S01E22: When processes are practiced

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda FINALLY talk about their writing process... and see how different they really are!

Next week Sam and Matilda will be back on track with the next theme Writing Dreams vs Reality.

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: The Deathless - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deathless-Frances-June/dp/B0915V5L6F

Most recent book: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/fVXwW3j

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)

Mentioned on the show:

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00340ESIS/ Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B078VWDNKT Jami Gold beat sheets: https://jamigold.com/for-writers/worksheets-for-writers/ Shonda Rhimes Masterclass: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/shonda-rhimes-teaches-writing-for-television Train journey sprint video: https://youtu.be/NF4qYm3U6Q4?si=Ydsit_OEPiwfqmk5Maggie Stiefvater seminar: https://maggiestiefvater.com/seminar/

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books About Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello, and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Matilda Swift here with my co-host, Samantha Cummings, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us, and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our mastery through missteps journey.

Each week, we cover a topic to help along the way.

This week's topic is going to be writing processes.

And as we're recording this one in advance, so it'll post while Sam's on holiday, we're not doing wins and whinge of the week.

Instead, let's look back over the past couple of months and see what stands out at distance as a win or a whinge.

Sam, what do you have?

Oh, I think that if I'm just gonna do a quick year's recap of a win and whinge, my win is that I feel like I have come on like 100% in almost every way, which is a huge win.

I feel like this podcast and what we're doing with our meetups and everything has revolutionized my life as a writer.

I feel like I'm taking myself so much more seriously as a writer.

And I don't feel like a secret writer anymore.

I feel like last year, even up to last year, I felt like in my life, I still felt like a secret writer.

Not everyone knew that that's what I did, despite the fact that's all I talk about on social media.

But now it's like everyone knows and they know that I'm serious.

And they know that I'm doing this stuff.

So I'm not even gonna have a win.

I'm just gonna say that's my big win is that I feel like I write it.

I mean, I think that's definitely a win for me too.

It really feels like so much has changed.

I think we first met up probably a month ago, sorry, six months ago for our first meetup before we started recording the podcast.

And it just feels like huge amounts of change in that time.

And obviously part of that coincides with the fact that we kind of started meeting at the start of a process where I'm trying to make changes.

But it does feel really nice to reflect back over time and just be able to really understand that so much has changed, both in me personally and my mindset, but also in my writing and self-publishing.

And yeah, part of it is maybe being more public, maybe more confident about being able to ask questions because I'm asking it for this purpose, rather than, I don't know, rather than taking people's time just for my own questions of not being sure about things.

So it feels, yeah, like we've made big strides in feeling legitimate and feeling big, which feels great.

My other win is the bookbob feature deal I had in the last six months, which does sort of feel connected.

Even though there's no way that this mastermind has influenced that, it sort of feels like I didn't get it until I was sort of more big and legitimate somehow.

And obviously part of that is I was just applying more regularly because I was taking myself more seriously.

But it does feel like everything is feeding into each other and building and building, which is fantastic.

I would say my winch is...

I am going to have a winch.

My winch is that there's still so much to do.

There's still so much more on the plate.

And in fact, everything I do opens up like five more things to do and to learn how to do.

So it's sort of a winch.

But in a productive way.

Yes, I agree.

Every task turns into five more tasks, turns into five more tasks.

It is a hydra.

It's insane, really, when you think about it.

And you couldn't ever explain it to anybody who wasn't in the biz.

People just think, well, you put a book out and tell people about it.

And everyone will buy it, so much.

I think I mentioned recently, my dad's big suggestion for how to promote myself.

Sorry, I think you've overlapped there.

My dad's big suggestion recently was like, oh, why don't you try just making a movie for one of your books?

Like, then maybe people would read them more.

I think people, everyday people's understanding of self-publishing, and publishing in general, is just so far away from the reality of it.

In a good way, right?

Like in a way that I think people have a lot of faith.

So, I was talking to my dad about, I want to prepare some foods that I'm going to make for one of my next book launches.

I want to kind of celebrate it more.

So, I want to make like foods on the theme of the book, and like do it with friends and post on social media in a fun way.

I was like, yeah, when the book launches, I'm going to have this sort of picnic.

And he was helping me prepare food for it.

And he was saying, oh gosh, something's quite fiddly.

Like, how many people are coming to your book launch?

And I was like, are you envisioning a book launch of thousands of people that I am making sandwiches for coming to where I live?

Like that is, anyone in the business is like, that is so far beyond the realms of what anyone would ever imagine.

And it was like my dad's first thought.

I was just like, yeah, so it is miles away.

So really nice to have you to talk to about that and not have someone who is, you know, the conversation is not relatable.

