I'm Sofia, a somewhat unsuccessful writer, trying to get control of a life full of work, studying, and writing, and sometimes failing at it. Twitter: ias_writesbad, IG: Surviving_creativity.
Honestly, given that almost very single week has held close to 60h of work or more, I am surprised I even reached the half-way goal.
It was a new project, and one I am excited about, so hopefully I could finish it by the end of January?
For December, and for the new year, I’m hoping to build a weekly habit of at least 5K words. It’s not a lot at all, and I’m definitely capable of getting that out in a day if I have a day off, but it might be a sustainable goal that I could overshoot instead of miss completely, long-term.
So this will be a tough month. Of course, I already knew that, and it’s not the worst month I’ve ever had in my adult life. I managed to cut a few costs and since I did manage to do some freelance work, the end result wasn’t as bad as I feared. (The currency in this budget is SEK, my income for the month amounts to about 800 USD/Euro).
INCOME-WISE, my salary was a little bit higher than I thought it would be, I had saved a little bit more than I thought I would be able to, and my mom promised to repay some money at least this month. Of course, I don’t know exactly how much I can get for surveys, mom, and freelance work yet, but I made an estimate that is a little lower than I thought I’d get, to be on the safe side.
THIS IS HOW I BUDGET. I know some advice out there say you should start with food, but I can live on very little if I’m forced to, and it doesn’t make much sense to me to decide a number for food, and then have to change it because of some other factor out of my control, so I start with my fixed costs, rent, utilities, various other bills that will have to be paid or I get late fees etc.
THEN, CHARITY, because I will never be so poor that I can’t give to charity, and the one debt I have to pay this month, since my other one gave me a free month. Because I know I won’t be able to spare much money, I’m only paying the minimum amount this month, but will get more aggressive once I have a job again.
That gave me a final estimated sum for spending for the month.
I BUDGET SPENDING in two different ways. One is the things that I have to spend money on during the month, and the rest is divided into my weekly budgets.
For this month, I’m not expecting to be able to do much, but normally this is where I would add trips I know I have to take, gifts to buy, stuff I need that isn’t food, but this month is a sad month, so nothing like that. I always make sure to budget for something fun, because if I don’t, then I will feel too pressed and end up spending money anyway and then my budget is ruined.
WITH WHAT IS LEFT, I calculate what I can spend on food for a day, and if there is money for a weekly misc/fun category too. Having a daily budget helps rein me in when I’m at the store.
For this month I’ll be trying weekly budget tracking, to see if it helps me stay focused. For that I allot money for food, and money for fun, write up anything I spend money on, and tally it up at the end of the week. As the month progress, I might change the spending budget a little, but I’m hoping to stick with this. Even managed to put some money away for next month, which is hopefully not going to be so bad. Or to pay someone to do my cover art for my novel, which I really want to do.
So, I know everybody uses Scrivener, or at least it seems that way, but I don’t. This post isn’t about comparing Scrivener to other programs, as I’m sure any writing software out there can do pretty much everything I’m describing here, I just happened to use WriteWay Pro, which is free and works for me.
I got to the end of my read-through of my novel thus far and ended up with a LOT of notes on what should happen in the final act, both main plot and subplots. How to get everything in the appropriate order is a lot harder, and this is the process I used to outline act 3 in my novel (and when I get working on my second draft, I’m going over the novel and using this process for the rest of it too).
This is WriteWay Pro. This is what it looks like when you’ve opened a new book, which I did for the purpose of this outline. It comes preloaded with 3 acts, but you can add more, and one chapter and one scene already started.
I started renaming the acts. What is named act 3 will be the final outline, Act 2 is where I put all ideas for the main plot, and act 3 is where all ideas go for the side plots. Those two folders are temporary of course.
So, I started with my list of ideas and started putting them in the second act folder. While all those things are main plots, the main plot could be divided into several small pieces. Each piece got its own chapter, and then each idea had its own scene. The chapters and scenes were named with this idea, sometimes the titles were long, but that wasn’t a problem.
Soon it was starting to fill up. I ordered the main plot stuff into folders mostly based on chronology, but in some cases based on certain character groups.
