by Dave Haslett
Every minute counts
Remember that the first five minutes of every mini writing session are exclusively for thinking, not writing. This is important, because it means you’ll know exactly what you’re going to say when you start writing.
But don’t wait until the five minutes are up if you already know what you’re going to say. Get on and write it.
On the other hand, if you don’t know what you’re going to say by the time five minutes have passed, take as long as you need to think about it. Or write down what you have so far and then think about the next part.
If the words won’t come, skip that section and try a different one. When you come back to it later, you should find it slightly easier because your subconscious mind will have been thinking about it in the interim.
Manage your time
If something will take a long time, it makes sense to leave it until you have plenty of time to do it. You’re supposed to be concentrating on your book right now, so postpone any big projects and just do the small, essential ones.
If something urgent crops up, do it immediately or get someone else to deal with it. It gets it out of the way and it doesn’t sit around cluttering up your thoughts. If it isn’t urgent, postpone it until you’ve finished your current writing session or completed your book – or get someone else to deal with it.
If you only do what’s absolutely necessary, and you get other people to help you, you can easily gain an extra two hours each day. You’ll also save your energy, so you should feel more alert and productive as you write.
When your book is finished, deal with everything you postponed and thank everyone who helped you.
You’ll probably find that some of the things you postponed have taken care of themselves. And you might be able to lump several of the outstanding things together and tackle them all at once. If that’s the case, consider making it a regular thing, so you gain more time even when you aren’t writing.
Never a dull moment
One of the main problems with working on a long project – such as writing a book – is that your initial excitement soon wears off. If you notice your enthusiasm waning, try working on several books at once. If you use the techniques in this book, this should be perfectly straightforward, as you’ll have a detailed outline for each book.
You could write a section of book one, then a section of book two, and then a section of book three. Or you could work on a different book each day. Or switch from one book to the next whenever your enthusiasm drifts. As always, mark off each section of your outline as you complete it so you keep track of everything.
If you get fed up with writing and want to spend a day editing, researching, or creating the outline for a new book, do that instead. It’ll stop you from getting bored, it’ll give you something interesting and useful to do, and you’ll have several books at different stages of completion to work on as your mood takes you.
It might not be the fastest or most efficient way of writing a book, but if it stops you from abandoning it, that’s got to be a good thing.
Go green and recycle
Most novelists have a few unpublished books and short stories tucked away, so how about giving them a new lease of life? You could reuse parts of an earlier story in a new novel, or incorporate the entire storyline as a sub-plot.
If you already have a great set of characters, don’t waste time coming up with new ones; just give them a new story. The same applies to the locations you’ve used in the past.
Series of novels featuring the same characters generally sell much better than standalone novels.
If you’re writing a non-fiction book, you might have written articles or blog posts on the same subject. Could you incorporate them into your book? If you’ve written enough articles or blog posts to cover the entire subject, you might not need to write another word; just compile them into a book.
If you’ve sold any of the articles that you want to reuse in your book, you’ll need to check what rights you have. Most magazines buy First X Serial Rights (where X is the country you sold it to – First British Serial Rights, for example). This means the magazine can publish the article once, in their own country or territory, and they’re the first publication in that territory to publish it. They have no rights to use it again afterwards, so you’re free to reuse it word-for-word in your book. And, of course, you’re free to use any of your articles that have never been published.
Some magazines buy all rights. This is rare, but it means they now own the article and you can’t reuse it. You would have to write another one.
(Not really) going out to work
Imagine that you’re short of money and you’ve had to take an evening job. Perhaps you work in a bar. You’d have to find the time to do that job – and you could find the time if you really needed to. So tell everyone you work in a bar – or whatever your fantasy part-time job is – and “go to work” for a few hours every evening.
You could even go to an actual bar, as long as it’s a nice quiet one. But you won’t be serving the drinks, you’ll be getting on with your writing.
Cross it off and start again
As soon as you’ve completed a section of your book, mark it as completed in your outline. Then choose which section you’ll work on next. You can start thinking about that section immediately, even if you haven’t got time to write it yet. Let it sit in the back of your mind for a while until you can get around to it.
As we saw earlier, you don’t have to write the sections in the same order that they’re listed in your outline. But you will, of course, need to assemble them into the right order when you’ve finished writing them.