Talking about relatable, let's segue into the topic of the week, which should be something that everybody listening is going to be able to relate to.

And that is writing processes.

So what is your writing process and how has it developed over the time you've been self publishing?

So, I mentioned in my last podcast and the last podcast that everything since I started self publishing has been in a state of flux, both in the world.

There have been protests in Hong Kong that I lived through.

There has been a pandemic and also my personal life, or some of it interconnected.

So I moved countries during the pandemic, I bought a house.

So just constant big life changes and world changes that have really made me struggle to not even put a process in place, but to really evaluate a process.

Because oftentimes things have felt like I put them in place sensibly and they haven't worked.

And it's been hard to figure out, is that because the world is on fire, or is it because this isn't the process for me, or is it because I'm not pushing myself hard enough?

So that's what's kind of been tricky.

I have got a process now, and I think I'm really happy with my overall kind of schedule level process.

So the way that I overlap parts of my writing, editing, but I'm really not happy with the sitting down to write part.

So I maybe talk about those two parts separately.

So my overall big schedule process, when I first started, I would write a book and I would write, and in fact, I had critique groups that I went to, and I went to a group, we met about monthly, but I was kind of writing relatively slowly.

So I would often take in sequential chapters and sections and have them critique it and come back and go back and forth on it.

And it felt like I was sort of writing a book all the way through, and then I'd got the book finished and then go and edit it.

And the editing process, I wasn't, I was panting at the time, so the editing process was very much like going back and figuring out where something felt slow, where something felt like it was missing things.

And all that time, because I was trying to kind of professionalise and make things better, I was reading various books about craft and process, and I read Save the Cat, and maybe also Save the Cat writes a novel at the same time.

And if anyone hasn't read those, obviously fantastic.

You can find plenty of things online about them, but I do think Save the Cat, Save the Cat writes a novel were the most useful books for me to read towards the start of my writing or self-publishing journey.

Not necessarily writing, because I think they are definitely books for people who want to be writing commercially.

So I'm just making a note to add those to the show notes.

So when I read those, I'm kind of in tandem with trying to make, to do my editing process and figure that out.

I read, actually I was sort of reinventing the wheel when I was editing, and that where I, part of where I thought it was too slow, it was out of sync with the kind of the beat sheets that you can get from Save the Cat and from various websites that are, you know, taking the ideas of Save the Cat.

So there's quite a good Cozy Mystery beat sheet, for example, by, I think it's Jamie Gold, that is beat sheets for a mystery.

So again, I'll just make a note of that and share that if anyone's interested.

I know a lot of people use Jamie's beat sheets.

So when I was looking at the beat sheets compared to my book, all the places where I thought it was too slow, it was where it had too much word count compared to the beat sheets.

All the places where I thought, oh, this feels a bit thin, is because it should have had like three extra chapters according to the beat sheet.

So I was like, oh, I've just reinvented the wheel and it took me ages to edit the first book and was an absolute waste of time because had I thought about beforehand, I would have just followed the beat sheet markers.

And that's what I do now.

So that is a big help in terms of reducing waste.

And I do sometimes when I'm writing a book, I will often have parts where I'm knowingly writing too much.

I will have a part where I know the midpoint, for example, should be falling at about page whatever, it's 160, let's say 125.

So it should be falling a bit before 125 according to my document outline or document layout.

But it is getting past that, getting to 140.

I'm thinking, I'm not the midpoint yet, but that's fine thinking back and know where I should edit it.

So it really helps to have that confidence of saying, I'm knowingly over my word count just because I wanted to kind of explore a bit more in these points and I know where I'll take it out.

So I feel really confident in that.

And that kind of helps me know where I can be a bit freer.

So now I plan nothing to start.

I will just have ideas and fun and discover and explore and write the first 10,000 words.

And whoever gets killed, gets killed.

That is up to the writing muses.

Someone gets killed in the book.

Whoever it turns out to be most exciting and interesting to me on the day that I'm writing the murder scene.

And I like things being like a surprise to a writer because I think it then feels surprising to the reader.

So first 10,000 words, I will put in any character that comes to me that feels fun, that is exciting, that fits in with the theme.

I will have planned the kind of central characters and who they are and what their backgrounds are.

But I will try and let side characters just come as much as they can.

And then the murder happens.

I've never got any idea who did it or why.

That is irrelevant because that happens at the end of the book.

So wild news at the beginning.

And the first 10,000 words kind of gets you past the murder and to the point of the call to action.

So it should have then hit the stage where it is impacting the protagonist's life.

So the murder is not the call to action, which I used to think it was.

And every time I've written a book in the past, I've had to really remind myself like, this is not a call to action because police are there to solve murders.

You don't have to solve it.

