Sorry It’s been a bit since I’ve typed anything here. I’ve been busy typing my (now complete) manuscript!
Here’s some lessons learned:
1. The rule above all: Just freakin’ write, man
Here’s what worked for me: Writing 1000 words a day. Every day. No matter what. We had an overnight ER visit, I packed my laptop and wrote next to the bed while my partner slept. We had a couple of day trips that involved several hours of driving, I either woke up early enough to write, or stayed up late enough to finish. There was only one time I had a rise/sleep cycle without writing in between, so I wrote double the next day.
Writing 1000 words a day every day gets you 365,000 a year. That’s three-and-three-quarters novels. You can finish THREE novels in one year by writing an hour or two a day. I’ve decided to give myself the grace of one week off after finishing a novel, so I’ll be writing closer to 344k words a year.
Is 1000 words too much for you? That’s completely fine. Do 400. 400 words a day every day no matter what gets you 146,000 words. That’s nearly two novels a year.
Consistency is boring. Writing 5000 words today and being burnt out and hating yourself tomorrow is sexy. It’s being an artiste. If that’s what you want to do, great! But if you want to have a novel done in a predictable time frame, just be consistent.
2. Your rough draft is just that. Rough.
I won’t sit here and lie to you that I was able to just keep relentless forward progression while writing. I’d stop, re-read what I wrote, edit a little bit, change things around. But once it was in a place where I wanted to continue writing, I wouldn’t revisit it.
Now that I’ve started looking back on some of the stuff I wrote, it’s bad. OK — maybe that’s not fair. It’s not BAD it’s just not in the voice I have evolved into over the course of 90k words. The truth is, you’re going to learn a LOT while writing. You’re going to write a sentence that makes you think ‘damn, why can’t all my sentences be like that?’ and then you’re gonna try and make every subsequent sentence like that. If you succeed, the sentences before are going to seem elementary. But they’re all doing their job. Telling your story.
As Terry Pratchett says, the rough draft is just you telling yourself the story.
Tell it to yourself. Flaws and all.
3. Pantsing vs Outlining
Are you a pantser? Are you an outliner? You’re neither. You’re a person who finishes what they start. Stop wasting time trying to define yourself and just do whatever it takes to get words to the page. For me, it looked like this: I broke the story down into a story arc — a hybrid of the typical three act story and the hero’s journey, then wrote a sentence for each of the 27 “chapters.” Then I ‘pantsed’ until I wrote myself into a web, then wrote a new outline sentence for the sections I hadn’t reached yet.
Since I know someone is probably gonna ask, here’s what each chapter/section was for me:
Act 1
Introduction
Inciting incident
Call to adventure
Refusal of the call
Meeting the mentor
Crossing the threshold
Tests, allies, and enemis
Approach to the inmost cave
The first big confrontation
Act 2
The ordeal begins
Tests and Trials
Approaching the center
Allies and betrayal
The midpoint
Darkest hour
A new resolve
The second big confrontation
The road to the final conflict
Act 3
The final push
The supreme ordeal
Seizing the sword
The return journey
Resurrection
Return with the elixir
A moment of reflection
Tie-up loose ends
Final tease
4. Forward. Progression.
I’ve only ever golfed twice in my life. The first time was in high school. I would hit the ball 7-10 feet and it would shank. hard. I kept apologizing to my buddy who had actually golfed before. He told me something that’s stuck with me ever since. “Hey man, as long as there’s forward progression we’ll reach the same hole.”
Whatever you gotta do, just make sure you’re moving forward. You will 100,000% be 30,000 words in and think “no one is ever going to read this. I am a terrible writer. This story doesn’t even make sense. These characters are fake, flat, and don’t act in rational ways.” This is your ego talking. The part of yourself that’s like, ‘why are we letting this uncurated version of ourselves out into the world?’ Accept your ego’s flaws, listen but don’t engage, then keep writing. Word by word. Bit by bit. Ego gets tired way faster than your fingers do. You’ll eventually find your rhythm again while your ego rests.
5. Writing is lonely.
I have heard some version of this statement (writing is lonely) several times in the podcasts I’ve listened to. I didn’t fully understand it until I was about 10,000 words in. That was the moment I decided “Hey, I’m actually 10% of the way in, I might actually finish this. Maybe now I can tell people I care about/love about it.” (I have a habit of hobby-hopping so I try to keep stuff to my self until I’m sure I’m going to stick to something.) I told probably about…15 people that I was writing a novel. Exactly 2 ever followed up with a ‘hey man, how’s that book coming along?’
The harsh reality is, no one will likely care that you are writing a novel. The other harsh reality is, we’re human, and we can’t just NoT sEeK vAliDaTiOn like I see touted so much online.
When you have *finished* the rough draft though, the very people you are seeking validation from will grant you what you seek.
I also do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, so here’s a little allegory: No one cares that I go to practice 4-6 times a week and have been for 5 years. But everyone cares when I get my next belt. Writing is practice. Your finished drafts are your belts.
6. Generative Models
I’m in IT. I use generative models a LOT to write me scripts and stuff I don’t want to. Accept this one fact: generative models are here, are here to stay, are extremely helpful to a lot of people, and are only going to get better.
Here’s the other truth: As of writing this, generative models write like absolute shit. The prose is legitimately awful and predictable. The common stuff you see like ‘too many em dashes’ are very true, but beyond that, no generative model has a context window large enough to contain an entire novel yet. It will get confused, it will write things that don’t make sense in your story, and it will hallucinate details. It will learn your voice and give you prose that sounds like you, but if you read what it gives you, you’ll quickly see that you could write something much more imaginative.
That being said, I can think of two occasions where I wrote myself into an absolute tangle, thought “how the hell am I going to explain why character X can’t just do action Z that he has done before to get out of situation Y,” explained it all to a generative model, and it spat out something to where I was like “oh. hey. that might actually work.”
Don’t use generative models to write prose. It’s genuinely awful (right now.) Do use it to get past writers blocks if you want.
7. Conclusion
Well, that’s the major stuff I wanted to say. The writing subreddits have been a real boon and bust during the time I’ve been writing. There’s real gems in here. There’s also a lot of stuff that will just suck away your time. Find the content that helps you. For me, the Brandon Sanderson/Tim Ferriss interview is required viewing. For you it might not click. r/PubTips has also been super fun to read just for motivation. I’m also a podcast junkie, though I haven’t quite yet found a writing podcast that really clicks for me.
Now, if you’re reading this you probably don’t have a complete rough draft. So stop procrastinating, and remember…FORWARD PROGRESSION.