What do we mean when we say Track Writing?

This Chanticleer article is a little more personal than most. Normally we speak generally, but sometimes you can’t replace a good ol’ personal anecdote.

Haruki Murakami: “Writing a long novel is like survival training.”

Barbara Kingsolver: “I have to write hundreds of pages before I get to page one.”

Jodi Picoult: “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

Diane Gabaldon: “Writing is an active skill; the only way to learn is to do it, to actually sit down and write every day.”

With all this in mind, I want to talk here about my experience taking the advice of Rachel Aaron/Rachel Bach from her article “How I Went From 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.” Whenever I see a new idea for improving writing, I try to play Peter Elbow’s “The Believing Game.” The Believing Game, in short, is an exercise where you ask yourself what would happen if you accepted a particular suggestion as true, and then practice acting as if it were true and seeing what happens as a result.

A white man in a yellow sweater giving two thumbs up as he works remotely — This man believes!

1. Track where you write.

This was the one I thought was the silliest. During a pandemic, I don’t write anywhere except my bedroom/office, the kitchen, or the living room. However, when I really pay attention to where I write best, I notice a few things.

First, I write well in groups, even if that’s just online at the Roost (Chanticleer’s Online Community) doing writing sprints with friends and the help of Sprinto. Generally, timers help me quite a bit in my writing, because they give me permission to ignore the rest of the world until the timer goes off.

Coffee Klatch Write In is held at the Roost on ZOOM. The next Write-Ins are currently scheduled for Tuesday mornings. However, any Roost member can set up a Write In group to accommodate their time zones—which is handy since Roost members live across North America and around the globe.

Check us out!

We meet up once a week to do some writing. Usually folks join, we chat about what we’re working on for 10-15 minutes, and then dive in to work! Light conversation and the Chat are excellent ways to check in.

Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021 from 10 a.m. – Noon PST

Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021 from 10 a.m. – Noon PST

Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021 from 10 a.m. – Noon PST

I also found out, weirdly enough, that my most productive space is not my desk where I work from home and play videogames, but rather on my futon with plenty of pillows for back support using my laundry basket as a desk.

A wicker laundry basket with twinkle lights behind it — I don’t know what the magic is, but I really like working on this laundry basket. -DB

I have no idea what it is about these factors. Maybe it’s the giant stuffed pig that’s my quarantine companion, but that’s where I am happiest and most productive. The second-best place is at the dining room table with the roommate’s dog hanging out.

Maya Angelou passed away on May 28, 2014. She preferred writing lying down and leaning on one elbow.

Maya Lou Angelo rented hotel rooms for a few months at a time in her hometown. She would have the management move all of the paintings and decorations out of the room. Also, they were not allowed in to clean or straighten just in case she had thrown away piece of paper with writing on it that might later prove to be useful. Ms. Angelo said that she would head to around 6:30 in the morning and hang out there until about 2:30 then she would head home to edit. The hotel room was creating and writing only. She would average 10-12 pages of written material a day. She would then edit these pages down to three or four pages in the evening at her home.

“Nothing will work unless you do.” Maya Angelou

2. Track when you write.

This next suggestion helps you learn when you are most productive. I have always dreamed of being that person who wakes up at 5am, reads for two hours, writes about what I read for another two hours, and then eats breakfast and jumps into amazing creative work. It would help if I didn’t need at the very least thirty minutes to drag myself out of bed.

NaNoWriMo this year gave me a strong reset to my writing habits. Having the regular goals made me prioritize my work, and being in quarantine removed many of the distractions I usually have. The deep dive even gave me some great community locally and on The Roost that I’m still holding onto.

Things that I ask myself when tracking:

What Project am I working on?
When did I start?
When did I finish?
What was my general mood?
How many pages/words did I get through?
Where did I write?
Additional notes

Doing NaNoWriMo this last November, I’ve finally discovered that while I can sit down and do paid work at almost any time, I do my best creative writing between 8-11pm. This is tricky, because that’s when most people want to hang out, but I can usually make late afternoon work well, too. The times that don’t work for me? Anytime before 11am. I can always do brainstorm work, but if I want to do writing I’m happy with and make progress in a story, I need to set aside some time in the evening.

This isn’t so much how much time you make to write (though that can help). It’s also about how much writing you do in a particular amount of time. Generally, I write 250 words every 15 minutes. I also write about 250 words every 30 minutes. Depending on how I time myself, I come out with a different amount. Likewise, if Aaron/Bach (from the opening paragraph) sits down to write for only an hour, she writes about 500 words. However, if she sits down to write for 5 hours, she can manage 1500 words in that same hour! The amount of time we know we can get lost in the work affects us each differently.

Looking for more advice regarding what to do with your NaNoWriMo? See this article Chanticleer posted in November here.

3. What do you write on?

Rather than the material (desk, floor, laundry basket), this means more to the tools you use to write. Referring back to Aaron/Bach, I write different places for different things. When I first started at Chanticleer (and I still do), took and kept notes in a journal about how things work here. There are a lot of moving parts and “under the hood” technology here at Chanticleer. I’ve noticed that Kiffer carries around a small black notebook and old school small planning calender even though we use Google Calendar apps and the latest digital management apps (hat tip to Argus Brown) here at the home office of Chanticleer.

