There comes a time in every work in progress, around thirty-three thousand words, might be different for you, where the writing becomes a slog. For most normal novel length manuscripts this is right smack dab in the frothy middle. The roads so bright and clear when the idea was new have run there course. Characters…
In all my previous failed attempts at crafting a novel, my writing style was that of a pantser (one who writes by the seat of their pants) in the truest sense of the word. I didn’t plan any part of the book. From the moment the idea hit I let the words fly. Characters? They’ll come. Setting? Whatever works. Story? It’s on the blank page all I have to do is find it! Where this haphazard methodology led was stalling out when ideas ran dry and leaving the work behind. That is until I learned to use the concept of a roadmap to help give direction to my pantser style.
The process of editing a novel can seem daunting to us amateur authors. After completing my first draft, I took Stephen King’s advice from ‘On Writing’ and put the draft away for six weeks. In the intervening couple of months, I read a couple of writing books and outlined a plan for completing my first revision. As with writing…
One piece of advice going around Twitter is “don’t compare your draft to someone’s final product,” which helps emphasize the idea that a project should go through a development process. This got me thinking about how writing compares to the process of shooting movie. How the various stages of the production sync up with…
Often while editing there is a scene or character that doesn’t feel right even after several passes. By doing research online about various methods of drafting and how to read your own work I was able to construct a method to proceed through the process. However, after listening to Joe Abercrombie’s interview on ‘The Bestseller Experiment’ episode nine I began to develop another test to use while editing. Joe received harsh, but fair criticism when he was starting out from his Mother who, per Joe, said:
Yesterday was a good day of writing. The coffee next to my laptop tasted better than usual. The words flowed onto the page without a fight and rereading it was a pleasure, not a ……
A current piece of advice floating around Twitter is that one way to approach writing a book is to take the total word count and divide it by the days in a year. Alright, let’s assume 100,000 words is our goal. This is considered a “generally safe” range for mainstream fiction. Taking 100,000 words and dividing it by 365 you get 274. If you take off a couple of days a year for birthdays or holidays then you’re looking at somewhere around 280 words a day.
Distractions are everywhere these days. We carry a distraction machine to turn on at the slightest sign of boredom. We use computers (well, most of us) or tablets to write on. These tools, while useful, host a myriad of distractions ready to play at a moment’s notice through connections to the internet. And these distractions…
A key aspect of setting up a writing routine is determining a time and, as importantly, a writing space. From personal experience, I had to write at the same time every day in the same place to set up my routine. Unbeknownst to me, Cal Newport covers this concept in his book Deep Work: Rules…
Why. One of the five Ws we learn about in grade school and the motivation behind any goal. Why defines the reasons we stay up late writing and sacrifice weekends revising. Why can be the motivator during desperate periods of self-doubt. A powerful why can ignite the beginning, traverse the middle, and take you through to the end.