If I had to go for the murder, I would not solve it.

I would call the police.

That would not be a call to action in my life.

So having that BTS really helped me make sure that I am not making the call to action the murder because you can get halfway through that book and realise I have made a mistake.

I have done that.

So anyway, so I write the first 10,000 words, no planning, no thinking about it, just exploring.

Then I will leave it and go away, ideally to be doing something else on another book.

So either editing another book, writing the middle section of another book, whatever it is.

But I will have an overlap.

Another book will be in person and read the 10,000 words when they're sitting there.

Then I will come back and I will continue with the story and I'll go back to the beginning and I'll edit a move and change things around.

If I'm mid-series, I will know quite well that the beginning will suit.

I'll often change the first couple of chapters just to give it more life and more focus once I've kind of got the book going.

But in a brand new series, I will quite often revise the whole 10,000 words and that's fine because I've got a better idea of the series once I've let it rest for a bit.

But once I've got the 10,000 words kind of redone, then I will go on and I will write what Sophie Hanna, the mystery writer, calls a gnocchi draft because it's sort of part like pasta and part potato, it's sort of a bit of both.

So that really suits my writing style and it's like a very, very detailed plan.

It's a plan often with dialogue in it or little scenes described and character perspectives in there.

But somebody was talking about something the other day that made me realize I do this as well.

I write my plan in present tense, even though my book is in past tense.

And the person I was talking or listening to talking in the Cozy Mysteries Clubhouse was saying she writes her sort of planned version in first person, but her book is in third person or something like that.

That is really, really helpful because it stops you seeing it as writing.

You're sort of able to go a bit faster with it because you're not having to be precious about it because it's not the writing.

It is planned, but you can then also start to slip into bits of description, bits of reaction, and it feels like you can then just go and change the tense a bit later.

So then I'll do the whole book like that.

I might leave the last like quarter quite sketchy because I often still don't know who the murderer is.

It is somewhat irrelevant because I like to discover it.

I like to discover it as I'm going, as the reader does.

And I would say maybe half my books, I've changed the murderer.

Even if I knew who it was when I was heading towards it, I've changed the murderer right when I got there.

Because you should be setting up where a mystery could be many, many people.

Because and also I'm going to edit it so I can go back and make it much clearer.

It was that person all along.

And I like to leave the flexibility because it allows you to sort of force yourself to make it believable.

Whereas if you have planned, it's going to be this person.

You're stuck with that.

So you can write whatever you want to lead up to it.

And you sort of you know that it's that killer.

So you don't have to persuade anybody.

Whereas I like to try to persuade myself that it's going to be that person, it's going to be that person.

Sometimes I get there and it's not that person because I haven't persuaded myself.

I was like, oh, no, extra layer.

It's their mom secretly pulling strings behind the scenes.

So yes, that has really helped.

It was like trying different things.

I've done a lot of, as you can probably tell, like listening to different people talk about their processes and figuring out, oh, that rings a bell for me.

I think what has surprised me is things like the gnocchi draft that Sophie had talked about.

I thought was me being lazy and procrastinating because I set myself word count goals every day and I thought one of the ways I'm cheating to meet it is writing these very detailed plans and then she was saying, like, this is the best way I found to write.

I was like, oh, that actually is the best way I found to write.

Why am I saying it's like cheating?

It is helping me to write these very detailed plans and then go back and write over it.

So yeah, so that's where I'm at now.

And I used to do, back when I wrote the book all the way through and then I took a break and I edited it, I took a break and edited it.

I used to do maybe four drafts, maybe more, but now because it was kind of an overlapping method, well, I'll do the first 10,000, go away, come back and restart the first 10,000 and then plan and then restart and write, I'm sort of doing three drafts simultaneously.

So I in fact only do two, what people call two drafts, but obviously my first draft is sort of three drafts together.

So I'll do one draft from start to finish that includes as many stages.

Then I will leave it.

And ideally in that leaving time, again, I'll be writing the beginning of another book or editing another book, doing something else on a different book.

And then I will do what I think many people think is a very fast edit, but I really like with a mystery to hold everything in my head at once.

I have a lot of subplots, a lot of tiny links and like suggestions of people.

So I have to edit very fast to hold all in my head all at once so that I can make sure all the strands tie back together.

So I will just spend, I'll spend like three solid days reading intensely and making a lot of notes so that I can see what the places are slow and I'll be very mean to myself and I'll write notes like boring, dull, like confusing, don't understand, because future me has to deal with that.

But future me is anyway in a couple of days, which is quite annoying.

So future me then I have to go through and actually make all the edits, but go as fast as possible.

And in an ideal world, if a book is mid series, so it's, you know, a world I pretty well, so I haven't hopefully made any massive mistakes.