And then it was time to move everything into the actual outline. If there is one mistake I think I made early on, it was not being firm about chapter structure, but now I think I got it right. Each chapter HAD to have something important from the main plot happen, even if that wasn’t obvious and central to it. Every chapter needs to move the main plot along. In the outline notecard for plot (you get a lot of these notecards if you want to use them in WriteWay, but I mostly only use the plot and character ones), I wrote any details I could need later. But now I wasn’t just putting in ideas, now I was putting in actual scenes, so the act1 outline had a lot fewer things than the act2 main plot folder did.
As things were being added from 2 to 1, I deleted them from 2. There’s a sense of accomplishment in seeing things crossed off and eventually, Folder Act 2 was completely emptied.
And then I got started on the side plots. Anything that didn’t fit well into an actual side plot was put in the Loose Ends folder. The things in there were either very closely connected to the main plot, and so there wasn’t enough left to make a separate sub plot folder, but there were a lot of things in here that could be dealt with by having a character mention it in passing. Most of these things won’t need actual scenes, and in the end, one or two were cut completely, and another couple didn’t need to be dealt with until the sequel.
And in the end, this is where the finished outline ended up. Too many spoilers in the scene-titles to show it. But yeah, 13 chapters, in total 44 scenes. If I wrote full time, 40h per week, I could have it done in four days. But I don’t, so I won’t.
The next step of this outlining process is to draft up a detailed scene outline for each scene, but I do that by hand, because reasons.
If one day I write my autobiography, I will look back on these years as the starving artist years. Sometimes it helps to romanticize things, doesn’t it?
Yes, I can laugh about it know, the week when I ate nothing but potatoes, the time I stole toilet paper from a public bathroom, when I had to cancel all fun things, but eventually-
well, eventually something will change, right? If I pretend this is the starving artist years, then by pure logic, some other years will come. But as creative people, this is something most of us go through, and we’re often trapped between spending our free time trying to make more money fast, or spending it writing (which might one day lead to money, but probably not soon and statistically not a lot).
In the end, we need to survive.
Sources of income
There’s a pay check coming in, which is more than there was last month. But I only worked a few hours, as I got my job late in the month.
There’s some money in my savings account, but not much since I paid my bills with it last month.
I need 7000SEK (Swedish Krona) to survive this month.
So, with an expected salary of 4150, and 2300 in savings, I’m missing 550SEK to be able to survive and not go crazy.
I outlined 3 options for how to get this money. Option 1 is my mom who owes me money might finally pay me back some of it, and I’ve been doing some paid surveys in my free time which I think might add up enough to pay me 50 (I don’t recommend this as an income source, it’s just a little bit extra for when nothing else is getting anywhere). Option 2 is doing even more of those surveys, which might be the case if my contract don’t get renewed on Friday, and then hoping someone will lend me the rest. Option 3 is those surveys, trying to get some freelance work done for anyone who will hire me and I suppose begging? I have seriously considered borrowing a guitar from someone and try my luck singing on the street.
At the bottom of this page I’ll be adding up what actually happened at the end of the month.
Time is money.
But all these options take time. And in the end, I need to write. At the end of the day, it’s what I need to do or I go crazy. Writing takes time. Time I should perhaps be spending on looking for a better job, or finishing up my degrees. It gives me a bad conscience to spend time on things that won’t give me money now, but I need to write.
In the end, it’s all a balancing act of life, isn’t it? But whoever said money can’t buy happiness is a piece of shit. If time is money, then money can buy time, and time to do what you want sounds a whole lot like happiness to me.
As any of you writing inclined folks might now, July is the month of Camp Nano. Or a month of Camp Nano, there’s April too of course. This is the fourth Camp I am participating in, and I’ve had both successes and failures. So far, I’ve failed both April, and won in July, so maybe April isn’t a good month for writing for me? First April camp, 2017, I participated in I had a number of scenes goal, but fell short spectacularly. I did manage to rework the story a bit, making it a lot easier in July 2017, to add 10K words to the novel. Even finished about a week early. April 2018, I think I stuck with my number of scenes goal for about half the month, then everything went wrong in life, so writing suffered. Or maybe I don’t do as well with scenes as a goal?
