Category Archives: writing

What I leaned from writing 50,000 words in one month

In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, in which people all over the world attempt to write 50,000 words and produce the first draft of a novel. In a month. Yeah, a book in a month.

A MONTH.

I started keeping a diary, but it quickly became clear that the last thing I needed to do was commit to writing even more words. In hindsight, it was a bit like winning a bet that involves eating 20 boiled eggs and celebrating with an omelette.

So, now that it’s all over, and I’ve had some time away from the keyboard, I thought it might be interesting to share what I learned.

Firstly, trying to write fast without a plan is tough. I’m a pantser – that means I don’t plan stories before I start writing them. I write “by the seat of my pants”. In fact, I’m an ultra-panster. I don’t make notes about characters, keep a notebook, anything like that. I keep all my ideas in my head and I believe that if they’re good enough, they’ll survive up there in the old noggin, competing for space with the shopping list of things I’ll buy when I’ve sold fifty million novels and had my work turned into a hugely successful HBO series. There are a lot of cars on that list. And a robot that looks like Christina Aguilera, but enjoys talking about crime novels, crime shows and crime films.

Well, I used to believe all that until I tried to write a book in 30 days, which means cranking out 1,667 words a day, every day.

When you know what you need to write, you can write it. It might not be a good scene, but that doesn’t matter for a first draft – get the words down. Someone’s found a body? Describe where it’s been found, the injuries, what the detective’s feeling. If I said to you “Go and write 1,667 words about a murder scene”, you could do it, right?

But what happens next? And after that?

Now, in the past, this wasn’t a problem for me, for two reasons. One, I didn’t have any deadlines. I could pause and think about my options. And two, I was possessed. Not by demons, or anything like that. But I had one of those stories that occupied my thoughts all day long, so when I arrived at the keyboard, I had a huge amount of material that I wanted to get down on the page.

This time, though, it wasn’t quite like that. I’ve had a few ideas floating around in the story swamp for a while. But at the end of October, a shiny new one surfaced. Now, those old ideas were like relationships. We’d spent some time together and the honeymoon period was over. Plot holes had been identified. They’d farted in bed. This new one had none of that baggage. No farting had occurred. (That was at the beginning of November. Now, a month and 50,000 words later, it’s a Swiss Cheese of plot holes filled with farts).

A man is at a murder scene, cleaning up. But he has no idea how he got there, as though he’s just woken up. “It’s like he was somewhere else, but now he’s here” says the first sentence. And there’s a female psychological profiler. She’s tough (Saga Noren and Stella Gibson are personal favourites – if you don’t know who I’m talking about then you have some serious gaps in your knowledge of fictional female detectives that need to be filled), and she has a mysterious past, which I keep the reader guessing about to create a little suspense. That gave me plenty to work with, but occasionally I would still arrive at the keyboard without knowing what I was going to write. That really matters when time is tight – when I was in the zone, I could get 800 words in 35-40 minutes. When I was struggling, it was more like 300.

Is that important? Well, a lot of people complain that they’d like to write but they just don’t have the time. (A lot of these ‘aspiring’ writers also spend many hours a week watching TV, posting on social media, reading blogs about writing… but let’s not give them too hard a time. Even though I really want to.) Anyway, 800 words in 40 minutes, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year (so you get weekends and holidays off) is 192,000 words a year!

Who doesn’t have forty minutes to spare five times a week? I start work at 7.30am and finish at 5.30pm. I have two small children who, if I’m being charitable, I will merely call ‘active’. And I have a wife who rather selfishly expects me to spend time with her occasionally as well as contributing to the care of the children. (Yeah, I know. Sometimes I wish it was the 1950s and I could spend the evenings in my study, the children only entering to say “Goodnight father” before going upstairs to cry themselves to sleep.) So I write on the train, I write when I can take a lunch break and I’m writing this on a Saturday night.

I learned something during NaNo though: if you have a limited amount of time to write, make every minute count. And having a plan, even a loose one, will help.

But, some people might ask, won’t planning a story rob it of its energy, won’t it make it more likely that you’ll end up with a drab, formulaic, plot-heavy story?

As a natural pantser, I hear you. During NaNo, I wrote a conversation between my amnesiac main character and a secondary character. It was a bit of a strange scene and didn’t really fit into a thriller. But two days later the lightening bolt struck. I realised that conversation held the key to why the amnesiac was behaving the way he was. It set up a fantastic twist later in the book. Pantser heaven. So I ploughed on.

But as things progressed, problems developed with the plot. My psychological profiler, who was supposed to be really tough, couldn’t discover a way to trace the killer with her skills. She ended up just following the police around, becoming quite passive. And once I had my big revelation for the amnesiac, it raised a lot of questions. So… I just had him trying to escape from the police and the story lapsed into exactly the kind of plot-heavy sequence of chase scenes that my “I’m a unique and beautiful snowflake creative genius pantser” approach was supposed to avoid. Because sometimes, if you’re going fast and you haven’t given enough thought to things, you end up with “this happened and then this and then this”.

