Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 1
Total Queries: 2
Scenes Arranged: 200
Total Scenes: 26
What a day yesterday! I stayed on pace with sending out another query yesterday and intend to do the same, but that writing! I have never (that I recall) mapped 26 scenes in a day. I hit my stride and things just fell into place. I’m past the build up to the First Pinch and have covered two of the three chapters in the Pinch itself now. When I map out Meibor’s today, which should be easy, I’ll be into the Fourth Eighth and making my way to the huge moment at the Midpont. It’s going to get fun.
That said, I’m 30+ chapters deep already and I’m not even at the halfway point so either I’ve got too much happening or I’m spreading things thin. Or I need to write short chapters. We’ll see what happens when I get to the actual writing.
Filling the Well
That Hideous Strength: 61%
Elegy: Page 20 of 89
No, I’m not making any real progress on Elegy. It’s a harder read than I expected since the pages are formatted as .pdf images instead of Kindle pages so each page is a slog. As for That Hideous Strength, it returns in a few days so I’m going to try to plow through the ending 5.5 hours of it over the next day or two. Plus, I found The Devouring Gray on Hoopla which I’m VERY excited to read/listen to so I’m further encouraged to get That Hideous Strength behind me and get into a most-contemporary title.
Polishing the Well
My wife and I watched A Quiet Place last week and the kids were interested in it so we all watched it again last night. It’s a great movie. We thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m also at the tail end of the second season of Lost with my wife which just makes me keep asking, “What is going on with that island?!?” I know I’m way behind on this show, but I swore off it for a very long time. Now, I’m in the whirlpool of its influence too.
Well Chat
Gaining and Maintaining the Ability to Write Fast
After my mapping dash yesterday, I realized something. Writing is like any other action in motion: it STAYS in motion unless something stops it. That idea is making me thirst for a writing vacation, but I digress.
So, how did I arrange so many scenes yesterday. Let’s start with this: writing is writing no matter how you style it. Thinking about writing is writing because it takes a lot of thinking to get each word on the page. If you could quantify the amount that I THOUGHT about my first book before it was to the state it is in now, it is probably on the order of a short story PER WORD on the page. So whatever you’re thinking about your own writing, if you’re working toward the goal, you’re writing, so give yourself a break in your own mind.
To that end, it feels good to get a lot WRITTEN when you sit down to write. There is a lot of advice out there, but one of the best pieces of it I recently read was from Neil Gaiman when he said every time he sits down to write, he either writes or he does not; there is no other option. On the face of it, that sounds over simple like, “What else would you do?” But there’s more to the subtext of it. He’s either writing or thinking about his writing or giving himself a break or something that eventually feeds the writing. What he does NOT do is beat himself up for not writing.
It would have been easy for me, after a week of editing, to be upset with myself that I didn’t split my time and put scenes together while editing so I was making progress on both projects. But I didn’t. I was just excited to get back to writing. So I used that excitement to power me through so many scenes.
Now the how is a little more complex than that. I was able to write so fast because I knew where I was going. I was amped up, I had the motivation, but if I had not had direction as well, I would have been lost. All speed and no control, as my mother used to say. So I try to stay organized. I’ve talked before about plot points and the decreasing size of the steps to take. I’ve got my eighths laid out so every time I hit a major plot point (Key Event, First Pinch, etc.) I lay out the things I need to happen to get me to the next one. What I did yesterday that got me going as fast as I was going was to lay out even smaller steps than that. I asked myself, “What needs to happen to check this off the list? Okay, how to I create the dotted line between those tiny actions?” Next thing I knew, 26 scenes.
So that’s what I’ll be doing going forward, at least with intention. On some level, I’ve always been doing that, but now it’s on the front of my brain rather than deep in the core. Hopefully this helps you in whatever journey you will soon take. Be well.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG