Category: NaNoWriMo

Running a bit late with this today.  Sorry.

So, I’m wading into a new book this month, and I figured… well, that’s probably a great time to talk about getting started and the draft process.

Of course, right off the bat… did I really start it this month?  I mean, sure, about two weeks ago I sat down and started actively working on an outline for it.  But the truth is, this is actually the second outline.  I first pitched it to my agent almost two years ago (and then again to my editor that summer).  They both said (and eventually, I agreed) that it needed some more work.

And, really, the bare idea came almost a year before that.  Back in early 2016, if memory serves.  I know I talked with another author, Kristi Charish, about one aspect of it back then, to get her thoughts and expertise on parts of it.

When do we “start” writing?  When does it count?  Is it when we first start thinking about a project?  When we actually make some notes or an outline?  Or is it not until I write VAMPIRE KAIJU: BOOK ONE by Peter Clines   CHAPTER ONE…?

I think that’s worth mentioning, because whenever I see someone talking about writing a book in five weeks or two months or whatever, I always wonder what they’re counting.  A finished, polished manuscript?  Just the first draft?  Are they counting the time they spent outlining, or that they started mulling it over months—maybe years—in advance?

Paradox Bound came out in 2017, but I pitched it to my editor and wrote up a first rough outline back in 2013.  And Dead Moon, my new one that just came out on Valentine’s Day?  My very first stab at that actually happened back in 2011, right after I finished writing Ex-Patriots.  Yeah, it was a different book back then, but still… when I sat down to “start” writing it in 2017, I already had about 30,000 words done.

So how long did they take to write…?

Again, just think about that the next time you see someone say they wrote something in a short amount of time.  Or in a very long amount of time.  We all have our own thoughts about what counts as starting and stopping points.

Anyway…

At the risk of sounding arrogant, let me walk you through my process.  Well, more of a quick stroll, really.  I’ve talked about a lot of this before (so I’ll add a lot of links), and I don’t want to bore you with it since… well, odds are you won’t be doing things this way.

No, seriously, you won’t.  The process I use is pretty much unique to me.  And the process you use is unique to you—even if maybe you haven’t figured it out yet.  Or you’re in the process of evolving from one process to another.  I’m just showing off mine to maybe spark some thoughts and help you think about such things.

So… let’s get started.

All of this always starts with an idea.  Maybe you’re the type who writes them down, maybe you keep it in your head for a while.  I’m 50-50 on it.  If an idea really sings in my head right at the start, in any sort of way, I always write it down.  But some I mull over for a while.  I let them ferment in my brain, see if they grow a little or get a better shape.

Eventually all these notes come together in some form of rough outline.  I think we all do some kind of outline.  Even the most random of road trips starts with, at the bare minimum, “let’s head west.”  Maybe it’s just a page or two of those rough notes.  Maybe it’s an extensive beat sheet.  It might be a huge stack of color-coded index cards.  This stage is really going to come down to “whatever works for you.”  The outline I just finished up for this project is twelve pages, with another two page document about the characters, but that’s just me.

And now, I guess, we’re ready to “start” writing.

My first drafts are big, messy things.  I write a lot, but I also skip a lot of things.  The only goal with a first draft is to get it done.  Nothing else matters.  Not punctuation, not spelling, not finding the exact right word or crafting the perfect cool line to end that chapter on.  These things’ll matter eventually, but right now… I just want to finish this draft.

NaNoWriMo is really all about this.  It’s pushing yourself to just focus on finishing a first draft, rather than slowing down to worry about individual scenes and chapters.  If you’re especially determined (or masochistic) you could try the 3 Day Novel contest.  My partner’s done it a few times now and… well, I just try to keep her supplied with coffee and stay out of her way.

Once I’ve got this done, I dive into my second draft.  This is me in clean-up mode.  All the stuff I skipped gets filled in.  Sentences I never finished, incomplete descriptions, the places where I had to look up a certain place or name and for now it’s just ######### or [ADD BIG FIGHT HERE] or [MAKE THIS NOT SUCK SO MUCH!!!]

I also take a good look at the things I skipped.  Why didn’t I write it earlier?  Could I not come up with anything to go between these two elements?  Was I just not interested in writing that bit? If I’m not interested in writing it, people probably aren’t going to be interested in reading it.  This might tighten things up right here.

For me. the goal with this draft is to end up with a solid, readable manuscript.  Someone should be able to go to page one to page 500 and never hit any weird gaps or confusing typos or anything else that immediately kills the flow.

Third draft is editing.  I go through the whole manuscript line by line.  I check all my spelling.  I look for repetition and redundancy.  I cut a lot of excess words here.  Thousands of words, usually.  This involves a bunch of passes, the last one to make sure all this random cutting and tweaking hasn’t created any new hiccups.

