How to Write The Thing (Fast), Part 2: In Defense of Drafting with Arrogance
Hello, hello! Welcome, new subscribers, to my wee corner of the internet!
Like last month, I have quite a lot to say, so I’m going to put some news and monthly favorites up here at the top! Below the fold, I share techniques, tools, and theories about fast drafting novels that I have found useful.
News
I’m thrilled to announce my second short story sale of the year! “My Sister is a Scorpion,” the very first of my #StoryAMonth short story writing challenge, will appear in Lightspeed Magazine later this year. I wrote the first draft in about an hour and am just stunned that it found a home so quickly.
March Favorites | books, stories, and music I disappeared into over the last month
Wild Beauty, Anna-Marie McLemore: one of the last books I read before shit really hit the fan last year. Transports me elsewhere. Light on plot, dives into the feels. Lush and escapist. Love being able to see myself, my sisters, and my cousins in the Nomeolvides girls.
King of Scars, Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo: A thrilling conclusion to the Grishaverse novels (for now, at least), Bardugo’s latest offering had everything I wanted. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I was tricked, I was thrilled. Altogether a thoroughly satisfying read that just whets the appetite for Netflix’s Shadow & Bone show later this month!
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado: My best friend from high school sent this to me for my birthday in November and I finally got around to finishing it in March. Truly, a gorgeous, heart-wrenching, unputdownable take on the craft of memoir.
The Ghost Story Guys Podcast: A pair of nerdy Canadians talking paranormal activity, The Ghost Story Guys has earned the hallowed rank of the one (1) podcast hosted by white men that I actually tolerate. (The world is absolutely dominated by white cis male voices, I personally cannot stomach even more in my downtime.) My aunt recommended them to me a while back because the hosts are based in Victoria, and I finally got into it on the long flight back to NYC from Vancouver Island. I highly recommend the episodes on hauntings in Victoria and Vancouver Island! Great storytelling and solid dad jokes. Yes, I generally get hit by a sleepless night or two after bingeing 4 episodes in a row. Yes, I am a weenie. Yes, it is totally worth it.
“Machu Picchu,” Camilo (ft. Evaluna Montaner): a sweet and light love song ft. two Latin pop crooners who are married in real life. A total bop and exactly the vibe of music I love listening to as we turn the corner into spring.
“One Last Time,” LP: the unofficial anthem of the WIP I flung at my agent on Friday! I’ve been playing this on loop as I draft. LP’s raspy voice, achey, heartbroken lyrics, and transcendent whistling (don’t knock it ’til you listen to it, honestly) never fails to get the story wheels spinning in my mind.
Lately, I’ve been working on projects that are revision-intense. My PhD dissertation, for example: by the time this newsletter reaches you, the first 70 pages of my dissertation will be in my adviser’s inbox and I will be a puddle of human jelly on the couch. (Academic writing is exhausting.) I’ve been revising some old short stories lately as well. And, of course, I have some big ol’ secret thing (one that will be a secret for only a little bit longer *suspenseful music*) that has been incredibly revision-heavy since January. As I pulled together this newsletter on fast-drafting, I realized how much I missed the joy of racing through a new draft. The freedom of making things up on the fly as I sprint to the next guidepost, not worrying about continuity (the bane of my existence!) or word repetition or whether or not the emotional resonance of a scene is vivid enough. In first drafts, I chase story like a demon on the wild hunt, pinning its smoky trail to paper as I go.
In this newsletter, I’ll show you drafting data from last April, where to hide from the world I utterly abandoned PhD research and worked on three separate projects. I wrote a 23,000 word novella in about six days. I wrote the first act (20k) of a thick novella/short novel in a week. Then, I revised and wrote the second half of a novel (~45k) in about ten days (check). Reality called me back to the cold, hard world of PhD research with deadlines and translations not long after, but I stumbled into May with my head held high and a bag full of conquests on my back.
A disclaimer: First, I am a PhD student. I set my own hours, for better or for worse, and so long as I meet certain highly arbitrary deadlines and one or two rock-solid deadlines over the course of a year, I’m free to balance fiction and fact in my days as I please. Second, though my PhD is a source of income, I also am married to someone with a Grown Up Job that pays well/supports us. Third, I have no kids. Thus, I have the privileges of time, a head free of financial worry, and freed up emotional energy, which I recognize not everyone has—so please, take my strategies below with a grain of salt. If they don’t work for you, I beg you—pitch this email right out of your inbox. No hard feelings!
