Invited by my brother (SFWA’s board secretary), I just attended the kick-off meeting for SFWA’s Winter Worlds of Giving.
If you’re a writer, and especially if you’re a SFWA member, check out that link! They’re asking writers to make a public statement of their “creative interests, and the broad strokes of what you’ve got on the go.” Doing so will put you in a group of people who are going to be doing some pretty cool stuff over the next three months.
I got in a very good morning writing session today, starting pretty much right after second dog walk. By late morning I’d topped 1200 words. I took a break then and paused to do some on-line chatting with my brother, some morning exercises, and take the dog out for third walk just before lunch.
I stopped at a point where I’m not quite sure what comes next. This is widely considered a bad move, because it makes it harder to get back to writing. Still, sometimes it happens, and it’s worth having a couple of tricks for getting going again.
Here’s one: skip ahead and write a “candy-bar scene.”
A candy-bar scene, if you don’t know, is a scene that you already know is going to be fun to write. A scene where a character does something wonderful, or something wonderful (or wonderfully awful) happens. A scene where a reversal happens that’s both completely unexpected and inevitable. A scene that makes you reinterpret the whole story up to that point.
Besides being fun to write, hopefully a candy-bar scene is also fun to read.
Arguably, your whole book should be nothing but candy bar scenes. In practice that’s hard to do, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.
Anyway, I had a candy-bar scene in mind as something I could write when I got back to writing this evening. In fact though, I picked up exactly where I left off, adding a good bit to the scene that had petered out on me in the morning session. (I can probably credit thinking during a dog walk for this.) Then I did go on to write the first bit of the candy-bar scene I’d had in mind. But only little bit of it, leaving a nice ragged edge where I know what happens next, all ready to pick up tomorrow.
It’s a nice feeling.
Another nice feeling is that I hit the target word count. (That is, the 1667 words per day I need to average, if I’m going to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.) I’m not actually very fixed on hitting the word count, but I figured I give it a try, at least for a little while.
For the morning writing session I wore my writing vest—the moleskin vest Jackie made me years and years ago, that I took to Clarion with me, and have made a point of wearing when I wanted to crank out some serious words. It worked great.
I didn’t get a photo, but I’ll try to get one later.
This evening I switched to my wool Filson vest, which I’d worn for warmth when I took the dog out for fourth walk, and I got a sort-of picture of me wearing it, sitting with my dog.
It’s a little hard to see in the photo—the green vest looks almost the same color as my grey mock-T—but this is the same vest that Joe Pickett wears in the C.J. Box stories. It is cozy and durable.
Daily gratitude:
*Note: Obamacare is a great program, which came along at a critical time for me, and lasted long enough for me to get on Medicare. My gratitude for the program knows no bounds, and I feel immense sorrow that the Republicans continue to try to ruin it.
Ashley seems to enjoy going for a run, and she’s a pretty good running companion. She does want to stop and sniff rather more often than I do, and she wants to stop and pee occasionally, which does make it tough for me to hit my best pace for any particular mile. But that’s okay. Enjoying some dog-companionship is a lot better than hitting my best pace.
I had virtually quit running a couple of years ago. I’d gotten a trifle tentative after a fall, and then Jackie was out of town (and therefore not on-hand to rescue me if necessary), and then the weather got cold and the running routes icy. And by the time the weather improved, I’d just fallen out of the habit. For a few months now I’ve been working to reestablish the habit. I haven’t accomplished that yet, but I am getting in an occasional run.
The Fitbit software in my Pixel watch estimates my VO2Max. My estimated VO2Max has long been excellent for my age, but it had gradually dropped some, which was part of the reason I wanted to start running again. These past few runs have produced a modest increase, so as of today it’s in the 95th percentile for people my age. (I think Peter Attia suggests that the minimum acceptable VO2Max is the 95 percentile for someone a decade younger than you, which I’m still a bit below, although it seems perhaps doable.)
