Category Archives: writing

Why Do I Write For 15 Minutes A Day?

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Why do I write for 15 minutes a day? Because it works for me.

You do you, fair reader.

What Came Before Was Terrible

Here’s my reasoning: I’ve spent countless days not writing a single word.

All those days when I wrote exactly ZERO words, I thought would be offset by days when I “finally have some reasonable time to sit down and focus on writing.” It turns out, that approach doesn’t work for me. I mean, I make some progress. I wrote around 3000 words of fiction over the course of the first five months of this year. Not super impressive, right? Well, it’s in part because I only found a couple of occasions to sit down for “at least an hour or two.”

When I did finally sit down to write for an extended time, I noticed two things right away:

  1. I couldn’t remember much about what I had been writing, and it took considerable time and effort to get back up to speed.
  2. Rusty doesn’t begin to describe the state of my writing when gaps of weeks or months come between sessions.

No bueno.

Where Did This Silly Idea Originate?

Which brings me to the inspiration for my idea to write 15 minutes a day. It is multifold.

I’m a programmer, a code monkey, or perhaps most applicable, a software craftsman by training. I don’t write a ton of code day to day anymore since I now manage several teams of folks doing it instead. As part of my experience and training as a software craftsman, I learned the tactic of practicing coding through the use of code katas. I don’t want to bore the non-technical folk, so suffice to say that katas are a something you spend maybe 15-30 minutes a day practicing to keep the old coding muscles in shape (or learn new things).

I took that approach and started applying it to learning Spanish (using the excellent phone app Duolingo). Hola, amigos. Yo hablo español un poco. No, no nececita hablo bueno, pero me hablo.

Anyway, it was going pretty well, and I thought, self– this Spanish thing isn’t eating up too much of my day. I mean, I’ve read/heard plenty of writing advice saying you have to write every day. I wondered how practical it would be to write for just 15 minutes a day. Probably not very, but at least I could get some of these ideas I’ve been hoarding over the past year or so out on paper.

Idea Meets Action

So I went to my notes and my voice memos. I wrote some fiction about several ideas I’ve been sitting on. Nothing earth-shattering, I assure you. But I did write. Next thing I knew, it was going so well, I decided I would move on to some former WIPs. I had Rue From Ruin in an unfinished state. Maybe I could finish it. At this point, I’d already put more words down in about two weeks than I had in the entire 5 months previous.

What did I have to lose?

So I applied the same discipline to Rue: sit down at the computer, start a 15-minute timer, and write like my life depended on it until the timer ran out. If you follow me on social media, you already know how it turned out. I finished Rue From Ruin in a few days. Note, it does need revising before I get it up on the blog. For any who are waiting, it’s coming.

Then, I felt like I was ready for something a little bigger. So I went on to one of the ideas I had written a bit about. I’ve been calling it GIAO.

I’ve been writing every day for at least 15 minutes for nearly two months now (**). What do I have to show for it? Confidence that I can finish my writing projects. Over 20,000 words (a quarter of the planned length) on a new book I’m really excited about. A bunch of great starters for other stories/books. A couple of new writing projects from external sources. How is this a bad thing? You let me know if you discover it.

The Method (For You TL;DR Folks)

For the sake of clarity and to put it in a friendly format, here’s what I’ve been doing:

  1. Sit down at a computer with my favorite editor (Scrivener in my case) open to the thing I want to write.
  2. Start a 15-minute timer.
  3. Write like my life depended on it until the timer ends.
  4. Perform steps 1-3 one or more times daily.

I hope it helps someone else the way it’s helped me.

** I wrote the majority of this article on 8/3/2017 and I’m leaving the word counts, dates, etc. from that time. Since this time, I’ve picked up some additional projects and seen them through the creation, writing, and revision process. I write almost every day, but not always on the same piece.

State Of The Writer’s Brain/Work

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Hey all, it’s been a while since we’ve talked. I mean REALLY talked.

How’ve you been? Are the kids doing well? How about the dogs? Goldfish? Broom?

If you’ve been following along on Twitter or my Facebook page, you might have gleaned a few tidbits about what I’ve been up to. However, I think if you read on, you’ll find some surprises.

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What’s On Hold

The Galaxy and All Her Charms is officially on hold. What I realized is this: the story I have in my head doesn’t match what I’ve written. I’m not ready to write that story for many reasons. I readily admit, one of them is my lack of skill.

Good news though, I had some professional help to review what’s already written. I have some fabulous feedback I’m going to be working through, but for now, I have other projects taking precedence.