When I’m all done with this—which can take a week or so—I try to get it in front of a few people I trust.  My partner.  Old friends who’ve ended up in the storytelling line of work.  People who’ve heard me talk about it and people who don’t know a thing about it.  The important thing is they’re all going to give me honest thoughts and opinions.  Which may sting sometimes, but will be much more useful.

Once I have all these notes from folks, I start my fourth draft.  Now I’m going through all these copies one line at a time, taking notes of my own and implementing changes where they’re needed.  How many people liked this bit?  How many didn’t like that one?  Whoops, guess I missed a comma there.  Now, having been away from this for a month or so while other folks were reading it, that line’s really dumb, isn’t it? Did I actually think that was deep and clever at some point?

This takes at least a week. Often more.  I’m simultaneously reading three or four copies of the book line by line, getting everyone’s thoughts and takes on it.  Weighing their thoughts against my own and each others.  Sometimes it goes fast, other times… it’s really slow.

And this eventually, finally brings us to the fifth draft.  This is me going through the whole thing again to make sure those fourth draft edits didn’t leave anything hanging or tweak a key point.  Just a nice, slow read-through.

One thing I like to do at this point is switch the whole thing into another font.  If I’ve been writing in , I switch it all over to Courier New.  If you’ve been doing that Comic Sans thing, hey, you needed to switch anyway.  When I do this, it makes everything sit differently on the page.  The words look different.  And suddenly passages I’ve been glossing over (after going through this a dozen times) are fresh and new.

And at this point… I wrap it up.  I think it’s important to just say “done” and move on to new projects, or else you can get stuck in an endless trap of rewriting again and again.  After all these rewrites and edits, there’s not much else I can do.

So that’s my process, beginning to end, in a nutshell.

Hey, what do you want?  I just started a new book.  I’ve got work to do.

Speaking of which… next time, I’d like to talk to you a bit about that guy across the street who just said the weirdest thing to me.  See him right over… where did he go?

Until then… go write.

            Wow, November’s almost over.  Where’s this month gone?  Hell, where’s this year gone?  Can you believe Black Panther only came out a little over eight months ago?  Seriously.

            Anyway…

            The end of November also means we’re closing in on the end of NaNoWriMo.  About, what, a day and a half left?  Maybe a little less, depending on when you read this?  I hope it’s going well for you.  I’m sure you kicked ass, but I hope you realize that.  Whatever you got done this month is an achievement.  So many people talk about writing, but you went out and did it.

            How much did you get done?  Thirty thousand words?  Forty five?  Sixty?  Are you one of those inhuman folks who closed in on ninety thousand words (an average of 3000 words a day—I know lots of pros who’d envy that kind of stamina).

            Which brings me to one of the best things you’ll get out of this.

            Let’s say you ended up with 45,000 words.  An average of 1500 a day.  Not a novel, but it’s halfway there, easy.  It’s a good solid novella as is, and there are some markets opening up for that sort of thing.

            But here’s the thing…

            If I did this once, I can do it again.  Those 45,000 words are inarguable proof that I’ve got the ability to produce words at a good rate.  At a professional rate!  Which means I could do it again in December and boom look at that! A ninety thousand word manuscript, if I keep going on the same thing.  That’s a novel.  Any publisher on Earth would call that a novel.

            Are they 90,000 perfect words?  Ehhhh… probably not.  But it’s a very solid first draft.  And if you produced a first draft, it means you’ve got it in you to do a second and third draft.  You can’t deny it.  The proof is right there.

            Even better—you can do it again!  Maybe in March and April.  Keep up that same rate and there’s another 90,000 word first draft.  Hell, maybe next time you’ll be just a little faster.  Now that new manuscript’s 100,000 words long.  One.  Hundred.  Thousand.  Words. 

            And we both know you can do it, because you just did it now during NaNoWriMo.  And you can do it again.  And again.  And again..

            A bunch of times here I’ve mentioned my early attempts at writing novels.  The Werewolf Detective of Newbury Street.  The Trinity.  Even the wonderfully goofy, very early-oeuvre masterpiece Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth.  One thing they had in common was that I didn’t finish any of them.

            Another thing they had in common is that nobody bought them.  Nobody was really interested in them.  Because they were incomplete.  I didn’t have the stamina—or the confidence—to finish them.

            The Suffering Map is the first thing I finished.  It’s the first thing I wrote that made it to second and third and fourth drafts.  It’s also—no coincidence—the first thing of mine that got any interest from agents and editors.

            Did they buy it?  No, of course not.  It’s still awful.  I mean, let’s be honest–it was my first finished book.  There was so much clumsiness in it, on so many levels.

            But I finished it.  So I knew I could finish another one.  A better one.

            And I did.  I wrote my next book in almost a third the time.  Or a tenth, depending on how you want to look at things.  And that book sold.

