What's your process?

[pmmg]

Question, particularly for are more successful or prolific writers, what is your writing process like?

Do you write everyday? write like its a full time job? Have a way of pushing through when you are blocked? Do things to avoid distractions? Whatever it is, what do you to make it work for you, especially if you think what you do might be useful to others if they knew it.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

This is an excellent question. I'm a full-time writer, so this is what I do all day. I write and I know things. I'm part of a three-person team, so our process looks a little different than people who don't collaborate. One of us does development, one is our plotter, and I'm our drafter, which basically means I write whatever the other two tell me to, and then dress it up and take it dancing. The plotter creates detailed prewrite-style outlines for me and tries to keep a chapter or two ahead of me as we draft, and while I'm making pages the other two are working on shaping the rest of the book.

I'm someone who needs to edit as I go, so I'll reread a chapter or two every day to get back into the right headspace, and while I'm at it I'm polishing and making notes. And then I launch into new writing. This isn't an 8-hours and then knock off gig. I also do a fair bit of social media and working with other writers. There is also a great deal of caffeine involved. And then, by some miracle, the book ends, and we start the next one.

 

[Devor]

The only thing I do which really helps is that I dialogue or script most of my scenes before I write them. Sometimes I dialogue the scene far in advance, so that some scenes were long-planned, often high impact scenes, while others are - let's call them pathway scenes, the scenes that are there to cut a pathway through the story, and I don't always have a clear idea of what they look like ahead of time.

I still dialogue my pathway scenes as a first draft. But when I butt heads with them and have to write them, not in advance.

 

[Mad Swede]

As a severely dyslexic author my writing process is probably very different from many others. I work things out in my head first, there's no outlining, no charts with arrows pointing to bits of text, no character sheets, no timelines. When I start writing, I write the opening scene first, then write the main scenes. I usually have an idea of how the story will end, but this can change if the story develops as I write. Once the main scenes are done I write the rest of text, linking it all together and filling in all the other details like scenerey, smells, etc.

I don't do re-writes. I simply can't. What goes down on the first pass is usually very close to the final text, and it's my (very patient and supportive) editor who picks up the mistakes and tidies the text up.

I don't write for a living (very few authors in Sweden earn enough to support themselves only by writing), so although I write every day it's something I do for a few hours in the evenings. I always allocate time for writing and I will always sit down to write at those times. I don't do social media, at least not under my pen name. As for writers block, the only cure I've found is to write something unrelated to the story I'm stuck on. That means I sometimes have several stories on the go at the same time

 

[ThinkerX]

I strive to write a little every day. Even if it's just a few hundred words that I end up having to go back and delete later. Once I get in the writing groove, 600-900 words a day is the norm, though I can sometimes double that. I will often 'fix' crucial points during the first draft, making it a sort of 1.5 draft. I pay sufficient attention to the onboard editor to keep the grammar bugs down. At times, in the past, I have taken an old cooking timer, wound it up, and forced myself to write until the bell rings.

Putting together a new story, there's a lot of skull work first - does it have a definite beginning, middle, and end? If not, it doesn't get written, except for the odd very short 'think about it piece' to test out this or that idea.

Longer works - 30,000+ words - I'll put together a short outline, three-four pages, each chapter getting three or five short sentences describing the key scenes in that chapter. This helps me keep the scenes in order; sequence issues are something I struggle with.

Scenes are crucial: I envision each as a sort of 'mental movie clip,' which I then write out. Said 'clips' are almost always from the POV of the character whose chapter that is, which means putting myself in their skulls.

The second drafts suck. Getting the names straight, finishing chapters that were left as mere stubs, patching plot holes with anything from a few sentences to entire new chapters...it drags. Doing the second draft will typically take me double the time it did to do the first draft, and usually the text increases by something like 30-50%. Often, this is where the cooking timer comes in.

The '2.5 draft' is a line edit, patching trivial plot holes and dealing with sections that have grammar issues or come across as confusing. Typically, these only take a few days. Sometimes I'll *still* rearrange scenes or even chapters in this stage, but that's rare.

 

[Penpilot]

Do you write everyday?

