Fast drafting is a technique that I have used successfully on quite a few books. What is fast drafting? Fast drafting is when we sit down and write a book within a given amount of time. It can be as short as two weeks, but I don’t recommend longer than six.

WHY, KRISTEN? WHY????

Many new authors slog through that first book, editing every word to perfection, revising, reworking, redoing…and they never finish. So they start another book and edit and nitpick and…don’t finish.

Wash, rinse, repeat…mildew.

When I used to be a part of critique groups, it was not at all uncommon to find writers who’d been working on the same book two, five, eight and even ten years. 

I have been guilty myself…which is exactly WHY I fast draft.

Every time I’ve ever fast-drafted all the way to The END? I have published that book. Comes in handy when you’re also ghostwriter.

Conversely, every time I thought I was too smart and I didn’t NEED to fast-draft, I’ve stalled.

Those ‘bright ideas’ are all sitting in my Documents hanging out with the digital dust plot bunnies.

Fast, Slow & Author Process

Before anyone shouts me down, let me make this clear. HOW we write books is called ‘author process.’ When we are new, likely we’ll have to experiment.

Guess what? If you’ve never finished a novel, might be at least a good idea to emulate or learn from those who have. I learned from Candace Havens because she’s written, finished and published a gazillion books.

Seriously, click that hyperlink. Candy is amazing!

Great, maybe Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help took five years and 62 revisions to get her story published. Awesome for her. And yes, her book was a runaway success, but this isn’t the norm. We are also now in a totally different publishing world.

This said. I don’t care if your writing process involves writing 100 words a day while wearing a unicorn outfit. Some people do super detailed outlines. Others write by the seat of their pants and are allergic to outlines.

If it works and you are finishing books? Who cares? I don’t.

So if you’ve tried fast-drafting and it doesn’t work, then fine. You at least gave it a try OR you know how to finish. I’m not talking to y’all. You’re set.

But for others, it might just be the key y’all need to break out of perfectionism.

Perfect is the enemy of the finished.

Fast Times in Indie Publishing

For those who want to make a living writing, here is the tough talk. If we keep perfecting and going back and revising and rewriting, then guess what? We are not finishing.

Why is this important? Well, first of all, most people are not interested in buying our clever and perfect half-finished manuscript.

Readers find a book, author or series they love and they will inhale everything. In the ‘Not So Good Old Days’ most authors were limited to publishing a book a year, maybe two. This was why, in large part, authors had a 96% failure rate (actual 2004 numbers from Book Expo America).

It is also why it took FOREVER to make excellent money as an author. One had to build up a backlist, while also being hindered by an outside editorial calendar over which authors had NO CONTROL.

Now? If you want to publish a book a month? You can do it. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but no outside force is going to limit you.

Notice I said, I don’t necessarily recommend it. If you want to fast-draft ten books, position each in a queue, then release a book a month? Awesome.

Regardless of how we write/publish, we must pick up the pace to make a living.

Does Writing Quickly Produce Inferior Work?

I’m a huge fan of fast drafting, if you haven’t caught that. As I already mentioned, Candace Havens teaches this technique, and it works. In fact, I think she has an upcoming class on this.

Candy is hardcore. She pushes you to write your novel in two weeks. I know right now there is great gnashing of teeth. I thought it was insane as well…until I did it. And my first novel was a product of that fast-draft session.

When we fast-draft, of course we do a little planning. What is the story about? Who are the main characters? But limit this, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

Why do we need to do some planning? Because…

Ultimately, our story needs to make sense. There is cause and effect, things cannot happen for no reason, and everything must be set up ahead of time or the reader WILL call “Foul!”

This aside. The point of fast-drafting is to simply write. No looking back. Always forward. You can fix stuff later.

I’ve heard some writers criticize this method, believing that writing at this increased pace somehow compromises quality. Many writers are afraid that picking up speed will somehow undermine craftsmanship, yet this isn’t necessarily so.

Some Fast Examples

To prove my point, here are some interesting factoids about writing hard and fast, some taken from James Scott Bell’s WONDERFUL book The Art of War for Writers (pages 79-82):

• William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks.
• Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises in six weeks.
• After being mocked by a fellow writer that writing so fast created junk, John D. MacDonald wrote The Executioners in a month. Simon & Schuster published it in hardback. It was also serialized in a magazine, selected by a book club, and turned into the movie Cape Fear TWICE.
• Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on a rented typewriter.
• Isaac Asimov was the author/editor of over 700 books over the course of his career.
• Stephen King writes 1,500 words a day every day of the year except his birthday. He’s published over fifty novels, and I don’t even know how many short stories and novellas. Let’s just say he’s written a LOT. Could he have done this writing a book every three years? Every five?

NO.

