Monday, February 5, 2018

When the Washing Machine Calls, Don't Answer

Q: How do you set real life aside and connect with the imaginary worlds you create? And how long do you write each day/week?


-from Susan

A: Depends.

If the writing is under contract with a deadline, it’s easy to stay focused. I have a due date and so I aim to write a set number of words a day and that motivator works for me. If it is 1,000 words, I might only get to 750 on Monday, but may be in the zone and do 2,500 Tuesday. I was once a newspaper reporter and then editor, and deadlines were what propelled a lot of the activity at the paper!

If I don’t have a contract for the work I’m doing, something not in an existing series, for example, it’s much harder. I have one eye on the contracted work, the marketing and promotion I need to do, and a launch date coming up. The new WIP is a struggle because I don’t know the characters as well, and may even be writing outside of my favored genre. The one right now also requires research and there’s no siren song more distracting than amassing vast quantities of information I’ll never use but which is important to understanding the time and place in which my story’s set.
So the research reading is important and combined with my political activity, social fun, the laundry, and the cats, can pretty much fill up a day. Not good.

It’s February. Whatever discipline I had disappeared around the holidays and I’m writing or researching three hours a day, but actual prose for the new book is probably only half of that. I am still not settled into this new story and I’m still figuring out who these characters are, going back to poke them a bit as something reveals itself. Once I hit my stride, I’ll be back at 1,000 words a day, I promise myself. I am just now setting a realistic goal to finish the first draft by a specific date. Then, I’ll count the number of days before that date, divide the estimated length of the draft by them, and that will tell me how many words per day I need to hit. As long as I can fool myself about the set-in-stone quality of the due date, I will get back in gear.

Fingers crossed!






2 comments:

Paul D. Marks said...

You said, "...there’s no siren song more distracting than amassing vast quantities of information I’ll never use but which is important to understanding the time and place in which my story’s set."

Writing is fun, but sometimes the research is more fun, Susan. At least for me. I can get lost in that for hours on hours and fool myself into thinking I'm working :-) .

Susan C Shea said...

But...you mean we're fooling ourselves, Paul?