If you follow Holly Black’s blog, you’ll know that she is embarking, with some fellow writers, on an experiment to see if she can up her daily word-count, a holy grail if ever there was one. Prompted by Rachel Aaron’s (The Legend of Eli Monpress, Orbit Books) article How I went from writing 2000 words to 10000 words a day , they are looking to see if they can also stimulate an increase, based on recognising how you use your time, knowing what you are about to write and thirdly, being enthused about it. Rachel even has a diagram. Like in Science. I’m tickled when seeing a diagram in relation to writing in much the same way as Nigella gets when employing a diagram to show how to cut potatoes for the best roasties (Feast, P26, Nigella Lawson, Chatto & Windus. No, do not scoff. The proof in is the pudding, or in this instance, the potatoes). Nerdy. Yes indeed, but mmm so pleasing. As are the roasties.
I can definitely vouch for easier flow of words when you already have your scene sketched, and I’d bet every writer knows that soulful joy as the words gush for a scene that they’ve been hankering to get onto the page, but I hadn’t thought to spread-sheet my productivity by hour yet. (Is that a new procrastination tool I see before me? Yes. Yes, I do believe it is...) I suspect I already know that my best writing time is during school hours, but that is by necessity as opposed to my nature. And I am not a pre-7am person. On any level.
So I’ll be watching how their results shape up, and equally hoping that some of them go so far as to progress from diagrams to Graphs. Mmmmm.
Today’s Distraction Tool; Establishing word count spreadsheet.
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