drafting

Writing Challenges: Focusing on One Project

What’s the hardest part of writing a novel in a month?

April is Camp NaNoWriMo – a variation on November’s “write a novel in a month” challenge. The month-long deadline presents many challenges: How will you make the time? Can you generate enough steam to do the work each day? Can you stick to the plan for a month?

For some writers, the biggest struggle happens before they start. In late March, a writer I know sent me the following question:

“I have two projects I am working on. It is actually stressing me knowing I might have to focus on just one. Any ideas?”

Facing the deadline, she had a hard time narrowing down her focus.

She’s not alone. I face a similar dilemma deciding which book idea to pursue, as publishing a book (for me) requires a singular focus bordering on the obsessive.

If your Muse sends you many ideas, selecting a single one to work on can be painful. It may feel like you’re giving up on the other ideas or shutting down creative impulses. Keeping your options open feels like a safe thing to do.

Who is more productive: the writer with ten works in progress or one published work? I vote for the published one.

Keeping your options open is one way to avoid the risk of commitment.

Maybe you love having multiple burners firing at once. If so, perhaps that’s how you should work much of the time. But to get something out into the world quickly and take advantage of the power of a deadline, you need to know when to narrow your focus.

This is true whether you’re working on short blog posts or multiple novels. Sometimes you have to choose one to move forward. You don’t actually abandon the others if you change your juggling technique.

The Art of Juggling

The Writer’s Process describes seven different phases of the writing process. Whether your personal process involves more or fewer steps, the act of getting written works into the world entails work beyond drafting, including research, outlining, incubation, and revision.

Having multiple projects in progress can make you more productive and creative:

You can choose the project that fits your current mood and inspiration.
Your brain may make connections across the different projects, cross-pollinating and feeding creative associations.

But here’s the key to successful juggling: Only have one project in the drafting phase at any time.

How a Single Focus Makes You Faster

Drafting is the most intense part of the work, involving the delicate collaboration of the Scribe and the Muse. It requires focused concentration, and you only have so much of that available in any given day. If you go back and forth between projects during that time, you’ll lose steam. Switching imposes costs.

This principle applies in the workplace as well. You may be involved in many projects. But in that rare, uninterrupted time you have for drafting each day, choose one thing to write rather than doing a few hundred words on each.

For a long-term project like writing a book, focusing your drafting attention has another benefit: you train your mind to work on that book even when you’re not actually writing.

Your subconscious processes will keep working on that idea as you go about your life. You’ll think about that work when you drive home, walk the dog, or doze off. That subconscious processing makes you more productive when next you sit down to draft.

The Power of Incubation

You don’t have to abandon those other projects. Simply tell yourself that they are in different phases: research, revision, or incubation.

Projects that are incubating are not forgotten. You can remind yourself of their existence, making them available to the Muse when you’re doing other things. Ponder them, gather ideas, and let them simmer. If ideas pop up, open a file and write them down.

Productive writers are always incubating fresh ideas.

When you’re done with the intense drafting,you’ll be primed to start working on another project.

Have a Writing Challenge of Your Own?

Have a writing challenge of your own? Send it to me by email, in the comments, or using the Contact form.

Find insight on scheduling work and juggling different projects in The Writer’s Process.
Watch the writing challenge videos.

Two Reasons Not to Revise As You Draft

You’ve heard many versions of this advice before:

Embrace the ugly first draft. Ann Handley, Everybody Writes
Write with the door closed, revise with the door open. Stephen King, On Writing
Turn off the inner critic and be fearless. Me, The Writer’s Process

No matter how it’s phrased, the advice is sound. Resist the temptation to revise and polish your words while you write the first draft. Revision and drafting use different cognitive systems, and they can get in each others’ way.

Revising while drafting can shut down creative input and flow.

Using the Muse and Scribe analogy, if you try to revise and wordsmith as you set down the first draft, you’re giving the steering wheel to the Scribe. The Muse is likely to take off and do something else altogether.

But cognitive systems aren’t a compelling argument for many people. So, this post is for anyone who really likes to polish and choose every word as they draft, or who otherwise thinks they can combine drafting and revision and end up with a good first draft. You’re taking a big risk.

A Disclaimer

Can you truly separate revision from drafting? Not entirely.

Drafting and revision are the yin/yang of writing.

No matter how much you try to delineate them, a little bit of each happens in the other.

For example, you’ll think of a stronger verb as soon as you finish a sentence, or rephrase something as you draft. It happens. Likewise, when you’re in the revision phase, you may discover that you need to write a transition or come up with a new segment.

Few of us can completely separate these two phases unless we hand over the revision process to someone else entirely.

But once you open the door to revision while drafting, it can be difficult to close it. It’s so tempting to imagine that you’re capable of spinning out brilliant stuff at the first pass.

Most of us aren’t.

If you insist on revising and polishing while you write, you risk either wasting your time (stealing time from other writing) or compromising the quality of the finished work.

Wasted Time

Perhaps you prefer to polish and revise as you write. You may believe that you spend less time by doing it at once than by saving revision for a separate process..

That may work for something short, like a blog post. But what about a longer work with structure and linear flow, such as a paper, dissertation, or book?

The first step of the revision process should be reading through from start to finish and asking the big questions about order and flow. Even if you worked from an outline when drafting, the act of writing often reveals issues you were not aware of when starting.