It’s possible (and my god, as a despiser of plans and to-do lists and organisation it pains me to say this) that, if I’d spent October writing an outline of my plot, asking questions, connecting dots, well… I might have uncovered some of the problems I would run into in the final days of November. I could have forced myself to come up with alternative scenarios there and then, rather than having to do that in the second draft. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of interesting stuff in “Serial Killer Novel #2”. I’ve spent a month living with my characters, listening to them talk to each other, observing how they react in certain situations. And by living in that story for a month, I’ve discovered the problems that need to be fixed. I can fill in the holes and make the story stronger. But I suspect that, if I return to the novel next year, I’ll be approaching it with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel.

This leads me nicely on to another lesson I learned, though: I would rather write 50,000 bad words than no words. It’s possible that the story I wrote will never become a finished novel. But I’m ok with that. Before NaNo, I’d gotten out of the habit of writing. Now, I know that if I neglect other areas of my life, I can write 50,000 words in a month. So, if I dial things back, I can easily write 20,000 words a month and I will still have time to read, watch TV, see friends, pay overdue bills and actually be a half decent parent. (That last one is important, because I don’t want my kids, who will of course have a genetic predisposition to be great writers, to grow up and write a best-selling memoir all about how much of a dick I am. Although, if they turned into the kind of teenagers who hated their father and would rather die than spend time with him, it would leave me more time to write…)

I’m off topic again. I promise my novels aren’t like this.

So, even though it might seem like a huge waste to write that many words without turning them into a polished story, it absolutely isn’t. A lot of people fall in to the trap of thinking that what they produce early in their writing life is really important and they spend a huge amount of time on a flawed project.

There is an old saying about writing, though: kill your darlings. And that doesn’t just apply to superfluous sentences or beautiful metaphors that don’t fit into the story. It can apply to everything: scenes, chapters, characters and even entire novel-length works. If you feel like you have spent a long time on something so you just have to keep on at it until it’s fixed, then you could well be wasting your time. Let that kitten drown, because there might be an even cuter one just waiting to be discovered. (That is a metaphor. Please don’t ever let a kitten drown.)

I started writing a science fiction story about 15 years ago. I returned to it, throughout my early twenties, re-writing the first 100 or so pages before eventually giving up. Then in my late twenties I wrote a thriller. It was pretty much a copy of John Grisham’s ‘The Firm’, transposed on to the world of hedge funds, with more sex and some Russian gangsters. Neither of those stories will ever be published. So was writing them a waste of time? Hell no! I learned a lot, especially about things that don’t work, so I could avoid them in the future.

How does this fit in to NaNo? Well, there is a tendency for people to focus too much on ‘talent’. They think there have been all these great writers who were simply born great. That Agatha Christie or Charles Dickens or Elmore Leonard just started producing great work from the very first sentence they wrote. But here are some questions for you: How many great composers just sat down at a piano, or with a quill and some paper and started producing concertos and operas? Why do you need to study for five years and then complete two years of professional training to qualify as an architect? If I asked you to play Macbeth in a stage production, with no previous acting experience, do you think you’d win many awards?

Practice. That is what’s required to become competent in any creative pursuit. The first novel or five or twenty that you write might be equivalent to Beethoven’s first piano lessons, or coursework that Frank Gehry completed in the 1950s when studying architecture, or Steve Guttenberg’s first acting lesson. (Actually forget that last one. He probably was born great.)

Maybe that idea you have is fantastic. But here’s the thing: you might not have the writing skills to do it justice. Or you might have a better idea in five years time. And it’s possible that the better idea will come because you’ve spent the previous five years writing stories, getting feedback on them and improving your writing. Your brain in five years will know more about plot, pacing, character development and description. But only if you train it to.

So make time, every week to write stories. Lots of them.

You have to finish some of them, but you also need to develop the ability to decide which ones have potential. Consider doing some planning first. Then switch off your inner critic and let the story pour out of you. And then switch the critic back on to decide whether your story works or not, and what needs changing. In between drafts, it’s probably a good idea to work on other stories. If you have more than one thing on the go, you’re less likely to over-invest in the wrong idea. But you also have to make sure they don’t function as distractions that prevent you from completing anything. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

I’m starting work on another novel this week. Because this happened.

I’m excited, though, because it’s an idea that plays to my strengths, but also has a strong sense of place, which is something that can be missing from my work. At its core, it’s a very simple idea with less potential for plot holes: there’s a killer who has a very good reason for killing and an ingenious way of doing it. I’m as excited as I was the first time I thought about writing a story featuring a female serial killer.

