Launch my project, change my life.

July 20, 2012 4:32 AM

Let's leave aside the odds, or what I end up doing with this thing I want to do. I want to think big, very big and plan, schedule and execute against a "project" of writing a novel or a memoir. From a project perspective, I want to end up with say, 350 pages in a realistic but compressed timeframe. You tell me ... how would you get there?

I have been a writer for years (started as poet/fiction writer) and have been sidetracked for many of those years as a business writer (ie., earning a living). Concurrently, I have had an extremely rich and colorful and tragic and comical run of good and bad luck. I have stories galore, I have a 'voice' and the desire. But my work life, social life and so-many-hours-in-a-day mentality -- I can't find the time or motivation to add this Big Project to my world. Yet ... I'm in my mid-50s and it's now or never. I want to write it all down. How would you approach, from a Get It Done or project management perspective? I guess I'm hoping for more than "get up at 5 a.m. ..." type advice? Possibly courses or workshops or software or coaches or how you've regimented yourself to tap the creativity inside and let it flow ... immediately.

posted by thinkpiece to Writing & Language (18 answers total)

How would you approach, from a Get It Done or project management perspective? I guess I'm hoping for more than "get up at 5 a.m. ..." type advice? Possibly courses or workshops or software or coaches or how you've regimented yourself to tap the creativity inside and let it flow ... immediately.

By getting up at 5AM.

The fact that you anticipated that answer suggests that you already know that's going to be the obvious thing to do. Or, if not that, then something very much like it. If you want to do all the things you're currently doing, plus write a memoir, you need more time in your day. And not just generic time here and there, but a solid hour or two of undisturbed, productive time. The best places to find that are early in the morning or late at night.

Barring that, you need to drop something. In the past year, I co-wrote a book and got engaged. My time spent playing video games dropped by about 85-90%.

Fundamentally, this isn't really a technological problem. It's a discipline problem. You've got the time--everyone has the same amount--you just need to decide that this is more important to you than other things, whether those things are spending that extra night out on the town, spending that extra hour in bed, or whatever.
posted by valkyryn at 5:13 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The timeframe cannot be compressed unless you are willing to devote the time. Compressed timeframe = hours per day.

If you are willing to work in an uncompressed timeframe, then there's the undervalued option of "chipping away". "Chipping away" means that you don't scold yourself for not completing so-and-so words per week, but you do have to actually use the spare time you have to work on the project.

People underestimate how much can be done by chipping away. The chips add up. I wrote 2500 words in a free afternoon recently. It was a confluence of free time and excitement once the flow got going. 2500 words is an enormous chunk of this big project I am tackling. It was very exciting, and I can't get my head out of the project since then. It's great.

The willingness to devote time comes from motivation, to be sure. But if you really want to write this thing, the motivation will appear as you begin amass pages. It might help you to lower your target. Write the opening. Write the first 10,000 words. If that's done and you're not motivated to keep going, I'm not sure that any external force can make you. No motivational software/coach works for me so much as having a start of the thing in my hands.

(That said, my writing software makes a pleasant sound every time I write 850 words. I'm not sure why. I never asked it to. But I never switched it off either. It's a nice thing to aim for when I sit down.)
posted by distorte at 5:18 AM on July 20, 2012

I'm currently working on a novel, and I have a full time job, a part time job, and a pretty active social life. What has worked for me is to set a small goal (like try to write 500 words a day), and I don't beat myself up if I don't make it that day.

Also, consider carrying around a journal with you. You may find you have little bubbles of time (such as waiting at the doctor's office) when you can write.

It sounds like you may have outlined in your head the story you want to write. You may not be able to set that story down on paper. You may wind up writing a completely different story, and you should let yourself head in the direction your creativity wants to go. (I say this from experience. For years, I had this idea for a book-- the book I am working on now. And I realized that it was the book I would have written at 20, but now that I am older and have a different sense of the world, its not what I want to write anymore.)