I’m afraid I failed to get a photo of Ashley or myself running (or better, the two of us running together), but I did get a picture of a cool little snake friend who was crossing the sidewalk where I was running.
I got in one writing session in the morning. Now that I’ve finished my run, I very much hope to get in some more writing (and most especially some more plotting) before the end of the day.
I was busy most of the day. In the morning I took Jackie to her (last!) physical therapy appointment, and in the afternoon I had my usual Thursday visit with some former co-workers. But in the early evening (after fourth dog walk) I sat down and wrote a few hundred words. I’ve also updated the progress tracker in the sidebar. (And, if you’re reading it, wrote this brief post on my day’s progress.)
Three things I should do soon (they’re on my schedule for “before November 1st”): Write a logline, short synopsis, and long synopsis for the story. I don’t know that I need to do all three, but I should definitely do some thinking about what the story is about before I spend much more time writing.
Probably just the sort of thinking to do tomorrow while walking the dog.
Today was something of a trial run at what I’m hoping to do during NaNo 2.0. I did first dog walk, ate breakfast, and did second dog walk. Then I sat down and banged out a few hundred words on my new novel. Then I did my morning exercises, followed by a workout.
Going forward, I’m hoping to be able to spend some of the afternoon and evening writing as well. At least, that’s the plan I’m hoping to follow all November.
Today we spent a big chunk of the afternoon enrolling in new Medicare Advantage plans, because the insurance company that we’ve been using for nearly 20 years is closing up shop. We had been very happy with our old health insurance. We’re approaching this new plan with a degree of trepidation. The signup was a one-time thing, and the fact that I had to spend my afternoon that way doesn’t mean that I’ll be unable to write future afternoons. I hope.
Now it’s evening, and I got a tiny bit more writing done.
All told my day’s writing came to 879 words. That comes to only about half of the 1667 I’ll have to average to get 50,000 words by the end of November. But that’s okay. I’m just getting started.
The workout was my first workout in more than a month—since Jackie had her surgery, and I got very busy. (There were only a couple of weeks when I was nearly a full-time caregiver, but even after that period was over, it turned out that just the odd hour here and there taking Jackie to physical therapy and such put a hole in the day that was hard to work around.)
Anyway. Words! Go me!
I’ve started generating prose for my NaNo 2.0 story, despite the fact that starting early is supposed to be against the rules.
I figure it’s okay because I’m not really trying to write the story yet. I’m just capturing some text to use to validate things like the NaNo 2.0 progress bar, which should now be visible in my sidebar, below my short profile, and above the form for subscribing to my newsletter.
I’m not sure the progress bar is working yet. It looks kind of minimal, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t written much yet. By the time NaNo 2.0 goes live on November 1st, it should be clear that it’s working.
Besides writing, I’m making notes about how the story is supposed to go. I don’t really have an outline yet, but I’m capturing internal details about the story world as I figure them out.
And I’m figuring it out while I’m walking. Mostly while I’m walking the dog.
I’ve always done some of my best thinking about stories while walking. The past three years or so, I’ve done less such thinking, for two reasons: The dog, and podcasts.
Ashley, especially as a younger dog, was kind of hard to walk. She was a little too likely to lunge growling and snarling at people. (Too often she acts like she’s a very good dog until she jumps on someone, so people want to meet her, and then get booped in the nose with Ashley’s snout.) So I’ve really had to be very alert to people coming within reach, to make sure nothing bad happened.
That made it harder to think about other stuff while I was walking Ashley.
I’ve also been listening to podcasts, which I rather enjoy, but which also lead to less thinking about stories while I’m walking.
So, between Ashley behaving much better these days, and cutting back on podcast listening, my walks are turning back into an excellent opportunity for plotting.
I’m very pleased with the results so far.
Daily gratitude: I am enormously grateful that, back in my days writing for Wise Bread, my readers were not having AI generate summaries of my articles and only reading those, and were not having LLMs generate comments to paste into the comment field.
