On Thursday last week, I started a new project. The previous thing I was working on – a thriller/dystopia thing about a smuggler – had been in the works for literally years under various guises. What I learned from working on it for so long is that sometimes you have to take your idea back behind the potting shed and shoot it in the face.

Luckily, it also taught me a thing or two about what my process looks like and the most efficient ways for me to get words down on a page. In particular it taught me that any kind of plot or planning completely stiffled all creativity and motivation in me, and that thinking too much ruins my drafts. This is perhaps contradicting some of my previous posts, where I’ve mentioned that I need a little bit of a plan, but this is an evolving process and I’m learning new things about it every time my fingers hit the keyboard.

The new project, code name Twilight Phantom1, is a time travel thing. Since starting just over a week ago, I have written no fewer than 12000 words. For me, that is an absolute miracle. Many months have gone by without anywhere near that much progress.

The dreaded cycle

Question is, what’s different this time?

Firstly, I have no plan. Nothing at all2. I don’t know where I’m going at all, so I’m discovering things as I go along. So far the story has meandered around a little as I settle on style and on certain ideas, but it’s not as wandering as I expected. I’m also not writing linearly. I’ve given up the idea of thinking in chapters, or even thinking about the beginning, middle, or end. I’m writing scenes as they come to me, and perhaps most interestingly of all, I stop writing a scene once I’ve conveyed the central theme of the scene. It’s all very disjointed, but I feel like I can fill in the gaps once I have a collection of scenes that constitute the main events of the book.

I’m excited, and I’m riding this motivational wave as far as it will take me. Stephen King says that a writer should charge through the first draft as quickly as possible or the blade will become dull, and you’ll lose your drive and connection with your characters and story. I think that’s true. After the years I’ve spent trying to force through my last project, my mind is set on finishing the draft of this one in a timely manner. I even have deadlines. Part of the reason I wrote so much this week is because I thought I could hit 10000 words in a week. And so I did. It’s weird how a minor piece of gamification can help so profoundly.

  1. I’ve decided that code names for in-progress projects is a good idea because titles are hard and otherwise I’d have many different directories named derivatives of “Who Knows” or “New Project 5.” 3 ↩︎

  2. I do have a nebulous collection of notes, loose thoughts, and editing suggestions, but no real outline. ↩︎

  3. These are not imaginary examples. ↩︎