The Week of Epicness That Will Change My Writing Life
As my mom likes to say, "Life is never dull or boring around here." That has certainly been true this week. It’s one of those weeks I file under “epic,” the kind you remind yourself of when things aren’t going so well to know that dark days won’t last.
I have been experimenting with new technology this past week. This has been motivated by my constant desire to increase productivity and my fitness level as an author. And, just so you can’t accuse me of burying the lead, I have been trying to figure out how to dictate my novel.
First, some context.
(Psst… if you don’t work with words all day in some form or another and aren’t really interested in how I might be producing even more stories for you to read within the next year or so, feel free to skip to the end of this post where I talk about a sale on one of my books and the other epic stuff that happened outside of this exciting new writing skill I’m learning. Fair warning if you read the whole thing through: I’m going to be geeking out about word counts a lot.)
This week, writing became magical again… again.
Since I actively began working towards a full-time career in writing in 2016, I have been on a constant quest to increase my productivity. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you make money from writing words, the more words you write, the more money you have the potential to make. Not to mention, the more words I write, the more stories I get to tell—and that’s really the fun part!
Now I know there's a lot of debate about writing fast in the industry, as writers go back and forth about quantity versus quality versus how do you make a living doing this indie gig? I'm not here to debate that today. I'm just here to tell you what I've been doing to bolster my own productivity within the last year with the starting premise that I want to be more productive.
You might remember my experiment with knittercising last year. That was my brilliant idea to exercise for an hour a day by walking around my house knitting, thereby making it not unfun by being warm and more fun by getting to, you know, knit.
I stayed with it pretty faithfully for about a month, and then… deadlines hit. Suddenly, taking an hour a day to not only knit, but walk around instead of creating the words that I was being paid to create, didn't seem quite so justifiable. “I'll get back to it after this issue is out,” I told myself.
Yeah, right.
Needless to say, the knittercising quest died. Because after the issue was out, then I had a book to put out. And then I decided to put out a novella (The Waterboy). And then there was the marketing, and the next issue, and a piano recital to plan, and, and, and… The list goes on.
However, in the midst of all that craziness, I began some other productivity habits. For one thing (and in my defence), once springtime hit, I did actually exercise outside by walking about an hour day while listening to audio books. (Yay! An hour of fiction a day! Fun!)
I did that for about a month, too, before a plague of grasshoppers hit the Peace Country and made walking outside about as much fun as, well, as going outside and being bombarded by thousands of grasshoppers. (I’m sure you can imagine it.)
I'm trying to like audio books. They’re growing on me, but I can't say I love them yet. So maybe that wasn’t the best hook for me. For instance, I don’t love listening to audio books more than I like not having insects crawling on me. Weird, right?
My experiment with audio books, however, did lead me to a new experiment: podcasts.
My interview on Joshua Pantalleresco’s podcast this spring wasn't my first podcast interview, but after it came out, for the first time I actually started listening to a podcast on a regular basis. (Yes, Josh, you were first.) I started listening partly because I knew some of the guests, and partly because I found it very inspiring to hear what other writers had done and what they were doing and how they were making a success of this whole “writing for a living” thing.
My list grew from there. I went to WWC and heard about a couple other podcasts. So I added them to my list. As of about a month ago, there were maybe three or four part podcasts that I listened to on a regular basis—Stark Reflections by Mark Leslie Lefebvre, The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn, and, of course, Joshua Pantalleresco’s Just Joshing. (I’ve since added a few others which I’ll probably be talking about on my Writing Tips blog later this week.)
Despite my limited listening library, podcasts were quickly becoming one of my favourite ways to consume information during times that would otherwise have been “wasted”, such as folding laundry, starting a fire, making a meal, or even just driving.
Okay, no, those times were never really wasted. I actually value my mental downtime.
Often, I use that time to listen to music that inspires my stories and to work out plot problems or even just to plan my day. Having mental downtime is a key component of mental health as a writer. (And as a person, by the way.)
However, I usually had more of that than I wanted or needed, so now, I fill in that “extra” time by taking in information through podcasts. What this has allowed me to do is to stop feeling the need to keep up on the industry news while seated and reading from my phone (one less thing I need to sit for!) or while sitting at my computer, and to use those “sitting” times to be productive instead.
