Tag: writing

Better Late than Never

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

So I had to work this weekend and I rewarded myself by playing some Terraria. As such I forgot to write my journal post for this week. On Monday I got hit by some depression and everything I tried to write came out sounding like I was a complete and utter failure, even though that certainly wasn’t true.

I made good progress these past two weeks, though it wasn’t all easy and smooth, and there’s nothing big in particular that I can point to and say ‘I accomplished that!’, so it’s hard to write a post about what I did accomplish.

Sometimes this is writing. It has nothing to do with how skilled you are as a writer and everything to do with whether or not you can keep going back to the page day after day. I know some people who, I believe, are far better storytellers than I am, but I’m the one putting in the work. And so there’s nothing exciting to tell you about except that I’m still going.

Though my husband did make this:

Help from Sebastien de Castell

Laura Highcove

I have poured out some new words on The Huntsman, but things are still not coming together the way I would like them to. As such I’ve gone back to the beginning again to smooth what I have and hopefully push forward again.

Going back to the beginning of my story does two positive things for me. One, the beginning is rather solid right now, so it helps me remember I’m not a terrible writer and it lifts my spirits. Two, it allows me to shift the story as a result of new things I have discovery written, including relationships between characters, because, let’s be honest, the thing I enjoy most about writing is the relationships between characters. So whenever they get more nuanced and detailed, it makes me happy and keeps me motivated.

I was listening to a podcast from DIY MFA.com where the author Sebastien de Castell talked about how much more difficult writing a sequel book is. As he pointed out, in the first book you can just create as much as you want, but in the sequel there are already rules, rules you can’t change (especially if the book is already published.) and expectations that have been set.

It just made me realize how true that was, and I stopped beating myself up so much about the expectation that I had that since the first book only took me two years, I should be able to do that for the second. The book is going to take as long as it’s going to take. I may never be one of those authors who pounds out a book a year. And that may change when I have an agent and/or editor helping me out. Right now I can only work with what I have. My goal right now is aimed at having an alpha ready by the end of the year. It’s good to always have a goal, even if you don’t make it. And who knows, tomorrow I might have that idea or write the scene that fixes all the problems I’m having. That’s part of why writing is so much fun.

PS: Sebastien’s Greatcoat books are super amazing, so if you like swashbuckling and snarky narrators, give them a shot.

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Last year I realized that NaNoWriMo was too easy for me. I have participated every year since 2008, and have won every year but two. This year I decided to give myself a new challenge, 90,000 words. Not quite double the original goal, but actual novel length. I went into NaNoWriMo with the first anticipation I’d had in years. I failed to reach my goal. But it’s not about the failure, but about analyzing the why and learning what I can from it.

Why did I fail?

1) I started out with a goal of 3,000 words a day. Then I reached my first Friday and had no time for writing (due to my normal schedule, I just didn’t take it into account.) I caught up Saturday by writing 6,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day, and that burned me out. I changed my daily goal to 3,500 with no writing needed on Fridays. I couldn’t keep this up either.

2) This story came out in a way I was not used to. That being: I wrote scenes out of order, and multiple times before I wrote something that moved the story forward. I don’t know if this was caused by my sudden need for such a large amount of words, the fact that this was a sequel, that I’ve learned so much craft in the two years since I wrote The Storyteller, or something else entirely. Either way, the result is that my forward momentum kept coming to a screeching halt, and while I could produce words, I wasn’t actually moving the story.

3) Politics. I’m actually not kidding. Despite your opinion about who should’ve won or why, the amount of anger and hate that existed on the Internet in the days following the election wrecked me emotionally. I had to abandon Facebook completely.

What did I learn?

1) While 1667 words a day is pretty easy, 3,500 is not. I believe it might be because writing this much didn’t give me enough time in between to think about my story and live my life. I felt very dry, creatively. In the third week I backed off the schedule I had set for myself for a few days and after a few days the ideas started flowing again. So what I learned is I should try something closer to 2,000 words a day for a while.

2) I am a multi-drafter. For those who haven’t read my blog previously, I know that one part of my process is that I write, go back and rewrite from the beginning and go a little further into the story, then go back and repeat. While somehow I managed to plow right through the Storyteller two years ago, that did not work this time. So I also learned that I need to let myself stop an reassess when I need to, otherwise I end up just spinning my wheels.

3) I also learned I should’ve removed myself from the toxic environment online more quickly. As much as I wanted to support the people who were scared, my emotional well being is more important.

Getting Back Up to Speed

Laura Highcove

Yep, Nano has kicked my butt this year. I got into a spiral of self-doubt and since my schedule was all screwed up because of the holiday I really didn’t get anything done besides grouping the multiple versions of scenes into separate files.

As soon as I got home and was able to organize my space (I swear, I must be the most organized discovery writer in existence.) all the ideas started flowing again. I’ve been able to make some good progress on some scenes I wrote a few versions of already, but now I’m getting it to the way I want it to be.

My plan right now is to continue organizing and rewriting what I have this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be ready to go forward a bit more. I’d like to get to 70k words by the end of NaNo (Just to say I did.) though I’ve likely written more words than my ending word count will suggest. It’s hard to count words on rewrites because I take chunks of previously written words along with completely new writing.

I’m disappointed that I’m not going to reach the goal I gave myself, but then I knew it was a rather lofty goal. I’m going to finish out the month strong, and there’ll be a post coming next weekend on reflections of the month and what I’ve learned.