No, but I try to. Unfortunately, life gets in the way occasionally and writing gets put on the back burner. But I never go more than a day or two without writing. If you want to make progress, it's important to be consistent.

write like its a full time job?

I write because I want to tell the story and find out what happens. The only way to do that is to keep showing up and putting in the work. My commitment to getting better and telling the best story I can is serious, but otherwise, you still have to find the fun in it otherwise why bother?

But to get to the TL;DR of it. I want this to be my job someday. And if I want to be looked at as a professional one day, then I have to approach what I do with a certain level of professionalism.

Have a way of pushing through when you are blocked?

For me, I rather dislike the phrase "Writer's Block". It makes it seem like a random thing that just drops in from the heavens and just stops one from writing, which it isn't. And it makes it seem like it's not under one's control, which it is. Being blocked is simply coming face to face with a problem in your story that you haven't solved yet, and you need to solve it in order to progress. For me it's like coming across a math equation where it goes 2+2 = 5, and you have to find a way to turn one of those 2s into a 3 in order to for things to make sense again.

Do things to avoid distractions?

For me, I just simply ask myself one question, "Do you want to write or not?" We each have our priorities in life. If writing isn't one of them, then it isn't one of them. If I'd rather play a video game or watch some TV, then I go do that, guilt free. For me, it's about being honest with myself and not making excuses. The reason I only wrote for half an hour is because I wanted to watch this TV show. It's not because I didn't have time. I had the time, but at that moment, I prioritized the TV show over writing. There's nothing wrong with that. Our priorities shift from moment to moment, day to day, etc.

But if writing consistently gets pushed down the stack by things like simply surfing the net or clipping your toe nails, you have to ask yourself if you really want to write or do you simply like the idea of having written. From my experience, if I really want to do something, any excuse will do in order to go do it. If I really don't want to do something, any excuse will do in order to not do it.

For example, today I sat down at my computer(s) to write. As I waited for my writing computer to wake up, I checked my email and watched a short youtube video on another computer. Once the writing computer was ready to go, I put everything else on pause and did my my writing session. I came back to the other stuff after. I didn't need tricks or anything else to drag me to the writing keyboard. It was simply what I wanted to do at the moment above the other things, so I simply went and did it.

Whatever it is, what do you to make it work for you, especially if you think what you do might be useful to others if they knew it.

For me, it's simply being honest with yourself about what your priorities are. Too many people think just because they have a story idea, they're obligated to use it. And when they don't, they feel bad like they're wasting something precious or letting themselves down. Everyone has ideas. They're a dime a dozen. Understand yourself and your priorities, and if writing isn't one of the, then it isn't one of them. If it is, then follow your joy. Pursue it with all your heart regardless of what anyone else says or any of the mistakes you'll inevitably make. Learn from your mistakes and keep going. Learn from other people's mistakes and keep going. Simply learn and don't stop doing that either. Because if you do, and you start to think you've got it down 100% and know it all, to me, that's the surest sign that you don't.

This isn't a sprint. This is a marathon, where everyone is constantly tripping.

my2cents

 

[Prince of Spires]

Sorry for the long post...

I'm not a full-time writer, though I would like to be (I just need to sell a few more than the roughly 6 copies a month I manage now...). So I don't know if I count as succesful. I do have 3 books published, with the first draft of the 4th about finished, and I get about 2 books a year written. So, make of it what you will.

I aim to write 5 out of 7 days a week. I've got a wife and two kids. They need attention. I've got a few friends I like meeting up with, family birthdays, sports to play. 5 out of 7 is a pace I can keep up forever. It leaves me a night per week to spend with my wife, and a night for anything else, like visit a friend or do sports. Life happens, and all that stuff is important.

The 5 nights a week I do write, I do my chores, then sit down behind my laptop and write. Aim is 1.5 hours, usually I manage 1, between 9 and 10. I finish up around 10, relax a bit and then it's time for bed. I recently started using writing sprints and I've found they work for me. I set a timer for 15 minutes. In that time I write. When the timer goes off I stop for a short while, aim is 5 minutes, but I don't time this. It's usually just get a cup of tea or go to the toilet or something like that. After that, repeat.

