Writing diary: January

 

Start of the year means resolutions, of course.

 

I love a resolution. Part of it is a result of being self-employed, and at the moment entirely in control of my own workload (due to no one breathing down my neck demanding I get on with producing timeless prose). Part of it is just my nature, I think. I like a schedule. I like targets. I like to keep a timesheet so I can be accountable to myself for what I’ve been doing with my time.

 

In fact 2022’s resolution is a direct result of 2021’s timesheet. As well as logging the hours I spend on various projects and tasks, I log words written. And looking at 2021, I realised that I have written scarcely any new words. I kept a diary approximately weekly, but that’s really just a sort of mind-dump that helps clear my brain and set things straight. It’s not anything I ever expect anyone to read, including myself. I’ve edited a couple of manuscripts of mine, which involved writing the odd word as well as deleting many. I’ve made a very detailed plan of the next thing I’m going to write which includes a 5,000-word outline. But I have not written any new books. I think this may be the first year this has happened since I started writing fiction. It feels very strange. I’ve been treading water.

 

It’s partly the world situation, I suppose. It has seemed like nothing is moving forward and that has affected me. And for quite a bit of the year there wasn’t any space in my house for me to be on my own to write and that had an impact on me. I think the fact that I now have an agent who is submitting my work to publishers has made me feel like I’m in limbo too. What’s the point of starting something new if I’m going to have to stop to do edits once something gets accepts, or change tack if it seems like no one’s interested in the type of book I’m producing?

 

But a writer has to write. I can’t just sit around tweaking the books I’ve written before. For a start some of them really aren’t worth the trouble! I need to write to get better at writing, to find new and more fabulous stories, to investigate my voice, to grow my ideas so that they entertain other people.

 

And now I have my own little office and a ‘don’t even knock if the door’s shut’ rule, I have nothing to distract me.

 

So for 2022 the first thing I’m going to do is write that book I’ve been planning. And I’ve got another one that’s just the germ of an idea at the moment too. Perhaps I’ll get that one done. Or maybe something (*whispers* having one of my books accepted for publication) will come along to distract me from it, but I’m not going to sit around waiting for that to happen.

 

And my resolution? I’m going to write at least 500 words a day every day this year, as I have in some other years. It doesn’t have to be my books – these words count too – and I will have to have a stack of ideas for days when nothing seems to want to come. Maybe I’ll begin some more Snippets stories; those were begun in a 500 words year. The thing about writing a little every day is that it leaves you in no doubt that you are a writer.

 

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 My latest book Snippets: Tiny Pieces of Fairy Tale is available now.

 

Writing resolution 2019

I like a challenge, as you know. I like to start something new in the new year and keep it up. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Mostly when it doesn’t, it’s because it’s too vague or too hard. The single most successful challenge I have ever set myself is to write 500 words a day every day for a year, which I did in 2016. I found that for me 500 words a day is absolutely doable in any circumstances. On a good day, it’s thirty minutes of writing; on a slow day it might take about an hour. I included every type of writing in my 500 words – words that were part of whatever my work-in-progress was, blog words, reviews, writing exercises. Each day I added my words to a spreadsheet and found, by the end of the year, that I’d written over 200,000 words. Every single day felt like a successful writing day when I added my daily total to the spreadsheet. That is a feeling worth having.

I learned two main things the last time around. Number one is that, for me, first thing in the morning, before I get out of bed is the optimum time for writing fast because the critical self-editor who normally sits on my shoulder appears to be still asleep at this time. Any later and it’s likely to take me twice as long. And the point is to get the words on the paper. They don’t have to be readable – they just have to be there. Knocking them into shape is an entirely separate thing.

The second thing I learned is that I need to spend more time on detailed plotting and planning ahead so that I always know exactly what I’m going to be writing each day. I had some moments in 2016 when I had finished everything I had planned and so I began writing random parts of things that I had had vague thoughts about, all of which are still sitting in files waiting for me to get to them some day. On the other hand, there is definitely room for spontaneity. In 2016, I began writing little pieces of fairy tale as writing exercises and these stories grew wings and have become my Snippets project which continues to be an absolute delight to work on.

So I am beginning the year writing a short piece which will become the beginning of a new novel I hope. At the moment I know how the story begins but the rest is sketchy. I need to find a way into it before I start doing serious planning. I think this will be around 3,000 words and so will fill about a week. I’m not yet sure what my subsequent 500 words a day will be about because my first big project of the year isn’t writing something new but reworking something I originally wrote back in 2016. I need to read it first to decide if I’d be better off starting from scratch or if there is something that can be salvaged. That probably sounds like a disheartening task to be undertaking but it’s not. I love the idea of this book and I think I’ve come up with a much better way to tell the story. I imagine I’m going to need a good bit of planning before I’m ready to write some more on either of these projects. Seems to me like this might be a chance to write some new Snippets stories – oh yes!

How to write 200,000 words in a year

This time last year I made a resolution to write 500 words in every day of the year. Here I am on December 31st 2016 and I’m pleased to report that I’ve made it. My final total (adjusted when I finish writing this piece) is 209,803 words. That’s 26,803 more than the bare 500 words a day for 366 days.