Look out for ‘Sleepers’ in bookstore windows, bestseller charts and book of the year lists some time during 2018.

That’s all for today. Now I shall retire to my study, where I will discuss the latest crime fiction releases with… Christina-Bot! Have you farted?

Damn, I knew it was too good to be true.


COMING SOON: I’ll be starting a regular series of posts called “What I learned”, where I read successful crime novels and er… tell you what I learned from them. It will be a must for any fans and writers of crime fiction. Sign up to subscibe to my blog at the top right of this page if you’re on a PC or tablet. Otherwise, come back and check at the end of the week.


If you want to see if I can walk the walk as well as talk the talk, and you like serial killer thrillers, you might enjoy my novel PsychoAnalysis.

NaNoWriMo Diary – Week 1

When you’re driving yourself nuts, trying to grind out 1,667 words every day for 30 days, what kind of really dumb commitment could you make? How about keeping a diary – i.e. writing even more words – to document the experience…

For those of you who know what NaNoWriMo is, I suggest you skip to the next paragraph. For those of you who don’t, it’s National Novel Writing Month, in which people attempt to write 50,000 words during November, hopefully leaving them with the first draft of a novel at the end of the month.

Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.


I have a dirty secret. The novel I published in October – I started writing it about 3 years ago. I wrote draft after draft until I was happy with the end result. This year, I’ve done some minor rewrites, but the book was pretty much finished at the beginning of 2016. So lately, I haven’t really been doing much of the thing that makes you a writer.

Writing.

I started a couple of stories, but lost interest. And the last few months have been taken up with editing, formatting and marketing.

Now, a lot of the people who read PsychoAnalysis enjoyed it. But they kept asking a question:

When’s the next book coming?

The short answer to that was: I have no idea.

And then I started seeing posts about NaNoWriMo and realised that I had to participate. I am a writer. I need to write.

So, here’s what’s happened so far.

Monday – Day minus 1 (or NaNoWriMoEve)

I am seriously psyched up. I have a great idea for a story. I have a psychological profiler and I have a serial killer. Why exactly is he killing people? I don’t know yet. That’s what I’ll find out over the next thirty days (or more likely the next year as I rewrite and rewrite). But I do have some interesting scenes in my head, some themes I want to explore, and a strong urge to write.

Time to prepare. So I take out the Bluetooth keyboard I use with my tablet and… the charger port appears to have been crushed.

I have no f***ing keyboard. How am I going to write 1,667 words tomorrow?

But wait, there’s still some juice in the battery. I order a new keyboard, which will arrive on Wednesday, and pray to the gods of battery life.

Tuesday – Day 1. I’m a writer again

The words flow like water.

My routine involves writing on the 30 minute train journeys to and from work, and grabbing lunch in a café where I can bash away at my keyboard (as long as it stays alive) for up to an hour. I get over 500 words each way on the train and more than 1,000 in my lunch break. For those of you who aren’t numbers people, that’s over 2,000 words.

The beginning comes easily. I don’t have a great opening sentence or anything like that – I can agonise over the minor details sometime next year. But I have a character waking up (yes, I know that’s a lousy start to a story, but this is the first draft) and she interests me. I start to get a sense of who she is, some things from her past, and she’s going to visit a serial killer in prison. I’m interested.

Wednesday – Day 2. Going well until…

Things are still going great, until I leave my tablet in the office, so I can’t write on the way home or on the way to work the next day. No biggie, you say? Just catch up that evening, yeah? Well, bear in mind that I get up early and leave home at 6.25am, returning at 6.15pm. I have two small children, so between 6.15pm and 7.45pm, I spend my time shouting, “Drink your milk”, “Stop hitting your brother”, and “Keep your penis away from your sister.” Then I have to help tidy up, eat and think about paying some bills. But the first rule of NaNoWriMo (well, it’s not so much a rule as the entire point of the whole thing) is that you have to keep writing. So I bang out my last 500 words on my laptop and get an early night.

Thursday – Day 3. Slump

No matter how many times you repeat the Hemingway quote “All first drafts are shit”, at some point you will start to feel discouraged. Today I notice that I have been writing almost nothing but dialogue, and my characters keep having conversations in which they talk about things that happened in a previous scene. They are telling me stuff I already know. Not particularly thrilling. It’s a bit like those ‘reality’ TV shows where beautiful people who are supposedly friends sleep with each other’s partners and then talk about it endlessly. And there are no beautiful people or big houses to look at in my book. But I encourage myself to just keep wading through this lake of raw, untreated sewage, because there could be something fantastic floating in it (protected by a watertight container, obviously).