It only takes me a couple of weeks, and I spend a lot of time in it in those weeks.

I'm really like, don't talk to anybody, don't do anything else.

I'm just in that zone, keeping everything in my head.

And then at the end of it, and then it goes to an editor, I'll do a proofread after that as well.

So there are other checks, but I would say that's the end of my actual editing process in terms of the writing.

And yeah, that's the end of my like, scheduled editing.

I said there's a lot of overlap of different stages.

So I would say one stage is the first 10,000, one stage is the writing, one stage is the editing.

So I've got three stages.

I try to overlap those with other things.

So if I'm doing 10,001, I'll take a break of a couple of weeks and maybe do the edit of another book.

Then I'll come back to the main part of the book on book one.

Then I'll go away and I'll do the first 10,000 different book.

So I really try to interweave those.

It depends on where I'm at with my series and where I'm at with my publication schedule, but that is my ideal world.

And I'll talk a little bit about my day-to-day writing process in a minute, but how about you tell us a bit about your overall schedule process.

Oh, okay.

So I used to be a pantser and I only ever pantsed.

Because I have got such a, and I say this and it sounds like I'm kind of bragging, but it can be quite detrimental.

I've got a very active imagination and I can really get lost in my own mind.

So I can really imagine a whole complete story very quickly.

My brain is constantly making up stories.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this in the podcast, but my dreams are as vivid as if I was living another life.

And I sometimes do think that I am going to places and living lives.

I've had dreams where they took place over years, and I wake up and think that that's insane.

So my brain is just very good at creating lots of very complex storylines.

So, I always pantsed because I always instantly knew what the story was.

But I took a writing course.

It was actually a masterclass on the masterclass website with Shonda Rhimes, who is Grey's Anatomy creator.

And I took her writing class, but it was about writing TV shows because I love the idea of writing for TV.

But I actually learnt so much about storytelling and series creation and character arcs and beat sheets just from that course.

I find it very interesting to watch or listen to somebody talking about it rather than reading about it because I don't learn very well from reading.

So, once I did that course and I learnt about beat sheets and how she created her stories, I originally did it because I was writing a TV show, so I wrote a TV show using her method and realised this is the best thing in the world.

And then applied it to writing books and my life was changed.

So now I am a complete planner.

I always start with a beat sheet now and write all my points down.

And I am very different to you.

I actually love the fact that you write the first 10,000 words and you have this playful creation like jumping into a new world and trying to find the best way into it.

I love that.

And I actually really would love to do that for the next book that I write because I think that sounds like such a fun process to have.

So, I'm going to try and do that for the next book that I write, but for like what I do right now, I will write a book all in one go.

My first draft process is very fast.

I can write a first draft in a month, but I tend to try and spread it over two months.

And once the first draft has been written, I will put it away and generally start working on something else.

I have a backlog of books, let me tell you that for free.

So before I started publishing, I was just writing books and putting them on a shelf.

And so I probably have 15, no, 10 books, let's say 10 books, just on a backlog.

And I'm not publishing them all, like that is that they're not all going to see the light of day.

But I've had a lot of practice of just writing and leaving stories to rest.

I'm not doing that going forward, because I really want to be writing and editing and publishing with a lot more direction.

But, yeah, I tend to leave my first drafts on the shelf for a couple of months, because I just like to try and forget the story exists.

So when I come back to it, I can read it and kind of completely forget about the writing process, which is another wondrous thing that my brain does is once I've put a book down for a couple of months, when I go back to read it, I have no recollection of writing it, and we'll read it and literally have no memory of ever writing the words ever.

I think that is a real gift because I also have that and it is so useful when you come to edit because you can read it and you can think, when I'm in the process of writing it, I feel like I'm very insensitive to the pace.

I'm somewhat sensitive, but I'm not as sensitive as a reader would be.

And when I come back and edit it, I'm like, this is boring.

This whole chapter is rubbish.

Delete.

I don't care.

Like, I'm not precious about it.

And I think the less precious you can be about your writing, the better.

It is such a gift to be able to forget that it belongs to you and to forget it's your book.

Because the less precious you can be about it, the better your book gets.

I love being able to be like, this whole chapter that I know, in the back of my mind, I spent a week on, delete.

It's all useful.

I have dragged characters off the page by their hair.

You're not in this anymore.

Delete them from the whole thing.

I have done that a couple of times.

Yeah, and I love that I do think that's a real talent to be able to go back and think, I don't know who wrote this, but this bit's awful, but also really recognize when there was good stuff, which I think I really...

I don't think I'm like the best writer in the world, but I love...

I do love some of the stuff that I write and I like to be able to read it and be like, wow, good for me.