The basics of Camp Nano
Camp Nano is the smaller, lesser known version of Nanowrimo, which takes place in November each year. For Nanowrimo, you write 50K words, that’s what you do. and belong to a community based on where you live. For Camp, the goal can be pretty much anything, and you belong to cabins. Cabins can be random, or you can find one based on interests, or genre, or what part of the writing process you’re in. I made one for people with a specific other interest of mine, not because it affects the writing (although it could), but just because it means I get to have my friends around.
The Camp Nano goal can, like I said, be anything. Word counts, page counts, scene counts, illustrations, hours worked, minutes worked, really anything. Sometimes you have to get creative with how you set it up, as not all parameters will count officially. And since you don’t have to reach 50K words, there’s always room to adjust your goal if it was wrong for you.
Why bother?
Sure, if you write a lot, and often, like I do, there is the question of what you get out of it. I like the community aspects, of course, but even more importantly: it gives me a sort of automatic deadline for things. I’m not a full-time writer, most people aren’t. I have a job that is mentally draining. There is a limit to how much I can write every week. But the camps and Nanowrimo itself gives me a nice balance of heavy writing load, and lighter load. Finishing one camp makes me sit down and think about where I want to be with my writing at the next one. It helps me plan. And you know how much like a good plan.
My goal for Camp Nano July 2018
This year my official goal is 20K words. But that’s only half the truth. Despite what I wrote above, I had intended to have finalized a more detailed outline of the final act of my novel by July 1st, so I could just write all month, but I wasn’t there. Unemployment took its toll, and then a new job and and and excuses and more excuses, and I knew I’d be spending a lot of the month not-writing but working on my novel. So I decided on the following: 10 words is a minute. A minute is 10 words. Not actually of course, I write more than 10 words in a minute, but I made it low on purpose. So any time spent on outlining etc. is recalculated into words.
The progress
Currently, it’s July 13th and my official word count is just over 8000 words, which is good, especially with the weekend coming up, which will give me more time to write. Out of those 8K words, about 5,5K are actual written words, and the rest are outlined minutes made into words. During July so far, I’ve written the final two chapters of Act II, and once the outline is better, I hope to get a good chunk of Act III written. I don’t expect to finish it though, I think it’ll be about 30K words, meaning best case scenario, it’s done by mid-August. This would then allow me to let it rest, get some input from my critique partners, before getting everything ready for edits and rewrites during Nanowrimo in November. I’d love to get my text beta-reader ready by Christmas, but we’ll see how far we get.
And because I sometimes need to remind myself:
Writing is fun. It’s hard, it’s draining, it’s time-consuming. But it’s fun.
So, today is May 14th. I promised myself that I would attempt to write 5K words today. It’s the half-marathon of writing I think, and I am excited to try it. I will reach my goal by doing 30min or less wordsprints, and I have calculated that 8 of them should be enough, but we’ll see how the day goes. Inbetween sprints I’ll be taking short breaks and doing other stuff, but I don’t anticipate doing much else except writing today.
So, without further ado, it’s 10.00, the document is open, my notes are in front of me, I have cold water and no excuses, it is time to write.
10.00 Wordsprint #1, 26minutes. 632 words.
11.10 Wordsprint #2, 30minutes. 547 words.
Break for yoga.
12.15 Wordsprint #3, 30 minutes, 658 words.
Break for a walk.
14.00 Wordspint #4, 30 minutes, 828 words.
At the halfway point now, at 2665 words. Break for tea and cookies :)
15.30 Wordsprint #5, 30 minutes, 693 words.
16.15 Wordspint #6 6 minutes, 153 words.
At this point, I reached the end of the chapter, and needed a break in order to write a detailed outline of the next chapter, as I hadn’t done that. Next time I do a 5K in a day-challenge, I need to make sure to have more chapters outlined in detail beforehand.
18.10 Outlining of the next chapter is done, so the wordsprints can continue.
18.40 Wordsprint #7 27 minutes, 740 words.
Break for snack.