Other ways of finding more time to write
Even when you aren’t writing, you can still be thinking about writing: coming up with new ideas, running lines of dialogue through your head, or thinking about the words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs you’ll write in the next session.
When you’re watching television, listening to the radio or reading a newspaper, you can look for ideas or do some research at the same time.
All reading matter can provide ideas and serve as research material: newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, websites, menus, cereal boxes, instruction manuals, signs, posters, price labels, and so on. If you can read it, you should be able to find an idea in it.
You could also:
Learn to write faster. See Chapter 13 for various ways of doing this.
Use technology and the techniques in this book to speed things up as much as possible.
Don’t use your writing time for anything except writing. Don’t answer the door, or answer your phone, or check your email, or talk to anyone – unless it’s an emergency.
Get someone to take your children out for the day, or send them off to stay with friends or relatives for the weekend.
Turn down invitations to things you’d rather not go to anyway. Writing your book is the perfect excuse.
The next step
It’s almost time to start writing your book. If you’re planning to write in mini-sessions, you could start writing it immediately. But if you’re planning to include some longer writing sessions as well, a few warm-up exercises will boost your productivity no end. We’ll look at a few of those next.
9. Getting started (part 1)
In this chapter we’ll look at some warm-up exercises to help ease you into longer writing sessions. If you’ve decided to use mini writing sessions, as I recommend, you could skip this chapter. But it’s only a short one and there are several tips that might benefit you if you’re planning to string several mini writing sessions together.
Some of the exercises involve writing and thinking about things in different ways. They could lead to all sorts of ideas for your next book.
A relaxing start…
A great way to start a long writing session is to spend the first fifteen minutes of it relaxing, meditating, and concentrating only on your breathing.
Later on in the session, if you feel
any kind of tension, you should be able to recall that feeling of peace and relaxation by simply closing your eyes for a few seconds.
Take breaks
It’s important to take regular breaks during long writing sessions, and particularly after completing each section of your book. Stand up, stretch, walk around, go outside if you can, and focus your eyes on objects in the distance. You’ll feel a lot better and be much more productive if you do this. Sitting still and staring at a screen for long periods really saps your energy.
Pick a word – any word
If you have trouble getting started in a writing session, pick a word from a book, newspaper, or magazine and write about it for ten minutes without stopping. It helps if the word is a noun. Describe its size, shape, colour, texture, smell, sound and taste. What does it remind you of? Who would use it? What else could he use it for? How might it save someone’s life? How might it be used for mischief and nefarious deeds? Let your mind wander, and write down whatever you come up with.
Reverse psychology
Another great exercise is to think about something you really don’t want to write about. This immediately gives you something to write about. Start writing quickly, before your brain can raise any objections. Write whatever comes into your head, and keep going for several minutes.
The Ten-Minute Liar
Spend ten minutes writing complete rubbish. Write anything that pops into your head, as long as it isn’t true. Water is purple, wood conducts electricity, you can tell how intelligent a cow is by shining a light up its nose, and so on.
This exercise is only meant to get your brain (and typing fingers) warmed up. But keep the things you come up with anyway. Perhaps, when you look at them again in a few months’ time, you’ll find some brilliant ideas among the really stupid ones.
But most of them will be really stupid – and that’s fine.
Think and doodle
A great way of clearing your mind of other thoughts is to concentrate on what you’re going to write about in the coming session. But don’t just think about the words; do some simple drawings or doodles as well. They might illustrate the scene and characters you’re going to write about. Or they could be random doodles that relate to the subject. Or they might be something to do with the particular words you’ll use.
This exercise is designed to help you improve your concentration. If you do it, you should find that you become highly focused on writing the next section of your book. Thoughts about other matters should fade into the background or disappear completely.
It’s is also a useful way of organising your thoughts if things seem confused or messy.
Vent your spleen
Sometimes you’ll have so many thoughts rattling around in your head that you won’t be able to settle down to write. Perhaps someone upset you at work or nearly caused a serious accident on the journey home. You might be thinking about getting revenge instead of writing your book. It’s important to get those negative thoughts out of your system so you can get back to your writing.
Shut yourself away with a notepad and a pen for five minutes and really let rip. Write down all those things you didn’t dare say at the time. Hurl insults at him, cast doubts upon his parentage, accuse him of cheating on his exams and driving test, and so on. You could even write it in the form of a letter – perhaps to your boss, or the other person’s boss, or to the police.