So yeah, once I've picked it back up to edit, my editing is probably not the best.

I would say that in the past, I haven't been very nice to Future Sam, and I have written very rough drafts and just throwing caution to the wind and when Future Sam picks it up, she curses past Sam something wrong because there is just some absolute atrocities that go on in the writing process.

I don't do it as much anymore, but definitely some of my older books, I have been a horrendous writer.

Now it is a lot better.

My editing tends to be very re-writey.

I do like that.

I do like that part of the process.

So once I've gone through and read and made notes, I re-beat sheet.

So I redo the beat sheet.

Do you do it without any reference to the original?

Yes.

No, I do it with reference to the original, but once I read through the book or the first draft, I can completely see what the actual story is.

So I do tend to overwrite because I know that I like to explore everything that comes into...

Even though I do do beat sheets on my original draft, sometimes my beat sheets change whilst I'm writing it and I have to do quick edits because my imagination runs wild and things happen that I didn't think were going to happen.

So, yeah, when I'm editing, I re-beat sheets.

It's based on the story, but it's just restructured.

Some things get taken out and some scenes get put in to solve the pacing of the story.

And then my edit tends to be an edit slash rewrite.

And that is my slowest process because it is a rewrite.

And I would love to write cleaner first drafts so that my edit is quicker.

And I'm hoping that the next book that I write, that will be the case because I'm aware of this.

I'm aware I do this now.

So I wasn't really aware of it until I started looking at everything that I'm doing.

I've become very aware of all of my shortcomings of writing.

But yeah, I'll edit and rewrite and then once I've done that, which can take a few months, go and read back through again immediately and catch and tweak things that need tweaking.

And then it's done and then everything that happens after happens after.

So it's kind of my editing is my longest process.

And I feel like I would prefer if it was flipped, I would prefer to take longer writing and my editing to be a little bit different.

I wrote myself some notes here.

What else do I want to say?

That was basically it.

I would love to do-

I have missed that one bit of mine actually.

I was going to say one amazing thing that I have changed is I no longer write the last few chapters in my first draft.

Because I kept finding that I was completely changing them.

So I do do quite a deep rewrite like when I'm editing.

If you look at the pages, because it's double spaced, every line has got something written on it.

And often it is completely rewriting the whole chapter, which feels fine to me and feels very comfortable.

And it sort of feels like I'm basically writing a book in two weeks.

Well, I can't do that first time around, but I need that original draft to go from.

But I was consistently rewriting the last couple of chapters wholesale, because I had often changed so much leading up to there.

So I now just don't write the last couple of chapters.

And it moves further and further back every book at the moment.

So I stopped writing the epilogue.

Very occasionally I write the epilogue actually quite close to the beginning, because the epilogue is very separate.

In my books, it's always two or three weeks later.

It doesn't necessarily depend so much on what's happened in the rest of the book.

It is the sort of lifestyle consequences.

But it started with not really writing the epilogue.

Then it was not writing the last chapter.

The last book I wrote, I think I missed the last like three in the epilogue.

And when I came to edit it, I really kicked myself because I said, oh, I forgot there was just this much to write, because three chapters is thousands of words.

And I had not budgeted enough time to do it.

Or I not much enough time to feel comfortable doing it.

So I think I want to give myself like a maximum number of chapters I'm going to not write.

And I'm going to say it's probably three and maybe add a bit more time to my editing, just so that I have more time to do that.

Because I do think it is a time saver not writing those, because it's always a waste of time to write them in the first draft for me, because I edit them so heavily.

And by the time I'm doing my edits, I don't need that first draft for the last part, because I've done so much work on the beginning part.

Then I'm like, okay, now I know what the ending is.

I'll go and write that.

So that's been a big, big change for me and a good place to stop wasting time.

It's funny because the ending is always so cemented in my mind when I'm writing, that that's what I'm writing towards.

Like I always envision these huge endings.

Like I know exactly how every book ends, and I'm just like clawing my way there as I'm writing.

So that's a really fun thing to learn.

I really like what you...

You've shown me your document for this, and I have done this when I was writing a short story, is you have your beat sheets include word counts.

I don't do that.

So I'm very, very naughty because I love to overwrite.

So I tend to just write as much as I want, and I don't think about word count until I start editing.

That is a place where I just found I was really wasting time.

Yeah, 100%.

I'm definitely wasting time there.

I think for in the future, like I already know I'm gonna be writing a book in November, I completely want to change my mindset and write the cleanest first draft I can.

And that is definitely going to include using word counts in my beat sheet.

I love that.

And when you told me that, because I've never even thought about it before, because I'm just such a chaos monster.

I just...

I'm basically the Tasmanian devil at a laptop.

