Category Archives: Writing

I’m back from the workshop (see yesterday’s post on the ARR blog). One thing that came up briefly was the idea of writing every day. I work on writing every day, but planning and revision are such a huge percentage of my writing time that I don’t write new words every day. I do keep trying it, though, usually with a 250 words a day goal, because revision and planning aren’t going to help me get better at the actual writing (well, revision might).

Why don’t I manage to create new words every day?

• I’ve tried to plan my projects in such a way that I always have something I can be writing, but it hasn’t worked out all the time, especially if I get bogged down in a short story. Or if a short story comes out a lot faster than expected. However, I am actually planning three novels right now, so those should give me a lot of 250-word chunks to write for the next year.

• If I’m mired in a novel revision, it seems like a waste of time to write something else. Even for only 15-20 minutes a day. Plus they tend to eat my brain, making it difficult to think about anything else. On the other hand, taking a break to do something fun while still being productive would be nice.

While I was there, I did start writing 250 words a day–but it’s kind of cheating, because I have a novel to work on, so it will be a lot of 250-word days before I’m done. Or 1000-word days if I want to get it done by my self-imposed deadline.

Do you write every day?

Remember when I mentioned I was going to a novel workshop in Kansas? Well, I’m there now [1].

I have extremely limited internet, because I figure I’ll get more work done if I don’t pay to have it in my room.

Have fun, and see you in mid-July!

[1] Technically I’m writing this at 9:37 pm on the 22nd. So I might not be there. But I’d rather not think about that.

Rachel Aaron’s blog post about how she started writing 10,000 words a day had another brief run around my LiveJournal friends list recently. Which was amusing timing, because a day or so before that, I’d had to remind myself of one of her points: know what I’m writing before I write it.

Something I realized a while back is that for me, it is very hard to both a) figure out the details of what happens in a scene and b) find the right way to say it at the same time. So when I write a scene, I tend to first write a paragraph of narrative description, then a longer version that includes dialogue, and then finally, a full prose version. Every now and then, when I find myself stuck, it’s because I skipped a step. [1]

I have no problems with this seemingly inefficient process–except it makes it hard to track my word count. That second step includes a fair number of words that I keep, but the third step can increase the size by a factor of 2 or more.

I was trying to track my word count to see when I’m more productive–morning versus evening, coffee shop versus home. But there’s no good way to count these different steps, especially since each one includes deleting words as well as adding them.

I’ve decided to try tracking “productivity” instead. It’s a subjective measure–yes, no, or maybe–but better than nothing. I want to know whether I work better out of the house than at home, or in the evening instead of the morning (I suspect yes to both counts). In a few months I should have enough data to draw some conclusions.

[1] Exception: Many short stories. For some reason most, but not all, need the right words the whole time and I get stuck if I try to do my usual summary. Whatever.

My writing group has a new blog! We’ll be talking writing, reading, and…whatever else seems like a good idea at the time.

What does that mean for this blog? Nothing! Maybe. Right now the plan is to keep doing writing posts here on Wednesdays, and also over there on Tuesdays. If I get lazy busy I might just link from one to the other, or repost something from there, here. We’ll see.

For now, remember The Willpower Instinct, which I posted about a couple weeks ago? Yesterday’s post at All Rights Reserved covers a different chapter from that book, on the importance of social networks.

Check out the blog now–then when we’re all famous, you can say you were there from the beginning.

Steve Buchheit linked to Catherine Schaff-Stump’s summary of a Wiscon panel about rejections, which included this tidbit.

A very important piece of advice is keep your eyes on your own page. Don’t compare your career to that of others. There are a variety of variables in a writing career.

I would like to second, third, and fourth that. And I agree with Steve’s comment that it’s easy to say and hard to do.

But even though wallowing in envy isn’t useful and doesn’t make one pleasant to be around, that initial twinge of envy can be motivating. Someone sells a story to a market I’d love to crack? Maybe they put three times as much time into their writing than I do, and therefore get a lot more practice. Maybe they’ve worked harder to learn techniques that I’m struggling with. The solutions to both those problems are pretty obvious. (Maybe they’re just more talented than I am, but there’s no point in thinking about that.)

So, while envy is hard to avoid, it does have its upside. Acknowledge it, use it, and move on.

I’ve been reading an interesting book about willpower, The Willpower Instinct, by Kelly McGonigal. It’s both an explanation of how willpower works and a manual for strengthening it.

A few chapters ago, one of the exercises was to reward yourself for doing whatever you put off: drink hot chocolate while doing paperwork, watch television while working out, scratch off a lottery ticket every time you complete a household project. (Those are examples of what her students have done when she’s taught this as a class.)

Which got me wondering about rewarding myself for writing. I’ve tried this in the past, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work over the past couple weeks, either. Apparently I’m just not a reward-driven person. Whatever my goal, I’m not going to reward myself with food or time, since either would be counterproductive. (“I wrote a chapter! Time to take an evening off!” leads down a bad road.)

Rewarding myself with money/things doesn’t work either. I’m pretty frugal by nature, which means a) there’s not much I want enough to make it an appealing reward, and b) if I really want something, I tend to buy it because that doesn’t happen all the time. I was going to buy myself a piece of jewelry when I got a hundred rejections, but never got around to it. I was going to buy a new bike after I did a triathlon last fall, but never got around to that either (I might get one this summer, because I want one rather than as a reward for a race I did months ago).

Rewards just don’t seem like a useful motivational tool for me–my reward for writing is getting stories done. Do rewards work for you?

