The universal answer to that question is, of course, CHOCOLATE, but I was looking for one that doesn’t increase my hip span. Oh, and wine works too, but after a few glasses I get too sleepy or too loopy to write. My main motivations to keep writing includes my critique partners, my local RWA chapter, and setting concrete deadlines for myself by signing up for a conference, contest, or class.
These last few weeks, I’ve been enrolled in Candace Haven’s Fast Draft class where I committed to write twenty pages per day for two weeks. Think of it like NaNoWriMo on steroids—or more correctly: on speed. I didn’t make the page count every day, but I did finish a first draft of a new novel.
Is it a crappy first draft?
Absolutely.
Will I have to revise the hell out of it?
You bet.
Then why did I do it?
Because I’m a binge writer. By that I mean I work best when I get to spend lots of time vomiting prose on a page. It doesn’t always make sense, it’s rarely pretty, but the bones of the story are there. Being that immersed in my characters makes them do wonderful things. They take me places I didn’t at all intend but are so obviously right for my story. My subconscious is a much more creative person than I am. (This by the way is something Candace Haven swears by and why she started Fast Draft.)
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I am not a binge reviser though. I’m quite happy working on second, third, and fourth drafts in pieces and focus on a particular chapter, scene, or sentence to make it perfect. I enjoy obsessing over a word choice for a day or two or three, but only during revisions. If I do that during the initial writing, my first draft never gets past the first three chapters. I have a drawer filled—okay, a couple of computer folders—with perfect first chapters that were never completed. I got bored with the story before I finished a complete draft.
To bring it back around to the title of this post, the Fast Draft class motivated me to get my ass in the chair and crank out a first draft. I learned that I can get a lot done in only an hour or two of writing every day.
Being a natural “pantser,” I had to come up with a way to plan what to write every day, or the story just went around in circles. I learned a way of plotting that works for me. It gives me an overall overview of the structure of the book, where the turning points needs to be, and how to tie the internal and external conflicts together while also relate the advancement of the romantic arch. It’s not an outline, but the method allows me to see my book in bigger chunks, which also helps in the revision process.
I’m a master procrastinator. Long open-ended projects are bad for me, because I start them the week, night, hour before the due date and set myself up for failure. Fast Draft allowed me a short time period in which I needed to get a sub-task done, I got it done. Now I’m dividing my book into chunks and setting deadlines for when the revisions have to be done. Having critique partners waiting for those chunks helps the process tremendously.
Another thing I do to keep my writing motivation up is set deadlines for the whole year. This year I’m going to three writing conferences. My goal is to have a new project to pitch at each of those. Two of them are new projects, one a reworked manuscript.
I’m very sure I’ll hit those milestones, because otherwise I’ll beat myself up to the point where I won’t enjoy the conferences. I’m my own worst critic, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case it helps. And when my loud-mouthed inner voice berate me too much, I silence it with chocolate and wine.
What motivates you? How do you keep your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard?
14 comments
I often need to feel “in a scene” or at least have the first line in my head. But I have also learned, it takes putting myself in a position where I can think about the story and not push it away if it starts to come. Otherwise I am always in the middle of something I can’t stop focusing on when an idea hits. And now I am learning, don’t sign up for so many long term projects because they are destined to come to a head all at once!
Good points Jamie. I too need a blank slate of a day to be able to concentrate and stay motivated. If there are too many things on my to-do list, I can’t stop thinking about them and my writing becomes labored.
One of the hardest things I’ve done is to learn to say ‘no’ to projects and people to protect my writing time, and not feel guilty about it. I’m still working on the not feeling guilty part. 🙂
Asa Maria –
Kudos on the hot draft, and on tying hard pitch goals to your conference plans.
Thanks Betty!
Tracking my progress in terms of pages rather than word count or time spent writing helps-I don’t know why, but I go with it 🙂 Also, printing out a hard copy (as each chapter is finished) and putting it in a binder helps,too. Something about seeing my small, incremental efforts add up to something bigger is encouraging. And when I feel like what I’ve written for the day is really, really lame, I can flip through my hard copy and find a paragraph, a line, a description, something I’ve already written that seems kinda cool and makes me feel better…which keeps me going. I’m a carrot-motivated girl. The stick? Not so much.
Love the idea of the binder Virginia. I kind of do that in that the pages my critique partners give back pile up, but I throw them away when I’ve incorporated the edits. I think I’ll keep both their pages and clean pages in hardcopy from now on.
I too am not a stick girl.
Hi Asa! Well, having a deadline hanging over my head is a pretty good motivator. 🙂 Other than that, I create my own deadlines and pretend they’re as absolute as the ones set by my editor. That works for me. (as does maybe ONE glass of wine…)
I have a hard time believing my own deadlines, unless it’s a hard stop like a conference. At times I feel like I have more than one personality and none of them respect the others or take them seriously. Whenever I try to have a stern talk with myself, I end up just blowing myself off. Kind of like a stubborn teenager blowing off their parents. 🙂
To write every day? The realization that I’ll never have a career in writing if I don’t finish quality books editors will want to buy and readers will want to read. Also, I love living in the settings and experiencing the adventures my characters are going through.
Wow, you’re getting serious when you’re putting your future career as the cost, Tesa. Maybe I should start thinking like that though. It would certainly put my butt in the writing chair more often.
Asa, I love writing this way! But I am a plotter, so I have everything I need to know done (with lots of wiggle room) before I sit down at the computer and write those twenty pages plus a day, which makes it a lot easier on the revision end of the process. It’s great that you found something that allows you to just zoom!
Traci, your post-it plotting workshop session still inspires me. I don’t do quite as much detail as you did, but I incorporated everything you taught me into my plotting spreadsheet.
I think the support of my friends in the writing community have always been one of the strongest motivating factors in my career. I have learned to set short term achievable goals that take me step by step toward reaching my bigger goals. I have a set number of pages to write each week and keep track of it. Seeing those pages adding up helps keep me productive.
I don’t know why it took me so long to learn to set small goals, but am glad to hear the method endorsed by a best-selling author, Alexis. It makes me more motivated to stick to both my goals and my method. 🙂
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