I'm just like, just going nuts.

When I wrote a short story using that method, it was so helpful.

I've never been good at writing short stories, and yet having word counts in my document for the plan, made the short story just like poured out of me.

And I've never been able to do that before.

So 100% love that.

I think, and that's what Jamie Gold's beat sheet has.

I think the big benefit for me is, and I think really for every author, there are parts that everyone is worse at.

So I am very bad at the part that's called the debate.

So the part where the character has had a call to action and they're deciding whether to actually do, like change their lives.

Because I am a very decisive person.

If I, I would decide that in two minutes.

If I was gonna solve murder, I'd be like, I'd be looking at the body, I'd be like, hmm, yeah, all right, I'm solving that.

And then just do it.

And I would never question myself.

And I think then when I knew I had to write a debate section, so I was looking at a beach seat, like the content of it, I literally had a character really take the debate too seriously and spend like one chapter thinking about the pros and what, not literally like pros and cons, but like really focusing on the, oh, I should do it for this reason.

And the cons, I shouldn't do this reason.

The debate section of the book is enormous.

Like just word count wise, the decision to take on the call to action is huge for me, for someone who's very decisive.

And I really had to think about, okay, you cannot just make it someone literally sort of having a debate.

They cannot go straight on.

So how will those, and I think for me, my word count is something like six chapters.

How would six chapters worth of someone doing that play out in like a less straightforward, like in a way that it wouldn't look to the reader like, here is a character having a debate.

And that is incredibly helpful for me.

So that is where word counts are a big, big help.

It helps you think more sensibly about the parts that you're weaker at.

And I know a lot of people struggle with like, what they call the muddy middle of a book.

And to have a sense of like where you should be word count wise at different points is a big help, I think.

Yeah.

Oh, a hundred percent.

So do you have any plans in the next quarter or in the next year that to maybe spend some time, I don't know, not just thinking about doing something different, but do you have any plans to actually do different stuff?

Like to try a different process?

Yeah, I think it's not.

So like I was saying, I've got kind of two ways of thinking about this.

So I've got the big scale like schedule process, and I think that works well for me having that like 10,000, then take a break to a different section of a different book, maybe edit a different book, then come into the whole book.

I think that process works really well for me.

The part that is not working well for me is the like bum in seat time, the sitting down to be the writing time.

And so my actual day to day writing process is I, and it comes from, I used to work, when I worked in Hong Kong, I used to work at a company that started quite late, so we would work from 10 in the morning.

And then you finish work quite late.

So actually I started writing before work, which I hadn't ever done before because, you know, mornings in the UK can be quite dark.

I had never been inspired to think, I'll get up pretty early and write.

Whereas like getting to Starbucks, the Starbucks next to my office, eight in the morning to have a nice coffee and to write in lovely air conditioning was a treat.

It's using the best parts of your brain.

It is using your most awake self.

It felt like a great use of my time.

And then when I moved back to the UK, I in fact moved back with the intention of just coming on holiday and I continued doing it.

So I was working at one in the morning.

So I was getting up at 11 p.m.

to write, which was insane, did not work at all.

And it was a pandemic crisis.

But then when I moved my schedule to actually say, I'm living in the UK now, I also have to work slightly earlier to have enough overlap with Hong Kong to make my job effective.

So during summer, because they don't have daylight savings time, during summer I start work at nine, in winter I start work at eight.

But because it's so effective for me, working for two hours before, writing for two hours before work, I actually get up at five a.m.

in winter to write, which whenever I tell people that, they gasp in horror, and it is horrifying.

But I have, if you can see behind me, like a daylight lamp, like a sunlight lamp.

I have a light alarm clock that slowly wakes me up, likewise.

And I'm a very good sleeper.

I think that's a big benefit.

So like a big reason I can do that is, I am a very reliable sleeper.

If I want to wake up at five, I go to bed at 10.

And I can go to bed at five to 10 and be asleep at 10.

So that is a real like privilege I have that allows me to do that.

I would not say early morning writing is for everybody, but it works for me.

I also have one evening a week when I write in like a sort of social group.

And that is very helpful because it reminds me always that I can write in the evening, even though I end the day and I think, oh, my brain is so tired.

I have had so many important thoughts today.

I cannot possibly write anymore.

Not true.

I could write plenty more.

So I have set schedules when I write.

And I am definitely a person who, their tasks fill the time they have.

So if I say, I'm going to write for two hours, and I set myself a word goal during the week, I write a thousand words before work, and I then at the weekends will write 3000 words a day for two days, ideally, if I need to split it over three, I can.

But I think that I write in the same way that I do my day job.

Like I just have computer time.

I have like bum and zee time, so like I'm here for two hours.

