Category Archives: Writing

It’s the last Wednesday of the month, so here are my posts from the All Rights Reserved blog:

• Monologuing Characters – I try my voice at acting, and come up with an idea for a new writing exercise.
• Swimming – I discover that swimming makes my brain work just as well as running does.
• People at Cons – I discover that I have people to talk with at conventions.

As always, go check out what the other members of ARR have to say!

Other links of interest:

• Please, Please, Please, Give Your Protag Friends, a Sibling, Parents (Justine Larbalestier) – This is how I end up with the cast of thousands. It’s still a good point.
• A Writer’s ‘If…’ (Jon Gibbs)
• How to Become a Better Writer (Rachelle Gardner) – This is about filling the creative well, not craft.

Also, because I still like the post:

• The writing process demonstrated by black swallowtails

As of Tuesday night, I’ve received 99 short story rejections. Number 100 could come at any moment. Maybe by the time you read this.

Those rejections are for 17 different stories. That surprises me, because I didn’t think I’d written that many stories. (But now I see why I have such a big backlog of short stories to give to my crit group while they’re in between novels.) Lots of writers seem to spew out short stories as if they’ve got a three-shift assembly line in the basement, so I usually think of myself as not very productive. But my decision in late 2009 to write at least four a year seems to have resulted in…almost four stories a year. (I started slow since I was new at it, and have done more than four the past couple years.)

They seem to be getting better, too. Who’d have expected that practice helps?

99 is a big number. Every now and then someone expresses sympathy for a rejection. Very few of them sting even a little bit. You have to get numb. (Being a reporter helps there, btw.) My tiny but nonzero number of sales helps too.

Step 1

You have an idea. It’s not pretty yet, but it has potential.

Step 2

Your story is starting to look pretty cool, but it’s not quite what you imagined when you started.

Step 3

Lots of hard work happens here. Or a miracle. Take your pick.

Step 4

Your story is finished!

And then it mates with another story, lays eggs on your fennel, and the process starts over again. Or something like that.

All photos from Wikipedia.

I feel kind of dorky saying this, but some months ago I put an item on my to do list (repeating daily) that is a few sentences for me to read. That means I start every day by checking my to do list and reading those sentences, which are a reminder to put writing first.

In particular they say that writing is more important than various other activities, including blogging.

So today I got up, did my strength training, made breakfast, and worked on my novel (ok, that’s 3rd, but whatever). That’s pretty much my normal morning schedule, so why am I telling you this? Because I ran out of time to write today’s blog post. Usually I write them on the weekends, but I was away.

I could have cut my novel time short this morning and written a post. I could write a post today at lunch instead of writing the cool scene where my protagonist goes to the place to get the thing but runs into that person. But the book comes first, so I’ve got no post for you.

(Yes, technically this is a blog post. But it isn’t really.)

In which I tell you what I’ve been up to on the All Rights Reserved blog:

• Music and Writing – In which I muse about train rides
• Convention Bound – One down, two to go
• Shorts vs Novels – Spoiler: I like both
• Not a Rewriter – A response to Kelly’s post about rewriting. Shockingly, we disagree.

Other links of interest:

The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy (New York Times) – I almost never review the books I read. It’s not because no one pays me.

Project: Write Faster / EARLY RESULTS (Holly Black) – Holly Black sums up her early experiment with some of the techniques Rachel Aaron used to vastly increase her daily wordcount. My current write-faster trick is Write or Die. I’m tempted to get the iPad app, but I’m not sure it’s being maintained any more.

Last week I looked at how much time I spend revising vs writing vs planning. Today I’m looking at how long a short story takes me. For today’s post, “writing” includes revising and planning (but not research).

I’ve run the numbers on eight short stories, from around 500 words to more than 6000, that I’ve taken from idea to submission since I started collecting data. Longer stories do tend to take longer, but that’s not quite the full picture.

The shortest story is half the length of the second-shortest story, and took half as much time to write. But the second-shortest story didn’t take the second-smallest amount of time. That honor belongs to a story that’s nearly three times its length.

