So you’re writing about six different novels all at the same time and none of them are getting done and you just can’t decide which to work on next. What do you do?
Katya posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
I am 22 year old college student. I am immensely in love with creating my own characters and worlds. Currently I have six projects, most of them more than one novel. The trouble I am having is picking the right one to work on. Sometimes I work a bit on this one, a bit on that one, but that does not help me finish any of my projects. I want to sit down and just finish one crappy first draft so I can polish it and be proud of finally finishing my first novel.
Do you have any tips when you are stuck with several projects and do not know which one to go with?
Thank you for your time,
Katya
Randy sez: Katya, the good news is that a lot of writers would pay to have your problem, which is that you have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to ideas.
The bad news is that you have a bottleneck in your writing process. That bottleneck is strangling your production. You are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.
The good news is that you can break that bottleneck right now.
But first you have to identify it.
Let’s start by identifying what you’re doing well. You’re generating ideas. Lots of ideas. So many that they’re competing for your attention, and you’re afraid that if you don’t work on them all right now, you’ll never work on them.
That’s an illusion. The reality is that by paying attention to all of them all at once, you are preventing ANY of them from ever getting published.
The Fiction Writing Bottleneck
That creates the biggest problem most novelists have: the fiction writing bottleneck.
What’s the solution?
Let me tell you a little story. About 15 years ago, my buddy John Olson had that same problem. I asked him what he was working on and he gave me a list of 10 different books he was working on. All at the same time.
I pointed out that he was working a full-time job and writing in his spare time. Even if he had 40 hours per week to write, he’d only be able to spend 4 hours per week on each book, and he was competing with professional writers who had 40 hours per week to commit to a single book. So John didn’t have a chance.
So I told John he had to pick one, any one of the ten, and commit to it. He picked one and agreed to make a firm commitment to write it, but only if I’d coauthor it with him. As it turned out, I really liked that idea, so I agreed to work on it. The result was our award-winning novel Oxygen.
Breaking the Bottleneck
Now how do you commit, Katya? There are two things you need to do, and these have to be firm decisions that you won’t back down from under any conditions:
- Pick one novel–any one of them. If you can’t decide, then flip a coin. Seriously. It truly doesn’t matter which you choose now, because ultimately you will choose all of them.
- Join the 500 Club. That means you commit to writing at least 500 words on that novel EVERY DAY until it’s done. No excuses. No rollover words from yesterday. Every day you have to put down 500 new words on that novel. You can write more words, but under no circumstances are you allowed to write fewer. You can edit some words from previous days, but that editing time doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is new words.
How does this solve your problem?
The answer is simple. At 500 words per day, minimum, you will finish that novel in just a few months. You can afford to set aside everything else temporarily because you are guaranteed to be done in a few months and then you can pick up the next project. And the next, and the next.
The fact is that just about every commercially successful novelist on the planet has a word count quota. Some of them have a time quota, but word count seems to me to be better, because you can waste 30 minutes staring at the screen, but you can’t write 500 words staring at the screen.
The Magic of the 500 Club
There is nothing magic about 500 words, by the way. Maybe you want to join the 250 Club instead. Maybe you can join the 1000 Club. Or even the 2000 Club. But whatever club you decide to join, make it a hard commitment. Absolutely no excuses unless you’re unconscious or giving birth or at the top of Mount Everest. And even in those cases, some writers would drill out their 500 words.
The magic comes from being totally committed. The bottleneck for most writers is the actual production of first draft copy. They don’t spend enough time on that. Which means they don’t have enough to edit or sell or promote.
Stephen King used to tell interviewers that he writes every day except Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. But he notes in his book On Writing that this was a lie. Because he writes every day including Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. And he’s in the 2000 Club. That is part of the reason he’s successful.
First draft copy is your number one priority as a writer. If you get that habit right, everything else will tend to fall into place.
The Fiction Writing Challenge For You
Katya, I challenge you to join the 500 Club for one month and then report back to me. Leave a comment here on this blog.
And the rest of my Loyal Blog Readers, I’ll give you the same challenge. Try the 500 Club for 30 days and report back to me in a comment here.
If you do that, one month from now you’ll have AT LEAST 15,000 words, and possibly much more. And 15,000 words per month, every month, is two full-length standard-size novels per year. Every year, for the rest of your life.
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.
Before we break the bottleneck and write, write, write, let’s remember the outline. I have written a novel that took ten years because I had no outline. If one remembers to spend five hundred words a day on the outline (snowflake method preferred!) then the novel write comes easy. Can you comment on the outline and the snowflake method? Thanks for your astute post. Kaye Linden
Good point Kaye! Many us MUST plan before we write.
The habit of writing a daily word count is a “keystone habit” — which I wrote about in the March issue of my e-zine. It’s a habit that tends to create other good habits, such as the habit of planning regularly. If you have to feed the beast with 500 words per day, then you also have to plan those words in advance. And once you’ve got this words, you have to make a habit of editing, of marketing, etc.
My belief is that the habit of producing those words is enough to cause you to create all those other habits.
The 500 club sounds like a great idea for novelists. I used to be in the 1000 club, but was writing articles as well as a novel. With about 40 articles in progress at any one time, counting the added words as I worked on each project got to be too much counting.
