I've been working on writing projects for more than a decade now. I've completed some of them, and many others are sitting half-finished on old, discarded hard drives. I recently got to thinking about what has helped me bring projects to fruition, and I decided I should start a new series of posts about the tips I've picked up along the way. First and foremost, I would tell anyone taking on a large project to set a schedule. This really isn't a new idea, I've heard the same advice in many different forms. Some folks advocate very strict guidelines. 'Spend the first hour of every day writing,' or, 'Make a list of 6 ideas you want to explore before you go to bed, and prioritize them by importance. The next day, tackle each one in priority order.' When I was working on Much Love though, I kept my schedule pretty loose: write 1,000 words every week.
There are a few things noticeably lacking from that goal. First off, write 1,000 words of what? I never limited myself to working on a particular project at a time because, well, sometimes I just get fed up with a book and want to shove it aside for a while. That's totally fine in my opinion. The way I see it, if you bang your head against the same thing again and again trying to force yourself through a block, you're just going to get more burned out. For me, the important thing is not to continually make progress on my current project, but rather to just keep up the schedule. As long as I maintain the creative mindset I'll eventually break through the block that was holding me back, even if I've shifted my focus elsewhere for a couple weeks.
The second notable omission: I didn't say write 1,000 good words every week. A lot of what I wrote in the early days of Much Love was shit, and I knew it. But it was more important for me to keep writing and advancing the story than to perfectly wordsmith a single paragraph. What's more, there were many passages in Much Love that I thought were great when I wrote them but didn't make the final draft. There's an old adage in film: cut what you love. No matter how good you think a passage is, you have to be willing to get rid of it if it doesn't further the final story. So why kill yourself trying to write a perfect opening chapter if you don't even know that it will be in the final draft?
Really, all you're trying to do is create a body of work large enough to build a book from. Unless you've storyboarded every single detail of your idea before setting pen to paper, you really don't know how the story will turn out. Small details you add for color can start to coalesce into larger themes, and if you're spending all of your time perfecting a tiny piece of the story then you may not give the little things room to grow into a three-dimensional narrative. My goal in Much Love was to simply get 30,000 words on the page, then take a step back and see what had developed. Once I reached that point I could see the holes I had left unfilled and the clever bits that didn't actually further the story. I could assess the book as a whole and decide what I needed to shore up to fully realize my vision.
The key is that you have to accept the bad in the beginning with the knowledge that you will perfect it once you're ready for the editing phase. That's a topic for another post though. For now, all that matters it that you decide on a schedule and stick with it!