Four stories cluster around 5000 words; the time I spent on them spans a range of around 10 hours.

While it’s nice to know that I could write a short story in a week (or even a good weekend), what I haven’t looked at is how long in real time each story has taken. Sometimes the ideas ferment for a long time before I start really working on them. Sometimes I get partway into a draft that isn’t working before realizing that the story is in the mystery genre and I need to learn how to write a mystery (I’ve been listening to podcasts from Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s). In other words I still can’t say “Need story by Tuesday? Start Sunday.” But it’s good to know that I don’t know that…and that if I allot 25 hours to each short story, I’ll end up with “extra” time to spend on my novel.

Way back in April, Jay Lake posted some numbers that revealed he’d spent about 36% of his time on his first draft and 43% of his time revising.

And I thought, wow, only 40% revision! How nice! I assumed my percentage was higher, but never got around to doing the math.

Then recently, I found this other blog post on the three phases of writing that said “Writing is 85% prewriting, 1% writing, and 14% rewriting.” I read that and thought, that can’t be right. Where’s your data?

Well, I have data. I’ve been tracking my writing time for about two years. And it turns out…only a third of my time has been spent on the miserable part (revising). Since mid-2010ish, I’ve spent about 19% of my time planning, 48% writing, and 32% revising. I guess I should stop complaining. Revising must feel like it takes 90% of my time because I hate it so much.

It’ll be interesting to look back at these numbers in a few years and see what my longer-term average is, since the numbers have been in a wide range. In 2011, for example, only 9.6% of my time was on planning, and so far in 2012, only 22% of my time has been writing (a percentage that is about to increase drastically, since I’m now writing the book I spent the beginning of the year planning).

I don’t have numbers for a full book start-to-finish (I started tracking halfway through my last book). But stay tuned next week when I’ll run the numbers on individual short stories. (Preview: Length of story? Not so important.)

My story “The Breeding Pond” appears in volume 4 of The Crimson Pact, a prequel to my previous story for this series.

I got a sneak peek by proofreading a few stories. I especially enjoyed Sarah Kanning’s “Wild Card”, which continues her stories from the previous volumes, and Brett Peterson’s “Indigo Ocean”, which shows a demon hunt from a whale’s perspective.

If you haven’t read any of the previous volumes and want to know what the Crimson Pact is all about, the sampler Tales From the Crimson Pact is free at Amazon until the end of the week. Also, you can get a free PDF of “The Failed Crusade”, the story that sets the whole thing up.

Enjoy!

Remember when I said my writing group has a new blog? Oh, you forgot to go read it? Lucky I’m here to remind you. Here are some of my (mostly writing-related) recent posts on All Rights Reserved:

• Tweaking Style
• Outline Bashing
• My First Big Bookstore
• The Willpower Instinct: Why Willpower is Contagious

While you’re there, read the others’ posts too. They are smarter and more interesting than I am.

Some other items of interest:

• Wolfram|Alpha will now calculate warp speed (for those of you who are starship captains)
• Finding the Unfamiliar Phrase (avoiding cliches)
• Backing Up, Switching Out, Going Forward (writing time/efficiency)

Do you make timelines for your books? I played around with the idea for one of my previous books, but for the most part it seemed like overkill. I’m a fan of the vague “x days later” school of timeline.

However, the book I’m working on now is requiring me to make one. Events are happening very quickly, so that “x days later” thing isn’t going to work (“x hours later” is a fast way to 48-hour days). Plus, I’ve got two points of view, and it’d be helpful to know which of them is doing what when.

So I’ve started putting things into Aeon Timeline as I fill in my outline some more. It’s fun software because I get to color code things and tag them–and it integrates with Scrivener, so I’ll be able to dump the outline into that program once it’s done. First thing I had to do was create a calendar, because the book isn’t on Earth, I’m going to need to refer to dates (maybe), and Aeon lets you create custom calendars. So now my events are taking place on Day2xxx, the 3rd of Month9xxxx. I’ll name them later if I really need to.