Now that that’s out of the way: really, how did I write that fast? More importantly, how have I churned out novels in six weeks, as Part 1 of this series promised?
Because being a PhD student taught me to squeeze all the words I possibly could out of the hours I did have to write.
Until I reached candidacy, being a PhD student meant lots of classes and being a TA during the academic school year. Until very recently, being a PhD candidate meant a fair bit of teaching my own course: planning, writing lectures, recording lectures (I hate pandemic teaching), grading, putting out fires, more grading, meetings, meetings, and more recording lectures. As much as I joke about how it’s not a “real job” (because what real job involves doing six-week Ottoman paleography summer courses on an Aegean island, really?), it’s extremely intellectually—and while teaching, emotionally—demanding. During the academic year, I only had a few hours during the day where I could wholly devote myself to drafting fiction—and those hours were approximately 6:30-8:30am. In the summers, I generally only had a few weeks free in between final papers and summer language intensives. I taught myself to write fast so I could squeeze those weeks dry.
So, at last: my madcap guide to the wild hunt for story.
Step 0: Have that Zero Draft Ready
Last month, I wrote about how useful I find having a zero draft. All of my mad pre-writing rituals are structured around turning out a zero draft that maps what I want to write from beginning end, weaving together emotional arc with tightly-plotted story.
If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you do. If you can’t be bothered to click away, here’s the 411 on why I preach the gospel of the zero draft with the zeal of a recent convert:
A zero draft isn’t just an outline. It’s more than a map.
It’s a paint by numbers.
When I am fast-drafting through a zero draft, I don’t have to worry about the big picture. I don’t need to worry if the scene I’m working so hard on perfecting will be cut or kept. All I do is focus on the next sentence. Just as a paint-by-numbers tells you what color to pick and how long to paint for, I follow the instructions I left myself and focus on the sentence I’m writing. Then the next sentence. And the next.
Instead of groping through the dark, the “driving by the light of the headlights” method so many writers say they espouse (I am, frankly, agnostic that this is possible), I liken having a zero draft to having a series of guideposts. In my mind’s eye, I see a line of wooden posts in a line that lead me to my destination: those sweet, gorgeous words the end. Because of my zero draft, I always know how far away the next post is. Sometimes I have some light to guide me. Other times I have to reach through perfect darkness. But I know the post is there. Because I have that knowledge—the knowledge of not only what comes next, but roughly how far away it is—I can move quickly through the dark. Even race.
(A digression: I just don’t know how pantsers—the proverbial opposites of plotters like me, who “write by the seat of their pants”—do it. Whenever I try and pants something, I spend about 500-1500 words of chasing that beautiful opening scene… and then I freeze. I’m left staring at a blank page, utterly paralyzed.)
Step 1: Find Flow and Keep It
Before you sit down to write, create the conditions you know will help you achieve flow state. My ideal conditions consist of three things.
(A) Time.
I carve out specific blocks of time in my schedule for fast drafting. I sit down when the time starts and stand up and walk away when the clock is up. The length of time varies depending on the project and what else I have going on (specter of the dissertation hovers in the distance), but I find that writing down my intended work hours increases the likelihood that I will show up on time and clock out not a minute sooner than I originally intended.
(B) Tools.
There are no hard and fast rules for this, of course. Whatever works for you is what works. Some writers need white noise. Others need a carefully curated playlist, or one (1) song played on loop for literal hours (raises hand shyly). Others need a crowded cafe (or at least, in these socially distant times, a youtube video of a busy cafe humming merrily away in the background). Use a computer. Use an iPad. I love writing by hand, but here, we’re talking about speed and flow. If writing by hand is the most reliable way for you to get to flow state and you can count your words reliably/more or less reliably (word count is a huge part of my process—see below), then go for it.
In the past, I have written about how I personally swear by my Alphasmart Neo 2, the ultimate dumb drafting machine. It is, I admit, occasionally too dumb—I lost nearly 3000 words several times in the course of my last book because I kept trying to type ñ and misfiring, a mistake that on the Alphasmart will wipe the document. (Meltdowns occurred.)
