Category: Writing

Posts about writing. Writing is my work but since I work better when I pretend work isn’t work, I mostly call it fun—even when it isn’t. ;)

This might be my best schedule ever

Lynn

I enjoyed another day of writing on a schedule today. The easy success of the last few days has made me think, wondering what the difference is between this schedule and those that came before. I finally think I’ve come up with several reasons to explain why it might be the best one ever.

  • I start later. 9 am is quite late for me. I’m usually up at 6 on weekdays but I sometimes sleep later on weekends. 9 am means the schedule works no matter which day it is without adjustment. Usually, I set up schedules that start really early and I’m always making adjustments.
  • The break between 12 and 1 is only an hour. Meaning I have less time to prepare food and less time to get sucked into watching TV or reading a book once I sit down to eat. Because I’m eating less at mid-day, I don’t get so sleepy afterward. Usually, I set up schedules with big breaks so I’m more rested when I get back to it. Unfortunately, I’m usually too rested and don’t want to!
  • I don’t have a quota or run the timers so the only pressure I have is the pressure to stick to the schedule. Usually, I have competing pressures because I usually do set word count goals and I run the timer and keep track of how much I produce. That’s a lot of added pressure. It’s nice being able to just focus on sticking to the schedule.

Anyway, I thought I had another reason but I can’t remember it just yet. If I do, I’ll add it. :)

Made it another day with the schedule

Lynn

Day two of following my new schedule went well. I stuck to it and probably got in about 5 hours of writing total after necessary breaks and one short, frustrating period of time where I thought seriously about taking a quick nap. I didn’t, but boy did I come close.

To recap:

Yesterday — 1,343
Today — 2,201

I wrote more today. Not by a lot, because I’m still stuck on this ending, but it is coming along.

Survived day one of the schedule

Lynn

I’m quite proud of myself. I wrote almost the entire six hours scheduled and I started on time at 9 and then at 1, although I admit to two interruptions and one almost nap that lasted about five minutes. All in all, I’d guess that I actually wrote for about 5 hours total.

My word count for that time amount of time sucks. Two reasons: I’m at the end of the book and endings always trip me up, and I’ve been stuck here for days so I’m not surprised it’s been a bitch trying to write my way out of this mess.

I have 1,011 words more than I started with and all of it was added to what I already had in the scene (which is now so long that it’s been split across two chapters). Anyway, it’s coming along and I’m pretty sure this is the climax, to be followed by a fun twist in the wrap up section that will leave a thread for the next books in the series. This series could go on for a long while. I really like writing it when I’m not pulling out my hair because of it. ;)

I’ll be writing more this evening because I’m at the point where I just need to get this book done, but I am taking a break before I get back to it. 3 hours is long enough for one sitting!

My final schedule

Lynn

I didn’t waste any time sitting down and sketching out a schedule after I wrote my little essay today. It was actually a bit of an eye-opener for me. I had no idea how strongly I believed that doing something you love means it should be easy to make yourself do it.

I really feel like I’ve had something of a breakthrough with that one. I’m almost always excited by whatever I’m writing once I actually get started. That’s a big deal because I find getting started insanely difficult even on the best of days. I’m like a rock that won’t roll when I have something I need to do, and that applies to so many areas of my life that you can take it as a general rule for my behavior. You can count on it. If I’m consistent in nothing else in my life, I’m consistent there.

Anyway, without wasting time optimizing the schedule or anything because it really doesn’t matter if I do—there’ll always be days where it just won’t work out well—I set my writing times: 9–12 and 1–4.

I’m going to try to get into a habit of turning off my WIFI at 9 and 1 sharp.

Any day that I don’t have obligations or outside interruptions, I plan to hold myself accountable for using that time for writing: I can write at other times throughout the day if I want, but I have to try to write during those times specifically, even if that means I just end up sitting with my computer and staring at my document.

I’m not setting a word count goal or quota for any of this, but I’m still interested in where I’ll even out with my daily average. Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll be satisfied as long as I’m putting in effort to actually write on my schedule.

