Don’t tell anyone, but some days I write 30k words
Yes, I know I’m a freak of nature—except that I’m not. I’m a normal person just like you. I just have a unique set of work experiences that have brought me to this point in my career.
And yes, I always get eight hours of sleep every night. Sleep is my number one nonnegotiable. I don’t think if I haven’t slept. I’m not one of these Kobe Bryant outliers who can get by on three hours of sleep a night. That isn’t how I do it.
I’m going to talk about my evolution as a writer and how I developed the work habits I use to write more. Hopefully, you’ll be able to take some of these points and apply them to your own writing. So here we go.
#1: Repetition
As most of you know by now, I started as a freelance fiction ghostwriter. I got paid by the word, so the more I worked, the more I got paid.
I was solely responsible for supporting three children and myself, so there was always a constant pressure to do more, work more, and earn more.
I originally started working as a freelance writer so I could work online at home while I took care of my children.
I started when my oldest child was four and my middle child was eighteen months old. When I started, I had to snatch every spare minute to write in between changing diapers, making their meals, reading them stories, taking them for walks, and everything else I had to do around the house.
I got into the habit of sitting down in front of the computer and just typing as fast as I possibly could.
There was never any room for writer’s block or sitting around wondering what I was going to write next. I just had to type as fast as humanly possible before the next interruption came along and stopped me.
I worked like that for more than ten years. I worked when and where I could while my children were small. The instant they went down for a nap, I worked as fast as I could cranking out as many words as I could.
I also worked late at night after they went to sleep. I stayed up until midnight some nights to finish contracts while the house was quiet and no one would interrupt me.
Later, I did the same thing when my children started going to school. I dropped my kids off at school and then sat down at the computer. At the stroke of nine o’clock, I would start typing as fast as possible to get as much done before I had to go pick them up again.
A lot of you will say that writing faster reduces the quality of the work. You’ll say quantity is bought at the expense of quality.
I disagree. The quality of my work improved over the years. I studied writing craft and worked to get better. I had to boost the quality of the product I was offering to clients. Quality was the main selling point that I used to attract them to use my service instead of another writer’s.
As the quality of my writing improved, I could charge a higher payrate per word. So there was always a matching incentive to write better, higher quality books in addition to writing them quickly.
Several prospective and current clients tell me that I’m the best there is. I had one prospective client tell me that he’d searched the entire internet and not found anyone as good as me.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford me, so I never wound up working for him.
Another reader commented on one of my books and said it was better than Tolkien.
Many writing coaches (and other high-performance coaches) tell us to iterate faster, to repeat the process again and again as many times as possible.
The process of writing a book from start to finish is no different. The more quickly you can complete the entire process, the more times you can iterate and your process improves each time.
It also becomes easier and quicker simply because you have the experience of having done it so many times before. Over the course of my freelancing career, I wrote more than three hundred books, so naturally, I got really good at it.
This concept of iteration, repetition, and completing projects as quickly as possible applies to your daily schedule, too.
Most writers go through a cycle of writing something and then taking the rest of the day off to think about what they’re going to write next.
I go through the same process, but on a much shorter time scale.
I use Pomodoro technique of writing in short bursts and taking a short break to think about what I’m going to write next, stare out the window, or do something completely different.
This could be housework, yardwork, exercise, crafts, or anything else. Sometimes I even work on writing something else like an outline. I’m actually writing this blog post in between working on another project (ask me which one).
I write for twenty minutes, in which I write 1,000 words. Then I take ten minutes off. I divide up my workday into half-hour blocks, so I get plenty of mental rest in between writing sprints.
Since I started doing this, I have tried going back to writing straight through and not stopping at all.
I found that I usually spend those ten minutes staring out the window anyway and thinking about what I’m going to write next. So I can write just as fast or faster if I plan on taking those ten minutes off to think about it.
In general, if you’re telling yourself you need to take the rest of the day off to think about what to write next, you’re just giving yourself an excuse not to do the work.
If you’re telling yourself your brain needs a rest, you’re probably just giving yourself a pass to think about anything other than your work.
You won’t be able to think about it more clearly an hour from now or a month from now than you can right now.
An hour from now or a week from now or a year from now, you’re going to sit down in front of the page, stare at it, and rack your brain to come up with something to write next.
