Category Archive for ‘process’

It was about a month ago now I was proudly declaring the advent of new working practices, in which rigid timekeeping would lead to greater productivity and happiness.  Has it been a success?  Well … yes and no.

You wouldn’t have thought it would be hard to find two two hour blocks of time in which to work each day, along with two other single hours in which to handle email and business related correspondence.  But actually, when you’ve got three kids, it kind of is.  Certainly it is to find them at the same time every day.  Stuff comes up, time gets nibbled into, and before you know it you’re starting your block ten minutes late, or half an hour late, or having to split it into an hour here and another later, getting called to some emergency half way through, and the ideal notion of rigid timekeeping starts to dissolve.  You tell yourself there are exceptional circumstances today, but exceptional circumstances of one kind or another come up with depressing regularity and I’d be very surprised if I’ve managed more than two or three days in the whole month where I’ve stuck closely to the plan.

That said, on those days when I have stuck to the plan the productivity has been ridiculous.  Last week I managed 8,500 words, and words I consider reasonably good, including nearly 3,000 in one day, which is my best day in a long time, and I also managed to keep pace with a whole set of administrative tasks as well.  It somewhat depressingly reveals how bad the procrastination can be at other times.  This week, because of one thing and another, and partly because I’ve spent some time thinking and planning rather than just straight writing, I’ve only done about 1,500 in three days, which is useless.  Need some good days today and tomorrow to make up that shortfall.

Overall I’d have to consider it a success, though, just one that needs to be constantly worked at and reaffirmed to keep effective.  Right.  Now for two hours work.  Except I’ve got to pick up the kids at three so maybe just an hour now and then catch up the rest later.  Except I do have that stuff about foreign deals to attend to and some paperwork for my accountant and, and, and…

Writing is a difficult job in some ways.  Working as a TV editor you work to other people’s timescales, other people’s briefs.  Sure, you can have quite a major contribution depending on the job and the director you’re working for, but ultimately you’ve got a set task to do in a given space of time.  Or, more often, a whole set of small tasks to do within a set schedule.  You have an office, a time to arrive and a time to leave and usually a daily assessment of progress.  Writing is very different in that, although you’ve got some oversight and input from your editor, they’ve got a whole list to manage and a whole set of other authors and projects, and in general you have the one big goal of producing a finished book and no one else really imposing any particular shape on how that’s to be done.

Separating work life and other life is something that’s a difficulty for anyone who works from home, but it’s particularly so when the task is so long-term and amorphous.  You have notional deadlines, places in the publishing schedule, but in the end no one can supply one of your books but you, so as long as you sell copies it’s unlikely anyone’s going to get really aggressive with you about supplying that manuscript.

It doesn’t help that most of us writers start out as hobbyists, amateurs, enthusiasts, burning the midnight oil after a day’s work at the day job to get a chapter finished for nothing more than our own amusement, hoping perhaps one day we’ll get published, maybe even make a living from it.  Things change as it shifts from being a leisure pursuit to a work one, and when, perhaps, against all expectations, you’ve finished that book or series you always dreamed of writing and have to think of something new you want to write, digging a little deeper for ideas and methods.  Inspiration and enthusiasm wane, perhaps, over the grinding years, and the shortfall has to be made up by earthier virtues of craft and application.

At the same time a huge amount of work-related tasks appear which are not actually writing.  Interviews, blogging, promotion, dealing with agents, editors, rights, touring to support a release, going to cons and events to meet readers and other professionals, responding to email.  The more successful you are as a writer, the more of this kind of work there is to do.

There’s a romantic notion that writing, along with other forms of art, maybe, should somehow be free-form, unpredictable, chaotic, maverick, not subject to the same kind of rules as any other kind of work.  That writing should spring from a sort of heavenly inspiration.  I’m not sure I see it that way.  When you get a great idea, feel suddenly inspired, are visited by the muse, it can be a wonderful thing and the words can suddenly flow, hands hardly able to keep up with thoughts, you look up and night has fallen and you’ve pounded out a few thousand words you’re really happy with.  But in my experience it doesn’t happen that often.  So you have to find a way to make progress when you’re not feeling inspired.  You have to spend time grinding it out.  Slapping down ideas and deleting half, or three quarters, or four quarters of them.  Writing rubbish sentences instead of beautiful ones and chipping, and chipping, and chipping away at them until they’re . . . at least better.  What’s that they say about inspiration and perspiration, again?

After The Blade Itself was published I was still working as a tv editor just about as hard as I had before, fitting in the writing around it.  It wasn’t until I signed my second contract, for Best Served Cold and The Heroes, that I was able to start turning down editing jobs in order to give me more time to write.  But I’m not sure that my writing speed necessarily increased all that much, if at all.  I still didn’t have any structured approach to the job, didn’t engage in any meaningful timekeeping or analysis of how I was working, kept on with the hobbyist approach of picking at it, piddling about on the internet an awful lot, in a sense working all the time but at a very low intensity.

