JasonClearwater
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Ah. Fair enough, mate, fair enough.
Things you wish you were better at writing
- Thread starter JasonClearwater
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Ah. Fair enough, mate, fair enough.
_Lynn_
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I can appreciate the value of plotting arcs, stat sheets, etc. However, as with most things, people need to find what works for them. I've tried your suggestions as well as ideas others found useful. Eventually I may find something that helps me.
JasonClearwater
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I can appreciate the value of plotting arcs, stat sheets, etc. However, as with most things, people need to find what works for them. I've tried your suggestions as well as ideas others found useful. Eventually I may find something that helps me.
Yeah, good point there, too. I get a bit excited when I've got a Thing That Works. Or, so I've been told.
_Lynn_
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Yeah, good point there, too. I get a bit excited when I've got a Thing That Works. Or, so I've been told.
Many of us do.
BiscuitHammer
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But mention it in a story and people have tantrums at you... :/
JasonClearwater
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_Lynn_
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Ah, I see.
NotWise
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Especially among the older male population.
TxRad
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Hey now, leave me out of this. My water works works fine... more or less... more often than not. Sometimes, too often.
Working with a full page instead of by the paragraph has sped things up for me. A paragraph you can pick to pieces. A full page has more chances of survival. I've limited my edits as I go feature to spelling and that is all. A read later is limited to what I can catch in one read. After that, it is up to my editor.
NotWise
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I have to avoid the rewrite bug. It's gotten me a few times now, but never so badly as my current story.
I have a story idea and plunge into it, then 2/3 of the way in I think, "This story could be told so much better if..."
And the rewriting starts.
For me, rewriting is boring as hell and it's painfully slow. That makes me think that I should never do it, but the results have been successful. We'll see how that works with the current story.
So, I wish I were better at writing a good story straight through.
TxRad
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I guess I'm lucky because I don't rewrite anything until after my editor gets through with it. I might do some if I catch an error or something I left out that is important. Getting the story down is the important part. I learned that with Nano. One very valuable lesson. Without the story down on paper, it is still an idea.
JasonClearwater
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Just post more pics like that one and no one will care WHAT you write.
Mmm, I'm both afraid to ask, and unable not to ask - what kinds of stats sheets are you doing?? ARe you tracking your productivity (quantity of words put down) or something else?*Sits you down*
I understand, I do. But a sloppy first draft is just the cake you're going to ice; it's very hard to bake a cake and ice it at the same time, and an un-iced cake is nothing to be ashamed of. First drafts and editing make the most sense as separate processes, like building the skeleton, or the vascular system of a clone, before you start printing the rest of the organs around them (you know, when you're assembling a clone from scratch).
You need to fool your OCD into OCDing about something else. The number of words you put down each night (I did stats sheets on all kinds of metrics that satisfied the OCD urges). You can put that energy into plotting your arcs, or your character dev. But that perfect sentence... is a show stopper. And what if you change it later anyway because it doesn't fit the plot anymore?
If you write to keep that one sentence, you may end up with a book that makes no sense. I've done this in short stories, attempting to write for one specific line that needed to be delivered. It wasn't a good idea.
Not that I don't need help with some OCD issues either.
Much
thanks
JasonClearwater
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It's been nine months and six hours since my last spreadsheet...
A few things:
Words per hour
Time started and finished each night
Total hours spent writing each night
Words written per night
Then calculating out how many hours are spent per draft, graphing weekly productivity, working out when I'm most productive, and graphing and how consistent my output is.
I wanted to know if I could consistently produce, and how much effort went into a novel, so if I wrote full time, I'd know how many weeks that represented and what a book would need to earn to make it worthwhile.
Needless to say, I'm not giving up my day job any time soon.
K
KindofHere
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I have difficulty being succinct.
It's a mighty struggle for me to master it. A speech therapist is working w/me on that now.
I also have problems writing gay, bisexual, and lesbian material. I'm 100% heterosexual and my mind simply will not put me in the head of something so foreign to me. I am trying though.
It's a mighty struggle for me to master it. A speech therapist is working w/me on that now.
I also have problems writing gay, bisexual, and lesbian material. I'm 100% heterosexual and my mind simply will not put me in the head of something so foreign to me. I am trying though.
ElectricBlue
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Yep. Jason's little baby.It's been nine months and six hours since my last spreadsheet...
Plotting all your story starts and progress doesn't help your tenses, though. You still need to figure out the difference between "doing" and "done"
.Me, I just write 'till I stop. "Done" is then easy. But possibly not so much fun.
TxRad
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When I first started writing, I had a similar problem. My mind ran way faster than I could type. It took some time and a whole lot of patience to slow down. It still does at times. So there is hope. Just take a deep breath and look at what you are typing one line at a time to start.
Ok, so that's ..... comprehensive.It's been nine months and six hours since my last spreadsheet...
A few things:
Words per hour
Time started and finished each night
Total hours spent writing each night
Words written per night
Then calculating out how many hours are spent per draft, graphing weekly productivity, working out when I'm most productive, and graphing and how consistent my output is.
I wanted to know if I could consistently produce, and how much effort went into a novel, so if I wrote full time, I'd know how many weeks that represented and what a book would need to earn to make it worthwhile.
Needless to say, I'm not giving up my day job any time soon.
