Writing Log

[Coryn]

August 30th - September 3rd: I have committed the writing sin of switching stories half way through a chapter, but here I am  Cruising through a previously abandoned chapter of Bleach MR: MUTD. I'm beginning to realize that my habit of writing on my phone in spare moments, although great at keeping me productive, has the unintended side effect of drawing out chapters as it is easy to add paragraphs of minor details because it's easier to break down a small moment instead of remembering the greater context I'm in the middle of. I guess time will tell if it makes for better story telling or not.

[Echo_River]

November 1 - 7: NaNoWriMo! Last year I didn't participate, but I wanted to do it this year in order to catch up writing Charred Life. So yeah, I'm not doing a new idea. I do hope that I'll be able to finish up Part 1 during this and begin Part 2.

For scheduling time to write, I've found that timing myself for a couple of hours in the morning/early afternoon, and then another couple hours at night after work has been pretty productive. Also knowing that I've got something else to do later in the day has helped give that little pressure to keep me going.

NaNoWriMo Word Count daily so far -

Nov. 1 - 2.1k
Nov. 2 - 1.6k
Nov. 3 - 1.5k
Nov. 4 - 1.3k
Nov. 5 - 1.7k
Nov. 6 - 638

Total: Around 10k right now

Playlist: Arknights OST

Huh? What about today? Well... you see *cough* someone invited me to their Minecraft server *cough* a couple days ago and um *cough* I haven't written anything yet. Hence also why yesterday's word count was a little low ahaha... (Help, I need to stop playing!)

[Coryn]

Ah, the draw of a fresh Minecraft server, I know it well. Good luck Echo! If you're on PC, I'd delete the desktop shortcut 

[Echo_River]

Ayy, that seems to have helped! Thanks!

November 8-14: Writing this week has been... all over the place? I've still been able to churn out a little bit of writing each day, although not as much as I'd like to. I'm at least 6k words behind the schedule.

Instead of writing out and finishing a whole chapter, I've been bouncing around the story. If I find myself spending too much time trying to figure out one part, I'll go and do a scene for another chapter. On the one hand, it's helped me see the general pacing of the story, on the other hand, I end up leaving sections blank. And that feeling of something incomplete is just aldkjfaklsjf.

NNWM Word Total at the moment: 20k

[Suuper-san]

I've been trying out free-writing/stream-of-conscious writing to break down the primary barrier to getting writing done - getting my thoughts on the paper/screen rather than just mulling them in my head.

I've written about 10k words in various half-baked stories and plain rambling.

So far as you'd expect it's an utter bunch of chaos and nothing is remotely usable, but I'm starting to get more used to writing junk down, and so I'm hoping that when I approach a story next, I will be able to write the first draft faster even if I don't use any of it.

I'm also starting to get a sort of "sketchy" writing style for planning out a story with zero quality control for the vocabulary etc, so using much plainer ways of describing things just to get the words out my head. and much simpler sentence structure.

I'm trialling a bunch of stuff slowly but until I've crunched down some pending art projects I won't make much progress on the writing front. I'm going to switch to writing as a main in around 6 months or less to really spam some skill building in writing so that will be really helpful I think.

[Coryn]

January 2, 2022:

I planned to have a full day writing session, but general exhaustion, errands, Metroid Dread, and a snow storm/cold snap conspired against me. It's nice to have your own rented driveway folks, but gosh darn does it suck shoveling it when the snow has frozen so solid you can walk on top of it without sinking in.

That being said, I still got to sit down for about an hour and wrote a page and a half. It's a far cry from the good ol' days of spending dawn-to-dusk typing away, but satisfying all the same. I look forward to a lot more lazy Sunday afternoons of writing in 2022!

[Suuper-san]

Kicking myself into writing gear for this contest thing.
Wrote 8k words today, 50% utter rambling and 50% something sounding like bits of a novel.
Would have done more if I had woken up earlier lol.
Overall, focusing on pure content generation had me at 80+wpm for the entire time. Going to try and write a few 1k short stories to force my writing skills to de-hibernate and then hopefully write a tolerably coherent short story.
we'll see.
most major writing issues so far:
-writing dialogue
-actually deciding on the plot

[Suuper-san]

wrote 5k today, 2k of which being the most novel-like story I have ever written. Unfortunately it's so utterly terrible. But it's definitely something.

[Suuper-san]

Wrote an entire 5k story today from start to finish. Thanks to Operative for the tips and nagging with the deadline reminders.
I think definitely it helped working on it in one massive block, simply because of the effort involved to get myself in gear it's better to do it just once, and write everything while I still have the momentum.