Friday – Day 4. Gold

It happens. A couple of days ago I wrote a conversation between two characters, which felt a little out of place. But today, I realise that the relationship between those two characters holds the key to the whole story, explaining why the killer is killing people yet has no memory of doing it. I won’t tell you what that reason is, because I hope the many thousands of people (ahem) reading this will go on to buy the book. All that matters is that I’ve done what every ‘pantser’ (someone who writes by the seat of their pants rather than being one of those tedious folk who plan and outline) dreams of – I was meandering along and then BAM!, I had a great twist for my story.

Saturday – Day 5. It’s the weekend!

So far, it’s been easy to carve out some time in the day to write. But weekends mean time at home with the family. No train journeys, no lunch breaks. Lunch with the kids is an hour, but that time is spent cooking something that a pair of fussy eaters will eat and then chasing a 16 month old girl around the room, trying to feed a moving target because she refuses to sit down at the table for more than 2 minutes. It’s a little like hunting an amphetamine-fueled Care Bear, but instead of a gun you have a spoonful of yoghurt, or a chicken nugget. Thankfully, though, these creatures get tired. And that means they have to take a nap. Now, usually nap times are where I recover from the morning’s exertions. But this is NaNoWriMo, so I have to write as many words as I can while praying that the little buggers angels stay asleep.

Sunday – Day 6. Happy birthday to you

My son’s fourth birthday is tomorrow. So we’re having the party today. It’s also my birthday tomorrow, but when you share your special day with a child, there is only one person who is going to get the attention. And because he’s having a party, he’s skipping his nap. Someone also needs to entertain him while the party is being set up… that would be me. Then there’s the actual party, followed by cleaning up. So when do I write? I suppose, because I’m ahead on my word count (I knew weekends were going to be tough), and today has been, let’s say, a teeny bit tiring, I could take a break. But no, if I skip one day, there’s a danger the spell will be broken. So I sit down at around 8.30pm and write until I go to bed.

Monday – Day 7. Uh-oh

So far, I’ve been targeting 2,000+ words every weekday, because I have less time to write at the weekends. But I realise there’s another problem. On Mondays I play football (or ‘soccer’ as my American readers would call it) at lunchtime. I obviously can’t write and play ‘soccer’ at the same time, so I’m going to lose fifty percent of my writing time every Monday….AARGH! More of those evenings where I write before bedtime. Unless…

I write for an extra twenty minutes before catching the train in the morning and then I somehow manage to pound out over eight hundred words on the journey home by typing without interruption. Word count achieved. Just.

And when I get home, I discover that my wife is taking me out for a surprise birthday dinner while her parents babysit. The cocktail menu at the restaurant includes a Hemingway Martini, so I obviously order one of those. I don’t actually like it, but who cares, I’m not writing and I don’t have to shovel food into my mouth while my children scream at me. Happy birthday.

First week target: 11,667. Words written: about 13,000 (yeah, yeah, I know I should have the exact number, but I don’t, ok?)

Next week: The difficult week two (or ‘week poo’ as I call it), the curse of the pantsers, and some stuff that hasn’t happened yet so I can’t tell you about it.


If you like serial killer thrillers, you might enjoy my novel PsychoAnalysis.

Creating creativity

“Where do you get your ideas from?” and “how do you overcome writer’s block?” are two questions that never go away. But that’s not surprising. The creative process seems at times to be mystical and totally uncontrollable. We all dream of having that eureka moment. But it doesn’t seem to come…

As Thomas Edison famously said, though, genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. So perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for that eureka moment, accompanied of course by the lightbulb (not invented by, but commercialised by one Thomas Edison). We should be at our writing desks forcing inspiration to strike.

Well, the truth is probably somewhere in between the waiting and the working approach. I think of it like this. You read. You write. You think. That’s how you acquire the raw materials or the fuel for the creative process. You play around with some story ideas, maybe write a list of character attributes. Then one day you’re in the shower and, from nowhere, lightning strikes: “The aliens are harvesting human organs because their advanced civilisation has gone too far with genetic engineering, unleashing a virus that eats them from the inside!”

Why does this happen (the ideas popping into your head, not the virus – I already explained that was due to genetic engineering) and how can you enhance your creativity? Well, you can delve into the neuroscience if you want. You can also listen to a wiser man than me.

Music producer Brian Eno has some great things to say on this process of focusing, generating the raw materials for the creative process, but also mentally relaxing, creating the environment for ideas to emerge out of those raw materials. Here are some quotes:

“The big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something. You have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It might seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in a place to notice something… about noticing chances and acting on them”

“The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes.”

“Obviously there’s an inequality of opportunities among people. But there’s also an inequality of readiness. Some people are more ready to make use of the opportunities that come up than others.”

“There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process.”

What do you think? What works for you? Long walks? Tidying?

I find that if I’m sitting at the keyboard, it’s often when I get up to do something else that the ideas come. But then I have to go back to the keyboard and craft those ideas into something readable…

http://99u.com/articles/7034/developing-your-creative-practice-tips-from-brian-eno