A thousand words is actually not a lot to type.

It's a lot to think about.

So I spend a lot of time just dawdling and procrastinating.

And I have a hard time figuring out what that is useful because I love in my books, having a lot of like interesting research.

And I love being able to kind of make a reference or think of reference and then go and explore it a bit more and figure out how it's going to connect to other things in the book or how I can make it go deeper.

And when I say things, I mean things like, I love putting things in about like traditional English myths or I absolutely love like weird celebrations.

So around here, we have a thing called the Pace Egg, which is like a centuries old play that is on an Easter that is absolute nonsense.

And during the day, they perform it five times and between it, they have to drink and they just get drunker and drunker.

And this is a tradition, it's heritage.

And there are all sorts of set lines to it and you have to buy things to take with you, a bit like rock and horror, you have to buy a bunch of a packet of licorice, all sorts, because someone asked the doctor, oh, what sort of ailments do you treat?

And he says, all sorts, and everyone in the crowd throws all sorts.

And it's in the town square and it's sunny and it's Easter.

And it's like, I love things like that.

So as soon as I learned about something like that, and I think I'm gonna put it in this book, then I start researching.

And I do it in my writing time.

And I do it as a way to push my deadline.

And I don't like the way I do it.

I would rather be more deliberate and say, because I know that I work well writing wise in very short sprints.

But to an extent to me, that feels a little bit like cheating, because I could write 250 words in a matter of minutes.

And a thousand words is just four of that.

So I sometimes feel like it would be cheating to write so quickly.

It must be rubbish.

And that's a mindset issue, is like, I would think it must be rubbish.

But what I would rather do is like have my own like Pomodoro where I say, okay, I'm gonna write for five minutes, and I will write a couple of hundred words at that time.

Then I'm gonna research for 10 minutes, then I'm gonna write for five minutes.

And I just don't, I just do slogging away at the computer time, because that's what you do in your day job.

You don't need a day job.

You take a dance break over five minutes, which might help, but you think someone's paying me for this, they're paying me to be at the screen.

I've got presenteeism in my writing, and I do this at the weekend even worse, because I actually find it quite easy to write 2,000 words in a day.

I find it a real strain to write 3,000 words.

So if I've got a day of writing at the weekend, it's maybe a 12 hour day, and I'm slogging through it, and it's the worst, I'm doing it to myself, and I know I am.

So I really, really wanna work on that this year.

Make my time at the computer more productive, feel more fun, take advantage of my skills more, and not feel like those are cheating, and get more words down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, yeah, that's very interesting.

I also, next Easter, can I come to your town?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes.

That sounds very fun.

I like what you talk about with the sprints.

I actually only discovered sprint writing for last year's NaNoWriMo.

I've never done it before.

So prior to that, every writing session I had, I would get home from work, because I can't do morning writing.

Unfortunately, my brain does not start until at least half nine, when I've had my first coffee.

Anything before that, I'm not really a human being.

I'm just a human-shaped fog thing.

It's like, it's just, I just can't do it.

I'm a nighttime writer, and I love writing at night.

And yeah, like I couldn't do it.

But I, yeah, I tended to just get home from work, and I would sit down at the computer, like I say, bum and seat, and try desperately to claw out.

For NaNoWriMo, you've got to write 1,667 words a day to hit the 50,000 word target for the month.

And I used to find that so difficult, and it would take me an hour to an hour and a half just to do that.

Last November, when I thought, oh, I'm gonna give writings, like sprint writing a try, I started writing 2,000 words a day in 50 minutes.

By doing, yeah, like revolutionize, because once I tell myself that I've just got like, I did 25 minute sprints, which is quite a long time for a sprint, but it really worked for how involved I like to get.

Yeah, I would set myself, like use YouTube videos, because there are sprint videos on YouTube, and I would use like, and I still sometimes just listen to them for fun, just to have them in the background.

There's one that I use-

Can you send a link and I'll go to the show notes?

That sounds fantastic.

I definitely will.

There's one that I listen to in particular, which is on a train.

So you hear train sounds.

I love the train.

I am a freak for the train.

I could listen to a train-

And fall asleep.

Yeah, I love it.

Everything about it is so cosy.

So I have this writing video, and I sprint to it 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and then hit another 25 minutes.

And yeah, it really did change the way that I was writing.

It's actually crazy to think that I was really-

I used to really struggle to write less than 2,000 words a day, and now I find that really easy.

So I'm so glad that I figured that out.

I do want to try and start writing during the day again.

So before I-

Oh, I'm just trying to think when it was.

I used to work in a different office.

Same job, just a different office.

And I work in a very small village.

And my office used to be at the end of the village where there was a coffee shop.

