In my last post I detailed a few writing strategies that had worked for me, and I referenced a helpful article by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. It’s a fascinating piece, with several intriguing suggestions, some of which I like and others, not so much.
As I said before, I love his idea about committing yourself to writing a certain number of words per day. However, I disagree strongly with the idea of writing an exact number of words. If I’m inspired I want to continue writing for as long as time permits. On the weekends I sometimes write as many as 2000 words per day on my primary project. Most days, though, I don’t have time to go much beyond my minimum 500; my day job takes care of that. If I were a full-time writer, though, I would need to balance my time between writing new material and other activities such as researching, editing, and promotion. I would probably either set a maximum word count or a time limit.
Doctorow’s reason for stopping at an exact word count – even if it means quitting in the middle of a sentence – is so you have a continuation point in your brain for the next day. That’s a good argument, but for me, it’s not necessary. I rarely get stuck on a story, and if I do, I’m obsessive enough that I think about the problem while doing other activities, such as walking the dogs or driving to work. I almost always come up with something.
Another of Doctorow’s rules, which I arrived at independently, is “don’t research.” More precisely, he means to keep your writing and and research times separate. Part of the trouble with Fidelio is that, being in the steampunk genre, which requires a lot of historical research to do correctly. I love history and could spend hours reading about it- but it doesn’t get your writing done.
When Doctorow is writing and needs to reference a fact that he doesn’t currently know (the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, for example), he doesn’t stop to research that fact. Instead, he inserts the abbreviation “TK” into the text, to remind himself to insert the information at a later time. He uses “TK” because the combination appears in very few English words, making it easy to search. During my July experiment I began doing something similar. For my own place marker I use a descriptive phrase in curly braces, such as {name of spouse.} As a software developer I use braces all the time, but when was the last time you saw them in fiction? The advantage of my scheme over a fixed marker such as “TK” is that I don’t forget what kind of info I need to substitute in any particular place.
Now for another of Doctorow’s point that I don’t like: dump the word processor. He suggests using a plain-vanilla text editor such as “emacs” rather than a word processor like Microsoft Word. It’s true that word processors can be distracting with all of their formatting features, but there’s also an advantage in ease of use. Besides, I use very few of these features until the entire work is done. I’m a Open Office partisan myself; it’s simpler than Word but much easier to use than emacs, which I appreciate from a programmer’s standpoint, but not for prose. Features like word wrap and double spacing make the text easier to read, which means easier to edit, and jobs like paragraph indenting and converting quotation marks are done automatically.
That brings me to a rule of my own that was not in Doctorow’s article– I like to plan in advance what my primary writing project will be for the upcoming month or two. If I didn’t, I’d be tempted to jump around from project to project and not finish any of them. For example, when I started Diana’s Fury at the beginning of July (to be honest, I’d already written one scene, but lets not quibble) I didn’t allow myself to switch projects it was finished. However, to ensure I wouldn’t stray from Fidelio for too long, a set a drop-dead date of August 1st. Luckily, I finished the rough draft of Diana a week early, so I then took the opportunity to work on an urban fantasy story I’d started and abandoned in 2011. Although I haven’t yet finished that story, it’s next in line after I’m done with the rough draft of Fidelio.
These simple rules have helped me vanquish a problem that has bedeviled me since I’ve started writing seriously- my obsession with working in a totally linear fashion (that is, writing one book at a time.) That’s what almost killed my enthusiasm for the craft. I spent many months writing my first book, Centrifugal Force and many more editing it. During the editing phase I had many cool ideas I forced myself to forgo. Eventually I got so burned out on the book that I had to put it aside for a few months. Now that I’m doing two or more projects in parallel (one for just writing, another for editing, and a possible third for research and/or outlining) that doesn’t happen to me any more.
So now you have them, my “top secret” writing tips, which you can modify to your own liking. Remember, the most important rule is not to write at any particular time of day, it’s just to set a regular time and stick to it. Also, be sure to check out articles and blogs by experienced authors. To a writer, newbies are not competition, they’re comrades.