Meet “Captain Kirk Brain” & “Spock Brain”

Here’s my explanation of why writing faster than we ‘are comfortable’ can produce fiction just as good (if not better) than a work that’s been written slowly and deliberately.

And, since all roads that do not lead to LOTR, lead to Star Trek…

When we write quickly, we get into The Zone and pass The Wall. We become part of the world we’re creating. Fatigue wears out the cerebral cortex (the ‘Inner Editor’ which I will call our ‘Spock Brain’).

Fatigue diverts us to the Limbic Brain (also known as the Reptilian or Primal Brain, or for today’s purposes—‘Captain Kirk Brain’).

Captain Kirk Brain is emotional, visceral and has no problem kissing hot, green alien women or cheating the Kobayashi Maru. He out-bluffs Klingons, outruns Romulans, starts brawls and throws the rulebook out the window. He’s pure instinct, raw emotion and all action.

Live Fast, Write Fast

In short, Kirk is the stuff of great stories because he doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants. No one ever got to the end of a book and said, “Wow, that book was riveting. The grammar was perfect.”

Captain Kirk Brain can do it’s job better—write fiction—when Spock Brain isn’t there saying, “But Captain, you’re being illogical. It clearly states in Strunk & White….”

The BEST line Star Trek: Into Darkness is when the villain of the story (Kahn) says to Spock, “You can’t even break rules, how can you expect to break bones?”

So, I’m going to apply this to writing.

Many writers hold back emotionally when writing. Why? They aren’t going fast and hard and so Spock takes over and he wants us to use a seatbelt and our blinkers.

He isn’t the guy you want in charge if you’re going for the GUTS and breaking bones.

Kirk is for Action & Spock is for Rules

Spock Brain is a perfectionist and wants us to take our time, make sure we follow all the rules and put the commas in the right spot. He’s seriously uncomfortable with ‘suspending disbelief’ and he tries to explain everything so others don’t get confused.

The trick is to hop on a cerebral crotch-rocket and outrun Spock. He is seriously uncomfortable with speeding and you can easily lose him in the school zones or the parking lot of Walmart.

Don’t worry, Spock will yell at us later…at the appropriate time which is during revisions.

Thing is, Kirk and Spock make the perfect team, whether on The Enterprise or in our head. They balance each other, but they are also antagonists. Kirk wants to put phasers on KILL, and Spock wants to check and see if the rules for the Oxford Comma allows this.

Write Fast and Write Frequently

Tonight, I am teaching a class on Blogging for Authors. Why do I want authors to blog, other than it is one of THE BEST ways to cultivate an audience who will love our writing and buy all our books?

The reason I encourage writers to blog is that blogging is writing.

WHO KNEW? Yes, y’all are here reading WORDS from MY HEAD! Amazing!

And the more we write, the leaner, meaner, faster and cleaner we become. We learn to finish. It helps us override our need to ‘perfect’ everything.

Blogging helps us ship and get comfortable with going FAST. No, maybe every blog isn’t the quality of a New Yorker article, but who cares? It’s a BLOG.

We aren’t looking to win the Pulitzer. We’re looking to get better riding a Cerebral Ducati and ignoring all of Spock’s protests that “This isn’t safe” and “Where is our helmet?” and “Clearly the speed limit forbids you going this fast.”

When we get the stories out faster, they’re more visceral. We get more practice with more stories since we aren’t letting Spock nit-pick for the next ten years…which he will do if Kirk doesn’t go running the other way despite Spock’s protests.

The Fast Zone

As I mentioned in the beginning, if we want to fast-draft then I recommend a little bit of planning. For instance, I am fast-drafting a novel right now. I have written over 15,000 words in the past few days.

Before I started, though, I had to do some basic world-building. It’s a dark comedy but set in the future, so I had to work out how my world would look. Then I needed a rough idea of my main characters, and I also came up with the log-line.

What is my story about in ONE sentence?

Once I know that? Then I know the POINT of my story. How does it end? Who needs to arc and how?

Do this planning, but don’t camp here. Planning is productive procrastination. Limit how long/how much you plan.

Since I already know all of the core information ahead of time, fast-drafting becomes a lot easier.

You know what is toughest? To keep moving forward no matter what. I have already caught myself a few times wanting to go back and ‘fix.’ NO!

As an added bonus, when we fast-draft, we literally are rewiring our brains. Neurons that fire together wire together. Ever wonder how the prolific authors seem to only get faster? Practice! There is a reason Dean Koontz’s first-draft is his final draft. He never revises.

How can he do this?

He has written so many books that story structure is hard-wired into his brain. Fast drafting might not pay off the first time, the second, the third. But we are training our brains how to FINISH. We are hard-coding storytelling into our neurons.