            Being able to produce words is a huge accomplishment.  Having the discipline to keep doing it is fantastic.  And if you’ve managed to do ninety, fifty, or even just ten thousand words this month, you’ve proven you can do this on a regular basis.

            So, congratulations.  You just won NaNoWriMo in one of the most important ways you can.

            Next time, I thought I’d bounce a couple character ideas off you.

            Until then… go write!

            Hey!  It’s November.  Like, just barely scraping into November.  By hours.  You’ve probably still got the taste of chocolate in your mouth, don’t you?

            Yes you do.  Don’t lie.

            Anyway, if you’re even a semi-regular reader of this site, you’ve probably heard of a certain November writing event that starts… well, probably right about now, depending what time zone you’re in.  Some of you may have been writing for the past hour or two, fueled by miniature Heath bars and Reese’s cups.  Power to you for starting right at midnight.

            On the off chance this is all new to you, I’m talking about NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month.  You sit yourself down at the keyboard, scoop up your legal pad, jack in to your hexadecimal cerebral port, and try to get an entire novel done—start to finish—in just thirty days.

            And when you finish, you get…

            Well, bragging rights, basically.  Pride.  A feeling of accomplishment.

            Sounds a bit intimidating, yes?

            It sure as hell is. 

            Don’t get me wrong.  It can be fun, recharge your batteries, stoke the fires, and lots of other clever aphorisms.  But the simple truth is, it’s a huge, exhausting undertaking.  I do this full time, for a living, and the idea of writing an entire book in thirty days makes me feel a bit overwhelmed just thinking about it.

            So here’s four quick thing to keep in mind so you don’t get as intimidated or overwhelmed.

            1) Don’t be Hard on Yourself—this is supposed to be fun.  You’re on a deadline, yes, but it’s a self-imposed deadline with no consequences if it’s missed.  Seriously, relax.  Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t make your daily or weekly word count.  That’s the kind of thing that makes you feel bad about yourself and about your ability as a writer.  It doesn’t help anything, it just makes you enjoy the act of  writing less.

            Push yourself, but don’t pressure yourself.  The big goal here is to improve, so any and every improvement counts.  Have fun and enjoy all the little victories this month.  This is a time when coming in second or third is still a great achievement.

            2) Pace Yourself—nobody wins a marathon by sprinting the entire way.  Trying to fill every single waking moment with writing is going to burn you out quick.  And it’ll show in your work.

            Try to be aware of diminishing returns.  A lot of times when I’m on a deadline, I’ll work late into the night.  Sometimes it goes great, but sometimes… I start to slow down.  My productivity drops.  And eventually it hits a point where I would’ve been better off going to bed two hours ago because I would’ve gotten just as much done in half an hour on a good night’s sleep.

            It’s so friggin’ simplistic, but think of the Tortoise and the Hare. Slow and steady gets the worm and the second mouse gets the cheese.  Something like that.  You get the idea.

            3) Rest and recharge—if the last two pieces of advice got together and had an advice baby, it would be this.  Don’t be scared to step away, just for a little while.  Have a nice meal and maybe a drink.  Go for a walk.  Take a nap.  Take a shower.  No, seriously, take a shower.  You should probably do that before going out—you’ve been sitting there for days typing and you’ve got writer stink on you.  Play a game.  Call a friend.  Curl up with somebody on the couch and watch an episode of Legends of Tomorrow or The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or something.

            Point is, don’t feel bad about stepping away from the computer for an hour.  You’re trying to get a lot done, yeah, but with that in mind you don’t want to overwork the machine to the point it overheats and seizes up.  Give it time to cool down and refuel.  I’m not saying take a day or three off in the middle of this, but don’t be scared to get up, stretch, and walk away from your computer for an hour.  In the end, it’ll run smoother and faster overall.

            4) This Won’t Sell—no, seriously.  It’s won’t.  Kick that idea right out of your mind and stop worrying about it altogether.  It’s just not going to happen.  You’re worrying about your wedding venue and playlist when you’re not even dating anybody right now.

            The name NaNoWriMo is kinda deceptive, because you’re not really writing a novel this month.  You’re writing the firstdraft of a novel.  Maybe even just the first draft of a novella.  And there’s a huge difference between a first draft and a polished, completed manuscript.

            Most importantly… nobody’s going to buy a first draft.  No agent’s going to look at it.  No film studio will pre-emptively buy the rights after a prolonged bidding war.

            This draft is for you.  It’s to do whatever you want with.  Don’t spend a second second-guessing what those other people will want.  They’re never going to see this.  They may see the third or fourth draft—and be interested in it—but what you’re doing right now?  This is just a mess of cake batter.  It’s barely halfway through the process.

            So forget them.  Right now, just crank up the music and let your imagination run wild.  Do whatever you want.  Tell your story.  Drop all inhibitions and expectations and just write.

            Keep these things in mind over the next couple days.  Hopefully they’ll make things a little easier for you. Which’ll make the writing a little more enjoyable.