One of the things I haven’t done well in learning sword fighting has been “getting in the reps.” We’ll learn a move—a particular cut or thrust or parry—and I’ll work on it until I can do it correctly once (or a few times), but then I’ll quit. I don’t “get in the reps” that it would take to really learn the thing.
This is about 80% my own fault, of course. (It’s about 20% the fault of the instructors, who always want to move on and teach the next cool thing.) Clearly, having done something correctly once (or a few times) should put me in the position of being able to practice it more, either alone or with a training partner. And it’s totally on me that I hardly ever do that.
Anyway, I occasionally remind myself that I should get in the reps of whatever we’ve just learned. Sometimes I do better or worse, but I rarely forget. (I just get tired or busy or forget all the things we learned except the last one or find some other reason to fail to get in my reps.)
The reason I’m thinking about this today is simply that I’ve been writing more just lately, and of course writing is the same way. If you want to get better at writing, you need to get in the reps.
More specifically, you need to engage in “deliberate practice.” So it’s not just getting in the reps. You need to get in one rep, monitor your performance, evaluate your success, and then figure out how to do it better. Then repeat.
This is true at every level. In sword fighting there’s the cuts, thrusts, and parries, of course. But there’s also footwork to go with each one of those things. Then there’s postures that you might pass through along the way. There’s distance management. There’s watching your opponent’s postures for clues as to what he might be about to do. There’s figuring out what you might do in response.
Writing has its own levels, but it’s still the same. Word choice. Sentence structure. Paragraphs. Telling a story.
After decades of practice, I’m pretty good with words, sentences, and paragraphs. My skills with telling a story still need some work.
I need some more reps.
I did NaNoWriMo back in 2010. (There’s a NaNoWriMo tag, if you want to read the related posts.) I wasn’t successful. Worse, I found it didn’t help me write more or better. So after that one year, I pretty much gave up on the idea of writing-sprint-type things. This year though, I’ve decided to give it another try. Specifically, I’m thinking of doing NaNo 2.0.
The reason is simply that I’ve scarcely been writing at all for years now, and something like this seems like a way to get myself back to it.
I know how to get writing done, which is to write every day. I also know that (for me) it’s important to start writing early in the day. As I say in that post:
“Even just 20 or 40 minutes of early morning writing gets my head into the story space, and once it’s there I’ll continue to have story ideas through the day.”
It’s possible to get lots of writing done late in the day, but I know from experience that that my writing time is much more productive if I’ve gotten at least a little bit done early.
So, what am I going to do? Mainly, I’m going to write every day. That’s how I get writing done.
Less important, but not nothing: I’m going to set an ambitious word-count goal (1667 words per day). I won’t beat myself up if I don’t hit it, but I will take it seriously.
Also less important, but a trap I’ve been known to fall into: I’m going to make a point of refraining from going back and dicking around with the beginning until I have a complete draft. A complete draft is something I can fix. One-third of a draft isn’t.
Even the original NaNoWriMo rules made it clear that you didn’t need to write a novel specifically The point was simply to pick a large project and try to make progress on it each day for a month. But writing a novel would be cool, and given my experience of both my previous NaNoWriMo project, and of writing things since then, I’ve come around to thinking that a rather classic version of NaNoWriMo might work well for me.
So, my plan is very nearly straight NaNoWriMo. I’ll write daily from November 1st to November 30th. The 1667 word-count goal is simply a 50,000 words divided by 30 days. I’ll refrain from going back and editing my previous days’ work (except that minimal line-edits will be okay, as will making notes if I see things that I’ll want to change later).
You’re not supposed to start writing early. (It’s fine to start plotting early, doing research, making notes, etc.) Still, I’m not hesitating to capture some fragments of prose when something pops into my head. For one thing, that gives me some material for making sure that my backup mechanisms and file syncing mechanisms are working, so those are things I don’t need to worry about in November when I’m ready to start cranking.
I’ll try to post frequent updates here (although I won’t let such updates interfere with getting my writing done).
Wish me luck!