That process doesn’t get easier just because you put it off until later. If anything, it makes it harder.
Which leads me to my next point:
#2: Preparation
Always outline everything. Always. Always. Always.
If I’m writing a ten-book series, I outline the entire series from start to finish before I ever start writing the first book.
I’ve talked about this before and the reason is simple. You’re a lot more likely to get stuck if you don’t plan the book or series ahead of time.
Writing a book is like digging a ditch. The fun part happens at the beginning. By the middle or even a third of the way through, the project ceases to be fun. It becomes work.
You only keep going so you can finish the book and move on to the fun part of planning your next project.
Finishing the book or series becomes astronomically easier when you have the whole thing outlined in as much detail as you possibly can.
If you don’t outline it, you’ll get to the halfway mark, run up against a brick wall, and start thinking, “What happens next?”
This can lead to months or even years of thinking the same thing. This is why so many writers have so many unfinished projects sitting in dusty drawers or dusty corners of their hard drives.
The same process becomes even more acute when you’re writing a series with multiple books.
There is no domain of life where it’s better to go in completely unprepared or even partially prepared.
If you got up to give a speech in front of five thousand people, you would make sure to be prepared. You would never go into that expecting to just walk out on stage and start winging it.
Most writers think that having an outline will cramp their creative flow, but it actually works the other way around.
Flow state is a function of mastery and preparation.
Think of any other art form or any other area of human endeavor. Take music for example. Master musicians can go into a long, complicated improvisation and make it sound incredible.
They can only do this by spending decades practicing and learning their craft. They invest many, many years learning all the fundamentals of music theory, all the rules, and playing scales for hours every day for decades.
The same is true for Olympic and other champion-level athletes. They go into a flow state during competition—but only because they are supremely prepared.
They’ve practiced each individual routine for decades. These athletes know exactly what they’re going to do beforehand and they mentally rehearse it down to the smallest detail.
Public speakers, standup comedians, and actors do the same thing. They don’t leave it to chance.
The mastery in their work comes from making something so rehearsed look effortless. They make it look like they just came up with this stuff off the tops of their heads when the opposite is true.
There is no reason to think it will be different in fiction writing. It isn’t different.
If you think you’re going to sit down in front of a blank page and start flowing, you’re deluding yourself. You might be able to start out like that, but eventually, you’ll run out of ideas.
You’ll wind up taking the rest of the day off to think about what happens next…..and that could turn into a week….a year…five years…..
If you’re staring at the wall wondering what happens next, you should be doing that during the outline phase, not while you’re writing the book.
While you’re writing the book, you can be thinking about how you’re going to describe something in your next scene. You can be visualizing a fight scene or a battle scene. That part is hard enough as it is.
You should have established the basic plot elements long ago—long before you ever sat down to write.
The longer it takes to finish a book, the harder it gets. Having an outline planned down to each individual scene makes this process infinitely easier and makes the writing go much quicker.
I found early in my freelancing career that working slowly, stopping and starting, actually breaks my flow.
Flow happens when I sit down in front of my computer with a completed outline and I knock the book out as quickly as possible. Every interruption and every delay breaks my flow.
#3: Perfectionism
My mantra is: Just write the book. Just write what’s in the outline. Don’t think or second-guess or try to make it perfect.
This is flow. Flow is effortless, thoughtless, and automatic.
If you’re struggling with it, overthinking it, second-guessing everything, and going over it and over it trying to make it perfect, you aren’t flowing. The writing quality will suffer as a result.
Perfection is the enemy of good. If you try to make it perfect or constantly second-guess whether what you’re doing is good enough, you’ll never finish the book.
Just write what’s in the outline, even if you think it isn’t good.
There will always be parts of a book that flow more easily than others.
There will always be parts of the book that you have to force yourself to write.
This is a common misconception about creativity.
Think of a potter. The potter molds, shapes, and essentially forces the clay to take the shape the potter wants it to take.
A potter would never put the clay on the table, sit back, and just wait for the clay to take shape by itself.
You are never going to write a book that just happens by itself. Lightning isn’t going to strike from On High and give you the inspiration to finish a book.
Lightning might strike from On High to give you the inspiration to start a book.
Finishing a book takes work—hard work. You have to make it happen. You have to grapple with the text and force it to become what you want it to become.