The plan is to avoid shifting my writing times even if it means I end up not writing some days because I procrastinated my way through my scheduled writing times. I really hope that doesn’t backfire, but I feel like it’s a necessary step to keep me from messing with my schedule too often. I’m counting on it being easier to start and sustain a habit if I stick as close to the schedule as possible as often as possible.

If I were trying to squeeze writing in after a job or as a part time venture, I’d do things a lot differently. It would make more sense to just try to write as much as possible and go from there. But I’m not, and frankly, I’ve tried that and it worked when I had a job, but it doesn’t work now. I have so much more time available now that I procrastinate too much. Also, I just don’t need to do that anymore. I love writing, and I might be a little obsessed with it sometimes, but I actually don’t want to spend every spare moment I have doing it. I want free time that I can enjoy guilt free. I want to read and watch TV and keep up with my family and get together with my friends once in a while.

I hadn’t realized how much pressure not having a schedule puts on you to work all the time—and how that weighty feeling can lead to so much procrastinating.

Anyway, that’s the schedule. Wish me luck. I see good things in my future. :)

This month’s goal is to finish two books

Lynn

I didn’t make it to the end of the book I wanted done in March, so April’s goal has become to finish two books this month. Both books are already started—one is almost complete already. The other sits at 15,000 words or so.

It’ll take approximately 1,365 words a day to finish both these books, assuming my length estimates are close. This is considerably less than the 2,000 a day average I want to end up with this month, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Getting started every day is the hardest part. If I ever find something that works consistently to get me started early and often… well, that’ll solve 99% of my productivity problems.

Changing my assumptions about my writer self

Lynn

I’ve been thinking about the fact that I need to become more productive with my writing. This is my full-time career and I need to be more cognizant of that fact sometimes. I’m not really sure how to move forward though because I’ve tried all the usual stuff over the last two and a half years: rigid schedules, flexible schedules, word quotas, book quotas, time quotas, all of that, and I still haven’t broken through my own resistance to regular, consistent, daily writing. I’m honestly at a bit of a loss as to what to do. None of those methods have helped me at all. There doesn’t seem to be anything left to try. Right now I’m just trying to focus on the enjoyment I get from writing, hoping that will make a difference. Do I just give up and accept that I write as fast as I write and that’s it?

I read something recently about challenging assumptions. Maybe that’s what I should focus on. I should challenge my assumptions about myself as a writer.

Assumption: I’m a slow writer.

Am I a slow writer? Let’s see: I had to refer to my archived time data (I stopped logging time on 3/18/2015), but a few formulas later, and I see something a bit surprising.

I wrote more than 500 words an hour 56% of the time, more than 800 words an hour 17% of the time, and more than 1,000 words an hour 5% of the time. Is that slow?

I see the 1,000 words an hour figure dropped regularly by other writers, and I have no way of knowing what kind of copy they turn out: finished or rough draft work. I don’t guess it really matters, because almost anyone I know considers a novel a month fast. 2,000–4,000 words a day is what it would take for that, writing the way I do (clean drafts, final copy). 56% of the time I can write 2,000 words in less than 4 hours. So 56% of the time I can produce at a highly prolific pace, working less than 4 hours a day.

This belief that I’m a slow writer doesn’t seem to have a lot of basis in reality.

Really, this just emphasizes that I need to worry a lot less about how fast I write and worry instead about how often I write.

I don’t write often enough and I don’t stick with it long enough. That’s the crux of the problem I’ll need to solve if I want to be prolific.

March was a good month

Lynn

I could have ended the month a little closer to my goals, but overall the month wasn’t bad. I wrote a bit more than 26,000 words and they’re solid words that won’t need more than a typo and clarity check when I’m done. That’s important to me, because I don’t do the shitty first draft writing that some writers advocate. It just doesn’t work for me, and believe me, there were years in there where I tried. Those were my most unproductive years as a writer, and I don’t ever plan to go back there.

April is going to be better. I’ve stumbled on a method of work that seems to be helping me produce more words each day. If it holds out, maybe April will be my first 2k-a-day month.