What’s Done

If you missed it, a second Clah tale is published. Clah Versus the Volcano: A Marshmallow Roast.

The first draft of parts 6, 7, and 8 of Rue From Ruin are in the can awaiting a revision and publishing here on the blog. I also had some professional feedback on the first few parts, and I’m going to do a bigger overhaul at some point and submit the resulting story to some contests and anthologies.

I submitted around 5000 words of RPG writing to be published in a forthcoming RPG game. I’ll keep the name of the game quiet for the moment. It’s due out later this year or early next, so I’ll share once there is something for you to see.

What’s In-Progress

My new novel, codenamed GIAO, is well underway. The draft is about 1/4 finished, and I’m writing on it regularly. This one is very exciting for me. I’ll write about some related topics as I go along. Maybe some worldbuilding posts and such.

Blog posts: I have one about paying for professional critiques (the short answer is: if you can afford it, do it). Also an RPG review a new version of one of my favorite games of all time King Arthur Pendragon. Finally, for those reading from work, I have several posts in various stages of completion on my tech blog: http://blog.dubmun.com

What’s Brewing

Another RPG project is in the works. This one is considerably more ambitious than the last, and I may be involved as more than a pinch-hitter. Very early stages, but I’m really excited about it. I’ll share more when the plans firm up.

I’ve also written up seeds of quite a few new stories and/or longer works. They aren’t worth sharing at the moment, but a couple of them are exciting.

Finally, I’m considering writing a webcomic. I’m talking to a few artists about an idea I believe translates well to the medium.

 

See ya around, and thanks for reading!

What I’m Excited About: Coal Belly

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Hey folks, time to take a break from writing and discussing RPG games (and how I like them as creative tools for writers).

Now I’m going to talk about reading.

I try to broaden my reading horizons from time to time. Try is the operative word. When I had an opportunity to read some books indie-published by an author in my writing group that was firmly outside my usual reading coterie, I welcomed the opportunity with perhaps some minor trepidation.

K.M. Alexander’s weird fiction series, The Bell Forging Cycle, has three books so far. I didn’t relish telling a growing friend who gave great writing advice his style of writing wasn’t for me. What if I couldn’t bring myself to read book two (Old Broken Road)? Also, I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited about reading something “self-published”.  All I knew about self-pubs at the time was the worst FUD distributed by two types of sources. Traditional publishers and reviewers with obvious skin in the game continue to rail against self-pubs even today. Also, multiple people I know have read and reacted poorly to something written and published by a person (often their neighbor or family member) who clearly had no understanding of what is actually involved in the publishing process or frequently even the writing process.

It turns out, there was absolutely no cause for concern. I finished The Stars Were Right rarely putting it down over a single weekend. I’ve since read the rest of The Bell Forging Cycle, and I can’t imagine a sci-fi/fantasy fan who wouldn’t enjoy following along with Waldo Bell’s trials and triumphs in the strange yet familiar multi-tiered city of Lovat. It’s such a rich and intriguing world. I could imagine myself visiting Lovat, and I sure wish I could.

The Point–

K.M. has just finished a zero-draft version of Coal Belly, and I’ll be gnashing my teeth and wailing until I can get my hands on it. Coal Belly isn’t a new installment in The Bell Forging Cycle, it’s a new novel with a whole world of fascinating characters, stories, and ideas behind it.

Mr. Alexander can surely explain it better than I:

–REBLOGGED–

Last weekend, after a year and eight months, I finally hit print on the final chapter of my latest novel, Coal Belly. The first of what I hope to be a trilogy. Right now, it weighs in at 190k words, and I expect it to grow. Long time readers know this isn’t the first time I’ve written […]

via So, Coal Belly is Done… Sorta — I Make Stories

What to Expect During Your First Year of Writing Fiction

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Welcome, friends, to a post about writing when you are new to the craft. First, let’s do a little housekeeping. You may have questions. I think I have guessed a couple of them. Let’s see if I’m right.

Isn’t it presumptuous of you to be giving writing advice when you aren’t published (indie or traditional)?

Yes and no. I’m not going to be telling you about “my sure fire way to get published”, “the top 10 things you MUST do as a writer”, or even “all the mistakes I made during my first year writing”. Believe me, do I ever have plenty of content for the last one.

But no. This is an experience report. An opinion piece on all the things I believe a new writer will probably notice as well. At least if they are half as dim-witted and brain-addled as I am.

Wait. Haven’t you been writing way more than a year?

