Stuff I've Learned: Writing Log

Continuing on in my "Stuff I've Learned" series...  There's something else important that I've learned about writing that I want to tell you about:

Brains lie.

If writing is going well, my brain thinks that it's always gone well, will always go well, and I'll be done this novel by next Tuesday, even though I started it three hours ago. If writing is going poorly, my brain tells me that I'm doomed forever, I will never be able to form a sentence again, and furthermore I've never actually written a full paragraph and maybe the cat wrote all my prior novels.

To counteract this effect, I keep a daily writing log.

This is just a simple Word doc where I note the date and write down how many pages I worked on. No details. No value judgement. Just:

October 14, 2013, Monday
worked on The Found, pages 122-129
wrote blog entry
 
Doing this has several benefits:

1. It forces my brain to face reality. (Yes, I wrote yesterday. Yes, I'll write again tomorrow. And it will all be fine.)
2. It makes me accountable. (Here's proof of whether or not I've met my page goals. No fudging in either direction.)
3. It gives me a realistic idea of how long it takes me to write a book. (Very useful when agreeing to / setting deadlines.)

This is definitely one of those your-mileage-may-vary things. But for me, I love having the data. I find it comforting to know precisely where I am in a book and at what speed I'm moving through it. It helps keep my expectations realistic. And it helps me plan for the future. For example, because of this log, I realized that I'd started writing faster -- and that I could increase from one book a year to two books a year.

I know of other writers who keep much more elaborate records -- spreadsheets that include word counts and time-of-day and so forth -- and I know many, many others who don't keep any kind of records at all.  But I've been keeping my writing log since 2002, and it works for me.

Another method that I've heard about recently but never tried is the sticker trick.  You get a calendar, buy some stars or adorable whatever stickers, and put a sticker on the calendar every day that you reach your word count goal.  Author Victoria Schwab explains it in this video.  If I weren't already so attached to my log, I'd do this.  I may still try it someday.  I do like stickers... and I've learned not to trust my brain.

Stuff I've Learned: Just Finish It

Here's the second most important thing I've learned about writing (next to making bite-size goals): finish the story.

I started writing when I was ten years old, and I wrote tons and tons of story beginnings. I'd create lovely folders for each of them, using my beloved Lisa Frank unicorn folders for my favorites. Every year, I'd put "write a novel" on my New Year's Resolution list, and I'd plan out daily, weekly, and monthly goals to meet that resolution... and then ten pages into whatever story, I'd be disillusioned with it and skip off after another shiny idea. This continued pretty much until I graduated from college.

After college, I moved to England with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. I'd planned to stay for a year and work at a bookstore or library or something involving words... but I kind of forgot to check about whether that was legal or not. So when I discovered that my student work permit would expire after six months, I decided that THIS was when I would write my first novel.

I told myself that it didn't matter if it was horrible or not, all I had to do in that year was finish it. And so I dove in and wrote every day, even before my work permit expired. The story was based off one of those abandoned beginnings from one of my Lisa Frank folders, and it had talking wolves and other worlds and girls with swords and everything I ever wanted to throw into a book.

And I did it. Before we left England, I had a full manuscript, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. When I came back to the US, I started submitting it to various publishers and agents. It piled up some lovely rejections, and then it took up residence in my closet. In the meantime, I'd run across a beautiful picture book illustrated by P.J. Lynch called "East O' the Sun, West O' the Moon," and I started work on what would eventually become my third published novel, Ice.

But here's the amazing thing that happened after I finished that first novel that lives in my closet: it got easier.

Finishing that novel taught me that I could do it. And once both my conscious and subconscious mind knew that, everything changed in a profound way that I hadn't anticipated. It removed this massive psychological wall that I hadn't even fully realized was there, and I became a writer.

So that's my hard-won advice for this Stuff I've Learned post: just finish it. Finish the story. Finish the novel. Finish the play. Finish the script. It doesn't matter if it's good or not or if it sits in a closet forever. The key is to finish it... and then you can write the next one and the next one and the one after that.

JUST FINISH IT. After that, anything's possible.

Stuff I've Learned: Don't Wait for Inspiration

In my last post, I touched briefly on inspiration, and that inspired me to devote a whole post to it.  (See what I did there?  It inspired me.  Get it?  Okay.  Moving on...)