Word count has become my biggest obstacle

Lynn

My daily word count has become my biggest obstacle over the last few years. I’m not sure exactly when it started to overtake every other writing concern I have, but it has and I’m not feeling great about that. I know my daily word counts are important. They’re intricately tied to success as measured by revenue because you can’t sell what isn’t written.

However, I’m also feeling a bit like the excessive focus on word count has had some side effects that I’m not really happy with, the biggest and scariest of which is a diminishing enjoyment of writing.

I know I need something to keep me going in the right direction, but … some days this need to measure everything just gets old. I want to love writing so much that I can’t wait to get started and hate to have to stop. Some days I still feel like this. Less so lately though. It’s hard for me to love writing when I’m constantly disappointed in myself because of writing.

Still, although I’ve axed my timer and my time data (archived it, to be exact), I won’t be abandoning my daily log of my word count. I love having that list of numbers. What I don’t love is looking at it and feeling bad about myself when there’s a blip where the numbers drop or a zero shows up.

On the other hand, I do love a good writing streak. For the moment, I’m going to focus on writing every day (that getting started thing is really important) and worry less about the actual quota. I want to end up with a nice average, but “average” means I don’t have to be so hard on myself for any particular day’s word count if I have a reasonable mix of bad days and good days.

What I’m learning: Consistency is important, but it’s probably better if I’m not rigid about it. I want to write every day, but some days are going to be more fun than others and it’s going to be easier to stay at it longer. We’ll see where that gets me in April.

32 day streak

Lynn

I’m now at 32 days of writing fiction every day. Unlike with previous streaks, this one has no quotas, time or words. My plan is simply to see how many consecutive days I can make it writing fiction every day.

Really and truly, getting started is the hardest part for me. When I do get started, I usually do better than I expect. Like last night. I thought I’d get nothing, but then I decided I wanted to keep my streak alive, want, in fact, to create the best streak I’ve ever had, so I started writing. 439 really decent words later I stopped and went to bed because time had gotten away from me. (A really good thing when it comes to writing.)

I’ve said before, if I eliminate all the zero word days I’ve had in the past and replace them with as little as 50 words, I could have written 15,000 words more than I have since I started writing to publish. If that number had averaged 200 words, that’s an entire extra novel.

Averages are powerful things and I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine I could average 200 words a day for all those days that might be zero word days otherwise.

My ultimate goal is still to reach and maintain a 2,000 word a day average, but these small steps are helping me get there. After a really bad streak of low productivity that lasted more than a year, I’m happy to see improvement.

Why I don’t offer writing tips (most of the time)

Lynn

I’ve been writing for about twenty-five years. It’s really funny that fifteen years ago, I had a site devoted to giving out writing tips. Nowadays I don’t feel qualified to give out writing tips, despite the length of time I’ve been writing fiction. Or maybe it’s that I’ve learned in the meantime that writing tips are a bit worthless. I only discovered true happiness with writing when I finally tossed aside all the tips that had taken up residence inside my head and wrote what I wanted, how I wanted. Sadly, that’s only been in the last ten years or so.

I freely admit that maybe I needed those tips at the time so that I could become the writer I am today. Then again, maybe they delayed my development as a writer. I’ll likely never know.

I also freely admit that I am far from done learning how to write. The difference these days is that I learn from reading others and practicing my own craft, trying to find ways to get the words out so they translate best to the biggest portion of my reading audience. (You can never please everyone, and you’ll go mad if you try.) That’s not to say I don’t read select craft books, because I do. But I avoid the kind of tips that proliferate online in favor of in-depth discussions of topics meant to help writers write good stories.

How can I offer advice to others when I still have so much to learn?

Still, sometimes I want to say to some writers I see scouring the forums and blogs for the secret to better writing: Stop! Just write. Write and write and write, and complete things. Even the terrible things. Finish those stories you start, because that’s how I learned. I took a giant leap forward when I finally started finishing the stories I started.

