Sherrinda asked: You said you did not know what you would be writing Sunday. Do you not have a plan…an outline…of what you are writing?

Debra wrote: I’ve been doing the 1k1hr challenge once or twice a day but I can only do it if I list the three or four things I need to get done in each chapter. Then I have no problem hitting that mark.

Best-selling author Tom Wolfe once said:

What I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

Because I’m at the point in my novel in which I’m in the middle—the section where I’m supposed to be upping the ante for my characters, complicating/thwarting their goals, and driving them toward the climax at the end, I’m also at the section of the book in which I had the fewest ideas for specific scenes when I wrote the synopsis for the proposal (which, let’s remember, was about eighteen months ago).

About four or five months ago, right after I signed the contract and knew for sure this was what I’d be writing, I pulled out the synopsis and my big Post-it Notes and wrote scene cards for the scenes I’d already written (prologue and first three chapters which went out with the proposal) as well as for the specific scenes mentioned in the synopsis. Though I stuck them to a table-top A-frame flip-chart easel, and not to my office wall (which no longer has this space available), here’s a reminder of what that process looks like:


Scene cards from Ransome’s Crossing

However, once I get into the middle of the book like this, I’m not always certain what specifically comes next when I sit down to write. Much depends on what happened in the previous scene, and much depends on what specific scenes toward the end I know I need to work toward. But most of the time, when I sit down to write, I don’t have a specific scene in mind.

There are those occasions when I will suddenly hear the dialogue in my head or I will see a scene play out in my mind’s eye and have to scramble to transcribe it onto the page. That did happen to me with one of my 1k1h sprints last weekend. I’d already begun writing the scene (about 300 to 400 words) of which I’d had a very clear vision the day before. So when I sat down to just write, write, write for that one hour, I knew exactly where that scene was going—what the action was, what they characters needed to say to each other, and what the motivations/reactions/goals of each of the three characters in the scene were. But part of the problem of having that scene so clear in my head was that it slowed my ability to write it because of the fear that I’d never be able to get it down in words the way I envisioned it.

The next afternoon, when I started the next 1k1h challenge, I’d already started a new scene—and shortly after starting to write, I knew where it was going and what hook I was working toward for the end of the chapter. Which I got to with plenty of time to spare in that hour. So I started the next chapter, really not sure exactly where it was going.

How did I start the next chapter if I had no idea what came next? Well, I thought through my four or five POV characters (I’m still not sure if I’m keeping all of them, but I am allowing myself to write a first draft, so I’m experimenting with viewpoints right now) and picked the one who hadn’t had a POV scene in a while. I started with his name. Andrew. Then I figured out where he was. In his cottage. What time of day it was. Afternoon. What he was doing there at that time of day. About to look at the thing wrapped in cloth that Meg handed him in the previous scene. But, as an experienced author, I know I can’t just have him sitting in his house alone thinking. A knock on the door. So . . . who’s on the other side?

As soon as I figured out who was at the door (his rival for the heroine’s attention), then I had my scene—and I was able to write more than 1,600 words in one hour. But if I hadn’t made myself sit down and write, I probably wouldn’t have (a) come up with that scene or (b) gotten any progress made on my word count that day.

When that hour was up, I walked away—and left off in the middle of a sentence (and with a misspelled word at that!). So the next time when I sat down to write, I was able to immediately pick up where I left off and keep writing. Which resulted in another almost 1,500 words in one hour.

Though I didn’t get anything written yesterday, as I was exhausted from having been kept awake until almost 3:30 in the morning by the tornado sirens the night before, I am planning on doing at least 1k1h challenge every afternoon this week to see just how much progress I can make on this manuscript this week. And, no, I won’t know what I’m going to write every day when I sit down to do it . . . I’ll simply know that I must write. And trust that my creativity will kick in and illuminate my path.

Which brings me to my favorite quote about writing from author E.L. Doctorow:

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

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Tuesdays are our main day here for discussing topics about the craft and industry of fiction writing. I’d love to get your input on topics you’d like to see discussed or even questions you have so that I can do some Q&A style posts like this one from last November. Post your suggestions/question here or e-mail me (see the contact page).

Writing Update
This weekend, my local writing group held two write-in events in conjunction with our month-long writing marathon. At each of the events, we did a 1k1h challenge—sprint writing for one hour trying to hit at least 1,000 words. On Saturday, I knocked out 1,440 words in that hour—a scene I’d envisioned the day before, so it formed pretty easily once I got started. Sunday, when I started that timer, I had no idea what I would be writing. Yet I still managed to add 1,242 words. Which puts my total word count at 29,809. Nowhere near where I should be at this point in the month, but I’m making progress.

So, what topics on writing do you want to discuss on Tuesdays in the near future?

I mentioned last week that my biggest short-term writing goal for 2012 is to get the first draft of Follow the Heart finished in January. But for the first eight days of the month, I was so sick that I had no energy or creativity for anything. Yesterday, however, I made myself sit down and write as soon as I got home from work. I had a goal of 1,500 words in two hours.

I wrote 1,904 words, putting my manuscript’s total word count at a hair under 27,000 words. To finish (with a length of somewhere between 80–90k), I’ll need to step that up a little bit—I’ll need to average between 2,500 and 3,000 words a day for the next twenty-one days to meet that word count by that deadline. Of course my goal is to be able to spend February, March, and April on revisions/edits. So if I have a complete story which isn’t quite up to that word count, I will still have met my goal of a complete first draft by the end of January—and I can add word count in the revision process.

How did I get those 1,900 words after so many months of not writing? As I said, I made myself write. When I got to a point at which I wanted to check e-mail or get on Pinterest or read blogs, I forced myself to write one more sentence. And then one more.

No, not all of those 1,900 words are great. But they are written. And tomorrow, my goal is to write 2,000 words. And Thursday . . . 2,100 words. And Friday . . . you guessed it, 2,200 words. Because I’m finally getting back into the rhythm of just writing without worrying about if it’s perfect, or if one of my characters has repeated something they might have said in a previous chapter. Because I can always fix it later.

Which leads me to the quotes I’d love to get your feedback on. Both are from Madeleine L’Engle:

“With free will, we are able to try something new. Maybe it doesn’t work, or we make mistakes and learn from them. We try something else. That doesn’t work, either. So we try yet something else again. When I study the working processes of the great artists, I am awed at the hundreds and hundreds of sketches made before the painter begins to be ready to put anything on the canvas. It gives me fresh courage to know of the massive revision Dostoyevsky made of all of his books—the hundreds of pages that got written and thrown out before one was kept. A performer must rehearse and rehearse, making mistakes, discarding, trying again and again.”

“There are in the life-works of all artists things which don’t work. But sometimes that painting which did not work, that piece of music which did not work, was a necessary preliminary for the next thing which did. And if the artist had never been free to fail, he never would have gone on to that next work.”