Writing advice not in books

[olivermoss]

Basically, why I follow C. Robert Cargill on twitter.


"Gang, I do this for a living, and I set my daily goal at only 3 pages. Setting low daily goals means you hit them consistently and never feel the oppressive weight of failing to hit those goals. Feeling like you accomplished something every day keeps your momentum at full speed."

Link

He then clarifies for someone in a follow up that Stephen King does 5 pages a day.

Some context: Robert is a screenwriter so his 3 pages are going to be tighter and take more revisions than a novel or a fanfic would. Screenwriting has to be painfully lean and still work. Also, that doesn't mean pro writers do a few hours and lounge by the pool. Research, reading, studying other writers, making deals, promotional stuff, keeping track of the industry, doing things specifically to recharge creative batteries, etc. Some maintain a web presence by teaching writing, kinda like how Robert tweets regularly about writing to help mentor writers. I assume every writer I follow works way more than 40 hours a week. But that doesn't mean 40-60 hours a week actively writing.

He is also someone who used to be a reviewer who became a writer later in life.

Over the years I've heard a lot of pro writers say how much they write per day and it's always been between 2 and 10 pages. (The one exception is JMS who is the Spiders Georg of script writing)

Two more tweets from him:

"The most important thing in writing is to finish. A finished thing can be fixed. A finished thing can be published. A finished thing can be made into a movie.

An unfinished thing is just a dream. And dreams fade if you don't hold on tight enough.

So finish the thing."

Link

And yesterday he tweeted:

"There are 222 work days remaining in 2022.

If you only wrote one page a work day you could write two scripts or one novel.

If you wrote only 2 pages a day (That's 500-600wds), you could write 4 scripts or one long novel.

You have the time to bring that dream project to life."

Link

That's the thinking and the model of writing I am trying to follow. It's slow. But it's in line with how people get projects done and how every writer (except JMS) I've heard talk about their schedule does things. Ideally, I want to do a few pages a day and have my photowalking time be something what is my 'recharging my creative batteries' time. I'm not there yet. I am not consistently writing and my working through writing books has derailed my writing a bit.

I'd feel better about all of this if I had more work done. But, if you want to know where I want to be, it's basically what Robert describes. It's frustrating to not be nearer my goals, but slow and steady wins the race... unless I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, which knowing my luck...

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

Yes!

Count me very in favor of this kind of writing.

And those numbers are for people who DO make this their full time job (with the understood caveat that the job involves a lot of time not actively writing.)

(I mean, I've been "making" myself write a minimum of 100 words per day. That's... really, really small. And I know that. But that's still at a minimum ~3000 words per month that I might have otherwise not gotten, if I didn't make myself write them/felt like it was too small a number to matter.) Also granted, I AM trying to work up to more as my standard! And I try to have at least a few days a week of 500 or 1000 words. But even when I'm not feeling like writing, getting 100 words is doable, and it feels way better than writing nothing at all.

(Basically I'm really glad to hear that from a more pro quarter!)

[olivermoss]

Keeping momentum is great! That is huge when it comes to actually getting projects done.

Robert used to be a horror film reviewer and now both does novels and is Scott Derrickson's co-writer. So, he knows a lot about the business and how the very prolific Stephen King operates.

I did write today, but it was just getting fantasy world concept out of my head... what plot I'd like to put there I don't know! So for me the additional caveat is 'on your current projects!' and not just any writing :)

[mistressofmuses]

I think that loss of momentum (or never building it up at all) probably kills the most creative projects. YOU HAVE TO WRITE THE THING is maybe as close to a universal truth as you'll find in all the advice out there - if you don't write, the thing won't exist. If you don't get the words down, you can't make them better.

Ah! That's probably how I recognized his name! I couldn't place it.

Heh, I know that feeling. Sometimes it's worth it to plop the ideas out, just so you have them and can go back to them later, without them tangling up the current project you're trying to complete. (Or at least sometimes that works for me!)

[olivermoss]

Also, each story has a vibe, a flavor. If you lose momentum you are going to lose that particular feel of it. I have a custom Scriviner template with a fron page where I try to info dump the feel and the emotional beat, the point of the story.

And yeah, it's all about finishing those projects in so many ways.

[mistressofmuses]

Also very true! Sometimes you can recapture the feeling, or get back into the correct headspace to channel it, but it's difficult to do so. (Or sometimes when you go back to edit, there's a really stark vibe difference from when you started vs. when you went back to it, and it's obvious.)

I very much hope to sometime get to use Scrivener. It sounds really helpful for organizing things. (I just have disgustingly long folders-within-folders of word docs for each work, chapter, thought-dump, outline, etc.)

Finishing things is hard, and I get why a lot of creatives struggle with it. But the oft-repeated "you can't edit a blank page" is a valid bit of advice. You can't fix something that you don't make in the first place.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's better to go back and crunch everything until it fits one vibe. Old vibe gone, must do new vibe.

Also, ugh, such a problem with some long running book series.

I am enjoying Scrivener, but I don't use it to it's full potential. Also, it did not work on my old laptop at all. IIRC it's make primarily for Mac OSes and can be cranky on others. I think it's also the reason I need to reboot my computer more often. But it has become my default. You can set it up so it has your own questions you ask yourself about your writing in a sheet at the start of every project and other things.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yeah. (I mean, it's sometimes interesting to see how that vibe changes, even when it's the same story/plot/characters/etc. But the end product should ideally have a pretty cohesive feel to it.)

Absolutely a problem with longer-running series. Too much tonal whiplash between entries can be painfully jarring and throw me out of the series.

Yeah, I do recall that it was intended mainly for Mac. And my laptop is a Mac, but waaaay too old and broken to run it, ha. But I do really like the flexibility that it sounds like it has, and the various features offered. I feel like I'd enjoy it. Someday!

[oracne]

I've used 100 words a day as a goal, too, and it worked great.

[mistressofmuses]

I'm glad to hear that!

[oracne]

It's amazing how much progress one can make little by little. I track my (net) wordcount each day because it helps me to SEE the progress in a metric that makes sense to me. But that doesn't work for everyone.

[olivermoss]

Deleting large chunks is such a part of my process that it's hard for me to do word counts. I want to get to a point where I can count pages, but I mostly need to count time. Most of what I did yesterday on my project was just heavily revising what I do have so far.