Welcome to this ninth/IX/9th writing club update!
Happy mid-March to you all, my well lettered friends. I hope you’ve been graced with some nice weather as we in the northern hemisphere enter into the warmer time of the year. Today is delightfully dreary and overcast where I’m at, which I’m hoping to channel into some indoor creativity.
Okay! Here are the Writers:
Please see last month’s post if you need to refresh your memory on what your goals were.
Just an FYI that while “membership” in the writing club is fluid and open, so too are the names above simply my best guess, without judgement, at who is participating on any particular month. So if you don’t see your name up there and you’d like me to add it, just shoot me a DM or even better just share what you’re working on and you’ll be added right back to the roster the following month. :)
I’m continuing work on my dystopian/contemporary setting cozy fantasy series. I started it in 2022 and it’s a trilogy, so it’s keeping me quite busy. There are contemporary elements in it that require quite some research, and I try to have representation that’s somewhat progressive so I want to get those things right. But most of the work simply is due to the fact that I currently do most editing myself based on a bunch of test readers, letting it sit for a few weeks, working through it back to front once more, and repeat.
Recently, I decided to format a specific kind of non-verbal communication that occurs in the books differently. Such changes require my own sort of style guide decisions, and then I have to go through every single paragraph to adjust things. It’s both meditative and a bit tiring, but at the end of the day I love that sort of busywork and it’s always a good learning opportunity.
The third book draft still lacks an ending, but I’m not in a huge hurry to finish it. This year has been busy with some side job things, and I usually prefer to take my time and get it right rather than rush. Since I have multiple books to work on, I also like to jump to whatever motivates me the most, so no time is really lost even if I don’t work on the final ending at any given point in time.
I used to track word count to motivate me, but it’s always an on- and off thing. Currently I simply work based on enjoying sitting down and getting lost in the pages. But perhaps to push for the final ending I might start tracking words again for a short while. It can help me with drafting, the editing part I usually manage without much of a competitive pressure but for drafting I need it sometimes to keep going.
(If anybody’s curious, I also switch between editing and drafting on often a weekly or even daily basis. It can be both risky and rewarding, kind of depends on whether that causes you to never get anything done or whether it keeps work fresh and interesting for you. I’ve been busy with this for years so I usually welcome any change from the usual boring flow, so I have found that it helps me more than it hurts.)
This is a huge challenge, and one of the reasons I prefer the more far flung (as in from the messy contemporary) settings. But I imagine it’s also very rewarding to do all that research and then package it up to into a story that you share with others.
This is subjective ofc, but if you’re writing for the joy of it, I feel you’ve “arrived” at the destination that these productivity games (tracking word counts, streaks, etc) are trying to stimulate. When did you notice that word count and other extrinsics were no longer required to motivate you?
I’m curious about your process at deciding to write a trilogy of novels. Did you start at a really high level outline and decide early on that 3 novels made sense, or maybe because you got the the end of one story and realised there was still more to tell?
For drafting I need the word count to motivate me sometimes, weeks on weeks off, it’s always been like that. For editing I don’t. I think it’s a brain chemistry thing. I use the word count motivation when I have issues making progress without it, otherwise I ignore it.
The research can be daunting for progressive topics since people can be slightly unforgiving. It feels like sometimes you get more anger for a not-fully-perfect representation than not attempting one at all. Test readers help but you can’t always find the “perfect” test reader to find all parts somebody might find problematic.
I usually write series of a 2-3 books worth of length. I have found that a single book usually barely allows me to set up the setting and characters and a minor villain, and usually the 2nd one is where things really get started. The middle book(s) are the most fun to write for me, everything is established and I can toy around with things for fun chaos, while I don’t need to think super hard about a perfectly conclusive satisfying ending yet.
I look forward to learning how you typeset your non-verbal communication, as well as discovering this form of communication in your story.
On another note, I hadn’t given much thought to how switching everyday between editing and drafting, as opposed to seldomer, could slow one down. I recognize now that I systematically get bogged down by my habit.