            Next time…

            Well, it’s been a while, so I figured we could talk about characters.  Or, to be more exact, who deserves to be a character in my story.

            Until then… go write.

            Wanted to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about a way that writing and publishing overlap.  It’s not my usual sort of thing but I figured… ehhh, it’s been a while since I talked about this.
            There’s a lot of pressure to be as fast as possible with writing these days.  More than a few would-be gurus—and even some small publishers—push  a business modelof quantity over quality.  Why take the time on one book if I can rush through half a dozen or so and get the same result?  Selling a hundred copies of ten books is the same as selling a thousand copies of one, right?

            On top of that, the ease of electronic distribution has pushed the idea that moving slow is clunky and antiquated.  Any person or publisher that moves at such a pace gets compared to… well, dinosaurs.  

            This need for speed creates an awful sense that time’s being wasted if I write something that doesn’t sell.  That spending time on editing or revisions is wrong.  And with the raw amount of stuff being e-published, I think all of us have a lurking fear that if we don’t get our idea out there now, someone else is going to beat us to it and have it out there tomorrow.

            I know there are folks (some of whom I know and like a lot) who advocate publishing everything.  Trunk novel?  Throw that up on Amazon.  First draft no agent or editor would accept?  Kindle format for a buck-ninety-nine.  Get it out there because somebody might love it, and at the worst you make fifteen or twenty bucks off it rather than nothing.  You’d pick up twenty bucks if you found it laying in the street, right?

            And I get that this is a really appealing idea.  We want to get paid.  We should get paid.  I’m a big fan of artists (of all types) getting compensated for their work.

            But…

            We also need to acknowledge there’s a learning curve. 

            It shouldn’t be too much of a shock that the first thing I put down isn’t going to be that great.  Or the second thing.  Maybe even the third. 

            Sure, there’s always a chance that my first book is pure gold on the first pass.  Scientifically speaking, there’s some chance almost anything could happen.  I mean, I wouldn’t put money on any of those things but, hey… there’s a chance.

            Because of this—he said, bracing for angry comments—I often find myself really doubtful when people say they wrote a book in four or five weeks.  I completely believe a draft can be written in that amount of time.  I wrote the first draft of 14 in about six weeks, and that was around 150,000 words.  But a finished book manuscript?  Something ready to hand off to an editor?  Or put up for sale?

            I just don’t buy it.  Sorry.

            Writing takes time.  It can take a lot of time.  It takes time to learn how to do it right and then it takes time to do it right.  I can’t expect the first thing I write to compare to something written by someone with years of experience.  I can’t rush through one edit draft in a day and expect to get the same results as someone who spends weeks going over their whole manuscript line by line. 

            Simple truth is, the majority of us aren’t ever going to put out material that doesn’t need work.  Not later in our careers.  Definitely not at the start of our careers.

            Yeah, ourcareers.  This holds for me, too. I wrote a lot of stuff that never got published and probably never will.  Why?  Because it’s bad!  It’s that first attempt at making chocolate chip waffles or trying to grill Ahi tuna.  It may be edible—barely—but no one should be asked to pay for it.

            I’ve mentioned The Suffering Map here a few times.  Okay, a bunch of times.  Consider this… when you pare away all the time where I worked on other projects, it’s probably fair to say I spent two, maybe two and a half years on that book.  My first 100% completed novel.

            Any d’you know what I’ve done with it?

            Nothing.

            Oh, sure, I submitted it a lot at the time.  It got some interest.  But everyone passed on it, and (lucky for me) most of them offered a few suggestions of where it needed work.  And they were right.  It did need work.  It had some real problems, and I’m glad it’s not out there hanging on my career like some kind of literary albatross on a cursed mariner or something like that.

            Or consider the book I just turned in.  That took seven months, start to finish. And that’s considering I’d plotted out a good chunk of it years ago  It went through four drafts before I even turned it in to my editor, because there were lots of things that needed tweaks and adjustments to make the book as good as it could be.  Believable characters.  Sharp dialogue.  Solid pacing. 

            And that’s okay.  Really.  The important thing is for me to write something good.  Churning out 8000 words every day or 400 pages for NaNoWriMo is an achievement, yeah, absolutely.  But in the end it’s always better for me to have 1000 good words or 100 polished pages.

            Now, going slow isn’t an ironclad rule.  Sometimes everything just lines up and my third or fourth draft only takes a few days.  No two projects are the same and no two writers are the same. 

            But if every draft of every project I work on goes fast… maybe I should take an effort to slow down for a while and see how it affects my writing.

            Because the goal for all of us is to be great.  To write the best thing we can.  Not to rush toward “okay” and stop when we get there. 

            Even if it makes us fifteen or twenty bucks.

            Next time I’d like to come clean about a couple more things.

            Until then, go write.