All-Patron Reward 1: How I Write

How I Write

"How do you write" is one of the most common questions asked of an author, and to an extent I've answered parts of this in other posts elsewhere.

Here, however, I'm going to describe the actual physical process, and other elements of it that I might not have put together so completely and clearly.

In general, I average about 4-5 hours a week for all writing-related tasks. On an ideal week, that could be as much as 9 hours – two or so on Tuesday, the same on Thursday, and five on Sunday – but various events ranging from medical emergencies to holidays, birthdays, and other events can, and do, interfere with these to the point that on average it's going to be about half that or less. 

If that time was spent doing nothing but writing, that would be about 250,000 -300,000 words per year, which fits with my average of about 2 books a year. I would have averaged more time in some earlier years, when I had fewer children or other demands on my time. In reality, some of it must be assigned to website articles, editing/revision of books to editorial request, and publicity. To an extent, money can be substituted for time, so the Patreon will allow me to get some things done faster than I personally would be able to do them (if I could do them at all).

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, a typical quick writing session begins after I have the kids in bed – usually around 8pm to 8:30. As I use a laptop, I can either sit at a desk in my downstairs office, or in the recliner in the living room. I also like to have something to drink to hand – not alcoholic because I don't drink anything alcoholic, but usually a ginger beer, which is one of the few soft drinks I like. As these are short sessions – I am usually tired to begin with, so I can't go more than a couple of hours at the end of a day – I try to focus on one task. That's normally writing one chapter or so of one of the books I'm working on at the time, but might also be proofreading X number of chapters of the galleys for a book that's going through the publication process, working on promo materials if I have something to work on for that, or sometimes participating in a relevant phone call. For instance, the Baen podcast interviews I've done were generally done on one of my writing weekdays. 

Sundays are the big writing day – I start around noon and go to five – and with that much time I can either crank out quite a bit of wordage for one book, or I can reasonably work on two things at once. 

In both cases, I usually need some time – anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour or so – to get my mind "on track". Especially for fiction writing I have to be able to make my concerns and focus on the world outside to go away, so that I am, effectively, living in the world I'm writing about. This is true whether I'm doing hard-SF, urban fantasy, space opera, or anything else – I have to make the world I'm writing in as real as possible to me when I write. This usually means that I'm slowest when I'm just starting a new book, because either I've never written in that universe before, or I haven't written in it for a while, and I have to re-acquire the "feel" for that universe.

It's a challenge to fit in all the things that need to be done; posting something even vaguely regularly to my main website means that I have to devote some time to writing stuff there rather than for my books. Writing chapters in a book means that much less time to focus on promoting the books that I have out there. 

In terms of the process of writing, I'm very, very linear. While I often know what's going to happen at many points in a book before I get there, I don't write that material until I have actually reached that point. I know some authors who do the opposite; they write all the parts that are really clear in their minds first, and then start filling in the blanks, but I don't. To a large extent that's because it's looking forward to those high points – such as, for instance, Ariane's duel against Amas-Garao, or Phoenix's confrontation with "Viedraverion" – that keeps me writing. "I can't wait to get to this point" is a really strong motivation. If I wrote the coolest parts first, I'm afraid I wouldn't write the other parts at all. 

I do very little editing, at least after-the-fact of writing. While I'm writing I will often pause, rephrase something, change a word, et cetera, but once I'm done with a chapter – once I've completed it and moved on to the next – it is pretty much set in stone. The only exceptions are (A) when I notice that there is some vital clue or contradiction that must be dealt with in order to keep the book as a whole consistent, (B) if my beta-reading group produces some cogent feedback that indicates there is a real issue to be addressed, and (C) if an editor has requested changes and I'm trying to implement them.

Yes, this is unusual; most authors do at least two and often several drafts of a manuscript before they feel it's ready to send off. I do one. Most of my published work is pretty much as it came off of my fingers the first time I wrote it; the simple fact is that I cannot see flaws in my work without someone pointing them out, unless I wait on the order of years before looking it over. That is, as you might guess, not practical with any work you're trying to produce for a contract. I did do some real editing when I produced Paradigms Lost – not only are there a lot of additions, but the earlier pre-existing sections that were in Digital Knight have been carefully examined and in many cases edited. My as-yet unpublished space opera Demons of the Past has actually undergone about five separate drafts, as I wrote the first draft of the story around 1978.

If I have a manuscript ready for submission, I'll also prepare it in the expected format for submission. Generally, this means double-spaced, no extra spaces between paragraphs, page breaks at every chapter, and some S&R work to change some things that are ingrained bad writing habits (for instance, my tendency to bracket dashes in text with spaces). All authors have some "tics" which are hard to get rid of; sometimes these are purely mechanical habits, like my spaced-dash habit; often they're more complex, like a tendency to overuse adverbs or re-use turns of phrase, or my own addiction to italics. Those are hard to catch, and even harder to change… and it's perhaps the hardest of all to know whether removing that tic is a good thing for the readers, or whether it's one of the signatures of the way the author writes and that their readers expect from them.

Designing a new world can also absorb multiple writing sessions. Partly this may be done during outlining, if I make an outline for the new story (I don't always outline), but for me to feel comfortable with a new universe I need to know a lot more than the readers will, and that means that I spend hours working out key elements of the world – focusing, of course, on the ones most relevant for the story in question. However, to make the world feel "real" requires that I cover material well outside the basic story. The extreme version of this is Zarathan, which I started working on in 1977-1978 and am still working on, so it's close-on 40 years old now. That does give me an advantage when writing in it; I've written, and run games, in Zarathan for decades; it doesn't take me long at all to put myself "into" the world and start working. 

That's pretty much all I can say about the process of writing. Next time we'll look at something maybe more interesting: what I expect to be writing!