This is SUPER useful. It might be the most useful blog post length thing on writing that I've ever read, kudos! I tend to find writing advice as either too general ("follow your heart," "explore the uncomfortable spaces," etc.) or too specific to be relevant to me. This strikes a very nice balance.
I love the idea of a writing journal and of post-its. The journal I might just incorporate into my daily routine. I already, on writing days, literally copy-paste the text into a word processor so I can count the words and make sure I'm hitting my writing goals. The post-its, I'll have to either do analogue or use an app to do digitally, but I love their ephemeral -- and yet extremely useful -- nature.
A very detailed question, did you use OCR or some software to copy the novel into your computer, or did you just literally type it, one word at a time? If the latter, did you feel a temptation to change things as you typed from longhand?
Thanks! I’m glad it’s helpful. It hadn’t occurred to me before you mentioned it, but I think there is a general lack of, hm, embodied and practical writing advice? There’s a lot of ‘follow your bliss out there’ and a lot of ‘here are eight rules for magic system coherence’ or ‘here are the nineteen types of scene transition,’ but the practical embodied process of manuscript creation doesn’t receive a lot of attention. Cartesian dualism screwing with us again.
(As for post-it equivalents, the comments feature in most writing programs should work for this—or you could enter the items into Omnifocus or some other to-do listing program. The useful points for me are the memory anchor, the ephemerality, and the /extremely loose/ structure.)
To your question: I typed up the whole manuscript by hand, one word at a time. And I absolutely change things as I type. I don’t go deep on the sentence level as I type—though I will sometimes cut a repeated word or clarify a phrase. I will, sometimes, cut grafs or sentences if I realize they’re repeating something that was established elsewhere, adjust or condense dialog if a better line suggests itself, etc. For the most part I try to keep going at the 100 wpm, because a manuscript takes a long time to type up, but the typing round is definitely the first revision pass. Between that and the general higher quality of the line-by-line first draft, I think manual drafting more than pays for itself in terms of throughput to shippable draft, but that’ll shift depending on a lot of personal variables.
That said, when I’m staring at 300 pages of manuscript, I do sometimes wish I had a typist!
Hi, and thanks as always for the post!
This is SUPER useful. It might be the most useful blog post length thing on writing that I've ever read, kudos! I tend to find writing advice as either too general ("follow your heart," "explore the uncomfortable spaces," etc.) or too specific to be relevant to me. This strikes a very nice balance.
I love the idea of a writing journal and of post-its. The journal I might just incorporate into my daily routine. I already, on writing days, literally copy-paste the text into a word processor so I can count the words and make sure I'm hitting my writing goals. The post-its, I'll have to either do analogue or use an app to do digitally, but I love their ephemeral -- and yet extremely useful -- nature.
A very detailed question, did you use OCR or some software to copy the novel into your computer, or did you just literally type it, one word at a time? If the latter, did you feel a temptation to change things as you typed from longhand?
Thanks! I’m glad it’s helpful. It hadn’t occurred to me before you mentioned it, but I think there is a general lack of, hm, embodied and practical writing advice? There’s a lot of ‘follow your bliss out there’ and a lot of ‘here are eight rules for magic system coherence’ or ‘here are the nineteen types of scene transition,’ but the practical embodied process of manuscript creation doesn’t receive a lot of attention. Cartesian dualism screwing with us again.
(As for post-it equivalents, the comments feature in most writing programs should work for this—or you could enter the items into Omnifocus or some other to-do listing program. The useful points for me are the memory anchor, the ephemerality, and the /extremely loose/ structure.)
To your question: I typed up the whole manuscript by hand, one word at a time. And I absolutely change things as I type. I don’t go deep on the sentence level as I type—though I will sometimes cut a repeated word or clarify a phrase. I will, sometimes, cut grafs or sentences if I realize they’re repeating something that was established elsewhere, adjust or condense dialog if a better line suggests itself, etc. For the most part I try to keep going at the 100 wpm, because a manuscript takes a long time to type up, but the typing round is definitely the first revision pass. Between that and the general higher quality of the line-by-line first draft, I think manual drafting more than pays for itself in terms of throughput to shippable draft, but that’ll shift depending on a lot of personal variables.
That said, when I’m staring at 300 pages of manuscript, I do sometimes wish I had a typist!