Okay, so I've/you've (who am I writing this for? Who knows.) acquired the desire and idea for writing a book. Spectacular. Huzzah. Bully for me/you.
I already gave my next piece of advice - Just write.
I/you know what to do.
So why don't we do it?
Time. Oh, time. You fickle, funny frienemy, you.
Does anyone else find they never have enough time? And then when they do have time, they just... waste it?
It's such an easy trap to fall into. Complaining and wasting.
You need time to write a book. Of course you do. What kind of basic, obvious advice is that? Ridiculous.
Okay, but talk to any "writer," and you'll find out how difficult carving out that time, and making it productive, actually is.
One reason for this is the writer's perpetual desire to edit their own writing. When I sat down to start writing The Seed of Magic, I promised myself I would NOT stop to reread or edit. Maybe I'd have to look back over a few sentences to see where I left off, but that would be it. I would not fall into the trap of rereading, then starting to edit the few pages I had, then finding they weren't good enough, then editing some more, and then maybe writing one new page per writing session.
Raise your hand if that process is you as a writer. Your hand is probably up.
It wasn't easy to just write. Especially because I knew that at the end of it, the amount of proofreading and editing would need to be pretty tremendous. Surely I would repeat details, leave details out, write too much, reuse words until they were stale.
But I also know that if I stopped, my forward momentum would be shot. So this time, unlike the others, I wouldn't reread until I was done.
That promise didn't solve the problem of having the time to write, though. And where did I finally find that time? I barely know.
I do know that I used to be married to handwriting. I love the feel of a pen pressing its ink mark into paper, and so I never imagined I'd go digital with my writing. I also loved that handwriting is so portable. For this book, as for most I worked on prior to it, I liked to use loose leaf paper. I kept a few blank sheets in a folder I toted around everywhere with me. Portable. I also loved that I could hide these papers under stacks of other things while I wrote in places like meetings, and it would just look like I was taking notes. I would keep 2 or 3 previous pages with me to look back at, but the rest would accumulate in a binder.
I worked this way for years, really thinking it was best. Until the day I looked at a clock and realized how long it take me to fill a page of writing by hand vs. how long it would take me to type a page. If I really wanted to get this thing done, typing it would be some much more efficient. Not to mention I wouldn't have to type the manuscript once it was done; it would already be saved.
So that was time efficiency win number 1.
Another win for time was Google Docs. I do worry sometimes what will happen if the website goes down and I lose it ALL except for the first half of the book, the handwritten part (which is now so different than the typed manuscript that it's almost a different story). But the beauty of Google Docs is, again, its portability. Now the writer no longer needs paper and pen to bring their story with them. The WHOLE THING can go right onto your phone or your tablet and go along in your pocket, easy as pie.
In fact, typing has revolutionized where I can write. There's no more process of taking out the papers and the pens, shuffling them around, finding a position I can comfortably balance my writing on my knee in, and worrying about people asking me, "Oh, what are you writing?" thus derailing the whole process. Now you just whip out your phone and look like a sheep out to pasture. Whatever. It saves. It's easy.
But even with these advancements, time. Still an issue. Getting in a few sentences here and there between classes, between meetings, while laying on the tens machine at the chiropractor, does not a book make. I worked on Seed for years and only had about half to 2/3 of it written.
So now/then what?
Enter social media, or what I consider to be the Ultimate Time Waster. How often do I open Facebook or Twitter or Instagram (and that's as modern as I intend to go, folks) for no reason and then end up scrolling thorugh it for 10+ minutes and then find the questionable political views of an acquaintence I haven't spoken to for 5 years and then worry about them, and if they think weird things I disagree with, how many of my friends actually feel that way and what is the world coming to and oh my goodness they have young children and they're going to raise the next generation to just look the other way when public figures make facist-like statements (because we'll all be fine if we just love each other right?)...
The spiral goes ever downwards. (Maybe social media gets its own whiney blog post one of these days. We'll see.)
There is some value to social media, though. One of the most valuable things it's taught me to date is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which is November. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write all of, or at least most of, a complete novel in a single month. It challenges writers to write 50,000 words in the month, which averages out to about 1,667 words per day.
In 2017, I accepted the challenge. (This is another place typing comes in handy. How could you possibly know how many words you were writing per day if you were handwriting? Like I'm going to sit there and count to 2,000 on top of writing? Talk about wasting time.)
But I took it a step further because I wanted this thing done already! So instead of 1,667 words per day, I decided to do 2,500.
And I did it.
I found time to knock out a few hundred words during small breaks at work, but I did have to set aside an hour or so at night to dedicate to writing. I'll admit that sometimes I did it with the TV blaring in the background, and maybe my focus wasn't 125% there, but that wasn't the purpose of the quantity of words I was writing. It was merely about quantity. Quality? I'd go back and fix that later.
I also posted my word count on Facebook and Twitter every day. Once I start a project, I really like to finish it, so I felt deeply obligated to post. People were also incredibly encouraging, telling me NaNo wasn't something they could ever do. Those things kept me going.
By the end of it, not only had I met my word count goal, but I had finished my book.
And discovered that what I wrote was more like three books, based on word count.
No wonder it took so long.
But three books is good, right? Automatic series! I hear publishers are into that these days, especially with Y(oung) A(dult). Another selling point for me.
Of course, that would mean the editing process was going to be a lot more involved than I initially thought.
And I can't really tell you what I initially thought about editing. But whatever it was, it couldn't have been 100% accurate. Not once I finally knocked on the door and let the editing monster in.
Editing. Is. A. Beast.
So bottom line? Type. Bring your tech with you. Sneak in little bits of writing here and there. But at the end of the day, the only way you're going to finish is if you commit yourself to an hour or so of solid writing time as often as possible.
And maybe put on a good playlist in the background (I like the David Benoit station on Pandora for some chill smoothe jazz) so you can zone out. And not be tempted to waste time on Facebook. Or playing Disney Emoji Blitz.
Get in the zone. Carve out the time. Make it productive.
Some big secret, huh?
Comments