Time

This month I'm participating in the A to Z Blogger's Challenge, found here. Every day of April (except for Sundays), we are posting a blog with the theme of A to Z.

T is for Time.

"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."

John Irving 

Everyone has a limited about of time in their life. Some of this goes to responsibilities, some to hobbies. Some to plain ol' fun. It all comes down to how we spend our time.

I don't know about you, but when I waste an entire day watching TV or running around doing errands, I don't feel productive in the slightest. It may have even been a fun day, but it wasn't productive unless I did something worth doing.

We can go through life and have a great deal of "fun," but not end up leaving something behind. As a writer, I want to accomplish something. I want to leave something of my writing behind every single day. So I was thinking about time, and how there's a limited supply of it, but also about what I do with the time I spend writing.

I can break my writing time into three parts: 
1. Planning
2. Writing the First Draft
3. Editing

But where does the majority of my writing time go? 

1. I'm not a huge outliner, so my planning stage tends to be brief, and usually mental (as in, unwritten). However, for the sake of argument, I'll include the mental outlining time in my calculations, because it is time on the novel. I'd say this is maybe 10% of my time.

2. I can type pretty fast, and NaNoWriMo helps me to put a first draft on the pages in about a month, month and a half. I spend from 1-3 hours a day on those days pounding out the first draft words.

3. Personally, like John Irving, I believe two-thirds of my time on a novel is spent editing. 

Allow me to rephrase: at least 66% of my time is spent in the editing phase. Perhaps this goes back to my perfectionism (see post here), and my desire to get every sentence perfect before sharing it with someone. That can be crippling. 

So it leaves me with a dilemma of when to stop. I could spend a lifetime editing and re-editing a novel (and, who knows?, maybe I will). But where's that moment in time when you stop doing good for the novel and start doing harm instead? I wish there were a timer on each of my novels. They would be just like those little plastic pop-up timers on the turkeys you cook every Thanksgiving. When the novel is prime and juicy, ready for consumption, the little red sphere pokes out and says, "Bing! I'm done. Send me on to a publisher, I'm not getting any better than this!" 

Okay, that's a bit unrealistic; let's get back to time. 

I think most of our time working on a novel should be spent in the editing phase. A first draft is crap.

For example, every NaNo month, the NaNo supporters and the NaNo haters pop up with their blogs, either encouraging or discouraging people to try their hand at writing a novel. Both have valid points. 

A first draft is crap. It's inedible swill, it's raw turkey. Maybe half-baked. And consuming it will give you food poisoning. Beginning writers must remember this. It's something that has taken me many years to learn. Looking back at my first novels, ones that I chose not to edit much, I know a first draft is not ready for a reader's eyes.

So the NaNo haters have a point: don't write a first draft and expect it to be awesome. Unless you're willing to do the work editing, you aren't going to make it as a writer. "Everyone has a novel in them," is an oft-quoted bit of encouragement for the wannabe writer. Yes, everyone may have a novel in them, but not everyone has the perseverance to make that novel the best they can make it.

A writer must accept that writing a novel is not just putting the words on the page. Writing a novel is rewriting. And that, my friends, takes times. And it's hard, sweaty work.

"There is no great writing, only great rewriting."Justice Brandeis 

NaNoWriMo Day #16: Tips for Accomplishing those Daily Goals

Day Sixteen of NaNoWriMo, and thousands of novelists are still going strong. Some have even finished their 50K word goal.

I've had my good days and bad days, and days in between.

There are a couple of things that help me in attaining my goals.

1. Overall word count goal
Scrivener has a nifty tool called "Project Targets" which allows you to set a word goal for your project. I do this, and set the writing deadline option for November 30th. This year, I've set my goal for 80K words. 

You can also declare some days of the week as non-writing days, which I've done for my Saturdays and Sundays (even though I've done some writing on those days, I treat them as vacation-days, so I don't have to write if I can't or just need a thinking day). 

By setting my overall goal and determining my writing days, I know exactly how many words I need to write per day, and I can watch my word count increase until it fills up the bar and I've reached my daily quota.

2. Mini outlines
I've said before that I don't outline, and I don't. But Scrivener has another great tool, which looks a lot like an index card. This is just a section where you summarize the scene you've created in Scrivener. You find the summary spot in the Inspector under the "Notes" section. You can also view all the "index cards" in order, and drag and rearrange them as you like. 

So instead of outlining, I do this, and then I have a rough idea of where I'm writing to, even if it takes me several scenes to get there. In Scrivener, it's easy to add scenes, so I just continue adding and keep the next "outline point" for a later scene.