19.30 Wordsprint #8 33 minutes, 917 words.
And with that, the total word count is 5168 words. As expected, I did 8 sprints, but since one of them was only 6 minutes and could’ve been done as part of another if I hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom really desperately, it was really 7.
My total writing time was 212 minutes, that is, about 3.5h in active working time. My average writing speed was 24w/min, which is actually quite slow, or 1463 w/h.
I have now proven to myself that I am capable, could’ve probably finished sooner if I had made my breaks shorter. This was a great experience, and I encourage anyone who has a full day off to try it.
March is a busy month, plenty of work, some travelling, plenty of birthdays etc, but it is also a long month, so I have hopes of this becoming a productive month when it comes to writing.
The big thing with March is of course that it comes right before April which is Camp NanoWrimo which I will participate in, so there are some things that I want to have finished before the end of the month is over.
Witch, my novel
In the picture above is a hand dandy spreadsheet I made for myself to keep track of how many wordsprints I am doing, and how much I am actually accomplishing per sprint/day/week whatever. This is just the overview tab because I am a sucker for functions and the fewer input fields the better.
Goals: Keep sprinting, and add the info, to hopefully be able to make some sort of conclusions regarding when I should write for best result, and how much I am actually getting done when I do.
Write at least chapter 15.
Do a more detailed outline of Act 3.
Prepare Act 2 for Camp Nano, outline scenes more etc, so all I have to do on April 1st is write write write
thirty. my online project
Finish posting chapter 13.
Outline chapter 14-17
Write chapter 14.
Murder Mystery, my secret project for December
Finish the set design of not only the important sets, but the major broad strokes of the smaller less used sets.
Make a good story outline
If the outline leads to that, finetune sets and make extra.
So, quite a lot to do, but I am confident I will be able to get most of this done.
It is February 28th and the month just flew past. In general I am pleased with what I accomplished, but it’s always a good idea to see how the results measured up to what I set for myself this month:
Witch, my novel
The goal:
Two rounds of edits of Act I, one to make some smaller plot edits and one to go over focalizers in each scene.
Write chapter 12 and 13, of Act II
The reality:
I changed it to one round of edits of Act I, and I completed it 100%.
I wrote Chapter 12 and 13, which became 13 and 14 instead, of Act II.
Result: Completed 100%
thirty. my online story.
The goal:
Finish posting chapter 12
Write Chapter 13 and start posting it (will probably not have time to finish)
The reality:
I finished posting chapter 12.
I wrote Chapter 13 and I have started posting it.
Result: Completed 100%
Murder mystery for December
The goal:
Work out subplots and red herrings
Identify the big important clues and how they will be revealed
Character design
Set design
The reality:
Subplots and red herrings are worked out. CHECK!
The Clues and how to reveal them have been sorted out. CHECK!
Character Design: CHECK!
Set Design: All big important settings are finished except for one, which I think I should get done this week with no problem.
Result: Completed 90%
In other words, I think this was a pretty successful month writing-wise. I am really getting into my novel, and I’m writing quite a lot on it so my imaginary end date for first draft of week 22 is starting to sound pretty doable actually.
It is February 14th, which means half the month has passed, and half the month is left, so it’s time to check in to see how I’m doing with my february writing goals I think.
Witch, my novel
The goal:
Two rounds of edits of Act I, one to make some smaller plot edits and one to go over focalizers in each scene.
Write chapter 12 and 13, of Act II
The reality:
I changed it from two rounds of edits to one round, for the very simple reason that I did some re-thinking about how to go about edits. So the first round is basically what I call content edits (I’ll talk more about this in a later blog post), which is what I the goal changed to. I am about 25% through with this.
I have not yet written chapter 12 or 13, and btw it’s now chapter 13 and 14 because I had to divide chapter 11 into two.
thirty. my online story.
The goal:
Finish posting chapter 12
Write Chapter 13 and start posting it (will probably not have time to finish)
The reality:
I finished posting chapter 12, so CHECK!