Although I’ve become more or less a full time writer over the last couple of years, I’ve had the major distractions of two new children, a big move, and a massive building project, and haven’t really been able to get into a routine.  A more disciplined approach is well overdue.  So from now on I’m going to be aiming to do two blocks of two hours’ work a day.  Focused writing time.  Chair time (or perhaps standing time, since I usually write standing up, as it happens).  Planning, revising, or drafting, and nothing else.  No email, no piddling on the internet.  In some ways that might not seem very much, but believe me you can get a fair bit done in four hours if you’re genuinely focused and I find, unless you’re really feeling inspired, it’s hard to get much more than that done in single bursts.  Whether I can maintain that tight focus day in day out we’ll have to see.  Then I’ll also have an hour where I do public facing tasks – responding to email (which has been sadly neglected of late), blogging and maintaining the website (also neglected), interviews and the like, and an hour dealing with business and organisational things, as well as attending to the general crap that accompanies modern life.

I will chain myself to the clock, and free myself through the imposition of tight rules.  Also lock the door so that my kids can’t distract me when I’m supposed to be working.  Hopefully I can cut down on the vast amount of procrastination that dogs the life of most professional writers and, if not work faster, at least work smarter and less stressfully, perhaps having more time in the evenings to play with my kids, be a functional human being and live life to its fullest.  Meaning watch the X-Factor on catch up, of course…

Ah, word count, word count, how I love thee, how I hate thee.

When I first started writing some time in, er, 2001, I think it was, the version of Word that I was using didn’t have a visible, steadily updating word count as does the modern one, you had to click the word count from the tools menu.  And boy, did I do that a lot.  Every three or four words, sometimes.  In fact it was a pretty good bet that, the more often I checked the word count, the worse was the quality of the words I was producing.  But with later versions of Word you can usually see the count ticking over down there, just at the bottom of your vision.  Or, more often, failing to tick over.

These days, when first drafting, fearsome professional that I have become, I aim for 1,500 words a day, but I tend to settle for anything over a thousand.  It is possible of course, to smash out loads.  My best ever day is around 3,500ish, I think.  Other days getting a few hundred down is like pulling teeth.  I tend to be fastest with a big action scene, usually when I’m starting out a chapter and can dart from one bit to another, writing whatever snippets come to me, or I’ve thought about before, slapping down dialogue with broad strokes.  Later comes the more laborious work of gradually filling in the gaps between the more inspiring sections, and going over those sections to make sure they work, I haven’t frequently repeated myself or turned a sword into an axe without realising.  Often it’s the descriptive bits that I find take the most intensive effort.

Of course, counting words is in essence a pretty useless measure of progress because words can be either good or bad, and a thousand words of crap are a lot less useful than a hundred of gold.  Obsessively counting words could be said to encourage the production of crap.  Although that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the alchemy of editing allows crap to be turned into gold later, and you’re a lot better off with a big pile of crap after a day’s work than you are with nothing, believe me.

The irony, of course, is that when I’ve finished a first draft of a full part and start to review it, or finished the entire book and start to edit it en masse, the emphasis shifts from producing to tightening, sharpening, introducing more character and colour, and I measure my progress in the number of words I’ve cut each day.

This, of course, is just as useless a measure of progress as counting the number of words you’ve added, as it stands to reason that a really good, tight, effective chapter is a lot more difficult to cut down than a rushed, flabby, sloppy one.  You might be able to cut 1,000 words from an 8,000 word chapter and still, ahem, not have a very good chapter at the end of it, while you could slave all day to cut 100 words from a 1,000 word chapter, and raise it from something merely wonderful to the type of truly earth-shattering quality that, ahem, all my stuff of course eventually reaches.

It’s also obvious that in the editing it’s possible (and, in fact, quite common) to get a huge amount done without really altering the number of words at all.  You cut rubbish and add quality, replace weak dialogue with strong, fuzzy description with sharp, sloppy language with tight.

So we watch the word count, knowing that a day of many words can still be a day of little progress, and vice versa.

But given that one’s judgement of whether what one is writing is good or bad is a hugely vague and changeable thing, shifting from day to day with confidence and enthusiasm, what other tool is there?

You’ve got to give yourself some sort of goal, after all.

Or you’d just be sitting there, drinking tea, playing computer games, and waiting for the royalty cheque from the stuff you did last year.

Hold on a darn second…

So I’ve finished my first (extremely rough) draft of the first part of my new book.  Which means, bizarrely, it’s already about one fifth completed.  Strange, since it feels I’ve hardly started it and still have only the vaguest grip on at least one of the two central characters and most of the details of the setting… 

They say that authors can be roughly split into architects and gardeners (or at least arranged upon a continuum between those two poles), that is to say those who plan everything in fine detail and then closely follow the plan, and those who work much more organically, starting with a notion, or a scene, or a character, and then seeing where it leads them. 

