An author’s gotta eat and so does her family.
There’s that AND other pesky, little things that sit at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which every human being has to take care of before aspiring to greater things . . . like writing all the words that make up a novel.
Therefore, said author has to have a job, one that normally takes ALL DAY *whimpers*, and starts with a shrieking alarm, morning workouts, lighting fast breakfasts, carpool lines and ends with doing those things in reverse (kind of.)
This is my story and the story of most fellow authors out there. It’s not a bad story—I’m glad I have a job and all—but it’s a story of battles and sacrifices and fatigue and postponed dreams and waiting, waiting, waiting for a chance, for a minute, for a second to just sit and finally WRITE.
No wonder TIME becomes a valued commodity, one that we’re willing to buy at very high prices, prices that may or may not involve bribes and promises to loved one and friends.
“I’ll do the dishes for a whole week in exchange for one hour of time to write. Deal?”
And thus, we buy ourselves an hour. Awesome! Okay, maybe we feel ripped off (I hate doing the dishes,) but we’re happy because we’ll at least get an hour with our story and our feels and our characters and that . . . is priceless.
Fast forward. The hour is here. Everything is set. Now all we have to do is make the best of it! But will we? And how, my God, how?!
Well, I’ve learned how! Eight years as an author have taught me tricks! Tricks that, for me, make the #1k1hr challenge a reality every time I take it on.
I’m doing it now with my current work in progress, the sequel to Ignite The Shadows, which got me thinking: why don’t I share my tricks with everyone? So, over a few posts, I will be doing just that, with the promise that if you put these things into practice, you’ll never feel as if the hour you just spent working on your novel was anything but productive.
And, like me, you will be able to write a book during your lunch break, without getting stuck with dirty dishes duty anymore.
First things first! Please, DO NOT try to do all these things at once the first time. Incorporate one technique per week or until you feel you have made it work. If you’re a couch potato, you don’t try to run a 5k right off the bat. No! You work yourself up to it, because there’s no way you can go from the La-Z-Boy to the finish line on the first day. Also, I should mention that I work in drafts, so what you’ll get out of writing this way is FIRST DRAFT quality material.
HELPFUL FACT – The average person types from 50 to 80 word per minute.
So to write 1000 words in one hour, you only need to type 17 word per minute.
Find out how fast you can type HERE.
TIP LIST
1. Fully Imagine
You only have 1 hour, so you have to hit the desk typing! You have no time to sit there, wondering what comes next in your scene. You have to KNOW exactly what is going to happen! I’m not saying you need an outline (if you have one, great; it should make this easier), but whether you’re an outliner or a pantser, you still have to imagine the scene, just NOT in front of the keyboard.
You will say: “But I need TIME to imagine the scene and we already established that’s the one thing we don’t have.When in the world am I going to imagine my scene if not when I sit down to write?”
The answer: You can imagine your scene at any time when your brain isn’t occupied doing . . . well . . . “brainy” things—which is A LOT of the time, if you think about it. Some examples: while you shower, get dressed, put on make-up, do your hair, sit on the can #LOL, wait in traffic (safety first, though), sit in a useless meeting, wait in line at the grocery store, between commercials, while you lie in bed awake, while you wait for your kid during piano lesson, on and on . . .
For my part, I do it in the shower, which works like a charm. Showering is such a mindless activity, been doing it my whole life (really, I have,) don’t even have to think about it. That means that every day I have 10 minutes or more of free “imagining” time. Yay! Best of all, this is alone time—most of the time, anyway *clears her throat*—which gives me the opportunity to go all out acting out my scene. Hey, nobody’s watching. I even do it out loud sometimes, full with different voices for my characters and dramatic poses like fingers running through wet hair, hands caressing cheeks, knees slamming into groins *ouch*. The works!
Yeah, I’m crazy, I know.
Anyway, by the time my lunch hour rolls around at work, I’m set. I’ve imagined dialogue, reactions from my characters, general details about setting. In short, most of everything I need to type non-stop and make the most out of my one hour. It works every time.
2. New Is The Key
Start a new document every day. That’s it. Simple. Try it, and you’ll see that just by not working in your master document, you will write more and get the most out of your hour.
A blank page will tempt you. As a writer, you will want to fill it with NEW words, which is exactly the purpose of #1k1h.
On the other hand, if you sit down to write in your master document, you’ll be tempted to go back and tinker with scenes you’ve already written. You’ll want to re-read and marvel at your abilities; you’ll want to find the perfect word in your thesaurus to make each sentence a work of art; you’ll want to sigh alongside your heroine as your hero takes her . . .
NO! STOP!
That is not why you’re here. You’re here to write NEW words! Not rehash what you already wrote. So open a NEW document and fill it with NEW scenes, NEW delectable sentences, NEW sigh-worthy relationships. NEW! NEW! NEW! Can’t say that enough.
At the end of the day, you will find that your story has advanced and all you have left to do is copy your NEW, shiny 1K words into your master document.
3. Keep It Simple
Do you have the best word processing program known to men? If you do, DON’T use it.
Why? Because it’s very likely your word processor is slowing you down. Just consider the momentum you lose every time you stop to look for a synonym, or to format your text just so, or to correct a misspelled word you wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for the red, squiggly lines under it, telling you what fat fingers you’ve got.