I found it tricks my brain into doing a lot of work. Firstly, there's no time to think of names for 10 minutes or research which type of tree would grow somewhere. I make a note of it and carry on writing. Secondly, it's very easy to tell myself "It's only 15 minutes". You can do something else after that. It makes it easy to get started, which tends to be the hard part for me (I'm a great procrastinator). I can usually get between 200-300 words written in those 15 minutes, which takes me to about 750 words an hour, which is higher than without sprints, where it's usually 600. And, because I can trick my brain to just start the 15 minutes, I can get more sprints done. Since I started my daily wordcount rose from 600 to 1000, give or take.

That's another thing I do. I track what I write. I've got an excel sheet, where I track my daily word count. I can go back 2 years and tell you how many words I wrote on a specific day. It helps me see how far I've come. The thing with writing a novel is that it's an aweful lot of words. If you write 600 words a day, then a 60k novel takes 100 days, that's close to half a year (at 5 days a week). It can feel like wading through snow or chipping away at a mountain with a spoon. The thing is, that's the only way to get there. And then seeing that I'm already up to 10.000 words helps.

As for my writing: I'm a plotter and I write start to finish, no stopping, no going back.

I plot because I found that a good idea or some great scenes aren't enough to fill a novel. After I had written those scenes I had no idea of where to go or what would happen. This would lead me to get stuck and eventually abandon a project. By plotting I offload all the thinking to the front of the project. I know what happens, now all I have to do is fill in the blanks.

I plot by making a list of the different subplots and what happens in each of them. Then I order those events in a single list of scenes. At this point I have all my chapters in order and 1 or 2 scentences per chapter. Then, before I start a specific chapter I detail what happens in that chapter. I take the 2 scentences and I turn them into 2 paragraphs of stuff that happens. From there, I write the chapter.

Now, as I write, I discover new things for my plot or characters, or stuff doesn't fit anymore, or a small detail suddenly becomes very important. I allow my outline to change. I might merge two chapters or split them up. I might drop a chapter altogether or add in new stuff.

I write straight through because that's how my brain works. I start at the beginning and I just write as a reader would read it, start to finish. I don't stop to go back and edit stuff. Even if something major changes, I just make a note of it, and carry on forward pretendig that the change has always been there. for instance, I once changed the race of my main character halfway through the book from being a dwarf to being human. I simply made a comment in the text which read "He's human from now on" and carried forward. It helps maintain momentum and I don't get bogged down in details which might change later anyway.

Writers block is interesting. I don't actually think there's Writer's Block just as there isn't accountant's block or pianist's block. Sometimes you might not feel like writing. That's okay, that accountant has that to. If you feel like writing but the words aren't coming, or if the not wanting to write takes a lot longer than a day, then there's probably something wrong in your story or you just don't know what to write next. Figure out what it is or just write something and carry on.

Because writing is individual, there's no one telling you to write. The motivation has to come from inside you, which makes it hard. The only way around that is to simply sit down and force yourself to write. And if you don't know what to write, you can always use the NaNoWriMo idea of having ninja's show up and start a fight.

 

[Helen]

Question, particularly for are more successful or prolific writers, what is your writing process like?

Do you write everyday? write like its a full time job? Have a way of pushing through when you are blocked? Do things to avoid distractions? Whatever it is, what do you to make it work for you, especially if you think what you do might be useful to others if they knew it.

First, I think you have to understand craft.

Then you have to make a habit of it. 300 words a day minimum for me, without fail. That's not too difficult but requires some concentration and keeps it fun.

At some point you have to regularly make money, which keeps it sustainable.

 

[pmmg]

At some point you have to regularly make money, which keeps it sustainable.

Do you make money with it?

My process is simply a strategy. I agree to write just one sentence a night. If I write one, and I am not feeling it, I can stop and do other stuff, but that never happens, once I get one, I usually get two...and so on.

I have some other rules, which I am applying now to see how they roll:

First, no editing.
Second: no research...including thesaurus lookups. Just put on the page and fix it later.
Third: no internet.
And last: same time every day.


So far its working well. Story is moving along.

BTW Helen:

I saw you quoted me in a post but the posting does not show up on the Most Recent Posts feed. I think this must be a setting you have set. Which I point out, cause if you are talking, no one may be seeing it, and that's not right.

