Peter M. Ball

General Notes

For years, I’ve set my alarm for either 5:00 or 5:45 AM, a prompt to get up and write before the vicissitudes of the day distract me. That’s usually more effective when I’ve got a day job to get to, compared to the days when I’ve got a more free-form schedule, and it ceased being effective after we adopted a second cat and needed to ride shotgun on kitty breakfast lest food be stolen or wars break out. 

One of the interesting things about tracking performance has been seeing just how efficient my practice is in terms of raw output. I can write right after I wake up, but looking back on last week’s data I was typically getting more words done in the hours between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM, so this week has been a bit of an experiment. I’m still getting up in the wee hours, but I’m not going to write. Instead, I’ll do some reading and some publishing work, then drive my beloved to their job. Only then, around 10:00 AM (or after the first mentoring session) will I log into my document and start work on the draft.

I hope that starting later will also mean the “hours on the keyboard” data that RescueTime tracks for a project is closer to the hours spent at the computer. I’ve noticed it usually takes me between 45 minutes and 80 minutes to get a half-hour of keyboard time, with the difference made up by short tasks (“I’ll just research this”), distractions (“I’ll check Facebook”), and being called away by cats or my spouse.

Ideally, if I can compress my writing time from 10:00 AM to 1:00PM, that leaves the early mornings and afternoons open for editorial and publishing tasks.

Starting around 10:00 AM also opened up doing my first writing stint of the day at the desk, on the desktop keyboard, instead of wrestling with the aging laptop on the couch. Over time, I’m hoping to borrow some writing advice from Rachel Aaron and do some real tests of where, when, and what tool is the most effective for me when it comes to writing. For now the desktop seems to have a slight edge over the laptop when I’m working in the optimal window, especially when using a Pomorodo timer with a a white noise generator built in.

That said, I’m wary of making broad assumptions here, because there’s any number of other elements including the projects worked upon and the fact I’m tracking things here which could be having an impact. 

19 June

• Heavy G Hammer novella: 2,766 words | 2 hours 6 min at the keyboard

Ah, Mondays. Another week where I fit writing between two mentoring sessions, which broke up my flow a little, and my spouse lasted about 20 minutes of work before coming home sick.

Basically spent the day writing in 30 minute bursts, then dashing off to take care of my spouse, our cats, or preparing for a mentoring call. At one point I needed to stop because the rapid-fire clatter of my keyboard overstimulated my beloved.

Basically did four short writing stints between 11 and 3, then came back for a focused 45-minute dash between 5:45 and 6:30.

20 June

• Heavy G Hammer novella: 2,971 words | 2 hours 15 min at the keyboard

Interesting day. Fired up the pomodoro timer and powered through 2400 words in around two and a half hours at the computer, doing 45 minutes between 10 and 11, then nearly a full hour from 11 until 12.

I sat the computer “writing” from 12 to 12:30, but unfortunately I’d hit the end of a chapter and resistance kicked in hard because I had to decide what happened next. Heavy G Hammer has gone in a really interesting following the Nickel Novel formula—the decisions made in the 4th and 8th chapters set up a very different act that I’d been idly contemplating.

I messed around with Facebook and writing notes here, then realised how to solve the problem and went back to work, figuring I’d squeeze in the final 400 words between 12:45 and 1:30 (when I go pick up my spouse). As you can see from the word count above, I went a little harder than that, even though the “what comes next” involves doing quick research about hydroponic grow houses.

I could easily have come home and kept working on this novella after lunch—I’m getting a feel for how easy it would be to actually ramp up to 40 of these a year if you were working fast and loose—but getting everything done before lunch meant putting focus on overdue Brain Jar and PhD tasks for the afternoon.

Probably as close to an ideal writing day as I’m going to get.

21 June

• Heavy G Hammer novella: 3,159 words | 2 hours 7 min at the keyboard

Started later than expected at 10:45, and wrapped up writing around 1:17. A little over a two and a half hours of writing time, with the bulk of it focused on producing new words instead of muddling through what happens next or doing research for the setting.

22 June

• Heavy G Hammer novella: 2,953 words | 1 hours 33 min at the keyboard

A challenging Thursday. Between mentoring, a fortnightly workshop session, and chores that took me out of the house, I didn’t end up sitting down to write until 8:45 PM and kept going until 11.