Yes. Sort of. I’ll explain eventually, give me time. I REQUIRE TIME.

On to the experiences!

Your first year as a writer

The first year as a writer is one of the most frustrating things a person can experience.

You’re thrust from the world where people don’t see your thoughts, feelings, and ideas on display for full scrutiny. Now those same thoughts, feelings, and ideas are available in a format where anyone and everyone can analyze them at their leisure.

It’s like if you moved your funny bone from its semi-protected spot on your elbow all the way down onto your fingertips. Now every time you angry-text someone, you get a nerve zinger shooting up your arm.

Delightful.

It’s ok. Sometimes people are kind– oh wait. Sometimes Roy is right too:

You’ll spend hours revising and proofreading

You will spend hours checking the words you wrote. You’ll look for spelling errors, grammar gaffes, poor phrasing, long sentences, short sentences, too many sentences that all are the same length, use of all five senses, nice rhythm and flow, consistent persona and tense, and the list goes on and on.

Everyone goes through this. We all have to learn it. Good news: the longer we spend looking at these mistakes and fixing them, the less likely they are to get into our zero-draft work in the first place.

You’ll receive conflicting advice

You’ll get advice from other writers, much of it conflicting.

You’ll be drawn in different directions by people with more experience than you. Who’s opinion should you take on board? Who’s right and who’s wrong?

As a wiser person than me once said: there are very few absolutes in the world. What works for one writer may not work for another and vice versa.

Reserve judgment on the “facts” you see and hear. When a writer tells you that she thinks writing in 15-minute sprints is better than waiting for bigger blocks of time, ask her why she thinks that. If you’re lucky, you’ll get concrete reasons for the opinion, and you will have learned something. Collect ideas from more than one writer. Find out if there’s a consensus. Read the original material and do your own research. Take no-one’s opinion as gospel, but put effort into formulating your own.

Try some of the different ideas, but not all of them. You’ll be forever experimenting otherwise. Just be sure you quit the things that are not working.

You won’t know what to learn

Should you learn more about tactical sentence structure? Do you need to figure out how to make your characters life-like? Does creating a plot structure terrify you? How early should you start building a following and how do you do that? How do you world-build and how much world building is too much? Where do you find reliable resources on writing?  And if you have to learn all this, what order should you learn it in?

It’s a hard enough to learn just exactly what the list of things you should learn are. Worse, you also have to prioritize the list.

I’ve gone down some rabbit holes in my time. My best experience thus far has been when I’m writing new words every day, and I try to get answers to the things that come up as I’m writing.

Also, having a good writing group at your back is an immense help here. If you aren’t part of a writing group… be part of a writing group.

Your ego is in your words

You’ll feel that a failing in your words is a failing in you as a writer. If someone finds mistakes in your writing, you’ll feel it’s an attack on you.

Learning to write well: you need to get some less desirable words out on paper/screen before you’ll start writing better ones. There isn’t a way around it. Just accept that you’ll be writing poorly at times.

Writers with more experience stay a little more detatched. They’ve already written tons of words even they consider terrible. Try to welcome criticism. Look at it as an opportunity to learn and improve.

Man, sometimes I want so badly to get defensive about words just because I happened to be the one that wrote them. The good news is, as the old coding saying goes, your words are not your child. You can throw them out if they get unruly. No one will even bat an eyelash.

You’ll feel like you have to know everything

The good news is: you don’t.

You’ll probably quit a lot

Maybe you won’t. I did. This is the answer to the question above. I just now feel like I’ve really had a year’s worth of writing effort. I will say this (and break my rule about giving advice in this article in the process):

Don’t quit.

Quitting is how you lose. In fact, it’s the only way you lose. Keep writing. Write every day or nearly every day.

It will pay off.

———–

Thanks to Najaf Ali for setting up a great template in his article about the first year writing code. In more than a few ways, coding and writing are alike. I shamelessly thieved Najaf’s format for this post.

 

 

 

I’ll keep this short.

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K. M. Alexander posted a quote that struck a chord. For over a month now, my entire writing existence has centered around the idea he recently espoused here.

It works. I sit at the computer, and I say, “For the next 15 minutes there is nothing but writing.” Then I set a timer, and I go. Sometimes I get 350 words of total crap. Other times I can barely force 190 words, and none of them seem great. Other times, I feel like it’s all coming together. I feel like I’m writing something I would enjoy reading.

The other times are starting to outnumber the rest. It’s a good feeling.

Now back to work.