So now I love podcasts. I listen to them at every opportunity like the learning addict I am. And that listening time has allowed me to be more productive during my “work” time. Win!
Now, that audio book I’ve been in the middle of for three months? Yeah, that's another story…
Meanwhile, I have also added a few other productivity tools to my toolkit. I mentioned before how I increased writing productivity after reading Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K while finishing The Waterboy this spring. What I learned from the book increased my fiction writing productivity right away, and within a few weeks, I began to see my word count per hour go up across the board. Plus, for the first time in my career, I was actually tracking these things, so I knew when I was or was not being productive and whether or not I was improving.
Of course, I decided to apply Rachel’s techniques to the next book in my series, The Sphinx’s Heart. But after starting with my initial bullet point outline for the entire epic novel, I realized there were some plot twists and turns that I needed to know in more detail before I even began writing. So I decided to apply Rachel Aaron’s write-it-out point plot technique to my entire book at once (except I typed). I was soon doing it for every scene. That eventually developed into what I call the “zero draft”—a beat-by-beat outline for my entire novel.
(Incidentally, I finished that zero draft on December 2. It's at about 47,000 words. Yes, that is twice as long as my first novel and The Waterboy, and well, frankly many other novels that exist in the world, too. Yes, The Sphinx’s Heart will be just as long as or longer than The Undine’s Tear. You're welcome.)
Was writing this novel with a zero draft faster, per se?
Well, let's see.
[Warning: We’re about to get uber-geeky.]
Writing The Undine’s Tear started from an idea I got in 2010. It's hardly fair to count from there, because after that point, I had to learn how to write fiction, how to publish fiction, and how to market fiction. Plus, I wrote two other books and published them before I started, not to mention had a major family upheaval, all while running other businesses. So for a starting point on this story, despite the epic amount of research I'd already done by the time I got there, I’m going to say I started outlining it when I completed Finding Heaven and decided it was finally time to write my mermaid story.
I published Finding Heaven in November 2017. I’m not 100% sure when I started drafting The Undine’s Tear, as my record-keeping on that was sketchy. All I can tell you is that by February 4, 2018, I had written nearly 20,000 words. And a 1,500-word day was a good day for me at that point in time.
So, for argument’s sake, let’s say I worked on the outline and first draft of The Undine’s Tear from the end of November 2017 to the end of November 2018, around twelve months.
I started outlining the next two books in March of this year, while simultaneously publishing and launching The Undine’s Tear. During the three months between March (when I published The Waterboy) and May (when I published The Undine’s Tear), I mostly brainstormed into a recorder app on my phone (unwittingly becoming a dictator) as I travelled to book signings. But for the most part, I had not had a single session with my butt in a chair where I was working on this until I started transcribing those voice notes in early July.
So, let’s say the bullet outlining started on July 6. My first day of zero-draft outlining The Sphinx’s Heart was July 25. From July 6, 2019 to December 2, 2019, or over the course of almost five months, I worked on that zero draft and brought it to 47,000 words.
While some people would consider that a fantastic rate, prolific authors can do that in about two weeks or less, and that would be pretty pathetic.
I’m still proud of it, though. It’s a huge step toward the productivity I crave.
How’s that, you say?
That zero draft is where all the hard work was. That's where I had to make all the different pieces of my plot fit together, and that's where I did most of my research. I may have some to do as I go through my first draft, but it will not be nearly as intensive as what I've already put into it.
But wait, there’s more…
I started my official capital-F First Draft on December 3. In other words, seven days ago. Last night, I hit 18,000 words.
I expect my daily word count on this first draft to be epic. However, despite hitting over 5,000 words in less than four hours last night, I’m not quite there yet, and here’s why:
On December 2, I decided I needed to draft the entire first draft of The Sphinx’s Heart in a month.
You heard me. 164,000 words or more in a single very busy month, with a week-long holiday to see my sister and other writing assignments in the mix. (Fortunately, no piano lessons this month. Whooee! And I purposely didn’t take editing clients so I could do this.)
That’s a daily word count of around 5,500 if I only skip one day (and I’m already over that limit!). I used to be happy hitting that in a week. That's a lot of freaking words.
