You guys amaze me. Some of you guys get 9000 words a day with limited time but I cant even get a couple of words in and I have almost the whole day. I guess I just can't get into it. How do you guys do it?
If you've ever seen the Care Bears I visualize my struggles to write sometimes like what No Heart is always trying to do. Turn Everyone including the carebears into a Grey, blah, uninspiring, lethargic creature.
That's why I refer to my innate desire to stare at the screen or worse, surf the net or read someone else's book instead of write my own, as The Desert. Cap locks very much deliberate.
I have all day to write, at least for right now. Every time I start writing it looks like something that came out the hind end of a dog. First I refuse myself permission to go online. I set myself a little time in the beginning and end of my day to do it. After that avaunt your foul seducer! I go to a part of the house without internet access. I refuse to open my kindle.
I write the first sentence. I stare at it a moment and finish the paragraph hoping against hope it looks cooler once its complete than the dog dodoo it is now. Its not. And yet amazingly, my books on amazon are selling very well. I can't get my head wrapped around this paradox. I don't want to write because what I am writing is complete and utter dung, and yet people like it. Convincing myself it'll all be made nice and pretty during the editing pass, because other wise why would anyone read this drek? I force my self to write. I don't want to, I'm ruining my book with every sentance that spews from my hands. I have to. I do it because my job is to write today and really if you've got a good editor, he/she or it doesn't even need to be a writer to be a real help.
I set myself a realisitic target. For me that's 5k a day. When I started out I said 1k. I did that and wrote 2k instead. So I said, 2k and then did 3k for a while. I declared the move at 3k and like a runner training up, before I knew it I had 5k days. Now I do between 6 and 9k a day. My daily goal is 5k so that at anytime after I finish my daily quota and I want to stop I am totally free to do so. If I write more in one day and have a family function the next, I take that extra apply it against tomorrow and thus have a lower target yet still am able to spit it out like clockwork.
Don't look at my numbers. Set yourself a goal. Refuse to stop because its bad. More give yourself permission to write the bomb and I'm not talking about the fun bomb or cool bomb, I'm saying the stink bomb. I originally wrote the Little Admiral because I couldn't bear the thought of ruining my Military Insect story, that is still almost half done, that story is cool, its wonderful and its still not done. While I'm almost done with the first draft of my 3rd Spineward Sector's Novels. Go figure huh?
I gave myself a story I didn't mind messing up. I set out determined to have some fun along the way, as anyone who's read my somewhat humorous Admiral Who should be able to tell and I bore down.
You have to harness your creativity and break it to your will, when you force it in the direction of the book you are writing and it suddenly goes all No Heart on you turning dull and grey with disinterest. You must force yourself through that desert one dehydrated, dull, boring step at at time, until you finally force your sub-conscious to realize, just like a little child that wants to go out and play, that its not going to get away with it. There is no fast one, your sub-conscious writing child can play, there's no trick, no constant cries for water or the toilet or I'm hungry right before bed time that will let your winy inner, creative child out of its chores.
Just like an angry child, you spank it or time out it or just plain don't let it do anything fun until the chores are done and eventually it will do it. After a while your little inner kid won't even notice how terrible its chores are and just give a perfunctory whine at the beginning. Then as you slog through some utter drek, your imagination will reluctantly take off and before you know it you're actually writing something fun! You love it even if no one else will! and almost before you can realize it, even though you've been stuck laboriously writing it every step of the way, you're done. You have a book. Its yours. you're proud of it, even if totally terrified everyone else will turn up their nose at the stink coming out of it.
Then low and behold you edit and fix and repair and suddenly its not the utter stink bomb you thought it was.
That's how you write 9k a day. In my experience.
The Deposed King