My personal setup for fast drafting involves sitting at the the kitchen table first thing in the morning (my husband stole my desk) with my Alphasmart and my zero draft pulled up on a Google doc on my iPad (and keep the WiFi turned off). It looks exactly like this.
The night before I draft, I set up my Alphasmart and iPad on the table before I go to sleep. Sometimes I even set out my clothes for the day the night before, too. (Decision fatigue and all.) Honestly? I try to kidnap my flow state from sleep first thing in the morning. The fewer barriers I have between waking and writing, the better.
(C) Twitter.
Block it. Block everything, honestly. If you don’t have a dumb brick to draft on, or need to work on your computer, recommend turning off Wi-Fi all together. To hit flow I need to be alone in my own head. That involves shutting down anything other voices could come from: social media, phone, iMessage on my computer, everything. Slam that Do Not Disturb button like your work depends on it.
Once I have my butt in the chair, my coffee at my side, and my hands on the keyboard, I set up writing sprints.
Step 2: Word Sprints
I don’t remember where I first heard of word sprints, whether it was a Nanowrimo forum or twitter, but I am never going back. I first started using them in 2016 while at work on. My second novel (a gargantuan soap opera that will *never* see the light of day… except in a heavily, heavily revised form that I’m chipping away at now). I don’t know if saw this setup somewhere online or came up with it for myself—I suspect the latter, but I can’t be quite sure. Either way, here’s what I do.
I take a notebook—one that can lie flat, and usually one that I’d otherwise throw away because it didn’t work for journaling. I write the following words, all nice and spaced out and pretty: Time Goal Words Sum. This is my pre-race incantation.
- Under Time, I write when I will be sprinting from, for example, 8:00-8:40.
- Under Goal, I write how many words I’m aiming to write in that period of time, let’s say, 750.
- Then I set a timer on my iPad and race to meet that. When the sprint is through:
- Under Words, I write how many words I actually achieved in the sprint.
- Under Sum, I write the total words I’ve written in the day.
In practice, it ends up looking like this:
There are a few reasons why I think this works for me, and why I encourage others to try it.
The clock is ticking. A ticking clock encourages me to make decisions fast and deal with the outcome later.
Usually the first sprint of the day is what I call a bit “sticky”:my feet are heavier, I’m sore, I’m still bouncing around my own head. Like a good cardio workout, the first ten minutes are always the hardest. If and when I can push through the initial resistance, I find that the middle sprints are where I get my best and fastest writing done.
The length of sprints is something you may have to play with to find what you are most comfortable with. I initially started off with the traditional Pomodoro (25 min on, 5 off, 25 on, 10 off), but have modified it over the years. I also encourage you to consider tweaking your sprinting times based on project you’re working on. I found that for my recent horror novel, my best sprint time was 40 minutes. Every hour, I would write from :10 to :50 and then take 20 mins off to pace the apartment, upload my Alphasmart words to scrivener, and grab a snack/water. In those 40 min sprints, I would get between 800 and 1200 words down, depending on how well I was doing that day.
I believe fast drafting is less about typing quickly and more about making decisions quickly. Over time, you build trust in yourself that the word or image you choose in the heat of the moment is either the right one or close enough to it that you can fix it later. That kind of trust in oneself takes a long time to build, and—as I discuss in my burnout newsletter—you can even lose it. Until you get there, fake it. Use a running clock to force yourself to make decisions fast. Pick the first metaphor that comes to mind, pin it to the page, next sentence. Next beat in the zero draft. Next chapter. The deeper you are in flow state, the more your unconscious writer mind—the one you have been training to be good for years, the one who is sometimes so hard to listen to because we bury them in so many layers of self-doubt—takes over.
My fast-drafting process is this: go, go, go. Move through the beats of the zero draft until the clock runs out, then check word count. Jot it down. Get up, stretch, get a snack, do not look at phone, sit back down. Repeat.
