Pseudographia

In the last week, I’ve started four new documents—an idea for revising a draft, two new short stories (at least one of which will become part of an in-progress novel), and this post for Pseudographia. In addition to the other short stories and novel that I’m working on, that’s a lot to keep track of. Without a system, it can be hard to keep focus. Without focus, I can spend all my time starting projects and no time finishing them. So, it’s important for me to keep track of all works that are “in progress” and focus on moving those through the process from initial ideas through early drafts, revising, editing, and eventually submission and publication.

In Ulysses, I keep all of my active projects in a smart folder by tagging them with the term “in progress”. As I create new projects, they are automatically added to this group. For novels, all chapters are placed in the novel’s folder, and only the active one is labeled “in progress”. Each week, I review the folder and remove the “in progress” tag from sheets I haven’t worked on in the last couple of weeks. Pruning the list helps me keep it limited and relevant.

Another way that I keep the group relevant is to try to limit the projects in each stage of writing. I may be coming up with ideas for one story while drafting a second, revising a third and working on the query letter for another. In addition to my fiction, there is often a blog post or article in the “in progress” folder. Unlike fiction, the lifespan for posts is extremely short—it either moves to publication in a couple days or is archived and subsequently forgotten.

Committing to tracking and completing “in progress” projects has allowed me to focus on the writing that is most important to me and to maintain my momentum. The system is nice to have, but the commitment is necessary.

Do you have a good strategy for staying focused and making progress on your writing or other projects? If so, let me know on Twitter: @jamescraig.

I’ve had a big idea, a capital B capital I Big Idea, knocking around my head for 5 or so years now.

Many of the concepts are well-established in science fiction, but I think this world has a unique twist on them. And I think that the shape of the story also has a unique way of unfolding and fitting together. Hopefully, a way that’s both sustainable for the story and for me as a writer because this could be my big idea for a while.

And it’s been so exciting to see how the themes fit together, how the presentation of the story makes it interesting from both a narrative and, potentially, business standpoint. It’s been fun writing exploratory stories in this world, ones that are unlikely to end up in the main storylines but that are useful to get to know the world and possibly interesting enough to stand on their own.

So, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been transitioning from planning to writing. And it has been…pretty terrible. I mean, it makes me reconsider why I ever thought I could be a writer, why I ever wanted to be one.

So, I went back to planning, and patched up a few holes, worked to improve characters. And, it’s been a slog getting back into the actual writing.

I’m aiming at a 5000-10000 word chunk to start things off. Ideally, that’s a couple of weeks. But between the general reality of starting a story, work, kids, sickness, the school year, it’s gotten off to a much slower start—roughly 750 words of prose in a week. Oh, it pains me to look at that number.

I constantly forget how hard this process is. I forget the excitement smashed by terribly slow, terribly written first drafts. I forget that it’s often easier to write 500 words on an outline than 500 words in a story. I forget that I spent more than two years writing my first novel, revised it twice, and then re-wrote it completely one last time.

This project is exciting, and terrifying, and I’m still trying to make the transition to writing it out. Getting to the revisions is a more successful strategy than trying to avoid them. I’m working to get out of this sinkhole, but it may be a bit messy in the meantime.