Here are two quotes that I like about inspiration:

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." -- Pablo Picasso

"You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club." -- Jack London

I'd like to point out that while Jack London probably had an actual club that he used to chase down his muse while riding bareback on a timber wolf, you don't need a club. 

Might help to have a wolf.

I have clear memories of myself as a teenager sitting someplace picturesque with a notebook and pen, waiting for inspiration and not writing a single word.  I remember quitting story after story because I didn't feel inspired to continue.  Or not writing for days and days because the muse wouldn't come, and I wasn't in the mood.

I wish I could borrow a time machine and smack myself on the back of the head.

Yes, there are writers who only write when they feel inspired.  And if that works for them, great.  But the vast majority of people who only write when they feel inspired probably won't finish their novel at all.  Ever.

Don't wait for inspiration.

Inspiration is a slippery minnow in a silt-saturated stream.  You see it once, and then it's gone.  But that's enough to know that this stream has life in it, and you should plop your fishing pole into it and see what comes up.

You don't need to feel inspired in order to write.  Really, you don't.  Your job is to string words together in sentences.  You can do that job whatever your mood.  The words don't care if you're feeling lightning-strike joy or humdrum malaise.

I can practically hear someone out there saying, "But the words won't be any good!  If I don't feel inspired, the story will feel flat."

So what?  Say you write five pages of complete garbage.  Say you know as you write it that you're going to toss the entire scene.  Nothing in it is worth keeping.  Except that one sentence in the middle of page four.  Yeah, that one's not bad.  In fact, if you built a scene around that sentence instead, then the story could really move!  And if that other character said that bit of dialogue...  Hello, inspiration, I didn't see you come in.  I was just here busy working.

In my experience, inspiration is far more likely to hit if you're already writing.

If you show up at your desk to write every day, odds are that the muse will wander by to see what you're doing.  And if you don't... she's going fishing without you.

Stuff I've Learned: Write Every Day

I know some writers who are binge writers.  Every few months, they drown themselves in their stories.  Sometimes they check into a hotel or go on an intensive writer's retreat.  More often, they shut themselves in their office or plant themselves in a cafe all day, every day.  For several weeks, they put the rest of their life on hold, and they hammer out a novel.  Then they return to the world, take a few months off from writing, and let their creative well refill until it's time to binge-write again.

That's a perfectly valid writing process, and if it works for you, yay!

It doesn't work for me.  I can't put the rest of my life on hold.  The rest of my life would FREAK OUT.  And besides, if I took a few months off writing, I'd be miserable.  In fact, if I take a few days off, I'm miserable.  So that brings us to one of the biggest things I've learned about my own writing process: I need to write every day.

I need to write in the same way that I need food, sleep, and shelter. 

You may think that sounds all cutesy and artsy.  "I need to write like I need to sleep."  Seriously?  Melodramatic much?

Seriously, yes.  And it's not so much "cutesy" as annoying.  Just ask my husband.  If I skip a night of sleep, I am as grumpy as a raccoon in daytime.  And if I skip a day of writing... exact same thing.  Whether I write or not directly affects my mood and my worldview.  It doesn't even matter if the writing goes well or not.  If I don't write, the world feels out of balance, and the glass looks half empty.

Stupid thing is that I often forget this.  Life will intrude, and I'll miss my chance to write, and there I'll be, feeling out-of-sorts, with no idea why.  My husband will come home from work and within ten minutes he can diagnose my problem.  And sure enough, as soon as I go string a few sentences together, I feel better and the world feels brighter and the birds are singing and tra-la-la-la-la.

So to maintain my own happiness level, I need to write every day.

The act of writing every day -- even if it's just for five minutes -- has several other great benefits:

1. It makes writing less scary.

It's easy to put "write a novel" up on a pedestal as this grand, lofty goal that can only be accomplished when everything is perfect (i.e. you have a lovely stretch of free time, solitude and silence, and lightning-bolt-level feelings of pure inspiration).  Thinking of it this way can lead you to push it off again and again.

But if you write every day, it makes the act of writing not such a big deal.  You don't have to write a novel today.  Really, you don't.  You just have to string a few sentences together.  Just like you did yesterday, and just like you'll do tomorrow. 

2. It decreases the throat-clearing time.

If you write every day, then writing becomes a habit like brushing your teeth.  You don't get nervous when you have to brush your teeth.  You don't wait to be in the right mood.  You don't play mood music or give yourself pep talks or take deep cleansing breaths.  You just walk into the bathroom and brush those pearly whites.

