This may be more of a writers or creatives post than our typical Authors in Our Midst posts, and I think it will be great fun. Some might call the concept crazy, but you won’t hear that from me.
Let’s give a warm welcome back to Werebear, who has been sorely missed in the comments!
And now for something completely different!
Writing a book in 10 Days!
by Werebear
I’m in the midst of a fascinating experiment. I’m writing a book in ten days.
The book which so inspired me was How to Write Pulp Fiction by James Scott Bell, writer of the Mike Romeo series. Five thousand a day until 50,000 words. The goal is creating what Monty Python called “a ripping yarn.” A spell-binding story.
I’ve been healing up and my brain is working much better. Only, at unpredictable times. This makes conventional employment still impossible, but fortunately I’m not conventional. So I set myself the challenge. Ten days to draft, 2-4 days to let it cool, and then I turn on my editing mode.
This is rough copy, of course, especially since a lot of it I dictate on my nature walks or while sitting in the car once I get to the grocery store. By breaking up my writing sessions throughout the day, and making my scenes mostly dialogue, the words can flow between the characters I’m inventing as needed.
I’m using the dictation app JustPressRecord and the writing software Scrivener. The next step is collecting this mess into chapters, but any outline/mind map software can work.
Because I’m not writing it in order. I think of a scene it must need, and I start setting the scene and discover characters. This is the first time I’ve ever first drafted an entire novel. My next cat book is progressing with much more polished chapters. My fiction book is going well but is more advanced, though I can still use this technique to fill in remaining gaps.
I’ve always been a fan of draft, then edit. But never went to the tallest diving board before, starting a whole book with only a vague idea. It’s forming a satirical tone to match the outrageous premise. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing something. Maybe I need fun. Maybe my readers do.
This might be helpful for any writer who dreads staring at the blank page. Because drafts don’t have to be good. They merely need enough potential to be polished into something good.
At five days I was halfway, 25,103 words. Now I see a book. And I think, like the main character in Stephen King’s Misery, the last difficult years might mean I’ve been “Scheherazade for myself.”
This is such a general creative question: “Where do you get your ideas?” (For writing and anything else.) My answer is that ideas are everywhere. I think it’s really about: “How do you make them live?”
Dorothy A. Winsor
That sounds liberating and potentially effective. Just let it rip. You don’t even have to see the words written down while you’re in that drafting phase.
Comrade Scrutinizer
BIg fan of Scrivener here. Good luck. Back when I was writing for publication in science journals and for my thesis, I found that if I was waiting for the work to come out fully formed in a linear fashion, I had an impossible time getting started. I stumbled upon the “just write stuff down and organize it later” method and found that it worked best for me, although it seemed a bit odd sometimes to start with details about the experiment, then the introduction, then the results, then the lit review…
WereBear
Perhaps it’s all the good “plotting theory” books I’ve been exploring. Everyone call out favorites!
It’s for screenplay writing, but The Nutshell Technique explains act structure in a very flexible way. I was thrilled to discover my more conventional WIP, a cozy mystery, was well constructed already. Got some confidence.
Cozy is on hold during this experiment. But when I get back to it I’ll have more tricks in my toolbox.
WereBear
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I Scrivener really shines in this process. Because I’m certainly a non-linear thinker, a “pantser” in the vernacular.
My first novel I wrote so much which I then threw away, just to find the story.
But at least I started with a word processor. It was typed in from a magazine and I think it was blocks of 255 and you put in your own HTML-stype formatting… but it was mine and I loved it!
JoyceH
(Joyce, there are people out there writing. What’s your excuse?).
Sigh.
WereBear
Here we go, my first word processor: SpeedScript.
At least the program beeped if the line of numbers didn’t compute.
For the Commodore 64. That’s how long I’ve been in tech. :)
Comrade Scrutinizer
@WereBear: WordStar 2.0, but I was training business/accounting software at the time (1982-ish) so I didn’t have to pay for it. I go back as far as batch processing on IBM 360/70s (JCL, anyone?) around 1972.
