6 Leassons learned from a month of straight writing
Posted on January 30th, 2009 | by admin |I have come down to the wire on my writing challenge, the deadline is tomorrow night. Writing 50, 000 words in one month doesn’t sound like it would be that difficult and just writing it wouldn’t be. Its the creative side, coming up with idea after idea and forcing the story forward that is the problem. I have had a headache for the last two weeks but it has been worth it. I have learned more about my craft in the last month than I have in all of my writing classes combined. Here is a summary of what I have learned:
- Just start writing. I have always heard that the best experience for a writer is to sit down and write but it always annoyed me. Write what? Its like saying “just lose it” to an over weight person, easier said than done. Everything came together when I did some free writing. I had came up with an idea that I liked and I sat down and said “what if this happened?” and started writing. Once I had that first scene it flowed into another and another until I had the beginning of my novel.
- Don’t expect perfection. Cut yourself some slack. Professional authors do not write the book that you buy on their first attempt, why should you expect to? When you write, turn off your inner editor. That little voice that tells you that you are writing crap that no one will ever want to read. Write crap, write tons and tons of it, then during the editing phase you can go back and fish out the worthwhile bits, wash them off and turn them into your masterpiece.
- Stick to your story. Writing your story will start out easy and fun and you will write thousands of words at a sitting. That is the honeymoon phase and its wonderful but soon it will turn into work. When you are getting into the middle of the story, you will start slowing down and it wont seem as fun. You will start thinking of dumping the story and starting a new one but your story is fine. You are just wanting that honeymoon phase back. Stick with your story and don’t abandon it. I went through the same thing with mine and some of my favorite scenes, the best ideas, came in the last half of my story.
- Don’t sweat the details. For the first half of my book, I didn’t even have a name for my main character but I didn’t want that to stop my progress. I read some advice from an author that said when he got stuck for a detail, he would just type TK. That way, later in the editing, he could word search for TK and add in all the missing bits. I used that for my main character name and when I had it figured out, I just went back and added it in.
- Have a goal. It really helps to have a tangible goal in mind to give yourself a sense of progress. I had the 50,000 word in a month goal but I also had a daily goal of 2000 words. If I had time to write apart from my normal time, I would set sub-goals. For instance: if I wrote 500 words I could get up and stretch, 1000 more and I could get a Dr. Pepper.
- Write with a group. I entered this challege with four friends and my story would not be the same without them. We bounced ideas off each other, shamed each other into writing when we didn’t feel like it and kept a bet going to keep us motivated. So let me say thanks to Justin, Jesse, Jessica and James, I couldn’t have done it without you.
Well, I haven’t quite finished yet. I have 1,124 more words to go so I had better get at it.