Now for the hard work...

This week, after putting the finishing touches to Gingerbread & Cupcake (out December 1st!), I’ve returned to work on something that’s been set aside for several months.

It’s an idea that I’ve been playing around with for years. In fact, it’s been with me longer than almost any other project. The first notes I made for this book were written in 1995. Ironic actually, since it’s about the education of a witch and I would have been writing those notes right around the time that You-Know-Who was working on You-Know-What.

Writer seeks plan

I am a person who needs a plan. The idea that you can sit down and write something worthwhile off the top of your head is something I find very hard to understand. Not that I need a completely rigid plan, you understand, just a direction.

So, for example, these past two months, I have been writing tiny pieces of fairy tale each day. If you want to know any more about this you can look back at earlier blogs. The good thing about this is that I have a place to start writing each day but I don’t have to spend time on planning because it’s not part of a plot. What I’ve done each day is, when I’ve woken but not yet got up, I’ve let my mind wander around in the canon of fairy tales until something snagged and then I’ve teased that until I could see a thread, then set it to one side until I was here, with the keyboard under my fingers. 

Occasionally over the two months if I’ve been lying awake, I’ve delved a bit further into my next day’s fairy tale – much better than letting my brain dwell on those dastardly circular middle-of-the-night thoughts. Then, of course, I’ve got hope I remember it all the next morning.

500 words a day – update 3

Current yearly total: 125,245 words


Keeping up with my 500 words a day is proving tricky at the moment. I’m deep in a major new draft of a book I’ve been working on for a couple of years and I have a deadline to finish it. That means, whatever else happens in my day, I need at least a couple of hours to devote on this. My head is right in the rather complex world of this book a good deal of the time, which would be great if I needed to write more of it – I could easily dash off 500 words of stuff that would fit. Unfortunately though, what the book actually needs is streamlining, which mostly means cutting. And that means that after I’ve done my redrafting work on this book each say, I have to tear my mind from this world and find another one to play with.

Now for a good part of the year, I was working on a new book – let’s call it the witch book – for which I had created a meticulous plan (you can find out something about it here). Each individual scene was mapped out and although I didn’t necessarily know the detail of what was to happen, I could conjure up 500 words from these brief scene notes fairly easily. The key was, I suppose, that having all the detail there made slipping out of the world of the book I’m editing and into this one easier. 

However, about a month ago, I ran out of planned scenes to write. All I had left were the final, wrapping everything up scenes and try as I might, those just wouldn’t come.

Since then I’ve been much less efficient with my 500 words. I’ve written blogs and reviews – I can always witter on about books or writing for 500 words and over on the Paisley Piranha blog we’re having Classic YA month, which required more reviews than usual. I’ve also been writing a bunch of totally unplanned scenes for a sequel to the witch book (I have a vague outline of four books in a series). This new thing would come together much better if I had the time to plan it properly, but, until I’ve finished the redraft I’m working on and can devote time to serious planning, I thought I would write a scene involving each of the characters, get to know them a bit and discover the place where my witch, Rowan, finds herself by stepping into the unknown next to her. I’m sure it’s not very efficient, as writing goes; I suspect I’ll end up getting rid of most of what I’m writing, but it’s quite fun to pick a character and write, knowing nothing about them but, for example, that this is someone who will end up being sympathetic but seems antagonistic at first.

Thinking about how this 500 words a day has worked for me over the past few months, I’m trying to work out the best way to use what I’ve learned when the year is up. I don’t think I’ll carry on with 500 a day every day. If I do that, I’m going to end up with thousands of first-draft words and no time to hone them. I currently have three first drafts almost complete – it’s always the endings that come later for me – and there’s no point in churning out all those words if I’m not going to go back and make them into something worth reading. Words need plenty of honing, and they need time to settle between drafts, so you can work on them effectively. So I think I’ll aim for new books to start with an intensive planning session, probably a week to make sure I’ve done effective plotting and given some thought to setting and characters before I start. Then I can write 500 words a day using this plan (as I did with the witch book), so a 60,000 word book would take about four months to write. I can do lesser edits on other projects, proof-reads and so on during these writing months, but I think I’ll lay off trying to do the new words and the deep redrafting at the same time. I don’t think I can do intense editorial work for more than a couple of months before the words start to be meaningless, but that’s fine: I can schedule a couple of months for that and then back to writing something new.

Will this work? I don’t know. It rather depends on how much the rest of life intrudes on my time and energy. You’ll note I’m only talking about the lonely-author-in-her-garret types of work here. At some point I’m going to have to accept that now and then I need to step out of the garret and jump up and down and shout so someone will read what I’ve written!

500 words a day - update 2

So here I am, halfway through the year, and my word count is standing at 106,380. Yes indeed, I have written one hundred and six thousand, three hundred and eighty words this year. It took dogged determination to start with but now – usually – it’s perfectly straightforward. I tend to write first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve had my breakfast and got dressed if I can, especially if I have somewhere to go. Weekends can be tricky; the routine is all to pot and getting up always takes so much longer. Also it’s much easier to accomplish if I am either alone in the house, or if everyone else is fully occupied. It’s most difficult if we have guests or if I’m not at home. But I have managed every single day so far, even on Brexit day, though I felt rather as though someone close to me had died.

