When the Work Is Hard: Make It a Game
Last week, I talked about the value of taking a more holistic approach to craft. This week, I’m flying in the face of all that to talk brass tacks: how to put words on the page when you really don’t want to.
You can be as philosophical about process and forethought as you want, but there are times when you just have to sit down and write. There are times when the outline’s done and your favourite scenes are polished, but you have 20k of empty space where plot should be and it’s standing between you and a finished work. Not that that’s my current situation. (It is.)
There are times when writing just feels bad. You hate to do it. Your cells threaten to break off and form their own shadowrealm union. This reality becomes especially salient when you decide to write for a living: writing becomes non-optional. It is work now. Good luck.
(“When the work is hard” is, to me, something fundamentally different than writer’s block. I mentioned the podcast START WITH THIS in passing last week and how the episode on writer’s block really spoke to me. Creators Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink argue there is no transcendent phenomenon called writer’s block; what we are experiencing is that the work is hard. I don’t agree with this completely; I think there are times when inspiration/creativity just isn’t there, and that this should be treated distinctly from “this sucks real bad right now.” But that’s for another post.)
My first disclaimer is that I’m fucking awful at writing for a living. I have no shortage of ideas; I can get any project from outline to the halfway mark—and then I lose steam. It’s partly that my excitement for the project disappears once the story has completely taken shape. Even when I’m writing my own work, there is an element of wanting to find out what happens. Once I know what happens, I am easily distracted by shinier, less developed ideas. Podcaster Alex Newall once said he approaches fiction like it’s a puzzle; this is certainly true for me. I am far more motivated by figuring out a solution to the puzzle than I am by actually writing out that solution.
Obviously, this is not sustainable. To make money off your writing, you must actually finish writing something. Or so I hear.
I spent 10 days in June in solitude in a cabin by the lake. This is what writers dream about: alone time, spotty internet, a fridge full of food. I had nothing to do for ten days but write, read, and stare at the lake. I did not expect the lake to put me under a thrall. I shan’t discuss it; birds have knowledge beyond our comprehension; we must respect them and the lakebound tides. Suffice it to say my wordcount was lower than I expected. I was not at my best for several reasons, and this surely had an impact—I was, as we say these days, quarantining—but it did highlight for me that vague plans about sitting down to write weren’t enough anymore.
So I returned to a system I had long ago abandoned: writing sprints.
I’ve frequented writing communities on chat platforms like Discord and Slack on and off for several years now. Writing sprints typically run all day. I used to find this highly convenient; solidarity in sitting around and typing as many words as we could in a limited time frame worked great for me for a long time. But my writing process evolved, and these solidarity sprints went from inspiring to distracting me.
At the time, I wasn’t first drafting as much as I was writing a paragraph, tweaking it, tweaking it again, writing a second paragraph, tweaking them both together, and so on. This process didn’t get along with sprints. This process also became inefficient as I became a more experienced writer. Now, as mentioned, I write first drafts.
Sprints are perfect for getting down first drafts. They are fantastic for inflating numbers. Shallow words that you will later shape into the lyrical phrases that will form your book? Sprints are now your best friend.
I decided to do sprints my own way. I had the sense that I would still find the community angle distracting, so I made a solitary system I thought would work for me:
I made a sign that said “WRITING WITH TIMERS” and taped it on my office door. (My partner respects this; my cat does not.)
I downloaded Forest, that app that grows trees if you don’t touch your phone for the allotted time.
I sat down and forced myself to just write for 30 minutes, even as my organs threatened to merge and multiply in rebellion.
I have rules for these timers:
I don’t set them until I’ve read through my document and have a sense of where in the story I want or need to write.
I must write at least 100 coherent, developed words in the allotted time or I must quit the timer and let the tree die.
If I still hate writing at the end of the timer, I’m allowed to go do something else—but I must try again in a few hours. If I hate writing during this second timer too, I’m allowed to quit for the day.
If words are flowing freely by the end of the timer and I want to carry on, I let the timer run over rather than starting a new tree. (The Forest app specifically is great for this.)