 

[RiserBurn]

First, I think you have to understand craft.

Then you have to make a habit of it. 300 words a day minimum for me, without fail. That's not too difficult but requires some concentration and keeps it fun.

At some point you have to regularly make money, which keeps it sustainable.

How do you deal with starting/stopping and momentum?

I've not been at this long, but I find that doing something daily - either writing or outlining/concept development - to keep things fresh in my mind has been working, but I have a hard time getting into actual *writing* mode at the drop of a hat. Once going, I don't really have a problem keeping going or finding parts to work on or improve, but just doing something to do something is.... difficult.

I'm just curious to get some input from someone for whom that has worked.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Find a story idea, the ending, the beginning, then write between the two points, heh heh.

If I wrote like it's a full-time job, I'd fire myself. I don't physically write every day, but I do spend a portion of every day in my fictional world. When I write, it probably averages 2k words. But it could range from 1 to 5k

Blocked, I have no idea what that is. It could mean lots of things.

 

[pmmg]

I would just steer you back to my post above.

 

[skip.knox]

>doing something to do something is.... difficult.
Sure. But maybe you're doing more than you realize. There's worldbuilding notes. There's outlining. There's character sketches. It's all writing ... what else would you call it?

One pattern I've noticed in myself is this: I sit down and can't really get straight to writing the scene. So I start telling myself the story. I'll actually write down things like "how does he actually get from X to Y? By horse? Walking? No, walking is too slow." That sort of babbling. But it's there on the page (I do this sort of thing on paper, but that's a necessity only for me).

This could evolve into an attempt at description. I'll maybe describe the road, the forest. Then I decide he took ship and I'm off describing that. Pretty soon I've decided the character needs to talk to someone and now I'm writing dialog. I may not (often!) know where I'm headed with the scene, but I do try to have it mean more than just getting from X to Y. Maybe there's an encounter, or maybe he's just thinking about a lost love. More than just travel.

Now, I might break off in mid-paragraph and dart in another direction. It's probably terrible process, but the point here is that it's all writing. If you are only thinking the things, that's not writing. Nor is it doing something just to do something. It really is actually writing.

There are other kinds of writing as well. Explaining how magic works, for example. Or some local elvish custom. It's all writing. Or, to take a completely different example, you could try writing ad copy--your blurb, a summary, an elevator pitch. You're gonna have to write it some day!

Any and all of these things gets butt in chair and words on paper. The rest is cakewalk. <grin>

 

[Prince of Spires]

I'm just curious to get some input from someone for whom that has worked.

Part of it is simply telling yourself that the only way to get a book written is to sit down and write for something like 100 to 200 hours (depending on writing speed and length of book).

The most important thing to remember is that all writers are different. Something which works for one person doesn't work for another. So, try a few things, experiment. Keep what works and toss out what doesn't. And never let anyone tell you there is only one way to do things.

Two things you could try which have helped me:
I outline, but more than that, I outline the specific scene I'm going to write. Making up what's actually going to happen is one of the hard parts of writing. So I offload that to the front of my writing. I take 5 minutes and write out what happens. It's not a lot, maybe 3 paragraphs for a 2500 word chapter or something like that. But getting it down makes the writing part a lot easier. It's a bit similar to Skip's process, except that he doesn't outline of course. And I find that when the writing is hard I usually don't know exactly what I'm going to write.

The other thing I do which makes writing easier is that I write in sprints. Now, I only recently started doing this, after having written 3 novels without it. I'm not sure how good it works when you're just starting out, but it might work for you. Basically what it comes down to is that I set a timer for 15 minutes. During that time I write. No research (well, almost no research...) or worldbuilding or anything like that. If I need a name or a city or to figure something else out I'll add a placeholder and do so after the 15 minutes are up.

When the timer rings I do something else for a few minutes. Quick toilet break, or put the laundry in the machine or get a drink. Or fill in some of the stuff I didn't know while writing. I aim for 5 min max. After that, rinse and repeat.

The reason this works is that sitting down for 1 or 2 hours to write is hard. I'm a procastrinator by heart, and two hours is a long time. I can fill some of that with youtube or browsing the internet or worldbuilding or whatever. 15 minutes on the other hand is a very short time. I can spare 15 minutes writing. After that I get to do something else. So in such a case I just sit down and write.