In the end, though, I have no idea if what worked for me will work for them. Maybe they need those tips. Or maybe they’re just delaying their own development as writers. We’ll likely never know.

I don’t offer writing tips because I don’t feel qualified. I know only what works for me as a reader and a writer. And I use adverbs when I want and I write run on sentences and I quite often mix my metaphors. But it’s what I want and how I want and my writing hasn’t been the same since. It’s lovely to own your art as uniquely yours.

248 words today and a posting hiatus

Lynn

I wrote 248 words today and I think that’s it for me today. I won’t be writing any more tonight. That headachy feeling has never gone away today and I’m calling it a night early to see if some extra rest can knock it out before tomorrow.

To meet my personal deadline for this book I need to up my daily quota for the next several days. Not by a lot but just enough to catch up a few off days.

I also think I’m about to stop these daily posts. They’ve been great but I’m letting them take up more time than I really should be. So… hiatus! I might return to posting after I finish this book. We’ll see. :D

1,284 words yesterday

Lynn

I wrote 1,284 words yesterday. I ended up with a late start last night and just never caught up, coming in about an hour and a half short on the time I should have spent writing.

I’m not having a lot of luck today, either, tbh, but I shall persevere. I’m feeling headachy.

1,605 words yesterday

Lynn

I’m trying not to be disappointed! I wrote 1,605 words yesterday. At the halfway point, after I’d completed my morning session, it looked like I’d reach 2,000 for the day, even though I had to work for that morning word count a little too hard. By the time I finished up the evening session, however, my pace had slowed considerably and I just couldn’t make it. I’m trying to loosen up this morning, think positively and all that, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m feeling a bit … stuck, for lack of a better word, and the writing involved an awful lot of deleting yesterday! I’m hoping there won’t be an encore.

Novel feels like it’s going to go long

Lynn

I aim for about 50,000 words when I write a novel. I can’t say I have a lot of luck keeping to that word count. The story usually ends up bigger because I don’t like to let my characters have wild changes of heart without a darn good reason. I believe change is hard and honestly, I believe most people never change and those who do fight for it tooth and nail.

Now, since I can’t really divorce myself completely from my characters, when I’m writing one that has to change in a big way before his story is done, I end up having to write more to make it happen. This seems to be what’s happening in this book. My main character has taken the first steps to change, but the fact is, he’s not there yet and I have a LOT of story left to squeeze into 20,000 words. :o

I’m going to try, because I always do, but I have a feeling this one’s going to get away from me.

464 words yesterday

Lynn

I wrote more than 464 words yesterday, but alas, this morning I deleted some stuff I’d been hanging onto at the end of the doc because I’m not going to be using it. Since I didn’t want to start from a negative position this morning, I knocked those words off yesterday’s count.

I mean, I haven’t started writing yet, so why not? :D

Who cares anyway, right? I had a positive yesterday, and I’m about to start writing the moment I close this window in about 10 seconds. ;)

Negative 52 words yesterday

Lynn

I wrote −52 words yesterday, or better said, I wrote some words and deleted some words and my net loss was 52 words.

I hate it when my word count starts going backward.

I could have done so much better. In defense of my lack of writing, I will say I was distracted for a good part of the day because right before I was supposed to start my first session, I smelled gasoline in the house. I traced it to a leaking gas tank in my lawn mower in the basement, and the only thing I can think happened is that the cold weather did something to it, even though it was in the basement and the basement never got that cold. I mean, my pipes didn’t freeze. But still, I spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to air out the basement and the rest of the house, and ended up with a headache to boot.

Still, I should have gotten some writing done. I had time. I just chose not to write. :(

Today, I need to make up some lost ground. I have a schedule for completing this book and I don’t want to push past the deadline I’ve set myself unless I have to. Situations like yesterday aren’t troublesome enough to be a legitimate reason for pushing my deadline.

I’m working on treating my deadlines with more respect.

599 words today

Lynn

I wrote 599 words today. I wish it had been more. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t manage to stick with it today but I’m going to blame it on a lack of sleep the night before.

Tomorrow is another day as they say.