Reflections of Writing

I’ve always written, as long as I can remember (though technically, I started when I was eight). Along the way, I’ve had transitions where I had to unlearn all the things I had previously learned. Sometimes the lessons were painful. My process has to fit me today, not the me of ten years ago, or even last year.

The Writing Challenge

The most recent has been over the last three or four years. In 2021-22, I signed up for a challenge to write a story a week for a year. The prize was a lifetime subscription to online writing classes. Lots of learning!

I eagerly jumped in and wrote about 25 stories. I tried genres I’d never written before, like cozy mystery and sword and sorcery. Had fun writing the stories.

At the halfway point, it became a slog. Instead of the story, I focused on minimum word count (2K) just to get the next story done. The challenge became about checking the box on making word count, not about enjoying the idea, the characters, and the story.

The Cost of the Slog

I didn’t realize it, but I’d broken my writing with the second half of the stories. Nor was it helpful that about two months after I finished the challenge, the writer sponsoring it discontinued the workshops.

Disappointing, to say the least.

So I’ve struggled with writing. I wrote stories for two anthology calls and struggled to get to 2K. That’s also affected novels as well where I kept getting stuck.

After one where the story never worked right, I realized the problem might have been caused by the writing challenge. What could I do to fix it?

Sparks from Author Nation

Enter the Author Nation conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. I like in-person conferences because not only do you hear from disparate writers, but I also start getting ideas for things I can do. Sometimes they’re story ideas, and sometimes they’re other types of ideas.

Two things popped up:

1. Business edits. This was from Becca Syme. She said that we should review things in our business and take something off our plate. It might be a social media channel we’ve abandoned but still have, or a project that we never finished. This idea paired well with Cal Newport’s discussion about “administrative overhead.” We can get too much going on. Even if we’re not doing it anymore, having it hang around sticks in the back of our heads.

2. Reviewing your writing. From T. D. Donnelly. I went to two of his sessions and thoroughly enjoyed them. He made me think more than any other session. He commented that writers often stick with the first way they learned how to do something and never change. Maybe. But we all change over time, and maybe the process needs to change with us.

Business Edit

The first thing I thought of was deleting all the workshop materials from the writer I took the challenge from.

That made me twinge a little. I had invested time in these courses and the folders included my notes. However, it became apparent that I needed to unlearn what I’d learned because it was no longer helping me. Shedding the files was an important step in that direction.

Clearing business issues is only half the problem. I still have to tackle the writing process.

Process Change

This is an area that became thorny over the last few years. The writing community has tended silo around writer/influencers. Outliner writers and discovery writers have prescribed methods they insist are required to write.

It’s not good. It makes writers feel like they’re doing things wrong when they’re only doing things that work better for them. I’ve been influenced by both ends of that. I’ve had to reassess my writing process and exorcise outlining techniques that had gotten in, since I can’t outline at all. Never has worked for me, but everyone assumes that everyone outlines. Now I must do it for the discovery writing as well. Ugh.

So that started me looking at my process from a different perspective. What did I need? What didn’t I need to do anymore?

On the plate:

My Clifton Strengths include 1, Intellection 2, Ideation, 3 Input, 4 Adaptability, and 5 Futuristic. Intellection means I need to do a lot of thinking about the story. Previously—and this showed up during the challenge–I had to keep writing the opening of the story over and over. It was a thinking process to help me get into the story. Very time consuming. Thinking takes the time it takes, even if can’t be tracked with word count.

There were also areas that I have consistently had problems with. I like writing speculative fiction, but I have trouble with the world building when I do Discovery Writing. I get stuck a lot trying to come up with basic setting details, and world building is setting on steroids. Even when I’ve thought about the details in advance, or written them elsewhere in the story. I still manage to leave them out. It’s just something that’s me.

Pretty much, I thumbed my nose at everything.

If someone said I needed to do X, I would do A.  So I started asking what I could do differently and came up with the following:

• Spend time thinking about each scene before I wrote it. I’ve struggled with structure long term. Outliners explain structure by describing outlining. Discovery writers explain structure with beats, which to me, is another form of outlining. So I’ve been experimenting on a current project with The Plot Module by Jason Alexander. For a Discovery Writer, Jason’s Plot Module can be done by looking at the requirements for the next scene, and in my case, thinking about them, before writing.
  
• Use AI to help me with setting and brainstorming world building. This is pretty fun to do. For the setting, I asked AI something like, “The story is set in XYZ. What are five common trees? What’s something unique about each one? What do they smell like? What color do the leaves turn in fall?” I also found this part of research very frustrating because it was hard to narrow down the amount of information.
  
  World building starts with my rambling about my thinking. Then AI gives me suggestions. I do more thinking, working out what I need. And sometimes, directions I want to avoid. There always has to be agency from the writer.
  
• Using placeholders. I didn’t want to spend time in the initial chapter coming up with a name of an organization, so placeholder. When I was doing death by writing, I couldn’t remember the name of the main character’s dog. Placeholder. I hadn’t developed a character enough to decide on a reaction. Placeholder. I needed to research a piece of information. Placeholder. I’ve been assured by other writers that placeholders are very bad, so I’m being bad.
  
• Reviewing if I need to do moving edits or can limit them. Moving edits going back to a different chapter to make a change caused by a later chapter. This is called cycling in other writing circles, but moving edits is my term because I’ve done it long before I heard about cycling. Moving edits are surprisingly time consuming. If you’re driving 400 miles, technically it takes eight hours. Then you stop at the rest area. That’s fifteen minutes. Stop at the gas station. Another fifteen minutes. Eating. An hour. Those forays back to add something to chapter 2 cost time. Might still be necessary, but the typo fixing will go because that can wait. I’ve purchased a tool to offload that to AI, since I really hate hunting for typos.

These are not about finding the “right” method and never changing. These are about finding what works for me, right now.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no single process fits every writer.  Nor does it fit them forever. The best thing we can do is question everything, keep what works, and let go of the rest. That’s how we keep writing alive—and keep ourselves writing.

My next step is simple: keep looking for business and process changes. Delete what doesn’t serve me. Writing is a long game, and I’m playing it on my own terms.