If you want to improve your speed, you have to understand that your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be a first draft—one which, during future revisions, you’ll make final. The same squiggly lines will be under the same words later, so why sweat them while you’re trying to get the most out of your writing hour?
I write on my iPad most of the time, so I use QuickOffice with the spellcheck turned off. It syncs nicely with Dropbox and creates word documents. Other options available in all windows computers are Notepad and WritePad. You can also turn off all the fancy settings in Word or any other processor you use, but you may not want to keep switching them on and off, depending on what you’re working on. Using a simple editor is just easy and gets rid of the temptation to do things that will just kill your momentum.
4. Don’t Stop For Any Reason
For the last tip, I have left what I believe to be the most important one, the one that will keep you moving forward even when you think you can’t. This is the one technique that, in my case, allows me to not sweat exactly what should come next and lets me move forward without ever getting blocked, stuck, constipated, or whatever you want to call it. And it’s this simple:
I don’t stop for any reason.
When you’re working on your first draft, literally birthing the book onto the page, there are a million and one reasons that may cause you to stop. And I’m not talking about your phone ringing, your cat jumping on the keyboard, or your significant other demanding attention—which are in themselves distracting enough to eat up the miserable 60 minutes you’ve managed to carve out. No, I’m talking about story-related reasons. To exemplify, here are a few things that will go through your head while you’re typing:
- What was this character’s eye color? I forgot. Let me go back and look
- My skies are always full of cumulus clouds. I should use a different type. Let me hop on google and check
- I wonder what strong, German surname I can use for this character? Let me hop on google and check what others there are
- How in the world does my character shift gears on this motorcycle she’s speeding away on? Let me hop on google and check
- What’s another word for “angry.” I’ve used that three times already. Let me pull up the thesaurus
- OMG, for this part to work, Johnny should promise Mary, he will always remember the chocolate sundae they ate together. Let me go back and add a promise five chapters ago
I could go on for a while, and I’m sure you can come up with your own examples. Moreover, you know that if you give into this impulses, especially if you open a browser to research something, your 60 minutes of writing are toast.
You have to resist the impulse, and it may be hard. Maybe it has become a habit, part of the way you write, even if you know it affects your productivity. Changing tasks can account for a lot of wasted time. Plus, there’s the chance that while you’re away doing some “research,” Twitter or Facebook will snatch you by the neck and keep you for the next 30 minutes. SO RESIST!
But what if later on I forget to make that very important change? What if I use the wrong eye color? You may ask. Well, don’t despair. It’s very simple. You won’t, because you’ll make a note, right there, on the page where you’re writing. You won’t go anywhere. You will stay right there and leave yourself a reminder.
Try this, whenever you run into these type of situations, use…tam-tam-tam…THE BRACKET!
Here are two examples:
- “Johnny frowned and his . . .”
- Alternative #1 – Hmm, what was this character’s eye color? I forgot. Let me go back and look—5 minutes wasted looking back in the master document or character sheet
- Alternative # 2 – Hmm, what was this character’s eye color? I forgot. Well, I’ll find out later and just keep typing now…
“Johnny frowned and his [what color?] eyes darken as he pondered Mary’s mean words.”—Zero minutes wasted - “An old acquaintance from my days in Berlin, Hedy . . .”
- Alternative #1 – I wonder what strong, German surname I can use for this character? Let me hop on google and check—5 minutes wasted looking in Behind The Name and 10 minutes wasted on Twitter, ‘cause it was there and the feed had 7 new notifications and the cutest cat video
- Alternative # 2 – I wonder what strong, German surname I can use for this character? Let me find out later and keep typing now…
“An old acquaintance from my days in Berlin, Hedy [find strong German surname], called me yesterday morning because she wanted to reminisce our past misadventures.“—Zero minutes wasted
This works wonderfully when SECOND DRAFT comes around. All I do is search for the opening bracket—“[“—and all the places where research is required are at my fingertips once more. I use this technique a lot, including instances where I’m having trouble describing setting, feelings, mood, etc.. I also leave myself instructions about things that should happen in later chapters that I have not written yet, to highlight important events that I need to track, and many other situations.
So, in the end, these might be some of the things I find dispersed across my first draft:
- [Flesh out this character more]
- [Make sure the setting reflects the mood of the scene]
- [Make sure to close the loop on this conversation between these two characters]
- [Chapter 20 – I just gave Johnny a mustache, make sure he has it from the beginning of the book]
- [This is the first time these characters kiss]
- [angry/use aw] – this is my shortcut for: pull up the thesaurus and use another word besides “angry.”
- [I love this last sentence, write more like this]
- [passive voice here. FIX IT!]
- [Include some backstory about Mary’s Berlin friend somewhere in earlier chapters]
- [This line is epic. Use it as a tag line]
As you can see, the possibilities are endless, so go and bracket away, or whichever other technique you come up with that works for you, just remember: DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING.
If you try any of these, come back and let me know how it goes, what problems you had, etc. I’d love to hear from you. Keep in mind that with these techniques alone you may not get to 1000 words per hour, but it should improve your output greatly.
[Image attribution: Photo by Flying High]
[Image attribution: Photo by Pierre Metivier]
[Image attribution: Photo by Amy Palko]
[Image attribution: Photo by FutUndBeidl]
[Image attribution: Photo by Andy Wright]
All images used under CC/No changes