New Writing Methods

As mentioned in the update on Wednesday, I have a few more things to tell you about my writing process. After my mother died in April last year, my writing has severely suffered and I only wrote few things during that time. For someone like me who is publishing four times a year, that did create a problem, as you might imagine.

It wasn’t so much the death of my mother which changed things for me (although I suspect it’s one reason why I have written “Alex Dorsey”), but what happened afterwards. I moved to a new flat further up in the same house, so my dad could take my old one on the ground floor. My dad visits me daily for tea - which happens to cut into the time frame when I was writing a lot before, so that changed the rhythm of my day severely. Don’t get me wrong, I love having my dad around - I just needed to figure out how to work around his visits.

I’ve been using a bullet-journal for several years already (since September 2014, as my very first one tells me), but I severely changed the way I keep it for November and now, one month in, I think the changes I made are good. I’ve started several trackers, among them both personal ones I’m not discussing here and ones for my work - more specifically a word tracker and a chapter tracker for months of editing and revising (November had one, December doesn’t, because I don’t publish this month). Like this, I have a nice, visual way of tracking my process during the month, in addition to my more precise notes for every day (I already put down my words per day per project from the beginning of my journaling). I just made things a little more visual overall and added long-term goals and suchlike, which is nice.

The bullet-journal is only one part, though. The new trackers are an additional motivation for me, which is good, but they can only do so much. Two more changes have had more impact on how I write now.

The first of those changes is that I, despite being a discovery writer, have started to plot more before I write. It’s not a detailed outline with a lot of notes and suchlike. I put down basic information on my main characters, such as looks, age, skills, and relationships. I write down shot descriptions (a couple of sentences) with what I expect to happen in a chapter, so I get the whole plot outline and see where the story is going. For me, it was quite difficult to work off such templates before, but that has changed to a degree. Having the time to sit down with One-Note (still my go-to for plotting, even though I do also have Campfire which isn’t bad) and to figure out what is happening when is giving me the time to percolate the stories before I start writing them, so I hope to outwit writing blocks to a degree.

Knowing what happens in a chapter doesn’t mean I know what the chapter is going to be like. I know that some stuff has to be happening to drive the plot, but how things get to that and what happens around those is a different matter. I knew before that Gabrielle was going to have to climb out of a window to escape from the police, but what exactly would happen on her escape was not in the notes, that was made up for the most part as I wrote the scene.

The principle already worked for both “The Mind-Control Beam” (the first story about the Eye) and for all three novellas which make up “The Cases of Benjamin Farrens”. Given I have been meaning to finish Benjamin’s story for over 15 years already, you might imagine how it felt to write the last word and close the file - and in a little over two weeks, no less.

Which brings me to the other change I’ve made which helps a lot with the writing: the pomodoro method. I’ve heard about this method of keeping focused before, but I never really connected it to my writing because it’s one thing to do regular work and another to be creative. Creative process is much harder to streamline than a regular bit of work. I’ll also be honest with you: my writing was pretty chaotic, so I really didn’t see how the regular rhythm of the pomodoro method would help with that.

That was before I plotted more. Just out of fun I used the pomodoro method (downloaded a free app for it) while I was writing, not expecting much. I managed a chapter of 2,500 words in less than one and a half hours. My regular output was usually one chapter per day before, two chapters every now and then, three on a very, very good day. The method was a game-changer for me.

Without the plotting, it wouldn’t work, because I wouldn’t know what to write in the 25 minutes of a pomodoro work part (the other part is a 5-minute break, every four pomodoro cycles, you take 15 instead of 5 minutes). I would be sitting in front of the computer, get annoyed and frustrated, and just stop the clock. With the plotting, being able to read what should happen in a chapter and then get to it, I can write a chapter in an hour to an hour and a half. I can write one chapter before and one to two chapters after my dad has been around for tea. I can consider two chapters my regular workload for the day and expand it to three on a good day. That helps a lot, as you might imagine.

It’s not as if I’ve never written that much before - I wrote the first two novels for the Knight Agency series in one and a half months, well over forty chapters of about 3,000 words each. It’s just that I was afraid I would never reach that output again and that I might not be able to hold up my ‘four books a year’ publishing schedule. Now I know I will be able to and I might very well manage to build up a bit of a reserve for the next changes in my regular life which might keep me from writing for a bit.

I will not deny that expanding my cast of main characters might also have helped. I have yet to plot the two novels I was working on before the changes (“Ignition Rites” and “Grey Eminence”) and which I was stuck in, because they weren’t done far enough in my mind. I will definitely get back to them. Yet, restructuring my bullet-journal, plotting my stories as far as I can without stopping the creative process, and picking up the pomodoro method for both writing and revising (I got ahead really well with it in November, so I’m keeping that going as well) are definitely a big part of how I got going again.

If you feel like your writing doesn’t work as well as it should, perhaps you will need to reorganize yourself as well. Take heart, it can be done and it can help a lot. We all change and sometimes that means changing the ways we do something as well.