I rewrote the ending about 6 times though, changing the plot every time massively. Was quite concerned at one point that I'd shot myself in the foot because of something massively important I'd forgotten to take into account, but I lucked out with a really decent idea.
Got a lot of editing to do though, I hope it's not too hard XD

Took 6 solid hours though, was tough. Somehow also took the entire day.

[Vacant]

I've decided 3rd or 4th times a charm with keeping a consistent log of writing 

April 12th-16th

Inspiration has struck me, so while that fires burning I'm getting on with it. I've revised the initial Plot structure for my story. I had it divided into 3 parts, with several arcs contained within each of these. I had several key events written down and knew where I needed to go leading into Part 2, but the more I delved into the 1st part of the story, it felt like it was mostly set up for when the real threat appeared.

To remedy this, I've done some drastic changes and spent some time building the plot skeleton for Part 1. I did this by literally scrawling ideas onto a word doc for a few hours. Which incidentally, I'd love to know how you guys brainstorm, or if you use a particular method/program for this?

This is the first time in a long while i've shaken the shackles of pre-existing story threads in my head and just said "go nuts". I found it a hell of a lot of fun to tinker with things. Anyway, to save me rambling a bunch, I've organised the ideas i latched onto and found to work and written up the outline of three arcs that form part 1.

Next, I tried the 3 act, 9 block outline method for the 1st novel. I'm happy with the 1st/3rd Acts and the second half of the 2nd Act. That little bit I'm not too pleased with is going to need some reworking.

Today I'm writing chapter outlines for the Novel. These are basically bullet points of what will happen. After this I'm going to do a sweep of the major plotlines, ensuring they're paced correctly and that any exposition needed is done at the right time and delivered in a decent manner. I'm hoping to have these chapter keynotes finished by next weekend (Lots of working coming my way sadly). So hopefully i can report back on that.

 

[Suuper-san]

It can definitely take a while to get a good routine up for stuff like that :P

I agree with the "go nuts" strategy, it's definitely helped me over the years with writer's and artist's block.

Which incidentally, I'd love to know how you guys brainstorm, or if you use a particular method/program for this?

I use Word myself as well. I have a few documents for different stages of development, this is how I generally do it at the moment:
1) "Plot Cloud" - Random ideas for the story, in any order. Mostly bullet points of anything, plot points, new characters, character developments, backstories, personalities, world building, anything goes. Basically just getting my thoughts out of my head. I often expand the bullets with developed or even opposite ideas (exploring different options basically), justification, and questions for my future self to answer, like a to-do list ("when does character A meet character B, did they know each other already?" kinda thing)
2) "Developed Plot" - chosen and accepted ideas get moved here. I develop and expand the ideas, adding more finer details and padding the story timeline-wise, to get a beginning, middle and end of each plot point, roughly speaking. Making sure the point fits with the story and doesn't create many plot holes.
3) "Consolidated Plot" - The actual story outline, in the order it comes in the story. points are moved from developed plot and placed in the right order for the story to be written. Sometimes a point gets split up and spliced with other points, to make the join more seamless (i.e. hinting at an event before it happens etc, name dropping before the character gets introduced etc, and mentioning the event later on etc)

For coming up with interesting ideas within a story I already have, I sometimes use random word prompts to inspire new scenes or characters which I then go on to develop.
For example: "stay , low pressure , Woodcrafter , dizzy , aggressive"
Often a verb/adjective/noun combination gives interesting ideas to play with. Even if the idea once developed doesn't resemble the prompt anymore, then it's still done its job.

[Coryn]

Ah, well the real answer to how I organize things is that I don't, lol. But that's not entirely true these days. I have done some legitimate chapter outlines ghost writer style to keep events in order for shorter stories. For longer ones, I actually have what is probably a pretty unique method?

Since I have long acknowledged that my primary inspiration engine is music that I randomly come across which gets the juices flowing, I have been building playlists for several years now. Obviously I'm not writing down details with this method, but it is a way for me to mentally catalog scenes in order, and simultaneously remember the emotions felt while coming up with them in the first place. Even for stories I haven't worked on in *checks wrist* a couple of years, I can vividly remember the planned scenes, as well as where I was when coming up with them.

Will this method be useless if I die and have to leave finishing my stories to some successor since I will be a famous author whose work begs to be completed? (Big dreams I know, lol), of course! But for the hear and now, pretty useful for me.

[Vacant]

It can definitely take a while to get a good routine up for stuff like that :P

I agree with the "go nuts" strategy, it's definitely helped me over the years with writer's and artist's block.

Which incidentally, I'd love to know how you guys brainstorm, or if you use a particular method/program for this?