I must take a 5-10 minute short break at the end of the timer, or the soonest natural pause. Refill drink, do a quick chore, bother the cat. After the short break, I must come back and try to write some more, either with a timer or without if it’s flowing well. The only reason not to come back right away is to do a longer chore, like grocery shopping or washing up.
I am not allowed to take up a book or video game until I’ve either hit wordcount or written for 3-4 hours, whichever comes first.
After 3-4 hours, if I haven’t hit wordcount for the day, I must take a longer break to eat and do a not-writing activity to rest the brain.
These rules are meant to balance writing discipline with kindness to myself. I’m not remotely an organized writer; I’m very all or nothing. The other day I didn’t start writing until 6:30pm (I really, really didn’t want to!), but I had 4k down by 11:00pm. The day before, I’d written nothing. Part of this is to create a consistent work day for myself, where I sit down in the morning, write for a few hours, then come back in the afternoon and do it again.
The tree timers are baby steps toward these goals. It’s basically the Pomodoro Technique, a famously good idea for many people with bad executive function (I don’t have ADHD but I do have other neat problems that have me aspiring to complete tasks and never actually doing them). When you force yourself to sit down and do something but only for a small amount of time, it sucks badly—but then you’ve done it. Sprints are how I hope to reconcile the plenty of first-drafting with the fallow of editing—I have little problem getting motivated to edit. Now, when the editing time comes, I will have a LOT of first draft to grapple with.
How’s this timer experiment going for me so far? Well—mixed. I used the timers incredibly intensively for a week, but the following week found I “didn’t need them.” This is to say that I hit wordcount every day Monday-Friday last week over 3-6 hours. It wasn’t always organized: sometimes I hit that wordcount at 11pm. I put “didn’t need them” in quotation marks above because, frankly, I didn’t quite meet my goals; I didn’t use timers because I wrote on the wrong projects some days. I really need to focus up, and because I was hitting wordcount in general, I didn’t put the effort into hitting wordcount specifically where it needed to be hit. But it’s comforting to know that I have a system for fostering the right habits at the ready—especially under the event I get put under the thrall of a lake again.
Gamify It!
If you literally only have 20 minutes a day to write—congratulations, it’s a game now. I bet you can get 200 words down. Now do that for 5 days—you have 1000 words. Do that every week for a year and you have a short novel. A first draft of one, sure, but that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Five minutes a day on the toilet? Set a timer and write as many words as you can. Why not? I call this game Shitter Words. (I do not, but you might.)
If you want the help of external gamification:
-Fighter’s Block is the best one. It actively reinforces speed, which is especially good for first drafting and getting as many words on the page as possible in a short period of time—but it also rewards backspacing, so if you’re paying attention and working, you still get extra time. I regret that the code is quite faulty; I mostly can’t get it to start properly. But if you can, it’s good. Your words are saved at the end of a successful battle.
-Habitica is a similarly gamified general habit tracker. These don’t work for me, but if they work for you, this is a great way to earn XP off your ability to sit down even one time and do one thing. It could also be a good way to track longer term goals and skill building if a spreadsheet or writing journal doesn’t appeal to you (I keep both).
-I have also heard good things about Write or Die (complex interface) and 4thewords (paid after trial) but have not tried them myself.
It’s not right to say that any words are good words, but any words are arguably better than no words. If you’re beating back the kind of writer’s block where the work just sucks—this might be the kind of pledge to live by.
If, on the other hand, you’re setting timers and nothing at all is happening, multiple times, with no end in sight? Pal, I am so sorry. That’s a more complex writer’s block than “the work is hard”; I’ll talk about that next month. In the meantime, try reading, watching something new, or playing a game. Jogging the old creative brain is a good way to make the work suck less, too.
Next week is a review week. I will probably review a book; I am nervous about doing this; I hope I will do a good job. The week following, I’ll talk about the utility of reviews and of reading widely, even stuff you don’t necessarily like.
You’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page.