Good luck!
posted by emilynoa at 5:29 AM on July 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

A novelist friend once told me, "Just write one page a day, and you'll more or less have a book in a year. Just one page a day."
posted by functionequalsform at 6:03 AM on July 20, 2012

Best answer: I have found that a method that works well for me is getting all my ideas out as fast as possible (without worrying too much about quality) then adding refinements in layers.

For example, my first draft is to basically describe what happens. This is the hard part because the temptation is to write and rewrite stuff until you get it just "perfect."

Then I take another pass and polish the dialogue so that the characters are no longer talking in my voice. Would character X really say things like "molecular excitation?" He's got no higher education, for gods sake! While he might understand the generic principle from watching a science show, he wouldn't phrase it in a polished way. So basically I go through with an eye to making each character more distinct.

Then I take another pass and go through descriptions of setting. You know how some books have this detailed richness in the setting that people remember, even if the actual plotline is crap? That is the quality I try to imbue in the third pass. Instead of saying "Pelal was a small, unprepossessing town" I edit that to "Pelal was the type of town that is never a destination, but simply a waypoint – the kind of place one passes through on the way to somewhere else. Towns like this exist all over the world – tiny places that are never known to anyone other than the locals, who often never leave but instead lead sealed-off lives, placing value on minor accomplishments and petty feuds that are meaningless to anybody outside their insular circle."

This approach seems to work very well for me personally, since it allows me to break up a huge task into bite-sized segments. YMMV.
posted by wolfdreams01 at 6:11 AM on July 20, 2012 [7 favorites]

It is certainly true that if you want to write, you need to make time -- something else has to go. You can do this in any number of ways, which folks have already talked about here.

But if you're looking for help on *how* to take a novel project from beginning to end, I recommend Holly Lisle's How To Think Sideways course. After starting and not finishing three different novels, taking Holly's course helped me actually finish one (and revise it).

I can't say I agree with Holly all the time -- she's very opinionated about everything. But she's an amazing teacher, and I couldn't have done it without her. Good luck, and keep writing!
posted by Shoggoth at 6:23 AM on July 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

You might try internet-blocking software, carrying around a voice recorder so that you can dictate when it's inconvenient to write (like while driving, cooking, in the shower etc), keeping your notebook with you at all times, and forgoing some activity you care less about or doing it for shorter time.
posted by windykites at 6:34 AM on July 20, 2012

As for creativity flow, Stephen King makes a point that you should never wait for the muse to write; instead, develop a practise of writing every day and you will be prepared when it does come- and it will feel more welcome and come more often.
posted by windykites at 6:39 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

The odds are high enough to not make this some weird dream. 200,000f people do this each year during NaNoWriMo.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:43 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

In my experience, unless you find yourself with a lot of free hours in your day, you have to carve out a space for it in your social life. That means turning down fun times with friends, getting real about what your actual "social obligations" are, and learning to say no.

For a long time last year I had a ritual of spending several hours every Saturday working on a similar long form writing project. I would wake up, get myself decent, and then I was Out The Door to the cafe to write. I went to a specific cafe every time. I did not ever ask for their wifi password. (If I desperately needed to look something up FOR MY WRITING it had to be doable via my phone. Or I would just make a note to look it up later.) If possible, I would go with only a notebook or my index cards. There was no puttering around the house on Saturday mornings, doing chores and faffing about saying, "Oh, I'll leave in five minutes..." It was up, teeth brushed, clothes on, and out the door. There was no texting back and forth with friends making plans that ebbed closer and closer to Butt In Seat writing time. Or casually mentioning to a friend, "Oh, I'm at Lulu's, come meet me!" I treated writing like my one-day-a-week full time job. And in that time, I was surprisingly prolific.

This really goes hand in hand with the "crazy-busy" mentality in that recent New York Times article. Very few of us are truly that busy. If you really want to, you can find time to do this. You may have to sacrifice other fun things, or the general idea of leisure time, idleness, puttering around, etc. But it can be done.
posted by Sara C. at 7:18 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

This is exactly what NaNo is for. You have a word count to do each day. Work on the novel in your free time until you hit word count for the day. Clear out a couple of hours in your schedule--work during lunch, get up early or stay up late, whatever--until you got that done.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:30 AM on July 20, 2012

Best answer: I've never really found that you can "manage" this stuff.

