I have a hundred stories I want to tell, of which at least 50 are complete novels in my head. If I want to get them down on paper I’m going to have to work hard and fast because new ideas are also constantly being birthed. I want to write prolifically across genres. Anyone who knows me knows that I write fast and intensely. I also have a pretty busy social and family life which I consider of the utmost importance to maintaining emotional balance with my writing life/career. I am newly married and will be thinking of having kids in the next few years, which will mean a whole new set of dynamics to wrap a full time writing schedule around. 

I write fast, which is good, but just because I write fast doesn’t mean I can’t improve on that skill and write faster. I am also deadline driven, inconsistent, binge-writing procrastinator of note. I waste hours of time and then feel terribly about them. Note, reading is not a ‘waste of time’, staring at the internet is a waste of time unless said staring is some sort of research or can in some way contribute to either my writing, or any of my other projects. Time is precious and it seems to flow quickly out of my grasp, and this from a mostly house-bound full time author with no children yet…  I know myself well enough to recognise that my skills also lead to a huge amount of lack of discipline on my part, which frightens the heck out of me. So its time to get serious, and what better moment then now, when I have my first book deal and my writing habits aren’t yet set in stone; needing to be undone and re-learnt. 

The Rachel Aaron triangle of writerly productivity. 

One of my favouritest articles on the interwebz is about writing prodcutivity by Rachel Aaron: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

She wanted to improve her consistent writing output from 2k to 10k in the few hours she had whilst juggling a new baby, and so she ‘got scientific’. I won’t explain it here, read the article, thank me later. 

Aaron has 3 areas to work on:

1: Knowledge, or Know What You’re Writing Before You Write It

Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn’t even a paragraph, just a list of this happens then this then this.

- Rachel Aaron

I adopted this religiously with the writing of ACOM, and plan to continue doing so. 

2. Time

I started keeping records. Every day I had a writing session I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet. I did this for two months, and then I looked for patterns…The numbers were clear: the longer I wrote, the faster I wrote (and I believe the better I wrote, certainly the writing got easier the longer I went). This corresponding rise of wordcount and writing hours only worked up to a point, though. There was a definite words per hour drop off around hour 7 when I was simply too brain fried to go on. 

- Rachel Aaron

4 to 7 hours without a break is impossible for me, especially since my doctor has advised that I excercize between writing sessions. I will need to least to stop and stretch at the end of writing sprints. I am planning on experimenting with writing spurts of differing lengths though. Starting at 20 minute (the Pomodori method) 30, 60 and 90 minute sprints and see which ones produce the best results. 

3. Enthusiasm

Those days I broke 10k were the days I was writing scenes I’d been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn’t that crazy about…Fortunately, the solution turned out to be, yet again, stupidly simple. Every day, while I was writing out my little description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I’d look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn’t find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.

- Rachel Aaron

I’ll need to work on this one, as some scenes felt like pulling teeth to me in ACOM even though they are pretty interesting/fun scenes to read. I wonder if it is because I am writing things which aren’t my favourite, such as a scene with a new setting demanding a lot of description of the scenery (I hate descriptions). I want to see how I learn and progress in this area…

More on productivity next week…