Tag Archives: fast draft

Writing Life

Is writing fast a valid career plan for you?

4 Comments

Every year around NaNoWriMo, the same articles start springing up: how to write faster. Why I’m not doing Nano. Why I am doing Nano. Nano is anathema to real writers. Writing fast can only produce schlock. Writing fast is not a valid career plan.

I disagree. But I’m biased. Of my last five novels, four were written in a month or less (a piece), some during NaNoWriMo, some not. So far I’ve published two of those novels—one fast one, and the slowest novel I’ve ever written. Both were finalists for an award.

There is the general idea out there that something done fast is shoddy, as if someone who writes a manuscript quickly is required to throw it up on Amazon the next week. But that just isn’t the case.

I see no reason at all why anyone can claim that writing fast isn’t a valid career plan. (There are authors out there who write fast, publish quickly, and rake in the dough. Sounds like a career plan to me, though it isn’t quite mine.)

But writing fast isn’t for everyone. How do you know if writing fast is a good idea for you? Here are five factors to consider.

107/365 [Flying Fingers]

This ain’t your first rodeo

Writing a first novel this quickly is probably not a great idea. (Okay, I did write my first “novel” in about four weeks, but it ended up being pretty short. I also wrote it longhand. You don’t have to be like me.) It takes practice to develop the necessary storytelling skills and basic writing skills to come out of a fast draft with something workable, or even the beginnings of something workable.

Once you’ve established your writing skills and storytelling skills, you can tap into those strengths to help you write faster and come out with something that’s just as coherent as most “slow” first drafts.

You love the immersive experience of writing

I love getting lost in my own story. When I’m drafting, I live and breathe my characters’ lives. I imagine new scenes all the time. I practice dialogue. I research, I design, I plot.

If you live and breathe your stories while drafting, writing faster and writing more makes that experience even more immersive. You’re really living your characters’ story, perhaps almost in real time.

Plus, once you’ve made it through those few weeks, you can get the house clean and caught up on laundry (ha!).

You can make connections

One of the big advantages of writing a book in two or three weeks is that you’ve lived all the events in your recent memory. You might not be able to hold every detail in your short term memory, but your subconscious sometimes hangs on to important symbols, characters, events and story threads that you might forget otherwise, and have to come and weave in later. If you’re good at making these kinds of connections, writing fast could make you even better.

You can shut up the inner editor

You can’t write quickly if you’re rewriting every sentence five times. (If you type and think fast, you might be able to get away with rewriting the occasional sentence 2-3 times. Not that I’ve done that. . . .) But no matter how fast or slow you write, during drafting you should usually turn off the inner editor—not the “subject-verb agreement” portion of your brain, but the nagging self-doubts that can shut down your creativity.

You’re willing to put in the time to edit AFTER drafting

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, but I’m going to go to the dark side for a minute: ALL FIRST DRAFTS NEED EDITING. Whether you labored over your first draft for three years or three weeks, there are things you’ll have to go back and fix. (In fact, I’d argue that if it’s been three years since you began your novel, you might not even remember some pretty important pieces, and you might need some serious rewriting.) Most of my fast books have required medium-to-major rewrites. All of my slow books have required medium-to-major rewrites.

In my experience, the quality of a manuscript isn’t necessarily correlated with the speed at which it was written. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes’s premiere), Alexandre Dumas (The Knight of the Red House), Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Stephen King (The Running Man), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Fyodor Dostoyevskiy (The Gambler—while also writing ) or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). These books, many of them bestsellers and/or classics, were written in anywhere from 66 hours to 4 weeks.

Maybe writing fast will work for you; maybe it won’t. But it’s definitely a viable career plan, and I enjoy writing that way (most of the time), so I see no reason to stop, NaNo or no.

What do you think? Do you write fast? Have you ever tried it?

Photo by The Hamster Factor

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Writing Life, Works

Lucky! Number! Seven!

2 Comments
This entry is part 8 of 13 in the series All my novels

After a maaajor crash and burn novel, I needed to quit writing, perhaps forever. And then fall (the season) came, and with it, NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month.

To this point, I’d never done a full NaNo. I made a sad attempt in 2006, but stalled out in the first chapter. In 2010, the year before this, I did a “Half-No” where I added 25,000 words to my ill-fated sixth novel. I’d written a book pretty quickly before: 90,000 words in 8 or 9 weeks, spanning over November (2008), but I started in October (five years ago today, in fact!), so it couldn’t count as official even if my word count was enough.

I like to challenge myself, so doing NaNo wasn’t enough. I heard of Candace Havens’s “Fast Draft” method, where you write your first draft in two weeks. I finally found the right characters to use for an idea that had been bouncing around in my brain for over a year, sketched out a plot, threw that away, took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and dove in.

The book stats

Title: Bloodstone
Genre: Uhh . . . action/adventure romance, I guess? It’s a lot like National Treasure.
Inspiration: Umm . . . I think it was partially inspired by a History Channel pseudoscientific special on Vikings in the Americas. Also, some notes on a passage of scripture.
Writing dates: 1 November 2011 – 14 November 2011
Length: Just over 78,000 in the first draft; sitting at 85,000 right now.
Elevator pitch (or a little bit longer than that): Professor Cora Warren has an archaeological dig to conduct; her student Jack has his own agenda: an unbelievable archaeological theory. But it’s not his theory that challenges Cora’s faith the most—until they unearth an artifact that will drag them through a thousand years of incredible history, give them both a reason to believe, and bring them face-to-face with a secret society hellbent on keeping the treasure and the glory for themselves.

Dude. I love this book.

107/365 [Flying Fingers]

What I learned from this book

First and foremost: as soon as I got up on November 1, I dove into this book. AND WRITING WAS FUN AGAIN! It had been two years since I’d written something that I loved and enjoyed, and had it flow. I’d forgotten the joy of drafting, and how much my soul needed that creative energy. I also got to revisit one of my favorite conflicts in romance: forbidden love!

To date, this is the longest I’ve gone from initial idea to actual writing. In fact, I was sure I’d given up on that idea, that it didn’t have the spark or passion I’d need to sustain a novel. The characters I’d initially sketched out for the idea just didn’t connect with me: the “hero” had such an obvious agenda he came off as flat before I ever even gave the guy a name. Having let the ideas percolate so much—and building on something that has as much background as Vikings in America—gave me a lot of fuel to write very fast!

And speaking of writing fast, I wrote real fast. I wasn’t sure if I could really do the Fast Draft method, especially since I don’t write on Sundays, but sure enough, I hit “The End” on November 14, averaging 6500 words a day. This was majorly helped by my first ever writing retreat, where I wrote . . . darn, my records are on my old laptop still. But it was many words. Plus, I got to be there to receive the acceptance letter for what was to be my first published novel (third manuscript), and to get to share that news with friends in person was very cool. (There may have been a request for a cartwheel. I may have fulfilled that request.)

Writing fast also had some other advantages. I thought I’d end up with a super sloppy first draft, and yes, in some ways I did. However, having the entire novel in my head helped me to weave together threads that I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, instead of dropping them and fixing it in revision. It really felt like weaving a novel, like all the craft and structure mechanics I’d spent the last four years beating into my head were really coming together. It was far from perfect—and I think it’s going to have to undergo a second round of revisions still—but it was surprisingly good.

COVEROne of the craft and structure mechanics that really came together for me during this time was the concept of the character arc, and most especially how I needed to use that arc at the climax. This was a major craft breakthrough for me, and I’m excited to share it with you in Character Arcs, coming next week! (You can add it to your Goodreads now. Just sayin’.)

This novel was also the first time I got to experiment with different timelines, something I love to read. I watched National Treasure to analyze the structure of the genre and I was struck that the beginning of the movie is a flashback (uh, sort of?) depicting part of the history of the secret/legend they’re pursuing. I ended up using three storylines throughout: one in Puritan times (the first time the stone is unearthed), one in the mid-nineteenth century (forming the secret society), and one modern (finding stone, coming up against secret society, romance, character arcs and more). Plus a scene in Viking times (remembering the creation of one of the clues).

Man. I love this book. I’m going to love it so much more when it’s shiny and perfect. Sigh.

Tell me about one of your favorite manuscripts!

Photo credit: The Hamster Factor via Flickr & CC

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Writing Life

Swinging for the fences (subplots to resume next week!)

1 Comment

This week, I decided to try something a little crazy. My husband was going to be out of town Monday and Tuesday, and my kids go to bed early, so I’d have my evenings to myself. What’s my favorite thing to do when that happens? Write with reckless abandon, of course.

And so I decided to go full force on the reckless abandon part. I decided to challenge myself: could I write a novella in two days? I’ve written novels in two weeks, but this would be pushing it—averaging 9,000 words a day, nearly double my usual “Fast Draft” method.

The short answer: no. When my husband got home late last night, I called it quits to spend time with him. But when I finished last night, I had 16,000 shiny new words. From two days of work.

I gotta do this every week!

fast fingers

The biggest lesson I saw from this was the importance of goal setting. On Monday, I set a goal of 8000 words (I had to take time for grocery shopping and finishing up book blast things). I stayed up way too late, but I met that goal while running a household with four little kids by myself. (I even did my own dishes!)

Tuesday, I had to swing for the fences. I set a goal of 10,000 words. Ten. Thousand. By midnight, I had written 8000 words.

I didn’t meet my goal—I fell short by about 2000 words. But, I figured, after two days of a jabillion words, I could knock that out in the morning, right?

Uh yeah. It took until 10 PM to get those last words, and not because the story was tough or I didn’t know what came next. I knew exactly what was supposed to happen. But apparently writing abhors a vacuum, and having so little pressure on myself to get the words . . . I didn’t.

So to borrow the cliché, swing for the fences. You might not write 10,000 words in a day—but you’ll geta heck of a lot farther than if you’re only aiming for first base.

(And yes, this is why there’s no post on subplots today. Next time!)

What do you think? How do your goals affect your outcome?

Photo by Katie Krueger

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!