I have hit 5,500 words per day during the mad rush to finish books before, but it definitely has not been my most consistent number.
Am I crazy?
Well, that’s another blog post…
BUT!
If I succeed, that means I’ll have completed the entire outline and first draft of this book in only six months!
Yeah, I’d say that’s faster.
Key words: “If I Succeed”
There were a few recent events that made me think I probably could succeed at this and decide to give it a shot.
First, I recently did an editing report for a client where I wrote (typed) 10,000 words in less than six hours. So I knew that I could type fast enough to write 5,500 words per day if I set aside enough hours to do it—as long as I knew what it was I wanted to say.
(And, thanks to my zero draft, I do know what I want to say.)
Second, all within the period of a week, I heard from three different sources about ways to make dictating a part of my writing routine and triple my hourly word count (one of which was Chris Fox’s 5,000 Words per Hour). So I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking and began my career in dictation.
Guess what? Everything in this blog post up until this point was (mostly) dictated into my phone while I’ve been cleaning up from lunch and making myself a coffee. (I’ve edited it with a keyboard since, but that was pretty painless.)
This is my first experiment with dictating using Dragon by speaking into a recorder app and then transferring it into my computer afterwards to be transcribed. I know have to clean it up (done!), but I'm excited to see how it works. So far, I've been recording for twenty-two minutes. If I had been typing for this amount of time at my average rates for typing a blog post, I would be at about 440 words. While dictating, I've already reached 1,889.
Yes, I'm very excited about dictating.
(Of note for those who have used voice-to-text apps. They are NOT the same as using a dedicated app like Dragon, which can be trained, and which actually lets you dictate in quotation marks. If I tried to dictate an entire book into Google Docs using their voice-to-text engine, I’d probably take up drinking.)
So that 18,000 words I hit last night? 5,300 of them were from yesterday, my best day dictating yet—and I was doing it while exhausted and with multiple interruptions from my family. Only a week into the experiment and I’m already starting to figure this dictating thing out and have caught up to my average recent “good day” hourly typing speed of 1,400 words/hour. (Note: while drafting The Undine’s Tear, my average hourly speed was about 700 words. Last night, I hit 1,400. My hourly word count for this post before copying to my site, including revision? 1,710. Boo-yah!)
Yes, I'm behind on my 5,500 words per day, but I'm expecting to catch up soon. Even more exciting, I'm looking forward to being more active this winter—not by knittercising, but writercising! (Like Kevin J. Anderson, who writes his books while taking long hikes.)
I am super excited about the idea of no longer being chained to my desk in order to do my job. I'm going to leave this here, as I'm sure you can imagine the possibilities yourself. However, stay tuned for further adventures of the dictating writer as I keep you posted about how it works for me.
(A little extra motivation to learn to dictate is the deposit I’ve paid a developmental editor to look at this book on January 16. So I’m VERY motivated to finish this book this month and still have time to revise!)
If you don’t hear from me again until 2020, you know what I’ll be doing. :-)
In other news:
Last week was epic for other reasons, too. First, I was honoured to be featured on Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s podcast, Stark Reflections. In the interview, I give a brief overview of my journey as a creative and a writer, talk about how awesome my mom is, and encourage you that it’s never too late to decide what you want to do when you grow up.
I’m also part of a Young Adult Fantasy promotion on Bookfunnel this month to promote YA fantasy with other authors. If you’re looking for some new authors to check out, you can see what’s in the promo here.
As part of the promo, I have put the eBook for The Undine’s Tear on for $1.99 everywhere. And thanks to that little sale, The Undine’s Tear Kindle book hit the top 100 bestseller list on Amazon in three categories for both Amazon US and Australia.
No, I’m not quitting my day job. The number of copies required to do that was embarrassingly low. But it’s something, so I thought I’d at least mention it.
If you haven’t yet added this book to your library, you can find it on any platform from this universal link:
Well, that’s it, folks. I’m back to the writing salt mines. Except, instead of mummifying myself slowly in front of my desk, I’m looking forward to all the ways I can make dictating part of a healthier, more productive lifestyle.
Happy Tuesday!
I’m tired of letting the bullies win. So this is my big third-act speech. (That I hope is actually in the first act.)