Not other variables though - in terms of productivity - things like how hungry you are, whether the sun is out, how motivated you're feeling, if you've had a row with your mother the day before, whether you've had a good/bad day elsewhere prior to sitting at the desk/laptop? Which maybe sound like facetious questions, but honestly isn't productivity such a human condition that metrics struggle to capture it?
I 'know' that there are some days I can write a ton (for work or pleasure) and other days where I can barely manage to punch out three paragraphs and I'm weeping over the keyboard in frustration, but nothing can change it.
Do you also have a spreadsheet recording how long you've gone without recording anything on the spreadsheet??
Ok, so that last question was a tad facetious..... but thanks for answering my first question, as I'm genuinely curious.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JasonClearwater View Post
It's been nine months and six hours since my last spreadsheet...
Yep. Jason's little baby.
Plotting all your story starts and progress doesn't help your tenses, though. You still need to figure out the difference between "doing" and "done" .
Me, I just write 'till I stop. "Done" is then easy. But possibly not so much fun.
__________________
electricblue
Yes, that's me - write til I drop .... when the stars are aligned, or whatever it is that produces the conditions for productivity!
K
KindofHere
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JasonClearwater
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Actually, yes. I recorded notes on mood, what I was doing (travelling is my best time to write), and if I got distracted and by what, why and for how long
I, ah... I didn't want you to think I was obsessive.
Honestly, it helped. The key idea being, if I approached a publisher and got picked up, I'd know (and be able to prove) my ability to produce content to deadlines.
I aim for around 100k per novel (give or take 20k), so the graphing also tells me how close I am to being done.
I have a plot that includes things I want to touch on, things that need to pay off, and 10-20 sentences that each outline a plot point to use as guides.
I know my ratio of research and plotting to writing. Sounds over the top but I now know, if I sit down to write another novel, how long it's likely to take and what, if anything, is going to get in my way.
I'm impatient. I write in a manic state and edit in a state of resentment that I have to slow down.
Smut though... I just write till I'm done and see where it goes. But my one attempt to write sci fi smut showed me I need my novel approach (uncharted this time) to do it properly.
Obsessive? What's wrong with that?!Actually, yes. I recorded notes on mood, what I was doing (travelling is my best time to write), and if I got distracted and by what, why and for how long
I, ah... I didn't want you to think I was obsessive.
Honestly, it helped. The key idea being, if I approached a publisher and got picked up, I'd know (and be able to prove) my ability to produce content to deadlines.
I aim for around 100k per novel (give or take 20k), so the graphing also tells me how close I am to being done.
I have a plot that includes things I want to touch on, things that need to pay off, and 10-20 sentences that each outline a plot point to use as guides.
I know my ratio of research and plotting to writing. Sounds over the top but I now know, if I sit down to write another novel, how long it's likely to take and what, if anything, is going to get in my way.
I'm impatient. I write in a manic state and edit in a state of resentment that I have to slow down.
Smut though... I just write till I'm done and see where it goes. But my one attempt to write sci fi smut showed me I need my novel approach (uncharted this time) to do it properly.
I'm definitely impatient and will just want to run at something until it's done, not stopping until that time ... which is clearly not possible. The need to eat and sleep get in the way, for a start. As does the idea of recording what I'm doing, even though I do need to do that in 'real life' otherwise I can't claim my fees, so I'm learning.
I plan out the story in so much as I write down some events and/or actual sentences that describe some of the key moments, and use them like I think you do as markers to reach. For longer pieces of writing - longer than what I've got on this site - I usually also think a lot about the geography of the places my characters are inhabiting - the cities and the houses, and I usually draw floorplans for their homes.... and family trees/friendship groups - yes, I draw those out too, with dates of birth and what music they like or what books they read. That sort of thing.
But I'm a huge daydreamer and can get lost in research or just thinking and rethinking a scene in my head for hours at a time if I don't control it.
I'd do editing a million times before I'd record very much about my own workrate. Even though I can see the value of it.
Hypoxia
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Words.
HBergeron
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Novels. I'm so enthralled with the screenwriting practice of 'show what you need to show and have the characters say what they need to say', that I have no patience for the novel form anymore, with all the prose involved. I wish I could get more excited about it, but I don't.
Blind_Justice
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Short stories and sex scenes.
"Short" is relative, I know, but it would be nice to write something on occasion which doesn't blow past the 10k words mark or evolves into a multi-chapter monstrosity. I have yet to write a quick, dirty 5000-word stroker or so.
As my lady love puts it, my sex scenes are serviceable. They are naughty and/or feature unusual kinks, but they lack the verbiage or gushiness true masters of the smut manage. I can't write three paragraphs about how he slowly pushes in and she goes seventy-nine kinds of bonkers in painstaking detail. Don't know why, because normally, painstaking detail is my jam, yo.
"Short" is relative, I know, but it would be nice to write something on occasion which doesn't blow past the 10k words mark or evolves into a multi-chapter monstrosity. I have yet to write a quick, dirty 5000-word stroker or so.
As my lady love puts it, my sex scenes are serviceable. They are naughty and/or feature unusual kinks, but they lack the verbiage or gushiness true masters of the smut manage. I can't write three paragraphs about how he slowly pushes in and she goes seventy-nine kinds of bonkers in painstaking detail. Don't know why, because normally, painstaking detail is my jam, yo.
