SFFMP 29: Increasing Writing Speed and Publishing More Books
For today’s show, we talked about how we’ve learned to write more efficiently and get more books out there. After all, a lot of the marketing stuff we discuss on this show becomes more effective when you have numerous books, and maybe even numerous series, out there. It’s also easier to keep the momentum going if you have new adventures coming out every few months.
Here’s some of what we covered:
- How each of us approaches plotting and whether we outline or pants
- Whether we write down the “beats” for individual scenes before starting on them
- Lots of tips that we’ve all learned for hitting our daily word count goals and staying on task
- Tips from the book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You love.
- How over-editing can slow you down (and may not be that useful in the end)
- How a series can make everything easier, since you’ve already established the characters and done the world building.
- Dealing with being daunted by a story idea
- Finding motivation to write every day and staying motivated for the long run
- How to get readers to try a new series, especially if you jump genres
- Ways of storing or backing up your work in the cloud and writing from anywhere
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Awesome podcast! I will be listening to this one a few times!
First important question … Lindsay, what class did you play in WoW? My wife and I have had to give up that time-suck too. You played EQ? How about DAoC? And age test … did you play Ultima Online? 🙂
Second real question … when you guys (and lady) began writing, how did you structure your outline? Supposedly there are certain points where you need a change in pace, like a screenplay, where the hero decides they must fix the problem, the mid-point change in pace, the dark day scene (where all seem lost) and of course climax and end. Did you’all follow that structure or did you just write?
I presume you went through the whole “Is my writing marketable?” worry and eventually people bought it and you were a writer?
Haha, I think I tried just about all of them at one point. My favorite was a gnome frost mage/engineer. I stuck with it long enough to get to Level 80 (back when that was the cap), just so I could make the gyrocopter. 😀 I had a druid for my main back in my Everquest days. I never played Ultima Online, but I did jump over to Dark Age of Camelot for a while. I had a troll skald named Grimsong.
For outlining, I’ve honestly internalized a lot of the plot structure stuff, so I don’t think too heavily about it as I’m creating my outline, but I definitely try to follow that rising action, rising action, climax, denouement pattern (http://techpudding.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/plot_diagram.jpg) and keep piling on the troubles for the heroes.
When I self-published my first couple of novels, I was definitely worried about marketing and if people would try an unheard of indie author at $2.99. 😀 I had sold some short stories previously and had gotten good feedback in my writing workshop, so I was fairly certain at least *some* readers would enjoy my stuff, so that helped a bit.
Hi Steve! Thanks for commenting!
I personally can’t answer the gaming questions, as my experience with games pretty much lies with an Italian plumber and his goofy brother. 🙂
As far as outlining, when I first started writing I had simply jotted down some notes in a notebook and occassionally referred to them as time progressed to make sure I kept the story pointing in the right place. However, I quickly learned that if I wrote down a condensed plot line in my notebook and then broke it into chapters, I could then be more productive as I didn’t have to try and remember how the story flow should be going.
With regards to the plot diagram you’ve mentioned, my plots will sometimes follow it and other times won’t. It all depends what I feel the story needs. The last thing I want to do is have a predictable plot, so I’ll try and keep readers guessing as much as possible.
And yes, every author will go through the “is my work marketable” phase. I released my first book and was deathly worried either everyone would hate it or else no one would ever buy it. The first dozen or so reviews informed me I had used way too many terms of endearment and left very lousy reviews. I capitulated to the overwhelming opinion and cleaned it up. Lo and behold the positive reviews came in. So you just have to trust yourself and learn how to take critique. 🙂
J.
I personally put very little thought into pace while I’m outlining, at least on the first pass. Once I’ve got the whole plot planned out sometimes I’ll go read through and say. “There’s too much here” or “There’s not enough there” and shuffle/cut/add as needed. And I don’t think I’ve ever laid out a story based on a checklist of mandatory plot elements. I know what I want to happen, and more often than not things work out roughly based upon standard plot flows. I think literature and film as sort of shaped our dramatic minds to sculpt things in that way.
Thanks for all the outlining philosophies. It was very enlightening. I was surprised you didn’t have a hard fast outline structuring system, but pleased also that I don’t need to be following strict rules when putting my story together.