I switched my goal to an article a day and that has worked much better.
I solved the problem of having too many projects by putting extra article ideas into a file. I keep it down to five in progress now. I don’t think I’d want to write more than one novel at once.
Thanks for the article.
Hi Ivan, sounds like you’ve found the ticket to production.
What I like about the 500 Club is that 500 words is a pretty low bar. But once you jump that bar, it’s easy to go on and do another 500 or 1000. Because you’re rolling.
The more often you just get yourself rolling, the more words you’ll produce.
Great advice. With things like Camp NaNoWriMo this April, there’s not much excuse for not getting those first drafts knocked out. 500 words a day? Most of us probably write that much texting daily. Yet I’m as guilty as anyone of getting off course with commitment. Trying to get consistent and I do love the ability to write on my iPhone with an app called PlainText. I’ve written thousands of words with it so far.
Thanks for all you do for writers, Randy.
Hi Sarah: I’ll look into Plaintext. Sounds cool, and if works on iPads, well, I never go anywhere without my iPad.
I have the same problem as Katya. Too many ideas; too little time to write them all; no clear idea which to work on first.
I’m critting a first draft right now (just started today). When I get to writing the second draft, I’ll be in!
Thanks for the reminder, Randy.
Hi Carrie: Flip a coin if you have to, but pick one and stick to it until you know for sure that the idea is a loser. If you decide that, then dump it at once. But otherwise, just forge ahead.
Hello,
Thank you for the tips.
I am in the 2, 000 words a day club – it is not that hard after making an outline.
This April I will be working on developing the stories. From there I will write my first draft.
I shall take your advice about just committing to one story – although it will be so hard.
Thank you
What I’ve done with my “excess” ideas is to put them all in a big doc file. Each idea might be a single sentence, a paragraph with a link or two to some external resource, or maybe as much as half a page.
Once an idea grows past half a page it’s time to create a project, gather a bit of research, start an outline, and create a few character sketches. That doesn’t mean I need to jump in and write, or even put many hours into the project at this stage. It means the idea is past the half-page state.
If I don’t do this there’s the subconscious panic that I might forget the idea. By recording my ideas I can let them go and relax. Maybe I never will develop the idea, or maybe it becomes next year’s hot project.
Thanks so much for the advice. I am not necessarily having the same issue as Katya, but I do have a huge problem in productivity. I get caught up on trying to make everything perfect as I go along. I know this isn’t practical, but I find myself worrying that I wouldn’t know how to fix it later.
I like the 500 club. At least then, at the end of the day, no matter how much one edits, erases, plans, and so on, there are 500 more words than the day before, and the story gets a little further.
I hearby declare, therefore, that I will join the 500 club and see how far it gets me in 30 days.
I am horrible about procrastinating and then having to write a book in 2 weeks to meet my deadline. I do this repeatedly and I’m tired of it, so I have committed to the 500 club. I just want to get into the HABIT of writing every single day for the rest of my natural born life. There is so much promotion and just general daily business stuff to this writing gig I had not counted on and it takes up way too much of my time. Writing often comes last when it should always be first. But since I made the commitment, I can already tell a difference in how I look at writing. I can easily get 2k words a day, but I wanted to start out small to, again, get in the habit of writing daily. It’s only been a few days but I am loving it.
One question I had was, as a plotter do the words I write in my outlines count? I spend about two weeks plotting a book if not more and my outlines end up between 40-60 pages long.
And like Katya, I have a million ideas. I’m working on 27 right now and those are just the priorities. Thank goodness for deadlines or I would do the same thing. Work on a dozen projects and never get anywhere with any of them.
Anywho, thanks! I love this blog!
The 500 Club? I never thought about it like that! I myself am a ‘bottleneck’ writer, I have one, two, three projects that I juggle at a time and at the end of the day I drop all three and scrap them because they ether seem to ‘bore’ me, or the magic falls. I think now I’m going to be stoneheaded, disregard my other ideas and go for the project I’m more deeply involved in. 500 words per day, and I’ll have my novel done in about 5-6 months!
Thanks Randy, it’s a perfect Idea I can carry with me as well as your book: “Writing Fiction for Dummies”! I’ll join the 500 club as soon as I get my snowflake working again, and get all the easy pre-writing cobwebs out of my head!
Kyle
Randy, you’ve got me pegged. Everyone who has written what I write seems amazed by my imagination and creativity. I love creating characters, worlds, and fictional situations. Like Katya, I never find myself wanting for new ideas. But there’s a mental hump involved with getting the actual writing started that’s very hard for me to get past.
I understood my potential as a writer coming out of school and always planned to become a published novelist someday. My excuse for the last 15 years is that I’ve been waiting to become a little more seasoned and experienced as a person before trying to publish anything as ambitious as a novel… but this is the week of my 40th birthday and that excuse no longer passes muster.
This bottleneck that you describe has crippled me as a writer for too long. I think your 500 club idea may give me the kick in the pants to become that published novelist I promised myself so many years ago.
Thank you for this.
Ugh. That’s everyone who has *read* what I write. I should try doing that more often myself. 🙂