When you’ve calmed down, tear the pages out of your notebook and put them somewhere safe. There might be something useful in them that you’ll be able to use in another piece of writing – especially if you need some really vicious insults.
If you write novels, the person who upset you could become a villain in your next book – and, naturally, you’ll ensure he gets his just desserts. Or he could be the victim of a really brutal murder. Or he might have a terrible accident or disease and die in the most horrible way you can think of. That’ll teach him!
Make a writing schedule
As we saw in Chapter 8, you need to either find time or make time for your writing. A good way to begin your first writing session of the week is to come up with a writing timetable.
Block out all the periods when your time is accounted for by other things – and make sure they really are essential and unavoidable. Remember that your book should take priority over everything else as far as possible.
Next, look at everything else that’s going on that week. If it’s potentially avoidable, could you postpone or delay it, cancel it, or get someone else to deal with it?
Any time that’s still unaccounted for can be used for writing.
Editing comes later
Many writers begin a new writing session by re-reading their previous day’s work and making corrections. As we saw earlier, this is a really bad idea because it immediately puts your brain into editing mode instead of writing mode.
When you eventually start writing, your brain will still be in editing mode and you’ll be overly critical of what you write. You’ll rewrite the same sentence over and over, stop writing to correct every little mistake, try different words and punctuation, and still not be happy with it. This kind of behaviour really slows you down, and often leads to writer’s block.
Forget all about editing, or making corrections of any kind, until you’ve finished writing the whole book. You can be as critical as you like when it’s done, but not until then. We’ll look at the fastest ways to edit your book in the companion book The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book.
Whenever you begin a new writing session, simply carry on from wherever you left off last time. Don’t re-read what you wrote.
As we’ve seen, the fastest, easiest and most productive way to write a book is to split it up into hundreds of sections, and write it one section at time in mini writing sessions. Longer sessions should (ideally) be made up of several mini-sessions strung together end to end. Aim to finish each section in a single session.
But having said that, sometimes you do need a longer writing session, particularly when you’re tackling a big set-piece scene in your novel and you want to get the whole thing sorted out in one go.
If you can’t finish it in one session, leave yourself a very short note to remind yourself where you’re up to and what needs to come next. In the next session, carry on from where you left off – without re-reading anything.
Perfection can wait
Many writers struggle to write the first page of their book because they want it to be perfect. It’s the most important part of the book because it needs to impress and hook your readers – and potentially also your agent, editor and publisher. You could spend weeks writing and rewriting the first couple of paragraphs and never be completely happy with them. But if you want to write your whole book in less than a month, you obviously can’t do that sort of thing.
As we saw a moment ago, you should never rewrite or edit a single word of your manuscript until the entire first draft is complete. Don’t worry about what it looks like for now. You just need to get it roughly right – out of your head and onto the page. You can work on making it perfect once the whole thing is finished.
If you’re struggling with the beginning of your book, the best solution is to simply leave it until the end. By then, you’ll know exactly how everything fits together, or how the story works out, and the opening lines will be much easier to write.
So, for now, begin your book by writing: "This is a book about…" and carry on from there. Come back and write the real beginning once you’ve written everything else.
Be excited
If you’re completely absorbed in what you’re doing, you’ll find you have endless energy and enthusiasm for your work. The time will fly by and your productivity rate will soar. This is called being “in the zone”, and it’s a wonderful place to be.
If you’re writing a novel, you should feel excited about every scene, every chapter, every character and every location. If you don’t find them exciting, your writing speed
will slow, the quality of your writing will slip, you’ll lose your motivation, and the whole project will feel so dull and boring that there’s a good chance you’ll abandon it.
You need to feel so excited about your book that you can’t wait to get started on it. And you need to maintain that excitement right through the writing process. You should feel excited about starting every new writing session. If you don’t feel excited about every aspect of your book, change it. Do it now, before you start writing it, otherwise it’ll ruin your book.
A few simple tweaks to the outline at this early stage could turn your dull or abandoned book into a runaway bestseller.
Think about this:
How can you make each character so exciting that you can’t wait to start writing about them?
How can you make your locations and settings more exciting?
How can you make your plot and descriptions more exciting?
How can you make each scene more dramatic and exciting?
If you’re writing a non-fiction book, go through the list of topics you plan to cover and mark the ones that excite you. Then take a good hard look at the ones you didn’t mark.