Writing in this broken era

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get things done these days. The news cycle has gotten dire enough that some mornings it’s difficult to get out of bed. Other days there’s so much going on, and so much of it is infuriating that it’s almost impossible not to spend the entire day distracted. 

Here’s what’s worked for me, like all writing advice, your mileage may vary:

1. Scheduling time for writing. I prefer routines. I don’t always get them, these days particularly, but I find if I set aside an hour here or there for writing, then I can force myself not to look at the horrid news. Usually. 

2. Writing sprints. Follow Jane Espenson on Twitter. There’s something particularly magic about when she calls a writing sprint. Maybe it’s the thought that there are others out there all writing at the same time. I don’t want to let the side down by checking my Twitter feed, seeing what our moron president has done, and wasting the sprint time fuming about it. If you’re particularly good and self disciplined you can call your own sprints. Working 30 minutes at a time is a whole lot easier to focus for than taking four hours at a time.

3. I love Scrivener. It’s a lot easier for me to set doable goals with Scrivener than writing in a big old Word file. Scrivener just does a better job of breaking things up into chapters and breaking those into scenes. If that’s not enough, sometimes I give myself the goal of writing one paragraph. That should be accomplishable, and if I accomplish one thing I avoid the downward spiral that will keep me from accomplishing anything down the line. 

These things sometimes are not enough. For instance I was getting pretty overwhelmed recently with my work in progress. The work in progress is a big departure from my first three books which were all set in a warped version of our world. This new book is set in a fantasy world. This means I’ve spent a considerable amount of time world building. When it came time to write, the first six chapters went very well, but then I started to run into the factors of how many things I feel like I need to include all at once: world building, character arcs for all the characters, setting details (can’t just look up something about my world on Google like I could on the previous books), dialogue, all the side plots, probably a thousand things I can’t even remember as I make this list… Anyway I lost the better part of two weeks to a slog of trying to write while worrying about all these things, but I think I’ve solved that, at least for now by creating a list of all the passes I’m going to do on this book. Knowing that I’m still going to do a setting pass for example is incredibly helpful for me not sweating the details when I’m still trying to get the structure down for some of these chapters. 

Not sure if it will help anyone else, all writing advice is pretty subjective, but here’s my list of passes for this book (may it help you, or may you find your own method that works for you): 

Plotline:  

Rough Draft: 

First Draft: 

First Draft Fixes

Plot Pass

Setting Pass

Character Pass

Character Arc Pass

Second Plot Pass

Writing Pass

Second Draft

Comments Pass

Corrections Pass

Content Pass

Polish Pass

Third Draft