Writing is not so different.  When it becomes a habit, you will find that you need less prep time at the start of a writing session.  You won't need as many rituals to get in the mood.  Plus the story will be fresh in your mind, as will the character's voices, since you just worked on it yesterday.

3. It invites the muse.

If you write every day, instead of waiting for inspiration, you are inviting inspiration to come join you.  I believe that if you show up to your desk (or wherever you write) every day, then the muse will know where to find you.

Happy writing!

Stuff I've Learned: Bite-Size Goals

Someone once compared writing a novel to eating an elephant.  You do it bite by bite.  Wise words indeed, and the focus of this week's Stuff I've Learned post:

Set Bite-Size Goals

If I sit down and say, "Today I will make this book awesome," I'll freeze and get zero done.  But if I sit down and say, "In the next hour, I'll work on making the descriptions of the setting in scene two of chapter three more vivid," I can do that.

And if I do it again and again and again, eventually the book's done.

One of things that I've learned is to estimate how big a bite is for me.  I'm not always right.  It's not an exact science.  But I have a better idea of it now than I did when I started, and it's a huge help.

Your bite size is a personal thing.  Not everyone can accomplish the same amount in a day or a single writing session.  Some writers aim for 1,000 words a day.  I know a few (very few) who can achieve 10,000.  And I know plenty who celebrate after 100 (especially if they're the right one hundred).

It also depends on where you are in the novel.  First drafts take a different amount of time than second drafts.  Second drafts can be faster or slower than fifth.  End of the book can be faster than the middle.  First sentences can be incredibly slow.

For me, knowing my bite size clears a big psychological hurdle.  It means I can bypass the whole this-elephant-is-too-big drama at the start of writing sessions and dive into the actual work.

Disclaimer: No elephants were harmed in the writing of any of my books.

Stuff I've Learned: Lie to Yourself

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird talks about Radio Station KFKD, that voice in your head that whispers (or sometimes shouts) an endless stream of self-doubt.  In order to be a writer, you have to at least temporarily shut that radio station off.  You have to trust yourself.

Easier said than done.

Sometimes it feels like that station is playing on a radio that runs with zero electricity, has a broken volume dial, and is hidden up in the neighbor's tallest tree.  And the neighbor has vicious dogs.

Here's one technique that I use for shutting off KFKD:
 
Lie to Yourself

I promise myself that no one will ever see the story that I'm working on.  It's only a draft -- my secret draft -- and none of the words I write will be in the final version.  The plot won't be the same.  The characters won't be the same.  All these words are merely placeholders until the real words can come along.  But I have to get the placeholders there so that the real words have a place to go.

In other words, I lie to myself.

Oh, to a certain extent it's true.  I will revise.  A lot will change.  But some of it won't, and I know that.  But promising myself that the words are secret is sometimes enough to trick my brain into cooperating.  It makes it okay to make mistakes because no one will ever see the horror of the secret draft.  It makes the draft safe.

I know writers who take it further and tell themselves that they're writing a secret book just for themselves.  They won't ever show it to their agent, their editor, or even their pet guinea pig Marbles.  And a part of them knows the entire time that that's not true and they'll try to publish it, but they lie to themselves to fool the radio station, to make the draft safe, to give themselves permission to experiment and play.

In other words, the lie can set you free.

Stuff I've Learned: Trust Yourself

One of my clearest childhood memories is of playing school with one of my babysitters.  I wrote a poem -- a beautiful poem, I thought, about summer and gardens and roses and... okay I don't actually remember what it was about but my memory says it was brilliant.  I painstakingly decorated the page with climbing roses and presented it to my babysitter.

She took it, read it, and used red pen to change the first letter of every line to a capital letter because, she said, every line in a poem has to start with a capital letter.  I was crushed.  And infuriated, since even then I knew she was TOTALLY WRONG.

Stuff I've Learned: Trust Yourself

You have to trust that you know what you're doing (even if you don't).  You have to believe in your vision, in your talent, in your skills, and in your own unique voice. 

Thanks to all the books you've read, you already have an innate grasp on dialogue, pacing, characters, and story.  Thanks to all the years you've lived, you've already developed your own worldview and preferences and opinions, even if you haven't consciously articulated them.  You are already a special snowflake.  Trust that.  Trust yourself.

Except when you're wrong.  But that's what revision is for.

