It’s true. You can’t judge whether your work is going well by how it felt to write it. Sometimes every word comes out like hard labor, and that doesn’t mean you’re doing bad work. Any time you’re sitting down and doing the work, you get to feel good at the end that you sat down and did the work.

My current listen is David Morrell’s The Successful Novelist, a book I’m thoroughly enjoying so far. He points out a habit I developed many years ago but never thought of as an actual writing technique. If someone had told me to do it at the very beginning of my career, it probably would have saved me the writing of a few terrible and overly plot-driven books.

The technique is this: When you are in the process of developing an idea for a book, and writing the book itself, have a conversation with yourself about the story on paper. It becomes a loose sort of plot outline. I keep a document for every book called “story notes” in which I brainstorm, write down ideas as they occur to me, ask myself questions I don’t know the answers to, and most importantly, I constantly ask myself why.

It looks something like this:

I think the heroine should be afraid of kids.
Why should she be afraid of kids?
Maybe because she has so many bad memories of childhood, and kids remind her of the pain she experienced when her dad drank too much and beat up her mom, and….

And it goes on that way. In the end I have a messy document, pages and pages of random conversations with myself, and always asking why, why, why. This question forces me to dig deeper. The temptation is always to go with that first idea that feels good enough, but the question why forces you to see if it’s really worthwhile. If I can’t come up with a good answer, I need to keep trying to find a better idea.

I don’t frequently need to refer back to my story notes document. Often, I have these conversations with myself right in the middle of my working manuscript when I get stuck, and if it’s something I feel I might want to refer to later, I’ll eventually cut and paste it into the story notes.

This kind of process, Morrell points out, is like a kind of written meditation, and I love that comparison. The written conversation forces me to put my meandering thoughts into real words, where I can examine them and see if they look pretty in the light of day.

Yay, Cindy! Visit her website for an excerpt, reviews, and more fun stuff.

Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, advises his readers to write 10 pages per day. He also says to work every day. Other writers, such as Anne Lamott, tell us to celebrate a page or two as a victory. Who’s right? I think they both are. Stephen King writes popular fiction, while Anne Lamott’s work is a bit more serious for the most part. Serious, I believe, can take longer. Popular fiction, difficult as it is to write, doesn’t get too caught up in a perfect turn of phrase. Crafting a great scene is more important to the author of pop fiction.

I have found myself most able to stay steadily productive when aiming for 8-12 pages per day. Those pages might take all day to write, or they might take a few hours, depending on how well the words are flowing. I can write 5-6 rough pages in an hour when I’m really on a roll, but it’s more realistic to expect 3-4 pages an hour as an average pace for rough drafting. If I shoot for bigger goals, such as 20 pages in a day, I inevitably burn myself out and end up needing a day of no writing here and there. If I write less than 7 pages in a day (the length of an average scene, more or less), the work tends to feel choppy and stilted.

Why does any of this matter? It helps to get a sense of others’ practices so that we can determine what is realistic in goal-setting. My current goal is 4 pages per day, simply because my day job keeps me so busy I can barely hope to get that much done. It comes out choppy, yes, but a bad scene is better than no scene at all!

What’s your daily page count goal? How do you decide?

Good Reasons:
Learn from other writers
Learn from industry professionals
Meet editors and agents (if you have a finished book)

Bad Reasons:
You want to be a “writer” by association instead of action
You want to make sure an editor or agent reads your work
You want to stalk editors and agents in the restroom

I could go on, but the bottom line is this: have you written a complete novel that you are proud of? You might learn more about writing query letters and improving your craft at a conference workshop. You might learn about mistakes made by authors in the query and submission process. You might meet an editor who asks you about your work and invites you to submit it to her.

Or you might not.

I think of writer’s conferences as writer-filled little vacations where I get to go and think about the business of writing for 3 days straight. I also get to see old friends and maybe learn something new.

Mistakes writers often make at conferences include being too pushy with editors and agents. Remember–it’s not just your book you have to sell, it’s YOU. Make sure you are behaving like a person you would want to work with throughout the arduous process of editing a novel (many novels, we hope!). Don’t rush to sell yourself or your book to anyone you meet at a conference, because really, no one wants to be ambushed that way. We writers tend to get oddly desperate when it comes to getting our work published. That desperation is poison–avoid it at all costs.

Are you going to RWA Anaheim this year? If so, I look forward to seeing you there!

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