Had to use the keyboard on the couch, because I’d just spent a lot of time on the desktop,, and that meant a lot of wasted time when you look at the hours spent with fingers on the keyboard. I stopped around 15000 words and debated calling it a short night, happy that I’d got something done despite feeling ready for bed at 8:30. Fortunately, I was in the final fight scene of the novella, which coaxed me into doing a little more.

Pretty sure I’ll finish this draft tomorrow, and I know what I’ll be writing next.

23 June

• Heavy G Hammer novella: 1,1160 words | 33 min 16 seconds at the keyboard
• The Gun Witch of Half Moon Bay novella: 1656 words | 1 hour at the keyboard.

As predicted, finished the first novella today and started a second hot on its heels. Writing kicked off around 10:30 AM and finished at 1:00 PM, with lots of interruptions because a) I wasn’t feeling crash hot and b) both starting and ending stories often slows me down a bit because it’s all about setting up and tying off elements from earlier in the tale.

Interested to see how the Gun Witch novella goes using this approach. Unlike the first few novellas I’ve written, which were fast-paced riffs on pulp fiction’s boxing story format, while the Gun Witch novella and the two I’ll write after part of the Crossbones & Sorcery universe set during the Golden Age of Piracy. That means a more ornate voice, more research to get period setting details right, and other things that’ll slow me down.

24 June

• The Gun Witch of Half Moon Bay novella: 3053 words | 2 Hours 3 minutes at the keyboard.

Numbers will be misleading here, as I realised I had about 8000 words of this project roughed out in a notebook and so it was less “writing” and more editing in/redrafting details I already had. Wrote over a lot of the work I did yesterday, but the upside is that I’m surer of the voice and the story now. Into the fourth chapter of the novella, pondering what I’ll do at the first act turning point.

Writing time went from 11:40 to 3:17, with breaks to look at notes and research details I wanted to get right on the page. Case in point, I spent a good chunk of my time researching Ships of the Line and the history of tools used for engraving metal (or, as I learned, burins). 

Last week, I mentioned my affection for John Milton Edwards’ The Fiction Factory and it’d oddly engrossing lists of publications and income across his writing career. He’s an interesting writer because he occupies a space where the dime novel format gave way to the pulp magazine—a format that won out because, as a periodical, it could be shipped far cheaper than a book at the time.

Every year, Edwards list of sold stories includes a double-digit run of “five cent library” and “ten cent library” stories, which are actually novellas of 20,000 to 40,000 words. Serials of the era typically ran to 60,000 words, broken up into four parts, and the short stories could well be novelettes depending on the market.

One of my favourite chapters in The Fiction Factory is where Edwards lays out The Ethics Of The Nickel Novel, which often feels like a glimpse into another world. The format proves to be fairly regimented:

The libraries, as they were written by Edwards, were typed on paper 8-1/2″ by 13″, the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. Eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. Thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story.

In these days of the infinite scroll, where computers keep extending the page down as required, the idea of tracking word count seems quaint and archaic; a metric from a bygone age where hitting the bottom of a page meant physically removing it from a typewriter and inserting a new sheet. Lots of early pulp writers measured their productivity via pages, rather than words, but Edwards nickel novel format is roughly equivalent to starting a novella and knowing you’ll write 16 chapters of 1250 words apiece.

I’ve adopted that format as an experiment a time or two, and it’s a remarkably calming way to work. The story conforms to the structure: Four chapters of set-up, eight chapters of complications, and four chapters to wrap everything up. Not a huge amount of forward planning needed because you’re just rolling towards one of sixteen way-stations in the story. The type of conflicts and solutions you offer are limited by the demands of the wordcount. All of these things are hard edges, ways of narrowing the infinite possibilities of what might happen in a story down to a more reasonable number of choices.

Plus, it brings style into the arena, demanding a certain speed and rhytjm adn pithiness. Speaking of which:

Each chapter closes with a “curtain.” In other words, the chapter works the action up to an interesting point, similar to a serial “leave-off,” and drops a quick curtain. Skill is important here. The publishers of this class of fiction will not endure inconsistency for a moment. The stories appeal to a clientele keen to detect the improbable and to treat it with contempt.

