Consistency (or: How I Got Published, Part 4)

Last week we talked about writing a novel. This week, let’s talk about finishing one. The two concepts are certainly worlds apart.

Once I made the commitment to finish a novel, things got a bit easier—but the fight wasn’t over. Sitting down and getting words on the page—writing on a relatively consistent schedule—was difficult. I’ve experienced the process of writing a novel (for the most part) twice—with Duskfall in 2010 and now with Dark Immolation (which I haven’t technically finished yet, but I’m getting very, very close). My process through writing both novels has been similar in many ways, but different in others.

My DF process was less disciplined. I did not have a specific time of day in which I wrote, and I did not write every day (although I did write most days, which I find pretty impressive, looking back on it). But here, why don’t you take a look at the following table, first:

DATE	(prose)	(notes)	(revisions)
Jan-Feb 2010	20,000	7,000	5,000
Tue 2 March 2010	2,500	100	2,500
Wed 3 March 2010	3,500	400
Thu 4 March 2010	1,500
Fri 5 March 2010
Sat 6 March 2010
Sun 7 March 2010
Mon 8 March 2010	1,700		2,500
Tue 9 March 2010	3,700
Wed 10 March 2010	2,600	500
Thu 11 March 2010		2,500
Fri 12 March 2010		2,500
Sat 13 March 2010		2,000
Sun 14 March 2010
Mon 15 March 2010	4,500	3,000	3,100
Tue 16 March 2010	3,400	2,900
Wed 17 March 2010
Thu 18 March 2010	3,100
Fri 19 March 2010	1,100
Sat 20 March 2010	2,000
Sun 21 March 2010
Mon 22 March 2010	2,500	200	3,800
Tue 23 March 2010	2,300
Wed 24 March 2010	2,200	300	500
Thu 25 March 2010	900	100
Fri 26 March 2010
Sat 27 March 2010	1,700	1,500	400
Sun 28 March 2010
Mon 29 March 2010	2,100		1,900
Tue 30 March 2010	3,600	150
Wed 31 March 2010	2,700	300
Thu 1 April 2010	2,400	300
Fri 2 April 2010	500	500
Sat 3 April 2010
Sun 4 April 2010
Mon 5 April 2010		200	3,600
Tues 6 April 2010	2,700	400	500
Wed 7 April 2010	4,100
Thu 8 April 2010	2,300
Fri 9 April 2010	4,100		1,100
Sat 10 April 2010	3,300
Sun 11 April 2010
Mon 12 April 2010	2,800	200	2,000
Tue 13 April 2010		400	5,000
Wed 14 April 2010
Thu 15 April 2010
Fri 16 April 2010
Sat 17 April 2010
Sun 18 April 2010
Mon 19 April 2010	1,000	200
Tue 20 April 2010	1,300
Wed 21 April 2010
Thu 22 April 2010	2,800
Fri 23 April 2010	1,000
Sat 24 April 2010
Sun 25 April 2010
Mon 26 April 2010
Tue 27 April 2010	4,400
Wed 28 April 2010	4,400
Thu 29 April 2010	4,200	300
Fri 30 April 2010	3,300	100
Sat 1 May 2010
Sun 2 May 2010
Mon 3 May 2010	3,000	400
Tue 4 May 2010	3,400	150
Wed 5 May 2010	4,100
Thu 6 May 2010	3,100
Fri 7 May 2010	2,800
Sat 8 May 2010
Sun 9 May 2010
Mon 10 May 2010	4,300
Tue 11 May 2010
Wed 12 May 2010
Thu 13 May 2010
Fri 14 May 2010
Sat 15 May 2010
Sun 16 May 2010
Mon 17 May 2010	5,300
Tue 18 May 2010	3,600
Wed 19 May 2010	5,200
Thu 20 May 2010	5,000	600
Fri 21 May 2010	3,100
Sat 22 May 2010
Sun 23 May 2010
Mon 24 May 2010	2,500
Tue 25 May 2010	1,000
Wed 26 May 2010	2,200
Thu 27 May 2010	2,300	700
Fri 28 May 2010
Sat 29 May 2010
Sun 30 May 2010
Mon 31 May 2010
Tue 1 June 2010	2,100	300
Wed 2 June 2010	1,500	200
Thu 3 June 2010	3,000	700
Fri 4 June 2010	14,600	1,000

A brief explanation: the first column is the dates during the six months I worked on DF (you’ll notice that the first row is for the entire months of January and February—that’s because I didn’t record on a daily basis how much I was writing per day until March). The second column is the number of new words I wrote in DF on each day—if the space is blank, that means I wrote nothing that day. The third column tracks how many words’ worth of notes I made in my worldbuilding document/series bible for DF. And the fourth shows how many words I revised that day, if any.