NaNo Speedbump

Laura Highcove

I met and passed the 50k NaNoWriMo goal. The problem I’m finding myself in now, is that I had to stop and organize what I’d written. I had no idea what had happened because I was writing scenes multiple times (yay discovery writer). Organization takes time away from producing words. And with my brother’s wedding and the holiday coming up, it would be hard enough to write 3.5k words a day, much less spend an hour or two reorganizing as well.

So I took a step back to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish this month. I could put out the words, that’s not a problem. But my goal is to write the sequel to The Storyteller and the less organized my writing, the slower my forward progress. Right now I have two or three versions of most of the scenes with only a vague idea of which one is the one I’ll keep.

I realized I was wasting too much time rewriting scenes. I am learning so much from this month, but I can feel that I’m not being efficient by pounding out words, so I’m stopping, reassessing, and reorganizing. Hopefully in a day or two I’ll have a new plan for how many more words I need to get done, and then I can plow ahead.

Starting NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I am now several days into NaNo and it is kicking my butt. This feels more like I remember my first NaNos, when it was a struggle to come up with 1667 words in a day. This month I started off doing 3k a day to reach my goal of 90k for the month. I’m pretty sure that I will never get many words on Fridays, since I work 7:30-5:30 and Friday night is when the hubby and I go grocery shopping, so the whole day is pretty much gone. The plan was to make up Friday’s words on Saturday, like I have in the past. Writing 6k words in a day ruined me pretty hard. This morning (Sunday) it took me three hours to get 1700 words.

I had to shift my approach. I decided I won’t expect any words on Fridays and divied those words to the other days. So now my goal is 3500, six days a week. Am I pushing myself past what is comfortable? Heck yeah, but I can do it for a month, and I have a good reward waiting for myself.

The Huntsman is probably the one story I have the most ‘outline’ for before I started writing it. Mostly because as I was finishing The Storyteller, I filled my head with all the things that needed to happen in the next book(s). As such, my writing process has shifted to a ‘stitcher’, super hard on this book. I am writing scenes in completely random order, as the ideas come to me, because if I don’t write them down then I will forget them. The idea is after I write it all, I will go back to order and smooth it out. This is not entirely dissimilar to my normal writing style, there will just be far more stitching required.

I am having to constantly remind myself that the important thing right now is to get through the words. Get through the story. It’s all there, even if it’s not organized right now. It has been a real struggle.

Working up to NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I did several prompts this past week, and then thought that maybe I should work on actually writing a large number of words a day. In the past I’ve been able to reliably bang out 1000-1500 words in an hour, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in output mode and not revision mode.

So I decided to work on the short story I had a vague idea about involving Cobalt and Archer. It takes place only a few days after the end of the Storyteller and involves them going to and also going to fix . It ended up being a good thing I did a little practice before NaNoWriMo starts this Tuesday.

Firstly, I had trouble producing words so I had a few days of reminding myself how to push forward through the resistance, as well as remembering the feel of how I get to the place where words flow.

Secondly, it helped me organize some of the fallout from The Storyteller. While that won’t be in The Huntsman, it’s still helpful to have it written out. I’m one of those authors who doesn’t know what I think until I write it down. I can plan all day long, but when I write, I think about it a different way and all the details flow into my brain. Most of the time it kills whatever my plan is and it’s glorious.

I am actually nervous about NaNoWriMo for the first time in several years since I am challenging myself to write 90k words in the month instead of the usual 50k. 50k just became to easy for me and I’ve had no challenge the past few years. Not to say getting out 50k words wasn’t helpful, because it certainly was. It will just be interesting to see if it’s actually possible for me to pop out an entire rough draft in a month, as opposed to it taking two months.

Still no more responses from agents. It only occurs to me now that I don’t know what the procedure is around announcing agent representation. When I (hopefully) find that lucky agent who loves my book, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it public right away. It might be that that only pertains to getting picked up by an editor. Either way, I’ll be sure to post about it as soon as I can.

Next Step

Laura Highcove

I typed a blog post on Saturday saying that I had a plan to finish smoothing the rest of my novel by my deadline of Friday. I let the post sit until Sunday, as I usually do, before posting. In that time I finished smoothing the rest of the novel and sent it out to my beta readers. As such, my plan is finished before the post had time to enter the world. Yay to me.

Then I researched agents who will be at the James River Writer’s Conference that I’m going to this weekend. That didn’t take too much time. I also went to the bookstore to try and find some Arabian fairy tales, but that didn’t work. So now I’m a little lost. I don’t want to start on a new project right before NaNoWriMo. At the same time, I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t spend time on writing. I figure maybe I should just sit down and write and see what happens. I am a discovery writer after all.

Extra time to Write

Laura Highcove

Starting in September I now have my weekday afternoons to work on my writing. I knew it would be an extra four hours a day, but I don’t think I quite understood how much time that was when I made my plan the other week. Which is a good thing, because working through the fight scenes and the prose ended up taking longer than I expected.

It’s not that the work is harder than I thought it would be, just more tedious. The book is over 100k words. Even if all you’re doing is reading the book, that takes a while to get through. Though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in going through and fixing the ugly bits that I’ve been ignoring up until now. This novel is more complete than any other novel I’ve ever written, and it’ll only get more so. It’s very exciting.

I also did some looking into agents, which was a little intimidating. Partially because of the idea that I am actually going to start submitted before long, and partially because I realized I am going to have to write a synopsis. A synopsis is basically taking my book and boiling it down to two pages. Or one paragraph. I started working on it, just jotting down the main plot points and I already have way too much, and I’m only halfway through the book. I decided to put it aside until a little later.

For now I’m going to keep working like my plan is perfect and infallible. When October hits I’ll reevaluate where I am.