I have written 75% of Chapter 13 and will most likely be able to post at least half of it before the end of February
Murder mystery for December
The goal:
Work out subplots and red herrings
Identify the big important clues and how they will be revealed
Character design
Set design
The reality:
Subplots and red herrings are worked out. CHECK!
The Clues and how to reveal them have been sorted out. CHECK!
Character Design: About 1/3 through I think
Will hopefully have time for all set design before the month is over
So all in all, I think I am on track, although I really want to start writing more every day and faster, so next month my goals might look a little different.
2018 will be The year. The year where stuff is finished and maybe even published. And the only way to get there is to work hard and set realistic goals.
So, these are my February writing goals, and now that I have written them down, I will have to achieve them:
Witch, my novel
Two rounds of edits of Act I, one to make some smaller plot edits and one to go over focalizers in each scene.
Write chapter 12 and 13, of Act II
thirty. my online story.
Finish posting chapter 12
Write Chapter 13 and start posting it (will probably not have time to finish)
Murder mystery for December
Work out subplots and red herrings
Identify the big important clues and how they will be revealed
I’ve been really trying to find a good compromise between a bullet journal that:
a) wasn’t threadbound because that’s not my thing
b) was vegan
c) wasn’t made from plastic, which a lot of fake-leather or vegan leather is.
This proved a challenge, until I decided on a simple, plain kraft binder in A5 size. But it looked a little boring, so today when visiting my parents, I found this really pretty pillow case in their second hand shop, which I cut apart, saving the scraps for handkerchiefs, and made into a nice cover for the binder. I’m very happy with it :)
It is the seventh day of Nanowrimo, a week has passed.
So far, I’d say it has gone rather well. I have at least one day buffer, so a little bit ahead, which feels great. Motivation and inspiration have not run out yet.
I try do outline the future parts of my novel while working on the current parts, and I’ve had a bit of problem with a block of chapters. I knew roughly what I wanted to accomplish with them, but not exactly how. The how is important.
It finally struck me. In the second chapter of this block, a boy runs away. So in the first chapter of this block, all scenes can be tied to him being missing in some way.
The solution to my little mental block is now called “Where is Ban?”
Today’s goal is 16K words, but honestly I feel inspired to keep going until I hit 17K.
Continuing on the theme of finally making an outline, I started the first step, which is to read through the whole text I actually have, and write down every single scene, with a description of anything important that happened in it, both plot-wise and character-wise.
The first thought is of course that this is going to take me much much longer than I had originally expected, which was 1-2 days. Well, I’m on day two already and I have done the prologue and the first chapter. In the middle is the scene description itself, on the right in orange pen is anything I thought of while reading that should be expanded or added that I noticed right away. On the left, in grey is anything I realized that could potentially affect the plot, but that I hadn’t thought of, so it’s not something that should be added to particular scenes, but rather, later on when I’m rethinking the plot.
There is a step 1B to this process, which is to add it to a document, but I’m so not there yet.
Oh well, back to work, I guess!
Again, I want to point out, that this is not about making an outline for a future project, which is the clever way to do things and therefore not the way that I, an unsuccessful writer, has done it. This is about outlining from a half-finished work, and in order to do that, I need to make an outline of how the story goes today.
5 Steps to outlining a project you’ve already started but didn’t outline because you are somewhat of a fool.
I know, because I am one. These are the steps I am working on, in order to get Witch, my novel, that has its main plot already written but which has a lot of plotholes and underdeveloped characters, its proper outline. Without an outline, I really don’t know where to go next on this project.
First I want to say that I know not everyone does an outline for their texts, and I’m sure there are people who don’t need them, but I am equally sure that there are plenty of failed aspiring writers out there who never properly finished a readable text who think that they’re one of the people who don’t need them but who might’ve actually finished by now if they had one. Like Past-ias. Boy, did she need an outline! But she didn’t make one, so it’s up to current-ias to make one so future-ias doesn’t tear her lovely long hair out. But let’s get on to the steps!
1. Read your text. Write down each and every scene, of every chapter. Name them, number them, whatever, but be clear about what happened in the scene, and what plot or character development tool place.