So what have I achieved?

I’ve more-or-less finished the first draft of a book I started last year, which is currently put to one side waiting for me to be ready to grapple with it. It’s too long, possibly because as I was writing I was aware that it wasn’t quite right but I just kept firing off another 500 words and another in the hope that it would suddenly become right. It’s a sort-of romance to go with my other two self-published sort-of romances, but finishing it is going to have to wait.

I have two thirds of a brand new book which I planned very thoroughly earlier this year. I’m expecting to have a complete 60-odd thousand word first draft of this by the end of August.

I’ve also written a ton of blog posts and reviews.

The next big thing for me to tackle is a big edit/rewrite/new draft of Reivers, the dystopian novel I’ve been working on for three years or so now. Someone (!) wants to read it, but having taken a good amount of time to consider feedback from various sources, I have some ideas to strengthen it, so I’ve promised this someone the new, improved version by the end of the summer. I’ve already done a little work on it, writing a new element, but now I need to totally unpick the whole thing, analyse what’s good and less good in it, and then sew it back together. I’ve given myself the six weeks of the school summer holidays. I have a spreadsheet to keep me right.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, it didn’t help that yesterday I was feeling a bit lazy, so decided not to get started right away first thing in the morning. Then, when I was just about ready to go, unexpected visitors showed up, the kind of visitors you need to invite to stay the night, so obviously getting to grips with a major rewrite went totally out of the window. (I did, however, manage to sneak off and write my 500 words and finish an editing job.)

So now, I’m ready to get started – although already behind – but I do wonder how it is going to work, writing 500 words of one thing and then trying to immerse myself in an extremely different thing.

I will tell you one thing, though. Even on the days when most of my time is taken up by things which are not writing, the thread of my 500-words that runs from day to day makes me feel that what I am, primarily, is a writer.

Hear that, world!

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Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?

500 words – an update

It’s twenty past seven on Friday night. I’m sooo ridiculously tired and I haven’t yet written today’s 500 words. I did try, but I spent the day going on a school trip which involved getting to school early followed by a two-hour bus journey on winding roads, four hours of child-wrangling with a 3D film (which I can only bear to watch if I don’t wear the glasses and I kind of squint) in the middle of it, and then another two hours of bus… My attempt to write was on the first bit of winding road, typing on my phone, and I stopped 65 words in when my head and stomach protested. So, though it wasn’t late when I got home, it was way past creative o’clock and hence, I thought I’d just have a chat to you about how the whole 500 words is going instead.

So here’s the thing. So far, so good. 123rd day of the year and I’ve written at least 500 words each and every day, giving me a grand total of 66,167 words so far this year. They’re not all good, or even all useful, but they are a sustained creative effort and I feel, I think justifiably, proud of my efforts thus far.

It hasn’t always been easy. There have been days like today, when it seemed far too difficult to fit it in. Once, I didn’t even start until quarter to eleven at night. A few times when I knew the day was going to be busy and draining I did it in bed at six in the morning before I got up. But 500 words isn’t much. If you know what you’re going to write, you can knock it off in half an hour. Not that it always takes half an hour. Just under an hour most of the time, I’d say, but once or twice, much, much longer. The thing is though, if I’m really struggling, I can do it in bits: 100 words and then I’ll go and do one of the other things I’ve got to do; as much as I can manage in the fifteen minutes I’ve got to spend on it and I’ll come back to it later.

It helps to have a plan. On days when I know I’m going to struggle, I like to make sure I know what it is I’m going to be writing before I start. On those days, I’ll probably go for one of the options that requires a bit less in the way of imagination and a bit more opinion – a blog piece like this or a review. I’m never short of opinions! Occasionally I’ve set myself a writing exercise.

It’s been much easier to complete the 500 since I planned out my next book. I’ve written a really detailed plan (scroll back a few blogs if you want to find out more about it) and it means I can always pluck a scene from somewhere in the plan and just get writing. I’m mostly working on it in order, but occasionally, when I fancy writing action or scary or something else in particular, I go for a scene later in the book. When I was working on the previous book – the one that’s complete but waiting for me to pick it up and work on the next draft – I had a much sketchier plan, and I’d just add another 500 words each day wherever I felt they were needed. Consequently I think I may have to cut a good bit from it. Heigh ho – fortunately I’m not counting deletions against my total!

Of course, there are days when having a target of only 500 words can make me lazy, days when I could easily get several thousand done if I kept going. But look – 66,000 words this year. What more can I say? There are also other things I ought to be getting on with that may be getting side-lined while I concentrate on this target. I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t really given this enough thought. Certainly I have two other books which need editing rather than more words and they both come behind my daily 500 in the queue for attention.

So to sum up, yes, I’ve written 500 words every day so far this year and I feel it’s working for me. It’s most effective when it’s backed up with advance planning. I’m still determined to keep going until the end of the year, and longer if I think it’s still useful.

Watch this space.