Some Useful Concepts, Including My New Favorite - Powerdays

Here are a number of ideas that I find useful in motivating myself, on the days when that fifteen minutes that I managed to put in feels insignificant. or the days that I do no writing at all. These days breed a malaise that can easily turn into a full blown rut, if allowed.

So, antidotes -

The thousand hours of crap, or the million words, take your pick. This is the amount of time and/or words written necessary to start producing good work. Some people less, some more, all depending on talent, previous experience, luck, which moon was in retrograde on the third month of your eleventh Valentine's day, and so on.

Everyone wants to get through this period as fast as possible, of course. Nothing wrong with that. Where such a monolithic seeming downer is actually useful is this - at least it's a finite amount. It isn't a dunno, a maybe this much, maybe not, a whenever. Write a million words, you'll be good. All you gotta do is make it.

Chipping away is important. 250 words is a page is .04 percent of the way there. Every little bit adds up.

Quality is important, sure. And you will get more quality as you continue writing. If your work is terrible, 100,000 words from now it may be passable, 500,000 it may not be half-bad. You will improve your quality through quantity. Writers learn by writing.

Power days. My new favorite concept, what I'm using on my day off short story challenge. Basically, whatever your daily word goal, dedicate one day a week, or every two, or a month, or whatever. But pick a schedule, and bust your ass that day. Balls to the wall. As many words as you can get out.

I id this two weeks ago, and hit my highest wordcount ever, 2,400. Last week, it was 3,300. Not a big deal for a full-time writer, sure. But for me, and my puny 1,250 daily goal that I miss only slightly less often that I make, this was huge.


Even more importantly, I'm learning a new skill, the skill of taking bigger bites. 2 or 3,000 word days chew up that 1 million a lot faster than 250 word days.

I'm also finding that I get the second thousand done faster than the first, and so on. Momentum. I'm building up creative inertia. The residual effect of this makes it easier to get through my slumpy days.

And on the days I get nothing done at all? Hey, I probably finished a short story in one sitting recently, I deserve a day off. Right?

Day Off Story Challenge - Round Two

The challenge - write one complete short story on my day of, once per week, start to finish. Using pre-thought ideas is okay, but not stories that already have more than a cursory word count.

The short of today's post - I was victorious, for the second time in a row. I was off on Wednesday, July 13, and I wrote for approximately six hours. I completed a 3,400 word SF story, entitled "The Day the AI Died". Go me!

The intention of this challenge was to write shorter, easier stories. I seem to have gotten away from this today, even more so than last week, when I banged out a 2,300 word story. My original goal for this challenge was between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

Both stories have been fairly straight-forward, as expected. My
alpha reader felt that the the last story was good, but the ending was too predictable. I have a sneaking feeling this one will have the same reception. Really original fiction may require more processing time than I am giving these.

On the other hand, the first few stories I ever wrote took far longer than these, and are much less interesting too me. So perhaps letting that startling plot twist happen, without spending days or weeks thinking of it, is a learned skill as well.

This story had a slight bit more background than the last one, a text file totalling about 200 words or so. It was also an idea I recorded on a voice recorder while working. It also bore little resemblance to the original concept.

This is not surprising, as I write mostly by discovery, and  none of my stories ever end up where I think they will. I rarely even start with an idea for the ending.

One really exciting fact is that this story is equivalent to about three days worth of daily writing goal word count, and will require very little editing. In practical terms, this is a week's output for me, done in a day. That creative momentum is a really powerful thing.

Day Off Challenge, Week One - Complete!

I am happy to announce that week one of my day off story challenge is now completed. I wrote 2,300 words in one sitting thursday morning (with breaks, of course.) It took me almost 4 hours, from not long after I got up to just after noon.

Close to 600 words an hour is a pretty good clip for me. I vary between 500 and about 750, depending. The more thinking, the less words written, is the basic equation. This is the first full story I've ever finished in one go, and I'm quite proud of myself.

I had the idea already, just a basic seed I recorded the day before. I developed it as I wrote, and the only thing that stayed consistent was the setting, and the genre. I went into it with the idea that I might try to make more of a heroic story, but I fell back on tragedy.

The story does a fair amount of jumping around in viewpoints, for being so short. I feel good about the necessity of the switches though.

It's also modern day, and I had to do a bit of research (online) as I wrote. I kept the questionable details to a minimum and tried to concentrate on the story. There may very well be some stuff that knowledgeable (or even not so knowledgeable) folk will laugh at. I did the best I could, and made up what I needed to to make the story work.

The above is one reason I stay away from hard SF in general, or anything that I feel requires heavy research. At least in fields I'm not already well informed about. Write what you know, right?

I chose from four different ideas before I started writing, all ones I had recorded and transcribed of the last few months. I will likely do all three remaining ideas over the next few challenge slots, since they all are good for shorter stories.

I haven't decided yet what to do with this story. It is (in my rather biased opinion) worth sending out to paying markets, so I am a hesitant to use up first serial rights by putting it online. If I had more stories written, or more readers, I probably would, though.

As it is, this story is my eleventh completed one, and represents a ten percent addition to my (potentially) saleable output. So I am going to think on it for a bit.

The biggest lesson here, for me - It is entirely possible to develop a bare idea into a complete quality story in not just one day, but one sitting. And it's also a lot of fun :)

Challenges

I got the idea to start using challenges to motivate myself form Dean Wesley Smith (among many other great ideas.) I am sure the idea doesn't originate with him either, but he makes great use of it.

Basically, the idea is that you come up with something that you think you can do, but that is at the limits of your abilities, and set a repetitious goal related to the concept as a challenge. Example - for competitive eating - fifteen hotdogs at a sitting, every day. This is a slightly silly (and possible completely wronhgeaded, by virtue of being to easy or too hard) example, but it shows the concept.

If you repeat a difficult task, it gets easier. Soon hard becomes bearable, becomes cake. And the achievements, small on day one, pile up quickly.

As a writer, my biggest self imposed challenge is writing 1,250 words daily. This is about two or three hours worth of work for me, but sometimes only takes me one hour, especially at the beginnings of stories. I find word count much more concrete and measurable than pages or time spent, and thus more motivating.

The magic here is that a week of 1,250 days is easily a short story, maybe two. Or a few chapters of a novel. A few months make a collection, a short novel, or half a doorstop. And so on. It all adds up.

I have two new challenges I am imposing on myself. One, My daily blog post challenge, you are reading right now. I am on my fourth consecutive day, I believe. Whee!

The other  is my day-off story challenge. I intend to complete, from scratch, one new short story every day I have off (once a week.) I will use existing ideas, or new ones, but nothing I have already been working on.

I am giving myself some wiggle room - editing later is okay, so long as the story is done in one day. I don't expect epic length opuses (opi?) here, flash fiction to a few thousand words is fine. I am also still counting these stories as my daily word goal, so no double pressure.

Can I do it? I don't know. Will I succeed every week? Probably not. But I bet I learn a whole heck of a lot about tight storytelling, and how to get my creative process on a fast track.

I haven't decided what to do with these stories, I may put them up here for free, for a short time at least, or I may shop the ones that I feel or saleable around. Haven't got that far yet. I am wanting to do podcasts, so maybe some of these will be useable for that purpose, after Tes-Nin is done.

All depends on what I write and how the challenge goes, really. Wish me luck.