Writing Analysis

Good morning, blog readers! Our Mood Kyrie today is actually a Mood Baxter. Bax is a pup from Kyrie's second litter. He is growing into a very handsome young fellow! This photo was taken when he was about a year old.

As usual, I have been working hard at NaNoWriMo this month. Also as usual, I am behind. I spent the first three days of November covered in puppies out east (well, they don't evaluate themselves, you know?) and the fourth day under the knife, having surgery. Negative fun. Luckily, after the first couple days or so I was well enough to type while propped up in bed!

I have noticed something interesting about NaNoWriMo. Though I can happily peruse any book on writing I want to in the days leading up to it, once NaNo is here I can not bear to pick up a book on writing! I have also found that I don't read much fiction during NaNo UNLESS it is completely outside of the genre I am currently working in. For example, I'm working very hard on my mythic fantasy West of the Moon right now, and I am reading either non-fiction or mysteries (re-reading some of my favorite Agatha Christie books from my childhood). I find that I have no urge to read fantasy or even SF right now.

As I have worked at my writing the last year or two I have started making a note of habits and tendencies like the above. This is valuable, I think, because like weight loss--and you think I jest, but I have found weight loss to be almost completely about this--writing is about figuring out what your best habits are and working within them, and figuring out what your worst habits are and attempting to avoid them as much as possible. Given that I say this when my diet and exercise regimen has gone completely to blazes thanks to the surgery (no exercise allowed yet, and I am going BONKERS) and the stress of being behind during NaNo (I devour great amounts of comfort food when I am under stress, and the most I can do is try to mitigate the damage).

So this brings me to the second part of this post, which is that during October I had picked up Rachel Aaron's short "How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day" and decided to make a run at doing some of the things she mentions in there.

There are three things that Rachel talks about as the key features in how she began to put out vast quantities of verbiage. Put very succinctly, these are:

1. discover the features of your most productive writing time;

2. write the scenes you are in love with; and

3. spend five to thirty minutes before you write making a detailed outline of the scene(s) you'll be working on. In other words, know what you'll be writing before you write it.

Now, every writer is different and many things that work for some are disastrous for others, but I set out to try Rachel's advice because I was curious. I am pretty right-brained at times, and I love statistics. So what could be more interesting than charting my writing productivity? I followed Rachel's suggestion and set up a spreadsheet. There were spaces to note the times when I started and stopped writing, my total words and average words per hour, whether I had been interrupted and by what (thus letting me know how disruptive those interruptions had been), and I also put in a few other spaces--where I had been writing, music or no, whether I had been prepared (i.e. did I know what I would be writing in detail before I jumped in) and which project and scene I had been working on.

After a couple weeks of tracking, the results have been eye-opening.

First, she was completely right that when I was working on a scene that I loved or that I was looking forward to for a long time--the "gravy scenes" to use my own term--I was a MUCH faster writer. There is a scene in West of the Moon that I envisioned all the way back at the start of East of the Sun. It sprung into my head and I loved it instantly. I couldn't wait to write it. But at that time I was stubbornly sticking to "write the book in order" more or less, so I put it off. Well, this week, I FINALLY came to it. And, using Rachel's other tools (like writing during my most productive time of day) I broke a new speed record for myself: over 2,000 words an hour. Wow!

Also, I found that point three did help me. Especially if I was headed for a scene where I didn't quite know where I was going yet, if I wrote some detailed notes in my longhand journal about what things I wanted in the scene before I sat down to write it, I never stalled. I still wrote slower because I was feeling my way, but I always could look at my notes and know what came next. And the outlining didn't seem to make my writing stale; instead, it freed me up to relax, and I came up with some new material while writing one of these scenes that delighted me. So even if you outline, there is still room for your characters to surprise you!

But the most interesting discovery came from my spreadsheet. I am a diehard Morning Person. I wake up perky, alert, and bouncy in the morning. I would have bet money that writing in the morning would be my most productive time. BUT NO. The spreadsheet showed me that I was actually balky, hesitant and distracted when I tried to write in the morning! I don't think there was ever a morning point where I broke 750 words an hour. But in the early afternoon my focus improved, and that carried through all the way until I started to get fatigued--around 8 or 9 pm. So my peak writing time is actually between 12 p.m. and 8 or 9 p.m.

I would NEVER have guessed this without the spreadsheet. Once I realized it, I put it to the test. I worked on my novel only during my key times all of this week, and, even though I've returned to work this week, I've done between 2,000 and 3,200 words per day every single day. I'm within around 3K words of catching up completely now, and we've only just passed the midpoint. In fact, I've decided I won't be happy with just 50K words this year--I'm aiming to end significantly higher, and to be within range of completing West of the Moon entirely by the end of this month.

So this is why you find me blogging now--it's not noon yet, so I haven't hit my super-productive time. Way to rationalize a blog update, huh? I hope that y'all will head over to Rachel Aaron's blog to check out her system. I've linked to it above. She also sells a short e-book of that title, with that blog entry expanded, where she goes into more detail into her writing methods. Check it out! And thanks, Rachel, for giving me some new tools to improve on and explore my writing. :)