words that appeared a bit too frequently there. At least I know what to cut out in the next draft.

As for the song that best encapsulates the experience of writing it..hmm, I don’t know. The last couple chapters, I was kind of on a Metroid trip, so even though the old NES game has absolutely nothing to do with my story, I suppose I’d have to go with the Metroid title theme:

So yeah, those are the stats. As for my thoughts, here goes:

This draft was tough, but a lot more fun to write than the rough draft. Most of the struggle happened with the outline, which took about three or four weeks to actually come together, which is unusual for me.

I did a complete read through back in the first week of December, putting everything else on hold just to write the revision notes, and ended up following almost none of it. However, it wasn’t a complete loss, because outlining it helped me to cut out a bunch of useless filler and dead-end subplots.

I tend to do a lot of shotgun writing on my rough drafts, which means I spew out all my ideas in every which direction, going off on useless tangents and failing to properly foreshadow the major central conflicts.

However, by writing this way, I often discover things that I never could have foreseen from the outset. So long as I’m careful to outline each successive draft and cut out all the filler crap (even the crap that I love), it usually works out in the end.

This draft is somewhere on the crappier side of rough draft vs. finished, polished product, but it’s definitely better than the first one. If the third draft is this much better than the second, I’m optimistic that I’ll have this thing polished and ready to send out before the end of the year.

But before then, I need the help that only a few dozen pairs of eyes besides my own can give. That, and a few months to sit so that I can come back to it with new eyes.

If I know you IRL and you’re interested in being a first reader, please contact me. I’m especially looking for male readers, since the target audience is probably more male than female, but I’m open to pretty much anyone who enjoys reading science fiction.

So anyways, enough of that. On to the next project!

4,271 words…whew!

Just a real quick post before I go to bed.

I wrote over 4k words today in WAFH–all for a chapter that I basically cooked up on the fly.  It feels amazing.

For the past month or so, I’ve been recycling old material, cutting a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, tweaking the stuff that does, and putting in a new scene here and there, but basically just doing revision (aka a “triage edit,” as Wolverton likes to call it).

I’m good at revision, but it seems that that’s all I’ve been doing for the past couple months.  The more I revise, the harder it is to write new material–or at least, the harder it feels.  I’ve always hated drafting new stuff, because midway through it all seems to fall apart and then I have to drop the project and let it settle in my mind.

But for this chapter, I basically told myself: “alright, this is what needs to happen, this is what the characters need to do–now GO!” I sped through the whole thing without paying conscious attention to the act of writing, and just pumped it all out.

Man, I need to do this more often.  Writing is so much fun!  I’m sure this stuff will need to be revised later, but the story is definitely taking form the way it needs to.

In other news, LTUE was this past weekend, and I was super lame for not posting about it.  But have no fear; I’ll recap the event soon, probably sometime tomorrow <fingers crossed>. And, as with past events, I recorded all the panels I attended.  I won’t post the links here, but if you want them, send me an email.

In unrelated news, Talecris sucks and I need a job.  Actually, correction: I need to start getting paid for the work I’m already doing by writing these novels.  One of these days, though…one of these days…

Encouraging realizations

So today I realized something about my writing process that encouraged me quite a bit.  With every project so far that I’ve finished, revised, and polished (or will soon be polishing), I went through a depressing period where the draft absolutely sucked and I questioned whether I was just wasting my time with the whole project.  I went through it with Genesis Earth, I went through it with Mercenary Savior, and I’m going through it right now with Worlds Away from Home.

None of that is new, of course; what’s new is the realization that this phase is an essential part of my personal writing process. In other words, it’s not a distressing thing that I’m going through this phase–it’s actually a sign that things are normal.  The story has potential but needs a significant overhaul, so until I complete that overhaul I’m only going to see how much it sucks.

The trick, of course, is keeping momentum.  I’ve found that if I consistently write 2,500 words per day, my mind is so absorbed in the story that I can make good headway on it.  I only revised through about 1.4k today, but I cut off at least another 2k of useless fat, so I suppose that works.

I also submitted Genesis Earth to two agents, so overall, today was quite productive.  I’ll probably count those as my submissions for this week, to allow people time off for the holidays.  Of course, I won’t stop writing!

10k words and going strong

Today I crossed the 10k mark for my newest project, Into the Nebulous Deep. It’s a little bit behind in terms of nanwrimo, but I’m confident it will be on par before the end of the week.  I wrote 2.6 words today, and I’m hoping to keep that fairly steady as I move on into the month.

Since I’m between jobs at the moment, I’m hoping to get my daily word counts up to between 4k and 5k and keep it there consistently.  Sounds daunting, but I know it’s possible because I did it back in June and July of 2009.  If I could enjoy that kind of productivity again, that would be awesome.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a good, hard look at my routine from that time to figure out how I did it.  Here are some of the key things that stood out to me:

1) I was waking up each morning in a timely manner.
2) I was exercising regularly.
3) I was splitting my time between two projects (one revision, one drafting).
4) I would leave my apartment and go somewhere else to write.
5) I had a short ritual I’d go through to focus myself on the project.

Of these, I think the most important were 1, 2, and 3.  A strong, early start to the day is always helpful, and exercising is not only good for you physically, it boosts your creativity for a short period of time as well.  For that reason, I recently bought a pair of good running shoes and started running.  Today was the first day, and it felt great!

Three was the most surprising, because whenever I was busy with school, I found it impossible to juggle two projects at once.  But out of school, it makes sense: work on the first one until you hit a rough patch, then shift gears and work on the other until you find what you need to pick up the first one again.  It helps to exercise two parts of the brain, so juggling between revision and drafting t is probably for the best.

As for going somewhere else, I’m reluctant to do that since my only other computer is a tiny little netbook–but if things get rough, you may start seeing me around the Provo Library more often.  I remember over the summer, this one chapter in Worlds Away from Home was just killing me, so I took my netbook to the Provo river trail, sat down on a bench, and muscled my way through it.  It surprised me how quickly I punched through it–because if I were at my apartment, I know it would never have gotten done.  It was just too tough.

The last one was kind of a quirky little thing for the second draft of Mercenary Savior (I called it Bringing Stella Home back then), but it would be a good idea to do the same with these other projects.  For Mercenary Savior, it involved watching the opening credits of Fistful of Dollars.  For Into the Nebulous Deep, I’m not sure what the ritual will be, but whatever it is I’ll make it awesome–without spending too much time on it.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on on the writing front.  In response to a nibble from an agent, I’m doing a fifth draft of Genesis Earth, but I haven’t gotten past the first chapter (which I posted).  Soon, I’d like to be doing about 2k to 2.5k on Nebulous Deep per day, and 2k to 2.5k in the revision of Genesis Earth.

There’s more, but I’m starting to fall asleep at my keyboard, so it’s time to wrap this up and post it.  Keep up the writing, nano-ninjas, and good luck!