A few recent posts got me thinking about lunchtime writing again. It’s been a while since I took a step back and thought about how it’s working for me.

Since the last time I posted about it, the breakroom I write in has become less crowded, so I feel less antisocial since I’m not sharing a table with people I’m ignoring. That also makes it quieter and less distracting. (People who work here have very interesting things to talk about. That sometimes has its downside.)

Since on Thursdays I go to Toastmasters, I only do this four days a week, and I miss it on Thursdays. Toastmasters obviously still gives me a break from work, but it doesn’t give me the alone-with-my-stories time.

The main thing I need to change is to take an actual lunch *hour*. Or at least 45 minutes. My lunch is often only half an hour. If I have to go buy my lunch that shortens things (there’s an obvious solution there). Plus, it’s too easy, if I feel stuck or I don’t feel like working on something, to tell myself I should get back to job-work.

Let me close with two points:

1) A tip–I have to make sure that when I leave the house in the morning I have everything I need. This seems obvious, but even after doing this for years I still packed up all my stuff today before remembering to sync my iPad, and then had to unpack it all again. It was simpler when I was just scribbling first drafts in a spiral notebook. (On the other hand, if I forget one project I usually have enough things going on to just work on something different.)

2) I just want to say for probably the dozenth time on this blog how much I love my iPad. I bought it specifically so I could write at lunch more easily (than on an iPod Touch), and it’s been fantastic. Once Scrivener for iPad is out, it’ll be even better.

This weekend Patricia Wrede briefly discussed writing exercises in the context of how writers can try to improve.

In the comments, I said

I used to see little point to exercises. But after becoming a plotter rather than a pantser, I get much more out of them. Whenever I do exercises, I pick a story or book that’s in the planning stages, and do them with those characters/setting. It helps me generate ideas for that story, so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time.

I should be doing this now, actually, for the next novel I’m going to work on, so that when I really sit down to plan it out this fall I have a better idea of what the characters are like and what I want to have happen.

So far this year I’ve been doing a fair number of exercises: I’ve been taking a bunch of online workshops from various RWA chapters on characters and feelings and related topics. Right now I’m taking a class on revising for emotional impact, and the exercises have been to revise passages from our current project, keeping the current lesson’s topic in mind. Which is a useful kind of exercise, since I’d be revising those chapters anyway.

Do you guys find exercises useful?

A while back I mentioned playing the “if I went back to school, what would I study” game.

Which I also mentioned isn’t going to happen. It gets tempting, though–there are a lot of things I’d like to learn, partly for writing and partly just for fun. Taking a class would make me focus on learning (part of) a subject in a reasonable amount of time. But I’m not going to spend money or a lot of time on it, or I’d never get any writing done.

Enter the wonder of the Internet and the future that we live in. A couple weeks ago I ran across a mention of Coursera, and last week, EdX made big news. If you haven’t heard about these, here’s the deal:

They’re both websites that offer free online courses–with lectures, homework, exams, and interaction with professors and other students. But, probably no grades, maybe a certificate of completion, definitely no real credit.

EdX is a team effort of Harvard and MIT (warning: the site auto-plays a video). Coursera has courses from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Coursera has started offering some courses, and EdX will begin in the fall, though MIT is currently running a course in electrical circuits.

I resisted the circuits class, but have signed up for three classes through Coursera (in series, not parallel–ok, I’ll stop with the puns now). I’ll be starting Intro to Sociology in June, a literature class on fantasy and science fiction in July, and a history class in September.

Unlike reading by myself, I can’t pick the exact topic and I can’t necessarily go at my own snail’s pace, but I think being able to interact with other people doing the same readings/hearing the same lectures will be a big benefit. And as I busy person, I have to admit that it being free and online makes it more tempting because missing a week for whatever reason won’t really matter.

I’m also just curious to see what these kinds of classes are like. Are these huge, free courses the new future of education, or a fad? Will I learn anything or are they just a marketing tool?

For the novel workshop I’m going to this summer (er, next month, yikes), I need to send people an outline. I had an outline already: a bunch of index cards stuck to my white board, color coded by point of view. Since taking a photo of it probably wouldn’t be helpful, I typed everything into Scrivener. (And forgot to take a photo of my white board before I took them all down.)

Back in March, I wrote up a post about the various sorts of notes in Scrivener and how I use them. When I started thinking about turning my Scrivener file into an outline other people could read, but that I could also use as I write the novel, I realized I have to make some changes to my usual workflow.

The problem was that when I compiled the file (turned the Scrivener file into a Word document), I’d get something that looked really messy. I really don’t need to share the stuff under “Notes” with people because it’s all notes that I’m using to write (or revise) the book. Stuff like “delete Susan?” or “make T angrier here”. And the synopsis fields were all blank, so someone reading this can’t follow the plot anyway. Plus I’m already running into my usual problem, that the Notes field has both my to-dos for the scene, and things like “the moon is 1/4 full” and “3 days later”.

Since I was using the synopsis at work, I’d gotten to like how easy it is to view in outline mode, and how the synopsis finder toolbar button makes it easy to…find things that are in synopses.

So (obviously) I’m adding summaries of each scene into the synopsis field. I’m also adding my to-dos there, prefaced with an exclamation mark. The exclamation mark means I can easily use the synopsis finder to find scenes that I need to do something to.

And I can keep using document notes for messy stuff I don’t want the people at the workshop to see. (In theory, everything with an exclamation mark in front should be taken care of before I send them the outline…)

Much nicer.