Ultimately, over time? We only get better with practice.

In the End

Perfect is the enemy of the good and death to the finished. There is no such thing as a perfect novel. Also, guess what? No half-finished ‘perfect novel’ ever became a runaway global phenomenon BUT plenty of ‘terrible but finished’ novels have.

What Are Your Thoughts?

Other than you cannot possibly fast-draft. I get it. Not your process and that is perfectly fine. Would you have ever believed that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in NINE DAYS?

Have you had good experiences with just writing? NaNoWriMo is great for this, though I recommend a little planning ahead of time.

I love hearing from you! And I like to reward those who chime in!

CONTEST

What do you WIN? For the month of MAY, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

The Prize?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

CLASSES!

***All classes come with a FREE recording

TONIGHT!

Spilling the TEA: Blogging for Authors

TUESDAY, May 31st, 7:00 PM E.S.T. to 10:00 P.M. EST.

Use code New25 for $25 off Sign up HERE

The Art of Character: Writing Characters for a SERIES

Thursday, June 9th 7:00-10:00 P.M. NYC Time

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Thursday, June 16th, 7:00-9:00 P.M. NYC Time. This is a TWO-HOUR INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP!

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The Write Stuff Special: 20 Pages of DEEP Edit ONE LOW PRICE HERE. Only 10 slots available and open until June 9th.

The post Write FAST & Furious! Outrunning “Spock Brain” appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Image via Flickr Creative Commons, courtesy of Anamorphic Mike.

Since the boom of the digital age, would-be writers have been practically coming out of the woodwork. Everyone wants to be a writer and hey, I can’t blame them. Sweet gig if you can score it. Yet, many of these eager folks are ill-prepared for the reality of what all an author’s job entails and this job is so much more than simply writing the book (though that is a saber-toothed bugaboo all in itself).

Years ago, when I decided I wanted to become an author, I heard all the sage advice from my writing mentors. Stuff like:

The first three books you write likely will be total crap. Don’t get too attached.

You can’t do this for the money.

Book signings are WAY overrated.

Remember to put on pants when leaving the house.

Me, being a total neophyte completely rolled my eyes because I knew *flips hair* that I was the exception. Yeah about that.

Frankly all of this is seriously excellent advice, especially the part about the pants. But why am I mentioning all of this? Well, I decided to become a novelist…in 2002.

I just published my debut fiction…Tuesday. As in of this week.

Yes I am being serious.

Granted, I did take a side-trip. I knew social media was going to be a MAJOR game-changer for authors. All the people I saw teaching how build a platform were insisting writers turn into marketing robots that shoveled out spam faster than C-Span shovels out BS. And I knew their approach would be more successful at turning writers into cutters than actually selling any books.

For me, becoming a branding expert for creative people was a moral imperative…a calling.

Just not my original calling.

I recall a conversation with a friend back in 2011. She was laying into me that I needed to work on my fiction. My answer?

“Social media is one of the largest tectonic shifts in human communication. There need to be guides. In 5 years? We won’t be as necessary and in 5 years? People will still want thrillers. Social Media How-To’s? Meh. Not so much.”

My years of blogging and being a social media expert and craft teacher kind of remind me of the movie Karate Kid. Instead of writing glorious novels that became instantly famous and were made into movies? Here was Kristen….

Wax on. Wax off. Wax on. Wax off.

But, I was willing to do it (yeah that hadn’t happened before). Sure technical writing, and editing and blogging and writing social media books wasn’t making me a novelist…but I sensed it would get me there and that it was MY road. The road that I needed. The one involving way more @$$ kicking.

Image via www.freerepublic.com

Granted, if I am brutally honest, there is a part of me that feels like a complete loser that it took FIFTEEN years to become a novelist, but I wouldn’t change how this all happened because this seriously long@$$ journey changed who I was. It shaped this undisciplined, self-centered, unlikable, lazy pile of wanna-be-hack into an actual honest to God pro.

Process

Before I decided on “author” I tried a lot of things. Hell, I wanted to be frigging everything when I grew up.

I loved ballet. I wanted to be a dancer. I loved being on stage. But the bleeding, wrecked, blistered feet? Practice six days a week for four hours a day? Working my a$$ off just to end up in the background waving a rose?

Yeah, not so much.

Then I was going to be a doctor. Loved me some science. Even won a military scholarship to become a doctor. I looked seriously cool in the white jacket and practiced signing Dr. Lamb…and deliberately making it messy because who the hell ever heard of a real doctor with legible handwriting?

All was cool at first, but then I had to start dissecting stuff. I’m not squeamish at all. Hell, my mom is a nurse.

But then I hit a crossroad in Majors Biology with, of all things? A starfish. The super smart Indian kid next to me in lab? His starfish was PERFECT. Like razor lines and every tiny organ laid out and delicately pinned in artful perfection.

