Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

The Dailies

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , ,

A few weeks back, I started picking up an old habit I’d left behind.

It goes like this: every morning, I tend to wake up and work my way through a three-page planning document designed to help me frame my to-do list. It started out as a bunch of notes from Todd Henry’s Die Empty, then gradually evolved to include little bits and pieces from other routines I’d trialed (such as this one at the bottom of of Tobias Buckell‘s bullet journal post).

It’s a useful document that walks me through four major areas of focus with dot point prompts to guide my planning: what’s important to me today? What am I trying to change or progress? Who will I talk to and what do I value about them? What are the things that need to be done, and the things I may have forgotten?

It makes for a nice little ritual to work through over coffee, and generally gives me about two pages of detail to guide my activities for the next twenty-four hours. I set it aside when I left office work behind and my focus narrowed, but as I move into the tail end of my PhD, I’m starting to accumulate more focus and split my focus a lot more than I’d like.

Ergo, I’ve busted out the list once more, and started a dedicated notebook I’ve dubbed The Book of Days.

Right at the end of the process there’s time and questions set aside for dreaming: In an ideal world, how would you spend your days? What are the ambitions you’ve let slide lately? What are the things you want to achieve before you leave this earth? What ambition have you need neglecting because you don’t know how to begin?

It’s interesting, answering these questions every day. My ideal day is never consistent, but are both recurring patterns that emerge over time, and weird interjections that crop up when I feel like certain parts of my life has been ignored.

And, slowly, I’m starting to develop a list of dailies. The things that I want to fit into my day, every day, in order to take steps towards the life I’d really like to be living.

  • Work on my current creative project
  • Write a short burst of words on my thesis/non-fiction process
  • Snuggle my partner
  • Walk for a half-hour and stretch, to prevent the back pain that’s been creeping up on me as I age.
  • Post a little process image over on instagram, and tell a story to go with it.
  • Blog about something interesting from my process notes or reading
  • Learn something new or refine a process/system so it works a little better
  • Write a second of my weekly newsletter, so I don’t have to find an entire block of time to write the full thing on a Tuesday/Wednesday.
  • Go out into the world and drink a cup of coffee somewhere interesting, or have an interesting conversation.
  • Cook something tasty.
  • Do something that may help Brain Jar Press sell more books (because, honestly, I have a number where the press is a success, and right now I’m still building towards it).

Or, if I’m feeling the need to be pithy about it: Make something. Learn something. Love well. Share something with the world and build for the future you want.

Leave any one of those steps out and my life starts feeling a little off-kilter, but get a little done on each and I go to bed feeling like everything is doing okay.

Hope and Fear and Writing

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’ve been tutoring creative writing at UQ for the last few months, going back to some early principles and trying to explain them in different ways. Sometimes it takes a particular example or way of phrasing a technique for it to click with a particular student, but you can always see the epiphany and the excitement when the see how stories work.

I know a few things about writing, but I read how-to books voraciously because I want other people’s phrasing and techniques in my toolkit for things like this. One of the winners, this time around, was this description of how scenes/stories work from Robin Laws Beating the Story:

More importantly, the important thing to keep in mind that he drops a little later in the chapter:

We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an outcome.

I don’t often do this kind of planning up front, but it’s the first thing I turn to every time a scene or story isn’t working. What do I want the reader to hope for? What result do I want them to fear?

Searching for the Sweet Spot in Daily Word Count

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

My favourite function in Scrivener isn’t any of the fancy layout options, the scratch-pad that exists for eery scene, nor the ability to set up a useful list of metadata attached to any particular slice of a story.

I make use of many of those things, but the thing that keeps me coming back to the program is the function that tracks the daily word count needed to reach a particular deadline (and automatically re-calculates it, when a day goes better or worse than expected).

Which means, most mornings, I boot up my computer and load two trackers: one for my thesis, and one for the current creative project.

Generally, speaking, whatever number is on the session target is what needs to get written in order to tick off my “have written” log on a given day. My actual target is usually slightly higher, because I crave consistency in the hard-edges to my process: generally speaking, the first time I look up from my thesis and I’ve written over a hundred words, it’s time to stop working on it for the day. The same is true on a fiction project once my progress has cleared 1,666 words.

Both numbers are largely arbitrary, although they occupy a sweet spot between “easy to get” and “needing to push myself” that’s useful to me. Low enough that i don’t fret about hitting the word count, high enough that I need to allocate work hours in order to stand a chance. They give me an opportunity to do a little bit more than needed, edging the session targets down as the project continues.

I get to see the small impacts of working steadily, which gradually add up, without feeling like I’m leaving the keyboard with too little work done. Everything after those draft targets are met is admin, redrafting, writing up my project diary, and planning future projects.

Prior experience says I could probably push myself to write more than I do, try and set the daily average closer to 2,500 words or more. I’m purposefully trying to avoid that, so I finish each day feeling with something left in the tank and a rough edge waiting for me to come and finish off.