Step 3: Keep Track of Your Data
As you can see from the photo above, as I was in the midst of drafting the second half of a novel, I challenged myself to do 6k. Because I had been keeping a detailed record of how many words I wrote per sprint over the course of April, I was (a) in good shape, because fast drafting is a muscle like any other, but also (b) I could estimate how long it would take me to write 6000 words. That was five 40-20 splits of writing-resting plus one final wee push to get to that finish line. My brain was utterly mangled by the end of the day, but surprisingly enough, my writing was not. After 6k I generally started to experience diminishing returns, but we’ll talk about that in a second. This section is about keeping track of your data.
I recommend keeping a sprinting notebook. Often, at the end of a day’s sprinting, I’ll write down a sentence or two of reflections before and after the sprinting. The opening feelings usually say “ugh, I feel like garbage, I’m tired and don’t wanna”; the end may say the same thing, but I did it. This helps me remember when I look back on my past sprints that some of my most productive days began with me feeling gross, sluggish, and unmotivated. The hardest part of any writing session is starting.
I didn’t start keeping track of my daily output in a spreadsheet until recently. I really loved the old NaNoWriMo website (IYKYK) and the word count graph. After spending NaNoWriMo 2019 loathing (as I continue to do) their new user interface, I decided to set up my own word count tracking graph in a spreadsheet. I’m no wizard with sheets, so cribbed off someone (I’m so sorry, I can’t remember from whom, or I’d link!) until I somehow broke the coding. This past November, I stood over my husband’s shoulder and backseat drove (“no, I want it this way, and I want it to calculate backwards from this date and THIS many words… also can the lines be pink”) as he set a new one up for me. (Said husband also fixed the html formatting for this very newsletter and nipped a meltdown in the bud. We salute you.)
This beautiful sheet, unfortunately, fell victim to the great burned-out fall of 2020 where I wrote a grand total of 9000 words over the course of NaNoWriMo.
Here's an example of a novella I wrote last April:
Recently, I also stumbled across a daily word tracking method organized by the indie romance writer Courtney Young, whose pen name is Lyra Parish. In NaNoWriMo 2019 I joined a sprinting group she loosely organized and I actually found this method to be extremely motivating.
For each hour slot, write in the number of words you wrote that hour. She set it up so the bottom rows automatically calculate (1) how many words you have left to reach your goal and (2) the sum of your words for the day.
I find this… unhealthily motivating. I really, really hate seeing empty boxes, which spurs me to write even 150-200 words in the last ten minutes of the hour. That’s 200 words I wouldn’t have otherwise had, and that really starts to add up over the course of the day. (Especially if I’m stealthily drafting in the corner of the lecture hall of the class I’m a TA for.)
I don’t always use all of these methods all of the time. Sometimes, I only have an hour to squeeze words out in the morning before turning back to my dissertation. When that is the case, I don’t use the hour-by-hour tracking sheet, because I find all the empty boxes at the end of the day is a bit depressing.
I hope these various methods don’t overwhelm you—my hope was to put out as many as I can in the hopes that one really resonates with you, dear reader!
Step 4: Do It Again. And Again. And Again.
Thanks to my various methods of tracking my words and my sprints, a few years ago I was able to determine what times of day are my peak writing hours. Basically, I am my sharpest and fastest between 6:30 and noon. After that, I can usually squeeze in another sprint and a half, but the afternoon (~2-6pm) is a case study in diminishing returns. The writing gets slower. My brain shuts down. The siren call of the late afternoon nap becomes overwhelming. Between 7-10pm, I have another golden period that is good for sharp, detail-oriented work. I generally try to use this period for revising.
But nothing beats my morning sprint sessions for sheer speed.
In the screenshots and photos above, you can see that with practice and conditioning, I am able to meet consistent daily word counts. You can also see that one’s word count doesn’t have to be ridiculously high (6k! 8k!) to be effective.
Because I keep close track of my data, I am able to estimate reasonable daily goals for different projects. It’s different for every book, frankly. The novella I reference above, the one that I drafted April 1-7, 2020 was a ~3k/day project (bar the sprint to the end—I usually draft hard and dirty as I race to the finish line). On the other hand, wrapping up the last half of the novel I worked on from April 27-May 4, 2020 was a 6k a day project. Maybe it’s because I knew the characters and the world better. Maybe it’s because I was only drafting in the second half of the project (having written and revised the first half during NaNoWriMo 2019 and over the third week of April, respectively). Either way, keeping track allowed me to set a deadline with my agent that I knew would both challenge me intellectually (because what’s the fun of the wild hunt, otherwise?), but that wasn’t out of reach.