My starfish? It looked like it got drunk then called Chuck Liddell a p***y at which point said starfish got pounded into paste…then peed on.

And what I realized was that, while science and medicine “in theory” fascinated me, I just wasn’t in love with the process of getting any good at it. Hell if I did that to a starfish? Yeah. Probably best not to let me near people.

There is a point in all of this and hopefully one that you guys will find helpful. I certainly had aptitude for all the careers that interested me, but I lacked one critical element—love for the process.

Was I willing to do anything for however long it took to get good at it? Really good. Maybe even the best? Nope.

That was, until I decided to become an author. Then everything changed.

The Author’s Life FOR REAL

There is this myth perpetuated by popular culture that talent is vitally important, when in actuality it is highly overrated. People seem to believe that if we are skilled with language then magically we’re capable of creating a work spanning 60K-110K words as easily as breathing.

They seem to think anyone with command of their native tongue can whip out a novel, no problemo. Writing is EASY!

***Note: These were the same people paying us a hundred bucks in college to help them with a four-page essay while they chewed a Xanax *rolls eyes*

No, writing is not easy. It is a craft. We are builders. But instead of getting wood and nails and sheetrock and concrete and crews of people helping us build? We are tasked with creating entire worlds from various combinations of 26 letters…alone.

Yeah, super easy.

It’s a skill and it often has a long and brutal apprenticeship filled with blood, tears, rejection, and too much box wine. We get down on ourselves because friends and family, six months after we start, are certain we’re a failure because we aren’t toppling J.K. Rowling out of her top spots on the best-seller lists.

I know. Been there.

But this is why loving process is critical. When we love the process, we keep at it. We learn all we can. We are willing to tweet and blog and maybe even figure out what the hell is so interesting about Instagram. We learn to ignore the naysayers. We gut through the unfun stuff because love fuels all we do. It has to.

I am not particularly worried about the millions of other “published writers” because many won’t be in it for the long haul. A lot of them are there for the cover, the book in hand and a “signing” and “launch party” and nothing wrong with that. It is their fun. Not all dreams are meant to be life callings.

But, often when these sort of folks discover this isn’t all a giant unicorn hug? That sure we authors can get raving 5 star reviews, but we can also get raving ONE star reviews from lunatics who have nothing better to do than be cruel and crush a writer’s will to live?

They move on *shrugs*.

Or maybe they are pretty good writers, but they don’t want to do the unfun stuff like building a platform (which actually IS a lot of fun if you do it the way I teach it). And these folks will languish in Amazon purgatory because they only loved part of the process, the fun parts.

Some will invest years and never get there and give up because it is taking too long. Heck took me 15 years. I can appreciate that kind of discouragement.

My first book? Well it reminded me of that starfish from Majors Biology (dramatic reenactment of Kristen’s starfish performed by a pumpkin)

Image via Flickr Creative Commons via Josh McAllister

But I kept at it and kept at it and kept at it and now, my starfish looks like this!

So yes! My romantic mystery thriller is finally out and available for .99 on Kindle (just click the cover pic above). We will do more official “launch” stuff next week. And thank you kindly for sticking with me these many long years. You have no idea how many times I would have given up had it not been for this blog, knowing y’all were there in the trenches rooting for me. So THANK YOU.

In the end, lighten up on yourself and give yourself a break. Not too much of one. You still need to get your tail to work. But remember everyone has their own road, their own journey and process and keep your eyes on YOU and YOUR work.

What are your thoughts? Do you get discouraged with the process of writing? I know I do. Would be awesome to just spend 8 hours a day making up stories but there is a lot more to this. Do you maybe feel better if you believed you were taking too long? 15 years is a tough number to beat, LOL. Did you have a similar experience? Did you try a career you thought you’d love but then went…yeah NO.

I LOVE hearing from you guys!

****The site is new, and I am sorry you have to enter your information all over again to comment, but I am still working out the kinks. Also your comment won’t appear until I approve it, so don’t fret if it doesn’t appear right away.

Talk to me!

And to prove it and show my love, for the month of MAY, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

***April’s winner is Carl D’Agostino. Please send your 5000 word WORD document to kristen at wana intl dot com. Double-spaced, one-inch margins and New Times Roman and CONGRATULATIONS!

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Book Bootcamp  $99 ($130 VALUE)

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Pitch Perfect—How to Write a Query Letter and Synopsis that SELLS! $45 May 25th, 2017

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For those who need help building a platform and keeping it SIMPLE, pick up a copy of my latest social media/branding book Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World on AMAZON, iBooks, or Nook. 

The post The Writing Process…It Ain’t No Unicorn Hug appeared first on Kristen Lamb.