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My gains and losses through writing #1

July 30, 2012 in Being productive, Writing, Writing Process with 1 Comment

I was asked a while back by my lovely friend Morten F if I would write a blog post on what writing does for me, specifically what I have lost and what I have gained. Now I am 25,000 words into writing my second novel The Firestorm Conspiracy, I thought it would be a good time to answer the question and start my new series of posts on the blog.

I’m not going to keep this post to my usual word count limit, so in order to keep it TL:DR I will break it into separate posts.

1: Gained Health and fitness

This one completely surprised me. When you think of sedentary careers, writing would probably feature pretty high on that list. Certainly at least equal to my former career in the computer games industry. But that hasn’t been the case at all.

In the last year I have lost over 18kg of fat (roughly 20% of my body mass), and replaced over 15kg of it with muscle. My entire body shape and metabolism has changed almost beyond recognition and I am genuinely now the healthiest I have been… well ever. I do four+ hours of weights a week and took up the Couch-to-5k running programme which I undertook at my own pace and now I am running 20km a week when before I could barely run to the end of my street. When I totted it up I realised I now do 4x the exercise I used to do at the gym when I was on a fitness kick.

Why?

A couple of reasons, really. I don’t know about other authors, but I cannot write when my body feels ‘twitchy’ or anxious. My former life left my body a wreck, producing far too much adrenaline and reacting to every minor stress as if it were life or death. This happened to the extent that those things actually became life or death and things looked really serious for me for a while there. I had to start taking really strong beta blockers just to control that. But I did not want to stay taking them for long so I sought out anything and everything that could help me use up my adrenaline and help me control my anxiety. Walking helped, running really helped and weights training topped that off.

I quickly found that after exercising I had a clearer head, a more relaxed body and even better: the time I spent exercising allowed my mind to wander freely through potential plots, twists, characterisations and all the other elements required in writing a novel. It was amazing thinking time.

So (at least in my case) writing and exercise have become natural partners and I love it. Best of all: I no longer need the beta blockers.


Distractions from daydreaming (and writing)

April 4, 2012 in Being productive, The Wyld Hunt, Writing, Writing Process with Comments Off

This post from Lifehacker.com asked “How Can I Stop Using My Phone All the Time and Actually Connect with People in the Real World?” but it may as well have asked “How can I stop distracting myself with my smartphone/tablet/laptop from the things I am meant to be doing?” which is a very real problem for me, and for other people too (if the unrepresentative sample I see in cafés around me are anything to go by).

I spend far too much time playing with my smart phone, tablet and laptop. Most of the time I am not doing anything meaningful – I am checking to see if I have new emails, or I am checking for updates to my apps, or I am reading my RSS feed. None of those things are inherently bad, until they cross the line and stop me doing the things I want to do, or even worse, the things I need to do, such as writing my new novel, reading more novels myself, or staring into space and daydreaming. Yes, that is right, I think daydreaming counts.

Daydreaming is where I come up with the ideas for my writing. It is where I explore the flights of fancy that eventually either get turned into a workable scene, or get jotted down in my ideas notebook (a physical thing!) for possible use in the future.

It is the interference with daydreaming that I think most worries me about my technological nervous ticks.

So this week, I have laid down new rules for myself. When I am out and about, usually sitting in a café, I am not allowed to use my tablet, phone or laptop unless it is to perform a specific task that I can clearly identify, and then once I have done that task I have to put it back. So far I’ve not used them at all! Apparently just having to define the task is enough of a roadblock. The immediate benefit is that I have read a new novel, jotted down at least 4 good scene ideas and made good progress on launching the Wyld Hunt. After all one of the reasons for going to a café in the first place was to escape the distractions at home!

The lifehacker article focusses in on setting some rules for your use of mobile technology and I recommend that as a place to start.

Full link and attribution: http://lifehacker.com/5898612/how-can-i-stop-using-my-phone-all-the-time-and-actually-connect-with-people-in-the-real-world?tag=ask-lifehacker

 


Editing: Complete!

March 10, 2012 in The Wyld Hunt, Writing, Writing Process with Comments Off

It is done! The 4th round and final edit of the Wyld Hunt is complete. Now I can get it formatted for publication and get back to writing the Firestorm Conspiracy. Excited!


Editing, editing, editing

February 12, 2012 in The Wyld Hunt, Writing, Writing Process with 5 Comments

Editing

Scrivener hard at work

The final edit  of the Wyld Hunt prior to release is underway. It is daunting, this being the 4th round of edits, but my two aims for this stage are clear:

  1.  Tighten up the short prologue and the first three chapters, after  all, that is what readers of my novel will encounter first but they are also the parts I wrote first, when (if I am honest) I was not 100% sure of where the novel would take me :)
  2. Clarify a few confusing elements. This is not dumbing down – none of my readers are dumb (many are far more intelligent than me) – this is actually about me getting a smack on the head to clear up some horrendously circular language that I occasionally used, as well as the odd occasion when I introduced a concept without bothering to place it in context (and I don’t mean with lengthy unwieldy exposition).

Written down like that, the tasks don’t seem as overwhelming. The problem with all editing is that you often introduce new mistakes when clearing up old mistakes, and I certainly fall prey to that!

So, with the helping hand of Mrs Roxen, I  am going through those first chapters with a fine-toothed comb to work out how they can be tightened up. First up I reduced the prologue from 1200 words with some waffle to a much tighter 900 words. Second up was a change of the break point of chapter two. The original break was a little too late and did not have enough punch. It allowed chapter one to bleed into chapter two and that was not right. Chapter one is about setting out the case presented to Aries and Lovelace, with chapter two marking the formal beginning of the investigation.

Anyway, back to work.


The Writing Process: 3 stages of how I write

February 8, 2012 in The Wyld Hunt, Writing, Writing Process with 4 Comments

Coffee and Writing

Coffee and Writing... a perfect combination

How do you do your writing? It is a question that interests me as there is no common answer (at least not one that has become visible to me yet).

I write in three stages.

  1. First draft: When in full writing mode (as compared to preparation and planning mode), I aim to write 1,000-1,500 words in a day for 5 days a week and to do this I prefer to write my first pass text while sitting in a café listening to my choice of music and watching the world go by. I allow myself a single coffee with no more than 1 shot of espresso. I find people, noises, sound, light and smells help me write. During this stage I do not allow myself to do any editing or formatting. I mark italic text with an underscore before and after, but nothing else. I do this writing in something like Documents To Go on my Android tablet.
  2. Light Edit: Later that same day I head to my study back home and I allow myself a one pass read through and light edit. I am not allowed to change anything substantial as I am still too close to the writing and lack perspective. All I do is correct typos, light formatting of italics where required, and filling in any missing sentences or words as I find that some times I miss one or more words in a sentence in my hurry to write them down. I do this stage in Scrivener.
  3. Review: Last thing I check I have scene ideas to write the following day. Perhaps with a few notes, or at least a brief outline. At this stage I output a .mobi version of the book so far and send it to mine and my wife’s Kindles. She tends to read the day’s pages before she goes to sleep and then gives me feedback the next day.

So that is how I do my writing. So how do you do yours?


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