Up Your Words

Seriously incredible post by Rachel Aaron on increasing your writing word count. It makes total sense and will probably have you backhanding yourself in the forehead *ouch*.

Read her post, but to quickly summarize, her three key things are:

Knowledge - Before you write, brainstorm for 5+ minutes about what you are going to write. We all did this in school, it was called brilliantly enough: Brainstorming. Block action, make plot decisions, do it rough and quick and then when you are feeling full of writerly fire, turn to the computer and start unloading those words.

Time - Find the time of day and location where you are most productive. This takes some tracking and organization to pull off.

Enthusiasm - There are scenes we love to write and scenes we hate to. Sometimes we are outside of our comfort zone, but it may be that most of the time we are merely writing something that is boring to us. Skip that, find a way to tell the scene that interests you. If it doesn't, then why should your reader be interested.

Side note: Perhaps obvious, but perhaps not, eloquence and word choice are not what any first draft should be about. Make your story pretty (or gruesome) after you figure out what your characters are doing and when they are doing it.

I've just barely tackled this method, but I think I can see that results will follow with perseverance. Thank you Rachel for an awesome post!

Here's a screen grab of how I've set up my own spreadsheet to track everything. Not necessarily perfect, but I think it will work for me.