If you’ve written a nonfiction book, when revising you should confirm the following:

Is the information presented in the right order, at appropriate depth for my target audience?
Have I left something out?
Does the text include unnecessary details or digressions?

You cannot always answer these questions until you have a little distance from the rough, first draft. If you let the work sit for a day or so and then return, you may discover that you need to pare down some areas, flesh out others, move sections around, and perhaps cut something altogether. A developmental editor may help you with this phase of your book.

Only after answering those questions should you start fine-tuning sentence constructions, choosing stronger verbs, and otherwise polishing and refining the prose.

What happens if you revised and polished the words while writing the first draft? That work is extraneous, and may be left on the cutting room floor.

Revising while drafting is like choosing the curtains before you build the house.

Compromising Quality

Suppose that multiple initial reviewers tell you that your book or research paper is best served by cutting out a section. But you have spent hours during the drafting phase polishing and fine-tuning the prose. You’ve come up with several clever, tweetable sayings based on that ontent.

If you revise and polish as you draft, you risk becoming so attached to the sheer artistry of your prose that you cannot bear to cut it out. As a result, you leave in content that does not serve the reader.

If you cut the section (as you probably should), you essentially lose all of that work, in which you have invested time, effort, and belief.

It’s hard to cut text that you have polished with care.

This is a variation on the Ikea Effect, in which we overvalue things we have helped to create. Cutting that section feels like a personal loss, and you are less likely to do it.

So there you go – two more good reasons to just write the ugly first draft and then get down to the business of revision!

Why Writing is Like Baking Bread

Have you ever baked a loaf of bread, or witnessed a masterful baker at work? Through a mysterious process of beating, kneading, waiting, and baking, an unappealing, gluey mass of dough transforms into fragrant and delectable food. Freshly baked bread is one of the wonders of the civilized world.

Baking bread is eerily similar to the process of writing.

Bread making is a mystical combination of recipe and technique, mastery and luck. The result depends on factors you cannot see, such as microbial yeast organisms that coax the dough into rising and unseen protein molecules that create structure and “crumb.” The temperature of the room, conditions of the oven, gluten content of the flour, and the elevation above sea level all affect the results.

Despite these uncertainties, bakers manage to replicate their successes. They follow other bakers’ recipes or develop their own and master techniques for kneading, shaping, and baking the loaves they love best.

Bread recipes vary widely based on the flour used, the amount of time available, and the type of loaf you’re trying to create. Most share a basic structure, which looks like this:

Assemble the ingredients
Activate the yeast (or feed a sourdough starter)
Beat and knead the dough
Let it rise in the right conditions so the yeast does its magic
Knead it a second time and shape it into loaves
Let it rise yet again (the final proof)
Bake, figuring out exactly when to remove the bread from the oven

(There’s another step—cooling—but who does that when there’s homemade bread in the kitchen?)

The process is rather long and ambiguous. From time to time, you go about your life, letting the bread work without you. Then you come back to punch and knead it, working hard. Then walk away again. And you hope it all turns out well in the end.

That sounds a bit like writing.

A Writing Recipe

Writing is much more than simply putting words on paper. The work begins when you start thinking about the project, and ends when you’re done revising and ready to publish. If you were to create a recipe for writing, from start to finish, it might look like this:

Research. Gather the ingredients. For nonfiction works, you may delve deeply into external research. Fiction may require more introspection and exploration. The research phase often continues even as you are drafting, but at some point you have enough material to move on.
Let the ideas incubate. Your brain is like the yeast organisms in bread dough, breathing life into the raw materials you’ve accumulated. Give it a chance to work.
Structure the piece. Read through your notes and assemble a rough outline or other structure for your draft.
Assemble the first draft. Dig in and create the first draft. You may have an unattractive mess when you’re done, but you’ll be on the path to something better.
Rest before revision. Just as you would leave the bread dough alone to rise, let the first draft sit so you can get distance. “Not-writing” is an important stage of the process. Thoughts, phrases, different perspectives, and inspiration often strike as the draft rests.
Revise and proofread. Revision is like the second kneading phase in bread making—vital to the quality of the result. You’ll wrestle with the piece from different angles, shaping it into its final form. A final proofreading is the finishing touch.
Publish. Decide when it’s time to publish. Impatient as you may be for the final product, you don’t want to put your work out in the world half baked.

Why Bother with a Recipe?

Separating out the distinct steps of the process like this has significant benefits.

Time management: It’s easier to set reasonable deadlines and juggle concurrent projects when you understand and identify the different phases of the process.

Picking the right environment: Most of us need quiet surroundings, without interruption, to write the first draft. Research or revision can take place in open office environments or while riding on a train. And incubation often happens away from the desk altogether, while our minds can wander. When you isolate the steps of the writing process, you can align your surroundings with the work at hand.

Creativity: You’ll notice that the recipe outlined above has at least two periods of rest or incubation. Creative insight arrives on its own time, often when your brain isn’t completely focused on the task at hand. Schedule time for your inner Muse to process your thoughts, and you may be surprised by the insights that appear.

[This recipe is part of the book The Writer’s Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear]

Kneading image: Dreamy Pixel on Stocksnap.io.

Bread image: Mike Keanneally on Stocksnap.io