(I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because I’m out of coffee so my inner-editor isn’t awake yet!)
I’m sure you’re starting to wonder if I gave up on blogging , fell off the face of the planet, or got eaten by zombies-but never fear, readers-I’m still alive and kickin’ in the blogverse. This past month has been pretty hectic-from my trip to the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival to working on two-yes TWO-different manuscripts, all while juggling my day job, collaboration with Ampersand H., and my social life. I’m starting to think I need a clone or three…
Enough of the chatter-let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this post. See, working on two manuscripts at once is, obviously, double the challenge of writing one. While I don’t have a definite deadline for either novel, I still hold myself to a relatively strict timeline. “Murder At Castle Rock” took me ten months to complete, but I learned a few time-saving tricks along the way.
That brings me today’s tip: I like to call it The One Page Method:
“Murder At Castle Rock” took so long to write because it was my first-ever piece of lengthy fiction—and because I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I spent HOURS re-editing, re-writing, and tweaking sentences before I even had a complete rough draft! This time around, I’ve learned to
tell my inner editor to take a hike.
Writers, I know what you’re thinking: Easier said than done, right? Right. Sometimes it’s quite difficult not to read, re-read, and re-re-read everything I’ve written to check for typos, grammar and sentence structure errors, consistency, flow, etc. I needed a way to kick my constant editing habit, and then it hit me: I can’t edit what I can’t re-read.
Don’t work out of the master copy of your manuscript. This is a wise tip for any writer, since you can’t screw up (or worse, lose) all of your work if you aren’t constantly working out of it. Sure, leave it open while you’re working on your rough draft, but I wouldn’t recommend typing directly into the document itself. Maybe it’s just me—technology hates me—but 4 times out of 5, if I’m typing new content directly into my master copy, something almost always goes wrong, and I find myself with a whole paragraph—or worse, a whole chapter—mysteriously deleted. In my opinion, better safe than sorry.
Focus on one page at a time. I have a master word document that contains the full content that I’ve written so far for each novel, and then I have a separate, blank word template. When I need to force myself to plod along in my rough draft without giving into the urge to peek back through what I’ve written so far, I open the blank document rather than the master copy. I type one page into the blank document, then I hit enter and move down to a new blank page.
The Benefit: I know this method sounds a little odd, but it’s been working. Adding a little extra space between pages deters me from scrolling back up to obsess over every word and punctuation mark. I focus on one page of text at a time, and when I’m done, I delete the extra blank pages in between each and paste the new scene into my master document. I’ve found that this forces me to focus on the more immediate content that I’m producing rather than pouring over everything the entire manuscript ten or twenty times to tweak it, hindering my productivity in the process. Instead, I have ONE page of content in front of me at a time, and once I’ve produced that, I push through another page.
Fellow writers, what tips and tricks do you have to keep you focused on completing a rough draft of your manuscript without stopping every few minutes to re-read the whole thing?