I finished a manuscript recently, while working full-time, AND freelancing, and am currently in edits with my publisher. (SPOILER: editing process in publishing is worse than writing process!)

How does that work? Well, it largely sucks, not gonna lie. But you just... do it?

The way I thought about writing the book was this: a good story is between 1500 and 3000 words, give or take. So, you know, you sit down and write one of these every day.

Then you have a pile of story-things.

Then, later, you compile your pile. But you don't have to worry about that now.

You're at the stage now where you just have to make the stories happen. You can whip out one of these in a sitting, easy. You write that story down, until it's done, then you walk away. The end. And at the end of THAT, you have 25 of these stories, that's about 50,000 words, which is essentially a fairly short manuscript.

You either will or won't do this, and so you will either have or not have a book. There is no "getting organized" about it. There's just sitting down for 20 to 90 minutes a day.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 7:30 AM on July 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray has a lot of good advice about managing a large writing project in your spare time.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:34 AM on July 20, 2012

Best answer: The 90-day manuscript class at L.A. Writers Lab provided me with the perfect structure to get off my ass and finish my first draft, something that had been difficult for me for years. http://lawriterslab.com/
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:03 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I have written two full novels while working mostly full-time. If I were you, I would sit down and write a rough outline, or dictate it into a voice recorder, all in one push. Create a text file for that. Then get a bunch of index cards in whatever size you like and fill one with writing whenever you have 15 minutes to spare. Always have notecards and a pen with you. (Or a tablet or whatever, if you really can't write by hand.) Plug everything into the outline. When you can actually sit down and write, try to get 10 pages or so. But mostly, get a first draft together as fast as you can. I have two novels for which I haven't done that-- I just wrote scenes and dialog as they came to me-- and not only did I waste a lot of time, but I'm not sure I can salvage those novels. They have been written over such a long period that they are very disjointed.

Using the 15 minutes here and there has worked really well for me, especially when I remember to leave the house with a 15-minute project in mind; it will percolate until I have the chance to take out a card and write. Sadly, the only thing that makes me actually finish a novel is having a deadline of some kind, like a contest or going to a workshop where someone will be reading the thing.

I've heard lots of good things about the Scrivener app and plan to get it to try and fix my stalled novels.
posted by BibiRose at 9:15 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Another thing. This sounds kind of counter-intuitive because you are already pressed for time, but see if you can get some professional feedback and get into a writers group or find some beta readers. You sound like you are already pretty professional, but even much-published fiction writers often have support groups and get critiques at various stages. Feedback can really spur you to keep going and also keep you from wasting time due to not having distance from the work. The first person I showed my book to said I needed to find a writing group, and she was so right.
posted by BibiRose at 9:25 AM on July 20, 2012

Best answer: I very much recommend Scrivener for big projects. I've used it in writing my own novel and wonder how I ever managed to function without it. The organizational tools that it gives you are phenomenal time savers.

nthing the "you have to give something up" advice. Important things like this require sacrifice. If you can't find something that you're willing to sacrifice, then maybe you just have to accept that all those other things are more important to you.

Take your time and keep plugging away at it steadily. A novel (or memoir) is a marathon, not a sprint. I take the "write x hours per week" approach. Gives me a concrete goal to aim for but also some day-to-day flexibility so I can work around the things that inevitably come up. I prefer going for time rather than word count, myself. I'd rather spend an hour writing 25 good words than an hour writing 1000 crappy ones. I've always found trying to edit junk into gold to be impossible. I want that first draft to be something of quality.

Over the longer term, make sure to give yourself the occasional "light" week, or just a week off. A lot of projects die purely from burn out.

But, mostly, just get started. Even if it's scribbling out half-digested anecdotes on scratch paper, just start. Once you get into it, big writing projects aren't really all that scary, you just gotta eat them a bit at a time.
posted by ghostiger at 12:00 PM on July 20, 2012

Response by poster: Thank you, colleagues, all great answers, I "bested" a few. I've committed to starting today.
So long, internet.
posted by thinkpiece at 4:25 AM on July 21, 2012