On Writing

 I've never shared much of my writing process before, mostly because when the writing is going well, I'm busy, and when it isn't... well, that doesn't make for a good story. Writing fiction is a form of exercise and you have to do it regularly; build up your brain to being ABLE to write more. When I wrote most of 1272 BC, which is the working title of that first draft I finished in February, I was writing a minimum of 500 words per day. And it was TOUGH. I slogged for hours over those 500 words. Now my minimum goal is 1500 words per day, but on a really good day it looks a lot more like 2000. (Which incidentally is how much Stephen King writes per day.) It is my long term goal to make 2000 be my minimum benchmark.

The tricky part (other than the hurdle of sitting down to write at all) comes if you miss a day, or a weekend, and you lose your momentum and then life is busy and a week or two goes by without a proper day of fiction writing. It happens, and it takes a lot to get back into it. You have to cut yourself slack, go back to celebrating small victories like 100 words, and then push yourself to write line by line, conversation by conversation, scene by scene. I will make goals like "I need to get her out of this room and into the next before I stop for the night," which is gruelling and the extremely unglamorous part of being a writer. When you write slowly the story drags horrifically. It's boring. Imagine if you were reading that slowly. One paragraph a day. And the characters had been in the middle of the same conversation for WEEKS. You would never want to pick that book up again. That's what writing is like sometimes.

And then there are the 2800 word days when the characters write their own lines and they pour out of my fingers onto the page like they're alive. I take a break to get a drink, but the characters keep talking and when I come back to the page I have to catch up, my fingers tripping over each other, trying to get the words down before they fade away. Those are the days it's wonderful to be a writer.

Of course, many days are somewhere in between. Nothing in life is all glamour or all torture. Like everyone's work, a lot of it is just... ordinary. But the more days I write, the more productive every one of those ordinary days become.