WereBear
@JoyceH: The suggestion in the book that I was most scornful of turned out to be one of the most useful things.
Plot wheels.
They aren’t meant to be the plot of our book, but to spark ideas about the one we want to write.
It comes up with absurd situations to trick our mind into saying, “No, the handsome frog should be searching for their true love, not taking the stock market for a ride. Change the general into a waitress and that’s the story I want to tell.”
It turns getting stuck into play time. Which might be what our mind needs when it gets stuck.
WereBear
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I was learning punch cards at gifted child summer camp around then.
Never learned Wordstar but wasn’t that the one with five keypresses to do things? Command C me, please.
Ruckus
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
As someone who has done a lot of writing (mostly boring, boring, boring work stuff – rulebooks in a sporting atmosphere) once upon a time, but collage as well, Scrivener is very good.
And as someone who has done the above I agree, write stuff down and then fix all the concepts into the words that you would want to read, or for others to read. And believe and understand. It has to flow from the idea to actual words, not the other way around.
WereBear
Scrivener users, did you know it now can generate names for the writer?
Heritage, M/F, with time ranges and geographic origins. It was in the book, along with a lot of good info on marketing and such.
Mr. Bemused Senior
No, thank you. [Don’t get me started 😁]
WereBear
Another fine book that helped me was Truby’s Anatomy of Story. By the time I finish it, I’ll be a genius.
Not that it’s a problem, but as soon as I grasp what he is explaining, I have a book to go off and try things with. A mark of how good it is shows in that I haven’t gotten very far.
It keeps giving me ideas :)
SpaceUnit
This post has inspired me. I’m going to write a novel about a knitting enthusiast who is thrust into a mission of bloody vengeance after a terrorist attack badly wounds a member of her family.
I’m going to title it Ripping Yarn.
Brachiator
I have attended a number of interviews with authors and have pretty much concluded that there is no single best way to attack that blank page. Just picking some method and doing it consistently.
I don’t write fiction, but have had to write lessons and lectures for various types of training. I knew what material must be covered, but I would write drafts of sections as I felt interested or inspired. I would flesh out, rearrange or delete sections as I thought appropriate. Then I would go back for cleanup and edits.
I like this and marvel at how writers do this. When it’s well done, it’s magical.
WereBear
@SpaceUnit: The knitter market is ready to hear their story told!
SpaceUnit
@WereBear:
I’ve actually started writing two novels but haven’t finished either of them. I suppose I ought to get back on the horse.
No, they weren’t about knitting.
WereBear
@SpaceUnit: Been there, suffered over THAT. However, since I’ve been coming up with words in this experiment, I have more confidence about finding my way out of the woods.
I have three novels, two of them even done, that I think I can revive. That’s energizing. I think I responded to these methods because I’m such a fan of narrative drive.
I have a friend who loves reading literary stuff, like the Nobel Prize winner each year, while I just can’t. But she read my first thriller and said “it was so exciting she could barely stand it.”
She doesn’t necessarily want to do that, thus the literary genre for her. But I was thrilled that such a reader “got it” from my writing.
It keeps me going, still. Writing a thriller seems so obvious to me now.
PaulB
I’m curious about when and how you take all of these disparate chapters and organize them into a coherent whole. I’m assuming that has to happen at some point, since when you start, you don’t really have a clear picture of where you’re going.
One rumor about George R. R. Martin is that he employs a similar strategy and that he’s allowed it to get away from him, such that he’s having serious trouble bringing things back under control and working towards a final resolution.
gwangung
I use Scrivener to my Playwrighting stuff. Keep all my research notes in there. Packed FULL of noted.
Now I gotta get back to my sequel….
SiubhanDuinne
@SpaceUnit:
Hahaha!
Ruckus
@WereBear:
Which might be what our mind needs when it gets stuck.