As you can see, DF was pretty inconsistent. I wrote in streaks, sometimes getting words in every weekday, while going more than a week without writing anything at others. My word count for each day varied pretty widely (from as little as 500 to as much as 14,600*), and I did a fair amount of writing in the series bible and revisions. It is interesting to note, however, that my revision writing stopped in April, and I did not revise any further until I finished the novel, which fits more into my current first-draft philosophy.

I won’t include a table for my current progress on Dark Immolation, mainly because it is much more consistent, and thus a bit boring—I write between 2000-2500 words/day (on rare days I get around 3k), 4-5 days/week. I’m not tracking worldbuilding notes or revisions, namely because I’m not doing much of either at the moment. (I write worldbuilding entires in my series bible often enough, but I’ve made a point this time around of never going back to revise anything. It tends to break up my momentum, and I want to get through the story first before I make any significant revisions. Also, if I continually revise, I risk falling back into my “eternal first drafts” mode, and nobody wants that.)

It took me almost exactly six months to write the first draft of DF, while I’ve been writing DI for a little over seven months now and still haven’t finished. I blame that mostly on length, however—the first draft of DF was around 180K, while DI’s current word count is almost 200K, and I still have about seven chapters to go. So I don’t think my speed has increased or decreased all that much, but there's a lot more to writing than speed. Consistency, I've found, is key.

DI has come along so much more easily than DF, and I think that is largely because I am a much more consistent writer. I get up at roughly the same time every day (6:30 or 7), go through the same routine every morning until about 9:30 or 10:00 AM, which is when I start writing. I then write until the point of diminishing returns**, or until I get to 2000K, whichever takes longest. The rest of my day is reserved for worldbuilding, research, reading, blogging, email, and so forth. That consistency has helped a lot. For one thing, I can actually get some writing and the aforementioned stuff done on a daily basis—something I couldn’t do when writing DF. And while I don’t have as many days where my word count spikes (you’ll notice when I wrote DF there were a number of days where I hit in the high 3k, sometimes the 4 or 5k marks), I find it easier to step into the world every morning, to get into the minds of the characters and see what they see, hear what they hear, and understand what they do.

That’s not to say that I had no consistency when writing DF—looking at that schedule, I’m actually impressed that I could be that disciplined given my writing philosophy and mental state at the time. You can still see hints of “binge” writing, but it certainly has traces of consistency, and I think that’s a large reason why I was able to finish the novel at all. But my current experience seems more efficient, relatively painless, and definitely more satisfying.

So if you have the desire, and you’ve made the commitment to write a novel, I suggest you then work on writing consistently to finish it. Find a time of day that works for you, and make that your Writing Time. Maybe it’s every day, maybe it’s once a week, maybe it’s at four in the morning, maybe it’s at two in the afternoon. But make the time, and keep boundaries so you can stick with it. It’s simple logic, really—if I write a bit every day, or every weekday, or every week, or whatever works for me, I am going to finish that novel at some point or another. That’s how writing works—you put the effort in, and you see the results. Those results come a lot easier when the effort is consistent.

* Biggest writing day I’ve had to date, btw—when I finished DF. 14,600 words in roughly ten hours of writing. It was euphoric. And, even today, that’s kind of my exception to my no-writing-binge philosophy; I’ve found that when I get close to the ending of a story, I feel like a shark that gotten its first sniff of blood, and I often go into a writing frenzy until I finish the thing.

** What do I mean by the “point of diminishing returns,” you ask? Simply put, I kind of have a finite amount of writing “energy” in me each day. I write until the point when that natural energy is gone. If I try to push past that point, I become less and less productive, until I’m suddenly spending 9 minutes on Facebook/Twitter/writing email/reading/otherwise dinking around for every 1 minute I’m actually writing. Efficiency is far more important to me than writing myself to death. Figuratively speaking.