Using my journal is also handy for our weekly brainstorming meetings. I find that I can generate 7 “ideas” in ten minutes if I am utilizing my trusty journal instead of my laptop. Now, very little of a full article or project would come out this exercise. It’s just brainstorming and laying out my ideas some place where I can keep track of them until I can work on the details. But it works! I’ve noticed that I have much more trouble brainstorming on a computer where the cursor blinks at me with menace and mocking intent.

The other thing that drives me up the wall when trying to brainstorm on a computer is there are so many distractions. If I have an idea, I can focus in, but if I’m casting around for thoughts, I’m open to the world, and the internet adores it when I’m open to suggestion. Somehow social media rarely helps me generate ideas for any type of writing.

Now, of course, once I’m running with an idea, I love the speed that I can put words down and edit when I type rather than scribble. Plus, my writing is always legible on a computer.

4. Mood

You know how it is, you’re in a bad mood, you need to do your writing, you sit down to do the work, and you get maybe half what you usually do done. What if that’s a pattern that you can predict? For me, knowing that when I sit down and I’m grumpy that my roommates haven’t wiped down the counters after cooking spaghetti (my first thought always being there has been a murder in my house), or maybe someone has said something mean on social media (somehow social media always features as an obstacle to writing).

5. Where will the story go next?

EL Doctorow famously said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

While you probably have written down the broad strokes of what happens at the beginning, middle, and end of your story, it’s important to keep other ideas in mind.

a drawing of a car driving at night

I felt good seeing Aaron/Bach suggest this, as it’s been a longtime habit of mine to sketch out what I want to happen next after I bring a writing session to a close. Since I write late, often this is the point where I feel like I really need to sleep, I’ll do a brief summary of how I see the rest of the text going, and if any strong images come to mind, I’ll write those down as well, hoping to use them as the story goes on.

When I return and see those notes, I simply delete them as I write the scene it suggests, keeping my notes clean and easy to read for what comes next. With the images I can even copy and paste them directly into the work as the place I think they’ll fit best appears on the page.

6. What are you excited about in the story?

I just started editing the first draft of a novel I finished in October. One of the big critiques my writing group gives me is that the conflict doesn’t start soon enough, which I thought was ridiculous!

In the first chapter, my YA protagonist has the 3-person panel for his high school senior project possessed by a conduit of 100 dead souls who he has promised to guide from Limbo into Heaven! What could be more intense than that?!

However, in rereading the work with fresh eyes I notice that my characters eat. A lot.

Now, this is probably from my great love of all breakfast foods and missing going out to restaurants, but everyone in this book can’t get to any scenes because they’re too busy giving light exposition at The Old Spaghetti Factory. As I go through, I find myself skipping these scenes to get to the next on, which tells me that, yes, they are not exciting. If as the writer I don’t care about a scene, it needs to go. If there’s key information I feel like is in that scene, I write it down separately and keep an eye out for the right place to insert it, rather than dragging the reader through yet another pointless meal—even if I am craving a Dutch baby with powdered sugar, cinnamon, maple syrup, and fresh fruit. Maybe with a side of breakfast sausage. Mmm. And hmmm.

Dutch Baby with fruit and powdered sugar on it

7. Review your information

So, for me, what I’ve learned is that I write best in areas where I can be comfortable and don’t have easy access to videogames. I like having friends, either virtual, stuffed, or furry, because then I feel like I’m accountable to someone, even if they only want to listen to me brainstorm when I’m giving them pets.

I am officially an evening person. I love mornings for relaxing, watching the bay, drinking coffee, and making extravagant breakfasts. If you haven’t made yourself Spanish tortilla, it’s easier than you’d expect—give it a try.

A few times a week I need to set aside my evenings for creativity, and that means no Mandalorian with the roommates (sorry Baby Yoda) or virtual game night with friends. If they want to hang out, they can come co-work (write) with me.

Sad Baby Yoda

I do my starting work in a journal of some sort, and then I do the writing work on a computer. Editing and marketing work also happen on computers, mostly out of necessity and the predominance of the internet.

I am gentle with myself when in a bad mood. Rather than lamenting that I couldn’t do as much as the day before or the week before, I remind myself that creativity is a process, and that even though I was in a bad mood I put in the time today, and that habit counts for more than any single day worth of word count.

I write best when I can work from notes that show me what scene I’m most drawn to write about next in my story. That lets me stay focused on excitement as I go through the work.

Finally, now that you can figure all this out for yourself, protect the things that let you write. They’re the loveliest tools you can give yourself.

8. Set goals

A dartboard with a dart in the bullseye — Nailed it

Ask yourself what your stretch goals are, and what goals are you confident you can meet. Go back to your goals periodically. Do they need to be adjusted for where you are in your w-i-p (work in progress). Editing requires a different focus than plotting. Plotting requires a different mind set than creating your characters or atmosphere.

What are your methods and writing habits?

We’d love to hear from you! What spurs you on? What trips you up?

Examine your own life to best see how you can maximize your own productivity and be the author you want to be!

Maybe this is getting something to the point where you can use one of our many Chanticleer services, from the Manuscript Overview, to the Editorial Book Review, to testing the mettle of your work in the Chanticleer Awards. Whatever goals you set, make sure that you keep your gaze on meeting them as you write!

Speaking of the Chanticleer Awards, did you know that we’ll be announcing the Finalists, First Place Winners, and Grand Prize Winners at our Tenth Anniversary Chanticleer Authors Conference (CAC22)? The CIBA Ceremonies will run in tandem with them from April 7-10, 2022! We’re optimistic we will be able to see you in person at the beautiful Hotel Bellwether here in Bellingham, WA.