Reading your own text is of course crucial. Don’t go by memory, even if you just finsihed writing it. Your memory can’t be trusted, if it was perfect then maybe you didn’t need an outline, but you’re here, reading this text, so you probably do. I name my scenes, rather than number them, at least at this stage.The title can be something very simple and descriptive as “N. receives the letter from L. and seeks advice from I.” It tells me what happened in the scene, and it makes me remember what scene I am referring to later on.
Now you have an outline of the story you have already told. I asked a friend to do a preliminary beta read for me at this stage, just to give me some pointers about what she thought about plot/characters etc.
2. Add anything that comes to mind during your reading, such as missing scenes, characters etc, to your outline.
It’s important to get it out of your head. Don’t trust your memory, remember? If you thought about it while reading, then it should go in your outline, at least for now. This gives you an extended outline with the more obvious stuff that needs fixing.
3. Go over character arcs, bios and sheets, or whatever you have, and add scenes that would expand on your main characters, or important secondary characters, to your outline.
If you don’t have anything like that, hey made it’s time to write some? Even a short plan for what your character’s arc is going to be will do it, as long as you look at the characters individually. All important characters deserve this. Again, add scenes where it is needed, to expand the outline further. Think about scenes that would help develop more than one character at the same time, but don’t have all characters evolve in the same way at the same time.
4. Go over individual plot arcs and add scenes to strengthen the main plot.
Just like your characters, all subplots deserve to be considered individually. What can be done to make it better, clearer, carry more weight. Feel free to combine plot arcs into the same scene, in fact, you probably should do that. Make sure that subplots don’t overtake the main plot, but also don’t shove the subplots aside just because the main plot got really interesting. Good subplots help the main plot, which means they should neither overshadow it, nor be neglected. This is an excellent time to consider if some subplot seem too disconnected from the main plot.
5. Divide your chapters into acts. Keep the different acts of a story in mind as you cull your now, probably quite expanded, outline.
If you’re unsure about how to divide a story into acts, read some Aristotle or something, or wait until I do a blog post about it, but to make it short: make sure the exciting parts of the story aren’t all in the last chapter. Make sure half the book isn’t exposition. Make sure main characters aren’t introduced too late. Condense the outline, make cuts, kill your darlings. It is a heck of a lot easier to do it now than in the editing phase.
5 1/2. Add a description of your added scenes to your text, in the right place. Move stuff around if you need to, cut already written scenes (I copy paste to another document until I am sure I won’t need it, instead of deleting), etc. Then repeat steps 1-5 until you’re happy with the story.
Is it nice, and perfect, and well-developed, and easy to follow? Does it help you write better, or faster?
Well... good for you. Maybe you’ll make it.
When starting my current writing project that I hope will become a novel one day, which we will call Witch, even though that’s not the whole titel, it was Nano, and I was going to pants it. Baaaad idea. Needless to say, by the time Nano ended, my novel wasn’t even half-finished. So, I spent Camp Nano in April trying to outline the rest of the novel, and then Camp Nano in June writing the “rest” of the novel.
Can you tell where I went wrong?
The problem was, once I had come half-way and realized I needed an outline, I didn’t go back to make one for the whole novel. Instead, I only outlined where I wanted to go next, and the outline wasn’t even particularly good, or detailed, and character development or pace wasn’t a priority. I did complete the scenes listed in my outline, but it only took me to where I am now.
I have a text. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has a multitude of characters, several who are not important to the main story. Some of these characters, and their plot lines might be turned into characters of higher importantce, but I don’t know which. I don’t know which parts are interesting and should be developed, and I don’t know which are yawn-inducing, and needs to be either cut, or made more interesting.
Without this knowledge, I also don’t know how to set up an actual outline of my story, because I don’t trust my judgement. Been trying to get a friend to beta read, but she’s busy and has only been able to read the prologue so far. It’s not ready for “public” beta as of yet.
Moral of this story: Outline your story, or pay the price later.
Check out my Plan with me video for September in my Bullet Journal to see how confused I get when I look at my writing schedule and realize it’s just wrong wrong wrong. https://youtu.be/d0S4oNvNIOU.
