From a writing perspective, July was a reasonably good month for me. If you read my blog post earlier this month entitled ‘Reboot Your Writing‘, you will know that I was very disappointed with my progress in June. Since that post on 4th of July, I’ve kept a record of my Words Per Day on a Google Drive spreadsheet. I set an average daily target of 500 words, with the intention of writing something every day, no matter how short.
For the first few days, I was all motivated and jumped right into my new book, reasonably happy with my story outline. However, by the fourth day, I was struggling, not with motivation or energy, but with the content of each scene. I knew the desired outcome but found I hadn’t enough detail on how my characters would reach that outcome.
Coincidentally, around that time I listened to Joanna Penn’s interview with Rachel Aaron – ‘How To Write Fast, Publish Slowly And Focus On Your Author Marketing’. During the interview, she shared many great tips, but one that particularly resonated with me was that of being prepared. According to Rachel, ‘the number one most important thing about plotting is just you have to know where you’re going … Because if you’ve ever driven anywhere and you’ve been lost, it takes forever. It is terrifying. It’s meandering. It’s awful.’
When Rachel said that last bit about driving somewhere and getting lost, I had an aha moment because it described exactly how I’d felt the previous evening during my writing. My book is a crime novel. I knew what crime had been committed and that my protagonist, Rogue, was hired to find the bad guy. I also knew how he would make life difficult for my hero and what obstacles he would throw her way. However, I was missing the steps Rogue would take during her pursuit of him. She was waiting for direction from me, and I had none – all I knew was that I wanted her to track him down.
Rachel went on to describe a method she uses in her writing, something called GMC, which stands for Goal, Motivation, Conflict. She says that every character needs a goal, a motivation, and some conflict. Further on, she mentioned using a system where her characters develop in parallel with their opponents, the people that cause their conflicts.
I was listening to the podcast while driving, so as soon as I got home, I read the transcript and wondered how I could apply her methods to my project. I liked the idea of the GMC approach and so I set about creating a spreadsheet of my characters along with their respective goals, motivations, and conflicts. This helped hugely. As I thought about each character’s role and filled in the blanks, I added additional rows such as Photograph, Background, Flaws, etc. Suddenly my characters came to life.
I also decided to adopt Rachel’s policy of preparing before I write. Since then, I’ve spent some time, even five minutes, thinking about the scene I am about to write, and playing the role of the characters in my mind, asking myself what would they do in that situation.
Now when I sit down to write, I am already familiar with the scene, and from my character sheet, I have a better idea how each person might behave in that scene. Adding a photograph for each character made a big difference, as now I can see the person in my mind.
Below is a sample Character spreadsheet I created similar to my own. I have not filled in all of the boxes, but enough for you to get the idea:
My Progress During July
Between 5th of July and 30th, a total of 26 days, I wrote 13,237 words, an average of 509, meeting my target of 500 per day. Of the 26 days, there were 11 Zero Days, days where I did no writing, nothing at all. That is 42% of the total days! Honestly, I was quite shocked when I realised this and resolved to reduce that percentage dramatically over the next month. My aim would be a maximum of 5 Zero Days per month.
Joanna Penn’s interview with Rachel Aaron is well worth listening to. You can find it here: ‘How To Write Fast, Publish Slowly And Focus On Your Author Marketing’.
Rachel Aaron’s website is http://rachelaaron.net/. Since listening to the interview, I bought Rachel’s book ‘2K to 10K: Writing faster, writing better, and writing more of what you love’ on Audible.
Happy writing,
Harry
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