I've been writing recently so I felt like talking about it. I've had a story in mind, a nice comfy scifi story with some fantasy mixed in. I'll just go ahead and compare it to DUNE in terms of setting. I'm at almost 90K words at this point, and it's going great, so I had a few thoughts about writing methods.
I'd been doing outlines and such for probably five years or more. I even started writing it, got around 20K words into it, and scrapped the entire thing as totally unworkable. Long story short, I miscalculated how to write a beginning. It was both trite and weird. To make an analogy, I was on track to write an entire book about Luke on the moisture farm trying to figure out how to turn his lightsaber on. It sucked! Fortunately I didn't give up and my 2nd attempt is going much better.
Here's my current method for overcoming writer's block and my general laziness: I have a set of strict rules, designed to fight procrastination. They sound a bit autistic, but they work for me. The goal is to get as much work done, as quickly as possible. I came up with this around new years.
Rule 1:
I have to write 1000 words minimum per day no matter what. Taking days off is out of the question, no weekends. I picked 1000 words because it's not too much, but not too little. It's a couple hours per day, and I want to form the habit of writing every day.
Rule 2:
If I do miss a day due to something unavoidable, I must make it up by increasing the minimum word count for the next few days. Say 1500 minimum for the next two days. Missing days is inevitable, so there has to be a plan to make it up. (I haven't actually missed any days yet lol)
Rule 3:
I cannot pre-write my 1000 words if I think I might miss a day later. The point is to get shit done, and I know I'd be scrounging for an excuse to skip a day if I allowed this. I must always be in word-debt when I wake up in the morning. It's psychological.
Rule 4:
If I reach 1000 words and am on a roll, I don't stop until I run out of steam. 1000 words isn't even that much, it's less than 2 pages. I am a lazy fucker, and my first instinct would be to "save" some work for later, so I have to have a rule against it. This also ties in nicely with rule 3. It doesn't matter if I wrote 3000 words yesterday, I'm still in word-debt today, I still owe 1000 words to the word goblin or else my kneecaps are getting broken.
Rule 5:
I keep a log of my progress. For each day, I record the current word count ( 88,185 ), how many days I've been doing this ( 67 ), and a few other metrics. I need this for motivation, it's like a score card. I like watching number go up.
I learned a few things doing this. I thought I was a planner-type, but after actually writing, I didn't end up using my outline the way I thought I would. With characters finally placed in the situations I set up, I found that I couldn't get them to resolve the situations the way I planned. There was a huge deviation between having a plot point on an outline, and actually doing the work of making it real. In a sense, the characters would chose to do something different, and usually better, than what I was thinking. That's because the version of me writing the outline only had a basic understanding of the situation. The story also grew, with whole chapters that were nowhere on the outline, events that were totally unforeseen consequences of what was going on. I also thought some things would be small and unimportant that turned out to be huge. A minor note like "Then the characters go from A to B" turns into an epic journey way more easily than I realized. Not that I'm complaining.
I also learned that I can't worry about prose on the first draft. It's too inefficient to sit there trying to think of the prefect turn of phrase when I've got 1000 words to get down. I'm often writing in a utilitarian way to keep my pace up. If reading a book can be slow, try writing it. It's slow enough as is, anything I can do to pick up the pace, I do it. I'll edit it later.
I also learned to throw away good ideas if they weren't fitting in. Some of the scenes which were the whole reason for making this story have ended up in the trash. That was part of the problem with my first attempt, I stuck too closely to certain "cool" scenes.
I also became more aware of how much time I'm fucking wasting on the average day, because now that I've started doing this, I can't even watch a two hour YT video without getting antsy about how much shit I'm not getting done.
I also learned that I can't really judge how long of a book I'm writing. I used to laugh at authors for taking 8 books to write 3 books, but I get it now. I thought the book I'm writing would be maybe 50K words. I'm now at 88K and I'm...half way through? Maybe a third? Who knows!
In conclusion, I now have more sympathy for poor old George RR Martin than I once did. This shit is complicated. I'm just writing it for myself, but if I do get it done and publish it, that would be cool too. I don't want my cringe Kiwi Farms posts tied to it though, naturally.