One of the hardest things to do when you sit down to write is to take that leap of faith that it will all be okay.  Especially when there are people telling you that it won't be okay, you won't make it, you can't do it, you're not good enough, you're not smart enough or funny enough or whatever enough.  Especially when the person telling you all that crap is yourself.

But it will be okay.  You will figure out the ending and the main character's motivations and that funky little bit of pacing in the middle and the voice for that secondary character and what happens in that part of the outline where you wrote "something cool happens next."

Or maybe you won't and then you'll go on to write another story that's even better.  And that's okay too.  You can still trust that if you write enough and read enough and live enough, you will get better.

And you don't need to capitalize the lines in that poem.

Your Writing Process

Welcome to my new blog series!  In these posts, I plan to share what I've learned about writing in hopes that it will be useful to anyone who shares this crazy writing dream.  I'm calling this series: "Stuff I've Learned."

I know, I know, it's not the most original name.  Kind of like naming your cat Fluffy... which I did.  Twice.  (In my defense, I was three years old when I named the first cat, and the second cat was named in the first one's honor.)

Anyway, to start things off...  If I had to pick the one most important thing I've learned in the last six years as a writer, it would be: label your leftover pizza with the date you ordered it so that you don't accidentally eat too-old pizza.

Second to that, though, is: learn your own writing process.

Stuff I've Learned: Learn Your Writing Process
 
Before I was published, I had no idea about one of the coolest perks of being a writer: meeting other writers.  At bookstore signings, conferences, conventions, festivals, library events... I've met a lot of authors, and I love, love, LOVE hearing about their writing processes.

Everyone's process is different.  Some write a little every day; some binge-write for a few weeks then lie fallow.  Some write in long stretches of time; some write in short bursts.  Some outline; some don't.  Some revise as they go along; some do lots of drafts.  Some write at home; some write in cafes.  Some write standing up.  Some write nude...  Okay, I haven't personally met anyone who writes nude but there are anecdotes.

Point is: what works for one person might not work for another.  You have to find what works best for you and disregard the rest.

Once you do, I promise that it gets easier.  Not easy.  But easier.  You can write faster and be more efficient because you know what works for you and what doesn't.  You can do the latter and avoid the former.

I consider myself living proof of this.  It took me two years each to write my first two novels, Into the Wild and Ice.  The next few novels took one year a piece.  Now I'm writing a novel every six months.

This change isn't due to having more time to write.  (In fact, the opposite is true.)  It's due to figuring out how I write a novel.  Not how Joe or Sue or Fred writes a novel, but how I personally write a novel.

In future posts, I'll talk about (amongst other things!) what specifically works for me.  And I'd love to hear about what works for you!

All Dreamers Welcome, Again

In September 2006, I started this blog with a post called All Dreamers Welcome.  Welcome to my dream, I said.  Please come share it with me.

THIS is my dream.  (Imagine me waving my hands expansively at my desk, the manuscript next to me, the books behind me, the stone polar bear on my desk, the stacks of cryptic Post-Its, and the vampire Mickey Mouse.)  All of this.  Being a writer.  It's what I've wanted to do since I was ten years old.  Prior to that, I wanted to be Wonder Woman or a Unicorn Princess (either a human in charge of unicorns or an actual unicorn with a tiara).

When I wrote that first blog post, I wanted this blog to be a blog about the craft of writing.  After all, it's what I do every day.  It's what I think about, obsess over, even dream about (when I'm not dreaming about tiara-wearing unicorns, of course).  But I felt self-conscious about it.  After all, in 2006, my first book wasn't even out yet.  Who was I to give writing advice to anyone?

Now, in 2013, I am doing what I've always wanted to do.  I have six books out and am under contract for five more.  And I feel that I've learned a lot over the past seven years.  So I've decided that it's okay for me to talk about what I've learned.  After all, I know there are a lot of people out there who share my dream.  (The writing dream, I mean, not the unicorn princess dream.)

So I'd like to reintroduce this blog and re-welcome you to it.  I plan to start a few different new blog series, including Stuff I've Learned, the Writer's Toolbox, and Reading About Writing.  If you dream about being a writer (or a unicorn princess) or if you're just curious, I hope you'll join me.

As one of my favorite poets says:

“If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic-bean-buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!”
-- Shel Silverstein, "Introduction" from Where the Sidewalk Ends

More to come.....