I’d always have put myself much more in the former camp.  Careful planning then filling in the blanks.  Indeed the idea of working entirely organically fills me with dread.  With the First Law I had a go at writing the initial scenes, a lot of which had been brewing in my mind for years, but even then had a pretty good idea what ground I wanted to cover and how I wanted to end things.  Quite quickly I realised I needed a more explicit plan and started working that out, then stuck to it pretty closely over the five years or so it took me to write the trilogy. 

But over time I must say I’ve started to drift towards gardening.  With Best Served Cold I felt I had a pretty coherent plan, a solid idea of the histories of the characters, their role in the story.  But when I came to write them I found myself pretty much floundering, and having profound doubts about what I was doing and whether it would work at all.  Writing the first couple of parts of Best Served Cold was probably the most difficult period I’ve had as a writer, in fact.  But, deciding just to push ahead, I started to get a stronger grip on the people, how they needed to think and behave, and as a result how I needed to write from their points of view.  The characters, their roles in the story, and the methods of writing developed together, if you like.  So by the time I’d finished a first draft I was much happier with the whole concept, and was able to go back to the start and quite radically change things around (mostly through a lot of cutting of thoughts and feelings that really didn’t need to be there and letting action and speech do the work).  With The Heroes, therefore, I was more confident in leaving the first parts pretty loose, letting the characters and story shift about into their proper configurations, then revising the whole thing en masse once the first draft was complete.  With this latest book I’m leaving things rougher yet, and trusting to the Fates and experience that by the time I’ve finished, I’ll know exactly how the people should speak, think, and act, and in the editing I’ll whip the whole thing into shape with a minimum of fuss and wasted time.  Honestly, I’m still not sure exactly how I’m going to end this one.  I’ve got a few possibilities, but I think I’ll wait and see what feels right when I get there.

But whatever it is, obviously, it will be great.

Honest.

So my read-through of the page proofs of The Heroes is complete, and my accompanying short story also first drafted, which means from my point of view the text of the book is categorically and completely DONE.  As if to prove it, US Advanced Reader Copies have recently gone out, and here’s one of mine:

Handsome, is it not?  A more “promotional materials” style approach than the UK one, which aims to look as much like the finished book as possible.  The sharp-eyed among you will also notice a startling discrepancy in heft.  Yes, it is exactly the same book, but due to the vagaries of printing and paper stock the US proof is some 150 pages shorter and only a little more than half the thickness.  Despite the monstrousness of the UK spine, it is in fact my shortest book for a while – about the same length as Before They are Hanged and a good 10-15% shorter than Last Argument of Kings or Best Served Cold.

You might think I would feel an overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction on the completion of this long and involved project (well, a sense of self-satisfaction even greater than my usual one), but in fact I find you don’t tend to get that as a writer.  No moment of typing “THE END” on your clackety-clackety typewriter then perhaps flinging the final sheet away like Stephen J. Cannell used to at the end of his TV shows.  Finishing the first draft segues rapidly into revision and editing, the editing process is naturally spread out and winds down through various stages, each with less impact on the final result than the one before.  Writing a book peters out rather than ends with a sharp bang in the way the reading of a book does.  And of course over the next few months people begin to read the book, and respond to it, and so it is very much still in your thoughts.  Plus the nebulous end of the writing process for one book dissolves naturally into the nebulous start of the process for the next.  Tis a strange business, all in all.

Looking back at my blog, I note in passing for any that might be interested, that I finished reviewing the page proofs of Best Served Cold back in April 2009, and although I’d already made a start on The Heroes at that point, it means that it’s taken me around about 19 months to write, 13 in the drafting and about 6 in the editing and reviewing.  Given I had another child, moved at least twice and have planned and overseen a comprehensive building project in the same period, I’m pretty pleased with that.  I mean, it’s no Brandon Sanderson level of productivity, but it’s ticking over.  It also means, for those of an extrapolatory frame of mind, that predicting the same workrate, you can expect my next book to be hitting the shelves somewhere around the end of August 2012.  Man, I can hardly WAIT to read it.

In other news, thanks largely to YOUR support, Bethod’s indestructible champion, Fenris the Feared, overcame and destroyed The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series over at Suvudu’s cage match.  I told you no small horse was going to get in his way.  Alas, he now faces no less a villainous adversary than Lord Soth from Dragonlance.  To be honest, I really can’t see the circumstances under which these two would fight, as I reckon they would have loads in common and really have a lot to talk about.  Still, by all means vote if you’re keen to see Fenris take on either a Terminator or Eric Cartman.  Man, you couldn’t make this up…