I use Word myself as well. I have a few documents for different stages of development, this is how I generally do it at the moment:
1) "Plot Cloud" - Random ideas for the story, in any order. Mostly bullet points of anything, plot points, new characters, character developments, backstories, personalities, world building, anything goes. Basically just getting my thoughts out of my head. I often expand the bullets with developed or even opposite ideas (exploring different options basically), justification, and questions for my future self to answer, like a to-do list ("when does character A meet character B, did they know each other already?" kinda thing)
2) "Developed Plot" - chosen and accepted ideas get moved here. I develop and expand the ideas, adding more finer details and padding the story timeline-wise, to get a beginning, middle and end of each plot point, roughly speaking. Making sure the point fits with the story and doesn't create many plot holes.
3) "Consolidated Plot" - The actual story outline, in the order it comes in the story. points are moved from developed plot and placed in the right order for the story to be written. Sometimes a point gets split up and spliced with other points, to make the join more seamless (i.e. hinting at an event before it happens etc, name dropping before the character gets introduced etc, and mentioning the event later on etc)

For coming up with interesting ideas within a story I already have, I sometimes use random word prompts to inspire new scenes or characters which I then go on to develop.
For example: "stay , low pressure , Woodcrafter , dizzy , aggressive"
Often a verb/adjective/noun combination gives interesting ideas to play with. Even if the idea once developed doesn't resemble the prompt anymore, then it's still done its job.

Ah okay, I think I need to let loosen up like that and just let it all out onto a page, then make sense of it later. I feel like i get hung up on organizing the chaos before its even begun.

The word prompt idea is really interesting. Thats a good exercise to get the juices flowing, Im going to try that out when i inevitably stumble at the midpoint 

Ah, well the real answer to how I organize things is that I don't, lol. But that's not entirely true these days. I have done some legitimate chapter outlines ghost writer style to keep events in order for shorter stories. For longer ones, I actually have what is probably a pretty unique method?

Since I have long acknowledged that my primary inspiration engine is music that I randomly come across which gets the juices flowing, I have been building playlists for several years now. Obviously I'm not writing down details with this method, but it is a way for me to mentally catalog scenes in order, and simultaneously remember the emotions felt while coming up with them in the first place. Even for stories I haven't worked on in *checks wrist* a couple of years, I can vividly remember the planned scenes, as well as where I was when coming up with them.

Will this method be useless if I die and have to leave finishing my stories to some successor since I will be a famous author whose work begs to be completed? (Big dreams I know, lol), of course! But for the hear and now, pretty useful for me.

I salute your impeccable memory, if i don't write a concept/scene idea down i forget it within a few days :P Maybe its because its associated with the music and that helps conjure it back up? I feel i'd get distracted by music too much, but that is actually an interesting method. I can imagine having a particular song could influence the tone of writing and help you get into the mindset better.

[Vacant]

April 16th-19th

And why I'm here, may as well provide an update 

I've written the keynotes for chapters 1-7 so far and doing 8-9 today so roughly halfway there. These chapters aren't set in stone, they're just where I get to what I consider the natural end of that set of scenes to give me an idea on whats happening. I expect to be chopping and changing when checking the pacing and flow of the narrative, but i think between 16-20 chapters is pretty much what I was expecting.


Also, quick tip if you are incredibly easily distracted like me. When I get to a part where I haven't yet named the character or place, I put "NTBA" in place and immediately move on. I used to stop dead and spend time coming up with a name, then going off on unrelated google searches and lose my mojo. Now, when I press ctrl+f i can go back and just find any entries with NTBA in and fill in these blanks accordingly at the end.

[Suuper-san]

I forget a massive amount of stuff because I just have so many thoughts lol.

I feel like i get hung up on organizing the chaos before its even begun.

That's a very natural feeling but it can really slow down the raw creativity stage. You start to second guess your ideas before they even make it onto the page >_<;
Because I've ended up working with stages of work, I can sort of procrastinate the fixing up and sorting out, because I know I'll come to that later. My art is the same, I do 1-2 minute rough sketches which are absolutely chaotic, and then worry about fixing them later :P

You might find "free-writing" or "stream-of-consciousness writing" a good practice for writing without thinking, so to speak. After a couple of times doing that I very quickly got used to just writing down anything, literally anything at all.

When I get to a part where I haven't yet named the character or place, I put "NTBA" in place and immediately move on.

Hell to the yeah!!!! That's my method too!!!!! Even down to the ctrl-F!!!
I use square bracketed letters and categorize them a bit more like this:
[p] - placeholder (like what you said)
[e] - expand (incomplete notes or description etc)
[m] - missing section completely (i.e. a gap in time in my script)
[r] - research needed (basically double check that my knowledge is actually correct - anatomy, science, geography  etc)

It 100% helps, so so much, I can't even describe how much XD