Sometimes the events of the story from Point A to Point B aren’t immediately obvious or clearly defined.
Decide all of that during the outline phase. Then, when you come to a difficult part of the story, just write what’s in the outline.
I’ll cover this in a future post on outlining, but there are times when, in the outline phase, I envision a scene before I start writing the book.
There have been times when I wrote an entire conversation or scene from Book 10 of a ten-book series before I ever started outlining the first book. That’s the easy part.
Then there are the other parts—the parts that you as a potter have to mold, shape, and physically create out of nothing.
This is creativity in its most primal form. Inspiration striking from On High is a tiny fraction of what creativity is.
True creativity is wrestling with the raw materials of a storyline. You forge it in fire and hammer blows to make it as good as it can be. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Thinking about it for weeks or months or years won’t make it better. Agonizing over it probably won’t get you a better result than just buckling down and writing the damn book.
Agonizing about it and dithering over whether you should write A or B might actually make it worse. It could stop you from writing the book altogether—which would be infinitely worse than something you wrote on the spur of the moment.
Nothing is worse than an unfinished book. A finished book that is seven out of ten is better than an unfinished book that is nine out of ten or even ten out of ten.
The medium of fiction is story. The story is sovereign. Your job as a writer is to tell the story—nothing else.
Decide how to tell the story during the outline phase. By the time you finish the outline, you should already know all the crucial elements of the story and how they fit together.
You should have included everything essential to the story and eliminated everything superfluous to the story.
Once you do that, how you execute the outline is secondary to the story itself. As long as the story gets told with all the critical elements included, the rest is just details.
People mistakenly think that the expertise of fiction writing is in crafting individual scenes, dialogues, descriptions, and wordings.
The reality is that the expertise of fiction writing comes from planning a story in its broadest strokes. This happens at the outline phase.
Crafting the essential elements of a story, how the characters grow and change over an entire book, and the overall message of the book vastly outweigh any one scene, dialogue, description, or the wording of anything.
These little extras will always be dependent on the story itself. A scene, dialogue, or description is only as good as the story itself. The really important work happens in the outline.
There have been many writers whose execution wasn’t fantastic, but they had it all going on when it came to plot.
This is the most important thing you need to understand about fiction. Story is everything. You can get away with almost anything else as long as you’re telling a good story.
The same goes if you want your book to deliver any kind of underlying message or leave the reader thinking about the deeper meaning. This won’t happen unless you plan it out beforehand.
Some of the best writers come up with the ending of a book before they ever write the rest of it. The ending of the book delivers your message.
The ending is the last impression you leave with your reader. It’s the final nail in the coffin that makes the rest of your book mean something.
That will not be possible if you just start laying down words on a page.
The only possible way that could happen is if you wrote the entire first draft, came to some conclusion with the ending, and then went back, rewrote the entire book, and made the rest of the story congruent with your now-created ending.
Plenty of excellent writers do it this way, but it takes much longer and is a much more agonizing and protracted way to write a book.
You can shorten the process simply by coming to this conclusion first, outlining the book to lead your reader to your chosen conclusion, and then writing the book in one shot.
This is what I do. I come up with a basic concept. Then I decide what the storyline actually means and the message I want my reader to walk away with at the end. Then I write the outline.
Once I do that, I don’t generally go back and change the storyline after the fact. I don’t have to. I’ve already established all the elements to create the outcome I want.
We can apply the same concept to individual sentences, scenes, and even descriptions. Spending a month on a single description or even a single sentence is a waste of valuable time.
Just write the sentence in the best way that conveys the essential story information. If it fulfills the story’s requirements, then the structure or wording of an individual sentence doesn’t really matter.
The same goes for descriptions. A description is not your chance to show off your chops as a writer. The description is there to communicate critical plot information. That is the description’s only function.
Making it sound beautiful and using a bunch of ornate language will actually interfere with readability. It will slow the reader down, stop the reader from fully immersing in your story, and fill the page with non-essential information. Don’t be that writer.
Just stick to the basic story. Tell a good story and get off the page with your dignity intact.
This will help you write faster and in all likelihood improve the quality of your writing. It will prevent you from wasting time unnecessarily on things that don’t need it.
You’ll be able to iterate faster, write more books, and get back to the fun part of planning your next project.
I hope this helps. God bless, everybody.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.