When you are truly stuck, effectively walking away is what works. And when I say effectively walking away, it is to put your mind in a different place, whatever that place is for you. And it applies whenever you are stuck in one spot/idea/solution and none of that fits or works. I worked in making molds for plastic products for a lot of decades, and most of the time it was just work, but sometimes one would get stuck in how to design/build the tool that would make a complex product. You could sit there and stare at it or walk away and be productive at something else for a time. And at some point the light bulb would come on. I call it background thought. It’s rolling around in there somewhere, but it can do it quietly and without any thought/stress about time or possibility. And then BINGO, the answer shows up.
WereBear
And there is the greatest incentive of them all, self-publishing. I started a blog to help people with their cats and interest publishers. They still aren’t interested, so I’m selling my own books.
Knowing the book I’m pouring my heart into will be available to readers?
Priceless.
WereBear
This is where Scrivener, being a nonlinear word processor, is the perfect tool for making sense of the rough, but mostly complete, draft.
Instead of being one document per chapter, as with Microsoft Word, all of your book is in text documents. It fits in a binder which is also an outline of chapters. But inside that chapter we can tuck notes and ideas, highlight in different colors, merge notes and split up a long chapter into two files.
I might have a file that says “Stephen King mayhem will go here” but only me describing the mayhem will fill my word count. I can look for these when I’m working up to my target goal, and something else around it lets me know what it needs.
It’s like we build a Christmas tree and hang ornaments of story where they need to go, and it’s easy to step back and see how it’s looking.
We not-few, we proud, we Pantsers, can start to see the story. Because we’ve let it grow organically.
WereBear
@Ruckus: SO true. It’s why you are supposed to think of anything else but the problem!
I think you’ve hit on the nature of what this process has knocked loose for me. Because I’m not blocking the flow of creative ideas by gatekeeping, and trying to stay ahead of the process as it unfolds.
It’s gotta unfold, first.
Rough draft means there’s nothing to be fussy over. I can find something that no longer fits in the story and ditch it, and I’m not wasting the hours I would have edited it and then given up :)
And I haven’t sweated over a beautiful phrase I need to toss, advice known as “kill all your darlings.”
WereBear
To be clear, I’m only half way through. But because I’m hopping around the story as likely complications occur to me, I have good coverage. The ending arrived late and I’m still uncertain how it will all resolve, but there’s a number of ways it can go.
But it is already a full book with plenty of things happening. The smaller the holes, the easier they are to fill. In fact, I now realize if I’m getting stuck, I need to write something else, somewhere else. I come back, and realize this troublesome chunk isn’t needed.
WaterGirl
Thanks so much for doing this, Werebear! Be sure to check back later this evening and again in the morning. Some people come to these threads late.
PaulWartenberg
I once tried the 3-Day Novel contest efforts and barely found myself getting to 25,000 words, and tended to get frustrated.
I do the 30-day 50,000 word effort with NaNoWriMo, which has more comfortable place, but their privacy / NDA issues are currently worrying me about keeping up with them.
Best of luck on the project, WereBear. You’ve got the main plot by the sound of it. Hope to see the finished novel soon.
Dadadadadadada
Since this seems to be where the writers hang out, I’m working on a novel of my own. I hope to have a draft done by November, and am obviously going to need beta readers. Is anyone interested?
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@JoyceH: Please write more. I love your work!
Kristine
QFT
WereBear
@WaterGirl: I’m back later than I wanted but I will :)
WereBear
@PaulWartenberg: Thanks for letting me know about NaNoWriMo’s difficulties. Poor supervision in their youth programs is especially heinous, I had no idea.
I’ve done it three times in the past, it’s how I managed to get my cozy mystery started. But the principle itself is as old as writer’s block. It started as a great thing but we don’t need a laxly handled organization to do it.
I like the motto I got from the book.
Trouble is my business. I’m a pulp fiction writer!
WereBear
@Kristine: Thanks for the warm feedback. Still trying to figure all this out.
I’m taking this so-far experience as a signal that I’m prone to letting my edit brain constantly come in and give head noogies to my drafting brain.
More than ever, I’m convinced they should work on separate shifts.
The little parentified child: desperate to do a “good job” when no one explained what it was or gave the power to actually do it. Poor thing is definitely mucking up my process. I will calm them down. :)