I would like to just quickly share with you the way I’ve been writing for the past three months or so…
In 2016, I started doing a method where I would just make myself write something for 30 minutes a day. It was really helpful for training myself to be less self-critical and just spit things out without the pressure to have it be good or even make sense. I was pretty happy doing this for a while, but I started to get tired of just writing crap only to throw it away. I decided I was going to pick a story that I felt I had the capacity to write (as opposed to something too far outside my personal experience) and just stick with it until it gets done.
I’ve been spending at least 30 minutes a day (timed with the timer function on a digital watch) about 5 days a week and marking days I write on the calendar with a big “X”. I count planning/outlining/asking and answering story questions as part of “writing”. As I’m trying to put more hours into planning, I’m opting to count by time rather than wordcount, since the words written in the outlines and planning documents won’t be in the final draft.
My minimum goal is 30 minutes because it’s hard to find an excuse not to try for such a small amount of time. I find it hard to focus for more than 30 minutes at a time, and I find that’s the longest I’m willing to work on really bad days. If it’s going pretty well, I can go a little bit past the end of the timer or do a second session later in the day.
I used my laptop for planning and outlining, and now that I’ve got that mostly done I’ve been using the Alphasmart Neo 2 for drafting. I like the Alphasmart because you can’t see too much of what you’ve written already, so it’s easy to focus on moving forward. I do like to set the font as small as it can go, though, because I like to get a sense of how the current paragraph sounds (it shows about 6 lines on the smallest setting). The Alphasmart Neo has arrow keys so you can make small edits as you go.
I got the idea for the story I’m working on now from Plot Perfect, which tells you how to write from theme. I tried to think of what themes were most important in my life right now and what message I might have for my prospective audience. From that theme, I thought of how it might express itself in a plot. I started a Word doc that looks kind of like this:
Theme: Escapism is seductive but isolating.
My story/plot: A girl gets sucked into another world when she looks in a mirror. In the Mirror World, she sees herself as a total badass and the heroine of the story. She beats monster after monster, but eventually she realizes that Mirror World isn’t helping her in real life and she decides to leave and get more involved with people irl.
Characters: [list of characters]
Settings:
Etc…
So I have this big Planning Word doc and a separate Word doc for the Outline, which started in the Planning Word doc and then got too big so I moved it to its own document. The outline is about 6 pages long and I used it to lay out what’s going to happen in each scene, up until the end and the epilogue, so I know what’s coming.
Eventually I got tired of starting things over and over without ever finishing them. I decided that I was going to pick one story and see it through to the end, no matter how bad it was. I’m just charging ahead, no looking back, no editing until the whole thing is basically done in skeleton prose. On the second pass, I’ll embellish and smooth things out a little more, and fill in places I got stuck. Right now, the prose is really cliched/awkward/stilted, but I keep telling myself “I’ll fix it in post.”
Let me know if you have any tips or tricks you use to get yourself writing!
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