Breaking the chain

Jerry Seinfeld offered some great productivity advice. Basically, if you want get better at something you need to practice every day. His craft was comedy and so he wrote jokes every day. His productivity system the simplest of tools: a large year wall planner. Every day he wrote, he crossed out the day on the planner. After a few days of watching the chain of days grow, your job becomes to 'not break the chain'. Simple.

So, as a writer, the natural thing for me is to not miss a day writing. I haven't got a wall planner but I've started using 42goals.com to achieve the same effect. But, you don't need to use wall planners to get this effect. If you're a blogger, you might want to blog every day about the skill you're developing. Chris Strom achieved mastery over new development languages by blogging about it every day. He even got books published off the back of this.

I'm also using 750words.com to write my morning pages, and that uses the motivation of 'not breaking the chain' to great effect.

I do like the idea of blogging about a subject to learn about it. I've so many things I want to learn in my job and personal life that I'm very much drawn to this idea. I'm going to go away and look to see which of these areas I could focus on.

Learnings from first novel

So, finally, I have a complete first draft of my novel. This has taken some time and the implications haven't really sunk in yet. So, I'm writing this in an effort to help me learn some lessons from the experience.

1. Don't take so long to get to the first draft stage. I've spent about (not sure for certain) 6 years to get to this stage. That has all sorts of harmful implications.

2. Love your characters. I suppose that's not necessarily a given. If you're writing about hurtful characters can you still truly love them? Maybe, maybe not. But, you must at least love writing them. If you don't, you're only going to do them a disservice. I'd like to kid myself that I haven't done that with my characters but I know that's not the case. At least two of my major characters are barely more than ciphers. I suspect you could switch dialogue around between some of my characters and you'd barely notice. I realise I'm not encouraging anyone to want to read it but, there you go - it's the truth.

In some dim and distance past, my characters had unique voices and I cared what happened to them. A couple of them were even pretty interesting and almost complex. This made them fun to write for. But as the years dragged on, and with gaps between my writing bursts, I started to lose touch with who these people were. I didn't know who I was writing for anymore. In fairness, they weren't exactly helping either but I can understand why they might have felt a bit neglected.

3. Have some idea of where your story is going. I appreciate you can, broadly speaking, categorise writers into those who like to plot and those that like to listen to their characters and develop the story as they go. I started my novel with the simplest of plot beginnings and no real idea of where it would go. I kept my fingers crossed and hoped that things would just work out.

I don't think they did really work out.

As I came across plot holes, new characters might get introduced, equally, characters might get erased. I don't think there's anything wrong with not plotting before you write, but my experience with this particular novel, was worse because I hadn't plotted.

A terrible side effect was the sheer amount of wastage. I've written about 200,000 words in the process of getting to a first draft of 120,000 words.  And, I know that if I'm to take this to a revised draft, I should be looking to shave a decent percentage of that (10% maybe). So, I've written the equivalent of two books worth and only have the first draft of one book to show for it.

4. Not all your ideas need to go in the mix. A side-effect of not knowing where the story was going, was that a lot of ideas got thrown in whether they contributed or not. In the early stages, when I was desperate to help boost my word count, I'd latch onto ideas that I thought would do that. This meant that sometimes things didn't make a whole load of sense. My plot was at the mercy of whatever new idea I'd come up with.

Characters started dancing to the best of this convoluted plot rather than stay true to themselves. I think if I'd kept a tight plot outline before starting to write, and maintained the courage to see that story through to completion, I wouldn't have had that problem. If an idea caught my attention, I should have made a note of it and kept it written somewhere else. There's every chance it would have come in useful somewhere.

In short, not keeping a tighter control on the ideas that I was throwing at the story, caused a lot of rewriting.

5. Keep to a writing schedule. Much as I love Douglas Adams's quote on deadlines making whooshing noises as they fly past, I realise that's not the approach I should be taking with writing a novel. In my day job, deadlines form an integral part of the calendar with at least six major deadlines each year. That's crucial to getting the work done. Why, then am I so flippant about any self-imposed deadlines I give myself in my writing?

A tighter schedule to getting to first draft would have solved many of the problems I've already iterated . I can type pretty fast. I can write my daily morning pages at 750words.com in 12 minutes. Bearing in mind that I might want to pay more attention to the words I'm writing in a novel, I could give myself an hour a day to write 750 words of a novel.

I'm not down about any of this. Getting this far has been a tremendous experience and has never made me want to give up writing.