We’re getting closer to Christmas and I’m getting closer to healthy, so those are all good things. Additionally, my daughter decided to get baptized this weekend. It was a really moving service and her choice struck me right to the core. Now, we’re settling back into the hustle and bustle of regular life until we hit Christmas. To that end, I’m trying to find ways to squeeze more time in. One of those ways is to look at just the next step. This is how you trick yourself into momentum. Don’t look at the whole elephant, just the toenail. In today’s Revisited post, we’ll get into details around that and what I’ve learned since then.
Drawing from the Well
I wrote another “patch chapter” this week. I’m still trying to get back up to full strength so I can get up early and write. I’m getting close. Soon, I’ll be back on track. Seven patch chapters remain to fill this in. I reran the math and the final word count jumped up just a little (as you can see below). I can’t believe this book is so long and still feels inadequately sparse in places. That’s what the rest of the editing is for.
Pages 315
162,716/177,133 Words
Filling the Well
I’m finally gaining ground. Pace is still ahead of me by three books, but that’s one fewer than last week. This week, I’m diving into Narnia to make up the remainder. The books are short, but I’ve always wanted to read them, so here we go. Last week, I finished Pen and Des’s adventures and also read Twelve Days of Faery and Hook: Dead to Rights. That last one was the most fun of the bunch. I liked the twist on the Pan mythos.
96/105 for #ProjectBookworm2023
Well Chat
In our third Revisited post, we’re heading back to 2019. There were a lot of posts in between that covered some topics, but most of it was “Hey, I’m back.” after long breaks. This was before I got my blogging cadence really down pat. Today, we’re looking at Chunks from January 21, 2019 whose advice was to trick yourself into momentum. Is this still true?
Books are big. Most BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) are too. It can all be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces until you get to an atomic piece that can be completed in one step. This is the idea behind First Principles. You break tasks down until you get to something that can actually be done. You can’t build an airplane all at once, so you break into pieces: fuselage, wings, etc. Each of those has several components and systems. You keep breaking it down until you get to putting two pieces together; that’s your first thing to attack. This applies to books too.
I can’t publish a book all at once. Yes, I jumped write to the end. It’s hyperbolic. This is to make a point, though. I can’t publish the book without cover art, a publisher/supplier, and, oh yeah, a manuscript. Well, looking at the manuscript, which is most of the book, I can’t write that all at once either. The book itself is broken into chapters. Some are long, some are short, some are at the beginning, some in the middle, and some at the end. You can’t write them simultaneously, so you’ve got to write one chapter at a time. Each chapter is composed of at least one scene. For me, this is often anywhere from two to twelve scenes. Again, these can’t all be written simultaneously, so we take one scene, and then one paragraph, and then one sentence. By then, I’ve finally gotten to an atomic unit for writing.
To trick yourself into momentum, you have to find the happy medium between these points. For me, this comes in the tracking. I can’t look at 177k manuscript and just say, “Go!” I can’t even look at 12k sentences or 4,500 paragraphs. Those numbers are just too big to be anything less than monumental. But 246 scenes? It’s a big number, but it’s chewable, so to speak. As I said in 2019, scenes can be anywhere from 15 to 3,755 words. That’s where Book III clocked in on the first draft. I can look at one scene, though, and focus in on telling the story in that scene alone. Because I bookend scenes with the feelers to the scene before and the scene following, as soon as I finish one scene, I want to write the next. Heaven forbid I forget what I meant to do next. So I write another. And another. The next thing I know, I’ve written 20-30 scenes. I built up my momentum while I wasn’t looking.
As you can tell, this hasn’t changed in four years. The processed has become more refined, but the basic building blocks are still there. It’s worked so far as long as I give myself the time for momentum to build up. We’ll see what develops in another four years. What are you tricks for completing big projects? Let me know in the comments and on social media.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG