Getting into gear

I was following a thread on a Facebook page for authors the other day and the discussion was about daily word count. Several people aim for a number of words each day - 1000 seems a popular number. Others don't count words at all but aim to write for an hour. One day this might produce a paragraph, other days a chapter.  When they've done their allocated word count, or time, they might carry on to exceed it, or do something else, but it's a measurable, organised way of ensuring that forward progress is made regularly.

I like organised. I like forward progress as well.

What's my method? What do I do?

Hmm.

I need to do some thinking about this, especially as I have such limited time to write. I have two days a week that I try to protect for writing, and that's just the hours between school runs, say, 9.30am until 2.30pm.  Some days I find that I can get down to things straight away and manage a blog post, a couple of scenes from the book, and still have time to surf Facebook and check out the headlines. These days are rare.

More common are the days where I start with the surfing (bad idea), try to appease the irritable Blog Monster and then find that I can't get my story into my head at all. I am distracted, and distracted by the most ridiculous things, like the need to clean windows, or check whether I should put out the black bin or the green one for the bin-men in the morning. I make endless cups of coffee before deciding that there is insufficient time left for actually...ahem...writing. Too late.

Then I sit in the car waiting outside school berating myself for wasting such wonderful empty hours with trivia when I want to get this thing written.

I'm told this is not uncommon, but I need to get over it. It's not going to write itself, and I am determined that I'm not going to give up on it. I need to be more disciplined. Maybe the 1000 words a day would do. One thousand words each day and I'd have a 90,000 word first draft in three months.

May, June, July. In time for the summer holiday, I'd have a draft to begin working on.

Except that there's no way of writing every day. There simply isn't time, or peace. I so envy those people with lots of space and time to spend on their work in progress, but at this point in my life I have school runs and a husband who is only home at weekends and more than enough swimming practices to deliver my children to every weekday evening and Saturday and Sunday too.

One thousand words twice a week when I do have the opportunity, and it'll take the best part of a year.

What I do know is that when I get in the right frame of mind, in the zone, I can write 3,000 words in a couple of hours. So I have hope.

Well, it's like this. I'm revving in neutral. I'm not getting anywhere. Time to get into gear.

Chippers and builders, planners and pantsers

I know that there are as many ways to write a book as there are authors - it stands to reason that everyone goes about it in a different way, but I've also heard that largely speaking (enormous generalisation here) there are two main techniques to writing: the planner, and the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants-er. I've heard this second category of writer referred to as a 'pantser'.

I am definitely not a pantser.

I don't know why I thought I might be, to be honest, since in every other area of my life I am a careful planner who requires advance warning of everything, who struggles to adapt to change and who loves routine and familiarity. I don't do surprises very well, and so clearly I am unlikely to be one of the writers who sits down one day with a vague idea of how to start a novel, and just starts writing, with no idea where the story might take them.

Goes with the flow, so to speak.

Nope. I have my 'protractor' idea and I am breaking my detailed synopsis down into chapters and scenes and attempting to make myself a plan for writing the scenes that I haven't got yet.

Another interesting way of describing the work of an author is to decide how you create your work in terms of sculpting a masterpiece: whether you start with nothing and slowly add pieces until your sculpture is complete, (a builder) or whether you start with a huge shapeless lump of stone and slowly chip away at it until the shape within is revealed, (a chipper).

Michaelangelo did this with the famous statue, 'David'. David was buried inside a block of marble until a master-craftsman found him in there and released him with a chisel, leaving all the unnecessary stone-chips on the floor around him.

I always thought I'd be a lump of stone-type writer. I am notoriously wordy and find that my writing needs a lot of editing down to get rid of all the bits that I don't need. When I was writing my dissertation at university I found myself with nearly double the word count and had to go through it again pruning off the excess. My dissertation slowly got smaller and smaller.

So, this is how I imagine myself as a writer.

However, sitting here writing this (and surfing pictures of statues and sculptures) to put off actually doing any proper writing on the project in hand, I find myself wondering whether it's possible to be a planner and a chipper at the same time?

Maybe with my detailed plan, my scene-by-scene guide, I am a builder after all? Or maybe a builder who will later turn into a chipper because she's created something vast and unwieldy?

Or maybe it doesn't matter even remotely and I should get on and put some words down and see what happens?

That sounds a little bit pantsy to me.