Good morning everyone. I hope you are ready for today’s task. We are almost to the end of our planning phase and soon will begin writing. For those of you still doing research or just reading along, there will be writing exercises posted on the writing days. Some will help with character building, others on world building. They can be used if you are doing the novel writing challenge or for something completely different.
Today however is Task 39 and it is a two parter. The first is mostly a housekeeping item and may be something you have already done. But I feel it needs to be said, so…
Task #39 Part 1: If you haven’t already combined the chapters broken out in your three acts into one long list, go ahead and do so now.
There we go, a nice long list of what we want to write. At least as we start. I always print mine out before I get started, but I also double space the lines and add extra space between each of the chapters. As I write I tend to add things. Or circle things I have mentioned in other chapters at the beginning but decide to put elsewhere once I get working. This is definitely a working document for me. It will get messy, often very messy and usually mid way through I will have to take a break, type in some of the changes and then reprint a new copy to work from.
Which will be just as messy by the time I finish.
My suggestion to you if you are doing this is to use a pen with blue ink. My printer is set to print in black and white and I always use a pen with bright blue ink so it is easy to find my notes. It is far friendlier than a red pen. I also tend to use fountain pens so I keep a bottle of Turquoise ink around, just for this, in case you wanted specifics.
And that is part 1.
Are you ready for Part 2? Brace yourself, because here is where you have to be honest about your time and schedule. That’s right…
Task #39 Part 2: Set a writing Schedule for this project.
We all have a long list of things we have to do each day, each week and each month. Some are scheduled, some aren’t. Here is the think I have found. I know a lot of people who really want to write a novel. They have great ideas and yet somehow, they never get going. Sometimes it is because they never get around to making the time, others because they were overly optimistic about their time and it was eaten away by other things that had to get done. So here is where we set the schedule and have to be realistic with ourselves.
If you have a week to week schedule, then when you sit down with your weekly schedule make writing time one of the items you schedule in. But also look at what else is going on. If you want to write every day and plan to schedule the time every day but know that this Tuesday you are set for a banger of a day, then maybe this week don’t schedule Tuesday on your writing schedule. The same if you are looking at a monthly calendar.
I tend to do broad scheduling Monthly and then look at my weekly schedule on Sundays to see what is coming up that week that I didn’t plan for.
Also realize that while having big blocks of time is nice (and if your schedule allows it than go for it) but it isn’t required. For those of you who have followed along for a while you know I do a post called the fifteen minute novel. Each morning I write for fifteen minutes on a story using the sentence from the day before to start the next day’s writing. The one I am working on now was started last year as the planned novel wrapped up early. I am working with no outline whatsoever on it, just a general idea of where I want the story to go. So it is a bit wobbly. But those fifteen minutes add up. For reference I am posting Day 210 of this story and the manuscript is sitting at 120K in the document.
So the words add up, even if you can only give it fifteen minutes at a time. Essentially what I am saying is don’t berate yourself if you can’t dedicate huge blocks of time to this story you just spent the last two months breaking out. Understand your schedule. Start small if you need to and then add in time when you can. Because if you make it a consistent item on your schedule than your brain recognizes it and a habit forms. If you try and over schedule and consistently skip that time, your brain remembers that too and it will get discouraged or mentally mark it as not a priority.
I know, long way to go to say, be realistic with yourself when you schedule and to remember that something is better than nothing in this case.
Another form of encouragement I like is a tracker. Mine are super simple sheets I make in excel and print it out. I’ve attached a PDF below. You can use it or use it as an example. While it sounds silly, on days when you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere it can really help your mindset to see little blocks colored in. This one is set up for word count because that is what I use to track but you can track number of days writing or even number of hours. You can make it fun with little cartoons or keep it as basic as this one. But if you need a little encouragement, sometimes it helps.
And there we have it, Task #39 in all it’s glory. I will see you tomorrow for Task #40 the last of our planning tasks. Have a great day!
Ten til Midnight 