General Notes
While I’m noodling around with the notion of trying to write a million words of fiction in a year, I figured I might take a closer look at some work habits to see if there’s any useful patterns I can discern around how I work, where I work, and what I’m working on.
For a long while, when trying something like this, I would have fired up scrivener and used that as my primary workspace. I’d set the session target for 560 words, attempt to pack 5 sessions in each day, and use that as my metric for getting things done.
I reverted to Word a few weeks back, trying to get away from my usual practices because they haven’t been working for me over the last few months.
Microsoft Word is, in many ways, inefficient and clunky for something like this. There’s no helpful pop-up alerting you to the fact you’ve hit your session target, and you have to scroll back-and-forth to the start and end of the film instead of quickly skipping between chapters. The only way to tell whether you’ve written 2,800 words in a day is to log your starting number, then subtract that from the current manuscript count.
Turns out, that works far better than me than Scrivener’s bells and whistles. I hit the target most days this week, and the days I didn’t still involved writing at least 1500 words, and they were frequently done in one or two sessions instead of five or six.
I also started the week splitting my focus, aiming for 2000 words on a novella and 800 words on a short story. That lasted until Wednesday, when I decided to aim for 2800 words per day on a single project until it was done
DAY BY DAY
Sunday, 11 June
- War on White Harbor novella: 2039 words | 1 hr 56 minutes at the keyboard
- Plunkets Hunt Short Story: 672 words | 28 minutes 19 seconds at keyboard
I did the bulk of this between 6 AM and 8 AM, as Sunday was the last of the four day birthday celebrations for my wife and I spent a good chunk of the day away from the keyboard.
Monday, 12 June
- War on White Harbor novella: 2053 words | 1 hr 56 minutes at the keyboard
Mondays are a heavy tutoring day, and it’s rare that I don’t have two hour-long sessions scheduled on the day. The writing day ended up broken into mutliple sessions, with two half-hour blocks between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM, and the rest split between 11 AM and 1 PM. Very much a “find the gaps” writing day, and it’s not surprising the short story fell by the wayside.
Tue, 13 June
- War on White Harbor novella: 2120 words | 2 hrs at the keyboard
- Plunket’s Hunt Short Story: 777 words | 30 minutes 47 seconds at the keyboard
Stayed up very late on Monday night hanging out with my wife, and there were a bunch of urgent emails to sort out about the PhD and freelance work, so Tuesday lost the usual writing sessions in the early hours of the day. Big work blocks on White Harbor just after 12:00 PM (45 minutes), and 3:00 PM (45 minutes), with the rest of the writing fit in around other tasks between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM.
Wed, 14 June
- War on White Harbor novella: 1476 words | 1 hour at the keyboard
Honestly, I fought the very idea of writing at all today. I’d hit the three-quarter mark on the novella, which is usually the point where writers doubt themselves and their abilities, so the writing didn’t actually start until around 9:00 PM, with the bulk of it done between 10 and 11.
Thursday, 15 June
- War on White Harbor novella: 1054 words | 52 minutes 32 seconds at the keyboard
- Heavy G Hammer novella: 1756 words | 1 hour 9 minutes at the keyboard
Got the news that my PhD supervisor would be supporting my request for an extension on my thesis when I woke up Thursday morning. I wasn’t expecting that, and it threw me badly for the bulk of the day. Lots of procrastinating and chatting to friends about pro-wrestling in my usual writing hours, with a short 13 minute writing stint around 7:00 AM.
Everything else happened between 3:00 PM and 5:30 PM, after picking my partner up from work and getting them settled at home. If it hadn’t been for me eying the idea of a million word year, I would have finished the first novella and stopped there.
Instead, I opened up a new file and started the third novella in the series. Really quick start, because I already know the voice and the tone of the stories I’m telling, and that’s something that normally requires a bit of experimentation when starting a story from scratch.
Friday, 16 June
- “On the Nickel Novel” post: 1021 Words | 47 minutes 35 seconds at the keyboard
- Heavy G Hammer novella: 2817 words | 4 hours 26 minutes at the keyboard
I wrote the post here in my six AM writing slot, doing a quick edit and reshape before taking my spouse to work. They were there approximately a half-hour before I ended up going back to pick them up, as they had a sore throat and cold symptoms and their workplace doesn’t fuck around with any “soldier on” bullshit.
Fridays, again, are a heavy tutoring day with two sessions booked around midday and 4:00 PM. Did a half-hour writing stint around 10:00 AM, but I wrote the rest of the Heavy G Hammer while parked on the couch with How I Met Your Father on in the background and my spouse playing SIMS 4 on their PC. Did about a half-hour of focused work each hour between 7:00 PM and 1 AM, when I finally hit my target word count for fiction and took myself to bed.
It’s tempting to blame the TV for this—and I suspect that’s accurate—but Friday’s sessions were also the two most pre-intensive of my mentoring clients. I logged another two or three hours of preparing notes and resources for them on top of writing.
A sick partner is also hell on sustained writing, even when parked in front of a computer game. Lots of pauses to talk, or deliver drinks, or just generally acknowledge that it’s awful to be sick and feel terrible.
Saturday, 17 June
- Heavy G Hammer novella: 2,871 words | 2 hours 36 minutes
Weekends are usually the break point for my writing, because my spouse likes to see me and we’ve got chores to get done. Did a forty-minute writing stint just after 1:00PM, did a twenty-minute plotting session and a half-hour of writing just prior to dinner, then settled in to finish my word count goals around 9:00 PM.
The rest of the day was taking care of sick spouse, collecting shopping, chasing a cat off our counter, and generally trying to keep the house afloat with “must do” chores while my partner’s out of commission (I failed, and may need to do more catch-up tomorrow).
The fact I got to 2800 words today owes a lot to my spouse’s recent re-discovery of the SIMS, which made working in the evening’s easier. Normally, we’d spend time watching movies or TV after dinner, and today would have ended around 2400 words.
My plot sheet, incidentally, is the single-page story planner from Larry Brooks Story Engineering, which is less a structured idea of what the story will be and more a series of questions that guide you towards possibility and meaningful turns.