There's plenty of coffee shops in this village, but it was like closest to my favorite one.

And then we moved to a different office in the same village that is no longer on that side of the road where the coffee shop is.

So when I was on the side where the coffee shop is, I would go at lunchtime and sit in the coffee shop and write at lunch.

And I would take Juno with me, who's my little dog, and she would sit on the bench next to me, the sweetest.

And I would sit and type with Juno sitting next to me on this little bench, living the life, like living my famous author life.

It just got, started to get really expensive, because every lunchtime, I was buying a coffee and I was buying lunch.

So we moved office and then I kind of thought, well, this is a good time to try and start saving money, stop doing that.

But I would like to start doing that again as a way to try and manifest the life of the author that I want.

But I feel like that is what I would love to do.

I love writing in coffee shops, I find it.

So I know it's so annoying, and I know that people think it's like really pretentious and you're just like very posery.

But there's something about it that makes me feel like, yeah, I know it gives me main character energy, but and that's what I want.

And I want to be, and the amount of times that I would go and sit in a coffee shop, like my local Starbucks, who like I've written so many books in there.

And people would come up and ask me, are you writing a book?

And it was the best feeling.

Where I live, it made me feel so famous.

So absolutely no one ever asked me that.

No, where I live, everyone's just like a social media mogul or something.

So when you see people on laptops, they're just doing like marketing stuff.

So it's, yeah, it was just the best feeling for people to be like, oh, she must be writing a book.

I really want to get back into that again.

And make writing an outside activity as well as just sitting in my dark cave because I do mostly write at night.

So it doesn't have to be expensive.

So when I went to Starbucks every day before work, I just had a cup of tea.

And that's not expensive because I would have already eaten breakfast at home.

And if you're buying office space for two hours, it's actually quite cheap.

So I don't know if you could just have like lunch at your desk when you get back into the office and just have a cup of tea at lunchtime.

Yeah, I think that I'm gonna start doing that because it feels so nice just to treat myself to a bit of time away from everybody because I'm always surrounded by people.

I live with my boyfriend.

Like when I'm at work, obviously there's people in the office.

I don't get a lot of alone time and that was my favorite alone time.

But I do also have a writing course that I want to do.

So there's a writer, she's a traditionally published writer.

And she amazingly does these courses for writing.

And she's also, I don't know if she's really, yeah, but she was going to do an editing one.

And the writer is Maggie Stiefvater, who is a young adult writer.

She's written many books, like many, many books, and they're all very highly regarded.

And she is one of the most super cool people you will ever come across.

She wears leather jackets.

She drives fast cars.

She is like the coolest person.

And she has a writing course about how she structured and wrote one of her young adult books.

And I bought it maybe the start of the year, and I've just never gotten round to doing it.

So it's actually quite a short term goal.

But in quarter three, I really want to do that course before I start writing the next book that I'm going to write.

Just to see if there's anything that I can implement from her process that may make my process a bit better.

So that's my current goal.

Right, writing coffee shops and taking a little writing course.

Sounds like an excellent goal, like just life goals right there.

So fantastic.

Hopefully it's been helpful for everyone to listen in on this.

And I think it's been helpful for me to really evaluate and like be honest with myself about things that are not working and to also just have time to reflect on the benefit of trying new things.

Like if I was still writing like I was writing before, laboring over four drafts when I was just twiddling with commas in the last couple of drafts, but I was taking time that I could have spent writing other books.

So it really helped me to reflect on things that have helped with trying new things and be encouraged to do that again at a time when I'm under no pressure to make a living from writing.

It is a great time to be experimenting with things, as we said in the last episode.

So the next week's topic, we're starting a new series on very relevant, real life versus writing with an episode on dream versus the reality of writing.

We normally have a section where we ask, do you have any thoughts on this?

But I feel like, because it's so similar to today's episode, we might just leave it here and maybe leave everyone to have some ideas of their own about the dream versus the reality of writing.

And we will come at it with fresh ideas.

Otherwise, we would just be talking about writing processes again.

So we will have more things to talk about on that next week.

Before then, you will have gone on a holiday, which is fantastic, very, very envious.

So have a wonderful literary time.

Enjoy presumably being in a garret, catching tuberculosis, being inspired, and being the most Parisian author of all time.

Yes.

I was going to say to the listeners, I'm going to Paris.

I'm not going back in time.

I only ever go to at least two centuries back, Paris.

I am fully living my Les Mis dreams.

So, sadly, you're not, but that's how it would be.

Well, thank you very much for listening, and we will talk to you next week.

Goodbye.

You've been listening to Pen to Paycheck Authors.

Stay tuned for our next episode, and don't forget to subscribe to learn how to write your way to financial success.