 

[Penpilot]

How do you deal with starting/stopping and momentum?

I've not been at this long, but I find that doing something daily - either writing or outlining/concept development - to keep things fresh in my mind has been working, but I have a hard time getting into actual *writing* mode at the drop of a hat. Once going, I don't really have a problem keeping going or finding parts to work on or improve, but just doing something to do something is.... difficult.

I'm just curious to get some input from someone for whom that has worked.

Everything you do is practice. If all you do is think of ideas and work concepts, that's the only skill you're getting practise at doing. Going from outline to prose, that's a skill that needs to be practised. And to do it, you just have to do it. One of the things that I found held me back at first was managing expectations. We all want our stories to be awesome, but the fact is when we start off, they're far from it. When I was starting off, I spent way too much time worrying about how the prose was coming out and trying to force it to match my expectations instead of letting the prose be what it is and come out naturally. To use a sports analogy, you don't pick up baseball for the first time and expect to be able to throw a 100mph fast ball or be able to hit one, so don't expect the same with writing. Allow yourself to go through the process of learning, and part of that is failing, struggling, and producing some stinky performances along the way.

We need to practise our skills in taking a story from concept, to outline, to prose, to final draft, over and over to improve. If you only do some of the things along that work flow, then those are the things you'll get good at and everything else will fall short. You need to get the repetitions in, or you simply won't improve.

For me, one of the biggest things that helped was learning story structure and using a detailed outline. It allowed me to break down the task of writing a novel into small, digestible parts, which made it easier to plan out how the story flowed scene by scene, and understand how it all built upon itself. Having that road map to my story made writing the prose easier, because each time I sat down to write, I understood where I was in the story, what I was trying to achieve in a particular scene, and I knew what it was all heading towards. So, it's not doing something for the sake of doing it. It's doing something with a purpose and a goal in mind and being able to see how all of it was going to fit together to form a greater whole.

With a detailed outline, it becomes easier to sit down and write for a few minutes here and there and not have to ramp up to things because you have a map telling you where you are and where you're going. You just have to push the cart ahead a few proverbial steps with whatever time you have at the moment.

Any ways my 2 cents.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Or outlines destroy your will to live, heh heh. The closest I can get is the Waypoint style where I have loose set scenes in my head that I know I want to reach, but even these might not exist until a flash in my mind says "oooo!". If I never wanted to finish a novel again, I would outline, heh heh. Back in the day, if in a groove and writing and finished a chapter or scene, I made sure to start the next scene so I had a beginning to jumpstart the next writing session. That doesn't always work, but it helped.

 

[Penpilot]

Or outlines destroy your will to live, heh heh.

At the end of the day, it's all about what works for the individual. Pick your punishment, call it master, and learn to love it.

For me, I used to be a pantser through and through, and I could never finish a darn thing. Over time, I've geared myself up to spend that pantser spontaneity on creating the outline. Instead of writing the prose, I just run though the story in my head as I outline, and those flashes of "Oh yeah" still come to me. The best part about those moments is I don't have to rewrite or throw out a bunch of stuff. Then when I'm writing the prose, there's room for even more discovery, and when a flash comes during those times, it's simple enough to change the outline if a significant shift in direction is in order.

From my perspective pantser or ouliner, they all do the same basic work. It's just done in a different order. Generally speaking, the way I see it, pantsers throw everything out there while writing the prose, letting inspiration take them to wherever, and then, on the rewrites/edits they organize and make sense of it all. Outliners throw everything into the outline and organize and make sense of things before they start writing the prose. Obviously, it's not as clean cut as I've stated. There's always an iterative process going on, but that's the very broad strokes of it in my eyes. It's just where you want to spend the crazy brainstormy time, either in the outline process or just getting into it and spitting out some prose.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I did it backward, I was determined to outline and never finished a thing, heh heh.

 

[ThinkerX]

I *had* to do very short outlines of the longer works just to keep the scenes in order. Each chapter gets something on the order of twenty or thirty words.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

The outline for our latest book was roughly about 100 pages long. Book's 650 pages in paperback, so it sort of balances out.