I’m all for learning to recognise your habits and standing your ground when people reccommend that books ought to have a hero and heroine, or that one finds the secondary characters in the Hero’s Journey, or that one must (outline, write every day, whatever). However, I think it’s a good idea to balance it with reviews- are those just habits habits, or are they habits that work for you?

One reason burst writing didn’t work for me was that I did not stay in touch with the story, and thus needed longer to get into it, and duplicated efforts, and contradicted myself. I still do those things, but not as much.

I doubled my productivity by employing a simple rule: every morning when I sit down at my computer, I’d open the current file. And before I go to lunch, I’d do the same. And in the afternoon, the same. Most of the time, I can see either something I can improve, or the next paragraph. Sometimes more than a paragraph. And thus, I write most days, even if it’s only fifty words here, a couple of hundred words there. On most books – not on the WIP, which is different – I can steadily write 1K in a day, sometimes more, with ordinary good days coming in around 2.5K – but there might be one or two in any given week, instead of once a month.

Sadly, this hasn’t helped me much towards publication as I tend to write long (I’m a natural trilogist), and so far, I haven’t hit all the right notes. (‘Great, but I can’t sell this’ is better for the ego than ‘no thanks’ but not by much.) I have more hopes for the WIP, but I’m a quarter through drafting the second volumen, and it will need considerable rewriting before I can even start submitting it.

Thanks for starting & posting these insightful discussions.

The cracks seem to be late at night, which is where I function anyway, so it’s not all bad. Until I have to get up and feed those things.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Alex – Keeping the pot simmering is half the point of the sentence-a-day trick; if the story is present enough in your head that you can note down another sentence during coffee break, you can get started faster when you do find that hour or two to write. The other half is that daily practice keeps the mental gears looser – and the more they work, the easier it gets. And if you have the kind of brain that CAN’T do an all-day marathon, it’s even more important to get in the every-day-slog habit.

Gray – If you can’t make forward progress, sideways is good. One does need to keep an eye out to be sure one is not just stalling…but as long as it’s pay copy of SOME kind, it will probably keep the brain in gear. For the way you work, it may have to be related pay copy (a side story with the same characters, for instance); for others, a break from the main project to work on some other thing entirely may be what’s indicated. The main thing is NOT to make a habit of stopping!

The discipline I eventually found works something like this:

1) If I’m stuck on one thing and shouldn’t write more of it yet, write something else – if all else fails, a disposable fragment, but done with full force and craft.

2) That out of the way, keep hacking at the problem with the main work, so it doesn’t cool off. If need be, give myself permission to write crappy exploratory draft until I understand the issues properly.

Pressing example: even my current crappy exploratory draft stalled at the weekend, hitting a point where it made insufficient sense, and I wrote exactly 16 mediocre words of it in two days. But I also wrote a demented little riff on Beauty and the Beast’s backstory, and composed all but two lines of a song in between bouts of hacking. That kept the springs flowing, and now the problem is sort-of-solved and I’m heading into closing the chapter.

I used to lose weeks together to the combination of internal editor paralysis, the drying up of the habit, and the cooling off of the main story. This habit’s a more comfortable one.

And, of course, the dual distractions of my sons being home from school doesn’t exactly help this resolution.