Tag: writing

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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.

The hilts of two longswords and two rapiers, with three fountain pens in the foreground
Add your own “pen is mightier than the sword joke here.”

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.

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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.

Why

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.

What

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.

The rules

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!

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I have written very little in a long time. But today I started working on something new, and I have a plan to get another (related) thing that I wrote a while ago ready to submit.

The older thing is a bit of steampunk-esque whimsy that I started as an experiment in voice, and found I rather liked. As it grew, I realized that it was longer than a short story, and a market I was interested in was about to open to novella submissions, so I thought I’d just let it grow.

One thing I do when I’m writing is to just drop bits in that seem cool, as possible set-ups for later bits. This often works out very well. Sometimes, though, those bits of set-up imply stuff that doesn’t get written. That happened this time, and I made a list of bits that either needed the follow-up stuff written, or else be deleted.

Since I was aiming at novella length (and I wasn’t there yet), I figured that I could just write those bits out. But several didn’t end up working out. So now my plan is to make another pass through the planned novella, delete the bits that didn’t go anywhere, turn it into a novelette, and get it submitted somewhere.

But that is all work for another day. Today I’ve started on something new: a sequel to that story. I remain delighted by the characters, by the steampunky world, and by the voice I used to write the story. And yesterday I came up with part of a new idea.

Just now I jotted down a few sentences, which I very much hope to get back to later today.

A tree trunk silhouetted against the sky with a barely risen sun
This picture has nothing to do with this post. I just wanted the post to have a picture, and this is the picture I took this morning.

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I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)

Me in fencing gear, with a rapier in my hand
A black dog lying in the sun on the patio

If you’re interested, subscribe here: https://philipbrewer.micro.blog/subscribe/

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“Have you been happy?” Julie asked.

“Of course,” I said, not noticing the tense she’d used.

“Even having to hide?”

“That may have been the best part.” I’d hidden myself pretty well, I thought. New country. New name. New hobbies. A job that let me get by without drawing on family accounts. “Well, second best,” I said, reaching to draw her close.

The door opened and three men came in. “Quite a little love you’ve got here,” father said.

“Sorry,” Julie said, her face against my chest.