Sometimes, I can keep this pace up for weeks. In September-October 2018, I did just that. I wasn’t taking classes that term (I was “studying for comprehensive exams,” cue sarcastic laughter). By sticking to 4k words a day, five days a week over the course of about six weeks, I finished a novel faster than I ever had before.
That was the first time I had ever done all my zero drafting song-and-dance routine that I outlined in my last newsletter. I was able to race through the book. It was a difficult book to write, emotionally; after a couple of heart-breaking rounds on submission, I ultimately trunked it. It’ll never see the light of day, but it was the training ground where I first learned all the methods I’ve been sharing with you over the last two newsletters. For that, I will be eternally grateful to it.
Step 5: Cultivate Arrogance
There is a great misconception that writing fast always means writing badly. Many writers will tell you that is not always the case. I have my own anecdotes to battle that myth.
As I was drafting the aforementioned horror novel in November 2019, I wrote 10,000 words in a day when my husband was on a business trip. Some of my best writing came in the final sprint. In fact, the chapter I wrote at the very end of that day was the one that needed the least editing. Apart from line edits/fussing over precise language, it has remained almost unchanged through 5 or 6 revisions.
When I drafted my first novel back in 2016, I gave parts of it to my mom to read. She’s an editor and uh, certainly a bracing first reader for a fledgling novelist to have handed a manuscript. But I trust her, and her feedback over the years has given me a pretty thick skin, so I figured I could handle it. I was surprised by what she said.
My mom said she could tell where I was writing slowly The writing was choppier. Uncertain. Less confident. Interesting, I thought. Interesting.
Writing quickly does not mean writing badly. It means making decisions quickly.
It means trusting that the first word you reach for won’t be bad. It might not be the best, it may not be the Hugo or Book Prize-winning Perfect Word, but finding perfection is Tomorrow You’s problem. I can promise that the first word you snatch from the air will perfectly good. It will be scaffolding. It will hold up your story. I encourage you to train yourself to snatch words from the air, pin them to the page, and move on without second-guessing yourself.
A writer who works hard on their craft and who espouses a growth-mindset is a fascinating combination of arrogance and nearly fatal second-guessing.
Second-guessing is enormously valuable. As writers, we must always revise our own work. Incorporate feedback. Rework. Interrogate our past decisions. Know when we made the wrong decisions. But with too much second-guessing, it can become difficult to move forward.
I argue that it is important to cultivate arrogance in our writing lives. It is blind confidence in the first draft gets you to the end. Then you can take that side of yourself, sit them down, and let your Second-Guesser take the wheel for the next 600 miles of the road trip… but always let Arrogance backseat drive here and there. Sometimes, Arrogance will remind you that yeah, you did make the right decision on the first try, because you’ve worked hard to cultivate your inner story instinct and your sense of character and prose rhythm. Allow yourself to admit that. Sometimes you’re just really fucking good at what you do because you’ve been working hard at it, and you continue working hard at it.
Of course, if you don’t let your second guesser take the wheel... well, we all know or have heard of at least one of those writers. Sometimes they have platforms. Sometimes they suck and never get published, but will spend all day long shouting in agents’ and editors’ inboxes about how they’re missing our on millions of dollars.
If you’re here reading about craft, you’re not that writer. In fact, my guess is that you might have the opposite problem. You’re looking for reasons to fix your process means you’re introspective, and therefore see flaws in your craft and your process. Seeing flaws sometimes leads to this awful condition of seeing still more flaws, and hacking away at your writing until you have none left.
Arrogance is tool. Pick it up once in a while. Use it to bludgeon a first draft into shape. Then put it away to revise.
And ah, revising… but that’s a conversation for another day.
Thank you so much for joining me on this two-part series! I thoroughly enjoyed writing it and hearing from you on Twitter and Slack about how parts of it resonated with you. I have spent the last few weeks slammed with PhD work and hearing from you all has brought bright bits of joy into my day!
Until the next one!
take care xx