3. Scene-by-scene word goals
I'm a goal-oriented person, which is probably why NaNo works so well for me.

In Scrivener, there's a way to set a word goal per scene. At the bottom of the screen, there's a round little target icon, and if you click it, you're given the ability to set the word count for the scene. Then there appears next to the target icon a bar which fills up as you write towards your word goal, going from red, to yellow, to green as you reach your goal. I do this for most scenes after I have an idea of what's going to happen in them, so it serves as a *very* rough estimate of wordage.

I like this because I find it nice to have a goal per scene as it helps me know if I'm being too wordy on a section or if it's too short. (If I can only come with 400 words for a scene, I know it's skimpy and I need to add conflict or another character, or consider deleting it.) I also find that when I pay attention to my scene's word count, I subconsciously acknowledge the flow of reading for the audience. This comes more into play later in subsequent drafts and as I'm editing, often trying to be more concise.

4. Sit down and write
There's really nothing else to say but sit down and write. You'll never be a novelist if you don't do this.

NaNo is great for getting my butt in the chair. It creates motivation where there otherwise might be none, and pressure to get it done in a set time period.


So while this may be the way I work, there are endless ways to write a novel out there.

Notes on Editing: Consistency in Timeline and Characters

Copyright Terry Bain:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/axis/

Lately I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my work-in-progress (WIP). It’s like every time I get one problem figured out, another rears its ugly head. 

Perhaps one of the reasons I’m so challenged with my current WIP is because I never outlined when I began writing it. I’ve outlined since my first draft, and plotted endlessly. However, I’ve also made plot adjustments and added new thoughts, scenes, characters, etc. So in the end, I feel overwhelmed by the changes and hopelessly frustrated by the timeline. 

I’ve found one way that allows me to keep this all straight in my mind, and breaks my editing up into shorter chunks, so I thought I’d share. 

1. I’ve broken down and titled the scenes in my WIP by character and select just those scenes in Scrivener.
2. Looking at only those scenes, I read through them--quickly--looking for timeline issues as well as character issues. Is the character of Joe being consistent throughout the novel? Or halfway through, is he showing characteristics that aren’t like him? *By timeline, I mean progression of events as well as dates and times of the novel. In Scrivener, I make comments on the side as I go, notes to myself to return to a certain paragraph or sentence later, or check on a fact later. (Note: I’m a compulsive editor, so big-picture edits are extremely difficult for me.)
3. After a quick review of the character’s scenes, I go through and edit more closely. Taking only these scenes as a whole allow me to read just those events and make sure that everything for that character is smooth and consistent.

I don’t know whether this is an unorthodox solution to timeline issues and consistency in characters, or whether it’s old news. But I’ve struggled to find a way to keep track of important events keeping my characters consistent at the same time. This way, I can compare one scene with another and check for inconsistencies.

Also, it gives me a piece of editing that I can focus on without getting overwhelmed by the entire picture.

Method in Writing

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.". - (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II).

Of late, it seems there’s more madness to my writing than method. 

Every time I think that I have my novel figured out, some new idea occurs to me that sounds better than the last. If I made every change in my novel that I had thought up, I’d never finish. Which leads me to my question: Is writing method or madness?

It appears that there are two general approaches to writing: outlining and “pantsing.” Usually, I fall into the latter category. I have, of course, attempted the outlining. Outlining is difficult for me, and I always stray from my outline when I write. 

I find outlining, in many ways, too confining. If I were to restrict myself to following an outline, I would never find out other things about my characters. When I write, my characters constantly are revealing more about themselves to me, and constantly changing my perception of them. If I were to keep to the outline, some of my best scenes would never have gotten written.

After many failed outlines, I have come to accept that I find outlines restricting, and recognize that I do not have to outline. When I write, my characters lead me down the path that they have already chosen, and my attempts to outline their paths merely constrains them. 

However, in the same sense, I have found much value in outlining. My outlines usually occur after I have written the first draft. I outline the draft in progress, which helps me to identify what is not working in the draft and realize what I need to work on. In this sense, outlining has proven valuable to me.

I cannot argue that the method of outlining has merit: when you write with an outline, you know your goal, your end result. When you write with without an outline, you waste a lot of time writing scenes that are often tangents. Writing without an outline certainly seems like madness. 

But even when I do not outline, I find that I need to know where I am headed with my novel--even if in just the most general, abstract of sense. If you start with no idea other than a character, you cannot expect to end up with a novel that anyone would want to read. So I follow an abbreviated outlining method, which consists of me knowing just the most general sense of the change in the character I want to show throughout the novel and knowing the end result of the book.

Yet, if you outline, you must allow that outline to be flexible and fluid, changing with your characters and with the novel as it progresses. 

There is both method and madness to writing. You must be able to see the value of outlining and writing according to plan, with a method, while utilizing the madness of writing with abandon, with no outline, with only your character to drag you along. There is both method and madness, but it is up to you to embrace them both.