MatthewGnann.com

Last Sunday, after a thoroughly enjoyable day at JordanCon, I sat down to do some writing. Now usually I have a problem where I try to make everything perfect before moving on. I spend a lot of time revising, not writing.  Well, I’m done with that. Sunday I sat down and started typing and didn’t stop until I had almost 7,000 words. That isn’t much overall, but it set down the bare bones for a couple chapters. And guess what? It worked better than planning.

So from here on out I will just write, no more days upon days of outlining. And I’m stating it in a blog so it must be true (serious face).

This method is not a surprise to me. I’ve known before that I was more of a discovery writer than an outliner. But for some reason I try to fight that and I waste a lot of time planning and brainstorming, when I should be letting my fingers do the thinking. If anyone out there is trying to become a writer, I would suggest that you first figure out whether you are a discovery writer or a outliner, and stick to what you do best.

Now if I could only follow my own advice.

Normally I would spend another week revising this section, polishing it, getting the prose perfect, the setting descriptions just right. This time I wont. I am going to move on, next time I will shoot for 10k words. That is my new goal: 10k on long days of writing, 5k+ on afternoon/evening sessions. At this pace I should have this draft done in June. That is another goal I am setting. Deadlines have never really been my thing, but I am going to start trying to set some.

Following these plans, within the next couple of months, I will have a very complete first half, and a skeleton of a second half. From there it wont be too difficult (fingers crossed, knock on wood) to flesh out the second part. At that point I will re-read the entire thing, adjust some wording and plot, and by the end of summer, probably sometime in August, have a very polished draft ready for anyone who wants to give it a read.

At least, that’s the idea.