1250 words for a chapter isn’t a lot. As I keep telling a lot of the writers I mentor, one of the major reasons we read is to see characters solving problems, and often their attempts to solve those problems are going to fail or create new issues. Every scene will usually have a character with a goal, and three or four beats where they try to attain that goal by switching up their tactics.

In this respect, the calming aspect of writing a story to this format is clear. Sixteen chapters means sixteen problems, each of which is tackled four different ways. 64 beats per book, each approximately 300 words long. The typewritten page becomes the rhythm of the work, in much the same way that comic book narratives have a rhythm placed upon them by fitting stories onto specific pages and generating effect by knowing when the page will flip to a new double-page spread.

The business model of the nickel novel also had their business model down, with an approach that seems very familiar to those of us in the indie publishing world:

Usually the novels are written in sets of three; that is, throughout such a series the same principal characters are used, and three different groups of incidents are covered. In this way, while each story is complete in itself, it is possible to combine the series and preserve the effect of a single story from beginning to end. These sets are so combined, as a matter of fact, and sold for ten cents.

Three nickel novels, in effect, give them a whole new dime novel to release. A solid choice, especially in a world where the original nickel novels disappear before too long and back-issues are non-existent. Although you can feel Edwards chagrin every now and then when one of his regular publishers realises they no longer need new stories because they can reprint the older works in their inventory.

Edwards has a lot more to say in his rambling, third-person style, but the remainder is less about the structure of the nickel novel and more about the content – who the heroes should be, what kinds of conflicts to avoid, etc. Interesting stuff, but for a neo-pulp writer in the modern age, something that leads us into the inherent intersectional issues of racism, classism, and sexism that are threaded through the fiction of the pulp era. There is a great deal said of manly virtues, with all the problems inherent with that. Although I am fond of this advice:

As for swearing, it is a useless pastime and very common; besides, it betrays excitement, and the hero is never excited.

In 1903, Edwards wrote 42 of these using the structure laid out here. 840,000 words of fiction, alongside ten other works, and probably higher than that (there’s a point in The Fiction Factory where one of his regular five-cent library publishers changes their preferred length from 30,000 to 20,000, and I think this predates the change). In many other years he limits himself to twenty, although they’re usually accompanied by an equal amount of new dime novels at 40,000 word a pop.

To a contemporary writer, especially those of us who grew up in the era where Stephen King was wrote too fast by producing four or five novels a year, this feels like an insane amount of work. Even in 1903, it’s impressive. Edwards is upfront about the fact that he works insanely hard, although he’s making a pretty good living from it.

On the other hand, I keep pondering how much the sheer regularity of the structure helped make this kind of writing possible. There’re studies into motivation that show focusing on what we do, instead of the long-term goal, tends to make it easier to keep returning to the same tasks—we may be inspired to go to the gym by the idea of losing weight and being healthier, but the people who stick with the gym routine typically forget about all that and focus on what they do: get up at 6:00 AM and head to the gym; do six K on the treadmill and then the yoga class; do weights Tuesday and Thursday. Their goals are short-term and manageable.

In a similar way, I’m going to write a novel or I’m going to write 40 novellas next year is a large, impossible to conceptualise goal. It sounds good—I’d like to be the kind of person who does that—but it’s going to take months of work and a huge cognitive load figuring out how to get all that writing done and what’s going to happen at every step.

The routine structure of the nickel novel takes away a huge chunk of the cognitive load around the work, and repeating the same rhythms over and over means you barely need to think about how things are going to be done. One never needs to think about the long-term goal, because the short-term goals are always the same:

• Today, I’ll write three chapters.
• For the next hour, I’m focused on hitting these four beats.

It doesn’t take long for the numbers to accumulate. I finished a novella five days ago using this structure. I’m halfway through the next one, which marks the end of the trilogy. If I maintain my current writing speed, the current WIP will be finished on Thursday or Friday, whereupon I’ll pivot to a new trilogy. I’m debating which of my various ideas is the best choice to start. 

The challenge, as always, is that drafted doesn’t mean finished. There’s plot issues with the novellas to be wrapped up, and copyediting and other production work related to the PhD. While I can write fast, I don’t particularly write clean yet, although I’m remembering things that help. Stuff like “Start each scene by orienting the reader, and putting one big ‘world’ gimmick there”, and “work towards a mid-scene pivot”.

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.