
My Writing Process

My writing process has changed a lot in the last couple of weeks. For a long time after I started writing I didn’t really have a writing process. It was basically write whatever comes to mind, try to finish it in a timely manner (I never did) and then move on, and usually I was writing quite a few stories at the same time. On Aug. 1st I came up with a better idea, which was based on the idea of a bullet journal. I had the idea to make small daily goals on each of my current projects, which is something I feel like I should have come up with a lot sooner because it seems like such a “duh” thing. But anyway, I started doing that and it worked really well. (I wrote a post on my bullet journaling process here.)
Currently I’m working on two drafting projects, an editing project, and an outlining project, along with my blog and a short story on the side. I make goals on all or most of those each day, and then make color coded check-boxes for each goal each day. At the end of the day I mark them done, cancelled, or rescheduled and do a journal of my writing that day, putting the day’s word count by the date up at the top of the page. I’ll be writing a post about my bullet journal on Monday so you can see how that’s set up.
I’m a lot more productive now that I’ve started this, and I’m getting a lot of writing done. Although I had a dry spot at the end of last week/beginning of this week because I was really busy and tired and couldn’t bring myself to really do any writing.
Hopefully one of my drafts will be done my the end of the month, the other will have a sizable chunk out of it, the editing will be done, and I will have gotten a good ways through the outlining process. I hope to be able to write that planned story… maybe for NaNoWriMo, maybe for one of the Camps next year. I’m not sure yet what I’ll be working on for Nano since I have a couple of different options there. One of them depends on getting the other of my drafts done before then, which I think should be doable.
This process has done a lot for my blog, as well. I used to be posting really infrequently, but then I decided on the 9th to really buckle down and write a bunch of posts ahead of time so that I could be posting regularly, and then I wrote several of those between the 9th and 10th and scheduled them. Since then I’ve been a lot more active with writing posts and getting them scheduled and it’s been cool, even though I’m not really sure how many readers I have, if any.
My aim is to have a couple novel projects, an outlining project, and an editing project going at one time fairly consistently, at least for non-NaNo months. I think that’s working pretty well for me. I’m sure my process will alter somewhat as I go along, but I think I’ve finally found a system that works for me.
What does your writing process look like? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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