Heres an unasked for tidbit about how Ive changed my approach to writing fiction. Feel free to eavesdrop as I think out loud. Im writing this post for my own benefit, because I never know what I think about something until I write about it. About a month ago, I decided I needed to crack down on my lack of productivity. Id done a lot of outlining on book 3 of my current series, but I was struggling to get going on it. Now Ive always thought of myself as a binge writer. I tend to write really fast first drafts (because I dont type them), and then sculpt the story into shape in revision passes. Fine. That worked for five novels, but I felt my productivity was lackluster at best. Two novels in two years just wasnt setting the world on fire. So I sat myself down and said: Self, write every day. I didnt want to hear this, so I plugged my ears and said: la, la, la, la, I cant hear you. But I did hear me, and so I set myself a daily quota of 1000 words, figuring that if I managed that for 300 days of the year, Id get 300k words done, which would be a 4 novels instead of one. Turned out, 1000 words wasnt very hard, especially when I dictated them. Thats about 20 minutes of work if I have an outline. But I dont want to dictate 300,000 words because, dang-it, transcription services arent cheap. So recently Ive been typing more frequently (sigh). Ugh. It takes forever. Anyway, NaNoWriMo cropped up all of a sudden and I just hopped right on that wagon and decided the minimum 1667 words per day was too weird of a number, so I just declared a 2000 word daily minimum for November. So far so good. Im ahead of pace on the challenge and starting to think that 2k per day might be a livable pace. The implications of this kind of stunned me. Thats 600k words in 300 days! Zoinks! Do I even have enough creative ideas to fill so many words? Maybe I should start doing the anti Strunk and White all over my manuscripts to bulk up my word count. But no. The point isnt the volume. I really only care about the readers being happy. [As an aside: I hate the Strunk and White book. Its a motivation destroyer designed to erase a writers unique voice from their writing.] This is the spot where a daredevil would boldly claim a huge goal. Im not susceptible to such temptations. Besides, Im in the middle of a 6-month no sugary sweets pledge (I have to pay a charity I hate $500 if I cheat even once. [except I declared a few exceptions on specific dates. {and thats not cheating because I can design my vows however I want and its about the spirit of the thing, etc, etc,} -- Ive lost my place among all these nested brackets, so well just use the return key here . . . So Im not declaring 600k words as a goal. But I intend to keep my 1k/day minimum. Might even bump that up to 1200/day (that extra 200 words per day = 60k words over 300 days [!]). I hated math in school, but I like that kind. Anyway, no more focussing on the book. Instead, my focus is on the writing.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:59:10 +0000