Tag: 600K Year

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sweet, Seductive Song of October Productivity

I have spent the last few weeks agreeing to do things, comfortable in the knowledge that time when I would actually have to do said things was comfortably distant in the future. Except now the future is almost here, and this will be my last week where all my writing time is actually devoted to writing-related tasks. I tend to forget that October is a good writing month. The weather is pleasant and there is a kind of lull in the yearly commitments, a quietness between the festival chaos of September and the beginning of the end-of-year chaos that comes in November. Every year October comes around and I do a whole bunch of work and I think, well, this is nice, it would be great if this was all year round. And then I start making plans, because everything seems so achievable. Then November reminds me that those plans are foolish, and December derails them entirely. It doesn’t stop

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Problems with Word Count

Since starting the 600K Year, I’ve been aiming to write an average of 1,800 words per day. I managed it pretty consistently through the chaos of November, failed pretty consistently during the chaos of December, and carried my December habits through to the first two weeks of January. Which means that I’m now trying to write an average of 2,750 words a day. I’m not quite hitting it – yet – but I’m getting within a hundred words or so. I’ve always been fond of word count as a productivity metric, but I’m conscious that it’s not without it’s problems. The first, somewhat related to Parkinson’s Law which suggests that work expands to fit the time available to complete it, is that your process expands to meet the word count expected of it. Once I know how to reach 1,800 words regularly, I let the cracks start to appear in my process. I’ll stop writing to check a fact on wikipedia,

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Can Get Done in Twenty Minutes

I’m always astonished by the patently untrue things I’ll internalise about writing, given half a chance. For me, the big one is the myth of time, which manifests in the belief that it’s not worth sitting down to write anything unless I’ve got a significant chunk of time to devote to the effort. It leads to some pretty weird decision making. Give me a two hour gap in my schedule, and I’ll consider filling it with writing. Give me a fifteen minute gap in my schedule, and I’ll consider filling it with Facebook on my cell phone. In my head, writing requires an long stretch of time and energy to make it worth while. Which is odd, ’cause I know that’s bullshit. I even have the data to back it up, courtesy of the novella diary I kept back in May of 2013, which largely constructed a draft out of ten and fifteen minute writing bursts of a couple of hundred words. It

Works in Progress

The Sustainable 600K: A Writing Dare Courtesy of Alan Baxter

Last week my friend Alan Baxter posted his annual link to a post about why he thinks NaNoWriMo is a stupid idea for writers, and ‘cause I was fresh off a teaching gig and looking for distraction, I accidentally clicked through and read said post for the fourth year in a row. I’m not quite the anti-NaNo grump that Alan is, although I do kind of dread this time of year as a natural by-product of working at a centre that exists to help new writers. NaNo usually results in a slight uptick in calls, activities, and other new-writer craziness that carries us through to the end of the December (I’ve also seen how useful it is when it comes to helping aspiring writers carve time out of their schedule, especially when they’re still at that early stage where no-one takes their writing ambition seriously, which is the same theory behind the weekly Writing Races we run via AWM). So,